The advent of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome took the world by storm, if pushed into the background by the high geopolitical drama of the war on Iraq. The virus has now been detected worldwide, and has spawned a new debate about the role of the World Health Organisation in the control of disease spread. Central to the debate is whose authority- that of the WHO, or of nation-states, is sovereign over health issues. Can individual state health policies exist, or coexist at all, in a world in which travel has expanded exponentially due to economic globalisation? Indeed, viruses, unlike health agencies, know no boundaries.
After the outbreak of the Ebola virus, the WHO worked to ensure it had a global prevention network in place to quarantine such diseases as they arose, effectively containing them and preventing their accidental emergence elsewhere by issuing worldwide alerts. The result was the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network initiated to "combat the international spread of outbreaks, ensure that appropriate technical assistance reaches affected states rapidly, and contribute to long-term epidemic preparedness and capacity building." The problem with the Network was its reliance on cooperation with member organisations, agencies, and individual medical treatment centres. It was less of a global system and more of an organisation relying on its members to fulfill their proper responsibilities under the Guiding Principles for International Outbreak Alert and Response. However, among the guidelines are guarantees the WHO will respect the independence of national, regional, and other international organisations with respect to a global outbreak. The WHO's limited powers only allow it to "strive for," rather than demand, participation and cooperation.
Therefore, a state like the People's Republic of China, with its clandestine security apparatus and fiercely guarded state secrets, would inevitably pose a challenge to international collaboration in the event of such an outbreak. China's failure to effectively contain SARS has facilitated its spread to worldwide Chinese communities, notably in Canada. The effective issue was compliance with the Global Outbreak Network. Chinese hospitals and doctors never fully cooperated with the network or with the WHO, failing to share reports of the outbreak or provide crucial data needed to fight the disease in its earliest stages. It was left to Dr. Carlo Urbani, a WHO representative in Vietnam, to discover the disease. Dr. Urbani paid with his life for its discovery, months after the initial Chinese outbreak. That the WHO was able to identify the virus in Vietnam led to its immediate quarantine in Hanoi, while in China isolation remains an elusive goal, especially as only now have some Chinese medical officials been allowed to pool information with WHO representatives.
China's prior inability has resulted in draconian crackdowns in order to ensure absolutely the capture of disease carriers. This most recent reaction to the disease has provoked condemnation from the WHO, which believes such a heavy-handed quarantine policy will only cause carriers to go into hiding and thus augment the risk of the disease's spread. Dr. Wolfgang Preiser, a WHO specialist, said recently that those suspected of carrying SARS were being victimised by the Chinese government. "If you make it hell for them, they go into hiding," he stated. "It is a bit of an over-reaction. Health officials must know how to draw a balance and stop victimising people unnecessarily." However, China, at least, is now fully responsive to the WHO's recommendations. This degree of transparency is crucial in the battle against an incipient health risk, but it was most necessary during the period in which the first cases were being reported.
China's prioritising of state over international policy has proven irrevocably dangerous, and yet it is not only traditionally secretive states in which the WHO's SARS policy has been subordinated to national health policies. France announced measures similar to those condemned by Dr. Preiser, in which those suspected of carrying the disease might be "locked up against their will." In the United States, a New York Times editorial states that "our own sense is that while there is a plausible rationale for WHO's recommended travel ban, the CDC has taken the more sensible approach in simply urging caution," effectively discrediting the WHO and proclaiming the superiority of the American CDC's guidelines. Such pungent air of Western exceptionalism has permeated the SARS dilemma. When officials in Toronto were aghast at a travel ban to their city, they were joined by their fellow North Americans in wondering how such a salbrious, Western metropolis could be included in a quarantine order with Chinese provinces. Such superiority complexes and parochial attitudes are entirely detrimental to the effort against a global pandemic. The fact is that, with no effective treatment or cure, the only guarantee the virus will not wreak more havoc is the absolute application of stringent quarantine; and with reports of the disease being transmitted outside Toronto, absolute caution is necessary. There are, indeed, more important issues than the economies of municipalities, as China acknowledged when it ended its protestations against the WHO travel ban to Guangdong Province, its showpiece liberalised economic zone.
That a globalised world requires global solutions to such transnational issues is evident to nearly everyone. However, disagreement is still endemic of the crisis- over policy, over procedure, over protocol. The issue of national pride; that one's state health agency is qualified enough to provide internal security, is not only one which needs to be abandoned in China and other "developing economies," but in the West as well. State health policies, indeed, have a place, with their superior funding and, often, access to superior medical talents- collaborating with the WHO in order to provide the maximum effective means to disease control. It must be for an international organisation to set global policy, as, otherwise, the lack of a uniform global quarantine guarantees inconsistencies and loopholes for the multiplication of infections. Recognising this, and not only directing state health agencies to collude with the WHO, but providing the organisation with a greatly expanded budget and powers in order to direct its own coordinated research and resource-application to afflicted regions, is essential in the inevitable event of such calamitous plagues.
On 29 January 2002 US President George W. Bush named Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the "Axis of Evil," echoing one of his greatest role models, former President Ronald Reagan, who labeled the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire" which was the "focus of evil in the world." Critics at the time chirped that Reagan could pillory the USSR with gratuitous insults, but refused to engage it in any meaningful way. In the early 80s, as Reagan squared off rhetorically with the hardliner of "the other side", Leonid Brezhnev, the world's fears of nuclear catastrophe reached a fever pitch. Another wave of demonstrations against American policy swept Europe as Pershing-II cruise missiles were installed in NATO countries to counteract the movement of Soviet SS-20 medium-range ballistic vehicles into the Warsaw Pact.
Fall and Rise of Neoconservative Nuclear Doctrine
With the successive deaths of Soviet Premiers Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernienko, however, came the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformer, whose desire to initiate economic perestroika was not compatible with the continued arms race. Reagan, trying to dodge criticism from the left that he would not engage in negotiations with the Soviet Union and from the right that he was too cowardly to challenge it, met with Gorbachev first at Geneva (1985) and Reykjavik (1986). In Iceland, Gorbachev presented Reagan with a startling proposal- the elimination not just of some, but all the long-range weaponry of both superpowers, with the condition that the United States also scrap its space-based missile defence system, SDI (the Strategic Defence Initiative). Reagan's defence advisers, who had been intransigent on SDI at the Geneva summit, were now apoplectic about this so-called "zero option" on ICBMs. The Soviet Union, they argued, was using this as a ruse in order to return to the military situation prior to the acquisition of atomic weapons, when the Soviets had conventional superiority. Freed from the shackles of deterrence, they argued, the Soviet Union would be unstoppable. Hardliners on Gorbachev's side also condemned the plan. In the end, the two powers only agreed to the withdrawl of the medium-range and cruise missiles from the European continent, ostensibly sparing Europe from being the superpowers' nuclear battlefield in the event of war. The still unsatisfied hardliners retreated into the background- those in the Soviet Union went on to stage the 1991 coup which backfired to bring about the dissolution of the USSR, and those in the United States went on to form the ideological origins of the neoconservative movement. Reagan had seemingly abandoned their cause against the "evil empire," they would pursue a radical agenda once more against the "axis of evil."
The Influence of Religion
Reagan's evangelical echoes are also heard in the younger Bush. Polarising the world into two camps- good and evil -presents to Americans, 46% of whom claim to be evangelic Christians, a simplistic dichotomy which seems to conform to the superficial grasp of religion they use as their guiding principle. It is not in the Christian intellectual tradition of Augustine or Aquinas, who dismissed these conceptions as the property of a misinformed cult- the Manicheans. Lewis Lapham, writer for Harper's, tried to explain to Europeans how this dualist philosophy had taken hold both in the American mindset and in circles of the United States' government. The Europeans, he observed, were incredulous- they had always viewed the United States as motivated by the Enlightenment conception of reason, and hence their cynical predispositions were to condemn American policy on the basis that it was enacted to serve the interests of unscrupulous capitalism. Upon the revelation the motivations of the American government might be more metaphysical, more spiritual, the Europeans seemed to grow uneasy- loosed from the soild grounding of the Enlightenment, they could never expect to extrapolate American behaviour along the same wavelength again.
