The Arrogant Empire msnbc.msn.com
America’s unprecedented power scares the world, and the Bush administration has only made it worse. How we got here—and what we can do about it now
By Fareed Zakaria
[ Scott, your quote of Marshall's quote of Zakaria inspired me to track down the original. It's quite a piece, long too, and hold up pretty well after a year. Except for the WMD part, of course ( Weapons of mass destruction will be found. , wrote Zakaria without qualification. Oops. ) . I don't want to post the whole long thing, but here's a couple extended excerpts to compare and contrast. ]
[ from PART II: THE AGE OF GENEROSITY ]
But there lies a deep historical fallacy in the view that “they hate us because we are strong.” After all, U.S. supremacy is hardly a recent phenomenon. America has been the leading world power for almost a century now. By 1900 the United States was the richest country in the world. By 1919 it had decisively intervened to help win the largest war in history. 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?
To answer this question, go back to 1945. When America had the world at its feet, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman chose not to create an American imperium, but to build a world of alliances and multilateral institutions. They formed the United Nations, the Bretton Woods system of economic cooperation and dozens of other international organizations. America helped get the rest of the world back on its feet by pumping out vast amounts of aid and private investment. The centerpiece of this effort, the Marshall Plan, amounted to $120 billion in today’s dollars.
Not least of these efforts was the special attention given to diplomacy. Consider what it must have meant for Franklin Roosevelt—at the pinnacle of power—to go halfway across the world to Tehran and Yalta to meet with Churchill and Stalin in 1943 and 1945. Roosevelt was a sick man, paralyzed from the waist down, hauling 10 pounds of steel braces on his legs. Traveling for 40 hours by sea and air took the life out of him. He did not have to go. He had plenty of deputies—Marshall, Eisenhower—who could have done the job. And he certainly could have summoned the others closer to him. But FDR understood that American power had to be coupled with a generosity of spirit. He insisted that British commanders like Montgomery be given their fair share of glory in the war. He brought China into the United Nations Security Council, even though it was a poor peasant society, because he believed that it was important to have the largest Asian country properly represented within a world body.
The standard set by Roosevelt and his generation endured. When George Marshall devised the Marshall Plan, he insisted that America should not dictate how its money be spent, but rather that the initiatives and control should lie with Europeans. For decades thereafter, the United States has provided aid, technical know-how and assistance across the world. It has built dams, funded magazines and sent scholars and students abroad so that people got to know America and Americans. It has paid great deference to its allies who were in no sense equals. It has conducted joint military exercises, even when they added little to U.S. readiness. 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 America’s mammoth power need not be feared.
[ from the next section, PART III: WHERE BUSH WENT WRONG ]
The Bush administration could reasonably point out that it doesn’t get enough credit for reaching out to the rest of the world. President Bush has, after all, worked with the United Nations on Iraq, increased foreign aid by 50 percent, announced a $15 billion AIDS program and formally endorsed a Palestinian state. Yet none of these actions seems to earn him any good will. The reason for this is plain. In almost every case, the administration comes to multilateralism grudgingly, reluctantly, and with a transparent lack of sincerity. For a year now, President Bush has dismissed the notion that he should make any effort toward a Middle East peace process, even though it would have defused some of the anti-Americanism in the region as he sought to confront Iraq. Suddenly last week, to gain allies on Iraq and at the insistence of Tony Blair, Bush made a belated gesture toward the peace process. Is it surprising that people are not hailing this last-minute conversion?
Nowhere has this appearance of diplomatic hypocrisy been more striking than on Iraq. 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 could 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. 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.”
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 government 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. “Most officials in Latin American countries today are not anti-American types,” says Jorge Castaneda, 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. The ambassador now seethes when he talks about U.S. arrogance. Does this really help America’s cause in the world? There are dozens of stories like this from every part of the world.
[ Zakaria's conclusion ]
There are many specific ways for the United States to rebuild its relations with the world. It can match its military buildup with diplomatic efforts that demonstrate its interest and engagement in the world’s problems. It can stop oversubsidizing American steelworkers, farmers and textile-mill owners, and open its borders to goods from poorer countries. But above all, it must make the world comfortable with its power by leading through consensus. America’s special role in the world—its ability to buck history—is based not simply on its great strength, but on a global faith that this power is legitimate. If America squanders that, the loss will outweigh any gains in domestic security. And this next American century could prove to be lonely, brutish and short.
[ Offhand, I think Zakaria's "But above all" part is extremely unlikely to happen without a local regime change. But that's just my opinion. ] |
