[Futurework] Manifest Destiny?

[Ed Weick]

Some of you may have read the Mother Jones article by Robert Dreyfus. I posted the URL the other day. It suggests that what is going on, and has gone on, in the Middle East is part of long-term strategy for global dominance that Washington hawks have developed over the past few decades. I've argued something like this in earlier postings, pointing out that both the location and resources of the Middle East are enormously strategic. The power that controls the Mid East may dominate the world during the next few decades. Thus far I've tended to think of this need for dominance in terms of the economy (energy) and power (keeping a lid on terror, etc.), but it also has more idealistic origins. Since its beginnings as a nation, America, in various ways, has been in a state of continuous expansion. During the earlier parts of the 19th Century this expansion was mainly confined to carving and filling out the continental United States. As settlers moved westward from the original colonies, vast tracts of lands were taken from the Indians, Louisiana was purchased from the French, and parts of the southwest and far west were forcibly taken from Mexico. Expansionism continued during the later part of the 19th Century and into the 20th with the Spanish-American War and the building of the Panama Canal. It continued throughout the 20th Century in Central America, Korea and Vietnam. Where it was not militaristic in nature, it was economic. Often, it was both.  However, by then it was no longer confined to the American continent.  It had gone world wide. While this expansion was at times brutal and typically exploitative, it had to be dressed up in the highest of ideals and principles. During much of the 19th Century, it was part of the nation's "manifest destiny" - something that simply had to happen because it represented a superior way and quality of life. In the 20th Century it was about progress and keeping the world safe for democracy. Currently, though it is most likely about oil and dominance at a material level, it is given the idealistic clothing of constructing global democracy. I heard a commentator on the radio this morning express concerns about what America is doing and where it may be taking us.  One of the points he made was that people dream their own dreams and cannot easily dream someone else's.  Global democracy may be a fine concept for Americans but may be difficult to export because others have different concepts of how to govern themselves.  Authoritarianism at the top does not necessarily preclude democratic institutions at the village or regional level, as was demonstrated in Czarist Russia.  Nor does democracy at the top guarantee democracy at the village level, as is illustrated by the re-emergence of regional warlords in Afghanistan.  Democracy is almost certainly not a one-size-fits-all phenomenon, and people have to have to decide how much freedom versus authority is tolerable at all levels of society, and then they have to figure out how to practically achieve the appropriate balance.  And we may have to accept the possibility that some people will take a very long time to figure it out.  Intervention in the affairs of other nations should not be based on giving them a particular model of democracy, but on giving them the means and breathing space to figure out what model might best suit them. Ed Weick