[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Soft Multilateralism

[Alfred Kagan]

Following up on yesterday's discussion, here is a 
provocative article for your consideration.

>Date: Mon, 09 Feb 2004 13:35:19 +0400
>From: "Fiona Hunt" <Fiona.Hunt at zu.ac.ae>
>To: "<"<mai-list at moon.bcpl.gov.bc.ca>
>Subject: Soft Multilateralism
>x-spam-status: Looks ok.
>Sender: owner-mai-list at moon.bcpl.gov.bc.ca
>
>This article can be found on the web at
>http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040202&s=wallerstein
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>'Soft Multilateralism'
>by IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN
>
>[from the February 2, 2004 issue]
>
>The hawks around George W. Bush believed the United States had been in
>a
>slow decline for at least thirty years. Their remedy called for the
>United States to flex its considerable military muscle, abandon all
>pretense of multilateral consultations with hesitant and weak allies,
>and proceed to intimidate both friends and enemies alike. Then it
>would
>be in the world driver's seat again. Instead, Iraq is a growing drain
>of
>lives and money, traditional allies are profoundly estranged, national
>security is more precarious than ever and economic power continues to
>erode. In short, the hawks have achieved the opposite of everything
>they
>intended on the world scene, except toppling Saddam Hussein.
>
>Democratic presidential candidates and even Republican moderates are
>now
>calling for a return to the multilateralist foreign policy of previous
>administrations. They want to bring back the golden era of Henry
>Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft and Madeleine
>Albright.
>Is this a plausible alternative?
>
>For the past thirty years, every administration, from Nixon to
>Clinton,
>including Reagan and Bush's father, pursued the same basic strategy, a
>policy I call "soft multilateralism." This policy had three elements:
>(1) offer our major allies "partnership"; (2) push hard to persuade
>potential nuclear powers not to "proliferate"; (3) persuade
>governments
>of the South that their economic future lay not in state-managed
>"development" but in export-oriented "globalization." None of these
>policies were entirely successful, but each was at least partially so.
>
>
>Let's look at each of the three elements. First, when the United
>States
>found it was no longer economically dominant but had become merely one
>part of a so-called triad (the United States, Western Europe and
>Japan/East Asia), each more or less competitive with the others, it
>had
>to change the way it handled these allies. Instead of treating them as
>subordinates it sought their collaboration as "partners." The real
>object was to slow down any and all emerging ideas that would permit
>political independence (such as, for example, creating a European army
>outside of NATO). The United States used two arguments with its allies
>to keep them in line. One was the continuing need to have a common
>front
>vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The second was their common interest in
>repelling attempts by developing countries in the South to reorganize
>the world-economy in a direction that was less favorable to the North.
>
>
>The allies went along, but only partially. For example, in the 1980s
>Western European leaders (even Margaret Thatcher) signed a gas
>pipeline
>deal with the Soviet Union over US protests. But in general, European
>steps were timid. What undermined US political strength the most was
>the
>demise of the Soviet Union, which removed the major emotional argument
>that had kept the Western Europeans and the East Asians in line. It
>was
>only then that South Korea could launch a "sunshine policy" toward
>North
>Korea, against US wishes. In response, the United States pushed the
>expansion eastward of both NATO and the European Union, thereby
>bringing
>into these institutions countries that were in no mood to become
>politically independent of the United States and served therefore as a
>drag on such aspirations by the previous members. Glass half full.
>
>On nuclear proliferation, the score was not too different. India and
>Pakistan became nuclear powers. Israel did too, although it never
>admitted this, and the United States winked at it. So did South
>Africa,
>whose apartheid government generously abandoned the program just
>before
>turning over power to the African National Congress. When Brazil's
>generals looked as though they would proceed with a nuclear program
>(with Argentina just behind), the United States suddenly became in
>favor
>of democracy. The generals were ousted, and the nuclear programs
>abandoned. When Iraq seemed to be making progress, Israel bombed its
>facilities. Glass half full.
>
>Finally, the United States was perhaps most successful in dismantling
>the economic developmentalist programs in the South. The Washington
>Consensus proclaimed that the world was in the new era of
>globalization,
>to which there was no alternative. The World Economic Forum at Davos
>rallied the elites behind this program. The International Monetary
>Fund
>(IMF) and the US Treasury enforced it. The World Trade Organization
>(WTO) was constructed to push the program further in multiple domains.
