[A-List] Manifest Destiny

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A New Direction for America

by William Pfaff

New York Review of Books

Volume 54, Number 2 (February 15 2007 issue)


President George Bush has decided to disregard both the political message of the
2006 midterm election and congressional pressure for an early end to America's
Iraq involvement, as well as the Baker-Hamilton proposals. These decisions are
meeting much opposition, which is likely to fail. Bush's opponents have been
unable to propose a course of withdrawal that is not a politically prohibited
concession of American defeat and that does not risk still more destructive
consequences in Iraq and probably the region - even though the result of delayed
withdrawal could be worse in all respects. Most of Bush's critics in Congress,
in the press and television, and in the foreign policy community are hostage to
past support of his policy and to their failure to question the political and
ideological assumptions upon which it was built.

This followed from a larger intellectual failure. For years there has been
little or no critical reexamination of how and why the limited, specific, and
ultimately successful postwar American policy of "patient but firm and vigilant
containment of Soviet expansionist tendencies ... and pressure against the free
institutions of the Western world" (as George Kennan formulated it at the time)
has over six decades turned into a vast project for "ending tyranny in the world".
{1}

The Bush administration defends its pursuit of this unlikely goal by means 
of internationally illegal, unilateralist, and preemptive attacks on other
countries, accompanied by arbitrary imprisonments and the practice of torture,
and by making the claim that the United States possesses an exceptional status
among nations that confers upon it special international responsibilities, and
exceptional privileges in meeting those responsibilities.

This is where the problem lies. Other American leaders before George Bush have
made the same claim in matters of less moment. It is something like a national
heresy to suggest that the United States does not have a unique moral status and
role to play in the history of nations, and therefore in the affairs of the
contemporary world. In fact it does not.

This is a national conceit that is the comprehensible result of the religious
beliefs of the early New England colonists (Calvinist religious dissenters,
moved by millenarian expectations and theocratic ideas), which convinced them
that their austere settlements in the wilderness represented a new start in
humanity's story. However, the earlier Virginia settlements were commercial, 
as were those of the Dutch, and the proprietary colonies in Pennsylvania and
Maryland were Quaker and Catholic, and had no such ideas. Nor did the earliest
colonies, the Spanish in Florida and the Southwest, and the French on the Great
Lakes and the Mississippi.

The nobility of the colonies' constitutional deliberations following the War of
Independence, and the expression of the new thought of the Enlightenment in the
institutions of government they created, contributed to this belief in national
uniqueness. Thomas Paine wrote that

"... the case and circumstances of America present themselves as in the
beginning of the world ...  We have no occasion to roam for information into 
the obscure field of antiquity, nor hazard ourselves upon conjecture. We are ...
as if we had lived in the beginning of time."


Even Francis Fukuyama, a recovering neoconservative, acknowledges in a recent
book that American economic and political policies today rest on an unearned
claim to privilege, the American "belief in American exceptionalism that most
non-Americans simply find not credible". Nor, he adds, is the claim tenable,
since "it presupposes an extremely high level of competence" which the country
does not demonstrate. {2}

The belief nonetheless is old and very powerful. The critic Edmund Wilson,
scarcely a chauvinist, wrote nostalgically, near the end of his long life, about
"the old idea of an anointed nation doing God's work in the world", although he
deplored its corruption in his time by "moralistic cant". {3} It is true that by
establishing a republic, Americans made themselves successors to the dynastic
monarchies of Europe (although the Dutch Republic and Swiss Federation preceded
us). But that God had taken a hand in this, nominating us as his Chosen and
confiding to us an earthly mission, has yet to be demonstrated, and a moral
theologian might see in the claim the grave sin of Presumption.


A claim to preeminent political virtue is a claim to power, a demand that other
countries yield to what Washington asserts as universal interests. Since 1989,
when the end of the cold war left the United States the "sole superpower", 
much has been made of this, with discussion of a benevolent (or even inevitable)
American world hegemony or empire - a Pax Americana in succession to the 
Pax Britannica. While such ideas have not been explicit in official discourse,
they seem all but universally assumed, in one or another form, in policy and
political circles.

The most coherent and plausible official articulation of such reasoning was
offered in the summer of 2003 by Condoleezza Rice, then President Bush's
national security adviser, speaking in London at the annual meeting of the
International Institute for Strategic Studies. She said that the time had come
to discard the system of balance of power among sovereign states established by
the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The Westphalian settlement ended the wars of
religion by establishing the principles of religious tolerance and absolute
state sovereignty. The UN is a faulty embodiment of international authority
because it is an indiscriminate assembly of all the governments of the world,
and should, she argued, be replaced as the ultimate world authority by an
alliance or coalition of the democracies. This is a theme frequently promoted 
in conservative circles in Washington.

Rice also told the institute's members that the time had come to reject ideas 
of multipolarity and balance of power in international relations. This was a
reference to French and other arguments in favor of an international system in
which a number of states or groups of states (like the EU) act autonomously,
serving as counterweights to American power. It followed the controversy earlier
that year over the UN Security Council's failure to authorize the US invasion of
Iraq. In the past, she said, balance of power may have "sustained the absence 
of war" but did not promote an enduring peace. "Multipolarity", she continued,
"is a theory of rivalry; of competing interests - and at its worst, competing
values. We have tried this before. It led to the Great War ... "

Foreign policies of power balance were, of course, a response to the rise of
nation-states of varying weight and ambition, which, in order to preserve their
independence and protect their national interests, had no alternative to
policies that "balanced" their relations and alliances with others in order to
contain rival interests and conflicting ambitions. The only apparent alternative
to such a policy is submission of all to a dominant power. Rice's seeming
confidence that such conflicts and rivalries would not create problems in some
new international organization of the democracies would seem very optimistic.
Nonetheless both the professional foreign policy community and American opinion
generally seem to assume that the international system is "naturally" headed
toward an eventual American-led consolidation of democratic authority over
international affairs.


During the first century and a half of the United States' history, the influence
of the national myth of divine election and mission was generally harmless, a
reassuring and inspiring untruth. During that period the country remained
largely isolated from international affairs. The myth found expression in the
idea of a "manifest destiny" of continental expansion -  including annexation of
Mexican land north of the Rio Grande - with no need to plead a divine commission.

 
With Woodrow Wilson, this changed. The national myth became a philosophy of
international action, and has remained so. In the great crisis of World War I
the United States and Wilson personally had thrust upon them seemingly
providential international roles; Wilson said that he believed he had been
chosen by God to lead America in showing "the way to the nations of the world
how they shall walk in the paths of liberty". The war's carnage and futility
largely destroyed the existing European order and undermined confidence in
European civilization. The European allies enthusiastically welcomed American
intervention in 1917, which tipped the military balance, and Wilson's Fourteen
Point plan for peace appealed to the people of the Central Powers as well as to
the allies and neutrals.

Wilson's plan, however, did not prove a success. The principle of universal
national self-determination did not solve Europe's problems but further
complicated them, creating new ethnic and territorial grievances subsequently
exploited by the fascist powers. A witness to the Versailles negotiations, the
British diplomat Harold Nicolson, considered Wilson a man "obsessed, possessed ...
by the conviction that the League [of Nations] covenant was his own revelation
and the solution of all human difficulties". The US Senate's failure to ratify
the League of Nations treaty (which Wilson had imagined as a proto-world
government) left most Americans persuaded of the prudence of national isolation,
support for which remained majority opinion in the United States until Pearl
Harbor.

When World War II ended, the isolationist bias remained, and foreign policy was
an issue in the 1946 and 1948 elections. As late as 1949, the leading figure in
the Republican Party, Senator Robert A Taft, objected to the NATO treaty, saying
that it involved unforeseeable commitments. (We can only imagine what he would
have made of NATO in Afghanistan today.) He was, on the other hand, in favor of
"international law defining the duties and obligations of nations  ...
international courts ... and joint armed force to enforce the law and the
decisions of that court". He felt the UN did not yet fulfill this ideal 
"but it goes a long way in that direction".

This seemingly contradictory position actually expressed the paradox of American
sentiment concerning foreign relations: on the one hand apprehensive about
involvement in international "power politics", and on the other open to utopian
reform, provided that it confirmed the special position the US had always
claimed. Despite his reservations about US military commitments abroad and his
isolationist instincts, Taft accepted the utopian global visions of Wilson and
Franklin Roosevelt.


The Korean War and developing political confrontation with Soviet Russia in
Europe provided a new reason for American international involvement, interpreted
in quasi-theological terms by John Foster Dulles, Dwight D Eisenhower's
secretary of state, a lawyer and Presbyterian elder (a Calvinist, as both Wilson
and the Puritan Pilgrims had been). The notion of the United States as the
providential nation became integrated into American foreign policy under Dulles,
so that George W Bush in 2001 automatically articulated his global war on terror
in imitation of Dulles's conception of cold war (even to the instant portrayal
of the September 11 terrorists as agents of an organized global threat to
freedom). The formulation was uncritically accepted in most political and press
circles, and much of the professional policy community.

