Now that we have passed the second anniversary of foreign policy
under the Clinton administration, critics have sated themselves on
easy pickings. But more recently a new direction has crept into view,
as commentators turn away from well-practiced lambast in favor of
more sympathetic attempts to explore--or even to validate--the
underlying patterns beneath the surface chaos. The tentative
indications of a more assured grasp of national priorities in the
White House in early 1995, notably the quietly effective diplomacy
with regard to North Korea and Vietnam, further encourage erstwhile
critics to ponder whether a new foreign policy rationale is emerging.

This revisionist approach is sure to produce any number of
interesting theories as to why foreign policy seems to be less
accident prone, but one that does seem worth further investigation is
that, in terms of operational practicality, post-Cold War experience
is teaching that American foreign policy succeeds best when its
practitioners acknowledge--whether explicitly or implicitly--that
American power is a much more ambiguous quantity today than it was
during the Cold War. An aggressively robust foreign policy is
impossible when both congressional and popular opinion are
steadfastly opposed to voting the resources or tolerating the
casualties that render such a policy sustainable. Even when an
operation is apparently progressing well or is of vital importance to
the United States--as in Haiti or over Mexico--the first instinct on
Capitol Hill is to set a date for termination or to bicker over the
details. Given the absence of foreign policy focus in the November
1994 election and subsequent Republican concentration on domestic
policy, the change of party control does not appear likely to
overturn the fundamental premise that resources and stamina for
foreign policy will continue to be meager--in point of fact, they may
have to be reduced even further, if a balanced budget is indeed to be
achieved early in the next century.

The good news is that, properly handled, this does not necessarily
matter very much. The world is a much friendlier place. The bad news
is that all too many of those who operate the levers of foreign
policy--including not only government officials but journalists,
commentators, think-tankers, academics, and lobbyists--stubbornly
continue to resist making the necessary psychological adjustment to
these new conditions. They encounter great difficulty in discarding
the habits of undiscriminating global engagement formed while
confronting--supremely successfully let it be said--the daunting
challenges of the Cold War. Unfortunately, their reluctance to accept
change may cause the inevitable reordering of America's role in the
world to be transformed from a controlled process in which American
influence is retained into an out-of-control, fully-fledged decline.

To speak of "decline" is still not pukka or kosher within the foreign
policy elite, any more than it was in 1987 when Paul Kennedy's Rise
and Fall of the Great Powers touched a raw nerve in the American body
politic, acting like a gratuitous injury to a great athlete, a
memento mori that America's best playing days might be behind it. So
it is necessary to tip-toe around this concept. Nonetheless, the case
can be made that, through its crucial psychological failure to come
to terms with the sharp reduction in the resources available for
foreign policy projects, this same foreign policy elite has failed to
meet the challenge of guiding the nation through the current
transition to a post-superpower age. Refusing to acknowledge
intellectually and emotionally that times have changed, they persist
in over-promising what they cannot deliver--a habit that has caused
endless chaos and poor policy choices as rhetorical excesses run
ahead of hard reality.

In his book Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger describes the United States as
"an island off the shores of the large landmass of Eurasia." This
brings to mind another offshore island where another foreign policy
elite of a similar temperament and outlook to their modern American
counterparts made the same mistake of preferring prestige over
substance in the wake of its greatest triumph in war. The story is
well-known, but may still be worth retelling today--not as a
straight-line predictor of what will happen in the United States but
as a cautionary tale of how foreign policy miscalculations can exact
harsh penalties on domestic welfare.

Some thirty years ago, Dean Acheson made his famous remark about the
British--for it is, of course, of them that we are speaking--as
having lost an empire and being unable to find a role. Today, the
United States finds itself in a similar predicament. It too has
"lost" an empire--the Soviet Union, opposition to which provided the
defining mold for three generations of policy-makers. Civilized
people everywhere have good reason to be grateful for the fortitude
of American purpose displayed during this period. Gratitude, however,
cannot disguise the fact that, with their mission accomplished,
today's Americans, like the British before them, are struggling to
find a new role.

