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It is
commonly held that the Cold War's end allows the United States to conduct a
searching re-examination of its role in world politics. In fact, however,
that has not happened and there is no reason to believe it will. As the
debate on U.S. intervention in the Balkans has made clear, the unspoken
assumptions that have guided American policymakers since 1945 have not lost
their potency. The driving force behind America's foreign policy
has shown itself to be more basic than the containment of its Cold War
adversary. Since the late 1940s, two paradoxes have shaped American foreign
policy. First, although the Soviet Union was the immediate focus of
U.S. security strategy, it was really quite incidental to America's liberal
internationalist policy. Second, the Soviet Union's existence, ironically,
was indispensable to that policy's success. At the end of
World War II, Washington was committed to an active internationalist agenda
and would have pursued it even if the Soviet Union had not emerged as a
geopolitical and ideological rival. That essential point was acknowledged in
NSC 68, the 1950 National Security Council document that articulated
America's Cold War strategy ``as one designed to foster a world environment
in which the American system can survive and flourish.'' Motivated by their
conviction that American security and prosperity depend on world order, NSC
68's authors argued that the ``policy of attempting to develop a healthy
international community [was] a policy which we would probably pursue even if
there were no Soviet threat.'' George Bush's call for the United States to
forge a ``new world order,'' echoed by President Bill Clinton's assertion
that U.S. security requires that America help ensure ``a just, enduring and
ever-more democratic peace in the world'' shows that America's ``Cold War''
grand strategy is being reaffirmed today, rather than reexamined. The debate
over American military intervention in the former Yugoslavia made this clear.
Although interventionists advanced humanitarian reasons for U.S. involvement,
they couched their primary arguments in terms of upholding a set of principles
that have come to be associated with world order, and, hence, vital
interests. These principles (which were also invoked during the Persian Gulf
war) include punishing aggression, preserving the inviolability of borders,
and preventing instability. Should
American foreign policy continue to be driven by a world view
that inexorably perceives American interests to be endangered by events in
places like the Balkans? To answer that question, the ``official mind'' of
American foreign policy--the assumptions underpinning the foreign
policy elite's peculiar notion of national interest--must be
dissected and examined. The belief
that American security is endangered by events in places that most agree have
no intrinsic strategic value is a longstanding tenet of U.S. foreign
policy. In 1966 John McNaughton, one of then defense secretary Robert
McNamara's chief aides, observed that ``it takes some sophistication to see
how Vietnam automatically involves our [vital interests].'' As was the case
with Vietnam, specific arguments for U.S. intervention in the Balkans are so
recondite that they only make sense within the broader context of America's
relentless pursuit of a world order that will safeguard its purported
strategic and economic interests. Only then does it become apparent why the foreign
policy elite sees so much at stake in an area that is, at best, of
marginal strategic importance. The Clinton administration and the foreign
policy community generally have viewed the Balkan crisis as a crucial
test of America's leadership in creating order in the postūCold War world.
Clinton has said the Balkans will set ``the standard for addressing other
ethnic conflicts and the effectiveness of vital international institutions,
including the European Community, the Atlantic Alliance and the United
Nations itself.'' Resurrecting
the domino theory, Clinton fears that unstanched instability in the former
Yugoslavia will spread to other countries and thereby somehow endanger the
United States. With the same logic that propelled American intervention in
Indochina, Clinton argues that America's interests require the United States
to lead an effort to build a world order shaped by U.S. values. The choice,
he says, is ``between unstable, highly nationalistic states with centralized and
potentially oppressive governments, on the one hand, and democratic
states...on the other.'' If America fails in its awesome responsibilities,
Clinton asserts ``we will miss an opportunity to create a more democratic and
stable world.'' To those
outside the foreign policy elite, the tenor of discussion of
the Balkan crisis must seem stilted. After all, visions of falling dominoes,
the perception that world politics is a bipolar ideological confrontation
between democracy and dictatorship, an obsession with reaffirming U.S.
leadership and resolve, and concern for the vitality of alliances such as
NATO all seem to belong to another era. To the uninitiated, the Cold War's
end renders implausible the entire rationale for continuing American security
obligations to Europe and East Asia. To understand
why the U.S. foreign policy elite still regards American
commitments in Europe and East Asia as vital, one must look beyond the Soviet
Union. After World War II Washington sought an international order based upon--to
quote NSC 68's primary author, Paul Nitze--``preponderant [American] power.''
