[Paleopsych] NYRB: Dreams of Empire
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Dreams of Empire
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17518
The New York Review of Books
Volume 51, Number 17 · November 4, 2004
By [13]Tony Judt
[15]America's Inadvertent Empire
by William E. Odom and Robert Dujarric
Yale University Press, 285 pp., $30.00
[16]The Imperial Tense: Prospects and Problems of American Empire
edited by Andrew J. Bacevich
Ivan R. Dee, 271 pp., $28.95;$16.95 (paper)
[17]Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in
the Middle East
by Rashid Khalidi
Beacon, 192 pp., $23.00
[18]The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Penguin, 400 pp., $25.95
[19]Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Harvard University Press, 478 pp., $45.00; $19.95 (paper)
[20]Multitude
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Penguin, 427 pp., $27.95
[21]The New Imperialism
by David Harvey
Oxford University Press, 253 pp., $22.00
[22]Fear: The History of a Political Idea
by Corey Robin
Oxford University Press, 316 pp., $28.00
[23]A New World Order
by Anne-Marie Slaughter
Princeton University Press, 341 pp., $29.95
1.
Talk of "empire" makes Americans distinctly uneasy. This is odd. In
its westward course the young republic was not embarrassed to suck
virgin land and indigenous peoples into the embrace of Thomas
Jefferson's "empire for liberty." Millions of American immigrants made
and still make their first acquaintance with the US through New York,
"the Empire State." From Monroe to Bush, American presidents have not
hesitated to pronounce doctrines whose extraterritorial implications
define imperial authority and presume it: there is nothing
self-effacing about that decidedly imperious bird on the Presidential
Seal. And yet, though the rest of the world is under no illusion, in
the United States today there is a sort of wishful denial. We don't
want an empire, we aren't an empire--or else if we are an empire, then
it is one of a kind.
This nervous uncertainty has given rise to an astonishing recent spate
of books and essays. Some of these display a charming insouciance.
America, write William E. Odom and Robert Dujarric, is an empire of a
new type,
unipolar, based on ideology rather than territorial control,
voluntary in membership, and economically advantageous to all
countries within it.^[24][1]
Others--like the essays collected by Andrew Bacevich in The Imperial
Tense: Prospects and Problems of American Empire--are a curious
amalgam of military hubris and cultural anxiety: they dutifully
document both America's truly awesome military reach and the
widespread national uncertainty about what to do with it.
The United States is different from other countries. But as an
imperial power it is actually quite conventional and even familiar.
True, modern America eschews territorial acquisitions. But that is
irrelevant. Like the British at the height of their imperial majesty,
the US prefers to get its way by example, pressure, and influence.
Lord Palmerston's dictum--"trade without rule where possible, trade
with rule where necessary"--has been applied by Washington with even
greater success. Whereas the British were constrained (after some
initial reluctance) to exercise formal--and costly--imperium over
whole sub-continents, the US has hitherto perfected the art of
controlling foreign countries and their resources without going to the
expense of actually owning them or ruling their subjects.
Even the story that America tells about its overseas initiatives is
hardly original. Like the Victorians, Americans readily suppose that
what is demonstrably to our advantage--free trade, democracy--must
therefore serve everyone's interest. Like the French, we count
ourselves blessed with laws and institutions whose incontrovertible
superiority places a duty upon us to make them universally available.
Europeans who cringe when George W. Bush describes America as "the
greatest force for good in history" --or promises to export democracy
to the Middle East because American values "are right and true for
every person in every society"^[25][2] --would do well to recall
France's "civilizing mission," or the White Man's Burden.
They should recall, too, that empires are not all bad. They bring
protection, especially to minorities. Joseph Roth correctly foresaw
that Jews above all would have cause to rue the fall of the Habsburgs.
