AMERICA
UNLEASHED
But
Krauthammer, of course, is ecstatic. As a neoconservative
who glories in the imperial pomp and splendor of what
he calls "the unipolar moment," he exults in the prospect
of an America unleashed on a tremulous world:.
"After
eight years during which foreign policy success was largely
measured by the number of treaties the president could
sign and the number of summits he could attend, we now
have an administration willing to assert American freedom
of action and the primacy of American national interests.
Rather than contain American power within a vast web of
constraining international agreements, the new unilateralism
seeks to strengthen American power and unashamedly deploy
it on behalf of self-defined global ends."
THE
CHAMELEONS
But
if these ends are "global," then what do they have to
do with our national interests? And who, by the way, gets
to define these "global ends"? It is the compliment paid
to nationalism by the internationalists that they must
always dress up their grandiose visions of a "new world
order" (as Bush the Elder put it) in red-white-and-blue.
But then the chameleon-like
neocons, for whom Krauthammer is a major foreign policy
oracle, have no trouble changing color as opportunity
and luck would have it. Having started out as liberals
(when to be left was chic), and wound up conservatives
(just as it was becoming fashionable), there has been
one and only one consistent principle upheld by this flock
of migratory cowbirds:
a vision of America as a global empire.
PHYSICIAN,
HEAL THYSELF
Of
course, during the cold war they never put it in those
terms: it was always a matter of defending ourselves
against a supposedly inherently hostile and militaristic
Soviet Union, or so these cold war liberals-turned-conservatives
said. But now that the cold war is over, and the great
emergency is over, their fulsome support for intervention
abroad, far from receding, has expanded until it has taken
on the grandiose trappings of a full-blown delusional
system: a symptom of unbalance that Krauthammer, a former
psychiatrist, somehow fails to diagnose in himself.
KISSING
HISTORY GOODBYE
In
the winter of 1989-90, when it became apparent that the
once-mighty Soviet empire was crumbling, and neocon Deep
Thinker Francis
Fukuyama was proclaiming "the
end of history," Krauthammer set out the goal and
guiding principle of a fearsomely grandiose unilateralism:
"The
goal is the world as described by Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama's
provocation was to assume that the end [of history] –
what he calls the common marketization of the world –
is either here or inevitably dawning; it is neither. The
West has to make it happen. It has to wish and work for
a super-sovereign West economically, culturally, and politically
hegemonic in the world."
OUT
OF THE CLOSET
The
title of this 1989 essay, "Universal
Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World," succinctly sums
up Krauthammer's megalomanic fever dream – a mad vision
which frankly proclaims its worship of power and lust
for conquest. The end of the cold war has brought these
old-style empire-builders out of the closet, so to speak,
and the "ism" that once dared not speak its own name now
shouts it to the skies: the "unipolar moment" begets the
"new" unilateralism, and, at the end of history, our Republic
becomes an Empire in everything but name. Whatever is
supposed to be "new" about the Krauthammer-Bush Doctrine,
it bears an amazing resemblance to a very old doctrine,
one that has been pursued by states since time immemorial,
which we used to call imperialism. A nation that
can afford to talk about "global ends" may pretend to
be a republic, it may retain the forms of a republican
(small 'r') and strictly limited form of government,
but while we may fool ourselves, the rest of the world
isn't taken in: they know an empire when they see it.
A
PROSAIC IMPERIUM
What,
then, are these global ends the Bush administration is
supposed to be seeking? Has the pragmatic Team Bush suddenly
gotten religion and woken up to its imperial destiny?
Well, hardly: after such a big buildup, it turns out that,
rather than seize "the unilpolar moment" and establish
"world dominion" once and for all, the three great assertions
of the new unilateralist dispensation are all rather prosaic:
"Ends
such as a defense against ballistic missiles. (We are
– most Americans do not know – entirely defenseless against
them today.) Indeed, the Bush administration's most dramatic
demonstration of the new unilateralism was its pledge
to develop missile defenses and thus abolish the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union. And
the most flamboyant demonstration of the new unilateralism
was Bush's out-of-hand rejection of the Kyoto protocol
on global warming, a refreshing assertion of unwillingness
to be a party to farce, no matter how multilateral."
