www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml
---
excerpted from a much longer article that discusses what the left should do about foreign policy.
---
A Neo-Progressive Strategy

In the early days of the post-cold war world, advisers to President Clinton spoke of being present at the creation, much as Acheson, Marshall and the other architects of the post-World War II order had been. But unlike Acheson and Marshall, they proved better at breaking down barriers than at creating new forms of governance; at unleashing the forces of global capitalism than at creating new social contracts needed to tame it; at asserting American power in old alliances than at building a more sustainable community of power; and at talking about democratization than at helping countries achieve it. The result was not a new American century but a weakened international system.

The Bush Administration that followed has destroyed much of what remained of that system while alienating a considerable part of the world in the process. As a result, the greatest threat to the security and well-being of the American people today stems from the further breakdown of that system and the absence of anything to take its place. The rise of religious extremism and terrorist networks in the Middle East is just one product of this breakdown. The economic insecurity of working people in much of the Western world is another. So too is the disorder and failed governance that afflict parts of the developing world and that threaten to spill over into the daily lives of Americans through the spread of pandemics and criminal networks and an increase in illegal immigration. The prospect of new nuclear-weapons states and the economic rise of China and India pose yet other challenges to the international order.

The overarching goal of a progressive foreign policy therefore must be to reconnect the United States to the world by working with others to build a more durable international system. The first element of such a policy must be to recognize that the world has outgrown American power, and that the maintenance of international peace and stability must be a shared goal and burden, not an American "right" or prerogative. If anything, the cost of the Iraq War and America's mounting international debt should put an end, once and for all, to the illusion that American power can sustain a unipolar world and that we can afford both our unipolar aspirations and a decent liberal society at home. We must therefore bring America's international pretensions back into line with our domestic needs and priorities. That means we should welcome and indeed encourage a multipolar world as the best way to share the burden of international order-keeping.

The principal cold war-era institutions of collective security--NATO, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the US-Japan Security Treaty--have limited utility in dealing with the international security problems of the early twenty-first century. And the UN Security Council, although necessary for the authorization of military force and for giving legitimacy to nation-building efforts, is often too unwieldy to deal with the security problems associated with the management of regional threats. Our goal, therefore, should be to develop regional concerts of power for preventing regional arms races and for managing potentially dangerous conflicts. The European Union, Japan, Russia, China and India must by necessity be our main partners in this effort, but we must harness the efforts of smaller nations as well.

The most pressing challenges in this regard relate to the Middle East and to the suspected nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, and thus the need for new security arrangements in the Persian Gulf and East Asia. Ironically, in the cases of Iran and North Korea, the Bush Administration has pointed the way by blessing the EU's efforts to negotiate with Iran and by relying on the six-power framework to deal with North Korea. What has been missing in each case has been active American engagement and the kind of security guarantees needed to make Iran and North Korea feel more secure and to give them a greater stake in a larger regional community.

Understandably, there are reservations about a policy of engagement with Iran and North Korea in that it would require us to overlook some unpleasant features of both regimes. The way out of this dilemma is to think of engagement as part of a larger multilateral process of establishing a new security order involving great-power cooperation in each region. In East Asia the eventual reunification of Korea must be at the core of a regional security order that further cements cooperation and forecloses new geopolitical rivalries among China, South Korea, Japan and Russia. And in the Persian Gulf the peaceful evolution of Iran is central to a new security order for containing the conflict in Iraq and for developing the oil and gas resources of the region.

With regard to the Middle East in general, we must extract ourselves from what could escalate into what many Arabs see as a civilizational war with the Islamic world. This, however, does not mean disengaging, but rather repositioning the United States to be less of an overbearing dominant power. Our strategy toward Islamic jihadism ought to consist of lowering America's profile in the region and patiently containing bin Ladenism as it slowly loses its allure by being denied the foreign imperial enemy it needs in order to succeed. And the best way to lower our profile, without sacrificing any legitimate American interests, is to internationalize as much as possible US policy toward the Middle East--to reduce America's dominant, in-your-face presence in the region by withdrawing forces from Iraq and by sharing responsibility with the three other members of the "Quartet," the EU, Russia and the UN.

