SJIR: U.S. Policies that Destabilize the World

Just over a decade ago when the Cold War ended, a short period of euphoria set in among world leaders. Two mutually threatening superpowers suddenly became one undisputed superpower and fears of a major nuclear confrontation seemed to be history. In Asia, China was eagerly throwing off much of its stifling Maoist heritage under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, despite a 1989 setback at Tiananmen. For the first time ever, all of Latin America except Cuba was more or less democratic. President George H. Bush, who was in office as this change was coming about, foresaw a New World Order but was not re-elected to work out its contours. The task of figuring out how the United States should fit into the post Cold War unipolar world was passed on to a new president, Bill Clinton, who then knew little about foreign affairs.

Clinton tried to help a number of troubled nations and regions to resolve their domestic or international conflicts, or to come in out of the cold. Among them were Haiti, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Colombia, North Korea and the Balkans, though in the end his efforts ranged from marginal successes to failures. In the process, Clinton squandered enormous amounts of time and resources on countries and issues of secondary or tertiary importance to U.S. national security, including Cuba, Haiti, Somalia and Kosovo, generally even failing in his stated objective to improve human rights and social conditions. At the same time, the administration’s policies toward the countries that mattered most, particularly Russia and China, largely lacked both clear and realistic direction and suffered from inconsistent implementation. In the end, the most important event of the Clinton years was the bombing of Yugoslavia between March and June 1999, a U.S. and NATO action that seriously skewed relations with countries throughout the developing world.

By the beginning of 2001, when Clinton turned the White House over to George W. Bush, America had assumed a new role and image in the world. It was not the image its architects had intended, though it is not yet clear whether they recognize that fact. For all the administration’s undoubted good intentions, by early 2001 Europeans and much of the developing world increasingly considered the United States an arrogant and hypocritical bully on the world stage. To some degree, this might have been the fate of any administration that suddenly found itself the world’s only superpower. But granting that, the administration carried out several important policies that pointlessly destabilized the world at the beginning of the new millennium.

This commentary will look at three policies that set in motion or accelerated dangerous developments and relationships: Kosovo/ Yugoslavia, China, and the war on drugs. As of this writing in May 2001, George W. Bush has been accused of offending America’s friends and enemies on such diverse policies as renouncing the Kyoto accord and promoting national missile defense over the objections of most countries in the world. It is too early to say, however, whether Bush will delineate and pursue a clearer and more constructive vision of U.S. national interests and whether he will achieve them more effectively and less offensively than Clinton. Certainly this is the right time to look carefully at how Clinton’s policies worked out and at least part of what Clinton left the new president to work with. The purpose here is not simply to criticize the Clinton administration, for Republicans share some of the blame for how things went, but to show that certain recent actions have served to destabilize the world. If the new administration ponders past mistakes, perhaps it will make essential changes and avoid making some of the same kinds of bad decisions in the future.

The bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was in many ways the most fateful and defining action of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. The main justification given for the action was to stop a national leader from committing genocide against his own people. The most irrepressible cheerleader for the U.S./NATO action was British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who called the bombing of Yugoslavia "a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values." NATO must have a "moral perspective and a conscience," he wrote, and "be willing to right wrongs and prosecute just causes" around the world.1 Blair, Clinton, and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright conducted "a new style of foreign policy," wrote Henry Kissinger, that was "driven by domestic politics and the invocation of universal moralistic slogans . . . . In the Clinton/Blair version of allied policy, NATO must act because it is the only posse in town and because its motives are pure."2 In a stinging critique of the war, former President Jimmy Carter wrote, "the approach the United States has taken recently has been to devise a solution that best suits its own purposes, recruit at least tacit support in whichever forum it can best influence, provide the dominant military force, present an ultimatum to recalcitrant parties and then take punitive action against the entire nation to force compliance. The often tragic result of this final decision is that already oppressed citizens suffer, while the oppressor may feel free of further consequences if he perpetrates even worse crimes."3

