Transcript
CHAPTER 20 Global Policy
Parallel Lecture 20.1
The Drama of Global Policy, Part 1: The Players and the Rules
This lecture closely follows the discussion in the chapter, though it provides a framework for you to help your students think about foreign policy as an ongoing story with many players. This lecture introduces the major players and the supporting cast, and explains who interacts with whom, and what the boundaries of those interactions are (and why those boundaries exist). The remaining topics are covered in Parallel Lecture 20.2.
I. Making Foreign Policy: The Leading Players
A. Foreign policy is a nation’s general plan to defend and advance national interests, especially its security against foreign threats.
B. The Protagonist: The President
1. The Constitution allows the President to deal with other nations in several ways.
a) The President is commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
b) The President has the power to make treaties.
c) The President appoints U.S. ambassadors and the heads of executive departments.
d) The President receives (or refuses) ambassadors from other countries.
2. Over time, the executive has used these provisions, laws, Supreme Court decisions, and precedents created by bold action, to emerge as the leading actor in American foreign policy.
C. The Protagonist II (and sometimes The Antagonist): Congress
1. The Constitution mentions the word “foreign” in five places, and all of these are in Article I (which defines the legislative branch).
2. The Constitution allows Congress to deal with other nations in several ways:
a) Congress has the power to create legislation.
b) Congress has the power to declare war.
c) Congress has the power to raise revenues and dispense funds.
d) Congress has the power to support, maintain, govern and regulate the army.
e) Congress has the power to call out state militias to repel invasions.
f) Congress has the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations.
g) Congress has the power to define and punish piracy and offenses against the law of nations.
3. Congress has only used its power to declare war five times.
4. Most importantly, Congress uses its power of the purse to provide funds for foreign policy activities it supports, and to prohibit funds for those it opposes.
5. The Senate has specific powers that make it the leading chamber on foreign policy issues.
a) The Senate must give advice and consent to treaties.
b) The Senate must give advice and consent to the appointment of ambassadors and other officials involved in foreign policy.
6. The Senate rarely defeats a treaty the President has made (only 21 of thousands have been defeated), but many of those defeats have been historically significant.
a) The Senate vetoed Woodrow Wilson’s treaty to join the League of Nations in 1919.
b) U.S. entrance into the United Nations required Senate approval; despite some isolationist sentiment, the treaty passed.
c) The most recent treaty rejection occurred in 1999, when the Senate rejected the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
D. The Power Move: Presidents can avoid Senate treaty rejection by creating foreign policy through executive agreements.
1. An executive agreement is a pact between heads of countries and has the legal status of treaties.
a) Executive agreements are within the inherent powers of the President and have the legal status of treaties.
b) They must conform to the Constitution, existing treaties, and the laws of Congress.
c) Like treaties, they have the force of law; unlike treaties, they do not require Senate approval.
2. Most executive agreements deal with minor issues.
3. Presidents have occasionally resorted to executive agreements on issues that were unlikely to win Senate consent: NAFTA is a recent example.
E. The Dance of Power: Legislation and Foreign Policymaking Power
1. Congress has allowed the presidency certain leeway on use of discretionary fundslarge sums of money that may be spent on unforeseen needs to further the national interest.
2. Congress has also granted the President transfer authorityallowing him to take money that Congress has approved for one purpose and spend it on something else.
3. As commander-in-chief, the President has authority to commit the armed forces to respond to emergency situations, effectively involving the U.S. in undeclared wars.
a) The War Powers Resolution (passed in response to the Vietnam War) requires the President to consult with Congress in “every possible instance” before involving troops in hostilities.
b) Troops may not stay for more than 60 days without Congressional approval.
c) The actual impact of the law is probably quite minimal; no President has ever been “punished” for violating its provisions.
4. Congress authorized President George W. Bush to “use all necessary and appropriate force” against those who committed or aided the terrorist attacks” after September 11, 2001.
5. Through a Joint Resolution Bush was authorized to use military force against Saddam Hussein. The resolution was opposed by more than half the Democrats in the House and nearly half in the Senate.
6. As presidents have expanded their role in the foreign policy drama, the Senate sought to enlarge its part on presidential appointment to offices involved in foreign affairs.
II. Making Foreign Policy: Supporting Players
A. The Department of State
1. The State Department helps formulate American policy and then executes and monitors it throughout the world.
2. The Secretary of State (the head of the State Department) is the highest-ranking official in the cabinet, and also (usually) the President’s most important foreign policy advisor.
