Paradigm Regained the New Consensus in US Foreign Policy

Paradigm Regained The New Consensus in US Foreign Policy

KARL K. SCHONBERG* Department of Government, St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY, USA

Introduction

HE TERRORIST ATTACKS on the World Trade Center and the Penta- gon of 11 September 2001 changed the political climate in the United TStates as dramatically as any single event since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 60 years before. In their aftermath, the United States has seemed as united as it has been over any foreign policy issue in the last decade, but how long this will last and what type of response will follow remain open questions. One immediate result is that a presidential administration that had been accused of having isolationist tendencies now appears determined to confront the threat of terrorism wherever it has roots and in multilateral coop- eration with traditional friends and foes alike. In speculating about the longer term, however, it should be remembered that the traumatic costs of global activism have sometimes spurred the United States to deeper engagement, but at other times to retreat from world affairs – as in the aftermath of World War I and Vietnam. In the current case, the long-term reaction of the United States will be renewed internationalism, more like its response to Pearl Harbor or World War II itself, followed as these were by a lasting commitment to globalism in the form of the Cold War. A similar response is likely now because the parti- san and ideological divisions between US political elites over the post-Cold War definition of US national interests had already become more illusion than reality by the late 1990s. By the end of the Clinton administration, a new post- Cold War consensus in US foreign relations had quietly but steadily emerged. This consensus is built on a common understanding of the value of open markets and economic globalization, the moral and strategic need for continued US leadership in global security affairs, and the utility of US military power – in particular the possibility of successful regional military interventions

Security Dialogue © 2001 PRIO. SAGE Publications, Vol. 32(4): 439–452. ISSN: 0967-0106 [021770] 440 Security Dialogue vol. 32, no. 4, December 2001 employing airpower almost exclusively, with ground forces deployed only later in peacekeeping roles. In the last decade, US foreign policy has been in a period of transition, as ideas and institutions have begun to adapt to the demands of the new international system. In retrospect, it is clear that the 1990s represent the latest in a series of 20th-century moments of transition in US foreign relations, in which, as after both of the world wars, old consensus assumptions were abandoned and debate ensued over the broad outlines of the nation’s appropriate world role in the future. As in the past, the debate in the 1990s has been between centrist internationalists, both liberal and conservative, and those they char- acterize as ‘isolationists’ on both the left and right extremes of the ideological spectrum. Over time, centrists among US foreign policy elites have forged a new consensus, which balances the liberal internationalism of the early Clinton administration with the conservative internationalism of some of its critics and takes historical lessons from an understanding of Vietnam as well as World War II and the Cold War. To an even greater extent, however, it is driven by commonly perceived lessons from the more recent US interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and now the terrorists attacks on US soil. These historical frames will create the cognitive backdrop, the common set of expectations and assumptions, for US foreign policy elites in the years ahead. They will spur US internationalism by suggesting the critical value to the United States of economic, political, and military engagement in the post-Cold War world and the relevance of US power to its crises, even while counseling caution in understanding the limits of that power.

