Reformed America Needed in New Global Competition

May 29, 1989, will be remembered as the moment when President George Bush seized the diplomatic initiative from Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. It also should be marked as the day America entered an era in which military power is becoming less important than domestic equality and economic strength in buying global leadership.

Not since Ronald Reagan met with Gorbachev at Reykjavik, Iceland, in October, 1986, has a U.S. President acted so boldly both to set the East-West agenda and to break with a Washington bureaucracy that sees the best future in the past. This parallel is instructive in two other ways. Unlike Reagan, who at Reykjavik patched together proposals that included scrapping all ballistic missiles, last week, before leaving for Europe, Bush sent emissaries secretly ahead so that anxious allies would not be caught by surprise.

The actions of both Presidents say something basic about the nature of global politics and the position of the United States. Reagan could not have offered to eliminate major categories of strategic nuclear weapons unless he understood that their role has radically changed. Not only is the U.S.-Soviet nuclear balance highly stable and the risk of a superpower nuclear war now most remote, but the diplomatic value of massive nuclear arsenals also has markedly declined.

The full import of Reagan’s insight did not become apparent until Bush admitted in Brussels that some U.S. troops can be removed from Europe. Even if the East-West talks on reducing conventional arms do not create the conditions for such a withdrawal, the possibility is now there for all to see. By his proposals, Bush has declared his belief that Gorbachev is genuine, that the Kremlin leader’s commitment to major arms cuts is serious, and that the Cold War is over.

Together, Reagan and Bush have said something more: American security no longer depends on maintaining an ever-growing nuclear arsenal or an ever-constant deployment of forces abroad to contain the Soviet Union. Some, at least, of this arsenal can be destroyed; some, at least, of these forces can come home. In the process, however, a major element of U.S. postwar power and presence in the world has been devalued.

Forty years of U.S. policy has thus been proved successful, but with critical implications for America’s role. In recent years, the United States has increasingly depended for influence abroad on exporting security to other nations, through its nuclear and conventional forces, and decreasingly on economic strength which no longer provides a critical edge. U.S. allies have narrowed the gap in wealth and become economic competitors, while America has been disinvesting--eating its seed corn--in a vain effort to consume beyond its means. Unwittingly, during the 1980s it has mimicked the classic Soviet model, relying on military power to maintain its position and influence in Europe and Asia. And along with the Soviets, the United States now finds that it is not well-prepared to greet the new world that is emerging. Allies that are rapidly losing their dependence on America’s military might are less likely to defer to it in shaping the new Europe.

NATO’s 40th anniversary has been a time for looking back to the wisdom of Western leaders who created the Atlantic Alliance, and for indulging a wistful hope that we will find their ilk today. But nostalgia ignores the critical point: that in accepting for America the burdens of global leadership, the wise men of the 1940s could rely on unrivaled U.S. economic strength and capacity to act as they went about the politically indispensable work of marrying Wall Street to Washington and blending U.S. self-interest with a global perspective, thereby preventing another Great Depression and another world war.

A constructive U.S. role is still important in a changing world that has no other leader, but there is no domestic consensus that this commitment comports with self-interest at a time when economic capacity falls short and Americans see jobs moving abroad. In U.S. attitudes, the 1940s’ Marshall Plan has been replaced by 1989’s Super 301 trade legislation directed against Japan and reflecting fears of a Fortress Europe in 1992.

Money does continue to flow into the United States as the world’s safest haven, but that provides little leverage on the future. For years, it has been apparent that America will not compete in tomorrow’s world without making basic reforms at home, an economic perestroika as necessary--if not as difficult--as that required by Gorbachev’s Russia. The need extends from renewing physical capital and promoting research and development to investing heavily in America’s human capital--from prenatal health care through education at all levels to training in new job skills. And for pragmatic if not also for moral reasons, there is no longer any choice but to fulfill an ancient promise of America: to end the Third World status of nearly one-fifth of its people and, at long last, to heal the nation’s division by race.

Ironically, by an act of statesmanship that can help make the world immeasurably safer from the threat of East-West conflict, President Bush also has revealed a different agenda for America for which military power is no answer. But this new agenda at home will determine whether the United States can succeed in the future as it has now won the past.