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 PART 8: Militarism and failed
states
By Henry C K Liu
(Click here for previous parts)
Militarism is the doctrine that military
might is the basic source of all security. In its
mildest form it argues that military preparedness
delivers peace through strength. The doctrine
leads inevitably to the militarization of peace as
a form of permanent preparation for war.
Militarism disparages peace movements as utopian
and naive.
Yet militarism can be
self-defeating. It can threaten national security
by energizing compensatory militarism in other
countries as dictated by the doctrine of balance
of power. Militarism is the doctrinal fuel for
arms races, not only among hostile nations but
also among allies who can be expected to change
sides in the future, since international relations
are affected by shifting national interests, and
not based on permanent friendship. National
interests of different nations converge and
diverge over time, particularly in an
international geopolitical architecture built on
the principle of balance of power. There is strong
logic in the premise that peaceful relations with
neighboring states will enhance rather than
diminish a nation's overall power and security,
which extend beyond the confines of the military.
Militarism rejects this self-evident proposition.
Militarism is not exclusive to dictatorships or
authoritarian states. Liberal democracies are
frequently proponents and willing victims of
militarism.
In his book The New
American Militarism, Boston University
Professor Andrew J Bacevich, West Point graduate,
Vietnam veteran, professional soldier for 23
years, and a conservative scholar, identified
Albert Wohlstetter and Andrew Marshall, both
life-long civilians, as having transformed a Cold
War strategy of nuclear deterrence that regarded
war as a last resort to be avoided into a
proactive war strategy of superpower aggression.
The resultant "marriage of a militaristic cast of
mind with utopian ends has committed the United
States to waging an open-ended war on a global
scale".
Herman Khan, while at Rand Corp -
the US Air Force strategic think-tank - was by far
the most dominant figure in nuclear-deterrence
scholastics based on the concept of terror. Khan
worked out the logic of MAD (massive mutually
assured destruction) as an effective deterrence to
nuclear war that would not allow any winners.
Wohlstetter was a minor voice at Rand who worked
on the theory that tactical nuclear war would be
winnable even under the general rules of strategic
deterrence. Both Khan and Wohlstetter subscribed
to the use of terror; the difference between them
was that Khan was strategic and Wohlstetter was
tactically inclined. Khan would prevent war
unleashed by first strikes with the terror of
doomsday war machines that would also destroy the
first-strike party even after the target party had
been obliterated. Wohlstetter advocated the use of
tactical wars that would gain geopolitical
advantage without setting off the doomsday
machines. Both had supporters in the Pentagon as
long as both themes provided ample circular
rationalization for rising defense spending.
Khan's nuclear-deterrence strategy is part of an
arms-control approach that requires a concurrent
buildup of conventional arms. Conceptually, arms
control is the deadly enemy of disarmament.
Weapons are acquired to create a condition of
military stalemate under which their use will
produce no advantage to any one side. That
condition is ultimately anchored in the terror of
global nuclear holocaust.
Deterrence moves
the prevention of war from an "if, then" to an
"either, or" and finally to a "neither, nor"
stability based on paralyzing terror. Stability is
enhanced when the dialogue of restraint among
enemies moves from "if you transgress, then you
will be attacked" to "either you desist, or we
will outdo you" to "neither would you start, nor
would we start". It is a concept of peace through
strategic terrorism.
The turning point
came after Khan's death and when strategic
deterrence based on the balance of terror ran out
of steam in its justification for further military
spending when both sides had more than enough to
destroy the whole world several thousand times
over, and more tanks and planes than any army can
use without the prospect of recurring shooting
wars. Strategic deterrence operates in a world of
two superpowers. After the dissolution of the
Soviet Union, the balance of terror was
destabilized with the existence of only one
superpower, albeit Russia is still a formidable
nuclear power.
Under US president Ronald
Reagan, tactical-weapon development spending took
over as the main driving force, propelling
Wohlstetter's tactical theories on to a pedestal
of doctrinal respectability. The argument of
"what's the point of having all these
sophisticated and expensive weapons systems
without reaping some geopolitical benefit?" began
to attract support from the military-industrial
complex. The technological imperative in arms
races is augmented by the stockpile imperative.
Stockpiles need to be depleted regularly in real
battles and refilled with new, improved
generations of weapons based on real battle
feedbacks. This is illustrated by Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's statement that "you go
to war with the weapons you have, not the weapons
you wish you had". The birth of new weapons
systems requires the midwife support of real
shooting wars to accelerate the rate of weapon
obsolescence and highlight the awareness of the
need for updating.
For Wohlstetter and his
followers, the function of weapons is not to deter
war, but to enable war with impunity to deter
challenges to US national interests. Peace through
strength is supplanted by democracy through war.
The United States, with its superpower resources,
is in a position to use war to impose its world
view on smaller nations to make the world safe for
the US values. This approach solicits two
responses: 1) the revival of the doctrine of
balance of power in international relations among
sovereign states to replace the doctrine of
balance of terror between two superpowers and 2)
the emergence of asymmetrical warfare from the
powerless in failed states in the form of
terrorism.
