Toward a Democratic Foreign Policy
Denitch, Bogdan
The great danger for the foreign and defense policies of the new Clinton administration lies in the "new" folks' widespread temptation to try to act statesmanlike by producing a high degree...
...Les Aspin's desire to act "responsibly" as the secretary of defense, that is, not to offend by anything like adequate cuts in the now mostly obsolete military budget, does not augur well...
...pressure on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund...
...These rights cannot remain confined to the privileged ghettos of the developed North...
...Thus, for example, nuclear submarines, much of the heavy armor, and strategic air-force might become redundant while quite possibly the Marines and light infantry divisions, including the Airborne, might well need to be built up...
...military's weapons systems would be radically different from those designed essentially for superpower confrontations...
...Its initial organizing convention in the spring of 1992 was broken up by thugs and then prohibited by the police for "safety reasons...
...To insist on such economic policies as a condition of aiding the South or the former communist-ruled countries is to push mightily in the direction of turning these into authoritarian, at best authoritarian-populist regimes...
...The party has great problems in finding places willing to rent space for meetings and in raising even minimal funds to keep its paper and activities going...
...This means a defense of basic rights of the peoples in the South and post-Communist countries...
...However, given the present twilight of universalist programs and values, any populist regime would most likely turn to aggressive nationalism as an ideological underpinning...
...Two SDU members had their cars dynamited in front of their homes in January 1993...
...These goals were to be accomplished by cutting social spending, freeing the prices of commodities, especially those of basic food and energy, and encouraging the private sector...
...Everything else is gravy for the stockholders and managers...
...That is a position that tends to set the direction of overall macro-economic policies...
...There is also a narrower reason for reversing past policies, which should carry some weight with progressives and democratic socialists in the advanced capitalist countries...
...The great danger for the foreign and defense policies of the new Clinton administration lies in the "new" folks' widespread temptation to try to act statesmanlike by producing a high degree of bipartisan continuity with Bush's dismal policies...
...For example: can the United States defend its current policy of refusing to place its troops under multilateral UN command when intervening in humanitarian or brush-fire actions...
...Nor does the high number of appointments from well established and conventional foreign policy think tanks and defense lobbyists...
...Bluntly stated, cheap labor in postcommunist countries, the South, and China are supposed to lower the costs of labor in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Japan...
...More to the point, democracy itself is in deep peril in these countries as long as they attempt to follow the economic prescriptions of the international financial institutions and the hordes of mostly U.S.-based economic advisers...
...These generalizations are drawn from places as different as Russia, Argentina, Ukraine, Brazil, Nigeria, and Tanzania...
...Countries in the South are told (as are the former communist countries) that in order to get any financial aid they must cut the cost of their already low-paid labor further...
...q 154 • DISSENT Clinton Proposes, We Respond Services Committee...
...Is it in the genuine interest of the United States that it assume the role of a world policeman...
...That is why generous aid must be provided to help in the transition to democracy...
...Should it not rather emphasize the building of a genuine international peace force capable of effectively intervening in the Cambodias, Bosnias, and Sudans of this world...
...People unfortunate enough to be on fixed incomes, including pensioners and much of the civil service, face catastrophic conditions...
...Nevertheless we ask Dissent readers and sympathizers to help our fellow democratic leftists in Croatia because it is essential for any prospect of a decent postwar society that democratic socialist, nonnationalist organizations survive...
...The present practice, much exacerbated by widespread military-industrial pork barreling, has historically reversed this process, at least since the Second World War...
...This is, let us remember, a distinctly centrist Democratic administration and therefore, at least, one should be grateful that notorious hawks associated with the AFL-CIO cold-war obsessed internationalist wing did not get the appointments they expected, at least thus far...
...That formula for hobbling welfare state measures at home and decent aid policies internationally must be undone if the new administration is not to remain a hostage to the Reagan years...
...In January of this year one of SDU's candidates for local elections was suddenly mobilized and, although previously classified as an army telephonist because of poor eyesight, was reclassified as a sniper and sent directly into the enemy line of fire...
...But democracy has no chance if it is linked to grinding poverty and a drop in already low living standards...
...A campaign to dismiss a leading tenured SDU member, Professor Milan Pupavac, as well as a well-known friend, Professor Zarko Puhovski, is now underway in the Faculty of Philosophy of Zagreb, previously a stronghold of Marxisthumanist praxis...
...This in part explains why, all violations of human rights notwithstanding, the Bush and Reagan administrations were so gentle with China...
...Tyson is not a member of the Chicago school of economics...
...SDU's members have been dismissed from jobs in the media, the economy, and civil service...
...They do not even have to SPRING • 1993 • 155 Clinton Proposes, We Respond bother with union-busting, since that will be taken care of by the Chinese communist regime...
...Much of the damage is the result of conscious ideological policies crudely based on the monetarist teachings of the Chicago School imposed through U.S...
...We should demand that clearly stated doctrine, agreed on after a substantial and open debate, dictates what defense systems will be required, and that these requirements in turn determine what is an appropriate defense SPRING • 1993 • 153 Clinton Proposes, We Respond budget...
...q 156 • DISSENT...
...Inefficient state-owned industries were to be privatized at any cost and their "surplus" workers dumped...
...The Reagan-Bush years were even worse on North-South issues than on domestic policies...
...It desperately needs help from friends abroad...
...Would this not place a burden of excessive and therefore all too often disappointed expectations on the United States...
...This debt, we on the left must continue to remind an electorate with notoriously short memories, was quite consciously created by the Reagan administration precisely in order to limit the ability of the federal government to spend on either domestic or international programs...
...Under such circumstances clearly the U.S...
...B.D...
...Much of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union now threaten to slide into the third world...
...She is not even a captive of the free-trade orthodoxies of the past decades...
...Help should be sent to: Institute for Democratic Socialism 15 Dutch Street, Rm...
...For much the same reason they do not have to worry about safety, health, or bothersome ecological standards...
...The devastated former Communist economies are now competing with a desperately impoverished South for ever scarcer resources...
...The early successful offensive by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their allies in the Senate like Sam Nunn around the issue of eliminating discrimination against gays in the military has weakened any likelihood that major restructuring in defense budgets, doctrines or policies will take place...
...10038 Checks should be made payable to: IDSYugoslavia Fund, and they are tax deductible...
...Dellums is more likely to provoke a long overdue major defense policy debate than anyone else in Congress...
...Even worse repression takes place in Serbia, particularly in Kosovo, and horrible violations of human rights and mass rape take place in Bosnia-Herzegovina...
...Once burned, in an ill-timed, although probably inevitable confrontation with the military, Clinton's people will be even more cautious than their centrist politics would lead them to be in challenging military budget orthodoxies...
...The search for ever cheaper labor has led to an assault on the crude welfare states in former Communist-ruled countries...
...In any case that defense policy debate is overdue, and the only good news is that Ron Dellums, a sophisticated critic of military and defense policy dogmas, has become the chairman of the House Armed Delp Democratic Socialists in Croatia The democratic socialist Social Democratic Union (SDU) of Croatia, headed by Professor Branko Horvat, faces continued repression by both the authorities and informally organized superpatriots...
...The same ideological drive that led to a sharp drop in wages of working Americans in the name of ever greater "competitiveness" has had a catastrophic effect on the third-world South...
...The already intolerable income gap between the North and South of a decade ago has increased sharply...
...Unsurprisingly these policies have resulted in a great deal of corruption, mafia-like collusion between the new entrepreneurs and the state as well as massive dissatisfaction of the majority of those employed and increased misery of the growing numbers of people who have become unemployed...
...One of the best signals is the appointment of Professor Laura Tyson from Berkeley to chair the Council of Economic Advisers...
...Even more important is the issue of doctrine, that is, the long-range defense policies of the United States...
...The police did not find the guilty parties, but a statement was issued to the effect that this was not a politically motivated crime...
...They have been arbitrarily denied citizenship papers together with masses of Albanian, Serbian, and Gypsy longtime residents of Croatia...
...Today American corporations have discovered that they can build a new fertilizer factory in China, pay workers $40 a month and engineers $80, sell the fertilizer to Japan and amortize the factory in one year...
...The universal formula imposed on the whole South and former communist countries is seemingly simple and has been applied with the same dogmatic rigidity that "state socialist" models were applied earlier...
...There are some good portents in the economic appointments of the new administration that will have a long-range impact on North/South policies as well...
...No regime can keep enforcing these policies and remain popular and democratic...
...The resources are scarcer in good part because the American treasury has been impoverished by feckless tax cuts for the rich and corporations combined with huge allocations for defense and growing interest payments on an ever increasing debt...
...500 New York, N.Y...
...Clearly a whole host of major issues will have to be faced soon...
...On December 17 one of SDU's trade union leaders, Milan Krivokuca, a member of the party's executive committee, was stabbed to death on his doorstep...
...Doctrine has been figured out as a post-factum justification long after the military got all the weapon systems the market would bear...
...Cheap labor in the third world is a threat to the social and ecological standards of the more advanced countries...
...Throughout the summer election campaign for the Croatian Parliament the SDU candidates were exposed to intimidation...
...We must work to change the present international policies of the United States, and that means to insist that defense of human rights must include the right of workers to organize their own unions, freedom of press and other media to criticize their regimes, and the right of opposition including new leftist and socialist parties...
Vol. 40 • April 1993 • No. 2
