Foreign Policy In Focus | Policy Report | U.S. Foreign Policy--Attention, Right Face, Forward March

America is under attack, and it is fighting back aggressively--on ever-expanding fronts. So quickly has the war widened from the hunt for Osama bin Laden to other targets and other countries that it has become a daily challenge just to keep track of where U.S. troops are and where they're headed next.

President Bush himself has been decidedly forthright about the scope and expected duration of the war--global and unending. No longer just a campaign against international terrorism, it is also a moral crusade in which good is facing off with evil. A chief target is the "axis of evil" that Bush identified in his State of the Union Address in late January. We are suddenly in a Hobbesian world where the U.S. appears bent on playing the part of the Leviathan against the forces of chaos and disorder.

The transformation has been nothing less than shocking, particularly given the soothing, "come-let-us-reason-together" rhetoric of the Clinton administration and Bush's own emphasis on "compassionate conservatism" during the presidential campaign. Candidate Bush promised to practice "humility" in foreign policy and to substitute narrow "national interests" for the globalism of his predecessor. At worst, according to most political observers, Bush would take his cues from his father, who, while hardly a Clintonian, was nonetheless a cautious, predictable, and self-described "prudent" practitioner of balance-of-power diplomacy. It made sense to assume that the younger Bush would follow in the same tradition.

But, with no foreign policy experience, Dubya was essentially a blank slate, and U.S. foreign policy has been up for grabs since he took the oath of office. As everyone now knows, the main contestants consisted of two factions: one headed by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who represents continuity of policy with both Bush's father and Clinton; the other, led by Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, whose vision is far more sweeping, not to say Manichean. Since September 11, the latter faction has emerged as dominant and is using the "war against terrorism" to impose its own, quite radical ideas on U.S. foreign policy and the global order. At their core, those ideas call for a world order based on U.S. supremacy and enforced by U.S. military power--a unipolar world in which the U.S. imposes the rules but, because of its own self-evident goodness, is not necessarily bound by them.

Foreign Policy--Then and Now

One has to go back at least to the Reagan era to find a vision of U.S. foreign policy that is so confident, focused, and aggressive as that of the new Bush administration. The moral certitude and crusading spirit of the Reagan era is back in style--ushered in by the ideologues, government operatives, and scholars of America's new right, who aim to protect and promote U.S. supremacy. Today, as then, the foreign policy direction of the administration is being set at least as much by ideology as by the actual conjuncture of international affairs.

The groundwork for Reagan's foreign policy was laid in the late 1970s by the Heritage Foundation and a phalanx of other right-wing organizations. Institutes and front groups such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Committee on the Present Danger, Free Congress Foundation, Council for Inter-American Security, and Council for National Policy established the ideological thrust, policy agenda, and frequently even the language for President Ronald Reagan's foreign policy of freedom fighters, a crusade against the evil empire, rollback campaigns, and the promotion of free market democracy.

Over the past couple of decades, global affairs have been marked by four major changes: the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rapid pace of economic globalization, widespread acknowledgement of the rapid deterioration of the planet's ecology, and the 9/11 attacks and counterattacks. The left and the center have been struggling to formulate new agendas to address these and other changes. The right, while also disoriented by the end of the cold war and the new challenges of globalization, has regrouped around a strong conviction that the U.S. should do whatever is necessary to protect and enhance its supremacy on all fronts. The "present danger" confronting America is seen differently by various strands of the right wing--with some focusing primarily on military threats, others on cultural/civilizational conflicts, others on economic threats, and some on the constraints inherent in multilateralism and the liberal diplomacy of the State Department. Under the Bush administration--and particularly since September 11--the conviction that the U.S. must assert its global hegemony has become increasingly pronounced.

In 1997 an influential grouping of neoconservatives, social conservatives, and military/industrial complex proponents came together to form the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), (online at www.newamericancentury.org). In its statement of principles, the group lamented that conservatives had not "confidently advanced a strategic vision for America's role in the world" but had instead "allowed differences over tactics to obscure potential agreement on strategic objectives" and had failed to "set forth guiding principles for American foreign policy." This small group (see accompanying box) declared: "We aim to change this. We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership."

It is worth recalling that the PNAC visionaries believed that the first step forward was to remember "the essential elements of the Reagan administration's success," namely "a strong military" ready to meet "present and future challenges," "a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad," and "national leadership that accepts the U.S.' global responsibilities." Essentially, the PNAC aimed for a reprise of the Reagan agenda but this time, in the absence of a Soviet counterweight, on a truly global scale.

