S FOREIGN POLICY AS AN INSTANCE OF THE ‘ANARCHY PROBLEMATIQUE’

Chapters Three and Four demonstrated how the divergent

theoretical traditions in the discipline of International Relations are an instance of the anarchy problematique, a problematization that

constructs the discourse of international relations around the presence of sovereign states in an anarchic environment. Given that the

poststructuralist attitude of this thesis makes no distinction between theory and practice - instead regarding theory as practice - it should be expected that postwar U.S. foreign policy is constituted by the same problematization. 63

®. A survey of national security officials employed in the Departments of State and Defense, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff demonstrated the institutional basis for the dominance of the anarchy problematique. They were found to usually hold graduate qualifications in International Relations,

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A major conclusion of the above review is that, contrary to the conventional understanding of containment, the danger that the United States faces is never defined by the foreign policy texts as flowing from a constant Soviet military threat. The intelligence assessments of the immediate postwar period actually discounted the prospect of the Soviet Union resorting to war. They did not question the fundamental assump­ tion that the Soviet Union was the United States’ major adversary, but they felt that it was more likely to use economic and political means to advance its cause. 64 Equally important is the constant shifting

characterization of the threat. Despite considerable differences in the order of magnitude of each, over the years United States policy makers have cited world communism, the economic disintegration of Europe, Red China, North Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, terrorists, drug smugglers, and so on. None of these sources poses a threat in terms of

political science or, in the case of the CIA, economics. When surveyed about the long-range influence of various communities, academia was rated second (behind colleagues and other government departments). Despite some concern that academic studies were not directly applicable to their work, they did believe that "academic studies [were] useful in providing an overall perspective from which to view international events." The list of influential scholars identified by these people included (in 1980) Kissinger, Morgenthau, Keenan, Brzezinski, Hoffmann, Marshall Shulman, Samuel Huntington, Raymond Aron and Thomas Schelling. The most influential journals were Foreign Affairs (read by two- thirds of the sample) and Foreign Policy (read by one-half). When presented with a list of ten phrases that represented theoretical approaches to International Relations, respondents favored one of four phrases, all derived from an image of international affairs that privileges the sovereignty/anarchy dualism: "balance of power", "interdependence", "geopolitics", or "protracted conflict"; with the first two accounting for about one-half of the responses. See Sallie M. Hicks, Theodore A. Couloumbis and Eloise M. Forgette, "Influencing the Prince: A Role for Academicians?", Polity 15 (1982), pp.279-94.

64. An excellent account of this is Matthew A. Evangelista, "Stalin’s Postwar Army Reappraised", International Security 7 (1982/83), pp.111-38. Evangelista demonstrates that the various assessments of Soviet military capabilities - which noted their postwar demobilization and poor logistical support - never led to a revision of the general view th at the Soviets harbored aggressive intentions towards Western Europe.

a traditional calculus of power, and none of them can be reduced solely to the Soviet Union. All of them, however, are understood in terms of their location in an anarchic realm.

The above review of the foreign policy discourse suggests that the absence of order in the international system is considered a basic problem for U.S. foreign policy. NSC-68 was explicit in this regard, noting that the United States would have to be concerned with

promoting a "healthy international environment" even if there was no Soviet Union. Similar themes were enunciated by Kennedy when he maintained that the U.S.-Soviet conflict was one of "two conflicting ideologies: Freedom under God versus ruthless, godless tyranny." But again, it was the concern for order that was prominent in much of the Kennedy administration’s policy - the desire to see "the societies of Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America develop along lines broadly

consistent with our own concepts of individual liberty based on consent" that will avoid the situation whereby the United States would find itself "a beleaguered island in a totalitarian sea." The understanding that United States’ interests are ensured when order prevails remains a constant organizing principle of U.S. policy. As Brzezinski has recently argued, "Given the fact that the international system cannot operate on the basis of sheer goodwill and spontaneity alone but needs some center of cooperative initiative, financial control and even political power, it follows that the only alternative to American leadership is global anarchy and international chaos."65

65. Zbigniew Brzezinski, "America’s New Geostrategy", Foreign Affairs 66 (1988), p.694.

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An example of the operation of the anarchy problematique as the problematization of U.S. foreign policy can be provided by considering the existence of critiques from within official policy circles. Paul Nitze has argued that in the early cold war period "The entire national security community in Washington felt that the Soviet Union posed the main threat to the United States. The debate over Soviet intentions was not significant."66 Such an interpretation conflates two issues. There was a debate over Soviet intentions that was bureaucratically

significant. Throughout the drafting of NSC-68, one of the State

Department’s senior Soviet specialists (Charles Bohlen) argued that the characterization of the Soviet Union as desiring world domination and having a master plan to achieve it was seriously mistaken. What is significant about this debate (and it was regarded as serious enough to be thought of as contributing to the alternatives to containment being discussed in the State Department)67 is that for all Bohlen’s insistence that there was a major difference between himself and Nitze, he never disputed that the Soviet Union constituted a threat and that the

Truman administration’s plans for a defence build-up were essential. In other words, the critique accepted most of the elements of its object of attack.68

66. Paul Nitze, "The Development of NSC 68", International Security 4 (1980), p.172.

67. See Robert L. Messer, "Paths Not Taken: The United States Department of State and Alternatives to Containment, 1945-1946", Diplomatic History 1 (1977), pp.297-319.

For Bohleris arguments see Memorandum by Mr. Charles E. Bohlen to the Director of the Policy Planning Staff (Nitze), Washington, April 5, 1950, FRUS 1950, Volume I, pp.221-225; The Counsellor (Bohlen) to the Director of the Policy Planning Staff (Nitze), Washington, July 28, 1951, FRUS 1951, Volume I. pp.106-109; and Memorandum by the Counsellor (Bohlen)[and

This co-opting of critiques - a result of the operation of the

problem atization - can be dem onstrated by other historical examples. During the Johnson adm inistration’s debate over w hether or not to commit one hundred thousand troops to Vietnam, the argum ents against the proposal by George Ball were defeated by Dean Rusk and others largely because Ball’s argum ent presupposed the same basis - the issue of the credibility of the United S tate’s commitment to its allies - as the argum ents in favor of the troop deployment.69 In the

1970s debate over the "window of vulnerability" - th a t Soviet ICBM developments threatened a first-strike capability th a t could destroy the U.S. ICBM force - critics such as J a n Lodal had less success th an advocates such as Paul Nitze because they refused to challenge the assessm ent of the Soviet Union th at was the basis of Nitze’s

argum ent.70

The power of the anarchy problematique in U.S. foreign policy was such th a t even allies of the United States did not escape inclusion as sources of threats. In the immediate postwar period, U.S. Secretary of the Navy Patterson told Secretary of State M arshall th a t the effective im plem entation of the Monroe Doctrine in the W estern Hemisphere

subsequent papersl, Washington, August 22, 1951, FEUS 1951, VOlume I. pp.163-181.

69. This argument is made in David Sylvan and Hayward Alker, "Foreign Policy as Tragedy: Sending 100,000 Troops to Vietnam", Paper prepared for the XIVth World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Washington, August 28 to September 1, 1988.

70. See Thomas F. Homer-Dixon and Roger S. Karapin, "Following Political Debates: A New Approach to the Window of Vulnerability Thesis." Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1987. Photocopy.

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meant that:

we [the U.S.] not only refuse to tolerate foreign colonization, control, or the extension of a foreign political system to our hemisphere, but we take alarm from the appearance on the continent of foreign ideologies, commercial exploitation, cartel arrangements, or other symptoms of increased non-hemispheric influence...The basic consideration has always been an overriding apprehension lest a base be established in this area by a

potentially hostile foreign power. 71

The United States, Patterson noted, must have "a stable, secure, and friendly flank to the South, not confused by enemy penetration, political, economic, or military. " 72 But it was not the Soviets who were

the original focus of this apprehension. As Leffler states: Patterson, Forrestal, and Army Chief of Staff Dwight D. Eisenhower initially were impelled less by reports of Soviet espionage, propaganda, and infiltration in Latin America than by accounts of British efforts to sell cruisers and aircraft to Chile and Ecuador; Swedish sales of anti-aircraft artillery to Argentina; and French offers to build cruisers for both Argentina and Chile. To foreclose all foreign influence and to insure United States strategic hegemony, military officers argued for an extensive system of United States bases. . . 73

Examples of the discourse such as this suggest that the problematization which has made U.S. foreign policy historically possible is predicated on the making ‘foreign’ of some events and

objects. The constitution of the ‘foreign’ is based upon the disciplining of the ambiguity and contingency of global politics into inside and outside, self and other, via the inscription of the boundaries of the state. The problematization that gives rise to U.S. foreign policy discourse is thus

71. Quoted in Leffler, "The American Conception of National Security", p.354.

72. Ibid.

"governed by a historically developed representational practice which is primarily geopolitical and...this has combined a way of constituting the Other, which places that other in a lesser moral space. " 74 In the

examples above, the acceptance of the basic geopolitical premises of the anarchy problematique provides a common discursive framework for proponents of different policy options, and forces critics into a secondary position.

As a geopolitical practice, where security is formulated through the spatial terms of identity and difference, it privileges the territorial enclosure of political space at the expense of temporal, historical, or social relations. 75 As a consequence, "it tends to make us treat existing

patterns and relations as if they were permanent and universally valid. " 76 The ambiguity and contingency of international politics is

disciplined in such a way that any social and political content, let alone any prospect for change, is expunged from consideration. International relations are therefore experienced as constituting a realm of necessity.

7\ Shapiro, The Politics of Representation, p.123. The record of postwar U.S. national security policy is replete with geopolitical references. Kennan first proposed containment on the basis that the United States could not remain secure if an aggressive power gained control of "Eurasia". The Reagan administration recently declared that "the United State’s most basic national security interests would be endangered if a hostile state or group of states were to dominate the Eurasian landmass - that area of the globe often referred to as the world’s heartland." See Reagan, National Security Strategy, p.l. Academic analysis of national security policy has seen a resurgence in geopolitical thought. See, for example, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Game Plan: How to Conduct the US-Soviet Contest (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986) and Gray, The Geopolitics of Superpower.