That objective had very little to do with any existing or projected Soviet
actions; in fact, American statesmen knew that their wide-ranging objectives
would increase Soviet insecurity and thereby the risk of war. If fear of
Soviet expansion had been the only, or even the most important, reason to
bring Western Europe and East Asia under the American security umbrella, why
did the United States persist in its strategy long after it was apparent that
Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea could provide their own security? And
now that the USSR itself has disappeared, why does Washington continue to
insist that an American-led NATO and the U.S. defense commitments to East Asia
are still indispensable to America's security? The answer is that the basic
aspiration of U.S. security policy since the Second World War has not been to
contain the Soviets. The Cold War
provided the impetus for the strategy of preponderance, which was directed
against both the Soviet Union and the Western sphere. By integrating Germany
and Japan into a network of U.S.-dominated security and economic
arrangements, Washington achieved two important objectives: Germany and Japan
were co-opted into the anti-Soviet coalition, and, just as important, these
erstwhile enemies were, themselves, contained. Through this policy of
``double containment,'' the United States assumed responsibility for
maintaining peace among the states in those areas. By constraining Germany
and Japan, America ``reassured'' their neighbors that these allies would
remain peaceful and thereby assuaged the neighbors' fears of resurgent German
and Japanese economic domination. For Washington, the pacification of Europe
and East Asia was the key to creating and sustaining an open global economic
system, which was seen as vital to American prosperity. In postwar
Western Europe, American policy was spectacularly successful. Freed from
looking nervously over their shoulders, the West Europeans were able to set
aside their historical animosities and security fears and work together to
achieve economic integration within Europe and economic interdependence
between Europe and the United States. Because stability and reassurance were
based on economic cooperation, it was at least as important for the United
States to defend the Europeans from themselves as it was to protect them from
the Soviet Union. Likewise, in East Asia, the U.S. reassurance against
resurgent Japanese power enabled the region to concentrate on commerce rather
than on power politics. Since the
aims of the preponderance strategy transcended the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, it is
not surprising that the foreign policy community now seeks to
employ the same approach after the Cold War. Indeed, the Soviet Union's
disappearance has seemingly removed the last barrier between Washington and
the complete attainment of its world order aspirations. The USSR's demise has
also forced the American foreign policy elite to be more candid
in articulating the assumptions that underpin its view of American strategy. The
continuity in U.S. strategy was--and is--explained by the belief that
preponderance prevents spiraling regional tensions by obviating the need for
other powers to provide for their own security. Removing the umbrella of U.S.
