American Influence Abroad May Shrink

As the country awaits the outcome of the presidential election, few have had the time or the emotional energy to look down the road at the longer-term implications of one of the closest electoral contests in U.S. history. At a time when Americans were largely obsessed by the twists and turns of the domestic political soap opera, fewer still were looking at the consequences of the electoral deadlock for foreign policy.

Yet, there will be consequences, and they could be severe. The next four years are shaping up as a time of serious testing for U.S. foreign policy, and a divided Congress and a president with a weak mandate, at best, will find it extremely difficult to navigate the shoals lying ahead.

It won’t be the big, obvious challenges that cause the real problems. If Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait again, the United States will once more go to the defense of the oil-rich sheikdom. If China attacks Taiwan, the United States will appropriately respond. Both parties are likely to cling to the long-standing policy of nudging the Palestinians to make a deal with Israel. And U.S. influence in Russia will remain weak.

Unfortunately, not all the challenges are this clear-cut. Take Mexico. The United States urgently needs President-elect Vicente Fox to succeed at his twin projects of modernizing the Mexican economy and solidifying Mexican democracy. Mexico is going to need more resources, more understanding and, on issues like immigration, a more generous policy from the United States. With public opinion still bitterly split over the North American Free Trade Agreement, and Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt’s Democrats more partisan than ever in the House, coming up with a new, positive consensus policy on Mexico will be harder to do.

Then there’s the Andean region, seemingly bent on disproving all the optimists who just a few years ago predicted that an era of stable democracy was dawning in Latin America. Colombian drug lords and Marxist guerrillas--from a U.S. point of view, the alliance from hell--have fought that country’s corrupt and sometimes ill-disciplined armed forces to a standstill, and the violence is spilling over into Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador and the home of the Panama Canal.

Peru, meanwhile, is flirting with a return to its banana-republic days, Ecuador is closer to political and social meltdown and the president of Venezuela, one of the largest sources of U.S. oil imports, is literally crooning love songs with Fidel Castro on the radio and expounding vague but, from the standpoint of foreign investors, alarming theories of what he calls a “Bolivarian revolution.”

A serious crisis could flare up in this region at a moment’s notice, and those who remember the controversies over Central American policy in the 1980s--and the continuing bitter battles over Cuba today--know how hard it can be for the United States to develop a political consensus concerning neighborhood policy.

Expanding NAFTA or pushing harder to establish a free trade area of the Americas are proposals most of the Washington establishment think have the best chances for stabilizing the region but, again, it is hard to see a politically enfeebled president and a divided Congress mustering the determination to move far down either road.

Trade gridlock could have repercussions beyond the Western Hemisphere. It will be harder for a weak president to make the kinds of creative concessions and compromises necessary to resolve trade disputes at the World Trade Organization, thereby increasing the risk of trade wars with partners like the European Union. Fast-track authority for new trade rounds will be difficult, if not impossible to get.

The news isn’t all bleak. In some cases, Republicans and Democrats are more united than their rhetoric suggests. Candidate George W. Bush may have downplayed environmental concerns and attacked the Kyoto Protocol, but world public opinion is worried enough about global warming that, like it or not, the U.S. has to be part of diplomatic efforts to address it. Ditto on AIDS. Whether or not Bush agrees that AIDS is a “national security threat” to the United States, the humanitarian and economic consequences of the HIV-AIDS epidemic are severe enough that both common decency and self-interest will compel the U.S. to take part in international efforts to halt the spread of the disease and to treat those who suffer from it. No U.S. administration can afford to ignore the international clamor for nuclear arms control, just as it cannot ignore the domestic popularity of national missile defense.

The real danger may be that the two parties will hold foreign policy hostage in an atmosphere of partisan bickering. If Congress settles down into trench warfare, the ability of the United States to conduct effective foreign policy could be seriously hampered. Fierce partisans would hold up the confirmation of key officials and ambassadors, block votes on foreign-assistance packages and use all means that Congress possesses to harass and annoy a president lacking a mandate.

Weak leadership also means trouble. When, as frequently happens, hot-headed domestic lobbies introduce bills with serious foreign-policy consequences--like the recent effort by Armenian Americans to have the House of Representatives declare Turkish-led 1915 massacres of Armenians in eastern Anatolia acts of genocide--a weak president, combined with a weak congressional leadership, may not be able to block the pander. Infuriate Turkey by an Armenian pander here, China with a Tibet pander there, India with a Kashmir pander, Spain with a Basque pander--after a while you can get in real trouble.

What can be done to limit the damage? The answer, for which there is plenty of precedent, is relatively simple: The next president must not only govern from the center, he will have to appoint leading representatives of the opposition party to key foreign-policy posts. His administration also will have to frequently confer with the opposition over foreign policy.

This has happened before. The current secretary of Defense is a Republican. President George Bush found key places for Democrats in his administration, notably Bernard Aronson, who as assistant secretary of State for inter-American affairs helped win Democratic support for a process that ended the political wars in Washington and the shooting wars in Central America. By working closely with Democrats in Congress, Aronson was able to break the deadlock over issues like aid to the Contras.

Making bipartisan appointments does not mean retreating on questions of principle. There are Democrats, like former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn, whose hard-line positions on national-security issues please many Republicans. There are Republicans, like the young Turks of the Weekly Standard, who staunchly supported humanitarian intervention in the Balkans. Either presidential candidate can find plenty of talent in the other party to staff senior and junior foreign-policy posts.

Presidents with weak mandates can run a strong foreign policy: Look at Harry S. Truman. But, like Truman, they can do so only with help from their political opponents. If the next president remembers this, he will be able to provide effective leadership for the nation no matter how narrow his margin of victory or how many recounts it took to get him into the White House.