US Responses to the New International System

Henry Kissinger wrote in 1994 that ‘there were tactical disagreements’ over foreign policy in the years between 1947 and 1989, ‘but no challenge to the overriding concept’.1 In the 1990s, the overriding concept – containment of the Soviet Union – had clearly become irrelevant, and doubt had been cast on the even more basic assumptions of activist internationalism. The Clinton administration came to office in 1993 with something resem- bling a plan for a coherent post-Cold War foreign policy, emphasizing eco- nomics generally and specifically advocating the creation of liberal, institu- tionalized trade regimes around the globe. In security affairs, policy early in the Clinton administration reflected the tradition of liberal, Wilsonian internationalism; it stressed ‘assertive multilateralism’, and, after 1993, the ‘engagement and enlargement’ of the democratic and liberal-capitalist community of nations. It assumed that the United States had an important interest in political and economic stability in every part of the world, and that collective Karl K. Schonberg Paradigm Regained: The New Consensus in US Foreign Policy 441 action through the United Nations and other international institutions would often be the most efficient, constructive means of pursuing that interest. Within the administration, the most notable proponents of these views were National Security Advisor Anthony Lake and UN Representative and later Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (who as UN envoy had an unusually high degree of influence on policy, along with a cabinet post). The Clinton administration, like the first Bush administration, approached US foreign policy after the Cold War by asserting a vision of world order reminiscent of those advanced by both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. Based on US power exercised through multilateral organizations, global order in the 21st century would be maintained through the even- handed application of liberal economic principles and universal standards of democracy, human rights, and international law. Bush’s version of the ‘New World Order’ was never enunciated as clearly as Clinton’s would be, though it appeared to emphasize military security and the possibility of unilateral uses of US power in defense of the stated principles more than Clinton’s, which tended to focus more on trade and the centrality of international institutions to the US world role. These ideals were attacked on intellectual and practical grounds by a variety of critics in Congress and the foreign policy community, and this criticism intensified after the 1994 ascent of Republican majorities in both houses of Con- gress. The administration depicted its opponents on these issues as ‘new isolationists’ (or, in Lake’s words, ‘Neo-Know-Nothings’2), who ‘would eliminate any meaningful role for the United Nations’, squandering the post-Cold War opportunity to create a more stable and functional system of world order. They would ‘deny resources to our peacekeepers and even to our troops’, Clinton claimed, and ‘refuse aid to the fledgling democracies and to all those fighting poverty and environmental problems that can literally destroy hopes for a more democratic, more prosperous, more safe world’.3 The Republicans who took control of Congress in early 1995 were a new generation, the children now of Vietnam rather than World War II. Whereas the Republican party under Ronald Reagan had consistently supported foreign interventions undertaken to oppose communism, the party under Newt Gingrich was generally less sure of its stand on foreign policy issues. The older generation of Congressional leaders often found the members of the new majority difficult to deal with on issues of foreign policy – an open revolt against the leadership in both houses occurred, for instance, in the wake of the collapse of the Mexican peso and a White House proposal for a US loan to ease its effects. The new Republican majority tended to be skeptical of foreign aid and ambivalent or oppositional on issues of free trade, support for which had been a strong point of consensus among Republicans only a few years 442 Security Dialogue vol. 32, no. 4, December 2001 earlier.4 More generally, they came to office, as Clinton had, espousing a domestic reform agenda and viewing foreign policy largely as an afterthought. The major foreign policy initiatives proposed in the Republicans’ 1994 ‘Con- tract with America’ were cutbacks in funds for UN peacekeeping and a revival of the Strategic Defense Initiative – a proposal which was not really new and which some critics thought was ‘inherently tinged with fortress-America overtones’.5 Though in early 1995 only 963 of the 67,000 UN peacekeepers deployed around the world were from the USA, new Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole nevertheless asserted that ‘it is high time we rein in U.N. peacekeeping, which is out of control’.6 More generally, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms wrote that he thought the UN was a ‘power-hungry and dysfunctional organization, [which] with the steady growth in the size and scope of its activities ... is being transformed from an institution of sovereign nations into a quasi-sovereign entity in itself. That transformation repre- sents an obvious threat to U.S. national interest.7

