Jim D. wrote:
The US industrial economy
may be in decline, but its military and financial might are undimmed.
The
US/NATO as a whole is still pretty strong. The transnationals are
running
the world economy. Etc.
=====
I think the revisionist "official" explanation for the Asian crisis,
whose revisionism preceded this particular episode, is, nevertheless,
all of a piece with the tangible increase in US efforts to exert control
over wayward, actually and potentially, allies and other less committed
types. [e.g., Finland's President, Tarja Halonen, has been, of late,
under serious pressure to commit the country to joining NATO. So far she
has refused. Sweden, meanwhile, is noticeably buckling, redefining its
"neutrality". We know, of course, that the Soviets had good reason to
have submarines lurking around Swedish waters, hence the occasional and
unfortunate beaching. In one of yesterday's papers here there was a
large article concerning Olof Palme's original career as a spy -- it'll
take a while for me to translate] The invocation of Article 5 of the
NATO charter is part of this process. It's totally unprecedented
alright, since, by the logic of that organisation, it has been ignored
on at least two occasions involving "foreign-inspired" attacks on NATO
members. Argentina's invasion of "British sovereign territory" in 1982,
together with the terrorist bombing campaigns in Paris of recent years,
spring to mind here. But it's not just that NATO should jump only when
the US is in trouble. In truth NATO's role has been evolving very
quickly in recent years, since, probably, around 1995 when clear
distinctions were being made by Clinton's national security apparatus
between NATO and the UN, with the latter having the ignominy of failure
heaped upon it in order to legitimise the much more "efficient" and
"effective" NATO, culminating in Lord (good grief) Robertson's strained
efforts in July of this year to rationalise the projection of NATO power
all the way into Kazakhstan and beyond. How timely that was, given
current events. It's also a very important reminder that it's not the
*Bush administration* that is being punished here, but a United States
foreign policy that has strong continuities going all the way back to
Reagan, at the very least, and probably much further than that (it's not
actually so important a debating point right now).
Meanwhile US financial might is under increasing pressure thanks to the
instability it creates in the global economy. Successive IMF bail-outs
have led some to bemoan the problem of "moral hazard" (master of tact
Paul O'Neill), but that is a mask for the mounting costs of such
operations. Similarly, the huff and puff about James Wolfensohn is a
smokescreen covering the real issue of the diminishing returns of the
World Bank's operations (from the point of view of capital) and
impatience with the legitimising role that the WB plays in the service
of the system now preparing to junk it. The demands being placed upon
the US economy by its military and national security state continue to
increase, and yet we are now, all of us, fully aware of the economic
house of cards upon which expectations of endless surplus and
stratospheric growth were based. The transnationals do not yet run the
world economy, meanwhile. Their agents in the state are as subject to
the famous "agency problem" as any, given the state's evolving
quasi-autonomy and its duty to legislate for capital as a whole. I
subscribe to the imperial state thesis put forward by the likes of Leo
Panitch and James Petras in this instance, plus acknowledge the
continuing importance of inter-state rivalry, as evidenced only recently
by the rather bizarre efforts of Britain's MI5 to carve out a new
consultancy role for itself in the ultimate "public private partnership"
of the Blair era so far.
I'm not a determinist, and agree that no historical process is
irreversible *in principle*. But I think that the current micro-process
(if it may be called that) is so far advanced that whatever has been set
in train is past the point of no return. Meanwhile, the very same
"logic" that is governing the current "response" is a microcosm of a
more general rationale that has committed an ever-increasing proportion
of resources to the construction, maintenance, augmentation and
protection of US hegemony. In these circumstances it might be useful to
dig out Norman Angell's "The Great Illusion", published in 1910, and
wholly pessimistic as regards the returns on imperialist investments,
given the associated costs of acquisition, subjugation, governance and
protection. The Cold War actually kept the US within a reasonably
manageable set of boundaries. Now it is committed to being global
supercop, a role that was way too expensive anyway, prior to Tuesday's
events. Now it's running a long-inevitable gauntlet that threatens to
precipitate events which will exacerbate the structural weaknesses of US
political and economic imperialism, which include its increasing
vulnerability to challenge from European states (as opposed to the EU,
for now). These same states will aim to use NATO as a vehicle to
manipulate the evolving imperialist agenda to the ultimate, long term
disadvantage of the US [invoking Article 5 is a clear admission of US
weakness, since it requires its allies to offer as yet unspecified but
legally mandated "support"]. That, of course, is assuming that we all
make it that far.
Michael K.
