The Race to the White House

By the incredible margin of only eight votes out of nearly 140,000, Mitt Romney, ex-governor of Massachusetts, won the Republican Party primary in the state of Iowa last Tuesday night. Thus, he was off and running in the race to the White House — on the Republicans’ side. On the other side, President Barack Obama awaits the selection of his opponent. In November, there will be general elections for the presidency, much of Congress and many state governments.

None of the main Republican candidates for the White House seems to have understood that in the new international order, there is no more room for the “imperial attitude” of the United States. This has not dawned on even the most moderate candidate, Mitt Romney, let alone Newt Gingrich, who, until Iowa, was considered the Massachusetts ex-governor’s toughest adversary. The conservative credentials of the Republican former Speaker of the House date from the period when he mobilized the unrelenting opposition to Bill Clinton.

In November, Gingrich declared that the United States should consider the possibility of attacking Iran, not only to prevent the development of a nuclear program, but also to promote a change in the regime of the ayatollahs. On the surface, he understands nothing of the limits of U.S. military interventions, which were once more demonstrated in Iraq and Afghanistan. As if that weren’t enough, he declared that he would name as Secretary of State (equivalent to the Minister of Exterior Relations in Brazil) George W. Bush’s former ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, a sort of “rabid dog” of American unilateralism.

Romney’s slender victory in Iowa suggests that he is still going to sweat to ensure his nomination (in total, other candidates have more than triple his number of votes). He will need to prove that he is not a “fake conservative,” as his opponents have called him, but a “true conservative.” That is, he will need to show himself more arrogant in foreign policy, more family-friendly in his values and more radically anti-tax and anti-state in the economic arena. In addition, he must keep the subject of religion from sneaking up on him: Romney is a Mormon and the Republican base, predominantly evangelical, rejects Mormon fundamentalism.

Romney’s foreign policy program doesn’t contain Gingrich’s reckless pronouncements. Among the principles stated therein are the preference for multilateral action and for the use of military force only after all peaceful diplomatic means have been exhausted. The political message of the document, however, goes in the opposite direction. It is printed clearly in the title of the program itself: The New American Century.

The slogan refers to an institution of the same name that formulated the main points of neoconservative thinking between the end of the 1990s and the middle of the first decade of this century. The government of George W. Bush drank deeply from this fountain, mainly in his first term, when he launched the country into two wars, solemnly disregarded international institutions and accords and strained, with those attitudes, the relations between the United States and some of its principle allies. However, no fewer than 15 of Romney’s 22 foreign policy advisers worked in the administration of George W. Bush.

If the main Republican candidate regresses to the fantasy of the New American Century, it is why he is alive. Part of American society refuses to accept the relative decline of U.S. power within the world order. Today, the United States faces not only new poles of foreign power, but also financial limitations that no longer let the the U.S. to “pay any price, bear any burden,” as John F. Kennedy said in the heyday of American power, in enforcing its interests in the world. However, there has been a decline in the appeal of the idea that those interests, based on universal values, ultimately coincide with the best interests of the international community. A president who ignores those limitations is a danger to the U.S. and to the world, especially if backed by a majority of the two houses of Congress.

Republican realists, like Henry Kissinger, know this very well. In the introduction to his book “Diplomacy,” Richard Nixon’s former Secretary of State writes that the United States lives, for the first time in history, within an international order from which it cannot withdraw and which it cannot dominate. Isolationism was the predominant attitude of the United States in the first half of the 20th century, with the notable exception of its participation in World War I. Incidentally, radical isolationism is part of the platform of Ron Paul, the most eccentric of the Republican candidates for the White House. American domination, at least in the non-communist world, was the hallmark of the second half of the 20th century, which culminated in the collapse of real socialism in the Soviet Union. Kissinger foresaw that the state of uncontested American hegemony would be short-lived. For him, Americans have to incorporate the notion of balance of powers into their foreign policy on the presumption that the power differential between the United States and an alliance of other nations will shrink in the long term. Kissinger wrote this in 1994.

Curiously, the one who understands this diagnosis best is not a Republican, but Barack Obama. Since assuming the presidency, the Democrat has done nothing in foreign policy but try to limit the damage done by Bush’s surge of unilateral tyranny and adjust American foreign policy to the new reality of the world. For this reason, the best that can happen is that the first black president of the United States continues to live in the White House for the next four years.