DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The revenge of the political
man By Leon Hadar
I am
a member of a book club in Washington that each
month invites authors to discuss their new works
on global affairs topics. It is not surprising
that in the past two years, most of the books that
we have been arguing about dealt with terrorism,
Iraq and the Middle East, with each gathering
attracting an audience of more than 100 members of
our group and igniting lively debate.
But
when our most recent invited speaker was the
author of a new and provocative book on US trade
policy towards China, no more
than
10 members showed up, despite the fact that the
event took place on a warm spring evening in the
US capital, not to mention the free food that was
served or even the free parking that was
available.
"Now if only this book had been
published 10 years ago," I thought to myself,
recalling the roaring globalization years of the
presidency of Bill Clinton (or was it Bill
Gates?), when the US geo-economic policy in East
Asia - and not US geostrategic policy in the
Middle East - was all the rage in Washington, when
the Pacific Rim was "in" and the Persian Gulf was
"out", when "global crises" were associated with
financial meltdowns in Southeast Asia and not with
suicide bombings in Southwest Asia, when the Top
Dog in the US administration was the secretary of
the treasury (Robert Rubin) and not the Pentagon
chief (Donald Rumsfeld).
A time when
Washington's policy analysts were flaunting their
fluency in Chinese and not in Arabic while
bragging about their expertise in the workings of
the emerging markets instead of in the methods of
terrorist groups, and when, indeed, books about
China and trade and not about Iran and national
security were topping the non-fiction sections of
the best-seller lists of the book reviews of The
New York Times and The Washington Post.
Those were the days, my friend. We were
all about to be downloaded into The Borderless
World (the title of a popular book by business
analyst Kenichi Ohmae) in which the archaic
nation-state had vanished into thin air (as
military historian Martin van Creveld predicted in
The Rise and Decline of the State), or at
least was being transformed into The Rise of
the Trading State (as political economist
Richard Rosecrance put it.
Joseph Nye's
Soft Power of Microsoft, MTV and CNN were
replacing the Hard Power of ICBMs, SLBMs and MIRVs
as the main currency of influence in world
politics, and the global Tribes, (Jews,
Arabs, Hindus, Chinese), as futurist Joel Kotkin
proposed in a book by that name, would cease
fighting each other over holy temples and olive
trees and emerge in our new and brave world as the
prime agents of global commerce, competing over
market shares and investment flows, as the Oracle
from Davos, Tom Friedman and his McDonalds Law
("no two countries that had McDonalds had gone to
war with each other"), had forecasted.
Indeed, during the height of the
globalization age, many leading Zeitgeist watchers
were moving beyond bold economic predictions (no
more business cycles; Dow 30,000; we'll retire in
our 20s) and proposed that a new civilization was
being born out of the increasing flow of money,
products, ideas, and, most important, people,
across the borders of decaying nation-states.
When a company was owned by Japanese,
managed by Americans and operated by Indians, Who
is Us? (the title of an article penned by
Clinton's labor secretary Robert Reich) as opposed
to "Them", these pundits were asking (It's the
added value, stupid!).
Others were
celebrating the rise of the New Cosmopolitans, or
"global hybrids" with "transnational identities,"
(terms coined by journalist Pascal Zachary in
The Global Me: The New Cosmopolitan Age)
with roots in more than one nation and with wings
to fly anywhere and any time, who would be the
winners in a universe where new determinants for
business, political and cultural success would be
national diversity and a "mongrel" sense of self.
Pass that Cuban-Chinese falafel, please.
And then there was the Internet and I was
a journalist ... oops ... sorry ... a "Content
Provider" (as my business card at that time
stipulated) who was confronting a personal
professional dilemma. My academic training was in
international politics, Soviet-American relations
and the Middle East, and there I was in 1992
trying to make a post-Cold War living, three years
after the Berlin Wall had collapsed.