Andrew W Marshall, known as
Yoda in defense circles, co-author (with Zalmay
Khalilzad and John P White) of Strategic
Appraisal: The Changing Role of Information in
Warfare, had been named director of the
Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment by president
Richard Nixon in the 1970s and reappointed by
every sitting president since. Today, Marshall,
along with his star proteges Vice President Dick
Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz (who has just been appointed
president of the World Bank), has been drafting
President George W Bush's plan to upgrade the
military. Put in charge of the Bush
administration's proposed major military overhaul
by Rumsfeld, he has sharply polarized the defense
community on the nature of future wars and the
military's role in fighting them.
Nicholas
Lehman, political correspondent, in "Dreaming
about war" published in The New Yorker on July 16,
2001, writes: "People with decoder rings knew that
Bush's speech at the Citadel had been drafted by
Marshall's corps of allies and that it endorsed
Marshall's main ideas." Bush said "the best
defense can be a strong and swift offense -
including ... long-range strike capabilities". The
comment implied that in future conflicts the US
might be denied access to US bases on ally soil
near the conflict. Bush noted that "power is
increasingly defined not by mass or size but by
mobility and swiftness ... The era of
procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and
baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a
close." In other word, the approach of "shoot
first, ask questions later" would govern the Bush
administration's security policy. And this was a
full year before the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001. In his campaign speech in
September 1999, Bush promised that, as president,
he would order up "an immediate, comprehensive
review of our military" and give the secretary of
defense "a broad mandate to challenge the status
quo". Within weeks into the new Bush
administration, it was reported that the secretary
of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, would conduct a broad
review of the military. Unreported was the fact
that Andrew Marshall would be the main force
behind the review.
Since the 1980s,
Marshall has been an advocate of an idea first
posited in 1982 by Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, then
chief of the Soviet general staff, called
Revolution in Military Affairs. RMA asserts that
technological advances have changed the very
nature of conventional war. Rather than conflict
conducted by ground troops, the new conventional
war will be conducted with the same control and
command of a nuclear war, managed by computers at
remote locations targeting missiles at enemy
military assets and infrastructure in accordance
with strategic defense doctrines. The battlefield
would be transformed into a vast virtual reality,
utilizing military assets from great distances.
War, in RMA lexicon, would be conducted by spy
satellites and long-range guided missiles with
precision targeting capability, by computer
viruses and laser beams that would disable enemy
offensive and defensive systems, and by a
"layered" defense system that would make US
defense impenetrable. Military adventurism is
enhanced by impenetrability of one's own defense.
It is a doctrine that focuses not on deterrence by
balance of terror, but on winning in war by remote
control from a safe haven. Yet the doctrine
neglects the more important problems of enforcing
the peace after military victory. It reduces war
to no more purpose than a barroom brawl where the
fighting itself was the game.
The US Army
War College's Strategic Studies Institute in its
seventh Annual Strategy Conference in April 1996
examined China's ability to participate in RMA. Dr
Bates Gill of the Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute (SIPRI), on a panel called
"Seizing the RMA: China's Prospects", argued that
there is more to participating in RMA than
securing or producing high-tech weaponry. A
revolution is an all-encompassing phenomenon with
socio-cultural as well as purely technological
aspects. China's prospects for seizing the RMA lie
not so much in the development of technology as in
the restructuring of concepts and organizations.
History, culture, and philosophical values will
make it problematic for China to participate in
the RMA. The same of course applies to the
military of all nations, including the US, where
RMA continues to have its skeptics. Gill believes
that China may be able to develop an "RMA with
Chinese characteristics" much as it took
Marxism-Leninism, a Germanic-Russian innovation
devised for proletarian revolution, and modified
its tenets to be relevant within a peasant
revolutionary context with a level of success
unseen in Europe or elsewhere in the Third World.
Through sheer determination and by optimizing
technology and expertise available from outside
sources, China might approximate a less
sophisticated RMA entirely suited to its own
needs. US Army Lieutenant-Colonel Lonnie Henley
argued that over the next decade, China will
deploy a dozen or so divisions possessing
relatively advanced systems, but that overall, the
People's Liberation Army (PLA) will remain about a
generation behind the US Army in terms of its
ability to participate in a fully developed RMA.
Furthermore, capabilities within the air and sea
forces of the PLA will be even more limited with
relatively small infusions of advanced aircraft
such as the Su-27 and naval vessels such as
Kilo-class submarines. These modern weapons will
make up only a fraction of what will be otherwise
seriously dated forces. According to Henley, by
2010 the PLA may be able to achieve for its elite
force the kind of capabilities demonstrated by US
forces in the first Gulf War. That does not mean
that the technological gap between the military
capabilities of US and China will be closed, as
the US is not expected to stay still and will have
advanced technologically significantly by 2010.
These papers, written a decade ago,
painted a picture of China with limited potential
to become a peer competitor of the United States
in the two decades following their writing.
Nonetheless, there was little doubt that China's
relative power in Asia and globally would grow
sharply in that period, a prediction that has been
borne out by fact. Even partial success in
pursuing advanced military technology and
organizing concepts could enhance the speed and
impact of that rise in Chinese power.
