The Foreign Policy the US Needs Stanley Hoffmann | The New York Review of Books Vol.53, No.13 | August 10, 2006
http://reflectioncafe2.blogspot.com/ During the cold war Americans believed that in order to eliminate risks of nuclear war, a policy of edgy coexistence with the Soviet Union was worth pursuing. Few believed that America should prepare for a military showdown with Moscow. In the debates between doves and hawks, everyone assumed there would be a very long contest with the Communist world. The rapid collapse of the Soviet Union left the US as the only superpower, or so it seemed. George H.W. Bush talked about a new world order, in which the "real world" of American supremacy and the formal world of the UN Charter would somehow merge. But Bush Senior was soon gone, and Clinton had no large international vision. This may have been a blessing, and relations improved with allies, including France and Germany, which had occasionally been miffed by shrill official statements about the US as the "indispensable nation" endowed with greater foresight than others. People such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who had long thought it time to proclaim US hegemony, were enraged by Clinton's failure to do so. When George W. Bush came to power, September 11 provided what seemed an unchallengeable opportunity for a drastic change in strategy and in diplomacy. The "war against terrorism" was now seen as a kind of World War II reborn, yet it was without a clear enemy and without allies comparable to Stalin's Soviet Union, or even Churchill's British Empire. A brief era of American triumphalismor imperialismled to but did not survive the disaster in Iraq and the fall in American popularity and influence abroad that the war provoked. The US is back to debating what to do next but the setting of this debate is quite different from that of the past. In addition to the familiar world of interstate conflicts, some of the most horrible wars of recent years have been internal; and some of the most spectac-ular acts of violence have been committed by private groups of terrorists not allied to any state. More than a few of the members of the UNZimbabwe, Somalia, Uzbekistanare "failed" or murderous states, whose inhabitants live in a nightmare of chaos and violence. The "realists," i.e., those who believe national interests are fundamentalmust now take into account the UN, which for all its flaws serves to certify legitimacy, as the current administration discovered when it defied the predominant opinion of the Security Council in attacking Iraq. It is also a world in which globalizationpartly under American leadershiperodes effective sovereignty of states (although least for the US) and creates a world economy that offers a very complex combination of permanent competitionespecially for oil and incentives to cooperate, not only for states but for private interests. There is now a transnational society that includes multinational corporations, nongovernmental organizations, criminals, and terrorists. This global economy, with its unprecedented combination of private and state capitalisms, can be immensely destructive, as when it eliminated millions of jobs in developed countries. It deepens inequalityat home and abroad. It lacks an adequate network of regulatory agencies and what international governance exists is stronger for economic relations through such organizations as the IMF and WTO than for political ones. So far, violence between states competing in the global economy has been limited, but in the contest for energy sources military force is already being used, for example in Nigeria, and could well increase. This, then, is the kind of world in which the "sole superpower" (as well as the largest source of global warming) must act: a world that is anything but flat. . America is now being widely criticized as a new empire. Already toward the end of World War II De Gaulle wrote about FDR's will to power, a will that soon took the form of an American-controlled network of unequal alliances, military bases abroad, and economic dominance. The harshest criticisms of US imperial aims were made against Bush after 2001: the US and much of the rest of the world fell out over America's new unilateralism and its refusal to accept the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol, and arms control generally. Most nations were appalled by America's flaunting of its dominance; its use of preventive war, particularly the invasion of Iraq, was widely seen as proof of a will to reshape and dominate the Arab world.[1] America's new mixture of patriotism and religiosity annoyed many secularists at home and abroad, and the American way of fighting terrorism by bombing and torturing Iraqis and mistreating Afghans shocked many previously well-disposed allies. Another category of criticisms concerns the American belief that globalization should come only in the orthodox form of American free-market and pro-business policies. Many Europeans see this as a denial of the state's responsibility to provide social justice, public services, and safety nets for the poor, the unemployed, and workers. Other sources of dismay were America's reluctance to include in international agreements provisions for standards of health or workers' rights, or to accept codes of conduct for multinational corporations, as well as the connections between American corporations and American political agencies not only in occupied Iraq. The most flagrant and widely deplored contradiction is between America's self-image as a force for democracy and human rights and a reality in which many rights at home are sharply limited, the death penalty continues along with the torture of "enemy combatants," while the US repudiates the international laws of war. Abroad, the US support of dictators and its failure to protect victims of genocide in Rwanda and Darfur[2] have contributed greatly to anti-Americanism. Foreigners can observe for themselves, on the one hand, the weakness of public services throughout the US, the cult of low taxes, and the distrust of any redistributive role for government and, on the other hand, the formidable apparatus of American military and intelligence services throughout the world and in the US itself. The strength of America's destructive power and the lack of American interest in nation-building and development abroad have become all too evident. Anti-Americanism is also fostered by various American illusions: "all human beings want what we want freedom," to paraphrase George W. Bush; hence democratization should be easy.[3] Democratization has become confused with elections, and the legal institutions and protection of rights needed for a workable democracy are neglected. America sometimes downplays or denies its own nationalism in its rhetoric, and yet America has asserted its sovereignty more forcefully than any other advanced nation in recent history (including Mrs. Thatcher's Britain). Most other countries are more affected and limited by US policies than the US is by anyone else's. Therefore most countries are very uneasy about a world in which the US is the single superpower. Thus, while the mighty US faces a huge number of problems that affect other nations as wellincluding those of global warming and the depletion of natural resourcesat the same time it distrusts or attacks global institutions such as the International Criminal Court that could be of some help. It shows little understanding of the pride, fears, and humiliations of others, and has damaged its "soft power"the power of influencing others through persuasion and exampleby its policies in Iraq, its recent abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, and its restrictions on foreigners eager to come to the US. Full text available at : http://reflectioncafe2.blogspot.com/ -- This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/join/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/join (Yahoo! 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