The Pentagon's strategic review of the U.S. role in Asia, generally known as the Nye Report, suggests maintaining the current American commitment to Asian security, along with the current level of U.S. forces in Asia (around 100,000 military personnel) for another 20 years. The U.S. armies in Europe may be down to some 100,000 troops, but this Watch on the Rhine will soon be celebrating its fiftieth year in place. As Sen. Pat Moynihan noted at the time of the fortieth anniversary, "This is the stuff of Roman legions."
Although its security has rarely been so unquestioned, the United States retains the world's most awesome and expensive military establishment and has an extraordinary global presence of garrisons, bases, and aircraft carrier task forces. The U.S. defense budget is greater than that of the world's next ten military powers added together, and the 1997 U.S. military procurement budget of $76 billion is greater than the defense budget of any other country.1 It will soon be seven years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but from America's military posture it would appear that the Cold War had not ended.
And yet Senator Dole makes much political play of sounding like a critic of America's global role. On examination, he is really more concerned with discrediting America's most obvious competitor, the United Nations. The peroration of the Dole campaign speech is invariable: "When Bob Dole is in the White House, no American fighting men and women will take any orders from Field-Marshal Boutros Boutros-Ghali." This would be an admirable sentiment, were he able to specify any instance in which the secretary general of the United Nations was in a position to give any such orders to U.S. troops during the Clinton administration.
Beyond loathing for the United Nations, the main thrusts of the new isolationism, or what we may more fairly call the new distrust of internationalism, have been twofold. The first has been animosity toward foreign aid, whose costs are invariably over-estimated by the American public in successive opinion polls. Foreign aid—including the entire foreign budget of the State Department, monies pledged to international agencies and financial institutions, the costs of Radio Free Europe, and aid to civilian and military bodies—amounts to some $17 billion, just over 1 percent of the U.S. federal budget for 1996, or almost exactly the sum Americans spend each year on video rentals. Almost a third of this sum is consumed by Israel and Egypt alone.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is currently chaired by Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who has never voted for a foreign aid bill and insists that the American people "are tired of pouring hard-earned money down those ratholes." The new chairman of the Foreign Operations Committee, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who wants to abolish the U.S. Agency for International Development, has almost complete control over U.S. spending overseas.
"We ought not to be using our money or our troops in places where we have no interests. We have to exercise some restraint," Senator McConnell informed me last year, explaining why he opposed the successful U.S. operation to restore democratic rule in Haiti. "Why in the world would we spend a billion and a half dollars picking sides in a banana republic? I'm an internationalist, and my goal is to see that the [Republican] Party not be isolationist. But you have to put yourself on a diet when it comes to intervention and devise a meticulous approach to the use of the military, and target foreign aid to areas where U.S. interests lie."
The second main thrust of anti-internationalism is rhetoric against rising levels of immigration, mainly the illegal variety; but even the legal use of immigration to reunite families by those with widely extended kinships has come under attack. In this sense, we may be observing less a shift toward anti-internationalism than a rejection of the long tradition of American altruism with respect to the outside world.
Some of this is driven by the changes in the U.S. missionary tradition. Far less of this is now conducted by the traditional Episcopalian, Methodist, and Unitarian churches and the U.S.-based Catholic missions. The new dynamic of the American mission, whether in Central or South America or in Russia, comes from the fundamentalist and deeply conservative churches of the American South. To give one example, the church of the New Covenant Fellowship, which is run from Louisiana by the Reverend Bill Shanks, opened its fiftieth church in Russia in the very week that its congregations delivered victory to Pat Buchanan in the Louisiana primary.
But the word "isolationist" lets the entire issue off the hook, evoking a 1920s-style retreat from an entangling world. The term that the heirs of isolationism prefer to use for themselves these days is unilateralist, coined in response to the Clinton administration's early flailing with what it called muscular multilateralism in Somalia and Haiti.
