America and the World

Fourth Quarter 2000

Fourth of a Four-Part Election-Year Series

One might label this year's presidential campaign "politics of the prosperous, by the prosperous, and for the prosperous." On a world scale, Americans are so wealthy, so unthreatened by any enemy, and so preoccupied with keeping the good times rolling, that neither of the major presidential candidates is saying much about America's role in the world. Louis XIV supposedly remarked at the height of his power, "The state: that's me." Turning that around, one can sometimes hear as the undertone of American public opinion, "America: we're the world."

It is dumbfounding at a time when the United States so dominates the globe—both for good and for ill—that the two candidates sound like they are running for mayor or governor. Listening to either Vice President Al Gore or Texas Governor George W. Bush, one catches this sense of global mission: the new president will work for the continuing prosperity of Americans; he will push for free trade here and—perhaps, but only perhaps—a little humanitarian intervention there; he will try to make it possible for Americans to spend as little as possible on gasoline; and he may move forward with a new missile defense system.

Do We Live in the Same World?

This is American leadership at the start of the 21st century, and in this regard, there is not much difference between Bush and Gore. This is the poverty of America's plenty and the weakness of America's power. The anomalies and ironies abound.

• While millions of people in the poorest parts of the world typically go without essential medicines to fight life-threatening diseases, the presidential candidates offer as one of their top promises to spend billions of dollars from a current and projected federal budget surplus just to ease the cost of purchasing drugs for America's seniors.
• While expressing concern about American health, and, in the case of Al Gore and Bill Clinton, fighting the tobacco companies for selling cancer at home, neither presidential candidate expressed any opposition to Congress's vote on September 13 (with the president's support) to give those same tobacco companies a hundred million dollars in tax breaks to sell tobacco abroad.
• While the United States continues to try to broker peace deals around the world, and to participate on occasion in humanitarian intervention in countries torn by civil conflict, neither candidate has expressed any intention to change the fact that the United States is far and away the world's leading arms exporter.
• While both Bush and Gore want to continue to promote democracy throughout the world, it is free trade and market competition that serve as their primary engine of international progress. It took the World Bank to announce (on September 12) that the past decade of market openings in other countries has not made enough difference in the lives of the world's poorest people—the 24 percent of the world's population that lives on less than $1 a day. What, beside free markets, is needed? According to the Bank, it is sound public institutions, something Americans take for granted for themselves. These include the rule of law, court systems, stable currencies, progressive taxation, good education, and a social safety net. Is either candidate willing to invest half or a quarter as much money in building these institutions abroad as in subsidizing American economic investments and trade, which accrue to our short-term benefit but leave the long-term in doubt?

Candidates on Their Own

These comments are not intended to belittle the presidential candidates. Either one might become a great world leader. But partly because of what our campaigns require, and partly because of American self-preoccupation and short-sightedness, the reality is that we do not know very much about what either Bush or Gore will do on the foreign-policy front. Candidates don't say more than they have to say. In many cases, they have no idea what they will do. Our system does not require that they rally their parties around a governing program or agenda.

Most of what either candidate is likely to do is react to circumstances. As Michael Kinsley put it recently, "the Clinton Doctrine is now our bipartisan foreign policy," namely: "Sometimes we will act and sometimes we won't; it all depends on the circumstances" (Washington Post, 8/9/00). Voters will simply have to assess each candidate's character and past performance; evaluate the advisers each has gathered around himself; and estimate the influence of the interest groups that back each candidate.

A recent commentary sheds light on the circumstances that constrain the foreign-policy thinking of the candidates. We Americans have become so convinced that our well-being is determined by continuing economic growth that we and our political leaders have become willing to risk almost everything to guarantee the security of economic entrepreneurs who are the engines of our increasing prosperity. This is the argument of Martha T. McCluskey ("Whose Risk, Whose Security?" The American Prospect, 1/31/00), who explains that this is a reversal—a turning upside down—of long-standing dogma. The old dogma was that entrepreneurs should be the risk takers. Security for the investors and the wider public was that only the business would go down if it failed, not everyone.

However, as McCluskey points out, much of the global economic apparatus that has been constructed in recent decades aims to secure the investors and entrepreneurs more than the countries in which they are engaged. For example, the International Monetary Fund's function, she says, "has changed from promoting global economic stability through currency controls to protecting international creditors in a newly volatile global economy." The U.S. government is doing the same for investors. Proposals to rebalance this imbalance are inadequate, says McCluskey, because "the prevailing ideal of unrestrained markets is fundamentally incompatible with policies to protect the majority of society."

Security for Whom?

This is essentially what the World Bank concluded about its past approach to economic growth in the least developed countries. It also corresponds with the argument made by the 1999 Kuyper Lecturer, Bob Goudzwaard, who argued that faith in economic growth cannot serve as the foundation for justice; it must be the other way around. According to McCluskey, popular desire for material gain has encouraged government to risk the lives and well-being of the majority, both here and abroad, for the sake of the security of the "risk-taking" investors and entrepreneurs. Multinational corporations "at the heart of the global free market inherently depend on socialized risk-protection for their success." What happens in tax and other policies is that those at the top of the economic order are treated as deserving of public support while those at the bottom have to assume greater personal responsibility for their losses. "The most consistent message of the free market system is not the embrace of individual risk but the embrace of a vision of community that subordinates the interests of the majority of humanity to the interests of a few." What McCluskey does not adequately capture here is the extent to which the majority of us have come to believe that our deepest interests do ride on the economic success of the favored few.

One need not agree with McCluskey's entire argument to see the extent to which Gore and Bush are both following and leading Americans to entrust their security and well-being to an ever-expanding economy. That economy is now global, and in it, at least temporarily, the American dollar and American expertise dominate. The temptation is to subordinate almost every dimension of foreign policy—including environmental stability and sound public institutions both at home and abroad—to the engine of economic growth. Current failures in the poorest countries (which the World Bank now recognizes) reveal the inadequacy of such an approach. Failures that Americans may experience in the future from an oil crisis, sharp dollar devaluation, stock-market crash, or collapse of international economic cooperation, will prove that putting most of our eggs in the basket of economic growth is a mistake.

To avoid such crises and disasters, we must change our view of the world, of America's interests, and of our chief end in life. And this is where we need political leadership that can envision and propose action for a more balanced, multidimensional, and just world. American power should be exerted to promote more than economic growth in the interest of a higher standard of living for middle-and upper-class Americans. Instead, sound, sustainable, diversified economic development should be oriented to help build the institutions and practices that can secure and stabilize life in the poorest and most fractured parts of the world as well as in the poorest and most fractured parts of the United States.

Will Al Gore or George W. Bush rise to this challenge?

—The Editors