In the new issue of World Affair’s Journal Scott McConnell, co-founder and editor-at-large of The American Conservative, pens an intriguing and provocative essay investigating the effects our increasingly multicultural society will have on the future of U.S. Foreign policy. In particular, he cites the growing influence of the Mexican-, Asian-, and Arab-American communities, as well as the unforseen and lasting effects of the 1965 Immigration Act in reshaping our “nation’s identity.” A new identity is emerging that is taking us away from the messianic and interventionist view our nation had adopted for the past 70 years:
… the backers of the 1965 act did not imagine huge demographic changes: there would be, they claimed, some modest increase in the number of Greek and Italian immigrants but not much else. The sheer inaccuracy of this prediction was already apparent by the early 1970s. The 1965 Act allowed entry of immigrants from any country, so long as they possessed certain job skills or family members living here or had been granted refugee status themselves.
The family reunification provision soon became the vital engine of immigrant selection. By the 1980s, it had greatly increased numbers of Asians and of Hispanics—the latter mostly from Mexico. The European population of the country was now in relative decline—from 87 percent in 1970 to 66 percent in 2008. If immigration continues at present rates (and barring a long-term economic collapse, it is likely to), by 2040, Hispanics will make up a quarter of the American population. If that does not guarantee a somewhat different foreign policy, there is also the prospect of a substantial expansion of America’s once miniscule Muslim and Arab populations. [Link]
The author summarizes that at the beginning of the 20th century America was “hyphenated nation” and that our multi-polar society had the effect of tempering our foreign policy ambitions, especially when contemplating entry into a conflict. Even at the beginning, our founding fathers, most notably Washington, believed that America had a special destiny and that we would eventually populate the entire continent and run our experiment of freedom and democracy free from the baggage of past conflicts in the old world. That isolationist view was later fortified by the fact that immigrants coming to the U.S. from different European communities, with competing viewpoints, served to some degree as a system of checks and balances in the 19th century. Pearl Harbor had the effect of sweeping away differences between the views of different European-American groups and helped forge what the author refers to as a “national identity” (“national white identity” might be more appropriate).
…America’s intra-European divisions began to melt away quickly after Pearl Harbor, as military service became the defining generational event for American men born between 1914 and 1924. The mixed army squad of WASP, Italian, German, Jew, and Irish became a standard plot device for the popular World War II novel and film. The Cold War generated a further compatibility between ethnicity and foreign policy. East European immigrants and refugees emerged to speak for the silenced populations of a newly Stalinized Eastern Europe. Suddenly, all the major European-American groups were in sync. Italian-Americans mobilized for mass letter-writing campaigns to their parents and grandparents warning of the dangers of voting Communist. Greek-Americans naturally supported the Marshall Plan. [Link]
So here is the larger point. Our present military is increasingly comprised of Evangelical Christians who come from red states or predominantly rural areas expected to lose political power as the demographics of our nation inexorably shift. Our foreign policy by contrast, dictated in large part by voting citizens, will be based on the conflicting priorities of a more heterogenous group.
Those sections of the country—the South, lower Midwest, and the regions touching the Appalachian mountains—that have received the fewest immigrants from the waves of immigration of the past 130 years not only count as the most Republican; they are the regions least likely to send white antiwar politicians to Congress. They provide a disproportionate share of the nation’s soldiers. (If one were to subtract the very poor and very white state of Maine, one would need to go through a list of twenty states ranked in order of per capita Army recruitment to reach a state that John Kerry carried in 2004.) One political conclusion is obvious: current rates of immigration will not only diminish the “white” proportion of the American population; they will also diminish the political weight of those regions with the most hawkish and pro-military political cultures. [Link]
This conflict between those who formulate policy (voters and politicians) and those who often implement it (soldiers) should naturally lead to a blunting of the aggressive responses that the U.S. exhibited in the latter half of the 20th century. Heinlein might have something to say about this.
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, America has entered a new era of ethnicity and foreign policy, whose contours are only just now emerging. During the 1990s, when multiculturalism was in vogue, leaders of old and new minority groups steered American foreign policy toward the cause of their ancestral homelands. African-American and Hispanic leaders touted the success of American Jews in lobbying for Israel as an example to be emulated. At one major Latino conference, participants nominated themselves the vanguard of a “bridge community” between the United States and Latin America.
Ethnic lobbies, the old as much as the new, quickly filled the empty space left behind by the Cold War. Traditional realists like former defense secretary James Schlesinger and Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington bemoaned the diminished sense of national cohesion and purpose. Ethnic lobbies, they feared, would inhibit the United States from exercising global leadership. Indeed, if one were to examine some of the major policy milestones of the Clinton era—active participation in the Northern Ireland peace process, the military occupation of Haiti, expanded trade embargoes on Cuba and Iran, the revelation of the Swiss banking scandals—it could be argued that ethnic lobbies were, as much as any coherent grand strategy, the era’s prime movers.
After a brief spasm of patriotic and military display following the attacks of 9/11, we have picked up where we left off the day before. Which is to say that the preliminary indications point toward a future that will bear some semblance to the politics of the 1990s and the World War I era, when ethnic constituencies operated as a brake on executive power and military intervention. There is no evidence that the rallying cries put forth by America’s neoconservatives and liberal hawks—democratization of tyrannies, the global war on terror, the fight against radical Islam—have gained significant traction among first- and second-generation immigrant communities. Certainly they do not resonate with anything like the intensity that anti-Communism did after World War II. On the basis of what is visible thus far, today’s and tomorrow’s Mexican-, Asian-, and Arab-Americans will more resemble the Swedes, Germans, and Irish of a century ago than the Poles, Balts, and Cubans of the Cold War era. [Link]
On this last point I somewhat agree. It seems very reasonable that barring events like 9/11 that momentarily unite ethnic groups with differing perspectives of the world, our foreign policy will most likely change in one direction. The beliefs and geopolitical views vocalized by South Asian Americans will, I believe, have a disproportionately large effect on our foreign policy. Not only are we very steeped in identity politics, particularly the first generation, but we also have a lot of money that can be used to influence policy-makers through campaign donations. Much like the author I am somewhat ambivalent about this result. For example, do I really want to see American policy toward Pakistan disproportionately influenced by the subjectivity of Indian Americans? A “national identity” implies an objectivity that will no longer exist (even if misguided), and that is simultaneously both a wonderful and disconcerting prospect.