Ted Galen Carpenter, of the libertarian Cato Institute, defines unilateralism as
a more nationalist foreign policy, a much more selective use of military engagement, asking the automatic question, what is the U.S. interest here? What's in it for us? There are some interesting parallels with Gaullism, that America is a special kind of nation, with a special role and special obligations, all stemming from a unique identity that other countries have to respect. We want to benefit from our engagement in world affairs and from our leadership, but at the same time we are reluctant to pay the costs in the way we once did. It's not isolationism. Unilateralism is the major feature.2Advocates of the traditional internationalist foreign policy are still trying to understand the ways in which the American political scene has shifted under their feet, and they are warning that the new Republican approach is much more dangerous than it might look. "There is now more danger of the United States returning to the pure isolationism of the 1920s than I have ever seen. At the moment, the current is unilateralist rather than isolationist, but it will lead to isolationism because we will not be able to carry the allies with us," according to Charles William Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy and former assistant secretary of state for international affairs in the Carter administration. Maynes continues:
There is a presumption that U.S. leadership will be indefinitely sustained because of the automatic followership of our allies. But our allies followed because they were frightened of the Soviet Union. Now they aren't. They are frightened of other things, like Muslim fundamentalism in North Africa, which are far less compelling to us. The unilateralist current is so strong in Congress now and the Clinton administration is so weak it cannot stand up to it. Congress has always been skeptical of the United Nations, of international commitments, and successive White Houses in the past have always stood up to it.Robert Zoellick, counselor in James Baker's State Department and perhaps the outstanding brain behind the foreign policy of the Bush administration, told me that the real change is not in the American public at large, but in the policymaking elite:
Go into the small print of all the polls and you find Americans still want to play an international role and are very clear about our vital interests: the oil of the Persian Gulf, stability in Europe and east Asia and the Western Hemisphere. You find a similar consensus among the elites in the wider civil society outside of Washington, the business and banking circles and the NGOs, the nongovernmental organizations who are involved in aid and humanitarian and environmental work. It is among the political and policy elites that the consensus has broken. They are all over the map, and what is striking is the lack of a catalyzing leadership which means the president.This is an acute observation. The U.S. policymaking elite is divided over such fundamentals as whether or not NATO should be enlarged; whether or not China should be contained; whether to support the German (or at least the Kohl) drive for much deeper Euro-integration, or the British opposition to Euro-federalism; whether or not the U.S.-Japanese security relationship needs to be renegotiated, and whether the United States should maintain its land force on Okinawa and in South Korea; whether or not Chile, a regional success story, should be brought swiftly into NAFTA; whether or not bilateral development aid can be said to work and should be continued; and whether or not the United States should continue to support the United Nations.
Nonetheless, the nature of America's engagement with the rest of the world has been changing in a very fundamental way. At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the United States shared a curious distinction with its Soviet adversary. The United States and the Soviet Union were the twins of autarky, the most self-reliant economies on earth. The Soviet Union chose not to trade with other nations outside its bloc of influence; the United States barely needed to bother. U.S. imports and exports together routinely amounted to 6 to 8 percent of GDP in the 1950s. By 1995, trade in goods and services and financial instruments amounted to 30 percent of America's GDP.
In a rational America, we would say that such are the fruits of victory, that the 50-year war against German, Japanese, and Soviet attempts to rally the powers of Eurasia against America had been won. But this is not a rational America. Witness the curious telephone call made last January by Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve (what any honest establishment would call the U.S. central bank), at the request of President Clinton. Greenspan was unhappy about the president's request, but he made the phone call to Rush Limbaugh anyway and personally explained to the right-wing talk show host why it was important to America that he not attack the plan to rescue the Mexican economy.
That sums up the plight of the traditional masters of the global order; they have been reduced to courting the new populists, begging them to go easy on their increasingly tentative decisions. The most startling contradiction in world affairs is that, having triumphed in its 60-year campaign for global hegemony, the world's last superpower has never been so utterly integrated into the global economy it fashioned and yet so ambivalent about its implications.
The Clinton Doctrine is trade. Clinton's problem is that most Americans think that the United States carries a constant foreign trade deficit of more than $100 billion a year. This is true for manufactured goods, but the U.S. surplus on services, from banking to royalties and license fees, was almost $80 billion last year. And the fact that U.S.-owned factories overseas command a greater share of global manufacturing exports than factories on American soil means that the United States in fact runs a modest profit on its dealings with a global economy that now is responsible for over a quarter of America's GDP.3 He may be out of office within the year, but Bill Clinton is already reaching for history's mantle as the free trade president, the first world leader who understood that the geostrategic old world of the Cold War had given way to a new age of geoeconomics.
It is in this very perception that we may see the anti-internationalism of the future. The brave new world of global free trade and global competition may stimulate and enrich the American economy as a whole, but it is proving far more problematic in its effects on millions of individual Americans. Global competition means selling Windows '95 in Asia, but it also means that unskilled or semi-skilled Americans, like South Carolina textile workers, have to compete with Mexicans earning a tenth, and Chinese earning a fiftieth, of their wages. It takes extraordinary investments in productivity to overcome that kind of wage/cost margin. The phenomenon has its parallels in the more skilled parts of the labor market; witness the sudden explosion in data processing services in India and the Philippines; the average American Express bill, for example, is now processed in Bangalore, India.
