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PAN Discussion Group TUESDAY April 24th 2007
Subject: The USA’s Future in the World
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Location: Logan Square -ish RSVP for details
Time: 7pm to 10pm - ish
Bring drinks and snacks to share
Thanks to everyone for their article contributions. I‘ve tried to get all the main themes in: China, India, empire at the price of democracy etc. The last article I’ve included just as an optional link for the keenies rather than try to hack out the main points.
General:
The articles are the basis for the discussion and reading them helps give us some common ground and focus for the discussion, especially where we would otherwise be ignorant of the issues. The discussions are not intended as debates or arguments, rather they should be a chance to explore ideas and issues in a constructive forum. Feel free to bring along other stuff you've read on this, related subjects or on topics the group might be interested in for future meetings.
GROUND RULES:
* Temper the urge to speak with the discipline to listen and leave space for others
* Balance the desire to teach with a passion to learn
* Hear what is said and listen for what is meant
* Marry your certainties with others' possibilities
* Reserve judgment until you can claim the understanding we seek
Any problems let me know...
847-963-1254
Colin
tysoe2@yahoo.com
The Articles:
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First a view from the business community
U.S. military prowess and economic clout must be deployed with enlightened principle, not raw power. Last update: June 25, 2006 – 5:22 PM
The world needs a good leader, now more than ever. But, you might say, the United States has played that role from the end of World War II. Yes, but ... today the United States finds itself in a unique position. Arguably, this country remains the world's most powerful military force and at the same time the strongest member of the world economy. We belong to a growing but still exclusive club of the world's major economies that includes the European Union, Russia, China, India and Japan.
Until a few years ago, the United States was the acknowledged leader of this club. But lately our willingness to lead has been questioned as inconsistent at best and hypocritical at worst. Our "leadership capital," although somewhat debased, can still be invested to shape a future in which world interdependence replaces attempts at world dominance. Now is the time to craft a future in which the promises of globalization can be more broadly shared and the gaps it has created can be narrowed. It cannot be in the interests of the United States, or the world at large, to allow a vacuum of leadership to develop. And yet that is what's starting to take place.
Russia, after an unsuccessful run at democracy, has started acting like the totalitarian state of old. President Putin has bullied his neighbors by holding the oil and gas sword over their heads and is arming anti-U.S. countries in our hemisphere, such as Venezuela, while all the time professing to be a friend to the United States.
China, of course, has made it clear to Japan and the rest of Asia that it has replaced Tokyo and its U.S. ally as the leader in that part of the world while extending its sphere of influence to South America and Africa. The New York Times last week published an article describing how the United States is competing with China for the favors of Vietnam.
Even India, the world's largest democracy and for all practical purposes a future U.S. partner, has created economic alliances with China, making it clear that the two most populated nuclear powers in Asia do not defer to the United States as they once did.
But it is not too late. Given a vote, most people around the world would still like to see the United States back at the helm of worldwide leadership. That's because in spite of the mistakes made by our leaders since 9/11, the world still believes in what the United States stands for: freedom, individual liberty, tolerance and the rule of law.
Globalization has created a growing gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world. U.S. leadership aimed at closing that gap is in the best interest of the United States and the rest of the world. But that will require our political and business leaders to show Americans -- by word and deed -- why it is not in our interest to withdraw behind a self-serving foreign and economic policy.
But saying we are willing to assume this leadership role is not enough. It will take action, including:
• Re-establishing relationships with both our traditional allies in the developed world and creating new alliances and relationships with the nations that are most at risk in the Middle East, Africa and South America.
• Supporting and helping to create U.N. programs that are best suited to address the poorest nations of the world on issues such as education, health care and social stability. That includes paying our U.N. dues. (It should be embarrassing that Bill Gates, Bono and Angelina Jolie appear to be doing more to help Africa than the world's richest government.)
In May, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell accepted the Humphrey Institute's Leadership Award with these words:
"No one policy will solve our problems. But this is clear: We must renew our alliances, and we must do much better in living up to our high ideals. ... We must recognize that power and principle ... must be bound together firmly. Our power must always be deployed in a way consistent with our ideals, for it is our ideals that have always been the basis for our influence in the world. We were a great nation long before we were a powerful nation."
Amen.Ronald M. Bosrock, of St. Paul, is the founder and director of the Global Institute, a research center.
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http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.print&essay_id=162416&stoplayout=true
America's
Romance with the Future
by
Martin Walker
When he announced his bid for the presidency back in 1991, the then-governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, spoke movingly of the teacher who had most influenced his thinking, a Georgetown University professor named Carroll Quigley. Quigley was known for ripping apart a copy of The Republic while he denounced Plato as the intellectual father of totalitarianism. But it was not the classroom pyrotechnics that most impressed the future president. Rather, it was Quigley’s emphasis on the future in his foundation course on Western civilization. Clinton never forgot the professor’s preoccupation—and not just because he was one of only two students in the class to receive an A.
“The thing that got you into this classroom today is belief in the future, a belief that the future can be better than the present and that people will and should sacrifice in the present to get to that better future,” said Quigley. “That belief has taken man out of the chaos and deprivation that most human beings toiled in for most of history to the point where we are today. One thing will kill our civilization and way of life—when people no longer have the will to undergo the pain required to prefer the future to the present. That is what got your parents to pay this expensive tuition. That is what got us through two wars and the Depression. Future preference. Don’t ever forget that.”
It is tempting to dismiss this preference for the future as a truism, an instinct for clan survival hard-wired into the genes of all living creatures. Adults of every species exert themselves to feed and protect their helpless young. Hunter-gatherers learn to salt and dry today’s meat against tomorrow’s hunger, and the most primitive peasants learn to save precious seed corn for next year’s harvest. But advanced societies have embellished and refined the instinct into something much grander: an array of deliberate policy choices. These include investment in police and standing armed forces, education and economic infrastructure, and social health and welfare. Advanced societies extend welfare provisions even to the elderly, though they know that there is little genetic advantage to be gained from such expenditure on those beyond breeding age. They make these substantial income transfers from the working population to the retired for reasons of social cohesion and human decency—and possibly also from an acute sense of the propensity of the elderly to vote. Whatever the cause, this is an act of general political will that has little to do with the individual demands of our genes and everything to do with what we might call Quigley’s Law: Successful societies are defined by their readiness to allow consideration of the future to determine today’s choices.
