Mutualism

Description

President Clinton likes to talk about building bridges to the 21st century, but there is no construction gang on the scene. The truth of the matter is that, nearly a decade since the end of the Cold War, the United States is still without a blueprint for the future. From the Bush administration's vacuous "new world order", rhetoric to the "engagement and enlargement" effluvia of the Clinton administration, the United States has substituted slogans for strategy. Such policy drift is partly attributable to post-Cold War complacency, and partly to the triumphalist belief in the march of liberal-democracy that permeates American foreign policy attitudes. There are, of course, differences in the way foreign affairs practitioners view the world. Neo-Wilsonians believe that a rational and educable world will eventually adopt the same values. Realists believe that the United States must exert its power and coopt others into joining international posses that the American sheriff would naturally lead. American nationalists, so-called neo-Reaganites, contend that the United States bears a special duty to create a peaceful and moral international order, while neo-isolationists-America Firsters, libertarians, pacifists-oppose the political and economic cost of an American empire. On the surface, these options appear to be quite different, at least in terms of what is required of the United States. Upon closer examination, however, they are all variations of American exceptionalism, and they all depart from the same premises about the contemporary international environment as it has evolved since the end of the Cold War.

Subjects