President Clinton and his advisers have frequently proclaimed that the emergence of an integrated global economy is one of the defining characteristics of the post-Cold War world—and quite possibly the most important. With the disappearance of Soviet communism, the most pressing challenge to American well-being comes not from direct military threats but, it is said, from economic competitors in Europe and Asia. The control object of the administration, in both its foreign and domestic policy components, is to improve the competitiveness of American industry and, specifically, the American worker. Failure to do so will result in a shrinking standard of living for ordinary Americans and a permanent decline on the global economic, political, and military status of the United States.

To avoid decline, the administration proposed first and foremost to address deficiencies in American economy and society that have supposedly hampered competitiveness. This involves reducing the federal budget deficit while increasing government spending in so-called investment accounts, which are said to be sources of long-term growth in productivity—e.g., infrastructure, education, and research and development. Further, the administration argues that it will be necessary to increase the "security" of the American worker, and especially the middle class, in order to provide them with the confidence to take the personal risks necessary to become fully competitive in the world market. These domestic security programs include universal health care, job retraining programs, and anti-crime legislation.

Whether the Clinton domestic agenda will achieve its goals of increasing American competitiveness and improving the standard of living is a subject addressed by other authors in this volume. For our purposes, we would note that there is, in theory, a seamless web between the Clinton administration's foreign and domestic policy. Clinton advisers point out that exports have accounted for the greater part of U.S. economic growth since the late 1980s, and that exports tend to provide higher-paying jobs than industries that only serve the domestic market. To continue an export-driven economic strategy, the administration must not only increase the relative performance of American industries and workers with respect to foreign competitors; it must also ensure access to foreign markets. The administration accordingly has to make a concerted effort to promote U.S. exports wherever and however possible, whether through multilateral agreements on trade liberalization; unilateral pressure against what the administration considers unfair trade barriers to U.S. goods and services; or direct U.S. government assistance to American firms doing business abroad.

The Clinton administration believes that continued American international leadership is necessary to ensure that foreign markets remain or become open. Without energetic American policies, political forces in Europe and Asia will tend toward protectionism, potentially leaving the United States economically isolated in the Western Hemisphere in a world divided into exclusive and hostile regional trading blocs. But the administration does not believe that the United States enjoys the same absolute power that it did during the Cold War, because of the growth of the economies of many other nations.

Accordingly, President Clinton seeks to find ways to leverage the United States' unique assets to increase relative American power in the short term, while relying on the revitalization of the U.S. economy to provide the long-term foundation for the domestic renewal of America (and its continued international predominance).

The first leverage point for the United States is its ability to play one region off against another for American economic advantage. Thus, Congressional approval of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) in November provided Clinton with political leverage in the subsequent APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum) meeting in Seattle, as he sought to open Asian, and specifically Japanese, markets. The apparently successful APEC meeting, in turn, provided Clinton with a stronger hand against the Europeans in his efforts to bring the Uruguay round of the GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) talks to a successful conclusion. This policy of economic maneuvering does not however imply an equality of priority among the regions. The administration appears to believe that Europe is a region in economic decline, with relatively limited opportunities for American trade and investment as compared with Asia. By some estimates, the overall growth rate in Asia for 1992 was 7.8 percent, compared with a 1.1 percent figure for Europe (the North American growth rate was 2.1 percent). Turning towards Asia as a source of dynamism for the American economy would logically lead the United States to reorient its alliance relationships, military force structure, and the like to accommodate an Asia-first policy—reversing the strategic priorities of the past 50 years.

The second point of leverage likewise reflects an attempt to reverse the patterns of the Cold War. When the U.S.-Soviet competition dominated the concerns of American policy makers, the United States made economic concessions to its allies in order to gain their cooperation on security matters. The Clinton administration now seeks allied accommodation on trade issues as a quid pro quo for continued American security guarantees—which guarantees presumably remain of sufficient importance to the allies that they will make economic concessions to Washington.

The third point of leverage is to use multilateral instruments of security to reduce the burdens on the U.S. military, permitting the United States to decrease its defense expenditures safely and redirect the savings into domestic investment accounts and deficit reduction. The United Nations is supposed to take the lead in what the administration terms "humanitarian" military interventions, while the United States retains the capability to act, unilaterally if necessary, in defense of its "vital" interests.

