From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (150 page)

Other commentators forecast even more gloomy scenarios. Some warned that the Cold War struggle between East and West would give way to conflict between North and South, the haves and the have-nots, the West and the rest. Runaway population growth in the developing countries portended a possibly disastrous drain on already scarce resources, environmental crises that could afflict the entire globe, and the rampant spread of crime, disease, and war. Others warned ominously of an assault on the borders of the developed countries through massive emigration. Still others admonished that the anarchy already gripping Africa would spread across the globe, the chaos in the less developed countries eventually contaminating the developed nations.
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Although such predictions appeared unnecessarily pessimistic and may even have reflected a
certain nostalgia for Cold War "order," it was clear that history had not ended. Conflict and disorder would continue to characterize the new era.

The position of the United States in the new world order was paradoxical. During the 1990s and beyond, America enjoyed a preponderance of power with little precedent in world history. Its economy was 40 percent larger than that of the second-rank nation, its defense spending six times that of the next six countries combined. What political scientist Joseph Nye called its "soft power"—the international appeal of its products, lifestyle, and values—gave the United States sway "over an empire on which the sun never sets."
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Because of its wealth and relative security, it appeared to have unrivaled and unprecedented freedom of action. Neo-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer proclaimed with unabashed enthusiasm a "unipolar moment."
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Not surprisingly, the nation responded uncertainly to the new world order. Its contours were fuzzy at best, and Americans had no blueprint for dealing with it. "The central paradox of unipolarity," political scientist Stephen Walt observed, was that the United States "enjoys enormous influence but has little idea what to do with its power or even how much effort it should expend."
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The absence of any obvious threat to its security removed any compelling inducement to assume leadership in solving world problems. Most Americans recognized that there could be no isolationism in a world shrunk by technology and bound by economic interdependence, but after forty years of global commitment and heavy Cold War expenditures, many of them yearned for what Warren Harding had called "normalcy" and relief from the burdens of world leadership. As in the aftermath of World Wars I and II, they preferred to focus on domestic problems. Support for foreign policy ventures waned. An always fickle public lost interest in the world. Both reflecting and shaping public opinion, the media drastically reduced coverage of events abroad. Sensing a "peace dividend," Congress slashed expenditures for foreign aid, diplomatic representation abroad, and international public information programs. Despite an overwhelming victory in the Gulf War, bitter memories of the Vietnam debacle continued to haunt the nation two decades after its end, adding yet another constraint. Military leaders were especially leery of so-called humanitarian
interventions to stop the bloodshed from burgeoning ethnic conflicts across the globe. With Gen. Colin Powell as chairman of a more powerful Joint Chiefs of Staff, the so-called Powell Doctrine first enunciated in the mid-1980s took the form of holy writ.

The halting response of the George H. W. Bush administration to the new world order it had proclaimed made clear the challenges of the post–Cold War era. Bush offered no concrete vision of America's future international role now that containment, which had guided policymakers during the Cold War, was no longer relevant. He was perhaps complacent after his triumphant leadership in the Persian Gulf. In his last year, he struggled with a stagnant economy and was politically crippled by enactment of the tax increase he had sworn not to endorse.
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The one serious effort to plot a post–Cold War strategy was quickly repudiated. A Defense Planning Guidance document drafted in Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz's office under the supervision of Lewis "Scooter" Libby set forth a new vision for the United States as the world's lone superpower. The nation must maintain absolute military supremacy, the draft firmly asserted. It must prevent any power or combination of powers from challenging its position. The document was decidedly unilateralist, minimizing the significance of the UN and alliances. It pinpointed the spread of nuclear weapons as a major concern and suggested that the United States might have to act preemptively to head off that danger. Leaked to the press in March 1992, it provoked a brief furor. With the presidential primaries under way, the White House quickly distanced itself from the controversial draft. A toned-down revision paid lip service to collective security but never received official sanction. The document would be dusted off by another Bush administration after the turn of the century and become the underpinning for post-9/11 defense policy.
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After the Gulf War, the administration acted decisively only in the Middle East. From the outset, Bush and Secretary of State James Baker had made clear their determination to break the long-standing deadlock in Arab-Israeli negotiations. Israel must accept the principle of land for peace as specified in UN Resolution 242. It must "lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a greater Israel," Baker boldly informed an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) gathering in
May 1989.
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The end of the Cold War, the demise of the Soviet Union, and the defeat of Iraq seemed to strengthen the administration's hand. The Palestinians would no longer have an arms supplier. By easing the threat from Iraq, the United States presumably gained greater leverage with Israel. Working with moderate Palestinians in the West Bank rather than Arafat's PLO, the administration secured agreement of the major Arab states for a peace conference. Baker jawboned hard-line Israeli premier Yitzhak Shamir into attending. The conference, held in Madrid's Crystal Pavilion in late 1991, produced no substantive results, but it was enormously significant. Syria participated, a major breakthrough. For the first time, Palestinians spoke for themselves in an international forum. Ancient foes sat around a common table to discuss issues that had long divided them. The Madrid conference revived a peace process suspended for more than a decade.
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Baker and Bush also blocked Shamir's efforts to solidify Israel's position in the occupied territories. When they discovered that the prime minister was committed to building more than five thousand new houses, they held up legislation providing Israel $10 billion in loan guarantees to help settle recently arrived Soviet Jews. They also stood up to the Israel lobby. "The settlements are counterproductive to peace," Bush affirmed, "and everybody knows that."
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The president warned he would veto any loan that did not include provisions for stopping the settlements. Bush's courageous stand helped drive Shamir from office. His successor, the more amenable Yitzhak Rabin, agreed to stop building new settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Bush's timely and forceful diplomacy kept Middle East peace hopes alive.
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In dealing with Haiti and the former Yugoslavia, the Bush administration was far less assertive. In September 1991, the Haitian military overthrew the popularly elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Baker at first responded firmly: "This coup must not and will not succeed."
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But the administration did nothing more than impose sanctions to back up its tough talk. It briefly considered and quickly rejected military intervention. Taking over Haiti would be easy, Powell asserted; getting out, very difficult.
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The former Yugoslavia offered an even more glaring example of U.S. unwillingness to uphold the new world order. An unwieldy amalgam of six republics composed of conflicting ethnic and religious groups, the country had been held together by the force of Marshal Tito's personality and fear of the USSR. With the end of the Cold War, ethnic hatreds exploded, and the country knitted together after World War I began to unravel. Fanning the nationalist hatreds of his people, Slobodan Milosevic plotted to create a greater Serbia at the expense of other ethnic groups. In the summer of 1991, he set out to wrest lands from Croatia, laying siege to two major cities and subjecting helpless civilians to deadly bombardment and horrendous destruction. The next year, he joined Bosnian Serbs in military operations against Bosnia's Muslims. The former Yugoslavia would become the burning foreign policy issue of the decade.

