The driver remains American. The discourses of foreign policy since the time of Clinton return to a common set of themes confronting the nation: the disorders of the homeland, the menace of terrorism, the rise of powers in the East. Diagnoses of the degree of danger these represent for the United States vary—Mead or Kagan sanguine, Mandelbaum or Kupchan concerned, Brzezinski alarmist. What does not change, though its expressions vary, is the axiomatic value of American leadership. The hegemony of the United States continues to serve both the particular interests of the nation and the universal interests of humanity. Certainly, it needs adjustment to the hour, and on occasion has been mishandled. But of its benefits to the world there can be no serious question. The American Way of Life, it is true, can no longer be held up for imitation with the confidence of Henry Luce seventy years ago. Ailments at home and missteps abroad have made it less persuasive. But if the classic affirmative versions of the blessings of American power now have to be qualified, without being abandoned, its negative legitimation is propounded ever more strenuously. The primacy of the US may at times grate on others, even with cause, but who could doubt the alternative to it would be far worse? Without American hegemony, global disorder—war, genocide, depression, famine—would fatally ensue. In the last resort, the peace and security of the planet depend on it. Admiration of it is no longer necessary; simply, acceptance um schlimmeres zu vermeiden.
That, in one way or another, it is in need of repair is the premise of virtually all this literature. The bill of particulars for internal reform is repeated with relentless regularity in one writer after another: inequality has got out of hand, the school system is failing, health care is too expensive, infrastructure is out of date, energy is wasted, R&D is insufficient, labour is under-skilled, finance is under-regulated, entitlements are out of control, the budget is in the red, the political system is overly polarized. Needed, all but invariably, is a ‘centrist’ agenda: increasing investment in science and human capital, improvements in transport and communications, cost control in health care, fiscal restraint, more realistic claims on social security, energy conservation, urban renewal, and so forth. The menu may be ignored—it largely is by Kagan or Barnett—but rarely, if ever, is it outright rejected.
Remedies for external setbacks or oncoming hazards are more divisive. The Republican administration of 2000–2008, more controversial than its predecessor, enjoyed the support of Kagan throughout, Mead and Barnett at first, while incurring criticism, much of it vehement, from Ikenberry and Kupchan, Art and Brzezinski. In the wake of it, the refrain is universal that in the interests of American primacy itself, more consideration should be given to the feelings of allies and aliens than Bush and Cheney were willing to show, if legitimacy is to be restored. Multilateralism is the magic word for Wilsonians, but after their fashion harder cases pay their respects to the same requirement—Kagan calls for greater tact in handling Europeans, Mead for a ‘diplomacy of civilizations’ in dealing with Islam, Art wants American hegemony to ‘look more benign’, Fukuyama urges ‘at least a rhetorical concern for the poor and the excluded’.1
Democracy, on the other hand, its spread till yesterday an irrenounceable goal of any self-respecting diplomacy, is now on the back burner. Openly discarded as a guideline by Kupchan, Barnett and Brzezinski, downgraded by Art, matter for horticulture rather than engineering for Mandelbaum, only Ikenberry and Kagan look wistfully for a league of democracies to right the world. The zone where America sought most recently to introduce it has been discouraging. But while few express much satisfaction with US performance in the Middle East, none proposes any significant change of American dispositions in it. For all, without exception, military control of the Gulf is a sine qua non of US global power. Ties with Israel remain a crucial ‘national interest’ even for Art; Brzezinski alone permitting himself a discreet grumble at the excessive leverage of Tel Aviv in Washington. The most daring solution for resolving the Palestinian question is to iron-clad the bantustans on offer under Clinton—demilitarized fragments of a quarter of the former Mandate, leaving all major Jewish settlements in place—with American troops to back up the IDF, and signature of a formal defence treaty with Israel. If Iran refuses to obey Western instructions to halt its nuclear programme, it will—no one, of course welcomes the prospect—in extremis have to be attacked, hopefully with a helping hand or a friendly wink from Moscow and Beijing. Only Barnett breaks the taboo that protects the Israeli nuclear monopoly in the name of nonproliferation.
