American Power

[...]

It's like, believe it or not, I'm not a neocon nut. I'm not a Cowboy. I don't have the means to watch Fox News. I read the Guardian more than the Telegraph or even the Times.

I've read quite a lot about the abuse of American Power, especially under Kissinger, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr, and Clinton.

But reading the use, and abuse, of American Power as one consistent line seems rigid and counterproductive to me, especially now, when US foreign policy and international politics have both changed profoundly.

The worse thing afflicting Bush's foreign policy is hypocrasy and lack of consistency, not neo-imperial aggression. For example, to bolster the idea of promoting democracy in the Middle East, they should promote fledgling democracies like Jordan and Bahrain, and vocally support the massive push for reform in Iran (maybe engagment is better than attack in this case: new ties between Iran and the US might, actually, kick off serious opposition to the Mullocrats), and, on the other side, distance themselves from the corrupt and disgusting House of Saud.

Connect America to its rich vein of political literature: to critique its power interests and its State gangsters and fundamentalist nuts, but also to counter the prevalent mode of thinking that tars the US as neo-imperialist or, even, neo-fascist.

Cos I'm not buying that argument, especially when it's based on analysis that's over 10 years out of date.

The best and closest of you, like Sufi and Luka and Mark, have twigged that my attitude to US power is complex, convoluted, and somewhat derivative. I can't deny that. Actually, my attitude is also based on studying the greatest scandal of the last decade: Rwanda. So let's talk about the idea of intervention, too. Because serious intervention to stop such catastrophes (see the Balkans in particular) rests, for success, on US military balls.

But to start, as Thomas Friedman put it, some reading: the US constitution, Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points speech, and the Declaration of Independance. I'd add to that: the Prospect interview with and the <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?041101fa_fact">New Yorker portrait</a> of Paul Wolfowitz.

Now, let's argue. (Come on, don't embarrass me, don't let this thread die, I know you all care passionately about this...)

 

[sufi]

you want to get pearsil in here,
not sure if he's a neo-con either , but we're straight into discussing american power on darfur thread...
i wonder if he'd agree with this:

Because serious intervention to stop such catastrophes (see the Balkans in particular) rests, for success, on US military balls.

 

[Pearsall]

You can't use html on this board. Links work like this: [ url = http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?041101fa_fact ] blah [ /url ] (just remove the spaces)

Paul Wolfowitz interview

I'm not a neo-con, I'm basically a centrist who can swing quite a bit in either direction as I see fit. Mostly I dislike any systematic world view that claims that everything can be explained by looking through a certain prism - it's bullshit. I'm harsher on left-wing view points than I am on right-wing ones because I used to be a fairly orthodox liberal, but once you start questioning one aspect of it you find you have to re-evaluate a lot of your positions.

As far as the discussion of American power goes, I broadly agree with you. I'll wait to see what else this thread throw up before I add my thoughts.

 

[gff]

one thing right away: i need to find it again (hang on) but i read a comparison of the iraq invasion with an imagined rwanda intervention that contended that iraq was by far the easiest country on earth to invade; i think this was meant to have a chilling effect on any iran-talk. Iraq: lots of int'l "blue" water around to park carriers, surrounded by unsupportive or enemy states, 3 US allies among them, and the country itself photographed and bombed daily for a decade after an earlier overwhelming defeat. Rwanda had none of these handy logistical features and a "humanitarian" goal which always makes defense beancounter types nervous. But it's general thesis was "Iraq, easy; Rwanda, hard."

ok i looked, but googling "Rwanda Iraq" turns up a billion things, sorry.

 

[Rambler]

The worse thing afflicting Bush's foreign policy is hypocrasy and lack of consistency, not neo-imperial aggression.

For what it's worth, I think that's dead right.

 

[luka]

this thread is only going to be good if you can get someone to call america 'facist lite'
then you can shout slogans at each other and get increasingly heated and unpleasant.
it'll be really boring if everyone goes, yeah, good point about america, theyve got some good things going for them.

iraq and afghanistan weren't really straight intervention, they certainly weren't sold that way. clinton did more actual intervening. i think its odd how you keep defending bush by reference to all the intervening (which he hasn't done) but, as i understand it, thats how you came to be a bush supporter, because you think its up for intervention and you think intervention is brilliant.

 

[luka]

and by the way oliver, i'm not happy about being told to read a 500,000 word article on wolfovitz just to learn that 'some of his best friends are muslim'
that took up a lot of my time, i could have been cutting my toenails.

 

[jaybob]

ok, however far off it may be, wouldn't a better idea (than american intervention) be a functioning European army, or more realistically some kind of revived Nato that had and was prepared to use force?

What the world needs most now is America being drawn back into a multilateral foreign policy environment. The UN, as far as the US is concerned, seems as discredited as the League of Nations was a couple of generations ago. In the FT, I think, there was a good article about a month ago proposing the idea of a new league of democratic nations, with some kind of pooled army. The key point of this league would be that it only admitted countries who could pass a strict democratic audit: no failed states, no theocracies, no corrupt princedoms. The authors suggested that America, in its current overstretched position, might welcome this potential support. what do people thinK?

 

[...]

blah blah...

Well, put! I was expecting more bile and silliness than this. Jeepers. Was the tone of my question too conciliatary? North Korea next! Nuke Tehran!

Oh and the thing about Rwanda is this: the point was never full scale invasion a la Iraq. Basically Clinton dropped to ball badly and got his administration to say anything to get out of admitting that straightfoward, clean-cut genocide was being unleashed, and with this US reluctance to get involved in any capacity, the UN was too tied and timid and weak to do anything, and Romeo Dallaire (you shoild never forget him) was militarily paralysed, stuck there with his troops watching Tutsis being machine gunned and chopped to bits, without being able to do anything. Clinton didn't want to get sucked in BECAUSE of, among other things, the nightmare in Somalia...oh, anyway, you get the picture.

I liked it when Madaleine Albright tackled Colin Powell, who didn't want his boys going anywhere near the Balkans, and said "what do we have this big army for anyway?"

He went mental! "I almost had an aneurysm," he said.

Intervention isn't just military invasion, of course: it can = good old diplomacy, like Colin Powell helping to diffuse nuclear war between India and Pakistan, although India's powerful IT sector probably had the most influence there.

Bush hasn't really "intervened" at all. But he has destroyed two nasty regimes, and scared a bunch of others witless. Therefore he's empowered the opponents of tyranny across the world, unless they're in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan or...

There are people here, I know, who despise America, and not just because of Bush and not just because of the American military, but because of American everything. The United Snakes crew.

I want to get them out of the woodwork.

And K-Punk's already decided that America is a fascist superpower. So where's the K-Punk chorus?

 

[rewch]

trouble is those failed states, theocracies and corrupt princedoms are inherently suspicious of any intervention, not to mention the concerns of various democaracies with similar suspicions...international relations have (& i'm not defending them) grown up with various working concepts (such as sovereignty) that are difficult to replace, though the us seems to be attempting to do so...in many reespects for itss own interests, which leads back too the former suspicions...rather ethnocentric to limit the moral authority of sadi body to 'strict deemocratic audit'...no? also weren't the authors rather close to an essentially internationally authoritarian position?

 

[...]

Robert Kagan made the same point in 'Paradise and Power', he reckons that the key to peace in the future between US and Europe is by Europe investing more in its military and becoming a counterweight, in some respects, to the US.

He's like, otherwise European resentment of US dominance will fester and become something much more malignant. It's literally military power that creates the gulf: economically, Europe and the US are more equal.

And, the best thing for Darfur, for instance, is a strong, functioning African Union army. And the leaders of the free world willing to say the word genocide when they ought to.

 

[luka]

yeah in terms of your argument, (intervention is cool, use to Power to defeat Evil), the us can't really do it anyway because it doesn#t have the public support, the military muscle or the dollars. it might be able to handle a couple of projects a year, but theres loads of fucked up shit in the world. if you want to have a go at every fucked up situation you need an international body.

 

[...]

Of course, but an international body is no use of it cannot handle a situation with any skill or consistency, or if it's used as a mechanism for countries to protect their own interests by censoring those of others, because then nothing happens. The international body slumps into a state of paralysis and then everybody else is paralysed too. I'm thinking of France in relation to Rwanda, and Russia in relation to the Balkans, in particular.

It would help if things like NATO, the UN, the African Union had some teeth. If more money was put into their armies. Because when things need to get done properly, the US are the only ones with the right kit and convinction to do it. They have mental shit, they can land fighter jets in the dark, and everyone else has rag tag armies in comparison.

