Bi-polar disorder – part one

The US and Europe have more in common than they realise Globalisation, it is has been well-argued , is not the same as Americanisation. Nevertheless, with around a third of the planet’s wealth and productive capacity, and much of its most effective weaponry, the United States plays a central role in the world’s economic and political system.

So what’s up with the US? If you went by some of the pundits over the last few months, you’d get a sense of a bi-polar disorder, one moment massively up, the next down in the dumps.

Neither the feel bad nor the feel good is new, of course. In the 1980s and 90s, the feel-bad-ers could point to the argument of imperial overstretch in Paul Kennedy’sThe Rise and Fall of the Great Powers or even to Osama bin Laden’s notion, based on incidents like the 1983 bombing in Beirut that left over 240 marines dead and led to a US withdrawal, that America was just a paper tiger.

As for the feel good side, well there was a prolonged boom in which three or four years growth yielded an additional increment in economic activity greater in size than the entire British economy (supposedly the world’s fourth largest). And with that growing economic power came an enhanced sense of US centrality in world affairs, memorably summed up in Madeleine Albright’s formulation: “We are the indispensable nation. We walk tall, and we see further into the future” (a view which left the other 96% of us humans wondering about the corollary – that we were all dispensable).

The trauma and tragedy of 11 September 2001 brought out determination to be a ‘hyper-power’ reshaping the world. In a unipolar world, suggested some pundits, the US should take up the burden of Empire, governing a world half-devil and half-child. Quick wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, one, two! A colossus bestrode the globe, and by the time George Bush made that landing on the aircraft carrier, Old Glory was up where it belonged.

Let’em come on! Others could compete for the role of handmaiden to the Hulk. Americans were from Mars, the planet of military virtues, while Europeans were from Venus, the planet of diplomacy and cooperation, and therefore inadequate to the harsh new realities.

Essential words in any language: 'my friend will pay'

More recently, there has been some more of the feel bad stuff. To keep Iraq from spiraling out of control looks set to require a larger proportion of deployable US army manpower for longer than most are comfortable with. The estimated costs of occupation, never mind rebuilding the country, have doubled.

In an article titled The Unbearable Expense of Global Dominance, published in the Financial Times on 9 July, Felix Rohatyn, a distinguished banker and former US ambassador to France, argued that massive budget deficits into the foreseeable future, vast and growing foreign debt and dependence on foreign capital would undermine American power.

Anatol Lieven, who has incisively criticised many of those setting themselves up to analyse American power and the idea of Empire, has suggested empires die by suicide.

And even a sometime booster of a new American imperial mission like Niall Ferguson, seems to have joined the doubters. Writing with Laurence Kotlikoff, Ferguson points out that the federal government cannot – unlike with some other debts – inflate its way out of its obligations to increasing numbers of citizens who will retire over the next few decades(see The Fiscal Overstretch That Will Undermine An Empire). “The latent fiscal crisis of the US welfare state”, they say, “implies at best an empire run on a shoestring; at worst a retreat from nation-building as swift as the original advance towards it” [for more on the American welfare state, see James Galbraith’s recent article for openDemocracy, The Real American Model].

Meanwhile, say leading economists, present US policies are doing a lot to undermine the benefits that globalisation can bring. “The myopic and self-serving policies of the world’s only superpower are doing serious and possibly irreparable damage to the global trading system” say Jagdish Bhagwati, and Arvind Panagariya. In an article titled Bilateral Trade Treaties Are a Sham, they argue that instead of an “altruistic hegemon” that delivers the public good of a multilateral trading system, the US has become a “selfish hegemon” precisely delivering the opposite.

Uneasy choices

In the context of all these ups and downs, and concerned about the role America plays for good or ill in the world, Globolog went along to a forum in London on 26 July titled Liberal Intervention: The Empire’s New Clothes? Here, some wise heads brought together by the Foreign Policy Centre and Prospect (a London based magazine which is not connected to American Prospect) discussed whether the Americans and their allies were acting like imperialists in Iraq, and whether it is possible to impose democracy and human rights from above.

On the question of whether or not the US is building an empire there was some agreement. Philip Bobbitt, who was director of intelligence at the National Security Agency during the Clinton administration and has thought hard about US strategy, said that the debate about whether or not America is an imperial power is sterile; we need a new vocabulary for a new set of circumstances (related points are well made by Joseph Nye).

Robert Cooper, who works on Foreign and Security Policy at the European Commission, argued that the US aspires to be a hegemon, not an empire. That is, it wishes to control the foreign policies but not the domestic policies of other countries. If anything, he added, the European Union was more like an imperial power, expanding and absorbing new countries within its framework. (There was, he said, an important rethink on the US role in Afghanistan going on).

Lindsey Hilsum, a correspondent for Britain’s Channel Four News who reported from Iraq both during and after the recent phase of high-intensity conflict, said that she found that Iraqis believe they are being colonised. Whether or not that is the American intention, she said, the belief itself has great dangers.

