‘It's the third world stupid!’ Why the third world should be the priority of the Clinton administration

Abstract

The inauguration of President Bill Clinton on 20 January 1993, coincided with a turning point in US foreign policy toward the Third World. The decline of the Cold War at the beginning of the 1990s seemingly had called into question an interventionist foreign policy built upon the twin themes of antiCommunism and containment. Most important, the primary perceived adversary of the United States-the former Soviet Union-had followed in the footsteps of other great empires throughout history, fragmenting into a host of smaller, independent, and nonCommunist countries. In short, the Clinton administration has been presented with a tremendous opportunity to transcend the reactive, Cold War mentality that rationalised a variety of US interventionist practices throughout the Third World from the 1940s to the 1980s, and instead fashion proactive policies designed to strengthen US ties with Third World countries concerned with promoting democracy, economic development, and the respect of human rights.' However, as demonstrated by the Bush administration's willingness to undertake a variety of military operations, ranging from the massive movement of over 400,000 troops to Saudi Arabia as part of 'Operation Desert Storm', to the more limited humanitarian military engagement in Somalia known as 'Operation Restore Hope', the decline of the Cold War will not automatically lead to a concomitant decline in US interventionist practices. As perceptively noted by Stephen John Stedman, a 'new interventionism' is potentially emerging within the policymaking establishment that blends the firm support for international organisations and self-determination of peoples traditionally adhered to by Wilsonian liberals, with the realist perceptions of international threats (such as monolithic communism) perceived by Cold War liberal internationalists.2 The net result, according to Stedman, may be the emergence of a new crusading, interventionist doctrine comparable in scale to that of containment during the last 40 years, in which the United States as the sole remaining superpower assumes the responsibility of compelling other governments-by force, if necessary-to adhere to a 'new humanitarian order'.3 A problematical aspect of this new interventionism is that the end of the Cold War has reinforced two trends-one domestic and one international-that increasingly have placed more constraints on the successful application of US power in the Third World. In the domestic realm, a fragmented US political culture is no longer content, as it was during the 1950s and the 1960s, to follow