The Kosovo War

These conflicting views came to a head over the 1999 war in Kosovo, in which Clinton and all of the administration’s spokesmen claimed that Wilsonian self- determination was an important principle that was being defended. ‘In 1989’, Clinton argued, ‘Slobodan Milosevic ... stripped Kosovo of the constitutional autonomy its people enjoyed, thus denying them their right to speak their language, run their schools, shape their daily lives.... When President Milosevic sent his troops and police to crush them, the struggle grew violent.’8 Clinton also held that the war was ‘important to America’s national interests ... [because] to the south are our allies, Greece and Turkey; to the north our new democratic allies in Central Europe.... Eventually key U.S. allies could be drawn into a wider conflict, which we would be forced to confront later only at far greater risk and greater cost’.9 In addition, Clinton drew an analogy to Bosnia, arguing that ‘we learned some of the same lessons from Bosnia just a few years ago. The world did not act early enough to stop that war either. And let’s not forget what happened: Innocent people herded into concentration camps ... a quarter of a million people killed not because of anything they had done but because of who they were.’10 In testimony before Congress in late April 1999, Albright added that Milosevic’s repression threatened not just the lives of his own citizens but also one of the key pillars of the post-Cold War order, the Atlantic alliance itself: ‘Belgrade’s actions constitute a critical test of NATO, whose strength and Karl K. Schonberg Paradigm Regained: The New Consensus in US Foreign Policy 443 credibility have defended freedom and ensured our security for five decades.’ US diplomacy had several objectives, she claimed, and the first of them was ‘to ensure that NATO remains united and firm’.11 US goals in the war as both Clinton and Albright described them were un- deniably Wilsonian, reflecting perceived connections between peace, open- ness, and self-rule, ensured by international institutions. Albright argued that past experience ultimately demonstrated the utility of US power not just to win wars but to achieve the Wilsonian aspiration of turning victory into per- manent peace by creating structures of justice. ‘We want to build a solid foun- dation for a new generation of peace’, Albright said about the Balkans, ‘so that future wars are prevented, economies grow, democratic institutions are strengthened, and the rights of all are preserved’.12 The administration’s rationale met with both support and criticism from both sides of the ideological spectrum. From the beginning of the war, both the Democratic and Republican parties were deeply divided over the issue, and some of the most intense criticism of the administration’s policy came from fellow Democrats.13 At the same time, some leading Republican voices on foreign policy – among them Senators John McCain, Richard Lugar, and Chuck Hagel – were urging the administration to prosecute the war even more vigorously and arguing against Congressional involvement.14 McCain sought to introduce a measure to authorize the use of ‘all necessary force’ in the war.15 William Kristol’s conservative Weekly Standard argued that ‘the moral and strategic stakes in Kosovo are high.... When America starts a war it needs to win it.’16 Many Republicans were also critical of the Kosovo war, however, and often in tones that were eerily similar to liberal attacks on the Vietnam War a generation earlier. At the same time, some Democrats who had been strident critics of the war in Vietnam rallied behind the administration on Kosovo.17 A number of Republicans also sounded the common historical refrain of liberal isolationists, that an imperialistic foreign policy would keep the nation from addressing social problems at home. ‘There goes our Social Security reform; there goes our surplus’, said Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of California.18 Liberal internationalists, however, responded that there were important strategic concerns at stake – and that the image of Clinton as too ready to use force in defense of human rights did not jibe with the historical record. ‘If the century-old U.S. interest in stability in Europe is not still a defining tenet of American foreign policy, what is?’ one commentator asked. ‘And since when has it really been true that Clinton intervenes indiscriminately around the globe? If anything, his approach to foreign affairs has been characterized by passivity toward genocidal forces and tyrannies’.19 444 Security Dialogue vol. 32, no. 4, December 2001

The Lessons of Bosnia and Kosovo

Both the relative immediacy of the US reaction and the abandonment of strict multilateralism in Kosovo were the results of specific lessons taken by Clinton and his advisers from Bosnia. In the earlier case, the administration had begun with the presumption that the support of allies and the UN Security Council were a critical precondition for US military intervention in the post-Cold War world, but quickly discovered that the British and French governments took a very different view of the appropriate role of force in the Balkans, and that Russia was deeply reluctant to accept any UN action involving NATO attacks on Slavic forces.20 So, in Kosovo, the administration began by instructing NATO allies in what would be done – seeking their support but not requiring it for action. When it became apparent that UN Security Council backing would not be forthcoming, the Security Council was simply ignored.21 Ac- cording to National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, ‘we waited too long in Bosnia.... We [were not going] to wait too long in Kosovo. We have enough evidence to know what would happen if we didn’t act.’22 ‘We have learned the lessons of Bosnia’, Madeleine Albright said in February 1999, ‘and we are determined to apply them here and now.’23 If the Clinton administration seemed to have retreated from its earlier em- phasis on the role of the UN in shaping post-Cold War foreign policy, however, Kosovo in retrospect does not suggest the irrelevance of the global body. ‘Kosovo ultimately says more about the UN’s continued strength than its weakness’, Michael O’Hanlon and Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution argued. The United Nations was a key player in the diplomacy leading up to the war’s end, and it may have been the prospect of a Security Council resolution affirming NATO’s war goals that convinced Slobodan Milosevic to seek peace. Once the war was over, it was UN administrators who became responsible for establishing stability, democracy, and peace in Kosovo.24 Over the course of the 1990s, the perceptions of US liberal internationalists had evolved from seeing the UN as the desired vehicle for US foreign policy to being a crucial adjunct. The UN could not be a substitute for US power, or even a reliable superstructure within which to use force. But it could be a ready vehicle for the kind of support, before and after, that could ensure the long-term satisfaction of the goals of force. Clinton claimed to hope that Kosovo would redefine the rules for military intervention in defense of human rights, because ‘whether within or beyond the borders of a country, if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing’.25 National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, however, added that, even in cases of genocide, the USA would need to weigh its concrete interests in a region carefully before making the de- cision to intervene.26 Karl K. Schonberg Paradigm Regained: The New Consensus in US Foreign Policy 445

