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.
