The National Interest
Spring 2001

Contending Schools

by Charles William Maynes

 

. . . Now America is entering another century, and, for many of the same reasons that the debate between Roosevelt and Wilson broke out at the beginning of the twentieth century, a new debate over America's role in the world is taking place. Today, as then, America finds itself having successfully concluded a long struggle and wondering what to do next. When Roosevelt and Wilson argued about the direction of American foreign policy, their clash took place against the backdrop of a nation successfully completing its internal consolidation. The nation was secure from coast to coast and hence free to consider important strategic choices, which it proceeded to do. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the emerging debate over foreign policy is taking place in a nation that has successfully prevailed in a global struggle against a powerful adversary. With international communism fatally crippled or functionally dead, the Soviet Union gone and the Warsaw Pact disbanded, America is again secure and, hence, as it was a century ago, free to consider different strategic choices.

There is another similarity. Americans are optimistic today about themselves and their future. As in the days of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, we are convinced that we know the way—politically and economically—and that therefore we have an obligation, if not also a right, to lead others to a better future.

Most countries, of course, are not so blessed by geography and history as to be able to consider radical new approaches to the world. They may enjoy temporary periods of enhanced security or their populations may develop a greater sense of confidence or optimism, but geography and history predetermine their international stance. They are trapped within narrow strategic margins.

America also faced such limitations so long as it was militarily weak and had not reached its natural limits. But once the country was internally consolidated, once other major powers were definitively excluded from its hemisphere, and its own population began to exceed that of all other industrialized countries, the United States developed into a unique state in the international system: It acquired, and still possesses, a larger strategic margin than that enjoyed by any other power.

It is therefore quite understandable that, at the beginning of the last century and at the beginning of this one, a debate over basic strategic options could take place. A country so confident and so secure begins to understand that it has options open to it that are not available to others. It has the luxury of the kind of public debate about its external options that most state elites try to avoid. And, indeed, over the past few years three schools of American commentators have begun to clarify three different approaches to the issue of America's place in the world. Various labels have been applied to these schools. I believe that they are best described—in terms of the scope they envisage as appropriate for their country's role—as the controllers, the shapers and the abstainers, it being understood that each school has its conservative and liberal wings. . . .

At the beginning of the last century, Americans interested in foreign policy had an advantage that those similarly interested today do not: Leading the debate over foreign policy choices were two exceptionally eloquent national figures—Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

By contrast, today's politics produce—perhaps require—political figures of narrow electoral calculation rather than lofty policy conviction. Since Reagan in the 1980s, no recent president or presidential candidate has been willing to make his vision of America's role in the world a major thrust of his message to the country. All have suffered from the lack of the "vision thing", and perhaps all agree in private that displaying it might prove politically lethal.

The schools of thought that have developed in recent years are therefore the work of a mostly anonymous foreign policy intellectual elite rather than that of major national figures. This circumstance has both advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that we are not carried away by eloquence alone. Woodrow Wilson, by all accounts a mesmerizing speaker, may have been more skilled at framing issues for the public than Teddy Roosevelt. But it is not clear that he had a better approach to international relations for the period the country was entering than did Roosevelt. To put the best gloss on his career, he appears to have been ahead of his time.

A key disadvantage surrounding our current debates is that they take place out of electoral earshot. The three schools of thought, each with its two ideological wings, frame thinking on foreign policy. They help to determine responses from administrations. But they pass no test of public support, so that, even if adopted, their doctrines are subject to rapid repudiation. And, indeed, in recent years the United States has announced and then renounced such different foreign policy approaches as a "new world order", assertive multilateralism, à la carte interventionism, priority to Russia and China, stress on alliance ties, democratic enlargement, and humanitarian intervention. . .