TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=94TT0289> <title> Mar. 14, 1994: How To Achieve The New World Order </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994 Mar. 14, 1994 How Man Began </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> BOOK EXCERPT, Page 73 How To Achieve The New World Order </hdr> <body> In his book Diplomacy, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argues that U.S. foreign policy needs less idealism and more Realpolitik By Henry Kissinger (c) 1994 Henry A. Kissinger. All rights reserved. From Diplomacy, to be published by Simon and Schuster, Inc. Americans, from the President to the man in the street, have always distrusted the very idea of international relations. The U.S., protected by size and geographic isolation, has tried to conduct a foreign policy based on the way Americans want the world to be, rather than the way it really is. Now more than ever, argues Henry Kissinger, the U.S. must temper its idealism with a more pragmatic approach, especially toward Russia, Europe and Asia. International systems live precariously. Every "world order" expresses an aspiration to permanence; yet the elements that make up a world order are in constant flux and the duration of international systems has been shrinking. The order that grew out of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 lasted 150 years; the international system created by the 1815 Congress of Vienna maintained itself for 100 years; the international order characterized by the cold war ended after 45 years. Never before have the components of world order, their capacity to interact and their goals all changed quite so rapidly, so deeply or so globally. Both Bill Clinton and George Bush have spoken of the new world order as if it were just around the corner. In fact, its final form will not be visible until well into the next century. In the post-cold war world, the U.S. is the only superpower with the capacity to intervene in every part of the globe. Yet the issues to which military force is relevant have diminished. The absence of an overriding ideological or strategic threat frees nations to pursue foreign policies based increasingly on their immediate national interest. In an international system characterized by perhaps five or six major powers and a multiplicity of smaller states--many of which are striving to prevail in ancient ethnic rivalries--order will have to emerge much as it did in past centuries: from a reconciliation and balancing of competing national interests. The end of the cold war has created what some observers have called a "unipolar" or "one-superpower" world. But the U.S. is actually in no better position to dictate the global agenda than it was at the beginning of the cold war. America is more preponderant than it was 10 years ago, yet, its power has also become more diffuse. Victory in the cold war has made it far more difficult to implement Woodrow Wilson's dream of universal collective security. In the absence of a potentially dominating power, the principal nations do not view threats to the peace in the same way, nor are they willing to run the same risks in overcoming those threats they do recognize. The world community is willing enough to cooperate in "peacekeeping"--policing an existing agreement not challenged by any of the parties involved--but it has been skittish about peacemaking--suppressing actual challenges to world order. Not even the U.S. has as yet developed a clear concept of what it will resist unilaterally in the post-cold war world. As an approach to foreign policy, Wilsonianism presumes that America is possessed of an exceptional nature expressed in unrivaled virtue and unrivaled power. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has been so confident of its strength and the virtue of its aims that it could envision fighting for its values on a worldwide basis. As the 21st century approaches, vast global forces are at work that will render the U.S. less exceptional. American military power will remain unrivaled for the foreseeable future. Yet America's desire to project that power into the myriad small-scale conflicts that the world is likely to witness in the coming decades--Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti are examples--is subjected to growing dispute. The U.S. will probably have the world's most powerful economy well into the next century, yet it will face economic competition of a kind it never experienced during the cold war. America will be the greatest and most powerful nation, but a nation with peers; the primus inter pares but in many respects a nation like others. As a result, Wilson's dictates--collective security, the conversion of one's adversaries to the American way, an international system that adjudicates disputes in a legal fashion and unqualified support for ethnic self-determination--are becoming less practicable. On what principles ought America then to base its foreign policy? Can Wilsonian concepts like "enlarging democracy" serve as the principal guides to American foreign policy and as replacements for the cold-war strategy of containment? The growth of democracy will continue as America's dominant aspiration, but it is much more difficult to translate into operational terms than the containment policy it seeks to replace. Curbing the power of the central government has been a principal concern of Western political theorists; in most other