Bush administration policy continues to reflect the influence of cold war
ideology, which in Dulles's case revealed the influence of the world-historical
thinking of the Marxist enemy as well as personal religious assumptions about
the meaning of history. The neo-conservative, "neo-Wilsonian" ideological
influence on Bush's thinking, that history's course is moving toward universal
democracy, was reinforced by the President's encounter in 2004 with Natan
Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident. Sharansky's argument that international
stability is possible only under the rule of democracy was reflected in the
President's second-term inaugural announcement that America's foreign policy
objective had become "ending tyranny in our world". {4} This amounted to a naive
instance of what the British-Austrian political philosopher Karl Popper called
"historicism", meaning faith in large-scale "laws" of historical development. {5}
The Bush vision is of a vast struggle between democracy and an effort by "the
terrorists" to establish an oppressive Muslim caliphate of global scope. (How
they are to do this against the opposition of the industrial West and non-Muslim
Asia has yet to be given a persuasive explanation.)

The Bush administration and its sympathizers thus see themselves supporting the
dominant force in history's development. If history's natural trajectory is
toward democracy, US policy is simply to accelerate the inevitable. When, as in
Iraq, this does not turn out to be so simple, a political equivalent of the
economist Joseph Schumpeter's argument concerning "creative destruction" can be
evoked, which says that destruction (in certain circumstances) clears the way
for progress. Schumpeter describes a mechanism of the market economy, but when
applied to the development of human society it reduces to a matter of secular
belief in progress - which is a question of faith, not evidence.


The United States today is the leading world power by many if not most
conventional measures. With the largest economy and the largest and most
advanced arsenal of weapons, it is acknowledged as such and exercises wide
influence. However, it is in the nature of political relationships that an
effort to translate a position of material superiority into power over others
will provoke resistance and may fail, possibly in costly ways. In the present
case, it implies the subordination of others, notably the other democracies that
are expected to accept US leadership in a new international order, and may
resist this for a variety of well-founded reasons. In the past, societies that
were more advanced in political and social organization, or economic or military
power, or even so narrow a specialty as navigation, created empires, but in
medieval and early modern times imperial powers were not necessarily
technologically or militarily superior to their subject nations. The Hapsburg
empire was the result of dynastic marriages and religious alliances.

Today's major democracies are all advanced societies; in some ways, in social
standards, distribution of wealth and opportunity, the provision of universal
health care and free or affordable education, and certain technologies and
industries, many are more advanced than the United States. They are willing to
cooperate with the United States in matters of common concern, as they have for
a half-century, but not to subordinate themselves to Washington. They are aware
that this administration's effort to establish a system of Central Asian and
Middle Eastern client states (the "Greater Middle East") has already produced
two ruinous and continuing wars, and worsened situations in Lebanon, Gaza and
the Palestinian territories, and Israel.

Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins recently asked why, if other nations really
objected to an American effort to establish a new international hegemony, there
has been no effort to build a military coalition to oppose it. He describes the
United States as already dominating the world, much as the elephant (in his
genial comparison) dominates the African savanna: the calm herbivorous goliath
that keeps the carnivores at a respectful distance, while supporting "a wide
variety of other creatures - smaller mammals, birds and insects - by generating
nourishment for them as it goes about the business of feeding itself". {6}
Everyone knows the United States is not a predatory power, he says, so everyone
profits from the stability the elephant provides, at American taxpayer expense.

Elephants are also known to trample people, uproot crops and gardens, topple
trees and houses, and occasionally go mad (hence, "rogue nations"). Americans,
moreover, are carnivores. The administration has attacked the existing
international order by renouncing inconvenient treaties and conventions and
reintroducing torture, and arbitrary and indefinite imprisonment, into advanced
civilization. Where is the stability that Mandelbaum tells us has been provided
by this American military and political deployment? The doomed and destructive
war of choice in Iraq, continuing and mounting disorder in Afghanistan following
another such war, war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, between Israel
and Hamas in Gaza, as well as between Hamas and Fatah, accompanied by continuing
crisis in Palestine, with rumbles of new American wars of choice with Iran or
Syria, and the emergence of a nuclear North Korea - all demonstrate deep
international instability.