It
was a time when the Middle East started to feel
like old news, when Desert Storm was gradually
turning into a distant memory and peace seemed to
be dawning over the Holy Land in the "New" Middle
East, where "Friedmanism" (Tom not Milton) was
assuring us that, Hey, Man, you know, those young
and extra-cool Israelis and Palestinians just want
to, like, surf the net, watch MTV and make a lot
of bucks. Even Yasser Arafat has a website. Don't
you get it? Duh?
So like Friedman, who at
that time was remaking himself as a globalization
prophet and Asia Watcher, I "got it". Diversifying
my journalistic portfolio I started covering East
Asian "stuff" and to write about trade, investment
and technology, so when a producer from Canadian
television phoned me to ask if "can you do
Indonesia"? on one of their news shows, I was glad
to oblige: "But, of course. What do you think?
That I do Iraq?"
And a few days before
leaving for the historic five-day 1993 conference
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)forum in
Seattle I had a chance encounter with an old
colleague, an unemployed and frustrated "terrorism
expert" who was "temping" for an ad agency. "I'm
going to the APEC meeting in Washington," I told
him. "I didn't know that the AIPAC is meeting this
month," he responded, confusing APEC, the fledging
Pacific trade group, meeting in the Pacific
Northwest state of Washington, with AIPAC, the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee, that is,
the pro-Israeli lobbying organization in
Washington.
"You lucky bastard," he
responded, telling me that by the way, he was
having trouble getting editors interested in his
idea for an article: What was happening to the
veterans of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan?
But I was on my way to Seattle and
couldn't care less about retired mujahideen
fighters. During the APEC conference, I was told
by US officials that America's ties with the
economies of the Pacific Rim were superseding its
ties with those of the Atlantic, and that the
future was in Asia where the "dominoes" the Cold
War were becoming the economic "dynamos" of the
post-Cold War era ("emerging markets" would come
only later), and who knows, perhaps one day APEC
would be considered more significant than NATO.
And by the way, we Americans were really
oriented more toward the Pacific (which in the new
narrative included Mexico and Chile, members of
APEC, as well as the rest of Latin America). I
cannot remember how many times I had heard
American spin doctors recycle these and other
cliches during the 1994 meeting in Seattle: "Have
you noticed that most of the new immigrants were
Latinos and Asians and that California's most
important trade relationship is with the Pacific?"
And apropos California, the Pacific
Northwest and Seattle, no need to dwell too much
here about what was going at that time in the
Silicon Valley, Intel and Microsoft. When Michael
Kinsley, one of the most celebrated pundits in
Washington (DC) announced at around that time that
he was relocating to the other Seattle
(Washington), to "do content" for Bill Gates'
company and launch Microsoft's news outlet, a
"webzine" called "Slate", one could detect a sense
of collective depression among the members of the
political and media classes in the nation's
capital: Are we becoming extinct?
Was
power shifting from the old Political Man in the
Washington-Boston corridor to the new Economic Man
residing in the booming high-tech linking San
Francisco, San Jose and Seattle? Will the 21st
century belong to the guys in the other coast,
doing those things we couldn't really understand
and getting paid a lot for that (that we
understood)?
Reflecting that
fin-de-siecle mood in my city on the
Potomac, I authored a commentary for one of my
media clients titled, "The two Bills [Clinton and
Gates] and their Two Washingtons: Who is Winning?"
in which I concluded - no surprise here - that
Bill Gates and his legions of young, productive,
forward-looking (fill in the rest) entrepreneurs,
geeks and "new media" in the Pacific-oriented
Seattle, Washington, was leaving behind the old,
parasitic and backward looking (fill in the rest)
crowds of politicians, lobbyists and "old media"
in the more "Atlanticist" Washington, DC. I
thought that was a clever piece.
This is
the point in a commentary in which you could be
humming, John Lennon's "Imagine there's no
countries, It isn't hard to do, Nothing to kill or
die for, And no religion too, Imagine all the
people, Living life in peace ..." and I could use
these words as a sage way to the obligatory
reference to Norman Angell's 1909 work, The
Grand Illusion, in which the British pundit
argued that the integration of the economies of
European countries in terms of the flows of trade
and investment - the globalization-like process of
the 19th century - had grown to such a degree that
war between them was becoming unimaginable, or at
least futile.