protection would force other states to ``renationalize'' their foreign and
security policies. As former deputy assistant secretary of defense Alberto
Coll argued in the winter 1993 Washington Quarterly, the security commitment
in Western Europe and East Asia makes it unnecessary for Germany and Japan to
maintain powerful military forces, and thus help to restrain ``traditional
rivalries'' among regional powers ``that otherwise could unravel into
unrestrained military competition, conflict and aggression.'' Such regional
turmoil, it is feared, would seriously damage U.S. interests. Thus, Coll
concludes, preventing renationalization ``is a signal contribution to
international order.'' As long as
the United States can use its superpower capabilities to manipulate,
regulate, and calibrate regional politics in Europe and East Asia, it can
continue to prevent international politics from relapsing into normal
patterns. Thus Washington must retain its preeminent role in world politics,
as the Pentagon's now infamous draft of the Defense Planning Guidance for the
Fiscal Years 1994ū1999 argued. That document asserted that to ensure a
favorable international environment, America must prevent other states ``from
challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political
and economic order [and that] we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring
potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global
role.'' ``Potential competitors'' were, of course, widely known to mean
Germany and Japan. Those goals mirror the imperatives formulated for
America's Cold War national security policy in the late 1940s. As historian
Melvyn Leffler has written, those imperatives dictated that ``neither an
integrated Europe nor a united Germany nor an independent Japan must be
permitted to emerge as a third force.'' The Importance of
Bosnia
The quest for
world order is the missing link that purports to connect the Balkans to American
national interests. Events in the former Yugoslavia--and possible crises of a
similar nature elsewhere--are regarded as dangerous because they could set in
motion a chain of events inimical to American interests. That, not Bosnia per
se, is what the Balkans crisis is all about. Those who
called for American intervention in Bosnia argued that unquelled Balkan
instability and unpunished Serbian aggression would reveal NATO's postūCold
War impotence. Without an effective NATO, the interventionists' argument ran,
Europe would lapse into those same bad old habits that the Alliance was
supposed to cure-power politics, nationalist rivalries, and ethnic turmoil.
NATO had to be validated in the Balkans as an instrument of postūCold War
security. If not, it was feared, the five-decade trend toward deepening
European political and economic cooperation would be reversed, and the
Continent would return to its normal condition as a geopolitical morass. Even if that
nightmare scenario did come to pass, it may be wondered how it would imperil
American interests. The interventionist response is that if the United States
fails to act in the Balkans, it will ultimately suffer economically. The
starting point of the interventionist position--and the foundation of America's
world order strategy--is the conviction that America's prosperity depends
upon international economic interdependence and that the precondition for
economic interdependence is the geopolitical stability and reassurance that
flow from America's security commitments. Thus, as then defense secretary
Dick Cheney said in September 1992, the United States cannot afford ``to step
down from our world leadership role'' because ``simply stated, the worldwide
market that we're part of cannot thrive where regional violence, instability,
and aggression put it at peril. Our economic well-being and our security
depend on a stable world in which the community of peaceful, democratic
nations continues to grow. Hostile and anti-democratic regimes must know that
aggression is a risk that will not pay.'' So, what is
at stake for the United States in the Balkans? The answer is the same one
that high-level Bush administration officials gave when a similar question
was posed before the Persian Gulf war--jobs. As Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warned, there ``will be devastating
economic effects in Europe of a spread of war and, thus, loss of jobs and
loss of income in this country as we try to base a recovery upon our export
potential.'' The former director of the National Security Agency, William
Odom, has, in a November 1992 Hudson Briefing Paper, elaborated upon the
argument that economic imperatives impel American military involvement in the
former Yugoslavia: ``Only a strong NATO with the U.S. centrally involved can
prevent Western Europe from drifting into national parochialism and eventual
regression from its present level of economic and political
cooperation....That trend toward disorder will not only affect U.S. security
interests but also U.S. economic interests.'' Our economic interdependency
with Western Europe creates large numbers of American jobs. Thus, Yugoslavia
stands as a test of the resilience of the Atlantic community. That is indeed
a major strategic challenge for U.S. leadership. That kind of
argument has clearly influenced the Clinton administration. As one U.S.
