A Familiar Foreign Policy

Now that most of the midterm election results are in and the Democrats have recaptured the House and possibly the Senate, the American publicand the rest of the worldfaces a key question: What difference in policy will the difference in party make? In the domestic arena, likely a good deal. In fiscal policy, healthcare, and judicial appointments, the Democrats could change direction in relatively short order. But when it comes to American foreign policy, the shift will be far less dramatic. The reason isnt simply that foreign-policy decisions typically lie in the domain of the executive. It is because President George W. Bushs approach to Americas role in the world is not as remarkable as it is often claimed to be. We should not confuse the gravity of the effects in Iraq and elsewhere with the banality of the current approach itself, which falls well within U.S. foreign-policy traditions. Indeed, the foreign policies of both parties have never been substantially different. As they look ahead to the race for the Oval Office in 2008, Democrats are not likely to stray far from Bushs foreign policy, as it is a tradition partly of their own making.

Bushs critics often charge that his tenure has fashioned a new, hawkish character for American foreign policy. But since its birth, the United States has been expansionist for the purpose of domestic enrichment, a policy pursued with fervor by politicians of all stripes. By the middle of the Civil War, the United States had already fought France and Britain to protect its trade, and dispatched its military to Algiers, the Falklands, the Caribbean, and Japan. Among President Woodrow Wilsons reasons for entering World War I were the protection of U.S. loans to the Allies and a seat at the peace table, where hed have a sayand stakein Europes economic future.

In practice, this expansionist strategy has meant liberalizing the worlds economy as much as possible and liberating peoples where necessarywherever a piece of the liberal global economy looked to fall to worse socialist or autarkic alternatives. Cordell Hull, the U.S. secretary of state during World War II, declared American forces to be missionaries of capitalism and democracy. His logic that economic liberalism and political liberty move in concert still guides U.S. foreign policy to this day.

But the years after World War II, an exceptional period of U.S. internationalism and institution-building, have come to be seen as the norm for American foreign policy and a template to which the Democrats can return. In this years midterm campaigns, Democrats and pundits at home and abroad nostalgically touted this period as a golden age for foreign-policy making. This past summer, one of Germanys top political writers, Joerg Lau, assured me that a return to the multinational institution-building of the postwar era should be a priority for Democrats. When Robert Reich sketched a plan for the Democrats response to terror in The New Republic, he reached back to the founding of NATO as his model.

Yet, Americas postwar achievement was a unique moment. Itnot Bushis the outlier in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Western Europe was liberated and liberalized economically and politically because of Europes singular position as a buffer against the Soviets and as a market for U.S. goods. Similar conditions did notand do notexist elsewhere, and nowhere else has the United States repeated its postwar performance. In the developing world, American presidents from Andrew Jackson to Bill Clinton have settled for economic liberalism coupled with political stability, and democracy was undermined by a long list of direct and proxy wars if local governments refused to go along.

Today, Bush may be denounced for asserting American hegemony, but his Democratic predecessor was hardly different. The Clinton administrations 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review held that the United States should prevent other nations from challenging its preeminent world role. Clinton intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo not simply on humanitarian grounds, but to maintain NATOs raison detre in Europe, a strategy aimed at preserving economic access along with military control. He extended Chinas Most Favored Nation status despite Chinas abysmal human rights record, and he negotiated with the Taliban on behalf of an American oil company. Even Bushs fight against terrorism has echoes in the 1990s. Clintons 1995 Decision Directive 39 on terrorism read: Return of suspects by force [to the United States] may be affected without the cooperation of the host government.

In light of this history, Bushs foreign policy cannot be considered radical. He has furthered U.S. economic interests around the world, kept NATO under U.S. direction, and attempted to balance American interests in Russia and China against those countries threat as geopolitical competitors. He has no interest in North Korea other than containing nuclear proliferation, so he is only spending diplomatic capital there. Sub-Saharan Africa is no more forgotten than usual, save for an increase in aid from $7 billion in 1997 to $19 billion in 2004.

That is not to suggest that Bushs policies are good or bad, only that they are unexceptional. Since Sept. 11, 2001, as Robert Kagan, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted, America did not change … It only became more itself. The results of Bushs invasion of Iraq may differ from previous interventions, but results often differ: Consider the Philippines, Korea, and Vietnam. Yet Bushs policies fall well within the range pursued by both Republican and Democratic administrations. He has an interest in a stable Middle East that allows the United States access to key resources and development opportunities. He supports economically liberal and politically stable (if illiberal) states and seeks to liberate countries where autocratic leaders are uncooperative or losing control of their restive populations. Considering the positions of the many presidents who have come before him, Bushs policies may even be described as ordinary.

The United States will eventually phase out of Iraq, but not because the Democrats won a few dozen seats in the House and Senate or because they could take the White House in 2008. Iraq is but one of many future fights premised on an enduring tradition of furthering economic liberalism by liberating nations from alternatives Americans think worse. A voluntary withdrawal of geopolitical reach lacks precedent by any party, or any power elsewhere in the world. Only a profound cultural shift could alter Americas sense of mission, and Tuesdays results are hardly evidence of that.