The Foreign Service Journal, May 2004

tence on requesting military force lev- els well below what the Joint Chiefs wanted, and its refusal to draw up clear-cut plans for occupation and exit, clearly created conditions more favorable to insurgency, costing hun- dreds of American lives. Again, the lesson is that decision- makers need to have access to, and be willing to consult, those diplomats, analysts, troops and agents with first- hand knowledge of conditions on the ground. For this to occur, of course, a certain amount of humility is required by the political leadership as well as a fair amount of structural change to reduce the rigidity of our foreign affairs bureaucracies. When he first arrived at State, Secretary Powell stunned the bureau- cracy by occasionally leaving the 7th floor and personally going to desk offi- cers to seek out knowledge. Coming from a military background and draw- ing on his experiences in Vietnam, Powell was undoubtedly aware that bad news is repeatedly filtered by multiple levels of bureaucracy before it reaches senior decision-makers. And, as any problem works its way through the system, more and more filtering is done by officials who, no matter how competent or capable, are less likely to have adequate knowl- edge of the realities on the ground. Furthermore, they have bureaucratic reasons not to disturb the status quo and existing chains of power and con- trol. Few are prepared to appear dis- loyal by failing to cheerlead adminis- tration priorities and policies of the moment. Bureaucratic advancement is as much the result of the absence of perceived error as it is of actual accomplishment. Paying the Tab Finally, in an era of half-trillion- dollar budget deficits, can we afford an empire? One of the major consequences of seeking a global political-military empire is the relegation of critical domestic and global economic, finan- cial and other policy questions to sec- ondary status rather than addressing them as key issues. Except for the United States, almost every developed nation (and many aspiring to that status) has placed economic and financial poli- cies, not political-military objectives, at the top of their respective agendas since the end of the Cold War. And, in large part, they did so precisely because they knew U.S. leadership — for its own reasons — was prepared to carry the burden for them. This was a rational decision both because of the lack of a pressing threat and in view of the lesson learned by other developed states from 1939 to 1989: namely, empires are expensive. The average citizen of a former colonial power may today regret the loss of his or her perceived superiority by associ- ation with an empire, but he or she certainly does not regret no longer having to pay the extravagant costs of maintaining an imperial system. United States policy-makers des- perately need to pay more attention to America’s pressing financial and eco- nomic needs. Cordell Hull is almost completely forgotten today, but he deserves to be remembered not only for being the longest-serving Secre- tary of State in history (1933-1944) but for being the last one to concen- trate on promoting U.S. economic interests. Admittedly, the collapse of the global economic and financial order left him and FDR with no alternative, but it is still disheartening to see how far we have gone in the opposite direction. Today, U.S. policies seem to be assisting a collapse of the very inter- national financial order we created in the aftermath of World War II. The disconnect between the United States and Western Europe on trade matters is growing. American restrictions on steel imports have caused greater harm to U.S. steel fabricators and consumers than the benefits they pro- vided to domestic steel producers, and provoked threats of retaliatory measures from Europe, China and Japan. Coincidentally or not, Wash- ington sharply increased subsidies to American agribusiness on the eve of global discussions on finding a way to increase and rationalize global agri- cultural trade, with predictable results. If the United States were a minor player on the world stage instead of the major funding source for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, those organizations would be demanding that the U.S. administration make major fiscal and economic policy changes. The United States’ staggering trade deficit (5 percent of GDP) would have to be addressed, as would its addiction to foreign investment capital to finance that trade deficit. The IMF and the World Bank would also demand progress toward a balanced U.S. bud- get. The rapid fall of the U.S. dollar relative to other major currencies over the past two years is a clear indi- cation that investors worldwide are today far less comfortable with invest- ing in the United States. Whatever else one may think of the policies of M A Y 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 59 The unilateralist neoconservative policies of today are a badly mutated descendant of our isolationist heritage.