Between the Alps and a Hard Place (28 page)

What would General Guisan have said to that? In the dark years of 1940–1943 the main threat to his country's survival and to his soldiers' capacity to fight came precisely from the pros. If the Swiss elites had merely arbitraged their interests, Switzerland
would have capitulated to the Nazis behind the backs of the soldiers. So this Swiss general made sure that arguments for resisting the Nazis got wide distribution among the people, and that members of parliament were fully aware of all the ways in which the Federal Council was failing to back the army. His Army and Hearth organization also helped rouse public opinion against any notion of tolerating pro-Nazi activities that might have crossed official minds. The Federal Council resented the army's political role, not least because it just did not want the issues of the war debated in public. The council members preferred not to discuss their views publicly because they believed that the people would not understand and should obey out of respect for the offices they held. But the power of office depends on legitimacy, and an official earns legitimacy by embodying a people's hopes and pride. By acting precisely as Powell advises, the Swiss federal government lost not only the argument over policy, but legitimacy as well.

The anti-Swiss campaign of 1995–1998 shows that America's role in the world is being undermined by unseriousness—about the realities of international affairs, brought on by a kind of corruption.

It is little wonder that at the end of the twentieth century an important contributor to America's ruling party was able to enlist the president and enough officials of that party to help extort a large sum from foreign companies doing business in the United States through a trial-less class action suit. Nor was the amount of money involved intolerable; the 10 percent of profits that the Swiss banks had to pay was roughly comparable to what foreign companies in Mexico have to pay as the “
mordida
,”
the local bribe. In our time, exchanging favors for permits is the way political business is done in America as well. Yet it is remarkable how quickly the practitioners of this low art went from extracting money from American companies on the basis of fraudulent claims about the harmfulness of products to attacking a whole foreign country based on imputed guilt for one of history's greatest crimes and in the sacred name of its victims.

More interesting than the corruption and chutzpah themselves are the reasons why U.S. officials felt safe in them. As often happens in history's rare prolonged periods of peace, the prospect of war becomes difficult to take seriously. To consider international affairs without war engenders behavior as unrealistic as might follow from considering relations between men and women while abstracting from intercourse and children. And so U.S. officials play at international relations mindless of the realities. It can be fun to wield the country's tremendous power unofficially, without actually committing the nation to anything, without ever putting anything to a vote. It also can be quite a bit safer to take on weak foreign countries than powerful domestic rivals. After all, the United States is so powerful that modern Germany, never mind Switzerland, can do little harm to us. So why not satisfy a valued contributor at the expense of Swiss or German companies? And why not do it in the name of moral principle?

Why not? First, because the fraudulent use of moral principle is immoral and the cynicism it engenders drives legitimate moral concerns even further out of international life. That is especially significant for America, whose relations with the rest of the world have rested to an unusual degree on claims to moral principle. It was unusually galling that the Clinton administration extorted money from Switzerland and other
European countries based on gratuitous accusations of responsibility for the Holocaust. By themselves such insults, much less the injuries, would not ruin American foreign policy. But the unseriousness of which they are part may well do so.

Second, any nation's international power is based to some extent on the admiration and awe it engenders in other nations. Nowadays that is called “soft power.” In the half century after U.S. soldiers earned it by hard sacrifice in World War II, America's soft power in Europe—and in much of the world—was overwhelming. Whatever else foreigners might have thought, they believed that America was imitable, was not out to hurt them, and knew how to get its way. The Soviet Union's calls for anti-Americanism fell mostly on deaf ears; anti-Americanism was confined to the fever swamps of leftist intellectuals. But beginning in the mid-1990s, when Russian and Chinese diplomats shopped around the world the argument that decadent America was dealing high-handedly with everyone, and that everyone should oppose American hegemony, more and more people outside Paris's Left Bank listened. As the twentieth century came to an end, opinion polls throughout Europe showed that between 60 percent and 70 percent of respondents thought the United States was unfriendly to their interests and should not be imitated. In other parts of the world, resentment of America was even more prominent.

Why? Consider, first, how latter-day American popular culture is sweeping the world. It is difficult to argue that the images we are exporting—rap music, public scandal—are anything but corrosive of any and all cultures. But in the political realm, consider how difficult it is for friends of the United States to deny charges that America's claims of impartial, uncorrupt government are hypocritical. After all, U.S. administrations,
Republican and Democrat alike, long ago acquired the habit of using official power to further the commercial interest of their constituents. The Clinton administration has often reserved seats on international trade delegations for political supporters—just as its Republican predecessors did before. Other governments do so routinely, but again, when mighty, self-righteous America does it, everyone notices and resents it.

Foreign policy is supposed to project power, both soft and hard. Whatever a country lacks in the capacity to make foreigners tremble it must make up in the capacity to attract them, and vice versa. But a prerequisite for awing or attracting is a foreign policy whose voice the whole country will support morally and physically. Yet almost by definition a foreign policy that is no more than what former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger called the stapling together of the goals of domestic constituency groups is more likely to invite all manner of disrespect.

