Condemned to Cooperate: U.S. Resource Diplomacy

CONDEMNED TO COOPERATE: U.S. RESOURCE DIPLOMACY Robert L. Rothstein R1 resource issues have been prominent components of foreign policy for many states, whether small or large, developed or developing. One need only mention the cases of Germany or Japan before World War II or the efforts of the oil producers to establish more control over production and pricing policies. The United States, however, at least until the past decade, was something of an odd man out: Resources were not a major foreign policy issue, except occasionally when investments abroad were threatened by increasingly nationalistic governments. The United States' resource abundance, buoyed by the perception that Americans were a "people of plenty," apparently precluded the need for a very active involvement in international resource diplomacy. Moreover, the United States' relatively slow adaptation to international developments reinforced its tendency to pay only episodic attention to international resource issues.1 The resource issue usually has been analyzed as a series of discrete problems or potential problems that seem to require particular policy responses in a domestic or international setting. In this context, the 1 . Raw Materials andForeign Policy (Washington, D.C.: International Economic Studies Institute, 1976), especially the introduction. Robert L. Rothstein is Harvey Picker Distinguished Professor of International Relations at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York. Professor Rothstein has written a number of books, the most recent of which is The Third World and U.S. Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1981). An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Strategic Minerals and U.S. Foreign Policy in March 1984. 163 164 SAIS REVIEW central questions are largely technical and economic, and analysis at this level is a necessary preface to further analysis since these issues combine political and technical questions in complex patterns. Answers to these technical questions thus provide a framework for the attempt to answer a series of policy questions. Can national objectives be pursued successfully in a multilateral context, or must they be pursued primarily by national or bilateral means? What kind of trade-offs are there between short-run and long-run objectives? And what dangers are implicit in greater or lesser dependence by various allies and enemies? It is a major thesis of this article that the attempt to answer these questions is necessary but not sufficient. Put differently, the resource issue can be analyzed on its own terms, but it ought not to be. There are wider issues relating to foreign policy concerns and interests in development and stability that need to be considered even if these issues (which are mixed together and separable only analytically from the technical and policy issues), are inherently complex and uncertain. Failure to consider these wider issues may generate policy responses that seem justified in terms of the national interest but simultaneously make it more difficult to deal with long-run problems or to integrate the developing countries into the international economy in a more equitable and jointly beneficial fashion. In addition to U.S. interest in the resource issues, we also have an interest in stability and prosperity in the Third World. Given Third World dependence on resources, these two issues are connected, even though they are rarely so treated. The failure to deal with both dimensions of the issue reflects some familiar weaknesses of the policy process itself: its short-run focus, its tendency to fragment issues in different bureaucracies, and its tendency—especially on North-South issues—to choose policies without sufficient consideration of the interests and perspectives of other countries. The short-run responses are not necessarily irrational—given the assumption of a second-best world—but we need to find ways to assure that such policies do not generate a third-best world or to devise policies that permit us to move toward a more equitable, first-best world. Growing import dependence for a variety of critical resources has been widely perceived as a threat to the United States or its major allies.2 And, indeed, popular reports frequently cite the alarming if familiar statistics: 100 percent dependence for certain critical materials such as 2. Space considerations prevent a full discussion ofthe physical depletion of mineral resources. Also, most...