3. Despite its size and selectivity in hiring, the State Department is often charged with lacking initiative and creativity.
4. The State Department lacks a strong domestic constituency to exert pressure in support of its policies; pluralist politics makes this a serious drawback.
B. The Department of Defense
1. The Department of Defense is charged with promoting unity and coordination among the armed forces and providing the bureaucratic structure needed to manage the peacetime military.
2. The Secretary of Defense is a civilian, and has budgetary power, control of defense research, and the authority to transfer, abolish, reassign, and consolidate functions among the military services.
3. The power wielded by the Secretary of Defense depends upon the Secretary’s own vision and willingness to use the tools available.
4. Below the secretary – the civilian secretaries of the army, navy and air force. Below them – military commanders of the individual branches of the armed forces, who make up the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
5. The Joint Chiefs coordinate military policy among the different branches, serve as the primary military advisers to the president, the secretary of defense, the National Security Council, helping to shape policy positions on matters such as alliances, plans for nuclear and conventional war, and arms control and disarmament.
C. The National Security Council
1. The National Security Council (NSC) is a group of advisors created to help the President mold a coherent approach to foreign policymaking by integrating and coordinating details of domestic, foreign and military affairs.
2. The statutory members of the NSC include the President, Vice President, and Secretaries of State and Defense.
3. The role of the NSC varies considerably according to the wishes of the President.
D. The CIA and the Intelligence Community
1. Before World War II, there was no permanent agency charged with gathering intelligence (information) about the actions and intentions of other nations.
2. The CIA was created during the Cold War, and is charged with collecting, analyzing, evaluating, and circulating intelligence related to national security matters.
3. The intelligence community also includes the departments of Defense, State, Energy and Treasury, which also possess intelligence capacities.
4. Most material obtained by the CIA comes from readily available sources, such as statistical abstracts, books, and newspapers.
5. Covert (secret) activities are undertaken by the Operations Directorate, and have included espionage, coups, assassination plots, wiretaps, interception of mail, and infiltration of protest groups.
6. Covert operations raise moral and legal questions in a democracy, particularly in the aftermath of the cold war: when a government engages in actions the people know nothing about, the people cannot hold government accountable for its actions.
7. The CIA was blamed for a massive intelligence failure in the events of 9/11 and in the estimates of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
E. Bit Players: Other Parts of the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy
1. Globalization has caused the number of players concerned with foreign policy to expand.
2. The Agency for International Development (AID) oversees aid programs to nations around the globe. It works with a full range of other departments and agencies.
3. The U.S. Information Agency (USIA) provides educational and cultural materials about the United States in over 100 countries.
4. The U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) negotiates, and supervises arms control, , and disarmament policies.
5. Many other departments, including the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Energy, engage in various foreign policy activities.
6. An array of government corporations, independent agencies, and quasi-governmental organizations also participate in foreign policymaking. These include the National Endowment for Democracy, the Export-Import Bank, and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.
7. States and localities are now also paying attention to foreign policy; most state governments now have offices charged with promoting export of state goods and attracting overseas investment.
III. These are the players and what they can do: now on to the stories they have created.
Parallel Lecture 20.2
The Drama of Global Policy, Part 2: The Stories
This lecture substantially follows the discussion in the chapter, though it provides a framework for you to help your students think about foreign policy as an ongoing story with many players. This lecture follows the lecture that introduces the major players, the supporting cast and their interactions, and delves into the specifics of their interactions during the 19th and 20th centuries and the challenges they will face in the 21st century.
I. The Story to this Point: A Review of U.S. Foreign Policy
A. Every President comes to office with an ideological orientation for interpreting and evaluating events, and they tend to be more internationalist than isolationist in their orientation
1. These orientations can be thought of in terms of the basic conflicts of freedom v. order and freedom v. equality (see text Figure 20.1)
a) International Liberals favor government action for equality of people in all nations over freedom, and favor freedom over the traditional order of the nation-state system.
b) International Conservatives favor freedom over government action for equality of people in all nations, and favor the traditional order of the nation-state system over freedom.
c) International Libertarians favor freedom over government action for equality of people in all nations, and favor freedom over the traditional order of the nation-state system.
d) International Communitarians favor government action for equality of people in all nations over freedom, and favor the traditional order of the nation-state system over freedom.
