America's New Course

William G. Hyland

From Foreign Affairs, Spring 1990

Summary:  Analysis of the USA's post-Cold War security interests, seeing a decline in military and ideological issues, and growth of interest in trade and economic policy, the environment, terrorism and drug trafficking. FA editor.

William G. Hyland is Editor of Foreign Affairs.

The United States remains the strongest world power, indeed the only truly global power, but its resources are no longer commensurate with the maintenance of the exalted position it held in the postwar period. In the 1990s few would claim that Washington has anything approaching the kind of freedom of action it enjoyed in the Cold War decades. In this regard, the world of the 1990s and beyond will resemble nothing in America's previous experience. This country will be required to conduct a "normal" foreign policy for which there is almost no precedent, with limited resources, in an increasingly competitive world in which the threat that held together the various anticommunist alliances will have vanished.

Because American resources are limited, the United States also has to weigh more carefully its international goals against increasingly urgent demands at home. In 1988 two former presidents, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, formed a group of experts to examine the "American Agenda" and issue a report to the incoming president. They commented on the situation that the nation faced at home:

We see two Americas, one increasingly wealthy, one tragically poor, a land of opportunity for most and of idle hopelessness for too many, a nation never so prosperous or so profligate. And in between are middle Americans, many of whom are struggling to hold their own.3

The current arguments over a "peace dividend" are symptomatic of this conflict between domestic and foreign policies. That conflict has always been present, but in the Cold War national security concerns had to prevail. Now the arguments are likely to be more evenly balanced, and the choices will be more complex.

Since 1945 the United States has had to bear the bulk of the burden of the Cold War, as well as the risks. In some periods, American leaders have welcomed the freedom to go it alone. Unilateral globalism was a charge frequently heard in the early days of the Reagan administration. But the United States is no longer alone. More recently there has been a revival of the idea of burden-sharing, given the obvious fact that America is allied to most of the wealthiest and strongest powers on the planet. In the next decade, going it alone will become an increasingly less justifiable course, and working out a redistribution of burdens will become a crucial challenge to American foreign policy.

III

In the name of what principle, therefore, will the American people be asked to continue bearing their international commitments and responsibilities abroad: the balance of power, economic security, human rights, democratic freedoms?

Throughout American history there has been a conflict between the dictates of geopolitics and the values the United States has championed-human rights and democracy.4 The Cold War saw constant tension between, on the one hand, a preoccupation with strategic requirements and, on the other, a concern that the unpalatable compromises and alliances the United States was forced to make, or chose to accept in the name of anticommunism, were corrupting America's traditional support of democratic values. It was periodically charged that the United States subordinated human rights and democratic institutions to realpolitik.

As the Cold War winds down, this tension over goals and practices will become more acute. It is reflected in two current debates: which policies won the Cold War, and what is the proper balance between concern for human rights and the requirements of realpolitik.

As to the first question, in the wake of the communist collapse in Eastern Europe two lines of argument are taking shape. One is that communism surrendered to the irresistible demands for human rights and that freedom triumphed because its time had come. This view has been eloquently expressed by Czechoslovakia's new president, Václav Havel: