A BRAVE NEW SERIES GLOBAL ISSUES IN A CHANGING WORLD This new series of short, accessible think-pieces deals with leading global issues of relevance to humanity today. Intended for the enquiring reader and social activists in the North and the South, as well as students, the books explain what is at stake and question conventional ideas and policies. Drawn from many different parts of the world, the series' authors pay particular attention to the needs and interests of ordinary people, whether living in the rich industrial or the developing countries. They all share a common objective — to help stimulate new thinking and social action in the opening years of the new century. Global Issues in a Changing World is a joint initiative by Zed Books in collaboration with a number of partner publishers and non-governmental organizations around the world. By working together, we intend to maximize the relevance and availability of the books published in the series. PARTICIPATIN G NGOs Both ENDS, Amsterdam Catholic Institute for International Relations, London Corner House, Sturminster Newton Council on International and Public Affairs, New York Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, Uppsala Development GAP, Washington DC Focus on the Global South, Bangkok IBON, Manila Inter Pares, Ottawa Public Interest Research Centre, Delhi Third World Network, Penang Third World Network-Africa, Accra World Development Movement, London DR NICHOLAS GUYATT was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Princeton University. He is currently a lecturer in the Department of History at Princeton and is the author of The Absence of Peace: Understanding the Israeli—Palestinian Conflict (Zed Books, 1998). ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? The United States and the World since 9/11 New Updated Edition NICHOLAS GUYATT UNIVERSITY PRESS LTD Dhaka WHITE LOTUS Bangkok FERNWOOD PUBLISHING LTD Nova Scotia BOOKS FOR CHANGE Bangalore SIRD Kuala Lumpur ZED BOOKS London & New York This new, updated edition of Another American Century? was first published in 2003 by In Bangladesh: The University Press Ltd, Red Crescent Building, 114 Motijheel C/A, PO Box 2611, Dhaka 1000 In Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam: White Lotus Co. Ltd, GPO Box 1141, Bangkok 10501, Thailand In Canada: Fernwood Publishing Ltd, 8422 St Margaret's Bay Road (Hwy 3) Site 2A, Box 5, Black Point, Nova Scotia, BOJ IBO In India: Books for Change, 139 Richmond Road, Bangalore 560 025 In Malaysia: Strategic Information Research Development (SIRD), No. II/4E, Petaling Jaya, 46200 Selangor In the rest of the world: Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London NI 9JF, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in the USA exclusively by Palgrave, a division of St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.zedbooks.co.uk Copyright © Nicholas Guyatt, 2000, 2003 The right of Nicholas Guyatt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. Cover designed by Andrew Corbett Designed and typeset in Monotype Bembo by Illuminati, Grosmont Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Cox & Wyman, Reading A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library US CIP data is available from the Library of Congress Canadian CIP data is available from the National Library of Canada ISBN i 55266 120 2 Pb (Canada) ISBN 81 87380 84 5 Pb (India) ISBN 983 2535 19 o Pb (Malaysia) ISBN i 84277 428 x Hb (Zed Books) ISBN i 84277 429 8 Pb (Zed Books) CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ix 1 THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY i The Global Economy since 194$ 2 'Trade, Not Aid': US Versions of 'Development' 13 Washington's Consensus 34 2 THE US AND THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 57 Defining the 'International Community' 58 'Saving Every Child': The US and International Peacekeeping 74 The US and the UN: The End of Multilateralism 86 3 THE US AND MILITARY POWER 114 Strategy 115 Technology 127 Conflict 138 4 AMERICAN MISSIONS 177 Theories 178 Perspectives 200 5 A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 233 George W. Bush and 9/11 233 Understanding the War on Terror 254 Debate and the Limits of Dissent 271 Looking Ahead 282 INDEX 298 ' g y y t s ss s t ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book was written in Princeton, Washington DC, and Cambridge, England, between July and December 1999. In the United States, I'd like to thank Wendy Cadge, Laura Fiske, Andrew Graybill, Sarah Igo, Drew Levy, Nina Paynter and Eileen Scully for reading the manuscript entire, and making many useful suggestions. Eileen Scully was instrumental in finding more readers for the manu- script outside of Princeton, for which I'm also grateful. For their help with specific queries, and/or their kindnesses to me as I put this book together, I'd like to thank Jeremy Adelman, Asli Bali, Ezra Block, John C. Culver, Michael D'Alba, Alec, Kelly and Mali Dun, Jennifer Ebinger, Philip Gourevitch, Kristen Harknett, David Kasunic, Jennifer Moorehead, Stefan Siegel, Emily Silverman, Todd Stevens, Simon and Eleri Tyler, and Chris Wren. Kristen Harknett and Andrew Graybill very generously gave their time to the thankless task of proof-reading, for which I'm very apologetic and grateful. Claire Minton offered very useful advice on indexing. In England (or thereabouts), I am indebted to Robert Molteno at Zed Books for suggesting the project to me, and for his circumspec- tion when I delivered twice as many words as I was supposed to. I'd like to thank my family for their continuing support. I'm also grateful for the encouragement and generosity of William Flemming, Conor Houghton, Robert Palmer, Edward, Nancy and Catherine Shaw, and Matt Thorne. Richard Serjeantson read the manuscript in its entirety, and allowed me to complete the book in his Cambridge rooms even as he succumbed to a grisly flu. Ben Jackson should have appeared here last time around, so now he has my apologies as well as my thanks. I'm grateful also to Lucy Morton and Robin Gable for their skill, generosity and attentiveness in setting the manuscript. Of course, all errors of fact or interpretation in the following remain my own. For Kristen This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION On 10 April 2003, the day after US marines toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Fardus Square, 15,000 people gathered beside what was once the World Trade Center to support the American war effort in Iraq. The crowd was mostly made up of construction workers and craftsmen, members of the local labour unions who had organised the rally. Many of them had been in Manhattan on u September 2001, or had helped in the clearing-up effort that had transformed the adjacent World Trade Center site from a vast, burning pile of debris into an empty foundation for a still taller skyscraper. The war in Iraq had generated enormous contro- versy throughout America even before a shot had been fired, with huge anti-war protests bringing a number of major cities - including New York — to a standstill in February and March of 2003. Those who rallied in April to support American troops, however, insisted that the anti-war protesters had forgotten about September nth. Many of the marchers told newspaper reporters that the roots of the war in Iraq lay in the devastation of New York City. One sign held aloft in the crowd put the point more succinctly: 'We GAVE peace a chance, we got 9/11!' 1 This idea that the attacks on New York and Washington came from nowhere, and that they forced a reluctant America to enter a world from which it had previously tried to seclude itself, was extremely popular in the United States after September nth. Al- though this hardly describes the reality of America's massive and profound influence over the rest of the world, and the particular prominence of American power across the globe in the 19905, it offers a very real glimpse into the detachment of the American pub- lic from the facts of this global role for the United States. After the IX X ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the breezy US victory over Saddam Hussein's armies in the first Gulf War, ordinary Ameri- cans largely focused on domestic issues and put foreign policy to one side. Although President George H.W. Bush was extremely popular with Americans in the spring of 1991 after his defeat of Saddam, an economic downturn in the ensuing year resulted in his defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton in the election of 1992. Clinton's unofficial campaign slogan — 'It's the economy, stupid' — became a mantra for his ensuing presidential administration. The irony of this was that, in the 19905, the United States was more involved than ever before in the affairs of the world. Not only could America boast a new diplomatic and military prowess in the absence of its Soviet rival, but successive American presidents were committed to an economic world-view which exposed virtually the entire planet to an American-led model of development and govern- ance. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton offered vague paeans to the effects of globalisation even as he stressed its benefits to the American people. In spite of some worrying signs that this 'new world order' of Ameri- can influence was unstable - such as the initial attack on the World Trade Center in February 1993 — ordinary Americans and the financial markets largely shared Bill Clinton's vision of a post-Cold War Utopia, at least for the United States. Incomes rose, unemploy- ment was low, and the stock market reached record highs. Although global inequality continued to rise and foreign nations suffered politi- cal or economic collapse, most Americans were either unaware or unbothered by these distant events. Bill Clinton's apparent economic miracle helped him to survive a drawn-out and embarrassing sex scandal, a much more potent threat to his popularity than, say, the US role in the economic crisis in Mexico or the efforts of American diplomats to prevent an international response to the genocide in Rwanda. By the time of the 2000 presidential election, most com- mentators believed that Clinton would have won a third term in office but for the limits imposed by the Constitution of the United States. This view of America in the 1990$ as essentially detached from or at peace with the world was shared by most Americans, Republicans and Democrats, and resulted in contrasting but essentially congruent world-views in the aftermath of September nth. For Republicans, INTRODUCTION XI as the New York sign maintained, the terrorist attacks had come from nowhere to disrupt a peaceful and innocent America. President Bush had not sought to wage war around the world on the propo- nents of 'terror', but this unprecedented and unprovoked challenge demanded a strong response. Many Democrats, meanwhile, drew upon Bill Clinton's supposedly benign or understated relationship with the rest of the world to excoriate George W Bush for his empire-building. From this perspective, American foreign policy since September nth had been hijacked by a political extremist bent on US domination of the world. Eschewing Bill Clinton's putative dedi- cation to multilateralism and the international community, President Bush would destroy America's reputation in the world and place Americans in still greater danger. This view was not, of course, lim- ited to American Democrats; many European newspapers in 2001 and 2002 waxed nostalgically for the Clinton era, and identified Bush as the extremist who had changed the course of American history. Perhaps the best (and earliest) summary of this viewpoint was offered on the eve of Bush's inauguration by a satirical news- paper in New York: next to a picture of the president, the headline sardonically proclaimed: 'BUSH: "OUR LONG NATIONAL NIGHT- MARE OF PEACE AND PROSPERITY IS FINALLY OVER.'" 2 It is understandable that many people — particularly in the United States — have looked to September nth as an epochal moment, a Rubicon which inevitably changed America and its relationship to the rest of the world. However, both the terrorist attacks and the American response to them become far more intelligible when we look at the 1990$ more closely, and pay attention to the simultaneous process by which American policymakers attempted to remake the world in the absence of the Soviet Union and, domestically at least, to deny that they were interested in doing so. Contrary to popular opinion, Bill Clinton was not a 'multilateralist', and George W. Bush was not the architect of'American empire'. Instead, both presidents pursued policies intended to advance American economic interests and to spread free-market ideas around the globe. Both men were deeply aware of an isolationist tradition within American politics that views foreign affairs as a burden or a distraction from America's prosperity and values; and both were also aware of a parallel tradition which held any American intervention beyond the borders of the XlRY? United States to be essentially benign, even altruistic. It would be foolish to declare that there were no differences whatsoever between Clinton and Bush, but it would be more foolish to deny a continuity in American foreign policy which stretches from the end of the Cold War in 1989 to the fall of Baghdad in 2003. If we seek to understand America's extraordinary role in the world, and to assess the possibilities for political change both within and beyond the United States, we have to place the events of September nth in a broader context and look critically at both the causes and the conse- quences of that terrible day. This book was originally published in 2000, a few months before the botched presidential election that left George W. Bush in the Oval Office. My aim was to describe the efforts of the United States to define a 'new world order' (in the first President Bush's phrase) following the collapse of the Soviet Union, an order based not only on political and military power but on globalisation and the spread of American economic ideas throughout the world. I was interested not only in the facts of American foreign and economic policy, but in the ways in which American commentators made sense of the new US role. The first four chapters of this book are concerned with different aspects of America's power and influence in the 19905. The first chapter examines the role of the United States in the world economy since 1945, and particularly the efforts of US policymakers to promote a particular vision of 'free-market' economics in the 19805 and 19905. The second chapter discusses the uneven commit- ment of the United States to international agreements and institu- tions, charting the difficult relationship between the US and the United Nations in the 19905 and the American reluctance to sign up to initiatives like the International Criminal Court. The third chapter analyses the role of the military in America's foreign policy and economy since 1989, and reflects upon the absence of any 'peace dividend' following the Soviet collapse. The fourth chapter considers the views of politicians, commentators, policy 'experts' and other American analysts in the 19905, as well as the role of the media and public opinion in the formation of American foreign policy. By examining America's engagement with the world from these different perspectives, we can see clearly the paradox which I intro- ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? INTRODUCTION Xlll duced above: since 1989, the United States has been extraordinarily influential in shaping political and economic realities around the world, and yet the American public has been extremely disengaged from this process. American military technology now makes it possible for Air Force crews to fly from their bases in Missouri, drop bombs in the Middle East, and then return home in time for pilots to mow the lawn or take their children to a football game. The United States might be bombing Iraq or at war with Serbia, yet its cities and citizens show no signs of any conflict or anxiety. After the air war in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999, during which not a single American pilot or soldier was killed, it appeared that the United States might even wage wars without casualties among its military personnel. Thus it seemed possible, in the 19905, for America to be both isolationist and interventionist simultaneously, to shape the rest of the world and yet to nurse feelings of innocence, detachment or seclusion. If America's interventions were multilateral, and the United States was a strong advocate of international institutions and international law, this unusual combination of power and isolation might be more durable. However, American foreign policy since 1989 has been shaped much more by the opportunities provided by the collapse of the Soviet Union than by the responsibilities enjoined upon all nations by international law. The 'new world order' has been defined not by the international community but by American presidents eager to take advantage of what the conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer has called 'the unipolar moment', in which the United States boasts unrivalled power and influence and can, essentially, do what it likes. Riding roughshod over the United Nations, projecting military power without international approval, and exporting an American-devised economic model through the International Mon- etary Fund and the World Bank, the United States has generated immense anger and frustration in many parts of the world. 3 Before 1989, the Soviet Union may have relieved the pressure on the United States to some degree: left-leaning governments or non- aligned nations could seek refuge in the financial or philosophical resources of the Soviet Union in the face of American power. Since 1989, however, America has faced both the privileges and the re- sponsibilities of being the sole superpower. While this has meant that American economists can reform the Russian banking system, or n XIV ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? American corporations can 'penetrate'Vietnam, it has also left the United States in the firing line: the many millions of people who find themselves frustrated, impoverished, or challenged by the US effort to fashion the world in America s image have one obvious target for their wrath. In the 19908, the contradiction between America's pre-eminent role in the world and an American popular isolationism was extremely volatile. The American government had unprecedented opportunities to shape the world, but this same power was the source of a profound weakness. The American people, mean- while, appeared unaware of either the power or the weakness, re- assured that the fall of the Soviet Union and the apparently inexorable rise of the stock market were part of the same Utopian process. The attacks on New York and Washington dealt a huge blow to this American world-view, but resulted in a simplistic reassessment of America's foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Republicans have argued strongly that the attacks were the result of homicidal fanaticism rather than American foreign policy, and have worked hard to discourage any linkage between the undeniably atrocious methods of al-Qaeda and the effects of America's lengthy involve- ment in the Middle East. Democrats, when they have not simply accepted the Republican line, have pined for Bill Clinton and a golden age of American diplomacy and multilateralism, implausibly identified as the 19905. Neither approach offers much hope either of defeating the threat of further terrorism, or of improving relations between the United States and the peoples of the world. Moreover, the curious sense of detachment from foreign affairs among ordinary Americans is a constant threat to a more productive popular engage- ment with America's role abroad. While many Americans rushed to educate themselves about the Middle East and central Asia in the wake of September nth, there has been little sustained appetite for 'nation-building' in Afghanistan or elsewhere. The war against Iraq was the subject of intense debate in the United States, albeit within rather narrow parameters, which we will explore below; but after the symbolic toppling of Saddam's statue on 9 April 2003, the story of America's faltering rule over 25 million Iraqis retreated almost completely from the front pages. In spite of September nth, the INTRODUCTION XV prospects for another period of American military engagement and popular detachment remain extremely high. In addition to the original four chapters, this new edition contains a fifth chapter on the extraordinary events in America and around the world since 2000. I have tried not only to sketch the numerous developments in President Bush's 'war on terror' but also to summa- rise the ways in which this 'war' has been understood within the United States. While conspiracy theories about both September nth and the subsequent global military campaign have abounded (espe- cially in Europe), the more mundane truth about America's 'war on terror' can be found in the public pronouncements of leading policy- makers, as well as in the way in which the media, the political parties and the public have responded to President Bush's agenda. The new chapter also discusses the various continuities and dis- continuities between the period before September nth and Bush's subsequent actions, and assesses the possibility that the United States might change or reverse the course of its foreign involvement in the coming years. The title of this book was inspired by a debate during World War II between two very prominent Americans: the media magnate Henry Luce and Franklin Roosevelt's vice-president, Henry Wallace. In 1941, in a celebrated magazine article, Luce emphasised the potential of America to shape the world and the twentieth century in its own image: America would be 'the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprise, the training center of the skillful servants of mankind, the Good Samaritan, really believing again that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice.' In spite of this altruistic rhetoric, Luce was particularly excited about the commercial possibilities that would accompany American pre-eminence. The sense that this altruism was hollow, however, prompted Vice-President Wallace to engage Luce's vision directly: 'Some have spoken of the "American Century." I say that the century on which we are entering - the century which will come out of this war — can be and must be the century of the common man.' Although Wallace conceded that it might be 'America's opportunity to suggest the freedoms and duties by which the com- mon man must live', he insisted that 'there must be neither military nor economic imperialism'. While Americans might find themselves XVI ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? in a position to dictate the terms of political and economic order to the rest of the world, Wallace realised that the temptations inherent in this power might ultimately overwhelm the good intentions of its bearer. 4 In the 19905, talk of the 'American century' was fairly muted, though the concept bubbled up at the end of the decade both as a rhetorical feint and as an occasion for political futurology. Since the election of George W. Bush, however, talk of another 'American century' has become much more bullish; moreover, in 2002 the media finally introduced to a broad audience a previously marginal think-tank called the 'Project for a New American Century', founded in 1997 and counting Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz among its ranks. The PNAC was an important refuge for right-wing thinkers during the Clinton years, providing a forum where conservatives could debate the outlines of an even more pro- nounced unilateralism than the one that Clinton was forging in the White House. By 2002, however, PNAC was sending talking heads towards hungry newspapers and television networks seeking an intel- lectual rationalisation for President Bush's new doctrine of 'pre- emption'. 5 The title of this book, then, has been 'pre-empted' by events, like so much else in the turbulent years since 2000. However, the idea of an American century - and the distinction between Henry Luce's chimerical altruism and Henry Wallace's 'century of the common man' — is more important than ever. Berkeley, California June 200) NOTES 1. Greg Retsinas, 'A Rally at Ground Zero for the Troops', New York Times, n April 2003, Bi2. 2. The Onion, 18 January 2001, i. 3. Charles Krauthammer, 'The Unipolar Moment', Foreign Affairs 70, no. i (1991): 23-33. 4. Henry Luce, 'The American Century', Life, 17 February 1941. The essay was reproduced, along with a number of responses from historians, in Diplomatic History 23, no. 2 (1999): 159-71. Henry A.Wallace, 'The , INTRODUCTION xvii Price of Free World Victory', address before the Free World Association, New York City, 8 May 1942; reprinted in Leland M. Goodrich, ed., Documents on American Foreign Relations, Vol. IV: July iQ4i-June 1942 (Boston: World Peace Foundation, 1942), 62-9. On the rhetorical exchange between Luce and Wallace, see John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace (New York: WW Norton, 2000), 266-82. 5. 'Statement of Principles', Project for a New American Century, 3 June 1997. On the rise and influence of PNAC, see Joseph Cirincione, 'Origins of Regime Change in Iraq', Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Proliferation Brief 6, no. 5 (2003). This page intentionally left blank CHAPTER I THE US AND TH E GLOBAL ECONOMY When you come right down to it, now that the world economy is becoming more and more integrated, we have to do in the world what we spent the better part of the century doing here at home. We have got to put a human face on the global economy. William Jefferson Clinton, 1999 State of the Union address 1 For much of the twentieth century, the United States economy was the largest in the world. Consequently, the gradual development of a global economy, highly integrated and diversified, has depended on American guidance and direction. At the close of the century, the global economy was dominated by American corporations and by standards and institutions largely shaped by the US. Meanwhile, the recent financial crisis which swept through Asia, Russia and Latin America has raised serious questions about the stability of the international system. In this chapter, I want to ask two questions: how has the US shaped the world economy since 1945? And how equitable and stable is the current global arrangement? In the first section, I will take a broad perspective on these questions; in the second, I want to look in more detail at three examples - Mexico, Africa and Russia — to see the ways in which US economic policies play out across the world. In conclusion, I will elaborate some of the established features of the global economy, and the substantial ways in which its 'human face' has been disfigured. I 2 THE GLOBAL ECONOMY SINCE 1945 The Depression and the case for regulation Looking back across the twentieth century, two events stand out as crucial to the course of the world economy: the Great Depression of the 19305, and the Second World War which followed it. The Depression was pivotal in demonstrating that economies needed regu- lation and prudence as well as enterprise and daring. In 1929, a boom in stock-market speculation and international bank lending precipitated a collapse of confidence and of financial institutions on an unprecedented scale. Companies and banks in the US went bust; loans were called in around the world, bankrupting more companies and banks outside the US; and ordinary people lost their jobs and their savings, plunging below the poverty line. Although every country had experienced the boom—bust cycle at some point, the size and duration of the Great Depression suggested to the US and other governments that something had to be done to prevent a repeat of this disaster. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt ministered to the immediate needs of the US population, therefore, his adminis- tration also set in motion a series of financial reforms and restrictions with a view to the long term: banks would be limited to particular regions and particular kinds of lending; bank deposits would be in- sured by the government to protect savings; speculators would be constrained in their gambling. The net result was a US economy in which government played a large role, and advocates of'free markets' and unfettered financial activity were marginalised. 2 If the Depression revealed the dangers of rampant speculation and overlending, World War II suggested the need for global cooperation across a raft of issues, especially the economy. Although the war was conventionally presented as a conflict of ideas, a battle between fas- cism and freedom, the underlying economic and imperial tensions between the combatants were readily apparent. The United States emerged from the war as the strongest economy in the world, and made provisions even before the end of hostilities for an international economic framework, a road map for the global economy which would contain future ambitions and tensions. An international con- ference held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 largely THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 3 established the rules and institutions by which the post-war economy would be managed. Currencies would be pegged, with some provision for occasional adjustment; the new International Monetary Fund (IMF) would step in to make emergency loans to any countries having trouble maintaining their currency rate; and a World Bank would make loans to poorer countries to facilitate their develop- ment. In theory, these provisions should have ensured the stability of national economies and encouraged the progress of smaller nations, especially those struggling to emerge from the shadows of imperial- ism and colonialism. In practice, however, powerful obstacles stood in the way of achieving these aims. 3 Was the Bretton Woods system an American invention? Did it advance US interests? We can answer both of these questions in the affirmative: the Bretton Woods conference took place under US supervision, and the models of economic development which emerged were strongly supported by the American government. 4 We should not forget that, as the Bretton Woods rules were put into place, the United States was entering a conflict with the Soviet Union which was both political and economic: the lure of socialism had generated a real enthusiasm for radical economic change in many countries, and the US was willing to intervene with force to uphold its vision of development rather than the socialist alternative. The post-war American government clearly felt that other countries should adopt the Bretton Woods system, and even used the CIA in Italy and Greece to destabilise those left-leaning parties which had alternative ideas of economic reform. 