The British struggle took many false turns and even today the deep
ideological fissures in the ruling Conservative party over European
policy show that it is far from fully resolved. Unfortunately, there
are disquieting signs that American officials--aided and abetted by
the wider foreign policy community--seem inclined to repeat the
central British failure to bring resources and aspirations into a
sustainable equilibrium.

The Folly of Make-Believe

If their status as two offshore islands were their only common
characteristic, Britain and America would have little to learn from
each other. They are very different countries and the history of one
does not transfer automatically to the other. In terms of raw
statistics of military power, wealth, size, and population--the
variables populating the equations of systems analysts--any
comparison between Britain and the United States seems risible.

With regard to foreign policy attitudes, however, the parallels are
striking. The psychological culture of the foreign policy elites in
London in the immediate aftermath to World War II and in Washington
in the wake of the Cold War triumph are notably close. Selwyn Lloyd,
foreign secretary at the time of the 1956 Suez debacle, has portrayed
the British foreign policy debate in the 1940s and 1950s in terms
very similar to those now playing out in the United States: whereas
in Britain the conservatives accused the Labourites of "scuttling" on
imperial responsibilities, in this country Republicans accuse
Democrats of abandoning "leadership" and exempt defense spending from
the budget knife; whereas British socialists set out in the 1950s to
bestow their vision of good governance on the nations emerging from
colonization, today's American liberals talk of "democratic
enlargement" and the reconstruction of "failed states." At a remove
of half a century, the British would immediately empathize with their
American colleagues in their struggles to reinvent their global roles.

The British mistake--and the implicit warning for the United States
today--lay in choosing to play a game of diplomatic make-believe,
fooling the British themselves and the rest of the world for the best
part of fifty years. Even when in 1947 the British were informing the
Americans that they would no longer be able to sustain their position
in Greece and Turkey--in retrospect the defining moment in British
postwar diplomatic history--they were preening themselves on their
superior brain power, as in the well-known doggerel:

"In Washington Lord Halifax
Once whispered to Lord Keynes,
It's true they have the money bags,
But we have all the brains."

Prime Minister Harold Macmillan voiced this attitude in his smug
remark that "we are Greeks in their American empire," adding--after
some disparaging comments on American culture--that the British
should run this empire as "the Greeks ran the operations of the
Emperor Claudius." In a slightly different way, Margaret Thatcher
made the same point in her memoirs when she wrote that the Gulf War
proved that "the ties of blood, language, culture, and values which
bound Britain and America were the only firm basis for U.S. policy in
the West."

This assumption of superiority at the peculiarly British style of
diplomacy to which it gave rise--at once arrogant and indigent--has
intensely irritated some of those who have encountered it: German
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, for example, once compared Britain to "a
rich man who has lost all his property, but does not realize it." He
characterized British foreign policy as "one long fiddle."

Many more, however, have made a virtue out of it. Foreign Secretary
Douglas Hurd takes delight in declaring that Britain "punches above
its weight" in international diplomacy. When Iraqi tanks rolled
toward Kuwait in October 1994, he hurried out to the Gulf (ignoring
the debate on Europe at the Conservative party conference that
carried far greater long-term importance for British interests) and
demanded that the tanks turn back, for all the world as if Britain
were the managing partner of the Gulf coalition.

The British sleight of hand has gained many admirers in this country.
Despite the fact that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's
anti-European histrionics robbed Britain of a potential leadership
role in Brussels, in the United States she remains probably the most
admired British politician for what is seen as her gutsy defiance of
the world's dictators. But whether that defiance was always well
considered and necessary in terms of core British interests is
another matter.

Immediately after World War II, there was a chance that Britain could
have escaped this self-deceiving error. At that time, Britain's
leaders did not entertain any illusions about the economic straits in
which it found itself. Prime Minister Clement Attlee wrote that
"Britain was facing a difficult position as a great power which had
temporarily been gravely weakened." Referring to the United States,
Churchill lamented to his physician, "They have become so big and we
are so small. Poor England!" As the costs of the British commitment
to Greece began to rise in 1946, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh
Dalton minuted that "I regard the Greeks as a poor investment for the
British taxpayer."

But clear-headed though they might have been about the precarious
state of the nation's finances, the psychological hurdles were too
high. Britain's leaders were too embedded in a tradition--and the
victory in World War II was too recent--for them to draw the
appropriate conclusion regarding global activism, namely, that a
prohibitive price would have to be paid on the home front. So Britain
persisted in painting her destiny on a global canvas for many years
after the financial crisis of the winter of 1947 should have brought
home once and for all her incapacity to sustain such a role. The Suez
expedition of 1956; the maintenance of large overseas garrisons; the
Falklands war; the unbridled British enthusiasm for the Gulf War--all
these events share a common denominator in what the British
commentator Peregrine Worsthorne has described as "ancestral voices,"
or what General de Gaulle called a penchant for the "open sea."
Given the choice, the British preferred (and continue to prefer) a
foreign policy that produced occasional glory on distant foreign
fields rather than the hard slog in the nearby trenches of Europe.

The cost has been great in terms of diminished domestic standards of
living and, ironically, even more diminished influence--particularly
in Europe. Instead of being one of the richest members of the
European Union, Britain falls below the EU average; instead of being
a leader in Europe, the British are forced to react to whatever the
Franco-German axis serves up, and--even when they have logic and
sound political judgment on their side--have difficulty making their
case heard. This point finds recent expression in the cool
take-it-or-leave-it tone concerning Britain's European options in the
September 1994 position paper issued by the ruling CDU party in
Germany.

The Fateful British Mistake

The seeds of the British post-World War II mistake were sown early. A
Foreign Office minute of 1943, commissioned to examine Britain's
place in the postwar world, observed that:

"If we did not fulfill our world wide role, Britain would sink to the
level of a second-class power and become either a European Soviet
state or a penurious outpost of American pluto-democracy or a German
Gau as the forces might dictate."

This led to the strategic error of holding back from developments on
Britain's doorstep. In a famous speech in Zurich in 1946 Churchill
called for a United States of Europe, of which Britain, rather than
being a member, would be a gracious "friend and sponsor." Foreign
Secretary Ernest Bevin warned his Cabinet colleagues that "the United
Kingdom--because of its overseas connections--could never become a
fully European nation."

The illusion could sometimes go even further. A 1949 Conservative
Party document entitled Imperial Policy stated that "it is sometimes
forgotten that the potential strength of the British Empire and
Commonwealth is greater than that of the United States and USSR."

In a series of other speeches, Churchill deepened this sense of
self-deception or--to put it more kindly--the British passion for a
global destiny. In his "Iron Curtain" address in Fulton, Missouri in
1946, he outlined a future of global British glory--this time in
partnership with the United States: "If the population of the
English-speaking Commonwealth be added to that of the United
States...there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power to
offer its temptation to ambition or adventure." He followed this with
his depiction of Britain as lying at the center of three concentric
circles: the Commonwealth and Empire; Europe; and the United
States--a view of things that, far from representing an advantage,
was to result in uncertainty and vacillation in determining how the
three should be related to each other and which circle should be
given priority.

These sentiments were in marked contrast to those that de Gaulle was
expressing across the Channel. No less absorbed with glory than the
British, he advocated an entirely different approach:

"Our planet as it is today shows two masses both of which are intent
on expansion but are driven by wholly different internal forces and
also by different ideological currents. Although one may hope that
they will not become enemies, America and Russia are automatically
rivals...In view of our situation, the preservation of our
independence becomes the most burning and decisive issue."

Churchill's words set the tone for the evolution of British postwar
diplomacy. Writing in Foreign Affairs in October 1947, Anthony Eden,
then a member of the Conservative opposition but destined to succeed
Churchill, wrote that Britain was both "a part of the European
continent and separate from it." He added with evident approval that
the "average Britisher is probably more conscious today that London
lies at the heart and center of the British Commonwealth and Empire
than he is even of his European neighbors."

