------------------------------------------------------------------------
H-DIPLO ROUNDTABLE REVIEW

Tony Smith.  _Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the
Making of American Foreign Policy_.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2000. x + 224 pp. bibliographical references and index. $35.00 (cloth),
ISBN 0674002946.

Review Editor: Gerald Horne

Reviewers: Robert Dean, Andrew DeRoche, Mark Lawrence, Elizabeth McKillen
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Review by Robert Dean
<rdean1@azstarnet.com>

Professor Smith's book seems to fit into a long tradition of elite laments
about the dangers posed by immigrant populations that assert their ethnic
identities and refuse to defer to their betters.  Although he carefully
hedges and qualifies his assertions so as to appear to be the voice of
tolerant reason rather than reaction, the message appears to be that U.S.
foreign policy should result from the deliberations of experts, men who
identify themselves as "Americans" without the taint of ethnic loyalties.
This argument echoes elite concerns of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries over the threat posed to the state by "hyphenated
Americans."

Smith worries that our "national interests" are endangered by the
political organization and mobilization of particular ethnic groups, who
then use a resulting disproportionate clout to force U.S. foreign policy
in directions that are "incoherent" or contrary to a presumed, but
undefined, national interest.  Theorists of "multiculturalism" pose a
threat to the integrity of the nation too. They encourage the assertion of
special claims on the state, based upon ethnic identity and the
rectification of past injustices.

A fundamental problem, as Smith acknowledges, is an inevitable tension,
often amounting to contradiction, between the particular and the general
interest.  But Smith doesn't seem recognize how deeply and inescapably
this contradiction is imbedded in human society at all levels of
organization.  Things that increase the well being, security, or power of
individuals often harm the larger group; that which increases the
well-being, power, etc. of certain classes often disadvantages larger
groups in society. The exaltation of individual gain and the power of
privileged classes at the expense of collective well-being has long been a
dominant theme in U.S. history (as in other national histories).  The
interests of the Wall Street lawyers, investment bankers, and Ivy League
academics who have largely composed the foreign policy establishment of
the last fifty or sixty years are not necessarily identical with that of
large segments of the American people, whether or not they flatter
themselves with such a pretense.  Thus Smith's lament seems a bit like
railing at the tides -- given the political and social traditions of our
heterogeneous, competitive, and imperfectly democratic nation, chastising
the formerly exploited, disenfranchised, or dispossessed for mustering
what power they can to shape the world to their particular ends seems
either naive or disingenuous.

At the root of the problem is Smith's failure to define what exactly "the
national interest" might be, or how in practice the national interest
might be determined and acted upon, if not through the messy political
tug-of-war between competing domestic interest groups that he deplores.
For a democratic capitalist state, the notion that a coherent, determinate
national interest exists somehow outside of the clash of competing
interests provides a useful fiction.  It lends an aura of necessary
legitimacy to the actions of bureaucrats and elected officials. In U.S.
practice, of course, it very often provides cover for policies which favor
corporate businesses at the expense of American and foreign workers.  If
we examine the arguments of the officers of the state, it is no surprise
to discover that their description of the national interest often closely
matches the interests of the wealthy, powerful, and well organized. The
picture becomes more complicated as particular non-Anglo ethnic groups
become increasingly wealthy, powerful, and well organized, and make
demands too.

Smith uses the notion of the national interest without ever engaging it
head-on, because doing so justifies his fundamentally anti-democratic
ideal of a small foreign policy elite governing by virtue of disinterested
expertise. Indeed, he fears the fall of the republic through an excess of
democracy, "if social differences legitimized by democracy breed division
to such a point that national cohesion is undone." (p.4)  It is true that
U.S. foreign policy is often "incoherent" in one way or another, and that
ethnic lobbies sometimes contribute to the disarray.  But I would agree
with Eric Alterman's argument in _Who Speaks for America?: Why Democracy
Matters in Foreign Policy_, that the problem is much deeper than assertive
ethnic pressure groups or the excesses of multiculturalism.

