America's neo-conservative world supremacists will fail
Current US megalomania is rooted in the Puritan colonists' certainties
Three continuities link the global US of the cold war era with the attempt to assert world supremacy since 2001. The first is its position of international domination, outside the sphere of influence of communist regimes during the cold war, globally since the collapse of the USSR. This hegemony no longer rests on the sheer size of the US economy. Large though this is, it has declined since 1945 and its relative decline continues. It is no longer the giant of global manufacturing. The centre of the industrialised world is rapidly shifting to the eastern half of Asia. Unlike older imperialist countries, and unlike most other developed industrial countries, the US has ceased to be a net exporter of capital, or indeed the largest player in the international game of buying up or establishing firms in other countries, and the financial strength of the state rests on the continued willingness of others, mostly Asians, to maintain an otherwise intolerable fiscal deficit.
The influence of the American economy today rests largely on the heritage of the cold war: the role of the US dollar as the world currency, the international linkages of US firms established during that era (notably in defence-related industries), the restructuring of international economic transactions and business practices along American lines, often under the auspices of American firms. These are powerful assets, likely to diminish only slowly. On the other hand, as the Iraq war showed, the enormous political influence of the US abroad, based as it was on a genuine "coalition of the willing" against the USSR, has no similar foundation since the fall of the Berlin wall. Only the enormous military-technological power of the US is well beyond challenge. It makes the US today the only power capable of effective military intervention at short notice in any part on the world, and it has twice demonstrated its capacity to win small wars with great rapidity. And yet, as the Iraq war shows, even this unparalleled capacity to destroy is not enough to impose effective control on a resistant country, and even less on the globe. Nevertheless, US dominance is real and the disintegration of the USSR has made it global.
The second element of continuity is the peculiar house-style of US empire, which has always preferred satellite states or protectorates to formal colonies. The expansionism implicit in the name chosen for the 13 independent colonies on the east coast of the Atlantic (United States of America) was continental, not colonial. The later expansionism of "manifest destiny" was both hemispheric and aimed towards East Asia, as well as modelled on the global trading and maritime supremacy of the British Empire. One might even say that in its assertion of total US supremacy over the western hemisphere it was too ambitious to be confined to colonial administration over bits of it.
The American empire thus consisted of technically independent states doing Washington's bidding, but, given their independence, this required continuous readiness to exert pressure on their governments, including pressure for "regime change"and, where feasible (as in the mini-republics of the Caribbean zone), periodic US armed intervention.
The third thread of continuity links the neo-conservatives of George Bush with the Puritan colonists' certainty of being God's instrument on earth and with the American Revolution - which, like all major revolutions, developed world-missionary convictions, limited only by the wish to shield the the new society of potentially universal freedom from the corruptions of the unreconstructed old world. The most effective way of finessing this conflict between isolationism and globalism was to be systematically exploited in the 20th century and still serves Washington well in the 21st. It was to discover an alien enemy outside who posed an immediate, mortal threat to the American way of life and the lives of its citizens. The end of the USSR removed the obvious candidate, but by the early 90s another had been detected in a "clash" between the west and other cultures reluctant to accept it, notably Islam. Hence the enormous political potential of the al-Qaida outrages of September 11 was immediately recognised and exploited by the Washington world-dominators.
The first world war, which made the US into a global power, saw the first attempt to translate these world-converting visions into reality, but Woodrow Wilson's failure was spectacular; perhaps it should be a lesson to the current world-supremacist ideologists in Washington, who, rightly, recognise Wilson as a predecessor. Until the end of the cold war the existence of another superpower imposed limits on them, but the fall of the USSR removed these. Francis Fukuyama prematurely proclaimed "the end of history" - the universal and permanent triumph of the US version of capitalist society. At the same time the military superiority of the US encouraged a disproportionate ambition in a state powerful enough to believe itself capable of world supremacy, as the British Empire in its time never did. And indeed, as the 21st century began, the US occupied a historically unique and unprecedented position of global power and influence. For the time being it is, by the traditional criteria of international politics, the only great power; and certainly the only one whose power and interests span the globe. It towers over all others.
All the great powers and empires of history knew that they were not the only ones, and none was in a position to aim at genuinely global domination. None believed themselves to be invulnerable.
Nevertheless, this does not quite explain the evident megalomania of US policy since a group of Washington insiders decided that September 11 gave them the ideal opportunity for declaring its single-handed domination of the world. For one thing, it lacked the support of the traditional pillars of the post-1945 US empire, the state department, armed services and intelligence establishment, and of the statesmen and ideologists of cold war supremacy - men like Kissinger and Brzezinski. These were people who were as ruthless as the Rumsfelds and Wolfowitzes. (It was in their time that a genocide of Mayas took place in Guatemala in the 1980s.) They had devised and managed a policy of imperial hegemony over the greater part of the globe for two generations, and were perfectly ready to extend it to the entire globe. They were and are critical of the Pentagon planners and neo-conservative world supremacists because these patently have had no concrete ideas at all, except imposing their supremacy single-handed by military force, incidentally jettisoning all the accumulated experience of US diplomacy and military planning. No doubt the debacle of Iraq will confirm them in their scepticism.
