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Bush Administration:
The American idol, Benjamin Franklin,
now replaced
by the Chicago mobster Al Capone
| Donald
Rumsfeld often quotes a line from Al Capone: "You will get more
with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone."
"I’ve been all over the
world in the last year, and almost every country I’ve visited has felt
humiliated by this administration." |
 |
|
Newsweek, March 24, 2003, page 19 - 33 |
|
America’s unprecedented
power scares the world, and the Bush administration has only made it
worse. How we got here - and what can do about it now.
THE RROGANT EMPIRE By Fareed Zakaria In its campaign against Iraq, America is virtually alone. Never will it have waged a war in such isolation. Never have so many of its allies been so firmly opposed to its policies. Never has it provoked so much public opposition, resentment and mistrust. And all this before the first shot has been fired. Watching the tumult around the world, it’s evident that what is happening goes well beyond this particular crisis. Many people, both abroad and in America, fear that we are at some kind of turning point, where well-established mainstays of the global order-the Western Alliance, European unity, the United Nations-seem to be cracking under stress. ... To understand the present crisis, we must first grasp how the rest of the world now perceives American power. ... How to explain that the vast majority of the world, with little to gain from it, is in the Franco -Russian camp? ... To support America today in much of the world is politically dangerous. Over the past year the United States became a campaign issue in elections in Germany, South Korea and Pakistan. Being anti-American was a vote-getter in all three places. Look at the few countries that do publicly support us. Tony Blair bravely has forged ahead even though the vast majority of the British people disagree with him and deride him as "America’s poodle." ... The governments of central Europe support Washington, but the people oppose it in almost the same numbers as in old Europe. Between 70 and 80 percent of Hungarians, Czechs and Poles are against an American war in Iraq, with or without U.N. sanction. ... Some make the argument that Europeans are now pacifists, living in a "postmodern paradise," shielded from threats and unable to imagine the need for military action. But then how to explain the sentiment in Turkey, a country that sits on the Iraqi border? A longtime ally, Turkey has fought with America in conflicts as distant as the Korean War, and supported every American military action since then. But opposition to the war now runs more than 90 percent there. Despite Washington’s offers of billions of dollars in new assistance, the government cannot get parliamentary support to allow American troops to move into Iraq from Thrkish bases. ... The United States has the backing of the people in only one country in the world, Israel. If that is not isolation, then the word has no meaning. ... A war with Iraq, even if successful, might solve the Iraq problem. It doesn’t solve the America problem. What worries people around the world above all else is living in a world shaped and dominated by one country - the United States. And they have come to be deeply suspicious and fearful of us. ... Washington announced that it would increase its defense budget by almost $50 billion, a sum greater than the total annual defense budget of Britain or Germany. A few months later it toppled a regime 6,000 miles away - almost entirely from the air - in Afghanistan, a country where the British and Soviet empires were bogged down at the peak of their power. It is now clear that the current era can really have only one name, the unipolar world - an age with only one global power. America’s position today is unprecedented. ... The United States will spend as much next year on defense as the rest of the world put together (yes, all 191 countries). And it will do so devoting 4 percent of its GDP, a low level by postwar standards. ... Since the beginnings of the state system in the 16th century, international politics has seen one clear pattern - the formation of balances of power against the strong. Countries with immense military and economic might arouse fear and suspicion and soon others coalesce against them. It happened to the Habsburg Empire in the 17th century, France in the late 18th and early 19th century, Germany twice in the early 20th century, and the Soviet Union in the latter half of the 20th century. At this point, most Americans will surely protest: "But we’re different!" Americans - this writer included - think of themselves as a nation that has never sought to occupy others, and that through the years has been a progressive and liberating force. But historians tell us that all dominant powers thought they were special. Their very success confirmed for them that they were blessed. But as they became ever more powerful, the world saw them differently. The English satirist John Dryden described this phenomenon in a poem set during the Biblical King David’s reign. "When the chosen people grew too strong," he wrote, "The rightful cause at length became the wrong." Has American power made its rightful cause turn into wrong? ... By 1945 it had led the Allies to victory in World War II. For 10 years thereafter America accounted for 50 percent of world GDP, a much larger share than it holds today. Yet for five decades after World War II, there was no general rush to gang up against the United States. Instead countries joined with Washington to confront the Soviet Union, a much poorer country (at best comprising 12 percent of world GDP, or a quarter the size of the American economy). What explains this? How - until now - did America buck the biggest trend in international history? ... "I’ve been all over the world in the last year, and almost every country I’ve visited has felt humiliated by this administration." For half a century, American presidents and secretaries of State have circled the globe and hosted their counterparts in a never-ending cycle of diplomacy. Of course, all these exertions served our interests, too. They produced a pro-American world that was rich and secure. They laid the foundations for a booming global economy in which America thrives. But it was an enlightened self-interest that took into account the interests of others. Above all, it reassured countries - through word and deed, style and substance-that Americas mammoth power need not be feared. ... Many conservatives thought the Clinton administration was overinvolved in the world, especially in nation-building, and hectoring in its diplomacy. So Bush argued that America should be "a humble nation’ scale back its commitments abroad and not involve itself in rebuilding other countries. Yet other conservatives, a number of whom became powerful within the administration, had a more sweeping agenda. Since the early ‘90s, they had argued that the global landscape was marked by two realities. One was American power. ... Bush officials drew the strange conclusion that America had little freedom to move in this new world. ... For much of the world, it was mystifying to hear the most powerful country in the history of the world speak as though it were a besieged nation, boxed in on all sides. In its first year the administration withdrew from five international treaties-and did so as brusquely as it could. It reneged on virtually every diplomatic effort that the Clinton administration had engaged in, from North Korea to the Middle East, often overturning public statements from Colin Powell supporting these efforts. It developed a language and diplomatic style that seemed calculated to offend the world. (President Bush has placed a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt in the White House. TR’s most famous words of advice are worth recalling: "Speak softly and carry a big stick." ... On an annual basis, George W. Bush has visited fewer foreign countries than any president in 40 years. Still, he does better than Dick Cheney, who has been abroad only once since becoming vice president. ... When NATO, for the first time in its history, invoked the self-defense clause and offered America carte-blanche assistance, the administration essentially ignored it. ... The signal this sent to our closest allies was that America didn’t need them. ... But it would act only for its own core security and even pre-emptively when it needed to. ... The president got high marks for his superb speech at the Security Council last September, urging the United Nations to get serious about enforcing its resolutions on Iraq and to try inspections one last time. Unfortunately, that appeal had been preceded by speeches by Cheney and comments by Rumsfeld calling inspections a sham-statements that actually contradicted American policy - and making clear that the administration had decided to go to war. The only debate was whether to have the United Nations rubber-stamp this policy. To make matters worse, weeks after the new U.S.-sponsored U.N. resolution calling for fresh inspections, the administration began large-scale deployments on Iraq’s border. Diplomatically, it had promised a good-faith effort to watch how the inspections were going; militarily, it was gearing up for war with troops that coud not stay ready in the desert forever. Is it any wonder that other countries, even those that would be willing to endorse a war with Iraq, have felt that the diplomacy was a charade, pursued simply to allow time for military preparations? President Bush’s favorite verb is "expect." He announces peremptorily that he "expects" the Palestinians to dump Yasir Arafat, "expects" countries to be with him or against him, "expects" Turkey to cooperate. It is all part of the administration’s basic approach toward foreign policy, which is best described by the phrase used for its war plan -"shock and awe." The notion is that the United States needs to intimidate countries with its power and assertiveness, always threatening, always denouncing, never showing weakness. ...
