ustxtxb_obs_1988_10_14_50_00018-00000_000.pdf

But he ignores the possibility of government-sponsored investment compensating for the recent lack of private savings. Callen doesn’t think much of neoKeynesian spending programs. Yet perhaps a slightly higher rate of inflation would be acceptable in exchange for low interest rates which would protect our domestic markets and an aggressive government program to rebuild our industrial infrastructure. But that approach will only be affordable if we cut back on our outlandish military budget, which means and this is Calleo’s overarching point modifying our foreign policy. ALTHOUGH CALLEO foresees an unavoidable global rollback from American security and economic commitments, conservatives have erred in branding his and Kennedy’s tomes “neoisolationist.” Calleo urges us to rethink our involvement in the developing world on a case-by-case basis. The French have pursued such a policy with notable success, developing excellent relations with the Arab world, just as the English have forged cordial post-colonial relations with many countries in Africa and Asia. The United States, on the other hand, has squandered national resources in Vietnam and Central America both futile and lawless interventions which only diverted attention from our vastly more important military and economic ties with Europe. While developing a flexible, streamlined policy in the developing world, Calleo sees an opportunity to redefine our relationship with the Europeans, especially the French and the Germans. Both countries, after centuries of conflict, are now entering into closer working relations, which might eventually include a joint military force to take the place of withdrawn American troops. The main task for Western Europe is to integrate its economic markets while at the same time addressing what may be the great diplomatic challenge of the next 20 years: the reunification of the European continent. As Soviet leaders become more preoccupied with domestic problems, and Soviet citizens grow more and more resentful of paying for military “protection” of the relatively well-to-do East Germans, Czechs, and Hungarians, Calleo believes the Russians relations between their satellites and the West. The continued presence of huge numbers of American troops in Europe only makes the diplomatic obstacles to such EastWest rapprochement more excessive. Naturally, conservative theorists find this policy of American realignment appallingly defeatist. Herbert Stein, of the American Enterprise Institute, recently argued that American per capita Gross Domestic Product remains so much higher than the rest of the world’s that we can easily raise our levels of defense spending to maintain our global military presence. The conservative argument ignores the entire psychology of governance. It is all very well to claim that poor people in the United States have a higher standard of living than the middle class in the Soviet Union, and that Americans should be willing to substitute their extravagant levels of consumption for more government investment in defense and international aid. But the essence of successful policymaking is understanding what domestic or foreign programs the hoi polloi are actually ready to support, gauging the elusive but indispensable “popular will.” No doubt Americans could sustain a higher tax burden to pay for continued American presence in Europe; no doubt we could also continue to buy large amounts of foreign goods in order to bolster the developing economies that our lending policies have brought to the verge of bankruptcy. But the fact is the majority of Americans are tired of spending money to support their country’s hegemony. As for the conservative assertion that public unwillingness to spend money on projecting foreign influence is base selfishness, they can hardly explain the increasing popularity of “protectionism.” Much to the distress of free-market theorists, most people seem to favor paying slightly higher prices for American-made goods and services if it means maintaining jobs and economic growth in this country. There is indeed a trade-off between guns and butter; the cowboys in Washington want guns, and almost everyone else wants.more butter. Even conservative economist Stein admits that this country’s international future is subject to an ongoing battle of priorities. “[The American economy] is not rich enough to do everything,” he writes, “but it is rich enough to do everything important. The only problem is deciding what is important.” Calleo, as a theorist of international trends, is interested not only in What’s Important, but also in What’s Inevitable. If the substance of Calleo’s analysis offends the right, its tone will annoy the left. Despite his general civility, Calleo hews to a rather bloodless realism; his argument is driven by logic and self-interest rather than appeals to global morality. Indeed, Callen makes a case that verges on being purely nationalistic. Commenting at one point on the ambiguous relations between the Western Europeans and the Soviets, Calleo dryly observes that, as far as our NATO allies are concerned, “defense is to be left to the Americans with diplomacy and trade reserved for Europeans.” In Calleo’s reading, the French and the Germans have been able to sustain more the Soviets because of the diplomatic flexibility they maintain under the shield of the United States nuclear deterrent. Calleo obviously thinks the current level of military confrontation with the U.S.S.R. is ridiculous, but he appears less worried about “the fate of the earth” than protecting the economic options of the U.S. Calleo’s cynicism on these matters stems from his perception of the. Europeans as the exploiters rather than the exploited on military issues. It is certainly the case that in the early 1980s, the European governments, in the face of their own powerful indigenous peace movements, requested U.S. Pershing and Cruise missiles. In final analysis, the entire European peace movement may turn out to have been a red herring: progressives in the U.S. have wasted a good deal of energy blaming the Reagan administration for giving the Europeans nuclear weapons that legislatures on the Continent had every opportunity to reject. This has left us in the position of negotiating away European theatre weapons while maintaining our strategic armaments at their present apocalyptic level. The absurdity of the administration’s current disarmament program lies in the expenditure of diplomatic resources bargaining down levels of essentially “stable” defensive weapons in the European theatre while avoiding more urgent reductions of the highly destabilizing first-strike weapons in this country and the Soviet Union. The obvious solution, one that seems to follow from Calleo’s analysis, is to make .sure all nuclear weapons in the European theatre, whether landor airbased, are under European control: in that case it would fall upon European governments to settle their own differences with the Soviets and a potential EuropeanSoviet conflict would not automatically drag the United States into a nuclear gotterdamerung . In the meantime, we could work with Moscow to bring our arsenals down to whatever minimal level would be necessary for deterrence \(which might, by Calleo clearly is no unilateralist. Readers with more pacifistic inclinations will object to this support of deterrence, which he would have been a disastrous conventional land war in Europe following World War II. And because he supports deterrence, he not only approves of the deployment of American Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe \(a gambit which it now appears will lead to the withdrawal of all Soviet mediumAmerican renunciation of a first-use policy. On this second point Calleo places martial posturing ahead of diplomatic flexibility, but until the Europeans build their own conventional forces to the point where a Soviet invasion is clearly impossible, the first-use option will surely remain open. These views are not going to gain Calleo any friends on the left. It does seem that in analyzing the relationship between the Russians and the Western alliance, Calleo has overstated the case for maintaining the Cold War. Calleo 18 OCTOBER 14, 1988