We should encourage the EU to take more responsibility for promoting democratization and economic development in the region around the European Rim, from the Maghreb to the Levant. We should also recommit ourselves to the Quartet and through it support an international conference for a comprehensive settlement of the Israeli-Arab conflict and the establishment of a Palestinian state. By delaying discussion of the final status of such a state, we are only encouraging the most radical elements in the West Bank, Gaza and the region.

The establishment of regional security concerts must be accompanied by other great-power efforts to manage conflicts and reduce security risks. Chief among these must be a stronger effort to put all fissionable materials under international control, strengthen international safeguards against biological warfare and create a greater UN capacity for state-building. Together with America's traditional role as the guarantor of the world's sea lanes, these would constitute the principal security pillar of American foreign policy.

As the progressives who lived through the 1919-39 crisis understood, collective security is difficult to maintain without collective economic cooperation aimed at expanding middle-class prosperity. And in many respects, the foundations of collective economic management are even weaker than those for collective security. So it is here that the United States must put its greatest emphasis in the decade ahead. The lack of middle-class jobs and economic dignity is what links the growing disquiet in Ohio to the backlash against Turkish immigrants in Europe to the rise of religious radicalism in the Middle East to the appeal of Hugo Chávez in Latin America--not to mention the threat of rising nationalism in China, should economic growth and job creation falter there. That is why we have to put jobs and prosperity at the center of American foreign policy.

The problem is that we are building a world economy that is too small, too risky and too dependent on American consumption to accommodate both the aspiring middle classes of the developing world and the existing middle classes of the developed world. We are doing so because we are relying on a nineteenth-century economic philosophy that ignores the lessons of the twenty-year crisis. As in the decades before the Great Depression, rising productivity gains made possible by the spread of industrialization and technology and the opening up of new production centers and labor markets have created a glut of capacity, savings and labor. The entry of China and India into the global economy has had the effect of more than doubling the world's potential labor force. This has put downward pressure on wages in both the developed and developing worlds. This in turn has caused a fall in global aggregate demand in relation to global supply, creating a classic 1930s-style Keynesian problem relieved only by America's debt-led consumption, which is unsustainable [see William Greider, "Debtor Nation," May 10, 2004, and "Elite Protectionists," April 11].

The good news is that these developments have set the stage for a new golden age of rising prosperity--but only if we shift our economic thinking from the neoliberal, export-oriented nostrums of the 1980s and '90s to the Keynesian ideas of the 1940s and '50s. Indeed, the solution to our economic problems as well as our foreign policy dilemma is to translate those productivity gains into rising wages and living standards in the newly industrialized and developing worlds--so that working men and women there can consume more of what they produce and so that the world economy can grow in a more balanced way.

For this reason, we must make full employment and ample demand the guiding principle of international economic policy, much as Roosevelt's policies did in the 1940s. We must become the champion of an international labor organization and a world labor movement that supports the establishment of unions in low-wage economies and fights Victorian-era working conditions in the world's factories. We must support public investment projects funded by international financial institutions to soak up excess labor and to give the unemployed in places like Egypt and Morocco a sense of economic opportunity. We need to put our weight behind the equivalent of New Deal programs like the TVA and the Civilian Conservation Corps and expand the efforts of specialized UN agencies like the World Health Organization to bring basic healthcare, education, housing and clean energy within the reach of billions of people and to relieve poverty in Africa and South Asia. We should also reorient the missions of the IMF and World Bank to support full employment and channel excess savings to public and social investment projects in the developing world. In short, we need to create institutions at the global level to do what the New Deal did for our national economy in the last century.

Our goal should be a New International Deal to build a global middle class and to eliminate global poverty. Rather than encourage emerging economies to develop through the export of manufactured goods and their component parts, we should champion what might be called middle-class-oriented development aimed at increasing domestic consumption--helping emerging economies to grow by expanding home ownership, investing in public infrastructure and creating more small and medium-size businesses, much as we did in the last century. This kind of middle-class development would have the beneficial effect of facilitating democratic reform in emerging economies while relieving the United States of the burden of serving as the locomotive of the world economy.