This leads to the fourth, and perhaps most critical element of the Clinton administration's search for foreign policy leverage: preventive diplomacy. In principle, the administration seeks to defuse or manage potential regional crises diplomatically before they reach the stage where they distract the president and the American public from their quest for economic security. In practice, this means gambling to some extent that the world will remain sufficiently quiet for the next several years so as to allow the president to implement his domestic and international economic agendas, and for new regional security arrangements to emerge that will serve to dampen conflict over the longer term. The administration's stance towards North Korea's nuclear program—tough public rhetoric, but reluctance to force any sort of confrontation—is one example of preventive diplomacy in action. The United States has also made the decision to throw its lot in with Russian President Boris Yeltsin, in hopes that democratic and market reform will solidify a pro-Western foreign policy for the Russian Federation. Such a positive outcome in Moscow would prevent what the administration defines as the greatest potential short-term threat to American security, and to Clinton's economic-centered foreign policy: that is, a newly aggressive Russia determined to oppose American regional interests in Eurasia. A key part of Clinton's strategy to buttress Yeltsin's position is effectively to allow Russia a relatively free hand in dealing with what the Russians call the "near abroad"—the other former Soviet republics (except for the Baltic states, at least at the moment), including Ukraine. The Clinton administration is also resisting efforts to expand NATO membership eastward, on the grounds that this would be regarded as a threatening development by Moscow. Such consideration of Russia's interests, it is hoped, will strengthen Yeltsin's hands against hard-line nationalist elements in Russia, while buying time for Russian reform to take hold.

To succeed in his effort to recast American foreign policy, President Clinton must establish a workable popular and Congressional consensus behind a new kind of American internationalism. The president and other administration officials have understood since the beginning that continued American global engagement and leadership (especially in its political and military dimensions) has been under attack from both the right and the left. Until recently, administration officials have struggled to mount a coherent defense of internationalism, and they have been hampered by the fact that the president preferred to focus on the domestic elements of his strategy of economic revitalization. But the NAFTA debate clearly energized Clinton and allowed him, intellectually and politically, to make the link between American economic growth and U.S. interests abroad. This linkage permits the administration to justify international engagement and leadership to the American public as the central mechanism to create high-paying jobs in the United States. Hence, the administration increasingly views foreign and military policy issues according to their impact on our trade objectives, which objectives in turn will be driven by an assessment of how trade can best support the domestic economy.

If President Clinton can realize the vision outlined above, he will have gone far in improving American economic and military security at less cost than that required to wage the Cold War. Whether he will be able to realize such a vision, in whole or in part, depends critically on whether the leverage points noted above do in fact exist. It also depends on the operational competence of the administration, domestically and internationally, to take advantage of that supposed leverage. Reasonable doubts exist on both accounts.

With respect to the question of leverage, it remains to be demonstrated that other major powers, including Japan and Germany, will accept American global economic leadership on Clinton's terms, or that they will be willing to pay (in terms of significant trade concessions) for the privilege of an American security guarantee. To be sure, American leadership and military protection is welcomed, or at least accepted, by many key nations. But with the end of the Cold War threat and the economic emergence of Europe (if temporarily lagging) and Asia, these nations are beginning to develop their own distinct political and strategic interests. There is a point at which American hectoring on economics—and especially implicit threats to remove the U.S. security umbrella—may lead to a break in political relations rather than a strengthening of the American economic position. Tokyo and Berlin, among others, now have options to operate independently of Washington that they did not previously possess, however reluctant they may be to exercise those options. To be sure, the United States should not neglect its economic interests or its unique position of international leadership, but it must develop a new style of leadership that accommodates the legitimate interests of others.

This cautionary point raises a deeper issue: whether the Clinton administration's "economy first" approach prematurely discounts the geopolitical dimensions of international relations. There is certainly no guarantee that ambitious or desperate regional powers, such as North Korea or Serbia, will elect to remain passive over the next five years while the administration puts the American economic house in order. The implicit U.S. approach toward Russia—not opposing Moscow in its ambitions to reestablish predominance over the territory of the former Soviet Union—is a particularly critical gamble. Arguably, an imperial Russia cannot also be a liberal Russia, and by implicitly condoning the former the administration is inadvertently sabotaging the latter.

