Three
years ago, in light of the end of the Cold War, the Clinton
Administration undertook a "fundamental reassessment" of America's
national-security requirements. But after six months of analysis
Administration officials concluded that the defense of U.S. global
interests still demanded military spending of more than $1.3 trillion
over the following five years and the permanent commitment of more than
200,000 U.S. soldiers in East Asia and Europe--in other words, a
strategy remarkably similar to that which America pursued during the
Cold War. Moreover, rather than relinquish America's costly and risky
responsibilities by dissolving Cold War alliances, defense strategists
now plan to expand NATO's responsibilities eastward. Those who call for a
more modest plan argue that U.S. strategy seems to be extravagance born
of paranoia, or of the defense establishment's anxiety to protect its
budget. In fact, given the way the makers of U.S. foreign policy have
defined American interests since the late 1940s, these plans are quite
prudent. And that is the problem.
If
many Americans had been asked ten years ago why U.S. troops were
deployed in East Asia and Europe, they would have answered, To keep the
Soviets out. They may have wondered, however, why the United States
persisted in its strategy long after Japan, South Korea, and Western
Europe had become capable of defending themselves. Now that the USSR
itself has disappeared, why does Washington continue to insist that U.S.
"leadership" in East Asia and Europe is still indispensable?
Ask
National Security Council staff members, think-tank analysts, or State
Department policy planners about America's globe-girdling security
commitments and they will deliver very different answers--ones that have
not changed in forty-five years. They will justify the Pax Americana by
invoking "the imperative of continued U.S. world leadership,"
the need to "shape a favorable international environment," "reassurance
of allies," and the ongoing need for "stability" and "continuing
engagement." Even during the Cold War the "Soviet threat" might not have
been mentioned.
The
question that all this justification ignores is What, exactly, is
"leadership," and why has it been the mantra of foreign-policy
cognoscenti for nearly fifty years? What have we been doing around the
globe, and why?
Most
Americans misunderstand their country's foreign policy. It seems to
operate only when "danger" looms--when Iraq invades Kuwait, when Russian
"imperialism" threatens to resurface, when China rattles its sabers at
Taiwan. Even people who religiously read the newspapers fail to grasp
that U.S. foreign policy is far more than simply a series of responses
to crises.
For
instance, media coverage of recurring tensions on the Korean Peninsula
has focused on speculation about North Korea's nuclear program and the
prospect of a new Korean war. But when foreign-policy officials and
experts discuss the Korean crisis among themselves, they rapidly leave
the Koreas behind to focus on the real players in the region: China and
Japan. As far as national-security experts are concerned, almost any
immediate crisis is subsumed by a larger threat--in this case no less
than East Asia's role in the potential collapse of the international
economy that U.S. power has sustained since the late 1940s.
It's
now an axiom of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment that economic,
technological, and demographic changes are making East Asia the world's
most dynamic arena, a driving force--increasingly the dominant force--in
the international economy. The Pacific Century, we are told ad nauseam,
has dawned. This transformation also means a shift in the international
distribution of political and military power. In a typical evaluation
of East Asia's strategic future the foreign-policy expert Aaron Friedberg states darkly in the journal International Security,
In
the long run, it is Asia [rather than Europe] that seems far more
likely to be the cockpit of great power conflict. The half millennium
during which Europe was the world's primary generator of war (as well as
of wealth and knowledge) is coming to a close. But, for better and for
worse, Europe's past could be Asia's future.
Friedberg's
assertion nicely illustrates the ambivalence with which the U.S.
national-security community views East Asia's future. He both prophesies
an exhilarating Pacific Century and warns the West that the East may
once again be up to no good.
East
Asia has never been a terribly successful field for American diplomacy.
There are undoubtedly many reasons for this, and surely that
shortcoming for which the United States is continually
indicted--cultural and historical myopia--has contributed enormously to
its failures in the region. Americans have always seen East Asia not for
what it is but for what it can do to them or for them: the region is
either danger or opportunity--either a new "ground war in Asia" or a new
China market. American understanding of Japan, for instance, is, in the
words of the historian Bruce Cumings,
caught within the conflicting views of Japan as "miracle and menace,
docile and aggressive, fragile blossom and Tokyo Rose." As Friedberg's
analysis attests, the U.S. foreign-policy community worries that the
fragile blossom may again bloom into a Tokyo Rose.
From our June 1996 issue
Check out the full table of contents and find your next story to read.
Pacific
Century rhetoric usually describes the new era in a "postCold War"
context. This is misleading, because it starts at the wrong place.
First, the shift of economic activity has not been sudden. Even if East
Asia rose in the American consciousness just as the Soviet Union
receded, to define the economic and geopolitical transformation of East
Asia as a postCold War phenomenon Americanizes and trivializes a
development in international (not American) politics of far greater
impact than the Cold War itself. Although Vietnam, China, and North
Korea were for forty years able to contain America's Cold War ambition
to "roll back" communism, they are proving utterly unable to contain the
juggernaut of East Asia's capitalist political economy. Most important,
to imply that the end of the Cold War is of primary significance to
U.S. policy in East Asia is to wrench that policy out of its most
important context and to distort its underlying aims and challenges.
What
we think of as the Cold War was merely instrumental in America's larger
"Cold War" strategy. In "scaring hell out of the American people," as
Senator Arthur Vandenberg said in 1947, the U.S.-Soviet rivalry helped
to secure domestic support for Washington's ambition to create a
U.S.-dominated world order. That same year one of Vandenberg's
colleagues, the
fervently anti-Communist Senator Robert Taft, expressed a strong
suspicion that the supposed dangers to the nation from the USSR failed
to explain America's new foreign policy. He complained that he was
"more than a bit tired of having the Russian menace invoked as a reason
for doing any--and every--thing that might or might not be desirable or
necessary on its own merits." The former Secretary of State Dean Acheson
put things in proper perspective: describing how Washington overcame
domestic opposition to its internationalist policies in 1950, he
recalled in 1954 that at that critical moment the crisis in Korea "came
along and saved us."
Making the World
Safe for Capitalism A
FUNDAMENTAL aim of America's Cold War strategy was to create and
maintain what the former Secretary of State James Baker has called "a
global liberal economic regime"--a capitalist world order. After the
Second World War, American statesmen believed that the United States,
standing alone and strong in a world of weary nations, had a remarkable
opportunity, as Acheson said, to "grab hold of history and make it
conform." American statesmen seized that opportunity by creating a
complex strategy to reify Adam Smith's dream. Washington envisioned a
world economy in which trade and capital would flow across national
boundaries in response to the laws of comparative advantage and supply
and demand--an economy in which production and finance would be
integrated on a global scale. The constricted national markets that were
emerging in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in Europe
and East Asia would be combined, eliminating the inefficiencies of
statism and self-sufficiency. Large-scale regional economies would in
turn be integrated into an interdependent world economy. U.S.
policymakers knew that building this multinational capitalist community
required the United States to provide Western Europe and Japan with
enormous amounts of economic aid (through such schemes as the Marshall Plan,
for Europe, and the Dodge Plan, its equivalent for Japan), so that
those areas would not retreat into closed economies. They also knew that
an open world economy demanded an even more ambitious American project:
transforming international relations.