The Forging of an Enemy
The loss of the Soviet Union as the enemy of the United States prompted both the neoconservatives, who sought the exportation of American democracy and/or power to less "fortunate" regions, and the evangelicals, who desired the confrontation between good and evil played out on the geopolitical stage. What better, then, to lump together the historic challenger to both "Americanism" and "goodness," communism (in North Korea), with fundamentalist Islam (in Iran) and rabidly enforced, secular totalitarianism (in Iraq). The unlikely conception of a bond between two nations which fought each other for nearly a decade and whose ruling faiths had been in contest since the seventh century with one which had little, ever, to do with either, a Ceausescuesque regime, was not an issue for most Americans, who perceived a vague threat from "rogue states" sponsoring terrorists and manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. That "rogue" states would be enjoined in an alliance with the rhetorical burnish of "axis," suggesting a powerful threat to liberal Western democracy on a global scale as that which manifested itself during the Second World War, was a ridiculous inconsistency also escaped many erstwhile rational individuals, whose minds were so clouded with the old fears (nuclear annihalation) and the new (terrorism) that the suggestion of a linkage of the two was enough to accept any policy designed to neutralise the threat. The impulse of the American national subconscious was such that such places were to be feared merely for their "hatred of America," akin, to the evangelical faction, to devil-worship.
In reality, the American administration was engaged in an effort to divert attention from their illogical war on the methodology of terrorism, which was a demonstrable failure, to the confrontation of nation-states, a strategy which would ultimately earn a more measurable "victory." That such victories would be achieved against weak states confronting the world's most powerful military force was irrevelant, indeed, it was a cause for celebration among Americans that their forces could topple the advertised threats to their security and as well as bring self-congratulation to the supporters of such action that the beleaguered populaces of Afghanistan and Iraq were "freed" from tyrrany. The effective orchestration of the national character by the media papered over the fact that the threats were neither eliminated (indeed, they were multiplied) nor would the people ever really gain "freedom," at least in the long-term. The administration had public-relations coups- by identifying the nation-states it could facilely exterminate as "terror-regimes," it purged the need to demonstrate much was being done at the intelligence level to actually counteract terrorist organisations targeting the United States or its interests. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and any future pressure on Syria, Iran, and North Korea represent a fulfillment of the neoconservative and evangelical need for enemies, which such ideologies feed off of, a distraction from a deteriorating domestic situation within the United States, and a distraction from both failed policies and capabilities in the hunt for whoever committed the attacks of 11 September.
Possibly the most fortuitous of events for the sponsors of the "axis of evil" strategy is the fact that, in the face of American action against Iraq, they have indeed started to collude. The US Navy allegedly intercepted shipments of nuclear material between North Korea and Iran. Both nations have capable nuclear reactors, though Iran denies any weapons programme. The recent revelation that North Korea has initiated a weapons programme is not surprising; it has been speculated upon for years. That the North Korean leadership is openly admitting it, however, is an indication the weapons are intended to serve a purpose other than what the accusations of the neoconservative movement claim- they are not, in fact, designed to be commodities to be traded to terrorist organisations, but instruments of deterrence. The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-Il, fears his state, no longer directly backed by the military guarantees of the People's Republic of China or the Soviet Union, is indefensible against the American hyperpower. Indeed, during the Korean War, American forces were able to occupy much of North Korea's territory, up to the Yalu River border with China, until the engagement of Chinese troops in the battlefield. Small states whose governmental systems run "rogue" from the absolutist expectations of the United States' neoconservative/evangelical leaders. Historically, the only means to staving off an American crusade against such "deviant" systems has been military deterrence of some kind. North Korea and Iran could never hope to achieve conventional superiority, but in the form of nuclear weapons they could hope to render a balance more to their favour. It worked for the Soviet Union, they must reason, why would it not work for us?
The New Approach to Nonproliferation
The United States has approached the proliferation situation with much the same attitude that brash Cold War presidents such as Kennedy and Reagan did, by refusing to neogotiate with the "evil ones" who dare challenge America on the world stage. It has abused the United Nations as a springboard to launch the conflict in Iraq, insisting Iraq's possession of unconventional weapons posed a risk to global security. Of course, the United States probably had some realistic conception of Iraq's WMD capabilities. Its troops did prepare for chemical attacks, but the State Department was well aware of its bogus intelligence reports on Iraqi nuclear programmes, which were thoroughlly discredited by officials from UNMOVIC and the IAEA. To one who would examine the war on Iraq in the light of WMDs, it was henceforth not about disarmament, but about prevention. Allowing Iraq to develope unconventional weapons would have checked the United States' military superiority of it and hence its capability to contain Iraq, war supporters admonished. Iraq would be able to use "nuclear blackmail" in order to "dominate the region." Those same arguments have been made against North Korea, though they seem much less prudent in the light of North Korea's actual, rather than potential, nuclear capabilities.
Such arguments assume a suicidal irrationality on the part of national leaders who attempt to acquire such weapons. On the contrarary, such leaders are probably well aware of the reprisals involved in the use of weaponry of mass destruction. The United States, as the leading member of the nuclear club, likes to argue such weapons cannot be "entrusted" to "madmen." At second glance, however, each military endeavour undertaken by Saddam Hussein seemed to have the tacit approval of the United States- the Iran-Iraq war more explicitly than the Gulf War, which resulted from a critical misinterpretation by Saddam that the silence from the US signaled its lack of opposition. Arguing that the leaders of nations outside the nuclear club (or, at least, given the situations of India and Pakistan, those nations which have challenged US hegemony) are insane does not broker much trust between such nations and the United States needed for crucial rapprochements, nor breed much trust among those who allege such actions are motivated by a desire to retain nuclear armaments in the hands of a small contingent of states. The United States does not add much credence to its arguments against proliferation when it continues to stockpile nuclear, not to mention biological and chemical, arms, and spends more on non-conventional weapons manufacture than securing potentially errant nuclear material in the former Soviet Union. Nor does it seem to acknowledge that aggressive weapons inspections designed to prevent proliferation provide a serious and ultimately more desirable alternative to prevenptive warfare against an alleged manufacturer of WMDs, along with intensive international policing of nuclear materials trafficking.
George Perkovich, writing in Foreign Affairs, has much to criticise within the Bush administration's "National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction." He notes that among the most flawed factors is the failure to acknowledge the hypocrisy of "nonproliferation," which restricts nuclear arms to certain countries, effectively allowing them to maintain supremacy. "Nuclear weapons," he wrote, "are temporarily legal in five countries, not illegal in three others, and forbidden essentially everywhere else - a complex and inconsistent arrangement that presents a unique set of dilemmas." The problem was fostered by the Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968, which non-nuclear countries objected to initially on the premise that it froze them out of power. Thus, the conviction that "total elimination of nuclear weapons is the only absolute guarantee against [their] use," was included in Article VI of the treaty. Perkovich explains that this evolved into a longstanding policy of the nuclear powers, and that "The United States and the other four nuclear powers accepted this proposition and in May 2000 reaffirmed their 'unequivocal undertaking' to eliminate their nuclear arsenals." Furthermore, Perkovich notes:
To persuade the rest of the world to give up its right to future acquisition of nuclear weapons, in other words, the nuclear weapon possessors had to promise to give up their own eventually. They had to offer other incentives as well: a pledge not to use their weapons to threaten non-possessors, help in acquiring and using civilian nuclear technology for states that renounced nuclear weapons and accepted international monitoring, and the enhanced security of knowing that the treaty would also help keep one's neighbors from acquiring nuclear weapons. On this foundation, the United States and other countries have constructed over the years a nonproliferation regime of norms, laws, rules, institutions, sanctions, and, ultimately, un-backed coercion.
The Bush administration has subverted this stable though ultimately somewhat skewed arrangement by infusing its Manichean rhetoric. Hence, the weapons are not the problem at all, only the "evildoers" with them are. It is akin to the American conservative argument that "guns don't kill people, people kill people," with the resulting logic that gun ownership should be unrestricted but moral inquisition ensue. Perkovich analyses the new Bushite nonproliferation programme:
Rejecting the fundamental premise of the NPT, these officials seek not to create an equitable global regime that actively devalues nuclear weapons and creates conditions for their eventual elimination, but rather to eradicate the bad guys or their weapons while leaving the "good guys" free of nuclear constraints. Ballistic missile defense, in this vision, will protect against the few weapons that get away.
He then illustrates the issues involved in the exclusive accordance of nuclear power to those the Bush administration deems "good" and therefore worthy of the technology:
So long as some states are allowed to possess nuclear weapons legitimately and derive the benefits that flow from them, then other states in the system will want them too -- including, perhaps, the successors to the governments the Bush administration currently opposes. The proliferation threat thus stems from the existence and possession of nuclear weapons and theft-prone materials, not merely from the intentions of today's "axis of evil."