The United States is a successful society today because over the past two or three generations it has applied Quigley’s Law more thoroughly and more widely than any other society in history, and, in doing so, has shaped much of the world. Until 1940, the United States was not much more Quigley-minded than most other great powers. But the challenges of global war from 1939 to 1945, and the Cold War thereafter, persuaded successive administrations of both parties to apply Quigley’s principles on a global scale. There had been a hesitant precedent in the way that the British Empire crushed piracy, abolished the slave trade, established the principle of freedom of the seas, and built lighthouses and ports available to all. But the strategy by which the United States waged the Cold War was altogether more grandiose in conception and more transforming in its application.
That extraordinary generation of policymakers gathered around Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman—George Marshall, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Paul Hoffman, and others—established, with bipartisan support, a series of global institutions that, in effect, created The West, the global economic machine that brought together the wealth, markets, and ingenuity of North America, Western Europe, and Japan. The policymakers set up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for common security, the International Monetary Fund for global economic stability, the World Bank for global development, the United Nations for global order, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade for the expansion of global trade. And they crafted inventive new instruments to help the war-flattened industries of Europe and Japan rebuild at American expense. The Marshall Plan, for example, which furnished Europeans with the dollars that enabled them to rebuild their factories and feed their workers (the offer was made to the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries as well), represented an annual disbursement of just over one percent of America’s gross domestic product (GDP) for five years.
There was method to this altruism. The Western European economies were thereby enabled to contribute not only more effectively but also more willingly to common defense; NATO, in contrast to the Warsaw Pact and its dragooned members, was an alliance of consent. The United States subsequently extended the pattern of altruism through the Pentagon’s Special Procurements Fund, which pumped more money into rebuilding Japan than West Germany had received under the Marshall Plan. Because Japan became the industrial and logistic base for the Korean War, American taxpayers financed the ports, railroads, power stations, hospitals, and shipyards of modern Japan. They even paid for the first assembly lines of the Toyota Manufacturing Corporation, which was about to go bankrupt when it was saved by a Pentagon order for trucks.
The spur to this Quigleyan activity on a global scale was, of course, the national security of the United States: The nation needed forward bases in Europe and Asia and allies to share the burden of the Cold War. Yet America’s grand strategists understood that, in rebuilding these allies, they were fostering formidable commercial competitors for the future, whose success might one day challenge the economic dominance that had allowed the United States to generate about half of all global economic output in 1945. American politicians certainly understood what was at stake, and, accordingly, they exacted various prices. Southern Congressmen, for example, insisted that American tobacco products be counted as Marshall Plan aid, which caused one British member of Parliament to complain, “The British Empire is being sold for a packet of cigarettes.”
A far more important demand was “the open door,” a requirement that the British, French, and Dutch colonial empires dismantle the imperial tariff system that gave their goods privileged access to colonial markets. This dovetailed precisely with the American strategy to promote world trade and thus boost American exports. As a grand design, it proved stunningly successful, although some Americans may have thought the price rather high. By 2005, the United States and the 25-nation European Union each accounted for less than a quarter of global GDP, and Japan for another 11 percent. The once-stricken competitors had long since become serious commercial rivals, in a large, prosperous, and competitive global economy that witnessed the decimation of American jobs in traditionally strategic industries such as coal, steel, and automobiles.
The Soviet Union, the West’s great adversary in the Cold War, had its own plans for the future. At the Twenty-second Party Congress in 1961, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev pledged that within 20 years his country would be outproducing the United States in all the traditional sectors of industrial might: coal, steel, cement, fertilizer, tractors, and metal-cutting lathes. The pledge was fulfilled: In 1981, the Soviet Union outdid America in every one of those industries; it had successfully reproduced a mid-20th-century industrial economy. But the West by then was inventing a different kind of economy altogether, one based on plastic and silicon, on the new service sector, and on world trade. Even with the best of Quigleyan motives, an advanced society, such as the Soviet Union (which put the first man into space even as Khrushchev was issuing his promises), can make disastrous choices.
That mistaken Soviet vision of the future ensured that the entire planet would eventually come to live instead in an American-designed future, whose contours were drafted in the furious burst of technological, cultural, and economic energy that powered the United States after it assumed its global role in World War II and the postwar world. Its films and popular music, its visual arts and literature, its assumption that a college education should be the norm, and its insistence on domestic comforts (appliances, central heating and air conditioning, family cars) have now all spread beyond the mass middle class that America invented and become the defining possessions of a mass middle class that is global. And with them have spread those essential underpinnings of the American creed: free press, free trade, free markets, and free elections.
We live now in that American future and call it globalization. And whatever the costs—personal, regional, environmental—that have been paid by Pittsburgh steelworkers, Amazonian tribes, Nigerian villagers, or deracinated Muslims in Paris slums, the overall achievement has been stupendous. More people than ever before are clambering out of the absolute poverty of their ancestors and aspiring to join that mass middle class. James McGregor, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China and author of the new book One Billion Customers, estimates that the market for private cars in China is already bigger than the markets of France and Germany combined, and within five years it will be twice as large again. By then, the Indian market, too, will be bigger than the combined markets of France and Germany. And so on. The biosphere groans under the strain, but the future of mass consumption that gripped the young Henry Ford 100 years ago, and that was implicit in the Cold War’s original grand strategy, now pervades the world.
Have we any clues as to how these new pressures are likely to affect human relationships and social change? We do—and these clues come from Americans. It is a remarkable feature of science fiction that, although Europeans invented the genre, Americans have produced its most thoughtful explorations of future societies. Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells were fascinated by the future of things, of stupendous technology. American authors of science-fiction classics tend to have been intrigued rather by the future of people. Robert Heinlein wrote what is still the most accomplished description of a wholly free-market society in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Isaac Asimov drafted laws of robotics (“A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”) that are sure to come in handy fairly soon. And Philip K. Dick explored, among other themes, the personal relationships that are bound to develop between humans and androids (the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was the basis of the movie Blade Runner), the nature of justice in a society where human behavior and even crime may be predicted (the short story “The Minority Report” became the movie Minority Report), and the likely outcome when virtual reality becomes all too plausible (“We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” reached the screen as Total Recall).
Americans, then, invent the future as statesmen and imagine it as writers, and they have traditionally been confident that the future will be splendid—that today’s debts will be tomorrow’s fortune, that their citizenship holds a vast and generous promise that will inevitably be redeemed. The vision on the other side of the Atlantic has been altogether grimmer. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever,” wrote George Orwell in 1984. That’s far removed from the sentiment of the modern American sage Daniel Boorstin: “America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocratic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable. Here they have tried to make dreams come true.” When Henry Ford said “History is bunk,” he was speaking a great truth for those millions of immigrants who had abandoned the old continent with its constipated social order and confining tradition. America was Hegel’s “land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of Old Europe.”
