[A-List] Alliances and the American election

Sun Sep 5 17:45:26 MDT 2004

by Gabriel Kolko

Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald (August 25 2004)

Alliances have been a major cause of wars throughout modern history,
removing inhibitions that might otherwise have caused Germany, France,
and countless nations to reflect much more cautiously before embarking
on death and destruction. The dissolution of all alliances is a crucial
precondition of a world without wars.

The United States' strength, to an important extent, has rested on its
ability to convince other nations that it was to their vital interests
to see America prevail in its global role. With the loss of that ability
there will be a fundamental change in the international system whose
implications and consequences may ultimately be as far-reaching as the
dissolution of the Soviet bloc.

The scope of America's world mission is now far more dangerous and
ambitious than when Communism existed, but it was fear of the USSR that
alone gave NATO its raison d'etre and provided Washington with the
justification for its global pretensions. Enemies have disappeared and
new ones - many once former allies and congenial states - have taken
their places. The United States, to a degree to which it is itself
uncertain, needs alliances. But even friendly nations are less likely
than ever to be bound into uncritical "coalitions of the willing".

Nothing in President Bush's September 19 2002 extraordinarily vague
doctrine of fighting "preemptive" wars, unilaterally if necessary, was 
a fundamentally new departure. Regardless of whether the Republicans 
or Democrats were in office, since the 1890s the US has intervened in
countless ways in the Western Hemisphere - from sending Marines to
supporting friendly tyrants - to determine the political destinies 
of innumerable southern nations. The Democratic Administration that
established the United Nations explicitly regarded the hemisphere as 
the US' sphere- of- influence, and they created the IMF and World Bank
to police the world economy.

It was the Democratic Party that created most of the pillars of postwar
American foreign policy, from the Truman Doctrine in 1947 and NATO
through the institutionalization of the arms race and the illusion that
weapons and firepower are a solution to many of the world's political
problems. The Democrats share, in the name of a truly "bipartisan"
consensus, equal responsibility for both the character and dilemmas of
America's foreign strategy at the present moment. President Jimmy Carter
initiated the Afghanistan adventure in July 1979, hoping to bog down the
Soviets there as the Americans had been in Vietnam. And it was Carter
who first encouraged Saddam Hussein to confront Iranian fundamentalism,
a policy President Reagan continued.

Joseph E Stiglitz, chairman of the President's Council of Economic
Advisers from 1993 to 1997, argues that the Clinton Administration
intensified the "hegemonic legacy" in the world economy, and Bush is
just continuing it. The 1990s was "A decade of unparalleled American
influence over the global economy" that Democratic financiers and fiscal
conservatives in key posts defined, "in which one economic crisis seemed
to follow another".  The US created trade barriers and gave large
subsidies to its own agribusiness but countries in financial straits
were advised and often compelled to cut spending and "adopt policies
that were markedly different from those that we ourselves had adopted".
<1>  The scale of domestic and global peculation by the Clinton and Bush
administrations can be debated but they were enormous in both cases.

In foreign and military affairs, both the Clinton and Bush
administrations have suffered from the same procurement fetish,
believing that expensive weapons are superior to realistic political
strategies. The same illusions produced the Vietnam War - and disaster.
Elegant strategies promising technological routes to victory have been
with us since the late 1940s, but they are essentially public relations
exercises intended to encourage more orders for arms manufacturers and
justifications for bigger budgets for the rival military services.
During the Clinton years the Pentagon continued to concoct grandiose
strategies and it demanded - and got - new weapons to implement them.
There are many ways to measure defense expenditures over time but -
minor annual fluctuations notwithstanding - the consensus between the
two parties on the Pentagon's budgets has persisted since 1945. In
January 2000 Clinton added $115 billion to the Pentagon's 5-year plan,
far more than the Republicans were calling for. When Clinton left office
the Pentagon had over a half trillion dollars in the major weapons
procurement pipeline, not counting the ballistic missile defense systems
- which is a pure boondoggle that cost over $71 billion by 1999. The
dilemma, as both CIA and senior Clinton officials correctly warned, was
that terrorists were more likely to strike the American homeland than
some nation against whom the military could retaliate. This fundamental
disparity between hardware and reality has always existed and September
11 2001 showed how vulnerable and weak the US has become. <2>

The war in Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 brought the future of NATO
and the alliance, and especially Washington's deepening anxiety
regarding Germany's possible independent role in Europe, to a head. Well
before Bush took office, the Clinton Administration resolved never to
allow its allies to inhibit or define its strategy again. Bush's
policies, notwithstanding the brutal way in which they have been
expressed or implemented, follows logically from this crucial decision.
NATO's failure in Afghanistan, and its members' refusal to contribute
the soldiers and equipment essential to end warlordism and allow fair
elections to be held (it sent five times as many troops to Kosovo in
1999), is the logic of America's bipartisan disdain for the alliance.

