worse or better after this election?

LONDON – Will it be worse or better? Or is U.S. foreign policy so firmly set on a course that even with a new a president it can’t be changed significantly? Some foreign policy analysts are saying that under President Bill Clinton’s stewardship the U.S. became a “rogue state”, a term cooked up by the State Department to describe the likes of Iraq, Libya and North Korea.

This sort of language is not just being deployed against America by those using it for effect, like those who described the impact of Western sanctions on innocent Iraqi children in a landmark article last year in Foreign Affairs magazine. It is being used by serious commentators such as Michael M. May who is quoted in a recent issue of Survival, the quarterly journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, as listing half a dozen damning developments in contemporary U.S. foreign policy:

• Nato expansion, made without any prior constraint on further expansion.

• An East Asian security policy which moves towards a greater use of Japan in balancing China.

• Enforcement of a military containment strategy in the Middle East which posits hostility towards the two most powerful Moslem states in the region, while supporting a number of weak client states susceptible to revolutionary change.

• Active competition with Russia in the Central Asian and Caucasus area.

• A rhetorically militant yet factually ambivalent leadership of nuclear non-proliferation efforts.

• Continued improvement in U.S. military forces, with particular emphasis on those that project American power overseas.

I would add to that a few more: first and foremost, the bombing of a sovereign state, the Yugoslav Federation, without an explicit mandate of the UN, throwing overboard a precept observed since the Westphalian Treaties of 1648 that war is not waged against a sovereign state which has not itself attacked another sovereign state.

Secondly, U.S.’s obsession with itself -that it possesses a sovereignty that overrides the sovereignty of others. This manifests itself in issues as diverse as refusing to be party to the creation of an International Criminal Court or the notion that U.S. legislation can be applied extra-territorially and that domestic legislation takes precedence over international commitments. Thirdly, there is the double standard on human rights with one part of the world being fair game for constant criticism and the other, stretching from the Bosporus to the Indus, which is almost immune from attack.

America now strides the world like a colossus. This is not because of its economic power- the post Cold War U.S. accounts for approximately 22% of the world’s gross domestic product which is about the same as it was in the 1918-39interwar period. It is because of its vast military power- the U.S. accounts for about one third of world military spending and no country can even think of matching it.

What is surprising is that there are foreign policy analysts who will accept the essential fairness of such a critique but who will still argue that, weighing everything up, they come down on the side of viewing America as a benign hegemon. One such is the distinguished French commentator Francois Heisbourg who is the Chairman of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.

He argues that for all America’s incongruities it remains “a key element of what measure of international order may exist”. The U.S. is the “only credible ultimate guarantor of that order….the only global-scale exporter of security.”

Yet even an observer as sympathetic to America as he warns that “foreign perceptions of the U.S. will not remain static. Several factors could exacerbate the already troublesome trends generated by some of the current perceptions.”

Not least, he points out, are the consequences of America’s incredible rate of economic growth. If this continues, even at a lesser pace, it will make the U.S. even weightier than it is in relation to Europe and Japan, not to mention the rest of the world. This can produce its own backlash, especially when America seems to be calling most of the shots on modern developments, information technology and economic globalisation.

Second, is the inability of the executive branch of the U.S. government to override the parochialism of Congress as it often could in Cold War days. Clinton’s defeat on the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is a warning of worst to come. U.S. foreign policy may simply become unpredictable. And unpredictability can lead to misperceptions and miscalculations.

Neither Al Gore nor George W. Bush have addressed this debate, even tangentially. At this time of electoral uncertainty the only thing that is clear about this poll is that who ever wins has no idea of how to deal with the America that the rest of the world is increasingly worried about.

I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com