And it is not by chance that the Abkhazian people trapped in
independent Georgia dream today of returning to the anonymous security
of the Russian imperial fold: there are many worse things than
subjection to a distant imperial capital. Empires often bring modern
institutions, too--an ambiguous economic benefit but not without other
advantages. And some imperial powers just do have a better track
record than others. There is little to say in defense of the Italian
overseas empire, much less the Belgian. But if we apply the felicific
calculus to the history of American foreign involvement, we shall find
a lot to applaud.
_________________________________________________________________
Nonetheless, even if it could be demonstrated beyond a doubt that
American hegemony really was a net good for everyone, its putative
beneficiaries in the rest of the world would still reject it. Whether
they would be acting against their own best interests is beside the
point--a consideration not always well understood even by proponents
of "soft power."^[26][3] As Raymond Aron once observed, it is a denial
of the experience of our century (the twentieth) to suppose that men
will sacrifice their passions for their interests. And it is above all
in its reluctance to grasp the implications of that experience that
America today is genuinely different. For the world has changed in
ways that make imperial power uniquely difficult to sustain.
In the first place, it is hard to be an imperial democracy. Given the
choice, voters are reluctant to pay the full cost of sustaining an
empire. In a democratic setting the sentiment that money might be
better spent at home can be more easily exploited by political
opponents, especially when expensive postwar "stabilization and
reconstruction" (i.e., nation-building) is at stake. That is why US
administrations have sought to underwrite overseas adventures (first
in Vietnam and now in Iraq) by borrowing money rather than taxing the
American citizenry, and have tried, so far as possible, to
outsource--i.e., privatize--the unglamorous nation-building part.
Moreover, the US is handicapped when it comes to exporting the image
of its own democratic virtues: because it has rather too many
undemocratic allies (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan come to
mind) and because America does not always regard democracy as an
unalloyed virtue if it produces the wrong results. Open elections in
Iraq or Palestine right now would produce outcomes wholly unwelcome in
Washington, as they have done or threatened to do in other places at
other times.^[27][4] The British and the French, not to mention the
Russians, did not have this problem: whatever "values" they were
exporting, universal suffrage was not one of them.
Secondly, it is almost impossible to practice empire in a world of
instantaneous mass media transmission. Imperial control is violent.
Colonization, as the Marquis de Gervaisis observed apropos of France's
seizure of Algeria back in the 1830s, unavoidably entails "the
expulsion and extermination of the natives."^[28][5] But most people
at home in the imperial metropole never saw that. Not so today.
To watch crimes being enacted is very different from reading about
them after the fact. That is why Bill Clinton was forced into the
Balkans in 1995, once the images from Bosnia had become daily fare on
American television. There is a good reason why Washington now
"embeds" reporters and looks with disfavor upon the independent
Qatar-based al-Jazeera television network (whose equipment we damaged
in both Kabul and Baghdad and which the sovereign authorities in Iraq
have now temporarily banned)-- the same reason the Bush administration
severely restricts visual coverage of American casualties in Iraq.
The crimes of Abu Ghraib were as nothing set against what King Leopold
of Belgium did to his Congolese slave laborers or the British massacre
of 379 civilians at Amritsar in the Punjab in 1919. The difference is
that everyone has seen what happened at Abu Ghraib. We don't know how
ordinary Belgians would have responded to seeing what their government
was doing in central Africa; but in any case our own sensibilities are
heightened. When the inevitable dirty work of exercising power over
reluctant foreigners--expropriation, violence, corpses --is available
in real time for all to see, the case for empire becomes a lot harder
to sell.
Thirdly, the US cannot be an effective empire precisely because it
comes in the wake of all the other empires before it and must pay the
price for their missteps as well as its own. The French had been to
Vietnam before the US got there. The Russians (and before them the
British) have been to Afghanistan. And everyone has been to the Middle
East. When Donald Rumsfeld assured his troops in Baghdad that
unlike many armies in the world, you came not to conquer, not to
occupy, but to liberate, and the Iraqi people know this [emphasis
added]
he was decidedly unoriginal. That's what the British General Stanley
Maude said in Baghdad ninety-seven years earlier ("Our armies do not
come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as
liberators") --not to mention Napoleon Bonaparte's proclamation upon
occupying Alexandria in 1798:
Oh Egyptians...I have not come to you except for the purpose of
restoring your rights from the hands of the oppressors.
