BOOK REVIEW
Driving American foreign policy
The Endgame of Globalization by Neil Smith

Reviewed by Dmitry Shlapentokh Buy this book

The beginning of the Iraq war led to unusual frankness in describing the goals and methods of American foreign policy. It was stated that Americans might well disregard international law and preach Hobbesian "realpolitik", in which right is defined by strength.

Some of the articles published just before or during the war could well have been published in Nazi propaganda publications. The difference is that these Iraq war articles stated that, while force should be applied in foreign policy, democracy should be preserved at home.

There was also unbounded optimism that, facing American military might, the enemy's resistance would soon crumble. But



the war is going badly and this has started to change, as an increasing number of publications provide a variety of explanations for why things went wrong.

Jimmy Carter's former national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, representing the Democrats, blasted President Bush for an imperialistic drive - Caesarism - and for abandoning the principles that made the US great. He claimed that this prostitution of "Lady Liberty" made Bush and company reckless and got America into trouble.

European historians have followed suit, albeit au contraire Brzezinski. They are skeptical of US ability to repair the damage. Emanuel Todd, who represents this intellectual trend, wrote that America is in serious trouble and in decline as a civilization, providing more geopolitical room for Europe and Russia. Finally, the American left - which despite a still-formidable position in academia has been pushed further aside in the public mind during the two-term Bush presidency - has received a new boost. The left also provides its own explanation for the troubles. Neil Smith's The Endgame of Globalization falls into this category.

In the author's view, the US as the embodiment of capitalism is therefore the most aggressive nation. In fact, imperial drive has defined American foreign policy, and the Iraq war is a continuation of this trend. The author has discarded the notion that the war is just about oil. It is much broader. American imperial expansion is in many ways due to the desire to install the American type of capitalism all over the world.

In a way, the author has taken the official Bush explanation of the war at face value. He also apparently believes that "neo-conservatives" are driving the war with their agenda of transforming the world according to the American model. In the author's view, the neo-conservative American elite believe they are spreading democracy.

But the effect is to create a totalitarian, fascist-type regime. This is exemplified by using the word lebensraum (living space), used by the Nazis in their imperial drive, to characterize American foreign policy. The author uses the American problems in Iraq and Afghanistan to argue that the American elite might try to impose their domination all over the globe, but would definitely fail to impose an actual neo-fascist regime.

One could of course challenge the author's argument. It is true that America has been imperialistic. But what country has not? All great and not-so-great powers have engaged in imperial aggrandizement at some point in their history. And clearly "Uncle Joe" (Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin) was not just in a defensive position at the beginning of the Cold War.

But the major problem with the book is the implicit connection of present-day American society with the Nazi regime. The idea that the US today has many similarities with Nazi Germany and Bush with Hitler is certainly not novel. It has circulated widely all over the world since the beginning of the Iraq war. Interestingly enough, the idea has been popular in Germany, where it is asserted that the evil of Nazism, from which Germany extricated itself, has now passed to the Americans.

The Soviet analogy has also been evoked, comparing the life of prisoners at US Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in Cuba with that of inmates in the Soviet Gulag concentration camps. After the pivotal work of author and gulag inmate, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the very name gulag became synonymous in the West with extermination of people, not by gas but by malnutrition and exhausting work.

It is not surprising that this accusation by the left and liberal wings has outraged the conservatives. In a public discussion on the conditions of the inmates in Guantanamo, one such conservative actually jumped from his chair when the comparison was made with Stalin's Gulag. He pontificated for half an hour, discussing the nutritious quality of inmates' food versus the meager diet of Soviet Gulag inmates.

The analogy between Bush's US and Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany does not fly, but not because most inmates in American prisons eat better than the captive workers of Siberian camps or the prisoners of Auschwitz.

The reason is much deeper. Stalin and even Hitler had rather sound views on war compared to those of the current US administration, which might be more successful if it followed the Nazi line. This reviewer is sure the author would recoil in disgust at the idea that a change along national-socialist lines would make the US more successful in the hard work of empire-building and survival in a world where it is losing its economic edge.

But one should remember that Hitler's policy was not just gas chambers and millions of slaves, but also a variety of sound social-economic arrangements that made it possible to fight, and almost win, a war against the majority of the world's population.

Hitler, while not discarding private property, understood that a long, global armed conflict could not be carried out on the basis of privatization, social/economic deregulation and mercenary armies, with the assumption that casualties would be low. Strict government control went along with a strong safety net, and the wounded soldiers from the Waffen SS in World War II did not need to engage in long litigation with the Reich to get decent medical service, housing and food. Their trust that the state would never abandon them contributed greatly to their fighting spirit. And, of course, there is no doubt that Hitler's kind of bureaucracy would work much better in dealing with natural disasters such as Katrina.

There is no way that Bush or any democratic president could change US social/economic arrangements in radical ways. Thus, "fascistizing" America, transforming it into a militaristic empire poised for global conquest, is out of the question.

But this does not mean that American rivals should be cheered up. The point is that the conflict between what the American elite and the public want and what they can do might well lead to increasing irrationality in the elite's behavior, as is reflected in recent changes in military doctrine, which now authorizes preventive nuclear strikes.

The Endgame of Globalization by Neil Smith. New York: Routledge, 2005. ISBN : 0415950120. Price $17, 218 pages.

Dmitry Shlapentokh, PhD, is associate professor of history, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Indiana University South Bend.

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