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Building a world empire - II
By Achin Vanaik
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The key characteristic of this Pax Americana is that it operates not against the formal juridical order of nation-states but through it.
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IN THE 120 years preceding the end of the Cold War there was never the kind of domination exercised over the system of nation-states that the U.S. exercises today. From 1870 to the First World War when Britain was the dominant imperial power, there was a growing challenge from the rising powers, U.S. and Germany. Between the two World Wars a declining Britain and France were being challenged by the U.S., Germany, Japan and the USSR. After 1945, U.S. dominance was being challenged politically-strategically-militarily by the Soviet Union with Germany and Japan gaining ground economically. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the former USSR catapulted the U.S. to a previously unachieved level of dominance for any single country within the nation- states system. Once the initial period of uncertainty about what to do in the post-Cold War era was overcome, and those voices which had argued for establishing new, more cooperative forms of security arrangements with other countries (including former opponents) were stilled, there emerged a consensus within the American security establishment that the U.S. must consolidate and expand the unexpected and sudden hegemony that the end of the Cold War had delivered to it. Differences arise now only with respect to tactics about how this should be pursued, not in respect to the strategic goal or direction itself.
The key to understanding American foreign policy perspectives has always been provided for the overwhelming part by its hard right thinkers-strategists, not by its liberals whose main function has been to establish the limits of acceptable dissent. Today, what are the areas of American dominance, not merely influence? These are North America, Australasia, Western Europe, the Middle East and East Asia barring China. Thus the crucial Eurasian zone of the globe is flanked at both ends (east and west) by a set of American dominated and controlled alliances, with U.S. strategic dominance at its crucial oil-rich middle as well. Sub- Saharan Africa is geo-strategically irrelevant so humanitarian tragedies (Rwanda) can simply be ignored. But in the Balkans where the stakes after the end of the Cold War were whether NATO would remain the security anchor for Europe, or whether Russia and Germany would now come into their own, humanitarian principles were invoked to justify American military interventions whose deeper purpose was to overcome Russian and German challenges to its wider geo-political ambitions and arrangements. Elsewhere in this critical Eurasian zone, the U.S. has unashamedly protected allied regimes guilty of great terrorist brutalities such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Indonesia.
Zbigniew Brzezinski with characteristic bluntness has divided today's world of unique American hegemony into ``vassals'' (all of Western Europe and Japan), ``tributaries'' (most of the rest), and those who by virtue of capabilities or inclinations must be more carefully watched as potential challengers. These are Russia, China and Iran, but not India whose elite is thoroughly Americanised and where the NRI factor provides additional powerful glue for ensuring that it becomes a strong ``tributary'' with ambitions, however, to achieving ``vassal'' status. All four of them (including Russia and China) in any case will, for a long time to come, prioritise their separate individual relations with the U.S. over their respective relations with each other. On the nuclear front, the ABM Treaty has been scuppered, with the U.S. giving six months notice that it is walking out of it. The stakes the U.S. is playing for in pursuing the BMD and associated TMD systems are very high and obvious - dominance of space and the replacement of nuclear parity with unilateral nuclear dominance. The Russians know this but are caught in a bind. They have decided to buy time and get whatever they can through soft-pedalling their opposition to the NMD rather than risk immediately deteriorating relations by criticising the U.S. strongly. They are clearly hoping that technical difficulties may eventually put paid to the larger ambitions behind the NMD project.
Regarding the international institutions set up after World War II, never before have they been so completely suborned to American will as from the 1990s onwards. From Operation Desert Storm in 1991 followed by sanctions against Iraq where U.N. `inspection missions' have been openly subordinated to the CIA to the Balkan wars where NATO was made the U.N.'s `subcontractor' in carrying out the `peace mission' to the current farce in Afghanistan where the U.N. provides the cover for a U.S.-determined interim arrangement, control of the U.N. has never been stronger.
The IMF and the World Bank are under American sway as never before. During the Mexican debt crisis in 1995, the U.S. Treasury brazenly violated the charter to command the IMF overnight to bail out American bond-holders without consultation with European and Japanese fund members. In the 1997-98 East Asian crisis, the IMF was again used as an instrument of U.S. unilateralism, most obviously to coerce South Korea. The former World Bank chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, alienated the U.S. Treasury, and its then head, Lawrence Summers, by critiquing neo-liberal economic policies from which the U.S. benefits most and through which it has partially retrieved economic ground lost in previous post-war decades to Japan and Germany. So he had to go. Ratification of the WTO has been made conditional on it being `fair' to U.S. interests.
It is vital to note that in the 1990s the bulk of economic changes are not about trade but about expanding property rights of foreign capital holders, to enable them to have the same powers abroad as at home to buy assets, to move capital in and out, to enforce monopoly rents on intellectual property. We must realise that the new American imperialism joins the states and markets of the core countries of the world capitalist economy by offering their elites a share of the global pie thus created, although the share going to a majority of the world's poor countries and peoples is diminishing. China is still excluded from this core, while Russia has only just made its entry into the G-8.
The key characteristic of this Pax Americana, in contrast to say Pax Britannica and older imperialisms, is that it operates not against the formal juridical order of nation-states but through it. Acquiescence in American social control the world over is all that is required, not formal or territorial submission. The U.S. is happy to leave the job of controlling and shaping domestic populations to the Governments concerned. So the form of Government is of little consequence: it can be more or less democratic, whatever the exigencies of American global domination may demand.
Once again, it is the American hard right that has most clearly articulated the current American mission. In one of its house magazines, National Interest (Spring 2000), two of its prominent spokespersons, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, wrote: ``Today's international system is not built around balance of power but around American hegemony. The international financial institutions... serve American interests. The international security structures are chiefly a collection of American-led alliances... Since today's relatively benevolent circumstances are the product of our hegemonic influence, any lessening of that influence will allow others to play a larger part in shaping the world to suit their needs... American hegemony, then, must be actively maintained, just as it was actively obtained.''
This is not a world destined to improve the lot of the world's poor and exploited, or to enhance the dignity and independence of people, or to enhance a deeper and better democracy worldwide but the very reverse. To be unequivocally and consistently opposed to this American project is now a necessity not an option. The Indian elite, in its large majority, however, will not be part of this struggle.
(Concluded)
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