American Politics and American Foreign Policy

The first thing to say about American foreign policy is that when the United States is accused of being a hegemonic power, I would grant that that is true. It is a hegemonic power in the sense that the disparity between the U.S. and other nations in military strength, economic power, and cultural reach is unprecedented. This, inevitably, evokes a desire by others to reduce that hegemonic position. That inevitable fact of life does not change the fact of our position: For America the challenge is that of any dominant power, which is to transform its strengths into mutual obligations; to avoid letting everything become an issue of power; to achieve a position of consensus on those issues that matter most; and to work for an international system that relates our position to the concerns of others. And we have to do this at a moment of huge international changes, some in the economic field, but also others within the structure of all societies and in the relationships that America has established with the rest of the world.

Generational Shifts, American Politics, and Contesting Interpretations of the World
These challenges have to be addressed at a moment when three different generations in America have three contesting interpretations of the world.

First, there is my generation, which is statistically passing from the scene. Our formative experience was World War II or its immediate aftermath. It was a generation that felt no ambivalence about the use of American power and that, on the whole, believed it had been used for constructive and beneficent purposes. When I was a graduate student in the ’50s, I asked President Truman what he had achieved of which he was most proud. He said, “I am most proud of the fact that we totally defeated our enemies and then brought them back to the community of nations as equals. And I would like to think that only Americans would have done that.” Now I am not arguing whether that last sentence is true, but it was a generous interpretation of the American role. It was not typical of how most modern politicians would respond to such a question. They would talk about what they had done as individuals, rather than what their society had accomplished.

The following generation suffered a crisis of confidence during the Vietnam War. They entered it for what I believe to be noble motives, trying to apply the lessons of Europe to Asia, only in circumstances where they didn’t fit. It was then dealt with in the American domestic debate not as a traffic accident, but as an aberration of the system, launching an attack on American worthiness to conduct any foreign policy at all until it had undertaken a strenuous exercise of domestic improvement. So the Vietnam generation is suspicious of American power and looks for more elevated expressions of the American purpose. It tends to apologize for the period preceding their entry into office. And I would say that on the whole this is the present generation of leaders. They believe in the dominance of the soft issues—“soft” being issues not related to the exercise of American power, or separated from it as much as possible, such as the environment or human rights. They have the tendency, which amazes me, of apologizing to foreign nations for our previous conduct. And the argument is always the same: that this was done for strategic reasons, as if this is a sin, but we now know better. We saw this when the new policy toward Iran was put forward. (With which, incidentally, I agree. I just don’t agree with its justification.) This generation has done important things in the promotion of human rights and other soft issues. But it has created such ambivalence with respect to what used to be considered foreign policy that, on the one hand, they have gotten involved in more military efforts than many previous administrations, but, on the other, they have never known how to bring them to some conclusion because they have been reluctant to articulate a geopolitical design for the world.

This reluctance is partly due not just to the difference in generations, but to changes in American politics. I entered politics as an advisor to Nelson Rockefeller. He suffered from the naïve idea that you become President of the United States by having the best program. So he spent nearly all of his time as a candidate meeting with intellectuals and other leaders developing programs, while his opponents were running around getting delegates. And his programs were more or less adopted, but in different administrations than the one he led. In those days, I, as an advisor, was asked what the leader should think. This has now changed. Now advisors are asked what the leader should say. They work on speeches and much more rarely on designs. No serious modern political leader will spend three or four nights a week and most Sundays developing programs. He has to raise money and concentrate on focus groups. This is a change in politics and not just a change of generations.

Then there is the third generation—the internet generation—which doesn’t have the guilt feelings about power. They can be pretty tough in those things they understand, which usually don’t include foreign policy. They believe—in so far as there is a dominant belief—that globalization solves all problems and, therefore, if you have a perfectly globalized world, it will automatically be peaceful. And if you throw in the theory that democratic countries don’t fight with each other, you then have a picture of political bliss and economic activity which does not require an active long-range approach to foreign policy. The best people of that generation tend to be in business, rather than in politics. And I must say, again, listening to the brilliant performances this morning, there was reinforced a feeling that the gap between the economic and political worlds—between the sophistication of the economic world that attempts to be global, and that of the political world, which is national and not all that reflective about what it means to have a national policy—creates major challenges.

Problems like human rights and globalization require much greater attention than they have received if aspirations are to be translated into politics. At the risk of being sacrilegious, I do not believe it can be said that democracy necessarily produces peace. Advanced democracies in highly developed countries produce peace. But if you look at the history of democratization, it often includes enlisting nationalism, and the great insight learned from the politics of the late 19^th century is that it is possible to split nationalism from liberalism in democratic societies. When I say great, I don’t mean morally great. So it’s not true that the process necessarily produces peaceful conduct, as we see in Russia vis-à-vis Chechnya or in China vis-à-vis Taiwan. This is no argument against democratization. It is an argument to look at it with some understanding of what one is really talking about. Moreover, I can understand what it means to defend human rights, but I am not sure that we know how to promote democracy in many of the societies in which we are trying to be active. Now the fact that I don’t know doesn’t mean that somebody can’t figure it out. I am saying that, in national policy, it has not yet been adequately addressed. In America, national policy is in the hands of various pressure groups that legislate individual sanctions on this or that problem. Sometimes they are adequate to the task and sometimes not.

Globalization must inevitably, as it proceeds, produce huge dislocations in each society and therefore requires a kind of political sophistication and attention that it has not received. The internet generation, for all its great achievements, has produced a different kind of mind and, thereby, one of the great revolutions in history. The advent of printing changed politics and religion. The invention of the internet is bound to produce huge dramatic changes. Before the internet, memory had to be trained, concepts had to be established, and a feel for the future had to develop. With the present technology, information is easy to acquire, knowledge is more difficult, and wisdom beyond the reach of many.

So one must deal with a political class that is national and not very reflective on foreign policy, and an economic class that is global in its outlook, but does not understand political relationships. This is not an argument against the internet. This is an argument over whether the internet generation can learn the perspectives of other periods so that these qualities can be combined.

Challenges Confronting American Foreign Policy
Now in the current world, we in the United States will have to face a number of conceptual issues relating to China, Russia, and Europe, in addition to all the other problems that I have mentioned.

China. The issue of China, of course, involves Taiwan. And I would recommend the paper that has been submitted to the Trilateral Commission,* with which I agree almost totally. (I would say totally, but I just can’t bring myself to say that.) The fundamental question we face now in the United States is, How do we deal with an emerging superpower? And how do we analyze this relationship? To what degree is it in our capacity to turn it into a replica of the American system, and how do we know what a democratic system in China would be like? It is sometimes argued that China is communist and therefore an ideological enemy. It is also argued that they are determined to push the U.S. out of Asia and therefore it is better to anticipate this by throttling them or at least by making the process as difficult as possible.

First, I don’t think they are a communist country. I think they are a one-party country using the communist label. But they are nothing like the Soviet Communist Party that claimed universal applicability and control of all others. They are not an ideological threat. Their problem is their potential ideological weakness, not their potential strength, and the measures they might take to use nationalism to compensate for this growing weakness.

As for the Chinese ability to push the U.S. out of Asia, I think the analogy to the Soviet Union is totally mistaken. The Soviet Union was surrounded by weak countries, not one of which could resist by itself. They therefore had to be combined. China is surrounded by countries, any one of which is capable of resisting alone—India, Russia, Japan. Japan’s defense budget is three times that of China’s. Looking at the world from Beijing, the danger to Chinese and regional security is a combination of surrounding countries, not China’s ability to march through any one of them.