The question now, however, is whether that vision still endures, whether the innate national confidence remains secure that made Ronald Reagan’s “It’s morning in America” resonate so powerfully. There are some troubling signs that Quigley’s Law is no longer operating with the old American rigor. America as an economic community is no longer saving the seed corn. Indeed, it is no longer saving. Since 2002, America’s annual net savings have failed to rise even to the miserable level of two percent of GDP. Europeans save about 15 percent of GDP, and the Chinese more than 35 percent. The federal budget deficit was $412 billion in 2004, and the current account deficit (which used to be called the trade deficit) was $666 billion. Combine those figures into a double deficit, and the United States in 2004 lived beyond its means to the tune of more than a trillion dollars. We learn from the bookkeeping of the Bank for International Settlements that these deficits were largely financed by the central banks of China and Japan, which bought dollars, Treasury bonds, and other U.S. securities. Thanks to the Chinese and Japanese savers who wanted Americans to have the money to continue consuming their exports, Americans were able to continue living in the style to which they had become accustomed, but which they could no longer afford.
In October 2005, the Council on Foreign Relations released a report, “Getting Serious About the Twin Deficits,” by Professor Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. (Chinn served on the Council of Economic Advisers for Presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush.) “Failure to take the initiative to reduce the twin deficits will cede to foreign governments increasing influence over the nation’s fate. Perhaps equally alarming, it will lead to slower growth, escalating trade friction, and reduced American influence in political and economic spheres,” Chinn wrote in the report. “Foreign governments and private investors, confronted with an endless vista of U.S. budget deficits, will tire of accumulating Treasury securities. Borrowing costs for the Treasury would then rise significantly and the dollar would fall sharply. The economy would slow dramatically, driven indirectly by a slump in the housing market or directly through falling private consumption.”
These are alarming warnings from a respected source. Perhaps the best antidote to the gloom is to recall that the United States has always been rather good at reinventing itself in the face of new challenges and changed times. It is barely 14 years since former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas won the New Hampshire presidential primary in 1992 with the slogan “The Cold War is over, and Japan won.” Since then, the Japanese economy has been virtually stagnant. The U.S. economy, which along the way developed the Internet and broadband technology, has grown by more than 40 percent. That is to say, the GDP of the U.S. economy has grown since 1992 by an amount greater than the entire GDP of Japan. It requires a breathtaking disregard for the lessons of history to bet against the resilience and vigor of the American economic machine.
One way to look at American history over the past century or so is to suggest that in the late 19th century the United States became the world’s farm, the source of cheap food that fed its own swelling population and much of the rest of the world. In the first two-thirds of the 20th century, it became the world’s workshop, the source of industrial innovations and goods, and, when needed, of munitions. Over the past generation, as European, Japanese, and Chinese manufacturers began challenging its dominance, the United States became the world’s graduate school.
The most recent ranking of the world’s universities (the criteria included the Nobel and other international prizes, articles cited in leading academic journals, research results, and academic performance) was published in 2005 by the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University. Of the world’s top 10 universities, only two, Oxford and Cambridge, were not American. The third non-American university to make the list was Japan’s Tokyo University, at number 20. The highest-ranking non-British European university, at number 27, was Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. America dominates the world’s brainpower and scores well on this classically Quigleyan measure of care for the future. If the global mass middle class is indeed straining the biosphere beyond endurance, it will be universities in America—if anywhere—that produce the research and innovation needed to repair the damage.
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the first volume of which was published in 1835, remains perhaps the most perceptive book ever written on the young republic. Tocqueville’s ideas and judgments have continued to ring true, including the cautionary notes he sounds along with his expressions of admiration. His celebrated warning about a singular American weakness provides the counterpoint to Quigley’s essential optimism: “The prospect really does frighten me that they may finally become so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures that their interest in their own future and in that of their descendants may vanish, and that they will prefer tamely to follow the course of their destiny rather than make a sudden energetic effort necessary to set things right.” These many years later, Tocqueville’s concern seems more prescient and urgent than ever.
Martin Walker, a former Wilson Center public policy scholar, is the editor of United Press International.
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Why
Nemesis Is at Our Door
By Chalmers Johnson
History tells us that one of the most unstable political combinations is a country -- like the United States today -- that tries to be a domestic democracy and a foreign imperialist. Why this is so can be a very abstract subject. Perhaps the best way to offer my thoughts on this is to say a few words about my new book, Nemesis, and explain why I gave it the subtitle, "The Last Days of the American Republic." Nemesis is the third book to have grown out of my research over the past eight years. I never set out to write a trilogy on our increasingly endangered democracy, but as I kept stumbling on ever more evidence of the legacy of the imperialist pressures we put on many other countries as well as the nature and size of our military empire, one book led to another.
Professionally, I am a specialist in the history and politics of East Asia. In 2000, I published Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, because my research on China, Japan, and the two Koreas persuaded me that our policies there would have serious future consequences. The book was noticed at the time, but only after 9/11 did the CIA term I adapted for the title -- "blowback" -- become a household word and my volume a bestseller.
I had set out to explain how exactly our government came to be so hated around the world. As a CIA term of tradecraft, "blowback" does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to, and in, foreign countries. It refers specifically to retaliation for illegal operations carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. These operations have included the clandestine overthrow of governments various administrations did not like, the training of foreign militaries in the techniques of state terrorism, the rigging of elections in foreign countries, interference with the economic viability of countries that seemed to threaten the interests of influential American corporations, as well as the torture or assassination of selected foreigners. The fact that these actions were, at least originally, secret meant that when retaliation does come -- as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 -- the American public is incapable of putting the events in context. Not surprisingly, then, Americans tend to support speedy acts of revenge intended to punish the actual, or alleged, perpetrators. These moments of lashing out, of course, only prepare the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.
A World of Bases
As a continuation of my own analytical odyssey, I then began doing research on the network of 737 American military bases we maintained around the world (according to the Pentagon's own 2005 official inventory). Not including the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, we now station over half a million U.S. troops, spies, contractors, dependents, and others on military bases located in more than 130 countries, many of them presided over by dictatorial regimes that have given their citizens no say in the decision to let us in.
