[wvns] The sun sets early on the American Century
The `American Century' only began 60 years ago. But it seems already
to be over, with the disaster of Iraq forcing some of the United
States' ruling elites to realise that its hegemony has been severely
weakened. But nobody seems to know what to do next, or even how to behave
The sun sets early on the American Century
By 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 ultra-nationalists and neo-conservatives that
coalesced in the 1970s, seeking to reverse the Vietnam syndrome,
restore US 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
US's volunteer army and the fact that the war is being funded by
foreign financial flows (although no one knows how long that can
continue). However, at the elite level the war has fractured the
national security establishment that has run the US for six decades.
The unprecedented public critique in 2006 by several retired senior
officers over the conduct of the war (1), plus recurrent signs of
dissent in the intelligence agencies and the State Department,
reflects a much wider trend in elite opinion and key state institutions.
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 United States history" (2), or Colonel Larry
Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, who denounced a
"blunder of historic proportions" and has recently suggested
impeaching the president (3), or former National Security Council head
Zbigniew Brzezinski who called the war and occupation a "historic,
strategic and moral calamity" (4).
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" (5). 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.
No doves
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 US 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. They were – and
some are still – system managers of a self-perpetuating bureaucratic
national security machine – first analysed by the sociologist C Wright
Mills – whose function is the production and reproduction of power.
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
realisation that the war in Iraq has nearly "broken the US army" (6),
weakened the national security state, and severely if not irreparably
undermined "America's global legitimacy" (7) – 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 everywhere apparent: in Latin America, where
US influence is at its lowest in decades; in East Asia, where the US
has been obliged, reluctantly, to negotiate with North Korea and
recognise China as an indispensable actor in regional security; in
Europe, where US plans to install missile defence capabilities in
Poland are being contested by Germany and other European Union states;
in the Gulf, where longstanding allies such as Saudi Arabia are
pursuing autonomous agendas that coincide only in part with US aims;
and in the international institutions, the UN and the World Bank,
where the US is no longer in a position to drive the agenda unaided.
Transnational opinion surveys show a consistent and nearly global
pattern of defiance of US foreign policy as well as a more fundamental
erosion in the attractiveness of the US: 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 shaken US
armed forces after Vietnam and to define an elite and popular
consensus on the uses of power. The mobilisation of nationalist
sentiment to support foreign adventures will not be so easy after
Iraq. Nor can one imagine a return to the status quo in world politics.
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 US 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 US hands.
Destined to act as hegemon
For the US power elite this is deeply unsettling. Since the mid-20th
century US 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 the US's simultaneous unwillingness to take
responsibility (isolationism) 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, theorised in US academia in the 1970s as "hegemonic
stability", has underpinned US foreign policy since the second world
war, when the US emerged as the core state of the world capitalist
system. As early as 1940 US economic and political elites forecast a
vast revolution in the balance of power: the US would "become the heir
and residuary legatee and receiver for the economic and political
assets of the British Empire – the sceptre passes to the United
States" (8).
A year later Henry R 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". He added that "in any sort of partnership with the
British Empire, America should assume the role of senior partner" (9).
By the mid 1940s the contours of the American Century had already
emerged: US economic predominance and strategic supremacy upheld by a
planetary network of military bases from the Arctic to the Cape and
from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The post-war US leaders who presided over the construction of the
national security state were filled, in William Appleman Williams's
words, with "visions of omnipotence" (10): the US 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 programmes dented US
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 acknowledgement 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 US 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 (11). Iraq was a strategic experiment
designed to begin the Second American Century. That experiment and US
foreign policy now lie in ruins.
Britain's long exit
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 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 subalterns and
subjects – 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 informal trading and financial empire that bound the world.
It is unsurprising that, despite apprehensions over US 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 for ever".
The Jubilee turned out to be "final sunburst of an unalloyed belief in
British fitness to rule" (12). 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 South African War was the greatest test of British imperial power
since the Indian Mutiny and turned into the most extensive and costly
war fought by Britain between the defeat of Napoleon and the First
World War" (13). The war that broke out in 1914 bankrupted and
exhausted 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 the second world war, 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 US 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 cooperation and interdependence in future. Yet it is just as
likely that US policy will be unpredictable: as all post-colonial
experiences show, de-imperialisation is likely to be a long and
possibly traumatic process.
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