The Case for Pragmatism

William G. Hyland

From Foreign Affairs, America and the World 1991/92

Summary:  With the end of the Cold War, and of the concerns it involved, it is natural that US attention should turn to the solution of domestic and economic problems. It is exaggeration to read such a shift as "some form of isolationism".

William G. Hyland is Editor of Foreign Affairs.

Obviously no one is beating the drums for intervention because no vital interest is threatened. In Yugoslavia the enemy is not only Serbian aggression but rampant nationalism. In Haiti it has not been so easy to differentiate among the democrats and the dictators. (The same might be said of once-Soviet Georgia.)

The same sense of prudence also governs the debate about aid to the former Soviet Union. A strong case can be made that it is in the American interest to aid Russia. The mayor of Boston, however, defined the context for this issue much better than his fellow Bostonians at Harvard when he suggested that for every dollar sent to the old U.S.S.R., one dollar should also be sent to American cities.

The world of the 1990s will resemble nothing in America?s previous experience. The United States will be required to conduct a foreign policy for which there is almost no historical precedent, and to do so with limited resources in an increasingly competitive world in which the threat that held together the various American alliances will have vanished.

V

To examine what this means at an operational rather than a theoretical level, Europe is the proper place to begin, if only because it is America?s oldest and deepest commitment.

Well before the Japanese attack in 1941, the United States made a fateful decision that shaped its foreign policies for the next five decades. Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that, if America entered the war, priority would be given to defeating Germany first. Since 1941, therefore, the United States has been, first of all, a European power: as the opponent of fascism and then the expansion of the Soviet Union in Europe, specifically in Berlin; as the promoter of the unity of western Europe, including the revival and rearmament of Germany and, far more tentatively, as the liberator of Eastern Europe. The United States became the linchpin in a system of European security arrangements resting on an "entangling" treaty commitment to defend its Atlantic allies and, to this end, deployed a large contingent of American troops, supported by a panoply of American nuclear weapons.

The American alliance with Europe has achieved each of its basic aims: Europe is unified, eastern Europe is liberated and the military threat of the U.S.S.R. has ended.

The United States will remain a European power for the foreseeable future. On neither side of the Atlantic is there any sentiment favoring a break. Nevertheless, American influence is declining (and German influence is rising). American involvement in Europe will be thinner and weaker. A selective disengagement by both sides of the Atlantic has already begun. In Washington, at least, there is a sense that the Europeans are moving too far toward a stronger regionalism that will be reflected in more protectionist trade policies, in greater independence of foreign policy (particularly toward eastern Europe) and in the creation of a new defense unit within the European Community (EC). Indeed some American observers claim that the greatest danger is increasing American irrelevance as Europe reshapes its own identity.

On the other hand, Europe is securely democratic, by and large prosperous, built on a functioning free-market system and, if its frequent assurances can be believed, dedicated to a free and open trading system. The most important remaining challenge is how to embrace the new states of eastern Europe. Strengthening western Europe may exclude eastern Europe; if this were to happen, then that area is likely to be dominated by Germany, or it could even become a source of friction between Germany and Russia.

Permitting a new, invisible iron curtain to divide Europe is a recipe for major trouble. But this may already be happening for three reasons: European fears over massive emigration from east to west; limits on the resources available to help the east; and the determination of key countries to deepen the EC before broadening it. American interests in eastern Europe have largely been satisfied with the collapse of the communist regimes, but the United States should try to facilitate a rapprochement between eastern and western Europe, even at the expense of diluting the EC and NATO.