In his depiction of our American-dominated new world order, Anthony Barnett writes of the celebration of power itself as righteousness. This is a phrase worth pondering.
Of course, righteousness is hardly a novel feature of American public discourse, but for the last year the language of the Christian right has come to fill the public space. The vocabulary of moralism, religiosity and patriotism is all-pervasive, from the early Presidential proclamation of a new crusade to the continuing Manichean talk of the American-led fight to eliminate evil across the world.
These various elements were symbolically united in the recent controversy over whether the phrase under God should be in the Pledge of Allegiance. A Californian judge declared it unconstitutional, but then stayed his own ruling in the face of almost universal enthusiasm for the phrase across the political spectrum. The story culminated in the spectacle of Senator Tom Daschle leading the entire Senate in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance under God, after which the Senate condemned the judges ruling 990.
But the celebration of American power has taken more subtle and insidiously disarming forms, at the hands of those old, familiar servants of power, the in-house and (as Gramsci used to call them) organic intellectuals. Some of them have begun to reflect on what distinguishes the American view of the world from the views of those who dissent from it. More specifically, an argument is being shaped which serves to bolster the current policies and attitudes of the Bush administration, not by refuting its opponents but by diagnosing them.
Diagnosing the opposition
Anthony Barnett himself cites the recent analysis, by alleged White House insider Robert Kagan, of why American and European perspectives are diverging an analysis echoed by Francis Fukuyama (in the Guardian of 7 September 2002). Europe, writes Kagan, is moving beyond power; it lays emphasis on negotiation, diplomacy, and commercial ties, on international law over the use of force, on seduction over coercion, on multilateralism over unilateralism. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kants Perpetual Peace. The United States, in contrast, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defence and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.
This growing transatlantic power gap creates a difference in strategic perceptions. These very different points of view, weak versus strong, have naturally produced differing strategic judgments, differing assessments of threats and of the proper means of addressing threats, and even differing calculations of interest. In particular, Europeans have concluded that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein is more tolerable for them than the risk of removing him. The Americans, being stronger, have reasonably enough developed a lower threshold of tolerance for Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction, especially after September 11. The problem is that the United States must sometimes play by the rules of a Hobbesian world, even though by doing so it violates European norms. It must refuse to abide by certain international conventions that may constrain its ability to fight effectively in the jungle. Because Europe has moved beyond power, the United States must act unilaterally.
A parallel case is made by Edward Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington (TLS September 6) in relation to the Arab Muslim world. Why did the essentially modern, sexually obsessed, doctrinally heterodox and utterly politicized Islamists of al-Qaida attract the approval of many if not most Muslim Arabs who are none of the above, and of many other Muslims around the world who are not Islamists, by any means? Because the 11 September hijackers were Arab Muslims motivated by hugely amplified renditions of common Arab and Muslim resentments. Their deed resonated with, and at least briefly assuaged, deeply felt Muslim grievances the grievances of the politically, economically, educationally and technologically weak, who desire a transfer of power from the powerful but cannot possibly evoke a positive response, or indeed any response, let alone a remedy, even partial.
There is, of course, much that is true in these analyses. There is a huge and growing transatlantic power gap. Kagan is right to point out that the US is heading towards spending some $500 billion per year on defence, and Europe has no intention of keeping up. It is quite true that by the close of the 1990s the ability of European powers, individually or collectively, to project decisive force into regions of conflict beyond the continent was negligible and that EU foreign policy is probably the most anaemic of all the products of European integration. And Luttwaks brutal and politically incorrect summary of the weaknesses of the Muslim Arab world is hard to fault.
Strategic deafness
But the common argument to which these analyses are hitched goes much further. What these authors are up to is deep interpretation of views they oppose. They dont engage or argue with these views, but treat them as naturally produced by their exponents situation and psychology. The point is to display the anti-American world views of the weak as mere expressions of their weakness, as symptoms of powerlessness, not as arguments to be countered or grievances to be appraised for their justice, let alone remedied.
Thus, Kagan remarks upon the Europeans unwillingness to acknowledge that their hostility to unilateralism is also self-interested and diagnoses their point of view in terms of the psychology of weakness. By his very labelling of unilateral foreign policies as Hobbesian and American and all criticism of them as Kantian and European, he seeks to display the former as realistic (the vital necessity of having a strong America for the world and especially for Europe) and the latter as symptomatic of the psychology of weakness. Likewise, Luttwak treats all Arab and Muslim grievances as resentments, as merely expressions of relative powerlessness. No need to consider whether any of them might be justified.
The danger of this insidious argument is not its rather transparent attempt to portray the Bush administrations imperial policies across the globe (refusing to abide by certain international conventions) as coolly realistic. Rather it is its ingenious impugning of all criticism of such policies as symptomatic of weakness. This is not Hobbesian but Nietzschean. All those who are critical of or hostile to America, abroad and at home, are simply expressing slave morality the resentful will to power of the weak.
It is an argument perfectly suited to rendering the current administration and its supporters deaf to what such critics and enemies have to say. And to the extent that it convinces, it can only make the world a more dangerous place.