We Need a Secretary of State for the ‘90s, Not the ‘30s

“My mind-set is Munich; most of my generation’s was Vietnam,” Secretary of State-designate Madeleine Albright recently told a reporter. Yet a secretary of state--and an administration--guided by such 1930s interventionist ideas could well shipwreck U.S. foreign policy in the 1990s. Fueled by a worldview logically incapable of establishing priorities for U.S. action, they would heighten the odds of America plunging into an endless series of foreign trouble spots completely unrelated to its security or prosperity.

As indicated by the Munich analogy, Albright and other traditional internationalists, whether left or right, believe that aggression and turmoil anywhere in the world eventually will endanger America itself. Thus, despite the Cold War’s end, the continuing need for deep and extensive U.S. involvement--including the use of military force--even in regions lacking strong militaries, strategic locations, major markets or resources for American business or any of the attributes usually associated with the term “vital interests.”

Yet for a country as strong, rich and geopolitically secure as the United States, such all-consuming global activism was defensible only in the era that has just ended--one defined by two monumental but historically unusual conditions.

The first was the emergence of rivals like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, both ideologically hostile and strong enough to project power globally. Such powers could threaten America directly and undermine its interests across the globe by subverting friendly or neutral governments. As a result, from the 1940s to the 1980s, levels of turbulence once safely dismissed as the normal warp and woof of world politics were regarded by Washington as inherently threatening.

The second condition was the accelerating mechanization of military power, which greatly tightened the link among national security, industrial prowess and access to raw materials like metals and oil. As George Kennan argued, if communism ever controlled traditional economic powerhouses like Western Europe and Japan, the armies available for attacking America would be immensely strengthened.

Obviously, the Soviet Union’s demise eliminated the first condition. Russia cannot even project its power successfully into tiny Chechnya. And China’s military often seems more interested in commerce than conquests. In any case, warnings of imperial revivals by these former foes are continuously undercut by the zeal of both Democratic and Republican presidents to trade with or aid them.

Consequently, international turbulence is not being exploited for anti-American purposes. Indeed, from Bosnia to Burundi, major powers are working harder to stay out of trouble spots, not plunge in.

Less obviously, even before the Cold War’s end, the development of huge, accurate, secure, intercontinental U.S. nuclear arsenals greatly loosened the relationship between economic power and America’s vulnerability to attack. As long as the United States maintains these forces and remains economically strong enough to ensure favorable commercial relations with Western Europe and East Asia, political control of these two regions matters much less.

The Vietnam analogy played down by Albright showed that even in a worldwide geopolitical struggle, intervening in marginal regions obscures America’s core needs, producing fuzzy political rationales, incoherent military policies and ultimately public disillusionment with all international engagement. Similar results have been seen in Bosnia and Somalia.

Meanwhile, America’s major treaty alliances are doing more lately to draw America into foreign conflicts than to protect it from aggressors. The likely dangers of traditional internationalism are starting to outweigh any plausible benefits.

Yet Albright’s prescription is more--much more--of the same. She was the administration’s strongest advocate of turning the humanitarian food mission in Somalia into a nation-building exercise and of authorizing U.S. forces to apprehend the warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid. As a result, dozens of U.S. troops were killed in a region of no intrinsic strategic or economic importance to America. She has favored the troubled, possibly open-ended Bosnia operation with equal vigor. And she has championed NATO expansion, which threatens to embroil America even further in the manifold troubles of East European countries never considered vital before the Berlin Wall fell.

Albright and the president claim to have learned the lessons of Somalia. Yet shortly after the U.S. forces’ defeat, she told Congress that although conflicts in trouble spots like Somalia “may not impinge directly on the national security interests of America or its allies, the cumulative effects of continuing conflict . . . can and do affect us” enough to require vigorous responses. In other words, Washington must remain urgently concerned about every square inch of the planet. Albright’s only concession to balancing ends and means in foreign policymaking is a content-free doctrine of “doability,” which says nothing about what is and is not worth doing from America’s standpoint.

In the late 1960s, when America was still struggling with a hostile superpower, Bill Clinton wrote to the ROTC commander at the University of Arkansas, “No government really rooted in limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens die in a war . . . which . . . does not involve immediately the peace and freedom of the nation.”

It’s a point worth considering by President Clinton again, by Albright and by the senators who will vote on her nomination.