US
Army Colonel Richard H Witherspoon, director of
the Strategic Studies Institute, sees the
exploration of the issues surrounding the RMA as
having only just begun, and being worthy of
consideration by anyone interested in the role
that China may play in the strategic military
balance early in the 21st century.
Michael
Pillsbury, an alumnus of Rand, former special
assistant for Asian affairs in the Office of the
Secretary of Defense, reporting to Marshall,
director of net assessment, edited for the
Institute for National Strategic Studies at the
National Defense University a volume titled
Chinese View of Future Warfare. The report
grew out of a process that began in 1995 when the
Chinese Academy of Military Science hosted in
Beijing a delegation of the Atlantic Council of
the US, with extensive reprint of papers by high
Chinese military officers and analysts. It shows
that the views of Marshall are highly influential
within Chinese military planning circles. It is a
vivid example of militarism in one government
stimulating counter militarism in other
governments.
Throughout the 1980s, the US
Central Intelligence Agency purchased arms from
China for the mujahideen in their war against the
Soviet Union. The USSR-Afghan war was the
beginning of US-China military cooperation, a
policy advocated by US right-wing Republican
senators Orrin Hatch and Gordon Humphrey and
defense secretary Caspar Weinberger, and carried
out by State Department intelligence head Morton
Abramovitz and the Pentagon's Pillsbury. The
Afghan mujahideen freedom fighters later evolved
into the Taliban, who harbored Osama bin Laden,
the hunt for whom was the pretext of the 2001
US-Afghan war after September 11.
Professor Bacevich argues that the
greatest threat to US security is not from
terrorists but the neo-conservative belief, to
which President Bush is firmly committed, that US
security and well-being depend on US global
hegemony and the imposition of US values on the
rest of the world. This belief resonates with a
patriotic and paranoid public manipulated with the
help of the mainstream media. Persistence in these
misconceptions will lead the United States to
"share the fate of all those who in ages past have
looked to war and military power to fulfill their
destiny. We will rob future generations of their
rightful inheritance. We will wreak havoc abroad.
We will endanger our security at home. We will
risk the forfeiture of all that we prize," argues
Bacevich, who sees the problem as not how to deal
with terrorism but how to deal with the hubris,
laden with catastrophe, that the US is God's
instrument for bringing history to its
predetermined destination. Being assigned such an
exalted role creates the delusion that US virtue
is unquestionable and its use of preemptive
coercion is infallible, a delusion that led to the
"cakewalk war" that would entrench democracy in
the Middle East and have US troops home in 90 days
with "mission accomplished". War is not much more
than an adrenaline-filled college spring-break
orgy with fanatic purpose.
Paul Craig
Roberts, former assistant secretary of the
Treasury in the Reagan administration, associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page
and contributing editor of the conservative
National Review and co-author of The Tyranny of
Good Intentions, and reviewer Bacevich's
The New American Militarism, observes that
US hubris, which flows so freely from Bush's
rhetoric, explains why half the US population
seemed unconcerned over the US slaughter of Iraqi
civilians and torture of Iraqi prisoners. The
"cakewalk war" is now more than two years old and
has claimed more than 10% of the US occupation
force as casualties. Yet the delusion persists
that the US is prevailing in Iraq and that
democracy is firmly planted in the Middle East.
In Chapter 7 of Marshall's The Changing
Role of Information in Warfare, Brian
Nichiporuk wrote of Emerging Asymmetric Strategy:
"The lopsided American victory in Desert Storm
featured a clear display of the vast margin of
superiority the US Air Force holds over any
conceivable adversary. Most analysts agree
therefore that, in future wars, hostile regional
powers will use asymmetric options to counter the
US advantage in air power."
Yet asymmetric
warfare decidedly puts a superpower at a
disadvantage. The logic of asymmetric response is
based largely on its economy, which suits the
poorer adversary. It costs exponentially less to
foil a sophisticated system with virus and laser
than to build the system and its defense. This
fact is demonstrated by the exponential growth of
anti-virus software companies such as Symantec. In
fact, the higher the level of sophistication, the
greater the cost differential between attack and
defense and the penalty of failure by each. Thus
the financial advantage lies with the asymmetric
attackers. This is the basic economics of
terrorism, with an astronomical cost:effect ratio
beyond the wildest dream on defense analysts.
Asymmetric warfare accelerates the effective
neutralization of superpower prerogatives.
Nichiporuk observed that work on
asymmetric strategies has revealed three types of
enemy options the US needs to be concerned about:
1) increasing hostile capabilities in selected
niche areas; 2) enemy strategies that target key
US vulnerabilities that are difficult or costly to
protect, and 3) creation of domestic and
international political constraints that hinder US
force deployments flexibilities.
The
emergence of enemy homeland sanctuary in wartime
protected by nuclear deterrence would have serious
implications for US Air Force planners and
operators. Specifically, the enemy's leadership,
command and control structure, and internal
security networks could all become off-limit
targets for fear of touching off a wider nuclear
war. This is why tacit cooperation from all
nuclear powers to refuse nuclear protection to
targeted non-nuclear nations is needed by the US
before hostile action can be launched anywhere.
Despite the dissolution of the USSR, Russian
nuclear protection remains the key reason the US
does not attack Cuba. Diplomatic concession by the
United States to other nuclear powers, both allies
and non-allies, is the price the US pays for such
tacit cooperation. That is the strongest argument
against US unilateralism. This special treatment
of nuclear powers gives irresistible incentive for
non-nuclear nations to go nuclear, not for
self-defense, but to gain diplomatic respect and
attendant concessions from the hegemonic
superpower. Nuclear proliferation will continue
unless the US begins to stop treating non-nuclear
nations as second-class nations in a nuclear age
and pledges a guarantee that non-nuclear nations
will be not be subject to attack by conventional
forces by nuclear nations. This is in fact what
North Korea demands and the US rejects as
preconditions for abandoning the former's nuclear
capability. Until and unless the US adopts the
doctrine of no first use, non-proliferation will
fail.
Supply and communications for enemy
ground forces could not be disrupted and the
enemy's industrial war-making capacity (including
electric-power generation and telecommunications
capacity) would in essence be off limits to the
orthodox offensive use of air power if the enemy
were under a nuclear umbrella. This limitation was
clearly demonstrated in the Korean War, where the
US had the capacity to attack Chinese air and
ground bases inside the Chinese border but was
prevented from doing so by the Soviet nuclear
umbrella.
The US is in a position to deny
the enemy a homeland airspace sanctuary if the US
leadership itself is protected from risk of
attack. Under such circumstances, the US could
deal with enemy possession of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) in more direct ways of
preemption other than offensive information
warfare. The United States could, as it did in
Iraq, threaten massive nuclear retaliation for any
nuclear power protecting any adversary use of WMD
by a non-nuclear nation and then proceed to carry
out a massive conventional air campaign against
the non-nuclear enemy homeland under the
assumption that the threat of escalating dominance
by the superior US nuclear arsenal cancels out the
enemy's sub-par nuclear capability or that of its
nuclear protector. Another option would be to
mount a conventional counterforce campaign aimed
at destroying the enemy's WMD before they could be
employed and before nuclear deterrence could be
put in play, as Israel did with the Iraqi Osirak
reactor in June 1981, albeit that the Orirak
reactor was considered by experts not to be a
weapon-producing facility. A third option is to
protect the US homeland with a strategic defense
initiative (SDI).
A US president could
well select any of these approaches in dealing
with nations without the protection of a nuclear
umbrella. However, if the US leadership is highly
risk-averse from non-nuclear terrorism or any
other form of asymmetric non-nuclear warfare in a
future major theater war (MTW), it would force the
US Air Force to plan to deal with scenarios in
which much of an enemy's homeland is off limits to
sustained aerial attack even without nuclear
protection. Thus, according of Marshall and his
colleagues, homeland security is not a just
defensive strategy, but a platform from which to
launch offensive wars in an era of asymmetric
warfare.
The new American militarism
is nursed by militant evangelical Christianity.
Christian doctrine of love and peace has always
been accompanied by the theme of "Onward Christian
Soldiers", as evidenced by the Crusades and
numerous expeditionary campaigns in the colonial
world to protect or avenge attacks on Christian
missionaries. Professor Bacevich, along with
others analysts with similar views, explains that
evangelicals, aghast at Vietnam-era protests of
the US war against "godless communism", turned to
the military as the repository of traditional US
Christian virtues. Of course, the images of
Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire to
protest government-sponsored persecution from
Catholics in Vietnam generally failed to disturb
US Christian evangelicals, nor the centuries of
anti-Semitic programs in Christian nations. For
Christian evangelicals, end-times doctrines join
US national security with eschatology, the belief
in the end of the world coinciding with the second
coming of Christ. Biblical prophecies clearly
merge US fate with Israel. Unlike Islam, Judaism
is not evangelical. In fact, it is
self-restricting in its exacting exclusivity.
Anti-Semitism is more secular than religious.
Islam on the other hand is a fanatic and
expansionist infidel sect in the Judeo-Christian
world view. Islam inherited the role of godless
communism as the post-Cold War target of a
Christian holy war against satanic evil. The US
emerges with the "same immensely elastic
permission to use force previously accorded to
Israel". Traditional isolationism was pushed aside
by the events of September 11, which served the
role of a new surprise attack at Pearl Harbor in
justifying a holy war. What US evangelicals
overlook is that the end of the world may bring
the second coming of Christ, but the price may be
the end of the United States as a nation. By that
standard, US evangelism is conceptually
anti-patriotic. In World War I, the European
monarchies lost their thrones in a war to defend
their empires, and in World War II, the
"democratic" imperialists lost their colonies in a
war of intra-imperialist rivalry to gain more
colonies. The next world war, launched by
superpower neo-imperialism to spread bogus
universal democracy, will have similar
self-destructive ironic outcomes. Democracy with
local characteristics, based on universal
equality, will rid the world of neo-imperialism
and superpower hegemony.
