Seeking a Stable World

American foreign policy in the post-cold war world has been a tale of two Americas. One America, the revolutionary power, has sought to tear down national barriers in the name of globalization and to remake the world in America's liberal market image. The other America, the status quo power, has worked to preserve US dominance. Over the past decade, these conflicting political/cultural tendencies have found common expression in a foreign policy best described as one of US triumphalism.

The voice of another America has largely been missing from our foreign policy discourse during this period. That is the voice of America that world-order power -- the generous America that helped rebuild Europe with the Marshall Plan, the farsighted America that envisioned the UN, America the principled yet pragmatic power that forged great-power cooperation around common world-order goals. This America is needed more than ever in the early twenty-first century as a balance to America's revolutionary instincts and as a corrective to our status quo tendencies.

America's revolutionary impulse has been most evident in the role the United States has played as the official sponsor of -- and moving political force behind -- the revolution in world affairs popularly known as globalization. It has been this America that has relentlessly pushed trade and financial liberalization, that has rewritten the rules of humanitarian intervention and from whose soil thousands of nongovernmental organizations have campaigned for human rights and environmental causes.

A revolution as sweeping as globalization simultaneously creates the need for a new order, for a new way of managing transnational relations. But it is here where the tendencies of America the status quo power have come into play. Washington's answer to the order question has not been to reinvent global governance but rather to fall back on the comfortable notion of US dominance. An otherwise forward-looking Clinton Administration surrendered early on to the bipartisan appeal of dominance -- even when opportunity or crisis called for moving beyond the status quo. It pushed NATO expansion, for example, not because an enlarged NATO represented an appropriate security structure for post-cold war Europe but because NATO was the institution that Washington controlled.

If the Clinton Administration has had a theory of world order to go along with its emphasis on dominance, it has been one of democratic liberal market convergence. The world of liberalized capital flows would be made safe if other countries became more like us -- if they adopted similar legal systems, the same accounting practices and adhered to the same democratic principles. World order would derive not just from good state-to-state relations but from the quality of governance in each of the world's countries.

It is easy to see why this utopian notion appealed to both America's revolutionary and status quo instincts. But it was bound to fail not only because it ran into the deeply rooted cultural and political practices of other nations but because the United States lacked the will and resources needed to micromanage the make-over of other societies. The discrepancy between America the revolutionary power and America the status quo power has left us with a huge governance gap in world affairs: a mismatch between the brave new world of global markets and failing states, on the one hand, and the institutional arrangements and great-power understandings needed to deal with them, on the other.

America the revolutionary power is on the right track in one major sense: A globalized information age does offer the promise of a better life for the great majority of the world's population. But in order for that promise to be realized, order-keeping institutions and global regulation are needed in some form -- whether in the form of great-power understandings or democratically accountable international bodies or as a result of the moral suasion of transnational civil society. Otherwise, the tyranny of the market and of international chaos will simply replace the tyranny of oligarchic state power and cold war empires.

The challenge is to figure out how to balance America's incurably revolutionary character with world-order considerations in its foreign policy. The ultimate goal of a world-oriented foreign policy is not to increase America's power; rather, it is to increase the capacity of the international system to contain large-scale violence, promote democracy and economic development, and avoid environmental destruction. Given this overarching goal, how does a world-oriented foreign policy differ from US foreign policy of the past decade?

First, such a foreign policy would be more concerned with shaping the architecture of the emerging international system than with micromanaging the socioeconomic systems of individual countries. Our objective should not be to make every country a liberal democracy but to create a structure of world order that would make it easier for countries to move in that direction if they so choose. Geopolitically, our principal concern should be with avoidance (and deterrence, if necessary) of great-power conflict and prevention of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. We should help set up the machinery and the rules for international peacekeeping, but we should leave the work of peacekeeping and nation-building to middle-level powers and to a UN-like body, which, if given adequate resources, would be better suited for these task. Economically, our main worry should be about getting global macroeconomic policy right, about establishing a level trade and investment playing field for developed and developing countries alike, and about reforming an international financial system that is prone to booms and busts. But we should leave the micromanagement of other countries' reforms as well as democracy-building to nongovernmental organizations and international development agencies with better track records in these areas.

Second, our principal foreign policy objective should be to find common interest with other centers of power on key world-order issues and to involve them in constructive long-range world-order endeavors -- whether it be the spread of information technologies or the eradication of disease. But in order to build such consensus, the United States must be willing to forgo from time to time its maximalist goals, whether they be a world of totally unfettered capital flows or a world rid of Saddam Hussein. Better to have Russian cooperation on controlling nuclear weapons than to have an even larger NATO. Better to have an international agreement on the minimal goal of containing Saddam's Iraq than to have France and Russia undermining that goal because they don't agree with our policy of rollback. We need to relearn that we do not need to get our way on every issue to have a world order that is generally favorable to US interests and values.

Third, a world-order-oriented foreign policy would be more willing to share power as a way of enlisting other powers to assume more of the burden for maintaining peace and prosperity. To date, Washington has been eager to talk about burden-sharing but reluctant to offer any real power-sharing -- witness the US proposal for cutting its share of UN funding. But it would be in our long-term interest if the United States were to strike a bargain with Europe and Japan whereby Washington gave up some control of international institutions, like the IMF and World Bank, in return for an increase in their contributions. An America-centric world order is ultimately unstable not only because it causes other countries to resist it but because US resources and willpower are limited. Indeed, the principal problem of world order is the huge gap between the demand for international public goods (military protection, development assistance, etc.) and the supply. We can close this gap by leveraging the resources of other powers -- not just those of Europe and Japan but those other middle-level powers like Australia and Canada and potential powers like India and Russia; not just states but major corporations civil-society groups as well. Closing the public-goods gap is critical to rebalancing the imbalance between threats and incentives that has developed in Western policy since the end of World War II. The resort to sanctions or the cutoff of international assistance has increased many times over, but the positive inducements the West has to offer have declined in relation to the changes demanded. Only future membership in the European Union (and possibly NAFTA) seems to offer elites in developing countries the incentives they need to undertake the painful reforms envisioned by trade and financial liberalization. A world-order-oriented foreign policy would make expanding these clubs an international priority.

Fourth, a world-order perspective would understand that US dominance will not last forever and that it would be a wise use of US power to build longer-term institutional arrangements favorable to its interests and values that would outlast US dominance. It would also understand that effective global governance requires international bodies that pool state sovereignty and command popular support. That does not mean the UN and the IMF as we now know them, but institutions that are both more focused and more accountable. It might mean, for example, a world security authority for peacekeeping and nation-building that while still answerable to the UN Security Council, is nonetheless separately constituted and more professionally run. As to the question of democratic accountability, a world-order-oriented foreign policy would increase the democratic accountability of international institutions not be letting NGOs have a seat at the negotiating table, as some have proposed, for in the end NGOs are no more democratic than the multinational corporations they criticize. Rather, it would do so by making greater use of inter-parliamentary committees, by including elected Congressional and parliamentary figures in the policy