_________________________________________________________________
Let us concede, for the sake of argument, that American intentions are
more honorable than those of the perfidious Brits and hypocritical
French. It really doesn't matter. The history of what they went on to
do is what counts--and what is remembered and weighed in the balance
when American behavior is assessed from abroad.^[29][6] The name
Mohammad Mossadegh doesn't trip readily off many educated American
tongues. But as the elected prime minister of Iran who was
unceremoniously bundled out of office in 1953 by an Anglo-American
coup his memory is invoked all across the Middle East whenever the
subject of Western intervention in the region comes up. Americans may
be only dimly aware of this history, but others are better informed.
Even when the US is free of any responsibility for some malevolent
colonial undertaking, it still inherits the consequences. Iraq, it is
now being whispered abroad, is America's "Suez": an ill-advised
foreign expedition that brought initial military success but long-term
discredit and catastrophic loss of influence. The implications of this
demeaning comparison ought to be a source of concern in Washing-ton.
Unparalleled military superiority counts for far less than its
besotted advocates sometimes suppose.
Americans may be from Mars, but this is Planet Earth. It isn't
significant that our armed forces can outspend and outshoot any
hypothetical foe. All they have to be able to do in order to exert
effective military hegemony is beat with ease any actual, existing
enemy. The rest is superfluity.^[30][7] And that level of domination
has been reached by a number of empires and armies (or navies) in the
past--Napoleon among them. In the end, of course, all were brought
low: more often than not by their own mistakes. Are America's
prospects any different?
One reason to be pessimistic about America is the mediocrity of its
current political class. A brilliant elite is no guarantee of
political wisdom, as David Halberstam reminded us many years
ago.^[31][8] But its absence is a bad omen. Douglas Feith, the
Pentagon undersecretary for policy and a prominent representative of
the generation of neoconservatives now installed in Washington, was
recently described by General Tommy Franks (who had to deal with him
in Iraq) as "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth." Even
allowing for the fighting soldier's traditional contempt for civilian
interlopers, this should give us pause--it is hard to imagine
Eisenhower being driven to describe Charles Bohlen or George Kennan in
these terms.^[32][9]
The generation of intellectuals and politicians responsible for US
foreign policy today did not emerge by chance, as John Micklethwait
and Adrian Wooldridge convincingly demonstrate in The Right Nation,
their detailed account of right-wing political culture in contemporary
America. While the great liberal foundations were irresponsibly
throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at fashionable scholarship
and "politically correct" causes, a small group of American
philanthropists and institutions spent the Seventies and Eighties
underwriting a revival of conservative political strategy. By the end
of the cold war a new generation of right-wing thinkers and activists
had recaptured--for the first time in many decades--the initiative in
public policy making: so much so that their ideas had become the
conventional wisdom. Many of Bill Clinton's successful domestic
policies (like those of Tony Blair) were adaptations of initiatives
first mooted in conservative think tanks.
But overseas policy was another matter. In their prime the British and
French empires could draw on a wealth of specialized overseas
knowledge--of terrain, of history, of languages. The soldiers,
administrators, businessmen, and proconsuls who ran these empires were
often scholarly experts in their own right and had in many cases lived
and traveled for decades in the countries they now ruled. The same was
true of the journalists and writers who commented on them. That didn't
make imperial rule any more welcome, but it did keep it well-informed.
A comparably talented foreign policy elite emerged in the US in the
wake of World War II; it has now been all but eclipsed.^[33][10]
Although the new conservatives at the American Enterprise Institute or
the Heritage Foundation never lacked for foreign policy pundits,
expertise was another matter. Whereas position papers on domestic
policy emanating from these institutions were usually detailed and
rigorous--if somewhat ideologically tendentious--recommendations for
US policy overseas inclined to the hyperbolic. Strategic ambition was
typically present in inverse proportion to professional
competence^[34][11] --and almost no one in these circles had any
military experience, so there was a natural disposition to exaggerate
the scope for military action and minimize its risks.
