Campaign 2000: Promoting the National Interest
With no Soviet threat, America has found it exceedingly difficult to define its "national interest." Foreign policy in a Republican administration should refocus the country on key priorities: building a military ready to ensure American power, coping with rogue regimes, and managing Beijing and Moscow. Above all, the next president must be comfortable with America's special role as the world's leader.
Condoleezza Rice is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She is also foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush.
Condoleezza Rice and Robert B. Zoellick accuse Bill Clinton of gutting defense, but George Bush's budget cuts were far sharper. Plus, Rice and Zoellick respond.
ReadLIFE AFTER THE COLD WAR
The United States has found it exceedingly difficult to define its "national interest" in the absence of Soviet power. That we do not know how to think about what follows the U.S.-Soviet confrontation is clear from the continued references to the "post-Cold War period." Yet such periods of transition are important, because they offer strategic opportunities. During these fluid times, one can affect the shape of the world to come.
The enormity of the moment is obvious. The Soviet Union was more than just a traditional global competitor; it strove to lead a universal socialist alternative to markets and democracy. The Soviet Union quarantined itself and many often-unwitting captives and clients from the rigors of international capitalism. In the end, it sowed the seeds of its own destruction, becoming in isolation an economic and technological dinosaur.
But this is only part of the story. The Soviet Union's collapse coincided with another great revolution. Dramatic changes in information technology and the growth of "knowledge-based" industries altered the very basis of economic dynamism, accelerating already noticeable trends in economic interaction that often circumvented and ignored state boundaries. As competition for capital investment has intensified, states have faced difficult choices about their internal economic, political, and social structures. As the prototype of this "new economy," the United States has seen its economic influence grow -- and with it, its diplomatic influence. America has emerged as both the principal benefactor of these simultaneous revolutions and their beneficiary.
The process of outlining a new foreign policy must begin by recognizing that the United States is in a remarkable position. Powerful secular trends are moving the world toward economic openness and -- more unevenly -- democracy and individual liberty. Some states have one foot on the train and the other off. Some states still hope to find a way to decouple democracy and economic progress. Some hold on to old hatreds as diversions from the modernizing task at hand. But the United States and its allies are on the right side of history.
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Uncertainty is necessarily the lot of the planner, since the deals with the future. Uncertainty can never be completely removed. However, it can be compensated for, and to do so is a continuing responsibility of those who plan military forces. Primarily this can be done by insuring, in so far as we can, that future weapons and forces will be adaptable to the right range of defense needs or, as defense planners often put it, by insuring flexibility.
By stressing unilateralism over cooperation, preemption over prevention, and firepower over staying power, the Bush administration has alienated the United States' natural allies and disengaged from many of the world's most pressing problems. To restore U.S. global standing--which is essential in checking the spread of lethal weapons and winning the war on terrorism--the next Democratic president must recognize the obvious: that means are as important as ends.
Despite a vast budget that dwarfs the military spending power of both friends and foes, the U.S. military today remains stuck in the past. American strategy still relies on a Cold War-era view of the world, and U.S. technology is ill-suited to current missions. Meanwhile, demoralization is creeping through the ranks. The next president must seize the opportunity to remake the military by forcing it to focus on the missions of the future rather than those of the past. The alternative -- more of the same -- is too dangerous to consider.