American efforts to deregulate the international economy and promote
globalization, whatever its benefits, have been the most powerful force of
political, economic, social, and cultural destabilization the world has known
since World War II, providing what closely resembles that "constant
revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social
conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation" forecast by Marx and Engels
in The Communist Manifesto.


Michael Mandelbaum's question about using military coalitions to contain
American power seems spoken from another age. The utility of military coalitions
is not what it used to be, as the United States has reason to know. No one today
would rationally consider conventional war with the United States a useful (or
feasible) response to American power, although North Korea and Iran (and
undoubtedly others) have concluded that a nuclear deterrent to what is seen as
the threat from the United States is a worthwhile investment.

The new American militarism, as Andrew Bacevich calls it, encourages reliance on
obsolete notions about power based on quantitative military advantage. Power now
comes primarily from economic, financial, industrial, political, and cultural
assets and influence, in all of which the United States is vulnerable. {7} If
American international hegemony is considered a threat, there are political and
economic ways for international society to check it, not to speak of
unconventional forms of military resistance, which have been employed with
success in Iraq, in Lebanon last summer, and, much earlier, in Vietnam.

War tends now to be driven by nationalism and religious or political ideology.
Nationalism and communalism, the defense of a community's identity and autonomy,
remain eminently powerful political forces, as in Vietnam three decades ago. 
The recent history of Lebanon, Iraq, Chechnya, the Palestinian intifadas, 
failed states, the memory of the Vietnam War, and the specter of rogue nations
possessing nuclear weapons combine to make military interventions in the
non-Western world an unattractive prospect.

Is there an alternative policy? At the time of George Kennan's death in 2005,
much was made of the cold war policy of containment, of which he was the author,
and its vindication by the collapse of the Soviet Union from inner decay, as he
had foreseen. Not much was written about Kennan's general view of the nature of
relations between states, which was in radical contrast with the policies and
assumptions of the present US government and most of those concerned with
foreign policy in Washington. Kennan's volume of autobiographical reflections,
Around the Cragged Hill (Norton), published in 1993 when he was eighty-nine,
contained his mature reflections on this subject, as well as his thoughts on
American foreign policy.

He did not think that democracy along North American and Western European lines
can prevail internationally. "To have real self-government, a people must
understand what that means, want it, and be willing to sacrifice for it". Many
nondemocratic systems are inherently unstable. "But so what?" he asked. "We are
not their keepers. We never will be." (He did not say that we might one day try
to be.) He suggested that nondemocratic societies should be left "to be governed
or misgoverned as habit and tradition may dictate, asking of their governing
cliques only that they observe, in their bilateral relations with us and with
the remainder of the world community, the minimum standards of civilized
diplomatic intercourse". {8}

With the cold war over, Kennan saw no need for the continuing presence of
American troops in Europe, and little need for them in Asia, subject to the
security interests of Japan, allied to the United States by treaty. He deplored
economic and military programs that existed in "so great a profusion and
complexity that they escape the normal possibilities for official, not to
mention private oversight". He asked why the United States was [in 1992] giving
military assistance to forty-three African countries and twenty-two (of
twenty-four) countries in Latin America. "Against whom are these weapons
conceivably to be employed? ...  [Presumably] their neighbors or, in civil
conflict, against themselves. Is it our business to prepare them for that?"


In the late 1950s, a colleague, the late Edmund Stillman, and I circulated an
argument that eventually became a magazine article and book, suggesting that the
American obsession with Soviet Communist power was turning the United States
toward an American version of Marxist historicism and ideological messianism. We
said that Washington had fallen under the influence of "the ideological politics
of the Thirties and moral fervor of the second world war" in assuming that we
and Soviet Russia were struggling, so to speak, for the soul of the world. {9}

We argued that quite the opposite was true. We said that common sense about the
nature of Russia's and China's real interests suggested that time was not on
their sides, and that Kennan's policy of containing the major Communist powers,
until what Marx would have called their internal contradictions undermined them,
was the correct one. The interest of China was mainly to weaken Soviet supremacy
among the Communists. Russia itself was in material decline, its messianism
faded. Western Europe, Japan, and other Asian nations were increasingly dynamic,
and could be expected to reclaim their pre-war influence. The 1950s, we
concluded, were already a time of plural power centers and multiple interests, a
system in which international power and ambitions were increasingly expressed by
independent state actors, a system in which the United States could flourish,
but the Soviet Union, in the long term, could not. We ended by recommending
patience.