Relative status in the world, but particularly vis-Ã -vis these same
European neighbors, began to obsess British statesmen from both left
and right. In 1948 the Labour Minister Herbert Morrison said that the
issue of the day was "whether we are going to be a great power or a
small one--a leader or a hanger-on." In 1950 the British ambassador
in Washington, Oliver Franks, reported to Prime Minister Clement
Attlee that "far from being one of the queue of European powers, we
clearly are one of the two world powers outside Russia." Two years
later Churchill--once again prime minister--recorded that "I love
France and Belgium, but we must not allow ourselves to be dragged
down to that level." In the same year Eden, now again foreign
secretary, said in a speech at Columbia University:

"Forming a European federation is something we know in our bones we
cannot do...Britain's story and her interests lie far beyond the
continent of Europe. That is our life. Without it we should be no
more than some millions of people living on an island off the coast
of Europe in which nobody wants to take a particular interest."

From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that Britain missed
the significance of the events that led up to European Community. In
1955 the British ambassador to France Gladwyn Jebb made light of the
seminal European meeting in Messina with the comment, "No very
spectacular developments are to be expected as a result of the
Messina Conference...the principal progress will be purely verbal."
In the same spirit, Jean Monnet's early advocacy of European
cooperation--advocacy which eventually led to the Treaty of Rome in
1957--was dismissed by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan with the
words, "I have known Monnet for a very long time indeed and he is a
charming man. But he has an incurable weakness for blueprints and
constitutions. I would not take them seriously." It is also not
surprising that the signing of the Treaty of Rome saw Macmillan
closeted with Dwight Eisenhower in Bermuda, talking global grand
strategy and nuclear politics and so far elevated above this decisive
moment in European history that he did not even mention the treaty
ceremony in his diaries.

The debate of Britain's independent nuclear deterrent is
characterized by these same concerns about status. Lord Cherwell,
Churchill's scientific adviser, wrote that without the bomb Britain
"would rank with other European nations who have to make do with
conventional weapons." Advocating an independent British nuclear
weapons program, he added:

"If we are unable to make the bomb ourselves and have to rely on the
United States for these vital weapons, we shall sink to the level of
a second-class nation, only permitted to supply auxiliary troops,
like the native levies who have been allowed small arms but not
artillery."

This reasoning drew a sharp retort from Henry Tizard, the chief
scientific adviser at the Ministry of Defense:

"We persist in regarding ourselves as a great power, capable of
everything and only temporarily hard pressed by economic
difficulties. We are not a great power and never will be again. We
are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a great power
we shall soon cease to be a great nation."

These words encapsulate the test facing Britain at the end of World
War II. In many ways, it must be said--admittedly with the benefit of
hindsight--that Britain failed that test. In his memoirs, former
Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, writing of the late 1950s, when he
had been viewing Britain at a distance as high commissioner in
Australia, put it charitably:

"Looking from abroad...it was obvious that Britain had, or shortly
would have, no Imperial or quasi-Imperial role left, and very reduced
international authority as an independent nation without it. Today
these statements seem pretty obvious, but they have taken a long time
to penetrate.The second reason for my conviction that our future lay
in Europe was my appreciation--and again it seems very obvious today
but was a great deal less so even a short time ago--that militarily
as well as economically we were pretty small."

Overemphasizing Military Prowess

The central mistake for Britain--a mistake that should resonate for
the United States today and for the Republicans in particular, as
advocates of high defense spending--was that those in charge of its
affairs overemphasized military power as the defining measure of
national greatness. Symptomatically, this was the one area in which
Britain could claim some successes for its early European policy,
notably the founding of the Western European Union which became the
vehicle for Germany's integration into NATO. Britain has consistently
played a dominant role in NATO, providing intellectual leadership and
taking many more senior positions than were her proportional due; and
since 1989 the British have been among the most energetic and
imaginative advocates of NATO's preservation.

Margaret Thatcher personified this line of thinking. She was always
more comfortable in NATO rather than European Commission settings.
Michael Butler, who served as Britain's ambassador to the European
Commission under Thatcher, has recorded that she "showed a deep
seated prejudice against the European Community" which, according to
her biographer Hugo Young, she regarded as a branch of NATO. In her
autobiography she writes:

"The significance of the Falklands War was enormous, both for
Britain's self-confidence and for our standing in the world. Since
the Suez fiasco in 1956, British foreign policy had been one long
retreat...Victory in the Falklands changed that. Everywhere I went
after the war, Britain's name meant something more than it had."