As but one striking example of imperial basing policy: For the past sixty-one years, the U.S. military has garrisoned the small Japanese island of Okinawa with 37 bases. Smaller than Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands, Okinawa is home to 1.3 million people who live cheek-by-jowl with 17,000 Marines of the 3rd Marine Division and the largest U.S. installation in East Asia -- Kadena Air Force Base. There have been many Okinawan protests against the rapes, crimes, accidents, and pollution caused by this sort of concentration of American troops and weaponry, but so far the U. S. military -- in collusion with the Japanese government -- has ignored them. My research into our base world resulted in The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, written during the run-up to the Iraq invasion.
As our occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq turned into major fiascoes, discrediting our military leadership, ruining our public finances, and bringing death and destruction to hundreds of thousands of civilians in those countries, I continued to ponder the issue of empire. In these years, it became ever clearer that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their supporters were claiming, and actively assuming, powers specifically denied to a president by our Constitution. It became no less clear that Congress had almost completely abdicated its responsibilities to balance the power of the executive branch. Despite the Democratic sweep in the 2006 election, it remains to be seen whether these tendencies can, in the long run, be controlled, let alone reversed.
Until the 2004 presidential election, ordinary citizens of the United States could at least claim that our foreign policy, including our illegal invasion of Iraq, was the work of George Bush's administration and that we had not put him in office. After all, in 2000, Bush lost the popular vote and was appointed president thanks to the intervention of the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision. But in November 2004, regardless of claims about voter fraud, Bush actually won the popular vote by over 3.5 million ballots, making his regime and his wars ours.
Whether Americans intended it or not, we are now seen around the world as approving the torture of captives at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, at Bagram Air Base in Kabul, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and at a global network of secret CIA prisons, as well as having endorsed Bush's claim that, as commander-in-chief in "wartime," he is beyond all constraints of the Constitution or international law. We are now saddled with a rigged economy based on record-setting trade and fiscal deficits, the most secretive and intrusive government in our country's memory, and the pursuit of "preventive" war as a basis for foreign policy. Don't forget as well the potential epidemic of nuclear proliferation as other nations attempt to adjust to and defend themselves against Bush's preventive wars, while our own already staggering nuclear arsenal expands toward first-strike primacy and we expend unimaginable billions on futuristic ideas for warfare in outer space.
The Choice Ahead
By the time I came to write Nemesis, I no longer doubted that maintaining our empire abroad required resources and commitments that would inevitably undercut, or simply skirt, what was left of our domestic democracy and that might, in the end, produce a military dictatorship or -- far more likely -- its civilian equivalent. The combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, an ever growing economic dependence on the military-industrial complex and the making of weaponry, and ruinous military expenses as well as a vast, bloated "defense" budget, not to speak of the creation of a whole second Defense Department (known as the Department of Homeland Security) has been destroying our republican structure of governing in favor of an imperial presidency. By republican structure, of course, I mean the separation of powers and the elaborate checks and balances that the founders of our country wrote into the Constitution as the main bulwarks against dictatorship and tyranny, which they greatly feared.
We are on the brink of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation starts down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play -- isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy.
History is instructive on this dilemma. If we choose to keep our empire, as the Roman republic did, we will certainly lose our democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates. There is an alternative, however. We could, like the British Empire after World War II, keep our democracy by giving up our empire. The British did not do a particularly brilliant job of liquidating their empire and there were several clear cases where British imperialists defied their nation's commitment to democracy in order to hang on to foreign privileges. The war against the Kikuyu in Kenya in the 1950s and the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956 are particularly savage examples of that. But the overall thrust of postwar British history is clear: the people of the British Isles chose democracy over imperialism.
In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt offered the following summary of British imperialism and its fate:
"On the whole it was a failure because of the dichotomy between the nation-state's legal principles and the methods needed to oppress other people permanently. This failure was neither necessary nor due to ignorance or incompetence. British imperialists knew very well that 'administrative massacres' could keep India in bondage, but they also knew that public opinion at home would not stand for such measures. Imperialism could have been a success if the nation-state had been willing to pay the price, to commit suicide and transform itself into a tyranny. It is one of the glories of Europe, and especially of Great Britain, that she preferred to liquidate the empire."
I agree with this judgment. When one looks at Prime Minister Tony Blair's unnecessary and futile support of Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq, one can only conclude that it was an atavistic response, that it represented a British longing to relive the glories -- and cruelties -- of a past that should have been ancient history.
As a form of government, imperialism does not seek or require the consent of the governed. It is a pure form of tyranny. The American attempt to combine domestic democracy with such tyrannical control over foreigners is hopelessly contradictory and hypocritical. A country can be democratic or it can be imperialistic, but it cannot be both.
The Road to Imperial Bankruptcy
The American political system failed to prevent this combination from developing -- and may now be incapable of correcting it. The evidence strongly suggests that the legislative and judicial branches of our government have become so servile in the presence of the imperial Presidency that they have largely lost the ability to respond in a principled and independent manner. Even in the present moment of congressional stirring, there seems to be a deep sense of helplessness. Various members of Congress have already attempted to explain how the one clear power they retain -- to cut off funds for a disastrous program -- is not one they are currently prepared to use.
So the question becomes, if not Congress, could the people themselves restore Constitutional government? A grass-roots movement to abolish secret government, to bring the CIA and other illegal spying operations and private armies out of the closet of imperial power and into the light, to break the hold of the military-industrial complex, and to establish genuine public financing of elections may be at least theoretically conceivable. But given the conglomerate control of our mass media and the difficulties of mobilizing our large and diverse population, such an opting for popular democracy, as we remember it from our past, seems unlikely.
It is possible that, at some future moment, the U.S. military could actually take over the government and declare a dictatorship (though its commanders would undoubtedly find a gentler, more user-friendly name for it). That is, after all, how the Roman republic ended -- by being turned over to a populist general, Julius Caesar, who had just been declared dictator for life. After his assassination and a short interregnum, it was his grandnephew Octavian who succeeded him and became the first Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar. The American military is unlikely to go that route. But one cannot ignore the fact that professional military officers seem to have played a considerable role in getting rid of their civilian overlord, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The new directors of the CIA, its main internal branches, the National Security Agency, and many other key organs of the "defense establishment" are now military (or ex-military) officers, strongly suggesting that the military does not need to take over the government in order to control it. Meanwhile, the all-volunteer army has emerged as an ever more separate institution in our society, its profile less and less like that of the general populace.