Rejection of the Peace of
Westphalia by NATO
The
Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War, a
secular war with religious dimensions. Subsequent
wars were not about spiritual issues of religion,
but rather revolved around secular issues of
state. The "war on terrorism" today is the first
religious war in almost four centuries, also
fought mainly by secular institutions with
religious affiliations. The peace that eventually
follows today's "war on terrorism" will also end
the war between faith-based Christian evangelicals
and Islamic fundamentalists. Westphalia allowed
Catholic and Protestant powers to become allies,
leading to a number of major secular geopolitical
realignments. The "war on terrorism" will also
produce major geopolitical realignments in world
international politics, although it is too early
to discern its final shape. Westphalia laid rest
to the idea of the Holy Roman Empire having
secular dominion over the entire Christian world.
The nation-state henceforth would be the highest
polity, subservient to no supranational authority.
Both the League of Nations
and the United Nations were international
institutions based on the concept of sovereign
states. They enjoyed no supranational authority.
The only creeping supranational trend comes from
institutions such as the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), the Bank of International Settlement
(BIS), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the
World Health Organization (WHO) etc, through
neo-liberal globalization after the Cold War. This
trend is fueled by US ideological assertion that
capitalist free markets, inseparable from Western
capitalistic democracy, are the sole venue for
prosperity. Out of ignorance and cultural
prejudice, such a biased assertion rejects
socialist or tribal democracy and cooperative
community in societies with historical roots
different from those of the individualistic and
materialist West. This assertion forms the
self-righteous rationale behind US global
aggression, ironically from a self-proclaimed
modern people who irrationally cling to the
primitive myth that a man born of a virgin was the
son of God who had been killed by followers of a
rival sect only to rise from the dead before
ascending to heaven and is expected to return to
Earth at its apocalyptic end. Just as the Holy
Roman Empire, even with the allegedly one true God
on its side, brought about its own demise by
trying to impose religious universality on a
Christian world, the United States will bring
about its own demise by trying to impose its
version of universal economic-political laws on
the modern world. Cultural relativity and
diversity is not suppressible even in a shrinking
world of universal standards.
After the Peace of
Westphalia, the concept of balance of power among
sovereign states governed the shape of world order
for subsequent centuries. The "war on terrorism"
today will eventually lay to rest US hegemony and
end the age of superpower, possibly through a new
balance of power by sovereign states otherwise not
particularly hostile to the United States as a
peaceful nation. It is ironically inconsistent for
the US, a culture that values individuality, to
aim to impose universal values. While everyone can
have the same weapons, he or she will use these
weapons to defend their separate individuality.
This trend of moral
imperialism is not limited to the United States.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
after the Cold War, looking for a rationale to
continue, has transformed itself from a defensive
security alliance against Soviet expansion toward
Western Europe to an offensive alliance of force
projection beyond Europe in the name of spreading
humanity and democracy.
In a
1998 Symposium on the Political Relevance of the
1648 Peace of Westphalia, then NATO secretary
general Javier Solana, a Spanish socialist, said
that "humanity and democracy [were] two principles
essentially irrelevant to the original Westphalian
order" and criticized that "the Westphalian system
had its limits. For one, the principle of
sovereignty it relied on also produced the basis
for rivalry, not community of states; exclusion,
not integration." Within days of Solana taking up
his NATO post on November 30, 1995, the NATO-led,
multinational Implementation Force (IFOR) was
deployed in Bosnia-Herzegovina to enforce military
aspects of the Dayton peace agreements. A year
later, in December 1996, IFOR was replaced by the
Stabilization Force (SFOR) in Bosnia. Solana
himself visited Sarajevo and other localities in
Bosnia many times, paying calls on NATO and
non-NATO forces there.
Solana's appointment as NATO
secretary general in 1995, a post he held until
1999, was a surprise to many, including 52 US
congressmen who telegraphed a protest because of
his alleged Marxist views and open sympathies for
Fidel Castro. Solana had once been on the United
States' subversive list. He was one of Spain's
most vocal and most prominent opponents of NATO
and had once written a pamphlet, "50 Reasons to
say NO to NATO". Scratch a Marxist, you will often
find a Trotskyite under the skin who despises
cultural relativism and professes firm commitment
to universality. The neo-cons in US politics are
Trotskyite rightists while the social democrats in
European politics are Trotskyite leftists.
The
NATO secretary general normally has a ministerial
role, passing on instructions from member-nation
consensus to the organization's military
components. NATO was not conceived as a
supranational organization. Charles de Gaulle took
France out of the NATO military command in 1967 to
pursue France's own nuclear defense program and
expelled all foreign-controlled troops from the
country, which rejoined in 1992. During his
1995-99 NATO tenure, Solana was given sole unusual
powers to make military decisions over Yugoslavia
and the order to commence bombing against Yugoslav
targets was subsequently given solely by Solana.
He is part of the so-called Third Way Movement
whose members include Bill Clinton of the United
States, Tony Blair of the United Kingdom, Romano
Prodi of Italy and Gerhard Schroeder of Germany.
In 2001, German Foreign
Minister Joschka Fischer, whose radical past was
well known with political trouble from allegations
that he had once harbored a key member of the
extremist Red Army Faction terrorist group,
referred to the Peace of Westphalia as obsolete in
his Humboldt Speech: "The core of the concept of
Europe after 1945 was and still is a rejection of
the European balance-of-power principle and the
hegemonic ambitions of individual states that had
emerged following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648,
a rejection which took the form of closer meshing
of vital interests and the transfer of
nation-state sovereign rights to supranational
European institutions." Fischer supported German
participation in the Kosovo war by NATO, which did
not have the backing of the United Nations, with
the justification of "international humanitarian
emergency".
