OUR
DECLINISM, AND THEIRS
But
the declinist insight that what Paul Kennedy called "imperial
overstretch" is draining our economy and leading to malinvestment
of vital resources – with serious consequences down the road
– is hardly disproved by the example of the Soviet Union.
Indeed, the case against imperial overstretch is buttressed
because that was so clearly the cause of the Kremlin's demise.
Unless we want to follow the Soviet commissars down the path
of historical obsolescence, US policy makers would do well
to reexamine their most basic assumptions about America as
"the indispensable nation," in the Clintonian version
of imperial glory – or the seeker after "benevolent
world hegemony," as the neoconservatives put it. But
the very definition of hubris, the urge to tempt Fate and
defy the gods, implies a certain blindness to the consequences
of one's actions, and Kaplan therefore finds it "odd"
that "terms like 'imperial overstretch' and 'American
exhaustion' have returned to favor." The new declinism
is on the attack! Only this time it isn't mushy-headed liberals
who had "ideological" reasons for opposing interventionism
in the years before the cold war ended: now it is "ostensibly
tough-minded foreign policy 'realists'" – conservatives
– "who have somehow managed to locate in one of history's
most lopsided victories the seeds of an even greater defeat."
Gee, I couldn't have put it better myself: it wouldn't be
the first time in human history that a glorious and supposedly
permanent triumph turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory. But
the mindless triumphalism of those who celebrate the rise
of an American Empire makes one immune to irony as well as
indifferent to history, or so it would seem.
CONSPIRACY
THEORY
According
to Kaplan, all those ignorant conservatives who opposed the
Kosovo war and now challenge each and every "humanitarian"
intervention that Congress is asked to rubberstamp are really
the victims of a tiny group of intellectuals, "some so
obscure that many of the conservative opinion makers who recycle
declinist wisdom remain unaware of its origin." Who are
these obscure intellectuals, who are handing down the party
line from on high? Samuel
Huntington, the prominent foreign policy theoretician
is one, and Chalmers
Johnson, author of Blowback,
is another. But before we get to them, let's look at Kaplan's
conspiracy theory, which assumes that ideas are planted by
small "cadres" of elites, and that the rest of us
ordinary folks robotically respond.
EARTH
CALLING KAPLAN
Earth
calling Kaplan: ordinary people, including grassroots conservative
activists, don't need to be told by anyone that the cold war
is over and it's time for the US to start scaling down the
scope of its global military operations. They didn't need
much of anyone to tell them that something is terribly wrong
about a war in which we bombed some of the oldest cities in
Europe in the name of "humanitarianism." Their natural
reaction was shock, horror, and shame – yes, shame
that their country had committed acts of naked aggression,
in violation of international law and all the laws of morality;
shame that we fought a war to benefit the totalitarian
thugs of the KLA, who are now trying for an encore. Does this
mean they hate America?
WHICH
AMERICA?
It
depends on what you mean by "America." If we're
talking about the American people themselves, then the answer
is obviously no. But what America means to Kaplan is the American
government – i.e. not only the state apparatus, but
in a broader sense the elites that rule over us ordinary folk,
in the media, academia, and the higher reaches of the corporate
world, as well as government officials. This, to him, is the
real America, the only America that counts – ordinary people
don't have opinions, remember, except those they are
programmed by intellectuals to accept – and so, yes,
given those terms, Kaplan is quite right: conservatives do
hate that America. They love their country – and hate
its rulers. To Kaplan, this dichotomy makes no sense, since
to an imperialist liberal like himself, the country is
the government and its intellectual courtiers.
BESIDE
HIMSELF
Kaplan
is practically beside himself with the rise of "realism"
as the leitmotif of conservative foreign policy analysis:
frankly anti-imperialist and skeptical of the idea that we
have the material and spiritual resources to spend on a quest
for empire, the conservative "declinists," avers
Kaplan, are just a new variation on what used to be known
as left-wing 'anti-Americanism':
"If
liberal declinism seemed designed to rebut the Reagan-era
cliché of 'morning in America,' the conservative version
means to debunk the Clinton administration mantra that America
is the 'indispensable nation' Unnerved by the enshrining of
democracy and human rights as central elements of U.S. foreign
policy, the new declinists warn that if naive policymakers
do not drive American power into eclipse, the resentments
stirred by their arrogant admonitions surely will. In one
article after another, they dismiss post-cold-war 'triumphalism'
as sheer delusion, arguing that American power is on the wane
or soon will be. And, as with the left of a decade ago, the
diagnosis presupposes the cure: the United States should mind
its own business."
THINKING
THE UNTHINKABLE
Mind
our own business – unthinkable! And how dare
those foreign ingrates fail to get down on their hands and
knees and bow low before the beneficence of the great American
hegemon –they have no right to resent being bullied,
hit with economic sanctions, and invaded by American "peacekeepers"!
