Wanted: A Grand Strategy for America! So proclaims an editorial piece in the front pages of Newsweek magazine by uber imperialist, Niall Ferguson, Professor of History at Harvard University, among other accomplishments. He eviscerates President Obama’s handling of the Egyptian revolution as a complete debacle.
Professor Ferguson starts by invoking the “footsteps” of God and the ghost of the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, the “great Prussian statesman” who united Germany by “blood and iron,” after defeating France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, thus reshaping Europe’s balance of power. He extols Bismarck for having caught, “the revolutionary wave of mid-19th-century German nationalism,” which “he managed to surf … in the direction of his own choosing.” Of course, we know how the nationalism business worked out for Germany and the world, but that’s a story for another day. Ferguson claims President Obama completely missed “the revolutionary wave of Middle Eastern Democracy.”
Talk of riding “revolutionary waves of democracy,” seems oddly out of place coming from Professor Ferguson who is the world’s foremost defender of imperialism. As Johan Hari claims,
“Ferguson has built a role as a court historian for the imperial American hard right, arguing that the British Empire from the Victorian period on was a good thing with some unfortunate ‘blemishes, that have been over-rated and over-stated.”
‘If it hadn't been the British, it might have been somebody worse,' he says. ‘In any case, empires have been with us as a means of power and control for centuries and centuries, so you might as well cast a moral judgement on rain as on the British Empire.’ He adds, ‘I am fundamentally in favour of empire, and says the Americans should be our successors as imperial rulers of the world.’
What a nice gesture of
noblesse oblige for him to pass the mantle on to us.
But later it is clear what he really means. He says Obama could have tried to catch the wave “Bismarck style” by lending his support to the youthful revolutionaries and trying to “ride it in a direction advantageous to American interests.” A calming, utilitarian thought, which disregards what the youthful revolutionaries might want and the ability of the US to control the situation as it unfolded in Cairo. No more than the US could have controlled what Ferguson calls the “thugs of the Islamic Republic” who “ruthlessly crushed the demonstrations,” in Iran in 2009. Unless, he is suggesting that the US should have intervened militarily in Iran like it did in Iraq. And that’s possible, because Professor Ferguson appears to relish military intervention. He was one of the principal cheerleaders for the Iraq war.
As Benjamin Wallace Wells reports,
“after September 11, Ferguson provided much of the theoretical ballast for a group of British-inflected thinkers--among them Max Boot and Marc Steyn--who urged empire on a newly expansionist American regime, acting as a transatlantic goad, the collective ghost of pith helmets past.”
“Perhaps more than anyone else,” he continues, “Ferguson was responsible for inserting the notion of a formal American empire into the public debate. Professors of imperial history around America started turning to his texts. Washington hawks from Richard Perle to Dinesh D'Souza to Bill Kristol drew on Ferguson's ideas and arguments to help make the case not only for the war in Iraq but also for a revolutionary, if vaguely articulated, new role for America in the world.”
But even after Iraq turned into a complete disaster, he was still arguing,
“that the problems in Iraq proved that America ought to be more of an empire, not less of one. Not only were the problems in Iraq the direct fault of America's unwillingness to call itself an empire, he said, but they were also predictable. ‘In behaving the way they did,’ Ferguson said, ‘those soldiers and military policemen [at Abu Ghraib] were largely doing to their prisoners what routinely people in the American military do to new recruits.’
Ferguson claims that the Egypt debacle has alienated everybody, “Mubarak’s cronies in the military,” “the youthful crowds in the streets,” and worst of all, America’s “two closest friends in the region – Israel and Saudi Arabia – [who] are both disgusted.” It is somewhat ironic that he is worried about offending Mubarak’s cronies and the Saudis, who he complains were “appalled at Washington’s failure to resolutely prop up Mubarak.” It's not quite clear which side he is on, but he doesn’t say how Obama could have pleased all those different interests by whatever action he took, leaving aside the question of whether it was Obama’s right to intervene at all. The tensions within the administration were obvious, however with President Obama claiming the side of the protesters by trying to ease Mubarak out, while Mrs. Clinton at the State Department was siding more with Mubarak and his cronies.
Ferguson brags that while other commentators were running around Tahrir Square like chickens with their heads cut off, he “flew to Tel Aviv for a security conference where all the assembled experts agreed that Egypt was a “colossal failure of American foreign policy, and the Israelis were dismayed by the administration’s “cluelessness.” But, Israeli analyst and historian, Ilan Pappe tells a different story about confusion on the Israeli side. He says,
“for a while you could not tell what officials in Israel thought. In his first ever commonsensical message to his colleagues, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked his ministers, generals and politicians not to comment in public on the events in Egypt. It seems Netanyahu was particularly embarrassed by the unfortunate remarks on the situation uttered publicly by General Aviv Kochavi, the head of Israeli military intelligence. This top Israeli expert on Arab affairs stated confidently two weeks ago in the Knesset that the Mubarak regime is as solid and resilient as ever.”
Mr. Ferguson's big claim, set out in red letters, is that,
“There is no more damning indictment of the administration’s strategic thinking than this: it never once considered a scenario in which Mubarak faced a popular revolt.”
