The Seductive Appeal of the NEW POPULISM

It has been said that history is politics looking backward. Thus, when many Americans are thinking about the U.S. role in the world, it has become fashionable to look afresh at the fate of former great powers and the factors that led to their decline.

One of the current focal points is Paul Kennedy’s book, “Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.” In tracing the decline of Ottoman Turkey, the Hapsburgs, Napoleonic France and the British Empire, Kennedy sees the common process of “imperial overstretch” at work: Foreign commitments and military responsibilities outgrew the economic capacity to sustain them. His final chapter warns that the United States faces a similar mismatch between international commitment and economic power.

Historians will decide whether Kennedy’s thesis is good history. The immediate question is whether it constitutes good politics. In a presidential election year, Kennedy’s arguments are being exploited and to some extent perverted by a growing number of politicians, policy analysts and special interests on both ends of the political spectrum. Many are spokesmen for a “new populism” in U.S. foreign affairs, advocating approaches that would scrap 40 years of internationalist U.S. security and economic policies in favor of a much more circumscribed, parochial and protectionist role.

“New populism” can be recognized by three distinct strands:

-- Economic nationalism : This school maintains that an open, international trading and financial system works against U.S. interests because many foreign competitors refuse “to play by the rules.” Its prescription is to insulate the U.S. economy through protectionist trade legislation like that proposed last year by Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.). Many economic nationalists worry, too, about the “selling of America”; they advocate controls on foreign investments.

-- Military neo-isolationism : A hang-over from the post-Vietnam era, this school argues that the United States should reduce its defense budget and lower its military profile around the world. Proponents include many liberals, who want the United States to withdraw militarily from Central America and other Third World trouble spots. In other regions, some neo-isolationists advocate major troop reductions and turning over a larger share of the defense burden to “free-loading” allies.

-- Strategic unilateralism : This school of thought finds adherents on the right. Neo-conservative critics of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, argue not only that the allies are not pulling their weight, but that their squeamishness about military force prevents the United States from pursuing a more hard-nosed foreign policy. They advocate a more assertive, go-it-alone course.

While these three strands obviously differ in important ways, their criticisms of U.S. internationalism tend to reinforce one another. In the process, strange bedfellows are created. For example, Rep. Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, on the Democratic left, has borrowed the sharp criticisms of allied defense spending made by Richard N. Perle, former Reagan Administration assistant secretary of defense. There is also a dangerous tendency for new populists to link military burden-sharing with concerns over the trade deficit. Schroeder, for one, has proposed that additional duties be levied on imports from allies who fail to spend the same percentage of gross national product on defense as the United States does.

Of course, the new populists have highlighted some legitimate economic and military problems. But solutions lie neither with military retreat nor economic protectionism. In the area of defense spending and military commitments, it is an illusion to think Europe and Japan will be coaxed into doing more by U.S. threats to do less. More likely than not, U.S. withdrawals would only feed neutralist and pacifist tendencies within these countries. Improved burden-sharing will result only from continued U.S. leadership. This has been most recently underscored in the Persian Gulf: U.S. willingness to take the first step led to the later deployment of British, French, Dutch, Italian and Belgian warships to assist the U.S. Navy in protecting gulf shipping.

In the area of international trade and finance, the United States still forms the linchpin of an increasingly integrated, global economy. Efforts to close the U.S. market to foreign imports and investment would lead to retaliatory actions by major trading partners, resulting in lost jobs, lost revenues--and probably worldwide recession. In the main, solution for the trade deficit is to be found at home, with efforts to strengthen education, investment and innovation.

It is also true that, in relative terms, U.S. military and economic power has declined over the postwar era. But this change should be understood in the context of a more fundamental shift in the global distribution of power. International politics are no longer so driven by the U.S.-Soviet bipolar contest. The unquestioned military dominance of the superpowers is fading: As Washington and Moscow negotiate nuclear reductions, the strategic arsenals of China, Britain and France continue to grow. Politically, Western Europe is making slow but steady progress toward speaking with a single voice. In the economic sphere, Japan and West Germany have emerged as first-rank trading and financial powers. In the Third World, meanwhile, a cluster of newly industrializing countries, especially in East Asia, confront mature industrial nations with unforeseen competitive challenges. China and such other emerging regional powers as India and Brazil possess growing influence.

It is difficult to define precisely what these changes entail for the United States. On one hand, the political maturation of Western Europe, the economic success of allies in the Far East, the growing ferment within the Soviet Bloc, the reform process in China and the progress of democracy in Latin American and Asia all serve U.S. interests. Indeed, the United States can take credit for helping bring about these changes.

On the other hand, moving from bipolarity to greater international pluralism will be unpredictable and even dangerous. The United States will have more room to maneuver but less margin for error. The United States will need an updated form of global engagement--a redefined internationalism--to secure its economic and security goals. As Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out recently: “It is evident that in the years to come the United States will have to exercise its special world responsibilities by increasingly subtle, cooperative and even indirect means.”

This more subtle leadership should focus, in particular, on two objectives.

The first is strengthening the Western consensus on defense. In an era of U.S.-Soviet negotiation, it is tempting for the West to engage in unilateral troop reductions and defense budget cutbacks. This would not only doom future arms-control prospects, it would also be destabilizing. No one knows what the military consequences of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reform efforts will be--or whether these efforts will even succeed in the long term.

The time is thus ripe to formulate a broad military and diplomatic strategy for the 1990s. Improved burden-sharing in the defense of Western Europe, East Asia and other regions where the West has important interests must form the core of the strategy. Rather than threatening unilateral troop cuts, the United States should clearly define its expectations for new allied efforts. In the process, it will be important to recognize that improved burden-sharing will take different forms, depending on the capabilities and psychology of individual allies. In East Asia, for example, it would be a mistake to expect (or want) Japan to increase military spending. Tokyo should use its expanding resources to address problems like Third World debt and to provide assistance to such strategic allies as the Philippines, Turkey and Pakistan. In Western Europe, the United States could facilitate greater burden-sharing by helping promote genuine European defense cooperation--the so-called “European pillar” of NATO--that would be designed to provide real relief, but not a replacement, for the U.S. military presence.

The second objective is accelerating the creation of an open world economy. In the trade area, there has been genuine progress, including the U.S.-Canadian free trade agreement and the European Community’s decision to achieve a common internal market in 1992. While it is important that these steps be implemented on schedule, it is also crucial that they not come at the expense of current efforts to reduce protectionism on a worldwide basis. There is danger, for example, that the decision to create a free market within Europe by 1992 could be accompanied by new barriers to imports from outside Europe. A “Fortress Europe” in trade could facilitate the emergence of regional trading blocs in the 1990s that would lead to new trade frictions and harm U.S. export opportunities. To avoid this, the United States must both resist protectionism pressures at home and press ahead with proposals for reducing global barriers to trade, especially in sectors such as agriculture and services, where the country is highly competitive.

Neither objective will be easy to achieve. But the United States really has no alternative. The 1990s will require more, rather than less, cooperation among allies and trading partners. In the U.S. presidential primaries, voters appear to have rejected the proponents of protectionism, disengagement and unilateralism. Yet these themes have a seductive appeal and are certain to surface again in the 1988 campaigns. Were the United States to succumb to their appeal, it would indeed become a nation in decline.