Sovereignty is a people’s ability to govern its internal affairs and protect its independence against outside interference. Military power has always been the most obvious pillar of sovereignty. Clausewitz’ dictum that the object of war is “to compel your opponent to do your will” means that the victor substitutes his sovereignty for that of the loser. This conflict of wills is not limited to questions of territorial integrity. Nations are driven by a combination of fear and opportunity to mold the outside world in ways favorable to their interests (however defined) as far as their strength will reach.

Military power has also been an indispensable tool for nation-building. There are few states that did not emerge from some caldron of international, civil, or revolutionary war. In the words of Charles Tilly, “War made the state, and the state made war.” This is as true of the great democracies of the West as of am dictatorship. The United States owe their independence to a revolutionary war, their continued union and constitutional system to a civil war, and their vast domain to a series of international wars (or threats of war) combined with the forceful pacification of the native populations in the acquired territories. American history is a confirmation of Ernst Kenan’s observation that “deeds of violence” have “marked the origins of all political formations, even those which have been followed by the most beneficial results.”

Popular support has long been necessary to mobilize the vast resources needed for war. What leads people to tolerate conscription, rationing, and war finance, not to mention death and destruction, is the belief that their society is unique and precious and that its fate is not to be surrendered to the dictates of any outsider. It is this very concept of independent group solidarity that has been, and continues to be, the object of attack from two sources: intellectuals who object to the view of a world torn by perpetual conflict and those special interests who feel restricted by state policy. Often the latter have made use of the former’s Utopian arguments to mask their selfish quests for personal gain at the nation’s expense. This is not as hypocritical as it may appear. Anti-nationalist thought has been primarily liberal in content, stressing the moral superiority of individual over social interests. Indeed, classical liberalism can be seen primarily as a reaction to the rise of the modern nation-state since the 15th century.

In the 17th century, Emeric Cruce opposed Louis XIV’s policy to make France the dominant power in Europe. Cruce presented an alternate view, writing in 1623: “What a pleasure it would be to see men going freely from one place to another without thought of country.” Part of this vision was the creation of an organization with representatives from Europe, Asia, and Africa that would arbitrate disputes and back their verdicts with force. He thought this feasible because “Human society is a single body.” His is one of the first modern calls for what has become a centerpiece in liberal thought: some form of world government that would eliminate the independence of nationstates and enforce global harmony.

In addition to world government, there are two other constant elements in all reform plans: military disarmament and free trade (meaning economic disarmament). Both of these are meant to deprive nations of the ability to act independently, either against other nations or in resistance to the proposed world government. This triplet runs through the works of the great classical liberals from David Hume to Thomas Paine and Immanuel Kant on to Jean-Baptiste Say and Richard Cobden. It was repeated as items three, four, and fourteen in President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, issued in January 1918, a plan Wilson said “rejects the standards of national selfishness that once governed the counsels of nations and demands that they shall give way to a new order of things.” Three-quarters of a century later, they form the core of President Bill Clinton’s vision of a post-Cold War “new order.”

In the name of free trade, Clinton completed the Uruguay Round GATT negotiations. Included was the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which is to serve as the ultimate legitimate authority over international trade disputes. The WTO will replace the old “power-oriented” system of negotiations and national vetoes with a new system of “rules-oriented” tribunals that can declare national practices “illegal” and impose sanctions.

Clinton’s desire for global economic integration and the rule of supranational law is set within a strategy the administration calls “engagement and enlargement.” This seeks to move beyond the security concerns of the Cold War era. The United Nations would play the central role in this process, with the United States making its military increasingly available to the United Nations for “peacekeeping” operations in remote areas. The Clinton administration’s 1994 paper entitled Policy on Reforming Multilateral Peace Operations contained the following assertions:

Territorial disputes, armed ethnic conflicts, civil wars (many of which could spill across international borders) and the collapse of governmental authority in some states are among the current threats to peace. While many of these conflicts may not directly threaten American interests, their cumulative effect is significant. U.N. and other multilateral peace operations will at times offer the best way to prevent, contain or resolve conflicts that could otherwise be more costly and deadly. In such cases, the U.S. benefits from having to bear only a share of the burden. We also benefit by being able to invoke the voice of the community of nations on behalf of causes we support.

