Will Hillary's Gambit Work?

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Hyungwon Kang / Reuters In her big speech Wednesday, Hillary Clinton told the world she is staking out a foreign policy that was more inclusive than George W. Bush’s. But is it too naïve?

Near the beginning of her big foreign-policy speech at the Council of Foreign Relations, Hillary Clinton took a shot at the “balance of power.” It may have been a good concept in the 20th century, she explained, when we faced the Soviet Union, but it’s outmoded today.

That spoke volumes. George W. Bush’s foreign policy was all about the balance of power. As he saw it, there were bad guys (terrorists and their state sponsors) and good guys (us and our allies). The goal was to isolate, if not eliminate, the former and strengthen the latter. He wasn’t seeking a balance of power in the sense of equal power between America and its enemies. But no country ever does. He was seeking the kind of “balance” you want in your bank account, a positive one. As Condoleezza Rice liked to say, “A balance of power that favors freedom.”

While there may be some value in publicly trashing the balance of power, let’s hope Hillary Clinton doesn’t really believe her own words.

Commentators often called Bush a Wilsonian because he talked about promoting democracy. But that was mostly nonsense, because the beating heart of Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy was his desire to abolish the balance of power, to replace a world divided between hostile alliances with a world united against common threats. To replace “us vs. them” with “we’re all in it together.”

Hillary Clinton, in other words, is the real Wilsonian. And her speech was a textbook example of the strengths and weaknesses of the Wilsonian tradition. What’s great about Wilsonianism is that it provides an intellectual framework for tackling non-military issues. The balance of power tradition—with its emphasis on us vs. them—stands totally mute before threats like global warming or the global economic crisis, which threaten all nations far more than they benefit any. That’s why Bush and most other conservatives so often ignore the economic and environmental aspects of foreign policy, because you can’t address them without seeing all nations as essentially on the same side.

Wilsonianism also implies moral reciprocity. By seeing America as part of a global community, it suggests that the rules of good international behavior apply to us as well. Clinton—like Obama—clearly acknowledges that when it comes to the environment, human rights, nuclear proliferation, and fighting poverty, we can’t lay down rules for other nations unless we’re willing to abide by them ourselves. In that sense, Clinton is the true moral universalist: the person who believes there are ethical standards that exist above and beyond all nations, including our own. Bush was a nationalist pretending to be a moralist: a man who believed that evil was something our enemies did, and that America—because we were so transcendentally moral—should not be judged by standards that non-Americans help define.

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