The result was a form of intellectual overreach whose best-known
public manifestation comes in the messianic sound-bites written for
George W. Bush: America is engaged in a historic mission "to change
the world" (from the presidential press conference on April 13 of this
year) is a representative example. The point, as William Kristol
explained it at the American Enterprise Institute in March 2003, is to
get some "respect" for America in places like the Middle East: first
Baghdad, and then on to regime change in Tehran and Damascus. The
inept execution of the Iraq misadventure has thus been a severe
disappointment to the Pentagon cheerleading bench, who spent the
Nineties dreaming of a Mesopotamian initiative. They now feel
personally affronted. When the editors of The New Republic asked "Were
we wrong?" (to advocate war in Iraq), they concluded that no, war was
always a good idea. But by misleading the country and the world in
order to get his war, the President let them down.^[35][12]
_________________________________________________________________
If the right has proved inadequate to the task of imagining and
executing a responsible foreign policy for the twenty-first century,
its critics have done little better. While neoconservatives culpably
overestimated America's capacity to dominate the actual world, the
left continued to dream up worlds of its own imagining. In an age when
the right to bear (nuclear) arms may soon be available to any
criminally disposed person on the planet, and when the problem of
maintaining security in an open society is the most difficult
challenge facing any democratic government (albeit cynically exploited
by the present American one), what is the most popular source of
political enlightenment on American campuses today? Empire, by Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri--now accompanied by the same authors'
Multitude.
Both books are dreadful. Anyone old enough to remember the
revolutionary rhetoric of the Seventies will recognize the style,
notwithstanding the postmodern updating. Negri, who spent many years
in prison for his part in the homicidal radicalism of Italy's Lead
Years, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing (Hardt is presumably
too young to have known anything in the first place). There are no
subjects in these books: just structures, processes, and "de-centered"
forces and "encounters." The proposition--to flatter more than nine
hundred pages of flaccid, inept prose--is that the "multitude" will be
brought together by the workings of "empire" and (with the familiar
help of some cleansing violence) will rise up and break its shackles:
Empire...by colonizing and interconnecting more areas of human life
ever more deeply, has actually created the possibility for
democracy of a sort never before seen. Brought together in a
multinoded commons [sic] of resistance, different groups combine
and recombine in fluid new matrices of resistance.
This is globalization for the politically challenged. In place of the
boring old class struggle we have the voracious imperial nexus now
facing a challenger of its own creation, the de-centered multitudinous
commonality: Alien versus Predator. Through his American dummy, Negri
is ventriloquizing a twenty-first-century paraphrase of Marxist
theories of imperialism popularized by Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin at the
end of the nineteenth. The originals were much better written and
distinctly more poli-tically threatening, since they had some purchase
upon reality. With the American left reading Multitude, Dick Cheney
can sleep easy.
David Harvey, by contrast, is a Marxist anthropologist who actually
does know something about the way empires work. Building on his claim
that there is a permanent tension in American foreign policy between
the logic of territorial dominion and the imperatives of a global
market, Harvey has some interesting geopolitical reflections to offer
upon the illusion of democratic "voluntary" empire. However much the
US might genuinely seek to democratize the foreign countries dependent
on it and win them over for its way of life, it is sooner or later
driven to undermine such exercises of "soft power" by manipulating
their domestic policies through a "predatory devaluation of [their]
assets."
There seems to me some uncertainty in The New Imperialism over what
distinguishes "function" (the core workings of capitalism) from
"intention" (the stated aims of American foreign policy): in Harvey's
hands the latter is accorded little autonomy and even less attention.
