Legacy to the World's Poorest Nations

When the dust settles on U.S. foreign policy under President Bill Clinton's stewardship, its most enduring legacy might well prove to be its high-powered intellectual capacity to pinpoint the new generation of strategic threats after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They are global terrorism, international criminal syndicates, the proliferation of mass-destruction weaponry, global disease epidemics--notably HIV/AIDS--and the illegal drug trade. Yet, identifying these threats did not produce durable and effective policy solutions. With communism discredited, an international regime of stable democratic states pursuing market-based economics is seen as the normative long-term answer to these problems. But there has not been an enduring consensus within the Clinton administration, let alone its critics, on the definition and extent of these new threats that would have provided common ground to work toward specific solutions. A definition, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, could formulate a generic solution to specific problems. As the United States moves to the next administration, the international affairs community has its work neatly cut out: to clarify and build the consensus on strategic threats to global security, their impact on the United States, and national and multilateral strategies necessary to counteract them.

Nowhere is that need greater than in the developing world, which combines with large swathes of the ex-Soviet "transition" states to generate more than their fair share of new security problems. Between them, these regions comprise the majority of the world's population. Collectively, they pose some of the most fundamental challenges of the new global security agenda: weak or ineffective statehood providing succor to terrorism and illicit drug traffic (Afghanistan, Colombia, Burma, Liberia, Somalia), a surging HIV/AIDS pandemic, and state-sponsored terrorism (Libya, North Korea, Iraq, Sudan). Within those regions lie a vast and increasing number of quasi-states, many of them masquerading as elected democracies that have self-induced material impoverishment, political mendacity, and administrative incompetence. This strife has driven millions of their ablest citizens annually into the world's more prosperous regions, such as North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan, where they generate new domestic social tensions and xenophobia in the receiving countries. Inflamatory anti-immigrant rhetoric brought new far-right threats to established democracies, notably Austria. Although there is at least some framework, however unsatisfactory it may be, for a multilateral response to these challenges in the West--the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the case of Serbia in 1999 and the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and the G-7 for global economic crises--the multilateral framework entrusted after World War II with the political and economic problems emanating from underdeveloped regions now seems decrepit and functionally disoriented. In the smugness and indecisiveness that followed the Cold War, both the Clinton administration and the U.S. Congress may have missed a golden opportunity to reform U.S. relations with the developing world, at small costs to themselves.

The international conflict-resolution mechanism in these far-flung places stumbled from one crisis to the next with uneven results, as did the administration's policies: failure and withdrawal from Somalia in 1994, nonintervention followed by genocide in Rwanda the same year, consternation with discordant Western responses to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, hand-wringing in Chechnya and the western Sahara, and partially successful intervention in Haiti and East Timor. From the standpoint of Washington and some of its allies in Europe, and by default rather than by design, strategic policy becomes clearer the closer one is to North America and Western Europe--as one can see in Bosnia, Kosovo, the rescue of Albania from anarchy by the European Union, and concern over the Mexican peso in 1995. It fades into rhetorical mists as one moves to the outer limits of the global periphery. Realists may insist that this outcome is a vindication of the immanent internal logic of their system: basic national interests drive foreign policy. There is some truth in that, but if the new...