A strange coalition is building against the Clinton Doctrine, one that brings together textile workers and data processors, Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan, the AFL-CIO and Republican congressmen. House Speaker Newt Gingrich made common cause with President Clinton and Fed chairman Alan Greenspan to support the rescue plan for the Mexican economy, in order to aid a key partner in NAFTA, which the Republicans had helped devise. But Clinton could not deliver the support of Democratic congressmen, Greenspan could not deliver Rush Limbaugh, and Gingrich could not deliver his Republicans.
"Not since Senate rejection of the League of Nations in 1919 has our power elite suffered such a rout as it has on the $40 billion Mexican bailout," crowed Pat Buchanan, whose America First! slogan in the 1996 presidential election campaign was taken directly from the classic isolationist movement of the 1930s.
"The Mexican crisis should be a warning as to what lies at the end of the big highway marked with the signs NAFTA and GATT," Buchanan went on. "We are linking our economic security, indeed our economic survival, to regimes like Japan that use spies to steal our industrial secrets and nontariff barriers to keep out products. To regimes like China that steal our intellectual property and use slave labor to earn the capital to challenge the United States for world dominance. To regimes like Mexico that devalue their currency to rob investors and drive us out of their markets."
Buchanan's words are echoed by Democratic congressmen and in trade union halls around the country, as well as by that veteran progressive, Ralph Nader, who joined Buchanan to campaign against the GATT world trade pact. The resentment against the free trade system has been a bipartisan phenomenon, a populist revolt that startled Gingrich and Dole as much as it cheered the AFL-CIO and the Democratic congressional leaders Richard Gephardt and David Bonior. There is a whiff of the Luddite in this new coalition against the free trade juggernaut, a flavor of a doomed cause in the railing against a global system so vast that it trades over a trillion dollars a day on the world's exchange markets. They deal in as much wealth in a week as the entire U.S. economy produces in a year.
But the global free trade system will only prosper if its trade routes, its overseas investments, and the sanctity of its contracts are underwritten and defended. In the nineteenth century, Britain played this role. In the twentieth, America took over, and it is now nagged by the constant and understandable fear that to be the last guarantor of a global trading system and the last free trader when others grow behind their tariff walls is to share, eventually, Britain's fate. America is being overstretched, paying to defend the stable environment that benefits others. As Benjamin Schwarz has put it, in a pretty paradox, "The worldwide economic system that the United States has protected and fostered has itself largely determined the country's relative economic decline. Economic power has diffused from the United States to new centers of growth. American hegemony, perforce, has been undermined."4
Perhaps, but few foreigners would agree. The United States is not just the only superpower. It is, in most serious ways, the only military power, and it will remain so far into the foreseeable future. The experience of the 1990s has also been instructive in the durability of American power and American wealth. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, U.S. GDP has grown by almost 30 percent (in 1989, U.S. GDP was $5.2 trillion; in 1995, it was $7 trillion). In contrast, Japan's has grown by 4 percent, and that of what had been the two Germanies by 5 percent.5 (Depending on the way one allows for shifting exchange rates, Japan and Germany can appear to be doing better than these figures indicate in dollar GDP growth, but not in terms of their domestic currencies.)
This was the third such defeat for this side in American politics. It is important to recall that the protectionist wing of the Democrats was beaten in 1988, when Rep. Richard Gephardt failed to win his party's nomination for president, and in 1992, when Clinton crushed Sen. Bob Kerrey's protectionist appeal in the New Hampshire primary. Ross Perot's third-party campaign against "the giant sucking sound" of jobs being lost to Mexico was also rejected by the voters in 1992.
The political force of American resistance to the global economic system is not impressive, although its roots seem widespread. Clearly, there are scenarios in which this resistance could grow quickly: for example, a sharp economic downturn in the United States, with increased unemployment combined with a global recession and intense competition. A defeat of President Clinton in 1996 could well lead to a chastened Democratic Party, more dependent than ever on its base in the labor unions, reverting to protectionism. But it is worth noting that American voters rejected protectionism not only in the boom conditions of the 1988 election year but in the recessionary season of 1991 92 as well.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to gauge the depth of the roots of American unilateralism and how difficult it might become to handle serious domestic dislocations of trade and investment. But the electoral evidence we have so far does not support the Buchanan thesis that a vast mass of suffering Americans are aching to be liberated from the new world order of the bureaucrats of trade. Nor is there much in the polling data to support the view that the United Nations is widely unpopular. Sociologist Stanley Greenberg, who serves as President Clinton's pollster, recently conducted a study with a startling result. Intrigued by poll data showing that, from the 1940s until well into the 1960s, over 60 percent of Americans consistently believed that their government did "the right thing most of the time," while only 18 percent had such confidence in their government by 1994, Greenberg began conducting some imaginative polls of his own. And while his findings confirmed this trend—in a 1995 poll, fewer than 20 percent of Americans thought their government could be trusted to do the right thing—58 percent of his respondents said they "had confidence in the United Nations to do the right thing most of the time."6
Americans may say they simply want open markets and free trade, but what they mean is that we are supposed to become more like them. They want to change our distribution and retail system to suit their exporters, and change our finance system to suit their banks. They want us to swallow an American culture of CNN and Hollywood, insist that we welcome their rude and intrusive American media, while they lecture us on human rights. The cultural arrogance of a country with such problems of race and crime is breathtaking to people on our side of the Pacific. Frankly, there are times when rather more American isolation would be welcome.One interesting feature of this sentiment is how reminiscent it is of the views expressed by certain French intellectuals of the 1960s, in that odd period when Gaullists and leftists made common cause in disdaining the American hegemon. Another is that my Asian friend was speaking before the latest wave of alarm rippled through the region as China rattled its sabers in the Taiwan Strait. Only the United States had the military capacity, let alone the political will, to do anything about this. In consequence, we may expect rather more readiness by other Asians to tolerate American initiatives, perhaps including those on trade and human rights, in the immediate future.
