Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

………

  Prof. Immanuel Wallerstein, Ph.D.

  THE GREATEST THREAT to the United States today – its liberty, its security, its prosperity, its future – is the United States. For at least thirty years, the United States had already been wandering uncertainly and hesitatingly down a slippery incline, when George W. Bush decided to rush full speed ahead. As a result, the U.S. is in immediate danger of falling badly, perhaps fracturing itself. After the dramatic and terrible September 11 attack on the United States, Bush listened to his covey of hawks, and declared a “war on terrorism” – one in which he told the whole world that it was either “with us or against us” and one, he said, that the United States would “surely win.” This bravura was the public face of just about the worst strategy the U.S. government could have adopted, not only weakening the United States and the world considerably in the subsequent years but also strengthening all those forces it was ostensibly designed to destroy.

  How did the United States come to place itself in such a disastrous position? It was surely not inevitable. The hawks around George W. Bush were determined to transform the world, and they have, but not at all in the way they hoped. The basic premise of the Bush hawks was that the U.S. had been in a slow decline for at least thirty years – which is true. In their analysis, however, this decline was the result of a weak and faulty policy of successive Presidents, therefore reversible. All the U.S. needed to do, they argued, was to flex seriously its considerable military muscle, abandon all pretense of multilateral consultation with hesitant and weak allies, and proceed to intimidate both dubious friends and hostile enemies alike, and the U.S. would be in the world driver's seat again. This, however, was not at all true.

  The U.S. decline is structural, the result of the predictable loss of the enormous economic edge the United States temporarily had after 1945 vis-à-vis everyone, including all the other so-called industrialized countries. In a capitalist system, such an edge – especially the outsized advantage the U.S. had in the 1950s and 1960s – is impossible to maintain, since others can and will copy the technology and organization that make it momentarily possible. This is exactly what happened. By circa-1970, Western Europe and Japan had brought their economic structures to the point where they were more or less competitive with the U.S. structures – in their home markets, in the home market of the United States, and in the markets of the rest of the world. The decline from the giddy but passing economic dominance and therefore hegemony in the world-system that the U.S. experienced is something one lives with, adjusts to, and makes the best of. The decline of an erstwhile hegemonic power is really less about its own decline than about the rise of the others. Thus its decline is initially only relative (it commands an ever-smaller proportion of world value produced and capital accumulated). And the decline can be slow. But it is not something that can be reversed in any fundamental way. Once the hegemonic peak has been reached and then passed, it cannot be regained. Trying to restore the glorious past only hastens the pace of the decline.

  The hawks do not see it that way. They have the vision of an imperial America always on top, always impregnable, virtually by moral right. They believe that supremacy in the economic and political arenas can be imposed and reimposed manu militari. The position of the hawks has been so egregiously arrogant that they could not get their way for a long time. Quite the contrary. Instead, in the thirty years after 1970, from Nixon to Carter to Reagan to Clinton, the U.S. government did its best to deal with an increasingly difficult situation with the strategy that I call “soft multilateralism.”

  The primary object of this strategy was to slow down as much as possible the process of decline of U.S. primacy in the world that had resulted from the loss of the once-unquestioned supremacy of the United States in industrial production. The three main pillars of this Nixon-to-Clinton strategy were (1) partnership: the attempt to keep our allies from striking off on independent political (and military) paths by emphasizing past politico-moral debts and continuing common enemies, and offering them a right of prior consultation on new initiatives in their role as “partners”; (2) nuclear oligopoly: maintenance of the status quo in the list of nuclear powers by persuading and/or intimidating middle powers (especially Third World countries) to avoid pursuing any and all roads to nuclear proliferation; and (3) globalization: the reorganization of world economic macrostructures by persuading and pressuring countries of the South – the peripheral zones located primarily in Asia, Africa and Latin America – to renounce protectionist, developmentalist policies in favor of opening their economic frontiers, especially their financial borders. I call these policies soft multilateralism because the U.S. was always ready to go unilateral if it thought it had to. It simply did not say so out loud, in the hope that going it alone would not be necessary. The United States counted on its ability to “lead” - that is, to persuade others to endorse the decisions that the U.S. favored and which best served U.S. interests.