The question here is not whether Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic was cruel to his own people but whether he engaged in genocide, as inflated NATO casualty figures at the time suggested,4 and whether the United States and NATO should have bombed a sovereign country on those grounds. At the time and now the answers are "no," for there was a critical quantitative and qualitative difference between Serbian repression before and after the withdrawal of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) peacekeepers on March 19 and 20, and the beginning of the bombing on March 24. Even the U.S. State Department got it right in a report in mid-May 1999. "In late March 1999," the report said, disproving the grounds for U.S. and NATO policy, "Serbian forces dramatically increased the scope and pace of their efforts, moving away from selective targeting of towns and regions suspected of KLA sympathies toward a sustained and systematic effort to ethnically cleanse the entire province of Kosovo."5 That is, the charge of genocide could not legitimately even be argued until after NATO had undertaken a bombing campaign against Yugoslavia on the grounds that Milosevic was already engaged in genocide.

But the primary long-term impact of the Balkan adventure is not even in the Balkans. An influential adviser to the Chinese Foreign Ministry put his finger on the real issue when he told me in Beijing in September 2000 that while most Americans have already largely forgotten the Kosovo war, "people in other countries are busy learning its lessons." And those lessons, he continued, are the following. (1) The United States supports the rule of law until it finds it more convenient to throw it aside and take military action. (2) The U.S. does not respect national sovereignty and thus at any time may intervene in any country, including Russia or China, if it objects morally or otherwise to what is going on there. China’s obvious concerns are possible international intervention with respect to its claims to Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and the South China Sea, the latter where the Hainan aircraft incident occurred in April 2001. (3) Countries outside America’s orbit who do not want to be dictated to by the United States should unite to defend themselves and each other, which accounts for the rapid and multi-layered ties being formed between China and Russia, among others. (4) National defenses must be expanded, and particularly nuclear capability, for Yugoslavia almost certainly would not have been bombed if Milosevic had had any type of nuclear device.

Bush administration officials have said they will be much more cautious about such interventions in the future. But the Kosovo precedent has already been set and other actions in the future, which may or may not be really in the interests of the United States, such as the strong promotion of national missile defense, may now be interpreted as continuing the thrust of the Kosovo/Yugoslavia war.

At bottom some panda-hunters in the United States (and eagle-hunters in China) seem to believe that war is inevitable between these two countries and so why not, in effect, get on with it? It is not inevitable, though a working relationship will certainly be a constant challenge since the two cultures have different perceptions of themselves and of the world, and potentially conflicting and overlapping national interests. Americans tend to discount the past when looking to the future, while Chinese see the present and future through the prism of a very long history that includes a century of humiliations at the hands of the West and 150 years of domestic chaos. Many Americans think we should preach at and "punish" the Chinese until they begin thinking and acting like us. This will not work. Our sermons will not force the Chinese to make basic domestic changes they do not want, but will rather make good relations or even peaceful co-existence with the United States more difficult. At the same time, U.S. policies and actions can have some impact on the direction of Chinese domestic policies if they are exercised in a strong but statesman-like manner.

Bill Clinton ran for the presidency accusing then-President Bush of coddling dictators in Beijing, but in a couple of years he turned toward an erratic form of engagement. The editors of a forthcoming book on China policy during the George H. Bush and Clinton administrations conclude that Clinton’s "early leadership deficiencies in foreign affairs greatly contributed to mutual distrust, poor relations with Congress, and lost opportunities to nurture Sino-American relations." Indeed two Chinese analysts contributing to the volume report that both the Chinese people and government view the United States with growing distrust and resentment.6 I have noticed this on numerous trips to China and it was apparent during the Hainan airplane incident.

