American foreign policy must evaluate new priorities

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 1994 by Jonathan G. Clarke

American foreign policy stands at a crossroads. The two main players, Pres. Clinton and Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher, have to decide whether to follow what has been labeled neo-Cold War orthodoxy.

This approach is based on the contention that the end of the Cold War has not reduced the need for an interventionist U.S. foreign policy. Proponents assert that the collapse of communism has created global instability and that more, not less, American political and military leadership is required. They have discovered justifications and rationales for maintaining the existing national security establishment and a virtually undiminished military budget in humanitarian and peace-keeping missions that are unrelated to the national interest, like the one in Somalia, and in such new rationales as "limited sovereignty" or the "law of democratic intervention." Anything else is stigmatized as isolationism, "1930s' appeasement," a "failure of will," or a "poverty of concept" that risks the rise of a new Hitler, such as Russia's Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

America's allies tend to subscribe to the neo-Cold War orthodoxy. For example, European diplomats at the Brussels NATO conference and the meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Geneva in December, 1992, pressed outgoing Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger for more, not less, American engagement in world affairs. Their motives for such enthusiasm are self-serving - taking advantage of the end of the Cold War to decrease defense spending. The Dutch and Germans announced cuts of up to 45%. In light of public opinion polls showing broad demand for even less defense spending, there is no guarantee that the European states will not cut back even more. Combined defense expenditures of the European members of NATO are shrinking by 23%. The last thing Washington's allies want is for the U.S., which consistently spends more than 150% of the combined expenditures of the other members of NATO, to insist on enjoying its own peace dividend.

If the U.S. did claim its share of the peace dividend, its allies might have to take more responsibility for crises in their backyard, such as the Bosnian conflict. The Europeans, principally the British and the French - all too conscious of being pilloried in the U.S. for what is perceived as their lack of leadership in the Yugoslav crisis - increased their troop contributions to the UN forces in Yugoslavia. Nonetheless, they show no signs of wanting to accept the entire responsibility.

In addition, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's ideas about diminished national sovereignty have introduced a new rationale for American interventionism. His proposal for a permanent UN force that would include U.S. units, acting under a UN mandate, would create new arenas for American military involvement.

More important, statements by members of the Clinton Administration have indicated that they share the inherited Cold War mindset. In his inaugural address, the President stressed that the world is "less stable." Rather than greet a new era, he spoke of the "old animosities and new dangers" resulting from communism's collapse and indicated America's readiness to intervene with force, not only when U.S. vital interests are challenged, but also when the "will and the conscience of the international community are defied."

At his first press conference, Secretary of State Christopher, while calling for a fresh approach, showed that he, too, embraced many of the tenets of the old thinking, citing a "new and vastly more complicated era." Although he pointed to the increase in religious and ethnic conflicts in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, he made no attempt to relate those conflicts to U.S. interests. CIA director R. James Woolsey has commented, "This world that we are beginning to see looks more and more like a more lethal version of the old world that existed before 1914 when a range of nationalist sentiments produced the holocaust of World War I."

Prospects for meaningful reform appear bleak. Indeed, spending on some aspects of national security even may increase. Defense budget reductions are relatively modest and will be scattered piecemeal among the services, additional evidence that the Clinton Administration is following the bureaucratic principle of "equal pain," rather than a new security strategy recognizing that the world has changed.

In a bureaucratically inventive twist, the national security community is asserting that the collapse of the superpower bipolarity has made the world a more complex place and that global threats will emerge unpredictably. That development, they insist, precludes any significant cuts in the national security budget.

The dangers of ill-considered, seat-of-the-pants decisions in response to television pictures of man's inhumanity to man are likely to increase dramatically. The U.S. will be the functional equivalent of a global policeman, whether or not the nation's leaders choose to use the term.