Coping With the Lippmann Gap

Samuel P. Huntington

From Foreign Affairs, America and the World 1987/88

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Summary:  A 'Lippmann gap' exists when a nation's foreign policy commitments exceed its power. Such a gap existed for the USA by the end of the 1960s, and until 1981 the USA sought to deal with it by reducing commitments and by increasing the role of US allies. President Reagan instead used policies of rhetorical assertion, military build-up, strategic defence, insurgency support, coercive diplomacy and arms control. The next administration's economic inheritance will compel reorganization of the defence establishment, conventional arms cuts, and greater effort by US allies. Concludes that the Lippmann gap will best be coped with by a middle-of-the-road administration.

Samuel P. Huntington is Director of The Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

Foreign policy," wrote Walter Lippmann in 1943 in an oft-quoted phrase, "consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation?s commitments and the nation?s power." If this balance exists, the foreign policy will command domestic support. If commitments exceed power, insolvency results which generates deep political dissension.

American foreign policy, Lippmann argued, had evolved through three phases. Insolvency and inconstancy in foreign policy coupled with dissension over foreign policy existed between 1789 and 1823. American foreign policy then became solvent; U.S. commitments were limited to the western hemisphere and underwritten by the "concert with Great Britain" and the British fleet.

In the late nineteenth century the extension of American interests and commitments in the Pacific began to erode this solvency. The U.S. defeat of Spain and acquisition of the Philippines in 1898 ended it. In Lippmann?s view, a period of foreign policy "bankruptcy" then ensued in which the United States refused to recognize and accept the consequences of its new interests. American policy during these years was based on a series of mirages: peace, disarmament, no entangling alliances, collective security. The results were Hitler?s conquest of continental Europe and the Japanese conquest of East Asia. To reverse both required a world war.

Writing in the midst of that war, Lippmann was, of course, concerned whether a new foreign policy balance could be constructed for the postwar world. American foreign policy did become solvent in the postwar years, although not exactly in the way Lippmann anticipated. That solvency was based on the overwhelming economic and military power of the United States compared to other countries, its continued close association with Great Britain and France, and the rapid recovery of Germany and Japan and eventually their equally close association with the United States. For almost a quarter-century after World War II, this combination provided what Lippmann would call a "comfortable surplus of power" abroad and a general consensus on policy at home.

II

This happy situation began, of course, to disintegrate at the end of the 1960s. American foreign policy became, in Lippmann?s term, insolvent, with commitments exceeding power. This shift was the product of four developments.

First and most obviously, the power of other countries increased relative to that of the United States. The Soviet Union achieved at least parity with the United States in strategic nuclear capabilities, thereby raising doubts as to the credibility of American nuclear deterrence in Europe. The Soviets created a blue-water navy and the air- and sea-lift capacity to project their forces into many regions in Africa and Asia. During the 1970s they modernized their forces in central Europe, increasing their capability to launch a short-notice attack on NATO. Soviet military spending during most of the 1970s grew at three to four percent a year; U.S. military spending declined for most of that decade. In addition new centers of economic power emerged, most notably Japan and Germany, but on a lesser scale among the newly industrializing nations of ...

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