[Sosfbay-discuss] Sun sets early on the American Century

[Drew Johnson]

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/266411
Sun sets early on the American Century

Even hard-headed realists in the U.S. power elite fear the Iraq war has
crippled America's ability to lead
Oct 14, 2007 04:30 AM
Philip S. Golub

The disastrous outcome of the invasion and occupation of Iraq has caused a
crisis in the power elite of the United States deeper than that resulting
from defeat in Vietnam 30 years ago. Ironically, it is the very coalition
of ultranationalists and neo-conservatives that coalesced in the 1970s,
seeking to reverse the Vietnam syndrome, restore U.S. power and revive
"the will to victory" that has caused the present crisis.

There has been no sustained popular mass protest as there was during the
Vietnam War, probably because of the underclass sociology of the volunteer
U.S. military and the fact that the war is being funded by foreign
financial flows. However, at the elite level the war has fractured the
national security establishment that has run the United States for six
decades. The unprecedented public critique in 2006 by several retired
senior officers over the conduct of the war, plus recurrent signs of
dissent in the intelligence agencies and the state department, reflects a
much wider trend in elite opinion.

Not all critics are as forthright as retired general William Odom, who
tirelessly repeats that the invasion of Iraq was the "greatest strategic
disaster in U.S. history"; or Col. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former
chief of staff, who denounced a "blunder of historic proportions" and has
recently suggested impeaching the president; or former National Security
Council head Zbigniew Brzezinski, who called the war and occupation a
"historic, strategic and moral calamity."

Most public critiques from within the institutions of state focus on the
way the war and occupation have been mismanaged rather than the more
fundamental issue of the invasion itself. Yet discord is wide and deep:
Government departments are trading blame, accusing each other of the "loss
of Iraq." In private, former senior officials express incandescent anger,
denounce shadowy cabals and have deep contempt for the White House. A
former official of the National Security Council compared the president
and his staff to the Corleone mafia family in The Godfather. A senior
foreign policy expert said: "Due to an incompetent, arrogant and corrupt
clique we are about to lose our hegemonic position in the Middle East and
Gulf."

"The White House has broken the army and trampled its honour," added a
Republican senator and former Vietnam veteran.

None of these, nor any of the other institutional critics, could be
considered doves: Whatever their political affiliations (mostly
Republican) or personal beliefs, they were – and some are still –
guardians of U.S. power, managers of the national security state, and
sometimes central actors in covert and overt imperial interventions in the
Third World during the Cold War and post-Cold War.

As a social group, these realists cannot be distinguished from the object
of their criticism in terms of their willingness to use force or their
historically demonstrated ruthlessness in achieving state aims. Nor can
the cause of their dissent be attributed to conflicting convictions over
ethics, norms and values (though this may be a motivating factor for
some). It lies rather in the rational realization that the war in Iraq has
nearly "broken the U.S. Army," weakened the national security state, and
severely, if not irreparably, undermined "America's global legitimacy" –
its ability to shape world preferences and set the global agenda. The most
sophisticated expressions of dissent, such as Brzezinski's, reflect the
understanding that power is not reducible to the ability to coerce, and
that, once lost, hegemonic legitimacy is hard to restore.

The signs of slippage are apparent everywhere: in Latin America, where
U.S. influence is at its lowest in decades; in East Asia, where the United
States has been obliged, reluctantly, to negotiate with North Korea and
recognize China as an indispensable actor in regional security; in Europe,
where U.S. plans to install missile defence capabilities in Poland are
being contested by Germany and other European Union states; in the Gulf,
where old allies such as Saudi Arabia are pursuing autonomous agendas that
coincide only in part with U.S. aims; and in the international
institutions, the UN and the World Bank, where the United States is no
longer in a position to drive the agenda unaided.

Transnational opinion surveys show a consistent and nearly global pattern
of defiance of U.S. foreign policy as well as a more fundamental erosion
in the attractiveness of the United States: The narrative of the American
dream has been submerged by images of a military leviathan disregarding
world opinion and breaking the rules. World public opinion may not stop
wars but it does count in subtler ways. Some of this slippage may be
repairable under new leaders and with new and less aggressive policies.
Yet it is hard to see how internal unity of purpose will be restored: It
took decades to rebuild the U.S. military after Vietnam and to define an
elite and popular consensus on the uses of power.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq is not the sole cause of the trends
sketched. Rather, the war significantly accentuated all of them at a
moment when larger centrifugal forces were already at work: the erosion
and collapse of the Washington Consensus and the gradual rise of new
gravitational centres, notably in Asia, were established trends when
President George Bush went to war. Now, as the shift in the world economy
towards Asia matures, the United States is stuck in a conflict that is
absorbing its total energies. History is moving on and the world is
slipping, slowly but inexorably, out of U.S. hands.