Also, there is no guarantee that Russian imperialism would stop with a defocus restoration of the former Soviet Union. The countries of east-central Europe are already deeply concerned about a new wave of Russian imperialism, which accounts for their urgent desire to begin the process of acquiring membership in NATO. To date, the administration appears to be bowing to Russian pressure to keep these countries out of NATO, but the desirability of giving any government in Moscow an effective veto over Western security interests in the heart of Europe is a dubious policy at best. In addition, the administration appears not to be giving sufficient consideration to an equally significant geopolitical event: the possibility that the Russian Federation, like the Soviet Union, might wholly or partially disintegrate. The American focus on the center (Moscow) thus may lead to missed opportunities to develop a better understanding of, and contacts in, the various regions of Russia.

It is also far from clear that the administration can safely reduce the burdens of the U.S. global military superpower status without jeopardizing its larger political-economic ambitions. The limitations of relying on the United Nations for relief have become so obvious as not to require comment. The Defense Department's recent Bottom Up Review claimed that, despite reductions in defense spending, the United States itself will still be capable of fighting and wining two nearly simultaneous regional wars (e.g., against Iraq and North Korea). Most serious military analysts outside the administration challenge this assumption. The U.S. military is already stretched thin with its various peacekeeping and forward presence commitments. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn, along with several members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have publicly signaled their concern that U.S. military capability and readiness are already on the ragged edge—even before the administration imposes deeper defense cuts than those now projected (which additional cuts seem almost certain to be made). To be sure, if all remains reasonably quiet on the international scene, this reduction in military capability might never become evident. But continued poor American performances in peacekeeping operations such as Somalia, much less a major setback in a future Operation Desert Storm, would have a devastating impact on the United States' international prestige and cause current allies, greater and lesser, to seek other means of security. This would undermine the administration's effort to create and lead a new world economic order, and perhaps lead to the marginalization of American political -military influence in key regions, especially Europe.

One should also question the administration's ability to translate its vision of a new economic order into continued public support for American international engagement. Historically, a focus on international economic has appealed to isolationist rather than internationalist sentiment. Recall George Washington's formulation in the Farewell Address: "The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible." Washington's rule made perfect sense for the United States in the context of the late 18th century, but it later became an unthinking dictum of those who failed to recognize that economic interests, as well as other interests, can generate overseas political commitments that do require military defense. Latter-day isolationists are certain to renew the claim that, with the collapse of the Soviet threat, the United States can return to an "economy first and only" foreign policy. Clinton's rhetoric runs the danger of reinforcing rather than countering that sentiment. The genius of U.S. post-Cold War internationalism was that it combined moral and geopolitical concerns—the need to contain the Soviet Union—with the legitimate promotion of U.S. economic interests. This formulation appealed successfully to the enlightened self-interest of the American people. It remains to be seen whether Clinton's rather crass appeal to "jobs, jobs, jobs" is alone sufficient to command the better instincts of the American people and overcome their natural and understandable desire to turn inward.

Arguably, in international relations, a well-executed plan of questionable merit is superior to a noble effort badly done. Setting aside the merits of Clinton's econo-centric approach to the world, we are therefore entitled to inquire about the operational competence of the administration. Here there are considerable grounds for concern, especially since the administration relies too heavily on the effective prevention and management of regional crises to free up time and resources for promoting the new American economic agenda. The Clinton administration's foreign policy team contains many of the same individuals who served in the Carter administration. This in itself is not undesirable, as many of these officials served previously with distinction, and experience does count. Still, the Clinton administration's inept execution of policy in situations such as Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti has shown distressing similarities to that of the failed Carter presidency. President Clinton has chosen to dismiss the significance of these "secondary" mistakes and to emphasize the operational success of "primary" efforts such as NAFTA, APEC, and support for Russian reform. But this ignores the fact that failures to deal with crises that the administration attempts to define as being peripheral to American interests can easily lead to a more general erosion of domestic and international confidence. This is precisely what the Iranian hostage crisis did to Jimmy Carter.

Here, responsibility resides at the top. Nothing much happens in this administration without the president's close and careful attention. President Clinton to date has been largely disinterested in foreign affairs, except for those topics dealing directly with American economic security (the Russian problem being defined largely in those terms). If President Clinton is right, if economic matters now control and transcend geopolitical considerations, this lack of attention is proper and salutary. If he is not, then he, and we, will suffer on both accounts.