U.S. foreign policy domination diminishes

By Martin Woollacott

WASHINGTON: Between bombs and bananas, the weaknesses of American foreign policy are more evident today than at any time since Vietnam, with the Kosovo war dramatically illustrating the dangerous divide between ambition and the commitments needed to carry it out. When the Kosovars are being forced out of their homeland in their hundreds of thousands, when China's would-be democrats are behind bars, when Russia is lurching from one economic crisis to another, and when American and British planes daily bomb Iraq without clear reason or result, that policy looks much less solid thing than it once did.

Ten years ago, it seemed that all the United States had to do was to cash in its chips, and, in one region after another, we would get the settlements and resolutions that had been so elusive before.

A decade later, there has been a global economic disaster, for which America bears large responsibility, and there could be developing a parallel failure of international security. If that happens, America's persistent refusal to commit its resources to international crisis management except on its own narrow terms, and its over-dependence on the often counter-productive instrument of air power could be very much to blame.

Bosnia was finally rescued, it is to be hoped that Kosovo will be, and American influence was helpful in Ireland. Elsewhere, there is not much good news. The United States allowed both Benjamin Netanyahu, the most inadequate leader Israel has ever had, and Saddam Hussein, the most dangerous figure in the Middle East, to defy it. Russia's situation is dire, and part of the reason is undoubtedly that the economic policies urged on it by the West, especially the United States, compounded its problems.

In China, much was expected of Clinton's policy of engagement, which largely disconnected trade from human rights. In the event, neither trade nor human rights have flourished. The persistent priority given to China was one of the reasons the Indian government, followed by that of Pakistan, became last year an overt holder of nuclear weapons. The attempt to cajole and coerce North Korea into renouncing its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons has not so far succeeded.

In Africa, a trumpeted new American engagement is nowhere to be seen, and six nations are warring in the heart of the continent.

In Europe, the alliance which America leads is hampered by America's refusal to contemplate the use of ground troops in an offensive role. The narrowness of the recent congressional vote on contributing American soldiers to the implementation force for Kosovo, a force that would have faced no combat risks, shows how difficult it may be, even if air power does not work, to get support for the dispatch of troops to a real war zone.

There is another risk as well, which is that the half- established pattern of American-led international military action without United Nations (UN) endorsement, let alone under UN control, will become a settled thing. Without giving much away on the primacy of the UN, America is proposing that NATO be re-made as an instrument of world policy, taking on rogue states, terrorists, drug smugglers, and international criminals across a broad swath in Africa, the Middle East and beyond.

If Kosovo is going badly, all this is going to look pretty sick, anyway, at this month's NATO summit, the 50th anniversary function which Washington naturally wants to be a big success. That will add to the pressures on Europe, which smarts at an America which one day wants global European military co-operation and the next slams job-destroying trade sanctions on European countries. The banana war, whatever the technical rights and wrongs, was about as asinine a move at a delicate time between America and Europe as can be imagined, and it has now been followed by the threat of more punitive duties on European goods in an attempt to force hormone-treated American beef on Europe.

President Clinton, flanked by his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, and his national security adviser, Sandy Berger, delivered an address on American foreign policy in San Francisco in February. It was one of those well massaged texts from which presidents read at such moments, and, early on in it, he declared that the solution to the problems he was outlining was not "to batten down the hatches and protect America against the world" but "to work with the world to defeat the dangers we face together".

A good sentiment, and yet the structure of the speech was such that his listeners heard first about physical threats to America such as chemical and biological weapons and terrorist attacks, and what the Clinton administration was doing about them. They also heard, high up in the speech, about trade cheating and dumping, a line which feeds into the American perception that they are as driven snow in trade matters, while foreigners are systematic breakers of the rules.