societies, political theory has sought to buttress the authority of the state. Nowhere else has there been such an insistence on expanding personal freedom. Western democracy evolved in culturally homogeneous societies with a long common history; even America, with its polyglot population, developed a strong cultural identity. The society and, in a sense, the nation preceded the state without having to be created by it. In such a setting, political parties represent variants of an underlying consensus; today's minority is potentially tomorrow's majority. In most other parts of the world, the state has preceded the nation; it has been and often remains the principal element in forming it. Political parties reflect fixed, usually communal, identities; minorities and majorities tend to be permanent. In such societies the political process is about domination, not alternation in office, which takes place, if at all, by coups rather than constitutional procedures. The concept of a loyal opposition--the essence of modern democracy--rarely prevails. Much more frequently, opposition is equated with treason and ruthlessly suppressed. America would not be true to itself if it did not insist on the universal applicability of the idea of liberty. That America should give preference to democratic governments over repressive ones and be prepared to pay some price for its moral convictions is beyond dispute. That there is an area of discretion that should be exercised in favor of governments and institutions promoting democratic values and human rights is also clear. The difficulty arises in determining the precise price to be paid and its relationship to other essential American priorities, including national security and the overall geopolitical balance. If American exhortations are to go beyond patriotic rhetoric, they must reflect a realistic understanding of America's reach. The U.S. must be careful not to multiply moral commitments while the financial and military resources for the conduct of a global foreign policy are being curtailed. Sweeping pronouncements not matched by either the ability or the willingness to back them up diminish America's influence in all other matters. The precise balance between the moral and the strategic elements of American foreign policy cannot be prescribed in the abstract. But the beginning of wisdom consists of recognizing that a balance needs to be struck. A gap is threatening to open up in America's policy between its pretensions and its willingness to support them; the nearly inevitable disillusionment too easily turns into an excuse for withdrawing from world affairs altogether. Foreign policy must begin with some definition of what constitutes a vital interest--a change in the international environment so likely to undermine the national security that it must be resisted no matter what form the threat takes or how ostensibly legitimate it appears. The controversy surrounding almost all American military actions in the post-cold war period shows that a wider consensus on where America should draw the line does not yet exist. To bring it about is a major challenge to national leadership. The concept of raison d'etat--that the interests of the state justify the means used to pursue them--has always been repugnant to Americans. That is not to say that Americans have never practiced raison d'etat--there are many instances of it, from the time of the Founding Fathers' shrewd dealings with the European powers to the single-minded pursuit of Western expansion under the rubric of "manifest destiny." But Americans have never been comfortable acknowledging openly their own selfish interests. Whether fighting world wars or local conflicts, U.S. leaders always claimed to be struggling in the name of principle, not interest. In the next century, American leaders will have to articulate a concept of the national interest and explain how that interest is served by the maintenance of the balance of power. America will need partners to preserve equilibrium in several regions, and these partners cannot always be chosen on the basis of moral considerations alone. DEALING WITH RUSSIA Just as Soviet hostility shaped America's attitudes toward the global order from the perspective of containment, so do Russia's reform efforts dominate America's thinking now. U.S. policy has been based on the premise that peace can be ensured by a Russia tempered by democracy and concentrating its energies on developing a market economy. In this light, America's principal task is conceived to be to strengthen Russian reform, with measures drawn from the experience of the Marshall Plan rather than from the traditional patterns of foreign policy. In the aftermath of the communist collapse, it has been assumed that Russia's adversarial intentions have disappeared. Students of geopolitics and history are uneasy about the single-mindedness of this approach. They fear that in overestimating America's ability to shape Russia's evolution, the U.S. may involve itself needlessly in internal Russian controversies and generate a nationalist backlash. While they would support a policy designed to modify Russia's traditional truculence through economic aid and global cooperation, they argue that even if a political transformation did occur, its effect on Russian foreign policy would take time. Therefore, America should hedge its bets. Nor should America expect economic aid to achieve results in Russia