The paper does not explain how events that do not pose individual threats to American interests can suddenly accumulate to pose a threat. Instead, it refers to “threats to peace” as a generic, and thus open-ended, concern. With this outlook, the United States has seen its costs go up, not down, as the result of paying for military interventions through the U.N. which could not have been justified on the basis of American national security.

Clinton’s policy is that of global “collective security.” The basic premise of this notion is that there really is a community of nations that will see all threats in the same way and be willing to respond in unison, that a “threat to one will be considered a threat to all.” Advocates of collective security who wish to substitute concepts of “justice” for “national aggrandizement” greatly underestimate the ability to win wide acceptance of what constitutes justice when vital interests clash. The same problem of subjective interpretation applies to branding one side or another as the “aggressor.” The related principle, that borders are never to be changed by force, is tantamount to proclaiming that the present divisions of the world are so perfect they should be frozen in time. This is untenable, as the world has always been a dynamic system, something of which Americans should be well aware given the role westward expansion has played in American history and mythology. The application of universal ideals (which are, in fact, not universally accepted) divorced from practical politics and concrete considerations of security, geography, resources, and aspirations is simply unsuited to the world as it is.

Even when nations express concern over violence or suffering and offer humanitarian aid, they balk at any substantial expenditure of scarce resources in parts of the world where they lack material or security interests of their own. The costs of “altruistic” intervention are always too high because there is nothing tangible to place on the other side of the ledger. Consequently, it should not be surprising that there has been no more of a consensus to use force in Bosnia or to isolate Iran economically in 1995 than there was to enforce comprehensive sanctions on Italy for its invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. If effective action is to be taken, it must be done by those nations that feel their interests are at stake. The United States could halt sea traffic to Iran any time it chose, using the kind of “gunboat diplomacy that was once common. And if the Iranian threat is as great as Washington claims, it should do so, rather than hide behind the lack of U.N. approval to justify inactivity. But-this is the same administration that loudly proclaimed the need to intervene in Haiti and to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia—but refused to act without first getting the U.N.’s approval. One does not have to agree with Clinton’s choices of where to commit American troops to see how paying homage to the U.N. can undermine the courage of a nation’s convictions.

Traditional alliances are much more effective and credible as multilateral groupings because they are formed by nations that have concrete interests in common that give substance to their pledge to act. Yet even strong alliances have failed to be converted into stable systems of collective security once common enemies no longer threaten. The dissolution of the victorious Allied coalitions after both world wars testify to this, with Japan and Italy after World War I and the Soviet Union and China after World War II becoming hostile to their former allies.

With the removal of the overarching Soviet threat, alliances are likely to become more flexible, ad hoc, and opportunistic—and also less predictable and reliable over time. In such an environment, collective security becomes an even less realistic concept. Instead, what is called for are the classical diplomatic skills of centuries past, in keeping with Lord Palmerston’s statement that there are “no permanent allies or permanent enemies, only permanent interests.” Unfortunately, prevailing liberal opinion in the United States (by no means limited to self-identified liberals), with its emphasis on Utopian principles, makes such a return to realism nearly impossible.

Alliances are part of the old system of power politics rejected by transnationalists. In Bosnia, for example, when NATO military capabilities were needed, it was imperative to give the U.N. a veto over their use. The Bosnian experience indicates that the diplomatic cover provided by the U.N. comes at a high price. It confirmed the old adage that “councils of war never fight.” As the circle of participants widens, the cohesion of any coalition weakens as interests vary and the more timid members set limits on what they will agree to do. At critical moments, when decisive leadership is required, the U.N. is most likely to be gripped by paralysis.

Manv proponents of a stronger U.N. understand this inherent weakness of collective security among sovereign states. In 1992, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali issued his Agenda for Peace that called for “preventive deployment” of U.N. troops by a standing army of heavily armed “peace enforcement units.” This army was to be supported by an expanded U.N. military staff, permanent bases, and weapon stockpiles. As Marrack Goulding, the U.N. Under-Secretary General in charge of political affairs and peacekeeping, stated, “The first principle of peacekeeping is that operations should be U.N. operations; formed by the U.N., commanded in the field by a U.N.-appointed officer, under the ultimate authority of the Secretary General, and financed by member states collectively.”

Boutros-Ghali wanted this U.N. army to be financed by assessments levied from the national defense budgets of the largest member-states. He also suggested that the U.N. tax arms sales and international air traffic and low interest payments on nations whose “assessments” were late. Martin Walker of the World Policy Institute argued for placing a tax on international currency transactions. This would yield sufficient revenue to fund a U.N. army independent of control by major U.N. members like the United States.

