Goodwill Toward U.S. Is Dwindling Globally

America’s dominant shadow has long been welcome in much of the world as a shield from tyranny, a beacon of goodwill, an inspiration of unique values.

But 10 years after communism’s collapse in the Soviet Union left the United States to pursue its interests without a world rival, that shadow is assuming a darker character. The preponderance of America’s power--economic, political, military and cultural--is fast becoming a liability.

In State Department meeting rooms it’s called the “hegemony problem,” a fancy way of describing the same resentment that children harbor for the biggest, toughest and smartest kid in school.

While there always have been those who resented America’s power, influence and priorities, even allies have grown queasy in the waning years of the Clinton administration. They are unsettled by fears that, in its hour of triumph, the United States seems to have lost its commitment to the global community and the international order it helped create from the ashes of World War II. The sentiment is mounting that no single country--however benevolent or well intentioned--should hold such a monopoly.

The complaint abroad is not that America is withdrawing into an isolationist shell, as it has so often in the past. Rather, foreigners diagnose America as suffering from a bad case of “me first.”

Free of the need to contain the Soviet Union, a goal that guided foreign policy for nearly half a century, the United States during the Clinton years has focused on new objectives: pressing American commercial interests in the global economy, championing democracy and intervening militarily to protect human rights.

These goals concern foreign leaders less than the manner in which they have been pursued--a manner that appears inconsistent, sporadic and occasionally capricious. With communism vanquished, American political leaders appear to have tossed aside their inhibitions against using their foreign policy differences as an arena for partisan bickering.

Last year’s rejection by the Senate of a treaty banning nuclear weapons testing is a case in point. America’s allies and adversaries alike interpreted the move not as a judgment of the treaty’s merits but as part of a Republican vendetta against President Clinton.

While the damage is not necessarily irreversible, it strains old friendships and diminishes America’s ability to rally support. It risks depriving the U.S. of the goodwill that has been a priceless asset for decades--in building the post-World War II order, winning the Cold War and setting the international agenda.

“It’s a very big issue,” acknowledged Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott.

The backlash is global:

* In the Persian Gulf, where the United States rallied 38 nations to its cause to fight Iraq in 1991, only Britain answers the call to strike the same nation seven years later.

* At a retreat deep in the French countryside, the presidents of America’s oldest ally (France) and Washington’s fast-emerging Asian adversary (China) spent much of their time mulling a common problem: the enormity of American power.

* In New Delhi well before Clinton’s recent visit, the Russian prime minister suggested that India, China and Russia form a partnership as a counterweight to the United States.

* In Tokyo, the Japanese government announced plans to develop its own intelligence-gathering satellites, a sign of its desire to build an independent military capability.

* In Brussels, the European Union’s drive for a common foreign and security policy is propelled in part by the conviction among America’s closest friends that they can no longer rely on the United States to “be there” to the extent that they could during the Cold War. Even in NATO’s U.S.-led intervention in Kosovo, one of the chief U.S. objectives was to avoid casualties.

Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington points to a “shrinking circle of governments who see their interests coinciding with those of the United States.” He says the consistent 4-1 American majority of earlier years among the five permanent U.N. Security Council members (the United States, Britain, France and China against the Soviet Union) has degenerated into a potential standoff, with the U.S. and Britain siding against Russia and China, and with France holding a swing vote.

A recent example: When Russia objected to the U.S.-sponsored nomination of Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus to lead U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq, it was quickly joined by both France and China, dooming America’s candidate.

“We’ve lost the sense of what we’re really good at: getting people to join us,” Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor during the Reagan and Bush administrations, said in an interview. “We don’t think as much about the effects of our actions on other people. We don’t consult, we don’t ask ahead of time. We behave to much of the world like a latter-day colonial power. It’s a very dangerous thing that’s happening.”

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who served as chairman of the House International Relations Committee, says the distance between America and the world it dominates is particularly evident at the United Nations.

“I don’t want to blow this into a major crisis,” said Hamilton, who now heads the Woodrow Wilson Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “But I put it in the category of serious concern.”

His concern grew when Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) warned the U.N. in January that the United States would pull out if the world body did not serve American interests. The crusty lawmaker’s message wasn’t entirely new, but delivering it in person gave it additional oomph, and even the ambassadors of America’s closest allies resented his threatening tone.

In a world filled with skepticism and stifling bureaucratic barriers, America has stood out as a special place: an unlikely melting pot of immigrants, fresh ideas and freedom that people everywhere aspire to, whether their governments agreed with U.S. policy or not; a powerful nation promoting universal values but not pushing for new land. Any erosion of this feeling would directly affect America’s global influence.