Nonetheless, military coups, however decorous, are not part of the American tradition, nor that of the officer corps, which might well worry about how the citizenry would react to a move toward open military dictatorship. Moreover, prosecutions of low-level military torturers from Abu Ghraib prison and killers of civilians in Iraq have demonstrated to enlisted troops that obedience to illegal orders can result in dire punishment in a situation where those of higher rank go free. No one knows whether ordinary soldiers, even from what is no longer in any normal sense a citizen army, would obey clearly illegal orders to oust an elected government or whether the officer corps would ever have sufficient confidence to issue such orders. In addition, the present system already offers the military high command so much -- in funds, prestige, and future employment via the famed "revolving door" of the military-industrial complex -- that a perilous transition to anything like direct military rule would make little sense under reasonably normal conditions.
Whatever future developments may prove to be, my best guess is that the U.S. will continue to maintain a façade of Constitutional government and drift along until financial bankruptcy overtakes it. Of course, bankruptcy will not mean the literal end of the U.S. any more than it did for Germany in 1923, China in 1948, or Argentina in 2001-2002. It might, in fact, open the way for an unexpected restoration of the American system -- or for military rule, revolution, or simply some new development we cannot yet imagine.
Certainly, such a bankruptcy would mean a drastic lowering of our standard of living, a further loss of control over international affairs, a sudden need to adjust to the rise of other powers, including China and India, and a further discrediting of the notion that the United States is somehow exceptional compared to other nations. We will have to learn what it means to be a far poorer country -- and the attitudes and manners that go with it. As Anatol Lieven, author of America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, observes:
"U.S. global power, as presently conceived by the overwhelming majority of the U.S. establishment, is unsustainable. . . The empire can no longer raise enough taxes or soldiers, it is increasingly indebted, and key vassal states are no longer reliable. . . The result is that the empire can no longer pay for enough of the professional troops it needs to fulfill its self-assumed imperial tasks."
In February 2006, the Bush administration submitted to Congress a $439 billion defense appropriation budget for fiscal year 2007. As the country enters 2007, the administration is about to present a nearly $100 billion supplementary request to Congress just for the Iraq and Afghan wars. At the same time, the deficit in the country's current account -- the imbalance in the trading of goods and services as well as the shortfall in all other cross-border payments from interest income and rents to dividends and profits on direct investments -- underwent its fastest ever quarterly deterioration. For 2005, the current account deficit was $805 billion, 6.4% of national income. In 2005, the U.S. trade deficit, the largest component of the current account deficit, soared to an all-time high of $725.8 billion, the fourth consecutive year that America's trade debts set records. The trade deficit with China alone rose to $201.6 billion, the highest imbalance ever recorded with any country. Meanwhile, since mid-2000, the country has lost nearly three million manufacturing jobs.
To try to cope with these imbalances, on March 16, 2006, Congress raised the national debt limit from $8.2 trillion to $8.96 trillion. This was the fourth time since George W. Bush took office that it had to be raised. The national debt is the total amount owed by the government and should not be confused with the federal budget deficit, the annual amount by which federal spending exceeds revenue. Had Congress not raised the debt limit, the U.S. government would not have been able to borrow more money and would have had to default on its massive debts.
Among the creditors that finance these unprecedented sums, the two largest are the central banks of China (with $853.7 billion in reserves) and Japan (with $831.58 billion in reserves), both of which are the managers of the huge trade surpluses these countries enjoy with the United States. This helps explain why our debt burden has not yet triggered what standard economic theory would dictate: a steep decline in the value of the U.S. dollar followed by a severe contraction of the American economy when we found we could no longer afford the foreign goods we like so much. So far, both the Chinese and Japanese governments continue to be willing to be paid in dollars in order to sustain American purchases of their exports.
For the sake of their own domestic employment, both countries lend huge amounts to the American treasury, but there is no guarantee of how long they will want to, or be able to do so. Marshall Auerback, an international financial strategist, says we have become a "Blanche Dubois economy" (so named after the leading character in the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire) heavily dependent on "the kindness of strangers." Unfortunately, in our case, as in Blanche's, there are ever fewer strangers willing to support our illusions.
So my own hope is that -- if the American people do not find a way to choose democracy over empire -- at least our imperial venture will end not with a nuclear bang but a financial whimper. From the present vantage point, it certainly seems a daunting challenge for any President (or Congress) from either party even to begin the task of dismantling the military-industrial complex, ending the pall of "national security" secrecy and the "black budgets" that make public oversight of what our government does impossible, and bringing the president's secret army, the CIA, under democratic control. It's evident that Nemesis -- in Greek mythology the goddess of vengeance, the punisher of hubris and arrogance -- is already a visitor in our country, simply biding her time before she makes her presence known.
Chalmers Johnson is a retired professor of Asian Studies at the University of California, San Diego. From 1968 until 1972 he served as a consultant to the Office of National Estimates of the Central Intelligence Agency. Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, the final volume in his Blowback Trilogy, is just now being published. In 2006 he appeared in the prize-winning documentary film Why We Fight.
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And here’s one that thinks the administration is taking the right path aligning with Asia…
The New
New World
Order
By Daniel W. Drezner From Foreign
Affairs, March/April 2007
Daniel W. Drezner is Associate Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and the author of "All Politics Is Global."
RISING AND FALLING
Throughout the twentieth century, the list of the world's great powers was predictably short: the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, and northwestern Europe. The twenty-first century will be different. China and India are emerging as economic and political heavyweights: China holds over a trillion dollars in hard currency reserves, India's high-tech sector is growing by leaps and bounds, and both countries, already recognized nuclear powers, are developing blue-water navies. The National Intelligence Council, a U.S. government think tank, projects that by 2025, China and India will have the world's second- and fourth-largest economies, respectively. Such growth is opening the way for a multipolar era in world politics.
This tectonic shift will pose a challenge to the U.S.-dominated global institutions that have been in place since the 1940s. At the behest of Washington, these multilateral regimes have promoted trade liberalization, open capital markets, and nuclear nonproliferation, ensuring relative peace and prosperity for six decades -- and untold benefits for the United States. But unless rising powers such as China and India are incorporated into this framework, the future of these international regimes will be uncomfortably uncertain.
