America’s World Role: Divided We Stand

When it comes to foreign policy, the leaders of American society are worried, divided-and uncertain about where they want to lead.

That’s the central finding of a poll by the Times Mirror Center for The People & The Press of more than 600 U.S. opinion-makers, drawn from the top ranks of business, state and local government and almost every other walk of life.

Four years after the end of the Cold War, the members of America’s elite-from the chief executives of Fortune 500 companies to top foreignb policy experts, archbishops and novelists-are no longer celebrating. Instead, they worry that the world is heading toward a future of ethnic strife, proliferating weapons and economic conflict.

But they aren’t sure how the nation should respond. Asked to name their most immediate priority in foreign policy, most name a domestic issue: getting the U.S. economy going again. In the long term, they wanted to stop the spread of nuclear bombs and other weapons of mass destruction. Beyond that, there is little agreement on America’s role in the world.

Not since the 1930s have American politicians, business chiefs and other leaders been so uncertain about the nation’s international goals.

And that has both the Clinton Administration and its Republican critics worried--for historically, that internationally minded elite has played a key role in forming public opinion on foreign policy, prodding a reluctant U.S. public toward global activism.

“With the end of the Cold War, there is no longer a consensus among the American people around why--and even whether--our nation should remain actively engaged in the world,” Anthony Lake, President Clinton’s national security adviser, said in a recent speech. “Geography and history have always made Americans wary of foreign entanglements. Now economic anxiety fans that wariness. . . . Those of us who believe in the imperative of our international engagement must push back.”

“Over the last 20 years or more, opinion leaders have brought general public opinion along on all sorts of (political) and economic issues that were international in scope,” former Secretary of State James A. Baker III said in an interview. “If the opinion leaders are divided . . . it makes it harder and harder to make the case for internationalism.”

The new poll surveyed 649 American leaders in nine influential groups outside the federal government: business, state and local government, the news media, foreign policy experts, defense experts, universities and think tanks, science and engineering, religion and the arts.

It was the largest survey of the top leadership of those institutions ever undertaken. (The Times Mirror Center is a project of the Times Mirror Co., owner of The Times.)

Among the poll’s key findings:

* About two-thirds of America’s opinion leaders are dissatisfied with the way things are going, both at home and abroad--a complaint shared by every group, from business executives to religious figures.

* A huge majority of opinion leaders agree on one thing: The nation’s top priority in foreign affairs should be a domestic issue, rebuilding the economy. Among business leaders, 90% cited this as a top priority; among university and think-tank presidents, 94%; among cultural figures, 72%.

* After the economy, though, opinion leaders were divided over the nation’s priorities. Scientists and cultural figures called for environmental protection; foreign policy experts cited helping Russia’s reforms succeed, and business leaders pointed to enacting the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

* Most opinion-makers still want the United States to play an important role in the world--but not as the world’s only leader. A majority said the United States should seek “a shared leadership role” but should also be “the most assertive of the leading nations.” Less than 10% wanted the United States to be “the sole leader.”

* Nevertheless, opinion-makers have little zeal for spreading America’s values around the world. Asked whether they consider promoting democracy in other nations important, only about 21% called it a “top priority.” Asked if they favor promoting democracy abroad at the risk of producing some anti-American governments, a majority said no.

* Many believe American power is on the wane. Nearly 40% believe the United States plays a less important role in world affairs than it did 10 years ago; about a third believe the U.S. role is about as important as it was. Less than one-fourth believe it is more important. (The survey was taken in July and August, before U.S. peacekeeping efforts suffered reverses in both Somalia and Haiti.)

* Asked what they considered the biggest threat to world stability, most opinion leaders named ethnic conflict or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But scientists and engineers said the population explosion is the biggest long-term threat.

* Asked which country poses the greatest danger to the United States, opinion leaders were again divided. Foreign policy experts pointed to Iran; defense experts named nuclear powers China and Russia; CEOs, preoccupied by trade battles, cited Japan.

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Taken together, those attitudes denote a leadership class that believes the nation faces inescapable challenges abroad--but also believes that those challenges must take second place to the domestic challenge of rebuilding the economy. It is an elite that has found no compelling crusade or unifying ideology to focus its thinking. Instead of harboring great notions of spreading democracy around the world, America’s leaders simply want to stave off dangerous little wars while they work on economic recovery.

The poll’s findings also suggest that Lake and other Clinton Administration officials guessed wrong when they tried, last month, to create a new national consensus around the idea of “enlargement”--meaning the spread of democracy and free markets around the world. Opinion leaders are more interested, it appears, in the concept Clinton advanced in his presidential campaign: that foreign policy should focus on the goal of promoting economic growth.

One thing the opinion leaders’ attitudes don’t quite add up to, however, is isolationism--at least not in the form that existed before World War II.

“Maybe it’s a kind of isolationism, but it isn’t the old-fashioned kind,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Times Mirror Center. “It’s a selective isolationism. It’s an expression of our focus on domestic affairs, rather than an expression of withdrawal.”

“This isolationism says . . . our real problems are here,” he explained. “(But) it also says there are global problems that are extremely important and that the United States has to deal with: nuclear proliferation, the environment.”

“It’s not isolationist,” agreed Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to President George Bush. “It’s kind of passive internationalist.”

Still, Scowcroft and others said, there is a serious danger of isolationist sentiment rising--and the uncertain, divided state of the elite is a major contributing factor.

“A disastrous intervention somewhere, troops bogged down, a Vietnam kind of thing” could lead to a resurgence of isolationism, Scowcroft said, as could “a failure of NAFTA . . . a poisonous atmosphere leading to a mood of rejection and bitterness” in international economic relations.

“If you can’t get NAFTA through, you’re isolated,” warned William G. Hyland, former editor of Foreign Affairs quarterly. “It would be a kind of inadvertent isolationism. It’s . . . more of a problem than many people realize.”

Indeed, a companion poll by the Times Mirror Center of 2,000 citizens selected at random found the general public in a considerably more isolationist mood than the traditionally international-minded opinion-makers.

Asked whether they would support using military force in various situations, opinion-makers backed the use of force in several cases: if Iraq invaded Saudi Arabia, if North Korea invaded South Korea or if Arab forces invaded Israel. But the public was willing to endorse force only in the case of an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia--not in Israel or Korea.

The general public’s concerns about international affairs are overwhelmingly tied to domestic issues: 85% chose job protection as a top priority of foreign policy, and 82% named drug trafficking.

By contrast, only 19% of foreign policy experts cited protecting jobs as a top priority, and only 32% expressed concern about drugs.

On the key issue of NAFTA, the elite and the public are far apart. Among business leaders, 96% support NAFTA; among state and local government officials, 81%; but in the public, only 46% of those who know something about the free trade agreement support it.

Those differences were both expected and understandable, most experts said. “When kids are getting shot in schools, it’s hard to tell parents they ought to be concerned about Iraq,” said Hyland.

But combined with the intriguing differences among various groups within the elite, the result is a serious fragmentation of public opinion.

“To me, the greatest surprise is the variations within the influential group, and how they differ from the public,” Kohut said. “No one is leading the public with regard to international issues.”

The leadership groups appear to reflect three or four different subcultures among the American elite, he suggested. Business leaders take a “pragmatic, unsentimental approach to foreign policy,” he said, seeking global stability and showing relatively little interest in promoting democracy, human rights, environmental protection or even domestic social concerns. Professional foreign affairs and defense experts tend to take a traditional geopolitical view, worrying about weapons proliferation and the stability of nuclear powers like Russia and China. Religious leaders, cultural figures and scientists tend to take a “globalist” view, arguing for the promotion of democracy, human rights and higher living standards in the developing world.

And closest in their answers to the concerns of the general public--jobs, drug trafficking and immigration--were state and local government officials and religious leaders. Almost as close to the public--a finding that some may find surprising--was the media elite.

Those divisions among the elite struck many analysts as the survey’s most significant finding--and the one with the most implications for national policy.

“It reflects, in a way, the structure of world politics at this particular time, which is very fragmented,” said Hyland. “There are a lot of issues floating around, important to some people but not to others. There’s no unifying theme. You have an Administration that does not have a strong central message. That makes a cacophony.”

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It also makes it more difficult for the President--any President-- to derive a clear, consistent foreign policy from the swirl of world events, and to rally both the opinion-molding elite and the general public around it.

“Once you fragment the agenda like that, you get interest groups” that can exercise more power on individual issues, Hyland said. “In this atmosphere, it’s very difficult to shape opinion--whether you’re the President or the Los Angeles Times.”

“This makes it harder to have a consistent policy,” agreed Leslie H. Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, the nation’s preeminent club of internationalists (whose membership list was used as the survey’s sample of foreign policy experts). “It’s hardened divisions.”

The result was clear in the public and congressional reaction to U.S. military setbacks in Somalia and Haiti, noted I. M. Destler, a visiting fellow at the Institute for International Economics and professor of public affairs at the University of Maryland.

“This looks like the Vietnam syndrome compounded by the lack of a larger rationale to justify people getting killed,” he said. “It suggests that it will not be an easy job for leaders to sell a rationale. The kind of world we’re in doesn’t dictate a clear set of American interests, and that leads to an unwillingness to bear costs.”

And that is bad news over the long run for Clinton, added Samuel Popkin, a professor of political science at UC San Diego.

“What this elite disenchantment says is that the president can’t call on (the elite) to back him,” he said. “There’s no Lee Iacocca for Somalia”--a reference to the former Chrysler chairman’s new job as the Administration’s chief salesman for NAFTA.

“Every single case has to be argued from the beginning,” he said. “The American people are not going to give the President a proxy for action. The lack of overall consensus means each case begins afresh in Congress.”

That means that Bill Clinton, a President who hoped to concentrate on domestic issues, will have to spend even more time at work on foreign policy.

“When you don’t have agreed-on principles, you have to establish new principles in each case,” Popkin noted.

In part, that is simply a consequence of the end of the Cold War, said Gelb--but the results are not likely to be pretty.

“There’s going to be a tremendous amount of floundering,” he said. “You take your life into your hands going to work for the government under these circumstances.”