How is American domination to be preserved in the arena of Weltpolitik proper—the domain of the great powers and their conflicts, actual or potential? The European Union is the least contentious of these since it evidently poses no threat to US hegemony. Ikenberry and Kupchan piously, Art impassively, Brzezinski and Kagan contemptuously, underline or recall the need for Western cohesion, for which Rosecrance proposes a sweeping institutional form. Japan still safely a ward of the US and India not yet a leading player, it is Russia and China that are the major apples of discord. In each case, the field divides between advocates of containment and apostles of co-option. Brzezinski would not only pinion Russia between one American castellation in Europe, and another in China, but ideally break the country up altogether. For Mandelbaum, on the other hand, the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders is a gratuitous provocation that can only rebound against the West, while Kupchan hopes to embrace Russia itself within NATO. For Kagan, China and Russia alike are hostile regimes, well aware of Western hopes to turn or undermine them, that can only be dealt with by demonstration of superior strength. For Mandelbaum and Ikenberry, on the contrary, China is the great prize whose adhesion to the liberal international order is increasingly plausible, and will render it irreversible, while for Barnett, with his more relaxed conception of such an order, the PRC is to all intents and purposes already in the bag. Art is willing to concede it a swathe of predominance from Northeast to Southeast Asia—provided the US continues to rule the waves in the Pacific. Brzezinski, after first imagining China as, par pouvoir interposé, a forward base of America to encircle Russia from the east, now envisages Russia encircling China from the north.
II
In such counsels of the time, three features are most striking. For all the attention they now pay to domestic woes, quite new in a discourse of foreign policy, salience of concern never transcends superficiality of treatment. On the underlying causes of the long slowdown in the growth of output, median income and productivity, and concomitant rise of public, corporate and household debt, not only in the US but across the advanced capitalist world, there is not a line of enquiry or reflection. In this community, the work of those who have explored them—Brenner, Duncan, Duménil and Levy, Aglietta—is a closed book. No doubt it would be unreasonable to expect specialists in international relations to be familiar with the work of economic historians. In ignorance of them, however, the roots of the decline so many deplore and seek to remedy remain invisible.
These are internal affairs. The external counsels, naturally far more copious and ambitious, are of a different order. There professional commitment is far from barren. To the task of redressing the present position of the country at large, and imagining the future of the world, passion and ingenuity continue to be brought. Arresting, however, is the fantastical nature of the constructions to which these again and again give rise. Gigantic rearrangements of the chessboard of Eurasia, vast countries moved like so many castles or pawns across it; elongations of NATO to the Bering Straits; the PLA patrolling the derricks of Aramco; Leagues of Democracy sporting Mubarak and Ben Ali; a Zollverein from Moldova to Oregon, if not to Kobe; the End of History as the Peace of God. In the all but complete detachment from reality of so many of these—even the most prosaic, the Western Union of US and EU, lacking so much as a line on the political means of its realization—it is difficult not to see a strain of unconscious desperation, as if the only way to restore American leadership to the plenitude of its merits and powers in this world, for however finite a span of time, is to imagine another one altogether.
Finally, and most decisively, to the luxuriance of schemes for the transmogrification of its foes and friends alike corresponds the dearth of any significant ideas for a retraction of the imperium itself. Not withdrawal, but adjustment, is the common bottom line. Of the adjustments under way—further tentacles in Africa, Central Asia and Australia; assassinations from the air at presidential will; universal surveillance; cyber-warfare—little is ever said. Those who speak of them belong elsewhere. ‘In international politics’, Christopher Layne has written, ‘benevolent hegemons are like unicorns—there is no such animal. Hegemons love themselves, but others mistrust and fear them—and for good reason.’2 The tradition of foreign-policy dissent in the US that he represents is alive and well. Like its counterpart in imperial Britain of old, it remains, as it has always been, marginal in national debate, and invisible in the affairs of the state, but no less penetrating for that. It is there that genuine realism, understood not as a stance in interstate relations, or a theory about them, but as an ability to look at realities without self-deception, and describe them without euphemism, is to be found. The names of Johnson, Bacevich, Layne, Calleo, not to speak of Kolko or Chomsky, are those to honour. The title of Chalmers Johnson’s last book, which calls for the closing down of the CIA and the myriad bases of the Pentagon, can stand for the sense of their work, and an hour as distant as ever: Dismantling the Empire.
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1Mead: God and Gold, pp. 378 ff. Art: ‘The task for US leaders is a tough one: to make the United States look more benign and yet at the same time advance America’s national interests by employing the considerable power the nation wields’, America’s Grand Strategy, p. 381. Fukuyama: ‘Soft Talk, Big Stick’, in Leffler and Legro, eds, To Lead the World, p. 215.
2Layne, Peace of Illusions, p. 142.