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Volume XVI, No 3, Fall 1999
After all the wars of the twentieth century—cold and hot—only one superpower remains. For some Americans, this may seem a great opportunity to shape history forever. More accurately, it is a moment of great temptation. America’s status is not so lonely as it seems. Granted, the other superpower of the Cold War is today only a courtesy superpower—retired, or perhaps on extended leave with severe disabilities. But even in its present disarray, Russia has a formidable nuclear arsenal, a large, talented, and discontented population and a huge wealth of natural resources. A great power since the eighteenth century, it has survived numerous bad times and revived. It may well do so again.
Today’s China is also an obvious superpower candidate for the near future. With its enormous, vigorous, and gifted population, united for the first time since the nineteenth century, it is certainly rising, even if not ready. Europe is a fourth, with collective resources that easily rival those of the United States, even if it is still working to consolidate itself in the wings. Much of the next century’s history will doubtless be determined by how well the four succeed in arranging their relations.
At the moment, the United States has choices not dissimilar to those faced by the British at the end of the nineteenth century. It can either accommodate its rivals or oppose them. It can oppose by pressing for a seamless “global” system that remains under its own hegemony. Or it can try to accommodate by coaxing the others into a global sharing of power, with some mix of regional spheres of interest and collective world responsibilities.
This decade has been a relatively easy one for American strategists. America’s preponderant economic and military might has produced a unipolar international structure, which has in turn provided a ready foundation for global stability. Hierarchy and order have devolved naturally from power asymmetries, making less urgent the mapping of a new international landscape and the formulation of a new grand strategy. The Bush and Clinton administrations do deserve considerable credit for presiding over the end of the Cold War and responding sensibly to isolated crises around the globe. But America’s uncontested hegemony has spared them the task of preserving peace and managing competition and balancing among multiple poles of power—a challenge that has consistently bedeviled statesmen throughout history.
The coming decade will be a far less tractable one for the architects of U.S. foreign policy. Although the United States will remain atop the international hierarchy for the near term, a global landscape in which power and influence are more equally distributed looms ahead. With this more equal distribution of power will come a more traditional geopolitics and the return of the competitive balancing that has been held in abeyance by America’s preponderance. Economic globalization, nuclear weapons, new information technologies, and the spread of democracy may well tame geopolitics and dampen the rivalries likely to accompany a more diffuse distribution of power. But history provides sobering lessons in this respect. Time and again, postwar lulls in international competition and pronouncements about the obsolescence of war have given way to the return of power balancing and eventually to great-power conflict.
Centuries rarely end on schedule. Neither does the sway of a great power. And while the collapse of the Soviet Union should have taught us that those who try to predict the future too often contribute little more than extrapolations from their understanding of the present, we are close enough both to the new millennium and to the next U.S. administration to be confident about a few things at least. At 12:01 on January 1, 2000,a millennium will have ended, but not the American Century. Whoever succeeds Bill Clinton will assume the leadership of a nation that, on the face of things, does indeed appear to be the sole remaining superpower.
Such, at any rate, is the triumphalist account that will almost certainly see the new president into office. None of the major candidates have shown any interest in dissenting from it, or are likely to during the campaign. And, at least in the absence of some immense crisis—a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, say, or civil war in Russia—whichever candidate is elected is unlikely to stray far from the path that the Clinton administration has followed. That policy, which can be described as an approach in which geo-economic questions were dealt with seriously, while geopolitical questions and questions of international governance (the role of international institutions, the degree to which the United States was willing to act alone or to cede authority to other states) were either avoided or dealt with on an ad hoc basis.
Whatever the failures and long-term risks of this policy, even its severest critics must concede that it succeeded in the sense that none of the international crises that havearisen over the course of the Clinton administration’s tenure ever seemed to threaten American vital interests seriously enough to galvanize any important constituency in calling for a significant change in approach. By the same token, no U.S. failure to act in accordance with America’s self-proclaimed values seemed to resonate enduringly with the public either, not even the failure to prevent or halt the Rwandan genocide.
Three goals shaped the postwar foreign policies of the Western allies: the economic reconstruction of Europe and Japan; the containment of Soviet communism; and international development. The first two goals were achieved beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, but the third has remained beyond reach. Far from approaching per capita income convergence with the advanced industrial states, as postwar development theorists had predicted would occur, the majority of so-called emerging economies are instead falling further behind as the new millennium dawns.
Within these countries we now find some 3 billion people living in poverty, and half that number are struggling to subsist on less than $1 per day. All too often their efforts are in vain. Starvation is the daily bread for over 100 million individuals, and over 150 million have never entered a schoolroom. Some 50 million children are mentally or physically handicapped due to inadequate nutrition, and over 8 million die each year because of the polluted water they drink and air they breathe. At a time when most Americans and Europeans have nearly unlimited consumption possibilities, daily life for millions in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the former Soviet bloc means being deprived of food, health care, education, and work.
