America at a crossroad.
The indispensable NATION
20jul02
IT has happened so fast. The US is in deficit, trapped in a collapse of financial confidence and in the early phase of a self-declared long war. With George W. Bush's authority under fire over his own corporate dealings, it is easy to see the US succumbing to multiple crises and internal divisions – yet any such conclusion would be utterly wrong.
The US entered a new political era on September 11 that will endure for many years. It is shaped by vulnerability, resolution and unity. Bush, elected President on an agenda to reduce the US's role in the world, presides over an unfolding US global activism. A grieving America is on the warpath. The way Bush implements this new role will determine how long the US's enemies live and the nature of the superpower's relations with its allies from Australia to Europe.
The US is a hegemony without parallel. It has the capacity to crush quickly Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, whose troops would face certain defeat and death in any showdown.
US historian Paul Kennedy says: "Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing. I have returned to all of the comparative defence spending and military personnel statistics over the past 500 years . . . and no other nation comes close. The Roman Empire stretched further afield but there was another great empire in Persia and a larger one in China. There is, therefore, no comparison."
America's slumps, neuroses and fears are transmitted rapidly today across a shrinking world such that the fact of a US crisis validates its self-image as "the indispensable nation". The September 11 attacks have many meanings. But, above all, they have re-energised the US's faith in its own exceptionalism – in the idea that America is the unique nation, guided by God and invested with a mission to delineate good from evil.
However, September 11 has another meaning. It shows that the US's military dominance cannot save its people from being killed in their cities and suburbs. The target was not soldiers on a battlefield but civilians at work. The American people know that they are the targets in this war – husbands, wives, children. The portraits of grief run by The New York Times commemorate not fallen soldiers but innocent victims. This is the emotional key to the so-called war on terrorism.
Despite his flaws, Bush's popularity rating still hovers around 70 per cent and the pundits expect him to be re-elected in 2004. Don't misread the internal debate about Iraq – if Bush decides to strike, there will be overwhelming support from the American people and a high degree of bipartisan backing within the Congress. This is tied to the sacred responsibility now assumed by every president from Bush onwards: to prevent the killing of Americans at home.
In this quest, Bush has unveiled his National Strategy for Homeland Security, the biggest reorganisation of the US federal government in 40 years. It runs to terrorism intelligence, border and transportation security, infrastructure protection, prevention of attacks involving biological, nuclear and chemical weapons, and civil emergency measures to handle the consequences of any such attacks.
The US's security elites assume an attempted terrorist attack against the US with weapons of mass destruction is inevitable. The issues are when, where and how. During my attendance at several seminars at Harvard University over the past half year, the consensus that emerged was a 50 per cent probability of a WMD attack on a US city within five to eight years. If successful, such an attack would generate civilian casualties many multiples of the 3000 victims of last September.
It would be folly for the US to interpret September 11 as an isolated outrage. It was the product of a cultural and technological synthesis that will endure for some time – the conflict within Islam, the privatisation of terror, a theocratic hostility to the US.
For Australia and other US allies it is largely business as usual post-September 11. Not so in America. The US has entered an experiment with 21st-century asymetrical warfare. The nation must master the guise of normalcy yet also prepare for irregular and lethal exchanges with an elusive enemy.
This struggle, without any moment of manifest victory, will make for difficult management of a public opinion unable to retain indefinitely a mind-set of conflict-driven intensity.
Bush captured the challenge when he told Americans last October 17: "It's a campaign that will be waged by day and by night, in the light and in the shadows, in battles you will see and battles you won't see. It's a campaign waged by soldiers and sailors, marines and airmen; and also by FBI agents and law enforcement officials and diplomats and intelligence officers."
Bill Clinton longed for a world challenge to make him a great leader but had to settle for fellatio in the corridors. Clinton's aspiration is Bush's fate. Bush's will be a decisive presidency because of the epic decisions that will come on his watch. Bush needs the common sense of Harry Truman, the marketing skill of Ronald Reagan and the conjuring instinct of Franklin Roosevelt. Just one out of three would sure help.
Bush should be judged by deeds, not words. He sounds like a hick but acts with caution. The Afghanistan operation that deposed the Taliban regime was measured and effective. Although invoking the "axis of evil", Bush is cautious about Iraq; he has raised the expectation of a US strike but is alert to the high risks involved.
The message left with Australian leaders in Washington a fortnight ago is that although the President has no war plan on his desk, the US cannot tolerate the risk to its security from Hussein's progression to a WMD capacity. This points to a military strike in 2003.
It is apparent that the Howard Government will back US action against Iraq; our military participation is likely but limited. The Labor Party has taken a more flexible position – in effect, it invites the US to persuade Labor, knowing in its political heart that it wants to be persuaded.
Iraq shapes as the pivotal test of how the US exercises its global leadership in the post-September 11 era. This is the most important question in world politics today.
The US's conundrum was captured at a Harvard University seminar last month in Tailloires, France, by French scholar Dominique Moisi: "Nothing significant can be achieved in today's world without the US, yet the US must also realise that there are very strict limits on what it can achieve alone."
Harvard's Kennedy School dean Joseph S. Nye argues that the "paradox of American power at the end of this millennium is that it is too great to be challenged by any other state yet not great enough to solve [alone] the problems such as global terrorism and nuclear proliferation".
Nye warns: "We will be in trouble if we do not get it."
These fears erupted into a Europe-US spat earlier this year when European Union Commissioner for External Affairs Christopher Patten warned the US against the false mind-set "that the projection of military power is the only basis of true security" and "that the US can rely only upon itself".
The issue is not whether but how the US deploys its military power. Will it go it alone against Iraq and elsewhere or will it try to persuade its allies and the international community? It is a question, ultimately, about the legitimacy with which the US uses its awesome power.
The administration is divided on this question. Although Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declares "the mission will determine the coalition", State Department policy planning director Richard Hass says: "We have to have allies. We can't impose our ideas on everyone. American leadership, yes; but not American unilateralism."
This issue is basic for three reasons. First, it is doubtful the US can win the war against the perverted theology of Islamic extremism by military means alone (witness Vietnam). Second, it is doubtful whether the US can win the war alone since international collaboration is essential to mount intelligence, law-enforcement and financial campaigns against terrorist units. Finally, if the US depicts this struggle through the narrow lens of its security needs rather than building a better world, then its support will disappear overnight.
The lure of the American dream has long rested upon a desire to imitate or share the values of the US. The risk today, however, is that a new tide of anti-Americanism is growing around the world and feeds upon the image of a unilateral, militaristic, self-absorbed superpower. Such an outcome would be a cruel postscript to the September 11 tragedy.
theaustralian.news.com.au |