Concluding their 1997 statement of principles, Elliott Abrams, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other right-wing luminaries noted: "A Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the U.S. is to build on the successes of this past century and ensure our security and greatness in the next." Though not fashionable in 1997, the aggressive Reaganite policy of right-wing internationalism--encompassing large military budget increases, Star Wars defense, Manichean formulation of U.S. foreign policy imperatives, and a rash of direct and covert military interventions--has been brought back into style by the Bush administration.

Before the September 11 terrorism, the Bush administration was having difficulty moving its Reaganite agenda forward. It wasn't for lack of trying or because the right team wasn't in place. The new administration drew heavily from the staff and boards of the PNAC, Center for Security Policy, and American Enterprise Institute. Also signaling the administration's intention to reprise the Reagan era was Bush's decision to draft a half-dozen of the stars of the "Iran-contra" scandals/crimes onto his foreign policy team.

The revival of an ambitious missile defense program and the dumping of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, along with many other pending treaties and conventions, clearly marked a rightward shift in U.S. foreign policy toward militarism and unilateralism. But the Bush administration was having trouble selling its agenda. Rumsfeld was getting resistance from Congress and within the military, and missile defense was a dud with the public and the media. The underlying problem was one that had stalled conservatives since the end of the cold war: Americans couldn't get all fired up over a rightist foreign policy agenda without an enemy. That all changed on September 11.

It's likely that neither the targeting of Al Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan nor Washington's increased attention to homeland defense would have been much different under any other administration. More time will be needed to measure the tactical, strategic, and moral success of this military response. But as President Bush has repeatedly stated, the post-9/11 U.S. response is now extending far beyond targeting the perpetrators of the atrocities in Washington and New York City. A new Reaganite agenda that was stalling in the first months of the George W. Bush administration has now kicked in with alarming intensity.

Dimensions and Extensions of U.S. Supremacy

The PNAC agenda is at once an ideology and a vision for America. Its core principle is U.S. supremacy--a transcendent superiority with diplomatic, cultural, economic, and military dimensions. It is a messianic belief arising from America's Puritan roots and sense of God-given mission.

Diplomatic Supremacy

In U.S. diplomacy, this belief in U.S. moral supremacy justifies America's exceptionalism, its global unilateralism, and its "multilateralism à la carte," as it was described by one senior Bush administration official. It doesn't dismiss the need for international law and norms, but it holds that the U.S. is exempt from these rules. Although the U.S. has been instrumental in developing multilateral instruments to manage global security--notably the League of Nations, the Bretton Woods economic institutions, and the United Nations--it has never embraced multilateralism as a principle but rather as an artifice. Multilateralism has served as a convenient cover to support U.S. foreign policy, but Washington has not hesitated to act unilaterally when doing so serves its interests.

Activist and scholarly right-wing elements have long been concerned that the UN constituted a forum for leftist, anti-Zionist, and anti-imperialist views, and they have attacked the UN as a barrier to the direct pursuit and defense of U.S. national interests. Today, with the U.S. as the world's only superpower and the UN increasingly sidelined in global affairs, the anti-UN campaign has faded, replaced by a more directed focus on strategizing how, when, and where to deploy U.S. might and right.

Cultural Supremacy

Americans have been raised and educated in the belief that the political, moral, religious, and social manifestations of American culture are superior to those of other cultures. More than just superior, U.S. culture--its free market democracy--is said to embody the culmination of Western civilization and as such represents what Francis Fukuyama has labeled the "end of history." The U.S. brand of political liberalism, individual pursuit of happiness, rule of law, Judeo-Christianity, and mass entertainment is therefore to be admired and emulated.

But American culture is also under attack, and since the 1960s the right wing, led by the social conservatives and Christian Right, has committed itself to an aggressive campaign against the forces that it believes are undermining the American culture of family, God, and flag. For the most part, the identified threats in these cultural wars have been internal ones--U.S. Communist Party, the communitarianism and antiauthoritarianism of the "counterculture" of the 1960s, secularism, illegal drug consumption, environmentalism, and feminism.

In the 1990s, the mandarins of New Right thought increasingly made the connections between the internal and external threats to U.S. culture and Judeo-Christian values. Paralleling the cultural wars on the domestic front (where fundamentalists face off against secularists, creationists attack evolutionists, etc.) they see a global conflict--a clash of civilizations in which Western society is being undermined, weakened, and attacked by what Samuel P. Huntington called the "rest" in his Clash of Civilizations. For those right-wing ideologues espousing U.S. cultural supremacy, China and the Islamic world are often cited as the main threats to Western culture.

