The reluctant imperialists By Gerard Baker Financial Times, September 8 2002
It must be one of the cruel jokes history plays on the world from time to time that the one good consequence of September 11 was also the quickest to dissipate. Events a year ago produced waves of sympathy for America. Much of it poured forth from predictable sources, albeit in unfamiliar garb - the Queen ordered the guards at Buckingham Palace to play the "The Star-Spangled Banner"; Nato members invoked Article V in the name of collective defence. But plenty came, too, from some unlikely places. When Iranian mullahs, French editorialists and Chinese Communist party officials rush to express support for Americans, you know something large has happened in international relations. Sadly, the post-mortems on Americaphobia proved premature. The old curse twitched back to life during the initial prosecution of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, as civilian casualties and the treatment of captives unsettled allies. Within months, George W. Bush's "axis of evil" speech and his support for Israeli suppression of Palestinian violence had nursed it back to full health. Now, with the growing threat of war against Iraq and a new stridency in Washington foreign policy generally, anti-Americanism is as robust as ever. It is important here to disentangle the new from the old. It has been the lot of the world's sole superpower to find itself the object of an odd mixture of fear and contempt for years. If anti-Americanism was in vogue during the perilous years of the cold war, when the US stood as the only reliable bulwark against tyranny, we should not be surprised that it has flourished in an era when there is no such obvious threat. The current resentment also stems from a newer but equally silly dislike of US economic power: the dominance of American companies and products in the world and the pervasive sense of cultural conformity they impose. Silly, because the tautology of free markets is that products (and indeed markets) succeed because people like them. No one ever forced a Frenchman to eat a Big Mac. No Arab leader ever ordered the haunting call of the muezzin to be replaced by the siren squeal of Britney Spears. The prosaic truth is that America is a big, successful economy that exports its success around the world by satisfying the demands of consumers. The bigger and more serious objection to American power today is that, thanks to a combination of post-September 11 insecurity and unrivalled military might, the US is about to embark on a new age of imperial adventurism. The focus, of course, is confrontation with Iraq. But more troubling still, even for some reliable friends of America, is the sense that this may be only phase one of the new global strategy. Indeed what many critics fear is not US failure in Iraq but success attended by bold plans for regime change to roll back unfriendly governments everywhere. This may be too pessimistic a view. It reckons without the aspirations, ideals and plain common sense of the American people. It is worth remembering amid the hysteria that the US is, and has proved itself for a couple of centuries, a reliable democracy and a reluctant imperialist. It is far from clear, for instance, that support for a strategy of reshaping the world is widely shared in the US. So far the most gung-ho proponents of a "new realism" on Iraq, the Middle East and beyond ranges from Richard Perle on the far right to, well, to Paul Wolfowitz on the far right. The self-reinforcing creed of the neo-conservatives flourished in the shadowy counsels of the Pentagon and the National Security Council for months. But it has not fared too well in the less forgiving light of public discourse in recent weeks. Critics now include old-fashioned isolationists such as Patrick Buchanan and Dick Armey, diplomatist-pragmatists such as Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, former military types such as Chuck Hagel and General Norman Schwarzkopf. And that is just inside the Republican party. There is a range of contrary views out there beyond the American Enterprise Institute and the Weekly Standard; and polls suggest public support for military interventionism is waning fast. It is also worth remembering, amid all the talk of fundamental divides between the US and the rest of the world, that Mr Bush was awarded the 2000 election after a tie. If 286 votes in Florida had been counted the other way, Mr Wolfo- witz and Mr Perle would have been peddling their views in discussions far removed from the Situation Room. Convincing the US public of the need for action is tough, even when that action is not pre- emptive. History suggests Americans do not like to act alone. The enduring genius of America's founders was that it can be devilishly hard for a president to get his way for controversial measures. In 1990, faced with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, a crystal-clear breach of international law by a member of the United Nations, it took five months of persuasion before the US public and its political leaders accepted the case for action. Most important, even if the Bush administration eventually wins authorisation for a big military campaign in Iraq, it will be because it has persuaded Americans of the seriousness of the threat from Saddam Hussein (not such an absurd notion). It is highly improbable that authorisation will be extended for a tyrant-smashing campaign of regime change around the world. Critics will contend this is a hopelessly Panglossian view and of course Americans do not always get it right. And yes, perhaps the pessimists are correct: the exceptional circumstances of post-September 11, post-cold-war America could yet tip the world into an abyss of military adventurism, an accelerating global cycle of violence and terrorism. Or, just possibly, the US may continue to let its benign writ run in a largely stable world, intervening occasionally, perhaps as in Iraq, when it sees a direct and immediate threat to its people but otherwise content to let the world revolve, unruled, on its axis. I know which my money is on. Article at: http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/ FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1031119147745&p=1012571727088
