AUT: Fw: Arrighi on Balkan war 1/2

[pmargin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Steve Wright)]

Angela forwarded this to me; I think it's well worth a read . . .

----- Original Message -----
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <lbo-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, 15 July 1999 5:27
Subject: Arrighi on Balkan war


> [From the MLG list; apologies for the length but it seems worth it.]
>
> THE BALKAN WAR AND US GLOBAL POWER
>
> by Giovanni Arrighi
>
> It will take time before anyone will be in a position to draw a
> minimally reliable balance sheet of the Balkan War that has just
> ended. From the point of view of the humanitarian objectives for
> which it was ostensibly fought, all we can do for now is to join Pope
> John Paul II in declaring its outcome an unmitigated "defeat of
> humanity." Beyond that, any kind of balance sheet requires a
> preliminary identification of the real objectives of the war.
>
> Noam Chomsky and many others have already shown much better than I
> ever could how suspect were the humanitarian motivations of the war.
> On this, I will limit myself to pointing out that throughout the
> conflict the humanitarian issue has been bound up in the declarations
> of the US and British instigators of the war with what they referred
> to as a "credibility" issue. The United States and its NATO allies
> had to demonstrate that their threat to use force was credible in the
> sense that it would actually be carried out if NATO did not get its
> way and, if carried out, it would result in NATO getting its way. If
> the war made one thing absolutely clear, it is that this issue of
> credibility (which is nothing but a straightforward issue of power)
> had absolute precedence over whatever humanitarian objectives, if
> any, were actually pursued by NATO. The most striking thing about the
> war was indeed the callousness and self-righteous determination with
> which the NATO command threatened to continue indefinitely an ever
> more destructive air campaign unless Milosevic (or better still
> anyone who might have succeeded in ousting him from power) bowed to
> NATO power and acceded to its dictates unconditionally.
>
> If additional proof was needed of the absolute priority of US and
> NATO credibility over humanitarian objectives, it came with President
> Clinton's "victory" speech on June 10. To him, victory meant first
> and foremost that Yugoslavia had more or less unconditionally
> capitulated to NATO demands. The human sufferings inflicted on the
> Yugoslav population, both Serbian and ethnic-Albanian, in the pursuit
> of unconditional capitulation were hardly mentioned, except for a new
> intimation to the Serbs that they would not get any help in
> reconstructing their devastated country unless they got rid of
> Milosevic. As it should have been clear from the start, the
> demonstration of US and NATO power was the true objective of the war.
> Appeals to human sentiments were mere means, camouflaged as ends to
> mobilize support at home and abroad for a disproportionate use of
> violence in a patent breach of international law.
>
> But why, we may well ask at this point, was it so important for the
> United States and NATO to demonstrate their credibility? Was
> credibility important in the pursuit of some broader objective? And
> if this was the case, how successful has the war been in attaining
> that broader objective? In seeking answers to these questions, it is
> helpful to see this latest US military exploit, not as an isolated
> event, but as a link in a chain of events capable of telling us
> something about the trajectory of US global power. Our questions can
> then be reformulated as follows: Is the need to demonstrate the
> credibility of the US/NATO military apparatus the sign of a long-
> term decline in the global power of the United States and the
> instrument of a US attempt to slow down that decline? Or is it the
> sign and the instrument of a new great leap forward of that global
> power? Can the Balkan war be expected to have been successful in
> slowing down the decline of US global power, or in propelling it to
> new heights, as the case might be?
>
>
> The Trajectory of US Global Power since 1968
>
> Let me begin with a sketch of the most basic facts of US global power
> over the past thirty years. Broadly speaking, over this period US
> global power seems to have followed a U-shaped trajectory, with each
> decade showing a different tendency: a precipitous decline in the
> 1970's, a bottoming out in the 1980's, a spectacular come-back in the
> 1990's. Let us briefly look at the forces that shaped this trajectory
> in each decade.
>
> The precipitous decline of US global power in the 1970's was
> thoroughly shaped by the two key, world-historical events of 1968-73:
> the defeat of the United States in Vietnam and the simultaneous
> collapse of the Bretton Woods system through which the United States
> had governed world monetary relations. Although in these same years
> the successful landing of US men on the moon showed that the United
> States could easily catch up with and surpass its Soviet rival in the
> armament race, the US defeat in Vietnam showed how powerless the
> high-tech and highly capital intensive US military apparatus was in
> enforcing US commands against the determined resistence of one of the
> poorest peoples on earth. Massive US spending at home and abroad had
> thus resulted in a major fiscal crisis of the US warfare-welfare
> state. Equally devastating was the loss of credibility in the
> capacity of the US military apparatus to do anything other than
> reproduce at ever more costly and risky levels the balance of terror
> with the USSR. US global power fell precipitously, reaching its nadir
> at the end of the 1970's with the Iranian Revolution, a new hike in
> oil prices, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and a new serious
> crisis of confidence in the US dollar.
>
> It was in this context that in the closing year of the Carter
> Administration, and then with greater determination under Reagan, a
> drastic change of US policies laid the ground for the subsequent
> recovery of US global power. Militarily, the US government began
> avoiding carefully (as witnessed by the flight from Lebanon) the kind
> of confrontation on the ground that had led to defeat in Vietnam, in
> favor either of war by proxy (as in Nicaragua and Afghanistan), or of
> confrontations of merely symbolic value against insignificant enemies
> (as in Grenada and Panama), or of confrontations from the air where
> the US high-tech apparatus had an absolute advantage (as with Libya).
> At the same time, the US initiated an escalation of the armament race
> with the USSR--primarily, though not exclusively, through the
> Strategic Defense Initiative-- pushing its costs well beyond what the
> USSR could afford economically. The USSR thus found itself caught
> into a double confrontation neither of which it could win and would
> eventually lose: the one in Afghanistan, where its high-tech military