What has been the industrial world’s response—our response—to this grim litany? The data tell us that we are turning our backs. The foreign aid budgets of the major donor nations are now at their lowest levels since the early 1950s. With the end of the Cold War on the one hand and intense fiscal pressures in Europe and North America on the other, aid has been an easy tar-get for the chopping block. But these cuts, which have occurred in the absence of public debate, have effectively crippled the war against global poverty.
Judging by the political rhetoric, one would not know that the American economy is significantly riskier today by many measures than it was only a few years ago. To the contrary, Congress and the president are engaged in a fierce debate over what to do with the budget surplus, seemingly unaware that a recession or a significant slowdown in economic growth would sharply reduce, if not eliminate, the projected future surplus as tax revenues fall. Such economic warnings are greeted with increasingly impatient skepticism as the bull market makes national prigs of critics who want to dampen the enthusiasm on Wall Street or in Washington. But the fact is that there is a significant possibility that the first order of business of a new president may well be economic crisis management.
The 1990s were an unusually optimistic period for inter-American relations. After a decade of debt crises, lost opportunities, and the painful emergence from military rule, much of Latin America seemed determined for the first time in decades to march forward enthusiastically to a tune orchestrated by Washington. The consensus view, powerfully supported by the newly installed elected governments in the region, the U.S. Treasury, and the international lending agencies, touted the benefits of free trade, electoral democracy, privatization of state assets, and open economies.
Within the United States the change was no less dramatic. The straitjacket that had defined America’s “friends” and “enemies” in Latin America along a rigid left-right divide had also been superseded. Following on the heels of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the winding down of the bitter conflicts in Central America, for the first time in living memory policymakers in Washington were relatively relaxed about the perceived threats to U.S. strategic interests from the left.
No less remarkable, the Latin American left itself became skeptical of the totalitarian utopias of communism, criticized Fidel Castro’s authoritarianism in Cuba, and recognized the importance of elections, individual liberties, and the rule of law. Jorge Castañeda perfectly epitomized this new mood in the Latin American left in the title of his book Utopia Unarmed (1994). In fact, as the Berlin Wall came down, Germany was reunited, and Russia’s empire fragmented, in a curious historical reversal it was the liberal capitalist world that now fell for the utopian illusion by proclaiming “the end of history,” even for a region like Latin America where history weighs as heavily on the present as it does anywhere.
Thirty years ago, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon. This early victory—the American astronauts over the Soviet cosmonauts—foreshadowed the outcome of the Cold War with the Soviet Union some 20 years later. Today, what may be more extraordinary and rare is the hope, cooperation, trust, partnership, and political alignments it took to accomplish this otherworldly endeavor. As a recent New York Times editorial, referring to the astronauts, put it, “Their feat implied that the same combination of heroism, determination, technical wizardry and managerial genius would soon conquer other worlds and a host of earthly ills as well.”
What that momentous event did not foretell is the uncooperative, provincial, and fearful mood of some of this country’s leaders, and our apparent inability to implement solutions to many of the same set of problems that continue to plague our world 30 years later. Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin described this mood: “For one crowning moment we were creatures of the cosmic ocean, a moment that a thousand years hence may be seen as the signature of our century. Yet an eerie apathy now seems to inflict the very generation who witnessed and were inspired by those events.”
Society
Between the early 1980s and the late 1990s, an elite consensus swept the globe that unfettered free markets provided the formula to make rich countries out of poor. In policy circles, this formula came to be known as the “Washington Consensus.”
As we approach a new century, however, deep cracks have appeared within this consensus. Its legitimacy has come into question in the face of an increasingly effective citizens’ backlash in North and South, and there is growing dissension within the ranks of its backers, as the effects of the financial crisis of the late 1990s are felt around the globe. While not yet dead, the consensus has been wounded—and potentially fatally so.
Our essay analyzes the reign of the Washington Consensus and what we see as its loss of legitimacy in the global economic upheavals of recent years. It is written neither to help rebuild the consensus nor to mourn its possible fall. Let us be clear from the start: we were never part of the consensus. In numerous articles written over the last decade and a half, we have chronicled the human and environmental wreckage of consensus policies. Our goal here is to dissect the reign and analyze the cracks in the consensus, and to reflect upon the lessons learned in terms of a new development agenda.
Reconsideration
My aunts like to tell the story of the trip they made to Rangoon as little girls in the summer of 1956. They were treated like princesses. The trip was all shopping and taking in the sights, excursions up to the mountain resort of Maymyo, a visit to Mandalay. One afternoon during their stay, their father summoned the family’s Rangoon jeweler to the house. In the middle of the drawing room floor, the jeweler unfurled a large piece of velvet. My aunts were seated opposite him; my grandfather, whom we always called Bapuji, was seated off to the side. One after another, out of little silk pouches, the jeweler produced rubies, sapphires, pearls, and diamonds, scattering them on the lush surface of the cloth. The rubies smoldered, the sapphires glowed coolly, the diamonds flashed, and the pearls lay luminescent in the afternoon light.
