That would be a pity, because Lake’s speech was the best attempt yet to define the administration’s foreign policy–and gave a glimpse of themes that Clinton will develop before the United Nations this week. Lake spoke against a backdrop of events that proved, for any who thought otherwise, that the road to democracy and free markets in Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union is full of potholes. Not only was there Yeltsin’s coup, but two days before Lake’s speech, the big winners in Poland’s elections were two parties with roots in the old Communist regime and an uncertain commitment to freemarket reforms.
So, one might ask, who cares? Why should we be interested in the pace of economic reform in Poland? Doesn’t public opinion in both Western Europe and America suffer from what Robert Zoellick, a top official in George Bush’s State Department, calls “Russia fatigue”?
Lake answered these questions by claiming that an activist foreign policy is in America’s self-interest. He argued that America should move from a strategy of containing communism to one of enlarging “the world’s free community of market democracies.” The expansion of market-based economies, argued Lake, “helps expand our exports and create American jobs.“The addition of new democracies “makes us more secure because democracies tend not to wage war with each other.”
This has history on its side: the expansion of world trade that followed world war ii fueled a long expansion of the American economy, and it’s not easy to think of a war between democracies since World War I (and that example begs a question or two). But framing a policy is easier than implementing it. The administration now has to convince an American electorate whose traditional wariness of foreign entanglements, says Lake, has been fanned by “economic anxiety and neo-know-nothings” that it should be engaged abroad. it will not be easy.
Consider some examples. A recent CNN/USA Today Poll found that 65 percent opposed sending American aid to the Palestinians, compared with only 30 percent who favored it. Or take the North American Free Trade Agreement. In Lake’s terms, NAFTA is the most obvious “enlargement” policy now available, because NAFTA would render irreversible the moves that Mexico has made toward free-market policies. That doesn’t make it any easier to sell NAFTA to neo-know-nothings like Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan and their fans.
Many in Eastern Europe, and some in the administration, would like to “enlarge” NATO, to offer the promise of membership in the Western defense alliance to Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and perhaps Slovakia. Only if those countries feel secure, it is argued, will they continue to move toward market democracy. But quite apart from whether Russia would be happy with such a development, there are doubts at home. When Gen. John Shalikashvili, Bill Clinton’s new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked in the Senate last week if he favored expanding NATO, he said, “I think in time, yes. I’m not sure that the time is right yet.”
Above all, just as in the case of NAFTA and foreign aid, there is public opinion to consider. When asked for his views on NATO expansion this week, Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that the “whole business” of the NATO treaty was that America would send troops to defend the borders of other signatories. Hamilton said that, for him, the question was, “Am I prepared to send young men from Indiana to defend the borders of Slovakia?”
For many Americans, to pose that question is to answer it in the negative. The problem, perhaps, is that in the case of NAFTA, perhaps even of NATO, it can look as if it is only America that is generously enlarging its responsibilities In fact, the best way to enlarge the realm of market democracies in Eastern Europe, say, is to help them sell their goods in Western Europe through early membership in the European Community. Containment could not be done by America alone. Nor can, or should, enlargement.