> apparatus found itself in the same difficulties that had led to the
> defeat of the United States in Vietnam, and the one in the armament
> race, where the United States could mobilize financial resources that
> were wholly beyond the Soviet reach.
>
> This change of US military policies eventually resulted in the
> collapse of the USSR and the beginning of the great come-back of US
> global power of the 1990's. Nevertheless, it cannot be emphasized
> strongly enough that the change in US policies that was most decisive
> in bringing about the great turnaround in US global power occurred in
> the financial rather than in the military sphere. Indeed, without
> this other change in US policies, it would have been impossible to
> escalate the armament race beyond the financial reach of the USSR.
>
> The policy changes--a drastic contraction in money supply, higher
> interest rates, lower taxes for the wealthy, and virtually
> unrestricted freedom of action for capitalist enterprise--constituted
> the liquidation of the legacy of the New Deal. Through these policies
> the United States began to compete aggressively for capital
> world-wide provoking a major reversal in the direction of its global
> flow. From being the main source of world liquidity and of direct
> investment in the 1950's and 1960's, by the 1980's the United States
> had become the main debtor nation and a major recipient of direct
> investment. The other side of the coin was the debt crisis that
> ravaged poor and middle income countries, most of which did not have
> a chance of successfully competing with the US giant in world
> financial markets. Latin America and, above all, African economies
> were devastated. But the crisis made itself felt in Eastern Europe as
> well, further reducing the capacity of the USSR to compete in the
> armament race with the United States, and contributing decisively to
> the tensions that eventually led to the break-up of Yugoslavia and
> the escalation of ethnic conflicts. Thus, while the United States
> came to enjoy practically unlimited credit in world financial
> markets, the Second and Third Worlds were brought to their knees by a
> sudden exhaustion of their credit in those same markets. What US
> military might could not achieve, US power in world financial markets
> did.
>
> There was nonetheless a problem with this victory. Japan and the
> overseas Chinese operating out of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and
> the main commercial centers of Southeast Asia, emerged as the world's
> leading creditor nations and the organizers and financiers of a
> region-wide industrial expansion that for speed and extent had few
> parallels in capitalist history. Indeed throughout the 1980's, the
> East Asian region seemed to be the main beneficiary of the
> intensifying interstate competition for mobile capital and the new
> escalation of the Cold War. While world trade and production
> stagnated, the economic expansion of the East Asian region gained
> momentum, capturing a growing share of world liquidity. Japanese
> banks came to dominate international asset rankings and Japanese
> institutional investors set the pace in the US treasuries market.
> Earlier prognostications of an "emerging Japanese superstate" or of
> "Japan as number one" seemed to be right on mark. The United States
> might have recovered from the depth of the crisis of the 1970's by
> putting its great military rival and the entire Third World on the
> defensive. But if money rather than guns had become the primary
> source of world power--as the very recovery of US fortunes seemed to
> indicate--did not Japanese economic power constitute a new and more
> insidious challenge to US global supremacy?
>
> These fears were put to rest at the very beginning of the 1990's by
> the collapse of the USSR and the almost simultaneous crash of the
> Tokyo stock exchange in 1990-92--two events that sent the trajectory
> of US global power soaring. The United States was left as the one and
> only military superpower with no prospect in the foreseeable future
> of any power to rival it. Moreover, the taming of the USSR cleared
> the ground for the US mobilization of the United Nations Security
> Council to endorse and legitimate its police actions throughout the
> world. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait immediately created an
> ideal opportunity for such a mobilization, which the US promptly
> seized, putting up a televised show of its high-tech firepower.
> Attempts to carry the experience one step further through the
> "humanitarian" mission in Somalia failed, because an ambush led to
> one televised snippet of a dead American pulled through the streets
> of Mogadishu. This revived the Vietnam syndrome at home and led to
> the immediate withdrawal of US troops. But subsequent safer
> "humanitarian" missions in Haiti and especially Bosnia were more
> successful. By and large, since the collapse of the USSR and the Gulf
> War, US military power has continued to remain unchallenged and, on
> its own terrain, unchallengeable.
>
> The Gulf War also demonstrated that Japan, for all its financial and
> economic power, was wholly incapable of taking an independent stand
> in world politics, once again falling in behind the United States.
> But even its financial and economic power were questioned, as the
> Japanese economy was incapable of recovering fully from the crash of
> 1990-92--a situation that was made worse by the region-wide financial
> crisis of 1997-98, which turned the near-stagnation of the Japanese
> economy into contraction. In the meantime capital from all over the
> world, and especially East Asia, continued to flow to the United
> States, sustaining a long speculative boom on Wall Street and
> enabling the US economy to expand considerably faster than in the
> preceding twenty years, in spite of a large and growing trade
> deficit. As the new millennium approached, not only the US military,
> but also the US economy seemed to be unchallenged and unchallengeable.
>
> In the light of this trajectory, it might seem that the most
> plausible answer to our questions is that the need to demonstrate the
> credibility of the US/NATO military apparatus in the Balkan War is
> more likely to be a sign of an ongoing great leap forward of US
> global power than of a decline. And since the United States and NATO
> have demonstrated in the Balkans that their threats to use force
> until they get their way are not empty or ineffectual, the war can be
> expected to add new momentum to that great leap forward. It is
> possible, even likely, that this is the way in which the US and
> British instigators of the war see the situation. But it is just as
> possible and likely that the situation is not at all what it appears
> from the perspective of the 1990's--that is, from the perspective of
> the rising portion of the U-shaped trajectory of US global power
> sketched earlier. It is also possible in my view that the




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