Asia Times Online


	June 4, 2002	atimes.com

Front

COMMENTARY
The power of the word
By Ehsan Ahrari

When former president Ronald Reagan coined those now famous phrases "the evil empire" and the "focus of evil" to describe the former Soviet Union, the global balance of power was more or less even, with a slight qualitative edge in favor of the United States in military affairs.

But there is something about those phrases that is hard to forget. Perhaps because the Soviet Union did not exist very long after the phrases were uttered; or perhaps there is something in the phrasemaking of a powerful nation that may sound silly when those phrases are first uttered, but they tend to become important in the relationships between the powerful and the weak. Those phenomena have occurred during as well as after the Cold War.

The next phrase that sticks in memory is "new world order", coined by George H W Bush in 1991, soon after the Cold War ended. It underscored the quest for a new focus for American foreign policy, rather than a reflection of the then extant global realities. But if that phrase was coined to describe a new framework for America¹s foreign policy for the post-Cold War era, it failed miserably.

What emerged after the Cold War might have been "new", but there was nothing orderly about that. In fact, the United States was to find out soon enough that compared to the Cold War era, the post-Cold War period was in a state of flux, messy and disorderly. Thus, no new focus of US foreign policy could have been developed then. No other enemy of the same magnitude or significance replaced the one giant-sized enemy of the Cold War years, the Soviet Union. In the post-Cold War years, there have been too many regional conflicts that are about ethno-nationalism; narco-terrorism; ethnic cleansing; the chaos associated with "failing" and "failed states"; uncertainties related to globalization - a phrase that is as imprecise as the trends that accompany it.

Pundits of global affairs wrongly argued that the notion of national sovereignty was passe. We were told that transnational forces such as transnational trade and financial transactions, speculative investing, junk bonds and multinational corporations would be more relevant and powerful than old fashioned national sovereignty and the conventional abilities of governments to manage their financial affairs. In reality, national governments did lose some of their ability to manage those affairs; however, national sovereignty did prevail as the chief basis for international transactions.

The United States, through its global financial transactions, and through the role of its intellectuals who produced iconoclastic scholarship - such as the "New Industrial States," "Megatrends", "Future Shock", "Third Wave" and "Building a New Global Order" to name only a few - played a major role in the new phrasemaking, underscoring its centrality in the post-Cold War world. But the post-Cold War years evolved without the emergence of a major global schism between or among nations a la the Cold War era.

Even in the post-Cold War years, a way to distinguish between the "good" and "bad" nations had to be established in relation to some issues of global significance. The United States, as the dominant power, rose to the occasion as the self-appointed global sheriff. After all, it had to safeguard its dominance and disallow the emergence of any serious challenge to its primacy from any region of the world. It identified a number of significant issues - such as nonproliferation of the weapons of mass destruction and ballistic and cruise missiles - and a group of countries that were not only challenging the American dominance in their respective regions of the world, but also were determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

They were North Korea, Iran and Iraq. Those states were conveniently grouped as part of a longer list of the "rogue states", that is, states that were not following the "rules of the game" established by the United States and its supplicant Western states within such organizations as NATO, and in regimes such as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, or even more informal agreements, such as the Missile Transfer Control Regime. It is interesting to note that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty does not fall in the category of regimes that the United States vehemently promotes, largely because the US Senate refused to ratify it.

The United States totally ignored the fact that the rogue states had genuine security reasons to develop those weapons. Since the legal avenues for becoming a nuclear power or possessing chemical and biological weapons for them were closed, they had no choice but to exploit other means to acquire those weapons. After all, Israel, India and Pakistan, in different decades, followed similar tactics to eventually emerge as nuclear powers.