In retrospect it may come to seem a matter of great regret that Clinton was the leader of the United States for six of the ten years since the end of the Cold War. For all his gifts, he has been quick to speak but slow to act, and when he does act, it is with an edgy eye on the polls, and on an often hostile Congress. The American columnist Jim Hoagland has written of the result as "virtual foreign policy". Clinton, Hoagland wrote, "seems to be hoping to leave office with these crises stroked but unconsummated". The personalities of his advisers have also not been without influence, from the over cautious Warren Christopher to Albright, who tends to be precipitated, and Berger, whose usual impulse seems to be to avoid action.

But, while Clinton and his advisers bear a personal responsibility, there are broader reasons why American foreign policy is in difficulties. That policy has had three defining characteristics in the last ten years. Firstly, it has concentrated on an ambitious yet not well thought out re-ordering of the globe, combining the pursuit of deregulation and democracy in a way that has been often shallow and ineffective. The extent to which untested neo-liberal economic ideas, deemed by Wall Street finance houses to be a good thing, have become a plank of American diplomacy is only now emerging.

In a recent series of articles in the New York Times, a team of reporters led by Nicholas Kristof has shown how it became part of the State Department's job to push deregulation and the dismantling of all barriers to trade and finance both with individual governments and in international negotiations on economic matters, such as those which established the World Trade Organization.

In parallel with this ideological drive, there was a tactical campaign to ensure that American firms achieved maximum penetration of other economies, partly by denouncing particular barriers, even when there were good social, cultural, or scientific reasons for them, and partly by the selective use of America's political influence. From the movies to genetically modified foods, U.S. foreign trade policy has been both aggressive and legalistic.

America's global economic policies, taken together, have undermined Russia, blown up the south-east Asian economies, destabilized some of its Latin American neighbors, affected many other economies for the worse, and angered its major trade partners, from Japan to Europe. Now there is constant talk of the need to deal with the "excesses" of globalization, but American policy nevertheless is not much changed, as the banana affair shows. The democracy measures often packaged with economic policies are hardly objectionable, but in many countries the structures urged on governments have been planted on sand. The facade democracies that result, for instance in Cambodia and some African countries, lack substance.

The second broad dimension of U.S. foreign policy is its preoccupation with American safety. Naturally all countries put their own safety first, but there is a peculiarly American perception of the outside world as a place of conspiracy against the U.S. that sits ill with its commitment to collective security.

In the American official mind, the Soviet Union has been replaced by a more diffuse group of enemies, including rogue states, Islamic fundamentalists, terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized crime. Nobody can deny that these are real problems, but there is an American tendency to organize diverse threats into an "Evil Underground" to replace Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire". Striking out at this supposed network unilaterally, often without reference to the UN or even to its close allies, America, it seems to some of those allies, may be starting a war that otherwise would not take place.

In addition, America's preoccupation with cutting edge military technology, in which it sees a means to give the United States protection not possessed by other nations as well as a means to limit the human costs, in terms of American lives, of its interventions abroad, cannot but suggest that the United States has a two class conception of global security. Clinton's references to anti-ballistic missile systems in his State of the Union address tend to reinforce such a view, as did the recent Senate vote in favor of expanding those defenses.

The third weakness of American foreign policy under Clinton has been its excessive deference to public opinion. A government involved in almost daily measurement of how particular initiatives will play easily loses sight of what policy is for, which is to achieve results in the real world, not fleeting approval in the minds of voters.

What American foreign policy successes there have been in recent years have often come about because strong figures like Richard Holbrooke have short-circuited the polling game, creating situations and opportunities to which the president has had to respond. Otherwise, over caution has usually been the rule, particularly when the deployment of American troops has been the question.

American foreign policy in recent years has its obvious roots in the old conception of America as a society different from and better than others, in the oscillation between intervention in the world and a turning away from it which has marked American history, in the tradition of ambitious global policy which the movers and shakers of the post-war period bequeathed, and in the lessons of Vietnam. Yet the disappointments of the Nineties seem special because hopes were so high. The United States is hardly alone among the nations in its weaknesses, and European count it, certainly, can claim no superiority. But power magnifies inadequacies. An America which wants much but risks little could find the task of leadership increasingly difficult, even if it is a leadership which most nations still wish Washington to exercise in the future.

-- Guardian News Service