BOOK REVIEW: 'The Frugal Superpower'
How Limitations on America's Global Leadership in an Era of Financial Restraints Will Change Everything
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
To foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum, Sept. 15, 2008 may turn out to be as significant a date
in American history as Sept. 11, 2001.
He reminds us in his new book, "The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era" (PublicAffairs, 224 pages, index, $23.95) that on Sept. 15, 2008 Lehman Brothers "collapsed, creating a panic in the nation's financial system and an immense loss of wealth, and deepening an already serious global economic downturn."
The date also will be significant in American foreign policy, he predicts, because the events of that mid-September day two years ago "accelerated a series of developments that will change the resources at the disposal of policy-makers in Washington, limiting the financial means available to conduct American foreign policy."
Mandelbaum posits that the economic crisis of 2008 -- and especially the gargantuan economic obligations that will confront the country in its wake -- will redraw the boundaries of American foreign policy in two closely related ways.
First, the limits of the possible for foreign policy will be narrower than they have been for many decades. The government will still have an allowance to spend on foreign affairs, but because competing costs will rise, it will be smaller than in the past.
Second, the limits that constrain the government in its external initiatives will be drawn less on the basis of what the world requires and more by considering what the United States can—and cannot—afford on its borrowed dollars. It makes sense to Mandelbaum -- and the average man or woman in America -- that in an era in which fewer resources will be available for everything, it is certain that fewer will be available for foreign policy.
When working Americans are paying more than in the past to support their fellow citizens who have retired, and retirees are receiving fewer benefits from the government than they were promised, neither group will be eager to offer generous support to overseas ventures.
For almost seven decades beginning with World War II, and in contrast to the experience of almost every country throughout history, freedom of maneuver rather than constraints on action was the norm for U.S. foreign policy. In foreign affairs as in economic policy, the watchword was "more." That era has ended. The defining fact of foreign policy in the second decade of the twenty-first century and beyond will be "less."
The country's soaring deficits, fueled by the huge costs of the financial crash and of its entitlement programs—Social Security and Medicare—will compel a more modest American international presence.
In assessing the consequences of this new, less expensive foreign policy, Mandelbaum describes the policies the United States will have to discontinue, assesses the potential threats from China, Russia, and Iran, and recommends a new policy, centered on a reduction in the nation's dependence on foreign oil, which can do for America and the world in the 21st Century what the containment of the Soviet Union did in the 20th Century.
Speaking of containment of the Soviet Union, Mandelbaum believes that President Bill Clinton's administration is reponsible for one of the two major foreign policy errors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the former satellites -- and even former republics such as Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia -- of the former Soviet Union.
He writes: "NATO expansion soured relations with Russia because expansion broke the promise that Soviet leaders believed, with good reason, they had received from their Western counterparts, as the Cold War wound down, that NATO its reach into what had been communist Europe. The result was to create festering doubts in the minds of Russians about the trustworthiness of the West, and especially the United States."
The other major error was the George W. Bush administration's March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Mandelbaum writes: "The debacle in Iraq resembled, in important ways, the misstep of NATO expansion. The resemblence strongly suggests that the root of both was a feature of post-Cold War foreign policy that transcends partisan differences."
Mandelbaum says "what the two fiascoes had in common was expressed in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, by the book's narrator, Nick Carraway, in describing the wealthy socialites Tom and Daisy Buchanan. 'They were careless people....They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.'"
We obviously can't afford "carelessness" in our foreign policy, given the horrendous budget deficits and the entitlement programs -- Social Security and Medicare -- that will be accessed by the gigantic baby boom generation of 1946-64, Mandelbaum writes in his clear, easy-to-comprehend prose.
I recommend "The Frugal Superpower" without reservation and I hope that President Barack Obama and his Cabinet and advisors and Congress will follow the sensible policies advocated by its author.
About the Author
Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy; Director of the American Foreign Policy Program at Johns Hopkins, SAIS. He is a former faculty member at Harvard University, Columbia University and the U.S. Naval Academy; his Ph.D. in political science came from Harvard University.
Publisher's website: www.publicaffairsbooks.com