The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era Read online

  Although they differ in significant respects, these two approaches have an important common feature: both lend themselves to ever-higher consumption without ever-higher taxation. Each approach made Americans an offer they could not, and did not, refuse: more spending, both public and private. These circumstances were favorable to those seeking resources to support a wide range of public policies, including foreign policy.

  The collapse of 2008, the surge in American indebtedness, and the retirement of the baby boomers with the resulting explosion of claims on the federal government will create a different economic imperative: higher taxes, more saving, and less consumption. This change will reduce the resources available for all public purposes: there will be less to go around. Along with other publicly funded activities, the change will impose new limits on the conduct of foreign policy. It will do so by altering the framework within which American foreign policy is made and carried out.

  FOREIGN POLICY LIMITS

  For the American public, matters of foreign policy are more distant and less familiar than domestic issues. Where taxes and government-provided benefits are concerned, Americans tend to have clear views, which they transmit forcefully to their elected representatives. On issues close to home, they feel at home. When it comes to policies toward other countries, the direct stakes for individual citizens seem (and usually are) low. Accordingly, most Americans know little about them and pay only occasional attention to them. Americans organize themselves into sizable, powerful lobbies, to which they contribute time and money on a large scale, to press for direct economic benefits from the government; the lobbies that focus on international affairs are smaller and less powerful.

  In foreign policy-making, in fact, the American public is divided into two groups of vastly different sizes: a small one, located mainly on the two coasts and especially concentrated in Washington, D.C., follows international issues closely, writes about and discusses them in the media, and, when its members serve as government officials, sets and carries out the foreign policy of the United States. The much larger majority of the population has far less information, interest, and influence. Foreign policy is the province of the expert. The foreign policy community is the equivalent of a physician, to which the public cedes responsibility for diagnoses and prescriptions governing America’s relations with other countries.

  This does not mean, however, that on matters of foreign policy the American government can do whatever it wants, or that it is restrained only by the opinions and activities of the members of the foreign policy community who do not hold office. In foreign affairs, as on domestic issues, policies are subject to democratic control. To be sure, the government has wider latitude in initiating foreign policies. But the public ultimately renders a verdict on them, through public opinion polls approving or disapproving of them and, most powerfully, through elections, in which those responsible for the policies are either returned to office or defeated. On matters of foreign policy the public in effect says to the government: You do what you think serves the interests of the United States. After seeing the result, we’ll pass judgment on what you’ve done. If we don’t approve, we’ll fire you.

  The public’s verdict is not always favorable. Public officials do get fired. The presidents responsible for initiating the American wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq all suffered public rejection. (In none of these cases did the public oppose the goals on behalf of which the war was being waged—a non-communist South Korea and South Vietnam and a united, stable, democratic, pro-Western Iraq. Instead, Americans concluded that the government was spending too much, in both lives and dollars, in pursuit of those goals.)

  Nor is electoral punishment the only constraint on the freedom to manage American foreign policy. The government operates within limits that arise from a broad consensus about what is desirable and what is feasible for the United States. During the Cold War, for example, it scrupulously avoided measures likely to bring the country into direct military conflict with the Soviet Union, for that would have sharply increased the chance of a catastrophic nuclear war. At the same time, the United States maintained a large and expensive military presence in Europe, because this was widely agreed to be necessary to protect American interests by deterring a Soviet attack.

  The limits that govern American foreign policy are not formally encoded in a foreign policy charter and are seldom even set out explicitly. They are more like customs in small-scale societies or good manners in larger ones: they are tacitly, but widely, understood. Prudent people who wish to be considered members in good standing of the foreign policy establishment take care not to violate these limits.

  In the United States, issues of foreign policy, like their domestic counterparts, are energetically debated. Sharply different preferences are regularly advocated for advancing American interests in the Middle East, for example, or on the subject of nuclear proliferation. Those debates, however, take place within these limits. Just as the rules of baseball determine what players can and cannot do on the baseball diamond in pursuit of victory for their teams, so the tacit boundaries of American foreign policy determine what may be legitimately proposed and carried out to further the national interests of the United States.

  The economic crisis of 2008 and especially the gargantuan economic obligations that will confront the country in its wake will redraw those boundaries in two closely related ways. First, the limits of the possible for foreign policy will be narrower than they have been for many decades. The government will still have an allowance to spend on foreign affairs, but because competing costs will rise it will be smaller than in the past. Evidence of the narrowing of the publicly permitted scope for foreign policy appeared in a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations in the latter half of 2009. It found that a higher proportion of Americans agreed that the United States should “mind its own business internationally”—49 percent—than at any time since the Gallup survey had first asked this particular question, in 1964. Only 44 percent of the respondents disagreed with this sentiment. Not coincidentally, the proportion of Americans who considered the national debt the country’s most serious problem rose sharply, according to other polls.

