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US:
The obvious emperor
By Francesco
Sisci
BEIJING - A
few days before the first summit of the Group of Eight,
after the war in Iraq, in the midst of the severe acute
respiratory syndrome (SARS) crisis, and while the world
economy is sputtering, all eyes are concentrated on the
United States, the only remaining superpower on the
planet.
Significantly, the G8 summit will be held in France,
the country that for more than two centuries was perhaps
the closest friend of the US but which in the past
months has voiced its stern opposition to US policies in
the Middle East. This opposition and the strength of the
present American Empire are closely linked.
The
roots of the present American Empire are linked with
France's ambitions in the sense that France's dream of
lonely grandeur helped push the US into the arms of the
British. This happened a few months ago with the war in
Iraq but also back in the 1960s, when Charles de Gaulle
partially pulled France out of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO).
World War II caused the US
to coordinate its policies in Europe closely with its
two main allies, the United Kingdom and France. Germany
and Italy were defeated and occupied; they were then helped
to rebuild their economies to assist in the Cold War
effort, but their militaries were in no way independent, being
under tight Allied control. The UK was the
stronger of the United States' two European partners. England
had been the base of operations for the liberation
of Europe, while the French army had to be re-established
with backing from the US that was far stronger
than that needed by the UK - which, unlike France, had
not been invaded by Germany.
The US-UK
partnership was in no way clear, as in the 1950s London
and Paris were in greater agreement. In the late 1940s
the US had been quite pressing on the UK to grant
freedom to its colonies, while Washington had been more
tolerant of the French colonies, strongly supporting the
French war in Vietnam, which the US eventually
inherited. France seemed to have better relations with
Britain than the US had with either of them, so Paris
and London launched, against Washington's advice, the
operation to reoccupy the Suez Canal in 1956. On the
whole the US, despite its overwhelming economic
strength, which at the end of World War II was some 50
percent of global gross domestic product (GDP), was not
the absolute political center of gravity, and its
relationship was possibly better with Paris than with
London. Washington was suspicious of London's colonial
and imperial past, of which America had been a victim
two centuries earlier.
This began to change when
de Gaulle pulled France out of the military structure of
NATO, saying it would point its nuclear devices, the
force de frappe, toward Moscow but also toward
Washington. Paris in this way returned to the idea of
power politics, a step away from the ideological divide
of the Cold War. This change of heart in France drew the
United States closer to Britain, which remained its
stronger ally in Europe. The two countries also shared a
common language and the total fear of Soviet communism.
Furthermore, as the French colonial empire
crumbled, the looser network of the British
Commonwealth, including Australia and New Zealand,
provided a better basis for the new US global
responsibilities. The war in Korea in 1950 proved to
Washington that it had to counter the Soviet Union
everywhere and that it must not repeat the mistake it
made in 1949, when it had pulled its troops out of Korea
despite growing belligerent rhetoric from Moscow.
In the expansion of its
unprecedented global reach the US came to draw more on the experience
of the British Empire. London gave Washington almost
total access to its intelligence, many British experts
migrated to the US, and in many ways Britain became the
guide in setting up the new American Empire. This
created what is now the intelligence and information
integration between the United States and Britain.
Interestingly, the International Herald Tribune,
which was a first attempt at global information
projection by the United States, was established in
Paris, showing the US preference for France. But the
successful British attempt to integrate its information
network with that of the United States has created the
extensive US distribution network of The Economist and
the Financial Times. Meanwhile The Times now belongs to
the American-Australian News Corp, which also owns
Sky-TV, based in London but very successful in the
United States, where it rivals the service provided by
CNN. Similarly, Reuters is also based in Britain, but
its New York office is about as important as its London
office. In a way Sky-TV is the next generation of US
global projection and, significantly, its European base
now is London, not Paris.
On the level of
information, and the global influence they can thus
exercise, Anglo-American media form a pretty integrated
community, with more of a common life, and far more
trans-Atlantic exchanges than those across the English
Channel.
The establishment of English as an
international language was pushed by the US but could
never have been so successful had not Britain laid the
basis for it with its empire, which left hundreds of
millions of people who spoke English all over the world.
Incidentally, had de Gaulle not pursued his policy of
national grandeur, the fortunes of the French people and
the French language might well be different.
