The American response to September 11th did not change the terms of international relations. It only enhanced and deepened a trend that was manifest in Bush's foreign policy from the beginning. Surprisingly, this trend should give pause to the corporate executives who lined up behind Bush's candidacy. Unsurprisingly, nobody else wins either. Bush is the ultimate lose-lose president.
Before the election of George Bush, the U.S. dominated a vast American empire. That empire had enormous military might, more powerful than anything ever dreamed of. U.S. military power was visible in a host of military bases around the world, from Germany and Saudi Arabia to Okinawa. However, since the end of the Cold War, U.S. military forces rarely functioned as U.S. military forces. They functioned as world police forces, intervening almost exclusively by invitation, with a mission to restore the peace or defeat local thugs.
In the space secured by this world police, America exercised its world domination, relatively peacefully, through a series of technocratic institutions that protected and extended the power of U.S. corporations over world production.
These institutions included the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, the G7, and the UN. A host of NGOs, such as Amnesty International, mostly funded by American philanthropy, also participated in this world order, acting in lieu of a non-existent world electorate to maintain the appearance of a social contract.
These NGOs supplied the necessary legitimacy for the U.S."police interventions," a legitimacy expressed in terms of human rights and respect for the law.
In this manner, American foreign domination replicated the capitalist model of the domestic domination of production: police in the background, economic necessity in the foreground. Exploitation was, and is, relentless. Third World workers are squeezed to the limit in order to bolster the spending power of First World consumers. And those who cannot be squeezed are left to rot.
But for the dominators, the virtues of the system are significant. The abstract, diffuse and apparently benign exercise of power makes resistance extremely difficult. It is difficult to organize against a power that manifests itself as destiny rather than as a concrete, nameable enemy. The U.S. professed commitment to human rights, democracy and rule of law, promised hope and gave the system respectability, even among its critics.
There were, to be sure, points of stress in this imperial Idyll. U.S. police intervention sometimes failed to materialize, as in Rwanda, and sometimes simply failed, as in Somalia. All too often, U.S. foreign policy merely paid lip service to human rights. These flaws were real. But far from undermining the system, they generated calls for improving it.
A new movement of protest that emerged in Seattle challenged the economic logic of the American empire. But the deglobalization movement was not posed to create massive social unrest. As a rallying cry, the evil machinations of international institutions are too complex and abstract to generate a heated emotional response. The demonstrations dented the confidence of Western governments, but they were far from posing a threat to the survival of the system. On the contrary, the deglobalization movement is a feature of the U.S. imperial rule.
Bush changed all that. In a series of actions that started soon after he took office and culminated so far in his"axis of evil" speech, Bush switched U.S. foreign domination towards an older imperialist model. Like British and French pre-war imperialism, Bush's imperialism is unabashedly and openly nationalistic."America first" became the motto of foreign policy, as Bush rejected international cooperation, arm-control treaties, the Kyoto protocol, and the very model of using the U.S. military as"world police."
For a brief moment, the September 11th attacks seemed to force U.S. policy back to the internationalist modus operandi. Urged by Colin Powell, and buoyed by an effusion of international solidarity, Bush could have responded to the obvious gangsterism of the attack with an international police action.
The right of U.S. to self-defense is not in doubt. But given that the terrorists never posed a real national security threat, an empty rhetorical gesture of magnanimity towards the world community would have solidified American imperial rule.
The U.S. could have come out of Afghanistan as the undisputed and unchallenged ruler of the world. Instead, Bush soon returned to the course he has already plotted before September 11, and the U.S. is emerging from Afghanistan as the hated tyrant of the world.
One can point to several reasons for the tenacity of Bush's"doctrine."
First, the human reasons: the personal touch of George Bush, and the rise of the strategic hawks; Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle. What unites them is a willful incapacity to take into consideration the benefits and potential of the post Cold War era.
Second, there are the interests of the oil and defense lobbies, dear to the Bush White House. It wasn't by chance that the Islamic fundamentalists who attacked New York came from the Middle East, a region in which old-fashioned oil politics blocked globalization. The Oil and Defense lobbies prefer old style imperialism.
Third, the dynamics created by America's military superiority makes negotiated cooperation seem unnecessary, hence unpatriotic. Americans have as much difficulty as anyone grasping the strategic value of human rights, restraint and"humanitarian interventions." It didn't help that Clinton never took the time to express a coherent foreign policy doctrine. That made it easier to portray his actions as incoherent and opportunistic.
Finally, holding it all together is the electoral policy of George W. Bush. As Karl Rove said explicitly, the swagger of the new muscular America would protect the GOP from having to confront voters over a bankrupt domestic agenda.