But the world today is increasingly dangerous for the US and Communism's
demise has called into fundamental question the core premises of the
post-1945 alliance system. More nations have nuclear weapons and means
of delivering them, destructive small arms (thanks to burgeoning
American arms exports which grew from 32 percent of the world trade in
1987 to 43 percent in 1997) are much more abundant, there are more local
and civil wars than ever, especially in regions like Eastern Europe
which had not experienced any for nearly a half-century, and there is
terrorism - the poor and weak man's ultimate weapon - on a scale that
has never existed. The political, economic, and cultural causes of
instability and conflict are growing, and expensive weapons are
irrelevant - save for the balance sheets of those who make them.

The problem is that at the beginning of the 21st century only the US has
the will to maintain a global foreign policy and to believe that every
part of the world is potentially important to it. It maintains it has
both the right and the obligation to be as active as it thinks necessary
everywhere and it possesses a spectrum of strategies all premised on an
activist role for itself. Ultimately, it is ready to regulate each and
every continent's fate. It believes it had the military resources to do
so, that its economy can afford interventionism and that the American
public will support whatever is necessary to set the affairs of some
country or region on the political path it deems essential. This
grandoise ambition is bipartisan and the two parties share a consensus
on it, details notwithstanding.

So long as the future is to a large degree - to paraphrase Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - "unknowable", it is not to the national
interest of its traditional allies to perpetuate the relationships
created from 1945 to 1990. The Bush Administration, through ineptness
and a vague ideology of American power that acknowledges no limits on
its global ambitions, and a preference for unilateralist initiatives and
adventurism which discounts consultations with its friends much less the
United Nations, has seriously eroded the alliance system upon which US
foreign policy from 1947 onwards was based. With the proliferation of
all sorts of destructive weaponry and growing political instability, 
the world is becoming increasingly dangerous - and so is membership 
in alliances.

If Bush is reelected then the international order may be very different
in 2008 than it is today, much less in 1999, but there is no reason to
believe that objective assessments of the costs and consequences of its
actions will significantly alter America's foreign policy priorities
over the next four years. If the Democrats win they will attempt in the
name of "progressive internationalism" to reconstruct the alliance
system as it existed before the Yugoslav war of 1999, when the Clinton
Administration turned against the veto powers built into the NATO system.
There is important bipartisan support for resurrecting the Atlanticism
that Bush is in the process of smashing, and it was best reflected in
the Council on Foreign Relations' vague and banal March 2004 report on
the "transatlantic alliance", which Henry Kissinger helped direct and
which both influential Republicans and Wall Street leaders endorsed.
Traditional elites are desperate to see NATO and the Atlantic system
restored to their old glory. Their vision, premised on the expansionist
assumptions that have guided American foreign policy since 1945, was
best articulated the same month in a new book by Zbigniew Brzezinski,
who was Carter's National Security adviser. Brzezinski is far more
subtle, rejecting the Bush Administration's counterproductive rhetoric
that so alienates former and potential future allies. But he regards
American power as central to peace in every part of world and his global
vision no less ambitious than the Bush Administration's.  He is for the
US maintaining "a comprehensive technological edge over all potential
rivals".  It is a call to "transform America's prevailing power into a
co-optive hegemony - one in which leadership is exercised more through
shared conviction with enduring allies than by assertive domination". 
And because it is much more saleable to past and potential allies, this
traditional Democratic vision is far more dangerous than that of the
inept, eccentric melange now guiding American foreign policy. <3>

But Vice-president Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the
neoconservatives and eclectic hawks in Bush's administration are
oblivious to the consequences of their recommendations or the way they
shock America's overseas friends. Many of the President's key advisers
possess aggressive, essentially academic geopolitical visions that
assume erroneously - overwhelming, decisive American military and
economic power. But personalized interpretations of the Bible's
allegedly missionary appeals inspire yet others, including Bush himself,
and most utilize an amorphous nationalist and Messianic rhetoric that
makes it impossible to predict exactly how Bush will mediate between
very diverse, often quirky influences. But although he has so far
favored the advocates of the United States unilaterally employing its
might virtually wantonly throughout the world, no one close to the
President acknowledges the limits of its power - limits that are
political and, as Korea and Vietnam proved, military also.