But the question of when to intervene had always been only half of the prob- lem. Equally difficult was the question of how to intervene, and Kosovo provided a major part of an emerging consensus answer. O’Hanlon and Daalder summed up a common view of one lesson of the war when they described NATO’s air campaign as ‘probably the most successful use of strategic bom- bardment in the history of warfare’. While it could not do everything, airpower had nevertheless proved itself more valuable than previously imagined in fighting limited wars. The bombing destroyed Serbia’s ability to refine oil, along with half of its military oil stockpiles, and seriously crippled the trans- portation and electrical infrastructure in much of the country. Though the Kosovo Liberation Army had to an extent served as a surrogate ground force, it was nevertheless true that airstrikes proved devastating against the modern weapons and logistical and industrial support structures of the Yugoslav military.27 The Gordian knot for US policymakers in the Bosnian war had been how to use US power without suffering US casualties. The use of airstrikes at the end of the Bosnian conflict suggested an answer. For many in official Washington, the Kosovo war drove the conclusion home definitively. In the months that followed, US leaders were willing both to deploy ground forces to Kosovo and later to increase the size of the US force in Macedonia, seeing the use of these troops as increasingly safe in the historical context of the air war in Kosovo. Kosovo was thus the final act in the Bosnia debate, defining a new paradigm that suggested both that humanitarian intervention could be effective and that the costs of failing to undertake it soon enough would be high. Kosovo represented the merging of the lessons of the Gulf War with those of Bosnia and the overarching conclusion derived from the synthesis – that in the post-Cold War world, intervention was necessary and airpower could be effective, even where peripheral interests were at stake.

A New Consensus

Kosovo both reflected and helped to cement this new consensus, but its outlines were becoming apparent much earlier in the decade. Increasingly after 1995, the Clinton administration made its emergence possible by changing the rhetoric, and to some extent the substance, of its perspective on foreign affairs, in ways that created areas of agreement with traditional conservative internationalists. The United Nations and other multilateral bodies were de- emphasized, and liberalized trade and US exports became even more a focus of policy than they had been before. Particularly in security affairs, this new direction in policy meant that the creation of a post-Cold War international order would increasingly take a backseat to the maintenance of local or 446 Security Dialogue vol. 32, no. 4, December 2001 regional peace and stability on an ad hoc basis. Military force would be used extremely cautiously and selectively, and, when forces were deployed, it would be in regions which were of clear and concrete importance to US interests, through well-established and trusted multilateral bodies like NATO – if any international organization were to be involved at all. The administration’s retreat from liberal internationalism in this period is apparent throughout its diplomacy, but perhaps nowhere more than in its rejection of both the 1997 Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines and the 1998 Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In both cases, more than 100 countries signed agreements that the Clinton administration had earlier actively pro- moted but ultimately refused to join (though Clinton did, symbolically, sign the ICC charter a few days before leaving office). When measured against the Wilsonian rhetoric of the administration’s first years in office, the change in basic approach to international affairs reflected by these decisions is striking. It has led to the emergence of a new but uncer- tain consensus by creating the possibility of broad agreement with conservative internationalists, many of them traditional Republicans of the World War II generation, who favor global activism and free trade but are wary of entan- glement in powerful international organizations. Even as the Clinton administration moved to the ideological center to seek these areas of agreement, however, these conservatives were challenged in their own party by younger leaders asserting a far more restrictive, introverted vision of foreign policy. In the current era, there has been an unusual concurrence in the thinking of realists and liberal internationalists. Strict realists like Henry Kissinger, for instance, have written that ‘America must try to forge the widest possible moral consensus around a global commitment to democracy’.28 Similarly, liberal internationalists have concentrated on enhanced security, in addition to justice and morality, in defending the promotion of democracy abroad. ‘Democracies don’t attack each other’, President Clinton said in his 1994 State of the Union address. ‘Ultimately the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy everywhere.’29

