2002 Speeches
Does the U.S. Need the Rest of the World?
Franklin L. Lavin - U.S. Ambassador to Singapore
October 24, 2002
I am delighted to be with you here today. I have gotten to know many of the people in this room during my time in Singapore and Hong Kong, and as some of you know, I come from a newspaper family background. My father-in-law started a chain of weekly newspapers in upstate New York; my elder brother was an editor for the Chicago Sun-Times and is now with The New York Times; and my younger brother was a reporter for many years with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Wall Street Journal. So the opportunity to gather with the media is a sort of a family reunion, meaning it can be insightful, amusing, or even challenging, but never dull. And in that spirit let me turn to the assigned topic and share some of my personal reactions to the questions that it raises.
I - Need to Change the Question
Let me commend the Singapore Press Club on selecting the most provocative title possible. Like the good journalists that you are, you have chosen an attention-getting lead. It’s useful to approach the topic of America’s role in the world this way, because it is the way many people see it, particularly those who are not satisfied with U.S. foreign policy. To one group of critics, the U.S. acts without concern toward other countries. The most ardent of these critics believe that U.S. foreign policy is even to the detriment of the rest of the world. The short-hand version of this criticism is the charge of unilateralism - that America pursues its own interests as if the rest of the world did not even count. Good world citizenship requires working through the international organizations to solve problems. It means taking other opinions into account. It means realizing that no one country can always do what it wants. If this is what defines a “good nation,” why then is the United States sometimes such a problem?
But if you are going to act like good journalists, I am going to act like a good editor, and line through the title. Because the premise behind it is wrong. The premise is that international relations is either conducted unilaterally, which is bad, or multilaterally, which is good. All of you in the room know that head-line writers get the story wrong from time-to-time. Let me outline why this unilateralism-multilateralism distinction is not particularly helpful in understanding international relations, and then describe the approach the U.S. is trying to take.
It is a mistake to see unilateralism as the enemy of multilateralism, that either a country is doing what it wants or it is working together with others. In fact, a good multilateralist system recognizes that each country has its own preferences, capabilities, and history, and seeks to accommodate these differences - not to enforce homogeneity. This is similar to the way that a market works in a nation’s economy. Markets work well precisely when they reflect individual desires. They work worst in a command economy in which all preferences are presumed to be the same. So a good multilateral system, for example the WTO, is one that provides means for interaction regardless of the many differences among nations.
Just as a good multilateral system should embrace nations of individual - dare I say unilateral - impulses, a proper use of individual state power will try to take into account the multilateral system. Look at the United States’ work in the United Nations regarding Iraq. The thrust of the U.S.’ work is to provide integrity to the U.N. system, to give weight and consequence to binding U.N. resolutions. So it is largely through the leadership of the U.S. on Iraq that the U.N. maintains its relevance on this issue. It is U.S. leadership that is ensuring that binding resolutions are in fact binding. It is U.S. leadership that is ensuring that commitments to the U.N. are kept. To use the short-hand, it is what certain detractors label unilateralism that gives multilateralism its relevance.
So these two views are not mutually exclusive but can be mutually reinforcing. Pure unilateralism and pure multilateralism are each false gods. They are based on a confusion between ends and means. The point in foreign policy should not be to ensure that you are doing everything by yourself - unilateralism for the heck of it. Nor should the goal in foreign policy be to ensure you are only doing what other countries want to do - multilateralism for the heck of it. The point of foreign policy is to do the right thing - to adopt the policies that help you get where you want to go. This is not too different than how we behave in our individual lives. Our goal, at least typically, is not simply to be different than everyone else nor is our goal simply to mimic everyone else. Our goal is to use our power of reason and moral sense to come to our own conclusions. A successful society is composed of individuals who act in their enlightened self-interest just as a good international system will be composed of countries that act in their enlightened national interest.
There are a number of activities, primarily technical and non-policy ones, that lend themselves well to multilateral fora. By the same token, there will be areas that are more likely to be tackled outside the multilateral system. When it comes to survival, all nations have an inherent right to self-defense. And we need to be mindful that multilateralism at its worst can mean inertia and lowest-common-denominator policies. We need only harken back to the low dishonest decade of the 1930s to remind ourselves of a catastrophic failure of multilateralism.
So multilateralism and unilateralism are not goals in themselves but means to ends. This begs the question - what are the ends?
II - A More Pragmatic Question
The question is not an abstract one. Even though I suspect most of us in this room would concede as an intellectual construct the view that nations have the right to act outside a multilateral system and sometimes this might even be preferable, the nub of the question concerns the U.S. and its policies, goals, and motives. Whether America is admired or hated, we live in an era in which the United States is the most consequential nation in the world.