The
greatest danger to U.S. democracy and prosperity came, they believed,
not from the Soviet Union but from Germany and Japan, whose potential
strength amounted to a sort of Catch-22. Without a flourishing
international economy, Under Secretary of State Will Clayton warned in
1947, "our democratic free enterprise system" could not function. As
late as 1960 exports accounted for only 3.8 percent and imports for 4.8
percent of GDP. The health of the international economy, in this
disputable view, depended on Germany's and Japan's economic
revitalization. Germany, if its economy was resurrected, would once
again be Europe's most efficient producer and most avid consumer. Its
very economic potential, however, made Germany a threat to the other
Western European states, which, as the future Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles explained to a closed Senate panel in 1949, were "afraid
to bring that strong, powerful, highly concentrated group of people into
unity with them." Similarly, as Dulles, Acheson, and other policymakers
understood, a strong Japan was both necessary for a prosperous
international order and intolerable to its neighbors. The problem lay in
the inherent contradiction between capitalism and international
politics.
Capitalist
economies prosper most when labor, technology, and capital are fluid, so
that they are driven toward international integration and
interdependence. But whereas all states benefit absolutely in an open
international economy, some states benefit more than others. In the
normal course of world politics, in which states are driven to compete
for their security, the relative distribution of power is a country's
principal concern, discouraging economic interdependence. Thus 250 years
ago the philosopher David Hume
bemoaned the lack of economic cooperation among countries, blaming the
"narrow malignity and envy of nations, which can never bear to see their
neighbors thriving, but continually repine at any new efforts towards
industry made by any other nation." In its efforts to ensure the
distribution of power in its favor and at the expense of actual or
potential rivals, a state will "nationalize"--that is, pursue autarkic
policies, practicing capitalism only within its borders or among
countries in a trading bloc. This circumscribes both production factors
and markets, and thereby fragments an international economy.
A truly global economy is probably impossible to achieve. In fact, as the Princeton political economist Robert Gilpin
has said, "what today we call international economic interdependence
runs so counter to the great bulk of human experience that only
extraordinary changes and novel circumstances could have led to its
innovation and triumph over other means of economic exchange."
Historically, to secure international capitalism a dominant power must
guarantee the security of other states, so that they need not pursue
autarkic policies or form trading blocs to improve their relative
positions. This suspension of international politics through hegemony
has been the fundamental aim of U.S. foreign policy since the 1940s. The
real story of that policy is not the thwarting of and triumph over the
Soviet threat but the effort to impose an ambitious economic vision on a
recalcitrant world.
Nurturing--and Constraining--
the Fragile Blossom THE
overriding objective of U.S. postwar policy toward East Asia was
restoring Japanese economic power. To be sure, this would help to
immunize the region against Communist expansion; but Acheson and the
other creators of the American Century thought the goal itself vital,
regardless of the Soviet threat. As the historians William Borden, Bruce
Cumings, Ronald McGlothlen, and Michael Schaller have argued, in
attempting to create a global economic system Washington pursued a
course designed in essence to restore the Greater East Asian
Co-Prosperity Sphere--imperial Japan's regional economy, which the
United States had just destroyed in the Second World War. If Japan was
to help fuel the world economy, it would have to be, in Acheson's words,
"the workshop of Asia." American postwar planners viewed the political
economy that had developed in Northeast Asia from about 1900 to 1945 as
the region's natural economy--a tripartite system in which Japan, given
access to continental markets and raw materials, formed the industrial
core and its neighbors formed the economic semi-periphery and periphery.
As Japan advanced in the product cycle, climbing up the technological
ladder, it spun off its low-technology and low-wage industries to its
neighbors.
In
the late 1940s and the 1950s the United States essentially restored
this system; but the machine could not run by itself. Washington had to
ensure that Japan's neighbors would feel secure politically in the
regional hierarchy atop which Japan stood. Washington also had to ensure
that the hierarchy did not develop--as it had in the past--into a
Japanese-led closed economic bloc, which would threaten the world
economy. NSC 48,
the National Security Council's 1949 blueprint for America's Cold War
strategy in East Asia, summed up the chief difficulty facing
Washington's economic goals in the region--and around the globe.