The Election of 2000

This emerging consensus was reflected clearly in the similarity of the foreign policy positions of the candidates in the presidential campaign of 2000, in which both George W. Bush and Al Gore stressed the positive aspects of economic globalization and the paramount importance of deep US engagement in world economic and security affairs implied by the emerging global economy. To be sure, there were real differences between Bush and Gore on foreign policy: on issues like the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, National Missile Defense, and the Kyoto Treaty on climate change, the candidates disagreed in meaningful ways. But more common were semantic differences which veiled Karl K. Schonberg Paradigm Regained: The New Consensus in US Foreign Policy 447 their intent to pursue essentially similar policies. On NAFTA, Most Favored Nation status and WTO membership for China, debt relief for the developing world, and the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas, Bush and Gore were in agreement. The Bush campaign argued that belief in the beneficial power of globalization was a deeply entrenched tradition for the USA, and one that had long ago proven its value to US interests. ‘The steady opening of international trade around the globe is the product of sixty years of American leadership from presidents and Congresses of both parties’, Bush claimed, and ‘is among the main reasons for the seventeen years of economic growth [and] ... the trend toward peace and freedom we know today.’30 In similar terms, Gore argued that ‘open markets spur innovation, speed the growth of new industries, and make our businesses more competitive.... Free and fair trade creates jobs and raises living standards for American workers.’31 Regarding the criteria for economic intervention in cases like the Mexican and East Asian currency crises of the 1990s, Bush and Gore listed in nearly identical terms the importance of quick action if a national collapse posed a material threat to the US or global economy.32 Bush was critical of the Clinton administration’s ‘strategic relationship’ with China (a term Gore did not use to describe his own prospective policy). ‘China is a competitor, not a strategic partner’,33 Bush held, but defined a policy of his own that in most practical respects paralleled what Clinton had done, particularly with regard to fostering democracy and human rights through trade. Like Clinton and Gore, he strongly supported Chinese membership in the WTO, claiming that ‘trade with China will promote freedom.... Once a measure of economic freedom is permitted, a measure of political freedom will follow.’34 More so than Bush, on security issues Gore emphasized the Wilsonian no- tion of indivisible interests within the world community and the need for international organizations as vehicles to pursue these interests, arguing that ‘threats that were once local can have consequences that are regional and global’, and that these threats should be addressed through ‘reinvigorated international and regional institutions’.35 Bush, on the other hand, said that ‘we should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide in nations outside our strategic interest’,36 but this was the same conclusion the Clinton administration had reached and publicly stated at the time of the Kosovo war. A suggestion by Bush’s choice for National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, that the new administration might consider withdrawing US forces from Kosovo created concern in Euro- pean capitals but has proven to be little more than posturing. During the campaign, Bush himself said that US foreign policy would depend crucially on ‘strengthening the alliances that sustain our influence – in Europe and East Asia and the Middle East.... The United States needs its European allies, as 448 Security Dialogue vol. 32, no. 4, December 2001 well as friends in other regions, to help us with security challenges as they arise.’37 And, when pressed, Rice conceded that humanitarian military interventions ‘cannot be ruled out a priori’, adding that ‘the next American president should be in a position to intervene when he believes, and can make the case, that the United States is duty-bound to do so’. The only Clinton-era intervention she said she fundamentally disagreed with was Haiti.38 Bush noted that ‘there may be some moments when we use our troops as peacekeepers’.39 At the same time, both candidates asserted a vision of foreign policy that was informed by a sense of both the influence and the inherent limits of US power. Gore said he would be guided by ‘strategic humility’, and Bush argued in similar terms that ‘if we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us’.40 Gore charged Bush with seeking to revert to isolationism; Bush charged Gore and the Clinton administration with naive idealism that neglected the maintenance of US power. But these claims had far more to do with the election campaign than with actual differences over policy. Both candidates ultimately agreed – as liberal and conservative internationalists always have – that US internationalism was an indispensable ingredient for US prosperity and global stability. ‘Look for more of the same under Bush’, predicted scholar Walter Russell Mead in a Los Angeles Times editorial following the election: A Bush administration may be slow to embrace ‘humanitarian interventions’ like the one in Haiti ... [but] the Clinton administration has shown much less eagerness for these interventions as well. Similarly, on Russia policy, the Clinton administration has already done what Bush proposes and moved from fecklessly cheering Russian ‘reform’ to a more realistic policy of disciplined engagement. On trade, the Bush administration will support Clinton’s proposal for a Free Trade Area of the Americas.... Where changes do occur, most of them will be more symbolic than substantive.41 And, in fact, in the first months of the new Bush administration a number of noteworthy tactical changes in foreign policy were accompanied by a broader continuation of the strategic vision of the Clinton era. Policy differences that had been highlighted during the campaign disappeared to a certain extent, as, for example, hints that the USA might withdraw its forces from Kosovo were abandoned and the administration renewed its commitment to security in the region. Far from stepping back from the Balkans, the administration also took a more active role in the emerging conflict in Macedonia, where President Bush stated that he took ‘no option off the table in terms of the troops. We’re a participant in NATO.’42 The domestic political prospects for intervention also changed in the early summer of 2001, as the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Com- mittee passed from Jesse Helms to the more internationalist Joseph Biden. Rather than acting as a brake on the impulse for intervention, as Helms often had, Karl K. Schonberg Paradigm Regained: The New Consensus in US Foreign Policy 449

