[A-List] US imperialism: a Clintonian critique

[Keaney Michael]

Unite against the new barbarians
US national interests may be best served by an internationalist, rather
than a unilateralist foreign policy, says William Wallace
Financial Times, February 25 2002 

The Paradox of American Power:
Why the world's superpower can't go it alone
Joseph P. Nye, Oxford University Press

America is at war. Military manpower and spending are rising. Support
for "our boys" is emblazoned on trucks and demonstrated in the flags
flying from vehicles and buildings. President George W. Bush has
identified the enemy as the "axis of evil" and the global terrorist
network it supports.

Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard University's Kennedy school of government
(and assistant secretary of defence in the first Clinton administration)
begs to dissent. He warns against a US foreign policy that focuses only
on the military dimension of power, neglecting both the subtler elements
of economic power and the soft power of cultural prestige and
international reputation.

In an analysis all the more powerful because it was written largely
before September 11, he unpicks the arguments of the geopolitical
realists whose world view has captured the Bush administration - the
uni-lateralists and sovereigntists, as he labels them, who assert the
primacy of US power against the constraints of international law and
institutions.

His most direct targets are the intellectuals of the American right who
have campaigned for a robust assertion of US interests, rather than
bending to the consensus of an illusory international community (as
Condoleezza Rice has put it). These commentators contend that China is a
rising threat that the US will have to fight, that the European Union is
a competitor more than a partner, that the first task of the
administration is to reassert American freedom of action, exploiting the
dominance of American military power.

Nye argues, to the contrary, that the US is both more and less powerful
than these one-dimensional analyses suggest. America's reputation, the
ability of its universities and cultural elites to set the international
agenda, give the US advantages in multilateral diplomacy that it should
cherish, not throw away.

Yet there are limits to how effectively the US can act on its own.
Intelligence on terrorist networks, policing of international financial
flows, and the promotion of economic, political and social development
in weak states are far beyond the capabilities of the US alone. The
information revolution is dispersing power away from state control,
reinforcing trends already evident in the open global economy that
earlier US administrations have done so much to promote, giving greater
influence to non-governmental organisations of all kinds. "Being number
one ain't gonna to be what it used to be . . . weare not only bound to
lead, we are bound to co-operate."

The US, he goes on to suggest, is also at war with itself. On the home
front, cultural pessimists proclaim the US's moral decay, seeing
immigration and multiculturalism as threats to national values.

Nye, on the contrary, is an unrepentant liberal inter-nationalist. He
accepts that "our practice of capital punishment and weak gun control
laws", the size of the US's prison population and the widening gulf
between rich and poor undercut US prestige and influence in Europe, as
racial segregation undercut the US's standing in Africa.

He provides figures showing that the majority of Americans remain
committed to international co-operation and that the current fervour of
moral and unilateralist crusade is driven by the 20 per cent who vote in
Republican primary elections. The structural corruption of campaign
finance has damaged the faith of America's allies in the wisdom of a
foreign policy that seems driven by special interests. "The barbarians
did not destroy Rome; rather, it rotted from within . . . Today
terrorist barbarians cannot destroy American power unless we also rot
from within."

Military power can coerce; but soft power can persuade. "A decent
respect for the opinions of men" legitimised America's Declaration of
Independence; it weakens US influence to reject the opinions of others
today.

The greatest quality of US diplomacy in the years after the second world
war was the recognition that its national interests were best served by
a multilateral international order in which US preponderance was
embodied in "a web of international institutions that allow others to
participate in decisions and that act as a sort of world constitution to
limit the capriciousness of American power".

The mood in Washington today rejects such strategic restraint, despises
multilateral diplomacy, is impatient with the Atlantic alliance and pays
little attention or financial dues to international institutions.

Against this hard unilateralism, Nye argues for the pursuit of long-term
national interests. These lie in strengthening the institutions of
global order, in sustaining the western community of democratic states
and in building a broader international community - not in undermining
the multilateral structures that earlier US administrations, both
Republican and Democratic, built up.

The reviewer is professor of international relations at the London
School of Economics

Full article at:
http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3NWWDA3YC
&live=true

Michael Keaney
Mercuria Business School
Martinlaaksontie 36
01620 Vantaa
Finland

michael.keaney at mbs.fi