Starting with the premise that "the economic life of the modern world is
geared to expansion," requiring "the establishment of conditions
favorable to the export of technology and capital and to a liberal trade
policy throughout the world," NSC 48's authors went on to warn that
"the complexity of international trade makes it well to bear in mind
that such ephemeral matters as national pride and ambition can inhibit
or prevent the necessary degree of international cooperation, or the
development of a favorable atmosphere and conditions to promote economic
expansion."
The
distinguished historian and diplomat George Kennan, then the head of the
State Department's policy-planning staff, saw only one solution to what
he described as the "terrible dilemma" confronting U.S. ambitions in
East Asia. Forty-seven years later Washington continues to pursue that
course.
You
have the terrific problem of how then the Japanese are going to get
along unless they reopen some sort of Empire toward the South. Clearly
we have got . . . to achieve opening up of trade possibilities,
commercial possibilities for Japan on a scale very far greater than
anything Japan knew before. It is a formidable task. On the other hand,
it seems to me absolutely inevitable that we must keep completely the
maritime and air controls as a means . . . of keeping control of the
situation with respect to [the] Japanese in all eventualities. . . . [It
is] all the more imperative that we retain the ability to control their
situation by controlling the overseas sources of supply and the naval
power and air power without which [Japan] cannot become again
aggressive. . . . If we really in the Western world could work out
controls, I suppose, adept enough and foolproof enough and cleverly
enough exercised really to have power over what Japan imports in the way
of oil and such other things as she has got to get from overseas, we
would have veto power on what she does need in the military and
industrial field.
By
providing for Japan's security and by enmeshing its foreign and
military policies in a U.S.-controlled alliance, Americans have
contained their erstwhile enemy, preventing their "partner" from
embarking upon independent--and, so the thinking goes,
dangerous--political and military policies. By restraining its powerful ally,
Washington has, to use a euphemism favored in policymaking circles,
"reassured" Japan's neighbors and stabilized relations among the states
of East Asia. The United States played the decisive role in promoting
Tokyo's integration with its former colonies in Japan-centered regional
trade networks that have been the foundation of East Asia's economic
"miracle." South Korea and Taiwan, for example, overcame their fear and
resentment of Japan and opened their doors to Japanese investment and
trade.
In
a series of revealing interviews published in 1970 the former
undersecretary of state Eugene Rostow was pressed to explain the
motivations underlying U.S. foreign policy generally and U.S. policy
toward Vietnam specifically. In doing so he betrayed the lingering and
profound distrust that U.S. policymakers feel toward any powerful state
that could play a role in world politics more independent than the one
the United States has assigned to it. At a time when America was
involved in Southeast Asia ostensibly to draw a line against
international communism, Rostow admitted, "I think the major concern--at
least my major concern--in this miserable affair is the long-range
impact a [U.S.] withdrawal would have on Japanese policy." He explained,
"After the Japanese lost the war they reached certain conclusions, the
principal one being that it was infinitely better to cooperate with the
United States than to follow a hostile, militaristic line. Now, it's
greatly to our interest to have that judgment proved correct." If the
United States abruptly pulled out of Vietnam, Rostow went on, "I think
the Japanese will draw certain conclusions. And I think their policy
will take on a much more nationalistic cast. . . . I think the first
thing that would happen would be that they wouldn't ratify the
nuclear-non-proliferation treaty. They would feel compelled to become a
nuclear power." This would endanger the imperative that America preserve
"a world of wide horizons in which we can move around and trade and
travel on a large scale."
America as
"Adult Supervisor" AMERICA'S
Cold War policy is best understood not by its communism-containing
words but by its ally-containing deeds. Washington committed itself to
building and maintaining an international economic and political order
based on what officials at the time termed a U.S. "preponderance of
power." By banishing power politics and nationalist rivalries, America's
Cold War alliances in East Asia and Europe in effect protected the
states of those regions from themselves.
The
United States has not subjugated colonies but, like Great Britain in
the nineteenth century, has built and benefited economically from a
stable international political order. In this way Lenin was right:
imperialism is, or allows for, "the highest stage of capitalism"--an
open economy among the industrialized nations.