This went against much thinking of the period. In retrospect, it is the loser's
tale, describing a road not taken. It might seem of little interest now, if the
direction actually followed had not proven so disastrous. It seems scarcely
imaginable that the present administration could shift course away from the
interventionist military and political policies of recent decades, let alone its
own highly aggressive version of them since 2001, unless it were forced to do so
by (eminently possible) disaster in the Middle East. Whether a new
administration in two years' time might change direction seems the relevant
question.

Yet little sign exists of a challenge in American foreign policy debates to the
principles and assumptions of an international interventionism motivated by
belief in a special national mission. The country might find itself with a new
administration in 2009 which provides a less abrasive and more courteous version
of the American pursuit of world hegemony, but one still condemned by the
inherent impossibility of success.

The intellectual and material commitments made during the past half-century of
American military, bureaucratic, and intellectual investment in global
interventionism will be hard to reverse. The Washington political class remains
largely convinced that the United States supplies the essential structure of
international security, and that a withdrawal of American forces from their
expanding network of overseas military bases, or disengagement from present
American interventions into the affairs of many dozens of countries, would
destabilize the international system and produce unacceptable consequences for
American security. Why this should be so is rarely explained.

What is the threat that America keeps at bay? Neither China nor Russia directly
threatens Western security interests, at least in the opinion of most
governments other than the one in Washington. Obviously all the major nations
have energy and resource needs and interests that intersect and conflict, but
there is little reason to think that these and other foreseeable problems are
not negotiable. Warmongering speculation of the kind one sometimes hears when
American conservatives discuss China or Russia -  not to speak of Iran - is a
product of world-hegemonic thinking, and a disservice to true American interests.

America's so-called war against terrorism has not saved its allies from violence.
The terrorist problem is generally seen in Europe as one of domestic social
order and immigrant integration - a matter for political treatment and police
precautions -  related to a religious and political crisis inside contemporary
Islamic culture that is unsusceptible to foreign remedy. Few leaders outside the
United States, other than Tony Blair, consider the terrorist threat a global
conspiracy of those "who hate freedom" - a puerile formulation - or think the
existing militarized response to it a success. The positive results have been
meager, and the negative consequences in relations with Muslim countries have
been disastrous. The US approach has become perceived as a war against Islamic
"nationalism" - a reaffirmation of cultural as well as political identity (and
separatism) - which like most nationalisms has thrown up terrorist fighting
organizations (as did another nationalism without a nation, Zionism, in its day).


The noninterventionist alternative to the policies followed in the United States
since the 1950s is to minimize interference in other societies and accept the
existence of an international system of plural and legitimate powers and
interests. One would think the idea that nations are responsible for themselves,
and that American military interference in their affairs is more likely to turn
small problems into big ones than to solve them, would appeal to an American
public that believes in individual responsibility and the autonomy of markets,
considers itself hostile to political ideology (largely unaware of its own), and
professes to be governed by constitutional order, pragmatism, and compromise.

A noninterventionist policy would shun ideology and emphasize pragmatic and
empirical judgment of the interests and needs of this nation and of others, with
reliance on diplomacy and analytical intelligence, giving particular attention
to history, since nearly all serious problems between nations are recurrent or
have important recurrent elements in them. The current crises in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine-Israel, and Iran are all colonial or postcolonial in
nature, which is generally ignored in American political and press discussion.

Such a noninterventionist policy would rely primarily on trade and the market,
rather than territorial control or military intimidation, to provide the
resources and energy the United States needs. Political and diplomatic action
would be the primary and essential instruments of international relations and
persuasion; military action the last and worst one, evidence of political
failure. Military deployments abroad would be reexamined with particular
attention to whether they might actually be impediments to solutions of the
conflicts of clients, or reinforce intransigence in the complex dynamics of
relations among nations such as the two Koreas, China, Taiwan, and Japan, where
lasting solutions can only be found in political settlements between principals.

Had a noninterventionist policy been followed in the 1960s, there would have
been no American war in Indochina. The struggle there would have been recognized
as nationalist in motivation, unsusceptible to solution by foreigners, and
inherently limited in its international consequences, whatever they might be -
as has proved to be the case. The United States would never have been defeated,
its army demoralized, or its students radicalized. There would have been no
American invasion of Cambodia, which precipitated the Khmer Rouge genocide. The
tribal peoples of Laos would probably have been spared their ordeal.

