Unpopular U.S. foreign policy to prevail, Gerson lecturer says

The United States will maintain its role of unilaterally intervening abroad for at least the next two decades, despite international criticism and the unpopularity at home of its foreign policy, according to Johns Hopkins Professor Michael Mandelbaum.

The Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins, Mandelbaum gave the annual Gerson Foreign Policy Lecture April 4 in the North Reading Room of Wilbur Cross.

Mandelbaum, who is often is a guest on TV news shows and writes a foreign affairs column for Newsday, said that “government” rather than “empire” most accurately describes the U.S. global role of keeping order in the world and preventing nuclear proliferation.  

“The mere presence of the U.S. military in Europe and Eastern Asia has a reassuring effect,” he said, by relieving countries of the anxiety of threats from their neighbors.

The U.S. role as the world’s government, which has developed since the end of the Cold War, is unprecedented, Mandelbaum said. He characterized it as positive, despite the criticism.

“A certain level of complaint about U.S. policies is inevitable,” he said.

Other countries criticize the dominant U.S. role, but they tacitly legitimize it by their acceptance of the services that the U.S. provides, he maintained.

These include the enforcement of order, acting as a lender and a consumer of last resort, and providing a “public utility” function of ensuring a global supply of oil by protecting the Persian Gulf, he said.

Europeans in particular are unhappy with the ideology of the current U.S. administration, he said, but they will not stop the U.S. in its global role because that would “eliminate their free ride.”

Where American foreign policy does the most harm is in the area of energy, Mandelbaum said. The high per capita consumption of energy in the U.S. increases the demand for oil and puts this country at the mercy of unstable, aggressive countries that have oil, he noted: “American energy consumption funds terrorism and props up bad governments.”

Mandelbaum said that both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations have furthered the global government role of the U.S. – Clinton through humanitarian intervention in Haiti, Bosnia, and Somalia, and Bush by defining the doctrine of preventive war and carrying it out in Iraq.

While the two presidents are often thought to be opposites on foreign policy, Mandelbaum called them “akin to fraternal twins – outwardly different, but sharing the same DNA.”