We Can All Do Better

by Bill Bradley

  The United States had been attempting to control events in other countries since the end of the Korean War: In 1953, there was the CIA-sponsored coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, the elected leader of Iran, followed by the elevation of the despotic shah. The coup against President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán of Guatemala in 1954, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the coup against Chile’s democratically elected Salvador Allende in 1973 reflected our belief that interference in the politics of other countries was our prerogative. In the post–Vietnam era, this kind of intervention continued, with efforts to depose dictatorial or communist regimes in Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Panama—efforts that offended millions of Americans in spite of arguments invoking the ideals of the Founders or our principled opposition to communism.

  The moralism in foreign policy that diplomat George Kennan so decried in his lectures on foreign policy at the University of Chicago in 1950 was once again fashionable by the end of the 1970s. Woodrow Wilson’s democratic messianism was back in vogue. President Jimmy Carter espoused a muscular human-rights policy but was wise enough to use only economic and diplomatic means to enforce it, even as he authorized covertly aiding the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in their war against the USSR. President Ronald Reagan committed U.S. troops to Lebanon and Grenada while sponsoring covert wars in Central America. The first Iraq war, in 1990–1991, revived the argument about “just wars” and the United States invoked the U.N. charter’s prohibition on members invading another member nation as justification for our involvement. President George H. W. Bush conducted the war flawlessly and ended it by keeping the promise he made to his allies: that Iraq would be evicted from Kuwait, not occupied, and Kuwait’s sovereignty would be restored. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, President Bill Clinton used the just-war argument to justify our intervention in Serbia in defense of human rights, while not responding to genocide in Rwanda—raising the old question posed to democratic interventionists: “Where do you draw the line?”

  With each of these exercises of military power, America became more self-righteous. We invaded on principle, which seemed to make violence acceptable—and besides we were omnipotent, so no one could stop us. There was no countervailing force to our entry into or instigation of wars intended to rid the world of this or that tyrant and “make the world safe for democracy.” Most of these interventions were brief and accomplished with allies—Who wouldn’t want to curry favor with the world’s only superpower?—which further convinced us that the world was swinging our way. Our democratic example could now be spread more aggressively. We decided to expand NATO eastward, even though the organization’s purpose—to counter Soviet military power—had evaporated with the dissolution of the USSR and the end of Russian communism. What could Russia do about it? Democracy was on the march—and Russia was invited to come along.

  When we bombed Serbia in 1999 and the Russians protested, our response, in effect, was that we had a right to intervene because in the sectarian violence between Serbs and Albanian Kosovars, we had concluded that the Serbs were more in the wrong. In 2008, we recognized the independence of Kosovo from Serbia. For the first time since the Helsinki Accords of 1975, a territory had been taken from a nation against its expressed desires. President George W. Bush was received in Albania by cheering crowds, just like Wilson in Paris in 1919. In 2010, the Council of Europe issued a report pointing out that Kosovo’s prime minister, Hashim Thaçi, in the last decade, headed a group once responsible for heroin trafficking and trade in human organs. Yet again, self-determination had created something quite different from what democratic interventionists had envisioned.

  Then 9/11 happened, in the first year of a new president who had campaigned against nation-building abroad. Ten years, two wars, and more than $1 trillion later, during the administration of Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, we finally killed the leader of the 9/11 strike, Osama bin Laden. By that time, our rhetoric had gotten us into a no-win situation.

  We maintained that we were in Afghanistan not for revenge but to remake a society in our image. We were there so Afghanis could rule themselves freely, women could receive equal treatment, and the standard of living could rise. Slowly it became clear that the reality of Afghanistan and Iraq was quite different from the liberal democratic ideal promoted by proponents of the invasions. We never really knew who our friends were in the government circles or among the intelligence sources in either country. We took our NATO allies into the Afghani conflict in part to show the reach of NATO’s new, broader, self-justifying mission. Instead, we may have generated, along with the NATO bombing of Libya, forces of disillusionment and discord that may well lead to NATO’s demise. As in the fog of war that obtained in Vietnam, our only recourse was to stay longer and send more troops. We had trouble recognizing that our version of democracy might not neatly apply in deeply divided tribal cultures.

  For those of us who believe that our example is our strongest asset in world affairs, what example do these wars convey to the world? How have they furthered our long-term interests? What have they said not only to the Muslim world but also to China, India, Brazil? What have they said to the billions of young people around the world who are looking for leadership they can admire and trust? What did we think we were doing by using military power to force democracy on countries that didn’t ask for it, at great expense to our own citizens in terms of money and lost lives? In the end, we have just been talking to ourselves, trapped in assumptions and rhetoric from another time. There has to be another path.

  I would go back to George Kennan and re-read his opposition to messianism in our foreign policy. While Americans feel that democracy—our democracy—is the best form of government ever invented, they are divided about whether we should fight wars to impose it on other countries. That’s called imperialism, and it requires occupation for decades and trillions of dollars to finance. There is no shortcut. And we have never aspired to be the English or the Ottomans or the Romans. The prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan contradicted the values that inform our view of ourselves. Bombing citizens of another country is now called “collateral damage.” We seem to think that a quick apology and restatement of our anti-terrorist purpose is sufficient to cleanse our hands. Yet such self-justification only further erodes our example. Who, after all, would want to emulate a country whose only contact with you is the humming of a drone?

  A country needs a strong enough military to defend itself from genuine threats. The use of that military, however, should be rare. The lesson of the Cold War was that deterrence requires not military action but only the development of a credible threat. In the 1990s, though, a new question arose: “Why have a military if we don’t use it?” My response is that militarizing too many disputes undermines our example and our claim to leadership and inevitably, given the law of unintended consequences, leaves us in no-win situations. The results of military actions are unpredictable. Thinking of military intervention as a handy policy tool you can pull out when the time is right ignores the messiness of war and underestimates its potentially negative effects on our political objectives, not to mention the cost in lives and treasure.

  Lead by Example

  So, what is the example we should be setting—the stance from which we should seek to lead the world? I think it should be the example of a pluralistic democracy with a growing economy that takes everyone to higher ground. By “pluralistic” I mean a tolerant, multiracial, multiethnic country in which people seek to learn from one another’s uniqueness but also accept what it means to be an American: our language, institutions, and the political ideals that hold us together. By “democracy” I mean a country in which people not only vote but also participate in the affairs of their communities, and a country whose judicial system renders judgments based on the law, our present circumstances, and our hoped-for future, not on politics, ideology, your ability to pay lawyers, or a too-narrow construction of the Constitution. By “a growing economy that takes everyone to
higher ground,” I mean a country in which upward mobility is possible and bad luck at birth doesn’t ensure bad luck for a lifetime; a country that encourages and rewards innovation and gives all Americans the educational tools they need to excel; a country that ensures its citizens’ access to health care; a country in which, if you work hard, you can have a good retirement. I believe this example has wide appeal. It is not fully realized. Still, if people around the world see that we’re on the path to its fulfillment, they will be with us. And we should invite them to join us.

  In the twenty-first century, the intelligence of people will determine the future. Our free society can be the magnet for some of the world’s brightest minds if we deliberately, carefully, and intelligently open ourselves up. Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, has said that while China has a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, the United States, given its history of accepting the foreign born, can draw talent from all 7 billion people in the world.3 We should welcome the arrival of doctors, scientists, writers, mathematicians, computer specialists, language teachers, and other such talented professionals from abroad. The United States has always benefited from immigration of talented people. One of the side effects of the persecution of the Jews that preceded the horror of the Holocaust was the immigration of Jews who have immeasurably enriched American society. As a meritocracy, we should welcome those who can get admitted to our universities or provide us with needed skills in government agencies, science laboratories, hospitals, and elsewhere. For example, we need an intensive effort to train Americans to effectively teach science and math, but in the interim the only way we can educate our kids in these critical areas is with the help of foreign teachers. The former mayor of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, once told me he was trying to import math and science teachers from China and Eastern Europe to the Chicago school system because he couldn’t find competent Americans. Any time a foreign student gets an advanced degree from an American university, he or she should automatically get a green card. We should also be open to those with entrepreneurial spirit who have the resources and want to start a business. Finally we should welcome not just the brightest or those with resources but also, as we always have done, those in limited numbers who just want a better life and show the ambition to seek it here. Surely, in a land as large as ours, we can make room for the energy, drive, and optimism that immigrants bring to our shores.

  Ever since the Great Depression, the economic prospect that has most terrified policymakers has been a labor surplus—unemployment. Even now, when unemployment remains at an unacceptably high level, it’s difficult to imagine that within fifteen years we will have a labor scarcity. The magic number needed to maintain a stable population is 2.1 children per woman. In 2010 we were at 1.93. Forty-seven of the most advanced countries are at 1.6 or less.4 As baby boomers retire over the next decade, we will need new workers to make the economy grow, pay the Social Security and Medicare taxes necessary to fulfill our promises to the elderly, and produce the goods that they will demand. We either increase our birth rate, or accept more immigrants, or settle for slower economic growth. Look at Japan or Russia, which are both losing population because of low birth rates and hardly any immigration. They are committing slow-motion national suicide. Would you rather have hardworking and sometimes brilliant foreigners paying into our Social Security system and making retirement more comfortable for elderly Americans, even as they create jobs for working Americans, or a smaller U.S. working population that will be unable to sustain the program at its current level in a few years? We need more young people to carry the load for the increasingly larger number of retirees. Demographics don’t lie.