The
culture of the American Empire, although very different
from that of the British, also builds on the close
contacts with Britain, which can't be overlooked when
watching the present American Empire, which is not
simply based on the force of its arms.
In fact,
its present Iraq intervention is born out two seminal
moments, the end of World War II and the end of the Cold
War. At the end of World War II the US was tempted to
withdraw back within its borders, and might have done so
had the Soviet Union not started war in Korea. The proof
of this is the US withdrawal of troops from the Korean
Peninsula in 1949, when only a few hundred US GIs were
left. The need to confront the USSR then pushed the US
decisively into an all-out war of containment.
A
similar temptation was present in Europe after the end
of the Cold War, but because of the war in Yugoslavia
and the inability of the European countries to find
common ground, the United States was called back. In
fact, when Slovenia decided to secede, triggering the
much more complicated secession of Croatia, along old
historical lines Germany supported the split, while
France and Britain supported Serbia. In the early 1990s,
the Europeans were unable to decide how to intervene -
they feared that intervention on either side might split
the European community. They were unable to muster the
necessary army or the funding to build one, and did not
have the drive to convince their domestic constituencies
of the need for intervening in a war in the Balkans,
where many pan-European wars had started. Then Europe
sent for the US, which went there despite the fact that
the Balkans were not a US strategic priority.
While the war in the Balkans dragged on, Iraq
invaded Kuwait, and the United States decided to
intervene in the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, the fate of
the Soviet Union saw a deep difference of opinions
between Europeans and the US. The former wanted to
salvage Mikhail Gorbachev and his empire, as they saw it
as part of a complex new European balance of power; the
latter wanted to end the Soviet experience and its
empire. However, US plans for the former Soviet Union
and for Iraq proved not to be definitive. Despite the
battering it suffered in the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein's
Iraq hung on, posing at least a hypothetical threat to
the area, while the dissolution of the USSR was (and
still is) very complicated, spawning new threats -
Russian mafias on the rampage almost everywhere and a
crowd of conflicts in the Caucasus and in Central Asia.
This imposed a continuation of the global US
commitment, which, during the presidency of Bill
Clinton, espoused a variety of humanitarian causes, such
as the intervention in Somalia, which was of little or
no strategic importance to the United States. But these
causes fed on US public feeling about the necessity of
protracted global intervention despite the end of the
Cold War.
We shall briefly list some of the many
facets of US power.
Military power
The
legacy of the Cold War was largely military: the United
States was left with overwhelming military power. This
strength went on growing, whereas that of its former
rival, Russia, was decreasing in importance for lack of
funds, and the Europeans, the only ones with in theory
the economic muscle and the technology to build a
similar war machine, had not the political will to do
so. The United States' unmatched military prowess makes
many in the world think that US power is based
exclusively on that, but this is a gross mistake.
The national missile defense (NMD) system would
provide security from a small-scale ballistic-missile
attack, for an amount of money that is quite reasonable
- US$60 billion, or some 10 percent of the US budget
deficit this year. NMD would allegedly be totally
effective if a score of missiles were launched, less
effective against an attack with hundreds of missiles.
But only the Soviet Union could have launched hundreds
of missiles against the US, and the Soviet Union is out
of the game. Theater missile defense (TMD) will be
largely paid for by host countries and thus will bring
cash to the United States.
NMD, by providing
total potential protection from a nuclear-missile
attack, provides an objective guarantee for a US war
against any given state. But September 11, 2001,
provided the example that many other types of attacks
are possible, against which NMD is useless. Besides,
even if the "homeland" is safe thanks to NMD, other
areas of the US imperial power remain exposed to attack.
The wars in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan
proved that the US can deploy its military at many
levels aside from its great nuclear capability. It can
start and win a war totally from the air, as it did in
Kosovo in 1999, or it can win a conventional land war
supporting proxies and allies, such as the Northern
Alliance in Afghanistan, or (virtually) by itself, as in
Iraq.
However, the power of the American Empire
is made of many instruments, all necessary to its global
reach.
Therefore, besides its home turf, the US
has to keep intact and possibly growing all these
instruments for fear of losing its clout. In a way, as
nuclear war is the ultimate weapon that should never be
used, full-fledged war is an instrument of power to be
used with great parsimony, because it is extremely
expensive and can squander global consent. Military
muscle is important, but to retain its power it must be
used as little as possible.