Alterman discusses two central tendencies that contribute to a
"pseudodemocratic" and "chaotic" U.S. foreign policy.  One is the chilling
effect following the growth of a huge national security bureaucracy and
its institutionalized culture of secrecy, thereby deliberately excluding
the citizenry from genuine participation in the process of policy
formation. Contributing to the disenfranchisement of most citizens is the
systematic corruption of the electoral process through legal forms of
influence peddling and corporate bribery.  The overwhelming influence of
multi-national corporate business forecloses the possibility of a foreign
policy driven by a democratically determined "national interest." Alterman
tackles big questions that Smith ignores--the relative influences of a
variety of "special interests" who manipulate U.S. foreign policy to their
own ends, and the articulation of those interests within a system that
serves powerful elites while excluding genuinely inclusive democratic
debate.  He locates ethnic groups as just one type out of many special
interests which exploit the system to particular ends, but unlike Smith,
he recognizes that the most influential ethnic group in the U.S. today is
not the Jewish AIPAC lobby, or right-wing Cuban-Americans.  None "can
compare with the power of Anglo-Americans" who continue to dominate the
American foreign policy establishment. (Alterman, p.147) Alterman succeeds
where Smith fails in providing a plausible sense of proportion about the
significance of organized ethnic blocs to the workings of U.S. foreign
policy.

I agree with Smith's implication that the actions of AIPAC in support of
an Israel bristling with U.S. supplied arms to repress demands for a
Palestinian state are wrong-headed and counterproductive.  I also agree
that the pressure applied by right-wing Cuban Americans to maintain an
embargo and the effort to destabilize the Cuban government is deplorable.
But I think Smith overstates the power and autonomy of ethnic lobbies in
shaping U. S. foreign policy, and he entirely omits mention of the
establishment's complicity in the creation and legitimization of the worst
of them. AIPAC and the Cuban-Americans (to take the most influential
cases) do have a disproportionate clout in Washington.  However, the
preconditions for their baneful influence arose as U.S. imperial managers
cobbled together a program of global containment during the 1950s and
1960s.  The CIA employment of Cuban emigre counterrevolutionary
adventurers as proxies for the U.S. Marines in the botched "covert" Bay of
Pigs invasion, the U.S. creation of a phony "provisional government" to
lend the illusion of legitimacy to the scheme, and the failure of the
invasion and assassination plots against Fidel Castro spurred the
subsequent growth of the Cuban-American lobby under the cover of an
irrational, disproportionate, and self-righteous anti-communism directed
at the upstart Caribbean nation that dared to resist U.S. domination. U.S.
leaders created a kind of domestic political Frankenstein by using the
Miami Cubans as tools of American imperial power, and by failing to reward
them through American hegemony over Cuba.  Blame for this cannot be laid
at the feet of "multiculturalism."

Likewise, today we see news images of American-made helicopter gunships
firing on rock-throwing Palestinians in the Israeli occupied territories
not because of the power of AIPAC, but because the U.S. government chose
to use Israel as an imperial proxy in the Middle East.  While AIPAC and
the Jewish vote clearly constrain the flexibility of U.S. policy toward
Israel, the origins and trajectory of that policy were largely a product
of concern over access to huge oil reserves and other strategic
considerations, resulting in a consequent desire to contain Soviet
influence in the region and to combat Arab nationalism and Islamic
fundamentalism." The policies that flood U.S. military hardware and money
into Israel may be encouraged by the influence of American Jewish
organizations including AIPAC, but without the decision of successive
administrations to use Israel as a proxy enforcer of U.S. aims in the
Middle East the weapons and dollars would not be forthcoming.

Smith's narrow focus on the ill effects of multiculturalism and ethnic
influence on foreign policy blinds him to larger and much more powerful
forces that undermine national sovereignty itself.  He quotes Samuel
Huntington: "For an understanding of American foreign policy it is
necessary to study not the interests of the American state in a world of
competing states but rather the play of economic and ethnic interests in
American domestic politics. . . . Foreign policy in the sense of actions
consciously designed to promote the interests of the United States as a
collective entity in relation to similar collective entities, is slowly
but steadily disappearing." (p. 8)  In this formulation, it should be
clear that economic interests promoting "globalization" vastly outweigh
the power of ethnic lobbies.  Furthermore, given the structure of the
transnational corporations driving the free trade crusade, it is not
always clear just how genuinely "American" are the economic interests
Huntington mentions.  The very notion of national economic interests
becomes problematic.  In recent years the expert leaders that Smith
suggests we entrust with U.S. foreign policy have been eagerly striving to
eliminate all barriers to the international flow of capital, with the
effect of progressively dissolving many of the institutional structures
that traditionally underpin our federal system.  This scramble to
seamlessly integrate the global economy under the hegemony of
unaccountable transnational corporations also requires the effective
disenfranchisement of American citizens through "fast track" arrogation of
power by the executive.  Smith lauds this trend "to increase the power of
centralized leadership in Washington relative to social forces." (p.83)