Of course, as China’s economy grows, it will gain more influence through normal economic relationships and it will probably use them. But the question we have to ask is, Is it to be our national policy that no other country can emerge at a rate of growth that can be in some respects disquieting? I don’t accept this proposition. I believe that the American position in Asia should be, and will be no matter who is in office, that we will resist the hegemony of any country in Asia. (Especially once the American people understand what the word “hegemony” means, which I don’t think is widespread.) But we don’t have to make grand alliances for that purpose. We have an alliance with Japan, which we will maintain. Japan for the foreseeable future is better off under the American nuclear umbrella than going the road of India, and, therefore, there is a confluence of interests between Japan and the United States. For the rest of Asia, we can afford good relations with everybody, vapid as this sounds. We don’t have to create a Cold War in Asia. And in fact, I would argue that the surest way to isolate ourselves in Asia is to lead the crusade that so many people are urging upon us.

Now, Taiwan is a very special case, and I’ll just state three principles and leave it to you to read the paper. One, we cannot abandon the principle of one China without provoking a showdown with China, whatever the costs to China. Two, China must be made to understand that we will not accept the use of force in settling the Taiwan issue. Three, Taiwan must be made to understand that it has gained enormously under this arrangement and that it should avoid provocative actions. What is provocative is not something that can be defined in Beijing, but something that is clearly provocative is a declaration of independence, or something amounting to it. Those seem to me to be the three principles we must maintain.

Russia. I will just mention Russia briefly. We are about to start another new relationship with Russia and one can already see the typical fever chart. Groups of leaders are rushing to Moscow to report in the traditional way about the new leader—his psychology, his humanity, the great improvement over his predecessor—and are competing with each other in their enlightened attitude towards Russia. If Russia wants to modernize, having many intelligent leaders, it will understand that market economics is the best way to proceed so we shouldn’t have to pay them for this. What we want from Russia is for them to stay within their boundaries. Russian foreign policy, even though Russia has a GDP the size of Denmark’s, destabilizes every country around its borders for the purpose of denying them the ability to live quietly and ultimately to bring them home to the Motherland. And as they pursue this policy they will create the normal suspicions of Russia in Europe and inflame the old historic tensions. The one lesson Russia has to learn is that when you have eleven time zones, from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, you shouldn’t feel claustrophobic. What we want from Russia is that they concentrate on their own territory first and then we can talk to them—and should talk to them—about Central Asia. And we must treat them with respect in all other international questions by letting them participate in international forums in a substantial way.

American-European Relations. Finally, I want to say something about American-European relations. Because NATO exists, everybody thinks American-European relations are very good. Every time we don’t know what to do, everybody thinks we have some technical problem to work on. But the fact seems to me to be that there has been a sea-change in every European country, most recently in Germany. It is of a different generation coming to power and very similar to the one I described in America. And it is a generation that hasn’t gone through the process of forming Atlantic cooperation. Therefore there is some necessity for defining two separate issues. One is, What does one mean by Atlantic cooperation? And the second is, What does one mean by European identity? And further, Is it possible to define European identity without focussing it on opposition to the United States? All this seems to me part of the agenda.

A Basic Challenge
Let me conclude with a Chinese proverb Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore, once told me, which I think sums up our challenge: When there is turmoil under the heavens, little problems are dealt with as if they were big problems and big problems are not dealt with at all. When there is order under the heavens, big problems are reduced to smaller problems and smaller problems should not obsess us. This seems to me to be a basic challenge, whether we can identify the big problems and reduce them to little problems. But before you become too impressed with this proverb let me tell you what was said to me in Beijing when I tried to use this proverb. One Chinese said, the next time Lee Kuan Yew tells you a proverb, tell him there is an old Chinese proverb which says: Lee Kuan Yew invents Chinese proverbs.

* Michel Oksenberg and Charles Morrison, “East Asian Security and the International System” (paper submitted at the Trilateral Commission Annual Meeting, Tokyo, Japan, April 2000).