By
building this global economy the United States has realized what Lenin
called "[the German socialist Karl] Kautsky's silly little fable about
ultraimperialism." In the celebrated debate between Lenin and Kautsky,
Lenin held that any international capitalist order was inherently
temporary, since the political order among competing states would shift
over time. Whereas Lenin argued that international capitalism thus could
not transcend the Hobbesian reality of international politics, Kautsky
maintained that capitalists were much too rational to destroy themselves
in internecine conflicts. An international class of enlightened
capitalists, recognizing that international political and military
competition would upset the orderly processes of world finance and
trade, would instead seek peace, free trade, and the cooperative
development of backward areas.
But
Lenin and Kautsky were talking past each other, since Kautsky believed
that the common interest of what he called the "inter-capitalist class"
determined international relations, whereas in Lenin's analysis
international relations were founded not in social classes but in
competition among states. Lenin argued that there was an irreconcilable
contradiction between capitalism and the international system; Kautsky
didn't recognize the division in the first place.
America's
foreign policy has been based on a hybrid of Lenin's and Kautsky's
analyses. It has aimed at the unified, liberalized international
capitalist community Kautsky envisioned. But the global role that the
United States has undertaken to sustain that community is determined by a
worldview very close to Lenin's. To Washington, Baker's "global liberal
economic regime" cannot be maintained simply by an internationalized
economic elite's desire for it to exist; it can be maintained only by
American power. Thus, in explaining its global strategy in 1993, in its
"postCold War" defense strategy, the Pentagon defined the creation of
"a prosperous, largely democratic, market-oriented zone of peace and
prosperity that encompasses more than two-thirds of the world's economy"
as "perhaps our nation's most significant achievement since the Second
World War"--not the victory over Moscow. And it declared that this
global capitalist order required the "stability" that only American
"leadership" could provide. Ultimately, of course, U.S. policymakers and
Lenin diverge. Although Lenin recognized that any given international
political order was by its nature impermanent, America's foreign-policy
strategists have hoped to keep the reality of international politics
permanently at bay.
Although
the Cold War has ended, what National Security Advisor Anthony Lake
calls the "imperative of continued U.S. world leadership"--as exercised,
for instance, in America's dominance of its alliances in East Asia and
of NATO--remains necessary to maintain a global economy. The
now-infamous draft of the Pentagon's defense plan, or the Defense
Planning Guidance, which was leaked to The New York Times in
1992, gave the public an unprecedented glimpse of the thinking that
informs Washington's security strategy, merely stating in somewhat
undiplomatic language the logic behind America's Cold War strategy. The
United States, it argued, must continue to dominate the international
system and thus "discourage" the "advanced industrial nations from
challenging our leadership or . . . even aspiring to a larger regional
or global role." To accomplish this, America must do nothing less than
"retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing . . . those wrongs
which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or
friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations."
The
United States, in other words, must provide what one of the Planning
Guidance's authors termed "adult supervision." It must not only dominate
regions composed of wealthy and technologically sophisticated states
but also take care of such nuisances as Saddam Hussein, Slobodan
Milosevic, and North Korea's dictator Kim Jong Il, to protect the
interests of virtually all potential great powers so that they need not
acquire the capability to protect themselves--that is, so that those
powers need not act like great powers. Thus, for instance, Washington
must protect Germany's and Japan's access to Persian Gulf oil, because
if these countries were to protect their own interests in the Gulf, they
would develop military forces capable of global "power projection." No
wonder the United States must spend more on its "national security"than
the rest of the world's countries combined. This postCold War strategy
reflects what the historian Melvyn Leffler defined as an imperative of
America's Cold War national-security policy: that "neither an integrated
Europe nor a united Germany nor an independent Japan must be permitted
to emerge as a third force."
