Primacy or World Order: American Foreign Policy Since the Cold War
Hoffmann, Stanley
BOOK REVIEW Primacy or World Order: American Foreign Policy Since the Cold War Stanley Hoffmann / McGraw Hill & Co. / $12.50 Owen Hatteras Stanley Hoffmann, now a professor of government at...
...The United States Owen Hatteras is a writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts...
...And, in fact, Hoffmann recommends better relations with Angola...
...The Soviet Union did indeed increase its aid to the MPLA in 1976, but it is disingenuous of Hoffmann not to mention that the Soviet Union had been arming and training the MPLA for years before Washington knew where Luanda was...
...Primacy or World Order is an attempt to show that, however understandable the American way of dealing with the world might be, the world is not going to adapt itself to fit our style, and we, as well as the world, suffer the consequences...
...Hoffmann presents a long and somewhat surprising list of disasters that the American style has already produced...
...No wonder the French expect the Third World to hate the West for its interventions, despite the opposing evidence...
...A common currency for Europe was impossible while the franc floated downward against a rising mark...
...One suspects that no matter how friendly the United States is, better relations will not follow until those needs arise, and then all our frowns or smiles will matter very little...
...France sought primacy by military means in the war of the Spanish Succession, the third Silesian War, the Napoleonic wars, and World War I, and managed only to lose its overseas empire, its sons, and its power...
...This insistence on the existence of shared goals will clearly lead to policies based on the most minimal understanding of our national interest, since agreement on anything more will not be possible between the United States and, say, Castro...
...It is hard to see exactly what Hoffmann is objecting to here, since the United States tolerated and even encouraged barriers to American trade and investment in Europe and Japan for the sake of good international economic relations...
...It is striking how much we still tend to view foreign powers as either "corrupt" or "progressive," categories that make some sense in urban politics, but none at all in international relations...
...We did not insist that everybody play by the rules of free trade that were favorable to us...
...In the 1960s, France favored gold over the dollar only to be forced, finally, to devalue the franc and sell one-third of its carefully hoarded reserve of gold...
...We did insist on floating monetary exchange rates in 1971...
...Stripped of the obvious desire to justify specific American concessions, this idea should command serious attention from conservatives...
...Third, says Hoffmann, we cannot use military or economic power to put pressure on the countries of the Third World...
...Despite that choice, his various writings leave little doubt that his upbringing had definite effects on his outlook...
...He is undoubtedly brilliant, and it is a mistake, I think, to dismiss him with a "no enemies on the Left'' and a shake of the head...
...If we support friendly dictatorships, we are upholding "sheer repression/' If we oppose unfriendly dictatorships, we will alienate authentic nationalist leaders...
...The few rules of world order that Hoffmann docs explicitly discuss revolve around the renunciation of the use of atomic weapons, except in the case of a nuclear attack on us, and the avoidance of direct military clashes between the superpowers...
...The United States "can no longer shape world order by itself, even by defining its interest in an enlightened way, taking into account the special concerns of its allies and clients.'' We will also have to accommodate ourselves to our enemies...
...Along similar lines, Hoffmann argues that American aid to the more pro-Western factions in Angola in 1975 and 1976 "provoked" the Soviet Union into aiding the MPLA...
...But as Dean Acheson once remarked, making foreign policy is not like writing a Ph.D...
...It is hard to fault this analysis...
...In his earlier writings, Hoffmann addressed the shortcomings of the American style of diplomacy and foreign relations...
...Firsts we cannot pursue uncommon goals by military means because of the danger and futility of war...
...Military assistance provided by both the United States and the Soviet Union, let alone direct superpower involvement, has been decisive too often in the last ten years for anyone to argue that we must give it up because it cannot work or will backfire...
...Second, argues Hoffmann, we cannot use our economic power to impose economic rules on the other industrial powers for fear that their opposition will lead to the destruction of the entire international economic order...
...Germany, low rates of inflation...
...By and large, those responsible for American foreign policy have been aware that they presented oversimplified pictures of the world to the American people in explaining and justifying their actions...
...Economically, the Continental system never got very far, while the French mercantile empire was a bad joke...
...But consider France's past...
...The only country that benefitted from this was South Africa, whose policy of apartheid was literally saved by the increase in the price of gold...
...This asymmetry inevitably brings to mind William Buckley's comment that right-wing dictatorships could solve a lot of their problems by calling themselves left-wing dictatorships-the People's Republic of Brazil, for example...
...Interdependence has given birth to "the age of compulsory bargaining and compromise" in which "the preponderant power must make concessions...
...It simply does not seem to be true that serious countries can afford to hold grudges...
...It may be natural for the French to dislike the United States, and for Stanley Hoffmann to use parentheses to apologize for his citizenship, but it is this sort of Gallic sneer that convinced generations of Englishmen that wogs began at Calais...
...Granting the differences between the two, it is no less true in foreign than in domestic politics that the unintended results of political action often swamp the desired ones, and therefore you should leave things alone if that is at all possible...
...12.50 Owen Hatteras Stanley Hoffmann, now a professor of government at Harvard, is Viennese by birth, French by education, and American by choke...