This important message was jointly delivered by Tokyo and Washington to Beijing on the eve of what is shaping up to be China's big test. The formal hand-over of Hong Kong from Britain to China will take place in 1997; how China handles this event will determine whether China is trusted or dreaded by its neighbors in the coming decade, when China hopes to catch and overtake Japan as the largest economy in Asia. If the Chinese takeover is brutal, without regard for the niceties of democratic government, freedom of the press, and due process, it is unlikely that China will be welcomed into the international community as a civilized and responsible partner.
Despite the reopening of U.S.-Vietnamese diplomatic ties, the renewed U.S. naval visits to the Philippines, and the presence of watchful U.S. aircraft carriers off Taiwan, there is as yet no structure of containment in place around China. Instead, a strategy of precontainment is becoming evident in a series of understandings, deployments, and constant consultations in the region that could escalate into containment quite swiftly, if the need were to arise. The choice rests with China, and American policymakers appear to be preparing their options with a sensible prudence.
Indeed, a pattern is emerging that may yet suggest that the Asian and European reactions to U.S. policy may be starting to converge once more. In 1991, in the heady aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the European single market project, French president Fran‡ois Mitterrand, speaking on the Yugoslav crisis, declared that the hour of Europe is at hand. Four wretched and murderous years later, in the absence of anything that could be called a European policy, the British and French admitted that only American leadership, and the commitment of U.S. diplomacy and U.S. troops, could answer the Bosnian question. This chastening experience helped prod the French government to quietly bury the old Gaullist doctrine and declare its readiness to rejoin the coordinated military command structure of the NATO alliance.
There are clouds on the horizon, however: Russian nationalism, for one; allegedly reformed resurgent Russian communism, for another. Some suggest that Islamic fundamentalism could be a third. In combination with one another and with China, such grand anti-American coalitions could yet pose a serious geostrategic threat to U.S. interests. The traditional suspicions between Russia and China make such an alliance unlikely, and even if some tactical accord were to be reached, it would be a fragile one. Neither its adherents nor its detractors can define Islamic fundamentalism as either a creed or a strategy. And so long as the combined GDP of the Arab world continues to be less than that of Canada, the smallest of the Group of Seven economies, its geopolitical potential will remain limited.
The price of American hegemony can no longer be described as burdensome. For some $250 billion a year, the United States enjoys a global military dominance that combines the transoceanic reach of the Pax Britannica with the military power of Imperial Rome at the height of its powers. This costs less than 4 percent of America's GDP, the Pentagon's lowest share of GDP since 1940, the year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. By contrast, when the United States was establishing the Cold War system in 1951, the Korean War was extracting 15 percent of GDP, and the Marshall Plan and similar investments in Japan and elsewhere meant a total U.S. strategic budget of at least 20 percent of GDP. Although they represented a share of GDP five times higher than the defense budget of 1996, the Americans of 1951 did not deem this too oppressive. With political leadership and informed public discourse, the almost infinitesimal costs of hegemony in the 1990s would barely require justification.7
In conclusion, the new, commercially based American internationalism is not logically likely to be seriously challenged by its enemies, either foreign or domestic. The global economy is currently working to American advantage, with America the world's largest exporter, and American military prowess looks to be beyond serious challenge for at least ten years ahead and probably longer. America's closest allies, in Europe and across the Pacific, have learned in Bosnia and in the Taiwan Strait that there is no substitute for a benevolent superpower. Naturally, with such splendid prospects, something is bound to go horribly wrong. But in the election year of 1996, whether one is looking at the American political scene or the international one, it is not easy to see what that unexpected dreadfulness could be.