Only
in this context can Washington's concerns regarding current
developments in East Asia be properly understood. For instance, in 1993
Alberto Coll, then a deputy assistant secretary of defense, clarified
U.S. aims in East Asia. "In the future," Coll declared in the Washington Quarterly,
the
stability of the Pacific Basin and a strong US-Japanese relationship
will be more important to the United States than ever before. The US
economy needs the vast markets of the Pacific Rim, and it benefits
enormously from Japanese investment capital and technology and the
impetus toward greater productivity provided by Japanese competition.
All
these benefits would be lost, according to Coll, if the "traditional
rivalries among Asian powers . . . unravel into unrestrained military
competition, conflict and aggression." In the same vein the author of
the Clinton Administration's security strategy for East Asia, Joseph
Nye, then the assistant secretary of defense, asserted last year that
the U.S. military protectorate is "the basis for stability and
prosperity in the region"; if the United States were to forsake its
"leadership role" in East Asia, "the stable expectations of
entrepreneurs and investors [would] be subverted." Although the United
States committed forces to Japan ostensibly to protect it from the
Soviets, and to South Korea to protect it from the North, in 1993 the
deputy defense secretary, William Perry (now the Secretary of Defense),
declared that America would continue to reassure and stabilize East Asia
by maintaining troops "permanently" in Japan and even in a future
unified Korea.
The Domino
Theory Revived TO
Washington, East Asia is still composed of dominoes ready to fall.
"Renationalization," a term used by the cognoscenti to mean the
resumption of international politics, could start virtually anywhere and
spread rapidly. In one of Aaron Friedberg's many nightmare scenarios
one can almost hear the click of the falling dominoes:
The
nuclearization of Korea (North, South, or whether through reunification
or competitive arms programs both together) could lead to a similar
development in Japan, which might cause China to accelerate and expand
its nuclear programs, which could then have an impact on the defense
policies of Taiwan, India (and through it, Pakistan) and Russia (which
would also be affected by events in Japan and Korea). . . . similar
shock waves could also travel through the system in different directions
(for example, from India to China to Japan to Korea).
Friedberg
and other national-security analysts paint a similarly gloomy picture
in Southeast Asia if, for example, Japan should undertake a military
buildup in response to Korean reunification. Japan's reaction would
alarm China--the emerging colossus, which U.S. defense planners now
regard as the most serious potential long-term threat to America's
global position. China would speed up the development of its "power
projection" forces. This would alarm Korea, Taiwan, and Japan--and also
Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam. Their defensive response
would further alarm China.
Such
developments, from Washington's perspective, would have one of two
results, either of which would shatter the global economy: international
anarchy, or regional dominance by China or Japan, which policymakers
believe would lead inevitably to a regional trading bloc. Arguing in
1992 for the maintenance of America's leadership of its Cold War
alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon official asked, "If we pull out, who
knows what nervousness will result?" The problem, of course, is that
America can never know. According to this logic, it must always stay.
To
the United States, the best change in East Asia is no change at all,
because any alteration in the status quo could start the dominoes
falling. And if there is to be change, Washington--not Tokyo or
Beijing--must manage it. To permit otherwise would send a dangerous
signal about America's diminishing ability to regulate, calibrate, and
manipulate international politics in East Asia. Of course, Washington
appreciates that change is inevitable, and its frustration comes from
being unable to square the circle--to manage an increasingly
unmanageable world.
Although
the United States remains committed to preserving the Pax Americana in
East Asia, the states in the region see U.S. influence inexorably
declining, and they are planning accordingly. South Korea, for example,
is reorienting its military away from an emphasis on the threat from the
North and toward projecting power against a future threat from Japan by
means of naval and air forces, submarines, spy planes, and satellites.
The problem is that in prudently preparing for similar eventualities the
East Asian states may indeed, as Washington fears, precipitate
renationalization.