  Second, the limits that constrain the government in its external initiatives will be drawn less on the basis of what the world requires and more by considering what the United States can—and cannot—afford. In an era in which fewer resources will be available for everything, it is certain that fewer will be available for foreign policy. When working Americans are paying more than in the past to support their fellow citizens who have retired, and retirees are receiving fewer benefits from the government than they were promised, neither group will be eager to offer generous support to overseas ventures.

  To be sure, a tug-of-war between domestic and foreign obligations is nothing new. Since the end of the nineteenth century, after all, the trade-off between international and domestic expenditures—between guns and butter—has been part of American political debate. Critics of foreign policy of all types, but especially of wars, have decried the diversion of resources to foreign adventures that they believed could better have been spent at home. Moreover, American foreign policy has always operated within limits of some kind. The country has never been free to do anything it wished, nor has the government ever been free to carry out any foreign policy it chose, regardless of cost.

  Yet for the foreign policy of the United States for almost seven decades beginning with World War II, and in contrast to the experience of almost every country throughout history, freedom of maneuver rather than constraints on action was the norm. In foreign affairs as in economic policy, the watchword was “more.” That era has ended. The defining fact of foreign policy in the second decade of the twenty-first century and beyond will be “less.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE NOVELTY OF SCARCITY

  THE ARC OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

  While varied and complicated, the history of American f
oreign policy since the founding of the country displays one consistent theme: expansion. During the first century of that history, the thirteen original colonies expanded across North America to the Pacific Ocean, and even beyond, to the Hawaiian Islands. In 1898 the United States acquired a modest version of the existing European overseas empires by defeating Spain and taking possession of the Philippines.

  In 1917, with the largest economy on the planet, the country entered World War I and helped tip the balance in favor of its allies, Great Britain and France. After the war, while withdrawing from the military affairs of the European continent, the United States took part in the European economic diplomacy of the 1920s. By the eve of the Second World War it had established itself as a significant participant in international affairs. It was World War II, however—which began for the United States with an attack by Japan on its naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—that inaugurated the era of foreign policy that featured an ongoing military presence and nonstop diplomatic activity around the world, along with a negligible role for considerations of cost. Almost seventy years later, cost is set to become far more important.

  For the countries of Europe, the Second World War repeated, and in some ways continued, the first one. The United States, however, had markedly different experiences in the two world wars. America entered World War II far earlier in the course of the fighting than it had World War I: the cost to the country of the second war was therefore considerably higher. American military forces had a much greater impact on the outcome of the second than on the first war. And for the United States, World War II became a global enterprise as World War I had not been: the American military took part in the fighting in the European, Asian, Atlantic, Pacific, and North African theaters.

  The demands of foreign policy achieved a higher priority in the United States between 1941 and 1945 than before or since. The nation fielded armed forces totaling more than 4 million men and women. A very large proportion of those who did not serve in uniform, women as well as men, worked in industries that produced arms and supplies for the military. The entire society was mobilized to wage an immense war, one in which all the countries involved made use of every resource, every weapon, and every tactic at their disposal in pursuit of victory.

  The end of World War II in 1945 might have been expected to bring about a sharp reversal of the expansive reach of American international initiatives. Instead, the aftermath of the Second World War witnessed the establishment of a pattern for American foreign policy that endured for almost seven decades.

  To be sure, considerable demobilization did take place once Germany and Japan had surrendered: the armed forces shrank, as did the proportion of the nation’s total production devoted to defense. The end of World War II surely would have begun a long-term contraction in the scope of American foreign policy had it not been for the almost immediate onset of a different kind of conflict, one that pervaded American public life for the next four decades: the Cold War.

  The Cold War lasted so much longer than World War II—from the mid-1940s to the end of the 1980s—that it is better understood as an era than as an event. Unlike World War II, it did not have a clear beginning; there was no equivalent of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Instead, between the end of World War II and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, a series of political events in Europe turned the United States and the Soviet Union, which had been wartime allies against Nazi Germany, into full-fledged global rivals.

  Unlike World War II, waging the Cold War was, for most Americans, consistent with a normal civilian existence, including a steady rate of economic growth that helped to support the military spending and diplomatic initiatives of the period. Unlike World War II, the level of national effort that the Cold War required varied over time. A telling measure of that effort, the American defense budget, regularly rose and fell as percentage of the total national economy.

