Rene — How the US became the world's dispensable nation
Topic(s): US Analysis | Comments Off on Rene — How the US became the world's dispensable nationHow the US became the world’s dispensable nation
By Michael Lind
FT January 24 2005 21:07 In a second inaugural address tinged with
evangelical zeal, George W. Bush declared: “Today, America speaks anew to
the peoples of the world.” The peoples of the world, however, do not seem to
be listening. A new world order is indeed emerging – but its architecture is
being drafted in Asia and Europe,at meetings to which Americans have not
been invited.
Consider Asean Plus Three (APT), which unites the member countries of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations with China, Japan and South Korea.
This group could become the world’s largest trade bloc, dwarfing the
European Union and North American Free Trade Association. The deepening ties
of the APT member states are a big diplomatic defeat for the US, which hoped
to use the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum to limit the growth of
Asian economic regionalism at American expense. In the same way, recent
moves by South American countries to bolster an economic community represent a clear rejection of US aims to dominate a western-hemisphere free-trade zone.
Consider, as well, the EU’s rapid progress towards military independence.
American protests failed to prevent the EU establishing its own military
planning agency, independent of the Nato alliance (and thus of Washington).
Europe is building up its own rapid reaction force. And, despite US
resistance, the EU is developing Galileo, its own satellite network, which
will break the monopoly of the US global positioning satellite system.
The participation of China in Europe’s Galileo project has alarmed the US
military. But China shares an interest with other aspiring space powers in
preventing American control of space for military and commercial uses.
Evenwhile collaborating with Europe on Galileo, China is partnering Brazil
to launch satellites. And in an unprecedented move, China recently agreed to
host Russian forces for joint Russo-Chinese military exercises.
The US is being sidelined even in the area that Mr Bush identified in last
week’s address as America’s mission: the promotion of democracy and human
rights. The EU has devoted far more resources to consolidating democracy in
post-communist Europe than has the US. By contrast, under Mr Bush the US
hypocritically uses the promotion of democracy as the rationale for
campaigns against states it opposes for strategic reasons. Washington
denounces tyranny in Iran but tolerates it in Pakistan. In Iraq, the goal of
democratisation was invoked only after the invasion, which was justified
earlier by claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and
was collaborating with al-Qaeda.
Nor is American democracy a shining example to mankind. The present
one-party rule in the US has been produced in part by the artificial
redrawing of political districts to favour Republicans. The role of money in
American politics continues to grow. America’s judges – many of whom will be
appointed by Mr Bush – increasingly behave as partisan political activists
in black robes. America’s antiquated winner-take-all electoral system has
been abandoned bymany other democracies for more inclusive versions of
proportional representation.
In other areas of global moral and institutional reform, the US today is a
follower rather than a leader. Human rights? Europe has banned the death
penalty and torture. The US is a leading practitioner of execution. Under Mr
Bush, the US has constructed an international military gulag in which the
tortureof suspects has frequently occurred. The international rule of law?
For generations, promoting international law in collaboration with other
nations was a US goal. But the neoconservatives who dominate Washington
today mock the very idea of international law. The next US attorney general
will be the White House counsel who scorned the Geneva Conventions as
obsolete.
A decade ago, American triumphalists mocked those who argued that the world
was becoming multipolar rather than unipolar. Where was the evidence of
balancing against the US? they asked. Today the evidence of foreign
co-operation to reduce American primacy is everywhere – from the increasing
importance of regional trade blocs that exclude the US to international
space projects and military exercises in which the US is conspicuous by its
absence.
It is true that the US remains the only country capable of projecting
military power throughout the world. But unipolarity in the military sphere,
narrowly defined, is not preventing the rapid development of multipolarity
in the geopolitical and economic arenas – far from it. And the other great
powers,with the exception of the UK, are content to let the US waste blood
and treasureon its doomed attempt at hegemony in the Middle East.
That the rest of the world is building institutions and alliances that shut
out the US should come as no surprise. The view that American leaders can be
trusted to use a monopoly of military and economic power for the good of
humanity has never been widely shared outside the US. The trend toward
multipolarity has probably been accelerated by the truculent unilateralism
of the Bush administration, whose motto seems to be that of the Hollywood
mogul Samuel Goldwyn: “Include me out.” In recent memory, nothing could be
done without the US. But today, most international institution-building of
any long-term importance in global diplomacy and trade occurs without
American participation.
In 1998 Madeleine Albright, then US secretary of state, said of the US: “We
are the indispensable nation.” By backfiring, the unilateralism of Mr Bush
has proved her wrong. The US, it turns out, is a dispensable nation. Europe,
China, Russia, Latin America and other regions and nations are quietly
taking measures whose effect, if not sole purpose, will be to cut America
down to size.
Ironically, the US, having won the cold war, is adopting the strategy that
led the Soviet Union to lose it: hoping that raw military power will be
sufficient to intimidate other great powers alienated by its belligerence.
To compound the irony, these other great powers are drafting the blueprints
for new international institutions and alliances. That is what the US did
during and after the second world war.
But that was a different America, led by wise and constructive statesmen
such as Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who wrote of being “present at
the creation”. The bullying approach of the Bush administration has ensured
that the US will not be invited to take part in designing the international
architecture of Europe and Asia in the 21st century. This time, the US is
absent at the creation.
The writer is senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC