THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (48 page)

The anarchic strategists go further and not only argue against strategic overcommitment but see opportunities in the very chaos of the international system that America's peculiar strengths would enable it to exploit. Unlike its potential competitors in Europe and Asia, the United States does not have powerful and threatening neighbors. That gives it less of a stake in the maintenance of a peaceful status quo, and allows for a comparative advantage should that system break down. Abandoning the task of underwriting a benign global political environment frees the United States to enjoy assets that are independent of that environment: the world's largest single market and the world's most secure geopolitical position. With such vast resources we can intervene when our own interests really are served, and pursue objectives that really are achievable. As Walter Lippmann wrote:

In what does such a defense consist? There are three principal elements.

First, the defense of our economic strength and its growth
. On this view, a national security establishment that, even in a period of record deficits and pronounced defense cutbacks, still takes about 29 percent of the national budget must rank as more of a threat to our long-term security than that posed by any particular state. Sizable and sustained tax cuts would be sought. Trade policies that are more geared to stabilizing the international trading system than winning advantages for U.S. companies and workers would be rejected. Military investment that is a drain on investment in infrastructure and innovation would be redirected.

Second, the avoidance of needlessly adding to the risks we would otherwise face
. This means abstention from involvement in conflicts that would add to our burdens but do not actually threaten us. The state system will never be “in balance” because it is dynamic and historical. The relative positions of “one sub-Saharan state vis-à-vis another, or of Hungary vis-à-vis Romania, or of Serbia vis-á-vis Bosnia” pose no real threat to us. Indeed the many bitter conflicts in the world are largely focused on such dueling pairs, who would not turn their hostility against the United States unless we seek to insert ourselves, as the American involvement in the Middle East has shown.

Third, an assertive defense of our territory and freedom of action
. This implies the abandonment of alliances, such as NATO, that have served their purposes but have no specifically American reason for being. This third element reinforces the demand for energy independence and a program of aggressive energy exploration and development. It implies a reconfiguration of the force structure: antimissile defenses ought to be developed that can shield the American homeland from the few, eccentric threats we might face as nuclear weapons proliferate to irresponsible but minor states like Iran or Libya. Without the obligation to defend Korea, Japan, or Western Europe, we would reshape our forces away from a large personnel base to fewer active-duty ground troops with greater readiness, fewer forward defense deployments, and greater sea- and airlift capability.

Such a proposed “paradigm” is far more tolerant of the proliferation of nuclear weapons to major states, because the latter (including the major state of Russia) do not pose geopolitical threats to the United States. At the same time, proponents of this view are more willing to hand over responsibility for regional security and regional trade to those states most closely affected. Far from feeling rebuffed by exclusion from a European Defense Community we should welcome it. If Ukraine had wished to retain nuclear weapons, we ought not to have ignored the advantages to the United States in having Russia checked by a regional nuclear power with its own considerable incentives to moderate Russian expansionism. In such a cacophony, the United States can prosper.

The New Nationalism represents a popular near-term option to remake American foreign policy. Some of its positions were adopted by Governor George W. Bush in his 2000 campaign for the U.S. presidency.
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Such a program is the culmination of decades of change in which our attitudes have gone from “thinking like lawyers” —which gave us the collective security paradigm I will next discuss—to “thinking like economists.” It is present in many forms in contemporary Western life and shapes and reflects our values to some degree in all our public (and a good many of our private) endeavors.

“Fundamental shifts in the definition of security begin at the conceptual level and, through a process of interaction with historical circumstances and emerging political perceptions, gradually prompt realignments of practical policy.” So wrote Janne Nolan and John Steinbrunner in
Global Enlargement: Cooperation and Security for the Twenty-first Century
, a report of the Brookings Institution and perhaps the most ambitious statement of the New Internationalism, the second proposed new national security paradigm of the United States. This proposal, in all its variants, relies on a structure of collective security. It is therefore a pole away from an autarkic, nationalist strategy. For our purposes it is important that the proponents of this view conceive it as a paradigm shift—whatever the philosophical merits of Nolan and Steinbrunner's (and Thomas Kuhn's) description of the process of shifts in paradigms.
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The authors argue that “the major powers must completely reconcile their vaunted security strategies in this more multi-centric and unstable post-Cold War environment.” Whereas the survivalist agenda of the New Nationalism focuses on the
U.S. position alone, the goal of the New Internationalism is world peace. One might characterize the nationalist agenda as leading to an international society where it is “every man for himself,” while the internationalist agenda is described as “all for one and one for all.” “In the former case,” a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report says, “the enemy is another nation-state; in the latter, the enemy is war itself.”

