The future of a contradiction.

• Author: Tucker, Robert W.
• Position: Conflicts in American foreign policies

The great issue of American foreign policy today may be simply stated. It is the contradiction between the persisting desire to remain the premier global power and an ever deepening aversion to bear the costs of this position. Evidence of the contradiction is pervasive. In Bosnia, it has merely found its most recent manifestation.

The contradiction itself is hardly novel. Many observers have traced its appearance to the experience in Vietnam. In fact, it goes back to a much earlier time in this century, for its origins are to be found in the period of World War I. In this respect, as in so much of our twentieth-century experience with the world, Woodrow Wilson is the dominant figure. It is Wilson who aspired, as no American president before him had done, to a role of world leadership for the United States. If we were ever to become partners in the world, he declared in urging the nation to strike out on a new course, our assured role would be that of "senior partner." To America would presumably fall the position of premier global power, were it only to abandon its past and commit itself to his League of Nations.

Yet it is also Woodrow Wilson who shrank from acknowledging and accepting the costs of playing such a role. America's leadership was to be gained, he was persuaded, at very little sacrifice on the nation's part. It had only to make, as he had made, a commitment of faith. The still prevalent view that Wilson failed in the end because he asked too much of the nation is quite misleading. Wilson failed despite the fact that he asked so little while promising so much.

In its origins, then, the contradiction that still besets us was resolved simply by the nation's rejection of its terms. In the interwar period, the American people neither claimed the role of world leadership nor evidenced any willingness to bear the costs of such role. Historians, it is true, often speak of an "interwar compromise" that involved a break from America's pre-World War I past yet did not embrace what was to be its post-World War II future. But that compromise, whatever else it might have meant, did not extend to a guarantee of European security. Nor, for that matter, did it extend to a reliable guarantee of Pacific security, despite the undertakings entered into regarding sea power at the 1922 Washington Conference. The fierceness of the prolonged struggle over intervention that occurred in the years 1939-41 is persuasive testimony of the nation's deep reluctance to accept a role the costs of which had by then become increasingly apparent.

Nor did this reluctance disappear with America's intervention in World War II. That America would henceforth play a leading role in world politics was now generally accepted. Yet the consequences thereby entailed were far from being generally accepted during the war years and even less so in the immediate postwar years -- as the very rapid demobilization and the abrupt ending of the Lend-Lease arrangement testified. It was not until the close of the 1940s when the Cold War was fully joined, that things changed and these consequences found widespread acceptance.

The Cold War Experience

The period from the Korean War to Vietnam appears as an exception to the contradiction that has since come to resemble virtually a chronic state of affairs. In these years of the classic Cold War, the disjunction between our pretensions to such a large role and our willingness to accept the costs of such pretensions was relatively narrow. But the favorable circumstances that permitted this state of affairs were unusual and, as such, unlikely to find approximation in any future that may be reasonably foreseen. The obvious advantages conferred by the relative power position that the United States enjoyed in this earlier period cannot be restored. Beyond restoration as well, it would seem, is the pre-Vietnam domestic consensus on foreign policy, which rested on a generally shared understanding that the executive was the ultimate authority in determining when a threat to vital interests, justifying the use of force, had arisen. Deference to the judgment of the president was perhaps the critical feature of the old Cold War consensus; on its basis the post-world War II security structure had largely been built. Until Vietnam, that structure also rested on a notion of sacrifice that was given operational meaning by the same institution -- the presidency -- that enjoyed the deference of public and Congress in deciding on critical issues of policy. Even when these factors are taken into account, it is well to recall that between 1953 and 1965 the cost in blood of a global position was virtually nil.

It is sufficient merely to recall these circumstances in order to be reminded how far we have since moved from them. While the decline in America's economic position has been emphasized almost to an excess, the erosion of the socio-political base that once sustained America's global role has been equally, if not even more, significant. In the quarter of a century or so since the breakdown of the old consensus began, there has been no real check to a trend that has led to an ever increasing disparity between ends and means in foreign policy. In the last decade of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan did not succeed in substantially altering, let alone reversing, this trend. To have done so would have required reconstituting the socio-political base of foreign policy, a task he made no real effort to accomplish. The foreign policy goals to which Reagan dedicated his administration, though themselves ambitious, did not imply a return to anything like the pre-Vietnam consensus. On the whole, Reagan respected the constraints on presidential power that had emerged in the years following Vietnam and instead sought to reconcile an ambitious foreign policy to those constraints.

In this attempt, the Reagan administration enjoyed a limited success. A public outlook emerged that once again viewed the use of American power with neither suspicion nor guilt. While this...