The "New Vision" of the "Gatekeeper" of so called Global "Free Markets"
At the end of September 1993, the Clinton Administration finally addressed "the vision thing" in the domain of foreign policy, with major addresses by the President and Secretary of State, and of particular significance, by National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, who laid forth the intellectual foundations of the new Clinton doctrine at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
A new National Export Strategy was announced that set guidelines for international economic policy, and a White House panel on intervention applied the doctrine in this particular sphere, all within a few days. The seriousness of the enterprise was duly recorded with such headlines as "U.S. Vision of Foreign Policy Reversed"
(Thomas Friedman, New York Times), implying a dramatic policy change.
The new vision is based on a picture of the contemporary world that has risen well beyond opinion, to the heights of truism. The picture is sketched eloquently by the Times chief diplomatic correspondent, Thomas Friedman:
QuoteAmerica's victory in the cold war was a victory for a set of political and economic principles: democracy and the free market. At last, the world is coming to understand that the free market is the wave of the future -- a future for which America is both the gatekeeper and the model.
The term "gatekeeper" has an ominous ring. The whole affair merits some thoughts about how we keep the gates, who we let in, and what kind of model we are to offer to the world. We begin with Anthony Lake's address, recognized to be the centerpiece of the new vision.
1. "From Containment to Enlargement"
A long-time liberal dove,
Clinton's National Security Adviser Anthony Lake explained that:
QuoteThroughout the cold war, we contained a global threat to market democracies: now we should seek to enlarge their reach, particularly in places of special significance to us.
The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement -- enlargement of the world's free community of market democracies.
That is the new vision that replaces the defensive stance of the past half century. To evaluate the announcement of the new vision, we turn to US behavior in regions where its influence is reached. There are many choices, the US being a global power. But the most illuminating will surely be the Western Hemisphere, where the US has long run the show virtually without interference, so its deepest values and convictions are revealed with great clarity.
There is no need to review further how we have "contained a global threat to market democracy" in "our little region over here," as FDR's Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, described the Western hemisphere. It is enough to recall a warning issued by
Simon Bolivar in 1822, as he sought to liberate Latin America from Spanish rule:
QuoteThere is at the head of this great continent a very powerful country, very rich, very warlike, and capable of anything. The United States seems destined to plague and torment the continent in the name of freedom.
-- including the evasion of "inconvenient fact."
Perhaps the "global threat" refers to indigenous Communists. Still more interesting, perhaps, is the way the concept "Communist" is understood. Here the record is voluminous and consistent: to gain the title "Communist," it is enough to work "from the bottom up," appealing to the "poor people" who "have always wanted to plunder the rich," as
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles described the plague:
QuoteThe poor people are the ones they [the communists] appeal to and they've always wanted to plunder the rich.
That is precisely why the US "dirty wars" in Central America, motivated by the "sincere impulse" to bring democracy, was in large measure a war against the Church -- "Communists," in the technical sense, once the Bishops had adopted "the preferential option for the poor." Nothing changes in this regard as new visions replace the old.
We learn more about our role as "gatekeeper and model" from a World Bank study reported in the London Financial Times just as the new vision of foreign policy was released here.
The World Bank found that Latin America has "the most unequal income distribution in the world," and predicted "chaos" unless governments "act aggressively against poverty," which is truly appalling in its depth and scale:
Quotestabilisation and structural adjustment have brought magnificent returns to the rich— in a continent with the world's most unequal distribution of income. Failures to act aggressively on poverty will likely encourage distributive conflicts, prompting discontent and perhaps even a return to populism, dirigisme and chaos.
The simple truths were underscored by
Clinton's Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen: QuoteI'm tired of a level playing field. We should tilt the playing field for U.S. businesses. We should have done it 20 years ago.
In fact, "we" (meaning state-corporate power) have been doing it for two centuries, dramatically so in the past 50 years.