...But Hoffmann has erred by drawing his lessons from the pitiful record of French foreign policy and statesmanship...
...This, says Hoffmann, killed the nascent European monetary union, and led to less order rather than more...
...Senator Moynihan, who has a good ear for this sort of thing, has correctly pointed out that rattling on about the common need to avoid nuclear war and starvation has the effect, intentional or not, of denying the importance of the issues on which nations differ, such as that of freedom and tyranny...
...In World War II, France lost its self-respect...
...Americans go wrong when they apply the lessons of their history to world politics in general, and assume that everybody will behave the way they do...
...According to Hoffmann, American bullying drove Nasser into alliance with the Soviet Union, Senator Moynihan's United : Nations rhetoric engendered the hostility of the Third World, etc., etc...
...Frenchmen today detest the British for doing this...
...Our response was to try to understand the world in terms of simple categories derived from domestic politics and from what little experience we did have in foreign relations...
...Alternatively, we view states as aggressive or peace-loving, on the basis of our relations with the fascist powers of the 1930s...
...As for alienating the Third World by our opposition, what is most noticeable about past American interventions is how ready the Soviet Union, China, and North Vietnam have been to deal with the United States when they think we can offer them something they need...
...The easy wealth, power, political homogeneity, and democratic system within the United States produced leaders whose impulses were usually decent, but whose actions were clumsy...
...Red China, and Vietnam, any sheer repression to the contrary notwithstanding...
...The less said about French intervention in the Third World the better...
...Still, it is mean-spirited to dwell on the inadequacy of these concepts, if only because every country can only interpret foreign affairs in terms of its own, necessarily limited, past experience and present political needs...
...Hoffmann himself provides a clue leading to a better explanation...
...Our penchant for employing military force to solve political problems led to our involvement in Cambodia, as a result of which the gentle Kampuchean Asio-Communists turned into bloodthirsty tyrants...
...Hoffmann claims that non-nuclear military force is also useless, and cites the 1971 Indian-Pakistani and Angolan civil wars as examples...
...If American military assistance did not produce the desired outcome, it is at least possible in the case of Angola that this was because the Soviet Union gave more and better aid to its clients than we did to ours...
...It is not possible to proceed even so far as to the table of contents in his latest book before encountering a dedication to two friends "who are French and (yet) who like the United States...
...In the United States, theorizing about the uselessness of power began during the Vietnam war, and has since been purveyed by senators and political scientists in books usually entitled either The Impotence of Power, The Power of Impotence, or Beyond Impotence...
...The demand that we constrict our foreign policy spiritually, if not geographically, is a lot to swallow, and is acceptable only on the grounds of strict necessity...
...Still, some would argue that our actions were less responsible for the genocide in Cambodia than the nature of the Khmer Rouge and the con-gressionally-mandated end to our aid to their opponents...
...But this discrepancy was more the result of economic decisions made in France and West Germany than in Washington: France sought low unemployment...
...The complexity of foreign affairs (to which America has been blind) creates a world in which we cannot use our power to pursue self-interested policies without also suffering from the unseen and undesirable side-effects of using that power...
...If we do not, we will create chaos...
...France itself was the object of military intervention in 1940 when the British sank the French fleet rather than see it fall into the hands of the Nazis...
...Their policies need not change greatly, since just about all Third World governments run their national economies, expropriate foreigners, and rule by force...
...was an unreflective and pragmatic country whose most profound belief, if it had one, was in the universal and unlimited efficacy of free elections and airplanes...
...A theme is detectable...
...We ignored the differences among Germans, Russians, and Frenchmen, and we tended to believe that the problems of the world, like the problems of America, could be solved with money and technology...
...American history had unsuited us for dealing with the un-American realities of world politics, yet we possessed world power and responsibilities...
...It is possible, of course, that Pol Pot and his associates decided that because the United States had bombed their bases they would kill half their population to get even...
...If all this is true, or at least partly true, how does Hoffmann come to his peculiar position...
...But the world, for better or worse, is not populated by Frenchmen...
...Nations, he suggests, understand foreign policy in terms of lessons drawn from their past...
...He goes a good way beyond explaining what we cannot do, and insists that we give up the quest for primacy, give up the business of "teaching others who may not want them the rules of our preferred game...
...The problem with American foreign policy, he held, is that it is conducted by Americans...
...In short, we must embrace a world order in common with our enemies, and pursue "joint goals" with them even if we do not much like them...
...Currency union would have been difficult no matter what the United States did...
...To persuade us, Hoffmann advances three arguments...
...Perhaps Hoffmann wishes to be recognized as the Michael Oakeshott of international relations- though this is doubtful...
...These are sensible precautions, but they stop far short of eschewing the pursuit of unilateral advantage, as the Soviet Union demon-strably recognizes...
...This is most odd, since it would seem that these incidents demonstrated the impotence of impotence more than anything else...
...thesis, and if he had painted America's enemies in shades blacker than reality, he had only done what was necessary...
Vol. 12 • February 1979 • No. 2