These sentiments are further illustrated thusly:
the fact that several powerful countries continue to assign great value to their nuclear arsenals reinforces just how important these weapons can be as sources of power and prestige and raises their attractiveness for others. This role-model effect does not by itself cause other states or terrorists to seek nuclear weapons. But it does impede efforts to persuade India, Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, and Iraq to curtail their acquisitions. It could also cause Japan, Brazil, and others to rethink their abstinence. Moreover, the administration's "emphasis on tactical uses" of nuclear weapons "increases the motivation of" targeted states "to improve and extend their own nuclear force, or to get one if they don't have it," as notes Michael May, the former director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The behavior of North Korea and Iran seems to confirm May's warning.
What is emphatically clear is that the Bush administration's nonproliferation policies are an abysmal failure which have accelerated the pursuit of nuclear capability among even US allies, fearful, as Britain was in the early stages of the Cold War, that being under an American "protective shield" is a guarantor of abdictated rights over policy influence. Every named or self-proclaimed adversary of the United States has now looked into the nuclear option as a credible means to deterrence. The confrontation of nation-states as a means to excercise American power on some far-off potential threat rather than directly seeking to achieve regional security through tempered rhetoric and cooperation to engage those groups which the administration sees as operating outside the scope of law has led to a reentanglement of the global community in a jockeying of national interests for power and self-preservation. The credible international monitoring institutions for weapons of mass destruction lay in shambles after the US debacle in Iraq. The North Korean reactivation of the Yongbyon reactor and demand for bilateral talks with the United States is in recognition of this departure from what was a strengthening planetary system for the control of proliferating materials and a regression to unstructured diplomacy.
However, the nonproliferation doctrine was also flawed from the start. The acquisition of nuclear materials by nation-states outside the five-member "nuclear club" began long before the Bush administration's toppling of what was a relatively stable order. Iraq's nuclear programme, for example, was at its zenith prior to the Gulf War. Furthermore, the nonproliferation system, as the administration manages to correctly point out, would not halt the spread of nuclear weaponry or material to insurgent groups operating outside the auspices of a nation-state. The Bush administration has neglected the worldwide security of nuclear materials and instead alleged that WMDs are provided to terrorist groups via national sponsors. By attempting to link terrorism with national strategy, Bush has endeavoured to show his confrontation of nation-states will lead to the elimination of terrorism. A recognition, however, of the fact that terrorism is supranational and more closely linked to transnational movements is needed. A consistent failure of the Bush administration's approach to global security is the necessity of recognising the origins of ideologies which drive terrorism and which motivate its operatives. Perhaps if they dug a little deeper, they would find that the confrontationism they have engaged in is precisely the type of behaviour which has led impetus to the rise of such organisations.
Reducing the Spectre of Nuclear Confrontation
In the realm of nuclear security, however, the United States needs to recognise the exceptionalism of nonproliferation is untenable. The only option truly guaranteeing the diminution of the threat of a nuclear detonation is for the nuclear club itself to curtail its WMD capabilities and focus on weapons-reduction, materials-security, and rapprochement with states like North Korea and Iran, both of which demonstrated sincere desires for negotiation and internal reform, respectively, before the consternation resulting from the incendiary "axis of evil" lambasting by President Bush. Perkovich presents a vision of the course the United States could take in order to encourage nonproliferation and step toward eliminating nuclear arsenals.
Instead of maintaining such an arsenal, many argue, the United States should lead the other nuclear powers in an effort to render nuclear weapons taboo -- the vision, that is, behind the international nonproliferation regime the administration appears to scorn. Bringing such a taboo into effect would obviously require decades and enormous changes in international relations. Yet promulgating it emphatically as a goal would help motivate states, customs officials, scientists, and others around the world to be more vigilant in combating the spread of nuclear weapons.
Nuclear standoffs are no opportunities to play theological or ideological games. The recognition that the United States needs to be a global partner in a concerted effort to reduce the threat, greater now than at any point during the (relatively stable) Cold War, is essential. Brash neoconservatives cannot argue for the abandonment of collective security in favour of alliances fighting for democracy with nuclear war at stake. The evangelicals cannot try to ward off evil lest they bring a spectacular Armageddon. Nuclear reality, as North Korea has aptly demonstrated, is a critical factor- albeit a dangerous one -if any nation should want to halt the American crusade. In an age in which one small nation, indeed, one fanatic, can extract revenge through a weapon of mass destruction, the Pax Americana is entirely infeasible. Unilateralists in the United States should ask themselves whether the hubris of military showdown, rather than a return to the spirit of the Reykjavik summit, is worth bringing on a battle worse than their esteemed clash of civilisations- an apocalyptic holocaust.
Ruled Britannia British Atlanticists think the UK's influence can be expanded through its servile pandering to the US. Why Europe is the better path.
As the Second World War came to a close, the reality that the British Empire would not survive the postwar era began to sink in as the people of the United Kingdom assessed the extraordinary effort needed to preserve the British Isles, let alone Britain's vast expanse of colonial holdings. British public intellectual life was rife with the charge that it was the dénouement of the British Empire, that theirs, like all empires, was coming to a close. The remainder of Britain's ardent imperialists, such as Winston Churchill, wanted to pass on the responsibilities of Pax Britannia onto the United States. Britain's role was reimagined as somewhat of a grandfatherly instructor: the United States would provide the brute strength to sustain the Pax, while Britain schooled it in the lessons its own centuries-old empire had accrued. Hence, British influence would be sustained. American distaste for imperialism, however, precluded such a scenario.
The Anglo-American "special relationship" has been in developement since at least 1895, when an anticlimactic border dispute in South America managed to illustrate to Britain the need to avoid conflict with the strengthening US colossus. The frontier between British Guiana and Venezuela had always been somewhat contested, but the issue exploded with the discovery of gold in the region. Suddenly, Britain was prepared to dispatch troops to support the claims of its colony, while militarily weak Venezuela urged arbitration. President Grover Cleveland, a passionately free-trade anti-imperialist, ordered his Secretary of State, Richard Olney, to author a note condemning potential British expansionism in the region, calling it a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Britain was undeterred by such warnings, but Cleveland continued to demand that US experts be dispatched to British Guiana to determine an official boundary. Should the British refuse this request, America would fight to preserve Venezuela's territorial integrity. The United States was swept with war hysteria, with the opportunity to confront its traditional enemy now presenting itself. However, Britain was faced, simultaneously, with growing threats from Continental Europe. The Russians, French, and Germans were now heavily arming, and the British policy of "splendid isolation" had left its splendidly vulnerable. At Westminster, fear of Germany's rising strength was especially great, and British attention shifted entirely to Berlin after the Kaiser publicly congratulated the Boer capture of a British raiding party in South Africa. Britain, whose hegemony was being gradually reduced by competing empires, decided to cover its backside, initiating an alliance with Japan in order to maintain its Pacific holdings and agreeing to arbitration in the Venezuela-Guiana dispute in order to placate the Americans. Furthermore, Britain began a policy of conciliatory relations with the United States in order to build an "Anglo Alliance" to outgun and outflank Imperial Germany. The long term result of this policy, of course, was British victory in both world wars. Of course, trade links developed in the "Anglosphere" in the first period of economic globalisation (roughly 1880-1914) also helped solidify the bond between former colony and master and provide impetus for American entry into the wars.
With the advent of the Cold War, interdependence was a recognised reality by both Washington and London. The British were a vital ally for the United States against expanding Soviet influence, as the Commonwealth comprised a great deal of the earth. Britain, in turn, needed US power to guarantee the maintenance of its influence. However, in order to maintain a relative degree of independence, Britain did develope a nuclear weapons programme. Britain's nuclear capabilities and global influence allowed it considerable prestige when formulating American policy. Prime Ministers Attlee and Churchill were able to halt the use of nuclear weapons in order to end the Korean and Indochinese Wars, respectively.
The end of the Cold War, however, presented new challenges to the "special relationship." With no Soviet enemy to unite against, what was the purpose of the relationship, or, indeed, the entire Atlantic Alliance? The question of what NATO's role in the post-Cold War world continues to perplex, but Britain seems to have developed a niche. With the ascendancy of neoconservatives to power in the highest levels of the American government, the United States finally seems to have embraced an imperial vision similar to that which briefly flowered from 1898 to 1917. Hence, the postwar British vision of guiding an American empire modeled on British principles seems to be once again guiding the policies of Downing Street.
