U.S. Foreign Policy, Brought Back Home

President George W. Bush saw the big change needed in America's foreign policy long before the intellectuals and the media did. Bush's campaign rhetoric and subsequent foreign affairs strategy -- in which he has sought to clear the decks of nonessential overseas involvements in order to concentrate on security threats for a new military and technological age -- while wrong in some specifics, have been proven tragically prescient in their overall conception. It is not that Bush foresaw specifically the recent terrorist attack; but his insistence that humanitarian missions are not a signal priority in a dangerous world -- where America has to look after its own -- showed considerable instinct regarding what has happened.

Moreover, his conception is firmly grounded in history. It realizes that America's continued dominance -- like that of Britain and Rome before it -- is not certain. Thus, improving the chances of America remaining a dominant power requires the husbanding of our foreign policy resources and the continued adaptation of our military establishment to new kinds of threats. What seems absolutely ahistorical today is the vision of a permanently secure America that will have the luxury of open-ended overseas deployments in places such as Bosnia and Kosovo. The latest spasm of triumphalist idealism -- first injected into our conduct of foreign affairs by President Woodrow Wilson in the early 20th century -- ended with the destruction of the World Trade Center. We can no longer afford the luxury of noblesse oblige in foreign policy now that the assumption of security at home is absent. Foreign policy must return to what it traditionally has been: the diplomatic aspect of national security rather than a branch of Holocaust studies.

The 20th century did not, as many have claimed, end ahead of schedule in November 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 1990s were not the beginning of a new, more enlightened era in international relations; rather, they were a coda to the Cold War in Eastern Europe and a period when the World War II Nazi slaughter of the Jews was uppermost in our minds as we tried to grapple with ethnic hatreds in the Balkans and elsewhere.

The 20th century ended behind schedule -- in September 2001. The post-Cold War era will be seen in future decades as a 12-year interregnum -- from the collapse of the Berlin Wall to the collapse of the World Trade Center -- in which the United States, basking in its victory over communism and with a seemingly unstoppable economy, tried to impose its moral vision on the rest of the world, while neglecting its homeland defense. Security became lax at airports, and the military and intelligence establishments were neither reformed nor beefed up, even as we dispatched troops to trouble spots only marginally related to our national interests. But following the most deadly terrorist incident in history, the American people have learned that to influence the world morally requires first the preservation of their own security, as well as their reputation for power.

The need to maintain power and security must now come first: Our values will follow in their wake. After all, democratization in places such as Eastern Europe has not been a natural and inevitable event; it is a direct consequence of our Cold War military victory. If the destruction of the World Trade Center diminishes America's reputation for power -- if it seems to paralyze this nation and make it appear unduly fearful -- the democratic values that we promote abroad will be similarly eclipsed.

Now we are truly in an age of new technological threats -- particularly chemical and biological weapons -- that will return us to an earlier epoch, at the beginning of the 19th century, when realism flourished under men like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton while we were being threatened on our own continent by the French and Spanish, as well as by the British fleet. Such realism posits that foreign affairs entails a separate, sadder morality than the kind we apply in domestic policy and in our daily lives. That is because domestically we operate under the rule of law, while the wider world is an anarchic realm where we are forced to take the law into our own hands. This is a distinction that the public will tolerate now that its security has been shaken. The public will likely have little trouble comprehending why Bush may have to perpetrate a certain amount of evil in coming months and even years in order to do a greater amount of good.

Even our vision of democracy must now undergo subtle realistic alteration. Rather than demand that countries such as Pakistan, Egypt and Tunisia democratize, we will have to increasingly tolerate benign dictatorships and various styles of hybrid regimes, provided that they help us in our new struggle. Nor will there be anything amoral or cynical about that. For, in the long term, the world will be a better place if the American people feel secure.

In the new age of warfare, speed will be the killer variable, making democratic consultation an afterthought. Striking terrorist cells before they strike us -- hitting not just hijackers, but the computer command centers of our future adversaries before they can launch computer viruses on the United States, for instance -- will need to be accomplished by surprise if it is to be effective. That will leave no time for the president to sound out the public or even many members of Congress.

The public will not likely mind, provided the attacks are seen to contribute to its safety. The more prosperous a society is, the more moral compromises it will be ready to make to preserve its material well-being. One of the false beliefs of the age of globalization has been that economic power has superseded military power. In fact, the reality is the reverse. The greater the economic power, the more military power is required to protect it, especially because of the envy and resentment that such economic power generates. Blather about how financial markets are the new foundation of power -- the mantra of optimists transfixed by globalization throughout the 1990s -- can only be indulged in when the physical security of those markets can be taken for granted. And it no longer can be.

Unfettered idealism of the sort associated with Woodrow Wilson is feasible only so long as the United States feels itself geographically invulnerable. Whenever we have failed to implement our lofty vision abroad, we have been able to retreat back across great oceans, as we did after World War I. Today, however, because of technology, places such as the Middle East are as close to us as the Ottoman Turkish Empire was to Europe. Oceanic distance from global hot spots such as the West Bank no longer exists. The duo of idealism and isolationism will have to be replaced by realism and constant engagement: engagement consistent with our national interest.

In his novel "The Secret Agent," Joseph Conrad wrote that the greatest threat to terrorism are ordinary citizens: the throngs of working- and middle-class people who -- because they just want to get on with their lives -- are willing to trust the grim details of their protection to the police and other security organs. Following Sept. 11, 2001, these ordinary citizens will determine foreign policy. It has ceased to be the realm of cosmopolitan elites in the media and academia, who for the past 12 years have been more concerned with universal values of justice than with our national security. But the elites' dream of an international civilization has been stillborn. Globalization, like the Industrial Revolution before it, is merely a phase of technological development -- not a system of international security. Wars will go on, because beyond the liberal elites, humanity is as divided as ever.