  On occasion, conflict has accompanied large waves of immigration to America. It happened when the Irish and the Germans came in the nineteenth century and the Italians and Eastern Europeans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it happens now with Mexicans and Muslims. Since passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, which abolished the national-origins quota system, the face of immigration has changed; there are fewer Europeans and more Central Americans, Asians, and Africans. We have absorbed these immigrants into our larger culture with a minimum of negative repercussions. When I heard a recent radio interview with Linda Sarsour, an Arab American woman preparing to run for the New York City Council from a Brooklyn district that is heavily Moroccan, Algerian, and Palestinian, I was moved by her obvious devotion to the sense of possibility that is the birthright of all Americans. Newcomers have always added value to America. Look at New York or Jersey City or San Jose or Houston or Miami or Chicago in the last thirty years; each has been revitalized by immigrant communities that have come to America to build lives they couldn’t lead in their homelands. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur I know, a Pakistani Muslim married to a Hindu woman from India, once remarked to me, “Where else in the world but America could we be happy and accepted?”

  Japan forbade non-Japanese to enter its island nation until the 1850s, and it still has very little immigration, even in the face of a declining birth rate. China has treated its minorities as groups to be controlled, not as individuals with valuable potential. Europe has historically focused on differences among its member states more than on commonalities. France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Britain have little history of genuine assimilation. As these societies age and birth rates drop, their economic future is bleak without immigration. Yet when immigrants do come, they trigger a more negative cultural and emotional reaction from a larger segment of the population than does immigration in the United States. At its extreme, the xenophobia produces riots in Britain and France and the murder of innocent children on an island in Norway by a right-wing fanatic who thinks immigration and assimilation are ruining Europe.

  In contrast, our history shows that each wave of immigrants added definition to what it meant to be an American. America is not static but constantly changing. Having overcome the deep racism of its history and integrated successive waves of immigrants, the United States, more than any other country, should welcome the pluralism that is growing in the age of the Internet and whose successful management could inspire admiration around the world.

  With regard to Mexico, our neighbor to the south, the answer is not building walls to separate us. Walls can be circumvented—witness the flourishing drug trade that still plagues us. For those who want to stop the border crossings, the answer is promoting economic growth in Mexico through trade and establishing a farsighted guest-worker program here. Who would leave their families, live in miserable conditions, and subject themselves to arrest if they weren’t ambitious and didn’t believe in a better future? Immigrants from Mexico and many other countries come to America for a job, often willing to work hard at things many Americans simply don’t want to do. Doctors end up driving taxis, accountants clean houses, and when you call a plumber to fix your leaking pipe, an electrician to rewire your house, a mason to build a stone wall, someone to work in your restaurant kitchen or mow your lawn or care for your child or sit with your elderly parent, inevitably, in many places in America, you will get an immigrant. Until our culture makes blue-collar work once again noble, many Americans won’t want to do it. Increasingly, the only people who will know how to deal with the nuts and bolts of our society will be people who learned their skills in another country.

  The path to U.S. citizenship should be open to anyone, but it should be a definitive choice. Until the late 1960s, people who became U.S. citizens weren’t allowed to vote in their home country’s elections. The naturalization oath still includes a renunciation of allegiance to any other country. Yet today it is possible to carry an American passport and the passport of another country. So you have a foot in two places. With that American passport, if things go to hell in the place you come from, you can always flee to America with no questions asked. America is your fallback. You can have dual allegiance. In the past, American immigrants wanted to become Americans. Their future was here. They had a p
rofound reason to participate in the affairs of their country, volunteer for its army, teach their kids English, learn our history. Now for some U.S. passport holders America has become a place of convenience, not commitment.

  China

  Our future will depend more on economic competition than on military conflict, and China is our number-one challenge. The United States continues to regard China as if it were just like any other country. It isn’t. Its population and its culture make it a formidable economic competitor—but not a military adversary. While armed conflict with its neighbors has played a role in Chinese history, China has not launched a war of aggression far beyond its periphery since the Manchu expeditions in the eighteenth century. It ended its overseas expansion and opted out of maritime imperialism. Instead, it exercised its power economically by granting access to the Middle Kingdom. Today, the Chinese have modernized this technique. Companies and leaders censor what they do and say about China out of fear of government retaliation against their interests there. The more deeply companies become entwined with the Chinese economy, the greater China’s leverage.

  China’s defense budget is growing, true, but ours is still larger than the defense budgets of China, Russia, Germany, England, Brazil, and India combined.5 Given how many times foreign powers have invaded China over the centuries, it is understandable that the Chinese want a defense capability that will allow them to defend their country against all comers, but they’re smart enough not to waste their treasure in military adventures. Just look at Taiwan. China claims that it is a province of China, but it has taken the long view that in time the natural evolution of economic connections and cultural affinity will bring Taiwan back into the Chinese fold. Preparing for a military competition with China is old-think. Economics is the challenge of the twenty-first century. The Chinese have internalized this fact; we seem to have forgotten it. As Bill Overholt, senior research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School has said, “After World War II, we stimulated the economic growth of our allies in Europe, Japan, and Southeast Asia and we won the Cold War through the economic revival and dynamism of Western Europe, Japan and friendly Southeast Asia. The Soviet Union lost through economic failure. Our military was vital to protecting the core nation building strategy, but the core strategy was economic and institution building.”6 Militarizing every disagreement in the world as an act of first resort not only will bankrupt us but also misses the nature of the threat we face and further erodes our example.