Editorials
COMMONWEAL State of the world Foreign policy, like charity, begins at home. That is the one sturdy arrow of truth in Pat Buchanan's campaign quiver, otherwise stocked with jingoistic and...
...It is not true that we can afford to pull in our horns and let the rest of the world go to hell...
...the former Soviet Union, because it is former, has resigned from the club...
...As long as the Soviets had or were perceived to have enough troops and weapons to smash their way into Western Europe, or to pulverize Japan, or (through proxies) to achieve hegemony in, say, the Persian Gulf or the Middle East—and as long as enough of the right kinds of people believed that Soviet power might in fact be used for these ends—the counter-balancing power of the U.S...
...But, though Armageddon has been rescheduled, the planet has hardly become a safe neighborhood...
...to pay in return...
...no longer has interests to defend and obligations to fulfill beyond its borders—and to build political campaigns and careers on that pretense...
...The war demonstrated as well that this country is now the world's sole military superpower...
...We do not need (and can never have) enough "defense" forces to police the world...
...And so on...
...We are condemned to live in interesting times...
...No one nation can dictate the terms of world trade...
...as Patrick Barnard writes, it will entail some risks and cause some painful disruptions...
...Fortunately, the new multipolar world that replaces the U.S.Sov iet duopoly does confer benefits besides relief from nuclear fear...
...In consequence of all this, those Americans who raised their index fingers in triumph at the close of the Gulf War ("we're No...
...And that depends in turn on a great many factors, from economic strength to political wisdom and political will...
...Despite Barnard's pessimism about the likely outcome, our hope is that the presidential campaign now lurching onward will force candidates, commentators, and voters to examine the options with clear eyes...
...The loss of its preeminent political power is a small price for the U.S...
...the campaign will reveal whether we will be blessed with interesting leaders...
...nobody's writing scenarios for the world stage that include such a role...
...Terrible events can still rise out of the unresolved hostilities on view in the Middle East, Yugoslavia, the new Eurasian commonwealth—to name only some of the regions most visibly threatened or already ruled by large-scale and contagious violence...
...In the Gulf War the U.S...
...We do need an adequate defense...
...Tom Harkin betrays his own past when he adds a note of jingoism to his protectionist program on world trade...
...Buchanan put it most bluntly in the title of an article: "America First—and Second and Third...
...The world's biggest creditor nation is suddenly its biggest debtor...
...is more or less out of a job...
...That can change and indeed may...
...We can sharply reduce spending on maintenance of our overstuffed nuclear forces, and immediately cancel ongoing plans for developing new nuclear weapons systems, plans that no longer have a rational end-in-view but will cost hundreds of billions of dollars if continued...
...It's always possible, of course, that another rogue leader like Saddam Hussein will set a course that threatens important Western interests, economic or political or both, but the possibility isn't enough of a likelihood to require continued European or Japanese deference to U.S...
...Tragic consequences—mass starvation, '30sstyle global depression, Hiroshima- or Dresden-scale massacres, planetary poisoning—can follow from a failure of the nations in concert to adjust the terms of international trade prudently and fairly, to strengthen our fledgling mechanisms for peacekeeping and conflict resolution, and to address such issues as nuclear proliferation, transnational pollution, deforestation, the booming trade in ever more deadly arms, the growth of megacorporations that do business in many countries and are accountable to none: issues dismissed as hokum by the newly resurgent isolationists among us, and most of which are ignored or downplayed in President George Bush's vaguely defined "new world order...
...Treasury with unprecedented new burdens...
...Commonweal 17 January 1992: 5...
...At the moment we are prevented from achieving such gains by the budget agreement of October 1990, which precluded shifting resources from military to civilian needs...
...Easy proclamations to the contrary, it should be added, are not only subversive of American interests but contrary to the best in the American character and in the traditions of the Democratic party...
...Paradoxically, however, our newly absolute military supremacy brings this country not more but less in the way of political clout...
...We have not entered Valhalla, or reinvented the Garden of Eden...
...Deregulatory folly has wasted the savings and loan industry, put the banking system at risk, and laden the U.S...
...The same echoes are heard in the campaign rhetoric deployed on the left by Iowa's Tom Harkin and at right of center by Virginia's L. Douglas Wilder, whose campaign slogan, "Put America First," is simply warmedover Buchanan...
...This is a seismic shift, and its implications are not easy to grasp...
...What the United States should do in the world, whether on its own behalf or for the sake of global peace, order, and prosperity, depends on what it can do...