The United States would not have suffered its catastrophic implication in what
was essentially a domestic crisis in Iran in 1979, which still poisons Near and
Middle Eastern affairs, since there would never have been the huge and
provocative American investment in the Shah's regime as American "gendarme" 
in the region, compromising the Shah and contributing to the fundamentalist
backlash against his secularizing modernization.

Without entering further into what rapidly would become an otiose discussion of
the "mights" or "might nots" of the last half-century, one can certainly argue
that a noninterventionist United States would not be at war in Iraq today. While
obviously concerned about the free flow of Middle Eastern oil, Washington would
have assumed that the oil-using states bought their oil on the market and that
oil producers had to sell, having nothing else they can do with their oil, and
that politically motivated interference in the market by the oil producers would
in the mid- and long term fail, as happened after the OPEC oil price rise of
1973.

Israel, with its conventional and unconventional arms, is capable of assuring
its own defense against external aggression, if newly aware of the limits of its
ability to combat irregular forces. It cannot expect total security without
political resolution of the Palestinian question, a problem only it can solve,
by withdrawing from the territories to some negotiated approximation of the 1967
border. International engagement would undoubtedly be necessary to a solution,
and would willingly be supplied. Forty years of American involvement have
unfortunately served mainly to allow the Israelis to avoid facing facts,
contributing to radicalization in Islamic society.

Washington might reasonably have considered people who are victims of domestic
despots, such as the Iraqis before 2003, as responsible for their own solutions,
and usually capable of their own revolutions - if they really wanted revolution.
No foreign power occupied Iraq, imposing Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. The
current Iraqi insurgencies against military occupation and an American-imposed
government, accompanied by mounting sectarian conflict, now tie down the quasi
totality of available American ground forces. "Regime change" is better left to
the people whose regime it is, who know what they want, and who will benefit
from or suffer the consequences of change.


A hard-headed doctrine concerning the responsibilities of people themselves may
seem unacceptable when the CNN audience witnesses mass murder in Darfur, Sierra
Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. However an interventionist foreign policy in
which the US aggressively interferes in other states in order to shape their
affairs according to American interest or ideology is not the same as responding
to atrocious public crimes.

The latter may be relatively simple to deal with, as in the case of Charles
Taylor, onetime president of Liberia, responsible for several rapacious and
exceptionally bloody West African conflicts, now being tried for war crimes in
The Hague. The adroit British intervention that ended civil chaos and conflict
in Sierra Leone was a public service, as was the pacification of Liberia.

There are limits to the feasibility of humanitarian intervention. It can create
its own problems, as nongovernmental groups now acknowledge. Their and UN
efforts to feed and support refugees can facilitate aggression by taking the
victims off the aggressor's hands, as happened in the initial Yugoslav
intervention, where the Security Council limited the UN force to "protection" of
civilians while a war of sectarian and territorial aggression was going on. {10}
Eventual military intervention produced the Dayton agreement, which nonetheless
left Kosovo and the explosive problem of the Albanian regional diaspora
unsettled.

Humanitarian crises are often the current manifestation of intractable
historical grievances, as in the former Yugoslavia, and in Rwanda, where the
Tutsi, Hamitic cattle-raising people who migrated to the Lake Kivu area some
four centuries ago, presumably from Ethiopia, had imposed a form of monarchical
and aristocratic rule on the Bantu-speaking Hutus, despite the latter's much
greater numbers. German and Belgian colonial authorities left this system as
they found it, and it persisted until independence in the 1960s, when the Hutus'
bid for democratic power launched the conflicts that followed, culminating in
the genocidal upheaval of 1994 against the Tutsis that ended with them once
again in power.

Such crises are often intensified by material developments, like the droughts in
recent years in the semi-arid Sahel, the geographical and climactic zone running
from Senegal to Ethiopia that separates the coastal deserts of Africa from the
savannah to the south. Its occupants have mainly been nomadic pastoral peoples
identified as Arabs, distinct from the black peasant cultivators of the more
fertile south. Arable land has been reduced, producing conflict, population
movement, and political unrest in fragile states. The Darfur victims are
refugees from political conflict inside Sudan, and their plight has spilled over
into Chad and the Central African Republic, and threatens trouble elsewhere.