He was describing another
new world in which the old Political Man with his
obsession with militarism, alliances and national
rivalries should have become obsolete, and which
the vision of the new Economic Man, reflecting the
belief in commerce as an engine of progress that
overcomes any obstacle standing in its way, should
have triumphed.
And as you as you consider
the failure of the Economic Man to reign supreme,
you may want to sing along to the tune of another
of Lennon's hits ("Nowhere Man"), "He's a real
Davos Man, Sitting in his Davos Land, Making all
his Davos plans for nobody ..." which is another
appropriate sage way to "and then came World War I
..." or in our case, "and then came September 11
..."
Well, it didn't happen all at once
when the planes struck into the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon. First, the members of the
political class in Washington had never really
waved the white flag. Most of them did not move
west, and just in case Bill Gates did not get it,
Bill Clinton's lawyers went after Microsoft -
proving once again, that "even if you don't think
about politics, politics thinks about you" (Leon
Trotsky) - forcing these guys to open a big
lobbying office in DC, which has provided new
career opportunities for the political
professionals.
At the same times, outfits
like Clyde Prestowitz Economic Strategy Institute
(ESI), advocating mercantilist policies to
"manage" the US response to globalization were
joined by many economic nationalists,
protectionists and the newest boy in town, the
China Basher, to secure the interests of the
Political Man - the heads of declining
manufacturing companies, labor unions representing
workers in the textile industry, environmental
activists, as well as all those suffering from
what former ambassador Charles Freeman described
as "enemy deprivation syndrome", hoping that the
Yellow Scare (China), the Green Peril (Islam), or
a resurgent Russia would play the role of the new
post-Cold War threat.
Intellectuals like
Samuel Huntington (The Clash of
Civilizations) or pseudo-intellectuals like
Robert Kaplan (The New Anarchy) and the
complex network of neo-conservative think tanks,
magazines and many political front organizations
provided the ideological components for policies
aimed at strengthening the power of the
presidency, embracing mercantilist strategies and
expanding the national security state in
preparation for the new geostrategic and
geo-economic wars that would once against
attention and resources to Washington, DC, and in
its center, the US president and his happy
warriors.
But the Clintonites, in the
spirit of "making the world safe for our CEOs",
ended up resisting pressures to "punish" China for
selling us cheap products and helped bring Beijing
into the World Trade Organization. In fact, the
WTO and China's entry into it, together with NAFTA
(North American Free Trade Area) and APEC coupled
with the efforts to contain the financial crises
in Mexico, Asia and Russia and permit Federal
Reserve chairman Allan Greenspan to set the pace
of US monetary and fiscal policies (resulting in
contracting budget and trade deficits and a
booming stock market) will probably be recalled as
the crowning achievements of the ambitious and
relatively successful trade liberalization and
pro-investment policies of the Clinton presidency.
And with the exception of the intervention
in the civil war in the former Yugoslavia,
president Clinton and his aides had also opposed
the constant bullying by the neo-conservatives and
their allies in Congress, the Pentagon and media
to oust Saddam Hussein, to ally the US with
Taiwan, to threaten North Korea with war, to
exploit terrorist acts as a way of launching
campaigns against evil Middle Easterners and to
drum up new and old phobias against Russia.
In a way, the Economic Man of the 1990s
has never been vanquished; he has only been tamed.
The "irrational exuberance" about the economy,
with all those forecasts about the Dow soaring to
the stratosphere and the end of the business cycle
produced also an irrational intellectual
exuberance reflected in the expectations about the
collapse of the state and the disappearance of
national, ethnic and religious rivalries.
And just as the high-tech bubble went
bursting, and the stock market became bearish, old
and new political animosities started rearing
their ugly head: two countries with McDonalds -
the United States and Serbia - had gone to war
with each other; India embraced the market economy
but that did not deter New Delhi from going
nuclear (in fact, its economic success may have
ignited its nationalist hunger for military
triumph); and the Israelis and the Palestinians
made it clear that they were willing to continue
fighting over holy temples (in Jerusalem) and
olive trees (in the West Bank) even as they
continued doing "cool stuff" online.
