Foggy Thinking in Foggy Bottom

After the decision was made to invite Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to join NATO, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright praised this as one of America's greatest foreign policy achievements because of the security it would guarantee in the event that "Russia might revert to its old Cold War foreign policy." This seems to betray either antipathy or ignorance regarding Russia and its internal politics.

In Russia, only the radical Communists and Nationalists present a genuine threat of such a reverse. These groups depend for their legitimacy, like any alarmist political party, on the perception that Russia is threatened by international forces drawing together against her. Nothing more clearly could convey this impression than the invitation by NATO to these three countries to join an alliance designed specifically to oppose Russia.

Thus, Albright's thinking was inverted: the very act of expanding the alliance is more likely than anything else to produce that Russian foreign policy of which she spoke so ominously. So why do it? The costs to the American people of the potential danger, particularly as Russia is still one of the world's top two nuclear powers, seem to far outweigh any benefits America might accrue from such an act of acceptance toward these peoples.

It is also arguable that the sense of exclusion created among 148 million Russians outweighs the positive feelings created among 59 million Poles, Hungarians and Czechs. This leads me to believe that either the State Department is guilty of dangerous miscalculations, or that it is not necessarily acting in the best interests of the nation.

To find whose interests it might be serving let's see where the buck stops. While there will be an indirect economic benefit for these countries from their increased sense of security, much more tangible is money (on the order of billions of dollars) NATO will provide to modernize their armies. The nations' defense ministries will then spend this money buying arms from American and other western defense firms. Is it likely the American defense industry would try to influence American foreign policy for its own benefit, to the detriment of the interests of the American people?

Let's look at the other possibility: the State Department just doesn't know how things work in other countries. This hypothesis is borne out by the recent bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan. These attacks were supposed to counter terrorism by impairing the physical resources of terrorists. But most terrorists do not have a highly developed military-industrial complex, the destruction of which would significantly diminish their ability to commit acts of terrorism.

The most crucial asset for terrorists is instead their human resources--a large pool of alienated, relatively poor, predominantly male youths who feel their nation or religion is being unjustly targeted by outside forces, particularly American. What better way to enlarge this human resource pool than an apparently (to populations of such countries) unprovoked attack by the United States? The anti-American demonstrations that rocked the Islamic world from Bangladesh to Egypt following the air strikes serve as only the most harmless manifestation of the emotions that may lead droves of young people to join terrorist organizations.

Again it is interesting to look at who benefited from these strikes. Certainly the American president, who could appear to be a strong leader at a difficult time, unafraid to use force against America's enemies. Is it likely the President would try to influence American foreign policy to benefit himself and his party, but act against the best interests of the American people?

There are arguments that would support these air strikes, but I don't know that anyone considered the long-term effects on the general populations of the countries involved. In fact, the State Department often seems to miss the point that nations are composed of many different actors. For example, in the former Yugoslavia, the vast majority of the people derive no personal benefit from the hostility that exists between their nation and much of the West, and in fact are economically hurt by it. However, the State Department seems to treat the former Yugoslavia only in terms of the Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic, to whose impudently hostile policies it reacts by increasing the hostile stance of the United States. The resulting impression of a nation embattled against a huge Western power, with one man courageous enough to oppose that power, benefits that one man immensely--the same man whose policies are so abhorrent to us.

The American policy of hostility toward the nations of hostile dictators seems almost uniformly counterproductive. There are very few nations where the population derives benefit from a hostile stance toward the United States. Yet there are many leaders in the world, democratically or otherwise empowered, who derive a benefit that may be essential to their maintenance of power from the image that can so easily be created of heroic opposition to the unjust and hostile United States.

With its bases in the Marxist philosophy repudiated by the U.S. victory in the Cold War, such a theory--that in any society there are a few people on top whose interests and benefit lie in their ability to fool the many on the bottom into supporting them--might well be spurned by the State Department.

But Susan Eisenhower, among others, might argue that America didn't win the Cold War (there was no invasion, no diplomatic crisis, no external threat that brought down the Soviet Union). The Russian people won it, with Marxist theory. It was ordinary Russian citizens along with renegade Russian soldiers who surrounded Boris Yeltsin on a hijacked tank in front of the Bely Dom during the August coup seven years ago. The many on the bottom of Soviet society refused to be fooled any longer into supporting the few on the top.

Perhaps the State Department could use a little basic Marxist theory. It might be better than whatever theory underpins their present actions, which so effectively create an impression of an American nation inimical to other entire nations and ethnic and religious groups. Whatever that theory is, it seems to bear a disturbing resemblance to another, rather more distasteful theory that also employed totalitarianism in the early part of this century: National Socialism.

Dan Epstein '99 is a Slavic languages and literatures concentrator in Quincy House.