  Still, American foreign policy during the Cold War decades operated on the same global scale as in World War II. The United States again confronted a powerful adversary, one capable, if unchecked, of dominating the international system. That confrontation stood at the center of the nation’s relations with all other countries: every American foreign policy was connected to it in some way. And almost everything that happened around the world had, or was thought to have, the potential to tilt the balance of power in favor of either the Soviet Union or the United States. An election in Europe, a civil war in Africa, a coup in Latin America were all seen as affecting the security of the United States, so the American government had to have the reach and the resources not only to monitor these events but also, if necessary, to influence them.

  For this very broad purpose, the United States retained the institutions that it had built during World War II: a substantial standing military force, a large diplomatic corps, several agencies for gathering intelligence abroad, and a far-flung system of alliances, with American military bases located in the allied countries.

  Unlike World War II, the two major antagonists of the Cold War never fought each other directly. Each was deterred by the other’s stockpile of nuclear weapons, but the United States did wage two major wars against Soviet allies in Korea and Vietnam. Throughout the Cold War, moreover, as during World War II, Americans believed that they faced a threat from abroad that required vigilance and sacrifice. They believed, as well, that to protect themselves and to assure the nation’s interests a foreign policy as expansive, although not as expensive, as the one the United States had pursued during World War II was necessary. For more than four decades, the United States conducted its foreign policy on a wartime footing.

  Eventually the Cold War, too, came to an end. When it did, Soviet armed forces withdrew from positions as far west as the middle of Germany that they had occupied during the course of World War II, positions that Americans had considered threatening to Western Europe and therefore to the United States as well. At the end of 1991 the Soviet Union itself, the great communist multinational empire of Eurasia that the Bolshevik Party had assembled after seizing power in Russia in 1917, collapsed entirely. The threat it had presented disappeared. Yet even in the absence of a major threat—indeed, in no small part because of the absence of such a threat—the United States sustained, for the next two decades, a foreign policy with the same extensive geographic reach and the same institutions of foreign policy as it had had during World War II and the Cold War. Post–Cold War American foreign policy prominently included, in fact, aspirations for promoting change in other countries that in some ways were even more ambitious than its goals during World War II and the Cold War.

  American foreign policy after the Cold War divides into two parts. During most of the first, which ran from the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991 to the attacks of September 11, 2001, Bill Clinton was president. For all of the second, from the moment of those attacks to the financial collapse of September 15, 2008, George W. Bush presided over the nation’s foreign policy. In neither period did the United States have to confront a powerful, hostile, aggressive adversary like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. The terrorist network against which the Bush administration declared war, although certainly dangerous, had nothing remotely like the capabilities of the nation’s principal adversaries between 1941 and 1991. Accordingly, the country spent less on the most expensive feature of foreign policy, the armed forces. As a percentage of the American gross domestic product, the defense budget fell by almost half.

  Despite this decrease in military spending, the United States continued to conduct a foreign policy of global scope using the institutions of the Cold War era. Its defense budget, although reduced from Cold War levels, far surpassed that of any other country; indeed, at one point it was larger, in dollar terms, than those of the next fourteen highest national defense budgets combined.

  While spending less on its armed forces, moreover, the United States used them more frequently after the end of the Cold War than before. The Clinton admini
stration took military action in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. In the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the Bush administration sent to Afghanistan and Iraq expeditionary forces that overturned anti-American governments and stayed to try to pacify the countries.

  During the Cold War, the American government’s use of its armed forces was kept in check by the possibility that they would come into direct contact with those of the Soviet Union and the near certainty that, even short of this, the Soviet Union and other communist countries would make any war expensive for the United States by supporting America’s adversaries, which is what happened in Korea and Vietnam. Military intervention became cheaper and less dangerous with the passing of the Cold War, and with the passing of the Cold War the United States intervened more frequently.

  Between 1941 and 1991, whenever America deployed its armed forces abroad prepared to fight or actually sent them into battle, the purpose was to defend itself against foreign threats. Military intervention in the post–Cold War decades had different purposes. The Clinton administration dispatched troops to rescue people in danger, usually from the assaults of those who governed them. The practice became known as “humanitarian intervention:” rather than protecting Americans from military forces controlled by other governments, the United States undertook to protect non-Americans from their own governments. This was a new development: few countries have ever been powerful enough (and even fewer generous enough) to be able, let alone willing, to use their armed forces in ways that brought them no direct benefit.