Rumsfeld's disparaging
reference to the European Union as "Old Europe"
was not off the mark, albeit for the wrong
reasons, based on his displeasure with French and
German opposition to the second Iraq war. NATO
wanted to revert back four centuries to
pre-Westphalia world disorder. In many ways, the
Kosovo war was the opening shot of a new Thirty
Years' War.
NATO's bombing campaign
lasted from March 24 to June 10, 1999, involving
up to 1,000 aircraft operating mainly from bases
in Italy and US aircraft carriers stationed in the
Adriatic Sea. Tomahawk cruise missiles were also
extensively used, fired from aircraft, ships and
submarines located hundreds of miles from their
targets. The US was, inevitably, the dominant
member of the NATO coalition against Serbia,
although all of the NATO members were involved to
some degree. Over the 10 weeks of the conflict,
NATO aircraft flew more than 38,000 combat
missions, setting a world record.
A
less official reason for the war was given by then
US secretary of state Madeleine Albright when she
said, "What's the use of having the world's best
military when you don't get to use them?" - a
remark that allegedly caused the US Army Chief of
Staff to question her sanity. The lady summed up
the weapon-stockpile imperative argument for war.
It was been suggested that a small victorious war
would help NATO find a new role.
There was, however, criticism
from all parts of the political spectrum for the
way NATO conducted its "clean war" of precision
weapons. The US Department of Defense claimed with
pride that, up to June 2, 1999, 99.6% of the
20,000 bombs and missiles used had hit their
targets. That meant 160 bombs and missiles hit
innocent victims, not counting collateral damage
of the direct hits. Moreover, the use of
technologies such as depleted uranium and cluster
bombs was highly controversial for a humanitarian
operation, as was the bombing of oil refineries
and chemical plants, which led to accusations of
"environmental warfare". Many deformed babies were
reported born after the war, and the British
Broadcasting Corp (BBC) reported that health
experts estimated that about 100,000 cancer deaths
would result from this pollution. The Chinese
Embassy in Belgrade was "accidentally" bombed on
purpose, causing a temporary rupture in US-China
relations, despite sham apologies from the US and
NATO.
The Kosovo war violated the
NATO Charter that limited its role exclusively to
the defense of its members within their borders.
In Kosovo, NATO was used to attack a distant
non-NATO country that was not directly threatening
any NATO member. NATO countered this argument by
claiming that instability in the Balkans was a
direct threat to the security interests of NATO
members. This line of argument has now extended to
the "war on terrorism". The far left saw the NATO
campaign as an act of US aggression and
imperialism, while the far right criticized it as
being not central to the country's
national-security interests. The liberal left and
the neo-cons were strange bedfellows in their
quest to spread freedom around the world. The term
"moral imperialism" came into general use in
policy debates over Kosovo.
Poland, Hungary and the Czech
Republic, former Warsaw Pact members, made history
by becoming NATO members on March 2, 1999.
Slovenia, Slovakia, the former Warsaw Pact
countries of Bulgaria and Romania, and the former
Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
officially acceded to NATO on March 29, 2004.
On
September 12, 2001, NATO invoked, for the first
time in its history, the collective-security
clause of its charter, Article 5, which states
that any attack on a member state is considered an
attack against the entire alliance, in response to
the September 11 attacks on the US.
On
February 10, 2003, NATO faced a crisis when France
and Belgium vetoed the procedure of silent
approval concerning the timing of protective
measures for Turkey in case of a possible war in
Iraq. Germany did not use its right to break the
procedure but said it supported the veto.
On
April 16, 2003, NATO agreed to take command that
August of the International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. The decision came at
the request of Germany and the Netherlands, the
two nations leading ISAF at the time of the
agreement. All 19 NATO ambassadors approved it
unanimously. The handover of control to NATO took
place on August 11, and marked the first time in
NATO's history that it had taken charge of a
mission outside the North Atlantic area.
On
June 19, 2003, a major restructuring of the NATO
military commands began as the Headquarters of the
Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic, was abolished
and a new command, Allied Command Transformation,
was established in Norfolk, Virginia. On March 29,
2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia join NATO. Many
argue that NATO is in conflict with the prospects
of deeper European integration in the fields of
foreign policy and security within the framework
of EU institutions. Advocates for a strong EU
Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) would
like to see NATO dismantled and would create
common defense and foreign policy within the
existing EU institutions. After the re-election of
President George W Bush in 2004, Norway publicly
questioned whether it would gain by strengthening
her defense relations with the EU, reflecting a
spreading attitude that NATO is a politically dead
organization.
Peace
of Westphalia rejected by Islamic
regionalism
Islamic
regionalism and pan-Arabism hold the view that the
international system that has splintered Islam and
the Arab nation into a large number of separate
states will collapse. This system had been
constructed by Western imperialism under the
sovereign-state principle of the Peace of
Westphalia. A new world order will rise with all
Islam under the leadership of a mighty Islamic
confederation and a unified Arabic nation.