comparable to those of the Marshall Plan. The Western Europe of the immediate postwar period had a functioning market system, well-established bureaucracies and, in most countries, a democratic tradition. Comparable conditions do not exist in post-cold war Russia. Alleviating suffering and encouraging economic reform are important tools of American foreign policy, but not substitutes for a serious effort to maintain the global balance of power vis-a-vis a country with a long history of expansionism. The vast Russian empire acquired over the course of two centuries is in a state of disintegration, generating two causes of tension: attempts by neighbors to take advantage of the weakness of the imperial center, and efforts by the declining empire to restore its authority at the periphery. Iran and Turkey are seeking to increase their roles in the largely Muslim republics of Central Asia. But the dominant geopolitical thrust has been Russia's attempt to restore its pre-eminence in all the territories formerly controlled from Moscow in the name of peacekeeping. The U.S., focusing on the goodwill of a "reformist" government and reluctant to embrace a geopolitical agenda, has acquiesced. It has done little to enable the successor republics, except the Baltic states, to achieve international acceptance. The presence or activities of Russian troops on their territory are rarely challenged. This is in part because America has been dealing with the anticommunist and the anti-imperialist revolutions as if they were a single phenomenon. In fact, they work in opposite directions. The anticommunist revolution has enjoyed substantial support throughout the territory of the former Soviet Union. The anti-imperialist revolution, directed against domination by Russia, is widely popular in the new non-Russian republics and extremely unpopular in the Russian Federation. Russian leadership groups have historically perceived their state in terms of a "civilizing" mission; the overwhelming majority of Russia's leading figures--whatever their political persuasion--refuse to accept the collapse of the Soviet empire or the legitimacy of its successor states, especially of Ukraine, the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy. Even Alexander Solzhenitsyn, when writing about ridding Russia of unwilling foreign subjects, urged the retention by Moscow of a core group of Ukraine, Belarus and almost half of Kazakhstan--nearly 90% of the former empire. A realistic policy would recognize that the reformist Russian government of Boris Yeltsin has maintained Russian armies on the territory of most of the former Soviet republics--all members of the U.N.--often against the express wish of the host government. These military forces have encouraged and even participated in the civil wars of several of the republics. And Russian diplomacy is beginning to claim a veto over the foreign policy of its former satellites in Eastern Europe. Long-term prospects for peace will be influenced by Russian reform, but short-term prospects will depend on whether Russian armies can be induced to stay at home. Russia is bound to have a special security interest in what it calls the "near abroad," the republics of the former Soviet Union. But the peace of the world requires that this interest be satisfied without military pressure or intervention. The key issue is whether to treat Russia's relationship to the new republics as an international problem subject to accepted rules of foreign policy, or as an outgrowth of Russia's unilateral decision making that America will seek to influence by appeals to Russia's goodwill. For the post-cold war period, American policy toward Russia has staked everything on a kind of social engineering geared to individual leaders. In the Bush Administration it was Mikhail Gorbachev, and under Clinton it has been Boris Yeltsin; because of their perceived personal commitment to democracy, Gorbachev and Yeltsin have been treated as the guarantors of a peaceful Russian foreign policy. America's leaders have been reluctant to invoke the traditional diplomatic brakes on Russian policy for fear of provoking Yeltsin's nationalist opponents. It does Russia no favor to be treated as immune from normal considerations of foreign policy, for this will have the practical result of forcing it to pay a heavier price later on if it is lured into courses of action from which there is no retreat. The veterans of Russia's internal struggles are quite capable of comprehending a policy based on mutual respect of each other's national interests; they are likely to understand such a calculus better than appeals to an abstract and distant Utopianism. Generous economic assistance and technical advice are necessary to ease the pains of transition, and Russia should be made welcome in institutions that foster economic, cultural and political cooperation. But Russian reform will be impeded, not helped, by turning a blind eye to the reappearance of historic Russian imperial pretensions. American policy toward Russia should be geared to permanent interests, not to the fluctuations of Russian domestic politics. If American policy makes Russian domestic politics its top priority, it will become the victim of forces out of its control and lose all criteria for judgment. The new Russian leadership is entitled to understanding for the anguishing process of trying to overcome two generations of communist misrule. It is not entitled to