The Hindu : Has U.S. over-reached its limits?

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Friday, Apr 11, 2003

Opinion

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Has U.S. over-reached its limits?

By V. P. Dutt

Control of Iraq and its oil resources and dominance over the region will not ensure the success of the Bush administration's game plan and could be the last hurrah of the exercise of solo power.

IT MAY appear fanciful to talk of the beginning of the end of America's unilateralist hegemony just when it has entered the "paradise of power". America's military reach today defies description. Its advances in the revolution of military affairs are unmatched. It can pulverise any place it decides to — witness what has happened in Iraq. Yet, America is reaching the limits of its power. The seeds of resistance have been sown around the world and the U.S. is not likely to enjoy in the coming years the kind of unilateralist hegemony it has done recently. Control of Iraq and its oil resources and dominance over the region will not ensure the success of the Bush administration's game plan and could be the last hurrah in the exercise of solo power.

Any major new international trend takes time to mature, sometimes years, but mature it will.

The consequences of the Bush administration's decisions to pour scorn over the United Nations and the world order would seriously hurt the U.S. in the long run. America has disabled itself by repudiating the international system. Never before has it been so isolated in the world, despite all the tom-toming of the "coalition of the willing". As a British member of the European Parliament exclaimed "NATO is a busted flush, the U.N. damaged, the U.S. and European relationship tested to destruction, relations between the European Union member states seriously damaged". And world opinion is outraged. No doubt, efforts would be immediately afoot to repair these relations and bring the U.N. back into the picture, and the U.N. would be, to a greater or lesser extent, involved again. But whatever the apparent bonhomie things would never be the same again. The public, the intelligentsia and the opinion-makers in the U.S. would all have to ponder over whether the cost of this arrogant display of power was worth such demonstration. They have to ponder over the lessons of history that power leads to hubris, hubris leads to over-reaching, and over-reaching to the erosion of strength. America remains and would remain a central power for many years, but unilateralist hegemony could be fast eroded.

The Bush administration never wanted to give peace a chance. It was only interested in establishing the primacy of its own doctrines. Its doctrines of pre-emption, of unrivalled and unchallengeable power, of changing and changeable coalitions instead of the present international system — all were evolved over years at many levels and diverse layers. One level was that of Dick Cheney, now Vice-President, and Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Defence Secretary. Twelve years ago, they began plotting the new course when Mr. Cheney was Defence Secretary and Mr. Wolfowitz one of his aides. They put together "a new vision" that America should brook no rival on the planet, now or forever, no matter friend or foe. Their "vision" was summarised in the so-called "Defence Planning Guidance" — a document, prepared by the aide under his mentor's guidance, which, for the first time, called for the pre-emptive use of military force. It virtually rejected multilateralism and talked of "ad hoc assemblies" such as alliances, a current version of which is the shifting "coalition of the willing". Curiously, the document singled out four potential rivals of the U.S.: France, Germany, Japan and India, and, equally curiously, China was left out. Because of the uproar the leaked document caused, it was disowned at the time, but the arguments in them have now become a rationale behind the new militarisation of the U.S. foreign policy.

The U.S. President, George W. Bush, revelling in the company of the fundamentalist Christian Right, embraced these ideas with enthusiasm and brought about another "coalition of the willing" — Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defence, and Condeleezza Rice, Security Adviser, apart from Mr. Cheney and Mr. Wolfowitz, to give a formal shape to and implement the new doctrines. They were given official sanction first in Mr. Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2002, spelling out the so-called "axis of evil", and then four months later, in his commencement speech at West Point calling for "new thinking" in place of "doctrines of deterrence and containment", and, finally, in September last year with his pronouncement of the policy of pre-emption. The new Right decided to take control of West Asia and many other areas to shape them according to its own requirements.

So, this war is about oil, but not just oil. It is about hegemony, but not just hegemony. It is all about establishing total dominance over the world and its resources. But Americans run the risk of being undone by this substitution of hard power for their soft power that has been holding sway over the world in the last half-century. The enormous goodwill for the U.S. after 9/11 is being rapidly dissipated. Unprecedented resistance to U.S. dominance is developing virtually in all parts of the world. As the former Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, put it, "we are stronger than anyone else but we are not capable of simply dictating to the entire world... we are almost totally stymied on North Korea".

The danger of over-reaching is becoming evident to many U.S. opinion-makers. This could also aggravate military fatigue, of which there is already some evidence. The U.S. threw in hundreds of thousands of troops in the Iraq war. In addition, it was sustaining peacekeeping missions in the Balkans, protecting South Korea and Japan from any possible aggressive move from North Korea and was simultaneously "pursuing war against terrorism that stretches from Afghanistan (where it is keeping 8,000 troops and incurring a monthly expenditure of some $1 billion) and the Caucuses to the Horn of Africa and South-East Asia". It seemed like a continuous warfare, likened by military analyst Ralph Peters to the "Thirty Years War that decimated Western Europe in the 17th century", and was leading to a conflict of priorities (to use the words of staff writers of the Washington Post) — between the need to fight today's wars and the pursuit of the means to dominate tomorrow's.

This military fatigue would increase substantially after the Iraq war. It is doubtful that in future the Americans would easily agree to be pushed by the administration into another conflict unilaterally. If the Bush administration tries to repeat the Iraq experiment, the resistance around the world would snowball. The issue was not Saddam Hussein. The question was not whether we wanted to be with a brutal dictator and the peaceniks, as some people sneeringly mentioned. The issue was what kind of international system would we wish established. The issue was whether we wanted to be in the company of world public opinion, whether we wanted the U.N. to be strengthened or we wanted to endorse a single dominance, waiting for a few crumbs to be thrown to us from the central table. While resisting international lawlessness, we should look for opportunities to make common cause with U.S. public opinion, which, sooner than later, would begin to shift in favour of a multilateral international system. The aim is not to bring about a confrontation with Washington but to reach out to the democratic impulses of the American people so that peace and democratic development could be ensured through consensually-arrived at decisions within the international system and within the U.N. framework.

(The writer is a former Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Delhi University, and a former MP.)

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