Superpower Without a Mission

September-October 1996

By Luis E. Lugo

Those who complain that all they hear from the presidential hopefuls is so much rhetoric should count their blessings. Those of us who are still interested in this country's foreign policy should be so lucky. We would welcome any kind of rhetoric from a would-be president of the only remaining superpower on what role the United States should be playing in this post-Cold War world.

If one is predisposed to find a silver lining in every cloud, then perhaps one can find one in the fact that the isolationist challenge in both parties has been beaten back, at least temporarily. This challenge was particularly in evidence during the Republican primaries, when Pat Buchanan's "America First" line threatened to push the party back toward an old-style protectionism. Thankfully, Bob Dole was able to overcome the Buchanan insurgency, though not, one should hasten to add, by presenting a compelling, positive alternative. On the Democratic side, the isolationist wing has been dormant since 1992, when then Governor Clinton successfully steered the party in an internationalist direction.

If there is a difference between the two candidates on foreign policy, it would have to be over the way in which they intend to pursue their vague internationalist agenda. This question is by no means insignificant, and Clinton and Dole have staked out very different positions. In the past, Clinton has spoken in unabashedly multilateralist terms, asserting that we should act in concert with international organizations like NATO or the United Nations. Dole, on the other hand, has touted the unilateralist line that we should be willing to go it alone in defense of our vital interests.

Is this, then, the great divide in American foreign policy? If it is, you wouldn't know it from listening to the candidates. Dole has not made much of an attempt to engage the issue, and the president has played down his sympathies and deprived Dole of a convenient symbol by opposing the reelection of U.N. Secretary General Boutros-Ghali. In this age of diminished political expectations, maybe we should just be grateful for the candidates' general sentiments; call it a win for internationalism; and wait for the next round of presidential elections, when the onset of the new millennium may provide a more hospitable setting for a serious discussion of these matters.

The Clinton Record

During the '92 campaign, Clinton mounted a frontal attack on President George Bush's foreign policy, an area widely regarded as the president's greatest strength. Charging that the administration's policy was essentially "reactive, rudderless, and erratic," Clinton declared that America deserved better than "activism without vision, prudence without purpose, and tactics without strategy," and promised to lead a "global alliance for democracy as united and steadfast as the global alliance that defeated Communism." Heady words, indeed, though one should recall that they were delivered before the Foreign Policy Association in New York, where people expect to hear such things, especially a few days before the state's primary.

We should also recall that the mantra of the Clinton campaign that year was the now famous line, "It's the economy stupid." Nor surprisingly, when the newly inaugurated president sat down with his cabinet to outline the most important policy goals of his administration, no mention was made of a single foreign policy objective. Whatever he said to those folks in Manhattan, to the rest of the country he was promising to spend less time than his predecessor on foreign affairs. It's one promise no one can justly accuse him of having broken.

This contradictory pattern of a lofty idealism on the one hand—what one commentator aptly labeled foreign policy as social work—and inexperience and inattention on the other immediately landed the president in hot water. Symbolic of the floundering and temporizing which characterized the first couple of years were the debacle in Somalia and the embarrassment in Haiti, where American troops were turned back by a few hired thugs on the dock in Port-au-Prince. Both incidents also served to sour the administration on the United Nations, which Clinton had pledged to make better use of in resolving regional conflicts. Perhaps the prime example of the administration's waffling, however, has been its China policy. The man who had accused President Bush of coddling dictators and ignoring human rights abuses to promote trade with China beat a fast retreat when confronted with the actual costs of revoking China's trading status.

It is instructive in this regard that the platform recently adopted at the Democratic convention credits Clinton foremost with finding new markets for American products and stengthening ties with our trading partners around the world. That is a telling statement and a good indication of the extent to which Clinton foreign policy has been driven primarily by trade concerns and threatens to become a simple extension of domestic economic policy.

Whether it is in confronting China on its piracy of intellectual rights (read: compact disks and CD-ROMs), securing financing to prevent Russia's and Mexico's economic collapse, or pressing the Japanese to open their markets to American products, the president and his team have spared no effort. When it comes to responding to genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, dealing with regimes that abet the traffic in nuclear and other deadly technologies, or isolating countries that support terrorism, the administration has been reduced to pleading and cajoling. Halting political progress has been made in places like Northern Ireland and the Middle East, but the public at home or abroad has yet to hear the president put forth a coherent American foreign policy.

Is There a Dole Alternative?

Is there any indication that a Dole presidency might be perceptively different from that of a second Clinton administration? In short, no. Nothing that candidate Dole has said in the course of the campaign, nor, for that matter, in the course of his otherwise distinguished career in the Senate, leads one to think that that would be the case. And he best not look to Republican leaders in Congress for help on the vision thing. When Speaker Newt Gingrich, for example, was asked during the heyday of the Republican Revolution to explain his views on international affairs, he responded by saying, "I don't do foreign policy" If there is a Republican foreign policy out there, it is not easy to detect. Without a set of guiding principles, Republican foreign policy is quickly becoming, as one friendly analyst has observed, a mere collection of knee-jerk reactions to President Clinton.

Dole's principal foreign policy disagreements with the administration seem to be over the pace of NATO expansion and the relative size of a missile defense system. These are important issues, to be sure, but hardly amount to a strategic vision, and do not provide us with enough material for a serious public debate. There is, of course, as we mentioned earlier, the matter of a unilateral versus a multilateral approach to achieving our ends. Here Dole is more upfront, stating that 'America's interests should not be second guessed, modified or subject to the approval of international organizations." This line plays well among those who see the United Nations (the United Nations?) as a threat to American sovereignty, but it fails on two counts.

First, it does not come to terms with the fact that international institutions play an important role in advancing our economic, diplomatic, political and security interests. We cannot talk burden-sharing one moment and unilateralism the next. Or are we so arrogant as to think that other countries exist solely for the purpose of carrying out our interests as we alone define them? Even in an earlier, pre-democratic phase of international relations, major powers recognized that the pursuit of their national interests was closely tied to the maintenance of the overall international system. Maybe it would be more helpful if instead of beating up on the hapless United Nations, Dole would give us his views on the usefulness and limits of that world body, as well as on the appropriate role of regional alliances like NATO and of other international organizations.

Second, Dole's assertion doesn't tell us anything about just which interests are worth pursuing, unilaterally or otherwise. If he is not going to talk about the national purpose, he can at least tell us what he believes America's vital national interests are. He could start by looking at the 60-page booklet recently released by the bipartisan Commission on America's National Interests and then laying out his own agenda. Absent that, how will we citizens know to what ends he is willing to commit American resources--political, economic and military? And while he's at it, perhaps he could also tell us on what grounds he would protest gross violations of human rights abroad, including the widespread persecution of religious believers, if he considers national sovereignty to be absolute and inviolable.

The post-Cold War world is admittedly confusing, and perhaps it's not possible at this time to articulate a coherent foreign policy framework that takes account of this complicated reality. Still, wouldn't it reflect well on any candidate's leadership abilities if he were to engage the American people in a serious discussion of the monumental changes that have transpired in the world and to challenge us with a vision of America's interests and purposes in this new order of things? This is not, after all, some pie-in-the-sky moralism, but a great imperative in a world where our interests and those of the international community are ever more closely intertwined. As that quintessential American philosopher, Yogi Berra, might have put it: "It's a very global world out there."