Joseph Nye, dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, had this prescient observation to make in his book, “The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Cannot Go it Alone,” published shortly after Sept. 11: “Any retreat to a traditional policy focus on unipolarity, hegemony and unilateralism will fail to produce the right outcomes, and its accompanying arrogance will erode the soft power that is often part of the solution.”
Soft power? That would be a country’s ability to influence events and effect change in the world through persuasion, rather than coercion, where the reach of its cultural ideals, political values and social institutions act as a magnet to others.
In an impassioned speech last Thursday, that effectively redefined the US agenda in the Middle East, President Bush said that the United States must commit itself to the “spread of democracy” in a wide swath of Muslim countries stretching through the Fertile Crescent, North Africa and South Asia, adding that the coexistence of Islam and democracy is not mutually exclusive.
“The United States has adopted a new policy: a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East,” he said in the speech, delivered on the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy. “This strategy requires the same persistence, energy and idealism we have shown before, and it will yield the same results ... As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export ... It would be reckless to accept the status quo.”
Them are fighting words — fighting words anchored in the belief that the export, or imposition on others, of American values has a forward advance that can be resisted but not ultimately defeated.
By what right does the president of the United States accord America the privilege of placing such a heavy footprint upon God’s earth?
By what right does a country, a superpower though it may be, feel entitled to say that it is “reckless to accept the status quo” in another, and plan to go about imposing on it ideological notions alien to its historical reality?
It’s all well and good to have gone to Iraq and gotten rid of a ruthless and dangerous dictator, but to want to “transform” countries with disparate systems of government, stretching from Lebanon to Pakistan, into Norman Rockwell land, is to speak of hubris, not to mention overreach, beyond comprehension.
A people’s habits of vision — their history, culture, faith, language, literature — codify that people’s immemorial reflexes, the contours of their communal reference, as subtly as do the contours of sky and land where their civilization had ripened.
President Bush in effect wants Arabs, along with folks elsewhere in the Muslim world, to weld these habits of vision to an idiom appropriated from Jefferson, Locke and Montesquieu.
Well, it ain’t gonna happen, fellow, not only because the whole enterprise is degrading for its ethnocentric bias, but because that’s not the way social systems organically evolve and transform.
Look, heaven knows, we have problems galore in the Middle East, and the “Arab Human Development Report” released more than two weeks ago attests to that.
And we may admonish our political leaders and intellectual elites for that state of affairs, but in the end it will be in the wealth of our own heritage, not in the borrowed dress of other tongues and political traditions that an Arab renaissance will strike root.
The United States, whose president has artlessly defined the enemy as people “who hate things” whereas “we love things,” and which has overthrown democratically elected governments all the way from Guatemala to Iran and backed two-bit dictators all the way from Nicaragua to the Congo, cannot be trusted to create a brave new world in the Middle East.
So, George, when we need you to put our house in order, we’ll call you, don’t call us.
— Arab News Opinion 13 November 2003