5 We should be careful, however, to avoid seeing Bretton Woods as the first stage of an unbroken and unilateral American domination of the world economy. In the first instance, the conference itself depen- ded heavily on the ideas of the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who had become the most prominent spokesperson for the view that governments had a big role to play in managing and encouraging economic growth. 6 Moreover, those ideas of govern- ment participation and regulation infused the discussions. Before 1930, there had been relatively little talk of the responsibility of govern- ments to keep a close watch on their national economies, let alone the global economy which had come to assert a major influence on domestic conditions. After the Great Depression, however, it seemed 4 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? irresponsible for a government not to control the financial markets, and to stand idly by as the ground for a future crisis was laid. The global economic breakdown had hit the US as surely as Europe and Latin America, and Bretton Woods suggested that every country had an interest in better-regulated and less risky financial activity in the future. 7 In this respect, at least, the original Bretton Woods agree- ment was very different from the arrangement at the century's end. The idea of free trade had been tied closely in American minds to the quest for overseas markets for American products; after the Depression, then, US policymakers accepted the need for govern- ments to regulate their economies in various ways, but maintained their interest in finding new markets overseas for American goods. After World War II, the US was especially well-placed to export its products, as long as it could find some way for the cash-starved economies of Europe and elsewhere to pay the bills. This was the context for the massive 'Marshall Aid' programme of 1948; and also for the inauguration of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the International Trade Organisation (ITO), which sought to broker international agreements that would enable 'free trade'. 8 The phrase itself is a misnomer of sorts, and the idea of free trade certainly chafed with the Bretton Woods commitments to government intervention and management. Although the US cor- rectly argued that protectionism and colonial privileges had contrib- uted to the onset of the recent world war, the claim that free trade was to everyone's advantage was disingenuous. The US economy had finished the war in much better shape than its rivals in Europe and Asia, and so those governments felt the need to defend their own moribund industries against cheap American imports. 9 Meanwhile, new nations in the developing world, and some older countries which had struggled in the transition to 'developed' status, toyed with the idea of more protectionism as a means of establishing their economic independence from Europe and America. Countries which were rich in raw materials were extremely sensitive to the changing price of their exports on the international markets, and were uncertain that 'free trade' would actually free them from the vagaries of price changes on the commodities exchanges. Many nations dissented from the US model of free trade and decided THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 5 instead to encourage domestic industry and a protected domestic market. Given that American companies often had a substantial interest in extracting or harvesting commodities for export in these foreign countries, local decisions to concentrate on industrial development -would frequently provoke a hostile reaction from the US government. 10 In the decades following World War II, therefore, the US was alternately collaborative and coercive in its stewardship of the global economy. In its dealings with large, developed nations, the US up- held many of the Bretton Woods rules and collaborated to maintain the pegged currency levels which underpinned economic stability. 11 At the same time, however, the US promoted a model of'free trade' which was unlikely to guarantee economic stability in poorer countries, and stood ready to intervene (sometimes militarily) in situations where a government or popular opposition threatened to secede from the international order. In Iran, Guatemala and Chile, the threat of communism was invoked by US policymakers to justify the enforced American rearrangement of those nations' economic policies. Under cover of the 'Cold War' with the USSR, the US was willing and able to impose its own model of economic development, disregarding the wishes of local people and occasionally killing them in the process. 12 'Free markets', bank lending and the return of the speculators As we will see, American advocacy of 'free trade' has been constant in the decades since World War II; the US perspective on government regulation of the economy, however, has changed dramatically, and has to some extent dovetailed with the argument for free trade. Originally, the Bretton Woods system tried to establish the conditions for stable economic development by fixing the value of currencies, and persuading nations both to help each other to maintain these values and to deter flows of money which might upset the balance. Until 1971, therefore, countries largely cooperated with each other (through the buying and selling of different currencies) to keep the various values in the right place. In addition, governments tried to limit capital flows emanating from private individuals or corporations; although companies could operate in other countries, they were not 6 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? permitted to deal in currencies or financial instruments which might adversely affect the pegged values under Bretton Woods. Effectively this limited the amount of money flowing through the international system and made it easier for governments to maintain rates of exchange. 13 In the 19605, however, the stability of these currency values was seriously threatened. As memories of the Depression faded, govern- ments in Europe and the US became more complacent about the activities of companies and banks, and increasingly tolerated the ingenious efforts of corporations to maximise their profits. Growing international trade was complicated by devious accounting pro- cedures, by which a company might take advantage of a weaker currency in packaging a particular foreign sale or purchase. Mean- while banks and financial institutions, especially those based in the US, exploited loopholes in domestic law to establish offshore branches. London became the centre of the 'Eurodollar' market, in which US banks offered dollar accounts and loans to foreign customers away from the supervision and regulation of the American government. Of course, this violated the cardinal principles estab- lished in the wake of the Depression; but it also brought large profits to some of the most powerful individuals and companies in Europe and America - ample compensation for the abandonment of that earlier prudence. 14 As companies and investors tried to bend the rules and introduce renewed speculation into this system, the American economy ran into difficulties which also put pressure on fixed exchange rates. Under Bretton Woods, the various currencies were pegged to the US dollar, and the dollar itself was fixed to gold: in theory, every currency could therefore be exchanged for gold (via the dollar) at a fixed rate, which meant that the US had to ensure that the dollars in circulation were backed by its reserve holdings of gold. Tallying gold with dollars became harder in the 19605 as the Eurodollar markets put huge dollar sums beyond the control (or knowledge) of the US government. Additionally, the US escalation of its war in Vietnam put pressure on the entire American economy and sent its inflation rate creeping upwards. By the late 19605, US dollars and US gold reserves were no longer in synch, and the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon feared that a run on the dollar would THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 7 force a devaluation and the end of the Bretton Woods system of pegged rates. The increasing appeal of speculation to wealthy Americans and Europeans, and the ballooning cost of the Vietnam War, ultimately destroyed the exchange-rate system. In 1971, Nixon closed the 'gold window' and allowed the dollar to 'float', to find its own value against other currencies without government intervention. The US dollar was devalued, and the pegged currencies began to float alongside it in the new international currency market. 15 The demise of the pegged-rate system may seem a rather arcane detail in world history. Its effects have been profound, however, and have shaped the face of the global economy at the turn of the century. The breakdown of the exchange-rate system was a major blow to Keyness original vision of a world economy managed by government cooperation. Moreover, the victory of the 'market' over government allowed (and even encouraged) riskier forms of invest- ment and speculation to re-emerge from their long disgrace. In the mid-1970s, many of the surviving restrictions on capital flows were removed, and the legacy of caution left by the Depression was dis- avowed. Within a few years, enormous sums of money were moving around the world, largely outside the control of national govern- ments; new forms of borrowing, lending, and especially of specula- tion were devised; and the profits of financial corporations depended increasingly on their foreign activities. US banks and firms led the charge, taking full advantage of this deregulation to expand their activities worldwide. 16 Much of the speculation was initially confined to the developed world, and focused on stocks, government debt certificates and currencies. Developing countries, however, were slowly sucked into this new world of easy credit and private/corporate influence. In the 19505 and 19605, developing countries relied principally on develop- ment loans and grants from specific countries or the World Bank to finance their various projects. Given the public-interest nature of most of these endeavours (electrification, damming, road building, and so on), the favourable terms of these development loans were properly tailored to the likely returns. Lending was specifically based on the premiss that these poorer countries needed assistance, and that they were unlikely to attract private banks or to repay loans at private rates. In the two decades following World War II, a combination of 8 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? wariness on the banks' part and government regulation in the US and Europe kept private lenders out of the developing world. 17 In the 19705, however, the larger trends we have been tracking — government deregulation and an amnesia about the Depression — persuaded the banks, especially in the US, to look for business in the developing world. As inflation rates remained high in their tradi- tional markets, banks were attracted to Africa and especially Latin America and the prospect of big loans at high interest. Developing countries, meanwhile, entered the bargain for various reasons. Some were run dictatorially and placed the interest of a ruling elite above the needs of the wider population; others were struggling to indus- trialise or to pursue their own development models without the assistance and approval of the World Bank. Developing countries previously faced difficulties in winning grants and loans from official sources for more redistributive or left-leaning programmes; many turned to private banks in the 19705 as a last resort, eager to imple- ment their reforms and hopeful that they could somehow deal with the interest that these private loans would demand. The banks, mean- while, competed with each other to offer loans to virtually any country which asked for them, even if that country's economic situ- ation was already parlous. 18 It would be hard to overestimate the loan bonanza of the 19705 and its influence on developed economies. 19 In the US, major banks like Citicorp and Bankers Trust were reaping almost 80 per cent of their profits from overseas transactions, and making cash advances that far outstripped their own deposits. 20 In the developing world, meanwhile, the loans had spiralled out of control, and the interest payments alone were forcing governments to borrow even more money. With the global economy largely idling in the 19705, and given slow returns on investment in development projects, debtor governments edged closer to disaster.The banks, meanwhile, dismissed warnings of impending doom with the breezy claim that govern- ments in the developing world could not go bankrupt, and that the debts would continue to be paid. 21 In August 1982, Jesus Silva Herzog, finance minister of Mexico, announced just the opposite: Mexico was indeed bankrupt, and would not be able to service its debts any longer. Thus began the 'debt crisis', and a series of US-led policies and decisions which have defined the current global economy. 22 THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 9 From crisis to 'consensus': debt and development in the igSos and iggos As the implications of Mexico's announcement sank in, commentators and politicians in the US and Europe realised the scale of the prob- lem. Some of the largest banks in the world had committed them- selves well beyond their own reserves, and were now faced with the awful consequences of these bloated bad loans. If companies and individuals tried en masse to remove their deposits from the banks, they would quickly exhaust the reserves and would force a collapse of the banking system, returning the world to the disasters of the 1930s. 23 The recklessness of the banks' lending practices had brought the global economy to the brink of another crash, and banks and government officials had quickly to respond to the Mexican and other defaults before the inevitable run on the banks. Of course, the first step was for governments to assume the management of the crisis, and for the banks to take a back seat as politicians worked on a solution. 24 The response of creditor governments was to avoid recognising the disaster in its true depth and extent, and to follow a course of action which denied the basic fact that many developing countries were bankrupt. The longer developed-country governments and banks could make it seem that the debtor countries were solvent, the more chance they had of deferring a widespread panic and a slump of confidence in the banks. The first principle of this creditor response, then, was to keep at least some money flowing from the debtors to the creditors. Loans were rolled over, interest payments were postponed in part, and everything was done to deny the suggestion that the loans were bad. In tandem with this, debtor governments were ordered to find additional revenue for repayments, even if the consequence of this was a series of budget cuts which hit the poorest people in their societies. This two-track approach - a postponement of some loans and a series of'austerity measures' on the part of developing-country governments to generate repayment revenue — characterised much of the developing world in the 19805, and enabled the major banks in Europe and the US to stave off panic on the part of their depositors. The developed world was largely saved from bank failures and economic collapse, while IO ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? developing countries endured the destruction of their social infra- structure — including basic health care and education programmes - and further impoverishment. 25 Who managed the creditor response to the debt crisis? Ironically, the private banks and individuals who had done the lending were represented by the World Bank and especially the IMF, which arranged the conditions for 'structural adjustment' of developing economies and monitored the success of the accompanying'austerity measures'. The IMF was working under a double influence. In the first place, developed-country governments were terrified of a wide- spread banking collapse, and obviously preferred to see the burden transferred to the developing world rather than to accept the conse- quences of failing financial institutions. Second, the big private banks themselves exerted pressure, threatening to pursue their own repay- ment arrangements with debtor countries even though this might trigger a more widespread collapse of the global financial system. 26 The US role in all this was substantial. US banks were heavily involved in the bad lending; the American economy was especially vulnerable to a banking crisis; and the US government enjoyed the largest influence of any country over the World Bank and the IMF, both of which have their headquarters in Washington. The debtor countries, meanwhile, were largely helpless: if they followed the IMF instructions, they would be forced to slash public spending and to cut vital services on which the population depended; if they refused the advice, and defaulted on the loans, they would be denied access to credit, would have their foreign assets seized, and might collapse altogether. The developing world's 'acceptance' of structural adjust- ment is hardly surprising given these dire options. 27 The decision to impose structural adjustment in 1982 was pivotal in many respects to the economic situation today. First, it established a rhythm of developing-world poverty and economic constraint which persists two decades later. Second, it averted the major global depression, or even collapse, which would have followed the failure of Western banks. Finally, it confirmed a drift away from Keynes, who would not have seen the logic of 'austerity' and of government abdication in the developing world or elsewhere. Just as Nixon's 1971 suspension of the 'dollar standard' had suggested the surrender of national governments to the international market, so the adjust- THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY II ment programmes of 1982 implied that government spending in the developing world was injurious to economic health. This seemed to vindicate those economists who had been arguing since the 19505 for the submission of all areas of government to free-market logic. A group of economists based at the University of Chicago had put forward the economic and political philosophy known as neo- liberalism — these theorists claimed that free trade (and especially freedom of capital movement) should be a primary goal of economic policy, along with tight governmental control of the money supply. Job creation, social programmes and welfare systems were substantially less important to the neoliberals, and were usually the first sacrifices to the new god of'economic discipline' or 'austerity'. Neoliberalism had initially attracted little support in the heyday of capital controls and Keynes. As the older prudence and the memories of the Depres- sion began to subside, however, the 'Chicago School' converted more economists and politicians to the neoliberal point of view. The debt crisis offered an opportunity to put these ideas into action, as well as a political emergency to strengthen the claim that free markets were the only way forward. 28 In the 19805, these free-market ideas came to prominence in Europe and especially the US, just as the IMF insisted on their implementation in poorer countries. Over the course of the decade, as free-market principles were selectively imposed in the developed world, the medicine of'adjustment' was increasingly presented as an orthodox rather than an emergency measure in developing countries: 'austerity' was less a last resort than the first step to a new economic well-being. The relative decline in the economies of the developed world during the 19708 played a part in legitimising this new rheto- ric of free markets; further deregulation of the financial industry, especially in the US, also encouraged the belief that private money could take over the responsibility of governments. American banks and investment firms led the way in financing new kinds of debt and stock in the developing world, resuming cash flows to heavily in- debted countries but concentrating their resources on privatisation and the operation of the private sector. Those countries which remained too poor to appeal to Western investors simply languished in 'austerity', bound to their debts and to IMF conditions and largely forgotten in their plight. 29 12 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? In 1990, a British economist gave a name to the recent policies of neoliberalism and structural adjustment: the 'Washington Consensus'. This title reflected the fact that the IMF and World Bank are located in the American capital; but it also captured the distinctly American flavour of the 'Consensus'. 30 The turn towards free markets could not have occurred without the gradual deregulation of the US financial industry, and might have faltered without the intellectual backing of American economists and policymakers in the late 19705 and 19805. Moreover, the power and reach of American banks is truly stagger- ing, and their full-fledged support for the 'free-market' model has exerted a powerful influence on successive US presidents. The Ameri- can financial industry has many reasons to love the 'Washington Consensus'. One of its conditions is that developing countries drop their controls on capital movements and open their doors to foreign investors and businesses. This has allowed US firms to move into developing-country markets and to cream off business, especially among the wealthier members of a developing society. Another plank of the Consensus encourages privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) such as power or telephone companies. This has also excited Wall Street by giving firms the opportunity either to buy into these SOEs at discounted rates, or to claim substantial commission fees for underwriting or consulting on the sale. Finally, developing countries have been forced to maintain convertible currencies, enabling Euro- pean and American speculators to gamble against particular curren- cies in the international exchanges or the futures market. Although this gambling can have disastrous effects on the economy of a poorer country, it can also result in huge speculative profits for private firms or individuals, a higher priority from the perspective of Washington or New York. 31 As we have seen, developing countries were largely offered the Consensus as a fait accompli, the only option in (economic) theory and in (political) practice. Those leaders who followed the IMF's direction, however, were offered some rewards. In the first instance, budget cuts hit the poorest in society, but had less impact on the middle and upper classes. In fact, many upwardly mobile members of developing societies profited from the cuts in state spending, since these provided business opportunities to the domestic private sector. The same is true of privatisation, which transferred public resources THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 13 into private hands at discount prices. Alongside foreign investors, domestic elites bought into the former SOEs and began to run them as private monopolies, usually at a substantial profit. Their new- found wealth was also boosted by currency convertibility and the introduction of financial services from US firms — domestic elites could now choose to keep their money inside their home country, to transfer it to offshore accounts, or even to gamble against their own currency in the hope of personal gain. 32 The consequences of the Washington Consensus, then, were wide- ranging. The IMF had certainly laid the ground for the world's biggest banks and corporations to capture new markets and profits; but it had also encouraged a widening gap between richer and poorer countries, as well as a divergence in the fortunes of rich and poor within developing societies as local elites were drawn into the Con- sensus. The US was in the forefront of all this, pursuing the Consensus in its foreign policy and strengthening its grip intellectually. By the 19905, free markets were largely enshrined in American universities and business schools; moreover, the most privileged and powerful members of developing societies were dispatched to those universi- ties and schools to learn the orthodoxy for themselves. 33 At the end of the twentieth century, political leaders throughout the world were routinely catalogued as 'Harvard-trained', as if their passage through American business programmes would underwrite the soundness of their economic thinking. TRADE, NOT AID': US VERSIONS OF 'DEVELOPMENT' Perhaps the best examples of the significance of these economic changes come from the presidency of Bill Clinton, who was elected in 1992. Clinton represented the Democratic Party, the party of Franklin Roosevelt, which had been shut out of executive office since 1980 by Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Although Clinton told voters in 1992 that he was a 'New Democrat', and that he represented a new approach to economics and politics from his Democratic predecessors, he was not considered 14 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? a neoliberal in his economic thinking. The free-market ideas of the Chicago School had traditionally been linked with the party of the right, and so Clinton's success raised the question of how far free- market thinking had gone within mainstream US politics. As it tran- spired, Clinton ultimately took free-market ideas to new extremes, confirming the 'New Democrats' in their break with their party's past. Although Clinton was reluctant to slash public spending and to privatise many government programmes, his stance on international trade was avowedly neoliberal: economies around the world should open to foreign investment; any remaining restrictions on capital flows should be lifted; and American goods and financial services should be sold freely around the world. 34 To assist him in implementing this agenda, Clinton surrounded himself with advisers and officials who had spent considerable time designing or profiting from the Washington Consensus. Foremost among these were Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary from 1995 to 1999 (and a key Clinton adviser from the beginning of his presi- dency), and Lawrence Summers, Rubin's deputy and eventual successor. Rubin had been chairman of Goldman Sachs, one of the world's largest investment banks, until he was asked to become a New Democrat. 35 The New York Times candidly noted that 'Mr Rubin had made a fortune on Wall Street' before working for Clinton, and quoted a Clinton administration official who stressed Rubin's 'very Wall Street view' in his new public office. Lawrence Summers, mean- while, was a Harvard academic who had become chief economist of the World Bank in the early 19908, working specifically to tailor 'austerity measures' and other conditions to developing-country loans. 36 To prevent his Treasury team from feeling lonely in a left- leaning Cabinet, Clinton picked a number of other Wall Street alumni for top jobs in his administration; and watched several advisers (including Rubin) leave public duties to return to the lure of high- finance and corporate derring-do, when they tired of public service or sought a higher return for their expertise. 37 Although the US economy enjoyed a lengthy upturn under Clinton's direction, his efforts to shape the global economy were far less successful — the flagship North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada and Mexico was severely buffeted by the Mexican peso crisis of 1994/5; tne Asian financial crisis of the f THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 15 1997 spread to other parts of the world in 1998, and had an especially disastrous effect on the struggling market economy of Russia; and large parts of the world continued to suffer under the burden of loan repayments and IMF 'adjustment', decades after the loans had been contracted. Given the concern of many American voters with their own economic well-being, these foreign events have had less of an impact within the US. I want in the remainder of this chapter to focus upon them, however, before concluding with a summary of current American thinking on the global economy and some consideration of the likely course of events in coming years. Mexico: 'It's not a loan, it's not a bail-out' To many observers in the early 19905, Mexico seemed a textbook case of the benefits of the Washington Consensus. It had undergone a period of budget cuts and 'austerity', which had impacted heavily on poorer sections of society but which satisfied the IMF. In the late 19805, the government of Carlos Salinas embarked on one of the largest privatisation programmes the world had ever seen, which also brought plaudits from the IMF and from foreign investors. Con- fidence in Mexico's 'progress' was so high that Bill Clinton invited Salinas to join NAFTA in 1994, binding the Mexican and US econo- mies and promising jobs to Mexico and cheap labour to American companies. If the US had any doubts in the Mexican government, they were assuaged in a familiar manner: Salinas himself was 'Harvard- trained', and his finance minister, Pedro Aspe, boasted a doctorate from MIT. 38 NAFTA went into effect on i January 1994, amidst general enthusiasm for the Mexican economic 'miracle' and happy prospects for the future. The causes of instability were already in place, how- ever. 39 Mexico was still paying back its earlier debts, and was relying increasingly on continued loans and investment to cover its own current-account deficit. In the interest of avoiding a destructive de- valuation, the Mexican government had in 1988 linked the peso to the dollar. By 1994, this linkage was only viable with continued infusions of foreign investment into Mexico. The Mexican govern- ment's anxiety about this weakness could have been remedied by a devaluation; but this might have upset the confidence of those same 16 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? foreign investors, and have done more harm than good. It might also have antagonised poorer Mexicans whose savings would lose their value after the peso's fall: 1994 was an election year, and Salinas was especially keen to avoid such an unpopular measure if at all possible. His party's candidate to succeed him, Ernesto Zedillo, might have suffered at the polls if Salinas mismanaged the economy in his final months in office. Salinas thus fell back on a series of risky strategies which might keep Mexico afloat. The government issued more short-term bonds, and tied $30 billion of them to a fixed dollar rate. These dollar- linked bonds, nicknamed tesobonos, were easier to sell but would be especially hard to redeem when they expired in December 1994, unless the downward pressure on the peso was relaxed. As the tesobonos bought Mexico time, Salinas's government put its hopes in the continued climb of the Mexican stock market, and a rise in the global price of oil, a major Mexican export. Meanwhile, Salinas could only hope that currency speculators would overlook the under- lying evidence of peso vulnerability: a concerted effort to bring down the currency would almost certainly succeed in this weakened climate. 