official said, the economic stakes in the Balkans were similar to those in
the Gulf war, although more difficult to articulate: ``There you were sitting
on oil and there were clear-cut economic interests that the American people
could understand; here the consequences are more indirect, and while they are
just as important, they are less easy to describe.'' The idea that American
prosperity depends upon a world order imposed by the United States has
extremely unsettling implications. The Open Door
Revisited
Underpinning
U.S. world order strategy is the belief that America must maintain what is in
essence a military protectorate in economically critical regions to ensure
that America's vital trade and financial relations will not be disrupted by
political upheaval. This kind of economically determined strategy articulated
by the foreign policy elite ironically (perhaps unwittingly)
embraces a quasi-Marxist or, more correctly, a Leninist interpretation of
American foreign relations. Such views surprisingly echo the radical ``open
door school'' view of American foreign policy advanced by
William Appleman Williams and other left-wing historians. Williams argued
that because American statesmen believed that U.S. economic welfare, and
ultimately the survival of American democracy, depended upon exports and
overseas financial relationships, Washington needed to impose an informal
empire of ``virtuous omnipotence'' that guaranteed a secure and stable
environment conducive to profitable and expanding trade relations. As
Williams argued, for liberal internationalists the American government has
always had a critical responsibility: ``the protection and extension of the
market in which the principle of free competition could operate. As with
mercantilism, classical liberal economics led to an expansionist foreign
policy.'' The view that
economic interdependence compels American global strategic engagement puts an
ironic twist on liberal internationalist arguments about the virtues of free
trade, which held that removing the state from international economic
transactions would be an antidote to war and imperialism. The nineteenth-century
Manchester school of liberalism held that free trade would increase
prosperity worldwide and thus contribute to peace by giving states a vested
interest in cooperative political and economic regimes. In some
respects, the American foreign policy elite's vision of world
order springs from the Manchester school's outlook. Today, proponents of
``complex interdependence'' argue that America's economic links with Western
Europe and East Asia are crucial to the prosperity of the United States and
its partners and that war among or affecting them would be too economically
costly to contemplate. The champions of this ``trading state'' outlook assert
that war does not pay because commercial intercourse affords the best means
for increasing a country's wealth and power. But the
American foreign policy community turns Manchesterism on its
head by accepting the economic but not the political logic of free trade
theory. Instead of subscribing to the classical liberal view that free trade
automatically creates a natural harmony of interests among states that leads
to peace, the foreign policy community looks to American
military power to impose harmony so that free trade can take place. Thus,
U.S. security commitments are viewed as the indispensable precondition for
economic interdependence. In that respect, Cheney's, Lugar's, and Odom's all
too candid comments reveal that modern Manchesterism is a fraud. Rather than
being the stimulus to peace that it is touted to be, economic
interdependence--and the need to protect America's stakes in it--is invoked
to justify a postūCold War U.S. military presence in Europe and East Asia and
military intervention in the Balkan conflict. The strategy dictates that the
United States be prepared to risk war, if necessary, to ensure that the
markets and raw material sources with which it is linked are not closed by
``renationalized'' economic and foreign policies that will result from
regional instability. In effect, the foreign policy
establishment has embraced the proposition that wars (or at least continuous
preparations for war) are necessary for the American economy to prosper. So
much for the peaceful effects of interdependence. What is most
frightening about the economic rationale of the strategy of preponderance is
its open-endedness; the logic of economic interdependence leads inevitably to
the exhausting proliferation of American security commitments. The
late-nineteenth century English statesman Lord Rosebery recognized such an
effect, and he warned that commitments must be made discriminatingly: ``Our
commerce is so universal and so penetrating that scarcely any question can
arise in any part of the world without involving British interests. This
consideration, instead of widening rather circumscribes the field of our actions.