Regardless of whether military power is used or only brandished, the military operations had better be of the same order of magnitude as the political objectives. In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War the United States demanded that Iraq stop manufacturing weapons of mass destruction; in the 1999 Yugoslav war the Americans insisted that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic stop chasing non-Serbs out of various parts of his country. Since meeting these demands would have meant death to the regimes of both countries, they would never bend to any but mortal military operations. Moreover, these regimes realized that the United States was not about to use its full power to unseat them. So they fought. To gain its objectives, the United States would have had to use
force majeure
. But it used
force mineure
, and lost its objectives.

All this would matter little if the United States were something like a fortress—if, like republican Rome prior to the Third Punic War, its military strength and ferocity increased dramatically the closer one got to it, and its national unity were unshakable. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century America's military forces were spread over the globe as never before, and were more dependent than ever on the goodwill of allies. And more than ever, America's foreign affairs either were of no interest to the American people or were bones of interest-group contention. When the U.S. government takes part in quarrels abroad that do not energize the American people as a whole, it drains the reservoir or public spiritedness. Hence it is no small thing whenever the U.S. government foments abroad disaffection with America—especially when U.S. military power is shrinking and America continually displays international ineffectiveness. In the 1990s the image of imperiousness, moral hypocrisy, and impotence was becoming ever more dangerous to America.

One of the lessons of the Swiss experience in World War II, and indeed of any nation's experience in any serious matter, is that military power—the capacity and willingness to destroy or to protect—is the foundation of international relations. The outstanding fact about America in the 1990s, and especially during the Clinton administration, was that, even as American military forces were being spread from the Persian Gulf to Haiti to the Balkan peninsula, their size shrank by some 45 percent. At the same time the U.S. government was making military threats and promises it could not possibly keep, such as protecting the eastern borders of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, and possibly of Ukraine. As regards the Balkans, President Clinton called “immoral” the Vance-Owen plan to give
the Serbs as much as 43 percent of Bosnia, and then bombed to obtain an agreement that gave them 49 percent. The United States raged against North Korea's and Iran's development of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, and then watched as these programs moved to fruition. America bombed Iraq to force it to accept United Nations inspections of its weapons of mass destruction, and then, as Iraq continued to build what its dictator wished, the United States agreed to increase his income from oil sales, making sanctions a joke and accepting the absence of arms inspectors. Moreover, the chief targets of U.S. military power, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, had survived and their influence in their regions had increased while that of the United States had waned. Obviously, more and more of the world's people had less and less to hope and fear from “hard” U.S. military power.

More important, during the 1990s the world noticed a new qualitative aspect of American military power, namely that U.S. military operations were being designed less to achieve military results than to hold U.S. casualties to zero. Of course, military threats and promises conditioned on zero expenditure of lives can neither eliminate enemies nor safeguard friends. In other words they are not for real. So why would one engage in such operations? What purpose do they serve? Alas, American military operations must stress avoidance of casualties above effectiveness precisely because foreign policies franchised to interest groups cannot give the American people sufficient reason to commit their blood. They serve no purpose for the country as a whole, but rather succeed in making politicians look good to their favorite domestic constituents. In the end, they prove to be shows put on at the expense of the national interest.

As for soft power, little constituency services such as those the U.S. Democratic Party performed for Edgar Bronfman and the World Jewish Congress taught a destructive lesson: the U.S. government's talk of righteousness is less a banner that the American people can follow than a fig leaf for special interests.

What, then, can be said of a foreign policy that insults a lot and injures a little, that advertises its impotence by speaking loudly while whittling down its military stick? Quite simply that it teaches its people the wrong lessons, and that American policy-makers themselves are in need of many lessons. May God administer them gently.

1
According to the Federal Election Commission, Edgar Bronfman donated $595,000 to the Democratic National Committee during the 1995–1996 election cycle. During that cycle Bronfman family members gave a total of $1,262,000, placing the family first among all Democratic personal donors.

2
David C. Hendrickson, “The Recovery of Internationalism,”
Foreign Affairs
, September–October 1994, p. 26.

3
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Erosion of American National Interests,”
Foreign Affairs
, September–October 1997, p. 49.

4
Jane Perlez, “Conflict in the Balkans: Serbian Strategy,”
New York Times
, March 29, 1999, p. A1.

1
Daniel Boorstin,
The Image: A Guide to the Pseudo Event in America
(New York: Harper & Row, 1964).

2
Hearings before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, May 14, 1997.

3
Hearings before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, April 23, 1996. Note that in 1951 Senator Joseph McCarthy began his campaign of defamation with a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he claimed: “I have in my hand a list. . . .” The less the senator has to go on, the more he needs the pretense that he has documentary proof of something new. D'Amato, like McCarthy, had nothing new.

4
Hearings before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, April 23, 1996.

5
See Alexander Hamilton's memorandum on the 1790 Nootka crisis.
The Papers of Alexander Hamilton,
vol. 7, Harold C. Synett, ed. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 36–57. The technique of inspiring stories and then citing them as evidence for one's claim to get further press attention is fundamental to pseudo events.

6
How much proof of ownership should be required to gain access to a bank account is everywhere determined by law. Swiss laws on the subject are among the most restrictive in the world. These laws have caused difficulties for people who possessed far more information than Mrs. Beer did. See the case of Estelle Sapir, in “Big Swiss Bank Settles with Daughter of Nazi Victim,”
New York Times
, May 5, 1998, p. A31.

7
Hearings before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, April 23, 1996.

8
Hearings before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, May 15, 1997.