Even those who do not share the views of the old generals and proconsuls of the US world empire (which were those of Democratic as well as Republican administrations) will agree that there can be no rational justification of current Washington policy in terms of the interests of America's imperial ambitions or, for that matter, the global interests of US capitalism.
It may be that it makes sense only in terms of the calculations, electoral or otherwise, of American domestic policy. It may be a symptom of a more profound crisis within US society. It may be that it represents the - one hopes short-lived - colonisation of Washington power by a group of quasi-revolutionary doctrinaires. (At least one passionate ex-Marxist supporter of Bush has told me, only half in jest: "After all, this is the only chance of supporting world revolution that looks like coming my way.") Such questions cannot yet be answered.
It is reasonably certain that the project will fail. However, while it continues, it will go on making the world an intolerable place for those directly exposed to US armed occupation and an unsafer place for the rest of us.
· Eric Hobsbawm is author of The Age of Extremes: The Short 20th Century 1914-1991. This is an edited extract from his preface to a new edition of VG Kiernan's America: The New Imperialism
Eric is obviously a player-hater, or just your average Marxist "historian". What an ass.
#1
I won't pretend to have read the whole article. I read enough to realize that this person doesn't realize that our goal, after WWII, was to "rebuild the economies", of the defeated nations. We've succeeded, don't you think?
Posted by: Tom Dooley ||
06/25/2005 20:10 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Mr. Hobsbawm is a classic Marxist and CP stooge in the UK and has been since the days of Stalin.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
06/25/2005 20:43 Comments ||
Top||
#3
A tiresome authoritarian lecture, assuming the truth of all previous totalitarian propaganda from the time of Goebbels and Stalin to Chomsky, Zinn, and Durbin.
Goebbels, you ask? Why yes, just substitute "Jewish" for "American" and you have a perfect summary of the evil doctor's worldview.
#4
More Lefty PC hogwash for SUPPORT-YOUR-LOCAL WARLORD/GENERAL/RAMPAGING BARBARIAN. etal. Why, where would the great civilizations of antiquity be iff criminals didn'y now and then take what didn't belong to them by force - see, the world and proper civility owes the Criminal, Bandit and Barbarian everything whilst they owe youse and no one nothing. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME THE GUARDIAN SUPP BRITISH-SPECIFIC REGIONAL OR INTERNAT HEGEMONY OVER THE COMMIES AND COMMUNIST ASIA!?
MOUT - Military Operations in Urban Territory. The linked article includes a "wish list" from a US Marines machine gunner, Fallujah veteran, of what he would have liked to have had, and not had, in that environment.
He mentioned armored piercing rounds, for use against moving car bombs, and a more powerful hand grenade. This raised in my mind the long-held and often asked question: what does a modern infantry squad need as weaponry?
And this is a great thought problem. Not just from a wish list point of view, but a "Yeah, and what if *you* had to carry the damn thing?" point of view.
One consensus item I have long heard of is the light cannon. Essentially a small recoilless rifle. A tube with a front and rear grip, with trigger mechanism. The back section breaks open to insert a round, somewhere in the order of 30mm, then snaps closed. Unlike the LAW, it is re-useable. It should fire HE, AP, and special purpose rounds. A man should be able to carry the tube on a sling and several rounds in addition to his rifle.
Another item is the "peek shield", a transparent Japanese-fan-like device that is thin and light, but can deflect a 7.62 round and some fragment. It clips on the side of a rifle, then 'fans' its clear panels around the rifle, guarding the face and head of the rifleman much like protector on an epee protects the hand of the fencer. It can also be used like a fan, for peeking around corners or over ledges. More than anything else, it gives a little extra confidence, thus significantly improving firing accuracy.
A shield is not such a bad idea in a MOUT environment, and there are other types of shields that could also enter service as general purpose devices. Shields can be mounted on armored vehicles, not just to protect the crewmen, but temporarily affixed to afford some protection to their infantry escort.
Grenades need a major technological redesign. The two major types are concussion grenades in the advance, and fragmentary grenades in the retreat. This concept has been unchanged since before WWI. It boggles the mind to think of the grenadier as a speciality still worth having, but the grenade is a weapon that "shoots around corners" and carries a lot of punch in a small package. A small team of grenadiers could, with advanced grenades, do far more and faster than riflemen alone.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