There is also a little too much genuflection in the direction of Lenin
and Kautsky. But that is negligible beside the major drawback to this
book, which is that Harvey, too, has a writing problem. Some samples:
The consolidation of bourgeois political power within the European
states was, therefore, a necessary precondition for a reorientation
of territorial politics to-wards the requirements of the
capitalistic logic.
The molecular processes of capital accumulation operating in space
and time generate passive revolutions in the geographical
patterning of capital accumulation.
If you didn't already agree, you aren't likely to be convinced by
something that reads like a parody of a radical sociology lecture from
1972. The point, as Marx observed back in 1845, is either to interpret
the world or to change it. This sort of prose advances neither
objective.
_________________________________________________________________
Fortunately, not everyone writes like this. Corey Robin's account of
the place of fear in American life is refreshingly clear--and timely.
The first half of his book is a brisk account of the idea of fear in
political argument from Hobbes to Arendt; the second a forthright
discussion of "Fear, American Style." Some of his observations about
the American pairing of optimism and fear--or autonomy and compliance
--will be familiar to readers of Tocqueville, though Robin illustrates
the American propensity to conformity with a particularly chilling
quotation from Dan Rather on media self-censorship in the wake of
September 11:
It is an obscene comparison--you know I am not sure I like it--but
you know there was a time in South Africa that people would put
flaming tires around people's necks if they dissented. And in some
ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a
flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck.... Now it
is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the
tough questions.
It starts with a feeling of patriotism within oneself. It carries
through with a certain knowledge that the country as a whole--and
for all the right reasons--felt and continues to feel this surge of
patriotism within themselves. And one finds oneself saying, "I know
the right question, but you know what? This is not exactly the
right time to ask it."
2.
Two of the author's arguments have a special bearing on our present
situation. The Madisonian institutions of limited government and
separated powers are commonly believed to protect the citizenry
against the abuses of state power, and so they do (although only
citizens, not aliens, need feel protected). But in Robin's view the
American system leaves civil society disproportionately
underregulated, with the result that the American workplace in
particular is a site of managerial coercion and workers' fear in a way
no longer true of any other Western society. This overstates the
case-- and anyway, whether the US government in the age of John
Ashcroft would be quite so recognizable to Madison may be open to
question. But there is no doubt that the American social model now
stands at a disconcerting tangent to the rest of the West.^[36][13]
Robin's most interesting observation, however, concerns what he calls
the "liberalism of terror." For some time now the center of gravity of
left-liberal politics in America and elsewhere has been what Judith
Shklar once called the liberalism of fear: the belief that the
twentieth century taught us that radical projects to accomplish social
goals in the service of grand visions were unwise and that the best
way to think about liberal politics was to "ramble through a moral
minefield." This was one source of the turn to human rights in the
last third of the century; it is the reason why many otherwise secular
thinkers are sympathetic to George Bush's emphasis on "evil" and
"terror" as the ultimate threats to the republic; and it accounts for
support by many liberals for overseas intervention to prevent genocide
or topple dictators.^[37][14]
Robin argues, against the grain of a generation of mainstream liberal
thought, that this is a seriously insufficient basis for political
action. He also claims that it diverts liberal attention away from
domestic injustice, since it is easier to identify absolute evil in
Bosnia or Rwanda (or Iraq) than in one's own democratic republic,
however imperfect. And of course it is easier to triumph over terror
or evil in foreign incarnations than it is to conquer injustice or
fear at home, where compromises and disappointments are inevitable.
_________________________________________________________________
I'm reluctant to swallow this argument whole. Having favored
intervention in Kosovo but opposed it in Iraq, I--like anyone else who
wishes to be taken seriously in public policy debates--had better come
up with good reasons for these hard choices: there will be more of
them in years to come. A left that won't engage the reality of evil
overseas because it wants to refocus attention on injustice at home is
no better equipped to face our brave new world than a right that
invokes the "war against terror" as an excuse for thinking about
nothing else.
Nevertheless, after reading Robin with a skeptical eye, I found my
attention caught by a recent remark by Michael Ignatieff, perhaps the
best-known proponent of the "negative" liberalism Robin dislikes.
