What we can expect if the US does not change its imperialist and bullying foreign policy.
Another Century of War?
by GABRIEL KOLKO
Editors Note: Gabriel Kolko is one of our favorite writers and the
foremost historian of modern warfare. Here at CounterPunch we
are honored to publish this excerpt from his vitally important new
book Another Century of War?.
AC / JSC
A foreign policy that is both immoral and unsuccessful is not simply stupid, it is
increasingly dangerous to those who practice or favor it. That is the
predicament that the United States now confronts.
Communism no longer exists, American military power has never been greater,
but the U.S. has never been so insecure and its people more vulnerable. After
fifty years of interventions in the affairs of dozens of nations on every
continent, interventions that varied from training police and armies to
supplying them with lethal equipment and advisers to teach them how to use
it, after two major wars involving its own manpower for years, America's
sustained, intense, and costly efforts have only culminated in greater risks to
itself. There is more instability and violence in the world than ever, and now it
has finally reached its own shores--and its political leaders have declared it will
continue. By any criterion, above all the security of its own citizens, the U.S.'
international policies, whether military or political, have produced consummate
failures. It is neither realistic nor ethical. It is a shambles of confusions and
contradictions, pious, superficial morality combined with cynical adventurism, all
of which has undermined, not strengthened, the safety of the American people
and left a world more dangerous than ever.
It is not accurate, nor is it consolation, to argue as many do that without an
activist foreign policy and military policy the present world situation could have
been worse or that communism would have triumphed in many more places.
Many of the CIA's analysts always perceived the Soviet Union's actions as
essentially defensive, and that it was ready to grasp opportunities that posed
no obvious dangers to it but unwilling to take great risks. As Marxists they
believed that history was predestined to favor
them, and that adventurism was
unnecessary--"infantile," to use Lenin's description.
But communism was a reflection rather than the
cause of the severe disorder in international affairs
that produced two incredibly destructive world
wars, a result of deeper and older problems, and
those who led the USSR gradually ceased to have
the conviction essential to perpetuate the original
Leninist beliefs and systemic legacies. As a ruling
system, it has disappeared in Europe and virtually
disintegrated in Asia, peacefully and by its own
leaders' volition--and not by force of American
arms.
The fear of communism which justified vast military
expenses and mobilized NATO and America's allies
is now gone, but the qualitative importance of this
fundamental transformation has not led to any
equivalent or appropriate changes in Washington's perceptions, much less
spending. It can no longer define its enemies clearly, where they live or how
they will behave, and it is unwilling to confront the analytic problems that the
immense changes in world affairs since 1989 have created. The U.S.' most
symbolic sites--Wall Street and the Pentagon--have been devastatingly
attacked, and it is now plain, as the government itself has predicted for
several years, that the country itself is highly vulnerable. Bin Laden's network
replaced "rogue states" for a time, but essentially American strategy continues
to flounder: it prepared for nuclear and mechanized war in Europe but fought
only in Asia, where it was stalemated and lost two major conflicts. It
encouraged and funded wars by Iraq against Iran and against the Soviets in
Afghanistan only to have to fight the very people it once believed were merely
its proxies. It has confronted innumerable surprises in Latin America and
Africa--to mention but a few of its policy failures--and it has precious little
control in both those continents. The U.S.' ambitions in the century that is just
beginning far exceed its military, political, and moral resources for attaining
them, and if it does not acknowledge the limits of its power--which it should
have done much earlier--it will continue to embark on quixotic adventures in
every corner of the worldand experience more terrorism on its own shores.
The U.S. has more military equipment than ever, and since 1950 Pentagon
spending has become one of the traditional and indispensable foundations of
American prosperity. There is no indication whatsoever that it will decline. But
there are no technological quick-fixes to political problems. Solutions are
political, which requires another mentality and a great deal more wisdom,
including a readiness to make compromises and, above all, stay out of the
affairs of nations, or they will not succeed. Worse yet, its reliance on weapons
and force has exacerbated or created far more problems for the U.S. than it
has solved. After September 11 there can be no doubt that arms have not
brought security to America. It is not only to the world's interest that the
America adapt to the realities of the twenty-first century. What is new is that it
is now, more than ever, to the interest of the American people themselves. It
is imperative that the U.S. also acknowledge the very limits of its power--limits
that are inherent in its own military illusions and in the very nature of a world
that is far too big and complex for any country to even dream of managing.