The power of
information
The era of globalization, combining
the legacies of World War II and the Cold War, has
created many other opportunities to exercise pressure.
The present system of rapid global trading, thanks to
the exchanges made possible through the Internet and
global open stock markets, and rapid personal contacts,
thanks to advanced telecommunications and convenient air
transport, created new fields of power. Exchanges of
money and investment are made possible by the flow of
information, which can also be fed by and be ancillaries
to an intelligence system. Any country is vulnerable to
a "public relations" attack, as global money, now
necessary to all, would flee a country under such an
attack. For example, if some important papers, on the
basis of authoritative intelligence leaks, say Country X
has a bad human-rights record, its leaders are corrupt,
and its domestic situation is unstable, global
investment would leave the country, or would simply not
go there. Then trade would trickle away and X would be
doomed to a fate of underdevelopment, which would make X
easier to subject to further pressures.
Now the
US has the most extensive intelligence network, and the
most credible.
This is coupled with the most
authoritative newspapers, and a political system that is
credible and transparent. If, say, the New York Times
writes on a US intelligence leak that the president of X
has stashed billions in gold ingots, people all over the
world would tend to believe it. The US has the
capability to obtain such intelligence, and the New York
Times has a tradition of accountability that can make
people trust that it is not running errands for a state
agency. No other country can claim the same combination
of assets. Some countries have a credible political
system but their intelligence is not as effective, say
France or Italy; other countries might have effective
intelligence but not credible political systems, say
Russia or China. Italy can make a revelation about
President X, but who would believe its sources? Worse
for China, if it did something like that, because of its
poor political system, everybody would believe China was
doing so for some selfish murky purpose.
This
capability has another element: the power of the
international media virtually rests completely in the
hands of the Anglo-Americans. From them comes the news
that moves capital around the world. Other agencies, say
Agence France-Presse, the Spanish EFE, Deutsche Presse
Agentur, the Japanese Kyodo, the Arabic al-Jazeera, etc
have limited, regional influence. Besides, they hardly
move any global investment like Reuters, AP, Dow Jones
or Bloomberg, whose terminals sit on the desk of any
major executive in the world.
American
values
This is the main force of the American
Empire. American values tell the story of an ideology in
which national interests and global values are carefully
enmeshed. The values of universal liberty and democracy
are abstract enough to be credible beyond any religious
faith. Besides, no other large country like the US hosts
all the ethnic peoples and all the beliefs in the world.
The US is the world in microcosm and, although dominated
by Anglo-Saxon culture, it is so tolerant that it can,
for example, use its Japanese community in New York to
help it speak to the Japanese of Tokyo. In this way its
national interests can be disguised under a veil of
universalism.
Only the Soviet Union with its
communism could have played the same game, and indeed
did so: it used the idea of universal communism to
further its national imperial aims. In either case, the
US and the USSR, it was not a simple game of cheating.
When the USSR conquered a territory, it really tried to
establish a communist system which it believed would
make that country better off. This reached the point of
pumping millions into Eastern European countries, at the
cost of keeping Russians poorer than their, say, their
Hungarian comrades, as a kind of fee for not letting
Eastern European countries develop a capitalist system.
The United States, for its part, sincerely believes that
a free electoral system is better than a dictatorship,
and this is certainly so for intellectuals, although
many common people may not be interested.
Since
the fall of the Soviet Union, no other country has this
capability of ideological projection. The Europeans have
values very similar to those of the United States but
have never been very keen on projecting them, as they
believe in and practice some kind of double-standard
system: democracy for themselves and colonialism for
others. Although during the Cold War the US also often
applied double standards, this was never its real
dominant thinking and, after the demise of the Soviet
Union, democracy has become more of an absolute value.
Only Osama bin Laden and his fellows have
similar global ambitions: they want to convert all the
Muslims of the world to their form of Wahhabism, and
then conquer or convert the rest of the world. But their
message has many problems even convincing their fellow
Muslims, and breaks no ice at all with followers of
other religions. US-style liberty is much more
appealing, as anybody can go to the United States and
see for themselves the welfare and well-being of the
Promised Land. Furthermore, Western Europe and Japan,
which have followed in the Americans' footsteps, also
enjoy great affluence and personal freedom. The model is
far from perfect, as the US managed to export its model
to Japan and Europe but not to the Latin American
countries in its own neighborhood. But the US attributes
the Latin American failures to the deep-rooted problems
of those countries, and not to the US model. This answer
is not universally accepted, but it is still more
acceptable than bin Laden's ferocity.
