THEY'RE
BACK!
Riding
the swell of war hysteria – stoked, then as now, by
Fleet
Street – Disraeli sent the British Navy to the
Dardanelles. But World War I was not fated to break out
quite yet, and was averted by the treaty of the Congress
of Berlin, wherein the Czar sold out his Slavic Bulgarian
brothers and the Turks agreed to be a lot nicer to their
slaves. The real winners were the Brits, who, by merely
threatening war, were awarded
the island of Cyprus. Disraeli described this triumph
of British bully tactics as "peace with honor" – yet
another unfortunate phrase of that turbulent era to have
come down to us with similar consequences. The war party
came to be known as the jingoes
or jingoists – and it looks like they are back
with a vengeance.
GRANDIOSITY
The
manifesto of the new jingoists – or, at least, the
condensed version – recently appeared in the London
Times, where news editor and columnist Michael Gove
openly exhorted conservative politicians on both sides of
the Atlantic: "We
must fight the good fight for jingoism"! It's time,
opines Gove, the grise
eminence
of the Tory Right, "for a revival of jingoism," which
he refers to as "this grand Victorian principle." Ah yes,
a principle that led to World War I, wrecked European civilization,
paved the way for the rise of totalitarianism, and ushered
in a new world war: it's simply dizzying to contemplate
the sheer grandness of it all!
SADDAM
IN BANGKOK?
Now,
as before, jingoism is concerned with what was known in
the late 1800s as the "Eastern question": back then, Turkey
was the prize. Today, it is Iraq, but the same imperialist
appetites and theater of operations comes into play. "With
the godfather of terror, President Saddam Hussein, still
repugnantly in place, and the rising son, George W. Bush,
at last restoring virtue to the White House, the moment,"
writes Gove, "is ripe" – for war. Not the promiscuous,
vacuously "idealistic" wars of Clinton and Blair, but the
hardheaded and focused aggressions that deal with "real
threats," such as the Godfather of Terror, whose agents,
we are breathlessly told, "have been at work as far afield
as Bangkok and the Balkans." Is Saddam planning on conquering
the
fleshpots of Bangkok? Having failed to corner the world
market in oil, perhaps he's moving in on the sex trade.
Hyperbole is the traditional jingoist style: in Hunt's ditty,
the Russian Bear "is pleased when blood is shed," while
Gove depicts Saddam as a madman who is "starving his own
people" and is ready to "devastate Western cities."
THOSE
MISUNDERSTOOD JINGOES
The
purpose of all this rhetorical hysteria, however, is to
divert attention away from the War Party's central problem:
with the old Soviet Union gone, the Left has taken up the
cause of global interventionism as the only way to establish
international socialism. So how to fight the rising tide
of what they call "isolationism" on the Right? This movement
grew up, they think, largely as a reaction to the giddy
internationalism of Clinton-Blair. In America, and Britain
to some extent, the
return of the Old Right, old church, anti-imperialist
conservatism of yesteryear presents the War Party with a
major challenge: the solution, as Gove has cleverly demonstrated,
is to package the new jingoism as the policy of caution.
While this may seem counterintuitive, Gove explains that
jingoism has really been the victim of a bad press. "Jingoism,"
he avers,
"has
become synonymous in the public mind with bellicose adventurism.
But when the word first emerged, it encapsulated the essence
of prudent foreign policy. In the words of the music-hall
song which inspired the phrase: 'We don't want to fight,
but, by jingo if we do, we've got the ships, we've got the
men, we've got the money too.' And in that raucous chorus
there lies more wisdom than in most contemporary pronouncements
on foreign affairs."
A
POSTMODERN TRAGEDY
Let
history judge whether it was "prudent" to squelch the move
for Balkan independence and take up the cause of Islam in
Europe as a bulwark against the Russian Bear. From the point
of view of Disraeli, whose sole purpose was the enrichment
and expansion of the British Empire, it was a policy that
made sense: so, too, with Mr. Gove and his fellow neo-jingoists
on the other side of the Atlantic (where they are called
neoconservatives)
What is striking here is that history seems to be repeating
itself in a way that underscores its tragic irony: the same
tragedy is being re-enacted in the same theater, with the
same players mouthing the same lines – but with a postmodern
twist.
LEFT
AND RIGHT
Many
commentators on the international scene have remarked on
the similarities of the post-cold war world to the years
preceding the first world war, with the former Soviet Union
taking the place of the old Ottoman Empire as the "Sick
Man of Europe" and the twin battlegrounds of the Balkans
and the Middle East once again central to the drama. Only
this time, in the West, the domestic players have switched
roles, with the conservative imperialists of yesteryear,
the Disraelis and the Teddy Roosevelts, replaced by the
born-again militarism of Blair and Clinton. Gove laments
that
"Unfortunately,
the most vigorous case made against the Blairite, and as
it happened, Clintonite, approach of promiscuous insertion
of military muscle came from a neoisolationist alliance
of Left and Right which doesn't want to fight at all. This
curious coalition which brought George
Galloway and Pat
Buchanan together, which unites continental Greens and
Le
Penistes and which has given Bruce
Kent a new lease of life, has been strengthened by the
Blair and Clinton Governments' mishandling of Kosovo and
energized by their proliferation of military adventures."
THE
NEW PEACENIKS
These
"extremists," says Gove, must both be rejected,
and a "prudent" Disraelian foreign policy put firmly in
place: jingoism, it turns out, is the "rational" center
of the foreign policy spectrum, the true middle ground between
Clintonian-Blairite utopianism and the "new peaceniks" of
the right. While "there is a strong case for proper suspicion
towards Utopian attempts to achieve a new world order" –
how understated, how British, can you get? –
the nationalists, or "neo-isolationists," as Gove dubs them,
"have damaged the case for caution with their willingness
to believe that any enemy of the 'new world order' should
be a friend." If hyperbole is the stylistic leitmotif of
jingoist propaganda, then its content is made up almost
entirely of lies. How many conservative opponents of the
Kosovo war idolized Slobodan Milosevic? Answer: none. I
don't recall Pat Buchanan singing the praises of Saddam
Hussein, either. It's a breathtaking lie, yet Gove doesn't
even stop to take a breather, but gets right to the real
cause of his ire: "The new peaceniks, with their opposition
to national missile defense (NMD), willingness to be Saddam's
stooges in attacking Iraqi sanctions, and blindness to the
resurgent imperial ambitions of Russia and China, leave
the world open to more conflict, not less."
OUR
IMPERIALISM, AND THEIRS
Gove
would like us to believe that he and his fellow jingoists
are making "the case for caution." But if a war to seize
the Middle East oil fields and confront the Russian Bear
in his own former lair is cautious, then I would like to
see what a really risky course would look like. Gove charges
Russia and China with harboring "resurgent imperial ambitions,"
but what is the Anglo-American assault on Iraq – a
mission of mercy? And as for the idea that a policy of nonintervention
in the affairs of other nations will, somehow, provoke "more
conflict, not less," the new jingoism, like the old, is
blind to its own arrogance, and blithely unaware of what
is obvious to every nation whose first language is not English:
that the Western powers, the US and Great Britain, are the
main causes of conflict in the world.
THE
NMD CONNECTION
The
most interesting aspect of all this is the National Missile
Defense connection: Tory leader William Hague's endorsement
of the NMD, and his suggestion that Star Wars ought to cover
the British Isles as well as the US, raises the banner of
the old "Union
Now" Anglophiles – and New York Times columnist
William
Safire was among the first to salute. Hague wants the
Bushies to go beyond "a purely national missile shield."
Instead, "the aim should surely be a global defense shield
to which Britain could contribute its early warning radars
as well as much-needed political and diplomatic support."
In the Times [January 25, 2001], Safire exults:
"This
revives the original idea behind NATO. American power –
including the nuclear umbrella – was extended across
the Atlantic to protect our European allies, as their forces
joined in mutual defense. In planning to cope with the threat
sure to come from Iraq, Iran or some well-financed terrorist
group, an American-built missile defense system should again
be assisted by, and in return protect, our allies."
"CONSERVATIVE"
GLOBALISM
A
global defense shield for a global empire – the nucleus
of which is the Anglo-American alliance, effectively and
militarily merged into a single entity. The idea of merging
the US and Canadian armed forces was recently raised
by a prominent advisor to the Canadian military, and such
a union with the Brits is the logical next step. In this
sense, the new jingoism is the perfect model of the old:
the jingoes of the British Empire saw their domain as the
symbol of the superiority of the English-speaking peoples,
and its most militant advocates eagerly looked forward to
the reversal of the American Revolution and the return of
the rebellious colonies. Along with Russophobia, the prospect
of this reunion is becoming a major theme of jingoists on
both sides of the Atlantic, and the drumbeat is likely to
get louder as NATO expansion brings American and British
soldiers within spitting distance of the Kremlin. It was
the neoconservative columnist Charles
Krauthammer who first announced the arrival of "the
unipolar
moment," as the Berlin Wall fell, and urged the US to
act quickly to assure its "universal dominion" over a "supersovereign"
entity consisting of America, Europe, and Japan:. This "new
universalism," he wrote, "is not as outrageous as it sounds"
– at least not if you're in tune with the new jingoism.
NO
MIDDLE GROUND
By
tying in the loopy conservative hobbyhorse of a "national
missile defense" with the prospect of looming monsters lurking
everywhere – Gove confides that "the range of threats
to stability in the modern world is, potentially, endless"
– the Gove-Safire Atlanticists
are attempting to go at least part of the way toward fulfilling
Krauthammer's universalist vision. It is a vision, however,
that will not find much sympathy outside the Washington
Beltway and its British equivalent. Furthermore, if the
Atlanticists hope to occupy the "middle ground" of a terrain
fought over by the antiwar Right and the globalist interventionist
Left, then they will find themselves caught in the crossfire
as the battle heats up. And it is getting hot pretty quickly.
WAITING
IN THE WINGS
The
immediate goal of our postmodern jingoes, it seems, is being
actively contemplated if not yet planned by the incoming
administration: Bush hadn't even moved into the White House
before Colin Powell was shaking his saber at Iraq. To give
the new war hysteria a bipartisan flavor, among the final
acts of the Clinton administration was the release of millions
of dollars in aid to Iraqi "insurgents" with a plan to send
them into Iraq. The more cynical among us raised the possibility
of the US having to "rescue" them, creating both a military
opening and a pretext for intervention. At any rate, Desert
Storm II is waiting in the wings, but whether the longer
term goals of the jingoist revival will be met remains to
be seen.
A
HARD SELL
From
where I sit, they'll have a hard time selling Desert Storm
II to conservatives, who will ask why we're enduring a gas
shortage and simultaneously embargoing Iraqi oil. As for
the long-range vision of Anglo-American unity, this will
prove even more problematic for American conservatives,
as underscored by their iconization
of Mel Gibson in The Patriot. In any case, the
neoconservative
vogue for all things "Victorian" is not shared by the
conservatives of the American heartland, where the new jingoism
is bound to go over like a lead balloon. While a few Tories,
not all of them in England, might swoon over the prospect
of reviving the British Empire as the Pax Americana, such
a scheme is indeed just as outrageous as it sounds.
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