"Iraq...," Ignatieff declared, "has made the case for liberal
interventionism impossible."^[38][15] Really? So in retrospect we were
wrong to attack the Serbs in Bosnia? And we would be wrong again to
send the Marines into Darfur? Isn't Michael Ignatieff folding the tent
just a little bit hastily? He is one of a number of prominent liberal
intellectuals--Adam Michnik in Poland, for example, and André
Glucksmann in Paris--who supported George W. Bush's Iraq policy as
part of the ongoing struggle against political tyranny and moral
relativism. Having thus deluded themselves into believing that the
American president was conducting his foreign policy for their
reasons, some of them are understandably disgruntled.
But is liberal internationalism so vulnerable, so politically
unsecured that one of its core moral tenets can be collapsed by the
mendacious misdealings of a single conservative president? Maybe Robin
is correct after all. But in that case how should Americans think
about foreign policy?
One problem with both left and right is that they look upon America's
foreign dealings as a zero-sum game. Either the US is sovereign, in
which case it should be free of all foreign entanglements, cooperating
only with those willing or constrained to accept its leadership. Or
else the US, like everyone else, must adapt to a borderless world and
relinquish some national sovereignty to international authorities for
the benefit of all.
Faced with that choice the outcome is foreordained. Their debt-ridden
economy may be in thrall to foreign investors and their overstretched
military desperate for allied help; but most US congressmen (like
their constituents) don't hold a passport and haven't been overseas.
They will never "relinquish" sovereignty to some toothless
international authority. Liberal internationalists who want to justify
intervention in foreign lands--on the grounds that the tradition of
"Westphalia"^[39][16] is defunct and the integrity of states has been
replaced by international law--will be doomed to accept one law for
the US and another for everyone else.
But that isn't the choice and it hasn't been for quite a while. As
Anne-Marie Slaughter shows in her new book, A New World Order, from
the World Trade Organization and the World Court to the international
organization of securities commissioners, the United States is already
inextricably integrated into a complex web of agencies and networks
that inform, oversee, regulate, negotiate, and in practice shape much
of what happens in America no less than everywhere else. This much is
the truth in "globalization." The fallacy, as she demonstrates, is to
suppose that all this either signals or necessitates the end of the
sovereign state, much less the coming of a supranational, global
system of government.
_________________________________________________________________
A New World Order offers copious evidence for what Slaughter, a
prominent international lawyer and dean of the Woodrow Wilson School
of Public Policy at Princeton, calls de facto global "governance." Of
course states exist, she says, and they aren't going away. They will
be the only imaginable form of legitimate political organization and
government for the foreseeable future. But untrammeled, autonomous
sovereignty is no more. Instead sovereignty is "relational": bankers,
policemen, environmentalists, doctors, Supreme Court justices,
ministers, and countless others now exchange and share information and
precedents and proposals.
Some trans-state links and networks are based on an explicit treaty or
agreement; others--such as the US committee on international judicial
relations in which American judges collaborate with their colleagues
abroad --remain informal. But the mere existence of this horizontally
networked world--some of it truly venerable, like the International
Postal Union or the Nordic Council, but with new intergovernmental
entities "popping up" every year--encourages convergence and
cooperation with, and compliance by, the vertically organized states
in its embrace. The result is not top-down imposition of rules but an
accumulation of common cross-border practices and the domestic
incorporation of regulations and procedures first applied or proposed
somewhere else. In the longer run Slaughter sees this producing, in
her own field for instance, a global legal system "established not by
the World Court in The Hague, but by national courts working together
around the world."
A New World Order is not an easy book to read but it is important. By
showing how today's world--of what she calls "disaggregated
states"--actually works, Slaughter cuts the ground away from
nationalists and internationalists alike. This, she says, is how it
is, for America and everyone else. She also, quite clearly, believes
that this is how it should be--because a world of collaborative
networks that acknowledges state sovereignty while securing and
facilitating interstate cooperation is inherently desirable; and
because nothing else will work.