The right has long sought to link its cultural war at home with U.S. foreign policy, and the war on terrorism has given it a new chance to forge that connection. Anti-American forces are not all alien--some are home-grown, argue U.S. cultural supremacists. In a full-page ad in the New York Times (March 10, 2002), a new conservative front group Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT), (online at www.avot.org), warned that we have to fight the war at home as well as abroad. "The threats we face are both external and internal," says AVOT's chairman William J. Bennett, a PNAC signatory and former education secretary. Within the U.S. are "those who are attempting to use this opportunity [9/11] to promulgate their agenda of 'blame America first.'" AVOT is a project of Empower.org, a conservative policy institute headed by Bennett and Jack Kemp. In its pronouncement, AVOT identified U.S. public opinion as the key battleground in the war against America's external and internal threats. "Our goal," declared AVOT, "is to address the present threats so as to eradicate future terrorism and defeat ideologies that support it. The central focus of our activity is public opinion."

Economic Supremacy

With respect to asserting U.S. economic supremacy, right-wing ideologues have had a much harder time forging a consistent agenda. The objective--to maintain and extend U.S. economic supremacy--is commonly agreed upon, but there are major differences about the best strategies and instruments. These differences manifest themselves in varying, and often opposing, positions with respect to the largely U.S.-created institutions of global economic governance, bilateral and regional trade agreements (China and NAFTA), sanctions policies, and the extent to which U.S. economic policy should reflect the interests of U.S. transnational corporations.

Although there is strong consensus that U.S. diplomatic and military might should be used to further U.S. economic superiority around the world, there are major discrepancies over the degree to which the U.S. should adhere to free trade principles. In the economic arena, the philosophy of American supremacy often comes hard up against the philosophy of free trade. And few within the right-wing community (or within any political group in the U.S.) are true believers in free trade. For the most part, appeals to the wisdom and justice of free trade philosophy are made only when U.S. economic interests stand to gain from increased liberalization and enforcement of free trade rules.

Just as historically the principles of free trade were invoked to open doors for U.S. markets and investment in areas colonized by European powers, in the past few decades the ideology of neoliberalism has been used to support U.S.-led corporate globalization. In much the same way that multilateralism is occasionally tapped as a tool to project U.S. national interests, so too are principles of free trade and multilateral instruments of neoliberalism (WTO, IMF, World Bank) championed only if they directly and immediately serve U.S. corporate interests.

This pragmatic application of free trade philosophy to U.S. foreign economic policy is the prevailing approach of conservatives (and most liberal policymakers, as well) in pursuing economic supremacy. However, within this general framework, there are bitter divisions. The nationalist and reactionary populist right wing, as epitomized by Pat Buchanan, contends that Washington increasingly measures U.S. economic interests by what is good for footloose U.S. corporations rather than the American people and domestic production. The populist right is more apt to support protectionist measures than the dominant internationalists of the Republican Party, who respond primarily to the interests of corporate donors.

A similar split within the right regarding international economic policy revolves around U.S. sanctions. Unilateral economic sanctions are generally opposed by the right's Wall Street donors but are heartily supported by right-wing populists and neoconservatives. A powerful coalition of business interests complains that the imposition of economic sanctions in response to violations of human rights and other international norms has the effect of handicapping U.S. corporations and undermining the drive for U.S. economic supremacy. This business-first approach infuriates the moral, political, and military ideologues of the right, who believe that the U.S. should severely restrict or condition its business dealings with respect to such considerations as national security, anticommunism, and the repression of religious minorities, principally Christians. One has only to look at the persistence of the U.S. embargo against Cuba to appreciate how ideology can trump the economic bottom line in U.S. foreign policy.

The overall thrust of Bush administration policy follows the lead of U.S. transnational corporate interests. But to gain political support, the Bush administration has not hesitated to adopt the terminology of the America Firsters of the populist right, citing the need to support U.S. "food security" and "industrial security" in the face of foreign imports. The administration has also forcefully employed the America First logic in its refusal to sign any climate change treaty that would in any way hurt U.S. national economic interests. Recently, the administration even risked undermining its larger free trade agenda by imposing tariffs to protect the steel industry--and, not incidentally, to win political support in key states. Yet although the right is less unified on U.S. foreign economic policy than on other dimensions of its supremacy agenda, there exists an underlying belief that the U.S. is the world's economy heavy and that it should not hesitate to throw its weight around.