America's traditional allies, of which Australia is one of the closest,
have to decide if they are willing to give a carte blanche to what is -
and will remain regardless of who wins next November's election - an
increasingly dangerous adventurism. We know a great deal of how American
foreign and military policies are formulated, and they are less and less
predictable and increasingly likely to alienate an ever-larger part of
the world. Cynicism, unrealizable ambition, deliberate but also
self-inflicted illusions are crucial to the byzantine way crucial
decisions for war or peace are reached. <4>  But to proclaim that the
alliance with the US is sacrosanct is to encourage an increasingly
irresponsible American foreign policy. That, too, is an issue the
Australian people must consider.

Kerry voted for many of Bush's key foreign and domestic measures and he
is, at best, a very indifferent candidate. His statements and interviews
over the past months dealing with foreign affairs have mostly been both
vague and incoherent, though he is explicitly and ardently pro-Israel
and explicitly for regime-change in Venezuela. His policies on the
Middle East are identical to Bush's and this alone will prevent the
alliance with Europe from being reconstructed. On Iraq, even as violence
there escalated and Kerry finally had a crucial issue with which to win
the election, his position has remained indistinguishable from the
President's.  "Until" an Iraqi armed force can replace it, Kerry wrote
in the April 13 Washington Post, the American military has to stay in
Iraq - "preferably helped by NATO".  "No matter who is elected president
in November, we will persevere in that mission" to build a stable,
pluralistic Iraq - which, I must add, has never existed and is unlikely
to emerge in the foreseeable future.  "It is a matter of national honor
and trust".  He has promised to leave American troops in Iraq for his
entire first term if necessary, but he is vague about their subsequent
departure. Not even the scandal over the treatment of Iraqi prisoners
evoked Kerry's criticism despite the fact it has profoundly alienated 
a politically decisive segment of the American public.

His statements on domestic policy in favor of fiscal restraint and lower
deficits, much less tax breaks for large corporations, utterly lack
voter appeal. Kerry is packaging himself as an economic conservative who
is also strong on defense spending - a Clinton clone - because that is
precisely how he feels. His advisers are the same investment bankers who
helped Clinton get the nomination in 1992 and then raised the funds to
help him get elected and then defined his economic policy. The most
important of them is Robert Rubin, who became Treasury secretary, and he
and his cronies are running the Kerry campaign and will also dictate his
economic agenda should he win. These are same men whom Stiglitz attacks
as advocates of the rich and powerful.

Kerry is, to his core, an ambitious patrician educated in elite schools
and anything but a populist. He is neither articulate nor impressive as
a candidate or as someone who is able to formulate an alternative to
Bush's foreign and defense policies, which themselves still have far
more in common with Clinton's than they have differences. To be critical
of Bush is scarcely justification for wishful thinking about Kerry,
though every presidential election produces such illusions. Although the
foreign and military policy goals of the Democrats and Republicans since
1947 have been essentially consensual, both in terms of objectives and
varied means - from covert to overt warfare - of attaining them, there
have been significant differences in the way they were expressed. This
was far less the case with Republican presidents and presidential
candidates for most of the twentieth century, and men like Taft, 
Hoover, Eisenhower, or Nixon were very sedate by comparison to Reagan 
or the present rulers in Washington. But style can be important and
inadvertently the Bush Administration's falsehoods, rudeness, and
preemptory demands have begun to destroy an alliance system that for 
the world's peace should have been abolished long ago.

In this context, it is far more likely that the nations allied with the
US in the past will be compelled to stress their own interests and go
their own ways. The Democrats are far less likely to continue that
exceedingly desirable process, a process ultimately much more conducive
to peace in the world. They will perpetuate the same adventurism and
opportunism that began generations ago and that Bush has merely built
upon, the same dependence on military means to solve political crises,
the same interference with every corner of the globe as if America has a
Divinely ordained mission to muck around with all the world's problems.
The Democrats' greater finesse in justifying these policies is therefore
more dangerous because they will be made to seem more credible and keep
alive alliances that only reinforce the US' refusal to acknowledge the
limits of its power. In the longer run, Kerry's pursuit of these
aggressive goals will lead eventually to a renewal of the dissolution of
alliances, but in the short-run he will attempt to rebuild them and
European leaders will find it considerably more difficult to refuse his
demands than if Bush stays in power - and that is to be deplored.

The Stakes for the World

Critics of American foreign policy will not rule Washington after 
this election regardless of who wins. As dangerous as he is, Bush's
reelection is much more likely to produce the continued destruction of
the alliance system that is so crucial to American power in the long-run.
Facts in no way imply moral judgments if we merely identify them. One
does not have to believe that the worse the better but we have to
consider candidly the foreign policy consequences of a renewal of 
Bush's mandate, not the least because it is likely.

Bush's policies have managed to alienate, to varying degrees,
innumerable nations, and even its firmest allies - such as Britain,
Australia, and Canada - are being required to ask if giving Washington a
blank check is to their national interest or if it undermines the tenure
of parties in power. Foreign affairs, as the terrorism in Madrid
dramatically showed in March, are too important to uncritically endorse
American policies. Politicians who support them have been highly
vulnerable to criticism from the opposition and dissidents within their
own ranks. But not only the parties in power can pay dearly for it, as
in Spain, where the people were always overwhelmingly opposed to
entering the war and the ruling party snatched defeat from the jaws of
victory; more important are the innumerable victims among the people.
The nations that have supported the Iraq war enthusiastically,
particularly Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Australia, have
made their populations especially vulnerable to terrorism. They now have
the expensive responsibility of protecting them - if they can.

The Washington-based Pew Research Center report on public opinion
released on March 16 2004 showed that a rapidly increasing, large
majority of the French, Germans, and even the British want an
independent European foreign policy, reaching 75 percent in France 
in March 2004 compared to 60 percent two years earlier. The US
"favorability rating" plunged to 38 percent in France and Germany. 
Even in Britain it fell from 75 to 58 percent and the proportion of 
the population supporting the decision to go to war in Iraq dropped 
from 61 percent in May 2003 to 43 percent in March 2004. Blair's
domestic credibility, after the Labour Party placed third in the 
June 10 local and European elections, is at its nadir. <5>

Right after the political debacle in Spain the president of Poland,
where a growing majority of the people has always been opposed to
sending troops to Iraq or keeping them there, complained that Washington
had "misled" him on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and hinted that
Poland might withdraw its 2,400 troops from Iraq earlier than previously
scheduled. In Italy, by last May 71 percent of the people favored
withdrawing the 2,700 Italian troops in Iraq no later than June 30, and
leaders of the main opposition have already declared they will withdraw
them if they win the spring 2006 elections a promise they and other
antiwar parties in Britain and Spain used in the mid-June European
Parliament elections to increase significantly their power. The issue
now is whether nations like Poland, Italy, or The Netherlands can afford
to isolate themselves from the major European powers and their own
public opinion to remain a part of the increasingly quixotic and
unilateralist American-led "coalition of the willing".  The political
liabilities of remaining close to Washington are obvious, the advantages
non-existent.

What has happened in Spain is a harbinger of the future, further
isolating the American government in its adventures. Four more nations
of the thirty-some members of the "coalition of the willing" have
already withdrawn their troops, and the Ukraine - with its 1,600
soldiers - will soon follow suit. The Bush Administration sought to
unite nations behind the Iraq War with a gargantuan lie - that Hussein
had WMD - and failed spectacularly. Meanwhile, terrorism is stronger
than ever and its arguments have far more credibility in the Muslim
world. The Iraq War energized Al Qaeda and extremism and has tied down
America, dividing its alliances as never before. Conflict in Iraq may
escalate, as it has since March, creating a protracted armed conflict
with Shiites and Sunnis that could last many months, even years. Will
the nations that have sent troops to Iraq keep them there indefinitely,
as Washington is increasingly likely to ask them to do?  Can political
leaders in the "coalition of the willing" afford conceding to insatiable
American demands?

Elsewhere, Washington opposes the major European nations on Iran, in
part because the neoconservatives and realists within its own ranks are
deeply divided, and the same is true of its relations with Japan, South
Korea, and China on how to deal with North Korea. America's effort to
assert its moral and ideological superiority, crucial elements in its
postwar hegemony, is failing - badly.

The way the war in Iraq was justified compelled France and Germany to
become far more independent on foreign policy, far earlier, than they
had intended or were prepared to do.  NATO's future role is now
questioned in a way that was inconceivable two years ago. Europe's
future defense arrangements are today unresolved but there will be some
sort of European military force independent of NATO and American control.
Germany and France strongly oppose the Bush doctrine of preemption. Tony
Blair, however much he intends acting as a proxy for the US on military
questions, must return Britain to the European project, and his
willingness since late 2003 to emphasize his nation's role in Europe
reflects political necessities. To do otherwise is to alienate his
increasingly powerful neighbors and risk losing elections.