Emphasis on military accomplishments as the chief determinant of
national identity brings with it an attachment to a crude form of
sovereignty that severely complicates any relationship with a
supranational authority. In 1951, Attlee said, "We are willing to
play an active part in all forms of European cooperation on an
inter-governmental basis. We cannot surrender our freedom of decision
and action to any supranational body." Later, Macmillan said that
Britain would never allow a European body to "close British steel
mills or coal pits." His argument echoes today in the American debate
over the World Trade Organization.

Unfortunately, however, military prowess and a global reach have
proved to be less central to national success than most Britons in
the early postwar years expected. The British have placed unusual
emphasis on military expenditure and adventures--in 1950 Britain was
spending more per capita on defense than the United States and as
late as 1964 still maintained more forces on the ground in Southeast
Asia than any other outside power. Even today Britain spends a larger
percentage of its GDP on defense than any other European member of
NATO other than Turkey and Greece. Experience has shown that these
policies have not proved to be a good investment in terms of British
domestic welfare.

This is perhaps why, in his comparison of de Gaulle's and Thatcher's
contributions to their countries, Desmond Dinan comes down hard on
the latter:

"De Gaulle looked to the future; Thatcher harked to the past. De
Gaulle espoused a 'European Europe;' Thatcher embraced U.S. hegemony.
De Gaulle battled against bipolarity; Thatcher was a creature of the
Cold War."

An Island off Eurasia

"Creature of the Cold War:" this returns the story to the United
States. In an age when, for the first time in nearly half a century,
we are having to reconsider foreign policy's first principles, does
American thinking remain captive to Cold War norms in the way that
British attitudes remained so long in thrall to imperial habits? Does
the British difficulty in coming to terms with its reduced
post-imperial role hold any lessons for the United States as it
struggles to define its place in the world?

The proposition that the United States may have to work out its
destiny against a background of decline--let alone one as sharp and
palpable as that of Britain--may not at first sight seem persuasive.
After all, events seem to be moving ever more decisively in favor of
the United States. The Soviet Union has disappeared. A new bout of
political and economic sclerosis grips Europe. Japan remains mired in
domestic recession, no matter how much its exporters sell.
Commentators like Harvard professor Joseph Nye (a recent head of the
National Intelligence Council) who have labored to "debunk the myth
of decline" feel themselves triumphantly vindicated.

The same view has gained ground overseas. In France, Alfredo
Valladão's best-selling book Le XXIème Siècle Sera Américain (The
Twenty-First Century Will Be American) has forecast that the United
States will dominate the next century through its control of
international corporate and media networks. In September 1994, the
Swiss-based World Economic Forum anointed the United States as the
world's most competitive nation.

Unfortunately, there lurks in these apparent advantages a trap
similar to the one into which the British fell. Surveying the
smoldering ruins of defeated or occupied Europe and with the British
armed forces and empire still intact, Britain's postwar leaders were
blinded to the need for a fundamental reordering of British
priorities. They misread British financial woes as merely temporary.
As the United States savors its Cold War triumph, it seems now
embarked on a parallel course to that already charted by Britain.
Basking in the warm glow of apparently unmatchable military
superiority, American leaders are evading the task of foreign policy
reassessment in favor of continuing on a business-as-usual course
that will keep the United States, in the words of Assistant Secretary
of State Strobe Talbott, "fully engaged abroad."

Since 1989, the "sole remaining superpower" or "unipolar" notion has
established itself in the United States as the short-hand description
of the nation's place in the world. According to this notion,
American ascendancy--especially in the military sphere--is so marked
that the United States can have its way effortlessly with the rest of
the world. One commentator has even spoken in terms of an American
master and world donkey, with the former applying occasional sharp
raps on the latter's back. In the October 10, 1994 issue of The New
Republic, Owen Harries, the editor of this journal, set out the
reasons why this notion may not be the surest foundation on which to
build today's American foreign policy purposes.

The superpower concept has resulted in a continuing almost reflex
embrace of American global activism. In a speech to the Council on
Foreign Relations in September 1994, National Security Adviser
Anthony Lake declared a Cold War-esque jihad on "extreme nationalists
and tribalists, terrorists, organized criminals, coup plotters, rogue
states, and all those who would return newly free societies to the
intolerant ways of the past." General Colin Powell has said that "the
vital interests of mankind are the vital interests of America, no
matter how far from our shores." Speaking of aid to Russia, former
Secretary of State James A. Baker said that "only America can do it."

Whose Interests?

In 1952, the British historian Denis Brogan wrote about the "illusion
of omnipotence," saying that "this is the illusion that any situation
which distresses or endangers the United States can only exist
because some Americans have been fools or knaves." American
activities over the past two years show that this illusion is alive
and kicking today, at a time when the American slice of the world's
GDP is roughly half what it was when Brogan wrote. And more than
rhetoric is involved. During this time forces have been deployed to
Somalia, Macedonia, Haiti, the skies over Iraq and Bosnia, the waters
off Cuba. An American military presence on the Golan Heights is
envisaged. A near-war situation on the Korean peninsula has expanded
the American commitment there, and there have been war games in
Poland. The rules of selectivity (widely invoked though they may be)
hardly seem to apply.

But do these activities reflect a rational calculation of the core
interests of the American people in whose name they are conducted? Or
do they--in the manner of British over-ambition--spread the United
States so thinly and needlessly across the globe that these same
interests go unheeded? Fixing the correct place in the global scheme
of things for an enormous country like the United States is a
difficult enterprise. So is the determination of a rational scale of
priorities among so many competing special interests. As we saw over
Haiti, the range of opinions is vast--from those who think remaking
Haitian democracy is well within the capabilities of the United
States to those who assert that this task lies beyond American power.

In the days when systems analysis enjoyed a vogue in the study of
international relations, researchers developed a pseudo-scientific
approach to rank nations: they set up multiple variable equations
involving such factors as population, size, and popular will power.
By assigning numerical quantities to these factors, they were able to
determine a nation's precise rank in the international pecking order.
Vietnam exposed the limitations of this approach as a useful
instrument for operational deployment. As in tennis, top seeds could
still be felled by journeymen players having a good day.

For present purposes, the methodology of coming to a correct
placement is less important than the consequences of getting it
wrong. If conflict arises between a nation's global aspirations and
the real resources it is willing or able to devote to their
fulfillment, the result will surely be an unstable foreign policy.
Under such circumstances, policymakers will tend to ignore the
nation's central interests in favor of will-o'-the-wisp enterprises.
They will fail to make the necessary adjustments to bring foreign
policy back on an even keel. Which in turn means that the return on
the national foreign policy investment will be negative. Sooner or
later this will lead to diminished domestic welfare.

The idea that the quality of foreign policy decision-making has a
direct impact on domestic well being is still rather new in the
United States. In its 1992 report Changing Our Ways, the Carnegie
Endowment comments that foreign policy can affect the price of a
mortgage. But such a recognition is the exception. Foreign policy in
the United States--as in most countries--is an elite occupation. The
notion that their decisions could render their fellow citizens better
or worse off is not central to the considerations of this elite. No
calculus is made, for example, of whether the funds expended in
Somalia or Haiti have or have not created a better life for those
from whom this money was compulsorily obtained in the form of
taxation. The expenditures are justified according to the codeword
precepts of foreign policy "leadership" or "reliability."

This thinking is in fact quite typical of great powers. For them, a concern about status, rather than the accountant's slide rule, represents the governing motivation of foreign policy. There may be nothing wrong with this - so long as the resources are available, whether coerced by an absolute monarchy or freely given by a democratic citizenry. For France under Richelieu or Great Britain under Palmerston, this act can be carried off effectively. The same was true for the United States under Eisenhower - or perhaps under all post-World War II presidents until the fall of the Berlin Wall. The difficulties start to multiply when their successors try - as is the case today - the same tricks without the benefit of substantive props.

Herein lies the crux of the argument. Arguing against aid for Mexico in January 1995, a Republican congressman from Texas stated bluntly, "We're broke." This may be an exaggeration, but the resources available for foreign affairs are unquestionably on a long downward cycle. With regard to foreign development aid, for example, the United States now ranks bottom among OECD nations in terms of aid as a proportion of GDP. Beyond this, military prowess - the central element in the "sole remaining superpower" thesis - appears to have limited use in terms of today's problems. That this is the one area in which the new Republican leadership foresees an expansion of foreign policy resources may therefore have little utility.

To take policy toward Asia as an example, in the past two years, the United States has quarreled with India over Kashmir, the ASEAN nations over Burma, Singapore over caning and freedom of speech, China over human rights, Japan over trade, and North Korea over nuclear proliferation. In theory, a superpower should have won all these quarrels-pretty much regardless of the tactics it used. This is not what happened. Looking back, it is difficult to argue that the American position is stronger or more widely accepted than it would be had these quarrels not taken place or had they been conducted in less pro-consular style.

When in 1969 President Richard Nixon tried to bring home to an Asian audience that they would have to provide more of their own defense, he encountered a plaintive cry from Japan: "Please don't run away from us." At the time, the United States dominated the relationship with Japan. In March 1994, the visit of then Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa provided a vignette of how things had changed. As a grim-faced President Bill Clinton announced the breakdown of trade talks, Hosokawa stood at his side, discreetly smiling, far from cowed. He later left the meeting to receive congratulations from Japan on standing up to the United States. In September 1994, much the same pattern was repeated as Japanese trade negotiators withstood enormous American pressure to open their automobile markets.

These episodes represent a growing number of incidents in which the United States is unable to impose its will easily. Decline may still be too strong a word to describe this phenomenon, but at the very least a shift in relative power has taken place. This requires a corresponding adjustment in diplomatic posture. If this adjustment can be made smoothly, American power and influence will be maintained for many more decades - probably to the great benefit of global welfare and human liberty. If it is resisted, then the example of Great Britain may be instructive - not as a literal forecast of what will happen in the United States, but by way of illustration of some of the hurdles to be overcome in this very difficult adjustment process. That, of course, is precisely the point of this cautionary tale. As Henry Tizard so sagely remarked, a great nation does not have to be a great power in the sense of feeling responsible for each and every event from Abkhazia to Zaire. During the global competition marked by the Cold War, it may have been excusable to disregard this advice. Afghanistan, Angola, and Grenada were all cut from the same cloth. The mistake lies in trying to continue with an unchanged policy today.

Now, there may come a time when the United States will have to use force again to defend American interests (in fact it would be very surprising indeed if it does not come). But the moral of the British analogy is that if - as many of the foreign policy elite advise - forcefulness, either in the form of actual deployment of force or in a general dependence on it to command foreigners' deference, is seen as the main ingredient of American foreign policy, then disappointment lies ahead. As they grow accustomed to their new power on Capitol Hill, the new Republican leadership will need to be particularly sensitive to this potential error.

The real problems with which American policymakers have to grapple lie in areas where force has little application but where sustained and subtle consensus-building maneuvering is everything. Maintaining commercial access to Japan and East Asia; accommodating the rise of China to superpower status; creating structures in Europe to prevent the Europeans from succumbing yet again to their self-destructive passions; forming a sensible relationship with evangelical Islam; building systems in the western hemisphere that insulate the United States from the effects of fissiparous tendencies, particularly in Mexico and Canada; fostering stable arrangements for global trade - these are the issues which should attract leadership time and attention. They are, of course, not "imperial" in character and certainly do not provide what George Ball once called the "satisfactions of power." Yet they are the bedrock. The future welfare of this nation does not depend on facing down minor opposition like Raoul Cedras or Saddam Hussein, but in attending effectively to the small number of really important issues. Much of this work will be unspectacular, short on military glamour, and wholly untelegenic. In their time the British, bewitched by nostalgia for conditions that had vanished and a role that was no longer appropriate, neglected these nuts-and-bolts aspects of their foreign policy and paid the price. If the United States now makes the same mistake, not only will its own interests be set back, but a great opportunity to determine the whole character of the post-Cold War era will be lost.

Jonathan Clarke is a former diplomat. His new book, After the Crusade: American Foreign Policy for the Post-Cold War Era, will be published by Madison Books in May, 1995.