|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The Twin Pillars of a New U.S. Foreign Policy
| Article
# : |
10101 |
|
|
Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
|
| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1993 |
3,888 Words |
| Author
: |
Larry Diamond
|
The end of the Cold War has brought a new world with two sharply divergent trends. On the one hand, democracy is expanding to unprecedented levels. In its new annual survey for 1992, Freedom House rates 75 countries as "free" (roughly speaking, "democratic"), 73 as "partly free," and 38 as "not free" (the smallest number since the survey began in 1972).
On the other hand, the world is witnessing a terrifying resurgence of war, hatred, savagery, aggression, and anarchy. By now, human rights and humanitarian disasters in Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Burma, Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, and several republics of the former Soviet Union have erased any hope that the global demise of communism would usher in a new world order of peace and harmony.
If there is to be a truly new world order, it will have to be created anew. And as fragmentation and confusion displace the stabilizing polarities of the Cold War conflict, only America can lead in that creation.
The twin realities of the post-Cold War world-the promise of democracy and the peril of chaos--call for a new doctrine in American foreign policy to replace the 40-year strategy of containing the spread of communism. The task that awaits us will in some respects be more demanding, because the new threats we must contain are much more numerous, diffuse, and subtle in their implications for American national security than a globally expansionist communist movement led by a Soviet Union with enough nuclear arms to destroy the United States many times over.
These new threats challenge directly not only the security of the United States and its democratic allies but the entire global system in its normative, legal, and institutional frameworks. This is one reason why, much more than in the Cold War, America must build up and work through collective institutions to find solutions to these problems. The other reason is that we simply no longer have the economic resources and geopolitical dominance to pursue our security primarily in unilateral terms.
Some new challenges are intrinsically global, such as protecting the earth's ozone and oceans and preserving its biological diversity. Others, such as liberalizing trade and fostering economic and social development in the Third World, have long been assigned to global institutional arenas.
But even with what Kenneth Jowitt has called "the extinction
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