 

[turtles]

Damnit, I was really trying to not to get sucked in to Dissensus untill after my exams were done, but this lackluster argument was just too much to take!

so basically, I take issue with this:

Originally posted by Oliver Craner
But reading the use, and abuse, of American Power as one consistent line seems rigid and counterproductive to me, especially now, when US foreign policy and international politics have both changed profoundly.

Surely you realize that this argument has been used many times before, during many previous administrations? The myth of change: "Well the US gov't may have done some bad things in the past, but things are different now, and stuff like that can't happen now." Yes the Bush doctrine of preemptive war is definitely new, but in reality it just makes explicit what has been implicit in America's foreign policy for decades: that the US will unilateraly act to protect it's interests.

So basically, I'm interested to know why you think US policy is so suddenly different now. Many of the people in the Bush administration have been around for a long time (Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.). Reagan already had a war on terror back in the 80's. And US economic interests have really not changed at all since Clinton, and have changed very little in the last 50 years or so. America has abused its power pretty terribly in the past, and many of the same people that performed that abuse are still in power, and many of their reasons for performing these abuses are still just the same.

Basically, 9/11 has been used as a pretext to persue existing and long standing goals. Things haven't really changed.

Hopefully this get's things going a bit more!



(yes yes I know, university student with leftist politics. shocker! )

 

[Pearsall]

Well, perhaps you can tell me of a great power (either global or regional) in history that has not abused its power somewhat?

Since obviously you think many US actions in the Cold War were bad (and I'll surely agree on some of them) I'd be interested to hear whether you think some of them were necessary in countering the Soviet Union. Or are you of the leftist school that holds that American actions in the Cold War, morally, were the same/worse than those of the Soviet Union and China in the same period? If the overall result (end of Communism) was a good thing, is that end unjustified by some of the means?

I guess we're getting closer to the heart of the matter now: is it possible to have a purely benevolent foreign policy if you are a nation that wields great power? Where should governments draw the line between their responsibilities to their people and their responsibilities to the world as a whole?

 

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Yo, hello Dave! That's the whole point, buddy! US foreign policy is always changing because the characters are always changing, and every big man's got his own doctrine or lobby to adhere to or service.

The BIG change, which is the thing that has changed American foreign policy in the context of 9/11, is the shift within the Republican party from the Realists to the Idealists. And, the thing is, that schism has been playing out for decades. Rummy was challenging Kissinger on his policies in the Nixon administration: he wanted to take Kissinger's place. And his idea was, end detente, and challenge the Soviets.

And then you had Reagan and the end of the Cold War. George Schultz was the don, and things were dirtier and nastier than later on, and supporting right-wing dictators and murderous militias and white oligarchies was justified by the Washington foreign policy community: Jeane Kirkpatrick being key to this, funnily enough, with a Commentary article called 'Dictatorships and Double Standards' which was a weird and sick synthesis of Kissingerism and Neoconservatism served up as newly-minted doctrine.

Then you no longer had the Cold War. But the heirs of Kissinger - Scowcroft, and later, Condi kinda - were still obsessed with Eastern European politics, while the Idealists started to focus on the Middle East. In the meantime, then, there's Clinton's administrations dealing with all the post-Cold War issues, and trying to work out what to DO with all that post-Vietnam/CW military power, and generally trying to work out what kind of foreign policy Democrats are suppossed to have anyway. Meanwhile Powell's in the Pentagon, with the 'don't do a damn thing' Powell doctrine.

You know all this, right? So, is it not just too easy and convenient to view US foreign policy as one monolithic chunk of genocidal evil shit that spans centuries? How the hell is that useful???

Maybe US foreign policy won't change cleanly, fundamentally, ever...because there are so many checks and counterchecks and party partitions and interest groups and there's Congress and there's Senate and there's Comittees and Special Advisors and all sorts...there's nothing clean, and there are too many fundamentalisms.

But it's more basic. Listen, when Bush said that the mission of the US was to challenge tyranny and support and export democracy he was speaking the language of the Idealists and turning his back on the legacy of Kissinger and realpolitik: Bush's 02 State of the Union address openly condemned that very legacy. That's a pretty important swerve in US foreign policy.

Now answer Pearsall's questions.