Even more dangerous, the Bush Administration has managed to turn what
was in the mid-1990s a blossoming cordial friendship with the former
Soviet Union into an increasingly tense relationship. Despite a 1997
non-binding American pledge not to station substantial numbers of combat
troops in the territories of new members, NATO last March incorporated
seven East European nations and is now on Russia's very borders and
Washington is in the process of establishing an undetermined but
significant number of bases in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Russia has
stated repeatedly that the US encircling it requires that it remain a
military superpower and modernizing its delivery systems so that it will
be more than a match for the increasingly expensive and ambitious
missile defense system and space weapons the Pentagon is now building.
It has 5,286 nuclear warheads and 2,922 intercontinental missiles. There
is a dangerous and costly renewal of the arms race now occurring.

In February of this year Russia threatened to pull out of the crucial
Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, which has yet to enter into force,
because it regards America's ambitions in the former Soviet bloc as
provocation.  "I would like to remind the representatives of [NATO]",
Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov told a security conference in Munich 
last February, "that with its expansion they are beginning to operate 
in the zone of vitally important interests of our country".  And by
increasingly acting unilaterally without United Nations authority, 
where Russia's seat on the Security Council gives it a veto power that -
in Ivanov's words - is one of the "major factors for ensuring global
stability", the US has made international relations "very dangerous".
<6>  The question Washington's allies will ask themselves is whether
their traditional alliances have far more risks than benefits - and if
they are now necessary.

In the case of China, Bush's key advisers publicly assigned the highest
priority to confronting its burgeoning military and geopolitical power
the moment they came to office. But China's military budget is growing
rapidly - twelve percent this coming year - and the European Union 
wants to lift its fifteen-year old arms embargo and get a share of the
enticingly large market. The Bush Administration, of course, is strongly
resisting any relaxation of the export ban. Establishing bases on
China's western borders is the logic of its ambitions.

The United States is not so much engaged in "power projection" against
an amorphously defined terrorism by installing bases in small or weak
Eastern European and Central Asian nations as once more confronting
Russia and China in an open-ended context which may have profoundly
serious and protracted consequences neither America's allies nor its own
people have any interest or inclination to support. Even some Pentagon
analysts have warned against this strategy because any American attempt
to save failed states in the Caucasus or Central Asia, implicit in its
new obligations, will risk exhausting what are ultimately its finite
military resources. <7>  The political crisis now wracking Uzbekistan
makes this fear very real.

There is no way to predict what emergencies will arise or what these
commitments entail, either for the US or its allies, not the least
because - as Iraq proved last year and Vietnam long before it -
America's intelligence on the capabilities and intentions of possible
enemies against which it is ready to preempt is so completely faulty.
Without accurate information a state can believe and do anything, and
this is the predicament the Bush Administration's allies are in. It is
simply not to Australia's national interest, much less to the political
interests of those now in power or the security of its people, to pursue
foreign policies based on a blind, uncritical acceptance of fictions or
flamboyant adventurism premised on false premises and information. It is
far too open-ended both in terms of potential time and political costs
involved. If Bush is reelected, America's allies and friends will have
to confront such stark choices, a painful process that will redefine and
probably shatter existing alliances. Many nations, including the larger,
powerful ones, will embark on independent, realistic foreign policies,
and the dramatic events in Spain have reinforced this likelihood.

But the United States will be more prudent, and the world will be far
safer, only if it is constrained by a lack of allies and isolated. And
while that is happening, Australia's explicit rejection of its dangerous
foreign policy premises would be immeasurably beneficial to both nations
- and all humanity.

References:

1. Joseph E Stiglitz, The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World's
Most Prosperous Decade, New York, 2003, passim.

2. Gabriel Kolko, Another Century of War?, New York, 2004, passim.

3. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Choice: Global Domination or Global
Leadership, New York, 2004, passim.

4. Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The
Neo-conservatives and the Global Order (New York, 2004), 
is an extremely well-informed and frightening account of 
how the Bush Administration conducts its foreign policy.

5. Pew Research Center, "A Year After the Iraq War" (March 16 2004).

6. Wade Boese, "Russia, NATO at Loggerheads Over Military Bases", 
Arms Control Today, March 2004; Los Angeles Times (March 26 2004).

7. Dr Stephen J Blank, "Toward a New US Strategy in Asia", 
US Army Strategic Studies Institute (February 24 2004).

http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/smh27.htm

Gabriel Kolko is the Professor Emeritus at Toronto University, 
one of the world's most distinguished war historians, and author 
of Another Century of War? (The New Press, New York, 2002)

Please also see "Neither Feared Nor Loved?" by Immanuel Wallerstein,
Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University (September 01 2004)
http://fbc.binghamton.edu/144en.htm

Bill Totten     http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/