For did we not strictly limit the principle of intervention we should always
be simultaneously engaged in some forty wars.'' The British
historians Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher have noted that if a region is
potentially unstable and a great power believes it has vital economic or
security interests there, as well as the means to forestall the instability,
then the great power will seek imperial control. Nineteenth-century British
policymakers, for example, believed that Great Britain's economic health
rested upon possession of India. The British, therefore, embraced as a
strategic imperative the safeguarding of the routes to the East. That
necessitated London's propping up the tottering Ottoman Empire, acquiring
extensive territories in the Mediterranean and East and South Africa as well
as a sphere of influence in the Persian Gulf, and assuming responsibility for
the security and stability of Egypt. The subsequent verdict of history is
clear: While economic imperatives seemed to demand that Britain pacify large
areas of the globe, ``the whole British position in the Middle East and
Southeast Asia was in fact,'' as British military historian Correlli Barnett
writes, ``a classic, a gigantic, example of strategic overextension. Far from
being a source of strength to England, India served only to weaken and
distract her.'' Stretching the Empire
Whether an
empire of free trade or an empire by invitation, the American role in Europe
and East Asia (which together are America's India) is imperial in the
strategic sense of the term. A world order policy based on pacification,
reassurance, stability, and economic interdependence expands the frontiers of
insecurity for the United States. As the frontiers of insecurity expand, so
do security commitments. U.S. forces must deter and defend not only against
direct threats to American interests but, even more important, against
threats to the security of others. The latter requirement is the hallmark of
America's postwar world strategy. As the draft of the Defense Planning
Guidance stated, the United States ``will retain the pre-eminent
responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not
only our interests but those of our allies or friends, or which could
seriously unsettle international relations.'' The assumption is that if
Washington cannot solve others' security problems for them, the world order
strategy will collapse. Compelled to provide for their own security, others
would have to emerge as great or regional powers, build up their conventional
forces, possibly acquire nuclear weapons, and generally behave like
independent geopolitical actors. U.S. strategists assert that such a process
of ``renationalization'' would destroy the reassurance and stability upon
which American interests are presumed to rest. It is, of
course, an exaggeration to suggest that the quest for world order will, in
Lord Rosebery's phrase, involve the United States in 40 wars simultaneously.
But it is not an exaggeration to observe that the strategy of preponderance
will inexorably result in a globe-girdling empire. To accept the reasoning
behind the calls for American action in the former Yugoslavia--and, more
generally, for the U.S. strategy of preponderance in Europe and East Asia--is
to accept a permanent and ultimately crushing burden. Arguing last year to
maintain a U.S. reassurance strategy in Asia and Europe, a then senior
Pentagon policy planner asked: ``If we pull out, who knows what nervousness
will result?'' The problem, of course, is that we can never know; therefore,
according to the assumptions guiding U.S. security policy, we must always
stay. During the
Vietnam War, then secretary of state Dean Rusk let slip that the United
States ``is safe only to the extent that its total environment is safe.''
Rusk's remark, in fact, was not excessive in the context of the American
elite's thinking. Cheney, Odom, and others would now use Rusk's formula for
security to protect economic interdependence from the nebulous threats of
instability and aggression. Threats to economic interdependence have replaced
Marxism-Leninism as America's global bete noir. As long as
U.S. interests are defined in terms of world order, Bosnias will be like
buses: Kosovo, Macedonia, the Baltics, Ukraine--there will always be another
one coming down the street. The same logic advanced to support U.S.
intervention in the Balkans applies to unrest across the former Eastern bloc.
Atlanticists' hand-wringing over the dangers of instability ``spilling over''
from East to West and their accompanying calls to have NATO guarantee the
borders of all European states stem from their appreciation of the disastrous
consequences regional instability might have for America's leadership.
