A Foreign Policy for the Common
Citizen
by Kai Bird
The Nation magazine, May 8, 2000
A quarter-century after the end of the Vietnam War, and eleven
years after the collapse of the Berlin wall, it has become commonplace
to say that we Americans have no consensus on foreign policy.
Across the political spectrum, left or right, most Americans still
cling to whatever assumptions they held during our long journey
through the cold war. Having inhaled the sweet narcotic of a false
triumphalism, Washington's foreign-policy elite talk as if America's
"soft power" can prevail in nearly every instance. And
where it cannot--as in Colombia's narco-civil war or against the
specter of "international terrorism" in Afghanistan
or Sudan--Republicans and Democrats alike sanction cruise-missile
diplomacy or outright military interventionism reminiscent of
Vietnam. Naturally, such behavior reinforces the anti-interventionist
instincts of citizens on the liberal-left. But here--as in many
aspects of foreign policy--I believe the American left has failed,
perhaps understandably, to face up to a new set of post-cold war
imponderables. It has also failed to take advantage of this post-cold
war period to put forth truly fresh ideas on matters ranging from
nuclear weapons to the environment.
It is one thing to be against unilateralism
and against nonhumanitarian interventionism--but it is quite another
thing to be against humanitarian interventionism. To put it bluntly,
the lessons we learned from Washington's bloody-minded intervention
in Vietnam have little relevance in dealing with ethnic cleansing
or oppression in Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda, East Timor and Kosovo.
And though the victims of these internal wars cry out for our
help--and the aggressors are invariably thuggish regimes--the
American left remains divided on how to respond.
This is understandable precisely because
the duration and intensity of the cold war make it difficult to
remember what might have been. Sadly, in our determination to
oppose nuclear brinkmanship and other idiocies that marked Washington's
foreign policy for forty-four years (1945-89), we have forgotten
our basic radical principles and the common-sensical path not
taken at the end of World War II. Most Americans have no memory
of the designs Franklin Roosevelt's New Dealers had for postwar
American foreign policy. Human rights, self-determination and
an end to European colonization in the developing world, nuclear
disarmament, international law, the World Court, the United Nations--these
were all ideas of the progressive left. Even the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund were initially conceived as vehicles
for internationalizing the New Deal.
And then in the spring of 1945, Harry
Truman became the accidental President. A narrow-minded man--a
product of the Pendergast machine in Kansas City--Truman purged
Washington of New Deal visionaries. An insecure liberal, Truman
felt compelled to protect his right flank by authorizing internal
security review boards. The subsequent witch hunt that we call
McCarthyism was very much a bipartisan affair, designed to suppress
dissent against the growing consensus of cold war liberalism.
We can blame Truman and his supporters in the foreign-policy establishment
for a host of missed opportunities during the cold war. They slammed
the door on nuclear disarmament by deciding to make nuclear weapons
the centerpiece of the nation's defense. They militarized the
cold war by deciding to divide Germany and rearm West Germany
within a NATO alliance, a policy that prolonged the cold war at
great cost to life and treasure. By closing the door to trade
and engagement, by hardening the lines of cold war confrontation,
they postponed for years the very real potential for liberalization
within the Soviet Union after Stalin.
Elsewhere, Truman reversed Roosevelt's
support for decolonization of French, British and other European
outposts in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Instead, Washington
spent billions of dollars propping up any regime of corrupt mandarins
willing to mouth the slogans of anti-Communism. In short, the
cold war legacy begun by Truman was a democratic disaster. Nor
were these policies inevitable. There was a choice. In 1945, at
the beginning of the cold war, our leaders led us astray. We need
to think of the cold war as an aberration, a wrong turn. As such,
we need to go back to where we were in 1945--before we took the
road to a permanent war economy, a national security state and
a foreign policy based on unilateralism and cowboy triumphalism.
This collection of essays underscores
that we on the left, for all our differences, share common instincts.
All of us are profoundly suspicious, as Bruce Cumings puts it
in his sweeping essay on the America Ascendancy, of what he calls
"the celebration of a 'globalization' that is uncomfortably
close to Americanization." As Robert Borosage argues, our
foreign-policy budget priorities are irrational. We should be
spending far, far less on defense against nonexistent enemies
and investing far, far more on economic development abroad--as
well as at home.