Furthermore, a century of religious war for or
against communism has left the world with an
unprecedented need for some global values. This need is
reinforced by the daily need to trade and communicate
with many different parts of the world. On what values
should these exchanges be based? How can we fill the
void left by the demise of communism? Religions of any
kind can be an answer, and certainly are, for the
fundamentalists of any religion, but the US message of
liberty goes over the religions and is far less
intrusive than other universal ideologies.
This
ideology seeps through all kinds of cultural production
and its success proves and reinforces the success of the
values. The products are film and television, music,
video games and of course news coverage. In each of
these fields other countries may have sizable local
markets, and in some cases US companies will join hands
with Japanese (for video games) or European companies
(for some films). But no other country has a global
reach in all these fields: there is no global Indian
film industry, or Chinese music industry, to speak of.
This realm of ideas is not abstract but takes a
concrete body in many levers, mainly finance,
corporations and international institutions, besides the
companies directly manufacturing cultural products.
On a level between pure culture production and
commodities there are typical US eateries such as
McDonald's, Pizza Hut and Starbucks, or products such as
Coca-Cola. They spread an American vision of life,
irrespective of culture. Starbucks sells Italian coffee
and Pizza Hut sells Italian pizza, and the hot dog is
nothing but the German Frankfurter wuerstel. Some
American firm may someday start mass-marketing Chinese
dumplings. The product per se is irrelevant: what is
important is the capability to absorb and standardize
models that then are exported everywhere and recognized
as American.
Finance and
corporations
New York is the center of the global
finance. There are other very important cities - Tokyo,
London, Hong Kong, Frankfurt - but New York is the most
important, and the only one with a very global reach.
Here a handful of brokering companies handle most of the
capital that changes hands every day in the world and
serve the many companies doing business worldwide. Most
of the companies dominating the world market and
production are American or from countries allied to the
United States. The center of finance based in the US and
the pervasiveness of US economic value tends to orient
companies toward the US, and if they are not American,
to push their home base to conciliatory moves toward the
US. London and Frankfurt are pretty integrated with New
York. Tokyo in the 1980s tried to remain very closed and
protective, financing the aggressive expansion of
Japanese companies, but this attempt has been defeated
and now it is more coordinated with New York.
After the 1980s the yen began going down; the
euro has emerged but has no unified political head, and
without it the dollar is bound to remain the main token
of global exchange. Furthermore, London (which,
incidentally, has kept its pound and has not joined the
euro) and Frankfurt have become more integrated but are
catering for companies that are not exclusively
European, as Tokyo was doing up to its crisis with
Japanese companies. There is a well-established
American-European economic community, firmly grounded on
the strong US investments in Germany.
Also
through the network of political alliances, the United
States leads a loose pack of economies (mainly the US
plus Western Europe plus Japan) making up a GDP of some
$200 trillion, about 80 percent of the global GDP. This
is no orderly phalanx - there is huge competition among
the different companies and many countries have had
large political friction with the US, as for instance
the current case of France. But economically most of the
significant companies in each country have a close
relationship with the United States. This is a bilateral
lever, in the sense that a German company could use its
penetration in the US market to pinch the US, but the
opposite is truer, as the US is the biggest of the lot
and can use client relations with a German company to
pinch Germany much harder than Germany might pinch the
US.
Then there is technology, where the US is by
far more advanced than any other country, and has an
integrated industrial system that can cope with any
segment of technology. The Europeans, including the
Russians, are better at theoretical research but weak at
application while, the Japanese are strong with the
application but weak with pure research. The United
States is the only country potentially to have it all,
plus enormous resources to buy any technology or brain
who might be hanging around in the world.
Diplomacy
To top it all there is
diplomacy, which acts on many different levels, and of
which diplomatic service is just one instrument.
Diplomacy acts through two different channels:
traditional political diplomacy comprising bilateral
relations, alliances, pacts with individual states, and
multilateral institutions such as the United Nations,
and economic diplomacy, comprising the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, etc, where the US
directly or indirectly plays a leading role, and the G8.
