Forced isolation

National Review, March 23, 1998 by John Hillen

Mr. Hillen is the Olin Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and an NR contributing editor.

AT a recent meeting with a handful of foreign-policy experts, a senior State Department official lamented the lack of congressional enthusiasm for an indefinite American military commitment in Bosnia. "I've got to deal with such a large bloc of isolationists," he moaned. When several conservative attendees suggested that perhaps these congressmen were motivated not by "isolationism" but by a desire for some evidence that a resolution in Bosnia was at least as important to Europeans as to Americans, the man from the State Department was dismissive: Either you're with us or you're against us.

This is the attitude the Clinton Administration brings to almost every major foreign-policy issue. Whether the question before the house is Bosnia, NATO enlargement, an arms-control treaty, an environmental agreement, United Nations dues, Fast Track trade authority, or a bailout by the International Monetary Fund, the Administration boils it down to a simple choice: You can be an enlightened and sophisticated internationalist by supporting Administration policy, or you can take us back to a troglodytic isolationism. There can be no other legitimate opinions about what constitutes responsible internationalism.

This approach often works as a political tactic. By presenting complicated issues as a simple choice between wisdom and ignorance, the Administration often manages to divide the opposition. Instead of putting up for sophisticated discussion a range of possibilities for the method and scale of dealing with a particular problem, the Administration defines its opponents as followers of Pat Buchanan. Neoconservatives tend to take fright at the association and rush into the Administration camp (as they have done on Bosnia, the UN, and most arms-control treaties), leaving their conservative internationalist brethren alone and lonely.

Washington opinion-makers buy the false dichotomies. The Washington Post recently reported, for example, that "many IMF advocates feared that liberal House Democrats would join Republican anti-internationalists and libertarians to block financing for the IMF." In fact, Republican opposition to an open-ended IMF bailout has been led by the likes of George Shultz, William Simon, the Heritage Foundation, and the Wall Street Journal -- none of them noted "anti-internationalists" or "libertarians" on foreign policy. As Shultz and Simon pointed out, one need not be a protectionist or libertarian to know that "the promise of an IMF bailout insulates financiers and politicians from the consequences of bad economic and financial practices . . . distorting the international investment market."

But Clinton's people were ready to go on the counterattack. They recruited hundreds of CEOs and former government trade officials to carry the Administration's water on the IMF issue in reiterating the false choices. Are you for a bailout that will save America's economic boom, or are you for an Asian-induced recession? Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, summed up the choices thus: "The success of the American economy depends upon a harmonious world economy, and you can't get that by the main country in the world, the United States, retreating into isolationism." U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue was even grimmer: "A U.S. leadership lapse in this critical economic realm may have dire political, and even national-security consequences." So fork over $18 billion or perish.

Similarly on the Chemical Weapons Treaty: Are you pro-gas or pro-life? On Bosnia: Are you for an ethnic war "raging in the heart of Europe" or are you for peace in the Balkans? On the UN: Are you a John Bircher or do you believe we should pay our lawfully assessed dues? On the Kyoto environmental treaty: Are you for responsible use of fossil fuels or for the destruction of the planet?

To be sure, Bill Clinton's team did not invent this approach. As Walter McDougall recounts in his splendid book Promised Land, Crusader State, Woodrow Wilson tagged anyone who opposed him on foreign policy -- whether the issue was our policy toward Mexico, U.S. neutrality in the early years of World War I, or the League of Nations -- as not only thick, but immoral. Many sophisticated Republicans opposed Wilson on the exact form the League would take while seeking compromises that would have brought the United States into it; Wilson smeared them as isolationists out-of-touch with America. Thirty years later Harry Truman painted any opponent of his international programs as unpatriotic or stupid. Dean Acheson, his Secretary of State, popularized the epithet "primitives" for those who opposed his agenda. The Clinton Administration in turn has made this form of arrogance the basis of its foreign-policy arguments.

HOWEVER, the approach can backfire, as it did for Wilson. Some neoconservatives have argued that conservatives should refrain from voicing their reasonable doubts about the Administration's foreign initiatives, lest they inadvertently encourage isolationism. But the Administration's initiatives themselves encourage isolationism. If "leadership" becomes a shibboleth and means lives wasted, money thrown away, and dangers unnecessarily courted, Americans might reasonably conclude that we can do without leadership. If free trade means IMF bailouts, a lot of people will reject both. That's why Pat Buchanan constantly connects these dots.