“If you don’t have it, you need a gendarme on every corner,” said Charles William Maynes, director of the Washington-based Eurasia Foundation. “Society internationally, just as domestically, depends on deference--deference to tradition, to authority, to law, to treaty commitments. If you lose that, the only thing you can back it up with is force, and there isn’t enough force to go around.

“There’s still a reservoir of goodwill for America, but we’re squandering it.”

Contributing mightily to this concern was the way in which the Senate voted last year to kill the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, not on its merits but largely as a tactical ploy by Republicans in a game of domestic political “gotcha” with Clinton.

Such casual dismissal of a treaty widely viewed outside the United States as a cornerstone of a safer world seriously wounded America’s stock as the global superpower. “It’s had a profound effect,” said former Defense Secretary William J. Perry.

Some European commentators equate the vote with the Senate’s 1920 rejection of the Versailles Treaty establishing the League of Nations--one step down the path that eventually led to World War II.

“It was similar to 1920, but with hubris and nukes thrown in,” said French defense analyst Francois Heisbourg.

“The impression is one of complete disregard for the rest of the world,” said Denis Lacorne, a specialist on transatlantic relations at the Center for International Studies in Paris. “If you are as multicultural as you claim to be, how can you show such little interest in the outside world?”

Beyond the test ban treaty, critics point to a host of other American deeds, misdeeds and nondeeds.

In 1997, powerful U.S. lawmakers declared an international agreement to control so-called greenhouse gases “dead on arrival” in the Senate. The Clinton administration declined to join more than 130 other nations in signing a treaty banning the use of land mines, insisting that the United States is a special case.

Likewise, the United States refused to join more than 90 countries establishing an International Criminal Court in 1998 after unsuccessfully insisting on immunity from prosecution for American soldiers and diplomats--but not those of other countries. Delegates to the founding conference for the court cheered the defeat of a U.S. attempt to exempt American soldiers.

The United States, which in the 1960s threatened action against nations that were late in their dues payments to the U.N. and other world organizations, has itself become a major deadbeat.

For nearly two years, the U.S. withheld $1 billion in dues to the U.N. while the White House and the Republican Congress wrestled over whether to allow any of that money to be spent on abortion. And the U.S. has fallen behind in its dues to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Organization of American States and an array of others.

Countless little things also contribute to the view that America considers itself not only special but detached.

Former German opposition leader Wolfgang Schaeuble, viewed as the likely next chancellor of Europe’s economic behemoth until his party’s recent political scandal, was forced to cancel a planned trip to Washington last year because the senior policymakers he wanted to see had no time for him.

Many expect the distance between America and its friends to grow.

Pressure from Congress for a new national missile defense system that would protect America--and America alone--against a limited attack looms as the next issue. Allies fear that a decision to go ahead would not just add to worries about America’s isolation but also touch off the first arms race in defensive weapons.

Some foreign affairs specialists argue that an American missile defense system would be in the allies’ interest because the United States cannot preserve peace in the world or project its force if it feels under threat. But they admit that the administration must work harder to get its message across.

Festering trade frictions, especially with America’s traditional friends in Europe, are a special concern because they so quickly become explosive political issues.

At last fall’s World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, the American hosts found themselves so out of touch with so many nations that they were forced to suspend business without reaching any agreements at all. The result was a major embarrassment for the United States, especially because such events are normally scripted in advance to assure at least some kind of agreement. Critics accused the U.S. of failing to consult with other participants in advance, out of the arrogant assumption that particularly the smaller nations would naturally follow its lead.

“This worries me more than any one thing,” said Sen. Charles Hagel (R-Neb.), one of a new generation of internationalists in the Senate. “It worries me first because most of us are not picking this up on our radar--this sense that we don’t care about what our trading partners or our allies . . . think. It’s going to come back and snap us in some ways that are very bad for this country.”

The complaint of lack of consultation reaches well beyond trade issues. In 1998, U.S. officials declared that funding for North Korea’s civilian nuclear reactors--more than 80% of which is coming from Japan--could go ahead despite North Korea’s test-firing of a medium-range missile over Japan.

“The Japanese were not included in any way in these negotiations,” said Michael Green, a Japan scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. “They were absolutely furious.”

Why has the United States become so aloof? Analysts point to four major causes:

* A president who engages only episodically on the international issues and too often has failed to use either the personal prestige or the power of his office to pursue key foreign policy goals.

