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Foreign Policy Challenges Ahead
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15850 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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1 / 1989 |
2,542 Words |
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David M. Abshire and Michael Moodie
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The foreign policy agenda of the Bush administration will have a disorienting quality about it: On the surface it will appear familiar and traditional; in fact, it will consist of new and challenging problems. Relations with the Soviet Union and with America's Atlantic and Pacific allies will remain the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy, but the factors shaping those relations are changing dramatically.
In particular, the increasing interaction between economic and security concerns will pose novel challenges to U.S. policy-makers. The task is made even more complex by the fact that major actors such as the Soviet Union and Western Europe will experience profound internal change in the next four years.
President-elect Bush got off on the right foot by immediately naming his secretary of state and setting his priorities--indicating his intention of meeting with the NATO allies before the Soviets.
Economics and Security
In confronting the growing interaction between economics, national security, and foreign policy, the Bush administration's greatest challenge will be coming to grips with its twin federal and trade deficits. Being the world's largest debtor and constantly importing more than it exports is obviously deleterious to the nation's economic health. It is also politically harmful. Increasingly, America's friends and allies are looking at the way the United States deals with its massive deficits as a touchstone of its political leadership. An inability to get America's economic house in order will undermine its credibility with allies, who will become considerably less willing to follow U.S. leadership on a host of issues.
The deficits also have a negative impact on the utility of U.S. foreign policy tools. Both economic and security assistance have been significantly reduced. Perhaps the biggest impact, however, will be felt in the defense budget, which faces a shortfall of more than $300 billion relative to planned levels of expenditure over the next five years. These deep cuts will force painful, fundamental choices.
If defense cuts are made without a strategy to guide them, large weapons systems backed by powerful political constituencies will be funded; but currently underfunded areas that are less glamorous but no less vital--such as sealift and airlift--will be shortchanged. At the same time, without a strategic guide to the tough choices that lie ahead, the Army, Navy, and Air Force will pursue their own individual priorities with little or no sense of how their plans mesh. The end result will be military power that is unusable in meeting the contingencies of the 1990s.
An urgent priority for the next administration, therefore, is to conduct a net assessment of where we are spending our defense dollars. With a sense of specific problems that need priority attention, limited defense dollars can be allocated where they are most needed.
Another aspect of the problem relates to the strength of the U.S. industrial base. The decline in competitiveness of American industry has generated enormous concern for its negative impact not only on the nation's economic vitality, but also on its ability to meet
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