http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/27/1085641649211.html
Warlike US will shed its Utopian view By Peter Hartcher May 28, 2004 The United States is a martial nation. It accounts for 5 per cent of the world's population, 20 per cent of the world economy, and fully 50 per cent of global defence spending. It is structured for war. In the 228 years since it declared independence, the US has made 200 military interventions abroad, says the Congressional Research Service, an average of one every 14 months. It has much less experience in introducing democracy than it does in waging war, incidentally. It has made 16 attempts, of which four have succeeded, says the Washington-based journal Foreign Policy. The journal defines success as the survival of a functioning democratic system 10 years after the first US intervention. The success stories? Japan, Germany, Panama and Grenada. Of the 43 presidents in the history of the US, about a quarter, 11 of them, have been former generals or military leaders. This is not a judgement but an observation: with this structure, this history, and this tradition of leadership, the US is a martial nation. And whoever is elected president on November 2, this is not going to change. As a junior alliance partner of the US, Australia needs to understand this fundamental fact of America's national character. Australians think that our diet of American pop culture brings us a sound grasp of the inner mind and soul of the US. We think we are the same. This is misleading and will lead to surprises and shocks in the years to come. Australia has a very different structure: 0.3 per cent of the world population, 1.5 per cent of the world economy and 1.2 per cent of global defence spending. Australia has a very different history and tradition, too; it never waged war for independence, was never at war with itself, has not sought to assert military dominance over any region, and has no experience of being led by generals. Australia has a history of going to war and Australians have a tradition of fighting with distinction, but that does not make it a martial nation. Rather, the history of Australia at war is a story of the politics of a client state, following its senior alliance partners into wars. Australian warfare is a derivative of the war-fighting policy of other countries, first Britain and then the US. John Howard next week will go to Washington to talk to Australia's great and powerful friend about Australia's present, and increasingly uncomfortable, derivative war. And whoever occupies the White House, whoever wins the Lodge, Australia needs to be prepared to manage its US alliance through more armed conflicts for years to come. The US is also inclined, more than others, to be a Utopian nation. Zachary Karabell in his history of American Utopianism, A Visionary Nation, argues that the US has cycled through six manifestations of this urge to create a perfect world. First was the Puritan vision for a City on a Hill in the 17th century; second was the ideal of individualism and freedom that took hold during the American Revolution in the 18th century; third was the drive to national union from the promulgation of the constitution through to the Civil War in 1863; fourth was the impulse to territorial and economic expansion in the late 19th century; fifth was the belief in the transforming potential of government through the New Deal in the 1930s and the Great Society of the '60s; and the sixth was the internet revolution, the New Economy and the New Era. Has the so-called war on terror opened the seventh phase of American Utopianism, a drive to purge the world of terrorists, of enemies and of evil? The impulse behind Bush's doctrine of pre-emption and hegemony was certainly utopian. The novelty of Bush's strategy was that he abandoned the Republican Party's tradition of realism in foreign policy, the idea of working with the existing grimy realities of the world, in favour of idealism, the idealism of the neo-conservatives. What is their idealism? The ideal of remaking the world. Listen to Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who said that although these times are a period of great danger for the US, they are also a time "of enormous opportunity . . . a period akin to 1945 to 1947, when American leadership expanded the number of free and democratic states, Japan and Germany among the great powers, to create a new balance of power that favoured freedom". American Utopianism, when projected onto the rest of the world, is known as exceptionalism, well expressed by the author Herman Melville in 1850: "We are the peculiar chosen people, the Israel of our time. We bear the ark of the liberties of the world." The Bush Administration's idealistic vision, with the blood of Americans and Iraqis, has been leaching daily into the Iraqi sands. Reality is overwhelming Utopianism, as it always does. And the true potency of the photos from Abu Ghraib prison is the damage they do to the idea of American exceptionalism. So the US strategy is likely to change. The difficulties in Iraq have discredited the doctrine of pre-emption, brought reality to bear on the idealism of remaking the world, and damaged the idea of American exceptionalism. If the war on terror launched the seventh phase of American Utopianism, Iraq has brought it crashing to earth. But the reality of the structure and history of America the martial nation endures. For instance, many opponents of the Bush decision to invade Iraq put great store in the possibility that the Democrats' John Kerry, will be elected president on November 2. And whoever is elected is most unlikely to wage pre-emptive war based on an idealistic vision again. But even if Kerry wins, he would not conduct affairs in Iraq much differently. He is committed to keeping the US forces in place as long as necessary to "finish the job", and to sending further forces if required. This is Bush's position too. Australians, like Americans and people worldwide, increasingly are recoiling from the horrors in Iraq. This recoil may yet destroy Bush, and perhaps Howard, too. But the martial nation will go to war again, and history says it will probably be fairly soon. History also tells us that the derivative nation will be there too. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. 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