The critical problem with Clinton’s policy toward China was that it was founded on good intentions but on little understanding or deep conviction, so that when domestic or other pressures arose, implementation sometimes became short-term, self-serving and thus glaringly inconsistent with long-term interests. Historically speaking, recent problems can be traced as far back as the mid-19th century Opium Wars or simply to post- Tiananmen incidents. These include the Chinese F-8 fighters in the U.S. in 1989 to be rebuilt under a joint-military program that were detained for five years after Tiananmen, as well as the U.S. boarding of a Chinese ship in 1993. Here I will note only events of the late 1990s when the deterioration of relations became almost a free-fall. In addition to Kosovo, which included the allegedly accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, several of the key events --sometimes pushed as much or even more by Republicans than Democrats--were the following.

All of these events fed the reactionaries in China, particularly in the military, and seemed to justify their arguments that China needs to pursue a much more vigorous policy abroad in opposition to the United States, as it has in Iraq and Afghanistan. And of course this in turn fed the panda-hunters in the United States. No U.S. policy should be made mainly because it might help reformers in China, but we should certainly avoid allowing equivocation and domestic politics to determine foreign policy and thereby seriously undercut relations abroad.

The Chinese tended to prefer Al Gore over Bush in the U.S. presidential election in 2000 because the latter emphasized that he would be tougher on China, tilt more toward Japan and perhaps Taiwan and promote a strong national missile defense system. At this writing, it is too early to judge Bush’s approach, though he handled the Hainan plane crisis diplomatically. If Bush continues as he has begun, the Chinese may find that a somewhat tougher but more reasonable and consistent leader is better for both sides.

The U.S. war on drugs is a global affair, stretching from the United States through Latin America and the Balkans to Central, East and Southeast Asia. My focus here will be on the region that most obviously affects the United States, namely Latin America and even more precisely, on Colombia.

Sometimes the popular media sends a message that scholarly studies and the best of op-eds, never mind politicians, do not. The film "Traffic," which came out in early 2001, seems to be one such case. The partly fictionalized documentary focuses on the drug trade between Mexico and the United States, with all of its corruption, kidnappings, terrorism, frustrations and futility. If you multiply everything in "Traffic" by ten and add new and further complicating factors, you have some idea of the impact of the drug war in and on Colombia. This country is about the size of Texas and California combined and has the fourth largest economy in Latin America. Americans may have known of it originally because of its coffee, but now they think of it as the main source of heroin and cocaine on our streets and in our offices. Colombia has a pair of decades-old guerrilla armies, more recent and probably still more fearsome anti-guerrilla "paramilitaries," and dozens of drug cartels who work hand-in-glove with the guerrillas and paramilitaries in exchange for a major portion of their operating expenses. On the government side there is an army that sometimes gets out of control and cooperates informally with the paramilitaries, and a once quite solid economy that is now in its worst recession in a century. Every problem is created or magnified by massive violence and corruption. Colombia has by far the highest rate of kidnappings, and one of the highest rates of homicides and domestic dislocation, in the world. On top of all of its current problems, there is a residue from its colonial past that, taken with the chaos of the day, means there is little or no effective government presence in the almost half the country that is today under the sway of the narcos and guerrillas.

Add to that an ally, the United States, with a ravenous appetite for illegal narcotics and a tragically misguided and hypocritical war on drugs, both of which have played a major role in causing and stoking the crisis in Colombia and in other countries as well. The Clinton administration did not launch this tragedy, but its policies helped make it much worse.

In a perverse sort of way the current nightmare may have its positive side if the chaos forces the new Bush foreign policy team to step outside the social and intellectual rut of previous administrations with respect to drug policy for, as The Economist has remarked, "by any reasonable measure, America’s ‘war on drugs’ is a disaster."7 The Bush administration needs to draw up a comprehensive new strategy on drugs at home and abroad. So far the appointment of John Walters as drug policy director and the president’s remark that "drug legalization would be a social catastrophe" are not encouraging. On the other hand, his pledge to focus more on treatment and reducing demand, instead of almost single-mindedly trying to end supply, is a step in the right direction.8 The problem in the United States was laid bare recently in a book by California Superior Court Judge James P. Gray. Gray is one of an increasing number of Americans, including former Secretary of State George Shultz, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman and former San Jose police chief Joseph McNamara, who wrote an open letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in 1998 warning that the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself. 9