Statistics tell us the U.S. is the world's educator, financier, aid donor, inventor, manufacturer, consumer, and farmer. The gravitational pull of the U.S. in international relations evokes the old saying from the Canadian Foreign Ministry: America is our best friend whether we like them or not.
III - Principles and Practices of American Leadership
What are the goals of U.S. foreign policy? They are as ambitious as they are simple: Peace, prosperity, and freedom. These goals were established at the inception of our international role, by our Cold War policy that for over 40 years provided leadership to the democracies as we faced a heavily armed totalitarian threat.
Some state, a bit too glibly in my view, that the application of these principles in the Cold War was straightforward, but in today’s world, beset with a less coherent international structure and a rise of transnational issues, the situation is more complex.
I am not so sure. The principles of peace, prosperity, and freedom endure. The specific situation might warrant a different response, such as the economic support we provide to Central Europe to help those countries make the transition to democracy. Or the technical support we provide to Russia to help it safeguard its nuclear material. Or the range of programs we pursue with Mexico on issues from migrant workers, to pollution, to counter-narcotics. But underpinning all of these initiatives are the goals of peace, prosperity, and freedom.
Peace does not arise through exhortations or by a state of mind. It comes when would-be aggressors realize they face resolute opposition. It is best maintained when countries work together to coordinate their alliances and their deterrence. It requires clear-eyed realism about calculations and motives and a willingness to maintain and deploy a military force.
Prosperity, which is sometimes scorned as mere materialism, has only come about through open economies, the rule of law, respect for private property, and resistance to corruption. There is no example in history of a country attaining prosperity simply as an aid recipient. And although most of us seek a better material world, we should remember that economic growth is an important vehicle for tackling the transnational issues. As an example, the fight against the major killer diseases of the last century - tuberculosis, typhoid, smallpox, whooping cough, polio, malaria - has been possible largely due to the United States. And it is the locomotive of the economy that allows the U.S. to play such a vital humanitarian role.
The goal of freedom includes democratic practices, human rights, free speech, equal treatment under law, religious tolerance, and limits on the power of the state. The US is active, insistent even, in putting democratization on the global agenda; encouraging economic and political reforms and confronting regimes that repress freedoms and deny basic human rights. We take these steps in full knowledge that democracy is not built overnight -in fact our own work in the U.S. continues.
IV - American Leadership in the World
Some people will find leadership, American or otherwise, inherently troubling. Some resent initiative, as it means a willingness to take action when a consensus does not exist. Some see it as implicit criticism of the existing order, that those who are nominally responsible are not up to the task. Leadership will naturally spark defensiveness. And criticism of American leadership is enormously seductive to free riders. If the United States is going to do what needs to be done, it is quite tempting for some countries to criticize those steps, even as they enjoy the benefits of the actions. I remember a saying from my days at the School of Foreign Service: There are only two times our allies complain, when we try to exert leadership and when we fail to exert leadership.
Criticism of the United States has an enormous appeal. It makes, or pretends to make, the critic relevant to the issue. It lets the critic believe he has elevated himself to the level of the most powerful. It is cost free, in that the U.S. never adopts punitive policies to those who have voiced criticism. And let’s face it, America invites criticism. Whatever human faults and foibles that might be found on this planet can be found in abundance in the U.S., perhaps even in concentrated form. Toynbee said, “America is a large friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.”
There is substantive criticism as well. Leadership carries with it an inherent risk because there is the prospect of failure. If you are going to lead more than others, you will enjoy success more than others, but you will also risk set-backs and disappointments more than others. We are all aware of moments over the years when American actions, however well-intentioned, might have fallen short of the goals of peace, prosperity, and freedom. But Winston Churchill might have put it best when he said, “You can always count on America to do the right thing, but only after it has exhausted all other possibilities.”
Americans believe we have a special responsibility to lead but the American style of leadership is different from that of other powers in history, which led by imperial fiat or by force of arms. For all of our present power, America is ambivalent about its use of force. It is worth noting that the present Iraqi crisis stems in part from America’s unwillingness to use force when there was an open road to Baghdad eleven years ago.
American leadership most often succeeds through example, perseverance, and persuasion. But, when necessary, the United States is ready to do the needful on its own. We realize that international behavior is characterized more by collaboration than by conflict. The U.S. derives enormous benefits from working with other countries, and they benefit similarly from the U.S. We prefer to work with others. We ask like-minded nations to join us and share the burden and opportunity of leadership. But we work by ourselves when we must. We are mindful of Thoreau’s observation that one man and his conscience is a majority.