Neo-liberal globalization is bringing about an
evolution of the international system that
threatens the principle of sovereign states that
has been enshrined by the Peace of Westphalia and
coopted by US neo-imperialism. This globalization
also provides the opening for global Islamic unity
and Arab nation-building.
Within the balance-of-power
framework, failed and failing states created by
collapsing imperialism are too destabilizing for
the hegemonic superpower to tolerate. Since
self-determination had been denied to
nationalities separated into colonies of Western
imperialist powers as a result of balance of
power, the post-colonial era's newly independent
sovereign states inherited territorial
arrangements that were convenient to the need to
maintain a stable postwar balance of power system
for the benefit of the victorious great powers. At
the Congress of Vienna in 1815, France was
punished for the Napoleonic Wars, but was
maintained as a major player in the ensuing
concert of Europe. Indeed, the practical
settlements in Vienna all attempted to create as
stable a balance of power as possible among the
European states. The German Confederation was
established and Sweden took charge or Norway.
After World War I, Imperial Germany fell not from
defeat in war, but from internal revolution. After
World War II, both West Germany and Japan were
made into key allies in the Cold War against the
spread of communism.
Klepto-imperialism is another
cause of failed states. Germany and Japan are
examples of klepto-imperialist victimization in
that their new constitutions were imposed on them
by the foreign victors in war to mimic the
victor's own neo-imperialist character. These new
constitutions fundamentally limit the sovereign
authority of the two defeated nations by limiting
the state structure to that envisaged by the
victors as desirable, denying the popular will
until it could be molded into desirable shape
under the label of "de-Nazification" in Germany
and "demilitarization" in Japan or
"nation-building" in weaker states in the Third
World.
Germany was artificially
divided into two failed states of opposing
ideologies, both imposed from the outside. Both
Germany and Japan still are unable to forge fully
independent foreign policies, rid their soil of
foreign troops, or free their politics from alien
ideologies imposed by the victors even six decades
after their separate unconditional surrenders.
This is the geopolitical aim of the US "war on
terrorism" - the spread of political institutions
deemed desirable by the hegemonic superpower into
sovereign states around the world. It is the
ultimate Clausewitzian view of war: to deprive of
the enemy not only the ability, but the will to
resist, in the complete sense of the term
"hegemony". Support from these two subservient
states for US policy was Pavlovian until the
second Iraq war.
Militarism and the doctrine
of balance of power
The doctrine of balance of
power among sovereign states is rooted in
militarism, for it is through military force or
the threat of force that the balance is
maintained. It has several aspects, all of which
are based on a common objective of anti-hegemony.
One is political equilibrium in which power is
distributed among many independent sovereign
states so that none can be a hegemon. A second
aspect is the natural tendency of weaker states to
unite against a rising dominant power to prevent
it from becoming a hegemon, or to demolish an
existing hegemony. A third aspect denotes the
status of a state whose membership in a coalition
is necessary, such status being recognized as
holding the balance of power between competing
coalitions.
The aim of statesmen in the
17th and 18th centuries was generally to preserve
their own maximum independence and utmost
flexibility of action in a fluid world. Hence the
basic rule was to ally against the dominant state,
regardless of common language, culture, values or
economic interests. A world order created by
balance of power was one where states threw their
weights toward where it was most needed, so that
its own importance was enhanced. The purpose of
balance of power was not to enhance peace or
prosperity, but to preserve sovereignty and
independence of states, as the term "liberties of
Europe" was generally understood. War was often
necessary to maintain or achieve a balance of
power. The doctrine was in essence anti-hegemonic
and imperialist rivalry.
As
the ambition of Louis XIV grew bolder, and as the
capacity of Spain to resist withered away, the
balance of power to oppose the Sun King was
engineered by the Dutch. William II, prince of
Orange, who in his late years would be king of
England and Scotland as well, became France's
tireless enemy. In 1609, the Dutch founded the
Bank of Amsterdam, the first modern national bank.
European money was in a state of chaos - coins
were being minted not only by great sovereigns,
but also by minor states and principalities in
Germany and city-states in Italy and by private
banks and persons. Under continuous inflationary
pressures, money issuers habitually debased their
money with cheap alloys. Money in all forms
represented uncertain and fluctuating value. The
Bank of Amsterdam provided a needed service by
accepting all forms of money from all holders,
accessed their true content value and allowed
depositors to withdraw equivalent value in gold
florins minted by it at exchange rates fixed by
it. By providing such monetary order, Amsterdam
became the center of world finance. Under their
republican government, the Dutch enjoyed
unprecedented freedom, but the Dutch nation was
not a modern state. The Prince of Orange was
simply first among equals of many noblemen in the
country. As finance became a national industry,
the aristocracy was being outdistanced by the
rising bourgeoisie and public affairs were
generally managed by the burghers fixated on
making money and lowering taxes, rather than
preserving feudal traditions. Private, civilian
and decentralizing tendencies prevailed to keep a
strong state from emerging except in times of
imminent foreign threat. It was the original
prototype of modern neo-liberalism.