Others agreed. Intentions – or perceptions of them – can count for a lot in politics. An idea of suspicions and hopes in the Iraqi capital was captured in a poll commissioned by the Spectator magazine and Channel Four News earlier this month. The results leap off the page: Baghdadis seem to be thinking just like everyone else around the world about the real causes of the war. 47% said it was about access to oil, 41% to protect Israel, and 23% that the main aim was to liberate the Iraqi people from dictatorship. Only 6% believe it was to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction.

But Philip Bobbitt made sense when he warned against judging the war solely on the motives of those involved. Rather, he said, the war should be judged on its consequences. So far, there were some plus points. Saddam was gone, for example, and according to the poll, a majority of Iraqis are quite pleased about this.

This writer concurs. We have to start from where we are. The war was always going to happen (recent disclosure that more intense war fighting was already underway in 2002, with systematic campaign to degrade Iraq’s Chinese-built fibre-optic military communications system, is new in detail but not in substance). In these circumstances, maximum effort should therefore have gone from long before escalation of the conflict this spring into preparing to deal with the aftermath.

Having learned in some in detail in 1989-90 about the nature of the Ba’ath regime, and western complicity with it, this writer concluded that it would be worth paying a high price to get rid of Saddam (including alliance with all kinds of people with mixed and unsavoury motives). There was a sole condition: that what comes afterwards be substantially better than before. It’s not a comfortable position, but I think it is an honest one.

On the question of whether it’s possible for outsiders, with all their mixed motives, to help create a better society in Iraq, well we just don’t know. If it is possible it is going to be incredibly hard. One place to start engaging with the issues is the sobering assessment by the Iraq Reconstruction Assessment Mission, a summary of which was published on openDemocracy last week.

The circumstances offer an opportunity for the US and Europe to learn to cooperate better. After all, Americans are from Earth and so are Europeans. Some even go so far as to argue that Europeans like Tony Blair have a better idea of what American power is really about than does the US administration.

Looking to other kinds of ‘liberal intervention’, Mark Leonard, Director of the Foreign Policy Centre, suggested that the Americans had something to learn from the European approach to Turkey, a country currently undergoing its own democratic revolution. Leonard contrasted the approach of German and American officials at a recent meeting he attended in Turkey. The German official talked about a sixth package of constitutional reforms which would further entrench human rights and the rights of minorities in return for which Europe would offer further benefits. The American, by contrast, essentially promised money if the Turkish army, bless its cotton socks, would just get a grip.

Borders, bombs and money

But there are least two issues which make any schisms between Americans and Europeans look like the narcissism of small difference: future use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by state or non-state actors, and the injustice to the world’s poorest people resulting from the policies of the rich countries.

With WMD it's hard to judge the wider consequences until they're used. And there are plenty who think their use is likely. For example Graham Allison, writes that nuclear terrorism poses the gravest threat today. Terrorists, he says, have motive, means and opportunity.

Means and opportunity are there in abundance: North Korean, former Soviet and other resources, above all Pakistani, suggest it is only a matter of time – and not very much of that.

Whether there is sufficient motive may be harder to gauge. The US has, for example, gone some way to at least appearing to meet a key al-Qaida demand by withdrawing troops from Saudi Arabia. (The conquest of Iraq may be viewed in Washington as an alternative platform for American power in the region).

As for state actors, William Perry, US Secretary of Defence from 1994 to 1997, suggested on 23 July that negotiation with, for example, North Korea is the least bad option, albeit that this route could fail and lead to the possession of small, easily deliverable nuclear weapons by non-state actors.

In all the excitement, biological weapons should not be forgotten. As Ron Manley noted in his interview with openDemocracy, biological weapons are much more difficult to trace, and therefore much more difficult to deter, than chemical weapons.

Mindful of this, David Kelly, the British microbiologist (in the words of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, “a good man who had repeatedly gone through danger, and come through”) had been searching for biological weapons in Iraq on his most recent trip, before returning to Britain on 2 June to a chain of events that led to his apparent suicide. It is at the least ironic that a man who had visited Iraq thirty-seven times and had acquired a close understanding of the monstrous nature of Saddam’s regime should, as New Scientist noted in its 25 July editorial, finally be destroyed by a supposedly free and open society, not a secretive and vicious one.

The motives of those who want to use WMD may or may not be beyond reason. It may be, as the late Paul Hirst suggested in his excellent book War and Power in the 21st Century, that their use will disturb the rich but not destroy them, at least in the next few decades. We’ll see. But one thing that’s sure is that you need as many friends as possible in dealing with them. And this is a good reason to think hard not just about military intervention – liberal or otherwise – but also about some of the other ways in which the rich western powers intervene in the affairs of other countries, and do more to perpetuate injustice than relieve it.

It is to this issue that Globolog will turn next week.

Write to globolog@opendemocracy.net