Given its performance over the last six years, one would not expect the Bush administration to handle this challenge terribly well. After all, its unilateralist impulses, on vivid display in the Iraq war, have become a lightning rod for criticism of U.S. foreign policy. But the Iraq controversy has overshadowed a more pragmatic and multilateral component of the Bush administration's grand strategy: Washington's attempt to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy and international institutions in order to account for shifts in the global distribution of power. The Bush administration has been reallocating the resources of the executive branch to focus on emerging powers. In an attempt to ensure that these countries buy into the core tenets of the U.S.-created world order, Washington has tried to bolster their profiles in forums ranging from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to the World Health Organization, on issues as diverse as nuclear proliferation, monetary relations, and the environment. Because these efforts have focused more on so-called low politics than on the global war on terrorism, they have flown under the radar of many observers. But in fact, George W. Bush has revived George H. W. Bush's call for a "new world order" -- by creating, in effect, a new new world order.
This unheralded effort is well intentioned and well advised. It is, however, running into two major roadblocks. The first is that empowering countries on the rise means disempowering countries on the wane. Accordingly, some members of the European Union have been less than enthusiastic about aspects of the United States' strategy. To be sure, the EU has made its own bilateral accommodations and has been happy to cooperate with emerging countries in response to American unilateralism. But European states have been less willing to reduce their overrepresentation in multilateral institutions. The second problem, which is of the Bush administration's own making, stems from Washington's reputation for unilateralism. Because the U.S. government is viewed as having undercut many global governance structures in recent years, any effort by this administration to rewrite the rules of the global game is naturally seen as yet another attempt by Washington to escape the constraints of international law. A coalition of the skeptical, which includes states such as Argentina, Nigeria, and Pakistan, will make it difficult for the United States to engineer the orderly inclusion of India and China in the concert of great powers.
Despite these difficulties, it is in the United States' interest to redouble its efforts. Growing anti-Americanism has revitalized groupings of states traditionally hostile to the United States, such as the Nonaligned Movement. To overcome such skepticism, the United States must be prepared to make real concessions. If China and India are not made to feel welcome inside existing international institutions, they might create new ones -- leaving the United States on the outside looking in.
PLUS ÇA CHANGE
When the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and NATO were created in the late 1940s, the United States was the undisputed hegemon of the Western world. These organizations reflected its dominance and its preferences and were designed to boost the power of the United States and its European allies. France and the United Kingdom had been great powers for centuries; in the 1950s the rules of the game still accorded them important perquisites. They were given permanent seats on the UN Security Council. It was agreed that the IMF's executive director would always be a European. And Europe was de facto granted a voice equal to that of the United States in the GATT.
Today, the distribution of power in the world is very different. According to Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, by 2010, the annual growth in combined national income from Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- the so-called BRIC countries -- will be greater than that from the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy combined; by 2025, it will be twice that of the G-7 (the group of highly industrialized countries).
These trends were already evident in the 1990s -- and the end of the Cold War presented an opportunity to adapt international institutions to rising powers. At the time, however, Washington chose to reinforce preexisting arrangements. The GATT became the World Trade Organization. NATO expanded its membership to eastern European states and its sphere of influence to the Balkans. The macroeconomic policies known as the Washington consensus became gospel in major international financial institutions. There were few institutional changes to accommodate rising powers, besides the creation of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in 1989 and China's hard-won admission to the WTO in 2001. Many of the new forums, such as the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering, comprised the usual suspects: the United States and its industrialized allies.
The Clinton administration had good reasons for not doing more. Remaking international institutions is a thankless task that requires holders of power to voluntarily cede some of their influence. There was no urgent need to undertake it in the 1990s: China and India were rising, but their great-power status still seemed a long ways off. Even minor shifts in long-standing U.S. foreign policy -- such as the reduction of U.S. troops in Germany -- caused great controversy. Most important, the Clinton administration's reinforcement approach worked. The creation of the WTO strengthened the global trade regime. NATO led effective operations in Bosnia and Kosovo. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) was renewed indefinitely. Despite the occasional gripe about American hyperpower, the United States seemed able to legitimately advance its interests through the adroit use of multilateral diplomacy. By and large, American hegemony went unchallenged.
These gains, however, came with hidden costs. Many of the rising powers believed that the existing global governance structures stacked the deck against them. The IMF's perceived highhandedness during the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s bred resentment across the Pacific Rim. New Delhi was frustrated by Washington's objections to its 1998 nuclear tests and grew tired of being viewed by Washington strictly through the prism of South Asian security. China resented the drawn-out negotiations to enter the WTO. And NATO's bombing of Kosovo was triply problematic for Beijing: the accidental hit on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade aroused nationalist passions, Washington's willingness to cross international borders to protect human rights clashed with Beijing's notion of state sovereignty, and the United States' decision to bypass the United Nations and act through NATO highlighted the limits of China's effective influence over world politics. Heading into the new millennium, the fastest-growing economies in the world were nursing grudges toward the United States.
THE NEW DEAL
The Bush administration's response to the September 11 attacks has triggered an avalanche of books about how to rethink U.S. grand strategy. Most of them, pointing to the chaos in Iraq and setbacks in the war on terrorism, condemn the Bush administration's penchant for bellicose unilateralism and assert that a better way is possible. Given the administration's rejection of multilateralism in the context of the Biological Weapons Convention, the Geneva Conventions, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, this criticism is well grounded.
But the analysis is incomplete -- even though the rhetorical excesses of former UN Ambassador John Bolton and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld make it easy to think otherwise. Myriad reasons explain Washington's recent outreach to emerging powers and its concomitant effort to revamp global governance. In part, changes in personnel motivated this shift: it is no coincidence, for example, that most of these outreach efforts have taken place since Condoleezza Rice became secretary of state and have accelerated since Henry Paulson became secretary of the Treasury. In part, change has been foisted on the administration from the outside world. As Philip Gordon, of the Brookings Institution, pointed out in Foreign Affairs last year, failure in Iraq rendered neoconservatism an unsustainable strategy.
But in part, the effort to institutionalize a new great-power concert has been a long-standing component of the Bush administration's foreign policy. And Washington-style multilateralism is above all a means to further U.S. goals. Accordingly, the Bush administration defers to institutions it sees as being effective (say, the WTO) and has consistently sought the enforcement of multilateral norms and decisions it deems important (be they IMF lending agreements or UN Security Council resolutions). But it scorns multilateral institutions that fail to live up to their own stated standards (such as other UN bodies). The 2006 National Security Strategy reiterates Washington's dual position by arguing that great-power consensus "must be supported by appropriate institutions, regional and global, to make cooperation more permanent, effective, and wide-reaching. Where existing institutions can be reformed to meet new challenges, we, along with our partners, must reform them. Where appropriate institutions do not exist, we, along with our partners, must create them."
