"Anyone who focused on what George Bush said he wanted to achieve abroad could be forgiven for concluding that he intended to stick with the status quo. What made George Bush's foreign policy different--and potentially even radical--were not its goals but its logic about how America should act in the world."
--James Lindsay and Ivo Daalder
The Hegemonists
Since the beginning of the 1990's, specialists in International Relations have argued that with the inception of the Globalized regime through the increasing interconnectivity of our world, we have entered a new and uncharted era in which the old rules may possibly no longer apply. It has long been thought that we must pay special attention to how we interact with the world, for we are unsure now of what consequences may arise from our actions. When September 11 occurred, the new reality we now live in came quickly into stark contrast. It was imperative that we change the way we function within the world. It was imperative that we revolutionize our why of thinking.
No matter who was in power, that person would have been forced into a drastic shift in their thinking, but that revolution still, nevertheless, would have grown out of their old original assumptions. Both the contenders for the 2000 presidential nomination saw the world from their own unique perspectives and therefore would have arrived at different revolutionary conclusions when the attacks occurred. For better or for worse, it was George W. Bush to whom it fell.
Bush's revolution grew out of his original way of thinking about International Relations, a way of thinking sometimes referred to a Hegemonist. This perspective has been a minority view, always very influential and present within the Republican party since the time the foreign policy battles between Woodrow Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge. It could also be seen in the 1950's in the militant anti-communists who sought to role back the USSR in Eastern Europe and often showed up in Reagan's anti-communist rhetoric. After the fall of the USSR, it became the dominate theme for the Republican party . Now virtually every member of the current administration ascribes to it in one form or another, with the possible exception of Powell and Armitage.
There are five basic tenets to Hegemonist thinking. Four of them flow from the traditional Realism once practiced by the European Great Powers. The fifth is almost wholly separate from Realist thinking. It is the fundamental flaw of the Hegemonist framework and, indeed, the current revolutionary foreign policy of the administration.
1.Based out of the writtings of Thomas Hobbes, this assumption basically contends the world is dangerous and that ultimately there are no allies, only competitors, and finally that allies are only useful in as much as they serve your purposes.
2.The self-interested nation-states are the keys to understanding the activities of nations. Hegemonists never really gave a lot of credence to the ideas of multilateralists who thought that in the era of globalization, the worth of nation states were being superseded by non-state actors. This assumption still animates their thinking and solutions to problems like Terrorism despite the obvious fact that in the War on. Terrorism they are engaging with nonstate actors called terrorists.
3.They believe that ultimately, international relations comes down to power, specifically
military power.
4.They give little credence to ideas like international law and even less to concepts like
soft power.
5.Finally, they believe that the US as a unique great power and that others also see it as
such.
This last tenet is accepted as true by virtually all Americans. What it means is that the US is essentially free to act as it chooses. It can do as it likes in the world--even attempt to remake to world in its image over the objections of the world itself--and its intentions should never be questioned. It is taken as an article of faith that what is best for America is what is best for the world.
Its easy to see how the Hegemonists' ideas have informed their decisions. I have to admit that when I watched the approaches the administration was taking in dealing with Terrorism, I could find little pragmatic value in them. It was clear that their policies were centered on their ideologies more than on reality. They focused on nation-states rather than Terrorism-inciting Islamic movements because they believe it is really only nations that matter. They rejected the diplomatic process of the United Nations because they believed that military power is all that matters--the biggest kid on the play ground can do as he likes.
Unfortunately, what the Hegemonists believe is best for the World may not even be what is best for America. We do not know for certain what the eventual results of Bush's revolution in thinking will be, but we can take a reasonable shot a guessing and the results do not appear to be attractive. Over the past week and a half, we have been treated to two very credible and terrifying potential visions of what those results might be.
Nightmare Scenarios as the Likely Scenarios
Last week, the National Intelligence Council released a chilling portrait of the future consequences of our invasion of Iraq and the ensuing failure to secure the post-invasion aftermath. Writing about the significance of the Iraqi insurgency to the US Global War on Terror, the Council's suggestions were, put mildly, bleak.
Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists, according to a report released yesterday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director's think tank.
Iraq provides terrorists with "a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills," said David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats. "There is even, under the best scenario, over time, the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed there will, in a sense, go home, wherever home is, and will therefore disperse to various other countries."