The international situation is less discussed in the United States than the domestic, but if anything it is more tragic and immoral. In early 2001 a well-meaning and beleaguered Colombian President Andr?s Pastrana sought to convince Americans that the drug war might have a happy ending. It might, but only if it is abolished in its present form and the increasingly tragic conditions are confronted in a more rational and humane manner.10

The most flagrantly hypocritical manifestation of U.S. policy is the annual Congressional "certification" process according to which Washington rates countries around the world on whether in the preceding year they tried hard enough to fight our war on drugs. If they do not measure up we cut back aid and diplomatic relations with them, as we did with Colombia during the Ernesto Samper (1994-1998) administration. This branding of Colombia as a bandit state was in some degree self-fulfilling and helped to create the chaos that is now dragging down the Pastrana administration and country.

U.S. policies of interdiction and eradication have stoked conflict in Colombia and other countries by making the drug business an explosive and highly profitable illegal operation. Few Americans realize how this war has slaughtered thousands of honest journalists, judges, policemen and others, and driven countless more abroad or into silence. It has, in the words of a recent editorial in The Economist, undermined "democracy, human rights and the environment in much of Latin America."11 The stepping up of U.S.-Colombian eradication policies in 2001 are predictably creating domestic resistance and spreading corruption and violence in neighboring countries.12

For decades the war on drugs has been a preordained failed campaign against human nature and the laws of economics. When the drug industry was driven underground even as the American and then European markets for narcotics rocketed up, we guaranteed astronomical illegal profits for those people who were willing to take whatever chances were necessary to cash in on the demand. And rather than taking primary responsibility on ourselves for reducing the demand, we have for decades largely blamed suppliers for the violence and corruption our appetites and our policies were instrumental in creating, though new Bush administration policies noted above may shift this somewhat.

As part of an internationally integrated program, sky-high profits from the drug industry should be slashed by some form of "decriminalization" and a new emphasis placed on education and rehabilitation. If this were done in the United States, and ideally in Europe as well, the levels of corruption and violence in Colombia, Mexico and other countries would become much more manageable. The clout of the drug lords would diminish greatly, as would the funding of guerrillas and paramilitaries. A fatal weakness in joint U.S.-Colombian strategy today is that U.S. guidelines preclude working to de-couple the activities of drug traffickers and armed insurgents. Only by severing the links between organized drug-related crime and organized political violence will the right and left wing armed insurgencies have incentives to approach the peace process with the objective of ending the armed struggle.

Among the first steps should be the immediate termination of the certification process and the ending of the massive military drug eradication campaign in southern Colombia. The eradication campaign will suck up most of the $1.3 billion granted last year during the Clinton administration and most of the $500,000 so far requested by Bush. U.S. support for Colombia should continue and perhaps even increase, but the focus should be on building essential state institutions and domestic and international confidence in the country. Washington should encourage even broader and more flexible peace negotiations with the guerrillas and paramilitaries. Remaining guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN) and even the United Self-Defense Forces (AUC) should be drawn into the political life of the country, as many from other groups were in the past. This will be a difficult challenge that in the end might have to be backed up with internationally-supported military force. Insurgents must be encouraged to participate in formal government institutions in their regions, bringing with them the infrastructures they have created locally in the absence of state infrastructure.

If the U.S. persists in its current disastrous policies toward drugs, we will reap continuing distress at home and persist in destroying the very democratic institutions we say we support in Colombia and other would-be developing countries around the world. If we refuse to devise a new and effective drug policy, the disorder in the Andes, which is already very serious in other countries as well, will get worse and spill over in various ways throughout the hemisphere. The United States itself will be drawn in because of increasing regional instability and reduced opportunities for the promotion of hemispheric trade and growth, the unimpeded or probably increasing inflow of narcotics, and greatly increased illegal immigration.