THE
UNIPOLAR CONCEIT
One
glaring problem with Krauthammer's thesis that that these
ends could be described as distinctly national
rather than global in scope: indeed, the Europeans worry
that a missile defense system will cause the US to turn
"isolationist." As for the Kyoto treaty, what could be
more nationalistic than a refusal to abide by an agreement
the Senate won't ratify? But Krauthammer is here concerned
more with method, than with content. He notes the predictable
liberal Democratic response to this withdrawal from the
Wilsonian internationalism of the Clinton administration,
but frames the issue in terms of the unique American position
as the "hyper-power," as the French like to call us. Citing
a Washington Post editorial on Bush's recent forays
into the foreign policy realm that opined "unilateralism
[is] not an end in itself," Krauthammer concedes that
this is true, "it only describes how one will conduct
foreign policy," but, he insists "nonetheless, how one
conducts foreign policy immeasurably affects what one
ends up doing." As for what Krauthammer would like
us to be doing, I need only refer back to his vision of
Ultimate Unipolarity (call it UU for short), in which
not only the US and Western Europe but also Japan are
all conjoined in one Super-Sovereignty (SS), and you get
the picture. Having achieved UU, we can frankly declare
ourselves to be the one and only SS – in which the whole
world is the US, the United States of the World.
AN
HEGELIAN FOREIGN POLICY?
You
see, we aren't like other countries, or, indeed,
any state or empire that ever existed. We are the culmination
of the World
Spirit, as Hegel
(and Fukuyama) would have it, the apotheosis of human
development, and our coming signals the end of ideological
evolution – nothing less than the grand finale of History
itself, which must now end if only because we cannot hope
to surpass ourselves. With the end of the cold war, and
the collapse of the old Soviet power, there is no barrier
to our power, no limit to our freedom to work our will
on the prostrate peoples of the world. Hubris,
the old Greek word meaning an overweening pride that cometh
before a fall, fits Krauthammer's crazed vision of "world
dominion" to a tee. I say "crazed" not only because the
sheer arrogance of such a goal makes it completely untenable
and self-destructive, but also because madmen always
see the portents of their own madness in perfectly ordinary
events. For Krauthammer the entirely predictable rejection
of a treaty based on dubious science (and even more dubious
political science) marks the advent of a new era:
only in Washington D.C. could such an unremarkable act
be called "flamboyant," and perhaps only a columnist for
the Washington Post could get away with it.
STRUTTIN'
OUR STUFF
Oh
yeah, we're really struttin' our stuff, according
to Krauthammer. Unlike those wimps in the Clinton administration
– who served under the most interventionist President
since Franklin Delano Roosevelt – the Bushies, we are
told, will not start "with a self-declared foreign policy
of 'assertive multilateralism' – a moronic oxymoron that"
means "you have sentenced yourself to reacting to events
or passing the buck to multilingual committees with fancy
acronyms." To hell with our allies – again, it's almost
wonderful to see how a chameleon takes on the color of
his background, in this case the isolationist and nationalist
markings of the rank-and-file conservative Republican,
but with a telltale touch of hubris. To hell with the
Europeans, advises Krauthammer, and everybody else: now
that the cold war is over, we shouldn't even think of
restraining ourselves. We shouldn't bother, avers Krauthammer,
because we're different:
"Small
countries are condemned to such constraint. Nations like
Israel and Taiwan have almost no freedom of action. Their
foreign policy is driven by destiny, dictated by the single
goal of sustaining their own existence. Even middle powers,
such as Great Britain and Germany, find foreign policy
largely dictated by necessities of power and geography.
An unprecedentedly dominant United States, however, is
in the unique position of being able to fashion its own
foreign policy. After a decade of Prometheus playing pygmy,
the first task of the new administration is precisely
to reassert American freedom of action."