This is not, obviously, a situation susceptible to solution by foreign military
intervention. However the US Army is pressing for a new Africa Command, possibly
based in Djibouti, with "forward-based troops" ready to deal with Africa's
"emergence ... as a strategic reality" (as Marine General James Jones, departing
commander of US forces in Europe, said in December). The 2004 US National
Security Strategy declaration identifies "failed states" in Africa as well as
"rogue states" as threats to American interests.

US support of the Ethiopian intervention in Somalia, which overturned Islamist
rule in that "failed state", together with demands in the US and Europe for
military intervention against the Muslim "Arab" tormentors of the Darfur
refugees, suggest that in government circles as well as the public mind, the
African humanitarian crisis is beginning to be confused with or assimilated to
the larger US "war on terror". This is a profound error, and risks setting the
United States on a course of endless and fruitless military interventions
against Africa's miseries - a "long war" indeed.

Nuclear weapons proliferation, since North Korea's recent nuclear claims, 
is now more than ever an American preoccupation. In North Korea and elsewhere,
the most important incentive for obtaining nuclear weapons is to deter American
(or in Iran's case, Israeli) military intervention. The advantage provided by
possession of such weapons is intimidation of neighboring states and inhibition
of foreign interference. On the other hand, as Iran is finding out, the effort
to obtain nuclear weapons may invite a precautionary foreign attack, so the
choice of proliferation presents its own risks.

In Washington, Iranian possession of nuclear weapons is usually described as a
threat to Israel, or to American bases or interests in the region, or even to
Europe. Given the ability of all of these governments to retaliate
conventionally as well as by nuclear means, it seems implausible or even
unreasonable that Iran would initiate such an attack, or even imagine that there
would be something to gain from doing so.

The possession of nuclear weapons provides mainly symbolic power, since their
actual use implies unforeseeable and uncontrollable consequences, while this
same uncertainty contributes to their deterrence effect. Building and testing a
nuclear weapon makes a country ostensibly more important, or a more notorious
and more feared actor on the international and regional stage, but the positive
exploitation of nuclear status, even for purposes of blackmail, is not easy.

The nuclear threat is not automatically a credible one since its execution would
be so disproportionate to any easily imagined provocation. Whatever the motive,
a nuclear attack against a nonnuclear state with no means for deterrence or
retaliation would provoke enormous international uproar and anxiety, invite
intervention by one (or all) of the old nuclear states as well as by the UN and
other international organizations, bring intense international opprobrium upon
the state making use of the nuclear weapon - and of course inspire any other
government in the region that thought itself potentially threatened to go after
its own nuclear deterrent.

Would, for example, either the United States or Israel really gain by using
nuclear penetration weapons against Iran's nuclear installations, breaking the
nuclear truce that has lasted since Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Would this not add
to the incentives that Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, perhaps states in the
Persian Gulf, and certain countries in the Far East already may feel to seek
nuclear deterrents? And would it not give the Europeans reason seriously to
reconsider their own situation?

As the last sixty years of nuclear strategy studies suggest, the value of these
weapons for any purpose other than deterrence seems slight. Their utility for
coercion or blackmail seems very doubtful when not linked to a secure
second-strike capability to deter retaliation, of the kind possessed by the cold
war nuclear states, and this is beyond the means of the countries now considered
candidates for nuclear status. {11}


History does not offer nations permanent security, and when it seems to offer
hegemonic domination this usually is only to take it away again, often in
unpleasant ways. The United States was fortunate to enjoy relative isolation for
as long as it did. The conviction of Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries that the country was exempt from the common fate has been succeeded in
the twenty-first century by an American determination to fight (to "victory", as
the President insists) against the conditions of existence history now actually
does offer. It sets against them the consoling illusion that power will always
prevail, despite the evidence that this is not true.

Schumpeter remarked in 1919 that imperialism necessarily carries the implication
of

"... an aggressiveness, the true reasons for which do not lie in the aims which
are temporarily being pursued ... an aggressiveness for its own sake, as
reflected in such terms as "hegemony", "world dominion", and so forth ...
expansion for the sake of expanding ... "

"This determination", he continues,

"... cannot be explained by any of the pretexts that bring it into action, 
by any of the aims for which it seems to be struggling at the time ... 
Such expansion is in a sense its own 'object'". {12}

Perhaps this has come to apply in the American case, and we have gone beyond the
belief in national exception to make an ideology of progress and universal
leadership into our moral justification for a policy of simple power expansion.
In that case we have entered into a logic of history that in the past has
invariably ended in tragedy.

Notes

 {1} "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", Foreign Affairs, July 1947.