 

[...]

Change is not a myth. Myths don't change.

 

[turtles]

Alrighty then, good to see things pick up a bit.

So yeah, absolutes aren't very useful, and the political world is definitely a lot more complex than people tend to think. Of course I don't think US foreign policy has not been in constant flux for as along as there has been a US foreign policy. But that's kind of my point, that despite the fact that "every big man's got his own doctrine or lobby to adhere to or service," the end result of US foreign policy has been strickingly similar accross all sorts of different Administrations. In a sense it didn't really matter whether there was a Democrat or a Republican in the White House during Vietnam, the war was fought pretty much the same either way.

What I think this points to is that: a) US foreign policy is driven by a lot of factors completely outside of who is running the government (the economy being the real big one there). And b) though there are variations in policy, they tend to all come from within a similar and rather limited perspective--of priviledge, absolute faith in the capitilast system, and belief in America's right and duty to police the world (or something like that...I'm sure ppl will disagree on this). So essentially what I'm saying is that these larger factors have not changed. The swerve into Idealism is just one extreme within this spectrum.

The thing to remember is that, Bush might have said some nice things about freedom and such, and you know, that's great. But we're not actually going to start judging politicians by what they say now are we? You have to look at what Bush & Co have actually done. They have continued to support many despotic regimes. They have invaded a country, killed a lot of civilians, and installed a government which its people do not support. It remains to be seen if a trully independant Iraqi gov't is created, which would be great. But I have my doubts.

Anyway, you support Bush's rhetoric? Fine. I think it sounds kinda nice too. But I object to what he's actually done.


Phew....so on to Pearsall

Originally posted by Pearsall
Well, perhaps you can tell me of a great power (either global or regional) in history that has not abused its power somewhat?

Of course I can't (power corrupts, remember ). But that really doesn't mean we should be singing the praises of the US, does it? "No worse than any other great power" is hardly a compliment, nor is it a reason to stop looking for something better.

Lastly, as for the US vs Soviets comparison, no I don't think they are equivalent, I'd much rather live in the States the Soviet Russia. However, I do think that neither of them are all that great in their influence on the world. Standing up to the Soviets was a good thing, but that wasn't exactly the only thing the US was doing during that time. And really, I'm not too sure how much stuff that went under the banner of "standing up to the Soviets" actually performed that roll. Most of the interventions in Central America (Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, etc) were framed as fighting Communism, but I think it's pretty clear that they really had fuck all to do with Russia, and all about extending American hegemony.

alright, that'll do for now, I hope.

 

[MBM]

OK, so the US is the world's only military and economic superpower. What should it, as a nation state, do with that power?

And what should the EU - that big, sprawling mass of 25 nations - do? Work with the US? Limit it thru oppositional tactics? And assuming it wants to pick and choose, how does it do that effectively? With an aging population (and hence a massive pensions bill just around the corner) and lacking a real Executive arm - I can't see the EU investing more militarily.

P.S. One really banal comment I'd make concerns the relative lack of contact most americans have with other countries and cultures.

 

[&catherine]

It's not just 'should we intervene?', it's also 'will it work?'

The problem with US interventions is not just their hypocrisy. It's also the fact that these interventions almost always, without fail, go horribly wrong. The result is either that the aims of the intervention are not reached, while the target countries are left in a state far worse than prior to the intervention; or that the narrow aims of the intervention are technically achieved, while the country falls into chaos. (See, for example, Balkans in the early 90s, Kosovo in the late 90s, Iraq right now, Somalia, Afghanistan...)

No one seems to be talking very concretely about actual examples of US intervention here. I think a closer inspection would reveal that they are generally, to use a non-technical term, giant cock-ups.

And to tie this into the question of the abuse of American power... It tends to be the case that the rather narrow intellectual / intelligence / military frameworks through which the 'architects' of these interventions work are 'to blame' for this. It's a systemic thing.

(Apologies for the short post - will furnish the above with examples and elaboration if I get some time.)

Oh, and one more thing - I think Slavoj Zizek was right on the money when he said recently that the slogan for American policy could quite easily be a reversal of that old Green slogan - in America's case, "Think local, act global." Even in more 'liberal' administrations, the prime consideration is always national interest. Which may not be surprising, but it's worthwhile to remember as a guard against getting too misty-eyed about liberalism...