DRIVEN
BY DESTINY
But,
of course, for the greater part of our history, we always
did have freedom of action. We owed this not only
to the good fortune of geography, but, most of all, to
the wisdom of the Founders that kept us out of entangling
alliances, and largely unburdened by an empire until the
turn of the nineteenth century. In our freedom, we chose
not to seek out foreign troubles; it was only later, when
the wisdom of the Founders was deemed anachronistic, that
we became the prisoners of history, driven by a sense
of Manifest Destiny not just to seed a continent but,
somehow, to save the world.
THE
CHOICE OF NATIONS
Small
nations, contra Krauthammer, do have a choice:
they can, like Israel, choose to be aggressors, ruthlessly
colonizing and conquering their neighbors, or, like Switzerland,
they can declare themselves uninterested in the spoils
of empire or the internal affairs of other nations, and
pursue the path of peace. Great Britain and Germany were
driven down the road to empire not by geography or the
alleged "necessities" of power, but by the war-maddened
designs of their rulers. As for the immortal Prometheus
– well, we all know what happened to him. For the
sin of hubris – that is, of stealing the fire of the gods
and deluding himself into thinking that he could play
god – he was sentenced in the court of Olympus to be forever
chained to a rock where vultures feasted on his liver
(which, much to his chagrin, grew back on a daily
basis).
FEATHERING
OUR NEST
For
some, probably the overwhelming majority of conservative
Republicans in Congress (and in the ranks of the GOP),
the achievement of UU means that the obligation to intervene
has passed. In their hands, the "new" unilateralism is
the old isolationism, the decision to unilaterally declare
"to hell with you guys, I'm going to feather my own nest."
For a few others, such as Krauthammer and the Weekly
Standard crowd, this is an opportunity to declare:
to hell with you guys, we're "intervening abroad, not
to 'nation-build' . . . but to protect vital interests."
In short, we're going to feather our own nest by plucking
the rest of you bare.
THE
NEW CAESARISM
Krauthammer
goes into lurid detail in his Weekly Standard piece
about the shape of the coming world, which is depicted
as all-but-inevitable. We are treated to the by-now-familiar
triumphalist blather about the overwhelming magnificence
and permanence of American political and military dominance.
The glories of the new unilateralism – why doesn't he
just call it the New Caesarism? – are celebrated:
"The
international environment is far more likely to enjoy
peace under a single hegemon. Moreover, we are not just
any hegemon. We run a uniquely benign imperium. This is
not mere self-congratulation; it is a fact manifest in
the way others welcome our power. It is the reason, for
example, the Pacific Rim countries are loath to see our
military presence diminished."
LOST
IN CLOUD-CUCKOO LAND
It's
a long way from Washington, the Imperial City, to Okinawa,
where the mayor and 99.9% of the inhabitants are demanding
the swift
exit of our "benign" presence, but surely Krauthammer
has heard some vague rumors about discontent in the provinces
of the Pacific Rim. Has he heard, perhaps, that even such
a long-treasured relic of America's Pacific conquests
as the US-Japan
"Security" Treaty is being called into question by
the Japanese foreign minister? Not only that, but the
South Korean government, eager to peacefully absorb the
failing regime in the North, is practically begging us
to reconsider our reluctance to at least discuss the continued
terms of our dominance. The recent
US decision to reopen negotiations with Pyongyang
is proof that the all-powerful "hegemons" in Washington
must take reality into consideration, even if Krauthammer
will not. But reality has nothing to do with Krauthammer's
foreign policy vision. Lost in the theoretical cloud-cuckoo
land of Fukuyama's "endism," he imagines that history,
having ended, no longer holds any lessons for us, because,
you see, we're the exception:
"Unlike
other hegemons and would-be hegemons, we do not entertain
a grand vision of a new world. No Thousand Year Reich.
No New Soviet Man. By position and nature, we are essentially
a status quo power. We have no particular desire to remake
human nature, to conquer for the extraction of natural
resources, or to rule for the simple pleasure of dominion.