Biden now suggested that he would give the White House the political cover it needed to act, and seemed poised to push for more aggressive action than the administration might otherwise take. If the Bush team ‘were to do what we think they should be doing – a much more robust diplomatic and military presence in Macedonia’, Biden said, ‘I will back them up. I will also protect their political flank.’43

Conclusions

At the beginning of the 21st century, the United States is the world’s strongest economic and military power, not approached in the latter case by any state and only matched in the former by the European Union as a whole. In economic affairs, the USA is nevertheless bound to act as the first among equals in a system in which no state possesses the means to unilaterally coerce the other central players; each of the major actors necessarily regards its interests as tied to the health of the system as a whole, since the global marketplace has evolved to make isolation or even insularity a clearly self-defeating proposi- tion. Militarily, the United States’ leadership, or at least participation, is necessary for bringing together coalitions and making them decisive. In the wake of Vietnam, however, domestic pressure has limited what policymakers see as their freedom of action in using military force abroad. The Gulf War showed that the public could be rallied to support the use of force for important strategic and moral goals. The debacles in Lebanon and Somalia, on the other hand, reinforced the public’s caution toward the use of force for less-than-vital interests. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon of 11 Sep- tember 2001 will have an even more profound effect in shaping the ways in which Americans understand the appropriate role of their country in this new international environment. Those events will help to crystallize a new consensus for global engagement that has gradually emerged over the course of the last decade. Since 1989, the United States has been forced to reassess its position in the world and reinvent its foreign policy. When this has occurred before in the 20th century (after each of the world wars, for example), commonly perceived lessons of recent history have played a crucial role in orienting the beliefs of US leaders as they eventually coalesce into a broadly held new understanding of the USA’s place in world affairs. This tendency has been apparent in the modern era as well, though in the 1990s there was no single event that was sufficiently recent and emotionally charged to focus the debate in the way that, for instance, memories of World War II did as the nation considered the threat posed by the Soviet Union in the late 1940s. 450 Security Dialogue vol. 32, no. 4, December 2001