I would care to bet that Ferguson didn’t either and neither did Israel from the evidence above. But if Israel did have information that wasn’t available to the Obama administration why didn’t they share it? After all, Israel is our most trusted ally.
Ferguson complains through a quote from an anonymous American official that,
‘we’ve had endless strategy sessions for the past two years on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in the possibility that Egypt moves from stability to turmoil? None.’
But Professor Ferguson doesn’t clue us in on why so much time was spent obsessing about Iran to the exclusion of everything else. Could it have anything to do with the constant agitation by Israel, its neocon lobby in the US and “public intellectuals” like Professor Ferguson that Iran is such a dire threat to the entire world (like Iraq before we demolished it) that all efforts, even war, are necessary to contain it?
His own obsession with Iran shows up in his extraordinary counterfactual statement that
“The Iranian Revolution of 1979, which took the Carter administration wholly by surprise, was a catastrophe far greater than the loss of South Vietnam.”
I doubt that Professor Ferguson will be contacting the families of the 58,000 American soldiers killed in Vietnam or the families of the million or more Vietnamese who were killed in that conflict with this bit of historical revisionism. Nor will he probably recount what precipitated the Iranian revolution starting with the CIA’s overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 and the subsequent years of US support for the Shah’s oppressive regime. Harvard should revoke Professor Ferguson’s history credentials.
But Professor’s Ferguson’s main complaint is that the Administration has no “Grand Strategy.” Since his heroes include Otto von Bismarck, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, and the British Empire, we can well imagine what he means by a “Grand Strategy.” In fact, it is fairly standard terminology in US foreign policy circles.
It is surprising that he criticizes the Carter administration for the lack of such a strategy, because Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has been a long time proponent of the “grand strategy,” the meaning of which he outlines in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, “American Primacy and its Geo-strategic Imperatives.” For Brzezinski, as I suspect for Ferguson and much of the traditional American foreign policy establishment, “grand strategy” means a strategy to ensure US global hegemony. Brezezinski argued that Eurasia, a huge area stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, is the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played. The United States, a non-Eurasian player, had (prior to its occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq) its power deployed on three peripheries of the Eurasian continent, a dominant position that no state could challenge. Professor Brzezinski argued that America’s chief task is to maintain its “global primacy” over this vast area and,
“to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitrating role.”
He fails to mention, of course, that both Napoleon and Hitler tried to dominate this vast area with disastrous results.
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was established in the spring of 1997, by a group of now nefarious neo-conservatives, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and William Kristol among others. The goal of the group was to “promote American global leadership.” Their statement of principles included the assertion that,
“The United States stands as the world’s most preeminent power. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests.”
In 2000, this group published a report titled: “ Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century.” They mirror Brzezinski’s arguments. In short,
“the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.” The document is a “blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.”
The idea of US pre-eminence was translated, once George W. Bush took office, into America’s foreign policy doctrine of “pre-emption,” of striking any country before it could become a threat to the global dominance of the United States. The report also provided a justification for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, stating:
“The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”
No word of weapons of mass destruction, bringing democracy to the Middle East or liberating oppressed Iraqis. Such is the neocon vision of the “grand strategy,” for America.
It’s Ferguson’s vision too. He says the “grand strategy’ is all about “choosing between a daunting list of objectives: to resist the spread of radical Islam, to limit Iran’s ambition to become dominant in the Middle East, to contain the rise of China as en economic rival, to guard against a Russian [reconquest] of Eastern Europe – and so on.” For the “so on” see above.
Professor Andrew Bacevich in his book, “Washington Rules,” calls this the “American Credo.”
“In the simplest terms, the credo summons the United States -- and the United States alone -- to lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world.” It is based on a “sacred trinity,” that requires “the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism.”
This is not to say the US should have no strategy, but neocons, like Ferguson, refuse to count the cost to the United States of their megalomaniacal vision. Professor Ferguson admits that Bismarck had the wits to focus attention on his problems at home rather than undertaking imperialistic adventures abroad, but Ferguson offers no similar advice for President Obama. Rather, he is obsessed by the Muslim Brotherhood, a sclerotic sideshow that was just as much blind-sided by the youthful protesters as was the Mubarak regime, the Obama administration or the Israeli government. But this group is now being pushed as the new boogeyman of the Middle East, which Ferguson wails is “wholly committed to the restoration of the caliphate and the strict interpretation of Sharia.” He's obviously been spending too much time with Glen Beck.
The sad fact is that American
“confidence that the credo and the trinity will oblige others to accommodate themselves to America’s needs or desires -- whether for cheap oil, cheap credit, or cheap consumer goods -- has allowed Washington to postpone or ignore problems demanding attention here at home. Fixing Iraq or Afghanistan ends up taking precedence over fixing Cleveland and Detroit.”
Moreover we no longer possess the financial resources
“to sustain a national security strategy that relies on global military presence and global power projection to underwrite a policy of global interventionism. Touted as essential to peace, adherence to that strategy has propelled the United States into a condition approximating perpetual war, as the military misadventures of the past decade have demonstrated.”
We could just ignore reactionaries like Ferguson, but allowing public policy to be shaped by advice like his is dangerous as we learned in Iraq. If we want a truly revolutionary strategy to guide our foreign policy we should adopt one simple principle in world affairs: Every country has the right to determine its own destiny without foreign intervention.