2. Presidents are often at ideological odds with members of Congress.
3. The story of foreign policymaking in the U.S. reflects theseand othertensions.
B. Emerging from Isolationism
1. For most of the 19th century, the limits of American interests were defined by the Monroe Doctrine, in which the U.S. rejected European interference and agreed not to involve itself in European politics. This was the politics of isolationism.
2. Throughout the 19th century, the U.S. continued to expand and became a regional power that was increasingly involved in the affairs of nations in the Pacific and Latin America.
3. World War I was the first challenge to isolationism.
a) The slogan that surrounded our entry into World War I“to make the world safe for democracy”gave an idealistic tone to America’s efforts to advance its own interests.
b) When the Senate failed to ratify the treaty needed for entry into the League of Nations, America’s brief moment of internationalism ended, and its security interests continued to be narrowly defined.
4. World War II changed America’s orientation.
a) The U.S. emerged from the war as a superpower, with national security interests around the world.
b) After the war, the nation was forced to confront a new rival: its former ally, the Soviet Union.
C. Cold War and Containment: The 1950s and early 1960s
1. The Cold War was a new kind of war, characterized by suspicion, rivalry, mutual ideological revulsion, and a military buildup between the two superpowers.
2. The Cold War was waged based on the policy of containment (holding Soviet power in check).
a) Militarily, the Cold War committed the U.S. to high defense expenditures, including maintaining a large military presence around the world.
b) Economically, the Cold War required the U.S. to back the establishment of an international economic system that relied on free trade, fixed currency exchange rates, and America’s ability to act as banker for the world.
c) Politically, the U.S. forged numerous alliances against the Soviet Union.
(1) The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was the first of these.
(2) The U.S. also tried to use international institutions (such as the U.N.) as instruments of containment.
3. The early years of the Cold War were characterized by reliance on nuclear weapons through a policy of nuclear deterrence.
4. By the late 1960s, both nations had nuclear technology that would allow them to totally destroy each other; this resulted in the policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD).
5. The end of the colonial era also had an impact on the Cold War.
a) The Soviets offered to help forces involved in wars to end colonialism (wars of national liberation).
b) The U.S. developed policies aimed at nation building: it sought to strengthen the opponents of communism in newly emerging nations by promoting democratic reforms and shoring up their economies.
D. Vietnam and the Challenge to the Cold War Consensus
1. The Cold War turned hot in Vietnam by the mid-1960s: Soviet support for a war of national liberation came into conflict with American nation building.
2. The Vietnam War damaged the Cold War consensus on the value of containment.
a) Some critics complained that the government lacked the will to use enough military force to win the war.
b) Others argued that the U.S. was relying on force to solve political problems.
c) Still others objected that the U.S. was intervening in a civil war.
3. The U.S. signed a peace agreement, pulled its forces out of Vietnam, and in 1975 the country was unified under a Communist regime.
4. Even during the war, President Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, began to shift U.S. foreign policy toward the Nixon doctrine, seeking to limit U.S. involvement abroad.
5. Nixon was also responsible for the policy of détente, a relaxation of tension with communist nations.
a) This policy led to the conclusion of a major arms agreement, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), in 1972.
b) There was also greater cooperation between the U.S. and Russia in other spheres, such as space exploration.
6. Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy reflected the influence of the “Vietnam syndrome,” a crisis of confidence that resulted from America’s failure in Vietnam and the breakdown of Cold War consensus about America’s role in the world.
a) Carter tended to downplay the importance of the Soviet threat, seeing revolutions in Nicaragua and Iran as products of internal forces rather than of Soviet involvement.
b) Carter’s administration also de-emphasized the use of military force, but could not offer an effective alternative when Iranians took American diplomats hostage, or when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.
E. The End of the Cold War
1. Ronald Reagan was untroubled by Vietnam syndrome.
2. He pursued the policy of peace through strength: the best way to combat the Soviet threat was to renew and demonstrate American military strength.
a) Increased defense spending was focused on major new weapons (such as the Strategic Defensive Initiative, also known as “Star Wars”).
b) During this period, the Cold War climate became even chillier.
3. When Mikhail Gorbachev came into power in the Soviet Union (1985), things changed substantially. Gorbachev wished to reduce the USSR’s commitments abroad and concentrate its resources on domestic reforms.