Consequently, both international political cooperation and economic
integration would be threatened. Hence, the foreign policy
establishment's recent spate of reports on the postūCold War ``security
agenda'' argues that NATO must not only extend security guarantees to Eastern
and Central Europe, the Balkans, Russia, and the European states of the
former Soviet Union, but also must ensure stability in the former Central
Asian republics (since instability there could spread to Turkey, which could,
in turn, spur massive immigration to Western Europe, which could destabilize
a region vital to American prosperity) and in North Africa as well for the
same reason. The rationale
behind this view is similar to the containment era's domino theory:
Instability even in economically unimportant areas like the former Yugoslavia
could infect other areas regarded as essential to global economic
interdependence. The domino theory, however, has never reflected the real
dynamics of international politics. Unlike the chain reactions posited by
physics, in the world of statecraft crises are usually discrete
happenings--not tightly linked events. The outcome of events in potential
hotspots like Nagorno-Karabakh, Moldova, the Baltics, Ukraine, Transylvania,
and Slovakia will be decided by local conditions, not by what the United
States does or does not do in the Balkans. Put another way, Slobodan
Miloūeviū was not deterred by U.S. action against Iraq; Saddam Hussein was
not deterred by U.S. action in Panama; Manuel Antonio Noriega was not deterred
by U.S. action in Grenada, Lebanon, or Vietnam; Ho Chi Minh was not deterred
by U.S. action against North Korea; and Kim Il Sung and Joseph Stalin were
not deterred by U.S. action against Adolf Hitler. The postūCold War domino
theory, like the Cold War domino theory, will doom America to a string of
military interventions in strategically peripheral regions. Rethinking the Axioms
The time has
come for the United States to have a real debate about its postūCold War
grand strategy. Since 1945, ``discourse'' about foreign policy
has sounded like a broken record--endlessly replaying the ``lessons'' of the
1930s and the cliches of the Wilsonian variant of classical liberalism. That
kind of discussion is no longer good enough. The balance of world forces is
shifting dramatically, undercutting the whole edifice of postwar American
policy. It is time to reexamine the first principles and assumptions--both
stated and unspoken--that have shaped America's vision of world order and the
imperial conception of security that underpins it. As long as
the apparent dictates of economic interdependence guide U.S. policy, America
will feel a need to ensure stability in Europe and East Asia--both of which
are likely to be geopolitically volatile. Of course, the American foreign
policy community always plays down the costs of a world order policy,
even as it highlights the supposed economic benefits. To use an example, the
defense burden entailed in protecting U.S. access to Persian Gulf oil is
supposedly justified by the cheap and ready supply of a vital commodity.
When, however, all the costs of protecting access to that oil are considered,
the oil is not at all cheap. In the same
way, the continuing cost of pacifying Europe and East Asia must be weighed
against the supposed benefits of interdependence. Many thoughtful Americans
are concerned about U.S. dependence on overseas oil because of the risks
inherent in relying upon an unstable region for their prosperity. Should not
the same concerns apply to Europe and East Asia? In both cases, relying on
risky economic ties acts like a straitjacket, dictating expensive and
potentially dangerous defense commitments. Depending on unstable regions for
economic prosperity has, of course, brought many empires to ruin. Any real
fundamental reassessment of America's grand strategy would carefully assess
the costs and benefits of interdependence and its concomitant, America's
world order strategy. In doing so, it must be remembered that not only does
the United States depend far less on foreign trade than its major economic
``partners,'' but to a large degree the interconnection is volitional. To be
sure, efficiency and consumer choice, which interdependence promotes, are
important values. But they are not the only important values. Maximizing
national autonomy, achieving foreign policy solvency, and
minimizing the risk of war are also important--indeed much more important. Although the
task is complex, it is possible to perform an audit of the costs and benefits
of the American empire. In assessing the importance of maintaining
undisturbed access to markets in Europe and East Asia, the following factors
have to be considered: (1) the harm to the United States if access to those
markets is disrupted; (2) the likelihood of such disruption; and (3) the
availability of alternatives to those markets--such as increasing domestic
demand to make up for lost exports or shifting to overseas markets in regions
less vulnerable to political turmoil. Any economic benefits generated by
interdependence would have to be balanced with the ongoing costs of
maintaining military forces dedicated to the task of pacifying Europe and
East Asia and the potential costs if war occurs. Also, it would be necessary
to consider the opportunity costs of investing resources in military
capabilities versus freeing up those resources for other economic and social
purposes by discarding the preponderance strategy in favor of a more
discriminating grand strategy. Without prejudging the outcome of such an
audit, one suspects that the verdict on U.S. economic interdependence with
Europe and East Asia would be similar to the conclusion that British prime
minister Arthur James Balfour reached about defending India at the beginning
of this century: ``Were India successfully invaded,'' he said, ``the moral