Contrary to "Friedmanism", striving to
trade and invest in the global economy has not
deterred one from launching costly military
campaigns. The suggestion that those who make
money do not make wars proved to be (once again) a
"grand illusion".
Indeed, one of the major
failures of the Clintonites was the unwillingness
or inability to put in place political or
geostrategic foundations so as to ensure the
long-term endurance of the globalization process.
Instead, much of what Clinton and his aides
pursued in the arena of foreign policy was
reactive and "ad-hocish" in nature and based on
the assumption that Pax Americana could be
maintained with relatively low diplomatic and
military costs: sending diplomatic fire brigades
to the Middle East to quell fighting between
Israelis and Palestinians and pretending to "do
something" to revive the "peace process" in the
Holy Land; applying a dubious strategy called
"dual containment" in order to isolate Iraq and
Iran through economic and diplomatic sanctions
(and the occasional launching of missiles against
Baghdad) while continuing to maintain a US
"over-the horizon" military presence in the
Persian Gulf; antagonizing Russia by expanding
NATO to Russia's borders and insisting that
America has the right and the obligation to
"export" democracy worldwide.
Instead,
Washington could have attempted to work together
with the existing powers (EU and Russia) and
emerging players (China and India) of the world to
create the institutional mechanisms and the policy
structure for a multipolar strategy aimed at
establishing stability and containing threats like
terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)
in the arc of instability stretching from the
Balkans through the Middle East and Central Asia
to the borders of China, including a resolution of
the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
But that
would have necessitated granting more diplomatic
influence to the Europeans, making more
concessions to the Russians, reaching compromises
with the Chinese, irritating the Taiwanese,
provoking the Israelis. At the end of the day, the
political elites in the capital of the world's
only remaining superpower were not willing to take
such steps that would have involved high domestic
political costs in terms of opposition from
powerful constituencies in Washington and would
have also diminished their status as the Masters
of the Post Cold-War Universe.
From that
perspective, both the US failure to achieve an
Israeli-Palestinian deal at Camp David and the
ensuing intifadah II followed by terrorist attacks
on New York and Washington on September 11
demonstrated that there was no such thing as a
cost-free Pax Americana. The chickens came home to
roost at the epicenter of the unipolar system, in
the Middle East, and made it possible for the
ideologues of US global hegemony to set a
nationalist and imperialist agenda that was
supposed to secure the interests of the Political
Man that was now challenged by threatening
anti-status quo players.
Nationalism and
imperialism, two political forces that are so
inimical to the values of classical liberalism,
the preferred ideology of the Economic Man, seemed
now to be the driving forces propelling American
foreign policy, helping centralize more power in
the hands of the imperial presidency and the
national security state - following a path set by
the American Civil War, the two World Wars and the
Cold War in the last century, and producing
countervailing anti-American forces around the
world, that have served as a self-fulfilling
prophecy. "Hey, they all out there hate us anyhow;
so we need to isolate, punish and bomb these guys,
and show them who the real boss here is."
Ironically, the weird creature that
neo-conservatism has given birth to - "Democratic
imperialism" - the child that Woodrow ("let's make
the world safe for democracy") Wilson and Queen
Victoria never had - the idea that America invades
and destroys other countries aka "liberation" in
order to "democratize" and "liberalize" them, only
helped to release even more destructive and
atavistic forces of nationalism, ethnicity and
religion in the broader Middle East and
threatening a new Thirty-Year-War, this time
between Sunnis and Shi'ites, which kind of makes
one nostalgic to the "Old" Middle East.
At
the same time, the US drive for hegemony here,
there and everywhere, including by choreographing
those "Color Revolutions", also helped boost
nationalist fervor in Russia, China and even in
America's "backyard", in Latin America, where
"neo-liberalism", an ideological subset promoted
in the Economic Man in the 1990s and which was
supposed to bring about a US-led hemispheric
free-trade area, was replaced by a mixture of
indigenous Indian particularism, "Fidelism" and
Fascism", fused into "Chavism".
