Is the U.S. fighting a war in Kosovo to make the world safe for capitalism? The Clinton administration's own justifications for its grand strategy and its Balkan policy raise this issue. But as disturbing a thought as this is, it is not a new question.
In the 1960s, against the backdrop of America's deepening commitment in Vietnam, a group of so-called "revisionist" historians challenged orthodox explanations of U.S. foreign policy. In his classic book, "The Tragedy of American Diplomacy," historian William Appleman Williams maintained that American statesmen believed that U.S. prosperity depended upon exports and overseas economic relationships.
According to revisionists like Williams, U.S. policymakers thus believed that they needed to impose upon those regions considered economically vital to the United States an informal empire of "virtuous omnipotence" that guaranteed a safe, stable and predictable environment conducive to expanding trade relations. As Williams explained, U.S. policymakers assigned an awesome international responsibility to America: "The protection and extension of the market in which the principle of free competition could operate." Therefore, "classical liberal economics led to an expansionist foreign policy."
At the time, this interpretation of American diplomacy was harshly criticized as a form of crude Marxist economic determinism. But now, remarkably, American policymakers are parroting the revisionist arguments. In explaining its global strategy, for instance, the Pentagon declares that "a prosperous, largely democratic, market-oriented zone of peace and prosperity that encompasses more than two-thirds of the world's economy" requires the "stability" that only American "leadership" can provide.
The belief that the U.S. must use military power to create a tranquil international environment in which trade can flourish is not an abstract concept. In the debate over U.S. military intervention in Bosnia, leading foreign policy figures, including Gen. William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) asserted that, left unchecked, the war in Bosnia could destabilize Europe, threatening global economic interdependence and American prosperity.