...it's a tourniquet around the national neck, but until recently it received from the administration and many in Congress rather more respect than the Constitution...
...It happens, however, that Americans are being forced to reconceive geopolitics at the very moment when the critical character of our own economic and social ills has become visible even in the White House...
...There were strong echoes of the same theme in the successful senatorial campaign of Pennsylvania's Harris Wofford, a Democrat: "It's time to take care of our own...
...was indispensable, and the U.S...
...itself was not merely influential but dominant in "the West...
...We can very greatly reduce the deployment of U.S...
...troops and gear to protect Western Europe and Southeast Asia...
...No one nation can protect the ozone layer or prevent the poisoning of the seas and the air around us...
...Certainly it is Commonweal 17 January 1992: 3 a great blessing, maybe the best thing that has happened in this bloody century, that the possibility of global nuclear war is so greatly diminished...
...Meantime, as Patrick Barnard points out in an article in this issue (pp...
...policy choices—especially since, if such a threat rises, and is credible to us and to them, they and we can cope again...
...As military superpower, then, the U.S...
...Steven Kelman, who teachs public policy at Harvard, points out in the Washington Post National Weekly (December 16-22) that Douglas Wilder himself belongs to the American ethnic group that suffers most when mean-spirited scapegoating crowds out intelligent generosity...
...We do not need overkill capacity...
...9-11), our latest military spending spree, coupled with Ronald Reagan's voodoo economics, has sharply reduced our economic standing...
...Given the new situation in the world, given the assets the United States still commands—rich and varied resources, a vast market, political stability, a numerous people—the policy choices now available constitute an unparalleled opportunity...
...That is the one sturdy arrow of truth in Pat Buchanan's campaign quiver, otherwise stocked with jingoistic and xenophobic campaign darts...
...That creates a strong temptation to pretend that the U.S...
...demonstrated that it can still do a lot of harm in a hurry—against a fourth-rate power and with the help of lots of yen, marks, pounds, francs, riyals, and dinars to pay the bills...
...Teaching Americans that they don't have to care—should not care—about the hundreds ofmillions on the planet who know hunger and suffer oppression is a prescription for another kind of political and social disaster...
...We can swear off interventionist adventures in Latin America and the Caribbean...
...And there are other, less obviously "political" problems demanding attention from the world community that may be aboming...
...These and other Democratic aspirants for the presidency, along with maverick Republican David Duke, are attacking George Bush not on the substance of his foreign policy, where he is indeed vulnerable, but simply for having a foreign policy...
...Our smart bombs, our nukes and missiles cannot coerce the Serbs, Slovenians, and Croats into a settlement of their murderous conflict, nor prevent its spread...
...Refusing it will commit us to long-term decline—and who knows what else...
...It follows that the level of unnecessary military expenditures we are now maintaining constitutes a massive diversion of resources—not just tax money but brainpower, technology, time, attention, raw materials—to nonproductive purposes...
...Unlike schools, roads, machine tools, the instruments of war are pure consumption: every tank, bomber, warship over the level of need is pure waste, and every excess dollar taken from the Pentagon and given to education, civilian R&D, preventive medical care, infrastructure, and the like is pure gain...
...We no longer need to buy allies around the world with huge infusions of arms and other military support for the sake of containing communism...
...1!") were not seeing the real world...
...It's perfectly true that the current state of the economy reflects something worse than the bottom stage of the business cycle, that we urgently need to turn the economy around, and that doing so will require a massive shift in our deployment of resources...
...Perhaps the greatest danger is that candidates in search of sound bites will propose new "usagainstthem" approaches to both domestic and foreign policy, blaming Japan or Germany or the European community for made-in-America problems, dismissing desperately poor nations as hopeless basket cases, pretending that it's now a unipolar rather than polycentric world, dreaming up new dangers to justify feeding the gargantuan appetites of the military-industrial complex...
...Campaigning 4: 17 January 1992 Commonweal against foreign aid for humanitarian purposes and for development (a tiny slice of the budget, a mere 0.24 percent of GNP) slides easily into a campaign against foreigners —and then against those Americans who also need and deserve our compassion and help, and who are "different"—i.e., poor, black, Latino...
...Because of governmental failure to invest in infrastructure and "human assets," along with corporate mismanagement that has amassed improbable debt totals while aiming at next-quarter profits, the country lags in productivity, and outpaces its competitors only in the size of its trade imbalance...
...Seizing the opportunity will be a difficult political and managerial task...
Vol. 119 • January 1992 • No. 1