be handed the sphere of influence that Czars and commissars have coveted all around Russia's vast borders for 300 years. If Russia is to become a serious partner in building a new world order, it must be ready for the disciplines of stability as well as for its benefits. MANAGING EUROPE The architects of the Atlantic Alliance would have been incredulous had they been told that victory in the cold war would raise doubts about the future of their creation. They took it for granted that the prize for victory in the cold war was a lasting partnership. But the alliance has been marking time since the collapse of communism. Downgrading the U.S. relationship with Europe has become all too fashionable. Yet without its Atlantic ties, America would find itself in a world of nations with which--except in the Western Hemisphere--it has few moral bonds or common traditions. In these circumstances, America would be obliged to conduct a pure Realpolitik, which is essentially incompatible with the American tradition. Disagreements with Europe have the grating character of family squabbles. Yet on nearly every key issue, there has been far more cooperation from Europe than from any other area. Europe may not be able to rally itself to a new Atlantic policy, but America owes it to itself not to abandon the policies of three generations in the hour of victory. The task before the Alliance is to adapt the two basic institutions that shape the Atlantic relationship, NATO and the European Union, to the realities of the post-cold war world. In the years ahead all the traditional Atlantic relationships will change. Europe will not feel the previous need for American protection and will pursue its economic self-interest much more aggressively; America will not be willing to sacrifice as much for European security and will be tempted by isolationism in various guises. In due course, Germany will insist on the political influence to which its military and economic power entitle it and will not be so emotionally dependent on American military and French political support. Europe, even with Germany, cannot manage either the resurgence or disintegration of Russia. It is in no country's interest that Germany and Russia should fixate on each other as either principal partner or principal adversary. If they become too close, they raise fears of condominium; if they quarrel, they involve Europe in escalating crises. Without America, Great Britain and France cannot sustain the political balance in Western Europe; Germany would be tempted by nationalism; Russia would lack a global interlocutor. And without Europe, America could turn, psychologically as well as geopolitically, into an island. The future of Eastern Europe and of the successor states of the Soviet Union are not the same problem. Eastern Europe was occupied by the Red Army. Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia have historically, culturally and politically identified with West European traditions. Without ties to West European and Atlantic institutions, these will become a no-man's-land between Germany and Russia. To be economically and politically viable, they need the European Union, and for security they look to the Atlantic Alliance. Since most members of the European Union are members of NATO, and since it is inconceivable that they would ignore attacks on one of their members after European integration has reached a certain point, membership in the European Union will lead to at least de facto extension of the NATO guarantee. President Clinton's objection to NATO membership for these countries goes back to Wilson's historical objection to alliances--because they were based on the expectation of confrontation. The President offered an alternative vision at last January's NATO summit. He argued that NATO could not afford to "draw a new line between East and West that could create a self-fulfilling prophecy of future confrontation." Instead Clinton put forward a scheme he called the Partnership for Peace. It invites all the successor states of the Soviet Union and all of Moscow's former East European satellites to join what amounts to a vague system of collective security. It is not a way station into NATO, as is often misleadingly asserted, but an alternative to it. The Partnership for Peace runs the risk of creating two sets of borders in Europe--those that are protected by security guarantees, and others where such guarantees have been refused--a state of affairs bound to prove tempting to potential aggressors and demoralizing to potential victims. Care must be taken lest a strategic and conceptual no-man's-land is created in Eastern and Central Europe. It will prove impossible to solve the twin problems of establishing security for Eastern Europe and integrating Russia into the international community as part of the same program. If the Partnership for Peace is made an aspect of NATO, it may well undermine the Atlantic Alliance by diverting it into activities unrelated to any realistic security mission, magnify the sense of insecurity of Eastern Europe and yet, being sufficiently ambiguous, fail to placate Russia. The Partnership runs the risk of being treated as irrelevant, if not dangerous, by the potential victims of aggression. At the same time, relating Russia to the Atlantic nations is important. There is a place for an institution that deals with missions that all of its members interpret in substantially the same manner. Such common tasks exist in the field of economic development, education and culture. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) could be given expanded functions for these purposes. In such a design, the Atlantic Alliance would establish a common political framework and provide overall security; the European Union would accelerate membership for former Eastern European satellites; and the CSCE would relate the republics of the former Soviet Union--especially Russia--to the Atlantic structure. A security umbrella would be extended over the new democracies in Eastern Europe. If Russia remained within its borders, the focus on security would shift over time to the Partnership. The common political and economic projects would increasingly dominate the East-West relationship. HANDLING ASIA There has been a surge of American interest in Asia, as symbolized by the proposal for a Pacific community made by Clinton at a meeting with the Asian heads of government in 1993. But the nations of Asia view themselves as distinct and competitive. Their relations bear most of the attributes of the European balance-of-power system of the 19th century: any significant increase in strength by one of them is almost certain to evoke an offsetting maneuver by the others. There is no pretense of collective security or of cooperation based on shared domestic values, even on the part of the few existing democracies. The emphasis is all on equilibrium and national interest. Military expenditures are already rising in all the major Asian countries. Clinton's proposal for a more institutionalized Pacific community was received with polite aloofness. Asian nations do not want an institutional framework that might give potential Asian superpowers or even the U.S. a major voice in their affairs. They favor keeping America sufficiently involved to help ward off threats to their independence. But they are too suspicious of powerful neighbors, and to some extent of the U.S., to favor formal institutions. Nevertheless, the attitude of the U.S. is crucial, for it alone has the capacity to function in much the same way that Great Britain once did in maintaining the European balance of power. The stability of the Asia-Pacific region, the underpinning of its vaunted prosperity, is the consequence of an equilibrium that will need increasingly careful and deliberate tending. In the next century, China's political and military shadow will fall over Asia and will affect the calculations of the other powers, however restrained actual Chinese policy may prove to be. The other Asian nations are likely to seek counterweights to an increasingly powerful China as they already do to Japan. Though they will disavow it, the nations of Southeast Asia are including the heretofore feared Vietnam in their ASEAN grouping largely in order to balance China and Japan. And that too is why ASEAN is asking the U.S. to remain engaged in the region. During the cold war, Japan basked in the protection of the U.S. A determined economic competitor, it paid for freedom of maneuver in the economic field by subordinating its foreign and security policies to Washington's. As long as the Soviet Union could be perceived as the principal security threat by both countries, it made sense to treat American and Japanese national interests as identical. That pattern is not likely to continue. Confrontation with the U.S. over economic issues is becoming the rule rather than the exception. With Korea and China gaining in military strength, and with the least impaired portion of Soviet military power located in Siberia, Japanese long-range planners will not indefinitely take the absolute identity of U.S. and Japanese interests for granted. Japan's perspective differs from America's because of geographic proximity to the Asian mainland and historic experience. The Japanese defense budget has been creeping upward until it has become the second largest in the world. Faced with an aging population and a stagnating economy, Japan might decide to press its technological and strategic superiority before China emerges as a superpower and Russia recovers its strength. Afterward, it might have recourse to that great equalizer, nuclear technology. Close Japanese-American relations will be a vital contribution to Japanese moderation and a significant reassurance to the other nations of Asia. Japanese military strength linked to America worries China and the other nations of Asia less than purely national Japanese military capabilities. And Japan will decide that it needs less military strength so long as an American safety net exists. A substantial American military presence in Japan and Korea will be needed to give America's commitment to a permanent role in Asia credibility. Confrontation in economic matters should be kept in strict limits. Good American relations with China are the prerequisite for good long-term relations with Japan, as well as for good Sino-Japanese relations. It is a triangle that each of the parties can abandon only at great risk. It is also an ambiguity with which the U.S. is not totally comfortable, since it runs counter to the American tendency to label nations neatly as either friend or foe. But with economic growth rates around 10% annually, a strong sense of national cohesion and an ever more muscular military, China will show the greatest increase in stature among the major powers. China welcomes U.S. involvement in Asia as a