4. By 1988, the U.S. and the USSR had concluded agreements outlawing intermediate-range nuclear forces (the INF treaty) and providing for the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
5. In 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down, symbolizing the end of the Cold War.
a) Who won? Some believe that Communism collapsed because of Reagan’s policies.
b) Who won? Some believe that the combined appeal of Western affluence, Gorbachev’s policies, and the desire to overcome the nuclear threat led to the end of the Cold War.
c) Who won? Some argue that both powers lost by spending trillions of dollars on defense and ignoring needs in other sectors of the economy.
F. A New Story: Foreign Policy without the Cold War
1. George H.W. Bush faced a classic national security challenge when Iraq invaded Kuwait: not only had a friend been attacked, but the U.S. oil supply had been put in jeopardy.
a) Bush emphasized multilateral action and the use of international organizations like the U.N. to counter the threat.
b) To oppose Saddam Hussein, Bush built a coalition of nations that included the Soviet Union, Eastern European States, many Arab states and other developing countries. e The U.S. won approval for a series of actions against Iraq from the U.N. Security Council. .
c) The threat galvanized Americans in support of Bush’s military action to repel the invasion.
2. Bill Clinton did not have such a visible threat to vital U.S. interests, and struggled through his presidency to provide clear, coherent foreign policy leadership.
a) The Clinton administration pursued the policy of enlargement and engagement.
(1) Enlargement meant increasing the number of democracies with market membership and adding to the membership of NATO.
(2) Engagement meant rejecting isolationism and striving to achieve greater flexibility in a chaotic global era.
b) Critics worried that the policy did not provide adequate guidelines about when, where and why the United States should be engaged.
c) Clinton did draw praise for his attempts to broker peace in Northern Ireland and an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
G. The Hot War on terrorism. The attack on America on September 11, 2001, transformed Bush’s presidency. He acted as leader of the world’s only remaining superpower whose goal was to eliminate the threat to order posed by international terrorism.
1. He made international affairs the centerpiece of his administration.
2. The U.S. led the assault against the Al Qaeda network, heading a truly international coalition.
3. After success in Afghanistan, Bush announced a new doctrine of preemptive action.
4. The doctrine met with a controversial reaction.
5. Ambitious national goals led observers at home and abroad to speak of “an American Empire.”
6. Citizens in many foreign countries turned against Bush’s twist in American foreign policy.
H. Moving the Story Forward: From Foreign Policy to Global Policy
1. Global policy, like foreign policy, is a general plan to defend and advance national interests, but global policy embraces a broader view of national interests.
2. Global policy confronts the silent, cumulative effects of billions of individual choices made by people everywhere on the globe.
3. Global policy requires global action; the players are international organizations that cooperate on a worldwide scale.
4. U.S. leadership is less evidentand less acceptedwhen such global issues as world trade, world poverty, the environment, human rights, and the challenges of emerging democracies are in play.
II. New Stories: Global Policy Issue Areas
A. Global problems are intermestic problems: they blend international and domestic concerns. Not only are economies tied together, but the air we breathe, the illnesses we contract, and even our climate can be affected by events in other countries.
B. Investment and Trade
1. At the end of World War II, the U.S. dominated the world’s economy. This dominance slowed, but even through the 1970s the U.S. was able to invest heavily abroad.
2. The U.S. was able to make tactical use of economic policy in making foreign policy during the Cold War.
a) The U.S. lowered trade barriers for Western Europe and Japan to shore up anti-Soviet forces.
b) The U.S. did not allow products with possible military use to be exported.
3. The situation changed in the 1980s.
a) Gaping deficits in the federal budget were partially financed by selling U.S. Treasury obligations at high interest rates to foreigners.
b) The value of the dollar soared, making American goods expensive for the rest of the world, and foreign goods cheap in the U.S.
c) Foreign firms became less interested in investing in the U.S., and American economic problems deepened.
4. The U.S. became more closely tied to other countries through international tradebut this is a complicated story with many actualand potentialplotlines.
a) Pursuing a true free trade policy would allow for the unfettered operation of the free market; nations would not impose tariffs or other barriers to keep foreign goods from being sold in their countries.
(1) Free trade would allow the principle of comparative advantage to work unhindered: all trading nations gain when each produces goods it can make comparatively cheaply and then trades them to obtain funds for the things it can produce only at a comparatively higher cost.
(2) The U.S. does not have pure free trade, but it has generally favored a relatively free trade regime in the last half of the 20th century.
(3) Other nations do not always have such liberal policies, though, which may put American goods at a disadvantage in the world market.
b) Americans want not only freedom, but fairness, in the world market: the idea of fair trade requires policymakers to create order through international agreements outlawing unfair business practices.