40 For all the austerity and restructuring, Mexico was still fretting over the price of oil on the international commodity markets and the prospect of speculators undoing its modest progress. Structural adjust- ment may have preserved Mexico's ability to borrow from the IMF and private banks, but it had hardly strengthened the nation's eco- nomic or political independence. Moreover, the growing number of super-rich within Mexico posed an additional threat. Between 1991 and 1994, the number of Mexican billionaires increased from two to twenty-four, a result of the huge profits made from privatisation and financial deregulation. 41 This domestic elite, however, had no particular loyalty to the government or to the peso. The loosening of capital controls in Mexico had encouraged the rich to set up dollar accounts in the US and Europe, and various offshore accounts in the world's many tax havens. This gave domestic investors and speculators ample opportunity to sell their Mexican stocks, to cash in their debt certifi- cates, and even to bet against the peso on the currency markets. Instead of mitigating Mexico's vulnerability to foreign capital, the Washington Consensus had deepened and domesticated the threat. 42 THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY IJ In the final months of 1994, then, word of the peso's weakness circulated among Mexican elites, and encouraged many wealthy Mexicans to move their money out of the domestic stock and bond markets. Some even bet on the peso's fall, taking short positions on the currency markets and further aggravating the problem. The Mexican government had tried to offset the peso slump by selling its gold reserves, and managed to mask the extent of the crisis so effec- tively that Salinas's chosen successor, Zedillo, won the presidential election in August. As capital flight continued, however, it was clear that the new Zedillo government would be forced to devalue. More- over, that devaluation would not make Mexico's December bond repayments any easier: the tesobonos holders expected to be paid in dollars, and the Mexican government was broke. Following the lead of domestic elites, American and European investors rushed for the exits, compounding the difficulties of the stock market and denying any foreign capital to the Mexican government. By January 1995, the Mexican economy was in free fall, with no obvious means of dealing with the crisis. 43 Around this time, Robert Rubin, Clinton's new Treasury Secretary, was enjoying a fishing vacation in the Caribbean. A phone call from Clinton disturbed this tranquil scene, and Rubin was rushed back to Washington to engineer a response to Mexico's plight. Clinton's flagship economic project, NAFTA, would certainly be battered by a prolonged financial crisis in Mexico. Clinton had previously persuaded a wary US public that Mexico was a strong and stable partner; there was little evidence of this amidst the panic selling and devaluation of December and January. Rubin was well equipped to remind Clinton of another American interest in Mexico: many Wall Street firms were holders of debt certificates, including the tesobonos now due for repayment. How would these firms get their money back? How could the US deal with the inevitable instability that would follow Mexico's troubles? 44 Rubin and Clinton initially proposed that the US sign loan guar- antees for Mexico, which would enable the Mexican government to borrow $40 billion from private banks with the US acting as guaran- tor of the loans. This was good for Clinton, who told the nation in the January 1995 State of the Union address that the $40 billion package was 'not a loan, not foreign aid, not a bail out'. 45 It was also 18 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? good for Rubin's Wall Street friends, who could advance more money to Mexico in the sure knowledge that the US, in the last resort, would pick up the tab. The only constituency that remained underwhelmed was the taxpayers, in spite of Clinton's reassurances. Many members of Congress had been sceptical of NAFTA, and this latest fiasco suggested that the benefits of the Clinton Mexico policy might be less compelling than the costs of engagement. Although Rubin seemed (by turns) serious and amiable, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the US population at large was paying to rescue his super-rich colleagues in high finance: 'Why should Main Street bail out Wall Street?', asked one Congressman. 46 Clinton and Rubin needed the support of Congress to pass their massive loan guarantees. Congress, in the second half of January 1995, made clear its serious reservations about the plan. What hap- pened next was to have profound significance in ensuing years. Clin- ton took the unprecedented step of making a huge loan — not a guarantee — on his own authority. Uncovering a legislative loophole from Franklin Roosevelt's administration, Clinton circumvented Con- gress and put up $20 billion of US money for the immediate use of the Mexican government. In addition, Rubin confirmed the power of the US over the supposedly multilateral IMF by persuading the Fund to lend $18 billion on the same terms. This was a staggering sum, dwarfing previous 'emergency assistance' and setting a prece- dent for similar IMF 'rescue operations' in the following years. As the US Congressional representatives watched from the sidelines, open-mouthed, Clinton and Rubin matched the $40 billion they had previously sought in loan guarantees and, contrary to Clinton's earlier promise to the American people, engineered the largest bail- out in US or IMF history. 47 Even such a huge sum was quickly devoured in bond repayments and the effort to restock Mexico's dwindling reserves. Mexican financial elites were largely ecstatic: they made a great deal of money from their management of stocks and bonds and from currency specu- lation, and were mostly fleet-footed in getting their money out of the country. Wall Street had a mixed experience. Bondholders were eventually bailed out by the re-infusion of cash from the US and IMF; those who had traded heavily on the Mexican stock market, however, had to swallow some heavy losses. At least the big Wall THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 19 Street firms could take comfort in the prospect of more consulting and underwriting deals with the Mexican government, however. The rescue deal was conditional on even more austerity measures, a hard- ening of the adjustment regime for which Mexico was previously the poster-child. Although rich Mexicans and Wall Street emerged from the peso crisis in the black, ordinary Mexicans bore the brunt of the 'adjustment': inflation and unemployment increased; public spending was slashed; and social unrest, particularly in the southern state of Chiapas, continued to grow. This was the silent constituency which no one sought to 'bail out'. 48 The US response to the peso crisis shaped the rules by which the global economy now operates: the IMF is prepared to advance massive loans to countries under speculative attack, with those loans largely underwriting investors who have become overexposed in that country, or who simply seek to cash out their winnings. It also reflected some of the uncomfortable realities of an economy in which private gain is unchecked by national loyalties or the claims of a broader public interest. The most striking aspect of the crisis is the sheer scale of money at stake, which seems even more daunting when we consider the speed and chaos of the peso's collapse. Al- though economists and politicians have subsequendy stressed the weakness of Mexico's economic 'fundamentals' in 1994, an d especially its reliance on foreign money to finance its deficit, the adjustment programmes following 1982, and the grander political reforms of the Washington Consensus, have encouraged precisely this dependence. A policy of deregulation and abolition of capital controls, lodestar of Clinton's 'New Democrat' perspective on the world economy, has been faithfully exported with disastrous results: any economy is vulnerable to capital flight and speculative attack, and the combination of weak capital controls, hot money and continuing economic in- stability make the developing world an especially attractive location for such profiteering. Perhaps the biggest US achievement in Mexico has been to fashion parallel domestic elites which reliably implement these policies, come rain or come shine. One group consists of US-trained technocrats, who have imbibed the neoliberal elixir at elite US schools and whose dedication to the plan is consistent and depend- able. These economic experts take their place in a broader techno- 2O ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? cratic coalition which has been blooded in the US and which reaches around the globe: having passed through US economics departments and business schools, some technocrats stay on in academia to teach and research the creed; some return to their national governments to implement what they have learned; others go to the IMF or the World Bank, liaising between the distant points of this alumni network. Alongside the technocrats, the other elite group consists of financiers and speculators. Once again, many have been trained or employed in the US, and do business there (often keeping their winnings in American dollars). We might ex- pect, rather naively, that the technocrats and the financiers would eye each other suspiciously across the first-class lounges and restau- rants where they chance to meet; the financiers, after all, showed little allegiance to the efforts of the technocrats in the midst of the peso crisis. In fact, the reverse is usually true. Technocrats and financiers, following Rubin's example, move effortlessly from one side to the other, seemingly content to organise speculative attacks on a currency or to manage a central bank. In the world of free capital flows, financiers are too powerful to be shunned or criti- cised, and so we have seen a kind of inversion of national feeling: if elites were once loyal to the idea of the nation, national govern- ments are now loyal to elites — even if those elites have plundered a country's resources and attacked its currency. 49 The US Congress was correct, then, to suggest that the 1995 bail-out put Wall Street ahead of Main Street; but perhaps the most profound development was not the rescue of Rubin's friends, but instead the confirmation of powerful Mexican elites who can profit from speculation even more dexterously than Wall Street firms. In 'emerging markets', the financial elite alternately helps to build and destroy the handiwork of the governing elite, and the two groups often transfer star players from one side to the other, confirming their entanglement. As Mexico struggled to emerge from the crisis after 1995, it seemed unlikely that the new president, Ernesto Zedillo, would draw attention to the instability which accompanied volatile capital flows, or mount an attack on local and international finance. His Ph.D. thesis, written in the early 19805 at Yale University, argued that Mexico's previous debt crisis should be blamed on the govern- ment rather than the banks which made loans. As long as the US, THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 21 the IMF and international financiers are ready to administer the 'assistance', this kind of confession seems set to continue. 50 Africa: 'The sin of neglect and ignorance' In March 1998, President Clinton left Washington for a two-week tour of Africa. The first US leader to visit the continent since Jimmy Carter, Clinton journeyed throughout the sub-Saharan region with a message of US humility and economic optimism. Although Clinton promised a new relationship between the US and sub-Saharan countries, he paused often to make reference to the previous state of this relationship. 'Perhaps the worst sin America ever committed toward Africa', he declared in Uganda, 'was the sin of neglect and ignorance.' 51 US interest in Africa has waxed and waned since World War II. Given the ravages of colonial exploitation across the continent, eco- nomic development was both desperately needed and desperately difficult. Basic infrastructure was missing in most areas, and the threat of disease and famine compounded the problem. From the 19505 until the 1980$, the US viewed Africa (like much of the rest of the world) through a Cold War frame, and frequently lavished aid and loans on repressive regimes which would side with the US against the USSR. Given that American largesse was directed toward the governing elite which could vouchsafe this support, US presidents showed little interest in how the money was actually spent — and so basic development projects were ignored as dictators and their associates got rich. Coupled with the unwillingness of US business to extend its operations to Africa, this blunt Cold War strategy amply deserved Clintons 1998 language: the US was ignorant of African politics and neglectful of the needs of its people. Worse, its channel- ling of loans and aid contributed to undemocratic rule across the continent, and a major debt crisis in the 19805 and 19905. 52 The debt burden hit Africa particularly hard. Even those countries which had thrown off their corrupt leaders had to foot the bills for former profligacy. Austerity measures were applied, under IMF direction, to economies which had skeletal public services in the first place. These IMF plans were intended to ensure that money kept flowing to service the debts; the plans were insensitive to the effect 22 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? of the austerity measures on the population at large. By the mid- 1990s, at least 40 per cent of Africans were living on less than a dollar a day, and the same proportion suffered from malnutrition and hunger. Even those governments which were interested in the welfare of their people faced daunting obstacles to development. Debt in sub-Saharan Africa had reached $250 billion and most countries were devoting more revenue to interest payments than to spending on education and health combined. 53 The IMF, content to see money flowing out of Africa to service the debts, was sanguine about the side-effects of structural adjust- ment. Western campaigners and many African-advocacy groups, how- ever, protested against the IMF's policy in the strongest terms. In 1996, these complaints finally forced a concession from the IMF. Responding to protesters' demands that the debts be written off, the IMF proposed the 'Heavily Indebted Poor Countries' (HIPC) initia- tive. The HIPC plan first identified the neediest countries, 80 per cent of which were in Africa. These countries were then required to pursue IMF dictates for six years, before being rewarded with a reduction in interest payments. Although the plan was introduced with much fanfare, it proved inadequate both in its qualifying terms and in its results. Six years of austerity measures promised a great deal of misery before any reward; the eventual payoff, meanwhile, made little more than a dent in the massive debt repayment provi- sions. Only two countries in Africa had qualified for any relief by 1999; one of these, Mozambique, was offered a cut in its repayment of $10 million a year, leaving $110 million outstanding as its annual fee - twice its annual health budget. 54 In 1999, protest groups refocused media attention on the issue of debt. With the support of rock stars, religious leaders and even some economists, organisations like Jubilee 2000 demanded debt forgive- ness to coincide with the millennium. 55 These campaigns were well organised and quickly gained popular support from the general pub- lic in developed countries. Debt was once again a political issue in the US and Europe, and the American government offered a new version of the HIPC plan in June 1999. The new proposal, however, shared many of the problems which had stymied the 1996 initiative. A very modest level of debt relief was again contingent on poorer countries' acceptance of IMF 'discipline'. Moreover, the major THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 2j industrialised countries that would bankroll the relief programme could not agree on how to pay for it. One idea was to sell off the IMF's gold reserves, then invest that sum and use the interest to fund debt relief. The immediate effect of this announcement, however, was to impoverish many African countries still further by pushing down the market price of gold, a major African export. As Western leaders used the proposals to boast of their own munificence, Oxfam dismissed the new 'debt relief plan as 'painfully inadequate'. 56 Behind these proposals and counter-proposals lies a fundamental battle over debt and development. In the 19505 and 19605, the US and other countries provided loans or grants to Africa for the establish- ment of public infrastructure. By the end of the 19905, the idea of government-controlled services had fallen out of fashion with economists and politicians, and the market had been crowned as the legitimate provider of even basic needs like health and education. According to the neoliberal creed, Africa's problem was not the burden of debt, but the apathy of the international private sector. The solution to problems of development lay therefore in more austerity and adjustment, followed by the opening of Africa's borders to free flows of foreign capital. As the Financial Times put it in a revealing article on anti-debt campaigners, it was a 'myth' to believe 'that debt relief has to be good for poverty alleviation'. 57 One might expect a progressive American government to be wary of neoliberal solutions. As we have seen, however, the Clinton admin- istration has rushed to embrace free markets and free capital flows at every opportunity, exporting its enthusiasm around the globe. When Clinton visited Africa in 1998, and lamented the decades of'neglect and ignorance', he had a genuine alternative in mind: a hefty dose of neoliberalism, specially designed to take advantage of Africa's new- found commercial appeal to US corporations. Speaking of the need for 'trade, not aid', he urged African leaders to put their hopes in budget reductions, privatisation and a new wave of foreign investment. The US would act as their partner in this, and would spearhead an investment drive which would more than compensate for reductions in the US aid budget, and the continuing burden of old debts. 58 On his return to the US in 1998, Clinton followed up on his promises and encouraged legislation for a US—Africa economic 24 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? agreement. 59 The plan, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), was quickly dubbed 'NAFTA for Africa', and was rejected by the Senate later the same year. President Clinton, however, praised the Act in his 1999 State of the Union address, and it returned to Congress soon after. 60 The AGOA calls for Africa to abandon controls on capital movements, to reduce tariffs, to privatise SOEs, and to reduce taxes for business. It also requires qualifying countries to avoid 'gross' human-rights violations (whatever that means) and 'activities that undermine United States national security or foreign policy interests.' 61 In return for meeting these criteria, African countries would be given special consideration by US corporations and investors, many of whom are already excited at the prospect of acquiring monopoly concerns in Africa via privatisation programmes. AGOA also establishes a free-trade area, and envisages the delivery of African products (often made in US-owned factories) to the US with negligible tariffs. Although US labour unions are concerned at the possibility of a deluge of cheaply manufactured goods, American corporate leaders are intrigued by the prospect of a cheap African workforce. US investment firms, meanwhile, stand ready to pour short-term capital into the region, particularly as the Asian crisis of 1997/8 has dented confidence in other 'emerging markets'. 62 The Clinton administration is dedicated to AGOA, and it seems likely to become law in 2000. 63 At this point, sub-Saharan Africa will split into two blocs: those countries which meet the US qualifications and enter into the agreement, and those that cannot or will not qualify. The future for the disqualified countries looks bleak indeed. The US has very deliberately undermined its aid budget and has rejected the idea of bilateral assistance — Clinton's 1998 tour made clear that trade was the way forward, and it seems unlikely that those who refuse to trade on US terms will be given aid as a consolation prize. Moreover, the non-qualifiers will suffer from the disruption of the existing trade network inside Africa. Because the qualifying countries will be locked into preferential trading with the US, it seems unlikely that any success they are able to attain will spread to former trading partners who have not qualified for the AGOA. 64 Perhaps the only consolation for non-qualifiers will be the grim knowledge that qualifying nations have their own set of problems. American critics of the US-Africa trade deal have described a THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 25 proposal 'that combines NAFTA's failed rules with cruel IMF dictates'. 65 This is a reasonable prognosis for those countries which agree to the US offer. Although US companies will create some new jobs, and neoliberal policies will enrich the higher echelons of society, the majority of Africans are unlikely to see any benefits in the short or medium term. In fact, the continued squeeze on public spending, and the supposed need for private rather than public investment, will probably worsen conditions for the poorest Africans. 66 Of course, the advocates of free markets have claimed that the long-term benefits of such policies will eventually redeem the decades of suffering. This argument seems hard to sustain, especially given the recent crisis involving Latin American 'success stories' and the flight of invest- ment capital. As speedily as money hearkens to Clinton's call, it will leave Africa at the first sign of trouble, or of a more lucrative oppor- tunity elsewhere. Given sub-Saharan Africa's particularly severe poverty crisis, Clinton's recent corporate courtship of the region seems especially disingenuous. Alongside Clinton's protectionist opponents at home, who fear the loss of US jobs to cheap African labour, some Congressional representatives have lined up against the trade agree- ment on the grounds of its potentially destructive impact upon Africa. Jesse Jackson, Jr., a Congressman from Illinois, has even introduced alternative legislation which reverses Clinton's emphasis: instead of trade taking priority over aid, Jackson has proposed debt forgiveness and a substantial aid package as a first step to addressing poverty and disease across the continent. 67 Given the looming disaster of HIV/ AIDS, which is devastating many African states, Jackson has justi- fiably argued that millions will die before any benefits trickle down to the poorest Africans. In response, the US Congress has proposed to delegate the African AIDS problem to a familiar friend: 'Corpo- rate America,' pleaded one Congresswoman, 'we need you to band together, to use your resources to cement Africa's greatest resource, its people.' She went on to suggest that 'corporate America' should be given responsibility for funding a response to AIDS across the African continent, perhaps contributing to a fund for AIDS research and care. Since the African labour pool is substantially larger than the number of jobs corporate America has to offer, this faith in the private sector seems misplaced. Perhaps US firms will take a greater 26 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? interest if they can successfully turn Africans into consumers of their products — a more distant prospect. 68 Clinton's treatment of Africa has at least clarified US policy on aid and economic reform. If poorer countries could once expect a measure of assistance simply because of their poverty, the new US linkage of neoliberalism and development has extended 'market discipline' even to the world's poorest people. Simply to give out aid without insisting on austerity and open markets is to risk alternative modes of development; linking 'discipline' and 'austerity' to some kind of debt relief, however, gives the US the opportunity to shape African economies to its own preferences. This raises the question of whether African countries really want to become 'emerging markets', and returns us to Clinton's initial apology for the decades of US 'ignorance and neglect'. If US know-how can only offer an Africa of 'free markets' and continued social disaster, many Africans may hope, in spite of their current poverty, that the American 'neglect' continues. Russia: 'I can't tell you exactly what happened' In the summer of 1991, the Soviet Union was in its death throes. The US government, seemingly as surprised as anyone by the rapid collapse of its arch-enemy, faced the attractive but daunting prospect of assisting Russia and its former satellites in their transition from communism. With the discrediting of the old system, and even of those 'reformers' like Gorbachev who had tried to reconfigure the Soviet economy, the way was cleared for new faces and new ideas. Although some of the stars of the US policymaking establishment — such as Henry Kissinger - urged that the US keep its distance from the transition process, American politicians and economists could not resist the opportunity before them. A group of US academics met with aides to Boris Yeltsin in July 1991 to prepare a set of radical ideas that, they promised, would transform Russia's economy in five years or less. 69 The US government became actively involved with the Russian transition in 1991, but promptly channelled many of its grants and assistance loans through a prestigious subcontractor: Harvard Univer- sity. Harvard's Institute for International Development (HIID), com- prising economists and development experts, petitioned to take charge THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 27 of the US intellectual mission to Russia and was soon assuming awesome responsibilities in Moscow and St Petersburg. On the Rus- sian side, this American involvement was not viewed with hostility, at least at first. Broad sections of the population could look at the fantastic wealth of the US and hope for direct aid, rather than loans and technical assistance. Russian elites, meanwhile, were impressed at the involvement of Americas premier university, and susceptible to the HIID rhetoric about the necessity for radical change. 70 The most prominent American economist in this mission to Russia was Jeffrey Sachs, an HIID professor who led the 'Harvard Boys' into Russia, and would later direct the Institute. 71 Sachs had already, by 1991, won repute as the evangelist of'shock therapy', a programme of extreme economic reform which he had peddled throughout east- ern Europe. In essence, 'shock therapy' called for a drastic and sudden reorientation of an economy, with immediate cuts in public spend- ing and the suspension of government price controls to contain a country's deficit. 72 Appearing as part faith healer, part mountebank, Sachs was wont to pepper his speeches with memorable truisms which would reinforce the neoliberal message: 'You can't jump a chasm in two leaps' was a particular favourite, and rather revealing. Perhaps the chasm was too wide to be scaled with one leap? Sachs prodded the new Russian government to jump all the same. 73 By 1992, Sachs and the HIID were receiving millions of dollars from the US government to fund the creation of Russia's new financial architecture. The Russian finance minister, Yegor Gaidar, was pushing through HIID-recommended reforms. Although price controls were lifted, the 'therapy' had disastrous effects; as the Harvard Boys implemented their reforms, prices soared out of control, lead- ing to hyperinflation (which reached 2,500 per cent at one point) and the devastation of ordinary Russians' savings. Gaidar was dis- credited, and soon out of a job. Sachs and the Harvard Boys, how- ever, merely switched horses to the new'reformer', Anatoly Chubais. Reluctant to abandon their policies even after this disaster, and strengthened in their convictions that popular discontent should not affect the 'reform' process, the Harvard economists entered an alliance with the 'Chubais clan', a group of Russian economists and business- men who were to mastermind extraordinary feats of larceny and corruption over the following years. 74 28 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Much of this corruption surrounded the second phase of 'shock therapy': privatisation. In 1992, the Supreme Soviet (precursor to the Russian parliament) voted for a voucher scheme which would widely distribute ownership in newly privatised SOEs. The initial privatisa- tion programme was open to many forms of abuse, especially since the bosses who had previously managed Soviet industries were in a position to maximise their personal holdings in the various share issues. 75 The first privatisation wave, however, seemed a model of probity in comparison with the 'loans for shares' scandal of 1995/6. In brief, the Yeltsin administration gave away controlling interests in some of Russia's largest companies to wealthy bankers, in return for much-needed funds which would bolster the government in an election year. Although the deal was supposedly a temporary one, which would have allowed the government to buy back the shares after the 1996 election, government officials and Russia's emerging financial elite actually agreed in secret that the transfer of shares was to be permanent. In return for obtaining the shares at low prices in rigged auctions between colluding banks, the government extracted a pledge of support from the financial elite in the 1996 election. Tycoons like Boris Berezovsky thus threw their substantial influence (and their media empires) behind the Yeltsin campaign, stressing his democratic and economic achievements even as they engineered the least democratic and the most corrupt deal in post-Soviet history. 76 In 1996, when the banks were obliged to sell the shares they'd acquired the previous year in another auction, another round of price-fixing ensured that Berezovsky and his colleagues obtained permanent control of many of Russia's largest companies for a fraction of their market worth. Berezovsky himself, appointed to Yeltsin's government in the wake of the 1996 election victory, made little effort to disguise what had happened: he told the Financial Times that, before the election, 'business realised that if business is not consolidated, we will not have a chance. It is not possible to have this [market] transformation automatically. We need to use all our power to realise this transformation.' Chubais, meanwhile, was the chief architect of this deal; or, as the Financial Times put it, the 'businessmen's conduit' to Yeltsin. Acting as the chief liaison between the Russian financial elite, the Yeltsin administration, and the series of international 'experts' and reformers who were supposedly over- THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 29 seeing Russia's transition, Chubais apparently decided that the promotion of private ownership justified any means necessary to obtain it, even massive theft. 