>And given first the world economic stagnation and balance-of-payments
>problems of countries in the South, and then the economic and
>political
>collapse of the Communist regimes of east-central Europe, most
>countries
>in the South fell into line. Glass three-quarters full.
>
>This globalization program was already beginning to come apart in the
>late 1990s, before George W. Bush became President. The Europeans
>created the euro, which threatened the last remaining element of
>fundamental US economic strength, the fact that the US government was
>not subject to balance-of-payments dilemmas, combined with the
>commercial edge the reserve status of the dollar gives the United
>States. The financial crisis in 1997 in Southeast and East Asia,
>followed by those in Russia and Brazil, tarnished the sheen of
>globalization and brought to power a series of leaders who represented
>a
>harder line toward the United States: Roh Moo Hyun in Korea, Megawati
>Sukarnoputri in Indonesia, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Luiz Inácio Lula
>da
>Silva in Brazil, and Néstor Kirchner in Argentina. Saddam Hussein had
>survived the Gulf War and remained a lump in the craw of the United
>States and a continuing symbol of defiance for others in the Arab
>world.
>The Oslo Accord on Israel/Palestine fell apart, despite all the energy
>Clinton put into fulfilling it. By the time the WTO got around to
>trying
>to do its work, in Seattle in 1999, it ran into serious organized
>opposition, which then transmuted itself into the World Social Forum
>that met at Porto Alegre.
>
>In short, the United States was already in difficulty when George W.
>Bush was voted in by the Supreme Court. At first, he continued the
>Nixon-to-Clinton foreign policy. That was, after all, the point of
>making Colin Powell Secretary of State. But after 9/11, Karl Rove and
>Dick Cheney joined forces and persuaded Bush that he had to become a
>wartime President and implement the program of the hawks. Bush did
>this
>and now finds himself in the impossible situation of not being able to
>pull back, even though the whole Iraq policy no longer seems so useful
>in electoral terms and is certainly not succeeding in geopolitical
>terms.
>
>Those who criticize Bush for his "unilateralism" seem to think that
>all
>the United States needs to do to put the country back on track is to
>return to the policies of the past thirty years, and the glass would
>become at least half full again. This is an illusion. The reason I
>call
>the previous policy "soft" multilateralism is that the United States
>never really meant it. Every administration of the past thirty years
>assumed it would get its way at least 95 percent of the time. But it
>always reserved the right to go it alone if it didn't. US diplomacy
>was
>good enough that the bluff was never called. In 2003, it was called.
>
>Why cannot the United States simply go back to soft multilateralism?
>Because once Washington displayed its raw power against its allies,
>none
>of the three tactics are viable anymore. Partnership no doubt appeals
>to
>some governments in NATO. But the key ones have grown very wary of the
>United States. And the public opinion of those others who are still
>seeking partnership is not with their governments. Look at France.
>Pascal Boniface, director of the mainstream Institut de Relations
>Internationales et Stratégiques, writing in the principal conservative
>newspaper Le Figaro, argues that Bush merely amplified the policies of
>the "multilateralist" Clinton, concluding, "We are not about to see
>normalized relations between France and the United States." And the
>historically pro-American François Heisbourg of the more conservative
>Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique, is scarcely friendlier:
>"France
>has been right for months.... to think that 'old Europe' is going to
>jump into the same hole that the Americans are trying to get out of,
>that's fantasy land." In Germany, the most popular thing that
>Chancellor
>Schröder has done in recent years, when he and his party have
>otherwise
>been in trouble, has been standing up to the United States. And France
>and Germany have now announced a much closer coordination of their
>foreign policies, which is certainly not good news for the US State
>Department. It represents the reinforcement of the idea of a hard
>European core within the European Union that is autonomous and
>therefore
>need not follow the US lead.
>
>As for Putin, he plays a cagey game, trying not to irritate the United
>States too much. But when the chips are down, he no longer goes along
>with Washington. Witness his overt move to continue to help Iran build
>a
>nuclear plant. He may cancel Iraqi debts (which he'd have a hard time
>collecting), but only if he gets new Iraqi contracts. In Spain, Prime
>Minister José María Aznar has found that his Iraq war policies are
>threatening his party's electoral prospects. And in Great Britain,
>George Bush visited a country where he had to be hidden from, and
>protected against, the British people. He didn't address Parliament
>because he feared being publicly heckled. Not like the good old days.
