[Count Zero]

The cold war turned the US into the hegemon of the Western world. However, this was as the head of an alliance. There was no illusion about relative power. The power was in Washington and not anywhere else. In a way, Europe then recognised the logic of a US world empire, whereas today the US government is reacting to the fact that the US empire and its goals are no longer genuinely accepted. There is no coalition of the willing: in fact the present US policy is more unpopular than the policy of any other US government has ever been, and probably than that of any other great power has ever been.
The Americans led the Western alliance with a degree of courtesy traditional in international affairs, if only because the Europeans should be in the front line in the fight against the Soviet armies: but the alliance was permanently welded to the US by dependence on its military technology. The Americans remained consistently opposed to an independent military potential in Europe. The roots of the long-standing friction between the Americans and the French since the days of De Gaulle lie in the French refusal to accept any alliance between states as eternal, and the insistence on maintaining an independent potential for producing hi-tech military equipment. However, the alliance was, for all its strains, a real coalition of the willing.
Effectively, the collapse of the Soviet Union left the US as the only superpower, which no other power could or wanted to challenge. The sudden emergence of an extraordinary, ruthless, antagonistic flaunting of US power is hard to understand, all the more so since it fits neither with long-tested imperial policies developed during the cold war, nor the interests of the US economy. The policies that have recently prevailed in Washington seem to all outsiders so mad that it is difficult to understand what is really intended. But patently a public assertion of global supremacy by military force is what is in the minds of the people who are at present dominating, or at least half-dominating, the policy-making in Washington. Its purpose remains unclear.
Is it likely to be successful? The world is too complicated for any single state to dominate it. And with the exception of its military superiority in hi-tech weaponry, the US is relying on diminishing, or potentially diminishing, assets. Its economy, though large, forms a diminishing share of the global economy. It is vulnerable in the short term as well as in the long term. Imagine that tomorrow the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries decided to put all its bills in euros instead of in dollars.
Although the US retains some political advantages, it has thrown most of them out of the window in the past 18 months. There are the minor assets of American culture's domination of world culture, and of the English language. But the major asset for imperial projects at the moment is military. The US empire is beyond competition on the military side and it is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. That does not mean that it will be absolutely decisive, just because it is decisive in localised wars. But for practical purposes there is nobody, not even the Chinese, within reach of the technology of the Americans. But here there will need to be some careful consideration on the limits of technological superiority.
Of course the Americans theoretically do not aim to occupy the whole world. What they aim to do is to go to war, to leave friendly governments behind them and go home again. This will not work. In military terms, the Iraq war was very successful. But, because it was purely military, it neglected the necessities of what to do if you occupy a country - running it, maintaining it, as the British did in the classic colonial model of India. The model "democracy" that the Americans want to offer to the world in Iraq is a non- model and irrelevant for this purpose. The belief that the US does not need genuine allies among other states, or genuine popular support in the countries its military can now conquer (but not effectively administer) is fantasy.
THE war in Iraq was an example of the frivolity of US decision- making. Iraq was a country that had been defeated by the Americans and refused to lie down: a country so weak it could be easily defeated again. It happened to have assets - oil - but the war was really an exercise in showing international power. The policy that the crazies in Washington are talking about, a complete re- formulation of the entire Middle East, makes no sense. If their aim is to overthrow the Saudi kingdom, what are they planning in its place? If they were serious about changing the Middle East we know the one thing they have to do is to lean on the Israelis. Bush's father was prepared to do this, but the present incumbent in the White House is not. Instead his administration has destroyed one of the two guaranteed secular governments in the Middle East, and dreams of moving against the other, Syria.
The emptiness of the policy is clear from the way the aims have been put forward in public relations terms. Phrases like "axis of evil", or "the road map" are not policy statements, but merely sound bites that accumulate their own policy potential. The overwhelming newspeak that has swamped the world in the past 18 months is an indication of the absence of real policy. Bush does not do policy, but a stage act. Officials such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz talk like Rambo in public, as in private. All that counts is the overwhelming power of the US. In real terms they mean that the US can invade anybody small enough and where they can win quickly enough. This is not a policy. Nor will it work. The consequences of this for the US are going to be very dangerous. Domestically, the real danger for a country that aims at world control, essentially by military means, is the danger of militarisation. The danger of this has been seriously underestimated.
Internationally, the danger is the destabilising of the world. The Middle East is just one example of this destabilisation - far more unstable now than it was 10 years ago, or five years ago. US policy weakens all the alternative arrangements, formal and informal, for keeping order. In Europe it has wrecked the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation - not much of a loss; but trying to turn NATO into a world military police force for the US is a travesty. It has deliberately sabotaged the EU, and also systematically aims at ruining another of the great world achievements since 1945, prosperous democratic social welfare states. The widely perceived crisis over the credibility of the United Nations is less of a drama than it appears since the UN has never been able to do more than operate marginally because of its total dependence on the Security Council, and the use of the US veto.
How is the world to confront - contain - the US? Some people, believing that they have not the power to confront the US, prefer to join it. More dangerous are those people who hate the ideology behind the Pentagon, but support the US project on the grounds that, in the course of its advance, it will eliminate some local and regional injustices. This may be called an imperialism of human rights. It has been encouraged by the failure of Europe in the Balkans in the 1990s. The division of opinion over the Iraq war showed there to be a minority of influential intellectuals, including Michael Ignatieff in the US and Bernard Kouchner in France, who were prepared to back US intervention because they believe it is necessary to have a force for ordering the world's ills. There is a genuine case to be made that there are governments that are so bad that their disappearance will be a net gain for the world. But this can never justify the danger of creating a world power that is not interested in a world that it does not understand, but is capable of intervening decisively with armed force whenever anybody does anything that Washington does not like.
Against this background we can see the increasing pressure on the media - because in a world where public opinion is so important, it is also hugely manipulated (4). Attempts were made in the Gulf war, 1990-91, to avoid the Vietnam situation by not letting the media near the action. But these did not work because there were media, for example CNN, actually in Baghdad, reporting things that did not fit the story Washington wanted told. This time, in the Iraq war, control again did not work, so the tendency will be to find yet more effective ways. These may take the form of direct control, maybe even the last resort of technological control, but the combination of governments and monopoly proprietors will be used to even greater effect than with Fox News (5), or Silvio Berlusconi in Italy.
How long the present superiority of the Americans lasts is impossible to say. The only thing of which we are absolutely certain is that historic ally it will be a temporary phenomenon, as all these other empires have been. In the course of a lifetime we have seen the end of all the colonial empires, the end of the so- called Thousand Year Empire of the Germans, which lasted a mere 12 years, the end of the Soviet Union's dream of world revolution.
(continued in the next post)