Responses
Hehir, J. Bryan
Stanley Hoffmann's description of the world confronting U.S. policymakers is characteristically complex in its analysis and clear in its definition of policy choices. Moreover, Hoffmann's work...
...foreign policy is the way in which these two major shifts in the international system— the structure of power and the principles of order—intersect in the daily dynamic of world politics...
...In a similar fashion, the need to expand the reasons justifying intervention in response to atrocities within states should be joined with a healthy respect for the role nonintervention has played in a world of very unequal states...
...there is less agreement on what is supplanting it...
...role will be in a changing structure of power and order in the world...
...DomesFALL • 1994 • 509 tic restraint can be one dimension of a broader view of the U.S...
...Nuclear proliferation and intervention illustrate the intersection of the two...
...A combination of factors and forces (political, economic, and normative), has eroded the protection that sovereignty once offered states and has led to calls for a reevaluation of the role nonintervention plays in international society...
...The collapse of the cold war amounts to a change in the structure of power in world affairs...
...The Clinton administration has argued that it has managed well the broader geopolitical issues of the structure of power (for example, relations with Russia and the Middle East), yet has been under constant criticism because of the internal conflicts within "failed states...
...By itself this tendency is neither adequate as a guide for policy nor entirely unhealthy...
...The unresolved analytical debate about the structure of power in the 1990s is a good sign that the quest for a doctrine is at least premature...
...That judgment is strengthened by the recognition that the changing structure of power is only one dimension of the forces at work in the world of the 1990s...
...involvement in a leadership role—defining the threat posed by proliferation and catalyzing a political and military consensus in response to the threat...
...The crucial characteristic of the 1990s for U.S...
...Major states should help fund and authorize interventions through regional and international bodies, but not lead them...
...Involvements means being part of a process that will collapse without us, but will not yield to a script written in Washington...
...dominance, to a new multipolar balanceofpower system involving the United States, Europe, Japan, China, and Russia, to an argument, advanced by Hoffmann and others, that neither unipolarity nor a revivified balance of power captures the complexity of the present world order...
...They distinguish instead different kinds of power (political, military, economic), which in turn yield multiple levels of balance at work in the world...
...This in fact is only one dimension of a more complex process at work in international politics in the 1990s...
...A second dimension of change, distinct from the first but intensified by it, involves the principles of order by which international relations have been understood and governed for three centuries...
...policy options in the 1990s because of the profound transformation that has occurred in international politics...
...The dominant debates of the Clinton presidency—Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda—are less about the geopolitical structure of power than they are about principles of order...
...A unipolar military order can coexist with a multipolar economic order, neither of which is adequate to explain Bosnia or Rwanda, situations that are not primarily shaped by the external balance...
...Legitimizing unilateral responses to proliferation is a recipe for chaos...
...Failure to find a way through the catastrophe of Haiti will not change the structure of power, but will affect the reputation and standing of the United States in the eyes of others...
...Hoffmann's method is particularly useful in an assessment of U.S...
...policy of "involvement without overexpansion" requires that the administration confront issues of structure and order together...
...Neither state sovereignty nor intervention has the clear status and meaning that has marked other periods of international relations...
...Moreover, Hoffmann's work over many years provides a basic approach to the making of foreign policy...
...The twin principles of international order, the sovereignty of states 508 • DISSENT and the prohibition against intervention in their internal affairs, are both in flux...
...In the case of North Korea, protecting the principle of nonproliferation requires U.S...
...Reshaping principles of order to allow for intervention in the face of such systematic threats as proliferation involves attending to the need for multilateral authorization and participation in any military response...
...role, in my judgment, to undertake a unilateral military response to the Korean threat...
...Stanley Hoffmann's call for a U.S...
...But it would be overexpansion of the U.S...
...Legitimating international interventions should not be equated with expanding the interventionary role of the major actors in the structure of power...
...Bosnia and North Korea combine aspects of "high politics" (structure of power issues) with issues of sovereignty and intervention...
...Concern for how systematic threats to the structure of power are met in the 1990s means establishing the right precedents of order...
...Contending conceptions run from a unipolar view of U.S...
...There is little public support in the United States today for "overinvolvement" in world affairs...
...The depth and nature of that transformation as well as its likely consequences are topics that divide both analysts and diplomats, inside and outside the policy-making process...
...The dominant description of the change is the transition from the cold war order of politics to the post–cold war world...
...The collapse of the cold war lessened the geopolitical dangers surrounding intervention, raised the expectations of many about the possibilities of international order, and, at the same time, unleashed forces of internal conflict long dormant within states...
...The forces affecting sovereignty and nonintervention have been at work for over two decades, but the collapse of the cold war structure of power provides new impetus to the pressures on both...
...responsibilities, but not uniquely U.S...
...He has always given priority to an analysis of the dynamics and structure of the international system in the shaping of U.S...
...Doctrines can be helpful in defining choices and determining priorities in policy, but only if the doctrine accurately responds to the world it seeks to shape...
...The change in the structure of power has been caused by the collapse of the bipolar world that made the cold war pattern of politics so familiar to analysts and diplomats alike...
...The moral fabric of the sovereigntynonintervention compact was always thin, but the danger of legitimating intervention in the cold war world discouraged any significant effort to recast prevailing principles of order...
...role that recognizes that reshaping the structure of power and redefining principles of order are U.S...
...These concepts never meant that the sovereignty of all states was equally protected or that nonintervention held absolutely, but there was a presumption that both should be respected...
...The complexity of the structure of power debate is a principal reason why Hoffmann is not concerned that a single "Clinton Doctrine" has not emerged in the first half of this administration...
...One can be persuaded of the basic point in this apologia, yet not convinced that the two kinds of issues (structure of power and principles of order) can be kept that separate...
...All agree that bipolarity is gone...
...prerogatives...
...Increased expectations of the international community inevitably focus on what the U.S...
Vol. 41 • September 1994 • No. 4
