Say this for America: As the sole "Big Power" in a new world order, it shuffles along oblivious to the central conceits of its foreign policy.
As the White House moves closer to a new security doctrine that supports pre-emptive strikes against recalcitrant nations (the "rogue state" of Saddam’s Iraq readily comes to mind), we can discern nothing less than a major shift in America’s perceptions of its place in the world today. The name of the game here is unilateralism. "Rather than continuing to serve as first among equals in the postwar international system," William A. Galston, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public policy, wrote in the Washington Post last Sunday, "the United States acts as a law unto itself, creating new rules of international engagement without agreement by other nations."
In short, the US now leans toward exercising power in the lawless Hobbesian sense, where accepted rules of international behavior can be left by the wayside and the promotion of the "American way" and American interests depend on the use of military might. Three weeks ago at the US Military Academy, President Bush declared that he would take "pre-emptive action" against countries his administration considered a threat to the United States. "If we wait for the threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long."
And who, pray tell, is out there to challenge that posture anyhow?
Cold War rivalry between Washington and Moscow came to an end well over a decade ago with the collapse of the Soviet Union, a former empire that, in its heyday, wielded colossal power, but that in an improbably short number of years was reduced to becoming a mendicant sate — perhaps the most significant, even sensational, retrenchment of global influence in human history. (Consider how empires take decades, even centuries, to decline and fall.)
And World War II all but destroyed the European nations as global powers after four centuries of imperial dominance, stripping them of all measures of Big Power status.
Now what? What we have today is a US that will not resolve disputes or contain and deter a hostile state through, say, diplomatic and moral persuasion, through contract and dialogue, but through force of arms.
And therein lies the irony: The divergence on the question of the morality of power between the US and Europe today. We are so accustomed to speaking of the Euro-American world, otherwise known as "the Western democracies," as sharing a common view on strategic and international issues.
Not so, says Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in the current issue of Policy Review. "They agree on little," he writes, "and understand one another less and less."
The irony in question? According to Kagan, it lies in how the US and Europe have effectively traded places. Whereas in the past, right through the 18th and 19th centuries, the European nations relied on brute force as a tool of international relations, the US at the time, as a new republic whose immigrant population and leadership elite brought with them the intellectual traditions of the Enlightenment, abjured that tool, opting instead to appeal to international law and international consensus to deal with international strife.
Europe and the US, then, having traded places, have also, by definition, traded perspectives.
But what about the psychology of power, an issue that Kagan glossed over in his paper?
The "new Europe," united into a single territorial conglomerate in the wake of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, is an economic and political colossus, but hardly a military one, whereas the American power profile rests on all three legs of the tripod. Strong and weak nations are likely to have dialectically opposed views about the utility and morality of power. The former will not hesitate to diffuse it, favoring policies of coercion, while the latter, lacking military punch, will approach problems with greater subtlety, nuance and reason.
Put more colloquially, Americans will do what they want, when and how they want it done, because, well, they can. And, by Jove, who is going to stop them?
Thus, foreign-policy intellectuals and media commentators in the Arab world who speak hopefully of the quartet — the US, the EU, the UN and Russia — wielding their influence to eventually bring about an equitable solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, or moderating future American adventurism in Iraq and elsewhere, are deluding themselves. The game is not determined by a quartet of players, or for that matter a trio or a duo, but by a solo.
Russia is a basket case. The UN is, in every sense of the word, under the thumb of Washington, independent only in the ceremonious and unbinding resolutions it can pass in the General Assembly.
And the European nations are helpless at projecting their influence into regions of conflict beyond the continent. The US is the solo performer on the world stage today, composing the tunes, writing the lyrics and singing the vocals. (Watch out, in that regard, for President Bush’s anticipated speech on Palestine this week.)
It all boils down to power, its ethos and its seductions — you have it, you have the propensity to use it. With it you regroup the world around you in response to your interests.
Take even the case of a two-bit regional power like Israel and how it exercises power unilaterally because, well, it can. Last week, for example, it began building a "fence" destined to wall off the West Bank into a vast concentration camp, and effectively annex large chunks of territory in the bargain.
Will this result in more suffering and less freedom for the Palestinians? Clearly. Will it be a fence of hate and apartheid? Nothing else. Is it meant to delineate the final borders of the future, truncated Palestinian state, hemmed, deprived and emasculated? That’s the intention. And will Israel get away with it? Ask the Big Boss in Washington.
What it amounts to is that the administration elite has cut the American sensibility off from all that was alive in its Jeffersonian tradition and all that was morally optimistic in its Declaration of Independence. (Thomas Jefferson’s death in 1826 was remarkable, for it occurred on July 4, while the nation was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which he wrote.)
Meanwhile, Washington has the nerve, the tactlessness, to feign evenhandedness in Palestine as it obscenely endows Israel with unlimited military, economic and diplomatic power, enabling it to rub the noses of its helpless Palestinian victims in the vomit of its Zionist ideology of expansionism and racial arrogance.
There is no more apt a way to conclude this column than to invoke the old cliche about the burdens of power — how power corrupts and its absolute exercise corrupts absolutely. ([email protected])
