Diplomatic triumphs don’t get much better than this in the world of Bill Clinton’s post-cold-war foreign policy. In U.S. embassies around the globe, initiatives like Mueller’s chicken diplomacy are being pursued in an open campaign of promoting U.S. business. Not since the 19th century, when gunboats opened Japan and China to Western trade, has U.S. foreign policy been so closely identified with commercial interests. “For a long time secretaries of state thought of economics as “low policy,’ while they dealt only with high science like arms control,” Secretary of State Warren Christopher told Newsweek recently. “I make no apologies for putting economics at the top of our foreign-policy agenda.”
That, as much as anything, may have been what was riling the French last week when, in a rare breach of decorum between NATO allies, they publicly accused four U.S. diplomats and another American of industrial spying for the CIA (following story). Considering Clinton’s new policy of identifying economic security with national security, the French action sounded ominously like a volley fired in a new “soft” war in which neomercantilist First World nations jockey to dominate emerging markets. “This is a bruising game with a hell of a lot of money at stake,” says a senior State Department official. “We’re bumping into the French at their own game a lot more often.”
And it’s about time, says Mickey Kantor, Clinton’s combative trade representative. “For years we have allowed our workers to be hurt and our companies to be left out because we wouldn’t pick up the phone and ask for the order,” Kantor told Newsweek. “Why shouldn’t we?” He has a point: for all the talk of privatization and open-trade regimes like the new World Trade Organization, state-sponsored economic nationalism is pursued as fiercely as ever by France, Britain, Japan and Germany.
This new strategic vision has meant a new set of priorities for Foreign Service officials, and a tectonic shift of power in Washington. Foggy Bottom may have abandoned its traditional disdain for commercial diplomacy, but the Commerce Department and the trade representative have become agenda-setters for much of what passes as foreign policy. When the issue is not an ongoing geopolitical headache like Bosnia or the Middle East, Christopher often takes a back seat to Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who has transformed his once backwater agency into a policy dynamo with trade-mission-a-month headlines, even as questions about his alleged mixing of public and private business have prompted a Justice Department inquiry. (Brown, in an interview, denied any wrongdoing.)
When they’re not dealing with emergencies, the main brief of U.S. ambassadors in Clinton’s new world order is to get the order – for whichever U.S. business happens to be in town. “To be relevant in today’s world, people have to do this stuff,” says a State Department official. “They are ready to take the white gloves off.” Last June, for example, James Laney, U.S. ambassador to South Korea, hosted an auto show on the front lawn of his stately residence, displaying Buicks and Fords like a late-night TV huckster. In Malaysia, Ambassador John Stern Wolf, a career diplomat, has become a “one-man marketing organization,” says an admiring American CEO, landing multimillion-dollar contracts for McDonnell Douglas and General Electric. And Walter Mondale, the former vice president, has spent much of his two-year tenure in Japan plugging for Motorola.
American businessmen abroad are, of course, delighted: after all, they used to have to pay for lobbyists. “This is a complete reversal of a decade ago or so. I’ve never seen this level of support out of ambassadors or out of the State Department,” says David Biegler, chairman of Enserch, a Dallas-based energy giant that both Brown and Ambassador to India Frank Wisner have promoted. “I can remember a time in the not too distant past when it was like, “We don’t dirty our hands with business. If you get thrown in jail, call us’.” To reindoctrinate his charges, Christopher encouraged the Foreign Service training center to overhaul its curriculum. Ambassadors now sit through lectures on negotiating strategy and game-playing, in which scenarios are based on trade talks with the Japanese rather than cold-war classics like brinkmanship.
The French aren’t the only foreigners dismayed by Washington’s gloves-off hucksterism. Some critics say this kind of dollar diplomacy is beneath the world’s only remaining superpower. They suggest the Clinton administration may be doing what one of the president’s heroes, Franklin Roosevelt, once warned against: jeopardizing its world leadership role by becoming just another “dog in the manger of trade selfishness.” The danger may be particularly acute in Japan, where Kantor threw what he called free-trade “theology” overboard and demanded guaranteed market shares for U.S. exporters. The policy largely failed, and left bad feelings on both sides.
This week the administration tacitly conceded it may have damaged the crucial security relationship with Japan; the Defense Department announced an initiative to reaffirm the alliance with Tokyo. “U.S.-Japan policy in recent years has been driven by Motorola. That’s a mistake of the first order,” says Richard Cooper, a Harvard expert on commercial foreign policy. “The risk is that, in becoming a door-to-door salesman, we lose our moral authority.”
Still, none of this began with Clinton; it was Calvin Coolidge who said “the first business of the American people is business,” and President Bush who dragged U.S. auto executives to Tokyo in 1992. What distinguishes the Clinton administration’s efforts is its coordinated, interagency approach, complete with an advocacy “war room” at Commerce. When Raytheon won a $1.4 billion surveillance contract in Brazil last year, beating the French firm Thomson-CSF, nearly every major cabinet-level agency, including Commerce, State, Interior and Treasury – along with the National Security Council and the CIA – got involved. Ultimately Clinton himselfimportuned the Brazilian president in a personal letter.
In a very real sense, many of America’s ambassadors and embassies – indeed, the whole security and intelligence bureaucracy – simply need a broader mission these days. Perhaps more to the point, they need to justify their existence to a knife-wielding, often isolationist Republican Congress. There are no more reports to pore over from cold-war monitoring stations. “Since we don’t have geopolitics anymore, trade is the name of the game,” acknowledges a Christopher adviser. That’s overstating things a bit; political crises aplenty will still erupt. But in a world won over by capitalism, today’s close-the-deal pragmatism may make sense. With a few exceptions, Washington no longer needs to push a grand vision of capitalism to counter communism around the globe; one of Uncle Sam’s main jobs now is to practice it better than the next guy.