By the late 1990s, the shape of a new consensus in US foreign policy was nonetheless becoming clear. Bosnia and Kosovo provided historical analogies suggesting that limited war and humanitarian intervention could and should be undertaken using airpower and peacekeeping troops, though still assum- ing a very limited public tolerance for casualties in such wars. In addition, this new consensus was defined by a common assumption of the moral and pru- dential need for US leadership in world politics and the importance of open markets and the value of globalization to US prosperity. Within both political parties, these key elements had emerged as the dominant themes of foreign policy prescription, as became apparent in the 2000 presidential campaign. They represented agreement on broad foreign policy conclusions not simply between Republicans and Democrats, but between centrist internationalists of both the Wilsonian and the realist camp. These ideas had their critics in the 1990s as well, as a new kind of Republican gained strength in Congress – younger, more populist (and often Christian fundamentalist), more fiscally conservative, and especially disdainful of international organizations and free trade. These conservatives often found alliances on foreign policy issues with traditional liberals, who drew many of the same conclusions regarding the perils of military activism and economic globalization, though beginning from very different assumptions. Though these isolationists on both sides of the ideological spectrum presented a challenge to centrist internationalism through the mid-1990s, however, their message had become more muted in the second half of the decade. Their voices remain a factor in the public discussion of foreign policy today, and could be strengthened by a protracted war or economic crisis. But, for the foreseeable future, they have been marginalized, and their criticisms now sound more like radical challenges to an accepted orthodoxy than viably competitive views. In the 1920s, an American generation chastened by war naively sought to return to the isolationism of its past. The United States did not retreat entirely from world affairs, continuing to play a role in arms control and actively pro- moting its own exports abroad (over its own high tariff walls). But US leaders did firmly reject any temptation toward high military spending or peacetime commitments to the protection of the European and Asian security systems. There was thus an isolationist consensus, but it was ambivalent, not deeply held in a time of relative prosperity and peace. Events intervened, however, as a series of crises focused and intensified this general disposition. The depres- sion at home and rise of dictatorship and aggression abroad produced ten years of the deepest isolationism in US history. This earlier era is not unlike the 1990s, but one major difference is that the new consensus in the last decade has weakly favored global activism, not retreat. The terrorist attacks of 11 September are thus likely to have a similar effect to the crises of the late 1920s and early 1930s, but will push policy in ex- actly the opposite direction. They will more firmly establish the need for Karl K. Schonberg Paradigm Regained: The New Consensus in US Foreign Policy 451 global activism as the presumptive starting point for debate over foreign policy issues in the years ahead. The centrist alliance on foreign policy issues that has developed in the last ten years has done so in the absence of a profound threat on the international horizon, and without the kind of recent historical experience that formed the cognitive framework of engagement in earlier eras, as World War II did for the generation of US statesmen who presided over the early Cold War. In the form of a global struggle against terrorism, US leaders now have both this threat and a generational experience to spur international activism in the future. As a result, the fragile, tentative internationalist consensus that emerged in the 1990s will become more strident and firmly entrenched in the first decade of the new century.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

* Dr. Karl K. Schonberg is an Assistant Professor of Government at St. Lawrence Univer- sity, Canton, NY. 1 Henry Kissinger, ‘Reflections on Containment’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 3, May/June 1994, pp. 113–130, on p. 114. 2 Anthony Lake, ‘From Containment to Enlargement: Current Foreign Policy Debates in Perspective’, address delivered at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, 21 September 1993 (Washington, DC: Executive Office of the President, 1993). 3 William J. Clinton, ‘Remarks to the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom Policy Con- ference’, 1 March 1995, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, vol. 31, no. 9, 6 March 1995, pp. 339–344, on p. 341. 4 Elaine Sciolino, ‘G.O.P. Senators Fire Away at Foreign Policy’, New York Times, 27 Janu- ary 1995, p. A8. 5 Gerald F. Seib, ‘New Isolationism: A Slow Drift the Wrong Way’, Wall Street Journal, 30 November 1994, p. A1. 6 Eric Schmitt, ‘House Votes Bill to Cut U.N. Funds’, New York Times, 17 February 1995, p. A1. 7 Jesse Helms, ‘Saving the U.N.: A Challenge to the Next Secretary-General’, Foreign Af- fairs, vol. 75, no. 5, September/October 1996, pp. 55–60, on p. 57. 8 Bill Clinton, televised address of 24 March 1999, transcript published in New York Times, 25 March 1999, p. A15. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Madeleine K. Albright, ‘U.S. and NATO Policy Toward the Crisis in Kosovo (Testi- mony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 20, 1999)’, U.S. Department of State Dispatch, vol. 10, no. 4, May 1999. 12 Ibid. 13 Richard E. Cohen, ‘Behind Enemy Lines’, National Journal, vol. 31, no. 21, 22 May 1999, p. 1402. 14 Ramesh Ponnuru, ‘War Torn: Republicans Confront Kosovo’, National Review, vol. LI, no. 8, 3 May 1999, p. 16. 452 Security Dialogue vol. 32, no. 4, December 2001