“Collective security” is an organizing strategic concept that seeks to marshal the resources of the group through institutionalized cooperation to achieve common goals. This perspective relies on the insight that the end of the Long War has globalized security needs in a way that only a global, collective response can cope with.

It is indisputable that the well-being of Americans is affected by the behavior of remote economic and political actors. How many American cities have substantial Vietnamese populations today, the internationalist asks, pointing to an obvious domestic consequence of foreign upheaval. Enthusiasts of collective security take this point to demonstrate that a nationalist agenda is therefore unrealistic and that the withdrawal of the United States from multilateral institutions is not really a viable alternative for policy. It, has been estimated that, in 2001, more than a twelfth of the population of El Salvador and one-sixth of the population of Haiti was living in the United States. How, the internationalists ask, can a serene neglect of the troubles of others really protect the United States? That unfairly caricatures the nationalist approach, I think: its proponents are perfectly aware that the perceptions and policies of other states, and indeed actors that are not states, must be taken into account by U.S. security policy and, moreover, that the security problems America faces are global in nature. Rather, the nationalist believes that the most successful manipulation of those perceptions and policies lies in the bilateral dialogue of the United States vis-à-vis other states and actors, and not through the multilateral institutions that, necessarily, curb our freedom of action and reflect interests that are not our own. In any case, the nationalist argues, we cannot resolve civil conflicts in Viet Nam, El Salvador, Haiti, or anywhere else. If we had been more self-restrained in our policies to Southeast Asia, perhaps the Vietnamese would never have left in the first place. If refugee flows are the problem, then perhaps a stricter border regime is the answer. At least this lies within our control.

To this the multilateralist asserts two propositions: (1) that American leadership of multilateral collective institutions can multiply the weight of our own policies, giving them a legitimation (and a cost sharing) far beyond what the United States standing alone could achieve; (2) that the well-being of others is and should be treated as a fundamental national goal for Americans. Of course this last point is the sort of pulpit rhetoric that drives the nationalist wild, but there is more to it than simply a vague
egalitarian altruism. As James Rosenau has pointed out, modern media make Americans conscious of the identity and conditions of people around the world, and this awareness changes and enlarges the objectives we care about.
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Nor should this difference about goals be overstated: many of the objectives sought to be achieved by the New Internationalism are the same as those of the New Nationalism: to deter attack on the United States, its armed forces and citizens; to maintain U.S. prosperity; to reduce the vulnerability of the United States to nuclear attack. The means chosen to accomplish these objectives simply are different. The internationalist believes that U.S. prosperity is best ensured by a general lowering of barri-eers to trade and that this can be achieved only through multilateral institutions, preferably global ones, like the GATT and the WTO. Regions important to our prosperity—East Asia, Europe, the Persian Gulf—must be kept out of the hands of hostile powers and this can be done at an acceptable cost only by sharing the burden of forward defense (as in the case of the Gulf War, which was fought largely by the United States but financed largely by others). The internationalist believes in stopping weapons proliferation much for the reasons her liberal counterpart believes in gun control on the domestic scene, and also in the necessity of economic development for all states in order to ensure civil stability much as those who promote jobs for the poor at home do so as a prophylactic for crime. The nationalist is more dubious about these means, but in any case, does not concede that international organizations, like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) regime or the World Bank and the IMF, have been or could be successful at achieving the ends that would be required of them by both internationalists and nationalists.

Some objectives, however, belong to the multilateralist alone. Ensuring that the basic needs of all peoples are met (whether or not they could conceivably pose a security threat to the United States even by migration); strengthening U.S. control over multinational corporations; maintaining equal terms of trade for all states; protecting the global environment; developing agreed-upon norms of international behavior in the resolution of conflict and the settlement of disputes. These ambitious goals are achievable, if they are achievable at all, only through multilateral institutions.

What are these institutions and how would they change? For some internationalists, NATO would be expanded both as to its mission and its membership. What have thus far been regarded as “out-of-area problems” beyond the scope of the North Atlantic Treaty, which set up NATO and commits its members to a collective defense of the European frontier, would henceforth be included within NATO's responsibilities. NATO forces fought the Gulf War, though no one much said so at the time. Now NATO's mission would be expanded to include not only the protection of
the Gulf states, but other responsibilities as well. Article 43 of the United Nations Charter might finally be activated in order to provide armed forces to the U.N. which would take up the role in the Korean peninsula, for example, now filled by U.S. forces. The permanent membership of the U.N. Security Council would be expanded to include Germany and Japan and the most influential states from the southern tier, such as India, Brazil, and others, such as Indonesia and Nigeria. While NATO would be devoted to peacemaking, the U.N., with its own Article 43 forces, would be an active peacekeeper and intervenor to provide humanitarian relief. Multilateral institutions such as the G-8,
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which is now confined to coordinating macroeconomic policy, or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) would expand their missions to take on new roles including environmental protection, nonproliferation, counterterrorism, even the coordination of technology transfers. The IMF and the World Bank would be invested with greater funds to accomplish the mission of environmentally sustainable development in the Third World and in the former Second World of ex-communist states. GATT would be strengthened and extended to the equity and capital markets. Taken together, these institutions would act as a chorus, reminding the world of its possibilities and urging it on.

New Internationalists often hold, as James Chace does in his justly influential
The Consequences of the Peace
,
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that economic stability is the precursor to international peace. Like the New Nationalists, Chace concedes that America's economic position does not enable it to either dominate the world economy or act as the world's policeman. But because international peace is the goal he wishes the United States to pursue, these concessions commit him not to a retrenched agenda of more or less autarkic objectives, but rather to reaching out to restructure international organizations to take up the role the United States is no longer able to play. Chace argues for a supranational central bank—Margaret Thatcher's worst nightmare—that could create and manage the money supply of a common global currency. He also envisions a parallel global organization vested with authority to manage international trade, pointing to the example of the E.U., which, unlike the GATT, has been able to abolish tariffs among the member states while maintaining their diverse tax and regulatory structures.

Like other New Internationalists, Chace supports an enlarged role for international security organizations, particularly the U.N. (although like Eugene Rostow, he points to Article 51 of the Charter as providing a reserve clause by which the United States can retain the power to act if the U.N. Security Council is stymied).

It is interesting to observe that multilateralists, like their nationalist counterparts, are inclined to believe that the superpower is over. The United States's role as a debtor nation;
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its comparatively low savings rates that make it hostage to the indulgence of those very competitors; and its lack of self-control regarding imports and consumption generally: these facts reflect and re-enforce the prospect of a diminished future. They are salient characteristics of our current situation for both the internationalist and the nationalist.

Precisely because no nation is self-sufficient, as Richard Rosencrance has argued,
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and every economy is intertwined with others, either the United States must exploit the institutions that arise from this necessary interdependence or exploit the comparative advantages that may be ours in the disarray that would follow the collapse of those institutions. Depending on which of these alternatives one chooses, one counts oneself as an internationalist or nationalist respectively. And that choice in turn seems to depend on whether global peace or comparative American success is the principal objective of the policy.

Or does it? The New Internationalist counters that a stable international environment that the United States has a leading role in shaping will be less expensive over the long term than a volatile system drifting out of control. Moreover, the United States cannot shape a stable environment unilaterally, but it can use multilateral institutions to work its will and project its interests. Indeed it is hard to see how the United States could broker a deal wherein it offers its unique military assets as its contribution to international security, partly funded by others whose contribution is material but not military, in the absence of multilateral institutions. Without such a deal, however, U.S. forces become too expensive to use, possibly even to preserve. How can it make sense to liquidate those assets in the name of promoting the
national
interest? And how can it make sense to liquidate also the political capital of the West—the shared goals, values, habits of cooperation, and institutions that have emerged from the struggle of the Long War? It is precisely because, as former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski suggests, America has neither the legitimacy to act as the world's policeman nor the liquidity to act as the world's banker that the northern-tier states must act together to preclude the re-emergence of the coercive, utopian-myth states that would arise in the vacuum created by our abdication of international leadership. Even the narrow goal of national survival is better served, he maintains, by collective security than by mercantile solitude.

Brzezinski argues that the American constitutional system has produced in the United States a policy of gridlock that prevents the institutions of government from dealing with our pervasive internal social problems.
Moreover, our reliance on legal institutions has replaced the moral consensus of the community with the technical substitute of the law: not right and wrong but legal and illegal are the standards by which behavior is measured. As a result, the United States, despite its military, economic, political, and cultural power, cannot sustain a position as international role model (as required by the New Evangelism) nor as the apotheosis of the New Nationalism (since the ethos of consumerism, not dour mercantilism, has replaced self-restraint with the “permissive cornucopia” of modern life), nor as arbiter of the balance of power, as called for by the New Realism (because our security problems do not arise from a competition among the great powers, but rather out of the seething underclass, domestically and in the Third World, that has been seduced by the cult of consumption at a time when the future dictated by its demographics moves this class ever farther from realizing its fantasies). By contrast, our constitutional structure and the dynamics of our political process make us “organically congenial” to multilateral, collective institutions. America's openness to outside participation in its own affairs—through foreign-sponsored lobbies, growing foreign ownership of its assets, and even some foreign participation in the definition of its domestic agenda—makes America both the exemplar and the harbinger of an increasingly internationalist state.
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