We could not wait to get out of Haiti, and we would get
out of Kosovo and Bosnia today if we could. Our principal
aim is to maintain the stability and relative tranquility
of the current international system by enforcing, maintaining,
and extending the current peace."
IT'S
GREEK TO ME
Krauthammer,
who just got through telling us that America, uniquely,
has complete "freedom of action," now informs us that
"we would get out of Kosovo and Bosnia today if we
could." Well, then, why can't we? Is it that we are
not following the "unilateralist" strategy laid out by
the architects of global "hegemony," or that we are imprisoned
by our own Empire, and thus driven by "the necessities
of power," as Krauthammer puts it? As for being a "status
quo" power, the advantages of such a position are surely
negligible. For what could be more Sisyphean
– to take the mythic Greek analogies one step further
– than the endless task of constantly shoring up our dominance
on every continent, swatting down adversaries and potential
rivals even before they rise to challenge us? What is
the profit in such a thankless role? Our troubles, far
from being over, would be eternal. In this sense, we would
indeed share the fate of Prometheus, chained to his rock
and tortured in perpetuity.
THEORY
AND PRACTICE
It
is interesting to note the specific examples utilized
by Krauthammer to illustrate how unilateralism is supposed
to work in practice. In discussing what ought to be the
concrete goals of Bush's foreign policy, number one on
his list is:
"To
enforce the peace by acting, uniquely, as the balancer
of last resort everywhere. Britain was the balancer of
power in Europe for over two centuries, always joining
the weaker coalition against the stronger to create equilibrium.
Our unique reach around the world allows us to be – indeed
dictates that we be – the ultimate balancer in every region.
We balanced Iraq by supporting its weaker neighbors in
the Gulf War. We balance China by supporting the ring
of smaller states at her periphery (from South Korea to
Taiwan, even to Vietnam). One can argue whether we should
have gone there, but our role in the Balkans was essentially
to create a micro-balance: to support the weaker Bosnian
Muslims against their more dominant ethnic neighbors,
and subsequently to support the (at the time) weaker Kosovo
Albanians against the dominant Serbs."
LESSONS
NOT LEARNED
Does
he really mean to convince us by citing Britain's path
as one to follow when we all know where that road led:
to decay, decline, and eventual fall into the quagmire
of socialism? And what's this about how our uniqueness
"dictates" that we must take on this role as the Ultimate
Balancer – what happened to our much-vaunted "freedom
of action"? We have indeed supported Iraq's weaker neighbors
– but, today, they are no stronger, and, what's more,
they are turning against us. And as for balancing China
by supporting Vietnam – surely the irony of this doesn't
have to be pointed out, since it leaps right out at anyone
who remembers the dark history of US intervention in the
region. Naturally, however, the lessons of history mean
nothing to such a Promethean philosopher as Krauthammer,
and so the tragic irony of history also eludes him.
BALLING
UP THE BALKANS
What
is surprising is that Krauthammer brings up the question
of the Balkans at all, since this example surely makes
mincemeat out of his argument that we can or should set
ourselves up as the ultimate arbiter of world events.
That parenthetical "(at the time)" says it all: in intervening,
we upset the natural balance of forces in a troubled region,
and unleashed the monster of Albanian ultra-nationalism
– which is now rampaging through Macedonia, and even threatening
Greece. Our continued presence, far from stabilizing the
region, has plunged southeastern Europe into a maelstrom
of war. Will we now join with our former enemies, the
Serbs, to destroy the monster we have created – is this
what we have to look forward to, indefinitely?
BUTTING
INTO BELARUS
If
the "new" unilateralism as explicated by Krauthammer triumphs,
and his neoconservative buddies in the Bush administration
have their way, then this is, indeed, our awful fate for
years to come: endless intervention in an increasingly
tumultuous and resentful world arena. But if you don't
know Krauthammer's work, and have only read the Washington
Post op-ed piece, the camouflage of "vital national
interests" can be deceptive. An
excellent article in the American Spectator by
Daniel McAdams – linked here and featured as today's
spotlight piece – opens with a hopeful discussion of Krauthammer's
unilateralist proposal, "giving Krauthammer's declaration
the benefit of every doubt," and then launches into an
interesting exposure of our arrogant intervention in Belarus.