_________________________________________________________________
It is not clear to me how democratic politics fits in here--this may
be how the world actually works but most people don't know that. What
if they choose--like the American people-- to be governed in their own
country by leaders who are actively unsympathetic to Slaughter's new
world order and who would seek to unravel or just ignore it? There
would be nothing to stop them: certainly not the United Nations. As
Slaughter acknowledges, a certain kind of power will always be
retained by the state and no supervening authority exists to stop it
abusing that power. The problem of force, and the legitimate
application and regulation of force in international affairs, are not
addressed in her book.
But if Slaughter doesn't pretend to have all the answers, she does
have a working model. If you want to see what this new world order of
voluntarily linked sovereign states will actually look like, she says,
go to Europe. There, the European Union is "pioneering a new form of
regional collective governance that is likely to prove far more
relevant to global governance than the experience of traditional
federal states." The "genius" of the EU, in Slaughter's view, is that
it maximizes the benefits of international governance while avoiding
the risks of centralization. Legitimacy and power remain at the
national level while the regulatory agencies in Brussels are
authorized to organize and administer transnational regulations and
rules that are supposed to work to everyone's advantage and often do.
This seems to me a rather generous reading of the EU, which is not
universally appreciated in Europe these days, and is anyway an
accident of that continent's unique history. But I have absolutely no
doubt that Slaughter is on to something. Seen from the rest of the
world, the arrangements that Europeans have worked out for themselves
are by far the most attractive and realistic solution to the problems
that states and societies alike will face in the coming decades. Given
that we have to start from where we are and not some better place,
they are the only way to get anywhere.
And what of the US, all dressed up in its martial finery but with no
place to go? What if America--"the hope of the world," as Churchill
told Clark Clifford on the train to Fulton in March 1946--were now
irrelevant: still Madeleine Albright's "indispensable nation," but
less for the example it offers than because of its capacity to impede
the wishes of others? We haven't reached that point yet--in 1995 the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili,
observed that "absent America's leadership role, things still don't
get put together right"; and little has changed.^[40][17]
But as Shalikashvili would doubtless agree, it is hard to be a leader
if your behavior is not admired, your authority not respected, your
example not emulated. All that remains to you is force. Of course, as
the neocons are fond of repeating, a good prince would rather be
feared than loved; but what they forget is that the same is true of
most bad princes. An empire built on fear--fear of terror and the
aspiration to make others fear us in turn--is not what Machiavelli (or
Jefferson) had in mind.
The challenge facing American voters in the coming elections is not to
find a president who can convince the world that the US isn't an
empire--or else, if it is an empire, that its intentions are
honorable. That argument has been lost and is now beside the point.
Nor is it even a question of choosing between being loved and being
feared. Thanks to America's performance in Iraq--and our evident
inability to plan one war at a time, much less two--we are neither
loved nor feared. We have shocked the world, yes; but few now hold us
in awe.
And yet the election of 2004 is the most consequential since 1932, if
not since 1860. Is John Kerry the man for the moment? I doubt it. Does
he fully grasp the scale of America's crisis? I'm not sure. But what
is absolutely certain is that George W. Bush does not. If Bush is
reelected much of the world (and many millions of its own citizens)
will turn away from America: perhaps for good, certainly for many
years. On November 2 the whole world will be looking: not to see what
America is going to do in future years, but to find out what sort of a
place it will be.
With our growing income inequities and child poverty; our
underperforming schools and disgracefully inadequate health services;
our mendacious politicians and crude, partisan media; our suspect
voting machines and our gerrymandered congressional districts; our
bellicose religiosity and our cult of guns and executions; our
cavalier unconcern for institutions, treaties, and laws--our own and
other people's: we should not be surprised that America has ceased to
be an example to the world. The real tragedy is that we are no longer
an example to ourselves. America's born-again president insists that
we are engaged in the war of Good against Evil, that American values
"are right and true for every person in every society." Perhaps. But
the time has come to set aside the Book of Revelation and recall the
admonition of the Gospels: For what shall it profit a country if it
gain the whole world but lose its own soul?