counterweight to its feared neighbors, Japan, Russia and, to a lesser degree, India. Yet an American policy that seeks simultaneous friendship with Beijing and with countries that Beijing perceives as potential threats--which is the correct U.S. stance--requires a careful and regular dialogue between the U.S. and China. For four years after the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989, this dialogue has been inhibited by the American refusal to engage in high-level contacts--a measure never employed against the Soviet Union, even at the height of the cold war. Human rights moved to the center of the Sino-American relationship. The Clinton Administration wisely restored high-level contacts; the future of Sino-American relations depends on the substance of these exchanges. Clearly, the U.S. cannot abandon its traditional concern with human rights and democratic values; the problem is the degree to which all aspects of Sino-American relations are made conditional on them. China finds condescending the implication that Sino-American relations are based not on reciprocal interests but on American favors that can be shut off at Washington's discretion. Such an attitude makes America appear both unreliable and intrusive, and unreliability is the greater failing in Chinese eyes. China might be prepared to make some human-rights concessions, provided they can be presented as emerging from its own free choice as part of a broader relationship. But American insistence on publicly prescribing conditions is perceived in China as a humiliating attempt to convert its society to American values and as a sign of a lack of American seriousness. Such an insistence suggests that America has no national interest in the Asian equilibrium as such. But if America cannot be counted on for that purpose, China will have no interest in making concessions to Washington. The key to Sino-American relations--even on human rights--is a tacit cooperation on global, and especially Asian, strategy. STRATEGY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY When, in 1821, John Quincy Adams warned Americans against the penchant to slay distant "monsters," he could not have imagined the magnitude and sheer number of monsters that would exist in the post-cold war world. Not every evil can be combatted by America, even less by America alone. But some monsters need to be, if not slain, at least resisted. What is most needed is criteria for selectivity. America's leaders have generally stressed motivation over structure. They have placed emphasis on affecting the attitudes more than the calculations of their counterparts. As a result, American society is peculiarly ambivalent about the lessons of history. American films often depict how some dramatic event transforms a villain into a paragon of virtue, a reflection of the pervasive national belief that the past has no final claim and that new departures are always possible. In the real world such transformations rarely happen. The American habit of rejecting history extols the image of a universal man living by universal maxims, regardless of the past, of geography or of other immutable circumstances. Since the American tradition emphasizes universal truths rather than national characteristics, American policymakers have generally preferred multilateral approaches to national ones: the agendas of disarmament, nonproliferation and human rights rather than essentially national, geopolitical or strategic issues. A country with this idealistic tradition cannot base its policy on the balance of power as the sole criterion for a new world order. But it must learn that equilibrium is a fundamental precondition for the pursuit of its historic goals. And these higher goals cannot be achieved by rhetoric or posturing. Foreign policy is conducted by a political system that emphasizes the immediate and provides few incentives for the long range. Leaders are obliged to deal with constituencies that tend to receive their information through visual images. All this puts a premium on emotion and on the mood of the moment, just when priorities need rethinking and capabilities require analysis. At a time when America is able neither to dominate the world nor to withdraw from it, when it finds itself both all-powerful and totally vulnerable, it must not abandon the ideals that have accounted for its greatness. But neither must it jeopardize that greatness by fostering illusions about the extent of its reach. World leadership is inherent in America's power and values, but it does not include the privilege of pretending that America is doing other nations a kindness by associating with them, or that it has a limitless capacity to impose its will by withholding its favors. The fulfillment of America's ideals will have to be sought in the patient accumulation of partial successes. The certitudes of physical threat and hostile ideology characteristic of the cold war are gone. The convictions needed to master the emerging world order are more abstract: a vision of the future that cannot be demonstrated when it is put forward and judgments about the relationship between hope and possibility that are, in their essence, conjectural. The Wilsonian goals of America's past--peace, stability, progress and freedom for mankind--will have to be sought in a journey that has no end. "Traveler," says a Spanish proverb, "there are no roads. Roads are made by walking." </body> </article> </text>