Responses
Cohen, Mitchell
A far-reaching transformation of global politics has made the world a freer but messier place. The cold war was never tidy, yet superpower competition did impose a simplicity—often...
...Fashioning the Gulf coalition as an exercise in American-led collective security was, finally, a moment, not a policy...
...Missing was a reconceptualization of America's place in a changing world, of a proper balance between domestic needs and foreign requirements...
...Their might has been enhanced by revolutions in communications and technology...
...These institutions, busy championing what Alice Amsden has called "economic correctness," are subject to no democratic controls or accountability...
...In a way, Stanley Hoffmann's thoughtful proposal for a concert of powers reveals that his description of the Clinton administration is too generous...
...Americans entered the post–cold war era with a sense of deep domestic malaise, due especially to the socioeconomic consequences of the Reagan-Bush years...
...While economic correctness is presented as the "natural" order of things, social charters are emasculated, unions battered, and international ecological and populaFALL • 1994 • 503 tion problems deepen...
...Undoubtedly, we need to be circumspect in our foreign engagements, even while recognizing that it is impossible as well as dangerous and morally dubious to isolate or insulate ourselves from the world...
...I don't see that Clinton has gone much beyond this, except for some ecological addenda to NAFTA...
...but no less urgent is the need for a Socioeconomic and Environmental Concert to counter the orchestration of the IMF and company...
...Maynes wants to foster regional "self-reliance" through structures such as ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations), the OAS (Organization of American States), and the OAU (Organization of American Unity...
...the very absence of a single focus of world conflict demands it...
...Still, a balance between Hoffmann's concert and Maynes's regionalism would be salutary, especially since there is a dual dynamic at work in the new world flux: globalization plus fragmentation...
...Since calls for us to police (or help to police) the world are now chronic, and since the history of American interventionism is not glorious (with some important exceptions), this is a serious failure...
...The cold war was never tidy, yet superpower competition did impose a simplicity—often an unfortunate simplicity—on perceptions of events, if not on the events themselves...
...Finally, it is essential to bear in mind that the stakes today are not solely national security and amicable interstate relations...
...Here the guide was a type of market fundamentalism, with little regard for the social or environmental costs, expressed in the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) negotiations and in prescriptions for ex-communist lands...
...It is not surprising that Americans are torn between engaging the new world and turning inward...
...Today, virtually all the assumptions that governed international politics must be reconsidered...
...International steering through these messy times is a good idea, and something like an enhanced UN Security Council is what Hoffmann has in mind...
...The ideological proclivities—market fundamentalism—of powerful nonstate international economic actors such as the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the World Bank, and multinationals affect dramatically the lives of millions of people...
...But Bush did have a strategic perspective in one essential domain, and that was foreign economic policy...
...It seems to me that a useful supplement may be taken from an alternative security strategy proposed recently by Charles William Maynes in Foreign Policy...
...A concert of powers, both global and regional—fine...
...concurrently, the ability of governments, democratic or otherwise, to harness economic forces to set social priorities has eroded...
...In fact, in the first year and a half of his administration, NAFTA was just about the only foreign issue that truly moved the White House...
...When is it appropriate and when is it inappropriate for the sole remaining superpower to intervene abroad...
...This notion has some real problems: regional organizations may prove ineffective (witness the Europeans and Yugoslavia) and regional actors may pursue their own narrow interests selfishly in the context of efforts to solve a local crisis...
...On this vital issue the Clinton team has not provided Americans with much more direction than Bush's...
...Consider this depressing statistic, reported in Paul Kennedy's Preparing for the Twenty -First Century: in 1988, 65 percent of federal research dollars went to the military, while .5 percent went to environmental problems and .2 percent to industrial development...
...This is precisely why Washington needs, if not a grand design, then a much broader vision...
...502 • DISSENT George Bush proclaimed a "new world order," but this only masked a new world flux that he was unwilling to address in a comprehensive manner...
Vol. 41 • September 1994 • No. 4