The Bush administration had no inclination to stop the carnage. It was by no means clear at the beginning what horrors Milosevic would inflict. Throughout 1991, top officials were preoccupied with the Persian Gulf and the fall of the USSR. Intervention had no strong advocates within the administration. The military adamantly opposed the use of force in the Balkans. To scare off civilians, Powell deliberately exaggerated the number of troops that would be needed. With the end of the Cold War, Yugoslavia lost its geopolitical significance, and civilian leaders saw no compelling national interest there. Memories of Vietnam still held sway. The administration viewed the Balkans as a European problem, and at first Europeans seemed to agree. But even after Milosevic struck Bosnia in 1992 there was no interest in taking action. Despite growing warnings of a new Holocaust, the administration did nothing to halt Serbia's brutal "ethnic cleansing" of Croats and Muslims. "Where is it written that the United States is the military policeman of the world?" State Department spokesperson Margaret Tutwiler asked.
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"We don't have a dog in that fight," her boss Baker curtly proclaimed after a trip to Yugoslavia in 1991. Baker admitted in 1992 that Bosnia had become a "humanitarian nightmare," but the administration would go no further than assist modest relief efforts and give verbal support to halting and ineffectual European peace efforts.
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In its last weeks in office, a lame-duck administration undertook a limited intervention in embattled Somalia in East Africa. Torn by struggle among competing warlords, with civilians the victims, Somalia by 1992
was a horrendous humanitarian disaster. Starvation was epidemic. Thousands had been killed in the fighting, and refugees poured out of the country. Illustrating a new phenomenon in world affairs, images of human misery were beamed around the globe on television, creating demands to do something—the so-called CNN effect. Responding to such appeals, the administration in the summer agreed to transport UN troops to provide food and medical assistance. Perhaps to compensate for his opposition to intervention in Bosnia, Powell endorsed the dispatch of thirty-five thousand U.S. troops on a strictly limited mission of mercy to feed the hungry and aid the suffering. Once some semblance of order was established, they would be replaced by UN forces. The mission at first seemed to work.
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But the Bush administration never really determined whether it was committed to the new world order under U.S. leadership its rhetoric spoke of or, because of domestic preoccupations, preferred retrenchment and retreat. The post–Cold War world was full of surprises, Baker's successor, Lawrence Eagleburger, insisted, resulting in "pasted together diplomacy."
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Even more than its predecessor, the administration of William Jefferson Clinton found adjustment to the new world order vexing. Clinton's aides had salvaged a once floundering election campaign with the simple slogan "It's the economy, stupid." In many ways, this administration seemed more attuned to the new era, making clear from the outset its preference for domestic issues. Although a graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and a Rhodes scholar, Clinton seemed the polar opposite of Bush. Having spent his political career in state politics, the former governor of Arkansas was plainly less experienced with and informed on foreign policy issues. Smart, gregarious, charming, a charismatic and natural-born politician, he was also notoriously undisciplined in his work habits and private life. His few campaign pronouncements on foreign policy hinted at more forthright leadership and a more active role in defending human rights in such volatile areas as the Balkans. At heart, however, Clinton was a domestic policy "wonk" with a full agenda. In the beginning, at least, he appeared to hope that his foreign policy team could hold the world at bay while he implemented domestic reforms.

His top foreign policy advisers, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and Secretary of State Warren Christopher, a protégé of Cyrus Vance, came mainly out of the liberal Democratic mold—burned by Vietnam, nervous about unilateral intervention, committed to working
through the UN and other international organizations. Although a Kissinger protégé, Lake followed the precedent set by Scowcroft, becoming "by design the most obscure member of the Clinton foreign policy team."
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The new president's relations with his uniformed advisers were especially tenuous. Having avoided military service during the Vietnam era and actively protested the war, he was viewed with contempt by some of the top brass who served him. His early efforts to defend the rights of homosexuals in the military provoked seething opposition in the armed services.
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The Clinton administration was deeply committed to promoting domestic prosperity through expanding foreign trade. The president himself was an unabashed enthusiast for globalization, like the eighteenth-century
philosophes
viewing commerce as the essential instrument to promote free markets, democracy, and eventually peace and prosperity. "Since we don't have geopolitics any more," one Clinton adviser pronounced, "trade is the name of the game." In embassies across the world, diplomats turned their attention to economics. Clinton cashed in all his political chips to secure congressional passage in 1993 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). He also vigorously promoted the Asia-Pacific Economic Community as a modern economic NATO and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The Clinton administration eventually presided over an enormous expansion of U.S. foreign trade, sparking one of the nation's longest periods of economic growth.
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