loss would be incalculable, the material loss would be important--but the
burden of British taxation would undergo a most notable diminution.'' The need to
reassess American security arrangements ought to be apparent. As the
Princeton political economist Robert Gilpin points out, the overhead costs of
empire are great. Thus, over time, a predominant power's internal position
begins to erode because the costs of sustaining its preeminence undermine its
economic strength and thereby its geostrategic capabilities. As long as it
remains wedded to a world order mindset, however, the American foreign
policy establishment will categorically reject ``declinist''
solutions that seek to redress America's imperial overstretch. Former defense
secretary James Schlesinger succinctly explained America's strategic
quandary: ``The United States, as a great power, has essentially taken on the
task of sustaining the international order. And any abandonment of major
commitments is difficult to reconcile with that imposing task.'' Simply put,
the U.S. foreign policy establishment does not want
international responsibilities to be reallocated because it fears diminished
American leadership and a greater--perhaps even equal-German and Japanese
voice in international affairs. Better, they say, to bear disproportionate
costs than to yield American control. It is not
surprising, therefore, that far from worrying about the costs of America's
world order policy, many analysts have inverted the imperial overstretch
thesis, taking the position that the great postūCold War danger actually is
imperial understretch. According to that argument, if U.S. defense spending
declines, regional powers, no longer ``assured'' by the United States, will
pursue nationalist goals. The resulting regional turbulence will imperil U.S.
economic interests and ultimately force a dramatic surge in U.S. defense
spending. Thus, so the argument goes, rather than demanding a reduction in
America's imperial expenditure, economic imperatives require greater defense
spending now to forestall even higher costs in the future. While such
thinking is consistent with the logic of America's strategy of preponderance,
it will doom America to the same economic fate that has brought down
history's other predominant powers. Because the
United States discourages others from assuming greater international
responsibilities, it often finds itself taking the lead in security
interventions--despite the rhetorical mantra that it is not the ``world's
policeman.'' Clinton nicely encapsulated that outlook in April 1993 when he
said, in reference to the Balkans, ``We are, after all, the world's only
superpower. We do have to lead the world.'' Of course, if Washington policymakers
better understood the logic of collective action they would realize that this
belief inevitably becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the United States
says only it can lead, others have every incentive to sit back and let it do
so--which is, of course, exactly what the Europeans have done in the Balkans.
Western Europe has refused to take punitive military action against Serbia
unless the United States leads the effort by contributing substantial ground
as well as air forces. Apart from
the costs and consequences of an imperial strategy, there is an even more
basic objection to the strategy of preponderance: It cannot survive the Cold
War's end. The Soviet Union was a necessary foil for the attainment of
America's larger world order objectives. Thus, while it is doubtful that the
United States will miss the Cold War per se, the Soviet Union will, in a
perverse sense, be greatly missed by America's foreign policy
establishment. At home, the
Soviet threat induced the American public to sustain the high economic and
political costs associated with the national security state. Most Americans
never understood that, for this country's foreign policy
leadership, the requirements of containment fortuitously coincided with those
of the world order strategy that would have been pursued even without a
Soviet threat. Thus the American public still wonders why postūCold War
defense spending must remain so high and overseas commitments so extensive. Abroad, the
Soviet Union performed a similarly useful function for the American foreign
policy establishment. For the strategy of preponderance, the Soviets
were a convenient adversary. While the Soviet Union was never powerful enough
to be truly dangerous, it was just threatening enough to cause Japan and
Western Europe to enfold themselves in the security and economic structures
the United States constructed after 1945. As historian Anders Stephanson
observed, the Soviet Union served
exceedingly well as an open-ended justification for the enormous American expansion-political,
economic, and military--that took place after the war, as a mechanism, in
other words, for the United States to defend vigorously its global interests
and to intervene without compunction wherever intervention was felt
necessary. Without a
hostile USSR, however, the geopolitical equation changes because Japan and
Western Europe need not sacrifice their autonomy and interests to secure
American military protection. Moreover, a unipolar world will spur the
emergence of Germany and Japan (and possibly others) as great powers to
balance unchecked American power. Without the bipolarity that existed after
World War II, America's world order policy becomes untenable.[1] In the final
analysis, American foreign policy probably would not change even
if an audit clearly established that the costs of empire and interdependence
exceed the gains. Notwithstanding an occasional dissent (such as Under
Secretary of State Peter Tarnoff's May 1993 comments), for the foreign
policy establishment it is axiomatic that America is bound to lead.
