[lit-ideas] If Not the US, Who?
- From: Eric <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 15:06:16 -0500
Here's a great argument that the US is indeed
imperial, unquestionably an Empire, but also one
of the best empires in history. -Eric
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/03/features/idlede4.php
If not the U.S. as world leader, then who?
By Martin Walker The New York Times
FRIDAY, MARCH 10, 2006
The Case for Goliath
How America Acts as the World's Government in the
Twenty-First Century
By Michael Mandelbaum
283 pages. $26; £15.50. PublicAffairs.
Michael Mandelbaum has taken all the fun out of an
ostensibly flippant but fundamentally serious
diplomatic parlor game. Usually played late at
night when the Americans have gone home to prepare
for their puritanically early start to the day,
the Europeans, Latin Americans and Asians take a
second glass of Cognac and imagine how awful the
world could be if someone else were to take the
place of the United States as the global hegemon.
Eastern Europeans tell sad anecdotes about living
under Russian dominance. Western Europeans shudder
at the thought of Germans running the benign and
virtual empire that the United States has
maintained and expanded for the past 60 years.
(And they murmur that within the European Union
the French are already being difficult enough.)
The Latin Americans have their hands full with the
arrogance of next-door neighbors like Brazil
without wanting to see it become even more
dominant. The idea of a Chinese hegemony sends
shivers down the backs of all, particularly the
Japanese and Indians; somebody usually mentions
the mournful example of Tibet. The Pakistanis, Sri
Lankans and Bangladeshis react equally unhappily
to the idea of India as superpower. As the
diplomats prattle on, meanwhile, the British smile
wryly and say they have been there, done that and
are extremely glad to have lost the T-shirt.
Mandelbaum, the Christian A. Herter professor of
American foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins
University School of Advanced International
Studies, pulls aside the curtain of diplomatic
civility to expose the crude and obvious reality
that everyone prefers to ignore, at least in
public. He explains coolly and clearly the various
ways in which the United States now functions as a
global government, offering the planet the
services of physical security, commercial
regulation, financial stability and legal recourse
that are normally provided by national governments
to their citizens.
Non-Americans naturally do not like to admit this,
even as they enjoy the results, and American
leaders do not like to spell it out, least of all
to the voters who pay for it. But the evidence is
clear. The network of military alliances (like
NATO) and trade pacts (like the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade) and international
organizations (like the United Nations and World
Bank and Group of 8) that the United States was
mainly responsible for bringing to life has become
an American-led global management system. It is
familiar, inclusive and fairly unobtrusive. Its
institutions provide a reasonable role for lesser
powers, which is why the NATO alliance of consent
survived and expanded while the wretched
conscripts of the Warsaw Pact rebelled.
Above all, this system has been a remarkable and
seductive economic success. Having built the
tripartite trading structure of the modern world
(North America, Western Europe and Japan) to
enrich its citizens and allies and sustain the
Cold War, the generous Americans have expanded it
to include the Asian tigers and Eastern Europeans.
Now 1.3 billion Chinese and 1.1 billion Indians
are clambering up the food chain to prosperity.
They deal in dollars, raise money in the New York
and London financial markets, generate big trade
surpluses with the United States and then send
their brighter and most ambitious children to
American graduate and business schools, where they
are exposed to the Western value system.
This is a magnificently benign loop, and will
continue to be so once those American-trained
graduates figure out how the biosphere is going to
handle tens of millions of Asians living the
American lifestyle, with their own cars and air
conditioning and fast food.
This international system, an improved and
democratized version of the clunky British model
that brought us the 19th-century wave of
globalization, is designed to operate to American
comfort and profit, while securing compliance by
sharing security and prosperity with others. But
it is no longer doing so quite as reliably as it
once did. Trade imbalances and the Bush
administration's fiscal policies are putting it in
jeopardy.
Mandelbaum says the American pattern of energy
consumption is "the worst 21st-century
international offense of the United States." He
adds that "the greatest threat to the American
role as the world's government comes not from the
discontent it generates in other countries, or
from the assaults of terrorists, but from the huge
bill for social spending that the American public
will have to pay in the 21st century, a
responsibility that has the potential to transform
American politics in other ways unfavorable to the
continuation of that role."
Moreover, traditional beneficiaries of the
American system increasingly complain that the
United States is no longer running it well. The
first sign of the British system's global utility
was its suppression of piracy in the 18th century
and of the slave trade in the 19th. Even with the
world's largest and most technologically advanced
navy, the United States is no longer effectively
policing the world's seas. Piracy is rife in the
Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and around the Strait of
Malacca, and America's stewardship is failing in
important areas like climate change and drug
trafficking.
The global governor has some fairly basic global
responsibilities, which include enforcing the
rules that everyone has to obey, Americans
included. That is why the rest of the world is
angry at the Bush administration's rejection of
the International Criminal Court, and its use of
the aid weapon to punish small countries that
refuse to grant Americans a waiver from the
court's provisions.
Mandelbaum does not dwell overlong on the grisly
intervention in Iraq, but he is confident that
while the world grumbles, it will tolerate
Goliath's occasional misadventures, so long as it
retains a broader respect for the United States as
the indispensable stabilizing power. America
survived the ignominy of the 1960s, when Vietnam
and Selma and Watts combined to discredit its
international image and it became fashionable to
talk of a moral equivalence between the United
States and the Soviet Union.
The country is undergoing a similar travail today,
made the more offensive and glaring in foreign
eyes by the Bush administration's clumsy abuse of
power. The White House has crudely dispensed with
the founding fathers' "decent respect for the
opinions of mankind" to tell the inhabitants of
the rest of the world that they are either with
Washington or against it.
Nonetheless, as Mandelbaum argues, there is no
credible alternative to the American role as
linchpin and guarantor of the global system.
Nobody else has the political will, the military
and economic clout and the ability to generate
sufficient international consent. Rising regional
powers like China, Brazil and the European Union
may be jostling to win some more room to maneuver,
and the global crowd may be grousing more fiercely
about the performance of the American Goliath, but
as Mandelbaum shows, the most serious threats are
being generated at home.
This is what worries the players of the late-night
parlor games, because however long the
American-led system may last, they would most
fervently agree with Mandelbaum's three closing
predictions: "They will not pay for it; they will
continue to criticize it; and they will miss it
when it is gone."
Martin Walker is the editor of United Press
International and a senior fellow of the World
Policy Institute at the New School.
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