Foreign Policy Hubris
by Steven E. Meyer
What drives post-Cold War American foreign policy? In 1989, the relative simplicity and almost comforting certainty of the bipolar world collapsed and the entire context of our foreign and security policy ended. The giddy realization that we won has never really dissipated, but the end of the Cold War quickly begged the question: what now?
The Bush administration, which had a golden opportunity to fundamentally redefine the direction of America's post-Cold War foreign and security policy, proudly and smugly declared a New World Order. But it was form without content. We were so conditioned by the Cold War that we could not get beyond Cold-War questions and, ultimately, Cold-War answers. But the Cold War could not be resurrected.
In its absence we experienced a sense of confusion and vertigo. How do we define ourselves? Who are our enemies? Do we have any? Do we even have a significant other? Do the Cold-War institutions still work? We were unable—or perhaps unwilling—to engage in the very difficult work of examining the new world around us, determining our interests, and constructing a foreign and security policy to deal with those interests. The results have been devastating and deadly
Moralism and Institutional Stagnation
With the Clinton administration the term New World Order has faded in favor of "enlargement and engagement," but the problem has remained essentially the same: we have proven unable to come to grips with the post-Cold War world in a creative, imaginative way. Instead, we have breathed new life into two residual yet powerful forces that have, in grotesque form, become boilerplate for the foreign policy part of a contemporary civic religion. The first force is a powerful reemphasis of Wilson's post-World War I moralism that has outstripped Wilson himself. The second is the continued reliance on Cold-War institutions and organizations.
The new version of moralism continues to rely on the often contradictory advocacy of democracy and self-determination despite historical evidence that the compelling of subject societies into our version of social and political "justice" often greatly enhances the prospects for conflict and war. This new, more virulent form of moralism is defined by a sense of cultural and ethical superiority that masks itself as American leadership. It breeds an intolerance of others, especially their faults, and hypocritically dismisses our own faults as irrelevant, nonexistent, or somehow "different." The new moralism rests on the assumption that the movement of social and political history must equate to "progress" (not simply change) and that the United States is the agent of that progress. This puts us in the very dangerous position of resurrecting the old concept of imperialism—not exactly the way it was practiced in the 18th and 19th centuries, but certainly carrying with it the same sense of arrogance, superiority, bullying, and the increased use of deadly force, more to justify ourselves and our institutions than to secure justice or our legitimate interests
Questions of international policy increasingly are not simply issues of difference between and among countries; they become issues of right and wrong, of good versus evil. Leaders with whom we disagree become Hitler or Stalin reincarnated; states we do not like are rogues or pariahs; opponents are aggressors. By contrast, our motives are always pure, our actions always just. For five years we actively supported establishment of a permanent international criminal court as a moral imperative, but, not surprisingly, when the court was finally agreed to in Rome last year, the Clinton administration rejected it essentially because we would be subject to its jurisdiction just like everyone else.
The second force driving contemporary U.S. foreign and security policy—reliance on Cold-War institutions—serves as the vehicle of the new moralism. Rather than constructing new organizations specifically designed to meet the needs of the new era, we are content simply to cling to what once was useful but no longer is. It is easier, even comforting, to try to reorganize and remold the familiar. The premier example is NATO—the rhetorical linchpin of American policy. Specifically designed to meet the threat of a Warsaw-Pact invasion, NATO fulfilled its mission well during the Cold War. But that era is past and security needs today are different from what NATO, even in its reconstituted form, can serve. In an era of ethnic conflict, failed states, challenges from a growing list of non-state actors, and lightening fast transfers of information and money, NATO is ill-equipped to do more than cause destruction on a massive scale. Indeed, the entire debate that surrounded NATO's expansion during the 1990s smacks of another era.
The United States in the Balkans
American policy in the Balkans is a prime example of both forces—moralism and reliance on Cold-War institutions—at work. During the early 1990s, we moved from strong support for a united Yugoslavia—even implying the use of force by the Yugoslav army to keep it together—to supporting the creation of several successor states. After the early and controversial German recognition of Croatia and Slovenia, we recognized Bosnia and became wedded to its borders even though they did not reflect the emerging ethnic reality of the area. Although ethnic conflict is not centuries old in the Balkans, as many believe, it is a fact of the 20th century and has become a mainstay of the area that once constituted Yugoslavia. As a result of the Dayton Agreement of 1995 we essentially forced the three ethnic groups of Bosnia to live together whether or not they wanted to—and they do not. The reality is that we have become, for all intents and purposes, an imperial power and we run Bosnia much as the British proconsuls and viceroys ran India during the height of the empire. But, that is almost irrelevant to American policy-makers because the important point is not and never has been the Balkans. Our policy toward the former Yugoslavia, enshrined in the Dayton mentality, has always been to vindicate our own sense of moral and cultural superiority and to justify NATO.
The Kosovo script differs from the one in Bosnia, but the fundamentals are the same. In Kosovo, we dictated a 'solution' which led to war when it was not accepted immediately by Belgrade. The air war that followed was based on the fundamental miscalculation that the Serbs would capitulate within a few days and accept NATO demands. When this did not happen, the U.S. and NATO could not lose face and for eleven weeks the bombing assumed Dresden-like proportions. When the heavy bombing started, the administration fully expected a much-increased flow of refugees and a much more lethal Serb assault on the Kosovar Albanians. The tragedy expanded when Milosevic miscalculated the need for the U.S. and NATO to prove their credibility and relevance. As with Bosnia, the action in Kosovo and Serbia had much less to do with those places than with our own self-justification. Thus, we bear as much responsibility as Milosevic does for the misery and destruction in Kosovo and the rest of Serbia.
With the capitulation of Serb forces in June, we now "own" Kosovo, much the way we do Bosnia. In Kosovo, too, we will sit for years and major decisions will only be made as we order them. Here, too, our treasury will bleed and more of our forces will be tied up. We are about to foster the same "dependency syndrome" in Kosovo that we have firmly established in Bosnia. But Kosovo will be more dangerous. We insist on autonomy, but not independence—a situation that will satisfy no one and, over the long-term, will not be sustainable. Our occupation, coupled with departure of Serb forces, has emboldened the Kosovo Liberation Army, is encouraging Serbs remaining in Kosovo to leave, and ultimately will lead either to the independence of Kosovo or its eventual union with a greater Albania. And in the background will lurk damaged relations with Russia and China and a wounded, destitute, sulking Serbia, which easily could spawn violence against occupation forces by radicals who cannot abide the loss of the province.
In the end, we have told the people of the Balkans three things: First, they may not develop politically and socially the way we did in the U.S. and in the rest of the West. They may not engage in 1000 years of alternating war and peace to arrive at stable borders and the kinds of societies we approve of today. Second, they may not take as long. And third, they must develop exactly as we tell them to do. This has become the heart and soul of contemporary American foreign policy, despite the rhetoric about democracy and self-determination. The greatest danger about Milosevic's capitulation is that it will feed American arrogance. The sound of hubris is already deafening.
[Dr. Meyer is an expert on Eastern European affairs with extensive experience in government and the academy.]
