No Hiding From the Future, Please

The legendary George Kennan was the first and greatest guru of postwar U.S. foreign policy. Back in 1947 this scholar, then heading the U.S. State Department’s policy planning staff, writing under cover of the mysterious byline “X,” laid out the road map for the U.S. role in the postwar world in the most influential article ever to appear in Foreign Affairs, the quarterly bible of the American establishment. His essay on the need to contain Soviet communism guided not only America’s postwar missionary approach to Moscow but also its entire foreign policy. Since the collapse of the Soviet empire, America has been waiting for a new George Kennan to lay down the new rhyme and reason for what we should be doing in the world.

More and more, Samuel P. Huntington has been seen as a candidate for the job. Many have long admired this professor of international politics at Harvard, chairman of Harvard’s Institute for Strategic Planning, Carter administration national security official and author of influential works on complex and important foreign policy issues. And so in 1993, when the first tantalizing excerpt from Huntington’s world-affairs book in progress appeared in none other than Foreign Affairs, that journal’s editors cried, Eureka! The essay, which foresaw a gloomy future of major conflicts between competing civilizations, triggered more response than anything since the famous “X” article, raising the possibility that America may have found its man. Even former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who might himself have coveted the role as Kennan’s intellectual successor, agreed that Huntington’s book, finally published this month as “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” was “one of the most important books .J.J. since the end of the Cold War.”

But hold off on the canonization. Based on the latest excerpt from the new book, in the current Foreign Affairs, I fear for America if the U.S. establishment accords Huntington’s misguided views the same respect it once rightly did Kennan’s. To be sure, Huntington’s foreign policy blueprint is on one level unsurprising. As might be expected of an academic based in Boston who has spent most of his life trafficking up and down the East Coast corridor, Huntington wants America to concentrate on Europe and forget about forging meaningful relationships with booming but deceitful Asia. But it gets worse: In his view, Asian cultures and nations can be treacherous players who will modernize but never Westernize sufficiently to permit America to become a true partner with them. Indeed, he believes that Asian cultures are so different from the West as to be mutually irreconcilable, that they and we are destined to grate against each other destructively.

He dismisses as “misguided, arrogant, false and dangerous” the Coca-colonization hypothesis of world convergence. This is the common and somewhat simplistic view that the export of Western materialism--whether burgers, CDs, Levis or TV shows--to Eastern societies will homogenize cultures and bring the planet together into one gigantic Disney park of mall-like consumerism. America, argues Huntington, should turn its back on forging new alliances with Asia just as George Kennan proposed almost half a century ago that the West link arms to oppose communism. “The peoples of the West,” he writes, “must hang together, or most assuredly they will hang separately.”

If Huntington’s vision takes hold in the drawing rooms, boardrooms and government offices of the East Coast establishment, make no mistake about it, the consequences will prove devastating. I have long respected Huntington, but he is totally wrong about turning the clock back to Europe. While our European ties always will be important, America’s millennial future is to be found on the other side of the Pacific, in the booming economies and dynamic cultures of Asia. U.S. policy and vision must avoid a relapse into a syrupy, suffocating Atlanticism and reach out to Asia, a region that is home to more than half the planet’s population, and that, according to the International Monetary Fund, will account for half the world’s economic growth by 2000 and sometime in the next century will boast most of the world’s superpowers.

It takes no genius to recognize the awesome potential of China as it begins to shed the chains of its insane and inept communist system. Or the future might of a Korea finally united, suddenly in Germany’s economic league. Or the determination of insular but deeply competent Japan to maintain its position in the first-class cabin of the world. One even can imagine (in the wildest of dreams, perhaps) India finally achieving the economic status its size and potential would justify. And what will be the ceiling on the potential of Asian societies like sprawling Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, or of awakening Malaysia, its now-alive economy growing at 8% to 9% a year, or of democratic Philippines, with 67 million people?

Huntington’s parochial world view, if the U.S. were to take it to heart, would sell America short. Any foreign policy that all but ignores half the world--the booming half, the increasingly consequential half--is at best half-baked. America deserves a worthy successor to George Kennan. But we need to be patient. If that great new sky-clearing Kennanite insight comes, it will have been worth waiting for. Huntington’s is not it.