We desperately need to engage with the
world--and not just dominate it with our marketplace. The problem,
as Sherle Schwenninger, writes, is that the United States is both
a revolutionary force in global culture and a status quo power:
"A revolution as sweeping as globalization simultaneously
creates the need for a new order." Some kind of global governance
is necessary--but to be effective and to command any legitimacy
it will require "international bodies that pool state sovereignty."
As Jonathan Schell has earlier argued in these pages, the United
States needs to revisit its first comprehensive approach to nuclear
weapons--their abolition, as proposed in 1946 by the Acheson-Lilienthal
Plan. That plan--drafted by J. Robert Oppenheimer--was derailed
by Soviet-American tensions that would shortly fracture the World
War II alliance and bring on the cold war. "The end of the
cold war," Schell says, "has presented the most promising
opportunity of the entire nuclear age to deliver the world from
nuclear danger. The alternative, heralded by the new nuclear arms
race between India and Pakistan (the first nuclear arms race having
no relationship to the cold war) and the stalemate of traditional
arms control, is unlimited, uncontrolled proliferation leading
toward what some have called 'nuclear anarchy'--a state of affairs
incompatible with any tolerable vision of the world's future."
Similarly, the World Bank and the IMF
should not be abetting those governments that spend scarce resources
on buying weapons instead of educating their children. We need
an authentic UN, a viable International Criminal Court and a standing
UN army to enforce recognized international law. And all this
means lending pieces of our sovereignty to the global community.
We need to work cooperatively with all countries, rather than
see them as, at best, temporary allies.
As William Greider writes in his essay,
"The choice is not between global engagement defined by the
multinationals and right-wing, pull-up-the-drawbridges nationalism.
The historic opening--ironically, advanced by the globalizing
marketplace itself--is to envision a world without empires of
any kind." Mark Hertsgaard argues that we should use our
vast power in the international marketplace to penalize those
who pollute the environment. And Kumi Naidoo suggests that much
of this agenda can be pushed by using our resources under international
law to encourage civil society.
In all these issues of global governance,
America needs to share its power. On this much we agree. Many
of us will remain in disagreement, however, on the divisive question
of humanitarian interventionism. This hot-button issue is discussed
in a round-table debate by Holly Burkhalter, Mahmood Mamdani,
Ronald Steel, Mary Kaldor and David Rieff. Even here, there is
more common ground than one might think.
Most of us will agree with Burkhalter's
instinct that the prevention and suppression of genocide is a
vital interest. In principle, this means we need to aid fellow
democrats, particularly those democrats defending a secular, multicultural
society from the attacks of ethnic cleansers. In some instances--as
in Rwanda's horrifying genocide or Serbia's meticulously planned
campaign of ethnic cleansing--this may mean, as Rieff maintains,
going to war. But in most cases, I think Kaldor is right to suggest
that "humanitarian intervention is much more like policing
than warfighting." And in any case, many of us will agree
with Steel's and Mamdani's reservations. Foreign intervention
may be necessary when a whole nation or tribe is targeted for
genocidal extermination. But as Steel puts it, "A humanitarian
impulse could, through abuse, become a geopolitical nightmare."
The world is a complicated place, and,
as Rieff argues, we can't take the politics out of foreign-policy-making.
There are difficult political choices to be made in pursuing a
foreign policy based on human rights. Nevertheless, the painful
human costs associated with the rush to globalization--as well
as the costs associated with ethnic conflict and environmental
pollution--can be salved by the messy, even cumbersome, judicial
tools of a democratic civil society. Whatever the cultural context,
civil society is defined by certain universal principles common
to every human community. So maybe, after all, we do have some
consensus. Certain truths are indeed self-evident: Ultimately,
our foreign policy should be wedded to a radical defense of all
human rights. Such a policy was broadly defined by Franklin Roosevelt
when he talked about an attainable world in which there would
be not only freedom of speech and worship but also freedom from
want and fear. We are at a crossroads--much like the crossroads
Roosevelt faced in 1945. Our nation's wealth and power are such
that Americans can't escape responsibility for good or ill in
this new century. We should be making bold, openhearted choices
now, in the light of day--lest we be forced to choose a path in
the dark crisis of some new and different cold war.
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