Charles Maynes - The Nature of the Post-Cold War World

The editors of the nation’s two leading journals on foreign policy were asked to examine the nature of the post-cold war world and America’s transitional role. These essays represent the views of Charles William Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy , and William G. Hyland, former editor of Foreign Affairs .

Charles Maynes reviews the major transitions that marked 45 years of Soviet-American strategic confrontation. Predictably, the U.S. global role and defense resources are declining as old threats decrease and domestic problems move higher up on the policy agenda. Less predictably, the relative defense spending of small powers is likely to increase, adding to the potential for regional instability. These trends and the proliferation of weapons technology, including weapons of mass destruction, will drive the major powers toward their third attempt in this century to deal with global instability through collective security. Power will become more evenly distributed as America’s military dominance recedes and others’ economic power increases. Such trends, Mr. Maynes believes, should not be disturbing so long as prudent retrenchment does not become a foolish retreat from an American global role.

William Hyland believes that no president since Calvin Coolidge has inherited an easier foreign policy agenda. Presidents from Truman through Bush did the cold war “heavy lifting,” and the Clinton transitional era should mark the ascendancy of domestic over foreign policy issues.

Economic power is essential to America’s future and the country faces the difficult task of economic recovery while avoiding the political expedience of protectionism or other forms of belligerence toward our trading partners. This would accelerate international fragmentation, undermining the political trends toward a collective security regime that is vital to the new world order and is the best alternative to the extremes of U.S. isolationism or global policeman.

Mr. Hyland advises against grand strategic visions. Instead, selectivity based on national interests should be a guiding principle while we put our economic house in order.

The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to publish these essays as a contribution to the debate on U.S. national security strategy.

CHARLES WILLIAM MAYNES has served as Editor of Foreign Policy magazine since April 1980. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard University, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford where he earned First Class Honors in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. Over the course of his career, Mr. Maynes has held significant positions in the Department of State, U.S. Congress, and the foundation world.

WILLIAM G. HYLAND was Editor of Foreign Affairs from 1984 until 1993. A graduate of Washington University, St. Louis, he also earned an M.A. from the University of Missouri. Mr. Hyland served on the National Security Council Staff and was Director of Intelligence at the State Department. After government service he joined the Georgetown Center for Strategic Studies and subsequently became a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Are we in a new era in world affairs? It has become commonplace to assert this. But the best way to peer into the future—perhaps the only way—is to examine the past and to look for trends that appear to be shaping the present. If we understand clearly the contours of the international system after 1945, it will probably be easier for us to determine the extent to which we are now truly in a revolutionary era, one which will give us, whether we wish it or not, a New World Order.

In 1945 all thoughtful observers realized that the world was indeed at a turning point. Both domestically and internationally strategists understood that the world could not return to the policies of the interwar period.

The development of the atomic bomb guaranteed that. The existence of a weapon qualitatively different from all that had proceeded it convinced policymakers that the world was entering a new age. Strategists began to assert that the very nature of war had changed. Before the goal was to win wars. Now the goal was to avert war.

Also convincing statesmen that a page had been turned was the position of Europe after the war. In contrast to the First World War, which despite its destruction still left Britain, France and Germany as major international actors, the Second World War brought Soviet and American troops to the heart of Europe. The periphery of Europe, broadly considered, was now in charge of the center. The world had not seen such a development since 1815 when Russian troops marched in Paris and there was a comparable sense that a new page in history was being turned.

In the domestic realm there was also a sense of dramatic departure. Governments associated with the West announced their determination to avoid the mistakes of the interwar period, racked with social and class conflict. All parties agreed that there had to be a new social contract, which we know as the postwar welfare state. Even conservatives accepted that government would have a new role to play in the economies of their countries. All major parties recognized that society could not permit the kind of domestic conflict that had spawned the twin evils of fascism and communism. The major issue was not whether to draw up a new social contract but what its provisions should be and who should pay for the new state obligations.

Internationally the creation of the United Nations and the development of the Marshall Plan reflected a feeling that a new security and social contract were needed abroad as well as at home. The consequences of unbridled nationalism were everywhere to be seen. With the establishment of the United Nations and its various affiliated organizations, the immediate postwar world saw the second attempt in this century at collective security. The international equivalent of the welfare state at home was attempted in the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank as the notion emerged that economically powerful states had an obligation to promote growth and welfare not only in their own countries but throughout the globe.

Americans like to think that such attitudes reflect a special vein of American generosity or altruism and that only their country could have come up with the Marshall Plan. The new course did represent an impressive policy departure, particularly for the United States, but in retrospect it should be seen as part of a more general international phenomenon. America stood out, not because it was so much more generous than others in terms of its national character, but because it was so much richer than others in terms of its large treasury. Had other victorious nations had the resources of America, it seems likely that we would now be talking about the de Gaulle plan or the Attlee plan or even the Chiang Kai-shek plan. For indeed, once other nations recovered, they also began to display the same pattern of generosity that many Americans like to believe is restricted to themselves. Today other members of the OECD contribute more to ODA than the United States by the standard measure of per capita effort. Indeed, America is at the bottom of the list of donors in per capita terms. If the American people were inherently more generous than the people of other states, such a transformation would never have taken place. It did take place because of the general postwar tendency to believe that governments had an obligation to promote an improvement in economic and social conditions both at home and abroad that could reduce the likelihood of civil strife and war.