Obviously, the rogue states paid no heed to such a labeling since their respective security concerns were driving their desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction. For them, such labels were unfair and reflected the desire of the dominant Western states to keep them weak and subservient. Toward the end of its second term, the Clinton administration attempted to soften its condemnation of the so-called rogue states by deciding to call them "states of concern". However, that proved to be too mild for George W Bush, a born-again Christian who, under proper circumstances, was also ripe for acquiring a Messianic complex for his decidedly sketchy worldview. And the phrase "rogue states" was laden with high-falutin' moralism, which was in harmony with the kind of rhetoric that Bush would later promote.

As a candidate, Bush talked about the need for humility by the United States in dealing with the community of nations, a notion to which he might have then earnestly subscribed. However, after becoming president, he became an unabashed practitioner of unilateralism that has a vocabulary of its own, through which he reflected a cavalier American attitude toward the rest of the world - which may best be described as disdain mixed with arrogance of the powerful.

In the pre-September phase of his presidency, Bush told Russia and China that he was bound and determined to develop the National Missile and the Theater Missile Defense (NMD and TMD) systems, in order to ameliorate the increasing vulnerability of the United States to the growing missile threats from the so-called rogue states. Then, in a move that was significant both symbolically as well as substantively, he appointed Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld had made a name for himself a few years earlier by chairing a commission - which bore his name - that came up with that highly contentious conclusion about the rising threat to America's security from the missile producing capabilities of rogue states. To make sure that both Russia and China were clear about his resolve to build NMD, Bush also declared his intention to abandon the 1972 ABM Treaty, which had been regarded as the cornerstone of nuclear arms reduction in the previous decades. On May 2, 2002, he carried out his promise.

When the United States became a victim of terrorist attacks on September 11, there ensued another series of phrases through which George Bush demonstrated America's will to exercise power in his global war on terrorism. His well-known speech - which admonished the entire world by declaring, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" - will go down in the lexicon of power-related phrasemaking as the beginning of a militant phase of America's foreign policy. The events of September 11 marked a distinct, if not a new, beginning. The most remarkable fact was that no nation after hearing that speech could tell the United States to go jump in the lake. America was resolute about imposing its will on other nations. Even China and Russia did not want to confront it. Those countries that did not particularly care to cooperate with Washington either demurred silently or disagreed privately.

Only a few months after "either-you-are-with-us-or-with-the-terrorists" admonition, came still another phrase, "the axis of evil", which, in reality, was an attempt to describe the three rogue states - Iran, Iraq, and North Korea - in a different and a more focused manner. The disturbing aspect of that phrase was that, by coining it, Bush did not present to the world any evidence that those countries were behaving in some new or different way to deserve an additional surge of America¹s condemnation. Bush's choice of the "axis of evil" phraseology was not mindless drivel. Quite the contrary, through it he not only was attempting to rejuvenate America's own resolve to fight global terrorism, but also wanted the community of nations to believe that it was also their battle.

The generally friendly Europe understood the rationale underlying Bush's heightened rhetoric, but it did not care for what it perceived to be driving it, his Messianic complex. A number of European countries were also accusing Bush of practicing, at best, "unilateral multilateralism" that is, merely creating a facade of multilateral approach in his foreign policy, while still insisting on cooperation and support for solutions to global issues that his administration had preferred all along; or, at worse, conducting a seemingly unending crusade; and remaining oblivious to the fact that it might backfire, and thereby defeat the very purpose of eradicating transnational terrorism, with which they were all in agreement.

The exercise of power, by its very nature, is controversial; thus, Bush's handling of it is also causing ample controversy. As still something of an amateur in the US presidency, he has to learn either to abandon his unilateral multilateralism or to face the potential of increased bickering and criticism of his policies among allies. But a somewhat nasty question is whether he can exercise America's power by acting first and letting other nations complain about it and still follow America's lead, or allow the process of coalition-building to supersede his larger objective of defeating global terrorism. It will be very hard for Bush to subordinate his predilections for acting first to that of coalition building. That is not how a superpower behaves.

Ehsan Ahrari is a Norfolk, Virginia, US-based strategic analyst.

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