New Republic shows historical fallacy, future dangers of Globalization as security policy

In an extraordinarily thoughtful cover article in this week’s edition of the New Republic, Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s favorite magazine has eviscerated the theory that passes for a security policy in the Clinton-Gore Administration: the notion that "globalization" is making the world safe for American interests in the absence of a credible U.S. capability to defend them.

The article’s author, Peter Beinart, describes this theory as follows:

"…[I]t isn’t the security system that keeps the peace, but rather the global market. And while military power waxes and wanes, the expansion of the global market — as [New York Times’ columnist] Thomas Friedman and Bill Clinton never tire of saying — is unstoppable. American foreign policy can content itself with helping globalization along, and with reminding other countries of the restraints it imposes."

 

Globaloney’s Pedigree

Beinart notes that this theory is not simply the product of the present day end-of-history crowd. Its roots lie in an earlier era — Victorian England — when the international economy was actually even more integrated than it is today,(1) a fact documented by a number of statistical measures cited in his New Republic article entitled, "Globalization: An Illusion for our Time." At that time, the intellectual and ruling elite of the sole global superpower (Great Britain) indulged in notions indistinguishable from those routinely embraced by the likes of Clinton, Gore, Friedman and Strobe Talbott, among others. Consider the passage cited by Beinart from the runaway 1910 best-seller by Norman Angell entitled The Great Illusion:

"International finance has become so interdependent and so interwoven with trade and industry that … political and military power can in reality do nothing…. These little recognized facts, mainly the outcome of purely modern conditions (rapidity of communication creating a greater complexity and delicacy of the credit system), have rendered the problems of modern international politics profoundly and essentially different from the ancient."

 

The dangers inherent in embracing such rot should be clear from Beinart’s description of its application in the Clinton-Gore team’s largely passive (or, at best, reactive) foreign policies. In Beinart’s words:

"The new doctrine…does not require the United States to levy sanctions and create diplomatic rows. Globalization — powered by the inexorable march of technology and trade — will do democratization’s work more effectively than State Department pressure ever could. America need simply warn renegades that if they menace neighbors or torture dissidents, they will be disciplined by the all-powerful global market. Foreign policy becomes an exercise not in coercion, but in education.

 

"This is globalization’s appeal to a country both obligated to keep the world safe and increasingly reluctant to do so. It allows American elites to imagine that the security won for this country in struggle is now protected by a force both unstoppable and benign. And it allows them to imagine that rising and aggrieved powers will embrace a world governed by free trade as well, even though it locks them into a position of political and military subservience.

 

"Globalization is the narcissism of a superpower in a one superpower world. It allows America to look at the world and see its own contentment and its own fatigue. And it has provided the same false comfort to lone superpowers in the past. That’s where Norman Angell comes in." (Emphasis added throughout.)

 

The Bottom Line

Under the Clinton Administration, Angellian globaloney is being translated into institutions, treaties and international obligations that will greatly complicate future U.S. governments’ efforts to exercise sovereign power.(2) This may, in fact, prove to be one of Mr. Clinton’s most regrettable legacies in the foreign and defense policy arena.

What is particularly worrisome is that the Clinton team is pursuing globalization through the creation or empowering of supra-national organizations that generally constrain only the law-abiding (e.g., an enlarged UN Security Council, the World Trade Organization, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the new emissions-trading mechanism envisioned for the Global Climate Change Treaty) at the same time that it is dramatically reducing America’s capacity to act independently. Whether by design, incompetence or coincidence, the combined effect of these policies is likely to be to create, via the United States’ eclipse, a vacuum of power that will be filled — not by benign trade arrangements and friendly economic competitors — but at America’s expense by emerging, hostile powers like China.(3)

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1. For example, Beinart observes: "It is obvious to any casual observer of international affairs that today’s world is far more interdependent than ever before. But it is not true.Yet after four decades of growing interdependence, the world is just now becoming as economically integrated as it was when Norman Angell wrote The Great Illusion." (Emphasis added.) International trade and investment have indeed been increasing since the 1950s.

2. For example, see the Perspective by the Casey Institute of the Center for Security Policy entitled As Clinton Pushes for Radical Approach to Global Warming, Will Impacts on U.S. National Security Be Frozen Out? (No. 97-C 147, 2 October 1997).

3. In this connection, see the Center’s Decision Brief entitled Clinton Legacy Watch #5: Welcome to the New Inter-War Era (No. 97-D 129, 8 September 1997) and the Casey Institute’s Press Release entitled Casey Symposium on Asia Illuminates High Stakes in Debate on Renewal of M.F.N. for China (No. 97-R 86, 23 June 1997).