>Compare his trip with that of Reagan.
>
>On all fronts, we are moving toward a Europe that is at least as much
>in
>competition with the United States as in alliance. Partnership?
>Partnership against whom? In East Asia, it may be true that all four
>regional powers--China, Japan, South Korea and North Korea--have
>reservations about each other and harbor longstanding grievances.
>Nevertheless, none of them is an unconditional US ally, and all of
>them
>are edging toward closer relations with the other three. How close
>they
>will be is yet to be seen, but East Asia is on the rise and is not
>about
>to take second place to a weakened United States, no matter how
>"multilateral" Washington claims to be.
>
>Before September 11, many potential nuclear powers in the South were
>indeed hesitating. If they made a bomb, they risked US (and often
>European) wrath. It was expensive. It wasn't all that easy to do. But
>now? Any country in the South that has looked at the second Iraq war
>can
>draw from it one simple lesson. Iraq was invaded not because it had
>weapons of mass destruction but because it didn't. All the talk about
>the superweapons the United States has been developing forces everyone
>to think about how they could possibly defend themselves against a
>United States they do not trust. One old-fashioned atomic bomb can
>make
>the United States hesitate seriously. That has become clear in the
>case
>of North Korea. One little bomb can cause enough havoc to make it very
>expensive for the United States to go pre-emptive--expensive in terms
>of
>US lives lost and of the willingness of public opinion to tolerate
>such
>a loss of lives. And the more bombs a country of the South can amass,
>the better. The United States says it doesn't trust these
>countries--not
>so much because they might use such bombs against one another but
>because they might use them against the United States. But the
>countries
>of the South think it far more likely that the United States will use
>such bombs (at least the so-called minibombs) against them than vice
>versa. We don't have to debate who is right. The fact is that the
>countries of the South will continue to act on this assumption, and
>they
>are not likely to be much more accommodating to a new
>"multilateralist"
>United States than they are to George W. Bush. The Brazilian generals
>gave up their program in the 1980s. In Brazil, today, they are
>mumbling
>about reviving it. Yes, Libya has "renounced" making the bomb it was
>in
>fact incapable of making, lacking the necessary skilled personnel. And
>Iran is allowing inspections. But inspections, as we know, will not
>really stop the process since, under present rules, a country can do
>everything necessary to prepare the terrain, then renounce the treaty
>and make the bomb. In ten years we may expect to see another dozen
>nuclear powers, no matter who is President of the United States. The
>whole program of containing nuclear proliferation is in tatters, and
>it
>is probably an enormous waste of energy to try to revive it. The
>United
>States has got to learn to live with it, which is quite a new
>situation.
>
>
>Finally, globalization is just about passé. It was more or less buried
>at Cancún in September 2003. What happened is that the countries of
>the
>South (led by Brazil, India, China and South Africa) called the bluff
>of
>the free traders. They said free trade works both ways. If you want
>the
>South to open up to the North, then the North must open up to the
>South:
>no more subsidies to Northern producers, no more tariffs to keep out
>goods from the South. Of course, the North never really wanted that to
>happen. It would be political dynamite at home. So the so-called Group
>of 21 said, Well then, bye-bye! The Miami meeting of the Free Trade
>Area
>of the Americas (FTAA) escaped the Cancún fiasco only because the
>United
>States and Brazil agreed to take anything important off the agenda. In
>short, Brazil won. The United States may twist the arm of El Salvador
>to
>sign a trade agreement, but what interests US capitalists is the
>Brazilian and Argentine markets, not El Salvador's.
>
>This attitude was made possible by three things: The first was the
>accumulation of negative effects of IMF and WTO policies in the South.
>Witness the economic collapse of Argentina, which had been the "good
>boy" of the IMF in the 1990s. The second was the stunning emergence of
>a
>worldwide "movement of movements," the World Social Forum (of Porto
>Alegre), which, despite its very loose structure and incredible
>assemblage of all kinds of groups, has become a major political force
>in
>the world-system, eclipsing its rival, the World Economic Forum (of
>Davos). And, not least, the third was the United States' continuing
>difficulties in Iraq, which have tied down its resources and political
>energy to the point that it is unable to mobilize successfully against
>the rising resistance to anything that has the smell of still more
>globalization.
