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It
was when he started thumping the table and jabbing the air with
his finger that I looked up. "Take ‘em out!" he said
quietly but menacingly. "Take ‘em out! We took out the Soviets,
we can take out the CHICOMS."
The
scene was the lunch table at an international conference hosted
by a leading right-wing think-tank in Washington DC. The speaker
was a highly influential American policy-maker: in fact, it said
"Distinguished Scholar" on his business card. As a United
States spy plane had just crash-landed in China, the Communist
leaders of that country were much on people’s minds.
"I
want people to remember that Reagan crushed the Ruskies,"
he went on. "What we need is a strategic response
to this crisis. If we’re gonna have a war with China, we’d better
do it sooner than later. In five years’ time, they’ll be much
more powerful." Seeming to recall that the Kaiser and his
general staff used to clank around Berlin saying much the same
thing about the Royal Navy in about 1912, I ventured timidly,
"Don’t you think a war with China would be rather risky?
I mean, they could take a million casualties and still have 999
more millions where that million came from." Like Dr. Strangelove,
the Distinguished Scholar had a German accent underneath his American
one when he replied. "Jahn," he said looking at me pityingly,
"if we launch a thermo-nuclear attack on China, we would
take out hundreds of millions, not just one." I quietly chewed
on my bagel.
Think-tanks
like this flourish like exotic plants all over the political hothouse
of the American capital. Usually located in sumptuous Suites,
and invariably a long elevator ride away from terra firma,
their influence on beltway policy is enormous. For much of the
time they perform a valuable service by bringing public attention
to specific policy proposals in Congress. But they also have a
tendency, like the philosopher-kings of Laputa, to distribute
military advice from a great height, allowing the world below
to come into view only to the extent that each week different
parts of it should, they affirm, be bombed.
On
the walls of this Institute, a clock with an AK-47 for hands and
real bullets showing the minutes marked time silently. Posters
in the corridors displayed aircraft-carriers, nuclear submarines
and fighter aircraft, with belligerent captions like "The
Steel in the Sword of Freedom" or "90,000 tons of diplomacy."
Meanwhile, down in the Washington underground, commercial advertisements
for heavy military hardware are common. One shows a huge Apache
helicopter with the jokey comment, "It keeps the peace -
in a dominating, intimidating sort of way."
The
United States may not be a welfare state but it is coming perilously
close to being a warfare state. Think-tanks play a key role in
the money-go-round which links arms contractors, policy wonks
and Congress. Often paid for by defence contractors, the think-tanks
threaten to tar every new administration with the brush of treachery
if it does not pour money into the Pentagon; they also point out
to the relevant Congressmen that any cuts in defence spending
might impact on jobs in their own districts. The result is that
American spending on defence is now higher per combat unit than
it was at the height of the Cold War and, as such, a byword for
fantastic levels of waste. Countless millions are spent on helicopters
which do not fly and on weapons which are so smart that they destroyed
every chicken-coop in Kosovo because the heat generated by chicken
shit shows up as a large square on their infra-red detectors.
The
role of these think-tanks, in short, is to maintain a continuous
production-line of weapons of mass distraction from the reality
that the world is in fact a peaceful place and that the United
States is already unassailable. Instead, they professionally produce
for their paymasters a lurid picture of a world lurking with bogey-men,
rogue states and other threats to the American bambi. The threats
they find are internal as well as external and so, naturally,
the response has to be both. "They’re trying to create a
police state," one Congressman told me, commenting on plans
to set up a national counter-terrorist force. All these plans
share with the ideology of European integration the false assumptions
that, in the new world, borders and states are of decreasing importance
and that "global problems demand global solutions".
We
are used to hearing such ideas from the Clintonite left. However,
the neo-conservative right marches in lock-step with liberal imperialists.
Both visions of the world are incompatible with the concept of
national sovereignty – except for American sovereignty, to be
sure. One of the neo-cons’ leading lights, Joshua Muravchik, has
written that the role of world policeman is not enough for America.
"A policeman gets his assignments from higher authority,"
he explains. "But in the community of nations, there is no
higher authority than America."
Any
other nation which believes in its own sovereignty is therefore
a psychiatric case. Last week, the right-wing Wall Street Journal
explained at length how the stand-off with China revealed how
that country was in hock to its "psyche" and "tortured
past." These psychological disorders manifest themselves
in the antiquated Chinese belief that borders are paramount and
that territory should be defended. According to the Journal,
the Chinese cannot understand that spy planes are an integral
part of the New World Order: "In today’s world, instead of
absolute sovereignty, countries nose into each other’s business
all the time."
For
a large segment of the neo-con establishment, it seems, foreign
policy is now the continuation of psychotherapy by other means,
helping or coaxing backward nations like the Chinese to "come
to grips" with the modern world and abandon their "19th
century perspective." But psychotherapy works both ways.
The main purpose of disbursing fantastic sums on the Pentagon
also seems to be to fuel the American national delusion that warfare
can be cost-free in human terms. This is deeply corrosive both
of any realistic assessment of the horrors of war and of the American
nation’s true readiness to fight if anyone hits back. As soon
as the airmen were detained in China, the American nation rushed
collectively to feel their pain and that of their families: supplies
of yellow ribbon ran out at the town near their air base in Washington
state, as little knots were tied all over the town in sympathy.
What an appropriate colour. The US Air Force wives have evidently
not been brought up on the quiet heroism of Mrs. Miniver, a fact
which will not have escaped the attention of the somewhat less
sentimental Chinese.
Although
vigorously supported by many on the Right, this mentality of "90,000
tons of diplomacy" - the US State Department is now headed
by an army general as if to emphasise the point – is the polar
opposite of conservative. It notably lacks those key concepts
which should form the basis of the diplomacy of any civilised
nation: the notions of reciprocity and of respect for the rights
of other nations. The neo-cons foam at the mouth whenever it is
suggested that the Chinese might have had enough of America’s
little "accidents" – the bombed embassy in Belgrade,
the fighter downed over the South China Sea – and that therefore
the correct response should precisely be diplomatic instead of
strategic.
Paradoxically,
the neo-con view also encourages the application of socialist
principles to foreign policy, for it fuels the fantasy that every
problem around the globe necessarily has a solution and an American
one at that. It is anathema to suggest that evil can, at best,
be kept at bay. "What should we be doing in Macedonia, John?"
my lunch neighbour enquired after he had finished with the CHICOMS.
When I replied, "Nothing," he turned away to speak to
someone else, his hitherto glinting expression having crumpled
in a mixture of keen disappointment and sheer incomprehension.
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