What Should American Foreign Policy Be?

...Russia has 498 • DISSENT always—before, during, and after communism —been obsessed with being treated as a major power and recognized as an equal by the other great actors on the world stage...

...Second, partly because of this, and partly because of the number of such issues, their solution requires the cooperation of a concert of outside powers—through international or regional institutions, or through diplomatic coalitions, wielding a mix of sanctions and rewards...

...Our goal ought to be the creation of a concert of powers capable of dealing with those issues or crises whose neglect could have disastrous effects or set an intolerable precedent...

...What has to be defined is a policy of involvement without overexpansion...

...Let us begin with the problems we face...

...It is illogical for American diplomacy to be both against unilateral American interventions and against an enlarged role for the UN...

...But domestic trouble is not the only issue...

...The second problem is that of a bewildering number of conflicts, potential and actual...

...and "pragmatic" improvisations to cope with some of the many troubles of the planet...

...It is important, and not only because of Zhirinovsky, that we remember Weimar when we deal with what is still—but for how much longer?— Yeltsin's Russia...

...As in 1815 and 1918, the defeated party is in domestic turmoil...

...The statesmen of the Congress of Vienna understood this concerning France...

...If we do not want to "remedy every wrong," we must give the UN the means to deal with significant "dislocations" —and the most important means are the political, financial, and military support a concert of engaged powers could provide...

...Similarly, a policy toward Japan that seems to focus only, and brutally, on the opening of Japanese markets and the reduction of our trade deficit with Tokyo risks having the opposite effect from the one we ought to seek: a greater involvement in international peace-keeping operations and in antiproliferation diplomacy...

...Ens...

...But in exchange for taking these into account, we need to obtain from Russia's leaders an assurance that legitimate interests (for instance in the stability of Central Asia or the fair treatment of Russians in Ukraine or in the Baltic states) do not become pretexts for a new imperialism, and that traditional connections (for instance with the Serbs) do not become a reason for protecting perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and of crimes against innocent civilians...

...The Gulf War marked both the culmination and the beginning of the end of that brief era: when the Soviet Union disintegrated and Yugoslavia collapsed into civil war, an entirely new age began...

...Anything that makes this reintegration more difficult, and appears to make it humiliating, risks being disastrous both for world order and for the future of a shaky new regime...

...It is therefore not surprising that Clinton's diplomatic and security team is low-key rather than forceful, and that American foreign policy in the first year and a half of the administration can be summarized as follows: an aggressive foreign economic policy aimed at opening markets for American goods—as a vital part of general economic policy...

...To press large (if legitimate) demands about human rights publicly and self-righteously helps neither the cause of human rights nor that of a new and necessary concert...

...or else massive violations of human rights, either as the result of such conflicts or by a regime determined to preserve its tyrannical power or to prevent ethnic or religious secessions...

...In the second place, this is an administration that wants to give priority to America's economic renaissance and to the solution of some of the country's major social issues—long neglected, in part, because of the priority of the global cold war...

...It is comparable to that of France after Napoleon's fall, of Germany after 1918...

...There have been enough fluctuations, tactical reversals, and conflicts of goals to suggest that the time has come to think about priorities and strategies...

...Without such a concert, the UN—which is no more than the sum of its members, plus a bureaucracy of dubious efficiency—will not be able to play the role it ought to be playing...

...The United States also needs to obtain the cooperation of China, whose present leadership is near the end of its rule...

...The cold war, for many reasons, did not degenerate into global violence, but it was a worldwide conflict, and it ended with the defeat of one side...

...second, the adoption, for the many cases of state disintegration that are likely to occur, of a policy that would both condemn and punish ethnic cleansing and seek, for threatened minorities, solutions that would fall short of full secession...

...To take Russia for granted and to ignore its traditional interests and connections only feeds antiWestern nationalism there...

...The Clinton administration cannot be blamed for having failed to produce a new grand doctrine or design...

...Clearly, the three problems are linked...

...This brings us to a third problem...

...The first is the problem of Russia...

...an increasingly troubled reliance on Yeltsin and reform in Russia, aimed at salvaging the dream of Russian-American cooperation around "Western" principles...