Global institutions cease to be appropriate when the allocation of decision-making authority within them no longer corresponds to the distribution of power -- and that is precisely the situation today. The UN Security Council is one obvious example; the G-7 is an even more egregious one. The G-7 states took it upon themselves to manage global macroeconomic imbalances in the 1970s. They were moderately successful at the job during the 1980s, when they accounted for half of the world's economic activity. Today, however, even when they meet with Russia (as the G-8), they cannot be effective without including in their deliberations the economic heavyweight that is China.
Incorporating emerging powers while placating status quo states is no simple feat. But the task should appear less daunting when it is understood that success will benefit ascendant states as much as it will the United States. It will bring ascendant states recognition and legitimacy to match their new power. Granted, they will have to accept a multilateral order built on U.S. principles. But they -- especially China and India -- have grown phenomenally by doing just that. Now that they are concerned with sustaining their current high rates of economic growth, emerging powers share some interests with the United States on issues such as the security of energy supplies and the prevention of global pandemics.
ONE-ON-ONE
The Bush team has already made significant efforts to keep up with the changing world. A few years ago, it started to reallocate resources within the U.S. government. More recently, it has spearheaded multilateral efforts to integrate China and India into important international regimes.
The Defense Department was the first U.S. bureaucracy to make major changes to reflect the new new world order. It started by moving around U.S. troops stationed abroad. In 2004, more than 250,000 troops were based in 45 countries, half of them in Germany and South Korea, the battlegrounds of the Cold War. To improve troop mobility in the face of ever-changing threats, President Bush announced in August 2004 that the number of U.S. armed forces stationed overseas would be reduced and that 35 percent of U.S. bases abroad would be closed by 2014. Many of these troops will be based in the United States, but others will be redeployed in countries on the periphery of the new zone of threat: in eastern Europe, in Central Asia, and along the Pacific Rim.
The State Department is also adjusting. In a January 2006 address at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, Secretary of State Rice said, "In the twenty-first century, emerging nations like India and China and Brazil and Egypt and Indonesia and South Africa are increasingly shaping the course of history. ... Our current global posture does not really reflect that fact. For instance, we have nearly the same number of State Department personnel in Germany, a country of 82 million people, that we have in India, a country of one billion people. It is clear today that America must begin to reposition our diplomatic forces around the world ... to new critical posts for the twenty-first century." Rice announced that a hundred State Department employees would be moved from Europe to countries such as India and China by 2007.
Washington has also strengthened its bilateral relationships with China and India. After an awkward beginning -- the Bush team's first foreign policy crisis came when a U.S. spy plane collided with a Chinese jet fighter -- the Bush administration reoriented its approach to Beijing. "It is time to take our policy beyond opening doors to China's membership into the international system," then Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick announced in September 2005. "We need to urge China to become a responsible stakeholder in that system" so that it will "work with us to sustain the international system that has enabled its success." The "responsible stakeholder" language has since become part of all official U.S. pronouncements on China, and the theory behind it has guided several initiatives. Last fall, Washington launched the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue. In December, Treasury Secretary Paulson led six cabinet-level U.S. officials and the chair of the Federal Reserve in two days of discussions with their Chinese counterparts on issues ranging from energy cooperation to financial services to exchange rates. On matters as diverse as dealing with North Korea and Darfur, reigniting the Doha Development Agenda, and consulting with the International Energy Agency, Washington has tried recently to bring China into the concert of great powers.
The United States has reached out to India as well. For most of the 1990s, the United States was primarily concerned with managing India's dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir and defusing potential nuclear crises. Even though Pakistan is a significant U.S. ally in the war on terrorism, the U.S.-Indian relationship has warmed considerably over the past five years. In November 2006, the U.S. Department of Commerce arranged its largest-ever economic development mission to India, expanding the commercial dialogue between the two countries. Last year, they also concluded a bilateral agreement to cooperate on civilian nuclear energy -- a de facto recognition by the United States that India is a nuclear power. The agreement reinforces India's commitment to nonproliferation norms in its civilian nuclear program, but it keeps India's military program outside the orbit of inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Critics of the deal have warned that it threatens the NPT. But the Bush administration argues that India is emerging as a great power, the nuclear genie cannot be put back in the bottle, and because India is a democracy, the genie will do no harm. According to the 2006 National Security Strategy, "India now is poised to shoulder global obligations in cooperation with the United States in a way befitting a major power."
ALL-INCLUSIVE
More ambitiously, the Bush administration has tried to reshape international organizations to make them more accommodating to rising powers. In some instances, the changes have occurred almost as a matter of course. The formation of the G-20 bloc of developing countries, for example, compelled the United States to invite Brazil, India, and South Africa into the negotiating "green room" at the September 2003 WTO ministerial meeting of the Doha Round of trade talks, in Cancún. Since then, U.S. trade negotiators have been clamoring for greater participation from China in the hope that Beijing will moderate the views of more militant developing countries.
Similarly, the United States has encouraged China to participate periodically in the G-7 meetings of finance ministers and central-bank governors. Washington's aim is to recognize China's growing importance in world politics and economics and in return get Beijing to concede that its exchange-rate policies and its repression of domestic consumption contribute to global economic imbalances. Officials from Brazil, India, and South Africa have also been invited to G-7 meetings on occasion, on the theory that, as a recent paper from the Treasury Department argued, "addressing global [macroeconomic] imbalances requires engaging heavily with new actors outside the G-7."
Also with a view to giving greater influence to China (as well as Mexico, South Korea, and Turkey), the Bush administration has pushed hard to change the voting quotas within the IMF. China's formal quota grossly underrepresents the country's actual economic size. Timothy Adams, the undersecretary for international affairs at the Department of the Treasury, told The New York Times in August 2006 that "by re-engineering the IMF and giving China a bigger voice, China will have a greater sense of responsibility for the institution's mission." At a meeting in Singapore in the fall of 2006, the IMF's International Monetary and Financial Committee agreed to reallocate quotas to reflect shifts in the balance of economic power. Clay Lowery, the assistant secretary for international affairs at the Department of the Treasury, restated Washington's position at the time: "We came to the view awhile ago that if we do not take action to recognize the growing role of emerging economies, the IMF will become less relevant and we will all be worse off." Washington also recently signaled its willingness to have China join the Inter-American Development Bank.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration has moved toward greater cooperation with emerging powers on other issues as well, especially energy, the environment, and nuclear proliferation. Washington has engaged China through APEC's Energy Working Group. It has encouraged China and India, which are anxious to secure regular access to energy, to work with the International Energy Agency in order to create strategic petroleum reserves. It has launched, along with Australia, China, India, Japan, and South Korea, the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate to facilitate energy efficiency and environmentally sustainable growth. (Because its members account for more than half of the global economy, the partnership has the potential to affect global warming more than does the Kyoto Protocol.) The United States has also relied on China and India to help halt nuclear proliferation. It is depending on Beijing to bring Pyongyang back into the six-party talks and to implement financial sanctions limiting North Korea's access to hard currency. In October 2006, following North Korea's nuclear test, for the first time China endorsed a UN Security Council resolution mandating sanctions against the regime. Similarly, Washington has relied on India's support for the United States' objections to Iran's nuclear program, as well as India's presence on the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in presenting its case against Tehran to the UN Security Council.