Military Supremacy

The current drive to ensure that the U.S. maintains military preeminence rests on a foundation of military theory dating back to the 1960s. Two of the leading proponents of projecting a U.S. military posture based on the principle of uncontested and unimpeded power are Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, chairman of the influential Defense Policy Board. Enemies should not be contained but rather defeated. Traditional balance-of-power structures of international relations are rejected, and the U.S. must spend whatever is needed and intervene whenever necessary to preempt or respond to military threats. All international arrangements--détente, arms control treaties, or any other multilateral agreement that might constrain U.S. freedom of action--should be opposed.

The PNAC's vision, as articulated by its founders and associates, brazenly favors a Pax Americana backed by superior military power and a will to confront--unilaterally, if necessary--any emerging or potential regional or global power before it can threaten Washington's interests or position. The vision's core ideas appear to be based in large part on a 1992 Pentagon strategy document drafted by Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Libby (Vice President Cheney's chief of staff) that was drastically toned down at the insistence of Bush Sr.'s top foreign policy aides, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, before its final publication. It is a vision that is clearly at variance with the more modest and multilateralist sentiments of the vast majority of the American public, according to polls conducted over the past decade.

During the cold war, the right insisted that the U.S. move beyond the containment policies advocated by George F. Kennan to a rollback agenda advocated by John Foster Dulles and eventually adopted by the Reagan team with its support of the contras in Central America, UNITA guerrillas in Angola, and the mujahadin in Afghanistan. Today, the military supremacists unabashedly argue for the U.S. to mobilize--at whatever cost--the troops and weaponry necessary to assert U.S. global hegemony.

Whatever the validity of U.S. military supremacy theory as a legitimate or effective defense posture, the ideology has immediate rewards for U.S. weapons manufacturers. This military strategy/military industry nexus is epitomized by the right-wing Center for Security Policy, (online at www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org), with its close connections to both military contractors and the Pentagon. The center's director, Frank Gaffney (who signed the PNAC statement of principles and serves on AVOT's board), recently rejoiced that his group's "peace through strength" principles have once again found a place in U.S. government. Like the Reagan years, when many of the center's current associates directed U.S. military policy, the present administration has, according to Gaffney, "invited an extraordinary number of members of the Center's National Security Advisory Council and others of the Center's colleagues to serve in top positions in the U.S. government." An early member of the center's board, Richard Cheney, is now vice president, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a recipient of the center's Keeper of the Flame award.

Bringing It All Together

President Bush, with no foreign policy background himself, has increasingly taken his foreign policy script from the pages of right-wing institutes and front groups. The same has been true for his domestic policies, including faith-based social services, privatized Social Security, and regressive tax cuts--concepts advocated with ideological fervor by the AEI and Empower, Inc., for example. The writings of the right-wing analysts associated with these institutions, together with the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard, have thus proved to be a better forecast of the Bush administration's foreign policy than the predictions of centrist or progressive pundits and scholars.

Meanwhile, the backlash against the Clinton administration has fostered a coalescence--not seen since Reagan's first term--of the various strands of conservatism. Within the Bush administration, there is an admixture of neoconservatives (largely disaffected or right-wing Democrats), social conservatives (like former Education Secretary William Bennett), and right-wing Republican internationalists (Reagan and company).

Today, the administration is confidently advancing a strategic vision for America's role, and that vision is one of U.S. global hegemony. It's a vision of cultural wars fought against internal and external threats to Judeo-Christian values (as interpreted by the right). Antiterrorism has substituted for anticommunism and has given the right's foreign policy elites the opportunity they need to launch their supremacy agenda. The call to "victory over terrorism" is being broadly construed to encompass most of the objectives of the supremacist right--from missile defense to counterinsurgency in Colombia, from support for Likud militarists in Israel to securing a hold on Central Asian oil supplies, from targeting Saddam Hussein to zeroing in on the "blame America first" dissidents at home.

In one year the Bush administration has succeeded in shifting the U.S. foreign policy agenda hard right. Thus far the American public--still in shock from the 9/11 attacks but boosted by a new sense of patriotism--has stood behind the administration. Will this support extend to counterinsurgency in Colombia, a military campaign against Iraq, and ideological wars at home and abroad asserting U.S. supremacy? Working in tandem, the right wing and the public diplomacy operations of the Bush administration aim to keep Americans facing right and marching forward.

Tom Barry <tom@irc-online.org> is a senior analyst at the Interhemispheric Resource Center and codirector of Foreign Policy In Focus. Jim Lobe <jlobe@starpower.net> writes regularly for FPIF, Inter Press Service, and OneWorld.net.

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U.S. Foreign Policy— Attention, Right Face, Forward March