Mankind cannot endure another century of war, because future wars will be far
more destructive, to civilians as well as soldiers.
The Dangers of Mindless Action
Nations have differing interests and ways of perceiving them. The U.S. itself
was belligerently unilateralist in the period before the September 11 and
changed briefly only to meet the grave emergency that event imposed upon it.
It has created "coalitions" which are ephemeral and transient marriages of
convenience, essentially discarded NATO as the pillar of its European policy,
and managed only to show that the United States is a fickle, unreliable
partner. It is obviously quixotic if not dangerous to talk of coalitions when
nations are unstable and perhaps even their rulers are in flux. It has already
probably destabilized Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in the brief process of making
war in Afghanistan, and in years to come it will confront the consequences of
having done so in these far more important countries.
But the world is more violent and wracked by war and insecure than ever, and
many American officials now nostalgically admit that the international system
was far more predictable and safer when the USSR existed, precisely because,
in the last analysis, it acted prudently. This assurance is largely misplaced,
since many of the greatest problems that the world confronted after 1945
were quite independent of communism and they persist even today, but it is
also true that Moscow discouraged potentially dangerous confrontations to the
extent that it could do so. The CIA told the government to expect the Soviets
to behave cautiously in the last analysis, but its estimates were often ignored
or disputed by military services--especially the Air Force--that wanted to justify
more spending.
Indeed, the CIA and other official agencies gave successive presidents ample
and accurate warnings of the risks they faced in Vietnam and elsewhere, and
they ignored much of them. Whatever rationality is built into the foreign affairs
apparatus simply has had little or no impact in guiding policy makers since
1950. There was far less clarity among those who guided American foreign
policy than there could have been, and those in charge were oblivious of either
the consequences or even the goals of their actions. For them action itself was
the name of the game, and the world has paid for it. This essentially paranoid
mentality failed to anticipate the collapse of the USSR and is still operational
because high budgets cannot be justified without dismal political
prognostications, fear, and mysteries. Such thinking is unable to go beyond
simplistic explanations or to comprehend causes or understand historical
processes and social dynamics of countless nations. Now there is a paranoid
view of Islam; the focus is off China temporarily but it is the same vision.
There is, in a word, far less understanding at the top than successive leaders
have claimed, and domestic politics and short-term factors play a much greater
role than they will ever admit. The world and now the American people cannot
afford U.S. foreign policy's opportunistic and ad hoc character, its wavering
between the immoral and amoral in practice but which official speech writers
portray as rational and principled. In reality, it has neither coherence nor
useful principles but often responds to one failure and crisis after another--and
these are usually of its own making. Even given its unrealistic ambitions, it has
lost control of its priorities, which all nations must have. We can never forget
that the two men who the U.S. has most demonized over the past two
decades, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, both collaborated for years
with the U.S.; Washington believed their causes were identical and put vast
sums at their disposal. There is no greater proof of confusion and ineptness on
America's part, and rather than leading the world in a better direction it has
usually inflicted incalculable harm wherever it has intervened. Its leaders have
been addicted to intervening for its own sake, to save the nation's "credibility,"
preventing an alleged vacuum of power, or its self-appointed role as the
enforcer of regional or global order (which it usually equates with the freedom
of American businessmen to make money). The U.S. has refused to accept a
much more modest and far less ambitious definition of its national interests,
one that is also realistic.
All of its policies in the Middle East have been contradictory and
counterproductive. The U.S.' support for Israel is the single most important but
scarcely the only cause of the September 11 trauma and the potentially
fundamental political destabilization, ranging from the Persian Gulf to South
Asia, that its intervention in Afghanistan has triggered. But it has repeatedly
seen its most ambitious diplomatic and military efforts produce disasters
instead. Its strategy of "triangulating" China and the Soviet Union, essentially
to achieve a victory in Vietnam, backfired and accelerated its calamitous loss
there. Then there is Guatemala in 1953, Chile in 1973, Angola in 1975, and
countless other places where its habitual penchant for activism and
intervention produced acute disorders, deaths, and only perpetuated and
usually aggravated many nations' difficulties.
