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CounterPunch
January
15, 2003
The Perils of
the Pax Americana
by GABRIEL KOLKO
Policies virtually identical to President George
W. Bush's national security strategy paper of last September,
with its ambitious military, economic and political goals, have
been produced since the late 1940s.
After all, the US has attempted to define
the contours of politics in every part of the world for the past
half-century. Its many alliances, from NATO to SEATO, were intended
to consolidate its global hegemony. And Washington rationalised
its hundreds of interventions--which have taken every form, from
sending its fleet to show the flag, to the direct use of US soldiers--as
forestalling the spread of communism. But that ogre has all but
disappeared and US armed forces are more powerful and active
than ever.
After the September 11 terrorist attacks
compelled him to create "coalitions", Bush minimised
somewhat the initial aggressive unilateralism that he and many
of his key advisers believe the US's overwhelming military capability
justifies.
But his disregard of America's allies
in the past year is only the logical culmination of the much
older conviction that Washington must define the missions of
whatever alliance it creates. The world has changed dramatically,
but the US still retains its historical ambitions to shape the
political destinies of any region or nation it deems important
to its interests. Bush's visions are only the logical culmination
of policies that began with president Harry Truman in 1947.
The dilemma that the US has confronted
since then is that the political and social outcome of its interventions
cannot be predicted. Vietnam was the longest war in US history,
to cite one of many examples, and in Iran in 1953, as well as
Central America, it seemed able to get its way for decades. Many
tyrants it supported--as in the case of Saddam Hussein in the
Iraq-Iran war of 1980-87 or the fundamentalist Muslim mujahidin
against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the '80s--subsequently
became its enemies. Others are simply venal and unreliable--Marcos
in the Philippines or Suharto in Indonesia were typical.
The US can never attain the world order
it idealises. Innumerable successes notwithstanding, it has also
failed to create many of the preconditions essential to achievement
of that goal. The world since 1990 has become much more fissiparous
economically and politically. Bipolarity in world military relations
ended with the demise of communism but the world is more unstable
and dangerous than ever. More nations have great firepower--aided
in part by US exports accounting for more than two-fifths of
the world's arms trade since the late '90s--and the spread of
weapons of mass destruction has continued unabated.
Before September 11, 2001, China was
the principal justification for the US's vast military expenditures.
But since then a fear and a sense of danger from indefinable
enemies, now located everywhere, has sufficed to expand them
further. Terrorism is indeed abetted by the necessity of the
weak to find vulnerabilities in the very strong; it is relatively
very cheap, and the religious fanaticism that encourages it has
flourished in the misery and ignorance that prevails in much
of the Third World. Terrorism will not disappear.
Yet there are innumerable situations
where arms are not merely irrelevant but, as Vietnam proved,
counterproductive. As we know from a growing number of memoirs
as well as experience, the CIA and various officials have futilely
attempted since the late '40s to make US policies adapt to facts,
however uncomfortable they were. Conservative former US senior
foreign policy leaders and military men--such as president George
Bush Sr's national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and Ronald
Reagan's navy secretary James Webb--have publicly deplored a
war against Iraq. Things go wrong for every great nation whose
ambitions exceed its power and reality, and the US is no exception.
The war in Afghanistan has destabilised
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Last month's comprehensive Pew Report
on public opinion in 42 nations, which former US secretary of
state Madeleine Albright chaired, revealed that anti-Americanism
has grown in at least 19 countries since 2000 and that the French,
Germans, Turks, and Russians--to name but a few--oppose a war
against Iraq. In South Korea and Pakistan, anti-Americanism has
already caused the politics of those nations to change dramatically.
Many of Washington's traditional allies fear its belligerent
unilateralism as much as terrorism.
The US has always had global priorities,
but Europe was invariably ranked as the most important. Protracted
wars in Korea and Vietnam confirmed that the US has often lost
control of these priorities and that by attempting too much it
not merely accomplishes far less, but also destabilises crucial
areas. A half-century after the fighting ended, 37,000 US troops
remain in South Korea and the dangerous security situation there
is still unresolved. And there is mounting political instability
in Latin America, where poverty is rampant.
The US now confronts a similar dilemma
in the Persian Gulf. The stakes are awesome and could preoccupy
the world for years to come. Will the geopolitical consequences
of making war against Iraq far outweigh the world's realisation
that the Pentagon still retains "credible" military
power and that the Bush administration is ready to employ it,
whatever the ultimate political, economic, and human costs?
Will the Kurds in Iraq proclaim de facto
independence and risk civil war? What will the Turks then do?
How long must US troops occupy that nation and how will they
relate to its mercurial political context?
Osama bin Laden and his key aides are
still free, and Afghanistan is a highly unstable, divided country.
Will Iran, which is militarily far stronger than Iraq, emerge
as strategically dominant in the oil-rich Gulf--thereby undoing
the reasons Washington supported Hussein in the '80s? And will
a US military victory in Iraq have any bearing on the war against
terrorism, not the least because al-Qaida detests Hussein's secularism?
There have always been limits to US power,
and the question today is when and how the US will acknowledge
this reality.
Gabriel Kolko,
research professor emeritus at York University in Toronto, is
author, most recently, of Another
Century of War? (The New Press, 2002). He can be reached
at: kolko@counterpunch.org
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January
4, 2003
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by Alexander
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