The nation of Belarus, it seems, is not sufficiently "democratic"
under President Alexander Lukashenka, in spite of his
repeated victories at the polls. According to McAdams:
"A
chief complaint against Lukashenka was that he was not
enthusiastic enough about 'reform.' He was going slow
on privatization. There were no fire-sales to hungry Western
multinationals, as was going on all around the region
with particularly devastating results next door in Russia.
The "free market" was not being embraced. The Clinton
administration response was to ship millions of our tax
dollars to artificially prop up anti-Lukashenka newspapers,
non-governmental organizations, and private businesses
– all, of course, in the name of "free market reform."
This is still going on under President Bush."
SURPRISE,
SURPRISE!
Of
course it is still going on. While Krauthammer
and the Bushies realize that Russia is no longer our enemy,
this hardly means that they won't seize the opportunity
provided by "the unipolar moment" to grab what they can
where they can – and not just in Belarus. The
whole region is under siege by the US. The
US is currently conducting military exercises in Georgia
– the former Soviet republic, not the former heart of
the Confederacy – in conjunction with NATO. In concert
with our NATO "partners," the Americans are also demanding
the Macedonians make certain political "reforms" so
as to meet the demands of the rampaging Albanians – a
recipe for the division and dissolution of Macedonia and
the further emboldening of Albanian expansionists to venture
into Greece, Bulgaria, and beyond. All this takes place
in the context of NATO expansion, and the reality that
Russia will soon confront: US troops within striking distance
of Moscow. Given this, is anyone really surprised that
Belarus is also within our sights?
A
BALANCING ACT
It's
all part of the great balancing act that Krauthammer sees
as the solemn duty of the American Empire, and perfectly
consistent with "unilateralism," new-fangled or old-fashioned.
Our military bases ring the world, and US troops occupy
every continent worth dominating. After all, we have unilaterally
decided to intervene, as Krauthammer puts it, "everywhere"
– everywhere our heart desires. Given this, why shouldn't
we overthrow the elected government of Belarus, or any
other country – unilaterally, of course.
TWO
SIDES OF THE SAME COIN
The
big "debate" in the foreign policy realm between the "unilateralists,"
like Krauthammer, and the "multilateralists," like Clinton,
is not really a debate at all. The former want the US
to dominate the world all by itself, while the latter
seek the cooperation of our allies and satraps. It is
a "debate" over means, not ends, and thus not worth having.
What is needed is a real discussion over the fundamental
premises of US foreign policy in the post-cold war world.
We need to start asking some basic questions, starting
with: absent the Soviet threat, or its military and political
equivalent, why do we need to intervene everywhere – or
anywhere outside our own borders? The struggle
between unilateralism and multilateralism is completely
phony, because both lead inevitably to the same results:
the endless expense of treasure and troops, in return
for which we only garner increasingly resentment.
EMPIRE
VERSUS REPUBLIC
The
real battle is between interventionism and the foreign
policy of the Founding Fathers, between the advocates
of Empire and the defenders of our old Republic – and,
in that struggle, there can be no compromise. As Garet
Garrett, the trenchant conservative critic of globalism,
put it in 1952, long before "the unipolar moment,"
"Between
government in the republican meaning, that is, Constitutional,
representative, limited government, on the one hand, and
Empire on the other hand, there is mortal enmity. Either
one must forbid the other or one will destroy the other.
that we know. Yet never has the choice been put to a vote
of the people."
UNILATERAL
ARROGANCE
Well,
we did have an election not all that long ago,
and I do seem to remember George W. Bush promising not
only to get us out of the Balkans but holding up the virtues
of a "humble" foreign policy, of an America that stands
in cautious awe of its own terrible power. But, at least
so far, I see no evidence of this much vaunted humility,
no indication that we intend to draw back from the abyss
– only a unilateral arrogance that can only end in disaster.