15 Deborah McGregor, ‘Mixed Message for Clinton on War’, Financial Times, 29 April 1999, p. 7. 16 Jamie Dettmer, ‘Little Ado about Something Big’, Insight on the News, 10 May 1999, p. 8. 17 Eliza Newlin Carney, ‘At Last, Congress Enters the War Zone’, National Journal, vol. 31, no. 18, 1 May 1999, p. 1174. 18 Ibid. 19 Jacob Heilbrunn, ‘Full Retreat: The GOP Rediscovers Isolationism’, New Republic, 19 April 1999, pp. 11–12, on p. 11. 20 Carl M. Cannon, ‘From Bosnia to Kosovo’, National Journal, vol. 33, no. 14, 3 April 1999, p. 880. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Madeleine Albright, Address at the United States Institute of Peace, 4 February 1999, quoted in British–American Security Council, ‘European Security: Kosovo: The Long Road to War: A Chronology, 1999’, available at http://www.basicint.org/ eur_kosovo_chron4.htm. 24 Ivo H. Daalder & Michael E. O’Hanlon, ‘Unlearning the Lessons of Kosovo’, Foreign Policy, no. 116, Fall 1999, p. 128–140, on p. 132. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., p. 136. 27 Ibid., p. 139. 28 Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 834. 29 Charles W. Kegley & Eugene R. Wittkopf, American Foreign Policy, 5th edn (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), pp. 540–541. 30 George W. Bush, ‘Normal Trade Relations with China’, address delivered in Everett, Washington, 17 May 2000; http://www.georgewbush.com/News/speeches/ 051700_trade.html (accessed 20 October 2000). 31 Remarks by Al Gore, Washington Council on International Trade, 9 July 1999; http:// www.gorenet.com/speeches/speeches_wash_counc_070999.html (accessed 2 Novem- ber 2000). 32 David E. Sanger, ‘Rivals Differ On U.S. Role In the World’, New York Times, 30 October 2000, p. A1. 33 Ibid. 34 Bush (note 30 above). 35 Gore presidential campaign press release: ‘Gore Outlines New Security Agenda for American Foreign Policy: 30 April 1999 Address at the International Press Institute World Congress’; http://www.algore2000.com/briefingroom/releases/pr_0430_MA_1.html (accessed 2 November 2000). 36 Anthony Lewis, ‘Bush and the World’, New York Times, 30 September 2000, p. A17. 37 Http://www.georgewbush.com/issues/foreignpolicy.html (accessed 5 November 2000). 38 Steve Mufson, ‘For Rice, a Daunting Challenge Ahead; Adviser Must Steer Leader Whose Foreign-Policy Outlook Is in Progress’, Washington Post, 18 December 2000, p. A1. 39 Sanger (note 32 above), p. A1. 40 Ibid. 41 Walter Russell Mead, ‘Bush’s Team Isn’t About To Make Waves’, Los Angeles Times, 24 December 2000, Opinion, p. 1. 42 ‘Bush: U.S. Troops an Option’, Newsday, 28 June 2001, p. A16. 43 Tish Durkin, ‘With Biden at the Helm, the Balkans Debate Gets Livelier’, National Jour- nal, vol. 33, no. 24, 16 June 2001, p. 1784.