Bush Is Charting a Dangerous Course

Gov. George W. Bush’s long-awaited foreign policy address should be studied carefully. First, the key policy goals he outlined conflict with each other. Second, his China policy is fraught with danger. Third, Bush’s view of America’s world role has portentous implications. Bush stressed the reinvigorating of America’s key alliances, especially NATO. Yet, he pledged to follow policies that would put Washington on a collision course with its allies--notably his promise to abrogate the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Defense (ABM) Treaty, and then to deploy a national ballistic missile defense system.

When it solicited European views on these subjects last week, the Clinton administration found that the allies strongly oppose treaty abrogation and ballistic missile defense deployment because they fear relations with Moscow would be damaged irrevocably, that a new arms race would be triggered and the strategic basis of their own security would be undercut. Bush would do well to take note of European concerns.

Even more disturbing is the confrontational stance Bush took toward China. It is true, as Bush said, that as an emerging great power, China might someday become a strategic competitor of the United States. But great power competitions can end in peaceful adjustment of differences, or in war. Bush declared that China’s conduct is “alarming abroad and appalling at home.” He said that under his administration, China would be “unthreatened but not unchecked.” Yet, from Beijing’s perspective, what Bush calls “checking” cannot possibly be viewed as anything other than threatening.

Bush made it clear that he believes that China’s government is barely legitimate because it fails to conform to America’s democratic values. He would have the U.S. undertake to defend Taiwan--an issue that China sees as an internal matter--and would back up this commitment by placing the island under the umbrella of a proposed U.S. theater ballistic missile defense system. Yet, while proposing to vigorously assert U.S. military dominance in East Asia and to meddle in China’s internal affairs, Bush denounced China’s military modernization. Bush may see this as ominous, but serious students of international politics know that the military buildup is typical behavior for an emerging great power, especially one that sees its vital interests and security challenged. Great power rivalry does not inexorably lead to conflict, but a Bush administration’s heavy-handed China policy--which reflects a belief that the setting of China’s national interests is Washington’s prerogative, not Beijing’s--would escalate tensions in East Asia.

Bush’s speech also reflected a deeply troubling view of America’s world role. He would vastly expand U.S. commitments abroad to “protect our allies,” “address the security concerns” of other, friendly states to dissuade them from acquiring nuclear weapons (and thus the capability to defend themselves without U.S. assistance) and prevent “power vacuums” in Eurasia. Moreover, Bush asserted that, strategically, America’s interests and its ideals are identical; that any challenge to America’s ideals of democracy and free markets threatens U.S. security. He approvingly quoted former Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s warning that the U.S. will come down hard on nations that refuse to play by Washington’s rules. Rusk--a justly discredited architect of America’s disastrous Vietnam policy--believed the U.S. could only be secure “when the total international ideological environment is safe.”

That is a recipe for open-ended U.S. intervention and foreign policy crusading. And it is the antithesis of realism: Regardless of whether other states embrace American ideals, the U.S. is quite secure from threat. It is the quest to impose its values on the rest of the world that gets the U.S. into trouble and leads to its involvement in strategically peripheral places like Vietnam, Kosovo and Haiti.

Bush explicitly called for the U.S. to maintain its post-Cold War world dominance. However, states that bid for global dominance invariably fail for a simple reason. When one state becomes too powerful, it causes others to fear for their security and they coalesce to “balance” against it.

The U.S. enjoys no exemption from history. Indeed, it now is apparent that America’s European allies and Russia, China and India all believe the U.S. is too powerful, and that it is American power that needs to be counterbalanced.

A debate on overhauling U.S. grand strategy to meet the challenges of a new century is badly overdue. But it will not occur as long as leaders like Bush refuse to acknowledge this need, and dismiss all alternatives to the ill-fated policy of dominance as “isolationism.”