Taxation is a sovereign prerogative. For the U.N. to claim such a right, regardless of how implemented, would establish it as a superior entity. Walker sympathizes with this notion: “The power to assert one’s own economic and taxation policy has long been the cardinal characteristic of the nation-state. That power is now in question. But so is the continued utility of the nation-state as the guarantor of internal order and prime actor in international affairs.” Note that the jurisdiction of the U.N. is to extend to “internal order” within nations and not just serve as a mediator between nations. This would be a violation of traditional sovereignty, but then, as former U.N. Under-Secretary-General Sir Brian Urquhart has said, “The unraveling of national sovereignty seems to be a feature of the post-Cold War period.”

Though Clinton has said he docs not favor a standing U.N. army, the administration’s paper Reforming Multilateral Peace Operations called for the creation by the U.N. of a Plans Division, an Information and Research Division, an Operations Division, a Logistical Division, a Public Affairs Cell, a Civil Police Cell, and a Professional Peace Operations Training Program. The U.N. should also have a “rapidly deployable headquarters team” and its own “modest airlift capabilities.” The paper also pledged the United States to “offer to help design a database of military forces or capabilities and to notify DPKO [Department of Peace Keeping Operations] for inclusion in the database, of specific U.S. capabilities that could be made available for the full spectrum of peacekeeping or humanitarian operations.”

Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress have done much to derail the Clinton program in the wake of U.N. debacles in Somalia and Bosnia. American troops are not to be committed under U.N. command unless the President first certifies that the arrangement protects our national security and retains our right to take independent action to protect our forces. And U.N. peacekeeping operations are not to be paid for from the Pentagon budget. The President must seek funds in advance for humanitarian and peacekeeping operations, not merely raid other accounts.

Advocates of expanded American involvement in U.N. operations allege that any failure to act means that our country is lapsing into isolationism. Yet the United States has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to act forcefully when its real interests are at stake. The danger comes if the United States is dragged into a series of fruitless conflicts unrelated to the country’s security. This is when public opinion could become disenchanted and turn isolationist, thus undermining the ability of the country to act when its interests are actually in danger.

What liberals really mean when they talk of isolationism is that they do not approve of foreign policies that are based on power politics, traditional alliances, or national security. To them, it is collective security under the sanction of some transnational authority—or nothing. This was evident in the recent congressional debates over cuts in foreign aid and in contributions to the U.N., which showed the liberal desire to transfer money to agencies and regimes that are not tied to American interests (or are even openly hostile to our interests) while objecting to spending money on America’s own defenses.

It is one thing to debate where and when the country should act; it is another to weaken the ability to act so much that it is no longer an option. Since 1990, military force levels have been cut by over a third, readiness has declined, and many vital modernization programs have been delayed or canceled. Planned force levels do not provide the credible capability to fight “two nearly simultaneous regional wars,” which is the declared policy and prudent standard for safeguarding American security in a turbulent world. For example, to liberate Kuwait in 1991, the United States sent eight Army divisions, six Marine brigades, six aircraft carriers, and ten tactical fighter wings to the Persian Gulf. These units represented about half of the nation’s conventional war-fighting capability at the time. This commitment involved roughly the same number of troops as the Korean War and the average deployment over the course of the Vietnam War. It has thus become the standard for a “regional conflict.” By the end of 1995, the United States will only have ten Army divisions, five Marine brigades, 11 aircraft carriers, and 13 tactical wings on active duty. This is barely enough to fight one regional conflict, let alone retain a reserve to deter others from exploiting the situation by mounting a challenge elsewhere.

The United States Armed Forces are being reduced to their lowest level since 1949. The cuts reflect the various liberal proposals made during the 1980’s for reallocating resources away from President Reagan’s rearmament program. Though the objective of such plans was primarily to find more money for social programs, sometimes the authors would let slip their disdain for the military as an arm of an independent American foreign policy. For example, a plan of massive defense cuts drawn up under the auspices of the World Policy Institute in 1988 proclaimed, “Our new strategy emphasizes defensive missions and common security . . . and precluding U.S. intervention in regional conflicts except for humanitarian purposes and U.N.-sanctioned peacekeeping efforts.” Among the authors was Clinton’s longtime friend and future Labor Secretary, Robert Reich.