These are three examples of recent misguided and often arrogant and/or hypocritical U.S. policies from the Balkans through China to Latin America that have made the world a more difficult and dangerous place in which to live. In all of these areas the fallout from U.S. policies has gone beyond the borders of the target countries to affect regions and the world. In each case the problems have been complex, but in each case we have devised policies that have made things worse rather than better, at great cost to the United States, in dollars, prestige, trust and security, as well as to other countries.

The Bush administration must find fresh and creative minds that are informed by history and current reality to deal with these and other issues that inevitably will arise. That is, if we want to have fewer security-related and other problems in the future, our political leaders must have advisers who are informed, open-minded and pragmatic while our leaders themselves must be firm, reasonable, respectful, consistent and statesmanlike, or at least more so than in recent years. Such advisers and leaders would have kept us from bombing Yugoslavia and setting in motion the suspicion, hostilities, anti-American alliances and arms race that are just its partial consequence. Such advisers and leaders would have developed a working relationship with China that would have improved understanding rather than cultivated suspicion and hostility. And such advisers and leaders would have seen and admitted what a total failure the war on drugs has been. These leaders would have told the American people the facts which instead must come to them from an increasing number of unevenly reliable non-governmental commentaries and movies like "Traffic."

The bottom line is the quality of politicians and other leaders who look for and convey the truth to their constituents. Of course this flies in the face of politics as usual in a democratic country, but somehow political leaders and their advisers must see beyond vote-getting to the good of the nation and world. And Americans generally must understand the need to act accordingly. Otherwise we will continue to have quixotic crusades after utopian visions and/or self-serving politically oriented policies that will make the world a more dangerous place for Americans and others, now and in the future. immigration.

William Ratliff is a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution with specializations in Latin America and China. He writes frequently on U.S. foreign policy for academic publications, major U.S. and foreign newspapers and MSNBC on the Internet.

1 See Tony Blair, "A Military Alliance, and More," New York Times, 24 April 1999, and Blair, "A New Moral Crusade," Newsweek, 14 June 1999.

2 See Henry Kissinger, "Then End of NATO as We Know It?," Los Angeles Times, 15 August 1999. Also, Kissinger, "New World Disorder," Newsweek, 31 May 1999.

3 Jimmy Carter, "Have We Forgotten the Path to Peace?," New York Times, 27 May 1999.

4 On exaggerated claims and charges of genocide, see William Ratliff, "‘Madeleine’s War’ and the Costs of Intervention: The Kosovo Precedent," Harvard International Review, Winter 2001, esp. pp. 72-73.

5 U.S. Department of State, "Overview" from Erasing History: Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo, May 1999.

6 Ramon H. Myers, David Shambaugh and Michel C. Oksenberg, Making China Policy: Lessons from the Bush and Clinton Administrations, forthcoming from Roman & Littlefield. Quote and references to Chinese commentaries from manuscript of "Introduction" by Myers and Shambaugh.

8 Scott Lindlaw, "Bush Names Walters as Drug Director," Associated Press, 10 May 2001; and Mike Allen, "Bush Suggests Shift in Drug Strategy," Washington Post, 11 May 2001.

9 See James P. Gray, Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs, Temple University Press, 2001. Also, William Ratliff, "Colombia's drug war must be won in the United States," Los Angeles Times, 11 February 2001. See the Open Letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, dated 1 June 1998, at http://www.lindesmith.org/news/un.html#uni.

10 Andr?s Pastrana, "Despite the Media, The Drug War May Have a Happy Ending," Los Angeles Times, 16 April 2001. On this and later drug war-related matters, see Edgardo Buscaglia and William Ratliff, War and Lack of Governance in Colombia: Narcos, Guerrillas and U.S. Policy, Hoover Institution, Essay in Public Policy, 2001.

11 Editorial, The Economist, 21 April 2001. Also, see special supplement on Colombia in the same issue.