Few Heed Words From the Last of the Superpowers

Two weeks ago, on the eve of a summit meeting of the world’s big industrial powers, President Clinton appealed to his fellow leaders to apply sanctions against India--as a way to dissuade Pakistan from exploding a nuclear bomb of its own.

They turned him down flat. Even Clinton’s closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, refused to follow. Merely persuading the allies to issue a statement condemning India for starting a nuclear arms race “took a fair amount of work,” a frustrated White House official said.

So when Clinton telephoned Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif with a last-minute appeal not to test, the president had few cards in his hand--and both sides knew it.

Clinton’s inability to influence Pakistan, once a virtual U.S. client state, is emblematic of a larger dilemma for the United States in the post-Cold War world: Being a superpower isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Old allies won’t follow your lead. Smaller powers won’t heed your advice. The “globalization” of the world economy, which was supposed to make old enmities obsolete, hasn’t lived up to its promise. And the disruptive forces of nationalism, religious fervor, economic instability and weapons proliferation seem largely beyond your control.

“We live in a different kind of world now, where it’s easier to say no to a superpower, even though other countries still expect us to get involved and fix things,” a senior Clinton administration official said. “There is, at the same time, greater resentment of American power and a sense that only we can do certain things. It’s a real paradox.”

The Cold War bound the United States and its allies together, but now “our interests are more diverse,” noted Graham Fuller, a former senior CIA analyst. “The incentives [for other countries] to follow their own policies are greater. The penalties for going their own way are less. What would it take to galvanize the world into joint action these days? It might take the arrival of Godzilla.”

Gulf War Allies Had to Be Cajoled

The United States was never omnipotent, of course; even at the apogee of recent U.S. power, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, allies had to be cajoled into joining a global coalition against Iraq.

Yet in recent months, examples of American frustration have multiplied.

In Iraq, Clinton threatened massive military action in February to force Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to comply with United Nations resolutions on arms inspection--but, with the exception of Britain, Clinton found himself without allies and accepted a U.N.-brokered compromise.

In Indonesia, U.S. officials wanted to pressure President Suharto to resign months ago--a move that could have averted bloodshed and would have enhanced U.S. power--but held off because of objections from allies Australia, Japan and Germany.

In Iran, the Clinton administration found itself at loggerheads with its closest European allies, and backed down from a threat to impose sanctions against France and Russia for doing business with the Tehran regime.

And in South Asia, U.S. and European diplomats struggled to get their alliance working again, if only to ask India and Pakistan to agree not to hold any further nuclear tests.

Some Republicans charge that the Clinton administration has made matters worse by being too tentative in its use of power.

“International order isn’t self-sustaining; it requires constant U.S. leadership, and this White House hasn’t provided that,” said Robert Kagan, a leading conservative foreign policy thinker.

But administration officials--and most outside analysts--point to deeper factors.

Economic globalization, which the Clinton administration hailed as a force that would impel countries toward peaceful economic competition, has instead helped create a backlash of nationalism and religious fervor. In a time of relative peace, each country’s public is focused on domestic concerns, not international order, making leaders in the United States and Europe reluctant to risk war--or even commercial contracts--for intangible issues of international order.

Economic sanctions, the favorite foreign policy tool of the U.S. Congress, are unpopular everywhere else and may even backfire in many cases.

And, in the end, the proliferation of sophisticated weapons--borne on the same wave of technological progress that has buoyed the world economy--is very difficult to stop.

Militant Nationalists Are Calling the Shots

In the first week of 1998, the National Security Council staff gathered for a session of “crystal-balling,” predicting the problems that might arise in the new year. One NSC expert made a prescient prediction: The most troubling prospect, he said, was that India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, might win the next election.

Several weeks later, the BJP did win, and its victory turned out to be a watershed. The election put a militant nationalist movement in power in one of the world’s most conflict-ridden regions.

BJP leaders immediately set about fulfilling their campaign promise to test and deploy nuclear weapons.

As if to defy the modern faith in a “democratic peace”--the idea that the spread of democracy will dampen international conflict--the governments of India and Pakistan are threatening nuclear war in response to popular enthusiasm. And those passions could spread further.

“The unleashing of virulent Hindu nationalism could unleash Islamic nationalism that could go beyond Pakistan,” warned Robert B. Oakley, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan.

“Just when most of the ‘isms’ have faded--communism, fascism, authoritarianism--various forms of religious identity or hyper-religious identity are filling some need or gap,” said Richard Haass, a former senior official in the Bush administration. “It may be something of a reaction to globalization. You feel all these forces beyond your control, so there’s a tendency to wrap around something that is yours.”

A senior Clinton administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed.

“Globalization puts demands on societies,” he said. “Those demands from outside produce greater strains inside, and that often provokes nationalist reactions.”

And that chain reaction is confounding one of the central hopes of post-Cold War foreign policy: that bringing every country into a single, global economy would make nations less likely to go to war.

“The real tension in international relations in the post-Cold War period is between integrative and disintegrative tendencies,” said John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale University. “The Clinton administration has been operating on the theory that integrative economic tendencies are sufficient to counter the disintegrative tendencies that come out of nationalism. . . . The events of the past few months suggest that some rethinking needs to be done.”

U.S. Concentrating on Perils in South Asia

In the short run, U.S. officials may have little time for rethinking their global grand strategy. They are concentrating instead on containing the danger of South Asia’s nuclear arms race.

Even there, though, their principal tool, economic sanctions, is a blunt instrument at best--and counterproductive at worst.

“When you try to use economic sanctions, that can trigger a kind of ‘need to defy’ on the part of nationalists on the other side,” a senior official warned.

Indeed, one reason Clinton was unable to win allied support for sanctions against India was that European countries have bristled at finding themselves the targets of U.S. sanctions against trading with Cuba or Iran.

“We have a set of existing tools that we’re trying to apply to this situation: sanctions, treaties, diplomatic negotiations. . . . But it’s not clear that we can recalibrate them for this,” said Joseph Cirincione, an expert on nuclear proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“We may need new tools and a new way of thinking about this. But this crisis came too soon. It’s too fast. We haven’t developed those new tools or ways of thinking yet.”