Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.comment From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Clinton's global plotters Date: Sun, 22 Nov 92 17:26:45 EST Message-ID: \SE B;COMMENTARY \HD Clinton's global plotters \BY Stefan Halper With President-elect Bill Clinton's transition now under way, the long-disheveled liberal establishment has focused with laserlike intensity to provide policy guidance for the new government. Spearheading much of the new thinking on foreign affairs is the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. But if Andrew Carnegie, a man as hard as the steel he sold, were privy to the proposals financed by his largess, he might well rise from the dead. Recently, the Carnegie Commission delivered its recommendations to the president-elect at his "New Camelot" (Little Rock) office on the Arkansas River. Chaired by Richard Holbrooke, an assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration, the commission built on proposals it released last August calling for fundamental change not only in the conduct of foreign policy but in the very definition of national security. The notion of peace through strength that served us well, and was instrumental in bankrupting Soviet and European communism, is discarded - ignoring the fact that many in the world still wish us ill. It is replaced by the fashionable idea that the Cold War's end means we are free to move toward a peace based on trust and shared interest in environmental, population and humanitarian matters. Emphasizing the virtues of collective action, the report underscores America's limited ability to curb nuclear proliferation and contain ethnic explosions, proposing instead, that we join with others in "principled intervention." Finally, ignoring the fickle and momentary nature of such things, Mr. Holbrooke and company inform us that since democracy is now the choice of a majority of the world's nations, "we need not act alone in an American crusade to promote freedom." Instead, we should engage other nations through the United Nations. Why bother with this bizzare document? The answer is that while opinion was solicited from a wide range of people, including some Republicans, the commission counts as members and advisers a veritable Who's Who of the Carter foreign policy team. Many are the same people who now form the Clinton transition team and who will shortly be appointed to senior foreign policy roles in the Clinton administration. A few samples: former Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, former U.N. Ambassador Donald McHenry, former White House Deputy National Security Adviser David Aaron, former State Department policy planning chief Anthony Lake - all who served under President Carter. But more important are the ideas and changed assumptions. Gone are the geopolitical calculations that have driven nation-states since Napoleon's surrender. Gone is the world in which America must beware of nations whose priorities differ from ours, as do antidemocratic nations like North Korea and China, who have sold high tech weapons or nuclear technology for hard currency to Iran and Syria. The grand strategists and power politicians can relax, for never again will a resurgent Japan or Germany, European Community or a nuclear Russia crowd our interests. Now is the time to turn to more important concerns like the global menace of environmental degradation, population growth, migration and humanitarian crisis that "may loom larger as threats to 'the American way of life' than nuclear conflagrations." This feel-good babble about "hinge-points" in history, the dawn of a post-Soviet era is, of course, poppycock. Most of all it is shortsighted. It flies in the face of bitter experience. How many times have nation's mistakenly believed that war is a thing of the past - and not contemplated the prospect of standing alone? How many times have American presidents deeply regretted defense cuts that led to inadequate numbers of men and equipment and heightened losses of both? It was what Mr. Carter's men (now Mr. Clinton's) forgot that underscores the importance of Clausewitz' comment that "war is an extension of diplomacy by other means." The systematic inability to exercise power in support of national objectives in the late 1970s exacerbated the Cold War, diminished American strength in world councils - like the United Nations where the United States became an object of derision - and heightened tensions in the Third World, where human rights standards, instead of democratization, became the lingua franca of the U.S. relationship. Environmental standards, population control and humanitarian relief will be fundamental to our security in the years ahead. But these must succeed, not precede, in importance the ability to project military force in support of American interests, alone if necessary, anywhere in the world. To reject this is to create a vacuum that nations, like nature, abhor. Further, our foreign policy is not value-free as some would suggest. The moral authority sustaining the projection of American power derives from our commitment to democratic pluralism. We should not now nor ever rely upon collective action to advance the interests of democracy; to do so accepts lowest common denominator reasoning among many nations, few of which share our beliefs. The inability of the European Community or the Western European Union to stop the genocide in Bosnia is breathtaking. Collective nonaction is again found in the disgraceful response to mass starvation in Somalia, the inability to protect the Kurds, or to enforce the peace in Cambodia. Yielding "a measure of autonomy" to the United Nations or like organizations, as Mr. Holbrooke's report suggests, does little more than devalue the currency of American standards and power in world affairs. We were bitten once when Mr. Carter candy-wrapped these tasty notions; Mr. Clinton shouldn't be surprised if we are twice shy. Stefan Halper is a former White House and State Department official and a nationally syndicated columnist. This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM