When Nobody Can Agree : Making foreign policy without any consensus

To judge from a sobering poll released last Tuesday by the Times Mirror Center for The People and The Press, whatever disarray affects the Clinton State Department affects equally the various elites on whose collective wisdom the Administration might hope to rely. Different elites see foreign policy differently; and even within a given elite, no single foreign policy danger commands the attention of all. Six hundred forty-nine leaders in nine groups (news media, business/finance, cultural, foreign affairs, security, state and local government, academics, religion, science and engineering) were asked to name which of six dangers facing the world was greatest. The grim selection included nationalism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, international trade conflicts, religious fanaticism, environmental pollution and population growth. Fifty-one percent of scientists and engineers named population growth as the greatest danger. No other elite could muster even a 50% vote for any given danger.

The day is clearly past when every foreign policy problem could be considered a moment in the life-and-death challenge posed to the West by the Soviet Union. Now, we have the luxury of considering each problem more nearly on its own merits, and the result is the confusion the poll reports, as different policy elites find different challenges differently compelling.

Given this disarray, whose advice should the President follow? Perhaps overpopulation, which contains within itself the threat of environmental degradation and of the eventual extinction of the human species, will become over time--first among scientists then among others--the challenge to which all others are subordinated. Briefly, some hoped (others feared) that Al Gore, author of “Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit,” would be the George F. Kennan of the Clinton Administration, bringing the swirl of lesser problems to a focus here as Kennan in his day did with militant communism.

It now appears that this won’t happen. Neither Gore nor anyone else is the Kennan of the Clinton Administration. It is not that President Clinton is declining to acknowledge some consensus of older, wiser policy hands. There is no such consensus. And yet even if American foreign policy must be a checklist rather than a formulation, the American people have a right to ask that it be a clear, stable checklist--one that reflects the Administration’s own thinking rather than its attempt to offend as few constituencies as possible. There are minor clarities within the major blur, and there is merit in taking a provisional position and sticking with it for a while in this era when the best minds are all asking different questions.