Notes
^[41][1] America's Inadvertent Empire, p. 36. The book is not all this
bad, though much of it is trite and smug. One chapter, on the US
military, is excellent--presumably written by Odom, a retired
lieutenant general and former director of the National Security
Agency. Odom provides a cogent account of the Pentagon's remarkable
failure to anticipate the tasks that American forces will face in
coming years, including peacekeeping and maintaining the security of
beleaguered states. Like many other commentators, Odom and his
coauthor make much of the way America's allies in Europe were
"free-riders" during the cold war, suggesting that this somehow makes
American power distinctive. But there were free riders under the
British Empire too--that is just how empires work.
^[42][2] Bush speech at the White House, July 30, 2002; presidential
cover letter (September 17, 2002) to The National Security Strategy of
the United States of America, quoted in Rashid Khalidi's excellent
essay Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous
Path in the Middle East, p. 3.
^[43][3] See, e.g., Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in
World Politics (Public Affairs, 2004), a restatement of his earlier
essay The Paradox of American Power (Oxford University Press, 2002),
which I discussed in The New York Review, August 15, 2002.
^[44][4] On April 13, 1976, fearing that the Italian Communist Party
(at the time supported by over one third of Italian voters) might be
invited to take office in a coalition ministry, Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger publicly declared --just nine weeks before the
forthcoming Italian elections--that the US would "not welcome" a
Communist role in the government of Italy.
^[45][5] Quoted by Khalidi in Resurrecting Empire, p. 182.
^[46][6] In Iraq Rumsfeld is best remembered for his enthusiastic
wooing of Saddam Hussein in the early Eighties, when the Iraqi
dictator really was manufacturing and using chemical weapons-- on
Iranians. See Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire, p. 187, n. 13.
^[47][7] This seems to be better appreciated by soldiers than by their
civilian superiors. See America's Inadvertent Empire, Chapter 3: "The
Military Power Gap."
^[48][8] The Best and the Brightest (Random House, 1972).
^[49][9] Franks is quoted by Bob Woodward in Plan of Attack (Simon and
Schuster, 2004), p. 281. Feith, now number three in the Defense
Department, was coauthor, along with Richard Perle, of A Clean Break:
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, a foreign policy memorandum
delivered to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in
1996. Among its recommendations is the removal of Saddam Hussein as
the opening move in a plan to reshape the Middle East. See www
.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm.
^[50][10] The US State Department remains a repository of specialized
knowledge and skills; but one of the achievements of the conservative
intellectual revolution has been to ensure that no one listens to the
State Department any more.
^[51][11] Thus Charles Krauthammer advised an audience at the American
Enterprise Institute in May 2003 that the "Bush Doctrine" (of
preemptive, preventive war) rivaled the Truman Doctrine in "audacity,
success and revolutionary nature." See The Right Nation, p. 414, n.
10. Audacity, perhaps.
^[52][12] Kristol and others are quoted in the Financial Times of
March 22, 2003. For The New Republic see its edition of June 28, 2004,
"Were We Wrong?" Note the unconscious echo here of an earlier
generation of intellectuals out to change the world on the backs of
others, and who particularly resented Stalin for blotting the
escutcheon of Marxism.
^[53][13] I shall have more to say about this in a subsequent essay.
^[54][14] Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Harvard University Press,
1984), p. 6; also "The Liberalism of Fear," in Political Thought and
Political Thinkers, edited by Stanley Hoffmann (University of Chicago
Press, 1998).
^[55][15] Quoted in the Financial Times, June 26/27, 2004, p. W2.
^[56][16] The reference is to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that ended
the European Thirty Years' War and is commonly taken as the starting
point for the modern state system.
^[57][17] Shalikashvili is quoted by Richard Holbrooke in To End a War
(Random House, 1998), p. 173.
------
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