Troubles Not Just to South: What of Russia and China?

As the southern neighbor of the United States, and source of most of its illegal immigrants and illegal drugs, Mexico is widely perceived as a special case in U.S. foreign relations. This was the assumption behind President Bill Clinton’s controversial decision to recertify Mexico as a cooperative partner in the drug war.

But that assumption is false. Mexico typifies a disturbing development that characterizes all three of America’s most important foreign relationships.

Mexico is in the throes of an agonizing social and economic transition from a one-party state, with centralized control over the country’s industrial and financial system, into a free market that will, with luck, generate a more pluralist political system.

One crucial symptom of these wrenching changes is endemic corruption among political, corporate and law-enforcement elites. Another is the growth of organized crime, and the erosion of law and order in major cities. All this is accompanied by a widening and politically destabilizing gap between the rich and the demoralized poor.

This is precisely the situation in two other countries of central importance to the United States: Russia and China. All three are wounded states in which traditional central authority is in question, and unscrupulous new elites are emerging whose new wealth comes from sources of questionable legality. Their power is such that the usual government-to-government agreements cannot be relied on. These countries have another feature in common: Any U.S. government has relatively few policy tools available to improve their behavior.

The levers at Washington’s hand in each case are the same: a little U.S. aid; a great deal more multinational aid, in whose distribution the U.S. has an important say; a great potential in U.S. trade, and sweet reason--as American policy makers seek to persuade these countries to promote political changes that are in their long-term self-interest.

These levers have not worked too well. They have not dissuaded Russia from selling advanced weaponry and nuclear technology to Iran; nor from being unhelpful in a process of NATO enlargement whose goal is the democratic stabilization of Eastern Europe, transparently in Russian interests. Nor have these levers yet persuaded Russia to devise a coherent tax code or an investor-friendly economic environment, because the self-interest of corrupt local elites outweighs the national interest.

These U.S. levers have also failed to persuade China to acknowledge even the basic human-rights decencies; to abide by its own promises to curb the widespread piracy of U.S. and other Western intellectual rights; to pay even lip-service to Hong Kong’s democratic institutions, or to control the greed of its arms traders.

In Mexico, U.S. aid has been more than generous--and not only in providing intelligence, funds and military-surplus helicopters to Mexico’s police and military anti-narcotics units. Clinton defied his own party base in the labor unions, and the Democratic leaders in Congress, to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has produced a U.S. trade deficit with Mexico, now running at $15 billion a year. One striking foreign-policy decision of Clinton’s first term was to take a serious political risk by overruling Congress in order to lead the international bailout of the Mexican peso.

Successive Mexican political leaders have tried to accommodate U.S. interests. Whatever the role of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and his extremely rich and controversial family in the murkier aspects of Mexican life, this Harvard-educated modernizer backed both NAFTA and the efforts to reform the sclerotic political system. His successor, President Ernesto Zedillo, appears equally intent on pluralistic reform. But rather as Mikhail S. Gorbachev discovered in the Soviet Union, and as Deng Xiaoping’s successors are learning in China, dismantling an entrenched one-party structure is difficult.

There have only been two triumphantly successful examples of authoritarian states being transformed into prosperous and stable democracies. But in both Japan and West Germany after 1945, the Western allies had troops on the ground to enforce the reforms and nurture the democratic process. In neither Russia, China nor Mexico is it possible to envisage reforms unfolding in similar conditions of political order backed by the presence of an occupying military force.

There are three logical responses to this unhappy challenge in the three states. The first is to shrug and accept that, under the principle of noninterference in domestic affairs, these states will go their own way. They lack the traditions of democracy and free enterprise that make the Europeans (relatively speaking) such agreeable partners in the promotion of U.S. interests and values.

The second course, essentially the one now pursued, is to provide some aid and facilitate trade in the hope these levers will do some good with the current political leadership, while effecting a slow socioeconomic transformation that will help bring a more congenial system.

This is not a vain hope. We may cite South Korea, again helped by a U.S. military presence, or Taiwan, with its discreet and offshore guarantee of U.S. military support, as examples. Increasingly democratic, increasingly cooperative in the global-trading system and broadly supportive of U.S. strategic interests, Taiwan and South Korea can be counted as successes for the civilizing effects of U.S. influence.

The third course would be far more bold: to hazard an aggressive campaign in support of reform-minded local leaders. This was tried in Iran in the 1970s, with the supportive presence of some 30,000 U.S. personnel trying to modernize the shah’s armed forces--and it proved disastrous. Something similar is now being tried in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states: U.S. diplomatic nudges toward local political and economic reforms, backed up by a U.S. military presence. But some lessons from Iran should have been learned. The two terrorist attacks on U.S. military facilities in Saudi Arabia point to the dangers in such a policy.

Without any U.S. military role in Mexico, China or Russia, the question becomes how far an aggressive U.S. role in spurring economic and political reform can be practical. Massive amounts of aid, on the scale of the postwar Marshall Plan, might make a difference. But in terms of comparative U.S. gross domestic product, Marshall aid cost something near $500 million in 1997 money. In the absence of any Soviet-scale military threat, such an program is not politically feasible.

If there is no carrot at hand, there is a stick. The threat of withdrawing access to U.S. markets would be devastating for China’s $50-billion trade surplus, as it would for Mexico’s $15 billion. But this would almost equally dismay U.S. corporations, which lobbied so hard for NAFTA and against Clinton’s 1994 threat to suspend China’s most-favored-nation trade role. That is the catch with pluralist democracies: One’s own nongovernmental interests have massive influence over policy-making.

U.S. governments are thus stuck with the unimpressive tools of paltry carrots and feeble sticks as they seek to manage the most problematic and serious of their foreign relations: Russia’s weakness, China’s growth and Mexico’s proximity.

There are policy options available at the margins, to seek to trade with them on U.S. terms while insisting they accept the international rules on copyright and dumping, and try to strengthen the rules on labor and environmental standards. This will be slow, uphill work.

It can be made less painful if the Europeans, the global economy’s biggest trading block, whose interests are similar, are enlisted into the common cause. They have been, to a large degree, in the case of Russia. They have yet to be rallied to join the giant task of steering China into civilized ways of behavior, and the prospects of their doing so are in question.

The Europeans were bullied into joining--reluctantly--the bailout of the Mexican peso. Their reward was to see their companies made vulnerable to sanctions in U.S. courts for affronting U.S. policy by trading with Cuba, under the Helms-Burton Act.

The Europeans claim they are “engaging” with Cuba in order to pressure it to reform--precisely the policy Washington avows toward China, Russia and Mexico. And short of the laughable option of extending the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba to Russia, China and Mexico, there may be no other feasible course.