Clinton scrapped the Bush administration’s plan to deploy an antimissile defense system to protect the United States. Instead, Clinton has favored protecting the integrity of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. He has even accepted some Russian demands that the ABM Treaty be expanded to restrict the development of theater defense systems that could protect American forces overseas. A bilateral agreement is ill-suited to a world with multilateral threats. Why should the United States make an agreement with Russia to “dumb down” its antimissile technology? This would not only limit America’s defenses against Russia, but also against Iran, North Korea, China, and every other threat. One answer is that the administration has an ideological commitment to arms control that supersedes any practical considerations. Another is that by keeping the United States vulnerable to attack, a significant constraint is placed on America’s freedom of action. This is clearly in the minds of those Third World militants who are busily expending their people’s meager resources on ballistic missiles and warheads of “mass destruction.” But there arc also some in the United States who still think that threats of “mutual destruction” support global stability, another principle they are willing to place above their nation’s interests—even the interest in survival.

United Nations Ambassador Madeleine Albright likes to charge that the Republican Congress is taking the United States back to the isolationism of the 1920’s. This is a reference to the country’s refusal to join the League of Nations. Yet the United States assumed a leadership role in talks to limit war and armaments throughout the interwar period. The most important arms control measure of this period was the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, later expanded in the London Treaties of 1930 and 1935. These agreements set severe limits on the navies of the world powers; scores of warships were scrapped. But the strategic result of this system was that militant but economically weak powers like Japan and Italy were able to build within striking distance of richer democracies, like the United States, who were prohibited from converting their superior resources into superior strength. The league proved useless, but the arms control treaties proved disastrous. It is thus the Clinton administration that is repeating the mistakes of the 1920’s.

House Republicans are pushing for the elimination of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency as an independent organization. The ACDA has been pushing expansion of the ABM Treaty. The agency and its defenders in Congress and the media have argued that there is a need for an independent voice for arms control as an end in itself. As an editorial circulated by the ACDA put it, the agency’s autonomy is needed “to protect them from the myopic Cold Warriors at the State Department.”

These debates have revealed the real threat to sovereignty. It is not “world government,” because such an institution is inherently unworkable. Every attempt made in its behalf has quickly collapsed in acrimony and incompetence. In most parts of the world, popular nationalism is on the rise. The real threat to the Ignited States is the continued belief of key segments of the American political elite in the liberal-universalist philosophy that makes world government seem attractive.

In the futile pursuit of this ideal, the American government has been surrendering the levers of power upon which its capacity for independent action and effective sovereignty depends. Indeed, the United States seems determined to surrender even the principle that it has a right to independent action. The real beneficiaries of this surrender will not be the “globalist” bureaucrats in New York or Geneva, though they will revel in the thought. And various special interests will line their pockets during the interregnum. But such unrooted nonentities can only thrive if national governments abdicate their vastly superior powers to make law, mobilize resources, and deploy coercive force in the name of a coherent society. That is why any power vacuum created by the retreat of American power will ultimately be filled by other nation-states that have maintained their military and economic strength and have, more importantly, kept the will to use their strength in support of their own strategic interests.

It is then that America’s considerable investment in the creation of multilateral organizations will prove to be the greatest blunder ever committed by a modern power. As the “last superpower,” America’s primary aim must be to prevent the rise of any rival power or coalition of powers that can match its strength. The very kind of anarchy deplored by globalists is thus to America’s advantage. The United States must avoid being submerged into larger bodies where it can be overwhelmed, and it must ensure that multilateral organizations, be they “regional” or “worldwide” in scope, do not become vehicles for the creation of hostile coalitions that could not only damage America’s prosperity but also its security.

The belief that America can “lead” movements that encompass hemispheres or regions as large as Asia is pure hubris. Advocates of this policy forget that the envy other societies feel for American material success is a dark emotion, made more explosive when combined with a revulsion for the degenerate side of American culture. The United States needs to be actively engaged in world affairs, but in the tradition of balance-of-power diplomacy—keeping potential rivals apart, not trying to bring them together. Like the spokes of a wheel, the United States should place itself at the center of a series of advantageous bilateral relationships that would obstruct the formation of competing coalitions. But to consider devising a new Grand Strategy for the nation first requires that the principle of sovereignty be returned to the center of American foreign policy.