77 Since a small number of Chubais' colleagues and associates became rich, and very few ordinary people benefited from privatisation, this second phase of Western-inspired 'reform' discredited the idea of reform in general. Of course, this popular dissatisfaction merely en- couraged Sachs and the Harvard Boys to strengthen Chubais further, while the new US President, Bill Clinton, praised Boris Yeltsin's expansion of executive power. By the mid-ippos, American diplo- macy and 'technical assistance' (in the form of HIID directions) were dedicated to political and economic 'reform' which encouraged Yeltsin's autocracy and the Chubais clan's kleptocracy. As Sachs and others continued to boast of the linkage between economic liberal- isation and democracy, a very undemocratic system appeared to be emerging in neoliberal Russia. 78 The final element in the Russian disaster was an inevitable consequence of the corrupt means by which new fortunes had been created. Although the Harvard reformers and their Russian colleagues (led by Chubais) claimed that the new kleptocracy would at least ensure prudent management of the new wealth and newly privatised companies, the financial elite feared that its gains would continue to be vulnerable as long as they were held inside Russia. World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz pointed out the danger in 1999: Consider the incentives facing the so-called oligarchs in Russia. They might well have reasoned: democratic elections will eventually conclude that their wealth was ill-begotten, and there will thus be attempts to re- capture it. They might have been induced to pursue a two-fold strategy: on the one hand, to use their financial power to gain sufficient political influence to reduce the likelihood of such an event; but, assuming that that strategy is inherently risky, to use the other hand to take at least a significant part of their wealth out of the country to a safe haven. 79 Thus, the 'free market' reforms had not only concentrated power and money in the hands of a tiny few in Russia, but had given them every reason to move Russia's wealth outside its borders altogether. In the process of converting Russian state assets into private property through a process of corruption and theft, the US-inspired 'reformers' actually invited massive capital flight which would further consolidate 3O ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Russia's financial crisis. This was the background for the crisis of 1997/8, as money haemorrhaged from the country into the private, foreign bank accounts of the kleptocracy. 80 Who was to blame for this mess? The most obvious target for opprobrium was the neoliberal creed itself, particularly as it was inflected by the Harvard Boys. As we have seen elsewhere, the proponents of neoliberalism have tended to treat it more as a science, or even a religion, than as one rather extreme (and questionable) model of development. The folly of this scientific confidence was readily apparent in Russia, where some awareness of cultural and political experience might have clarified the means and goals of reform. Even though Harvard University boasted a number of famous Russian experts, the HIID made little effort to seek their counsel as it designed Russia's 'shock therapy'. In fact, to solicit country-spe- cific advice might have undermined the claims of neoliberalism, by suggesting the importance of local variations and of human factors beyond economic logic and 'rational choice'. HIID representatives seemed interested in Russian history only when their policies lay in ruins — at that point, it was finally helpful to address uniquely Rus- sian character flaws which could explain this exception to the global rule of neoliberal 'success'. 81 Moving beyond Harvard to the broader US perspective on Russia, there was undoubtedly a triumphalism in the early 19905 which blinded policymakers to the reality of the US—Russian relationship. American claims of'victory' in the Cold War fed an arrogance toward the extent of Russia's difficulties and the limited efficacy of Ameri- can neoliberal 'solutions'. The Bush and Clinton administrations happily channelled cash to Harvard on the assumption that these academics must have the right answers, and that Russia could be made again in the likeness of the US. The flip side of this narcissism was the concern that the US continue to wage a 'Cold War' against the forces of reaction: Russia had been 'won' in 1991 but might still escape from the US, if sufficient attention was not paid to the (free- market) development of the former Soviet Union. 82 Richard Nixon, the disgraced former American president, regaled his successors, Bush and Clinton, with the warning that they not 'lose Russia'. Clinton seems to have been especially haunted by Nixon's admonition, up to and beyond the latter's death in I994. 83 THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 3! Some of the blame naturally fell on Russian elites, who appeared ready to implement Harvard directions only in return for fantastic personal wealth. These Russians were encouraged in their plundering in two important respects, however. First, the economic programmes implementing 'shock therapy' were dependent on a strong-minded and powerful Russian government which could push them through, in spite of popular anxiety or protests over budget cuts; 'shock therapy' would therefore mandate substantial political authority for the 'reformers'. Although Jeffrey Sachs, Lawrence Summers and other leading Harvardians may not have intended to produce corruption, their strategy of instantaneous and massive 'reform' tacitly encouraged it. Believing that the goal of an 'adjusted' economy was more important than the means necessary to achieve it, the HIID's local operatives could hardly help but give in to the pilfering of Chubais and his associates. This strengthened the sense of Russian elites that the 'free-market transition' was in fact a free-for-all, a once-in- a-lifetime opportunity for personal gain. 84 Unfortunately, this problem was complicated by the second en- couragement to plunder: the Harvard operation had its own impropri- eties, and members of the 'reform' team may actually have participated in what ordinary Russians glumly called 'the great grab'. In the first place, the bulk of US money, disbursed by the Agency for International Development (USAID), had gone to Harvard without competitive tender. More seriously, questions arose about the extent of Harvard's official and personal involvement in the Russian economy. Harvard investment managers appear to have received preferential treatment in Russian privatisation auctions, since they were the only foreign buyers allowed to invest (save for George Soros). Two of the Harvard professors who administered USAID funds, meanwhile, were accused in 1997 of using their money and contacts improperly. One Harvard professor, Jonathan Hay, even helped his girlfriend to set up a mutual fund in Russia, which was somehow licensed by Hay's Russian counterparts ahead of much larger and established US competitors. USAID finally cancelled the HIID contract in 1997, citing evidence that Harvard professors were engaged in 'activities for personal gain'. 85 The consequences of all this for ordinary Russians were severe. From the mid-1990s, the country was controlled autocratically by Yeltsin, 32 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? the mafia and a group of business leaders attendant on Chubais, many from the old Soviet nomenklatura. The Russian parliament pro- tested against Yeltsin's rule, but was largely unable to stop further 'reforms'.The government, unable or unwilling to tax the new elites, failed to pay the wages of remaining public-sector employees. The number of Russians in poverty increased from 2 million in 1990 to 60 million in 1999. Parts of Russia reverted to pre-cash systems of exchange, bartering goods and labour; and crime, violence and alco- holism reached unprecedented levels. Russian life expectancy slumped to 61, comparable with Indonesia, Paraguay or Egypt. One of the few policy initiatives to enjoy a modicum of democratic legitimacy was the brutal conflict with Chechnya, a diversion from the eco- nomic crisis which threw Russians back on older prejudices against nationalities and ethnic groups within the former Soviet Union. Although Yeltsin could hardly count on public support for his economic 'reforms', his 1999 offensive against the Muslim Chechens won some approval, especially in Moscow and St Petersburg. The price for this fleeting burst of popularity was paid in full, however, by Russian conscripts, Chechen fighters, and the civilians of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, who suffered indiscriminate bombardment and Russian occupation. 86 In spite of everything, the Russian economy did not collapse altogether. Wealthy Russians saw potential for further profits by manipulating the nascent Russian securities markets, and international investors, many of them ignorant of the true extent of neoliberal failure in Russia, saw the new stock exchange as a promising 'emerging market'. As the Russian government struggled in 1997 and early 1998 to roll over loans and to reschedule bond redemption, international investors created a speculative bubble which further enriched the nomenklatura. Financial managers in the US and Europe inflated the bubble with pension and mutual fund deposits, even as the Asian crisis of late 1997 suggested the inherent instability and danger of'emerging markets' which were over-dependent on loans and foreign capital. 87 The Clinton adminstration's response to Russia's difficulties was one of alarm. In 1998, as Russia was about to default on its loans, the US Treasury scrambled to engineer another bail-out. This time, unlike in Mexico, the money would be dispatched before disaster struck — a pre-emptive measure that was renamed a 'bail-in'. After THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 33 much US prodding, the IMF announced a $22 billion package in July, and sent an initial $4.8 billion immediately to help the Russian government to restore the confidence of investors. 88 Strangely, huge dollar sums began to leave Russia as soon as the IMF money was transferred; and, to the horror of the US, the Russian rouble collapsed on 17 August, barely a month later. Something had gone terribly wrong with the 'bail-in', and the Russian economy — including the 'hot' stock market - crashed spectacularly. By i September, the value of the Russian stock exchange had fallen precipitously to around 10 per cent of its October 1997 value. 89 Of course, the flight of international investors was hardly surpris- ing just before and after the devaluation - the speculators were hardly likely to stick around when disaster seemed inevitable. A more inter- esting question concerned the first segment of the IMF loan, the $4.8 billion delivered in July, and the large sums that left Russia around the same time. Although the details were initially murky, it emerged in 1999 that Russian elites had basically used the loan to underwrite their own rush to sell roubles. Instead of building confi- dence and encouraging investors to stay in Russia, central bank officials used the money to prop up an unnaturally high rouble rate, and allowed (or even encouraged) wealthy Russians to convert roubles into dollars at the higher rate; when the reserves had cashed out, the currency was devalued. The mystery of why a nearly $5 billion loan seemed so ineffective was thus solved: the loan proved extremely effective in enriching Russian elites, which is what it was used for. 90 Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin found himself in a quandary when he tried to explain this phenomenon to a US Congressional panel the following year. In his testimony, he declared that much of the $4.8 billion 'may have been siphoned off improperly'. When interviewed after the panel hearing, however, he suggested that he had been 'careless' to use the word 'improper': 'there's nothing im- proper about moving money out of Russia or any other country', he claimed. Rubin's correction, or schizophrenia, is instructive: although the US Treasury was furious with Russian elites for essentially stealing $5 billion, the language of free capital flows offered no phrases of condemnation or censure; even 'improper' may be too harsh a word to describe such extraordinary corruption. Ironically, the Treasury appeared finally to have met its match in Russia, coming across a 34 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? group of arrivistes and kleptocrats even more unscrupulous than the American cheerleaders of neoliberalism. Faced with the evidence of massive theft, but unable to criticise the free movement of capital, Rubin abdicated from the conversation: 'I can't tell you exactly what happened', he concluded. 91 After nearly a decade of US 'assistance', Russia now boasts fabulous levels of wealth inequality, crime and political violence, as well as an autocratic governing framework and a moribund economy. 92 The US, meanwhile, insists on the path of 'reform', and warns of dire alternatives — be they communist or nationalist - if the logic of free markets does not prevail. On an official level, at least, the US has therefore claimed that 'reform' has kept undemocratic forces at bay in Russia; and has ignored the possibility that 'reform' may actually encourage the resurgence of nationalism or communism, born from the poverty and failure of US-sponsored market 'freedom'. 93 WASHINGTON'S CONSENSUS At the opening of the twenty-first century, US domination of the global economy is extensive and deep-rooted. Emergency measures imposed on poorer countries during the 19805 have matured into an orthodox route of'reform': the 'Washington Consensus' quickly es- tablished itself as the single path of development. The intellectual momentum behind the Consensus was US-generated; in the 19905, this has been bolstered by a political will on the part of the US government to export the 'reform' model to every region on earth. Bill Clinton's administration has belied any left-leaning instincts and rushed into a fully fledged alliance with super-rich US individuals and institutions; at the heart of the Clinton presidency was Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who spent four-and-a-half years at his post working to break down capital controls abroad and to open every foreign market to volatile US investment and speculation. The Asian financial crisis of 1997/8 did exert a damping effect on the Clinton/Rubin revolution, and seemed to offer ample evidence of the instability of the new arrangement. Capital flowed into and out of Asia at alarming rates, and the actions of stock-market and THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 35 currency speculators were identified as a major cause of the disaster. Although the US accused some of the Asian countries of corruption, it was hard to distinguish illegal activity from elite greed and self- interest as stunned Americans picked through the wreckage of the Asian 'success stories'. When the crisis spread to other 'emerging markets', such as Russia and Brazil, financial commentators began to talk of the weakness and instability of the new global economy, and the risk of 'contagion effects' which would amplify regional crashes into global depression. Officials from the IMF and World Bank, and even currency speculators like George Soros, called for capital controls or a 'new global architecture' to replace the Washington Consensus. 94 In 1999, however, this enthusiasm for change largely subsided, and the free-market frenzy began once more. In the light of this turn-around, there are good reasons to believe that the neoliberal agenda will only be derailed by a complete financial breakdown. First, the investors who manage the huge sums of money now channelled into 'emerging markets' and stock market speculation have grown used to the higher returns offered by gambling on Russia, Latin America or even Africa. Wall Street, meanwhile, has enjoyed unprecedented profits from its stewardship of, and occasional partici- pation in, this international casino. The new 'global architecture' would certainly threaten these profits if it sought to limit currency speculation, privatisation, or the whole range of risky new 'financial instruments' which have recently given US speculators more ways to gamble and to win. In the wake of the Asian crisis, as the situation in Thailand, Russia and Brazil spun out of control, the IMF was forced to speak more humbly about the need for new 'reforms'; but the return of speculators and investors soon after these economies had crashed restored much of the confidence (and arrogance) to the Washington-based guardians of the global economy. The creation of even more debt in these struggling countries, and the continuing, systemic weakness of their 'reformed' economies, was less compelling than a new round of speculation in their re-emerging markets. 95 For now, there is little hope that the United States will change its neoliberal course. The US continues to appoint the (American) head of the World Bank unilaterally, and is angling for a much more active role in the process of selecting the IMF managing director. 96 Wall Street's infiltration of the Democratic Party is extensive; the 36 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Republicans, traditionally sympathetic to business interests, stand ready to take up the reins if Al Gore should fail to succeed Clinton in the 2000 election. 97 Ordinary Americans are not well placed to force change from the grassroots. Many have been persuaded that these larger economic issues are opaque, impenetrable, or the natural preserve of 'experts' like Rubin and Lawrence Summers. Clinton's paean to 'free markets' has linked neoliberalism to some more ab- stract idea of freedom, which plays well in the US. Labour unions occasionally protest against free trade on protectionist grounds, arguing that US corporate expansion into Mexico or Africa will lead to redundancies at home. Unfortunately, the economic logic of this argument is often diluted by isolationism, and labour leaders are forced into alliances with far-right 'populists' who demonise the IMF and the United Nations in equal measure. 98 Against this shrill pro- test, Clinton has easily depicted his own course as measured and moderate, as if the only way for Americans to support global development was for them to invest in the Mozambique stock exchange. 99 Although the picture is still unclear, it may also be true that the zealous US dedication to neoliberalism abroad has, temporarily at least, strengthened the economy at home. Clinton has worked assiduously to funnel increasing sums of money into the US stock market, which has enjoyed an unprecedented upwards sweep for much of his administration. Although the benefits from this bullish trend are not evenly distributed throughout American society, rates of unemployment, inflation and interest have been relatively low, especially during Clinton s second term of office. One factor sustain- ing the high stock prices has been financial deregulation in the US, which has unleashed a new wave of money (from pensions, mutual funds, and so on) into the financial system. Another factor, however, may be the high degree of instability outside the United States. Foreign investors have returned to the US stock market when 'emerg- ing markets' have disappointed them, suggesting that a widespread global crisis may actually boost the American economy, at least in the short term. 100 The same dynamic applies to currency trading. Although, in theory, the US dollar is as susceptible to speculative attack as the peso or the rouble, the relative economic strength of the US has THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 37 largely deterred any challengers. Moreover, recent developments suggest that the dollar will remain strong over coming years. Some countries in Europe have announced their intention to sell part of their gold reserves and hold dollar certificates in their stead, more confident of the dollar's prospects in the medium to long term than of the market price of gold. A genuinely calamitous global crisis, prolonged and extensive, would probably puncture this appearance of strength; but the evidence of 1997/8 suggests a definite stratifica- tion in the global economy in the absence of such a nightmare scenario. An elite group of countries will boast relatively stable currencies, and a majority will fall prey to intensive speculation and sporadic collapse. The relentless march of Europe towards a single currency seems prudent in this regard: the euro may be able to establish itself in the top tier (with the dollar), even though the franc or the lira might sink with the peso and the rouble into the lower tier. 101 What seems certain in all this is that the majority of the world's countries and people will continue to suffer under US-led neoliberal 'reform'. If they choose to embrace 'reform', they can look forward to Russian-style kleptocracy, periodic economic collapse precipitated by rampant speculation, and a reliance on US corporations for products, employment, and even public services. If they decline the offer of 'free-market' development, they have little chance of finding money for their own versions of economic reform, as the US preaches 'trade, not aid' and narrows the definition of acceptable policies to those contained in the African Growth and Opportunity Act. Perhaps developing countries which reject US corporate suitors can take comfort in the fact that the latter will not be gone for long. As one US executive hopefully declared after the 1998 Russian collapse, contemplating the future possibilities for his razor-making company: 'Never forget: there are still 50 million women out there who don't shave their legs.' 102 In July 1999, to much fanfare, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin retired from office. Rubin was feted as the most successful Secretary in history, and moved back to New York. 103 A week later, another Clinton appointment, J. Brian Atwood, also left his post, as admin- istrator of the US Agency for International Development, after six 38 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY ? years of service. 104 While Rubin had masterminded a bonanza for Wall Street and a booming stock market, Atwood had reluctantly overseen the devastation of the USAID budget. In his retirement speech, Atwood lashed out at the Treasury and the Clinton adminis- tration for precipitating a 'crisis' in aid and development. 'There's no money to do anything', he complained, calling the Clinton aid budget 'outrageous' and 'a joke.' Atwood referred more broadly to the growing inequality between the richest and poorest in the world, reminding his audience that 10 per cent of the world's population would soon control 90 per cent of its wealth, and that the 'trade, not aid' formula had ignored a crucial fact about the poorest countries: 'These nations simply could not afford to buy anything.' 105 Rubin's departure received much more attention from the US media than Atwood's, but a few people did note the coincidence of the two, and the significance of their divergent careers under Clinton. Jim Hoagland, writing in the Washington Post, neatly captured their entangled fates: The rise of Rubin's Treasury, and of US financial markets as unrivaled arbiters and sources of power in this administration, and the decline of support for developmental aid for poor countries travel along the same arc in Washington. The different trajectories of the two men and the two •worlds they represent trace an important shift in values here. 106 Although Bill Clinton has continued to spin 'free markets' and 'trade, not aid' as efforts to 'put a human face on the global economy', our brief survey in this chapter suggests the opposite: the global economy is now less human, less forgiving and less stable than it was even a decade ago, in large part due to the efforts of Clinton and Rubin. This has already had dire consequences for many of the world's poorer people, and seems set to continue. Jim Hoagland concluded his article on the departing public servants with a sketch of the new mood in the American capital: It takes nothing from Rubin's success to say that a large part of his role here consisted of providing an elegant rationalization for human acquisi- tiveness. He was the man of the Clinton moment. Atwood was an echo of a different, increasingly distant Washington era, before the capital be- came such a materialist playground and a moral swamp. THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 39 Save for a drastic change of course or a catastrophic economic collapse, the evidence we have reviewed suggests a clear pattern for the years to come: the US will shape the global economy in the next century with the same combination of elegant rationalisation, materialist abandon and moral abdication that now enjoys a consensus in Washington. NOTES 1. Delivered on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, 19 January 1999. 2. On the importance of the Depression, see Michael D. Bordo, Claudia Goldin and Eugene N. White, eds, The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), especially chapters i, n and 12. 3. Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw begin The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and Marketplace that is Remaking the Modern World, second edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), with the efforts of developed countries to remake the global economy after World War II. For a specific account of the Bretton Woods proceedings and provisions, see Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, J996), 93-102; the essays in the first section of Orin Kirshner, ed., The Bretton Woods—GATT System: Retrospect and Prospect after Fifty Years (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996); and the essays in part one of Michael D. Bordo and Barry Eichengreen, eds, A Retrospective on the Bretton Woods System: Lessons for International Monetary Reform (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1993). 4. For an analysis of the predominant US role at Bretton Woods, see Georg Schild, Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks: American Economic and Politi- cal Postwar Planning in the Summer of 1944 (New York: St. Martin's Press, l 99S)l and Raymond Vernon,'The US Government at Bretton Woods and After', in Kirshner, ed., The Bretton Woods-GATT System, 52-69. Vernon suggests (56) that, by the end of the Conference, 'the US gov- ernment drew a line in the sand against any provision that imposed significant restraints on its freedom to follow any economic policy it wished to pursue in the future.' 5. On US covert and overt propaganda efforts in Italy, and the CIA's funnelling of funds to right-wing and centrist parties to combat the leftist 'threat', see James Edward Miller, The United States and Italy, 1940- 1950: The Politics and Diplomacy of Stabilization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 248. On the Agency's similar activities in Greece, see Lawrence S.Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943- 40 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? 1949 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 150-51. These propaganda and planning efforts were merely a subset of broader US government attempts to prop up centrist and right-wing parties in both countries. 6. Yergin and Stanislaw install Keynes as the key intellectual influence on the post-war economic system, claiming that in the decades after World War II 'Keynes' theories of government management of the economy appeared unassailable.' The Commanding Heights, 14. For the role of Keynes and of the British government at the Bretton Woods conference, see G. John Ikenberry,'The Political Origins of Bretton Woods', in Bordo and Eichengreen, eds, A Retrospective on the Bretton Woods System, 155—82. 7. Barry Eichengreen and Peter B. Kenen suggest that 'the disastrous de- pression of the 1930s made clear the huge costs of the failure to de- velop rules and understandings as well as organizational structures to guide the conduct of economic policies."Managing the World Economy under the Bretton Woods System', in P.B. Kenen, ed., Managing the World Economy: Fifty Years After Bretton Woods (Washington, DC: Insti- tute for International Economics, 1994), 3-57 at n. Ikenberry reprints the remarks of American economist and post-war planner Jacob Viner, who suggested that ordinary people had come to see governments as 'obligated' to guide national economies away from potential depression or collapse. 'The Political Origins of Bretton Woods', 163-4. 8. For an account of the context for the GATT deliberations, see Simon Reisman, 'The Birth of a World Trading System: ITO and GATT', in Kirshner, ed., The Bretton Woods—GATT System, 82-89. Eichengreen and Kenen sketch the Marshall Aid plans, which were conditional on recipient countries' relaxation of their tariffs and import restrictions, in 'Managing the World Economy Under the Bretton Woods System', 15-18. 9. Fred Block and other economic historians have suggested that the al- ternative to multilateral, US-led free trade was a kind of'national capi- talism' which would privilege full employment and social policies over a dedication to international free trade. Ikenberry summarises these positions in 'The Political Origins of Bretton Woods', 167-72. 10. Of course, the vast majority of today's nation-states were not repre- sented at Bretton Woods, which took place before the bulk of de- colonisation that gave independence to the 'developing world'.The US relationship to development is rather complex, and encompasses sup- port for agro-exporting countries in some cases, and support for indus- trialisation (especially when led by US investment) in others. In much of Latin America and the Caribbean, at least, the model of import- substitution industrialisation (ISI) was frequently opposed by the US, since it threatened land holdings and commodity exports managed by US companies (as well as excluding many US exports). For an account of the shifting US perspectives on development, see John Brohman, Popular Development: Rethinking the Theory and Practice of Development THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 41 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), especially chapters i and 2. 11. Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital, 120-35. 12. On the US-sponsored overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, see Mary Ann Heiss, Empire and Nationhood: The United States, Great Britain, and Iranian Oil, 1950-1954 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), especially 135-66. Piero Gleijeses offers an analysis of the extensive contacts between the United Fruit Company (a US corpora- tion) and the US government prior to the Guatemalan coup in Shat- tered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 361-8. For a discussion of the several CIA-sponsored coups in Latin America, and the cosy relationship between US corporations and the US government, see John H. Coatsworth, Central America and the United States: The Clients and the Colossus (New York: Macmillan, 1994); and Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of US Policy Toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Coatsworth, 84-5, puts the case simply: 'For many years the US State Department maintained that the Arbenz regime [overthrown by the CIA in 1954] had fallen under the control of communism and the Soviet Union and that its overthrow was the product of a popular revolt carried out by the Guatemalan people. Neither of these assertions was true.' 13. Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital, 109—13; and Robert Solomon, The International Monetary System, 1945-1981 (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 9-62. 14. For a sardonic view of the rise of the Eurodollar, see W.R Hogan and I.F. Pearce, The Incredible Eurodollar (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982). Some economists have argued that the Eurodollar market proved the fallacy of US capital controls, linking the maintenance of such controls in the US with the ballooning of the Eurodollar market in London. For this argument, see Fred L. Block, The Origins of Inter- national Economic Disorder: A Study of United States International Monetary Policy from World War II to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 162. This seems to underestimate the extent to which the US tacitly accepted or even encouraged the Eurodollar market. 15. Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital, 128—34. See also Maurice Obstfeld and Alan M. Taylor,'The Great Depression as a Watershed: International Capital Mobility over the Long Run', in Bordo et al., eds, The Defining Moment, 353-402 at 391-3. Fred Block suggests that the US might have saved the Bretton Woods system by cutting its military expenditure (and reining in its foreign military adventures), but thinks that this would put the horse before the cart: 'It would be absurd for the United States to abandon its global ambitions simply to live within the rules of an international monetary order that was shaped for the purpose of achiev- ing those ambitions.' The Origins of International Economic Disorder, 163. 16. On new financial instruments, and the coincidence of capital mobility and destructive speculation, see Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital, 136— 42 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? 7; Obstfeld and Taylor, 'The Great Depression as a Watershed', 394; Dilip K. Ghosh and Edgar Oritz, 'The Global Structure of Financial Markets: An Overview', in Ghosh and Oritz, eds, The Global Structure of Financial Markets (London: Routledge, 1997), 1-14; and John Williamson, The Failure of World Monetary Reform, 1971—1974 (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 45-51. 17. Nicolas Ardito-Barletta, 'Managing Development and Transition', in Kenen, ed., Managing the World Economy, 173-200. 18. Robert Devlin discusses the mismatch of private capital from the de- veloped world and public-interest borrowing by poorer countries in Debt and Crisis in Latin America: The Supply Side of the Story (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 124. For an overview of the shift from government assistance for developing countries to private lend- ing, see James E. Mahon, Jr., Mobile Capital and Latin American Develop- ment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 29— 57- 19. Many commentators have argued that major banks in the US and Europe were guilty of'loan pushing': they aggressively marketed their loans to developing countries even when they realised that the debtor countries were likely to run into difEculties with repayment. See William Darity, Jr., and Bobbie L. Horn, The Loan Pushers: The Role of Commercial Banks in the International Debt Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing, 1988). See also Devlin's suggestion in Debt and Crisis in Latin America, 77—8, that banks made loans for reasons that were not 'rational', in economic terms - including the desire to win market share and to penetrate new markets, and occasional engagement in collusionary or corrupt practices. 20. For a table of the top ten US banks and their domestic and overseas profits, see Devlin, Debt and Crisis in Latin America, 38. Susan George launches a stinging attack on the banks in A Fate Worse Than Debt (London: Penguin, 1988), 30-46, noting their inability to conceive of 'development' for poorer countries without maximising their own profits. 21. Steven Solomon, in The Confidence Game: How Unelected Central Bankers Are Governing the Changed Global Economy (New York: Simon & Schuster, !995)> 196, attributes the 'countries don't go broke' line to Walter Wriston, former chairman of Citicorp. Solomon also identifies a straight- forward motive in the loan boom of the 1970$: 'Why did bankers, in hindsight, lend so much so imprudently? The short answer: profit.' 22. On Mexico's declaration of bankruptcy, and the genesis of the inter- national debt crisis, see Robert Solomon, Money on the Move: The Revolution in International Finance Since 1980 (Princeton: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1999), 34-40. 23. Robert Solomon suggests that loans from all US banks to merely the seventeen most indebted countries amounted to more than 150 per cent of those banks' capital; in the event of a widespread default, com- bined with a run on the banks from domestic deposit holders, there THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 43 was a real possibility that the US banking system would collapse, with dire consequences for the global economy. Ibid., 39-40. 24. For an account of the response of governments and bankers to the first stirrings of the crisis, see Joseph Kraft, The Mexican Rescue (New York: Group of Thirty, 1984). The rescheduling and IMF involvement was eased by the banks' original establishment of a lending syndicate in the 19705; see Devlin, Debt and Crisis in Latin America, 32, 93—101, 217—18. 25. For a broad perspective on the effects of'restructuring' in developing countries, see Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty: Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms (London: Zed Books, 1997); and Brohman, Popular Development, 132—97. A more concise treatment of the management of developing-country debt is offered by Robert Solomon, Money on the Move, 39—45. 26. Steven Solomon describes the battle between private banks and the central banks/IMF - the private banks tried to pressure the IMF (and, therefore, developed-country governments) into paying off the developing-country debts; the central banks and the IMF tried to pre- vent individual private banks from triggering a massive default. The Confidence Game, 212-47. The nightmare scenario of global economic collapse following the Mexican crisis is sketched by Darrell Delamaide, Debt Shock: The Full Story of the World's Credit Crisis (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), 6-28. 27. On the inability of developing countries to declare a default, see Kraft, The Mexican Rescue, 3-4, and George, A Fate Worse than Debt, 67-73. 28. The shift from Keynes to these Chicago School positions is the theme of Yergin and Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights; see their treatment of Milton Friedman and his Chicago colleagues, 145—9.1 use 'neoliberalism' throughout this book to describe policies which favour free trade (and freedom of capital movement) and which privilege a tight control of the money supply over job-creation, social welfare, etc. It should be noted, however, that the term has been defined in many different ways - and was often used in the 1980$ to describe the tax-cutting domestic policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. See note 30 below for further discussion of the taxonomy of neoliberalism. 29. In an assessment of the new flows of private capital to the developing world, Kunibert Raffer has argued that 'the only "success" of orthodox debt strategies seems to have been shifting some risk onto mutual funds, pension funds and retirement accounts - or onto the public at large.' 'Is the Debt Crisis Largely Over? A Critical Look at the Data of Inter- national Financial Institutions', in Richard M.Auty and John Toye, eds, Challenging the Orthodoxies (New York: St. Martins Press, 1996), 23-38 at 37. For the general context of new capital flows to developing countries, see Solomon, Money on the Move, 113—19. 30. The phrase was coined by John Williamson in a 1990 presentation which also summarised ten policy instruments necessary to Third World development:'fiscal discipline', a rearrangement of public expenditure, 44 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? tax reform, financial liberalisation, competitive exchange rates, trade liberalisation, an openness to foreign investment, privatisation, deregula- tion, and the preservation of property rights. 'What Washington Means By Policy Reform', in Williamson, ed., Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened? (Washington, DC: Institute for International Eco- nomics, 1990), 7-38. Williamson has responded pointedly to the charge that this 'Consensus' amounts to a 'neoliberal manifesto', stressing that his ten policy instruments do not mandate minimal taxation or the complete abolition of capital controls. See Williamson,'Lowest Common Denominator or Neoliberal Manifesto? The Polemics of the Washington Consensus', in Auty and Toye, eds, Challenging the Orthodoxies, 13-22. He admits, however, that the Consensus lacks 'many planks, notably those regarding the social dimension'. The Clinton administration, in its assault on capital controls, has moved to shore up the neoliberal credentials of the Consensus. 31. For an upbeat account of US financial deregulation, see Yergin and Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights, 331—69. A breathless guide to how to make money in the new global economy is offered by a pair of management consultants from McKinsey and Company: Lowell Bryan and Diana Farrell, Market Unbound: Unleashing Global Capitalism (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996). At xii, Byran and Farrell excitedly describe the process by which 'the market will force governments, like it or not, to open up their economies'. A more sober review of the new financial instruments and markets is offered by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in its Human Development Report 1999 (New York: Oxford University Press for UNDP, 1999), 30. 32. Brohman concludes his analysis of the effects of neoliberal 'adjustment' on developing countries with a pessimistic assessment:'Increasing societal polarization has generated a widespread perception that an elite minority has monopolized the benefits of development under [structural adjust- ment], while the popular majority has been forced to endure a dispro- portionate share of the costs.' Popular Development, 172. 33. ElizabethWeiner noted in 1992 that, in Mexico alone,'at least 42 govern- ment scholarship students are returning with Ph.D.s from leading US universities.... Most of them will carry the modernization flag straight into government ministries.' 'The Latin Revolution Has Ivy Roots', Business Week, 15 June 1992. See also David R. Francis,'Improving the World with Academic Advice', Christian Science Monitor, 5 June 1992. 34. Clinton's speedy acceptance of the eclipse of 'big government' is cel- ebrated in Yergin and Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights, 331—4. These authors make much of the electoral victories of Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK, each supposedly the representative of a 'third way' in politics which transcends the old platforms of right and left. One of the most inadvertently sobering accounts of the 'third way' is by Dick Morris, former Clinton adviser from 1995 to 1996, who helped prepare his boss for the 1996 election by essentially adopting most of THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 45 the policies of the right-wing Republican Party opposition: 'If you wander into [the Republican] line of fire, they're going to kill you every time. But they have no other game plan, no other way to win. If you come around behind them or alongside and don't raise taxes, if you're tough on crime and want to reform welfare, use the military effectively, and cut spending, they can't hit you.' Morris doesn't elabo- rate on the creepy suggestion that a president should 'use the military effectively' to win an election, but the outline here is clear: if you abandon your own policies and adopt those of your opponents, you can beat them - a strategy Morris dubbed 'triangulation'. Dick Morris, Behind the Oval Office: Getting Reelected Against All Odds, second edition (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999), 317-18. 35. The Washington spin on Rubin around the time of his appointment usually stressed the new appointee's 'hardheaded compassion' or his 'social conscience' rather than his estimated $125 million personal fortune. See Beth Belton, 'Wall Streeter with a Heart Defies Stereotype', USA Today, 3 March 1993. 36. Nicholas D. Kristoff and David E. Sanger, 'How US Wooed Asia to Let Cash Flow In', New York Times, 16 February 1999. In discussing Rubin's wealth, a Treasury aide joked to the reporters that Rubin had a fly- fishing rod that 'probably costs more than your house'. 37. Rubin's personal influence from early 1993 — which even secured him a seat on the National Security Council, the body of advisers which assists the president in foreign-policy decisions - is detailed in James Risen, 'Man to See is Clinton Aide Rubin', Los Angeles Times, 10 Feb- ruary 1993. On Rubin's eventual return to New York to head Citigroup, see Joseph Kahn, 'Former Treasury Secretary Joins Leadership Triangle at Citigroup', New York Times, 27 October 1999. On the other Wall Street alumni in Clinton's cabinet, and the 'revolving door' which linked the 'New Democrat'White House and Wall Street, see Laura M. Holson, 'White House Externs', New York Times, 3 February 1999. Jagdish Bhagwati argued in 1998 that a 'Wall Street-Treasury complex', made up of serving and former public officials with links to high finance, heavily influenced Clinton's policies. This 'complex' was 'unable to look much beyond the interest of Wall Street, which it equates with the good of the world'. 'The Capital Myth', Foreign Affairs 77, no. 3 (1998): 7—12. Even presidential aides with high-paying jobs were tempted by the prospect of greater returns from Wall Steet: President Clinton's former adviser Vernon Jordan moved to Wall Street in late 1999, accepting a position with the investment bank Lazard Freres. Jordan, who achieved a degree of notoriety during the Lewinsky sex scandal, had helped the Clinton administration from a position of power and privilege, com- bining his advisory duties with a law-firm job which paid 'considerably more' than $i million per year. Stephen Hess of the Brookings Insti- tution speculated on the reasons for his move to investment banking: 'I can only assume that he's going to make more money and have more 46 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? fun, not that he hasn't been making a lot of money and having a lot of fun.' Patrick McGeehan, 'A Clinton Advisor to Join Lazard Freres', New York Times, i December 1999. 38. For a description of Mexico's development in the late 19805 and early 19908 which stresses the nation's economic promise, see Robert Solomon, The Transformation of the World Economy, 1980-1993 (London: Macmillan, 1994), 187-96. Solomon's book was published just before the peso crisis, and his 1999 Money on the Move amended this enthusiasm. Kunibert Raffer notes that Mexico in 1994 was 'enjoying privileged treatment as a debtor and showing excellent debt indicators', which proves the weakness of the IMF and bank assessment methods: 'Is the Debt Crisis Largely Over?', 37.Yergin and Stanislaw offer paeans to Aspe and Salinas amidst details of their US training in The Commanding Heights, 257—8. 39. For general accounts of the peso crisis, see Sebastian Edwards and Moises Nairn, eds, Mexico 1994: Anatomy of an Emerging Market Crash (Washing- ton, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1997); Sebas- tian Edwards, Crisis and Reform in Latin America: From Despair to Hope (New York: Oxford University Press/World Bank, 1995), 295-302; Stephany Griffith-Jones, Global Capital Flows: Should They Be Regulated? (London: Macmillan, 1998), 100—136; and Jeremy Adelman, 'Tequila Hangover: Latin America's Debt Crisis', Studies in Political Economy 55 (1998): 5-35 at 22-8. David D. Hale reprints forecasts from various Wall Street banks in 1994, illustrating the general failure of American under- writers and investors to anticipate the crisis: 'The Markets and Mexico: The Supply Side of the Story', in Edwards and Nairn, eds, Mexico 1994, 201-45. 40. On the tesobonos, see Robert Solomon, Money on the Move, 122—9. 41. Albert Berry cites this figure from Forbes magazine in 'Confronting the Distribution Threat', in A. Berry, ed., Poverty, Economic Reform and In- come Distribution in Latin America (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), 9-41 at 39. 42. On the empowerment of Mexican business elites, see Philip Oxhorn, 'Is the Century of Corporatism Over? Neoliberalism and the Rise of Neopluralism', in Philip Oxhorn and Graciela Ducatenzeiler, eds, What Kind of Democracy? What Kind of Market? Latin America in the Age of Neoliberalism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 227-39; and Alvaro Diaz, 'New Developments in Economic and Social Restructuring in Latin America', in William C. Smith and Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz, eds, Politics, Social Change, and Economic Restructur- ing in Latin America (Miami: North-South Center Press, 1997), 37-56. 43. On capital flight among domestic elites in the second half of 1994, see Solomon, Money on the Move, I2$&; Hale, 'The Markets and Mexico', 215; and Edwards, Croj'5 and Reform in Latin America, 299—300. 44. When interviewed in April 1995, Rubin responded rather circuitously to the suggestion that the Treasury had intervened in Mexico in part to help Wall Street (including his old friends at Goldman Sachs):'! honestly THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 47 have no idea what firms have anything. All I know is, we got involved in Mexico to help deal with an issue that we thought was of critical importance to this country. And I truly do not know what firms have positions.' Paul Starobin and Bruce Stokes, 'No Avoiding Woes of Third World', National Journal, i April 1995. 45. Bill Clinton, 'State of the Union address', delivered on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, 24 January 1995. 46. Numerous members of Congress, principally Republicans, argued against using money to bail out Mexico that might be used instead to improve poorer areas of the US, or even to bail out the newly bankrupt districts of Washington, DC and Orange County, California; see the debate in the House of Representatives of the iO4th Congress of the United States, 'Foreign Trade Policy Relative to Bailout of Mexico', 19 January 1995. The 'Main Street' remark was made by David Funderbunk, a representa- tive from North Carolina, on the House floor on i February 1995. 47. A detailed account of this process, following the reluctance of Congress to agree to loan guarantees, is offered by George Graham et al, 'Mexican Rescue', Financial Times, 16 February 1995. Although the other major developed nations issued a press release confirming their support for the bail-out, the Financial Times article suggests that they were not consulted over the details of the plan, even though it constituted the largest IMF bail-out in history. 'It was just not acceptable,' said a European official. 'President Clinton goes to the press and says the Fund will do this and that. We are not banana republics.' Of course, the same official would presumably be more sanguine if the economic dictates were levelled at a 'banana republic', a theme to which we will return. 48. On Wall Street's mixed reckoning of the Mexican affair, see Brett Fromson,'Rescue Package Provokes Disagreement on Wall Street', Wash- ington Post, 16 February 1995. The very uneven effects within Mexico are summarised by Christopher Whalen,'South of the Bailout; The $20 Billion Rescue Plan Won't Help the Mexican People', Washington Post, 5 February 1995; and Jorge Castaneda, 'Mexico's Circle of Misery', Foreign Affairs 75, no. 4 (1996): 92-105. 49. A recent high-profile example of this free movement of intellectual capital was the appointment of Arminio Fraga, former fund manager for George Soros, as president of the Brazilian central bank. This sparked a hostile debate in the confirmation hearings held before the Brazilian Senate, although Fraga eventually assumed the new position. See Geoff Dyer and Richard Waters, 'Brazil Picks Hedge-Fund Poacher as Economic Gamekeeper', Financial Times, 3 February 1999; and Dyer, 'Brazilian Senators Grill New Bank Chief, ibid., 27 February 1999. 50. Yergin and Stanislaw recall Zedillo's thesis in The Commanding Heights, 259, arguing that the dissertation was so appealing to the head of the Mexican central bank that he subsequently hired the Ivy League graduate. 51. Quoted in Robert I. Rotberg, 'Post-Clinton Africa: The Wait Begins', Christian Science Monitor, j April 1998. IRS 4-8 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? 52. Gabriel Kolko has argued that US policy towards Africa developed from near-total delegation of the continent to Europe in the 19505 to a much more active programme - consisting of resource exploitation and opposition to radicalism - in the late 19605 and after: see his Confront- ing the Third World: United States Foreign Policy, 1945—1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 111-16 and 240-47. When Clinton apologised during his African tour for US misdeeds during the Cold War, one US columnist actually attacked the president for his 'dripping contrition', arguing (in reference to South Africa's president) that 'America's moral compromises during the Cold War were at least as justified as Mandela's during his war', and that 'communism caused far more suffering and posed a far greater danger to humanity than apartheid'. Charles Kraut- hammer,'In Defense of "Our" Dictators', Washington Post, 5 April 1998. 53. For a summary of Africa's predicament, see E.Wayne Nafziger, The Debt Crisis in Africa (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); and Nikoi Kote-Nikoi, Beyond the New Orthodoxy: Africa's Debt and Development Crisis in Retrospect (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996). 54. For overviews of the original HIPC plan, see 'How to Make Aid Work', Economist, 26 June 1999; and Michael Holman and Quentin Peel, 'Too Much to Bear', Financial Times, 12 June 1999. Holman and Peel relate the difficulties of Mozambique even under the HIPC initiative: 'What should have been a model example of the benefits of a new deal for the poorest of the poor instead stands as a stark illustration of the scheme's inadequacy.' 55. Jubilee 2000 cast an especially wide net in its campaigning, and man- aged to attract such unlikely advocates as Bono, of the rock band U2. Bono's efforts to win over Harvard economist Robert J. Barro to the cause of debt relief, however, were ultimately fruitless. In a bizarre article, 'My Luncheon with Bono', Business Week,, 12 July 1999, Barro narrates a meeting with Bono in which the latter's arguments on behalf of debt forgiveness were 'better than I had anticipated' but not persua- sive enough for Barro 'to put debt relief on the Top 10 list of growth- promoting policies for poor countries'. In an other-worldly denoue- ment, Barro asked Bono to sign some CDs for his children, and then summed up what had been achieved during this discussion of the fate of the planet's poorest people: 'So, the lunch had clearly succeeded in making me a hero with my kids. What's more important than that?' 56. The campaign for debt relief enjoyed a high profile in the US and especially in Europe: see Diane Coyle,'Clamour to End the Third World Debt Gets Louder', Independent, 14 June 1999. Oxfam criticised the terms of the revised HIPC proposal and the secrecy with which it had been deliberated by developed-country governments: 'The Gj ministries have been negotiating with all the openness of a Masonic lodge.' Michael Holman and Nancy Dunne,'Debt Relief Plan "Painfully Inadequate'", Financial Times, 16 June 1999. Bill Clinton's eventual advocacy in Sep- tember 1999 of a more substantial debt relief programme owed much THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 49 to the efforts of debt-relief campaigners, though was still uncomfort- ably dependent on Congress and on the acceptance of various neoliberal conditions by debtor countries. See John Burgess, 'Clinton Pledges to Forgive Poor Nations' Debt', Washington Post, 30 September 1999; and Eric Schmitt, 'House Passes Compromise Bill', New York Times, 6 No- vember 1999. For an account of the ongoing wariness in Africa over the gulf between US rhetoric and intentions, see Norimitsu Onishi, 'US and Africa: Unfulfilled Promises and Skepticism', New York Times, 25 October 1999. 57. Martin Wolf, 'The Debt Myths', Financial Times, 23 June 1999. Yergin and Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights, 385-6, offer a bracing introduc- tion to the prospects for neoliberalism in Africa, even suggesting that the 'private commercial tradition' which would foster privatisation and the retreat of government in Africa 'existed long before the colonial period and, against all odds and in the face of determined opposition, has endured ever since'. 58. Kate Dunn, 'Africa's Dreams Begin to Take Root', Christian Science Monitor, i April 1998. 59. For a friendly summary of the 1998 plan, see Paul Magnusson and Dean Foust,'Don't Waste a Huge Opportunity in Africa', Business Week, 6 April 1998. 60. 'We must fortify African democracy and peace ... by passing the African Trade and Development Act' [the AGOA]. Bill Clinton, 'State of the Union address, 1999'. 61. The text of the 1999 version of the AGOA was entered into the Congressional record as HR 434, and was approved by the House of Representatives on 17 July 1999. Nelson Mandela expressed reservations about the 'national security or foreign policy interests' clause, and suggest- ed that this would make the entire proposal unacceptable to South Africa. Mandela feared that this proviso would be used to pressure South Africa into renouncing allies in Cuba, Libya and elsewhere. See Anne Scales, 'Mandela Lectures Clinton on Peace', Boston Globe, 28 March 1998. The problem with the national security construction - as with the AGOA's vague commitment to protect 'worker rights' in Africa, or its discomfiting promise only to take notice of 'gross' human-rights abuses - is that the meaning of these clauses will be decided unilaterally by the US, which seems unlikely to look kindly either on South Afri- ca's independent relations with 'rogue states' or the prospect of union- inspired demands interfering with the operations of US corporations or investors. 62. Witness the flow of money into Africa in mid-1998, as the world's other 'emerging markets' plunged in value. Sheel Kohli, 'Africa Leads Emerging Markets', South China Morning Post, 16 August 1998. 63. The AGOA passed the Senate in November 1999. See Eric Schmitt, 'Senate Passes Trade Bills for Caribbean and Africa', New York Times, 4 November 1999. 5O ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? 64. On the reduction in aid to Africa, see Kurt Shillinger, 'Carter, Others Say US Has Faltered in Africa', Boston Globe, 8 December 1999. 65. Randall Robinson and Ralph Nader, 'A Forced March to Congress' Tune', Los Angeles Times, n March 1998. 66. As the AGOA was first debated in 1998, Bob Herbert noted in an editorial the oppressive effects of existing IMF adjustment programmes, and lamented the possibility of a broadening of'austerity' under AGOA- mandated 'liberalisation'; Herbert suggests that many sub-Saharan lead- ers have only expressed interest in AGOA because they hope that the US 'and its great corporations will alleviate their economic suffering. It's a situation ripe for wholesale exploitation.' 'At What Cost?', New York Times, j June 1998. 67. Jackson, Jr. is the son of Jesse Jackson, who diverged from his more radical past in Clinton's second term by appearing, alternately, as his president's therapist and confessor. Jackson, Jr., however, has been a fierce critic of the Clinton administration's neoliberal drives. His proposed alternative to AGOA, the Human Rights, Opportunity, Partnership and Empowerment (HOPE) for Africa Act, contained provisions for the protection of labour, the environment and public health. Jackson, an African-American, struck a distinct tone amidst the widespread praise for AGOA in the Congressional debate, introducing the broader his- torical context of American-African trade: 'Three hundred and eighty years ago our nation's first trade policy landed 19 Africans in Jamestown, Virginia. Since then our nation has struggled with that painful and profound legacy. Undoubtedly, the effects of trade are far reaching and long lasting. In many ways my presence here and that of 33 million other Americans is the result of this nation's first African trade policy.... After centuries of getting it wrong - through slavery, exploitation, as pawns in a Cold War and neglect - it is incumbent upon us to get this new policy right.' Congressional Record, io6th Congress, House of Rep- resentatives, 16 July 1999, H57I5. 68. The Congresswoman was Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas, who looked hopefully towards Chevron, Mobil, Bank of America, McDonald's and General Electric, among others, for solutions to Africa's HIV catastro- phe. Ibid., H5739-According to the UNDP Human Development Report 1999, 4, nine countries in Africa face a loss of seventeen years in life expectancy due to HIV/AIDS, 'reversing the gains of recent decades'. 69. For the general context of these events, see Marshall I. Goldman, Lost Opportunity: Why Economic Reforms in Russia Have Not Worked (New York:W.W. Norton, 1994); and David Remnick, Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia, second edition (New York: Vintage, 1998). Kissinger railed against a 'grand bargain' which would transfer responsibility for Russia's probable economic hardship to the US: 'The West should not maneuver itself into imposing conditions that can later be blamed for causing great suffering.' 'No Time For a "Grand Bargain'", Washington Post, 9 July 1991. THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 51 70. Janine R. Wedel narrates the involvement of the HIID in Russia in Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, 1989-1998 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 121-9. The HIID was awarded $57.7 million by the US government from 1992 to 1996. 71. Wedel dubbed the American experts the 'Harvard Boys' in a 1998 article, 'The Harvard Boys Do Russia', Nation, i June 1998. The soubriquet recalls another gang of radical reformers', the so-called 'Chicago Boys' - a group of economists from the University of Chicago, steeped in the ideas of Milton Friedman, who travelled to Chile after the military coup d'etat of 1973 to assist General Augusto Pinochet in consolidating his dictatorship. 72. Anders Aslund, one of Sachs's colleagues in the US assistance team to Russia, describes the 'shock therapy' programme in How Russia Became a Market Economy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995), 174- 222; he argues for 'shock' treatment rather than a more gradual approach at 186—7. In his acknowledgements, xi, Anders thanks Sachs for his help, confirming that 'among the Western advisors to the Russian gov- ernment', Sachs 'has been our undisputed intellectual leader'. 73. Wedel recalls a number of these shock-therapy analogies in Collision and Collusion, 21. She also attributes to Ryszard Bugaj, an economist for Poland's Solidarity party, the observation that Sachs's speeches and television appearances in eastern Europe were intended to minister to popular anxieties: 'He talked in such a smooth, confident manner that many responded as if they were hearing a revelation.' Ibid., 48. 74. On the disastrous effects of'shock therapy', see Goldman, 94—121; and Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society, second edition (London: Routledge, 1996), 233—40. On the emergence of the 'Chubais clan', see Wedel, Collision and Collusion, 125-6, 129-31. 75. Some commentators have charged that Chubais was involved in sub- verting the original Supreme Soviet plan to favour a privatisation model more conducive to corruption. For a detailed account of Chubais 'battle with the Supreme Soviet, and the obvious inequities in Chubais' plans for speedy privatisation, see Lynn D. Nelson and Irina Y. Kuzes, Radical Reform in Yeltsin's Russia: Political, Economic and Social Dimensions (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 133-63; and M. Steven Fish, 'The Roots and Remedies for Russia's Racket Economy', in Stephen S. Cohen, Andrew Schwartz and John Zysman, eds, The Tunnel at the End of the Light: Privatization, Business Networks, and Economic Transformation in Russia (Berkeley: Brie/Kreisky Reform Project and University of California, 1998), 86-137. 76. For an account of this affair, see Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 172-81. 77. Chrystia Freeland.JohnThornhill and Andrew Gowers, 'Moscow's Group of Seven', Financial Times, i November 1996. Andrei Piontkovsky, head of the Moscow Centre for Strategic Studies, contended in 1997 that 'Chubais believes that it is not important how property is distributed, 52 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY ? as long as property owners are created.' Quoted in Lieven, Chechnya, 176. 78. Janine Wedel tracks the activities of the 'Chubais Clan' in the midst of this: Collision and Collusion, 131-9. 79. Joseph Stiglitz, 'Whither Reform? Ten Years of the Transition', paper delivered at the Annual World Bank Conference on Development Eco- nomics, Washington, DC, 28—30 April 1999. 80. Andrei Piontkovsky noted Chubais' hope that the oligarchs would become productive economic citizens after their enrichment: 'After they have had their share of thievery, so the argument goes, they will start to turn their efforts to raising productivity.' Piontkovsky noted, however, that the quick gains of moving money out of the country (especially given insider trading, knowledge of the movements of the Russian central bank, etc.) would also appeal to financial elites with homes throughout the world, and 'a taste of this fabulous means of enrichment.' Lieven, Chechnya, 176. 81. For an early expression of the argument against Sachs and his team - that they had not sought the cooperation of Harvard's famous Russian studies scholars, and were preparing to implement 'reform' without proper attention to Russia's particular needs - see Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski, 'What's Needed is Basic Development, Not Harvard Prescriptions', Washington Post, 20 October 1991. Sachs eventually came around to the view that 'while Russia's crisis does not challenge the classical economic tenets, successful reforms were not guaranteed'. Reasons for this included 'Russia's sprawling land mass and centuries-old history of authoritarian rule without private property'. Lynnley Browning, 'Russia Ills Shake Faith in Market Cure-Alls', Boston Globe, 23 August 1998. (Quotations are Browning's paraphrases from an interview with Sachs.) 82. For a more recent example of this ongoing 'war', see Clinton's speech at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, San Francisco, 26 February 1999: 'We have as much at stake today in Russia overcoming these challenges as we did in checking its expansion during the Cold War. This is not a time for compkcency or for self-fulfilling pessimism.' 83. Although George Bush appears to have set less store by Nixon's warn- ing, Clinton regularly solicited Nixon's advice on how to handle Rus- sia. The first section of Monica Crowley's Nixon in Winter (New York: Random House, 1998) details Nixon's views on the transition from communism; see 156—8 for a summary of his policy concerns, and his perception of their mixed success in Washington. Dick Morris suggests in his Behind the Oval Office, 250, that Clinton remembered Nixon's advice in the run-up to the crucial Russian elections of 1996: 'Russia became to the President's foreign policy what California was to his domestic political strategy: the one place he couldn't afford to lose.' 84. Testimony delivered in Congress by Pete Stavrikis to the House Inter- national Relations Committee on 9 June 1999 confirms this fear. Describing US support for Anatoly Chubais, and the allegations that THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 53 Chubais had been involved in further corruption surrounding the 1996 Russian presidential election, Stavrikis set Chubais' activities against the broader political context: 'And this is an individual who as one former embassy official said is one of the few reformers that goes for blood. And I believe that. The higher political goal is what he serves. The law is an irritating element that has to be swept aside from time to time. Regrettably, I think his character is such that he retains that even when things get better.' 85. For allegations of formal improprieties in Harvard's involvement, see Wedel, 'The Harvard Boys Do Russia'. See also David L. Marcus, 'US Halts Harvard Contract in Russia', Boston Globe, 21 May 1997; David Filipov and David L. Marcus, 'Probe of Russian Work Shocks Harvard Adviser', Boston Globe, 25 May 1997; and Victoria Griffith and John Thornhill,'Harvard Dons to Face Insider Trading Probe', Financial Times, 18 January 1999. 86. On the rise of the nomenklatura, and the various definitions of the term in circulation, see Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society, 158—163; and Bertram Silverman and Murray Yanowitch, New Rich, New Poor, New Russia: Winners and Losers on the Russian Road to Capitalism (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 103-27. For accounts of organised crime in post-Soviet Russia, see Stephen Handelman, Comrade Criminal: Russia's New Mqfiya (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); and the essays collected in Phil Williams, ed., Russian Organized Crime: The New Threat? (London: Frank Cass, 1997). On the deteriorating levels of health and social welfare, see Nicholas Eberstadt, 'Russia: Too Sick to Matter?', Policy Review 95 (1995): 3-24. On poverty, see Stiglitz, 'Whither Reform', i.The connections between Russia's economic crisis and the 1995—96 offensive in Chechnya are the subject of Anatol Lieven's Chechnya tomb- stone of Russian Power. On the psychological basis for the 1999 offensive, see Michael Wines,'Russia Pines for a New Savior: Victory', New York Times, 21 November 1999. On the military brutishness of the attack, see Michael R. Gordon, 'Russia Uses a Sledgehammer in Chechnya War this Time', New York Times, 8 December 1999. 87. Martin Wolf, John Thornhill and Stephen Fidler, 'Meltdown', Financial Times, 28 August 1998. 88. David E. Sanger, 'IMF Backs $17 Billion For Russia', New York Times, 21 July 1998. 89. See Kimberly Blanton, 'Perils of a Fast Buck', Boston Globe, 6 Septem- ber 1998; and Alexei Brayer, 'Futurology and Risk', Financial Times, 4 September 1998. 90. See Sharon LaFraniere, 'Russian Banks Served Selves First', Washington Post, 30 September 1998; and Martin Wolf et al.,'Meltdown'. The latter quotes from a Credit Suisse First Boston bank report on the August 1998 currency crisis in Russia: 'The current outcome is looking more and more as though the $10 billion saved through the debt restructuring is simply being plundered by the banking system and fleeing the country.' 54 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? 91. David E. Sanger, 'US Official Questions How Russia Used Loan', New York Times, 19 March 1999. 92. The UNDP's Human Development Report 1999, 85, estimates that in- equality in Russia doubled between 1989 and 1996. 93. The official line from the Clinton administration appears to attribute Russia's ongoing problems to 'the political legacy of communism'. For an articulation of this view, see the speech of Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Thomas R. Pickering, at the 1999 annual meeting of the Trilateral Commission, Washington, DC, 15 March 1999. Pete Stavrikis, in his June 1999 testimony to the House Committee on International Relations, suggested that 'the United States and the West did play an important role in arriving at today's sorry state of Russian affairs. This is not simply because of funds misspent, I think. But it's also because of an improper conception of the direction of Russian development.' In her testimony before the same committee, Paula Dobriansky, Washington director of the Council on Foreign Relations, warned that 'many Russians appear to have lost the sense that it is Communism and its legacy as well as the mistakes by its leaders that are to be blamed for Moscow's current predicament. Rather, most Russians seem to equate reform and democracy with their failure and blame the United States for allegedly seeking to inflict misery and humiliation on the Russian people.' 94. This wave of anxiety about unfettered global capital markets appears to have crested in late 1998, and receded markedly by April 1999. For a sense of this alarm, on the part of governments and the IMF, see Louis Uchitelle, 'A Crash Course in Economics: Rethinking What's Driving the Emerging Markets Crisis', New York Times, 29 January 1999. The deputies of Michel Camdessus, former IMF Managing Director, made speeches on the subject of a 'new architecture': Alassane D. Ouattara, 'Reforming the International Monetary System', delivered at the Academic de la Paix de la Securite Internationale, Paris, 6 March 1999; and Stanley Fischer, 'Reforming the International Monetary System', delivered as the David Finch Lecture, Melbourne, 9 November 1998. George Soros's call for some form of capital control was made in The Crisis of Global Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 1998). Note also the pledge of Soros, PaulVolcker and others to form a task force, under the auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations, 'to come up with a new international financial architecture'.'In Brazil, the IMF Made Things Worse', Business Week, i February 1999. 95. When Brazil's economic difficulties in early 1999 seemed less severe than many investors had feared, government and IMF officials began to play down talk of capital controls, and to retreat from their earlier, more desperate rhetoric. See David E. Sanger, 'Rubin Proposes Modest Limits on Lending Risk', New York Times, 22 April 1999; and Michel Camdessus, 'Governments and Economic Development in a Globalized World', address to the 32nd International General Meeting of the Pacific THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 55 Basin Economic Council, Hong Kong, 17 May 1999. On the return of speculators to 'emerging markets', see Wayne Arnold,'The Casino Effect in Asian Stock Markets', New York Times, 22 July 1999. Arnold notes that US investors have been slightly more wary of returning to emerging markets than non-US investors, mainly because of the speculative boom in US domestic stock exchanges. 96. The resignation of Michel Camdessus as IMF managing director in 1999 encouraged US Treasury officials to seek a replacement who would be even more responsive to US interests. (As former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen said ruefully of Camdessus, 'Damn right he can be tough. Sometimes you have to lean on him real hard to get things done.') David E. Sanger, 'Longtime IMF Director Resigns in Midterm', New York Times, 10 November 1999. 97. On the prospect of almost complete neglect of the international economy in the 2000 US presidential race, see Robert L. Borosage, 'The Global Turning', Nation, 19 July 1999. The only obvious challenger to Al Gore for the Democratic presidential nomination was Bill Bradley, who him- self raised substantial campaign funding from Wall Street. In a profile of Bradley, David Corn conceded that 'Wall Streeters and financiers - who have generously funded his previous and present campaigns — can back him as an unabashed cheerleader of the global economy.' 'Bill Bradley: Can He Get Into the Game?', Nation, 5 July 1999. 98. The current head of the American Federation of Labor—Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL—CIO) warned of this danger in a 1999 speech. Addressing the substantial US trade deficit, he invoked Pat Buchanan, a famous US right-winger: 'I can tell you one thing. We will either gain greater balance in our trade with China - and with the world - or we will feed a xenophobic populism that may make Pat Buchanan look like Woodrow Wilson.' John J. Sweeney, 'The Global Economy:The Need to Act', address to the Trilateral Commission annual meeting, Washington, DC, 14 March 1999. The leader of the Teamsters union, James P. Hoffa,Jr., noted his 'tremendous amount of respect' for Pat Buchanan during the December 1999 WTO protests in Seattle (see the Afterword for a fuller treatment of the protests). Hoffa conversed with Buchanan on 'Rivera Live', MSNBC, 29 November 1999. 99. A rather grim precursor to Clintons 1998 'trade, not aid' formula came from then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers in 1997, as Summers reported back to the US media in Washington on a recent trip to Africa: 'What I was struck by was that a new wind is blowing through Africa.... It was there in the recommendation by a major Wall Street firm of the Treasury]-bills issued by a number of African govern- ments. It was there in the entrepreneurs investing US pension fund money in private African infrastructure.... It was there when I visited Mozambique, by some measures the poorest country in the world, and met the competing Internet providers to that country.' Press Briefing by Larry Summers, The White House, Washington, DC, 17 June 1997. , 56 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? The UN's 1999 Human Development Report, 148, notes that life expect- ancy in Mozambique is 45 years; that 60 per cent of the population is not literate; and that 70 per cent has no access to health services. Mozambique's stock exchange, meanwhile, opened (after a series of postponements) in October 1999. The Economist noted in a generally enthusiastic survey at the end of 1999 that '[n]aturally, the boom has not helped everyone equally. A relatively small middle class, concen- trated in Maputo, is doing well ... Mozambicans in the countryside are still depressingly poor, decades of civil war having reduced many to stone-age conditions."Maturing Mozambique', Economist, 4 December 1999. 100. On the strength of the US stock market in the context of financial disaster elsewhere in the world, see Louis Uchitelle, 'The Perpetual- Motion Economy', NewYorkTimes, 21 March 1999.The UNDP's Human Development Report 1999 notes, 97, that the 'Asian crisis' and its fall-out around the world was 'the worst setback to the global economy since the 1930$'; and yet this coincided with a very strong US economy, apparently unhindered by the Asian difficulties. 101. For a useful comparison between the relatively short-lived problems for the United Kingdom following the run on the pound in 1992, and the much more profound difficulties for Mexico after 1995, see Paul Krug- man, 'The Return of Depression Economies', Foreign Affairs 78, no. i (1999): 56-74. On the move towards a single European currency, and the hope that the euro will be a rival to the dollar, see Solomon, Money on the Move, 64. The IMF and the United Kingdom have recently announced plans to sell a large portion of their gold deposits and to hold dollar and euro certificates in their reserves. For perspectives on the future of the dollar and the euro as 'global reserve currencies', see Edward Luce, 'Bonded to a Bright Future', Financial Times, 14 June 1999. 102. This 'flash of optimism' from one 'steely-nerved foreign firm' with an interest in Russia is reported in 'Russia's Attempts to Create a Proper Business Culture are Now in Ruins', Economist, 24 October 1998. As one management consultant determinedly put it: 'Multinational com- panies know the demand is still out there.' 103. On Rubin's departure, and the succession of his deputy, Lawrence Summers, see David Wessel, 'Summers Break', Wall Street Journal, 13 May 1999. 104. On Atwood, see Philip Shenon, 'Departing Foreign Aid Chief Says Cuts Are Dangerous', New York Times, 6 July 1999. 105. George Gedda quotes from Atwood's speech in 'Retiring AID Head Vents Frustration', Associated Press, 29 June 1999. Atwood reworked this material for an editorial piece decrying 'Trade, Not Aid', Christian Sci- ence Monitor, 6 July 1999. 106. Jim Hoagland, 'Glory vs. Obscurity in the Clinton Era', Washington Post, 8 July 1999. AIRS CHAPTER 2 THE US AND THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' You know, no nation in history has had the opportunity and the responsibility we now have to shape a world that is more peaceful, more secure, more free. William Jefferson Clinton, 1999 State of the Union address 1 The relationship between the United States and the rest of the world is deeply paradoxical. On the one hand, the US has been the pre- eminent military and economic power since at least World War II, and has developed and defined the capacity to act in its own interest throughout the world. On the other hand, American policymakers have frequently attempted to present their actions as selfless, or dedi- cated to the good of other nations as surely as the US. This basic tension - between the pursuit of American interests and the presen- tation of those interests as universal - continues to characterise American foreign policy, and to place strains on the credibility of American intentions as well as on US relations with other countries. In this chapter, I am going to focus on the diplomatic, legal and political relations between the US and the rest of the world, and particularly on the vexed relationship between the US and various international institutions and agreements. Although the US boasts a formidable rhetorical commitment to universal ideals of peace, justice and human rights, the American record on these issues lags far behind the promises. The gulf between rhetoric and action has been particularly evident under the Clinton administration, which has advanced many policy proposals and commitments that have often been compromised or abandoned when tested by events. Even though Clinton's speeches have pointed towards a new multilateralism and universalism among nations in the twenty-first century, his actions have failed to check American power or to place the interests of the 57 58 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? rest of the planet on an equal footing with those of the United States. In the first section, I want to look at the idea of an 'international community', a group of nations that respect the same laws and acknowledge a common interest. I will argue that the US has a great stake in the idea of this 'community', but has found it hard to abide by its rules and conventions. The difficult American relationship with the United Nations (UN) is a good example of this; recent efforts to lay down international standards on landmines and on international criminal law have also exposed an American antipathy to the rules of a global community. In the second section, I consider the shifting American position on peacekeeping and the responsibilities of the 'international community' to assuage or prevent conflict and suffer- ing around the world. Events in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia since 1992 have demonstrated the substantial human cost of American ambivalence towards the rules of an international community: the US is not sufficiently committed to resolve disputes around the world, but is also too attached to its own global reach to allow other nations, or the UN, to become involved in its stead. The result has been a series of messy, equivocal interventions, as well as the kind of inter- national abandonment which allowed the Rwandan killings of 1994 to assume the proportions of a genocide. In conclusion, I use the peacekeeping issue to return to the subject of the US—UN relation- ship, and to describe both the parlous state of that relationship at the century's end, and its likely consequences for the future. DEFINING THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' The United States and the United Nations Throughout the twentieth century, the nations of the world attempted to maintain an international forum for the resolution of disputes and the articulation of global laws and standards. In the aftermath of World War I, European and American politicians established the League of Nations in the hope that another major war could be averted. The American Congress, however, refused to approve the THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 59 plan, and the League was forced to operate without American mem- bership and support. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt laid the foundation for a successor to the League which would feature the US in an integral role. The new United Nations, founded in San Francisco in 1945, would be permanently based in the US and would receive financial and political assistance from the American govern- ment. 2 Although the US was persuaded of the need for the UN, the distribution of power within the international organisation was a contentious topic. If countries' interests were weighed against each other equally, the new UN would adopt a one-nation, one-vote system which would treat the US no differently from any other power. Conversely, if a country's population determined its voting influence, the US would wield more power than the nations of Europe but less than China or Russia. In 1945, the US was not the most populous country but simply the most powerful. The challenge for the founders of the UN was to accommodate this imbalance of power within a voting system which seemed democratic, or at least equitable. They reached an ingenious solution. The UN would be divided into a General Assembly, which would operate a one-country, one-vote system; and a Security Council, consisting of permanent members (with the power to veto proposals) and rotating, temporary members. The General Assembly could thus appear as the democratic forum, whilst the Security Council could preserve the prerogatives of American power. 3 Given the wave of decolonisation in the 19405 and 19505, the distance between the Security Council and the General Assembly widened considerably. As the original 50 nations became 120 by the mid-1960s, so American influence in the General Assembly dwindled. The Security Council, meanwhile, had quickly asserted itself as the most powerful arm of the UN. The General Assembly gave smaller countries, especially the newly independent developing countries, the opportunity to state their views on the world stage. Resolutions in the General Assembly, however, were not binding and lacked any means of enforcement. The nations of the world might agree, by a large majority, on a course of action; but the General Assembly did not have the means to carry it through. 4 The Security Council, meanwhile, could authorise the use of force but had first to achieve 60 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? a consensus among the major powers on the desirability of any operation. The five permanent members of the Council — the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia and China — could each defeat any proposal with a single veto, which heavily curtailed the power and engagement of the Council as a whole. 5 In the decades following 1945, the veto powers of permanent Security Council members consigned the Council to near irrelevance. As the ideological battle between the US and the USSR hardened into Cold War, each country's efforts to use the UN were threatened by the veto of the other. 6 The post-war hopes for multilateral agree- ment and a new spirit of cooperation faded fast, replaced by the rejectionist logic of a bipolar world. From the American perspective, talk of an 'international community' was scant indeed: US presidents preferred instead to base their definition of world politics on the tyrannical ambitions of the Soviet Union, seeing the USSR and its satellites as an 'evil empire' ranged against the 'free world' which opposed communist advance. Although the UN continued to function, it was largely sidelined by this grand conflict, and could do little to assert its original mission of promoting the interests of all nations, not simply the most powerful. 7 As the Soviet Union fell apart in 1989, it appeared that the UN might at last emerge from its long eclipse. The predictable US- USSR antagonism in the Security Council had suddenly disappeared, and the proxy wars waged in developing countries with American or Russian guidance seemed likely to subside. 8 Rhetorically, at least, American presidents promised a new era of internationalism. George Bush led the US to war with Saddam Hussein under UN auspices in 1991, declaring in a victory speech that the multilateral effort against Iraq heralded the coming of a 'new world order'. 9 Bill Clinton, as he campaigned to succeed Bush in 1992, went even further in his vision of that new order, suggesting that the UN be strengthened, and given its own unit of troops to respond quickly to conflicts across the globe. 10 With the nomination of Egyptian politician Boutros Boutros-Ghali as the new secretary-general in 1991, with a mandate for reform, the UN seemed set for a period of renewed significance in international affairs. 11 THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 6l Two major difficulties disrupted this picture. First, the US retained its tremendous power and influence even with the end of the Cold War; in fact, US predominance has increased in the absence of the Soviet counterweight. Although this has made it easier for the Security Council to mandate action, the risk of conflating US interests with the global interest has increased commensurately. The UN has also become more dependent on the good faith of US leaders and their promises of an internationalist American foreign policy. The US has been able to exert economic influence over Russia and China in the 19905 to win their acquiescence in UN operations which enjoy US support; however, there is no obvious balance to this influence since no other country has the political or economic power to force American acquiescence in UN activities which don't obviously advantage the American government. As we will see, this has left the UN at the mercy of US politicians, and sometimes even the American domestic political scene. 12 The second difficulty proceeds from the first. If the US has often used the UN to advance its own interests, the American government has marginalised the efforts of other countries to organise effectively without US support. The US is happy to see a strong UN if that multilateral effort is directed towards familiar targets of American opprobrium: UN sanctions against Muammar Gaddafi or a UN task force against Saddam Hussein have proved perfectly acceptable to US policymakers. The idea of UN action in more ambiguous areas, however, has confounded and often angered the US: the abortive peacekeeping efforts in Rwanda and Bosnia, and the UN efforts to establish an International Criminal Court, have raised a fundamental question: is the US prepared to allow the UN to develop and succeed without US approval? Recent events suggest that the answer is no. 13 Boutros Boutros-Ghali's term as UN secretary-general coincided with this moment of post-Cold War realignment, and Boutros-Ghali's fate is a useful index to the eventual US understanding of the UN. At the beginning of his term, Boutros-Ghali was persuaded of the need to keep the US at the heart of the UN. In a memoir of his experience at the UN, Boutros-Ghali recalled his frank admission to an American official just before taking office: 'Without American support, the United Nations would be paralyzed.' 14 As he assumed his responsibilities, however, Boutros-Ghali realised that his desire to 62 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? toe an American line was compromised by the bullying and occasional contempt that the US manifested towards the UN. In the first place, the American government, and especially Congress, demanded sub- stantial changes in the structure of the UN and in its funding ar- rangements. Although Clinton's 1992 campaign promises implied a bolder role for the organisation, the new American President quickly made clear bis preference for a slimmed-down UN bureaucracy. The US Congress, meanwhile, set out to reduce the level of US contri- butions to the UN, upsetting those poorer countries which felt that the richest nation in the world should shoulder a commensurate burden of the UN's expenses. 15 The questions of reform and funding were further complicated by the embarrassing failure of the US to pay its dues to the UN. Throughout Bill Clinton's presidency, the US slipped further into arrears, making minimal stopgap payments to maintain its seat in the General Assembly. By 1999, the American debt stood at more than $1.6 billion, and the UN was in the grip of a serious financial crisis. 16 Although Clinton had pledged to remedy this in his occa- sional visits to the UN headquarters in New York City, he seemed content to accept the stigma of American indebtedness (perhaps dis- tracted by his many other embarrassments) and reluctant to pressure Congress into a settlement. 17 In fact, some Congressional representa- tives even proposed backdating their claims for a reduction in US contributions, unilaterally reducing the monies outstanding to the UN. This prompted one dissenting (and lonely) US Senator to ask: 'If someone was your debtor, would you let them lay out conditions of repayment of monies they owed? What would you think if your debtor unilaterally demanded a change in the rate of assessments as a condition for past, due, and future payments?' 18 Boutros-Ghali might reasonably wonder how the US view of the UN had changed so rapidly, from the lofty heights of Clinton's campaign rhetoric to a messy, unresolved battle over funding. Part of the answer lies in the frosty American response to Boutros-Ghali's efforts to strengthen and expand UN peacekeeping operations, a subject we will explore in more detail later in this chapter. On a fundamental level, however, the US remains ambivalent towards the idea of the UN. Policymakers are happy to bend the UN to their purposes, but reluctant to strengthen it lest it stand freely without THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 63 US support. The UN continues to be a powerful weapon in the US arsenal, against Saddam Hussein for example, but lacks the agency and autonomy to act independently in situations where the US is less interested. The recent funding crisis thus serves to remind the UN of its reliance (political and financial) on its largest contributor. At the grassroots level, this American ambivalence sustains those Congressional representatives who are reluctant to give American money to any kind of international organisation. Without a firm lead from President Clinton, Senators like Jesse Helms and Rod Grams have peddled their own brand of isolationism and pride in the moral authority of unilaterial US actions overseas. As Grams reminded a Senate committee on UN reform, 'I mean, the UN might have some problems with us, but we definitely have some problems with the UN.' By the end of the century, these 'problems' threatened not only the future of American-led multilateralism but the survival of the UN. 19 'Slaying the monster': international law and American objections As we have seen, the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly each has its own disadvantages in the resolution of disputes and the maintenance of international law. The General Assembly can pass resolutions in favour of an outcome or a wronged party, but can do little to intervene in a situation. The Security Council, mean- while, can be hijacked by the interests of any one of its five permanent members, or derailed by their apathy. These weaknesses in the UN system have prompted countries to seek new mechanisms for the establishment and policing of international standards, and have given impetus to efforts to reform international law. In general, this effort to codify international standards presents a particular challenge to the US, since international law seeks to equalise the differences between nations and submit each of them to the same framework. The irony of recent US policy, then, has been the apparent willingness of President Clinton to support or even initiate changes in international law - only to dissent from final agreements when their practical implications for American foreign relations become clear. Clinton has been particularly attentive to the publicity and benefits which accrue from leading the international community; unfortunately, however, 64 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? he has been embarrassed by the extent to which other countries have made good on their internationalist rhetoric, leaving the US behind. To illustrate the difficult relationship between the US and this reinvigorated concept of international law, I want to offer two ex- amples from Bill Clinton's presidency: the debate over a ban on landmines, and the creation of an International Criminal Court to prosecute human-rights abuses. In each case, the pattern was the same: Clinton expressed initial enthusiasm for the idea; subsequently viewed the speed and progress of negotiations with alarm; and finally refused to allow the United States to sign the agreement reached by virtually every other country. In this final stage, with the US isolated and even attempting to scuttle the accords reached by the rest of the world, we can see that the United States is as ready to defy the international community as any of the 'rogue states' it usually lam- basts for doing so. When Bill Clinton rose to address the United Nations General Assembly in September 1994, he was particularly excited by a new initiative which might spread from the US to all the members of the UN: And today, I am proposing a first step toward the eventual elimination of a less-visible, but still deadly threat: the world's 85 million anti-personnel land mines - one for every 50 people on the face of the earth.... Ridding the world of those often hidden weapons will help to save the lives of tens of thousands of men and women and innocent children in the years to come. 20 Revelling in the applause for his proposal, Clinton could hardly have realised how speedily and sharply it would backfire. The facts of the case were straightforward: around 25,000 people each year were killed by landmines, and many more were horribly injured. Advocacy groups in the US and elsewhere had been pushing for a ban on their production and use, arguing that landmines were unusually cruel weapons which predominantly injured civilians, often years after they had been planted. Campaigners hoped that landmines might be con- signed — along with mustard gas and exploding bullets — to that blacklist of armaments outlawed under international law. Clinton, looking to carry out a 'sacred mission' and 'to build a new world for our children', was happy to lead the charge. 21 THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 65 It is hard to assess how seriously Clinton had embraced the cause in 1994, since the international response to his proposal quickly wrong-footed the US government and ruined the president's original plan. In the first instance, Clinton hardly placed the issue on a fast track: the US submitted the landmine issue to the UN Conference on Disarmament, a body described glumly by the Washington Post as 'ponderous' and regarded by many countries as unlikely to achieve a ban. 22 As American officials began the slow process of convening the Conference, a group of states led by Canada broke away to start separate negotiations on a comprehensive agreement. By the summer of 1997, nearly one hundred countries had gravitated towards the Canadian position; but the US persisted in its own course. Finally, in August of that year, American negotiators joined the Canadian de- liberations, hoping (even at this advanced stage) to push the talks towards US priorities and concerns. 23 The other reason to doubt Clinton's 1994 commitment became clear at this time, as the various American objections to the draft treaty (to be signed in Ottawa, Canada) were made public. Although the US Department of Defense appeared nervous about the timetable for the phasing out of mines - even though the Ottawa treaty would allow nine years for this — the principal American objections con- cerned the Korean peninsula, and the need for US forces there to deploy anti-personnel mines to protect larger anti-tank mines. 24 The Korean exception was straightforward, if unconvincing. American military officials argued that the standoff between forces of North and South Korea could only be guaranteed by the extensive use of landmines, bluntly arguing that 37,000 US troops stationed in South Korea would be threatened by a universal landmine ban. As some experts pointed out, however, this was a disingenuous position for the US military to adopt. The overwhelming US advantage in military technology on the Korean peninsula hardly depended on these landmines, and the threat of American air power and even nuclear weapons made the Pentagon's arguments for landmines seem superfluous. 25 The other American objection to the treaty concerned the anti- personnel mines which accompany anti-tank mines. The larger anti- tank weapons were exempted from the Ottawa treaty; but the US had designed its anti-tank mines to include a cluster of anti-personnel 66 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? mines, a booby-trap to deter any soldiers from reaching the larger mines and trying to defuse them. The anti-tank mines are dropped from helicopters or planes, and the anti-personnel mines fan out around them, forming a network of explosive tripwires. If a soldier clips the wire, the mine sends a grenade flying towards his or her chest; this grenade subsequently explodes in lethal fragments. 26 Al- though these mines are labelled 'smart', meaning that they have a limited lifetime and are designed to self-destruct, the consequences of their failure to operate correctly (or of their self-destruction around any living thing) are just as dire as any 'dumb' mine. As such, anti- landmine campaigners, along with other governments committed to the Canadian negotiation track, were unimpressed with the US ex- cuse for not signing. Even Tom Daschle, leader of Clinton's Demo- cratic Party in the US Senate, criticised the president: 'It's pretty hard to justify going slow on something as heinous as this.' 27 Sensing an imminent public -relations disaster, Clinton tried to mask the basic American refusal to sign the treaty. One arm of this strategy consisted of a semantic battle, waged by various Pentagon 'experts'. In September 1997, presidential spokesperson Michael McCurry introduced the White House press corps to Robert Bell, a National Security Council defence consultant, who tried to persuade a wary media that the anti-personnel mines which clustered around American anti-tank mines were not really anti-personnel mines at all: These explosive devices that protect our anti-tank mines are not anti- personnel landmines.They are not being banned ... because they are not anti-personnel landmines. These things are explosive devices just like the explosive devices that protect our allies' anti-tank mines. They are built into this munition. It's sealed at the factory. It's an integral unit. 28 Bell's Pentagon handlers had given him a whole range of synonyms, clustered around the forbidden 'anti-personnel mine' and intended to ward off the curious reporters: the mines were 'anti-handling devices', 'little kinds of explosive devices', or just 'munitions'. At least one commentator made his way through this tangle of evasive language, asking drolly: 'When is an anti-personnel landmine no longer an anti-personnel landmine? When the President of the United States says so.' 29 : THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 6j The other element of Clintons rearguard action consisted of a promise to bring the US into compliance with the Ottawa treaty eventually: the president pledged to end the use of mines outside of the Korean peninsula in 2003, and to remove them from Korea as well by 2006. For various reasons, this promise sounded hollow. Clinton would leave office in January 2001, and he made no proposal for legislation which would guarantee the pledge after his retire- ment. 30 Still more worryingly, the commitment was premissed on the ability of the Pentagon to devise an (unspecified) 'alternative' to anti-personnel landmines which would confirm their obsolescence. 31 Not only had Clinton caved in to the military in 1997, he had tied the future of any landmine ban to the Pentagon's priorities and perspective. The first fruits of this trusteeship became evident in February 1999, as the Pentagon requested $50 million from Congress for a new landmine system. This new weapon was not an alternative to anti-personnel landmines, but a more efficient and deadly com- bination of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines. James Schear, the embarrassed Clinton administration official pushed out to announce the new mine to the press, admitted that 'it does not technically meet Ottawa standards', before announcing (with no apparent irony) that 'this system is a more humanitarian alternative to the existing suite of systems that we now have'. There was no shortage of ob- servers to question the 'humanitarian' credentials of the new mine, and to marvel at the surrealism of relying on the Pentagon to come up with an alternative to landmines. Stephen Goose of Human Rights Watch wryly noted 'the very odd situation where the Pentagon is saying we are going to get to a ban on anti-personnel mines by producing a new anti-personnel mine system'. 32 Bill Clinton visited Canada in November 1997, two weeks before the signing of the Ottawa treaty, and faced stiff questioning from the press about his failure to approve the agreement. As if reminding himself of how badly things had gone since 1994, he retorted that 'I was the first world leader at the United Nations to call for a total ban on landmine production and development.' 33 Three years later, the US had been left behind by the rest of the world, languishing in the company of Russia, China, Libya and other countries the US was wont to decry. 34 On one level, Clinton's failure was indicative of the reluctance of the US to uphold genuine international standards 6 68 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? which might clip its wings, even in negligible ways. In practical terms, however, the American rejection of the treaty made it almost impossible for campaigners and national signatories to put pressure on Russia, China and other nations involved in the manufacture and distribution of mines. Clinton was correct to draw media attention to US de-mining operations throughout the world, and a ban on the export of US-made mines; but his neglect of the treaty standards created the space in which other nations could continue to make mines and sell them overseas. 35 By 1999, as the treaty went into effect, the US had little to offer save for a tentative promise to sign in 2006, itself conditional on a Pentagon which was busy designing new mines. 36 The anti-landmine agreement, hailed by the United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan as 'an historic victory for the weak and vulnerable of our world', had succeeded not because of American actions, but in spite of them. 37 The other major initiative in international law during the Clinton administration was the proposed International Criminal Court (ICC), a new United Nations body that would investigate and prosecute human-rights violations across national boundaries. Again, Clinton and his aides were caught off guard by the proposal. The US had given its support to international war-crimes tribunals following the genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and was pleased with the progress of these ad hoc bodies. The Security Council had voted separately for the creation of each, and legal experts (as well as many concerned nations) wondered whether a formal, standing inter- national court might be given responsibility for all such cases. This would obviate the need for a lengthy process of consultation and Security Council deliberation before action might be taken against war criminals, and might even deter such crimes from taking place. 38 The Clinton administration appears to have been wrong-footed in the process of creating such a court, perhaps because US officials did not fully consider the pitfalls ahead. 39 In simple terms, the question of an ICC could be put in two very different ways. Follow- ing the Bosnian and Rwandan examples, one might argue for an institution which could implement international law under the guidance (and with the approval) of the Security Council. This would give each of the five major powers the opportunity to veto an 8 THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 69 investigation, and probably confine the court's activities to those 'rogue states' and weaker countries with little influence on the inter- national stage. This would also avoid the embarrassing (and even hazardous) spectacle of an investigation by the court into, say, Boris Yeltsin's war in Chechnya, or Bill Clinton's prolonged assault on Iraq. The permanent members of the Security Council could work together to ensure that their own foreign adventures were largely beyond the reach of international law, and immune from the threat of prosecution. The other model for an international court would be much more radical, circumventing the control of the Security Council and establishing independent means for the universal policing of inter- national law. Judges from many different countries would staff the court, and consider cases brought by an independent prosecutor acting within the guidelines of existing laws such as the Hague Regulations and the Geneva Convention. The implied multilateralism of this proposal would be truly unprecedented: the stranglehold of the Security Council would finally be broken, and signatories would submit their citizens to a binding, consistent legal process. This would obviously present the greatest challenge to the Security Council's permanent members; and especially to the US, which has intervened overseas more often than any other country, but which has leaned on its power, influence and permanent member status to defend its actions. The Clinton administration favoured the first version of the court: when the president told the UN General Assembly in 1997 that 'we should establish a permanent international court to prosecute the most serious violations of humanitarian law', the examples of Rwanda and Bosnia were firmly in his mind. 40 As with the landmine negotia- tions, however, the rest of the world could not be relied on to share Clinton's limited vision of the prospective court. The international debate quickly ran away from the US, as nations rushed to approve more radical plans for a sovereign, independent court. 41 To the alarm of American officials, the 'international community' had taken another one of their ideas seriously, and a more sweeping vision of the ICC was agreed upon at a conference in Rome in July 1998. David Scheffer, the chief American representative to the Rome conference, had argued in 1996 for the advantages of the court: 'In a civilized 7O ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? world's box of foreign policy tools, this will be a shiny new hammer to swing in the years ahead.' In the summer of 1998, however, SchefFer stood alone in opposition to this 'shiny new hammer', as virtually every other country signed the treaty which would create an ICC. Recalling SchefFer's metaphor and adding one of his own, former Bush administration official John Bolton mocked SchefFer's plight in testimony before a Congressional committee as the treaty was being signed: 'I think what happened is the administration took the genie out of the bottle and the genie took the hammer and broke their nose.' The US had been unable to argue for its much more limited version of the ICC, and was now isolated along with Iran, Iraq, Libya, China,Yemen and Israel in opposition to the Rome proposals. 42 The debate over the court in the US was basically conducted between two camps. On the one hand, the supporters of the court argued that there was virtually no chance it would ever pass judge- ment on American citizens. Apart from the obvious threat of in- curring the wrath of the US, ICC enquiries into the actions of Americans could also be curtailed by a US investigation of a possible crime, or overturned by a majority decision of the UN Security Council. These safeguards against prosecution had actually been added to the Rome treaty at the request of the US, in the (forlorn) hope that they might persuade the American delegation to sign. Arguing for the treaty on the grounds of this safety net, Michael Scharf, an American professor of international law, told Congress that The United States bullied its way into getting the US stamp on almost every single provision in the International Criminal Court statute. It re- ally is a US statute with just a couple of exceptions, a couple of things that we did not get. 43 Scharf and others urged Clinton and Congress to see the ICC as a 'US statute', and to disregard their fears that the agreement might substantially curtail American foreign policy. It is worth noting that this argument in favour of the ICC was not based on the idea that the US would submit its own citizens and conduct to the ICC's scrutiny, but the likelihood that, in practice, Americans would be immune from its jurisdiction. 44 The opposing camp was not persuaded by this line, and argued that the mere possibility of the US being investigated by the ICC THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' JI should deter the United States from signing the agreement. Senator Rod Grams put the case bluntly: 'The US will not cede its sover- eignty to an institution which claims to have the power to override the United States legal system and to pass judgement on our foreign policy actions.' Grams and others used the example of American soldiers on peacekeeping missions to suggest what was at stake: sup- posing honest and well-meaning US military personnel were in- volved in a 'friendly fire' incident, or an episode of'collateral damage' (i.e. civilian casualties) when serving overseas? 45 The ICC, its Ameri- can opponents argued, would submit these honest Americans to an alien and unpredictable jurisdiction. Lurking behind the sympathetic picture of the US military-as-victim was a darker fear: what if the ICC should indict US commanders, or even American politicians, for an invasion or the bombing of another country? John Bolton warned Congress that the court 'could well have a chilling effect on top decision-makers', suddenly held accountable for their actions beyond the shores of the United States. 46 The most obvious observation on this internal American debate over the International Criminal Court is that neither the supporters nor the opponents of the ICC wanted to see US citizens subjected to international investigations or prosecution. This in itself is revealing of a myopia within the US policymaking establishment, most nota- bly on the part of its more liberal members, who praised the idea of the court without following through its logic. The ICC s opponents, at least, were alive to the dangers of submitting the US to a genuinely equitable and multilateral, international law. Jesse Helms, chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, promoted not isola- tionism but America's right to invade or bomb wherever it pleased as he put into words what the Clinton administration was too nervous to express: So, what this court proposes to do is this. It will sit in judgement of the national security policy of the United States. Now just imagine what would have happened if this court had been in place during the US invasion of Panama or the US invasion of Grenada or the United States' bombing of Tripoli. In none of these cases did the United States seek permission from the United Nations to defend our interest. So long as there is breath in me, the United States will never - and I repeat, never, never - allow its national security decisions to be judged by any inter- national criminal court. 47 72 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Helms was right to suggest that the ICC posed this kind of danger; his colleague, Rod Grams, pointed out that the UN World Court, a kind of toothless predecessor to the ICC, had ordered the US to desist in its covert war against Nicaragua in 1984 and 1986, an injunction which the American government (headed by Ronald Reagan) swiftly dismissed. 48 Unless the US was proposing a major change in its foreign policy, it made little sense to sign on to a much stronger World Court, which might not only criticise US foreign policy but which might indict the secretary of defense or the secretary of state on their travels abroad. 49 On 17 July 1998, the court was approved by an overwhelming majority of nations, leaving the US uncomfortably exposed along- side those countries it typically derided as 'rogue states'. Although 120 nations agreed to submit themselves to the most powerful and comprehensive international legal regime in human history, the United States remained on the sidelines. This tells us something important about the true state of the American relationship with the 'international community' — instead of leading the drive towards a single standard of humanitarian law, the US sought to exempt itself and to preserve its right to conduct and judge its own foreign policy, away from the standards agreed to by everyone else. 50 This picture would be grim enough if the United States was simply left out of the treaty, unwilling to abide by its provisions. In fact, the imperatives of US policy, and the desire of American policy- makers to preserve their immunity, has pushed the US into confront- ation with the ICC treaty itself. The Rome provisions allowed for the prosecution not only of the nationals of those countries which signed the treaty, but of anyone who commits a crime within the territory of a signatory. The Clinton administration feared that US citizens might still come under ICC jurisdiction if they were charged with a crime committed overseas, an anxiety made acute by the huge number of countries that had signed the founding agreement. Michael Scharf told a worried Foreign Relations Committee that: We are not alone in the world, and what other countries do does make a difference, contrary to what some people might wish or hope. The other countries in the world made it clear early on that there was going to be an international criminal court. There will be such a court and the US will have to deal with it. 51 THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 73 Current proposals for 'dealing with it' are ominous. Although Scharf s preferred method would involve diluting those provisions which might threaten US citizens, hardened opponents of the ICC in the US have adopted a more aggressive line. William Cohen, Clinton's secretary of defense, was painfully direct in his dealings with the German government over the Rome treaty: US troops would be withdrawn from NATO operations in Europe unless some kind of ICC exemption was granted to American forces. 52 The US was ready to put its substantial military power into the assault on the ICC, forcing other countries to dilute the Rome treaty or to give up their various security arrangements with the United States, some of which had been in place for decades. Senator Joseph Biden did not mince words in backing Cohen's threat: 'In my experience, spanning more than two decades on this committee, nothing gets the attention of our friends like discussing the status of forces agreements we have with them.' 53 After the treaty signing, then, it was clear that the ICC was not only unwelcome to the US, but incompatible with the continued pursuit of US foreign policy. To the secretary-general of the UN, the ICC was 'a gift of hope to future generations, and a giant step forward in the march towards universal human rights and the rule of law.' 54 To Jesse Helms, however, the court was a 'monster — and it is our responsibility to slay it before it grows to devour us'. 55 Once more, the US stood outside the boundaries and rules agreed by virtually every other nation, even trying - through threats and coercion — to destroy the 'monster' of a genuinely multilateral com- mitment to global justice. The examples of the anti-landmine campaign and the International Criminal Court demonstrate that the US has serious reservations about binding international laws, and is particularly reluctant to forgo the safety net of its Security Council veto in the reckoning of its international actions. What is surprising, perhaps, is the extent to which other countries have abandoned similar concerns over sover- eignty and self-interest, and contributed fully to the creation of new international standards which are at least promising and perhaps pro- found in their implications for the future. American efforts to violate, undermine or destroy these standards are therefore of particular 74 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? concern, and augur very badly for the century ahead of us. An international community without the United States will struggle to uphold human rights and the rule of law; an international commu- nity at odds with the US will find the task impossible. 'SAVING EVERY CHILD': THE US AND INTERNATIONAL PEACEKEEPING Although the US has always expressed a rhetorical commitment to the maintenance of peace and human rights throughout the world, the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 appeared to clear the way for a much more active American foreign policy. After decades of proxy wars with the USSR, the US could now intervene, without Cold War distractions, to promote humanitarian values or political stability throughout the world. The logical instrument of this inter- vention was the United Nations, which might stand as a kind of guarantor of American actions and motives. In 1991, one of Boutros Boutros-Ghali's first tasks as secretary-general was to map out a plan for multilateral peacekeeping operations - which culminated in a report entitled An Agenda for Peace. Boutros-Ghali suggested that the UN develop its own capability to respond quickly and decisively to conflicts, even establishing a rapid-reaction force (made up of soldiers from the various member nations) to combat instability before it became uncontrollable. At the heart of these plans lay the idealistic hope that conflicts in the 19905 and beyond would be deterred or contained by the will of the international community. Since the world had been relieved of the burden of superpower rivalry, the UN might now be able to resolve disputes and defend the innocent on a consistent and equitable basis. 36 Given its unrivalled power, the US would inevitably determine the fate of these ideals; the initial signs, moreover, were promising. In 1992, an American election year, Boutros-Ghali's plan appeared to enjoy the favour of both major political parties. George Bush had benefited from the UN's sanction of the US-led war with Iraq in 1991, and his personal success in that conflict had made him more sympathetic to the idea of (selective) multilateral action. Bush's presi- THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 75 dential challenger, Bill Clinton, was even more supportive. Sur- rounded by advisers who spoke enthusiastically of the UN and the possibilities for a more settled international outlook, Clinton's cam- paign for the presidency stressed the benefits of a new US—UN partnership. When Clinton won the election, Boutros-Ghali's vision of a strengthened UN seemed closer to reality. 57 It would not be long, however, before Clintons commitments were put to the test. 'Assertive multilateralism': intervention in Somalia, 1992—1993 After his defeat in the 1992 election, George Bush initiated a final foreign-policy action which came to haunt his successor. The collapse of government in Somalia in 1991 had unleashed fierce fighting between various groups of Somalis, and the resulting instability had brought the country to the brink of mass starvation. President Bush, exercising his powers for the last time, proposed a massive US relief force which would enter the country and secure the distribution of food and humanitarian relief. Presenting his offer to the UN, Bush obtained Security Council approval for a unified task force (UNITAF), comprising around 30,000 US Marines, to combat the impending famine. UNITAF reached Somalia on 9 December 1992, and immediately made headway with the delivery of food and medical supplies. The leaders of the various warring factions in Somalia were driven into the shadows by such an impressive show of strength, and many Somalis who had been threatened by starvation were saved. 