Tony Blair's enthusiastic support for the war on Iraq evoked the eloquent Gladstonian liberalism of over a century ago. Gladstone, like Blair, was a liberal interventionist, insisting the tools of empire be used for the embetterment of the conquered peoples, an extension of the idea that empire brought "civilisation" to the "savages." The doctrine of liberal interventionism helped the idea of empire endure in Britain for a long period of time and allowed it to become a favoured policy of the left as well as right. By embracing liberal interventionism and its patronising principles, which are nevertheless seen as charitable and virtuous by its supporters, Blair became not only the evangelist bringing democracy to Iraq but the salesman whose pitch was powerfully felt across the English-speaking world.
Gladstonian ideals are at the height of popularity among the members of the American right-wing. Articles in rightist publications such as the National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the neoconservative bible Commentary are now pondering the theory that the American tradition is not anti-imperialist afterall. The American Revolution, they insist, was not a rebellion by culturally distinct, nationalist subjects seeking a schism with Mother England. It was a civil war, in which proud Britons rebelled against a mutated system which had strayed from the natural evolution of Britain toward economic and political freedoms. Some neoconservatives, hence, seek a degree of reunity among the nations of the Anglosphere (Britain, America, Australia, and Canada excepting Québec) under the "naturally English" political principles, notably a decentralised state composed primarily of a "civil society."
The Anglospherist faction of the neoconservative movement desires a break from both the United Nations, which they see as unable to engage in the crusade for democracy and freedom which is the glue of their creed, and NATO, whose members they see drifting away from Anglospheric ideals, toward a permanent alliance of English-speaking nations. This, however, is anathema to the mainstream of neoconservatives, who consider any permanent alliance a constraint upon the American Gulliver by audacious Liliputians. Only the United States, they reason, has the capability to react rapidly (and, presumably, militarily) to crises in global hotspots. Their preferred internationalist construct is the ephemeral "coalition of the willing," evoking the voluntary posses once periodically called up in American towns to administer such vigilante "justice" as lynching escaped black slaves.
Unfortunately for the members of the coalition, providing a tenuous measure of international legitimacy to an American cause seems to bring no real benefit to any country other than the United States itself. Britain, the most committed member of the coalition that faced Iraq, was ostensibly accommodated through the attempt to seek Security Council authorisation for the war. However, this route was advocated much earlier by Secretary of State Colin Powell, and is not necessarily the direct result of British lobbying. When it became evident the United States would face an embarrassing rejection of its war aims in the Security Council for the much-vaunted "second resolution," a measure Blair reportedly leaned on the US heavily for, the route was rejected outright by the United States, and, after a further inconsequential accommodation for Britain, the allowance of a parliamentary debate on the subject which was ultimately influenced by Blair's declaration he would resign if the Commons failed to approve of military action under a unilateral interpretation of previous UN resolutions, both nations went to war.
Is the United States likely to pursue a route through the United Nations when it engages in its next military adventure? It's unlikely, as following Blair's and Powell's suggestions have proven only further to the neoconservatives that the UN is a "failure." No British companies are to be awarded any contracts in the Iraqi reconstruction bonanza, and the American occupation is to reign supreme in Baghdad. The call for the UN to take over administration of Iraq, by Britain and every other European state, has been rejected unequivocally in Washington. Meanwhile, Blair is allowing the US to station apparati related to the American missile defence system on British soil.
What has become of the Transatlantic "special relationship"? Britain is lashed to American fortunes- a certain target for terrorist activity, as even Downing Street acknowledges. In the name of influencing American policy, it has done everything possible, to no avail and to no benefit. Britain faces a similar dilemma as that which its American colonial subjects rebelled against in 1775- taxation (or, in this case, exploitation) without representation. Britain has no means, solely, to influence American policy- its acquiescence to Washington alone has not even earned it treats for performing its tricks.
Think, by contrast, what the benefits would be for the United Kingdom should it abandon its kowtowing to American diktats and engage its energies completely in Europe. Rather than hypocritically pursuing a Euro referendum while simultaneously affecting a split between the French, German, and Russian governments with those of Eastern Europe, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, Britain could again be involved in uniting the Continent. Rather than waiting and hoping British doting will gain it more prestige in Washington (where such behaviour seems expected rather than welcomed), it could be its achieving policy goals within the European government. Those states entering the Union in May 2004 will inevitably be less sceptical of European integration with Britain more actively involved in European politics advocating devolution and other such principles. The power of a united Europe, even if split along Federalist and Anti-Federalist lines as described, would inevitably command respect from and power over the United States, respect which could translate into policy adjustments of the type Britain has been seeking through its rather imbalanced friendship.
George Monbiot, columnist for the Guardian and onetime Euro opponent, declares now that Britain alone has the ability to decide whether or not American power is checked- by joining the single currency. He writes that by engagement in the Euro, Britain can allow it to unseat the dollar as the world's preeminent currency, and thus seriously outpace the United States economically:
The only serious threat to the dollar's international dominance at the moment is the euro. Next year, when the European Union acquires 10 new members, its gross domestic product will be roughly the same as that of the US, and its population 60% bigger. If the euro is adopted by all the members of the union, which suffers from none of the major underlying crises afflicting the US economy, it will begin to look like a more stable and more attractive investment than the dollar. Only one further development would then be required to unseat the dollar as the pre-eminent global currency: nations would need to start trading oil in euros.
Last year, Javad Yarjani, a senior official at Opec, the oil producers' cartel, put forward several compelling reasons why his members might one day start selling their produce in euros. Europe is the Middle East's biggest trading partner; it imports more oil and petrol products than the US; it has a bigger share of global trade; and its external accounts are better balanced. One key tipping point, he suggested, could be the adoption of the euro by Europe's two principal oil producers: Norway and the United Kingdom, whose Brent crude is one of the "markers" for international oil prices. "This might," Yarjani said, "create a momentum to shift the oil pricing system to euros."
If this happens, oil importing nations will no longer need dollar reserves to buy oil. The demand for the dollar will fall, and its value is likely to decline. As the dollar slips, central banks will start to move their reserves into safer currencies such as the euro and possibly the yen and the yuan, precipitating further slippage. The US economy, followed rapidly by US power, could then be expected to falter or collapse.
The advocacy of the economic collapse of the United States is rather severe and unadvisable, given the close linkage between the US and European economies. The collapse of one system would drive down the other. However, Monbiot's observations highlight the opportunity Britain has by joining the Euro to convince the United States of Europe's ascendant supremacy and thus hope to influence it through the threat to its now almost total hegemony.
Tony Blair has attempted to find a "third way" between Britain and Europe as he did with his economic and social policies. Unfortunately for some Britons, who believed the UK could preserve Atlanticism by acting as a mitigator between the hardening attitudes of both the United States and the Eurozone, the middle ground has proved untenable, and Britain has slipped into a position of unwavering support of the US. It is thus presented with the stark choice- continue being ruled from Washington without consideration of its opinions, or immerse itself in Europe, in which it is guaranteed a major voice at Brussels. As Daniel Haufler of Die Tageszeitung stated on 2 April, "there remains nothing for the Europeans to do than to free themselves once and for all from the US." Britain can either be a European partner or an American slave.
The International Politics of Iraqi Reconstruction
Iraq's future economy faces major impediments. Aside from the sanctions still crippling it, the country is also awash in hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign debt, primarily owed to Russia and France. The US administration can cite good reasons for the removal of sanctions- that it has provoked a humanitarian crisis in Iraq and that no serious economy can develop within a system that trades oil revenues for sustenance.
Indeed, France, whose opposition to American war plans was met with incomprehensible acrimony in the United States, has led the charge in the Security Council to call for the end of sanctions. This has come as a surprise to the United States, which expected France to argue that the sanctions were linked directly to Iraqi disaramament and that they could not be lifted without direct certification of the removal of weapons of mass destruction. France would thus presumably argue for the necessity of UN weapons inspectors to engage in the operation, which, for the United States, could cause considerable embarrassment if such an independent inquiry determined that WMDs were either nonexistent in Iraq or were planted by American operatives seeking post facto justification for military action.
Instead, France's ambassador to the UN, Jean Marc de la Sabliere, did insist that sanctions were linked to disarmament, but not necessarily that such would have to be confirmed by UN weapons inspectors. "Meanwhile, we could suspend the sanctions and adjust the oil-for-food [programme] with an idea of its phasing out," he noted. De la Sabliere did state that a compromise should be reached which allows UN weapons inspectors to work alongside US investigators. France has found itself in disagreement with the majority of the international community over this issue, however. Many believe international organisations should have total sovereignty over weapons inspections, especially following a testimony by UNMOVIC chief Hans Blix exhorting the Security Council to allow him to return his teams to Iraq, and an insistence by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head Mohammed El Baradei that his agency was "the sole legal authority to verify Iraq's nuclear activities".
France's position emerged as a result of two factors influencing its policy. The first is the desire for a return to normalcy in its relationship with the United States, the strain of which has caused many in France to question whether Paris is being isolated by opposition to US positions. Recently, Jacques Chirac, speaking to President Bush, noted that France was willing to be "pragmatic" on Iraq reconstruction rather than pursue ideological aims. Furthermore, the US is placing pressure on France, noting that it will "review all relations" with Paris. The dramatic demonstration of Washington's ability to shape the world in its interests has caused fear among the French that resistance is futile- and that at least a partial return to Atlanticism is necessary in order to maintain a semblance of French influence. Some feel that by taking such a strong position during the Security Council debates on Iraq, France even jeopardised the potentiality the United States would look for UN legitimacy before engaging in military actions again.
Such fears paint a rather flattering image of US neoconservatives, whose contempt for internationalism knows no bounds. The neoconservatives have demonstrated they are not open to compromise- their aspirations have been mapped out for decades -and by becoming a quiescant Atlanticist, Chirac would only provide a legitimisation for US actions, not have any influence upon it. The UN, too, would become a rubber-stamping agency, rather than fulfilling its essential role as a forum of nations. Even if bypassed by the United States and effectively losing the ability to shape the world in realistic terms, the UN retains symbolic value for most of the world. If the UN is used by the United States, but only as an inexorable yes-man, it loses this symbolic value while still pandering to policy shaped in Washington. France should not return to the satellite status it uncouthly proclaimed the former Soviet bloc was adopting with regard to the US, not when hundreds of millions of Europeans now look to Paris for the crucial political leadership opposition to American policy among the populaces of the Continent has lacked since the passing of De Gaulle. Chirac needs to heed to his proclamation that "it is up to the United Nations - and it alone - to take on the political, economic, humanitarian, and administrative reconstruction of Iraq," or risk the mass abandonment of faith in his leadership of the pro-internationalist community.
The second factor influencing the French position on sanctions is the need to appear concerned with the fate of the Iraqi people rather than its own, larger geopolitical strategy. By appearing to be more concerned with humanitarianism at the outset of the debate over the future of Iraq, France gains crucial manoeuvring room for later jockeying, most notably that over Iraq's debt, billions of which is owed to France. Using the debt as leverage, France can gain more influence in postwar Iraq than using the sanctions, which could easily be construed by the rightist Murdoch media in anglophone countries as a shrewd denial of food for Iraqis in order to bolster French commercial interests. The tabloids could still run such headlines, however, with Russia as their whipping-boy of choice. Moscow is still convinced sanctions can be used as a means to returning UN weapons inspectors as the sole arbiters of disarmament. "We are not at all opposing lifting of sanctions - what we are insisting on is that Security Council resolutions must be implemented," said Russian ambassador to the UN Sergei Lavrov, ominously echoing the United States when it insisted that it did not seek war, but the implementation of a litany of UN resolutions. Still, there are powerful cards to play for those who believe sanctions are the key to reasserting UN authority- by obstructing the return of UN weapons inspectors, the US colonial administration could be construed as just as elusive of international control as the former Iraqi government. The image of American General Tommy Franks smoking cigars in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces, after all, did not play well in Europe, nor especially among Iraq's beleaguered population.
The UN's oil-for-food programme needs attention. Before being shelved by the war, it fed nearly two-thirds of Iraq's population, and no immediate substitute for it is available. It hardly seems practical for the occupation authorities to reconstruct the scheme unilaterally. The obvious solution is to extend the current arrangement for as long as it is needed. For Iraq to buy food and other badly needed imports, however, it needs to sell oil. But because Iraq remains under economic sanctions imposed after the first Gulf War, it can do so only under the supervision of the UN, which screens contracts, monitors imports, and uses some of the proceeds to settle war claims against Iraq. The United States now wants the Security Council to lift those sanctions.
But who would control the oil revenues? Iraq cannot yet do so because it lacks a government, and neither the Iraqi people nor the international community want to see the United States in charge. As an interim step, why not have the Security Council designate the secretary general to act as an agent for Iraq, under close supervision and in a highly transparent manner?
This opinion is in accordance with De la Sabliere's statements in the Security Council, but will probably ultimately be rejected by the American occupation authorities, more solicitious to American control of oil profits. The US has already assumed control of weapons inspections, humanitarian aid, and Iraq's government, why would it cede Iraq's oil to the control of the United Nations rather than allow it to be drilled by its own thirsty energy corporations? The US, of course, would probably argue that placing the secretary general in charge as an "agent" for Iraq would be no different than continuing the restrictions on oil sales stipulated by the sanctions. Ruggie also suggests other wonderful yet impractical ideas for postwar Iraq, including UN control of its government and UN police forces, while US and UK troops provide security. Of course, the most explosive issue in Iraq right now is anger with the US-UK occupation itself, and the US would certainly not agree to Ruggie's provisions for UN governmental supervision. He suggests that the US would have to accede to such positions as international recognition of any Iraqi government is necessary, but international legitimacy of any type seems to be the last thing on America's mind as of late.
How can the international community, then, even hope to gain so much as a toehold in Iraq, controlled by a United States which Ruggie describes as having an "Our blood and treasure, our decisions" mantra? The answer may lie in Iraq's debts. Iraq's oil sales currently amount to $15 billion annually, under UN controls. Its debt, however, is somewhere between $200 and $300 billion, a dire financial situation. Time Magazine reports that Iraq's creditors, most notably France, Germany, and Russia, are likely to demand contracts for Iraqi reconstruction in compensation, a voice in Iraq's economy, and perhaps the UN "central role" which the three powers agreed to at the St. Petersburg summit and which the European Union confirmed its desire for at the Athens accession summit. If the US does not succeed in persuading the troika to relieve Iraq's debt, it will have to assume the debt itself, passing it onto US taxpayers, an option the Bush administration would rather not consider. Germany, at least, seems prepared to use its creditor status to its advantage, its finance minister demanding compensation immediately following the fall of Baghdad. This may yet prove the key to harnessing European economic prowess to achieve soft balancing of American power in Iraq.
True Modernisation is Incompatible with Absolutism Why Iran, and not Colonised Iraq, is the Model for the Mideast
Lurking beneath the curious mixture of justifications for American "wars of liberation" is the pall of absolutism. The idea that there is but one way forward into "modernity" and that its total achievement will produce an "end of history," as Francis Fukuyama called it, is at the root of modern conflict. Absolutists, composed of an array of causes ranging from Christian to Muslim fundamentalism, neoimperialism to liberal interventionist internationalism, free-market capitalism to global Communism, all advocate the implementation of their vision, and ultimately such through imposition. The revelation that there is resistance to one's ideology, to the absolutist, results in the impulse to ram their "superior" vision down the world's throat.
The war in Iraq was masterminded by neo-conservative ideologues who believe that global terrorism is the result of the failure of Arab societies to modernise. Paul Wolfowitz's grandiose scheme for remaking the Middle East embodies the dangerous myth that the only way to peace in the region is to emulate America - in the American deputy defence secretary's eyes, as in Mr Blair's, the very paradigm of modernity.
The neoconservatives' arguments are supported by scholars such as Bernard Lewis, author of What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, an investigation of why he believes the Islamic world fell so far behind the West. Having dismissed other potential explanations, Lewis concludes, vaguely and awkwardly briefly, that it is the "lack of freedom" in the Islamic world that eventually led to its decline from the centre of science and artistry. He notes that reliance on Shari'a law will forever impair the Middle East, and goes so far as to say the separation of mosque and state is imperative- a statement which is an anathema to millions of Muslims. Lewis eventually prescribes introspection for those inhabiting the Islamic world, in order to realise that, by somehow emulating the West, they can finally succeed. Edward Said is characteristically offended by the white-maned Lewis assuming he even has the right, as a Westerner, to undertake a critical evaluation of the Islamic Mideast, but it does seem difficult to understand how one can make such loaded assumptions about the Middle East without having left the Princeton campus.
Thomas Friedman, liberal interventionist and columnist for the New York Times, in an exhaustive effort at appeasing the gods of jingoism, gloats that the American victory in Iraq is simply a matter of US cultural superiority and, if the people of the Middle East ever hope to resist American power, they would be well advised to adopt its ways:
America sliced right through Iraq. It did so because we are a free-market democracy that is capable of amassing huge amounts of technical power...We [the US] are strong because of who we are. Iraq was weak because of what it was...The message to Arabs who are depressed at how quickly Saddam folded is: You can't take on America without building something of substance of your own. You thought rogues like Saddam would bring you dignity. They have only distracted you from doing what it takes to really build your own societies...The Arab-Muslim states need to understand that if they build up this terrorism bubble again - and it may well happen - America will burst it again. But they also need to know that if they want to rebuild their societies, starting with Iraq, on a real foundation of decency, tolerance and rule of law, we will pay any price and bear any burden to help them - if they want us.
Notwithstanding the factual errors ("Arab-Muslim" states building "bubbles of terror"?) or the plagiarised Kennedyan prose, Friedman's thoughts overflow with insinuations of Caucasian racial superiority and the need to engage in Kiplingesque "white man's burden" activities to assist the Mideast in building societies modeled directly on Western democracies. Philip Weiss of the New York Observer, dismissive of such ideas, explains Friedman's position:
He believes, in essence, in the clash of civilizations- that the anti-Americanism in the Arab world, from which 11 September flowed, had little to do with American practices and everything to do with the Arab world’s failure to participate in globalisation. These are stagnant societies that cannot play in the new arrangements of capital and talent that the computer and the end of the Cold War brought about. They don’t have democracy, which would allow them to participate; they don’t harness the engines of education, free speech and women’s rights, which maximize human capital. They are falling behind. This leaves their embittered, underemployed men to sit around burning with resentments against their own society and ours, and thus to become the playthings for Osama bin Laden.
Weiss goes on to skewer Friedman's supposedly-informed observations of the Arab world, noting he can hardly understand Arabs without a fluency in Arabic, and that:
...for all his time in foreign lands, he has little ability to see things from someone else’s point of view. There is a secret xenophobia about him. He travels everywhere, and everywhere reports to his wife, according to the diary portion of his latest book, Longitudes & Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11. "You know, honey, the wheels aren’t on very tight out there." Somehow, nowhere are they tight enough for Mr. Friedman except home- when he is in the neat, clean Washington subway...
For all his time in the Arab world (including five years in Beirut), it is hard to read his work without concluding that he really is anti-Arab. He cannot abide Arab culture as it is; it is all of it infected by bin Laden-ism. "Mr. Hobbes’s neighborhood," he calls the Arab world in his latest book. "Backward," he said of young Arabs in a recent column. He writes dismissively of "the wall in the Arab mind."
Friedman's conception of the Arab world is self-evidently bigoted. The irony of the phrase "the wall in the Arab mind" is that it highlights the author's own gross intolerance and closed-mindedness. But this is not unexpected of Friedman, whose firebrand preaching of the Holy Book of Globalisation has always made him a suspect member of the left. Friedman vehemently advocates the expansion of McDonald's global consumerist empire because, under his "Golden Arches Theory," no two nations containing branches of this restaurant could ever go to war with each other, and calls the World Trade Centre the "temple" of America's "civic religion," which Weiss notes is "apparently is invention and making money." Can he really be considered a culturally tolerant, socially progressive liberal in the first place?
Compounding the neoconservatives' arguments, of course, are the President's own absolutist convictions, influenced by evangelical protestantism and neo-Manicheanism, the combination of which leads him to be suspicious or contemptuous of seemingly every culture outside Texas. Weiss explains that "Bush and the right-wingers demonstrate blanket insensitivity to Arab societies. They would, after all, heedlessly cause the destruction of the Iraqi museum, the dispersal and erasure of its cultural treasures." John Gray notes that Bush's absolutism is incompatible entirely with the liberal democracy he and the neoconservatives purport to promote:
Most seriously, the neo-conservatives have a blind spot regarding the singularities of American development. This paradigm of modernity is like no other advanced industrial society. Nowhere else is religion so pervasive or so politically powerful. In which other country has the head of state felt it necessary to declare himself neutral in the quarrel between Darwinism and creationism?
In the monocular neoconservative view of modernisation, every society in the world will eventually follow America in becoming a secular democracy. In reality, the US is a less secular regime than Turkey. If America is at the cutting edge of modernity, so is fundamentalism.
Gray also states that the American desire to spread free-market globalisation is inconsistent with the development of its own economic prowess, supported by massive tariff wall. His main point, however, is that subjecting the Middle East to absolutism is dangerous and counterproductive:
By seeking to impose a monolithic modernisation on Arab countries, the US is preventing them from finding their own paths to development. As can already be seen, the result can only be to boost fundamentalism. Far from fostering secularism and liberal values, the destruction of Saddam's Ba'athist regime is strengthening radical Islam. As things stand it looks as if postwar Iraq may suffer the fate of Lebanon and become a chronically weak, fragmented state. But if it does hold together it will not be a democracy on the Washington or Westminster model. It could well be more like Iran after the fall of the Shah.
Real progress cannot be made under the heel of an oppressor. For a nation to succeed genuinely, it requires a national experience in self-determination, whatever direction this may take. It is for this reason Iran under the ayatollahs may become the success story of the Middle East. It may not be the most tolerant or progressive state, but its revolutionary absolutism has given way, gradually, to evolutionary moderation. The key to Iran's success, and its indigenous version of modernisation, lies in its popular will. Unlike colonialism or Nasserism, Iran's government came about as the result of a majoritarian revolution against the American-installed Shah and his oppressive SAVAK secret police. In swinging from the extreme of oppressive monarchy to that of Islamic fundamentalism, many Iranians are again agitated, and are pressing for reforms. Already, significant progress has been made under the enlightened stewardship of Prime Minister Khatami, though, admittedly, the ayatollahs retain absolute power. Still, Iran has been slowly and erratically approaching the stated goal of the absolutists- modernisation. It is not the modernity of Britain or the United States, but it is one in which Iran will ultimately achieve a greater degree of popular representation in its government and augment its already modernised economy. Separating religion and state in the Islamic world may prove untenable given the nature of Shari'a and the devotion of its followers (see Islam by Seyyed Hossein Nasr), but states like Poland still claim official religions and expend large budget allocations on church construction. Not to mention, as Gray noted, the US is no model of secularism.
One should not advocate the application of US policy in fomenting the conditions for Islamic revolution, however, in order to create more Irans. The real lesson of Iran is that it has achieved a slow, erratic, but progressive national development in accordance with the mistakes and successes of its own population, rather than through manipulation by outside interests. The West should learn to facilitate the interests of Mideastern populations, rather than preventing them from finding their own paths to development. As Edward Said observed in Orientalism, the intervention of Western powers in the Mideast has been the primary cause of its decline, rather than inherent flaws. As Iran made serious progress toward a social democracy under Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953, a coup to reinstall the Shah was orchestrated by the CIA in what was seen at the time as both preservation of a strategic ally and the retention of oil supplies which would have been nationalised under the new government. Thus began a detour of 50+ years, after which only recently has Iran been able to move in such a direction again.
However, advice of nonintervention is not adovacy of a libertarian foreign policy. As was suggested in the previous column, engaging the Mideast in dialogue and trade links will bring about far more internal change than confrontationalism, which tends to harden convictions on either side of a conflict. Hopefully, this method will also allow an improved society to emerge without undergoing the trauma of an Iranian-style revolution. Weiss argues for modernisation in the context of cultural relativism:
I would like Arab society to change as well, for Islamic fundamentalism to soften. But bullying and dismissals of "the Arab mind" won’t achieve that. And we shall see about the removal of Hussein. Can you simply wave a wand and change a culture? Their traditions may not suit democracy, not in the form that we have it here; the absence of women in public life seems more complex and consensual than the assertion that they are oppressed; and their brand of capitalism will surely be different from the "civic religion" that Mr. Friedman worships at Wall Street.
An article in the Boston Globe, entitled "For many Syrians, reforms must come from within" reveals that the majority of Syrians believe no matter the odds, their destiny must be the result of internal reform rather than external deposition of the Ba'athist government:
Many Syrians believe reform must come from within. "We are moving toward a democracy slowly and it will take time, maybe even 30 years," says the elderly sheik, his soft voice barely audible as he sat on a long sofa with his two sons at his side. "Societies should be given the chance to change on their own...The United States should not tell the Iraqis or the Syrians or any state in the region how to run our countries."
Many Syrians have faith in the reformist impulses of Bashar, who promised a liberating "Damascus spring" upon taking power in 2000. But even those Syrians disenchanted with his leadership feel that change should not be imposed by a rain of American cluster-bombs. Many unsatisfied with the pace of reforms are revolutionary Islamists. Furthermore, American pressure has notably decreased the impulse for pluralism:
Instead of debasing his record, even Syrians critical of their government feel they must unite to protect their country from a possible military attack or sanctions from the United States.
Even intellectuals supportive of the US invasion of Iraq characterised possible American interlocution in Syria pejoratively. "Either an ignorant dictator or a Harvard man trying to occupy us," one said, "They are both bad choices. I don't know which one is worse." The ambivalence among Middle Easterners most enthusiastic of the neoconservative colonialist project for its further application is demonstrable of the general inclination toward self-determined modernisation.
The one-track intolerance of the absolutists is inherently contradictory, acknowledging, nominally, the success of alternate paradigms within the West. For it is not just between "civilisations" that such relativist modernisations occur. Russia floundered under free-market capitalism when it was first introduced in 1992, and it has taken a decade to find its own means of coping with a market economy. So too for each Eastern Bloc state. The United States and Western Europe have devised different means of achieving the same end- economic stabilisation through wealth redistribution -through New Deal policies and social democracy respectively. In each Western nation-state, universal suffrage was achieved in a unique fashion. The historically relative experience of modernisation among Western societies should serve as an instructive model for how the West views such processes in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Containing America Using Internationalism to Marginalise Military Hegemony
Neoconservative propagandist Robert Kagan was the first to popularise the concept that Europe was overreliant on diplomatic overtures and international cooperation in its approach to world affairs. In his seminal essay, "Power and Weakness", Kagan argues that the United States and Europe have reached a fundamental divergence in their perspectives on how to engage in extra-Western disturbances. While the United States believes in the application of force to meet force, he explains, Europe would prefer to rely on a more subtle approach, one consistent with the forces which engendered European unity. These attitudes, he believes, work well within the tranquility of Europe, but are bound to play into the hands of uncooperative autocrats, terrorist groups, and assorted other "dangers" abroad. He asserts that if not for the protection of the American military, Europe would be exposed and vulnerable, forced to rearm itself to protect its interests. Not only this, but Kagan concludes that Europe is not even capable of American military strength- and that historically, military powers have upheld the law by force while outgunned states appeal to international law. Kagan appears to have fallen prey to the discredited interpretation of Nietzsche that his study of the "genaeology of morals" is a prescription for a return to the Dark Age creed of the heroic code.
Similarly, writing in the New York Times, Tony Judt finds that "Europe finds no counterweight to American power." Arguing that the state of European unity is tenuous and will further wither with the inclusion of Soviet bloc states, Judt submerges such rational interpretations in the blood-lustful bile of the fact that "America has the guns and Europe doesn't." The American idea that Europe is held together only by the ephemeral acknowledgement that "enlightened self-interest" is the best course for its ultimately dominant military-states lies in the revelation that the United States will seemingly only acknowledge the solidity of Europe when a potent EU defence force emerges.
Americans like to argue that Europe's generous social policies are a byproduct of the Continent's defence costs being underwritten by the American military presence there. However, the current fifteen members of the EU employ two million troops between them, and the most modern, well-equipped militaries outside the US itself. If a unified European force was produced, it could easily match the manpower and technological potency of the United States, and slash costs at that, with the redundancies of fifteen command structures removed.
However, it is not in any way in Europe's best interests to engage in a transatlantic arms race. European states have the ability to manipulate the United States financially, to outflank it diplomatically, and to provide a beacon of international cooperation and social welfare life quality to serve as a model to the world. In this way, certain European states and willing partners could form an alliance similar to the Quadruple Alliance of 1814, which succeeded in containing and then driving back Napoleon, a revolutionary exporter much like the neoconservatives. Following the checking of American power, then, international organisations like the United Nations would be reinvigourated to act as they were intended, collective security apparati like the Concert of Europe devised by Prince Metternich at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
Judt finds the potentiality of Europe using "soft balancing" to influence the US ultimately ineffectual. Indeed, it would seem, ostensibly, the only effective restraints on US power have been military, such as the prospect of nuclear holocaust with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, or China's engagement of over a million troops in the Korean War. The military power of North Vietnam and its Vietcong insurgents was laughable compared to that of the United States, but the arrogant superpower was forced to disengage after the protracted resistance outlasted the patience of its victory-starved populace.
Financial Balancing
However, the United States is currently in an especially vulnerable position. Its economy is sinking into shambles. The prospect of further debts incurred from the various aggressive campaigns cheerled by the neoconservatives into the Middle East, as well as the ludicrous economic medicine of granting exorbitant tax cuts to the most ostentatiously wealthy in a startling display of fiscal irresponsibility unseen since the presidency of Herbert Hoover, prior to the Great Depression, can only mean the economic turmoil in the US will expand indefinitely, save for the obscene enrichment of those granted contracts for Iraqi reconstruction. The inevitable result of such ludicrous spending levels is the need to borrow money. For the United States, this has meant the transformation from a creditor to a debtor nation. It is more dependent on foreign capital than at any time following the First World War.
President Bush's emulation of the fiscal policies of Ronald Reagan bear an instructive lesson, that reliance on outside funding will inevitably force a change in policy. The bombastic militarism embraced by Reagan in the early 1980s soon gave way to a more conciliatory policy toward the Soviet Union. This was not primarily due to some change of heart on the part of Reagan, although his friendship with Gorbachev was somewhat influential. The most decisive factor in Reagan's agreement to arms control treaties and the most genuine détente of the Cold War was debt.
Reagan admirers have always claimed that it was Gorbachev who approached Reagan on arms control, as the Soviet economy could not keep pace with Reagan's arms race. Glasnost and perestroika were untenable while simultaneously spending wildly on weaponry. But, as Stephen Ambrose explains in Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938:
...the Americans had paid for their military buildup with money borrowed from the Japanese. Reagan was leaving his grandchildren with a $3 trillion debt. Prophets warned that some day that debt would have to be paid, and when it was it would be the American people who would be sacrificing not only consumer goods but even food and shelter to pay for [the Strategic Defence Initiative]. As Eisenhower had observed way back in 1953, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
Luckily for the United States, it was able to overcome the catastrophic fate of Eisenhower's worst prophecies about the military-industrial complex as Clinton-era Rubinomics produced the longest economic boom in its national history. Nevertheless, Reagan was forced to back down from his aggressive threat-mongering before the debt level grew even more unwieldy. As the same policies of excessive military spending and tax cuts create budget disparities during this Bush administration, the United States, like an impoverished man having taken out far too many mortgages, will have to answer to its bank. Increasingly, that bank is Europe.
Niall Ferguson demonstrates, in his New York Times article, "The True Cost of Hegemony: Huge Debt", the financial limitations on military supremacy. Whereas under Reagan the United States was spending solely on weaponry, limited campaigns (Lebanon and Grenada) and the anti-communist insurgency forces it sponsored (such as the Contras in Nicaragua), the Bush administration's doctrine, requiring the occupation, pacification, and reconstruction of entire nation-states, is fiscally daunting. The potent imperial powers of the past, most notably Britain, have all been creditor-nations, achieving economic as well as military supremacy. Ferguson expounds:
In the prime of the European empires, when the British ran much of the Middle East, the dominant power was supposed to be a creditor, not a debtor, investing large chunks of its own savings in the economic development of its colonies. Hegemony also meant hegemoney. Britain, the world's banker before 1914, never had to worry about a run on the pound during its imperial heyday.
The engagement of the neoconservatives' targets "could make for a fragile Pax Americana if foreign investors decide to reduce their stakes in the American economy, possibly trading their dollars for the increasingly vigourous euro," Ferguson explains. The debt of the 1980s, compounded by today's debts, amounts to a total of $8 billion in claims against the United States. Debtor status is not particularly an economic concern for the US as much as it is strategic. On the eve of the First World War, capital outflow from Britain was an unprecedented 9%. British hegemony encouraged its commercial institutions to invest in colonial improvements, and investments in non-colonised locales (like Egypt, pre-1882) gave Britain critical leverage. American investors are much more risk-averse; only 1% of American direct investment today goes to the Middle East. The sinking dollar and American stock markets also highlight the concern that the dollar may be abandoned as the world's stable currency of choice, as investors shrink from increasingly risky US government securities.
The last empire to rely so heavily on foreign credit was Russia under Nicholas II, which was inevitably manipulated by its French investors and ultimately collapsed! As the Bush administration increasingly alienates Europe, pressure will grow to use the power of the European Central Bank to influence the direction of European investments in the US. Whether or not Europe is able to transform its economic leverage into coherent policy is irrelevant; the prospect of being saddled with an untenable debt will inevitably force an end to American illusions of limitless power resting on military prowess.
The US agenda of promoting free and open markets thus backfires upon it once again; the globalised economy presents an inherent limitation to revolutionary expansionism via military force and provides a pathway by which Europe can influence American policy. During the Napoleonic Wars, Britain blockaded Continental ports and hence wreaked havoc on the commerce of Napoleonic Europe. In economics, especially, the lessons of 1814 apply.
Diplomatic Balancing
US policymakers were stunned when their plans for the utilisation of Turkish bases for the invasion of Iraq were thwarted by a parliamentary vote. A Middle Eastern democracy, of all things, had failed to heed their demands. The most significant of the Turkish lawmakers' motivations was preventing the overthrow of Saddam Hussein from resulting in the creation of a Kurdish state in Northern Iraq, ultimately encouraging Kurdish partisans in eastern Turkey. After decades of turmoil, eastern Turkey is now relatively stable. In accordance with EU demands, Turkey has outlawed its death penalty and come into compliance with a plethora of economic regulations. Turkey has been willing to trade longstanding policies for a glimmer of hope of EU membership, and has thus further advanced the most secular and most prosperous state in the Middle East. The US State Department could not believe that Turkey would snub its requests after over half a century of close collusion. The US has protected Turkey since the late 1940s, when the Truman Doctrine proclaimed its intention to thwart Soviet advances on it and Greece. The fact that this special relationship, as well as the promised $30 billion in economic aid to Turkey, was not enough to win over the Turkish legislature is a statement about both the nature of democracy in the Islamic world, in which US incursions on Muslim nations are overwhelmingly rejected, and the overpowering belief among the Turkish population that there is no need to trade national interest for aid when both the European quality of life and participation in the European political system are just around the corner.
Turkey is a primary example of how the shining example of the EU has brought positive change to an extra-European state. Morocco, too, seems willing to follow the Turkish path in pursuit of EU membership, and there is no reason to believe other nations will not follow. The EU has been an unprecedented success story, and those in Brussels who believe its expansion should be limited to nations befitting certain cultural parametres are missing a golden opportunity. The ability for the EU to remake nations through positive incentive is infinitely more advantageous than the US' military might being imposed upon them. That the EU's transformatory powers are consensual makes them so potent- the EU cannot foment majoritarian popular unrest in such places, as the organisation itself is founded upon self-interest.
The EU thus provides a marked contrast to the aggressive nature of the United States. The juxtaposition of stable, prosperous Turkey with restive, colonised Iraq will highlight for Arab states the direction each would rather take. Though the point is often made by the US that the Middle East is far from democratic, save for its favourite pet, Israel, the EU enjoys considerably more trust and respect among Arabs for its pacifist overtones and pro-Palestinian stance. While the EU's credibility is tarnished, unfortunately, in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, it has far more credit in the greater Arab world. Using open trade and economic aid as incentives, the EU could work through enlightened monarchs and autocrats in Syria (provided it's not soon invaded), Jordan, the UAE, Oman, and especially Qatar to produce diversified economies and to extract humanitarian concessions. The remainder, the "hostile" Mideast, could be effectively isolated and contained. The Arab media would not be able to ignore the positive benefits of EU partnership in places like Qatar, headquarters of al-Jazeera, nor the contrast with the bloodied soil of Iraq. With an economic structure in place to foment a middle class, demand for democracy will increase.
If this vision sounds too much like the US' belief it will create a "reverse domino effect" of democracy in the Mideast, it's because it relies similarly on the desire for emulation. However, with the EU policy achieved through self-determined interest, it is less suspect than the apparent US colonialism in Iraq. It is not a flawless policy, but one infinitely more possible than the American doctrine of confrontationalism and revolutionary imposition, and one which respects, rather than condescends to, the ability of the Arab world to modernise in its own fashion. Robert Kagan views this philosophy as laughably naïve, given the "forces of evil" supposedly lurking in the mysterious, Oriental Heart of Darkness his ideological cohorts seek to exploit. The real naïvité probably lies in the myopia of seeing the answer in military force- and not properly envisioning the aftermath. Furthermore, the strategy has built in a flexibility American "democratisation in force" appears to lack- the patience to sit out theocracies and dictatorships so long as they pose no demonstrable threat to regional or world security. In any case, the American doctrine is discredited and European internationalism becomes, at least, the superior alternative.
The EU must use its diplomatic experience to thus reach out to the rest of the world. It's already EU policy to encourage the creation of other economic superblocks; it should be doing more to influence this movement. Promising signs of EU-style collusion have occurred in South America with MerCoSur, and to a lesser degree in Africa with the AU. East Asia presents more acute problems with its fears of either Chinese or Japanese domination of any union, but the interest of all East Asian states in the peaceful resolution of the North Korean nuclear crisis is potent enough to check US military engagement, ridiculous though that sounds given the (atomic) nature of the threat. Providing a radiant example of international cooperation and promoting its global propagation in localised manifestations is both a peaceful counterexample to the fearsomely fleeting bellicose "coalitions of the willing" envisioned by neoconservatives and a means to extend European influence and check American militarism.
Continuing to promote organs of international law is also key to a European outflanking of American ideology. Exposing American hypocrisy on such matters as the International Criminal Court, weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East (of which its ally Israel has many), and free trade, which it applies on a self-enriching basis alone will gain supporters not only among the international community but within the United States as well. Strongly supporting the UN and bolstering its peacekeeping role will satisfy liberal interventionists across the West while minimising US vigilante justice.
How do [neoconservative] pundits explain that this anomaly has not appeared more openly before? Because, they say, the Cold War and the protective shield of NATO, essentially provided for by the US, made it possible for Europeans to build a kind of paradise based on idealistic but somewhat illusive concepts like international law, multilateral agreements, human rights, etc. These commentators have a tendency to consider the European Union as the apex of fairyland playing funny girls’ games and having even invented their own funny currency. Evidently, they consider that, in the new world order, this asymmetrical development can not go on much longer, if only because of the irrepressible need for the superpower to exercise his muscles in order to secure its eminence in a world of macho states.
The US, arguably the world's preeminent power since 1945, never saw fit to "muscle flex" before its government was hijacked by neoconservative Jacobins intent on remaking the world in their image. In Europe, extensive worries about the nature of the transatlantic alliance have caused some to label the responses of Germany and France to American policy in Iraq to be overreactions. The extreme example of this, Tony Blair, appears ready to sacrifice every scrap of his own respectability in the name of saving the Atlantic Alliance. In truth, the neoconservatives view Europe, and indeed, the alliance itself, as a constraint upon the United States "natural" right to do as it pleases, with its evident hegemony. Their interpretation of George Washington's warning not to engage in "foreign entanglements" seems to be "conquer and pillage all you'd like, but don't listen to any objections." Their opinions, however, are far from representative of the mainstream American population, which appears lost and delusional among the revelations of their nation's strategies, or the historical nature of US foreign policy, which always emphasised the maintenance of international law and the creation of organisations, like the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank, to provide fora for the airing of agreements between independent nation-states.
What has changed is that the neoconservatives who have the President's ear have manipulated public fear, spurred by 11 September, of any danger to the American mainland. It has been the US, therefore, which has departed almost wholesale from its policy of internationalism and cooperation. To try and engage in transatlanticism with the neoconservative government of today is to bend over backward acquiescing to their demands for little in return- to suffer the fate of Tony Blair. To engage in containment of the new American aggression is not only to avoid the fate of supplication to the incendiary New World Order, it is to reverse the course of a dangerous permutation in American foreign policy.
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