* A Congress that cares little about foreign affairs in the wake of the Cold War and seems to understand even less.

* A relationship between the two branches of government that is so poisonous in the wake of Clinton’s impeachment that a simple political vendetta can trump the national interest. When the Berlin Wall collapsed more than a decade ago, so too did the long-held tradition that partisan politics ends at the water’s edge.

* An American public generally receptive to an active global role for the United States, but inattentive to world affairs and confused by partisan backbiting now that its principal reference point--the evil of communism--has all but vanished as a major threat.

While opinion polls during the run-up to last October’s nuclear test ban treaty vote in the Senate found that 80% of the public said they supported treaty ratification, surveys taken after the vote found that less than half even knew that it had been defeated.

“It’s a familiar pattern of public support for foreign affairs in this country--a mile wide and an inch deep,” noted Alton Frye, who tracks how foreign affairs issues are handled with Congress for the Council on Foreign Relations. “The country is . . . ready to follow a lead, but when the president and Congress disagree, the public is stranded.”

In Congress, interest in foreign affairs has plummeted as much as a result of changing priorities as of public apathy. The absence of any visible threat to the nation’s security also helps reduce international issues to just one more arena for partisan politics.

“Congress, the Senate specifically, is peopled by individuals who arrived here with . . . a blank slate on notions relating to foreign policy and America’s power in the world,” said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I’d bet that in the last eight to 10 years, not 1% of those who come here talked about foreign policy during their campaigns.”

Interest in foreign affairs is so low among Senate Republicans that they have struggled to fill the party’s 10 slots on the Foreign Relations Committee. Last year, they considered--but put off--a proposal to downgrade the committee’s importance. Senators may sit on just one high-level committee; demoting Foreign Relations might encourage some to select it as a second choice.

But political analysts say it is wrong to blame Congress alone. They trace much of the problem to a failure of presidential leadership.

“We’ve got a president who’s not interested in foreign policy, so domestic lobbies are decisive when foreign policy issues arise,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to President Carter.

For instance, domestic political concerns last spring led to Clinton’s failure to agree with China on the terms of Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization and to his determination to avoid American casualties during the Kosovo bombing campaign, Brzezinski said.

The damage does not appear permanent. Some analysts are convinced that, if a new, involved president takes office next January, accompanied by a clear-sighted staff and decent relations with Congress, that would go a long way. It remains unclear, however, whether either Al Gore or George W. Bush, who have their parties’ presidential nominations all but locked up, would come to office with such a favorable constellation.

Richard Haass, a foreign affairs specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, also hopes for a more actively engaged business community and a new emphasis on foreign affairs by nonprofit foundations.

“It can’t be fixed overnight,” he said. “You just hope it doesn’t take events to fix it--because if it does, it’s going to be a disaster that focuses the mind.”

Hagel says that American business will push foreign affairs back toward the top of the national agenda as the country’s $2.2 trillion in total international trade binds American prosperity ever tighter to the world at large. “This is starting to build,” he said.

Others are counting on the younger generation to reverse America’s go-it-alone tendencies. “We’ve got an entire generation who see the world in very different terms than we did,” Biden said. “You tell them we can do everything on our own in this interconnected world, and they’ll tell you you’re crazy.”

Until then, analysts prescribe a measure of humility for the world’s only surviving superpower.

“Triumphalism is hard to control,” said Maynes of the Eurasia Foundation. “We have to be conscious of the shadow we cast.”

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A World of Troubles

Unhappiness with U.S. dominance is building around the globe, among both America’s traditional allies and its longtime adversaries.

European Union: Reflexive pro-Americanism is waning among leaders who cut their teeth on anti-American protests of the 1960s, not on American aid packages in the 1940s.

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Russia: Disillusionment with what Russians see as second-rate treatment by the U.S. and anger with American condemnation of Moscow’s assault on Chechnya are sinking relations to lowest point since Cold War.

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China: Political wounds still fester in the wake of U.S. bombing of Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia last spring, proposed legislation boosting aid to Taiwan and official allegations that China infiltrated American nuclear installations.

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Latin America: Resentment toward U.S. trade policies that are viewed as protectionist is driving South and Central America to regard the European Union as the role model for greater economic integration.

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South Asia: Washington’s efforts to coax India and Pakistan to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, especially after the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty, have diminished U.S. credibility.

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Japan: Anger over casual U.S. response to recent North Korean missile test and U.S. flirtation with China is fueling a drive to establish a military capacity independent of the United States.