Responses

...Clinton has so far chosen to follow, meek and mild, the lead of his Republican predecessors...

...In Russia, where Hoffmann rightly sees stability as crucial, the bank is fast and furiously privatizing with one hand while dismantling social services with the other...

...Either Clinton thinks all this is OK, or he and his people aren't even aware of it—one hesitates to suggest which is worse...

...or we can attempt to create a network of what I can only call, for want of a better name, ecological welfare states...

...We can either have the undivided reign of the free market (akin to the freedom of the fox in the henhouse) which necessarily excludes most people in the world and damages the natural base on which we all ultimately rely...

...The leader of the G-7 and host to the Bretton Woods Institutions can, if he so chooses, make policy there—certainly Reagan and Bush didn't hesitate to do so...

...In the name of "free" (deregulated) trade, NAFTA and GATT (or the future World Trade Organization) will transfer significant powers to non-transparent, nonaccountable bodies whose decisions can (in fact already do) supersede domestic law...

...There are also going to be increasing conflicts over dwindling ecological resources, including water, forests, and bio-diversity, with possibly major, irreversible environmental "flips" (climate, pollution, nuclear, whatever...

...executive director for the World Bank but hastened to name Larry Summers Under-Secretary of the Treasury, thus making him the man who gives that executive director (now Jan Piercy) her instructions...

...For over a year, Clinton didn't bother to appoint a new U.S...

...I don't agree with Hoffmann that a "world steering committee" is the answer...

...could name Mickey Mouse to the Board and he would still have enormous power...

...Hoffmann sums up the status quo as (1) an economic policy geared to blasting open markets, (2) a dodgy reliance on Yeltsin and (3) ad-hoc improvisations in the rest of the world...

...During the scandalous NAFTA vote-garnering scramble, it became clear that Bill Clinton's policy differs from Reagan's and Bush's imperceptibly if at all...

...As one World Bank director said, "The U.S...

...more drugs flowing, unstoppable tides of immigration...

...Isn't Hoffmann's (or Wolfers's) new "relationship of major tension" staring us in the face...

...More and more, foreign policy will have immediate domestic consequences...

...Future clashes will not be along nineteenth-century lines, but will center around what I've FALL • 1994 • 507 described elsewhere as "boomerangs" —increased environmental destruction and, perhaps, blackmail...

...policy is also being made by default...

...Surely these voluntary transfers of American national sovereignty and policymaking functions to nondemocratic, supranational bodies should be noted as a "foreign" policy of sorts...

...economic instability, especially job losses as transnational corporations pull up stakes...

...He has also praised the "obvious entrepreneurial energy of the black market" in Russia and has been described by the Los Angeles Times as a "virtual tent-preacher touting free-market economics to developing countries...

...The bank, with its sister, the IMF (International Monetary Fund), is now making policy—by U.S...

...design or default—in some ninety countries in the South or the former Eastern bloc...

...Is ad-hockery going to see us through as the flashpoints multiply...

...that if you can't sell consensus to the American people, you can, if necessary, buy it...

...Summers is not just the former chief economist at the bank who told a select list of colleagues that the logic of "dumping a load of toxic waste" in low-wage countries is "impeccable...

...confines him to writing a prescriptive piece and far be it from me to fault an author for not doing what he didn't set out to 506 • DISSENT do...

...As far as I can tell, the United States hasn't a clue as to what a desirable relationship with this fairly sizable chunk of the planet's population ought to be...

...Fair enough, but offhand, I'd say there's a good deal more to it than that and ask Stanley Hoffmann to go the extra mile and recognize that U.S...

...In the year 2000, what we used to call the third world will contain about five-sixths of humanity, much of it the victim of two decades of structural adjustment, young, uneducated, and angry...

...The market is somehow, like the Lord, expected to provide...

...Since Hoffmann has taken the lead on prescriptions, I'll follow suit and suggest that the United States should perhaps give it some thought...

...It wouldn't take much, not even much money, to establish a more intelligent—not to say more humane— policy toward the increasingly restive poor and toward the planet, but it would mean reining in the supranational institutions that are behaving now like global ministries of trade, finance, and everything else...

...One Bank official said in public that the success of this policy in Eastern Europe should be judged by the degree to which unemployment rises (he mentioned 20 percent jobless as a target...

...and more of what he calls a "bewildering number of conflicts...

...Still, I found myself wishing he had taken more than six lines to examine what American foreign policy actually is, as a rough guide to both the present and the future...

...That policy, a species of market fundamentalism, is called "structural adjustment," and it causes enormous human suffering and ecological devastation...