For the U.S. power elite this is deeply unsettling. Since the mid-20th
century U.S. leaders have thought of themselves as having a unique
historic responsibility to lead and govern the globe. Sitting on top of
the world since the 1940s, they have assumed that, like Great Britain in
the 19th century, they were destined to act as hegemon – a dominant state
having the will and the means to establish and maintain international
order: peace and an open and expanding liberal world economy. In their
reading of history it was Britain's inability to sustain such a role and
America's simultaneous unwillingness to take responsibility that created
the conditions for the cycle of world wars and depression during the first
half of the 20th century.

The corollary of this assumption is the circular argument that since order
requires a dominant centre, the maintenance of order (or avoidance of
chaos) requires the perpetuation of hegemony. This belief system,
theorized in U.S. academia in the 1970s as "hegemonic stability," has
underpinned U.S. foreign policy since World War II, when the United States
emerged as the core state of the world capitalist system. As early as 1940
U.S. economic and political elites forecast a vast revolution in the
balance of power: The United States would become heir to the economic and
political assets of the British Empire.

A year later, Time magazine publisher Henry Luce announced the coming
American Century: "America's first century as a dominant power in the
world" meant that its people would have "to accept wholeheartedly our duty
and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation and exert upon
the world the full impact of our influence as we see fit and by such means
as we see fit." By the mid-1940s the contours of the American Century had
already emerged: U.S. economic predominance and strategic supremacy upheld
by a planetary network of military bases.

The postwar U.S. leaders who presided over the construction of the
national security state were filled, in William Appleman Williams's words,
with "visions of omnipotence": The United States enjoyed enormous economic
advantages, a significant technological edge and briefly held an atomic
monopoly. Though the Korean stalemate (1953) and the Soviet Union's
nuclear weapons and missile programs dented U.S. self-confidence, it took
defeat in Vietnam and the domestic social upheavals that accompanied the
war to reveal the limits of power. Henry Kissinger's and Richard Nixon's
"realism in an era of decline" was a reluctant acknowledgment that the
overarching hegemony of the previous 20 years could not and would not last
forever.

But Vietnam and the Nixon era were a turning point in another more
paradoxical way: Domestically they ushered in the conservative revolution
and the concerted effort of the mid-1980s to restore and renew the
national security state and U.S. world power. When the Soviet Union
collapsed a few years later, misguided visions of omnipotence resurfaced.
Conservative triumphalists dreamed of primacy and sought to lock in
long-term unipolarity. Iraq was a strategic experiment designed to begin
the Second American Century. That experiment and U.S. foreign policy now
lie in ruins.

Historical analogies are never perfect but Great Britain's long exit from
empire may shed some light on the present moment. At the end of the 19th
century few British leaders could even begin to imagine an end to empire.
When Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee was celebrated in 1897, Britain
possessed a formal transoceanic empire that encompassed a quarter of the
world's territory and 300 million people – twice that if China, a near
colony of 430 million people, was included. The city of London was the
centre of an even more far-flung trading and financial empire that bound
the world. It is unsurprising that, despite apprehensions over U.S. and
German industrial competitiveness, significant parts of the British elite
believed that they had been given "a gift from the Almighty of a lease of
the universe forever."

The Jubilee turned out to be "final sunburst of an unalloyed belief in
British fitness to rule." The Second Boer War (1899-1902) fought to
preserve the routes to India and secure the weakest link in the imperial
chain, wasted British wealth and blood and revealed the atrocities of
scorched-earth policies to a restive British public. The world war that
broke out in 1914 bankrupted and exhausted all of its European
protagonists. The long end of the British era had started. However, the
empire not only survived the immediate crisis but hobbled on for decades,
through World War II, until its inglorious end at Suez in 1956. Still, a
nostalgia for lost grandeur persists. As Tony Blair's Mesopotamian
adventures show, the imperial afterglow has faded but is not entirely
extinguished.

For the U.S. power elite, being on top of the world has been a habit for
60 years. Hegemony has been a way of life; empire, a state of being and of
mind. The institutional realist critics of the Bush administration have no
alternative conceptual framework for international relations, based on
something other than force, the balance of power or strategic
predominance.

The present crisis and the deepening impact of global concerns will
perhaps generate new impulses for co-operation and interdependence in
future. Yet it is just as likely that U.S. policy will be unpredictable:
As all post-colonial experiences show, de-imperialization is likely to be
a long and possibly traumatic process.

Philip S. Golub is a journalist and lecturer at the University of Paris VIII.


-- 
JamBoi
http://www.greencommons.org/blog/63
"Peaceable: the ability to interact peacefully.  A skill set similar to
social or emotional intelligence that is unfortunately rare in today's
American culture, but can be developed by all.  The Green Parties need to
lead the way in Peaceableness."