Another
irony has been the fact that two of the policy
components of both Republican Reaganism (and for
that matter, Clintonism) championed by George W
Bush - immigration and free-trade - ended up
falling victim to the nationalist wolves being
reawakened by neo-conservatism. After all, it is a
mission impossible to try encouraging Americans to
welcome immigrants and foreign investment after
you helped to release chauvinistic sentiments and
xenophobic fears in the post-September 11 era.
So the people who brought us the Patriotic
Act and the Color-coded Threat Level System - Be
afraid, very afraid! - should not have been
surprised when a huge majority of Americans
rejected the plan that made a lot of economic
sense - the takeover of shipping operations at six
major US seaports by a state-owned business in the
United Arab Emirates, sending a clear political
message to Bush and Dr Reich: There is "Us" and
then there is "Them".
And when you are a
White House that continues to perpetuate the
political thesis that oil is a "national strategic
asset", which explains in part why we are in the
Middle East, do not be shocked if US Congress
opposes a bid by Chinese energy company China
National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) to
acquire an American energy company Unocal,
especially if you are an administration that
continues to portray the China a "competitor" as
opposed to a "partner".
Hence, against the
horrible mess in Iraq and the Middle East, the
expanding trade deficit and growing illegal
immigration, it is not surprising and not shocking
that public opinion polls are reflecting an angry
nationalist "Jacksonian" mood of the American
people - more isolationist, more protectionist,
more xenophobic. The ambitious trade agenda of the
Bush administration, including the Doha Round of
trade liberalization lies in ruins with economic
liberals hoping that pursuing bilateral free trade
agreements will ensure that the commitment for
free trade will remain alive in Washington.
But concern over the decline of the US
manufacturing sectors and the "outsourcing" of
service jobs to China and India coupled with the
ballooning deficits - resulting in part of the
rise in defense spending - is playing into the
hands of those calling for trade wars with the
Chinese, who, by the way, are helping the finance
the current-account deficit of the American
nationalist and imperial project.
So, in
the first years of the 21st century, one can
certainly empathize with the manic-depressive
mindset of the Economic Man who gets no
satisfaction as he (or she) relaxes in the
business class, reading The Economist and the
Financial Times. The leaders of the "old"
industrial sectors, including energy and defense,
are back and swinging and scratching the back of
the Political Man, whether it is Vice President
Dick Cheney in America (Halliburton) President
Vladimir Putin in Russia (Gazprom), Hugo Chavez in
Venezuela and in the Persian Gulf.
But
globalization is certainly not dead when it comes
to the amazing economic rise of China and India,
and there is some sense that post-Google, even the
Silicon Valley and Pacific Northwest is coming
back to life, although the Slate webzine has
relocated from Washington state to Washington, DC,
after being acquired by a proud member of the
"old" media, The Washington Post.
And
there are some signs that the neo-conservative
agenda is in retreat. Donald Rumsfeld it out from
the Pentagon, replaced by the realist and low-key
Robert Gates, while Treasury Secretary Henry
Paulson is trying to play the role of Robert Rubin
in the administration.
Rereading today the
rosy forecasts from the 1990s about the future of
globalization should provide us with some
perspective about the scenarios that have been
drawn by pundits who envisage the rise of a global
American empire in which the United States,
exploiting its unequaled military power, will make
the world safe for its interests and ideals.
In a way, talk about the American empire
in the first decade of the 21st century is
probably going to sound a lot like the chatter
about globalization we were hearing in the last
decade of the 20th century, an intellectual fad
produced by pundits searching for catchy phrases
and colorful metaphors to explain complex reality
and born out of another "irrational exuberance".
If the 1990s were the "thesis" promoted by
the Economic Man, and the first years of this
decade were the "anti-thesis" advanced by the
Political Man, perhaps the next US president will
help draw the outlines of a new "synthesis".
Leon Hadar, a Washington-based
journalist and foreign-affairs analyst, is a
research fellow with the Cato Institute and author
of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle
East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). He blogs at
Global Paradigms.
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