This is not necessarily a criticism; Macmillan, after all, was complimenting himself. Some of the best secretaries of state–George Marshall, for one–have been doers rather than thinkers. George Bush, in a less felicitous formulation than Macmillan’s, also voiced doubts about the “vision thing”–and yet he was a pretty good foreign-policy president. Good instincts can be as important as imagination in a statesman.
Yet now is a time for imagination. During the cold war, America’s basic foreign-policy course had been set, and good instincts were enough to stay the course. In the confusion of the present, the United States needs to chart a course–and it’s debatable whether any of the president’s new advisers is inclined, or able, to undertake this task.
Secretary of State-designate Madeleine Albright, for example, is a serious and assertive foreign-policy professional, but her positions have always been finely tuned to the political spectrum of the day. In the 1970s and 1980s she supported the nuclear freeze and opposed aid for the Nicaraguan contras; today she is a hawkish voice, often urging the use of force. Four years ago she hailed the United Nations and its leaders as American partners; this year she campaigned vigorously to oust Boutros Boutros-Ghali. We can be sure that Albright will articulate her positions with creativity. Whether they will be creative positions remains unclear.
A hardheaded internationalist is not given to bluster and could prove to be Albright’s most serious competitor as the vicar of American national-security policy. The Maine Republican has spent decades in the Senate speaking out with authority and is unlikely to shrink from trying to play a large role now. Sandy Berger appears to be a team player capable of containing the eternal feuding between the National Security Council and the State Department. Ironically, the one member of the new lineup who has tried to articulate new policy ideas is Tony Lake, who is moving to the only cabinet post explicitly not devoted to policymaking: director of the CIA.
When announcing the new appointments, Clinton said that he wanted to build on the foreign-policy achievements of his first term. Let us hope that this was rhetorical boilerplate. The foreign policy of the first Clinton term was, by and large, passive and reactive. (And it is worrisome that Cohen is the only new face in the crowd.) From the first months of 1993 the administration was distracted by crises that were made vivid by constant television coverage but did not involve America’s central security interests. At one point a White House aide admitted that the president was spending almost 90 percent of the time he devoted to foreign policy on the messy trinity of Bosnia, Haiti and Somalia. That left 10 percent of his time for such trivia as Russia, China, Japan and Western Europe. The result, predictably, was that these key relationships suffered (with the exception of Russia) for much of the first term.
The second Clinton administration will naturally have to deal with whatever crises come up, particularly if they happen in Korea, the Persian Gulf or Cuba. But it must ensure that it is not captured by crisis after crisis, yielding America’s international agenda to CNN or the United Nations’ secretary-general. Imposing a strategic framework on the hurly-burly of world affairs requires discipline and persistence. It also requires a strategic framework, perhaps even a vision.
Some might ask why. After all, the Soviet Union has collapsed, the cold war is won, the world is at peace and regimes everywhere are moving toward greater openness in economics and politics. But cordiality between the great powers and rising global prosperity is neither natural nor self-regulating. It is the product, more than anything else, of American power and purpose. Without conscious and sustained efforts to preserve and expand this system, the world could look very different in the 21st century. Hence the need for the Clinton team to engage in a burst of creativity.
Sustained great-power peace is rare; a functioning global economy is rarer still. Both came into being for the first time in the mid-19th century, when world trade grew, regimes everywhere liberalized and national economies became increasingly intertwined. Between 1870 and 1900 world industrial production quadrupled. This world of liberal economics and politics, however, rested on the massive edifice of British power. Britain was the balancer of Europe, providing political stability, and its navy kept international sea lanes open for commerce. It practiced unilateral free trade and, with the pound and the gold standard, provided the financial stability that allowed capital to move freely across borders. But by the 1930s, British power had collapsed, hastened by World War I. What followed was mercantilism, depression, xenophobia and world war.
The second flourishing of peace and prosperity began after World War II. Perhaps the best symbol of this world is the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), made up of countries that–like France and Germany, the United States and Japan–were once warring enemies but are now trading partners. Together they have produced the greatest economic miracle in human history: virtually continuous rises in the standard of living of their citizens for almost half a century. On almost all issues, the world’ statesmen convene, consult and coordinate their policies, with varying levels of interest and success, in an alphabet soup of international organizations: WTO, GATT, UN, IMF, WHO. It is a world utterly familiar to us but entirely new in history..
This, the golden age of liberal-democratic capitalism, has rested securely on four pillars, built, by and large, by America: the political unity that resulted from the Soviet threat and from American security guarantees (making separate and competing national-defense policies unnecessary); the free-trade system, which was sponsored by the United States; the dollar’s pivotal role in the international monetary system, and American public and private investment abroad.
The cracks in these pillars are evident. The Soviet threat is no more. American relative economic power has declined from its postwar peak. Regional blocs like the European Union and rising powers like China seek to bend and twist the rules of free trade. Nativism, populism and protectionism are growing everywhere in the West.
The Clintonites’ fundamental challenge is to place this world on firmer footing. No system of world order that excludes the second and third largest economies in the world can succeed. The Clinton administration must actively promote Germany and Japan as permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, or else the Council will slowly cease to be a forum for great-power decision making.
Washington should also ask Tokyo and Bonn to join with it to halt the deterioration of the open world economy. Free trade needs strengthening. Many of the rules, regimes and international institutions created at Bretton Woods in 1944, like the IMF, need overhauling; others, like the World Bank, may well need to be scrapped. Another challenge will be to bring into the system the newly prospering nations–what fund managers call the emerging markets–of East Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America; most difficult to integrate, of course, will be Russia and China. Otherwise, these countries will grow outside the system and become spoilers.
This is an ambitious agenda for the United States, but in many ways it is less ambitious than that taken on by the Truman administration after World War II. After all, it helped create this world; the task now is to secure it. And there is probably one person–and only one–on Clinton’s team who has the energy, the skill in politics and policy, the interest in economics and, most important, the sheer power to turn this vision into reality: Bill Clinton.
