'Soft Multilateralism'

The hawks around George W. Bush believed the United States had been in a slow decline for at least thirty years. Their remedy called for the United States to flex its considerable military muscle, abandon all pretense of multilateral consultations with hesitant and weak allies, and proceed to intimidate both friends and enemies alike. Then it would be in the world driver's seat again. Instead, Iraq is a growing drain of lives and money, traditional allies are profoundly estranged, national security is more precarious than ever and economic power continues to erode. In short, the hawks have achieved the opposite of everything they intended on the world scene, except toppling Saddam Hussein.

Democratic presidential candidates and even Republican moderates are now calling for a return to the multilateralist foreign policy of previous administrations. They want to bring back the golden era of Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft and Madeleine Albright. Is this a plausible alternative?

For the past thirty years, every administration, from Nixon to Clinton, including Reagan and Bush's father, pursued the same basic strategy, a policy I call "soft multilateralism." This policy had three elements: (1) offer our major allies "partnership"; (2) push hard to persuade potential nuclear powers not to "proliferate"; (3) persuade governments of the South that their economic future lay not in state-managed "development" but in export-oriented "globalization." None of these policies were entirely successful, but each was at least partially so.

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