At
a loss for what to do, U.S. policymakers propose two contradictory
solutions. On the assumption that democracies are inherently peaceful
toward one another, one solution goes, the United States should
tranquilize East Asia by democratizing it. At the same time, the second
solution has it, because only American dominance can ensure stability in
the region (as in Europe), the United States should maintain its
hegemony indefinitely. Leaving aside the question of whether either goal
can be achieved, it should be clear that proposing these solutions is
as inconsistent as simultaneously asserting, as do most in the U.S.
national-security community, that although democracies pose no danger to
other democracies, America must continue to contain Germany and Japan.
The
hope and fear with which policymakers view economic change in East Asia
illustrates the contradictory convictions that animate U.S. policy.
Washington both heralds the economic dynamism of the Pacific Rim, hoping
it will bring democracy and peace and worldwide economic growth, and
dreads the Asian miracle. It knows that just as economic change
engenders a shift in political and military power, so a particular
economic order is jeopardized as the foundation upon which it
rests--U.S. hegemony--weakens. In the oxymoronic vocabulary of U.S.
diplomacy, strong "partners" are economically welcome and indeed
necessary, but U.S. "leadership" is indispensable. Zbigniew Brzezinski,
who developed the idea of a trilateral division of responsibility among
the United States, Japan, and Europe, calls for Washington to develop "a
more cooperative partnership" with Tokyo even as he asserts that
America must continue to control Japan militarily.
Losing GroundTHERE
is something at once poignant and obtuse in James Baker's comment that
because President Clinton's foreign policy lacks consistency and
firmness, "for the first time since the Second World War, Japan is not
delivering an automatic vote for the US position." Sticking his head in
the sand, the former Secretary of State claimed that such problems could
be obviated "as long as America leads. . . . We have to lead." Japan's
actions are certainly related to a decline in U.S. leadership, but that
decline is not the fault of what Baker would characterize as Clinton's
weak foreign policy. No matter who is in charge of U.S. foreign policy,
America is less and less able to lead. Baker seems to have forgotten
that America's leadership in the Gulf War was possible only because its
allies agreed to pick up the tab. Given such leadership, it is no
surprise that once-subservient "partners" are increasingly going their
own way. Preponderance cannot simply be asserted; it must reflect a
position based on power. When that position shifts enough,
preponderance--"leadership"--is lost.
Lenin
argued seventy-eight years ago that international capitalism would be
economically successful but, by growing in a world of competitive
states, would plant the seeds of its own destruction. Ironically, the
worldwide economic system that the United States has fostered has itself
largely determined America's relative decline even as it has
contributed to the country's economic growth. Through trade, foreign
investment, and the spread of technology and managerial expertise,
economic power has diffused from the United States to new centers of
growth, thus undermining American hegemony and ultimately jeopardizing
the world economy.
Nearly
everyone applauds today's complex web of global trade, production, and
finance as the highest stage of capitalism. But international capitalism
may be approaching a crisis just as it is reaching its fullest flower. A
genuinely interdependent world market is extraordinarily fragile. The
emergent high-technology industries, for instance, are the most powerful
engines of world economic growth, but they require a level of
specialization and a breadth of markets that are possible only in an
integrated global economy. As U.S. hegemony continues to weaken,
renationalized foreign and economic policies among the industrialized
powers could fragment that economy.
The
future of a foreign policy designed to strengthen what the United
States must contain and, at the same time, to maintain an economic order
that weakens the very foundation of that order seems evident: it will
collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. The United States
remains caught in the dilemma Kennan discerned more than forty years
ago: "To what end 'security'? For the continuation of our economic
expansion? But our economic expansion . . . cannot proceed much further
without . . . creating new problems of national security much more
rapidly than we can ever hope to solve them." To escape this dilemma,
Americans will have to understand the foreign policy that is conducted
in their name and re-examine the requirements for their own security and
prosperity.
The Atlantic Monthly; June 1996; Why America Thinks It Has to Run the World; Volume 277, No. 6; pages 92-102.