>
>Tomorrow, if we have a "multilateralist" US government, can it come to
>terms with the Group of 21? Can it construct an FTAA? Well, yes,
>provided it is ready to open US (and European) frontiers to an inward
>flow of goods from China, India, Brazil, South Africa and all the
>tiny,
>weaker countries of the South. But is anyone seriously contemplating
>this? Clinton, champion of free trade, wasn't. In any case, after
>Bush,
>the price for any deal has gone up. The South will no longer be
>content
>with a little more aid and an occasional reduction in the prices of
>pharmaceuticals they have to buy. They want substance now, and
>substance
>means changing the structure of the world-economy in ways that reduce
>the advantage (and probably the standard of living) of the peoples of
>the North.
>
>What can the US do to get out of the deep hole into which the Bush
>policy has dug us? First, it has to stop thinking of itself as the
>greatest country in the world and start thinking of itself as a mature
>country that has had both greatness and things to repent in its past.
>Today it is a very strong country in a multipolar world that has and
>will have other strong countries. Multipolarity is a great virtue, not
>a
>danger for the United States. The United States has to decide to enter
>into dialogue with the world. It is not that the United States has
>nothing to offer the world; it has plenty. But it has a lot to receive
>from the rest of the world as well. And it can only offer if it is
>ready
>to receive.
>
>In terms of concrete policy, the United States needs to reverse every
>one of the objectives of the Nixon-to-Clinton world policy. It needs
>to
>accept, graciously, the political independence of Western Europe and
>East Asia, recognizing them as its political peers, who have the right
>to independent structures in which Washington has no say (such as
>military forces or currency policies). The United States would of
>course
>seek to defend its interests in its discussions with the rest of the
>world, but it needs to give up the idea that it should--that it
>can--undermine those structures. And of course Washington would have
>to
>accept that to the extent there are world laws and norms, the United
>States has no right to claim any exemption from them. Quite the
>contrary, the United States ought to be pushing for everyone to come
>in
>under the same umbrella.
>
>Nuclear proliferation is inevitable--and it's not necessarily bad. In
>1945, the United States was the only nuclear power. Today there are at
>least eight such powers, and many others are on the road to getting
>there. Going from one to eight did not lead to nuclear war, and it's
>not
>more likely that going from eight to twenty-five will do so. Indeed,
>one
>could make the case that it will reduce the likelihood of nuclear
>wars.
>To be sure, if the great powers could arrange very large reductions in
>nuclear stockpiles, this would be a plus all around. But the "middle
>powers" of the world are simply not going to accept having zero
>weapons
>while the United States has thousands. Knocking one's head against a
>stone wall has never been an intelligent or useful policy. The United
>States should stop doing it. The worst of all policies is to say that
>the existing nuclear powers can remain at their present or ever
>greater
>strength and no one else can join them.
>
>Neoliberal globalization has had its day; it is now dead. In the
>economic turmoil of the next twenty years, the major centers of
>capital
>accumulation will probably be more, not less, protectionist. And the
>South is not going to permit further penetration without reciprocity.
>The world is coming out of, not into, a free-trade era. In the 1997
>financial crisis, the Asian country that did best was Malaysia, which
>rejected outright the advice of the IMF. What the United States should
>be encouraging at home and abroad is the kind of economic policies
>that
>will decrease, not increase, polarization (internally within
>countries,
>and worldwide among countries). Capitalists (American and others)
>should
>return to being entrepreneurs--that is, taking risks, reaping the
>gains
>if they are adept and accepting the losses if they are not.
>
>Will such a radical reversal guarantee US safety, health and
>prosperity?
>There are no guarantees. But it has a far better chance than either
>the
>Bush doctrine or the now defunct Nixon-to-Clinton policies of soft
>multilateralism. Above all, it would allow the United States to hold
>its
>head high once again, as a country that tries to live its presumed
>ideals and, with some difficulty (the kind everyone has), seeks to
>promote the well-being of its inhabitants and be a good citizen of the
>world. The United States was once admired for doing this. It might be
>again.
>**********************************************
>Philip L. Bereano
>Professor
>Department of Technical Communication
>Box 352195,  Loew Hall
>University of Washington
>Seattle, Wash 98144 USA
>
>ph: (206) 543-9037
>fx: (206) 543-8858
>
>pbereano at u.washington.edu
>**********************************************
>
>
>
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-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu