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发帖数: 651 | 1 Does the United States still have the same level of control over the energy
resources of the Middle East as it once had?
The major energy-producing countries are still firmly under the control of
the Western-backed dictatorships. So, actually, the progress made by the
Arab Spring is limited, but it’s not insignificant. The Western-controlled
dictatorial system is eroding. In fact, it’s been eroding for some time. So
, for example, if you go back 50 years, the energy resources -- the main
concern of U.S. planners -- have been mostly nationalized. There are
constantly attempts to reverse that, but they have not succeeded.
Take the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example. To everyone except a dedicated
ideologue, it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of our
love of democracy but because it’s maybe the second- or third-largest
source of oil in the world, and is right in the middle of the major energy-
producing region. You’re not supposed to say this. It’s considered a
conspiracy theory.
The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism --
mostly by nonviolent resistance. The United States could kill the insurgents
, but they couldn’t deal with half a million people demonstrating in the
streets. Step by step, Iraq was able to dismantle the controls put in place
by the occupying forces. By November 2007, it was becoming pretty clear that
it was going to be very hard to reach U.S. goals. And at that point,
interestingly, those goals were explicitly stated. So in November 2007 the
Bush II administration came out with an official declaration about what any
future arrangement with Iraq would have to be. It had two major requirements
from its military bases, which it will retain; and two, “encouraging the
flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments.” In
January 2008, Bush made this clear in one of his signing statements. A
couple of months later, in the face of Iraqi resistance, the United States
had to give that up. Control of Iraq is now disappearing before their eyes.
Iraq was an attempt to reinstitute by force something like the old system of
control, but it was beaten back. In general, I think, U.S. policies remain
constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement
them is declining.
Declining because of economic weakness?
Partly because the world is just becoming more diverse. It has more diverse
power centers. At the end of the Second World War, the United States was
absolutely at the peak of its power. It had half the world’s wealth and
every one of its competitors was seriously damaged or destroyed. It had a
position of unimaginable security and developed plans to essentially run the
world -- not unrealistically at the time.
This was called “Grand Area” planning?
Yes. Right after the Second World War, George Kennan, head of the U.S. State
Department policy planning staff, and others sketched out the details, and
then they were implemented. What’s happening now in the Middle East and
North Africa, to an extent, and in South America substantially goes all the
way back to the late 1940s. The first major successful resistance to U.S.
hegemony was in 1949. That’s when an event took place, which, interestingly
, is called “the loss of China.” It’s a very interesting phrase, never
challenged. There was a lot of discussion about who is responsible for the
loss of China. It became a huge domestic issue. But it’s a very interesting
phrase. You can only lose something if you own it. It was just taken for
granted: we possess China -- and if they move toward independence, we’ve
lost China. Later came concerns about “the loss of Latin America,” “the
loss of the Middle East,” “the loss of” certain countries, all based on
the premise that we own the world and anything that weakens our control is a
loss to us and we wonder how to recover it.
Today, if you read, say, foreign policy journals or, in a farcical form,
listen to the Republican debates, they’re asking, “How do we prevent
further losses?”
On the other hand, the capacity to preserve control has sharply declined. By
1970, the world was already what was called tripolar economically, with a U
.S.-based North American industrial center, a German-based European center,
roughly comparable in size, and a Japan-based East Asian center, which was
then the most dynamic growth region in the world. Since then, the global
economic order has become much more diverse. So it’s harder to carry out
our policies, but the underlying principles have not changed much.
Take the Clinton doctrine. The Clinton doctrine was that the United States
is entitled to resort to unilateral force to ensure “uninhibited access to
key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.” That goes beyond
anything that George W. Bush said. But it was quiet and it wasn’t arrogant
and abrasive, so it didn’t cause much of an uproar. The belief in that
entitlement continues right to the present. It’s also part of the
intellectual culture.
Right after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, amid all the cheers and
applause, there were a few critical comments questioning the legality of the
act. Centuries ago, there used to be something called presumption of
innocence. If you apprehend a suspect, he’s a suspect until proven guilty.
He should be brought to trial. It’s a core part of American law. You can
trace it back to Magna Carta. So there were a couple of voices saying maybe
we shouldn’t throw out the whole basis of Anglo-American law. That led to a
lot of very angry and infuriated reactions, but the most interesting ones
were, as usual, on the left liberal end of the spectrum. Matthew Yglesias, a
well-known and highly respected left liberal commentator, wrote an article
in which he ridiculed these views. He said they’re “amazingly naive,”
silly. Then he expressed the reason. He said that “one of the main
functions of the international institutional order is precisely to
legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers.” Of course,
he didn’t mean Norway. He meant the United States. So the principle on
which the international system is based is that the United States is
entitled to use force at will. To talk about the United States violating
international law or something like that is amazingly naive, completely
silly. Incidentally, I was the target of those remarks, and I’m happy to
confess my guilt. I do think that Magna Carta and international law are
worth paying some attention to.
I merely mention that to illustrate that in the intellectual culture, even
at what’s called the left liberal end of the political spectrum, the core
principles haven’t changed very much. But the capacity to implement them
has been sharply reduced. That’s why you get all this talk about American
decline. Take a look at the year-end issue of Foreign Affairs, the main
establishment journal. Its big front-page cover asks, in bold face, “Is
America Over?” It’s a standard complaint of those who believe they should
have everything. If you believe you should have everything and anything gets
away from you, it’s a tragedy, the world is collapsing. So is America over
? A long time ago we “lost” China, we’ve lost Southeast Asia, we’ve lost
South America. Maybe we’ll lose the Middle East and North African
countries. Is America over? It’s a kind of paranoia, but it’s the paranoia
of the superrich and the superpowerful. If you don’t have everything, it’
s a disaster.
The New York Times describes the “defining policy quandary of the Arab
Spring: how to square contradictory American impulses that include support
for democratic change, a desire for stability, and wariness of Islamists who
have become a potent political force.” The Times identifies three U.S.
goals. What do you make of them?
Two of them are accurate. The United States is in favor of stability. But
you have to remember what stability means. Stability means conformity to U.S
. orders. So, for example, one of the charges against Iran, the big foreign
policy threat, is that it is destabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan. How? By
trying to expand its influence into neighboring countries. On the other hand
, we “stabilize” countries when we invade them and destroy them.
I’ve occasionally quoted one of my favorite illustrations of this, which is
from a well-known, very good liberal foreign policy analyst, James Chace, a
former editor of Foreign Affairs. Writing about the overthrow of the
Salvador Allende regime and the imposition of the dictatorship of Augusto
Pinochet in 1973, he said that we had to “destabilize” Chile in the
interests of “stability.” That’s not perceived to be a contradiction --
and it isn’t. We had to destroy the parliamentary system in order to gain
stability, meaning that they do what we say. So yes, we are in favor of
stability in this technical sense.
Concern about political Islam is just like concern about any independent
development. Anything that’s independent you have to have concern about
because it might undermine you. In fact, it’s a little ironic, because
traditionally the United States and Britain have by and large strongly
supported radical Islamic fundamentalism, not political Islam, as a force to
block secular nationalism, the real concern. So, for example, Saudi Arabia
is the most extreme fundamentalist state in the world, a radical Islamic
state. It has a missionary zeal, is spreading radical Islam to Pakistan,
funding terror. But it’s the bastion of U.S. and British policy. They’ve
consistently supported it against the threat of secular nationalism from
Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and Abd al-Karim Qasim’s Iraq, among many
others. But they don’t like political Islam because it might become
independent.
The first of the three points, our yearning for democracy, that’s about on
the level of Joseph Stalin talking about the Russian commitment to freedom,
democracy, and liberty for the world. It’s the kind of statement you laugh
about when you hear it from commissars or Iranian clerics, but you nod
politely and maybe even with awe when you hear it from their Western
counterparts.
If you look at the record, the yearning for democracy is a bad joke. That’s
even recognized by leading scholars, though they don’t put it this way.
One of the major scholars on so-called democracy promotion is Thomas
Carothers, who is pretty conservative and highly regarded -- a neo-Reaganite
, not a flaming liberal. He worked in Reagan’s State Department and has
several books reviewing the course of democracy promotion, which he takes
very seriously. He says, yes, this is a deep-seated American ideal, but it
has a funny history. The history is that every U.S. administration is “
schizophrenic.” They support democracy only if it conforms to certain
strategic and economic interests. He describes this as a strange pathology,
as if the United States needed psychiatric treatment or something. Of course
, there’s another interpretation, but one that can’t come to mind if you’
re a well-educated, properly behaved intellectual.
Within several months of the toppling of [President Hosni] Mubarak in Egypt,
he was in the dock facing criminal charges and prosecution. It’s
inconceivable that U.S. leaders will ever be held to account for their
crimes in Iraq or beyond. Is that going to change anytime soon?
That’s basically the Yglesias principle: the very foundation of the
international order is that the United States has the right to use violence
at will. So how can you charge anybody?
And no one else has that right.
Of course not. Well, maybe our clients do. If Israel invades Lebanon and
kills a thousand people and destroys half the country, okay, that’s all
right. It’s interesting. Barack Obama was a senator before he was president
. He didn’t do much as a senator, but he did a couple of things, including
one he was particularly proud of. In fact, if you looked at his website
before the primaries, he highlighted the fact that, during the Israeli
invasion of Lebanon in 2006, he cosponsored a Senate resolution demanding
that the United States do nothing to impede Israel’s military actions until
they had achieved their objectives and censuring Iran and Syria because
they were supporting resistance to Israel’s destruction of southern Lebanon
, incidentally, for the fifth time in 25 years. So they inherit the right.
Other clients do, too.
But the rights really reside in Washington. That’s what it means to own the
world. It’s like the air you breathe. You can’t question it. The main
founder of contemporary IR [international relations] theory, Hans Morgenthau
, was really quite a decent person, one of the very few political scientists
and international affairs specialists to criticize the Vietnam War on moral
, not tactical, grounds. Very rare. He wrote a book called The Purpose of
American Politics. You already know what’s coming. Other countries don’t
have purposes. The purpose of America, on the other hand, is “transcendent
”: to bring freedom and justice to the rest of the world. But he’s a good
scholar, like Carothers. So he went through the record. He said, when you
study the record, it looks as if the United States hasn’t lived up to its
transcendent purpose. But then he says, to criticize our transcendent
purpose “is to fall into the error of atheism, which denies the validity of
religion on similar grounds” -- which is a good comparison. It’s a deeply
entrenched religious belief. It’s so deep that it’s going to be hard to
disentangle it. And if anyone questions that, it leads to near hysteria and
often to charges of anti-Americanism or “hating America” -- interesting
concepts that don’t exist in democratic societies, only in totalitarian
societies and here, where they’re just taken for granted. |
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