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After Reagan: Confronting the Changed World Economy@@@Beyond Globalism: Remaking American Foreign Economic Policy

By now it has become commonplace to assert that U.S. foreign economic policy makers must operate in an increasingly interdependent global economy in which the United States is no longer the dominant (or "hegemonic") power. In different ways these books respond to the main features of the new international economic reality. The Aho and Levinson volume is the product of deliberations during 1988 of a study group on the "economic choices confronting the next president," convened under the auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations. The other study is coauthored by Raymond Vernon, who has commented astutely on issues of international economic policy for many years, and Debora Spar, a graduate student at Harvard. The Aho and Levinson study is a wideranging assessment of virtually the entire panoply of international economic issues, including macroeconomic imbalances (especially those of the United States), exchange rates and monetary policies, debt, trade, aid, and foreign direct investment (especially by foreigners in the United States). Each chapter contains a cogent statement of the problems, data to illustrate their various dimensions, and— the primary emphasis of the volume—recommendations for dealing with them. The result is what we have come to expect of the Council on Foreign Relations—a clear statement of "mainstream," "responsible," or "pragmatic" foreign policy options. At one level, the recommendations are so lucidly presented as to seem unarguable. Thus, the authors stress the primordial importance of reducing the U.S. budget deficit and offer a clearly reasoned plan for doing so over a fiveyear period. They argue the pros and cons (mainly the former, in their view) of the system of floating exchange rates and reject proposals to tighten international monetary cooperation in favor of the looser notion of "target zones" for the principal currencies. They repeat virtually all elements of the conventional wisdom concerning the international debt crisis, including the necessity of pursuing a solution on a case-by-case, voluntary, and market-oriented basis. They recite the usual case against protectionism in international trade and stress the importance of multilateral trade negotiations. They propose ways of dealing with the "sensitive sectors"—agriculture, steel, textiles, and "high-tech." While the analyses of these topics are skillfully undertaken, the resultant recommendations are not particularly innovative or exciting. For example, more radical approaches to reducing the budget deficit (through substantial tax increases or deep cuts in military expenditures, for example) are nowhere to be found; consideration of an "international debt facility" or other mechanisms for substantially reducing the external indebtedness of developing countries do not merit attention; and there are no bold institutional proposals for reforming the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, or other international institutions. However, precisely because the policy recommendations are essentially centrist and incrementalist, they seem likely to fall on welcome ears in the Bush administration. They appear eminently congruent with the president's predilections, both of tone and substance.