...Dissent asked Harvard's Stanley Hoffmann to outline an answer to this question, and solicited responses from an array of thoughtful commentators on American and world affairs, which we present below...

...Reaching such a goal requires, in the first place, a policy aimed at the guided reintegration of Russia into world affairs...

...When Gorbachev and his associates decided to replace rivalry with partnership and confrontation with accommodation, American statesmen briefly envisaged a "new world order" remarkably similar to Franklin D. Roosevelt's great design of 194445—one in which a concert of great powers led by the United States would provide collective security against (other) aggressors...

...to appear too eager for trade with China (at a time when China is the main beneficiary of it) is the opposite mistake...

...Two of the objectives that a "concert policy," inside and outside the UN, should pursue, are, first, the resolution of those disputes whose festering feeds the onslaught of Islamic fundamentalism not only against "the West" but against secular Muslim forces and regimes—I am thinking of the Palestinian issue, and of the territorial and nuclear conflicts between Pakistan and India...

...First, dealing with thempreventively or after they have become crises— requires interventions in domestic affairs and moves against internal policies (for instance, a nation's policy of weapons production and acquisition...

...There is little the outside world can do to bring democracy and a free enterprise system to Russia—any more than it could assure the success of Weimar...

...As for human rights, when massive violations result from ethnic and religious conflicts, as in Bosnia, or from civil wars, as in Angola, Rwanda, and many parts of the former Soviet Union, efforts by an international or by a regional concert of powers to resolve those conflicts are the best way of putting an end to massacre...

...Further expansion of trade ought to be made conditional, both on progress over human rights and on Chinese cooperation over issues of nuclear nonproliferation and the trade of weapons of mass destruction...

...When the violations are perpetrated by a regime for which the United States has acquired, through history, a distinct responsibility —as in Haiti, and also in Iraq (should Saddam Hussein try again to destroy the Kurds in the North and the Shiites in the South)— Washington has a duty to protect the victims (and certainly not to aggravate their misery through sanctions that hit them far more than they hit the murderers)— a duty that it cannot evade without undermining its human rights efforts everywhere and justifying the cynicism of those, in Asia and elsewhere, who choose to present the battle for human rights as a Western exercise in neo-imperialism...

...It is not surprising, but it is not sufficient...

...For forty years, containment provided a rationale, if not always a reliable compass, for American diplomacy...

...Others are domestic tragedies: the disintegration of weak, artificial or multinational states through ethnic, religious, or political conflicts...

...the other issue, which the winners must think about, is the reintegration of the loser into the international system...

...In the first place, a world without a single focus of conflict—what Arnold Wolfers called a "relationship of major tension"—does not lend itself easily to a sweeping vision, or even a simple slogan...

...FALL • 1994 • 499...

...What is needed to cope with these issues is a kind of world steering committee, composed of major global and regional powers who would try to agree, at least informally, on criteria justifying external interventions, and who would distinguish cases that have to be addressed because the failure to cope with them would seriously endanger international or regional security or fundamental values from cases that pose no such threat or offer no prospect of successful intervention...

...Two features of such issues are essential...

...Henry Kissinger is right when he writes, at the end of his new book, Diplomacy, that America can neither "remedy every wrong and stabilize every dislocation" nor "withdraw into itself...

...those of Versailles saddled Weimar with burdens that the new regime's foes exploited against democracy as well as against the equally fragile peace in Europe and against the new order of the League of Nations...

...But America's vast power has created a network of interests that rules out isolationism, and like every great power the United States also has an overriding FALL • 1994 • 497 interest in an international milieu or society compatible with, or not inimical to, essential American values, which are those of liberalism...

...What should American policy do about them...

...In the absence of a major threat to American security and values, the public is in no mood to do the former...

...One of the troubling features of the present moment is the absence of any such "concert," partly (but not exclusively) because most of the obvious candidates are absorbed by domestic difficulties...

...Some are classical situations of interstate rivalries and colliding ambitions—between the two Koreas, between India and Pakistan, Iran and Iraq, and so on...