On the other hand, a kind of business sovereignty might be blamed for the
inability of our foreign policy establishment to deal with extremely
dangerous long-term threats like global warming. Ethnic lobbyists or
theorists of multiculturalism are not responsible for this paralysis. The
recent failure of the negotiations over the Kyoto protocols illustrates
the power of the business lobby in the face of almost complete unanimity
in the scientific community that profoundly disruptive global ecological
damage will inevitably result if the production of greenhouse gasses is
not drastically curbed.  Given that the U.S. alone generates one quarter
of these atmospheric pollutants, American leadership is urgently needed,
but not forthcoming.  It seems to me that global warming presents the
gravest of threats to the long-term "national interest" in that it will
likely cause destructive climate change, massive disruptions of
agricultural productivity, the spread of epidemic disease, huge refugee
migrations, mass extinction of flora and fauna, and many other imperfectly
foreseeable disasters.  But it clearly presents contradictions between the
particular and the general interest that need to be addressed through an
open democratic debate to determine the "national interest" concerning
global warming, a debate that is not now occurring.  Further isolating
Washington policymakers from "social forces" seems unlikely to produce
decisive action on this problem.

Smith's meditations on the dangers posed by immigration are equally
troubling. His "reasoned, moderate multiculturalist position" seems to
call for far more stringent legal restrictions on immigration, in order to
protect the U.S. from the cultural and political fragmentation threatened
by unassimilated non-white populations.  (pp.148-153) Despite the demand
for cheap immigrant labor by "special sectors" of the business community,
uneducated immigrants represent a "socially regressive" form of labor,
Smith argues. U.S. affirmative action laws make non-white immigration
particularly unwise: "with the tide of Mexican and Central American
immigration riding on the current legislation, literally millions of new
immigrants who have not been the victims of this country’s past
discriminatory policies may find themselves privileged over white
Americans in consideration for jobs." (p. 149)  But Smith also has the
"genuine well-being of Mexicans" at heart in his calls for increasingly
restrictive immigration laws. Mexican immigrants face an inhospitable
"American wage and educational system." (p.149-150)  The result, he
argues, is social pathology: "family structures weaken; the second (or
third) generations may join the American underclass." (p. 149)  Thus we
see a happy congruence between the "national interest in controlling our
own borders much more tightly than we do at present," and the future
well-being of would-be Mexican immigrants refused entry. (p. 153)

I find this unconvincing. I live in Tucson, Arizona, where the desperation
propelling immigrants across the border is perhaps more evident than to
observers in New England.  Between October 1999 and October 2000, 250
illegal entrants died crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. (AZ Daily Star,
Oct. 6, 2000)  Seventy-four died in the Arizona deserts, most of
dehydration, a few from exposure during the winter.  The Tucson sector
Border Patrol counted 1,332 "rescues" during fiscal year 2000, situations
where agents found a migrant "in medical distress." In several cases, the
victims were young mothers who denied themselves water for the sake of
their small children, then died of thirst and exhaustion.  Whatever the
disadvantages facing Mexican immigrants in the U.S., surely only the
direst poverty, misery, and hopelessness could compel large numbers of
people to leave home and face the perils of crossing the Sonoran desert on
foot while trying to avoid capture by border agents, not to mention the
many other hazards they encounter. And as a resident of the border region,
I challenge Smith to delineate the practical steps that would effectively
"control our borders more tightly." Short of completely militarizing the
region with a massive 2,000 mile string of fortifications patrolled by
soldiers, what would stop the flow of desperate immigrants? Then as Canada
became the favored alternative route, would we then fortify our northern
borders?  How could a "fortress America" of that sort be compatible with
the free flow of capital and goods envisioned by the free trade crusaders
and stipulated by NAFTA?  Current trends toward militarization and
increased border patrol "enforcement" have merely shifted the migration
away from the populated border cities, and forced some of it into the more
lethal deserts without reducing the overall number of attempted crossings.
The only solution to the immigration problem is a reduction in the vast
North-South economic inequalities that spur the migration.  To take
substantial steps to reduce those inequalities requires a broadly
inclusive vision of our "national interests" that has been missing from
the debates over immigration, missing from the actions of our government,
and, I might add, missing from Professor Smith's contributions to the
discourse.


    Copyright (c) 2000 by H-Net, all rights reserved.  This work
     may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
     is given to the author and the list.  For other permission,
     please contact H-Net@h-net.msu.edu or H-Diplo@h-net.msu.edu.

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS