Clinton's
Live and Let Live Foreign Policy Catches the
Wind
By JONATHAN POWER
STOCKHOLM--In spite of America's surprise attacks on
terrorist refuges many American foreign policy commentators
are perturbed by Bill Clinton's way of dealing with the
world, even as American public opinion welcomes a presidency
with a low body count and an absence of bloody overseas
engagements. Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post calls it
"soft" power and one need look no further than the White
House effort to tell the UN arms inspectors in Iraq to cool
it, the most recent example, to see that it is the way
Clinton foreign policy appears to be heading. Whether it be
Iraq, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Kosovo, North Korea, the
Congo, Clintonesque foreign policy is becoming increasingly
of the live and let live variety.
Whether this is driven by the distractions of the Monica
Lewinsky business or by some carefully thought out
brainstorming is unclear. Certainly the media is no more
interested in reporting an absence of conflict as a positive
event than it is in happy marriages.
But the situation is making many of the "experts" deeply
troubled. They see an America that towers so far above its
rivals that to find comparisons one has to reach back to
ancient Rome or China. The temptation to smooth over every
kink on the world map seems too good an opportunity to miss.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national
security advisor, in his new book, "The Grand Chessboard"
writes wryly of America's allies as "vassals and
tributaries" and argues for an imperial geostrategy designed
"to keep tributaries pliant and protected and to keep the
barbarians from coming together". Then there is Robert
Kagan, arguing in the current issue of Foreign Policy, for
extending America's reach. "The benevolent hegemony
exercised by the U.S. is good for a vast portion of the
world's population".
Fortunately, the imperial crowd don't have the ear of the
American public. To judge by the opinion surveys, the man or
woman in the street has read the world situation better than
many of the pros and pols. They see that by any historical
standard the world is a calmer place, probably only very
rarely in need of American interventionism.
This gut feeling is given substance by a recent report of
the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Every
year for the past decade it has monitored the course of
world conflicts and every year since the end of the Cold War
the number has fallen each year, from 35 down to 25. Gone
into the history books, in all likelihood, are the
Chittagong Hill Tracts dispute in Bangladesh, a long-running
local sore; and Somalia, that managed in its momentary
severity to sabotage a new era of UN peacekeeping; and
Chechnya that diverted precious Russian energies at a
critical time. All have been wound up, or at least wound
down, without American involvement. And they are becoming as
distant and as important to current life as some tenth
century Viking invasion or eighteenth century French lunge
into Austria.
It is the gradual but steady disappearance of such
conflicts each year that has brought the numbers down. There
is no Cold War to heat them up and prolong their life-span.
And the culture of war-making is on an ebb, as people the
world over become more educated and more interested in less
macho pursuits. If it wasn't that the number of wars is
rising in Africa the world-wide fall in conflicts would be
even more dramatic.
It was Colin Powell who said, when he was chairman of the
U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, "I'm running out of demons". In
a reasonably well-managed world, whose waters are not
stirred by American hubris, there is no reason why Russia or
China or Brazil or India, the giants of tomorrow's world,
need become adversaries. Castro's sun is setting and
Gadhafi's sting has been pulled. Iran need not become a
nuclear threat if the present momentum towards
reconciliation persists. The Palestinians and Israelis and
Pakistan and India threaten mainly themselves. That leaves
only Saddam Hussein who presides over a military machine
that still reels from the devastation wrought on it in the
Gulf War and will never recover its prowess as long as
sanctions remain firmly in place.
It may be intellectually interesting to construct a pax
americana theory of modern international relations that
would deliver a world that would be a better place than it
is today. The truth is, knowing the perversity of human
nature and reading history, it would probably back-fire.
Without being particularly shrewd about it Clinton almost
accidentally has found the right balance, a sort of, to coin
a phrase, Goldilocks foreign policy, not too hot, not too
cold.
Clinton can be faulted on all sorts of grounds--the
expansion of NATO, a needless provocation, a lack of
political toughness with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, a weak spine when it came to blaming the UN
rather than his own military command for the mess in
Somalia, needless confrontation with Iraq earlier in the
year and a belated sense of the need to help Russia make its
heroic economic transition. Not to mention the appalling
lack of progress on big power nuclear disarmament.
But, a big but--as within America, the value of getting
unemployment down is worth more than all the social programs
put together, so on the world scene the absence of American
military intervention and imperial hype is worth a thousand
peace treaties. Most of the world, after all, seems to be
learning to take care of itself.
August 19, 1998,
STOCKHOLM
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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