Tipping the Foreign Policy Balance

Tech Central Station ^ | January 25, 2005 | Carroll Andrew Morse

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President Bush's inaugural address has reignited the most basic of foreign policy debates; should American foreign policy include efforts to change the nature of foreign governments? President Bush clearly thinks that the answer to this question is yes,

"The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands".

  

Condoleeza Rice, Bush's Secretary of State nominee, expressed this idea in a more diplomatic manner during her Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing,

"We must use American diplomacy to help create a balance of power in the world that favors freedom".

Though clearly in line with the President's vision, Rice's formulation expressed a measure of respect for the foreign policy tradition less concerned with the promotion of liberty. 

The balance of power is a "realist" idea. Foreign-policy realists believe that the United States best guarantees its security by working to balance the interests of other states against one another. America's foreign engagement should seek to maintain an overall balance of world power that favors the United States. To traditional realists, the quantity of power controlled by governments that restrict the freedoms of their citizens is, at best, a minor concern. 

A world that favors freedom, on the other hand, is a "liberal" idea. Foreign policy liberals believe that the United States best guarantees its security by consciously influencing dynamics within states, moving them towards more liberal political practices. The overall threat to the United States is reduced when more and more people live in free and prosperous societies, leaving fewer and fewer people interested in making war against the US.

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