Beyond left and right.

• Author: Tonelson, Alan
• Position: US foreign policy

"...if when the chips are down the world's most powerful nation, the United States, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and institutions throughout the world."

President Richard M. Nixon announcing the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, April 30, 1970.

"The West's worst moral and political disaster since the Nazis is coming to a climax. And just as many politicians and institutions paid for the failure to stop Hitler, so many will pay dearly for allowing the Serbian tyrant, Slobodan Milosevic, to destroy Bosnia."

Anthony Lewis, "The End of the Affair," The New York Times, August 13, 1993.

ANTHONY LEWIS' recent Richard Nixon impersonations are not only amusing, they are genuinely important. They are among the many signs that American thinking about foreign policy is finally entering the post-Cold War era--and perhaps dragging the rest of American politics along with it.

In foreign affairs, the old dividing lines are blurring or being ignored, and with good reason. As is clear from any recent op-ed page, familiar classifications such as interventionist and isolationist, hawk and dove, realist and idealist, and multilateralist and unilateralist (at least as they have been used since the end of World War II) no longer make much sense, in the absence of the Cold War's defining conditions. Abroad, those conditions included rigid military and ideological bipolarity and overwhelming American economic predominance within the free world camp; at home, widespread acceptance of a state of national emergency, and of the national priorities and resource allocations that followed therefrom. Because--as it is now fashionable to observe--foreign and domestic policies can no longer be neatly separated, ideological confusion has spilled over into domestic politics. Even ideas as basic to modern politics as Left and Right are undergoing redefinition.

So far, the results seem to be little more than rampant confusion--with San Francisco Democrats clamoring for air strikes and even ground operations all over the world; hardline anticommunists emphasizing the limits to American power; consumer advocates opposing trade liberalization agreements; paleo-conservatives backing interventionist economic policies at home and abroad; the Heritage Foundation and the Rainbow Coalition both endorsing big cuts in overseas troop deployments; the mainstream liberals who run "the party of the common man" railing against surging populism, while many conservatives stoke its fires; Carterites and Bushies both decrying "the new isolationism"; and, in the most delicious irony of all, right-wing columnist and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan picking up George McGovern's plea: "Come home, America."

The confusion and ferment are real enough. Slowly, however, more coherent patterns are becoming apparent. In fact, a new underlying fault line is already emerging in American politics and foreign policy, dividing what might best be called nationalists and internationalists. In terms of American diplomacy, this new alignment will pit a generic model of foreign policy-making that long predates the Cold War--one based at bottom not on resisting totalitarianism, or promoting democracy or world order, but on the belief that international activism itself is the key to American security and prosperity--against a rival approach that is much more radical than any Marxist alternative--a relatively passive strategy whose supreme goal is consolidating American military and economic strength, and enhancing America's freedom of action. In the realm of economic policy, those who argue that the nation-state, as an economic player, is obsolete or dangerous will vie with those convinced of its continuing relevance and legitimacy. In electoral politics, sharp differences in economic interests and cultural outlooks will produce a widening rift between business, professional, and government elites, on the one hand, and wage-earners on the other. The issue of class, in other words, is re-emerging in American politics.

The realignment process will be slow and messy, both intellectually and politically. Although cold re-calculations of interests are threatening many coalitions, most are still held together by sentimental bonds or simple inertia. If they do crystallize, however, the new alignments are likely to be stronger, more durable, and less inclined to compromise than their predecessors--at least until the next sea change occurs. In the meantime, American politics and foreign policy will continue to be influenced by what might be called the strange bedfellows phenomenon--confused divisions and coalitions based more on emotion, historical memory and personality than on substance or logic. In particular, the scene will be distinguished by a disjunction between politico-military outlooks and economic positions.

The Cold War Debate over Means

AMERICAN FOREIGN policy thinking has never been long on ideological coherence, especially since the end of World War II. When conservatives cautiously and reluctantly bought into the Cold War consensus forged by New Deal liberals in the late-1940s, they accepted not only unprecedented American international engagement and all manner of entangling alliances but a big, intrusive national security state at home, as well as Keynesian deficit spending to finance these new foreign ventures. Two decades later, during the Vietnam period, many liberals and conservatives flip-flopped, the former souring on most uses of American power abroad, the latter firming up as the strongest champions of the military tools and strategies needed to give anticommunist internationalism and containment their backbone.

Still, until the Soviet crackup, the Cold War set a durable framework for American thinking about foreign policy and most differences were contained within that framework. Nearly all American leaders and foreign policy analysts accepted the fundamental tenets of an internationalist doctrine that had congealed during and immediately after World War II. In the aftermath of that conflict, and with the lesson of the 1930s still fresh, the defining feature of internationalism seemed clear enough, despite disputes over means and tactics: the compelling, inescapable need to thwart an aggressive totalitarianism around the world.

Paradoxically, by removing that particular threat, the Cold War's end has revealed the true foundations of American internationalism: the belief that America will never know genuine security, lasting peace, and sustained prosperity unless the rest of the world also becomes secure, peaceful, prosperous, and democratic; the belief that international security is indivisible--that the inextricably interwoven problems of discontent, political extremism, and aggression are highly contagious and bound to spread around the world once they are allowed to fester anywhere; and the belief that the only way to achieve these goals is to eliminate the conditions that breed discontent wherever they exist, and somehow impose norms of peaceful behavior on all states.

On international economic and trade policy during the Cold War, nearly all influential Americans subscribed to the internationalist goal of a highly integrated world economy in which market forces assured the most efficient possible distribution of resources and thus the greatest prosperity for all the world. Thus the international economic order forged by the United States in the late 1940s centered on an International Monetary Fund to maintain stable exchange rates, and a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade designed to set rules for international commerce that would prevent the rise of economic blocs.

A faith in laissez-faire economics convinced internationalists that even if not all players obeyed the rules, Americans and others would still benefit from the freest possible worldwide flows of goods, services, and capital--at least within the free world camp. Any attempt to respond politically or strategically to economic problems--to try to enhance a country's relative position by limiting or manipulating market forces--would only backfire, because the cheater would become hooked on shortcuts, lose its skills, and deprive its people of the benefits of buying at the best prices. Just as important, the goal of free trade and economic integration maintained that what specific goods and services a state produces, or does not produce, are not important, so long as they reflect the unimpeded forces of comparative advantage. As a result, even liberals were timid about advocating any government intervention in the domestic economy, beyond macroeconomic steering and transfer payments. These beliefs also made it that much easier to soft-pedal economic disputes with allies, in order to maintain the supposedly more important strategic relationships. Of course, internationalists sought to deny U.S. resources and advanced technology to military and ideological enemies. But in the non-communist world, those assets were treated as little more than trinkets, to be doled out periodically as political favors to client states in return for good behavior.

Cold War conditions had two other profound but overlooked effects on American politics that are now rapidly fading. First, they greatly inflated American expectations of foreign policy. Anti-communist consensus and growing abundance throughout the West suspended much of what was normal in world politics--at least among noncommunist countries. Significantly, relationships between the United States and its allies were described more and more in unitary terms such as "the West" and "the Free World," which implied an underlying commonalty of interest. To many internationalists, relations among these countries started to look like domestic politics. Age-old concepts such as relative power, relative gains, and the logic of self-help in particular were widely seen as antiquated...