Alliance Curse: How America Lost the Third World

5 Social Bifurcation and Ultimatum Bargaining: The Vision Gap in U.S. Reconstruction Efforts

American presidents are compelled to tailor their appeals to the electorate in a language that draws from domestic experience. Unfortunately, the domestic models and belief systems on which U.S. foreign policy are based diverge from the experience of developing nations. Worse, U.S. models and assumptions have created a gap between American conceptions and the imperatives of social change faced by third world populations. U.S. policies end up appearing simplistic, misdirected, and hypocritical, generating deep aversion instead of trust among potential partners. To understand how the most salient foreign policy issues are defined, we must first understand America’s historical imagination and the public beliefs that shape it. The president must create broad consensus among citizens yet still cater to elites and interest groups—Congress, federal departments and agencies—for foreign policy support. Richard Melanson has written: Presidents and their foreign policy advisers try to provide interpretive images of the international situation that are compatible with domestic experience to justify the necessity, urgency, and character of their actions. Legitimation establishes the broad purposes of policy by translating its objectives into an understandable and compelling reflection of the domestic society’s dominant norms. As such it represents a political act within the context of national politics and characteristically relies on politically potent symbols to link foreign policy and these internal norms.1 5 Social Bifurcation and Ultimatum Bargaining: The Vision Gap in U.S. Reconstruction Efforts 55 The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. —James Madison, Federalist No. 10 (1787) Drawing on America’s legacy, U.S. politicians use cultural and historical models of social progress and political processes that are familiar to Americans but rarely are comparable to the experiences of third world peoples. The relationship between U.S. social institutions and economic development is unrecognizable to most developing nation populations. Even ideas that Americans take for granted, like the primacy of property rights, assume different political meanings in other historical and social settings. As a result, efforts to harmonize foreign policy goals with beliefs endorsed by the U.S. public are frequently at cross-purposes with the imperatives faced by third world governments. State Building in Europe and the Third World Gradual industrialization in the United States has endowed policy planners with models that reflect poorly the full context of economic change in the developing world. For example, America never had to achieve a politicalsocial transition at the same time that it transformed its industrial structure.2 Even America’s revolution and break from Britain are often represented, in both contemporary and historical accounts, as expressions of continuity rather than a wrenching break with the past.3 In America the institutions of the capitalist marketplace emerged in tandem with the institutions of democratic politics. Such co-evolution is not universal. A common standard of civic ethics or shared moral standards to facilitate arm’s-length market transactions is unrealistic in regions where, for instance, states were organized around artificial national borders drawn by colonialists ,4 or where social organization is derived mostly from interactions with the same people in a small group.5 The identities of third world populations are frequently independent of formal institutions. South Vietnam had no social contract—a large body of laws or social institutions—that applied to groups sharing a standard of civic ethics. This is one reason that America’s most expensive effort at state building failed. John D. Montgomery, one of the most perceptive early analysts of U.S. foreign aid in Vietnam, explained in 1962: American values such as efficiency, responsibility, and professionalism have dominated all efforts to improve foreign aid procedures, although they are values which are at times irrelevant or even run counter to those of most traditional societies.“Efficiency,”a Western and especially American value, calls for the abandonment of many taboos and social traditions, including forms of favoritism that are essential to the family The Legacy of the Cold War 56 and elite systems of most of the underdeveloped world;“responsibility” implies a delegation of authority and specialization of function that are impossible in much of the world; “professionalism” requires forms of training, the development of a career service, and the introduction of standards that few nonindustrial nations can support.6 By the early 1950s U.S...