(1) The World Trade Organization (WTO) was created in 1995 to regulate trade among its member nations.
(2) Rulings against U.S. laws have been highly technical and have had limited impact.
c) Managed trade allows the government to intervene in trade policy in order to achieve a specific result (such as paying down a balance-of-payment deficit). This approach is a clear departure from a free trade system.
d) Protectionists want to retain barriers to free trade.
(1) Protectionists are concerned with preserving American industries and jobs.
(2) Most unions and many small manufacturers opposed NAFTA.
(3) But protectionism is a double-edged sword: countries whose products are kept out of the U.S. retaliate by refusing to import American goods.
(4) Protectionism also complicates foreign policymaking about other issues: it is a distinctly unfriendly move to make toward nations that may be our allies.
C. Human Rights, Poverty, and Foreign Aid
1. NATO’s campaign against “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans made clear that Western democracies would go to war to champion human rights.
2. Support for moral ideals such as freedom, democracy, and human rights fits well with U.S. interests.
3. Nevertheless, the relationship between America’s human rights policy goals and its economic policy goals has often been problematic. Many of the “big emerging markets” (BEMs), such as China, Indonesia, and Turkey, have problematic records in the areas of human rights, worker’s rights, and child labor.
4. The U.S. uses other economic tools to pursue human rights policy objectives.
a) Development aid, debt forgiveness, and loans with favorable credit terms are all used to assist developing nations.
b) The U.S. also donates American goods, which directly benefits the American businesses that supply the products.
c) Growing income disparities between the industrialized North and the non-industrial Southern nations may lead to political instability and threaten the interests of the democracies in the developed world.
5. Foreign aid is an easy target when the budget is tight.
a) Foreign aid recipients do not vote in American elections.
b) Americans overestimate the amount that goes to foreign aid (half of survey respondents believe 15% of the budget goes to aid to other countries; in actuality the amount is less than 1%). (See Figure 20.2 in text.)
6. In the last month of his administration, President Clinton signed the treaty to establish the International Criminal Court.
a) The Court has jurisdiction over individuals on charges of genocide, war crimes, and other crimes against humanity.
b) The treaty was controversial because the armed services feared that American troops abroad could be vulnerable to prosecution as a result of military actions.
c) President George W. Bush later “unsigned” this treaty.
D. The Environment
1. Environmental issues have posed the challenge of freedom v. order in the international arena.
2. Third World leaders have not wanted limits imposed on their freedom to industrialize under the terms of global order defined by the developed nations.
3. The U.S. has often drawn attacks from both developed and underdeveloped nations for claiming special privileges in international agreements accepted by other nations.
a) The U.S. has been unwilling to abide by the terms of the Biodiversity Treaty that was the product of the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
b) Similar problems occurred in regard to the 1997 understanding on global warming that was developed in Kyoto, Japan..
III. Viewers or Actors? The Public and Global Policy
A. Historically, the public has paid little attention to traditional foreign policy issues, except for issues of war and peace and the spread of communism.
B. Globalization has made nations more interdependent, and events in other countries have more of a direct impact on life in the U.S.
C. The growing interdependence of nations has had some impact on public interest in the world at large.
1. A 2002 survey reveals that Americans’ interest in the news of other countries, and their interest in American relations with other countries, had risen considerably after the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks.
2. Most citizens also thought the United States should take an “active part” in world affairs. Both of these statistics represent an increase in public concern with foreign affairs compared to before September 11th 2001.
3. Many people think globalization is mostly good, but there was still a substantial number who had not even heard about it.
4. The study confirmed that Americans believe it is better to respond to international crises in concert with allies rather than going it alone.
5. However, President George W. Bush was able to marshal relatively strong support for the invasion of Iraq even without U.N. approval and over the objections of many other countries, including some U.S. allies.
D. Ordinary citizens often learn more of foreign affairs from the knowledge leaders of the groups to which they belong.
E. Interest groupsincluding foreign firms, groups, and governmentshave hired lobbying firms to represent their issues in Washington.
1. The influence of these groups varies depending on the issue.
2. Given that the public has limited interest in foreign affairs, interest groups can have great effect on global policies outside matters of national security (e.g., the China Trade Bill).
F. Foreign policy decision-making will only get more complicated as time goes on: the story will get more interesting, but the history of who is in the playand who is “the audience” suggests that global and foreign policy decision-making may be the least majoritarian aspect of policymaking.