But should the guiding philosophy of the world’s leading democracy really be the tough talk of a Chicago mobster? In terms of effectiveness, this strategy has been a disaster. It has alienated friends and delighted enemies. Having traveled around the world and met with senior govemment officials in dozens of countries over the past year, I can report that with the exception of Britain and Israel, every country the administration has dealt with feels humiliated by it. ... Jorge Castañeda, the reformist foreign minister of Mexico, who resigned two months ago. "We have studied in the United States or worked there. We like and understand America. But we find it extremely irritating to be treated with utter contempt." Last fall, a senior ambassador to the United Nations, in a speech supporting America’s position on Iraq added an innocuous phrase that could have been seen as deviating from that support. The Bush administration called up his foreign minister and demanded that he be formally reprimanded within an hour. ... Consider this fact: the Clinton administration used force on three important occasions - Bosnia, Haiti and Kosovo. In none of them did it take the matter to the United Nations Security Council, and there was little discussion that it needed to do so. Indeed, Kofi Annan later made statements that seemed to justify the action in Kosovo, explaining that state sovereiguty should not be used as a cover for humanitarian abuses. Today Annan has (wrongly) announced that American action in Iraq outside the United Nations will be "illegal." ... The point is to scare our enemies, not terrify the rest of the world. ... IN 1992, PAUL WOLFOWITZ, then a senior official in the first Bush administration, authored a Pentagon document that argued that in an era of overwhelming American dominance, U.S. foreign policy should be geared toward maintaining our advantage and discouraging the rise of other great powers. The premise behind this strategy is perfectly sensible. The United States should attempt to lengthen its era of supremacy for as long as it can. ... The old order is changing. The alliances forged during the cold war are weakening. Institutions built to reflect the realities of 1945-such as the U.N. Security council - risk becoming anachronistic. But if the administration wishes to further weaken and indeed destroy these institutions and traditions - by dismissing or neglecting them - it must ask itself: What will take their place? By what means will America maintain its hegemony? For some in the administration, the answer is obvious: America will act as it chooses, using what allies it can find in any given situation. ... Operating in a conspicuously unconstrained way, in service of a strategy to maintain primacy, will paradoxically produce the very competition it hopes to avoid. ... The Bush administration’s swagger has generated international opposition and active measures to thwart its will. Though countries like France and Russia cannot become great-power competitors simply because they want to - they need economic and military strength - they can use what influence they have to disrupt American policy, as they are doing over Iraq. ... While the United States can act largely by itself in certain special circumstances, such as Iraq, the fewer allies, bases and air rights it has, the higher the costs will be in American lives and treasure. And those costs will become unbearable if the United States has to both wage war and pay for postwar reconstruction on its own. ... Were Washington to move to an entirely ad hoc approach, why would the rest of the world agree to clean up its messes? Fighting terror also requires constant cooperation with countries across the globe. America could not have captured Qaeda strategist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed without the active partnership of Pakistan. And yet if you ask Pakistanis what they have gotten for this, they will point out that American tariffs continue to strangle their textile industry and U.S. aid remains meager. Having asked for help in de-Islamizing their education system - a matter of crucial concern to America - they have received little. Meanwhile the overall tone of Bush administration foreign policy has made General Musharraf embarrassed to be pro-American. ... Being pro-American should not be a political liability for our allies.The diplomatic fiasco over Turkey is an excellent example. For well over a year now it has been obvious to anyone watching that the Turkish people were deeply opposed to a war in Iraq. Yet the administration assumed that it could bully or bribe Turkey into giving it basing rights. But Turkey over the last year has become more democratic. The military is less willing to overrule politicians. The new ruling party, AK, is more open to internal debate than Turkey’s other parties. It allowed its members to vote freely on the motion to allow America basing rights, only to have it defeated. Since more than 90 percent of the Turks oppose giving America basing rights, this should not have been surprising. The administration wants democracy in the Middle East. Well, it got it. As usual, diplomatic style played a role. "The way the U.S. has been conducting the negotiations has been, in general, humiliating," says a retired senior diplomat, Ozdem Sanberk. ... Does America really want a world in which it gets its way in the face of constant public anger only by twisting arms, offering bribes and allying with dictators? ... And this next American century could prove to be lonely, brutish and short. |