75. Simon Dalby, "Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union as Other", Alternatives 13 (1988), pp.415-442.

p.71.

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To this point, the argument has considered the functioning of a problematization by the operation of disciplinary power and its various effects - the inscription of the boundaries of inside and outside, for example. While it has been argued that this leads to the construction of political identity in terms of self and other, it now needs to be

demonstrated how the construction of self and other operates in the specific site of United States foreign policy. While arguing that U.S. foreign policy has been made possible by the operation of the anarchy problematique, its actual operation - the character of the Other and the character of the self that result - cannot be specified outside their historical circumstances.

The remainder of the chapter will, therefore, seek to demonstrate how "U.S. foreign policy" is a practice constitutive of the "United States". This involves considering the particular construction of ‘man’ that has been enframed by the drawing of the boundary of domestic society and the inscription of danger; the differences within U.S. society that are transformed into the differences between the U.S. and other societies; and how the operation of these practices of statecraft is hidden in the U.S. context.

ENFRAMING UNITED STATES ‘MAIN

A striking feature of the above review of foreign policy discourse is that assessments of threat regularly begin with considerations that more traditional analyses might regard as epiphenomenal: culture,

ideology, and general reflections on United States society. NSC-68 is the most striking example of this, but it is far from being the only one. It declares that the United States’ fundamental purpose ("to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual") automatically places it in conflict with Soviet Union (being the embodiment of the "idea of slavery"). The debate concerning defense appropriations in the Eisenhower

administration was conducted on the basis that the defense budget should not create a burden so great that it would destroy the very system it was supposed to defend - a system of freedom of choice for individuals, democratic procedures for government, and a private enterprise economy. For the Kennedy administration, the preservation of "Freedom under God" and the spreading through modernization of the principles of individual liberty were guiding tenets. The Carter and Reagan administration’s pursuit of "human rights" is a further instance of the U.S. concept of the self, given that the concept of "human rights" embodies the achievement of freedom through an "institutionalizing [of] a purified notion of individual selfhood."77 These are arguments which claim universality for particular American values. They are arguments like those of Richard Rorty - whose comments on "Soviet imperialism" opened this chapter - when he maintains that there are major

differences between the First and Second Worlds: "We have hope, and they (unless Gorbachev astonishes us all) do not. We have freedom of the press, an independent judiciary, and [free] uni versifies... Such fragile, flawed institutions, the creation of the last 300 years, are

77. David Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger and After (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p.267.

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humanity’s most precious achievements. " 78

The constant reaffirmation of the character of U.S. society and the individual in foreign policy discourse suggests, as the argument here wants to maintain, that the practices of foreign policy serve to enframe, limit and domesticate a particular meaning of ‘man’. The identity that is thus enframed refers to more than just the characteristics of

individuals or national types; the meaning of ‘man’ incorporates the form of domestic order, the social relations of production, and the various subjectivities to which they give rise. In the context of the United States, ‘man’ is disciplined by the rhetoric associated with freedom of choice for individuals, democratic institutions, and a private enterprise economy. This serves to reproduce those practices in the face of contradictory and threatening interpretations of ‘man’; most

obviously, that of a communal ‘man’ whose interests are served by social planning and the public ownership of property. However, this dichotomy does not exhaust the variety of interpretations of ‘man’ that can exist. Robert Cox’s recent work has demonstrated the numerous alternatives to a liberal capitalist domestic order that have existed - often concurrently - throughout human history. He identifies twelve different social relations of production: subsistence, peasant-lord, primitive labor market, household, self-employment, enterprise labor market, bipartism, enterprise corporatism, tripartism, state corporatism, communal, and central planning. 79 The significance of this is that the

78. Rorty, "Thugs and Theorists", p.567.

79. Robert W. Cox, Production, Power and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), Chs. 2-4.

disciplining of this myriad of interpretations so as to sustain political identity requires a powerful means of transferring the differences within to the differences between.

The United States ‘man’ that is enframed by the transfer of

differences through U.S. foreign policy is that associated with a liberal capitalist order and its subjectivities. The nuclear family with its male breadwinner, spouse, prosperous children and suburban abode is the norm which many regard as the standard vision of these social relations of production. Founded upon distinct gender roles and economic relationships, the nuclear family is ‘man* written in time- honored fashion. But as Elaine May has argued, this enframing of ‘man’ is an effect of cold war practices. 80 With its "strong domestic

ideology, pervasive consensus politics, and peculiar demographic

behavior", the nuclear family is distinctive and a departure from past social relations. 81

The emphasis on domesticity in the postwar era was an effort to contain what one scholar has termed the "dual representations" of American society. Americans in the postwar era "developed a dual collective representation of themselves, nicely rendered by competing

80. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

81. Ibid, p.9. For another discussion on the distinctiveness of the nuclear family see Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: The Free Press, 1988), especially Ch. 9.

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