Don't they know its for their own good? "Unnerved"
is hardly the word for the conservative response to Mad Madeleine
Albright's conceit of American indispensability. As we watch
the US-funded-and -trained Kosovo "Liberation" Army
drive the last Serbs out of Kosovo, and the former Yugoslav
province turned into a gangster state ruled by the Albanian
Mafia, repulsion is more like it. What's more, this
equation of conservative "isolationism" with the
antiwar left of the sixties is meant as an insult, but ought
to be taken as a compliment. If only conservative opponents
of globalism could have the same impact as the sixties movement
against the Vietnam war, then this is good news indeed. The
bad news, however, is that it may take another Vietnam before
such a movement can become a reality. . . .
THE
CASE FOR PESSIMISM
Besides
attacking Huntington for having undergone an evolution of
his views – as did most conservatives after the implosion
of Communism and the end of the cold war; most, that is, except
the neoconservatives – The New Republic also goes after
Robert
D. Kaplan, the conservative Atlantic Monthly writer
and author of The
Coming Anarchy, which compares post-millennial America
with the Roman Empire in decline. Most of the world is not
and has never been touched by the ideals of the Enlightenment,
and we cannot bestow such gifts with a sword: the nations
of the former Soviet Union as well as in Eastern Europe have
no tradition of democratic or constitutional governance, and
in spite of any lip service paid to these lofty ideals – mostly
in an effort to garner US foreign aid dollars – the pendulum
is bound to swing the other way. This view is cited in The
New Republic piece as if it were a self-evident fallacy,
but the only effort to refute it is the characterization of
these views as "dark pessimism." But so what if
it is? In the lexicon of our court intellectuals, who are
themselves always in a frenzy of optimism and good spirits
due to the wisdom and good deeds of their masters in Washington,
all forms of pessimism, for whatever reason, are suspect and
necessarily "dark" (i.e. bad). What balderdash!
Anyone who isn't pessimistic about the prospect of what new
horror our rulers will pull off next is either brain-dead
or – out of self-protection – completely indifferent to anything
outside the sphere of the personal. If that be a state of
darkness, then you can color me black. . . .
SMEARING
JOHNSON
Most
outrageous of all is Kaplan's smear of Chalmers Johnson, whose
brilliant book, Blowback:
The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, makes
the case that imperial overstretch has had disastrous economic
consequences – which could manifest themselves in the US in
the very near future. Johnson's sin – apparently unforgiveable
– is that he pops the hot-air balloon of the Clintonian
triumphalists who seek to whitewash every crime with the same
old mantra of "we've never had it so good." Kaplan
writes:
"Then
there is Chalmers Johnson, a prominent Japan specialist, former
CIA consultant, and ivory-tower cold warrior who today sees
portents of declining American power in everything from the
Asian economic meltdown to (in his view, justified) terrorist
attacks against US installations. Johnson – whose latest
book, Blowback:
The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, suggests
that one of the chief occupations of American soldiers abroad
is to prey on local women – can barely contain his glee
at the prospect of an America cut down to size."
GLOBALISM
MEANS RAPING THE WORLD
To
say that Johnson believes terrorist attacks against Americans
are "justified" is an outright lie. The author of
Blowback
merely points out that, in the past, terrorist attacks on
US military and civilian targets in, say, Saudi Arabia, have
been "blowback" from the unintended consequences
of our various activities in that region of the world. If
we bomb an aspirin factory in the Sudan because the American
chief executive needs to divert attention away from his sexual
peccadilloes, at least for a crucial moment, then should we
be surprised when the survivors attack US tourists or businesses
or American military installations in the region? This is
not to justify, but to explain simple cause and effect. Apparently
it is unpatriotic – as well as politically incorrect – to
point out the sexual wildings routinely indulged in by American
centurions abroad, but surely this is a major cause of anti-American
feeling in US client states, such as Japan, and especially
on the island of Okinawa, which is dealt with in the first
chapter of Johnson's well-written and very interesting book.
Indeed, what is happening on Okinawa – the literal rape of
the country – captures, in microcosm, what the America's empire-builders
have in store for the whole world. A more apt metaphor was
never invented.
THE
POLITICS
The
political implications of the conservative-neocon split on
foreign policy are reflected, says Kaplan, in the Bush campaign,
with Bush adviser Brent Scowcroft and realist Ricard Haass
"balanced" by neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Richard
Perle. What he doesn't say is that the latter have the complete
upper hand: they won on Kosovo, when it counted, in spite
of mighty efforts on the part of the Bush campaign to appear
to be splitting the differences. Dubya is reportedly reading
Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy, or having it read to him,
but one can only speculate how much he actually comprehends.
In any case, the executive editor of The National Interest
is not really all that peeved at Bush: it's the Republican
Congress that really irritates him: "Though he cautions
against 'overstretch,' Bush has also repudiated the foreign
policy gloom that has become a staple of Republican congressional
speechifying."
A
FUNNY KIND OF "OPTIMISM"
But
unless you're William Cohen, how else is a Republican
to view the last eight years of American foreign policy except
as an unmitigated disaster? More US military interventions
than in the entire fifty years previous, and a new role as
the policeman and wet nurse to the world. Also, please note
the clever way in which the terms of the debate are colored
in the most emotional terms: all opposition to war and other
forms of foreign meddling is characterized as "gloom"
– while the rabid fulminations of the War Party about this
threat and the other are really the exhortations of a sunny
optimism.
