Soft and Fuzzy’s Time Has Come

In Beijing last week, Madeleine Albright was clearly if fleetingly at her best. Before an audience at the National Judges College, she brandished a copy of China Daily, that nation’s largest-circulation English language newspaper, and lauded its news judgment. With a flourish, she praised a headline hailing efforts to promote the rule of law across that huge and populated land. As the secretary knows, China lives in perpetual fear of another Tiananmen-type convulsion. Her pitch to the law school class was: “Laws that provide a legal means for settling disputes help promote social stability.” It’s hard to believe that her message was lost on anyone inside or outside the classroom.

Albright performed deftly in a difficult and potentially awkward setting and raised the kind of issue that can add new color to the otherwise dreary palette of U.S. foreign policy. Since the end of the Cold War, American policy, despite its liberation from the confining face-off with the Evil Empire, has been suffocating on its own stale air. Old issues have been stubbornly recycled: In the most glaring example, rather than being downsized or disbanded, NATO gets enlarged, while important new issues (the acid monsoon of worldwide family decay, the interconnections between domestic and foreign policy, the internal struggles of traditional societies to change under stress) are rejected by encrusted foreign policy establishments as “soft and fuzzy.” It’s not surprising that opinion polls about foreign policy reveal high levels of citizen disengagement. That’s because the core issues seem so distant. As a high-level administration official once neatly put it, “We have to make foreign policy less foreign.” Does America stand only for the accumulation of wealth, anti-collectivist economies and status quo stability?

Former U.S. diplomat and Asia expert David I. Hitchcock, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, asks U.S. foreign policy, toward Asia especially, to build relationships based on our increasingly mutual domestic problems. “The qualities East Asians want,” he says, “are close to those Americans strive for: stronger families, justice, equality, and a fair share in rising economies.”

He believes that the problem with U.S. foreign policy is that it is monopolized by the national security professionals when some common concerns could be better advanced by what he calls “grass-roots professionals.”

As America’s 64th secretary of state, Albright already is a special figure because she is the first woman in the position. That doesn’t allow her to be judged by a different standard, but inevitably she will be expected to make a difference, to move policy beyond the conventional. Her guest professor stint in China is a good example. Unfortunately it’s the exception. Indeed, after China last week, she moved on to Korea, only to sound like all of her post-Cold War predecessors. She did the same earlier in Japan, where nice-guy Foreign Minister Keizo Obuchi had to endure her blowhard public pronouncements about Japanese economic policy.

Asia, in particular, needs better than this. Its cultures and citizens are pressured by the West and the International Monetary Fund to change their ways practically overnight to accommodate the voracious needs of the globalized world. Foreign policies, our own and others’, need to develop more imaginative “human security” approaches that emphasize internal threats to security as much as external ones. Traditional national security thinking does not ask questions like: Is China more of a long-term threat to Japan than the latter’s growing culture of overworked fathers who are separated from their children save for 15 minutes on Sunday? Is China’s army more of a threat to the U.S. than the cancer of America’s failing public education, the fracturing of families and the corrosive income gap between rich and poor? On the surface this may look like the old guns-vs.-butter debate, but it entails a basic redefinition of national security to include factors usually excluded from the top table. In recent years, massive international migrations across borders have been more common than border wars. Sometimes the demographer can be more helpful in national security policy planning than the defense specialist.

Forward-thinking institutions like the New York-based International Women’s Health Coalition want to stretch our foreign policy imagination. As Adrienne Germain, IWHC president, puts it: “The shift from conventional ‘national security’ to a ‘human security’ approach requires fundamental shifts in values and in priorities.” The group would have our foreign policy speak more directly to domestic concerns that cross national boundaries, like economic empowerment, public health and mass education. American policy hammers away at the imprisonment of regime opponents in China, but more far-sighted foreign policy would broaden that view to world illiteracy, international migration and gender-power relationships--the latter potentially a more consequential issue in Asia than the rights of political opponents.

President Clinton is said to believe that all foreign policy has domestic roots. But his administration has not thought it all the way through or walked that walk beyond a few hesitant rhetorical baby steps. Ah, now I remember who so excellently said: “We have to make foreign policy less foreign.” It was the U.S. secretary of state herself. How about more along this line, Madame Secretary and Mr. President?