“Which ones do you like the best?” asked Bapuji. The little girls didn’t really know the value of what they were seeing, especially Usha, the youngest. They could have been asked to choose among bits of prettily colored glass or marbles as far as they were concerned. “I like the red ones,” chirped one of the girls. “Five sets with rubies,” commanded Bapuji. He had five children, so he wanted five sets, one for each daughter when she became a bride, and one to present to the future bride of each son, each set to include earrings, a necklace, a ring, and two bangles. “I like the clear ones best,” countered the other little girl. “Five sets with diamonds,” ordered Bapuji. When the girls had finished choosing, the jeweler was sent away to fill the order. He made up five sets each with rubies, sapphires, diamonds, and pearls, all set in 24-carat gold.
Bapuji put the jewelry in a bank vault in Rangoon for safekeeping while he waited for his children to grow up and find marriage partners, never suspecting that in a few short years, all his assets in Burma would be confiscated by the Burmese government, including the jewelry he’d put aside for his children. The daughters never got to add the Rangoon jewels to their wedding finery. The sons never got to present them to their brides. My aunts never again saw the pretty stones they picked out that sunny afternoon in Rangoon as little girls, except in their mind’s eye. The flash of the diamonds, the fire of the Burmese “pigeon’s blood” rubies, forever lost, burn only in their memories of Rangoon, and the magical sojourn they spent there as young girls.
Reportage
The driver’s tough finger points his glee toward a hulking neoclassical building with shattered windows and walls splotched with paint. In the old days, Moscow’s American Embassy was better protected against citizen’s projectiles, if not invective. But lobs of ooze are routine in this chilly spring of the eighth year of release from Soviet rule. “It’s not right to bomb Yugoslavia. It’s a sovereign country!” the taxi driver says. “War, that’s madness. The Americans think they can do anything they want. Well we won’t let them! Who cares about the Albanians anyway? They’re all drug runners. Let them shoot each other, that’s their business.”
The idiosyncratic puff of the proverbial Moscow cabbie? No, Russian public opinion, shaped by the free new media. Television news—even on the most independent NTV channel—dwelled on the damage inflicted by NATO bombs during the alliance’s campaign and scarcely mentioned the Kosovo Albanians murdered by the Yugoslav army or routed from their torched villages.
And many politicians are again—or still—fashioning foreign conflict into a test of loyalty to the Motherland. In the wake of NATO’s decision to bomb last March, the Communist Party seized the initiative in this, branding ‘unpatriotic’ everyone who opposed its impassioned devotion to Serbia. At the same time, four of Russia’s most prominent would-be young reformers rushed to Belgrade to try to broker a peace deal: a transparently cynical act for domestic consumption that further depressed debate on the issue to the level of Communist chest-beating for nashi, us mistreated Russians.
Will Russia forever be separated from the West? Even if not, the strident cries in support of the ‘Slav brother’ Serbs drove the wedge in further than at any time since the break-up of the Soviet Union. The country with the collapsed economy and the political system rent by ever-fresh scandals sounded a collective war whoop. The impotent anger solidified its view of its “new” global role: opposing America. That conviction bubbled up from the same cauldron of myth that is forming a supposedly new identity, the so-called Russian national idea.
Reflections
Ever since President Nixon’s visit to China 27 years ago, I have been involved in one way or another in the relationship between China and the United States, and over the years I have witnessed rounds of ups and downs in this relationship. This year is the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. As anniversaries often evoke reflections on the past and anticipation of the future, I cannot help recalling the situation at the time of the tenth anniversary.
A national symposium was sponsored by my organization, the Institute of American Studies, in celebration of the occasion. As chairperson, I presented the keynote speech, “Convergence of Interests: The Basis for Relations between Nations.” It was a time when the relationship was considered to be improving steadily despite existing differences, and the prevailing atmosphere was one of cautious optimism.
Since then, much water has flowed under the bridge and, unfortunately, the past decade has seen more downs than ups, and “steady improvement” remains to be desired. One might call it “a fragile relationship,” as in the title of Harry Harding’s book on U.S.-China relations since 1972, for there are always knotty problems that are very difficult to solve, and new ones keep popping up before old ones are settled. However, if one looks at the relationship from another angle, it can also be called tenacious or resilient, in the sense that it has withstood drastic changes in the general world situation as well as tumultuous domestic and bilateral vicissitudes.
Now, looking toward the twenty-first century from the Chinese perspective, what is the factor that has a fundamental significance for the relationship between China and the United States? Under the premise of “convergence of interests,” it is the U.S. attitude toward China’s development into a modernized, relatively strong country.
Coda