DECADENCE
AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Another
symptom of the conservative anti-imperialists' "pessimism"
is their critique of American society as decadent and thus
not up to the task of global imperator:
"In
their preoccupation with America's moral corruption, the new
declinists extend to foreign policy the cultural despair of
Paul Weyrich, Robert Bork, and many other pessimists
on the right. 'What does it tell about the West,' Huntington
asks, 'when Westerners identify their civilization with fizzy
liquids, faded pants, and fatty foods?" For Huntington, it
tells that the United States is going to hell in a handbasket,
subject, like the West as a whole, to 'internal processes
of decay.'"
POWER
CORRUPTS
This
misses the real point, which is that our old Republic has
been corrupted and transformed into an Empire. The conservative
noninterventionist case is encapsulated in an old liberal
axiom, Lord
Acton's aphorism about how "power corrupts and absolute
power corrupts absolutely." Imperialism corrupts the
nation not only morally, but also politically in that it centralizes
power in the hands of the federal executive. We used to have
a citizen president, now we have a king who aspires to be
an emperor, an imperial hegemon whose rule extends over the
whole world. It isn't that we aren't good enough to rule the
world – it's just that the effort required to achieve such
a goal would soon render us unworthy, if we weren't already.
THE
SMEAR
With
the neoconservatives,
there is no such thing as intellectual argument, and Kaplan
follows this well-traveled polemical route, quoting what he
regards as his opponents' outrageous arguments about how we
ought to mind our peas and q's and stay out of affairs that
don't concern us, and then smearing them in a few short sentences.
Thus, he goes on for paragraphs describing how everyone from
Senator
Kay Bailey Hutchison to obscure "declinist"
intellectuals are going around talking about the dangers of
imposing "gunpoint democracy" – and then out
comes the knife:
"And
with their reservations about American democracy goes a reflexive
sympathy for America's detractors abroad, whether they be
Serb, Russian, or Chinese. Singapore's authoritarian 'Asian
values,' in particular, have been singled out for praise by
Kaplan, Alexander Haig, Henry Kissinger, and other conservative
realists."
FIFTH
COLUMNISTS
This
has always been the chief argument of the War Party, when
push comes to shove: any and all opposition to their war plans
is treason, and should be dealt with accordingly. Opposition
to intervention means support for the Enemy. The Peace Party
is really a "fifth column." This argument is not
usually made at the beginning of a foreign policy debate,
but is nearly always reserved for the end, as the last and
deadliest weapon in the War Party's arsenal. That they are
hauling it out so early is evidence that they are getting
desperate. There is a rising tide of intellectual as well
as popular opinion embracing the noninterventionist insight
that our empire has become an albatross hung 'round America's
neck, one that will sink us unless we can somehow get rid
of it. Kaplan's panic is a good sign, then, that we are closer
to our goal than we think.
FALSE
PROPHETS
Kaplan
pulls out every old warhorse in the interventionist lexicon:
calling up the "appeasers" of the 1930s, the shadow
of Hitler is raised, along with hints that the new appeasers
are just as dastardly as the old: "Today, as before,
the most formidable challenge to that power comes not from
Europe, imperial overstretch, or rock and roll but from false
prophets in our midst." They are not only false prophets,
in Kaplan's view, but really traitors to the sacred cause
of Global Democracy and the new politically correct Americanism.
The implication that these rightist opponents of global gunpoint
"democracy" might be authoritarians or even closet
Nazis is raised when Kaplan describes the Huntington-realist
critique in the following terms:
"One
is the opening of US foreign policy to the influence of historically
marginal American ethnic groups ('It is scarcely possible
to overstate the influence of Israel's supporters on our policies
in the Middle East' complains [former Republican Secretary
of Defense James] Schlesinger). Another is the disuniting
of America that has resulted from letting 'immigrants from
other civilizations' into the country at all. Huntington,
for example, frets that a polyglot America 'will not be the
United States; it will be the United Nations.'"
THE
LESSON OF HISTORY
The
same old smears won't work, this time, because the War party's
game is up. Politically, the tide is turning, as the arrogance
of America's imperial pretensions strikes ordinary people
as un-American – and dangerous. Huntington's insight
into the transformative effects of multiculturalism on America's
global role has cut to the very heart of the conservative
conundrum over the question of their incipient "anti-Americanism":
America, the bomber of Belgrade, the murderer of Iraqi children,
the scourge of the Sudan and the terror of the world, is no
longer itself. The real treason, here, is not in the hearts
of the Empire's enemies on the home front, but in those who
have usurped the original American ideal and substituted something
alien: Kaplan talks about the triumph of the "national
creed" as evidence that world hegemony is our right and
our duty, but he is speaking, here, not of the American
credo but the imperial creed of our former colonial overlords,
the British. If, like them, we take the road of Empire, it
will be a one-way trek to oblivion. That is the lesson of
history – one that conservatives ignore at their peril.
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