  What one can say about this Nixon-to-Clinton strategy, pursued over thirty years, is that it was partially successful, in that the decline of the U.S. was indeed slowed down, but of course never reversed. The neocons, however, saw the glass as half-empty rather than half-full. They therefore proposed to improve the score in the pursuit of the same three objectives by using a new, tougher line. For a long time, their views were considered adventurous and outside the mainstream. And they were very frustrated, even with the Reagan administration. The attack of September 11, however, gave them at last the excuse they needed to implement their program, which had been advertised in advance in the 2000 report issued by the Project for a New American Century. Indeed, they had promoted an invasion of Iraq unceasingly since 1997. After 9/11, they went into high gear and the regime in power was ready to move forward. When, eighteen months later, U.S. troops entered Baghdad, they celebrated wildly. Now, they thought, all good things would follow. This program, imposed on the U.S. Congress and public in general through deception, manipulation, and demagoguery, has in fact been disastrous – above all, for the United States, which is far weaker today on the world scene than it was before September 11.

  The hawks expected that the war in Iraq would be easily consummated. It has proved to be slow and draining, a continuing bleeding of lives and money with no immediate prospect of closure. The hawks expected that the traditional U.S. allies would respond to the display of military strength and determination by abandoning their hesitant steps toward political independence. Today, instead, the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, only a remote possibility in 2000, has become a continually developing reality with which Washington must deal. For the first time in history, Canada was not willing to participate in a war fought by its two closest allies, the United States and Great Britain. Today, the U.S.'s once-firm allies in East Asia – Japan and South Korea – dragged their feet about sending troops to Iraq to help out the U.S. because public opinion at home was so hostile to the idea, and both countries insisted that the troops they did send would not be engaged in combat operations. The hawks expected that, once Iraq had been divested of weapons of mass destruction, others like Iran and North Korea would abandon their pretensions to nuclear weaponry. But the U.S. found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and both North Korea and Iran have clearly speeded up rather than slowed down their programs of obtaining a nuclear arsenal, even as they make not too meaningful gestures about inspections. And the U.S. finds that it can't really do very much about it.

  The true lesson of the invasion of Iraq concerns the limitations of the huge military power of the United States. Of course, today, the U.S. is far ahead of any other country – and, certainly, of a weak country like Iraq – in military strength. Of course, the U.S. is able to win battlefield operations. And, up to a point, it can deal with the threat of covert operations by nonstate hostile groups, although this requires constant expensive vigilance and an appreciation that the ability to prevent such attacks will always be less than perfect. Some of them will succeed.

 
But in the end one has to be able to control the situation politically. War, as Clausewitz reminded us, is only the continuation of politics by other means. It is not a substitute for politics. Military prowess is hollow without political strength. And politically, the United States is weaker, not stronger, as a result of the Iraq war. Let us analyze this zone by zone.

  Let us start with Europe. Ever since 1945, the alliance with Europe, Western Europe, was supposed to be the Rock of Gibraltar on which U.S. foreign policy was based. Europe, it was said, shared U.S. values. The dominant groups in the United States were all of European extraction. The cultural ties were deep. And of course, there were all kinds of institutional ties – military (NATO), economic (first the Marshall Plan, later OECD), political (G-7, the Trilateral Commission). If there were quarrels from time to time (particularly with France), these were in the end minor. When the chips were down, Western Europe and the U.S. were believed by both to be on the same side – as the joint bearers of the Judeo-Christian legacy, as the heirs of Greece and Rome, as the Free World versus the Communist world, as the North versus the South. All this was in fact largely true.