All of these are arenas where the US can listen and
lead, if necessary.
Besides, the US is home to
an enormous number of clubs and associations with
exchange programs aimed at bringing people to the United
States to be influenced by American values. The
Trilateral Commission is just the most famous of these
informal institutions. The web of formal and informal
ties reaches everywhere, and again no other state has
such an extensive and comprehensive network at its
disposal, which can wield political and economic
influence, make business deals, and exert ideological
influence among virtually any decision-makers in the
world.
Technological intelligence is thereby
coupled with human intelligence, and networks of
informants, agents, and retainers in any country provide
feedback for Washington and influence in the host
country.
In this environment the widespread
fashionable opposition to the United States in a way
confirms the US legitimacy to carry on with its rule.
Everybody opposes its hegemony, but no one really
threatens it in a global fashion any longer, and the US
tolerance for this opposition proves its benign,
tolerant character.
The opposition is after all
pretty futile. There is no alternative to US hegemony.
No country can replace the United States either globally
or locally. In fact the idea of a multipolar world is
but a slogan: it is not even clear what should be the
poles of the multipolar world, except one - the US. The
UN is no longer what it used to be, and it was an
important forum only as long as US and USSR would
directly meet and talk with one another. Now there is
some agreement that the UN can no longer function as it
did, but there is no agreement on how it should be
reformed. Moreover, the whole idea of veto power was
meant to prevent a nuclear war between the US and the
USSR, but is somebody going to launch a nuke at the
United States if it acts without UN permission?
Imperial crisis
Any real challenge to
the United States can come at the moment only from the
US itself, from a crisis, economic or political, hitting
the country. Short of that, any outside challenger
should be able to fill all the slots so far filled by
the US, including the claim to be a bastion of liberty.
In fact there are many ideas of liberty, and France
challenged the US on the Iraq war only on what was
supposed to be the best way to uphold democratic and
libertarian values in the Middle East.
With all
this vast array of levers it might seem strange that US
hegemony is not much more extended. In fact, despite the
many levers, this array of instruments is not enough to
cope fully with the world, which is vast and complicated
as never before.
Certainly, as the war in Iraq
proved, the US will try to further its grip on the
world, but this will also further its risk of
overreaching. The US in fact at the moment has a rather
weak economy while the present extension of power is
very costly. But the economy can recover and costs can
be redistributed among allies. What is more complicated
is to find a new ideological justification for the
present extension and redrawing of the world map. After
World War II and the Cold War, the necessity to cope
with victory and defeat demanded new borders, but the
present war on terrorism is a new concept, hard to
define, but terribly real, as proved by the recent bomb
attacks in Morocco and Saudi Arabia.
In this war
the attack on Afghanistan was a clear step; the attack
on Iraq was much less clear and raised a huge
controversy, as the US was unable to prove to the world
that Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda or had weapons of mass
destruction. Right or wrong, the war in Iraq has been
won and the peace in Iraq, if it succeeds or fails, will
have a huge impact on further US extension in the world.
If it fails, the Middle East could become more
troublesome than ever and suck the US into a quagmire of
Vietnamese proportions. But if the US peace in Iraq
succeeds in two or three years, it will become
instrumental to the further expansion of US ambitions in
the world, with or without the excuse of war on
terrorism.
China
At that
point the United States could well start dealing again
with what was its main objective before September 11:
China. It would do this with all its powerful arsenal,
but certainly using little of its military capability,
and using a lot of its most powerful weapon,
information. And in this field China is basically naked
and unarmed. China's response should be simple: arming
itself with the weapons of information. In fact it is
doing so now but, because of its politics, no matter how
many papers or TV channels it sets up, it will have
little or no success in the outside world.
A
pincer movement is now called for. On the one hand a
political liberalization in China would produce more
dignity and respect for its media. On the other hand
China should consider helping to set up a sympathetic
media group in Thailand, the freest country in Asia,
with very good ties with China but also with the US and
the rest of Asia. This media group would have to build
its own credibility, fend off possible future attacks
and draw the United States closer to China.
China should avoid at all costs any kind of
direct confrontation with the United States, which would
have only one result - huge damage for China, which
would only be in the interests of China's enemies.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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