Start with fear. George Bush has been scared by his own belated discovery of the country’s raging economic discontents and the corollary resentment of any substantial expenditure of government energy or money abroad. Ironically, the Democrats have in turn been scared by Bush’s reputed expertise in foreign policy (which he half disowns as he becomes Mr. I-care-about-you). The most you get so far between the parties is a little bit of sparring about who was where on the gulf war and why Saddam Inc. is still open for business.
The next reason for the silence is the fact of the Soviet collapse. For nearly half a century the Soviet Union had been at once the prime determinant and the prime target of American foreign policy; it shaped everything from our federal budget to our attitudes toward almost every other people on earth, whom we defined (“allies,” “neutrals,” “nonaligned,” etc.) strictly in terms of our conflict with the Soviet Union. And now it is no more. From this some assume that there is nothing more for the United States to do than (1) go around mopping up some of the cold-war wreckage, (2) detach ourselves from Third World and other foreign conflicts which are now to be guided by the great post-cold-war principle of “who cares?” and (3) go into intensive training for a showdown fight with the Japanese and, in time, the Europeans for markets and economic pre-eminence worldwide.
This last point leads to the final reason given for ignoring foreign affairs: that every moment spent on the subject is a moment stolen from what should be our priority concern of getting our economy back on its feet, improving our educational system and otherwise taking the steps needed to re-establish our competitive edge. Those amusing ancient maps whose distortions reveal how unrealistically some countries viewed the world and their place in it could have a counterpart in this country today. Surely the uninstructed child told to draw a map of the world based on what he overheard the grownups talking about would present a gigantic Japan and a gigantic Iraq and (maybe) a dot called Russia somewhere and a great big sad-faced us in the middle.
Only that is not the world, not the successor world to the cold-war construct that has just been deconstructed. To think it is, is dangerous, not to say mindless. Bush last year, at the time of the anti-Saddam coalition, talked about the New World Order. But even though the titanic U.S.-Soviet struggle with its ramifications in reflected small wars all over the world is a thing of the past, and even though the United Nations has come to play an enormously improved role in mediating and defusing disputes, there is new disorder, not new order. North Korea is shipping improved Scud missiles to Iran; the United States and governments of the former Soviet Union are trying to figure out ways to keep Soviet nuclear technology, materials and know-how out of the hands of surpassingly rich and surpassingly reckless would-be nuclear powers. These are but a couple of examples of how a complicated, hard-to-track traffic in deathly explosives, deliverable from long distances, is likely to become a main feature in a world in which violent disputes among traditional enemy states and tribes are rekindling. On every continent, tidal waves of refugees are surging from country to country. These are not circumstances that we can insulate ourselves from by putting up a STAY OUT sign as we pursue our internal concerns.
And, importantly, we are in need of new ways of thinking about and dealing with the impact of these post-cold-war conditions. The old analogies (as usual) don’t work: neither Munich nor Vietnam, the two favorites, instructs us in this morass. Nor do the cold-war scenarios, the much brooded-over putative Soviet and Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe or the insanely surgical first-strike/ second-strike war games that people played out in such unconvincing detail over the years. We had studied these things to death. They had a reassuring unreality to them, a quality of the academic exercise that had, in the face of a well understood mutual capacity to obliterate all, become a substitute for warfare.
Now there is a much more diffuse and elusive threat. And our institutions seem as ill suited as our imagery and mindset to deal with it. Our intelligence, foreign policy-making and defense establishments were all created in the wake of World War II to deal with a wholly different set of realities and, in addition, over the years have in many respects been bent out of shape and rendered imperious or rickety or, worse, both at once. Before we decide how the national-security apparatus of government should be reshaped and what kind of a defense we need we have to have some generally agreed-on answers to the prior questions: How should this country relate to the former No. 1 adversary? To those other states that, minus a cold-war significance, have never been much noticed by us? What responsibility should we assume for the economic privation, the population displacements, the multiplying violence, the newly frenzied arms bazaar seen around the world? What are the values we should pursue? What are the practical, self-interested objectives?
I don’t say that America’s economic woes should not be center stage, only that even acute as they are, they do not eliminate the urgencies of American foreign policy. The world didn’t go away with the Soviet Union. And it didn’t become a swell, happy place or a safe one for us or anyone else. A president has a prime responsibility in this area. Yet oddly it seems off most of these candidates’ election-year screen. As dear old Ronald Reagan might have put it: “Where’s the rest of them?”
title: " Where S The Rest Of Them " ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-18” author: “Michael Ortiz”
Start with fear. George Bush has been scared by his own belated discovery of the country’s raging economic discontents and the corollary resentment of any substantial expenditure of government energy or money abroad. Ironically, the Democrats have in turn been scared by Bush’s reputed expertise in foreign policy (which he half disowns as he becomes Mr. I-care-about-you). The most you get so far between the parties is a little bit of sparring about who was where on the gulf war and why Saddam Inc. is still open for business.
The next reason for the silence is the fact of the Soviet collapse. For nearly half a century the Soviet Union had been at once the prime determinant and the prime target of American foreign policy; it shaped everything from our federal budget to our attitudes toward almost every other people on earth, whom we defined (“allies,” “neutrals,” “nonaligned,” etc.) strictly in terms of our conflict with the Soviet Union. And now it is no more. From this some assume that there is nothing more for the United States to do than (1) go around mopping up some of the cold-war wreckage, (2) detach ourselves from Third World and other foreign conflicts which are now to be guided by the great post-cold-war principle of “who cares?” and (3) go into intensive training for a showdown fight with the Japanese and, in time, the Europeans for markets and economic pre-eminence worldwide.
This last point leads to the final reason given for ignoring foreign affairs: that every moment spent on the subject is a moment stolen from what should be our priority concern of getting our economy back on its feet, improving our educational system and otherwise taking the steps needed to re-establish our competitive edge. Those amusing ancient maps whose distortions reveal how unrealistically some countries viewed the world and their place in it could have a counterpart in this country today. Surely the uninstructed child told to draw a map of the world based on what he overheard the grownups talking about would present a gigantic Japan and a gigantic Iraq and (maybe) a dot called Russia somewhere and a great big sad-faced us in the middle.
Only that is not the world, not the successor world to the cold-war construct that has just been deconstructed. To think it is, is dangerous, not to say mindless. Bush last year, at the time of the anti-Saddam coalition, talked about the New World Order. But even though the titanic U.S.-Soviet struggle with its ramifications in reflected small wars all over the world is a thing of the past, and even though the United Nations has come to play an enormously improved role in mediating and defusing disputes, there is new disorder, not new order. North Korea is shipping improved Scud missiles to Iran; the United States and governments of the former Soviet Union are trying to figure out ways to keep Soviet nuclear technology, materials and know-how out of the hands of surpassingly rich and surpassingly reckless would-be nuclear powers. These are but a couple of examples of how a complicated, hard-to-track traffic in deathly explosives, deliverable from long distances, is likely to become a main feature in a world in which violent disputes among traditional enemy states and tribes are rekindling. On every continent, tidal waves of refugees are surging from country to country. These are not circumstances that we can insulate ourselves from by putting up a STAY OUT sign as we pursue our internal concerns.
And, importantly, we are in need of new ways of thinking about and dealing with the impact of these post-cold-war conditions. The old analogies (as usual) don’t work: neither Munich nor Vietnam, the two favorites, instructs us in this morass. Nor do the cold-war scenarios, the much brooded-over putative Soviet and Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe or the insanely surgical first-strike/ second-strike war games that people played out in such unconvincing detail over the years. We had studied these things to death. They had a reassuring unreality to them, a quality of the academic exercise that had, in the face of a well understood mutual capacity to obliterate all, become a substitute for warfare.
Now there is a much more diffuse and elusive threat. And our institutions seem as ill suited as our imagery and mindset to deal with it. Our intelligence, foreign policy-making and defense establishments were all created in the wake of World War II to deal with a wholly different set of realities and, in addition, over the years have in many respects been bent out of shape and rendered imperious or rickety or, worse, both at once. Before we decide how the national-security apparatus of government should be reshaped and what kind of a defense we need we have to have some generally agreed-on answers to the prior questions: How should this country relate to the former No. 1 adversary? To those other states that, minus a cold-war significance, have never been much noticed by us? What responsibility should we assume for the economic privation, the population displacements, the multiplying violence, the newly frenzied arms bazaar seen around the world? What are the values we should pursue? What are the practical, self-interested objectives?
I don’t say that America’s economic woes should not be center stage, only that even acute as they are, they do not eliminate the urgencies of American foreign policy. The world didn’t go away with the Soviet Union. And it didn’t become a swell, happy place or a safe one for us or anyone else. A president has a prime responsibility in this area. Yet oddly it seems off most of these candidates’ election-year screen. As dear old Ronald Reagan might have put it: “Where’s the rest of them?”