  Relations now, however, have become quite frayed. No doubt, lip service is still being paid to the alliance, but the seeds of distrust are deep. The neocons basically scorn contemporary Europe, and have spread their views to a much larger U.S. public. They see Europeans as too pacifist (even cowardly), too addicted to the welfare state, too ready to appease the Muslim world, too “old-fashioned” (recall Rumsfeld's famous characterization of those less enthusiastic toward the U.S.'s Iraq policies as the “old Europe”). That many American people have felt this way about Europe is nothing new. What is new is that the view became official policy.

  What this public proclamation of disdain did was trigger a European response that will not be easy to overcome. Many journalists speak in a facile manner about rampant “anti-Americanism” in Europe, especially in France. This is a gross exaggeration and, in many respects, actually less true of France than of other parts of Europe. But to frame the discussion in this way is to miss the cultural reality. Until 1945, Europe was in cultural terms the parent, or at least the elder sibling, of the United States, and this was the view not only of Europeans but of Americans themselves. Europeans tended to think of Americans as cultural adolescents, rebellious but naive. The Second World War changed all that. The United States emerged as the world's hegemonic power, the economic powerhouse, the political protector of Western Europe against the Soviet Union, and in cultural terms the new center of Western, indeed of world, culture.

  In the thirty or so years of American hegemony after 1945, the United States learned to hone its cultural rough edges; it tried to cease being Graham Greene's “ugly American.” And Europeans learned to accept, even admire, the United States – for its technology, to be sure, but even for its political philosophy. Still, even among the most pro-American of Europeans, the switch in relative cultural status rankled. As European economic self-confidence rose again, and as Europe began to construct itself politically, there commenced a strong drive to reassert an autonomous, powerful cultural presence in the world that would be distinctively European. Thanks to Bush, this drive, so natural and so evident, has now come to be defined as one that should and will distinguish itself very clearly from the United States – culturally, and therefore politically as well as economically. Europe and the United States are now going their separate ways. They are not enemies, but the days of automatic alliance – at any level – are forever over.

  The story of Russia is different. The collapse of the Soviet Union, though considered a positive thing by many, perhaps even most, Russian citizens, represented nonetheless a striking downgrading of Russian power in the world-system. This was most particularly evident in the military arena. As a consequence, Russia not only had to restructure itself internally, with all the difficulties that entailed, but also had to reposition itself on the world scene. The 1990s, the Yeltsin decade, is not one on which Russians look back with enthusiasm. During this period, Russia suffered a lowering of its standard of living, severe internal polarization, the financial crisis of 1997, the crumbling of its military strength and morale, and internal threats to the unity of the residual Russian Federation (most notably the continuing war in Chechnya).

  When Putin came to power in 2000, his program was clearly the restoration not only of internal order and economic growth within Russia but of Russian power in the world-system. The question was how to do it, and in particular what diplomatic stance to take. Putin obviously did not want to recreate a cold war antagonism toward the United States. He flew to Crawford, Texas, to make a deal with George W. Bush. What he wanted most of all was to be accepted by the U.S. once again as a major player on the world scene. But behind all the flowery language, equality on the world scene was the one thing Bush was not ready to concede to Russia. So Putin began to play the field, seeking better relations in all directions – Western Europe (particularly Germany), China, India. And of course, he wished to reassert a central role for Russia in the Middle East, a continuing priority of Russian foreign policy since at least the eighteenth century.

  The Iraq war was a decisive moment, crystallizing the results of three years of tentative outreach. For what Bush did, in effect, was to tell Russia that the U.S. did not consider it a major player even in the Middle East (and therefore, implicitly, not anywhere). Indeed, the United States used the occasion of the Iraq war to create and/or deepen the U.S.'s ties with countries formerly part of the Soviet Union – Central Asian countries in particular, but also Georgia and Azerbaijan. Far from reaffirming Russia's role, the U.S. was in fact working further to diminish it. France and Germany on the other hand reached out to Russia – as a permanent member of the Security Council, but also, no doubt, as a counterweight to the pro-American tendencies of the east-central European countries.