In
1661, the revolutionary government of England
re-enacted the Navigation Act, first passed in
1651 but lapsed into invalidity during the
Restoration, upon which a series of follow-up
measures were introduced that formed the
foundation of the British colonial empire. The
act, the first anti-trade-liberalization measure
in modern history, was aimed at destroying Dutch
carrying trade. It stipulated that all goods
imported into England and its dependencies must be
brought in English ships or in ships belonging to
the goods' country of origin. In the Act of 1663,
the importation principle required that all
foreign goods be ship to the American colonies
through English ports. In return for restrictions
on manufacturing and regulation of trade, colonial
commodities were often given a monopoly of the
English market and preferential tariff treatment.
The American colonies benefited when tobacco
cultivation was made illegal within England; and
British West Indian planters were aided by high
duties on French sugar. These trade restrictions
were a focus of popular agitation that preceded
the American Revolution and laid the foundation
for the north-south conflict that led to the
American Civil War.
Since the Dutch were too
small a nation to be producers or origin
exporters, they had to trade by carrying the goods
of others. Three indecisive wars over free trade
erupted between the two nations from 1652 to 1674
in which the British annexed New York. On land,
the Dutch were threatened by France, which in 1667
claimed the Spanish Netherlands and Franche-Comte.
To save their own lot, the Dutch aristocrats
granted the 22-year-old William III centralized
sovereign power, restricted feudal liberties and
constitutional checks, to move in the direction of
absolute monarchy by abandoning liberalism.
The
Westphalia world order of sovereign nation states
that survives to the present is based on the
concept of inviolable sovereignty. One of its key
functions had been to resist free international
trade that threatened national economies. Britain
was against free international trade until the
Industrial Revolution propelled it to the status
of world power and empire builder. The US went
through a similar transformation, from a policy of
Hamiltonian economic nationalism to a policy of
neo-liberalism as the two world wars propelled the
US to the status of superpower. The theory of
comparative advantage in free trade does not
contain an equalization element. In his National System of Political
Economy (1841), Friedrich List asserts that
political economy as espoused in England, far from
being a valid science universally, was merely
British national opinion, suited only to English
historical conditions. List's institutional school
of economics asserted that the doctrine of free
trade was devised to keep England rich and
powerful at the expense of its trading partners
and it must be fought with protective tariffs and
other protective devices of economic nationalism
by the weaker countries. Henry Clay's "American
system" was a national system of political
economy.
As List pointed out, once a
nation falls behind in economic competitiveness,
free trade only exacerbates the resultant wealth
gap. The causes of wealth are something totally
different from wealth itself. A person may possess
wealth, ie exchangeable value; if, however, he
does not possess the power of producing objects of
more value than he consumes, he will become
poorer. A person may be poor; if he, however,
possesses the power of producing a larger amount
of valuable articles than he consumes, he becomes
rich. The power of producing wealth is therefore
infinitely more important than wealth itself; it
ensures not only the possession and the increase
of what has been gained, but also the replacement
of what has been lost. Under "dollar hegemony", a
term describing the status of the dollar, a fiat
currency, as the major reserve currency for
international trade, free trade produces absolute
advantage for the dollar economy, not comparative
advantage for all trading economies. One should
not be misled by the dollar-denominated trade
deficit the US runs with the rest of the world,
particularly Asia, for dollar hegemony has become
the most effective power of producing wealth for
the United States, despite dislocations in
selected sectors of the US economy. These
dislocations, in the form of unemployment in
sunset industries, actually strengthen the US
economy structurally in the long run in a
globalized economy. When US Federal Reserve
Chairman Alan Greenspan warns about the adverse
effect of the deficit on the US economy, he is
talking exclusively of the government budget
deficit, not the trade deficit.
Within a world order of
sovereign states, for one state to attack another
with legitimacy, the target state needs to be
deemed as having failed as a political
institution. Failed states are defined as those
that can no longer perform basic governance
functions such as providing security, livelihood,
public health and education, usually due to
fractious violence or extreme poverty. Within this
power vacuum, common citizens fall victim to
warring factions and runaway crime. Sometimes, an
international institution such as the United
Nations, or a coalition of neighboring states,
intervenes to prevent a humanitarian disaster that
would spill across borders. However, states fail
not only because of internal factors. Foreign
powers frequently purposely undermine a minor
state by fueling ethnic warfare or supporting
rebel forces, or destabilizing its economy, or
assassinating its leaders, causing it to collapse.
Humanitarian intervention often rings hollow when
starvation is frequently caused by superpower
sanctions or embargoes brought on by geopolitical
motivation. Economic sanctions, generally
recognized as acts of war, caused the death of an
estimated 2 million Iraqi civilians, mostly women
and children, between the two Iraq wars, which
Madeleine Albright, as US secretary of state,
declared publicly on television as being "worth
it".
The general attributes of
failed states are that they are small,
underdeveloped and poor and helpless to stop
foreign interference in their internal affairs.
Yet a case can be made that large states with
advanced social infrastructure and developed
economy can also qualify as failed states, by
virtue of ideologically driven trends to disable
basic state functions.
Next: Sovereignty,
democracy and militarism
Henry C K Liu is chairman
of the New York-based Liu Investment Group.
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