'Our power, then, has the grave liability of
rendering our theories about the world immune from failure. But by
becoming deaf to easily discerned warning signs, we may ignore long-term
costs that result from our actions and dismiss reverses that should lead
to a re-examination of our goals and means."
These are the words of Henry Hyde, chairman of the House international
relations committee and a Republican congressman, in a recent speech. Hyde
argues that such is the overweening power of the US that it may not hear
or recognise the signals when its policy goes badly wrong, a thinly veiled
reference to Iraq. He then takes issue with the idea that the US can
export democracy around the world as deeply misguided and potentially
dangerous. He argues: "A broad and energetic promotion of democracy in
other countries that will not enjoy our long-term and guiding presence may
equate not to peace and stability but to revolution ... There is no
evidence that we or anyone can guide from afar revolutions we have set in
motion. We can more easily destabilise friends and others and give life to
chaos and to avowed enemies than ensure outcomes in service of our
interests and security."
It is clear that the US occupation of
Iraq has been a disaster from almost every angle one can think of, most of
all for the Iraqi people, not least for American foreign policy. The
unpicking of the imperial logic that led to it has already commenced:
Hyde's speech is an example, and so is Francis Fukuyama's new book After
the Neocons, a merciless critique of Bush's foreign policy and the school
of thought that lay behind it. The war was a delayed product of the end of
the cold war and the triumphalist mentality that imbued the neocons and
eventually seduced the US. But triumphalism is a dangerous brew, more
suited to intoxication than hard-headed analysis. And so it has proved.
The US still has to reap the whirlwind for its stunning feat of imperial
overreach.
In becoming so catastrophically engaged in the Middle East, making the
region its overwhelming global priority, it downgraded the importance of
everywhere else, taking its eye off the ball in a crucial region such as
east Asia, which in the long run will be far more important to the US's
strategic interests than the Middle East. As such, the Iraqi adventure
represented a major misreading of global trends and how they are likely to
impact on the US. Hyde is clearly thinking in these terms: "We are well
advanced into an unformed era in which new and unfamiliar enemies are
gathering forces, where a phalanx of aspiring competitors must inevitably
constrain and focus options. In a world where the ratios of strength
narrow, the consequences of miscalculation will become progressively more
debilitating. The costs of golden theories [by which he means the
worldwide promotion of democracy] will be paid for in the base coin of our
interests."
The promotion of the idea of the war against terror as the central
priority of US policy had little to do with the actual threat posed by
al-Qaida, which was always hugely exaggerated by the Bush administration,
as events over the last four and a half years have shown. Al-Qaida never
posed a threat to the US except in terms of the odd terrorist outrage.
Making it the central thrust of US foreign policy, in other words, had
nothing to do with the al-Qaida threat and everything to do with the Bush
administration seeking to mobilise US public opinion behind a
neoconservative foreign policy. There followed the tenuous - in reality
nonexistent - link with Saddam, which provided in large measure the
justification for the invasion of Iraq, an act which now threatens to
unravel the bizarre adventurism, personified by Donald Rumsfeld, which has
been the hallmark of Bush foreign policy since 9/11. The latter has come
unstuck in the killing fields of Iraq in the most profound way
imaginable.
Hyde alludes to a new "unformed" world and "a phalanx of aspiring
competitors". On this he is absolutely right. The world is in the midst of
a monumental process of change that, within the next 10 years or so, could
leave the US as only the second largest economy in the world after China
and commanding, with the rise of China and India, a steadily contracting
share of global output. It will no longer be able to boss the world around
in the fashion of the neoconservative dream: its power to do so will be
constrained by the power of others, notably China, while it will also find
it increasingly difficult to fund the military and diplomatic costs of
being the world's sole superpower. If the US is already under financial
pressure from its twin deficits and the ballooning costs of Iraq, then
imagine the difficulties it will find itself in within two decades in a
very different kind of world.
Hyde concludes by warning against the delusions of triumphalism and
cautioning that the future should not be seen as an extension of the
present: "A few brief years ago, history was proclaimed to be at an end,
our victory engraved in unyielding stone, our pre-eminence garlanded with
permanence. But we must remember that Britain's majestic rule vanished in
a few short years, undermined by unforeseen catastrophic events and by new
threats that eventually overwhelmed the palisades of the past. The life of
pre-eminence, as with all life on this planet, has a mortal end. To allow
our enormous power to delude us into seeing the world as a passive thing
waiting for us to recreate it in an image of our choosing will hasten the
day when we have little freedom to choose anything at all."
That the world will be very different within the next two decades, if
not rather sooner, is clear; yet there is scant recognition of this fact
and what it might mean - not least in our own increasingly provincial
country. The overwhelming preoccupation of the Bush administration (and
Blair for that matter) with Iraq, the Middle East and Islam, speaks of a
failure to understand the deeper forces that are reshaping the world and
an overriding obsession with realising and exploiting the US's temporary
status as the sole global superpower. Such a myopic view can only hasten
the decline of the US as a global power, a process that has already
started.
The Bush administration stands guilty of an extraordinary act of
imperial overreach which has left the US more internationally isolated
than ever before, seriously stretched financially, and guilty of neglect
in east Asia and elsewhere. Iraq was supposed to signal the US's new
global might: in fact, it may well prove to be a harbinger of its decline.
And that decline could be far more precipitous than anyone has previously
reckoned. Once the bubble of US power has been pricked, in a global
context already tilting in other directions, it could deflate rather more
quickly than has been imagined. Hyde's warnings should be taken
seriously.
· Martin Jacques is a senior visiting research fellow at the
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore [EMAIL PROTECTED]