 {2} America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy
(Yale University Press, 2006), pages 111, 112. Fukuyama and others, such as
Robert Kagan, now in retreat from the neoconservative project, nonetheless
insist on their continued belief in an American national mission to bring
democracy to the world, despite the disastrous practical consequences of that
effort since 2002, which they ascribe to faulty execution.

 {3} See Lewis M Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature 
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), page 522.

 {4} Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer, The Case for Democracy: The Power of
Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror (Public Affairs, 2004).

 {5} Popper's allusion is to "Hegel, Marx, Comte, Spengler, and Toynbee".
Writing at a time of totalitarian ascendancy in the middle of the twentieth
century, he observed that all these systems of historical interpretation offered
a foundation on which a totalitarian political ideology might be built.

 {6} Michael Mandelbaum, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's
Government in the Twenty-first Century (PublicAffairs, 2005), page 10.

 {7} Andrew J Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced
by War (Oxford University Press, 2005). See also Anatol Lieven, America Right or
Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2004), and
Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the
Republic (Metropolitan Books, 2003).
 
 {8} George Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy
(Norton, 1993), pages 64-65, 201, 223-224. Later in his memoirs he outlined what
these standards of diplomatic relations should be: the United States should
conduct itself

"...  at all times in world affairs as befits a country of its size and
importance. This ... would mean that it would show patience, generosity, and a
uniformly accommodating spirit in dealing with small countries and small
matters; that it would observe reasonableness, consistency, and steady adherence
to principle in dealings with large countries and large matters; that it would
observe in all official exchanges with other governments a high tone of dignity,
courtesy, and moderation of expression; that, while always bearing in mind that
its first duty is to the national interest, it would never lose sight of the
principle that the greatest service this country could render to the rest of the
world would be to put its own house in order and to make of American
civilization an example of decency, humanity and societal success from which
others could derive whatever they might find useful to their own purposes."

 {9} Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff, "The New Politics: America and the End
of the Postwar World" (Coward McCann, 1961, and Harper's, January 1961). See
also Stillman and Pfaff, Power and Impotence: The Failure of America's Foreign
Policy (Random House, 1966). Among other critics of the established policy of
the period were, of course, Kennan himself, the Christian theologian and
political realist Reinhold Niebuhr (whom Kennan called "the father of us all"),
Hans Morgenthau, Louis Halle, Ronald Steel (whose important books The End of
Alliance and Pax Americana appeared in 1964 and 1966, respectively), Kenneth W.
Thompson, and, to some extent, the columnist Walter Lippmann.

 {10} See, for example, David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of
the West (Simon and Schuster, 1995), and At the Point of a Gun: Democratic
Dreams and Armed Intervention (Simon and Schuster, 2005).

 {11} The India-Pakistan case is an exception since the perceived threat is
strictly bilateral, and the concerned countries have simply replicated for
themselves, at great expense, the "balance of terror" that existed between the
United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war.

Some have suggested that the adoption of suicide bombing by certain Muslim
terrorist groups implies the possibility of "suicidal" use of nuclear weapons,
in defiance of conventional notions about deterrence. Noah Feldman, for example,
writing in The New York Times Magazine on October 29 2006, says that "religious
thinkers ...  believe almost by definition that there is something in heaven
greater than government here on earth. Under the right circumstances, they might
sacrifice lives - including their own - to serve the divine will as they
interpret it." However, his own subsequent examination of Muslim tradition and
religious thought, particularly of the eschatological element in Shia religion,
tends to discount this possibility. To that I would add that launching a nuclear
attack requires the cooperation of a large number of military and technical
people, as well as political collaborators of the leaders making such a decision,
and they seem unlikely to be collectively suicidal.

The danger of terrorist-held nuclear weapons exists, if barely. It requires the
complicity of a nuclear state; the political plausibility of any government
allowing terrorists to control such weapons seems negligible, while the
technical and logistical complexity of such an operation would be great. In any
case, there is little to be done about this possibility that is not already
being done. See William Langewiesche, "How to Get a Nuclear Bomb", The Atlantic
Monthly, December 2006; Robin M Frost, "Nuclear Terrorism after 9/11", Adelphi
Papers #378 (London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies); and
John Mueller, "Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?, The Myth of the Omnipresent
Enemy", Foreign Affairs, September/October 2006.

 {12} Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and the Social Classes, translated by Heinz
Norden (A M Kelly, 1951) pages 5-6.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19879


http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com
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