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 ac- tivism 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 re- newed 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 mar- kets 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 inter- national 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 histori- cal 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 inter- nationalism; it stressed ‘assertive multilateralism’, and, after 1993, the ‘en- gagement and enlargement’ of the democratic and liberal-capitalist commu- nity 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 in- tensified after the 1994 ascent of Republican majorities in both houses of Con- gress. The administration depicted its opponents on these issues as ‘new iso- lationists’ (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 for- eign 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 do- mestic 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 sover- eign 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 ..