But there's the rub. Western capitalism moved away from both the pre-war model and the Cold War model of imperialism for a reason. The European empires died off because Third World nationalism made them too expensive to maintain. In Vietnam, the U.S. discovered that even superpowers cannot afford what it takes to secure a territory against a determined population. In response, capitalism transformed itself and learned to profit from the newly independent Third World.
Capitalism was also the prime beneficiary of the end of the Cold War. Consumer capitalism discovered the power of optimism. While containing the Soviet Union was a necessity, it could never be as sexy as the prospect of arming every Chinese peasant with an Internet ready cell phone.
Thus, the gospel of democracy and human rights proved to be a much more potent Bourgeois ideology than anti-communism ever was. Furthermore, the end of the Cold War freed the U.S. government to concentrate on economic expansion. Instead of being blackmailed by unsavory dictators, the U.S. was able to blackmail them back, in the service of multinational capitalism.
George Bush's White house is oblivious to this recent history. By trying to pull the clock back, his policy is undermining the world hegemony of the United States.
First, the new focus on war interferes with the business of promoting business. Second, U.S. policy undermines the credibility of the institutions representing Capitalism. And most importantly, by shedding the international institutional framework, Bush gives American domination a recognizable face and address.
During the Cold War, the Soviet threat balanced anti-Americanism. The ideological conflict masked the national issues. Today, there is no Soviet Union to scare the middle classes with.
As it emerges behind its international cloak, the new American domination appears unmasked, as a purely foreign force. Bush's clumsy attempt to substitute"axis of evil" for the"evil empire" convinces nobody beyond the Rose Garden.
As a result, all over the world, unmasking power no longer requires making sense of complex Marxist arguments. Patriotism will do just as well. And patriots are easier to come by than Marxists. America-bashing is thus slated to become de-rigueur for politicians far beyond the left.
We already see it happening. A ruling party parliament member in South Korea (of all countries) called Bush"evil incarnate" on the eve of his state visit. In France, U.S. hegemony is becoming an election theme. The British tabloids are almost as critical of Bush as the Guardian is. This is just the beginning.
Now to the crux of the matter: no matter what ensues, the bad blood between the United States and the world is going to hurt American business interests. As America contracts behind its night-vision goggles, the spread of market capitalism is bound to lose steam. That will cause a split between American capitalism and Bush's imperialism.
The coming split could be glimpsed at the recent World Economic Forum (WEF) convention in New York City. Colin Powell and Paul O'Neill had to sit through listening to none-too-subtle criticism from both foreign diplomats and corporate magnates. Some of the criticism surprisingly echoed the posters protesters carried at the demonstrations outside. Even American energy companies, Bush's staunchest support base, cannot be amused by the growing coziness between the Iranian government and Europe.
A believer in historical determinism may conclude that the new old imperialism will be short lived; either George Bush changes his tune soon, or he will be replaced by the very people who put him in power. There are reasons to doubt that. Tectonic shifts take time to propagate their effects within the complex feedback loops of world politics. And, outside America, people have longer memories. Hence, the forces Bush unleashed will take time to build up. Conversely, they are likely to persist long after he will have left office.
Moreover, as tensions multiply, the White House may conclude That, rather than change the tune, the best election strategy would be to raise the volume. Given the present popular support for saber-rattling in the U.S., that might be a winning strategy for George Bush. But it would drive America deeper into a vicious cycle of militarization and anti-Americanism. This is how empires self-destruct.
What can stop that from happening? Political dynamics can force Bush to calm down. Congress, for example, might take a hatchet to his"defense" budget. A face down with North Korea might chill the U.S. appetite for confrontation. A military operation could go awfully wrong. If nothing else happens, however, capitalism will start voting with its feet.
Capital fleeing the U.S.? That might sound outlandish, but it’s not. The huge American trade deficit means that capital doesn't need to move out. If enough stops flowing in, it will dramatically alter the American political landscape.
The U.S. economy looked iffy even before factoring foreign policy in. With debt mounting, credibility under fire, goodwill largely written off the book, and the Pentagon fast becoming a bottomless money pit, America Inc. looks less and less of a strong buy with every passing day.
Yet those who might welcome the weakening of American hegemony are probably in for a nasty surprise. In many corners of the world, the mixture of capitalism, rule of law and half-hearted human rights that America promoted during the last fifteen years was considered progress. Not enough progress, sure. But nothing that a return to plain old Cold War barbarism can’t improve upon.
The Bush presidency is likely to be remembered as one of those rare destructive forces in history that leave practically nobody better off.
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