[Peace-discuss] How the U.S. Became the World's Dispensable Nation

[Lisa Chason]

How the U.S. Became the World's Dispensable Nation

by Michael Lind

01/26/05 "Financial Times" -- In a second inaugural address tinged with
evangelical zeal, George W. Bush declared: "Today, America speaks anew
to the peoples of the world." The peoples of the world, however, do not
seem to be listening. A new world order is indeed emerging - but its
architecture is being drafted in Asia and Europe, at meetings to which
Americans have not been invited.

Consider Asean Plus Three (APT), which unites the member countries of
the Association of Southeast Asia Nations with China, Japan and South
Korea. This group has the potential to be the world's largest trade
bloc, dwarfing the European Union and North American Free Trade
Association. The deepening ties of the APT member states represent a
major diplomatic defeat for the US, which hoped to use the Asia-Pacific
Economic Co-operation forum to limit the growth of Asian economic
regionalism at American expense. In the same way, recent moves by South
American countries to bolster an economic community represent a clear
rejection of US aims to dominate a western-hemisphere free trade zone.

Consider, as well, the EU's rapid progress toward military independence.
American protests failed to prevent the EU establishing its own military
planning agency, independent of the Nato alliance (and thus of
Washington). Europe is building up its own rapid reaction force. And
despite US resistance, the EU is developing Galileo, its own satellite
network, which will break the monopoly of the US global positioning
satellite system.

The participation of China in Europe's Galileo project has alarmed the
US military. But China shares an interest with other aspiring space
powers in preventing American control of space for military and
commercial uses. Even while collaborating with Europe on Galileo, China
is partnering Brazil to launch satellites. And in an unprecedented move,
China recently agreed to host Russian forces for joint Russo-Chinese
military exercises.

The US is being sidelined even in the area that Mr Bush identified in
last week's address as America's mission: the promotion of democracy and
human rights. The EU has devoted far more resources to consolidating
democracy in post-communist Europe than has the US. By contrast, under
Mr Bush, the US hypocritically uses the promotion of democracy as the
rationale for campaigns against states it opposes for strategic reasons.
Washington denounces tyranny in Iran but tolerates it in Pakistan. In
Iraq, the goal of democratisation was invoked only after the invasion,
which was justified earlier by claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of
mass destruction and was collaborating with al-Qaeda.

Nor is American democracy a shining example to mankind. The present
one-party rule in the US has been produced in part by the artificial
redrawing of political districts to favour Republicans, reinforcing the
domination of money in American politics. America's judges -- many of
whom will be appointed by Mr Bush -- increasingly behave as partisan
political activists in black robes. America's antiquated winner-take-all
electoral system has been abandoned by most other democracies for more
inclusive versions of proportional representation.

In other areas of global moral and institutional reform, the US today is
a follower rather than a leader. Human rights? Europe has banned the
death penalty and torture, while the US is a leading practitioner of
execution. Under Mr Bush, the US has constructed an international
military gulag in which the torture of suspects has frequently occurred.
The international rule of law? For generations, promoting international
law in collaboration with other nations was a US goal. But the
neoconservatives who dominate Washington today mock the very idea of
international law. The next US attorney general will be the White House
counsel who scorned the Geneva Conventions as obsolete. 

A decade ago, American triumphalists mocked those who argued that the
world was becoming multipolar, rather than unipolar. Where was the
evidence of balancing against the US, they asked. Today the evidence of
foreign co-operation to reduce American primacy is everywhere -- from
the increasing importance of regional trade blocs that exclude the US to
international space projects and military exercises in which the US is
conspicuous by its absence.

It is true that the US remains the only country capable of projecting
military power throughout the world. But unipolarity in the military
sphere, narrowly defined, is not preventing the rapid development of
multipolarity in the geopolitical and economic arenas -- far from it.
And the other great powers are content to let the US waste blood and
treasure on its doomed attempt to recreate the post-first world war
British imperium in the Middle East.

That the rest of the world is building institutions and alliances that
shut out the US should come as no surprise. The view that American
leaders can be trusted to use a monopoly of military and economic power
for the good of humanity has never been widely shared outside of the US.
The trend toward multipolarity has probably been accelerated by the
truculent unilateralism of the Bush administration, whose motto seems to
be that of the Hollywood mogul: "Include me out." 

In recent memory, nothing could be done without the US. Today, however,
practically all new international institution-building of any long-term
importance in global diplomacy and trade occurs without American
participation.

In 1998 Madeleine Albright, then US secretary of state, said of the
U.S.: "We are the indispensable nation." By backfiring, the
unilateralism of Mr Bush has proven her wrong. The US, it turns out, is
a dispensable nation. 

Europe, China, Russia, Latin America and other regions and nations are
quietly taking measures whose effect if not sole purpose will be to cut
America down to size.

Ironically, the US, having won the cold war, is adopting the strategy
that led the Soviet Union to lose it: hoping that raw military power
will be sufficient to intimidate other great powers alienated by its
belligerence. To compound the irony, these other great powers are
drafting the blueprints for new international institutions and
alliances. That is what the US did during and after the second world
war.

But that was a different America, led by wise and constructive statesmen
like Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who wrote of being "present at
the creation." The bullying approach of the Bush administration has
ensured that the US will not be invited to take part in designing the
international architecture of Europe and Asia in the 21st century. This
time, the US is absent at the creation.

The writer is senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington,
DC

Copyright: Financial Times - http://www.ft.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/private/peace-discuss/attachments/20050127/64a64aa6/attachment.htm