An Isolated Interventionist

When I took Literature and Arts B-33: "Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Architecture" last semester, we studied the United Nations headquarters in New York City as an example of the architect Le Corbusier's work. Driving past the U.N. this summer, I noted the characteristic window-walls and boxy shape. I was proud to have learned something useful in a Core class; I now had an erudite factoid for future cocktail-party use.

But what is the U.N., other than great architecture? I had never thought through the intellectual and political implications of the U.N., and the role the United States plays within it, until I attended a conference on international relations this fall. The experience of viewing internationalism from a much more isolationist perspective than my own taught me an important lesson about the Ivory Tower and its dangers.

The Student Conference on United States Affairs (SCUSA), held annually at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, brings together several hundred students from colleges and graduate schools across the U.S. and Canada to discuss U.S. foreign policy and international ethics. Each student is assigned to a roundtable discussion group, led by professors or other foreign policy experts. Topics included global social issues, international security and regional issues, among others. My group of about 15 students focused on U.S. foreign policy-making. As a history concentrator with a focus in international relations, I was excited to meet other students who were interested in similar fields. Our roundtable was geographically as well as ethnically diverse; schools participating included the University of Maryland-College Park, St. Bonaventure University, Berry College, University of California-Davis, MIT and the University of Pittsburgh, to name a few.

We also had two foreign graduate students, a German Fulbright scholar studying international law at New York University and an Italian woman at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Small schools, large schools, Ivy and non-Ivy, rural and urban; the group appeared to be a fairly accurate cross section of America. With some exceptions, we got along quite well, eating meals together and dancing in a tight bunch the night of the delegate dance.

Our group mission was to develop a foreign policy strategy for the United States. Discussions focused around the various levels of international involvement that the U.S. should pursue to achieve maximum benefit for Americans and their objectives worldwide. International relations majors (which most of us were), tend to favor involvement rather than isolation, and we were no exception. We reached an informal consensus early in the conference that the U.S. should participate to some extent in global institutions.

The group came up with several paradigms of U.S. action abroad. Humanitarianism, we decided, meant that the U.S. would send troops on international peacekeeping missions, continue allocating foreign aid and push for human rights. We also discussed and rejected isolationism--which we defined as leaving U.S. interests abroad entirely in the hands of other countries--and "engagement and enlargement," President Clinton's national security strategy.

The Clinton plan, while somewhat less than coherent in practice, called for continued trade, military cooperation and peacekeeping missions with friendly countries. While its focal points appeared to be tied more closely to domestic politics than foreign relations, the plan described a foreign policy of awareness and interaction with the outside world.

We were well on our way to drafting a proposal calling for continued U.S. involvement in the post-Cold War world when someone brought up the United Nations. Suddenly, we went from discussing the practicalities of U.S. troop commitment to arguing over whether the United States should belong to the U.N. at all.

Dumbfounded, I watched my fellow conference participants shout out the failings of the U.N. A girl from Texas A&M said the U.N. was a grossly inefficient bureaucracy which took our money while spending it in a manner contrary to vital U.S. interests. A boy from Florida State agreed.

One cadet from West Point leaned forward in his gray uniform and said he wasn't comfortable with the U.N.'s apparent desire to create a supranational army using U.S. troops. Another student said we should stop paying our U.N. dues and starve the international government into submission.

My fellow Cantabrigian, the boy from MIT, said the U.N. should bow to us because we had clearly vanquished the Soviet Union in the Cold War and emerged the only remaining superpower. He compared the situation to a great battle in which a bear defeats an eagle, saving the world from the eagle's tyranny. The bear, he said, deserves to be honored after its victory.

During this discussion, which increased in pitch until the fervent isolationists were advocating recalling Madeleine Albright, the German Fulbright scholar sat watching us, his eyes getting wider and wider.

He finally raised his hand and chastised us for being stereotypically self-centered Americans, concerned only with our narrow domestic interests and not with the wider world.

As the discussion increased in intensity, several things became clear to me. First of all, I had never realized that isolationism ran so strong in this country. Sure, I had heard about the Freemen in Montana and the black-helicopter-fearing types, but I was certain that no thinking American could see things that way.

The SCUSA conference made me realize just how provincial my view-point was. I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where many of my friends were the children of diplomats and World Bank officials. At Harvard, too, most of the people I met despised isolationism. I had always considered U.S. involvement in world affairs to be a given; only the level of involvement remained to be determined.

But I was wrong. The other student participants were well-educated, and their reasons for distrusting the U.N. and other international organizations were at least as intellectually valid as the prevailing arguments for U.S. engagement abroad.

In addition, I realized that I didn't know much about the U.N. beyond what I read in the papers. I didn't know how much money the Administration owed the U.N. for unpaid dues. Professor Michael Glennon, an international law professor from UC-Davis who was one of our group moderators, mentioned this and other important facts while pointing out that the U.S., under international law, has a contractual obligation to pay its arrears. He noted that the U.S. will eventually lose its moral powers of persuasion if it fails to adhere to international laws.

Glennon also informed us that the U.N. charter provides for a supranational police force which would undertake peacekeeping missions. I had always assumed the isolationist fears of an international army that did not operate under U.S. supervision were paranoid fantasies, but I didn't know that such an army was, in fact, the brainchild and fondest hope of those who founded the U.N.

I had to stop and think about an army which claims to represent international interests. Who would decide what these interests were?

What if those commanding the army were not Americans, which seems fairly likely? Looking around at the West Point cadets, who might one day fight for the security of the United States, I realized the U.N. issue was much more complicated than I had previously thought.

So I returned from West Point bemused. Unable to reach a consensus on the proper role of the U.N. in world affairs, our group had left the issue out of our final policy paper. The German Fulbright scholar, whom I sat next to on the train back to New York City en route to Cambridge, told me the conference had confirmed all his ugly stereotypes about Americans.

Although I'm still conflicted about the U.N. and its ideal relation to U.S. foreign policy, the conference did teach me about my lack of knowledge and perspective. I'll have to learn that the Ivory Tower does not always accurately represent the views of the entire country.