Bush’s Preemptive Liberalism: Hopeless But Not Serious

Abstract

Since Bretton Woods, through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United States has led the world into an increasingly more liberal trade regime and a more interdependent economy. The liberal economic agenda rests on international cooperation, especially among the major trading nations. While it is hardly surprising that it espouses the continuation of these economic goals, the Bush Administration’s predilection for acting unilaterally in pursuit of national interests, most notably in the realm of international power politics, has created diplomatic difficulties for the United States. While George W. Bush is unquestionably a public relations disaster for the United States, a globally unpopular preemptive strike against Iraq is unlikely to appreciably shake a system in which so many nations have a deep and abiding interest.

“You have to understand,” a friend of the President recently said to reporter in reference to his head of state, “that he is only seven years old.” No, he was not referring to Duh-bya, but rather to another Ivy League cowboy Republican president with grandiose visions of empire: Teddy Roosevelt. To Americans, that is ancient history. To “old Europe,” that is a recent news item.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently dismissed France and Germany as the “old Europe.” This is truer than he no doubt intended. Being old countries, they have a much better developed sense of time--and of history--than America does. They surely understand that it is not just that our president is only seven years old, but that we as a nation are only seven years old, and sometimes we just have to be the terror of the playground. Our willful little power-play tantrums run their course and burn themselves out, and then we go back to making friends and playing well with others.

Is the Bush Administration’s unilateral militarism inconsistent with economic globalization? Certainly. But what of it? This is hardly anything new. Few will quibble that George W. Bush had the legal right to abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, but this president also practices the oxymoron of selective globalism, continuing farm subsidies, and actually raising steel tariffs. Moreover, Duh-bya took the unprecedented step of rescinding the signature of his predecessor on an international agreement, the Kyoto protocol on global warming. An American president’s signature can now be regarded as being written in disappearing ink.

Bush’s unilateralism pries open rifts that were previously unnoticeable, if not nonexistent. For instance, it has forced a debate within NATO over whether or not to defend Turkey in the case of war with Iraq. The issue should not be in question. NATO members are obligated by treaty to defend Turkey. Because of this, and because France and Germany appear ready to vote against an American resolution in the UN Security Council to sanction a war with Iraq, some commentators are now declaring the demise of NATO. This is doubtful. Rumors of NATO’s demise have been exaggerated on more than one occasion. Despite their well-placed exasperation with the Bush Administration, our European allies certainly understand that American presidents come and go, that the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue may go sooner rather than later, and that in any case their long-term interests lie with their continued military alliance and trading relationships with the United States.

These and other allies did not particularly care for American policy in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and early 1970s, yet there were no long-term deleterious consequences to the relationship. One important difference between then and now, of course, is that there is no longer a Warsaw Pact alliance menacing Western Europe. France and Germany are now less dependent on the United States for their security, and are therefore emboldened to thwart through diplomatic efforts American policies with which they disagree. Louis Rukeyser recently commented with characteristic irony that the French now lecture the United States on arrogance, and the Germans now lecture us on militarism. However, in the short run, neither France nor Germany is capable of pursuing a foreign policy that is substantially independent of the United States. There was hardly anything profound in Mao Zedong’s aphorism that power flows from the barrel of a gun. The military budgets of both France and Germany are a small fraction of what the United States spends on defense. Furthermore, the citizens of those countries are unlikely to suddenly support drastically higher military budgets. In Asian parlance, the “old Europe” is a paper tiger.

Yet the Vietnam War was not without consequences to the international liberal economic order. That long and expensive war exacerbated the United States’ current account deficit, and thereby hastened the collapse of the Bretton Woods system (the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74 was the proverbial straw that broke the system’s back, but that camel had already been toting several bales for years). However, after a period of floundering around, the developed countries devised a new basis of economic order. Although it cost thousands of American lives, millions of Vietnamese lives, and billions of dollars, in terms of the world order, the Vietnam War was a blip on the radar screen.

A quick war with Iraq will probably have little long-term effect, but its immediate repercussions are palpable. Rising oil prices and worries over an even steeper spike in prices--should war come--keep a damper on investment. CEOs contemplating building new factories and opening new offices look at the uncertain future and decide to wait for a few weeks or a few months, and the creation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs is deferred indefinitely. Still, this hesitance is short-lived, and bankers have the luxury of either extending credit or foreclosing.

An important factor in the explosion in world trade in the past several decades has been a dramatic decline in transportation costs. Obviously, rising oil prices will increase those costs, and raise a barrier to the international flow of goods, but the effect will be temporary. Furthermore, a second Gulf War oil shock may well be considerably less severe than the shock from the first Gulf War. Kuwait is not under Iraqi occupation, as it was then, and Saudi Arabia is not threatened. Iraqi oil production has been severely restricted by United Nations sanctions for more than a decade, so should it cease entirely as a result of war, the effect on world oil supply should be small.

The Bush Administration has certainly factored these considerations into its calculations, and probably fancies itself clever, like a naughty little boy who thinks he is getting away with something. Meanwhile, “old Europe” scolds us, and we sass them back, secure in the knowledge that we won’t see the backs of their age-enfeebled hands.

While the unilateralism of the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy may well prove fatal to thousands of Iraqis, its contradiction with the principles of liberal economic policy is unlikely to deal a fatal blow to the unipolar international order at which the United States is the center. The war, if and when it comes, will be a splendid little one. In the years following, there will be plenty of time for the United States to kiss and make up with its troublesome, critically-thinking allies. Time heals all wounds... of those who survive.

Bush’s unilateralism and doctrine of preemptive militarism are hopelessly out of sync with the multilateral institutions that support the complex interdependence of the global political and economic order, but they cannot seriously threaten them. These policies are transient phenomena, not symptomatic of a fundamental shift in America’s relations with the world. They are the kind of thing we can get away with once in a while because, in the words of that earlier cowboy president, we have the “big stick.” But in such moments, when we resort to naked force after inept appeals to distorted logic fail to persuade, we resemble less a shining city on a hill than a small Calabrian hill town under the thumb of an ‘Ndrangheta capo who would be so very gracious if only others showed him the appropriate respect. But then, this president prides himself on realism, and the ultimate statement of realism was expressed by Al Capone: “You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”

Might does not make right, and if pursued consistently, unilateralism would ultimately prove self-defeating. The current president and his advisors may or may not understand this, and this president may or may not win reelection next year, but if nothing else, such aberrations in America foreign policy are term-limited by the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution. Meanwhile, the New World Order, not so new, and consisting of both the Old and New Worlds, will survive.