  What had always been a theoretical possibility – a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis – was stimulated into existence by the unilateralist pretensions of the Bush regime. The difficult initial building-blocks of this alliance were put into place by George W. Bush. The rest of the construction will be done by the three countries. As with all such structures, once consolidated, it will be hard to tear down. The world has passed from a theoretical possibility to a practical process.

  As for the Muslim world, it has been a problem for the United States for all of the last half-century. This is the case for two reasons: the active and ever-greater commitment of the United States to Israel – not merely to its right to exist but to its ongoing policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians and the Arab world in general; and the continuing active intervention of the United States in the region because of the importance of its oil deposits. Bush did not create these tensions. What he has done is worse. He has undone the basic mechanism by which the U.S. government and most regimes in the region had hitherto managed to keep the tensions under some control. This mechanism was U.S. collusion in the deliberate ambiguity of the governments of the region in their public stance vis-à-vis the United States. In practice, they did most of what the United States wanted them to do (including at the military level) while frequently employing a quite different public rhetoric and, most important, allowing the multiple movements hostile to the United States (now grouped under the loose label of “terrorist” movements) to continue to work and even flourish within their borders.

  The game of ambiguity was a constantly dangerous one for the regimes, as Anwar Sadat learned to his peril. The governments had to be very careful not to tilt too far in one direction or the other. But on the whole it was a possible game to play, and it satisfied the needs of the United States. Two regimes in particular were crucial in this regard: Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It is therefore no accident that Osama bin Laden made it clear that the actions of his group, and most notably the September 11 attack, had as its primary objective the bringing down of these two regimes. What he hoped would happen, and it obviously did, was that the Uni
ted States would react by insisting that these regimes end their ambiguity in the light of 9/11. It called upon them to throw themselves publicly and fully into the “war against terrorism.” The U.S. largely succeeded with Pakistan, but thus far only partially with Saudi Arabia. The problem is that, once the veil of ambiguity is torn asunder, it cannot be easily restored. We shall see if the two regimes can survive. Any replacement regimes will be far less friendly to the United States.

  At the same time, the hawks in Israel have taken advantage of the unprecedented level of support they have gotten from the Bush regime to destroy the Palestinian Authority, which had also been playing the same game of ambiguity. The Oslo accords may never have achieved their objective of an agreed-upon two-state outcome, but the real point here is that the world cannot go back to anything like the Oslo accords. It has been said for the last thirty years that only the United States could mediate the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. It seems to me that what Bush has done is to achieve the exact opposite. The United States is now totally compromised, and if there is ever to be a political resolution of the dispute, which seems increasingly unlikely, it will come about only if the United States is not involved in the process.

  Latin America has been considered by the United States to be the latter's backyard, its private hunting-ground and zone of prime influence. The Monroe Doctrine dates, after all, from 1823. The Latin American revolutionary wave of the 1960s, which challenged U.S. dominance, was brought in check by the mid-1970s. As of 2000, the U.S. government could feel relatively relaxed about the political evolution of the continent. The governments were in civilian hands, the economic frontiers were largely open, and, except for Cuba, no government was hostile.

  By 2004, the tone of the continent had radically changed. There are two reasons for this. On the one hand, the Bush regime overplayed the U.S. hand by deciding to push full steam ahead with the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) at the very moment that Latin American governments found themselves in great economic difficulties as a result of the 2000 – 2003 recession. In particular, there was the spectacular crash of Argentina, the poster-child of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) of the 1990s. This crash affected not merely the working classes but the middle classes as well, who massively lost their savings and saw their standard of living collapse. The net outcome of three years of changing governments, popular insurrections, and general turmoil was a populist government that openly thumbed its nose at the IMF and has gotten away with it, to the great applause of the Argentinian people.