According to the report, the CIA believes that the foreign fighters currently operating in Iraq are likely to eventually return to their homelands and begin new movements of their own. Al Queda will eventually be superseded by these movements, which will be led by veteran terrorists trained in Iraq. In essence, the war we started in Iraq has made it possible for the next evolution of global terrorism to occur. The terrorist threat we will face a decade from now will be one we created in Iraq.
But the results of the choices we made over the last few years in addressing Terrorism have much more immediate potentials. Richard Clarke's recent piece in The Atlantic this month discusses just how imminent and unaddressed the threats to our security, and highlights the negligence and wrongheadedness of the administration.
Clarke paints a scenario in which, over the course of seven years, terrorists essentially bring the US to its knees economically, culturally, and psychologically. Sticking only with conventional methods of attack--Clarke never involves the use of WMD--he demonstrates how vulnerable our nation's ports, borders, chemical and power plants, and even shopping malls are. And with each major attack, the hysteria of the populace grows, surrendering ever more civil liberties. According to Clarke, this is not even a worst case scenario.
Writing as hypothetical 2011 commentator on how things might have been if we had taken a different approach than that of the Hegemonists, Clarke writes,
If the war had been restricted to eliminating al-Qaeda in the two years following 9/11, it is possible that the first generation might have been suppressed before al-Qaeda metastasized into a multi-group jihadi movement. In 2002 especially, we squandered opportunities to unite the global community in a successful counterterrorism effort. If we had initially sent a more substantial U.S. force to Afghanistan, bin Laden might have been killed in the first few weeks of the war, perhaps preventing many of the attacks that took place around the world in the following three years.
Had we not invaded Iraq, many of the jihadis we know today would never have been recruited to the terrorists' cause. Not invading Iraq would also have freed up money for earlier investments in domestic security: for instance, upgrades for chemical plants, trains, container shipping, and computer networks. Because we developed most such protective measures too late, panicking under political pressure, we too often used brute-force methods that were costly, intrusive, and less effective than we hoped. With more time, money, and careful consideration, the body politic might have persuaded the private sector to join the federal government in a real partnership to enhance the security of critical infrastructure. More important, we would have been better able to carry on an open national dialogue about the tradeoffs between security and civil liberties, and about the ways in which strong civil liberties and strong domestic security can be mutually reinforcing.
Perhaps, too, we could have followed the proposal of the 9/11 Commission and engaged the Islamic world in a true battle of ideas. Indeed, if we had not from the start adopted tactics and rhetoric that cast the war on terror as a new "Crusade," as a struggle of good versus evil, we might have been able to achieve more popular support in the Islamic world. Our attempts to change Islamic opinion with an Arabic-language satellite-television news station and an Arabic radio station carrying rock music were simply not enough. We talked about replacing the hate-fostering madrassahs with modern educational programs, but we never succeeded in making that happen. Nor did we successfully work behind the scenes with our Muslim friends to create an ideological counterweight to the jihadis. Although we talked hopefully about negotiated outcomes to the Palestinian conflict and the struggle in Chechnya, neither actually came to pass. Because we were afraid to "reward bad behavior," we let Iranian nuclear-weapons development get too far along, to the point where our only option was to attack Iran. This set back the Iranian democratic reform movement and added Hizbollah to our list of active enemies.
Conclusion
The imperative of Clarke's piece--and this essay for that matter--is to highlight that the situation is becoming more urgent every day. It is easy for us to ignore the potential consequences of our current foreign policy because they seemed so unthinkable. But if we wait to respond, as Clarke points out, it may be too late. Public hysteria and ideological political pressure have already forced the current administration into very bad decisions, such as failing to find bin Laden for lack of adequate troops in Afghanistan or the Iraq Invasion which, as the CIA report signals, may haunt us for years to come. Things may already be spiraling beyond our ability to control. If we wait to enact ideas like those Clarke suggests--engaging the Arab world, planning how to protect civil liberties in the face of a frightened public's hysterical calls for a police state, moving to secure the security weaknesses we are already aware of--it may be too late when we actually are attacked to save those things we hold so dear. Not to mention that the potential economic consequences of widespread terrorist attacks may be far too severe to allow us to have these debates then anyway.
It is therefore urgently necessary that Democrats abandon the frameworks the Republicans have created for dealing with Terrorism, and to develop their own framework based out of their old ideals, and offer it to the American people as soon as possible, at least by the 2006 election. The Hegemonist approach has taken us down a path toward self-destruction. The Democrats cannot sit idly by and wait while they destroy our country.
Sources: America Unbound, by James Lindsay and Ivo Daalder, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post