Defending the national interest

For at least a decade students of foreign policy have had to deal with a discomforting problem: most used a conceptual approach that treated the state as a unified rational actor, yet many felt uncomfortable with its assumptions. While the conventional model yielded many interesting findings, its analytic categories did not appear to represent actual institutions faithfully. The notion of the state seemed merely a shorthand for a complex set of bureaucratic institutions and roles. No modern country is run by a prince. Officials in Washington, who spend a good part of their time at interdepartmental meetings, play bureaucratic politics even if they do not know the proper label, just as Molière’s Monsieur Jourdan spoke prose. It has become commonplace to think of the American government as a large blundering bureaucratic mass incapable of sustained action and rational behavior. The greatest problems of public policy are described not in terms of goals but in terms of management skills. Decision making is seen as a morass of conflicting interests extending from the society through the ostensibly hierarchically ordered central bureaucracy of the state. In addition, the state-centric model used in international relations has

seemed at odds with the most prevalent approaches to domestic politics. At least in the United States, a pluralist image has dominated the analysis of politics. The behavior of the state is seen as a product of societal pressures. A liberal perspective may grant that the state is one interest among many (indeed, the bureaucratic politics model extends interest-group politics into the bureaucracy), but it rejects the notion of a national interest that is not a product of the aggregation of particularistic societal goals. Interestgroup analysis has not been applied to high politics because it could be assumed that all groups in the society would support the preservation of territorial and political integrity; but in the area of international economic relations there is, a priori, no such clear societal consensus. Tariff levels, exchange rates, and foreign investment all benefit some groups and harm others. Marxist theories have offered a clear alternative to the realist model. This

approach has an integrated view of domestic and international politics. In both spheres state behavior is seen as a product of societal needs. For

instrumental Marxists, government officials are the handmaiden of particular societal groups. There is a more sophisticated version of the Marxist position, structural

Marxism, which views the state as an autonomous institution whose task is to preserve the coherence of capitalist society as a whole. This may mean acting against the preferences voiced by particular capitalist groups. For both liberals and Marxists, however, the state is, in the final analysis, an epiphenomenon: its behavior reflects disaggregated societal needs, either directly for interest group and instrumental Marxist analyses or more circumspectly for structural Marxist ones. The concept of the national interest has no meaning except as a summation of particularistic preferences. This study has tried to demonstrate that neither a liberal nor a Marxist

conception is adequate. Its micro-theoretic task has been to elaborate a statist approach by inductively investigating the national interest and policymaking processes in the United States. This investigation has shown that the state has purposes of its own. The national interest does have empirical reality if it is defined as a consistent set of objectives sought by central decision makers. The cases analyzed in this book suggest that there has been a clear rank ordering of goals for American policy related to foreign raw material investments. In order of increasing importance the ranking has been: (1) maximize the competitive structure of the market and thereby reduce prices; (2) increase security of supply; (3) secure general foreign policy objectives. This is not to say that the policies actually implemented by the United

States have been coherent. Looking at what the American government actually did, as opposed to what central decision makers preferred, presents a complicated picture. The fragmentation of power in the political system has allowed powerful private groups to block many state initiatives. This has been most evident when achieving state aims required positive action from private firms. This situation existed in all of the cases involving the promotion of foreign investment. To get oil investment in Iraq in the 1920s and Iran in the 1950s, central decision makers had to compromise their desire for greater competition by sanctioning the Red Line Agreement and downgrading the oil antitrust suit from a criminal to a civil action. While government officials were successful in getting Firestone into Liberia during the 1920s, other US rubber firms were not responsive to the government’s call for new investments in non-British areas. Private actors were also able to block public initiatives when decisions could not be held within the executive branch. During the 1940s, efforts to buy Aramco, construct an oil pipeline, and sign an agreement with the United Kingdom were frustrated because they needed Congressional approval. In contrast, cases requiring positive action by the state rather than the

private sector present a different picture of power relationships. This category includes almost all issues concerning the protection of foreign investment. Companies usually wanted more support than central decision makers were willing to give. Even the largest and most powerful private corporations

were not able to turn instruments of state power to private purposes when this would violate the national interest, the aims sought by central decision makers. Such instruments, particularly the use of force, were controlled by public institutions that have been well insulated from private pressures. The White House and the State Department were concerned with broader foreign policy goals. The cases are not equally useful in contributing to the macro-theoretic aim

of this study-distinguishing among statist, Marxist, and liberal interpretations of foreign policy. Some are more or less compatible with all three theories. These include all of the examples of investments actively promoted by the state-rubber in Liberia, oil in the Middle East and the Dutch East Indies during the 1920s, and oil in Iran in the 1950s. In these instances public and private preferences were fairly closely aligned and were associated with general societal goals. Although the assertive role played by the state here cannot be as readily understood from a pluralist or instrumental Marxist position, nevertheless the evidence these cases provide for preferring one competing interpretation over another is not very decisive. Cases that show a clear divergence between corporate and state pre-

ferences are more analytically useful; they support statist and structural Marxist positions over interest group and instrumental Marxist ones. Such divergences arose most frequently from disputes involving the takeover of US firms. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson rejected private appeals that troops be used to protect American interests in Mexico. Before World War II American central decision makers turned a deaf ear to oil company entreaties for more vigorous official backing in Peru and Mexico. In 1966 Assistant Secretary of State Lincoln Gordon relaxed economic sanctions against Peru while Exxon officials continued to prefer strong pressure. At the Teheran negotiations in January 1971, US policy makers undermined oil company bargaining strategy by endorsing separate negotiations for the Persian Gulf, the procedure favored by Saudi Arabia and Iran. Examples such as these weigh heavily against any interpretation that views state behavior as a function of direct private pressure. The strongest conclusion that emerges from the evidence presented in the case studies is that instrumental Marxist and liberal arguments are inadequate. The two approaches whose relative merits are most difficult to assess are

structural Marxism and statism. Both see the state as an autonomous actor concerned with long-term objectives. The difference lies in the type of aims that are sought. For a statist paradigm, the state has its own needs and goals, which cannot be reduced to specific societal interests. For a structural Marxist paradigm, state behavior is ultimately related to preserving a set of exploitative economic relationships that benefit a particular class. It is not easy to find empirical evidence that can separate the two. Here the argument that a statist paradigm is more powerful rests upon two examples. The first is the effort of the American government to buy Aramco during the Second World War. A violation of the basic norm of capitalism-private property-in a

situation in which there was neither immediate pressure from the working class nor a clearly demonstrable long-term need cannot fit easily with a structural Marxist interpretation. Nevertheless, the state failed, and this case could be explained away, albeit with some sacrifice of elegance, as an aberration based upon individual peculiarities. The second set of empirical cases that support a statist perspective are drawn from instances where the United States was prepared to use either covert or overt force. After 1945 all of these were clearly associated with the goal of preventing communist regimes from assuming or holding power. This aim can be comprehended from a structural Marxist perspective: communism does not enhance capitalism’s longterm prospects. It can also be understood from a statist perspective: the United States wanted to remake the world in its own Lockean liberal image. However, the nonlogical manner in which American leaders pursued their anticommunism is not compatible with a structural Marxist position. The absence of means-ends calculations, coupled with misperception, led to policies that undermined the coherence of American domestic society, particularly in Vietnam. This is the very opposite result from the one predicted by a structural Marxist argument, but it is compatible with a statist view that sees the state as capable of defining its own autonomous goals.