[A-List] US imperialism: self-destructive

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Out of the wreckage

By tearing up the global rulebook, the US is in fact undermining its own
imperial rule

George Monbiot
Tuesday February 25, 2003
The Guardian

The men who run the world are democrats at home and dictators abroad. They
came to power by means of national elections which possess, at least, the
potential to represent the will of their people. Their citizens can dismiss
them without bloodshed, and challenge their policies in the expectation
that, if enough people join in, they will be obliged to listen.

Internationally, they rule by brute force. They and the global institutions
they run exercise greater economic and political control over the people of
the poor world than its own governments do. But those people can no sooner
challenge or replace them than the citizens of the Soviet Union could vote
Stalin out of office. Their global governance is, by all the classic
political definitions, tyrannical.

But while citizens' means of overthrowing this tyranny are limited, it seems
to be creating some of the conditions for its own destruction. Over the past
week, the US government has threatened to dismantle two of the institutions
which have, until recently, best served its global interests.

On Saturday, President Bush warned the UN security council that accepting a
new resolution authorising a war with Iraq was its "last chance" to prove
"its relevance". Four days before, a leaked document from the Pentagon
showed that this final opportunity might already have passed. The US is
planning to build a new generation of nuclear weapons in order to enhance
its ability to launch a pre-emptive attack. This policy threatens both the
comprehensive test ban treaty and the nuclear non-proliferation treaty - two
of the principal instruments of global security - while endangering the
international compact that the UN exists to sustain. The security council,
which, despite constant disruption, survived the cold war, is beginning to
look brittle in its aftermath.

On Wednesday, the US took a decisive step towards the destruction of the
World Trade Organisation. The WTO's current trade round collapsed in Seattle
in 1999 because the poor nations perceived that it offered them nothing,
while granting new rights to the rich world's corporations. It was
relaunched in Qatar in 2001 only because those nations were promised two
concessions: they could override the patents on expensive drugs and import
cheaper copies when public health was threatened, and they could expect a
major reduction in the rich world's agricultural subsidies. At the WTO
meeting in Geneva last week, the US flatly reneged on both promises.

The Republicans' victory in the mid-term elections last November was secured
with the help of $60m from America's big drug firms. This appears to have
been a straightforward deal: we will buy the elections for you if you
abandon the concession you made in Qatar. The agri-business lobbies in both
the US and Europe appear to have been almost as successful: the poor nations
have been forced to discuss a draft document which effectively permits the
rich world to continue dumping its subsidised products in their markets.

If the US does not back down, the world trade talks will collapse at the
next ministerial meeting in Mexico in September, just as they did in
Seattle. If so, then the WTO, as its former director-general has warned,
will fall apart. Nations will instead resolve their trade disputes
individually or through regional agreements. Already, by means of the free
trade agreement of the Americas and the harsh concessions it is extracting
from other nations as a condition of receiving aid, the US appears to be
preparing for this possibility.

The US, in other words, seems to be ripping up the global rulebook. As it
does so, those of us who have campaigned against the grotesque injustices of
the existing world order will quickly discover that a world with no
institutions is even nastier than a world run by the wrong ones.
Multilateralism, however inequitable it may be, requires certain concessions
to other nations. Unilateralism means piracy: the armed robbery of the poor
by the rich. The difference between today's world order and the one for
which the US may be preparing is the difference between mediated and
unmediated force.

But the possible collapse of the current world order, dangerous as it will
be, also provides us with the best opportunities we have ever encountered
for replacing the world's unjust and coercive institutions with a fairer and
more democratic means of global governance.

By wrecking the multilateral system for the sake of a few short-term,
corporate interests, the US is, paradoxically, threatening its own
tyrannical control of other nations. The existing international agencies,
fashioned by means of brutal power politics at the end of the second world
war, have permitted the US to develop its international commercial and
political interests more effectively than it could have done alone.

The institutions through which it has worked - the security council, the
WTO, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank - have provided a
semblance of legitimacy for what has become, in all but name, the
construction of empire. The end of multilateralism would force the US, as it
is already beginning to do, to drop this pretence and frankly admit to its
imperial designs on the rest of the world. This admission, in turn, forces
other nations to seek to resist it. Effective resistance would create the
political space in which their citizens could begin to press for a new, more
equitable multilateralism.

There are several means of contesting the unilateral power of the US, but
perhaps the most immediate and effective one is to accelerate its economic
crisis. Already, strategists in China are suggesting that the yuan should
replace the dollar as east Asia's reserve currency. Over the past year, as
the Observer revealed on Sunday, the euro has started to challenge the
dollar's position as the international means of payment for oil. The
dollar's dominance of world trade, particularly the oil market, is all that
permits the US Treasury to sustain the nation's massive deficit, as it can
print inflation-free money for global circulation. If the global demand for
dollars falls, the value of the currency will fall with it, and speculators
will shift their assets into euros or yen or even yuan, with the result that
the US economy will begin to totter.

Of course an economically weakened nation in possession of overwhelming
military force remains a very dangerous one. Already, as I suggested last
week, the US appears to be using its military machine to extend its economic
life. But it is not clear that the American people would permit their
government to threaten or attack other nations without even a semblance of
an international political process, which is, of course, what the Bush
administration is currently destroying.

America's assertions of independence from the rest of the world force the
rest of the world to assert its independence from America. They permit the
people of the weaker nations to contemplate the global democratic revolution
that is long overdue.

· The Age of Consent, George Monbiot's proposals for global democratic
governance, will be published in June