IN THE WAY
It is too soon to tell whether Washington's moves to bring Beijing and New Delhi into the great-power concert will succeed. Some U.S. initiatives have failed or yielded meager results. The IMF's initial internal reform has so far been modest: China's voting quota was increased from 2.98 percent to 3.72 percent. Reform of the UN Security Council has stalled because the proposals emanating from UN bodies themselves have seemed impractical and the key powers have not been able to agree on which countries merit permanent membership. One of the many stalemates paralyzing the Doha Round is the EU's refusal to further cut agricultural subsidies unless the G-20 countries agree to open access to their nonagricultural domestic markets. And opponents of the U.S.-Indian nuclear deal argue that the arrangement cannot be reconciled with Washington's hard-line stances against Iran and North Korea.
But skeptics should consider that such undertakings only bear fruit over time. Separate studies by Robert Lawrence and Iain Johnston, both professors at Harvard University, have shown that China's continued participation in international economic and security regimes have slowly, over many years, transformed Beijing from a revolutionary to a conservative status quo regime. The Strategic Economic Dialogue with China, which has received fair to middling reviews so far, has only just started. As with the Structural Impediments Initiative conducted with Japan over 15 years ago, which eventually opened up the Japanese market to U.S. retailers, progress with China will not come quickly.
Another difficulty is that rewriting the rules of existing institutions is a thorny undertaking. Power is a zero-sum game, and so any attempt to boost the standing of China, India, and other rising states within international organizations will cost other countries some of their influence in those forums. These prospective losers can be expected to stall or sabotage attempts at reform. Although European countries are still significant, their economic and demographic growth does not match that of either the emerging powers or the United States. Having been endowed with privileged positions in many key postwar institutions, European countries stand to lose the most in a redistribution of power favoring countries on the Pacific Rim. And since they effectively hold vetoes in many organizations, they can resist U.S.-led changes. The Europeans argue that they still count thanks to the EU, which lets them command a 25-member voting bloc in many institutions. But if the EU moves toward a common policy on foreign affairs and security, it will be worth asking why Brussels deserves 25 voices when the 50 states comprising the United States get only one.
Developing countries on the periphery of the global economy can be expected to back Europe in resisting U.S.-led reform efforts: they do not want to lose what little influence they have in multilateral institutions. Such resistance may be all the more common in the future because the Bush administration, having displayed a penchant for unilateralism in some matters, has elevated suspicions about its motives. Many countries are likely to view Washington's reform efforts as an opportunistic attempt to free itself from the strictures of preexisting multilateral arrangements. Moreover, rising anti-Americanism across the globe has made it harder for those governments willing to cooperate with the United States to do so.
The Bush administration faces obstacles at home, too. Some Democrats in Congress opposed the White House's initiative to give China greater influence within the IMF on the grounds that doing so meant rewarding an unfair player in the global economy; thanks to the 2006 midterm elections, this kind of opposition will now have an even louder voice. Exit polls showed strong support among voters for geopolitical realism and economic populism -- positions that could complicate efforts to rework global governance arrangements. On the one hand, Americans seem more likely to endorse any multilateral security initiative that would take some pressure off the overstretched and overburdened U.S. military; on the other hand, they seem primed to oppose the accommodation of rising economic powers.
IN OR OUT?
It may seem odd for the United States today to seek to disenfranchise its long-standing allies in Europe in order to reward governments that often have agendas that deviate from its own. But the alternative is even more disconcerting: if these countries are not integrated, they might go it alone and create international organizations that fundamentally clash with U.S. interests. In the past few years, fueled by anti-Americanism, dormant groups such as the Nonaligned Movement have found new life. If India and China are not made to feel like co-managers of the international system, they could make the future very uncomfortable for the United States. Nationalists in rising powers will be eager to exploit any policy fissures that may develop between their countries and the United States.
China, in particular, has already begun to create new institutional structures outside of the United States' reach. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, for example, which consists of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan (with India, Iran, Mongolia, and Pakistan as observers), has facilitated military and energy cooperation among its members, although still at a low level. At the SCO's June 2006 summit in Beijing, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proposed that the organization "ward off the threats of domineering powers to use their force against and interfere in the affairs of other states." The joint declaration issued at the end of the summit appeared to endorse this sentiment, noting that "differences in cultural traditions, political and social systems, values and models of development formed in the course of history should not be taken as pretexts to interfere in other countries' internal affairs."
China is also aggressively courting resource-rich countries. In October 2006, it hosted a summit with more than 40 leaders from Africa to ensure continued access to the energy-rich continent. And its leaders have proposed creating free-trade areas within the SCO and APEC -- displaying such willingness to go ahead that President Bush was forced to remove the global war on terrorism from the top of his APEC agenda, and in November 2006, he called for an APEC free-trade zone.
China's efforts do not necessarily conflict with U.S. interests, but they could if Beijing so desired. From a U.S. perspective, it would be preferable for China and India to advance their interests within U.S.-led global governance structures rather than outside of them. The United States could get something in return for accommodating these states in institutions such as the UN and the IMF and giving them the recognition and prestige they demand: a commitment by Beijing and New Delhi that they will accept the key rules of the global game.
The United States faces a challenging road ahead. European countries remain vital allies. On issues such as human rights and democracy promotion, Europe speaks with a powerful, constructive voice. Bringing China and India into the concert of great powers without alienating the EU or its members will require prodigious amounts of diplomatic will and skill. The Bush administration has gotten off to a solid start. As it proceeds, its task is simple to articulate but hard to execute: keep the United States' old friends close and its new friends closer.
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For anyone with a bit more time I would recommend this recent article that unfortunately would break our size guideline….
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19879
That’s all folks!
Colin
