Resisting the Seduction of Disengagement : Thoughtful American involvement in global affairs will provide the only sturdy foundation for foreign policy

Addressing the U.N. General Assembly four years ago, President George Bush described his vision of “a new partnership of nations that transcends the Cold War. A partnership based on consultation, cooperation and collective action, especially through international and regional organizations. A partnership united by principle and the rule of law and supported by an equitable sharing of both cost and commitment. A partnership whose goals are to increase democracy, increase prosperity, increase the peace and reduce arms.” With few if any changes, this statement of goals--with its implicit assumption that the United States would be the senior partner in the new cooperative effort--provides the philosophical foundation for the Clinton Administration’s foreign policy.

Bush’s “new world order” and President Clinton’s notion of “enlarging democracy” are very much in the admirable tradition of American political idealism. But the problems with trying to base a foreign policy on idealistic principles are still much what they were in Woodrow Wilson’s day, when a president first--with little success--tried to reshape the international order on the basis of American values.

COMPLEXITIES GROW WITH RISE IN NUMBER OF WORLD’S STATES

The most daunting of those problems is this: The separate peoples and sovereignty-jealous states that make up the world community can be expected in almost every instance where big issues are concerned to resist putting aside their own standards and traditions to line up behind someone else’s values. Were it otherwise, hopes for adherence to all the noble ideals expressed in the U.N. Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would have been realized long ago. Enlarging the number of democratic states remains a splendid goal. But policy-makers must still deal with the world as it in fact is, in all its ugly and disappointing reality.

The anxieties and challenges of the Cold War so shaped and focused American perspectives that, with its end, many automatically assumed that a less confrontational, more cooperation-minded world would emerge. The reality has proven to be grimly different.

Aggression has not ended--even as Bush was describing his vision of a new world order to the General Assembly, Iraq’s occupying army was pillaging Kuwait--and atrocities have not been curbed.

The multiplication of new states--nearly 100 more since World War II, 20 more since the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia--has worked to increase global complexities and exacerbate frictions. Victorious in the long Cold War, the United States has subsequently been forced to acknowledge that its power to influence events even in petty states has been severely blunted.

Frustration, weariness after four decades of costly confrontation and old-fashioned xenophobia today encourage a modest revival of isolationism in America. The United States, say those who urge a drastic cutback in its involvement abroad, should sharply reduce its military ties with Europe and Asia, stand aloof from the United Nations, further slash its already low foreign aid budget, be suspicious of international trade agreements and direct its energies and resources to expanding the domestic economy.

What’s wrong with this view of how national life should be ordered is that there is in fact no better way to look out for America’s primary domestic interests--its security and prosperity--than by vigorously maintaining the nation’s global role. For if that role is abandoned, then inevitably decisions affecting the safety and material well-being of the American people will be abdicated to others, and surely not to our benefit.

Disengagement from the world is no answer to the frustrations some feel and certainly not a tenable policy for the one nation that most of the world continues to look to for leadership. Thoughtful involvement, undertaken always with careful deliberation as to its need and with prudent regard for its possible consequences, remains unavoidable.

The starting place now as always is to set foreign policy objectives that don’t exceed the nation’s capabilities for meeting them. Capabilities in this context include not only our military power and economic strength but the political will to use both as an adjunct to diplomacy. Finding that will depends most of all on having a clear sense of what events abroad truly affect U.S. vital interests.

We cannot escape history, Abraham Lincoln said, and the history of this century has blessed or burdened the United States with awesome international responsibilities. The post-Cold War world is a far more unpredictable and so in many ways a more dangerous place than what preceded it. Ethnic and religious hatreds and rivalries long held in check now erupt with uncontrolled viciousness to destroy the peace and cohesion of states big and small. The threatened covert proliferation of nuclear weapons presents a forthright test of the willingness of major nations to act firmly and jointly to arrest their spread.

The stakes in maintaining a stable world order have grown steadily higher, as a burgeoning international capitalism and falling trade barriers feed global growth. But the rapidity and extent of that growth now challenge the post-World War II economic order established at Bretton Woods half a century ago. New rules, especially on currency exchange rates, may well be needed to prevent trade and international commerce from being undermined. But the major industrial countries, including the United States, have been reluctant to take up the great burden of international monetary reform. That task, however, cannot be indefinitely postponed.

The need to make at least a serious effort to bolster the ability of the United Nations to intervene where threats to world peace or gross violations of human rights occur also is now more urgent than ever. The genocide in Rwanda, the systematic flouting in Bosnia of U.N. demands for a halt to aggression, shame the civilized conscience. The United Nations can provide an effective peacekeeping presence where antagonists agree on its usefulness in keeping them separated and act to assure their own good behavior. Does the United Nations, which is only as strong and effective as its members allow it to be, have the will to begin acting as a peacemaker , ready, if diplomacy fails, to sanction military force to halt internecine aggression? If not, almost certainly there will be the horror of more Bosnias, more Rwandas.

However hard it is proving to be to mobilize international efforts to prevent or punish aggression or halt slaughter, it may well prove harder still to forge an effective consensus for responding to the destructive strains that natural growth and the quest for development now impose on our planet.

President Bush had nothing to say about problems of population and resources when he spoke of a new world order. Yet these steadily accumulating challenges--themselves heavy with political implications--could in fairly short order dwarf all other concerns.

EXPANDING POPULATION FUELS A FEARSOME COMPETITION

The world is experiencing runaway population growth. By the end of this century the Earth will be home to about twice the number of inhabitants it had in 1960. People, no matter what part of the globe they inhabit, are consumers--of food, fuel, space, of manufactured goods, of air and water. At some point that experts in population studies believe is rapidly approaching, available resources--first locally, then on a much broader scale--will simply prove unable to keep up with demand.

The process, of course, has already begun. It can be seen in the trek by indigenous populations from the countryside to the major cities in much of the world, and it can be seen in large and disruptive population shifts between countries. Both kinds of movement are prompted by a primal urge to survive. But entire nations as well as individuals have powerful survival instincts. As competition for life’s basics grows, the threat of political instability expands.

Is the world ready to acknowledge the magnitude of the population and resources problem and accept the adjustments and, yes, even the sacrifices that are needed? Is the United States, here as in the face of the other great international issues we have discussed in recent weeks, ready to lead wisely, boldly, resolutely? The challenge to America’s political leaders is not for today only, but for many years to come.