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http://www.nation.com.pk/daily/today/editor/opi5.htm The Nation (Pakistan) September 27, 2002 The dynamics of world disorder Philip S Golub -Zbigniew Brzezinski, who initiated the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, formulated the idea, now widely shared in Washington, that the US should seek to "prevent collusion and maintain dependence among the vassals, keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together". Krauthammer is even more blunt: "America won the Cold War, pocketed Poland and Hungary and the Czech Republic as door prizes, then proceeded to pulverise Serbia and Afghanistan and, en passant, highlighted Europe's irrelevance." -To borrow a powerful phrase from John Michael Coetzee, the US, like all previous empires, will spend its remaining period of power, however long it lasts, haunted by a single thought: "How not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era". A while before 9/11 the American historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, suggested that despite the "absence of international checks and balances" in the modern unipolar world, the United States would not "stroll too far down the perilous highway to hubris... No one nation is going to be able to assume the role of world arbitrator and policeman". Like many American intellectuals, he remained confident about US democracy. Charles William Maynes, influential in US foreign policy, asserted: "America is a country with imperial capabilities but without an imperial mind". But now we must face facts: a new imperial doctrine is taking shape under George Bush. Now is reminiscent of the late 19th century, when the US began its colonial expansion into the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, the first steps to world power. Then the US was seized by great imperialist fervour. "American economic leaders were fixing their eyes on the industrial supremacy of the world" and political leaders were dreaming of a "splendid little war", as Theodore Roosevelt put it, to justify international expansion. "We have a record of conquest, colonisation and expansion unequalled by any people in the 19th century. We are not about to be curbed now," said Henry Cabot Lodge, the leading imperial ideologue, in 1895. Summing up the imperialist fashion, Marse Henry Watterson wrote in 1896: "We are a great imperial Republic, destined to exercise a controlling influence upon the actions of mankind and to affect the future of the world as the world was never affected, even by the Roman Empire". Haughty but premonitory words. US historians have generally considered the late 19th century imperialist urge an aberration in an otherwise smooth democratic trajectory. The US had emerged from a war of independence to cast off British colonial domination, and had played its part in the Enlightenment project against absolutist European monarchies. Surely this experience inoculated it once and for all against the virus of imperialism? Yet a century later, as the US empire engages in a new global expansion, Rome is once more a distant but essential mirror for American elites. In 1991 the US found itself the only remaining great power. Now, with military mobilisation on an exceptional scale after September 2001, the US is openly parading its imperial power. For the first time since the 1890s, the naked display of force is backed by explicitly imperialist discourse. Charles Krauthammer, a neo-conservative Washington Post columnist, wrote: "No country has been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically and militarily in the history of the world since the late Roman Empire". According to Robert Kaplan, an international policy mentor to Bush, "Rome's victory in the Second Punic War, like America's in World War II, made it a universal power". Even writers closer to the political centre feel obliged to refer to Rome. Joseph S. Nye Jr, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and Assistant Secretary of State under Clinton, began his latest book: "Not since Rome has one nation loomed so large above the others." Paul Kennedy, who made his name in the 1980s with his premature prediction of US imperial overstretch, goes further: "Nothing has ever existed like the disparity of power [in the present world system]. The Pax Britannica was run on the cheap. Napoleon's France and Philip II's Spain had powerful foes and were part of a multipolar system. Charlemagne's empire was merely western European in stretch. The Roman empire stretched further afield, but there was another great empire in Persia and a larger one in China. There is no comparison." The recurrence of comparisons with Rome and the omnipresence of the word empire in the US press are not just descriptive; they reflect the emergence of a new imperial ideology. Max Boot, in a Wall Street Journal article titled "The Case for American Empire," wrote: "It is striking - and no coincidence - that America now faces the prospect of military action in many of the same lands where generations of British colonial soldiers went on campaigns. These are all places where Western armies had to quell disorder. Afghanistan and other troubled foreign lands cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets." Dinesh D'Souza, a far right ideologue, in an article "In praise of American empire", argued that Americans must recognise that the US "has become an empire, the most magnanimous imperial power ever". These imperial apologists are not confined to the far right. Imperial thinking has also infiltrated academia. Stephen Peter Rosen, head of Harvard's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, maintains: "A political unit that has overwhelming military power, and uses that power to influence the internal behaviour of other states, is called an empire. Our goal is not combating a rival, but maintaining our imperial position, and maintaining imperial order." An order, as a more critical Harvard professor emphasises, entirely "crafted to suit American imperial objectives. The empire signs on to those pieces of the transnational legal order that suit its purposes (the WTO), while ignoring or even sabotaging those parts (the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol, the ABM Treaty) that do not". The idea of empire is a radical departure from the image, articulated by Alexis de Tocqueville, that Americans have of their country, as a democratic exception among nations. This contradiction is no longer a cause of great concern. Those increasingly few still with scruples, qualify the words empire and hegemony with adjectives like benevolent or gentle. Robert Kagan writes: "The benevolent hegemony exercised by the US is good for a vast portion of the world's population. It is certainly a better international arrangement than all realistic alternatives". A century ago Theodore Roosevelt used almost exactly the same words. Rejecting comparison between the US and European colonialists, he wrote: "There is nothing even remotely resembling imperialism in the development of the policy of expansion which has been part of the history of America since the day she became a nation. There is not an imperialist in the country that I have met yet". Sebastian Mallaby calls himself a "reluctant imperialist". Writing in Foreign Affairs, he suggests the current world disorder obliges the US to pursue imperialist policies. He apocalyptically pictures the Third World, its bankrupt states, uncontrolled population growth, endemic violence and social decay. He maintains that the only rational choice is a return to imperial rule. Third World states threatening Western security should be placed under direct control. He concludes that: "Non-imperialist options, notably, foreign aid and various nation building efforts, are not altogether reliable. The logic of neo-imperialism is too compelling for the Bush Administration to resist." Bush does not seem to be trying too hard to resist. He is reluctant to invest in nation building or commit the US to humanitarian interventions, but quick to deploy armed forces worldwide to crush the enemies of civilisation and forces of evil. His vocabulary, of civilisation, barbarians and pacification, betrays classical imperial thinking. There is no knowing quite what he learned at Yale and Harvard, but since 9/11 he has become the unlikely Caesar of the new imperial camp. According to Cicero, Caesar "fought with the greatest success against those most valiant and powerful nations and the other nations he alarmed and drove back and defeated, and accustomed to yield to the supremacy of the Roman people." In much the same way Bush and the new US right plan to secure the US empire through war, subjugating fractious Third World peoples, overthrowing rogue states and perhaps taking direct control of bankrupt post-colonial states. Under Bush, the US hopes to achieve greater security and prosperity through force of arms rather than international co-operation. It is prepared to act alone or in temporary coalitions, unilaterally and in defence of narrowly-defined national interests. Instead of dealing with the economic and social causes nurturing recurrent violence, the US is fuelling instability. That its objective is not territorial gain but control makes little difference. Benevolent or reluctant imperialists are imperialists all the same. In the new US worldview, Third World countries must submit to a new period of colonisation or semi-sovereignty. Europe would have to make do with a subordinate role. Europe is seen as a dependent zone, lacking the willpower and resources to defend itself, and subservient to US decisions to wage war. It would have to find its place in a new imperial division of labour in which "America does the bombing and fighting, the French, British and Germans serve as police in the border zones, and the Dutch, Swiss and Scandinavians provide humanitarian aid". Apart from the British, the US trusts its allies so little that it excludes them from any but the most menial peacekeeping tasks. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who initiated the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, formulated the idea, now widely shared in Washington, that the US should seek to "prevent collusion and maintain dependence among the vassals, keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together". Krauthammer is even more blunt: "America won the Cold War, pocketed Poland and Hungary and the Czech Republic as door prizes, then proceeded to pulverise Serbia and Afghanistan and, en passant, highlighted Europe's irrelevance." This contempt helps explain the transatlantic tension since 9/11. Pursuing this hard imperial option will condemn the US to building walls around the West. To borrow a powerful phrase from John Michael Coetzee, the US, like all previous empires, will spend its remaining period of power, however long it lasts, haunted by a single thought: "How not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era". __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? 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