Ian Boyne
Ian Boyne, Contributor
"The struggle to define and obtain international legitimacy in this new era may prove to be among the most critical contests of our time."(Italics) ---Robert Kagan, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004.
THE BIGGEST casualty of the Bush Doctrine has been the squandering of the moral legitimacy of the United States as a Great power. Great powers need more than military might and economic prowess to get their way, and George Bush and his band of neoconservative foreign policy operatives have been spectacularly inept in handling the US soft power.
"Washington is currently creating new sources of friction, turning friends into antagonists, damaging once-valuable policy tools and impairing its own ability to harness the power of its citizenry It must reverse course and embrace a smarter, less draining brand of power" says Suzanne Nossel in an essay titled "Smart Power" in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs. She makes the important point that "US interests are furthered by enlisting others on behalf of US goals through alliances, international institutions, careful diplomacy and the power of ideals".
Instead, the US has alienated powerful allies in 'Old Europe', embarrassed friends in the Middle East, set itself on a collision course with international law and multilateralism and has betrayed the ideals of liberal internationalism.
The hawks who now control power in the Bush Administration seem content in the fact that "American hegemony today is militarily supreme, culturally pervasive, technologically dominant and economically dynamic. Its allies and enemies alike fear being swallowed up in it", as Walter Russell Mead puts it in his award winning book, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World.
Former US President Woodrow Wilson must be turning in his grave. His vision was that of a United States of America which distinguished itself by its ideals and values, not by its military and economic might. His vision of the US role in the world was that of a magnanimous giant committed to the mission of spreading its values and ideals of democracy, human rights, liberty and international law. Wilson rejected both isolationism and triumphalistic militarism. His view of America was one of constructive engagement with the rest of the world. The US had to be a moral leader, submitting itself to universal norms and values and gaining respect by so doing.
TAKING THE MORAL HIGH GROUND
George Bush's foreign policy is not simply a crude hamiltonism which equates US interests with industrial and commercial interests. Some on the Left who say that his adventure in Iraq has to do purely with oil fail to understand his thinking and his blend of idealism and realism.
The Left still suffers from the Marxist hangover of relegating the superstructure of ideas to a mere reflex of the economic base. But ideas and ideology can have an independent existence, as the sociologist Talcott Parsons used to lecture the Marxists.
George Bush uses the language of morality and liberty to justify his foreign policy. He speaks with the voice of moral absolutism, drawing on a cultural tradition in America which appeals to the average American and which feeds notions of American exceptionalism.
"The advance of freedom is more than an interest we pursue", he said before the Iraq war. It is a calling we follow. Our country was created in the name and cause of freedom. And the self-evident truths of our founding are true for us; they are true for all". This is the language of Wilsonianism: The values of America are universal, objective values, and America had a Manifest Destiny to protect those values and, indeed, to impart them to the world.
When some in the media project the agenda of the neocons as just being about contracts for oil companies in America, they are betraying their lack of sophistication in analysing the US foreign policy and America's self-understanding. The Bush Administration's use of the language and ideals of liberal internationalism provide its critics with the greatest weapon in opposing the Bush Doctrine and the unilateralist thrust of its foreign policy.
The Iraq prisoner abuse scandal is a significant blow to the Bush Administration for it goes to the very heart of its claims of moral superiority. More stories are emerging in the Press proving that the human rights abuses were not isolated, sporadic or the activities of some rogue soldiers, but were sanctioned way up the chain of command and, indeed, formed part of a whole psychopathology nurtured by the Pentagon. Even the conservative US News and World Report in its latest issue (May 24) points to the systemic nature of the abuses.
The international community can never match the military, economic and cultural force of the United States, but it draws on the overarching values of Western civilisation in its defence against America's sinister unilateralism. It was the United States which was at the forefront of the creation of the leading multilateral institutions -the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Now World Trade Organisation) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). The United States was pivotal in the creation of the United Nations, the European Union and the primary drafters of the initial international human rights conventions. The great proponent of international law in the Eighteenth century was the United States, the great opponent was Britain. When Britain was strong and America was weak, America pushed for international rules and conventions for international law. Now that America is the only superpower left standing and its military budget is 40 per cent of the world's total, exceeding the spending of the next 24 countries combined, it feels it can disregard international law. We must use the Bush Administration's own rhetoric to critique it. It is hypocritical to its ideals and does not walk the talk.
BUSH'S REPORT CARD
Since coming to power, George Bush has refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and the International Criminal Court. The Administration snubbed the authority of the United Nations and the Security Council in going to war with Iraq under the pretext of a clear and present danger supposedly posed by Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction, and rejected the counsel of its European allies. The Doctrine of Pre-emption goes violently against the whole essence of Westphalia (1648) which has governed modern political philosophy and international law.
The US is operating like an international outlaw, an arrogant power determining its own truths and creating its own absolutes. As the Stanley Foundation's Task Force of October 2003, (US Strategies for National Security: Winning the Peace in the 21st Century) says, "empires collapse for many reasons-the rise of great power rivalry, climate changes, exhaustion of resources, endemic corruption. But the common thread seems to be arrogance-the growing belief that because of its virtue there are no limits to what the imperial state can accomplish".
The Bush Administration is taking dare-devil risks with America's legitimacy in the world. When even an established right-winger like the former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brezinski can say in his provocatively titled book, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership that the choice is between using global power to create a system based on shared interests versus the "use of sovereign global power to entrench its own security". The latter, he warns, risks ending in "self-isolation, growing national paranoia and increasing vulnerability to a globally spreading anti-American virus".
Ivan Krastev, writing in The Journal of Democracy (April 2004) under the title "The Anti-American century?' says, "The rise of anti-Americanism around the globe is a distinctive feature of the post-September world". But who caused that? After the dastardly and barbaric attack on America on September 11, the entire globe recoiled in revulsion against terrorism and as one French paper now famously declared in banner headlines, "We are All Americans". Europe rushed to the support of America in launching an attack against Afghanistan, a breeding ground for terrorism. All over the Third World condemnation came in, swift and furious against the terrorists who attacked America and, indeed, the civilised world and its values.
Who squandered that goodwill and support? Who has caused the world to turn against America according to the latest Global Pew Public Opinion polls? America must retreat from its antagonistic course with international law. "The United States needs international law acutely now because it offers a way to pursue our most important interests while reassuring our friends and allies that they have no reason to fear us or to form alliances as counterweight to our overwhelming might", counsels the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the President of the American Society of International Law, Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter in the Wilson Quarterly (Autumn 2003).
"According to all precedents, the United States should be behaving as a conservative hegemon, defending the existing international order and spreading its values by example. Instead, it has been drawn toward the role of an unsatisfied and even revolutionary power, smashing to pieces the hill of which it is king", says Anatol Lieven in an article in the journal, Current History, March 2004. This is the legacy of the neoconservatives in the Bush Administration. History will be very unkind to them. History will record not only their treachery to their own professed values but their myopia.
"When the United States becomes so unpopular that being pro-American is a kiss of death in other countries' domestic politics, foreign political leaders are unlikely to make helpful concessions (Witness the defiance of Chile, Mexico and Turkey in March 2003)", says the highly-rated Dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Joseph Nye in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs. "When the US policies lose legitimacy in the eyes of others, distrust grows, reducing US leverage in international affairs".
Meanwhile, the respectability, credibility and moral legitimacy of Europe is growing. Europe might be a military dwarf comparatively, but its political clout is growing as a result of the ineptitude and tunnel vision of the Bush Administration.
"Consider again the qualities that make up the European strategic culture: the emphasis on negotiation, diplomacy, commercial ties, international law over the use of force,, seduction over coercion, and multilateralism over unilateralism", says the oft-quoted scholar Robert Kagan in the June- July issue of the journal, Policy Review. These were precisely the values which the US once trumpeted, however imperfectly it followed them. Now they have been subordinated to the paranoia over national security.
The Bush Administration is America's greatest threat to its security.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. You can send your comments to ianboyne1@yahoo.com.
