Dissed by the World, U.S. Must Reshape Foreign Policy : Diplomacy

WASHINGTON —  Is America becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of international relations--a country that “gets no respect.

Last week, the Russians told Defense Secretary William J. Perry that, notwithstanding U.S. protests, Russia intends to go ahead with its sale of light-water nuclear reactors to Iran. But this is only the latest in a series of rebuffs from foreign governments.

Germany and other West Europeans have refused to follow the American lead in trying to end trade with Iran. Japan, for the first time in the history of the postwar relationship, has publicly said “no” to a U.S. President pressing Japan to open its markets. Tiny Singapore proceeded to administer painful lashes to an American teen-ager after President Bill Clinton suggested the punishment was excessive. France humiliated Washington by revealing to the world press that U.S. spies had been caught trying to bribe French officials to provide information on French trade policy--which is copiously published in all French newspapers.

Egypt is resisting U.S. requests that it meekly sign up for an indefinite extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It wants the United States to press Israel to announce its willingness to honor the treaty, assuming success in the peace process.

Turkey recently invaded a part of Iraq that U.S. officials have told Iraqi Kurds America would safeguard against attack. Washington tells the Haitian president to rebuild the Haitian army, and the man who would not be in power except for the arrival of the U.S. military says “no.”

Fidel Castro might well ask, “Why do you get so excited when I pull your whiskers? Look at what the rest of the world is doing.”

This kind of disrespect was not supposed to happen. The post-Cold War era was to be America’s “unipolar moment.” The nation had emerged as the world’s only superpower. We will spend more on our military over the next five years than the rest of the world combined. The economy is bubbling along. The values of democracy and the free market are without serious challenge. Why doesn’t the rest of the world realize this?

Two factors explain the growing trend of foreign defiance to U.S. policies and whims. One is the erosion of the cement of fear that, during the Cold War, bound the fate of others to our own. The second is the progressive dulling of America’s diplomatic tools--a bipartisan achievement.

Americans have still not awakened to the enormous change that the end of the Cold War brought to the world scene. As long as it raged, the greatest fear of most governments was abandonment by a superpower, leaving them exposed to the full force of the other side. In the hierarchy of policy choices, acceding to the wishes of Washington or Moscow was accorded the highest priority.

Today, the greatest fear of most states is not external aggression but internal disorder. The United States can do little about the latter, whereas it used to be able to do a great deal about the former. In other words, the coinage of U.S. power in the world has been devalued by the change in the international agenda. We are all geared up to fight wars that are not taking place. According to U.N. statistics, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world has witnessed 82 conflicts; 79 are internal and do not trigger the structure of deterrence that the United States so carefully built up during the Cold War.

But Americans have also unnecessarily dulled the tools of diplomacy. Hans Morgenthau, the great theorist of realism in foreign policy, once said the three tools of the statesmen are logic, bribes and threats. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States has employed less logic, offered fewer bribes and found its threats were no longer credible.

With the Cold War logic of global engagement gone, the Bush and Clinton Administrations should have developed a new doctrine of engagement, which would necessarily have been more limited than was the case for most of the Cold War. Instead, we got a call for a “new world order” and for the enlargement of democracies and free markets throughout the world. These were visionary hopes consistent with an America that could be present everywhere but not policies reflecting a country that, because of resource constraints, had to reduce its international profile.

Another source of U.S. power during the Cold War was the country’s trade and aid policy. But the shift of America during the Reagan years from the world’s greatest creditor to the world’s greatest debtor undermined this source of strength. Our current-account deficit spells an end to the Cold War policies of building up the economic strength of allies by permitting them to discriminate against U.S. goods.

Meanwhile, the U.S. aid program has been progressively gutted and the remaining portion increasingly concentrated on the Middle East. In 1968, Israel and Egypt combined received less than 3% of U.S. aid. That percentage soared as a result of Kissingerian diplomacy, reaching new heights after the Camp David agreement. When the current Congress finishes its work, two countries, Israel and Egypt, may account for as much as 75% of U.S. aid. Obviously, such priorities mean a good deal of U.S. influence in the Middle East but much less elsewhere.

As for threats, Morganthau’s last category, these are discarded in a post-Cold War world, where trying to use force as a diplomatic tool does not mean raising the defense budget but deploying troops to messy internal conflicts--which every public-opinion poll suggests Americans will not support, and, in most cases, should not support.

The free conceptual ride most U.S. policy-makers have had as a result of the Cold War is over. They can no longer simply announce and look for others to follow. Rather, they must engage in a painful point-counterpoint that has characterized the diplomacy of most states.

In the case of Iran, this means looking soberly at a policy that rests more on the emotion of past hostility than on any calculation of future interest. We cannot stop Russia (and Germany) from carrying out a sale that vastly exceeds the value of U.S. aid provided Moscow; that is consistent with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and parallels what the United States is doing in North Korea. Instead, as in the case of North Korea, we must press the Russians to attach conditions to the sale that will diminish U.S. concerns.

If we don’t hone our diplomatic skills and do this soon, however, our protests at the treatment we are receiving may be as consequential as Dangerfield’s, whose complaints do not change the behavior of others terribly much.