There are many serious questions in the world that must be solved if there is
to be much greater stability and peace: poverty, illiteracy, human rights, and
the like. It was a convenient simplification for the Bush Administration to blame
al-Qaeda and "terrorism" for the world's insecurities and to pretend that
resolving this challenge would lay to rest many, if not all the others,
everywhere. It will not. Moreover, America's military power is irrelevant for
meeting virtually all of these issues, much less terrorism, and it was sheer
opportunism for Washington to convey the impression that this was the major
issue the U.S. now confronts. It is not. There are still countless unresolved
problems in Latin America, Africa, and Asia that it is incapable of answering
because it is wedded to approaches and institutions that have failed until now
and will continue to do so in the future. There is no substitute for political and
economic strategies that solve these real challenges rather than worry about
what American businessmen and bankers think is to their interest. But since
1946 no administration has thought and acted this way, and instead they
have relied on military power to intervene countless times in various places to
preserve status quos that perpetuate those economic and social conditions
that lead to violence and terrorism.
Whatever its original intention, America's commitment of time and effort is
essentially open-ended wherever it intervenes. It may last a short time, and
often does, but complications can cause it to spend far more resources and
time than it originally anticipated, causing it in the name of its "credibility" or
some other doctrines the government's publicists concoct, to get into
situations which are disastrous and which in the end produce defeats for
which the U.S. is much worse off. Vietnam is the leading example of this.
Should it confront the forty or even more nations that now have terrorist
networks then it will in one manner or another intervene everywhere, but
especially Africa and the Middle East, and such commitments will be
open-ended and unpredictable in terms of the time and effort each requires.
This lack of control leads America's leaders to a lack of coherence and a loss of
priorities, because when wars begin their eventual consequences and
outcome can never be predicted. This was true long before the U.S. became
the preeminent global power and it is still the case. Events over the past year
have confirmed that destabilization and friends becoming enemies--and via
versa--are the rule in warfare and grand geopolitics, and to be expected.
America's interventions since 1947 have usually not succeeded by the criteria it
originally defined, and its security at the beginning of the twenty-first century
is much more imperiled than it was fifty years ago.
The U.S. has more determined and probably more numerous enemies today
than ever, and many of those who hate it are ready and able to inflict death
and destruction on its shores. Its interventions often triumphed in the purely
military sense, which is all the Pentagon worries about, but they have been
political failures in all too many cases and led to yet more interventions. Its
virtually instinctive activist mentality has led it to leap into situations where it
often had no interests, much less durable solutions, and where it has
repeatedly created disasters and enduring enmities. America has power
without wisdom, and cannot recognize the limits of arms despite its repeated
experiences. The result has been folly, and hatred, which is a recipe for
disasters. September 11 confirmed that. The war has come home.
The United States can no longer afford procrastination or to commit more
errors, much less pursue the ad hoc, immoral opportunism, confusion, and loss
of priorities that has guided Washington for a half-century. It cannot throw
money at the Pentagon as if more weapons solve rather than aggravate
political problems. It has been adrift for decades and refused to admit that its
interventions have failed to resolve--and usually exacerbated-- most, if not all,
of the challenges Washington justified for almost fifty years to send men,
machines, or money and equipment to every corner of the world. Its readiness
to pursue activist military and foreign policies has, if anything, intensified most
of the world's problems by encouraging--and giving the essential material
means--to tyrants and officers who satisfy America's definitions of its own
interests. They comprise those who resist essential social and economic
changes and those whose adventurism had much better be discouraged. We
see today in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan how such ambitions have failed,
probably catastrophically, but on a smaller scale there are countless other
places where U.S. intervention has left festering problems that are returning to
haunt and endanger it.
But by purely non-ideological, rational criteria U.S. foreign policies have failed
even if they have made the world more prosperous for its own businessmen
and investors and their local cronies. The American people now paying the
price in lives lost and permanent insecurity--and they will have to accept the
turbulent existence that the president after September 11 promised.
At the present juncture of history, wars are at least as likely as any time over
the past century. The end of Soviet hegemony in East Europe and Moscow's
restraining influence elsewhere is only one factor, albeit of great importance.
The proliferation of nuclear technology and other means of mass destruction
have made large parts of the world much more dangerous, but highly
destructive local wars with conventional weapons in Africa, the Balkans, Middle
East, and elsewhere have only multiplied since the 1960s. Europe, especially
Germany, and Japan are far stronger and more independent than at any time
since 1945, and China's burgeoning economy has given it a vastly more
important role in Asia.
The world is more complex and dangerous than during the Cold War, and the
decentralization of military and political power, and the obduracy of the United
States' ambitions to guide the destinies of a virtually unlimited number of
nations is a highly inflammable mixture of factors. The U.S. has become what
Establishment pillar Samuel P. Huntington aptly calls the only "rogue
superpower," full of dual standards and hypocrisy in its pretensions to be "the
indispensable nation," as he quotes Madeleine K. Albright, committed to
advancing "universal values"--as another State Department official he cites put
it. 1 America repeatedly has sought to impose those values and policies that
conform to its definitions and interests on nations and international
organizations. This has led it, on the one hand, to lofty proclamations and, on
the other, to protecting American corporate interests, buttressing tyrants,
selling or giving arms to nations that have rebellious populations or grievances
against neighboring states, and unilaterally bullying its allies as well as weaker
enemies. September 11 proves it is no longer immune to the destructive
consequences of these designs. It must change fundamentally or pay a
frightful, ever-mounting price. That price is a function both of its foreign policies
and the spread and intensity of weapons of mass destruction. There are a
sufficient number of people, quite independent of states, who are ready to use
the latter.
All factors considered--the breakup of Yugoslavia, events in Africa and the
Middle East, to name but a few--wars, both civil or between states, remain the
principal (but scarcely the only) challenge facing much of humanity in the
twenty-first century. The numerous ecological disasters affecting all dimensions
of the environment are equally insidious, because of their relentless but
gradual development and the unwillingness of the crucial nations--above all
the United States--to adopt measures essential for reversing its damage. In
many vital regards, the challenges facing humanity have never been so
complex and threatening, and there is not the slightest reason for
complacency or optimism as a result of the end of the Cold War.
It is an essential precondition of stemming, much less reversing, the
accumulated deterioration of world affairs that the U.S. end its self-appointed
global mission of regulating all problems, wherever, whenever, or however it
wishes to do so. There are countless ethical and other reasons to cease
meddling everywhere. It has no more right or capacity to do so than any state
over the past century, whatever they called themselves. But September 11
confirmed, if any was needed, that it has failed abysmally to bring peace and
security to the world but instead has managed to be increasingly hated,
placing itself in profound and mortal danger. But an additional reason for
ending its role as a rogue superpower and promiscuous, cynical
interventionism is pragmatic: it has been spectacularly unsuccessful even on
its own terms, it is squandering vast economic resources, and it now places
the physical security of Americans on their own soil in danger. Paramount are
the obligations that politicians have to their own citizens, and to cease the
damage the U.S. causes abroad is also to fulfill their responsibilities to their
own people. Neither the American population nor its political leaders are likely
to agree to such far-reaching changes in foreign policy, and there is not the
slightest sign at this point that voters will call them to account, but more
events of the order of the September 11 calamity or the anthrax scare may
produce a learning process--and eventual changes.
Communism and fascism were products of the grave errors in the international
order and affairs of states that the First World War created, and the Soviet
system disintegrated after sixty years because it was the aberrant
consequence of a destructive and abnormal war. But radicalized, suicidal
Islamists are, to a great extent, the outcome of a half-century of America's
interference in the Middle East and Muslim world, and its repeated grave
errors, however different the context or times, have produced their own
abnormal, negative reactions. It is under these conditions and with these
threats that our century has begun. There are yet other crises incubating.
Above all, the destructive potential of weaponry has increased exponentially
and many more people and nations have access to it, and even what would
once have been considered small foreign policy problems now have potentially
far greater consequences. It all augers very badly.
There will be serious problems throughout much of the world even if the U.S.
abstains from interference and tailors its actions to fit this troubled reality.
Internecine civil conflicts will continue, as well as wars between states armed
with a growing variety of much more destructive weapons supplied by outside
powers, of which the U.S. remains, by far, the leader. Many of them have
independent roots, but the arguments for America staying out of them should
be dictated by both principles and experiences.
But the way America's leaders are running the nation's foreign policy is not
creating peace or security at home or stability abroad. The reverse is the case:
its interventions have been counterproductive. Everyone--Americans and those
people who are the objects of their efforts--would be far better off if the U.S.
did nothing, closed its bases overseas and withdrew its fleets everywhere,
and allowed the rest of world to find its own way without American weapons
and troops. Communism is dead, and Europe and Japan are powerful and can
take care of their own affairs as they think best. There is every reason for the
U.S. to adapt to these facts, but to continue as it has over the past
half-century is to admit it has the vainglorious but irrational ambition to run the
world.
It cannot. It has failed in the past and it will fail in this century, and attempting
to do so will inflict wars and turmoil on many nations as well as on its own
people.
Gabriel Kolko is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the author of
the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914 and
Another Century of War?. |