The drive to inflict American leadership upon the world--manifested in the
strategy of preponderance--reflects a commitment to a definition of U.S.
interests that is a tapestry of ideological, security, and economic factors.
To remove one thread would unravel the entire fabric. As James
Chace and Caleb Carr have observed in America Invulnerable, ``for over two
centuries the aspiration toward an eventual condition of absolute security
has been viewed as central to an effective [U.S.] foreign policy.''
The American foreign policy establishment continues to believe
that its vision of a perfectable international order must be transformed into
reality if the United States is to be safe and prosperous. For nearly 250
years, liberal internationalists have predicted that ``the end of
international politics''--brought about by free trade, interdependence, and
the spread of democracy--was just around the corner. Today, the American foreign
policy establishment believes that the goals of the preponderance
strategy are at last within reach. That view represents the apotheosis of
American exceptionalism because it posits that, unlike history's other great
powers, the United States cannot tolerate any uncertainty, instability, or
danger in the international environment. In other words, America must shape a
world order that transcends the inevitable patterns of world politics: war,
instability, great power security and economic rivalries, multipolarity, and
the formation of power balances. Realists, on
the other hand, believe that the United States can and should act as an
ordinary great power. They understand what the foreign policy
establishment does not: that because of the interlocking factors of
geography, nuclear deterrence, and still formidable (albeit relatively
diminished) economic capabilities, the United States in a relative sense is
far more secure than any great power in history. The paradox facing the
country is that although the United States lives in a safe neighborhood, an increasing
number of its citizens do not because accumulating social and economic
tensions have been neglected. Relative immunity from external threat gives
America great latitude in defining its interests and in striking a more
reasonable balance between external aspirations and domestic needs. Today,
America's insecurity is the self-inflicted consequence of a foreign
policy that equates national interests with the maintenance of world
order. In the post-1945 bipolar world, the United States at times seemed tantalizingly
close to achieving its grand ambitions. However, in today's less-predictable
international system, attaining world order is a Sisyphian task. The foreign
policy establishment's elegiac comments on the Cold War's passing are
an implicit acknowledgement that Washington regards any change in the
international status quo as a challenge to its world order aspirations. Like
the British prime minister Lord Salisbury a century ago, the American foreign
policy community is reduced to hoping that nothing at all happens in
world politics because anything that does happen is bound to be bad. But
international politics is dynamic, not static, and the United States must
face the emerging geopolitical realities rather than attempt to escape from
them. In the post-Cold War world, the United States will not find absolute
security in a unipolar system. Indeed, even to pursue such a chimera would
have the perverse effect of making the United States less secure. The
emerging multipolar world will be turbulent and competitive; but while other
powers will be seriously threatened and highly insecure, the United States
will--in traditional strategic terms--be shielded from most of the effects of
international conflict. As a great
power, the United States will be able to stand back and watch international
events from a posture of discriminating detachment. Only those with a willful
blindness to history's lessons can find virtue in pursuing the empire's siren
song. Realists do not agree with Clinton when he says that the United States
cannot be ``simply...another great power.'' Rather, they believe that America
must heed Walter Lippmann's sobering injunction: ``In the real world we shall
have to learn to live as a great power which defends itself and makes its way
among other great powers.'' Unfortunately, as realists also understand, a
radical--and thus unlikely--transformation in the establishment's world view
must occur if America is to avoid the path of folly in the Balkans and beyond
[1]For a
fuller discussion, see Christopher Layne, ``The Unipolar Illusion: Why New
Great Powers Will Rise,'' International Security (Spring 1993) ~~~~~~~~ |