58 Bush left office in January 1993, bequeathing the enormous UN/ US operation in Somalia to the new Clinton administration. Clinton's own calls for a more humanitarian and multilateral foreign policy appeared to have been answered even by his predecessor, and the Clinton team quickly set out to define their approach to international peacekeeping and humanitarian actions. Although Clinton's secretary of state, Warren Christopher, was responsible for the execution of foreign policy, the intellectual drive behind the administration's new ideas came from Anthony Lake, Clinton's national security adviser, and Madeleine Albright, the new US ambassador to the UN. Albright frequently used the phrase 'assertive multilateralism' to describe new American thinking on foreign affairs. The US would not stand idle 76 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? as conflicts raged around the world, nor would the American gov- ernment resort unilaterally to its military and political power if the UN might act instead. In the summer of 1993, Albright and Lake drafted Presidential Review Directive 13 (PRD-I3), a policy pro- posal which pledged American troops to UN operations, a first step towards the implementation of 'assertive multilateralism'. The new president was apparently eager to consolidate his ideas and to make good on his promises to the UN. 59 The US/UN mission in Somalia, however, would quickly unravel these policy strands, exposing an American reluctance and apathy which had always been lurking behind the new Clinton rhetoric. When George Bush initially dispatched troops to Somalia, Boutros Boutros-Ghali had made it clear that long-term stability would only be guaranteed by engagement with Somalia's political scene, or by a concerted effort to disarm the various Somali factions. 60 Despite the overwhelming American force, however, Bush was adamant in his refusal to use the US military to confiscate the caches of arms stored by the warring factions. Since the US had supplied many of these weapons to the former Somali regime in the 19805, the American government was well placed to understand the dangers they posed to humanitarian and political stability; however, neither Bush nor Clin- ton showed an interest in using the substantial American military presence to create a climate for meaningful political engagement. 61 This raised the question of what American troops were doing in Somalia in the first place. Bush had limited the involvement of the US task force to a six-month tour of duty, and Clinton had con- tinued Bush's policy of minimising any US strategy of peace en- forcement. When the bulk of US troops left Somalia in May 1993, therefore, the fate of the UN mission (now renamed UNOSOM) was seriously in doubt. 62 The Somali factions retained all of their weapons, and the dwindling number of US troops (complemented by UN soldiers and personnel) would find it harder to maintain the humanitarian effort, still less to preserve social stability. The American intervention had saved many Somalis from the immediate threat of famine, but had done very little to underpin the political develop- ment of the country. The US military, even in this UN-sanctioned mission, had always been under American command, and had not heeded the UN calls for a major push towards disarmament. 63 THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 77 The other option for an American force was to pursue political negotiations with the various factional leaders, and to try to achieve through diplomacy and mediation what the US was not prepared to seek through military force. However, the new UN force proved no more willing to engage in this task than its predecessor; and since American troops still comprised the bulk of the offensive force in Somalia, the UN was poorly positioned to demand a change in American policy. As UNITAF gave way to UNOSOM in the summer of 1993, Boutros-Ghali effectively acknowledged that the US would control the destiny of Somalia by appointing an American admiral, Jonathan Howe, to head the UNOSOM mission. Despite the UN mandate, and Boutros-Ghali's own views on the need for disarmament, the effort in Somalia was now divided into two elements which were either ineffective or unresponsive to the UN: an overwhelmingly American military force, in which US troops answered to their own chain of command and formulated their own strategy, and a broader UN operation, entirely dependent on US forces and, in any case, directed by an American admiral. Given the later efforts of American politicians to present Somalia as a UN-led situation, it is worth noting that operational control and strategic planning rested wholly in the hands of US personnel. 64 Faced with a choice between disarmament and political engage- ment in Somalia, the American government and commanders on the ground opted for a disastrous mixture of the two. Instead of disarm- ing all the various factions, or engaging their leaders in dialogue, American officials in Washington (and commanders on the ground) became fixated on Mohammed Farrah Aideed, head of the Habir Gedir subclan. Aideed was certainly no friend of the UN, and had been accused of the murder of twenty-four Pakistani peacekeepers after a UNOSOM raid in June. 65 However, the decision to direct US military action against Aideed alone had the dangerous conse- quences of involving UNOSOM as a party to the conflict, implicitly allied with Aideed's rivals, and of destroying the efforts to negotiate a peaceful accord between the Somali factions. 66 Although the Paki- stani deaths aroused little media interest in the US, the Clinton administration and the American Congress took note of the escalation in the UNOSOM mission, and received cogent warnings that this escalation would end in disaster. Frank Crigler, the former American 78 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? ambassador to Somalia, testified in July 1993 before a House of Representatives committee that, after the initial humanitarian success of the US operation, 'we are turning triumph into tragedy, applying brute military force to a situation that calls for quiet diplomacy, patient mediation, steadiness and understanding.' 67 If such remarks had minimal impact on Washington, they had no effect whatsoever in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, where UN forces waged an increasingly nasty battle to track down and apprehend Aideed, now routinely described as a 'warlord' by the US govern- ment. Even if one had recognised that goal as desirable, however, it was hard to see how the reduced US troop numbers in UNOSOM could achieve it. Caught between a desire to engage in Somalia and an eagerness to bring the troops home, the Clinton administration had dramatically reduced its contingent in May, and then instructed a small military force to carry out a much more aggressive role. Frank Crigler noted in July that the new policy 'has cast US combat troops in the ugly role of airborne bullies whose aim is to force peace on the Somalis at gunpoint'. The common understandings of peacekeeping (monitoring an existing agreement) and peacemaking (encouraging the conditions for stability and a political agreement) seemed alien to this new situation. The United States had declared war on Aideed, even bringing into Somalia a small unit of crack commando troops to ensure his arrest or elimination. 68 The American public could be forgiven, during the summer and autumn of 1993, for thinking that the US military was keeping the peace in Somalia; but, in fact, the reconfiguration (and militarisation) of the UNOSOM mission was hardening suspicions between Ameri- cans and the Somali people they had come to help. Armed raids on downtown buildings, the scaling back of humanitarian efforts, and the remorseless drone of low-flying helicopters helped many Somalis to redefine the US/UN effort as an invasion rather than a relief operation. 69 Meanwhile, American soldiers had come to describe Mogadishu as 'Dodge City', as Indian country filled with 'Skinnies' and'Sammies'. The overwhelmingly white company of US Rangers which undertook the bulk of offensive operations seemed especially ill-suited for the subtleties of a peacekeeping mission, disastrously inclined to see the Somalia intervention in black-and-white terms. 70 The 'war on Aideed' came to a bloody end on 3 October 1993, as THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 79 US Rangers and Delta Force commandos became pinned down in a firefight in central Mogadishu after yet another raid on Aideed's followers. The soldiers came up against concerted resistance not only from Aideed's lieutenants, but from women and even children, who, in some cases, returned the American fire. US forces had been largely insulated from the full impact of deteriorating relations with Moga- dishu's residents, buzzing over the city in their helicopters and keeping out of serious trouble. On 3 October, American soldiers confronted the true extent of local anger, even hatred at the mutation of the UNOSOM mission. Before the battle was done, eighteen Americans died on the streets of the city; hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand Somalis were killed by the retreating American forces. The Somali situation had come full circle, with the 'peacekeepers' now engaged in an indiscriminate shooting match with the Somali popu- lation. By any account, the US mission in Somalia had failed. 71 The working out of this failure was to have a profound effect on the course of US foreign policy. The American public was understand- ably shocked to learn of the deaths of American soldiers on a UN mission to keep the peace in a distant country: urgent questions - What were they doing there? How could this happen? — were directed at a Clinton administration which was already particularly sensitive to the ebb and flow of public approval. 72 The underlying causes of the disaster were readily identifiable: the massive reduction in the size of the US force in May 1993; the simultaneous American move to offensive operations against Aideed; the initial neglect of disarmament efforts, and the later disregard for political progress in negotiations among the faction leaders. A simple admission of these facts by the American government was complicated, however, by the knowledge that they might em- barrass the administration. Madeleine Albright had heralded this new era of US-UN relations, and was personally identified with the 'assertive multilateralism' that had brought the US to Somalia; Ameri- can politicians and military chiefs, meanwhile, had ensured a tight American control over UNOSOM, and would be particularly vul- nerable to charges of mismanagement or poor planning. In the days after the raid, high-level Clinton officials admitted that the United States had made mistakes. Warren Christopher, secretary of state, 8O ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? conceded in an interview that 'we focused very heavily on the mili- tary track and we lost focus on the political track'. 73 Given time to consider how best to spin the failed mission to an angry American public, however, the same officials soon began to shift the blame to the UN. Although the US had led the efforts against Aideed, and had escalated American military engagement, Bill Clinton began to imply that the UN was responsible for this fatal policy error. In speeches and interviews, Clinton thundered that in future operations US troops would be 'under American command', as if that had not been the case in Somalia; and suggested that American forces re- maining in Mogadishu would rediscover their humanitarian mission in spite of the UN vendetta against Aideed. 74 Somewhere behind these immediate events was PRD-I3, still under consideration by Clinton and his advisers but now influenced by the debacle in Somalia. As Clinton prepared to bring home the remaining US forces by March 1994, leaving the UN to deal with the continuing wreckage of civil society in Somalia, Christopher, Albright and Lake revamped PRD-I3 in accordance with recent events. Although the American participation in UNOSOM offered an excellent example of how not to run a peacekeeping operation, Clinton's team drew the lesson from Somalia that the US should not undertake peacekeeping in the first place. Somalia was interpreted not as a model of a flawed intervention, but as the justification for a new international apathy from the US government. This was to have dire consequences in 1994, when the American contraction of 'Somalia syndrome' contributed to the success of genocidal murder in Rwanda. 75 'A new realism': genocide in Rwanda, 1994 The Clinton administration's original announcement of PRD-I3 in early 1993 had attracted attention from Congress and the US media, and Washington buzzed with anticipation of the finished policy directive even as the administration's deliberations stretched into 1994. After Somalia, moreover, observers were still more interested to learn the fate of Albright's 'assertive multilateralism', and to see whether the events of October 1993 would affect the hopeful rhetoric of earlier policy statements. On 5 May 1994, the finished version of THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 8l PRD-I3, the newly renamed Presidential Decision Directive 25 (PDD-25), was finally unveiled. Anthony Lake briefed the press on the lengthy process of deliberation that had led to the new policy, and set up the context of international political instability alongside Americas humanitarian impulse: When I wake up every morning and look at the headlines and stories and the images on television of these conflicts, I want to work to end every conflict. I want to work to save every child out there. And I know the president does, and I know the American people do. With Somalia firmly in view, however, Lake invoked 'the reality that we cannot often solve other people's problems: we can never build their nations for them'. PDD-25, therefore, was an American effort to ask 'hard questions' about peacekeeping, and to make 'hard choices about where and when the international community can get involved'. 76 What this amounted to was not only a shift in American policy - the end of 'assertive multilateralism', for one thing - but a serious undermining of the more flexible and responsive UN envisaged by Boutros Boutros-Ghali and, back in 1992, by Clinton himself. According to the arrangements for funding UN peacekeeping opera- tions, the US was assessed around 30 per cent of the total cost. PDD-25 suggested that the US would seek to deter UN missions which were too expensive, asking 'hard questions' and, presumably, forcing the UN to give hard answers to various calls for assistance from the victims of civil conflict and humanitarian disaster. 77 Clinton's initial commitment to multilateralism had two elements: the US would seek its own foreign-policy goals through the UN framework, and would contribute its share to UN humanitarian and peacekeeping missions even beyond the narrow confines of American self-interest. PDD-25 substantially altered this emphasis. Anthony Lake reasserted the US right to act unilaterally on the international stage in the pursuit of its own interests, even as he doubted the viability of collective action and peacekeeping efforts. 78 The earlier proposals for a UN standby military force were rejected outright, and Madeleine Albright's relationship with Boutros Boutros-Ghali deteriorated markedly. The problem was not just the new US reluctance to participate in UN operations, but the active efforts of Albright and 82 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? the Clinton administration to prevent the UN from intervention in areas outside a US sphere of interest. Noting Boutros-Ghali's scepticism at the shift in American policy, Albright offered a frank assessment of the balance of power between the US and UN: 'He cannot veto US policy. That is ridiculous.' 79 Naturally, the US retained the right and the inclination to veto UN initiatives, and Clinton administration officials soon had an opportunity to demonstrate what Albright called 'a new realism' in peacekeeping deployment. 80 As the text of PDD-25 was finalised in April 1994, conflict broke out in the central African nation of Rwanda. 81 A plane carrying the Rwandan president was shot down over Kigali, Rwanda's capital, on 6 April and triggered massive violence. 82 The Rwandan population was divided along ethnic lines into Hutus (who made up the majority of the population) andTutsis, and a vocal (and extremist) Hutu leadership had spent the early months of 1994 laying the ground for widespread murder of Tutsis. UN forces based in Rwanda, who had been monitoring an earlier political agreement, were aware of the Hutu plans and sent messages to the head of UN peacekeeping in New York and to the permanent members of the Security Council conveying their alarm at develop- ments. These messages were dispatched well before the plane crash and the subsequent killing spree. The commander of the UN Assist- ance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), Romeo Dallaire, sought per- mission to confiscate caches of arms, and requested reinforcement of his 2,700 peacekeeping troops. Although the request unquestionably reached the UN and the US, no response was forthcoming; and Dallaire's small contingent was left alone to deal with the spiralling murder in April. 83 Once the genocide had begun, Dallaire's forces, along with inter- national aid agencies and other observers, were able quickly to clarify the nature of the fighting in Rwanda. Although an army of Tutsis (the Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF) did begin to fight govern- ment (Hutu) troops after 6 April, the vast majority of the killing was taking place in areas under Hutu control, where there was no fighting whatsoever. Hutu extremists had swiftly murdered Hutu moderates in the wake of the plane crash, eager to consolidate their own power and to close off any route of reconciliation; advocates of'Hutu Power' then incited gangs of Hutus to undertake the mass slaughter of Tutsis. THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 83 These killings took place away from the armed skirmishes between the RPF and Hutu government forces, and were usually accom- plished in sickeningly low-tech fashion: Tutsis were killed with small arms fire or, more typically, were hacked to death with machetes. 84 Even after taking stock of the scale of the killing, the UNAMIR forces were convinced that they could stop the genocide with only modest reinforcement — Romeo Dallaire pledged to restore order with only 5,000 troops, cutting off the Hutu Power radio network and disarming the machete-wielding gangs. 85 The UN Security Council, however, was inclined to withdraw UNAMIR altogether. The murder often Belgian troops on the first day of the massacre had confirmed Belgium in its desire to withdraw, and no other country was willing or able to take its place. Boutros Boutros-Ghali pleaded with Security Council members to offer the necessary reinforcement, and finally managed to keep at least a token force of 500 men in Rwanda, over the objections of the US. 86 These 500 UN troops managed to protect around 30,000 Tutsis at various locations around the Rwandan capital, Kigali - a figure which suggests both the effectiveness of those peacekeepers that remained, and the many more lives that would have been saved had the international community been willing to reinforce UNAMIR and to stop the genocide. 87 From an American perspective, of course, there was little at stake in Rwanda. According to PDD-25, the relevance of a crisis to US interests, and the likely cost of a peacekeeping operation, had to be considered carefully before any 'hard choices' were made. The only American motive for intervention in Rwanda would be humanitarian, the desire (as Anthony Lake had put it) to 'save every child'. The Somalia experience, however, had largely evaporated the reservoir of American goodwill, and Clinton officials did their best to parry media calls for a US relief effort. 88 As early as n April, the State Department had deferred the issue to the UN; by the end of April, when UNAMIR forces had confirmed the dimensions and the direction of the genocide beyond any doubt, State Department officials tried to blur the picture by pointing to 'violence which is going on among different groups and factions'. 89 Although the UN forces had warned of the mass slaughter of Tutsis in advance, and now stood witness to the one-sidedness of the killings, American spokespeople still denied the crucial facts: 'It's not one simple 84 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? perpetrator against another', one State Department official told a curious press corps. 90 Although the US correctly perceived that it had little interest in Rwanda, it had still to evade its responsibilities in international law to put down an episode of mass slaughter. According to the 1948 Convention Against Genocide, to which the US is a signatory, con- tracting parties 'confirm that genocide is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish'. 91 This simple clause should have forced the US (and every other signatory) to intervene in Rwanda even if its immediate interests were not af- fected. Instead, the Clinton administration pursued a two-track strat- egy to downplay the need for American involvement. 92 First, administration officials displayed great reluctance to use the word 'genocide', often employing elaborate euphemisms for the mass killing to avoid any responsibility in international law for failing 'to prevent' these crimes. 93 Second, Clinton officials tried to dilute the 1948 Convention by suggesting that it merely enabled an international response in cases of genocide, and did not compel any signatory to act. 94 If the first strategy betrayed the immediate victims in Rwanda, the second implied a more profound disregard for those threatened by the ultimate crime in international law. It seemed that the Clinton administration was so committed to PDD-25, and its new policy of retreating from peacekeeping responsibilities, that it was content to allow even genocide to take place without an American response. As Madeleine Albright proudly declared to a House of Representatives committee on 17 May, as the killings continued in Rwanda: 'We cannot be made to go along with any mission that is not in our interests.' 95 Albright, who had seemed previously to be the administration's biggest supporter of UN operations, acted as Clinton's chief 'realist' on the subject of Rwanda. As Boutros-Ghali and UNAMIR prodded the Security Council into some form of response, Albright threatened to veto proposals for reinforcing the UNAMIR troops on the grounds that the UN mission was too vague and open-ended. 96 For two weeks in May, Albright effectively delayed the UN plan for 5,500 new troops to be dispatched immediately; on 17 May, she argued that 'sending a UN force into the maelstrom of Rwanda without a sound plan of operations would be folly', and killed the proposal for THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 85 a major strengthening of Dallaire's forces. 97 Employing the language of PDD-25, inflected with the sentimentalism of Clinton himself, Albright patiently explained the situation to a sceptical interviewer: Well, the issue here, Margaret, is everybody wants to help in Rwanda. It's a horrendous situation. We know that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed or displaced, and there is a massive desire to do some- thing. However, we felt that it was very important to act responsibly and not make hollow promises. It didn't do anybody any good to talk about sending in a force for which there were no answers yet as to what the force would do, what we call 'concept of operations'. Albright delivered this line even though UNAMIR forces had had a 'concept of operations' since January, and had repeated their willing- ness to stop the genocide in April. In the US, Albright's hesitation was not universally well received, and many commentators questioned her effort to avoid any engagement in Rwanda. Even fellow Demo- crats were appalled; interviewed on the same television news pro- gramme as Albright, Congressman Donald Payne angrily rejected her justification for inaction: 'You would think we were some third- rate country that was confused about what to do. I am shocked and disappointed at the statement I just heard.' 98 The persistent American efforts to evade any responsibility in Rwanda confirmed the demise of multilateralism, as well as a collapse in the fortunes of the UN. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, when presented with further US delays at the end of May, finally lost patience and denounced the Rwandan effort as 'a scandal': All of us are responsible for this failure. It is a genocide which has been committed. More than 200,000 have been killed, and ... the international community is still discussing what ought to be done." As May turned to June, a pledge by the Organisation for African Unity to provide troops for a Rwanda mission was delayed by the reluctance of the US to make available armoured vehicles for these troops. In spite of its debts to the UN, the American government had decided to charge for the rental of these vehicles, further post- poning the arrival of a force which might contain the killings. 100 Only in July was the UNAMIR presence in Rwanda substantially strengthened. In the one hundred days of US-led inaction, at least 500,000 people had been shot or hacked to death. 101 86 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? The genocide in Rwanda exposed the fatal consequences of the new American peacekeeping policy, and confirmed the gulf between the avowed responsibilities of the international community and the willingness of nations to make good on their commitments. The Clinton administration had announced in 1993 its support for 'asser- tive multilateralism'; a year later, after the mistakes in Somalia and killings in Rwanda, this policy had been abandoned. Reluctant to give up its central role in world affairs but unwilling to commit troops and money for UN operations, the US atrophied the cause of peacekeeping just as the situation in Rwanda required a flexible and dynamic response. Although the killings of early April might still have taken place, prompt reinforcement of the UNAMIR force would surely have saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. Instead, American officials did everything in their power to avoid committing American soldiers to the effort, and stymied at- tempts to send any kind of force on the grounds that the US might have to pay for part of it. While this enabled Madeleine Albright to boast to Congress of a 'new realism' in American foreign policy, it represented a nadir in US commitments to human rights and the rule of law. The US led the international community away from recognising genocide in Rwanda, averting its gaze until the killings had run their course. 102 THE US AND THE UN: THE END OF MULTILATERALISM Unsurprisingly, the new American shift away from multilateralism put great strain on the US—UN relationship and forced UN officials to re-evaluate their earlier optimism about the Clinton administra- tion. The growth of UN peacekeeping operations in 1992 and 1993 had taken place with US approval; by 1994, as PDD-25 was un- veiled, the US had decided to change course. In Congressional testimony of March 1995, Madeleine Albright elaborated on the new US-UN relationship: Because we have a veto, we can block any peace operation that is not consistent with our interests. Because we believe UN peacekeeping grew THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 87 too fast in 1992 and 1993, we have adopted rigorous guidelines for decid- ing when a new operation should begin. As a result, there are fewer UN peacekeepers today than in almost two years. 103 The original goal of the Clinton administration had been reversed: instead of additional UN operations and more peacekeepers, Albright was hailing a reduction in the numbers as a success for the US. From the perspective of other countries, and especially the UN, this Ameri- can retreat was troubling and problematic. Albright was publicly com- mitting the US to veto any UN operations 'not consistent with our interests', a phrase that seemed clearly to indicate the rejection of multilateralism and humanitarian principles, which would motivate many peacekeeping missions. If the US was no longer interested in multilateralism, how could the UN function as anything other than an instrument of American foreign policy? This question haunted high-level UN officials, and especially Boutros Boutros-Ghali, after 1994. Boutros-Ghali's ambitious pro- gramme to reform the UN, and to re-establish its relevance, had been built on the very commitments which Clinton and Albright had now rescinded. As a result, the UN's relationship with the US entered a tailspin. This became particularly evident in the response of the international community to the break-up of the former Yugo- slavia. As with Somalia, the American response to the crisis was initially complicated by the transition from George Bush's presidency to the Clinton administration. Clinton had campaigned against Bush in 1992 on a platform of greater assertiveness in foreign affairs, and had committed the US to supporting UN efforts to broker peace in Bosnia. By early 1993, however, the intensity of the fighting and Clinton's reluctance to commit ground troops had complicated US- UN relations. Bosnian Serb attacks on Sarajevo and other towns put pressure on Clinton to do something to alleviate the situation; the new administration's fear of American casualties kept this impulse in check, however. European nations had dispatched thousands of troops to Bosnia to serve under UN command, but the US remained aloof from this effort. Understandably, this created serious tensions over the direction of the UN's operation in Bosnia. 104 For most of its first two years in office, the Clinton administra- tion showed little interest in solving the Bosnian problem. Moreover, the limited engagement of the US hampered the multilateral attempts 88 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? to ameliorate the situation. Clinton rejected the first major peace plan, brokered by former American secretary of state Cyrus Vance in February 1993, but finally backed an entirely American negotiation track in its drafting of a similar agreement two-and-a-half years (and tens of thousands of lives) later. 105 Meanwhile, the American re- sponse to Serb military threats was to promise NATO air strikes rather than the deployment of American ground forces. The eager- ness of the US to employ air power became a major source of disagreement between the Clinton administration and the UN, since the UN was responsible for the safety of those ground troops which served under its authority. For Clinton, air strikes were a relatively safe and cheap way of looking tough on Bosnia; for the UN troops deployed on the ground, these air attacks represented a physical dan- ger and increased the likelihood that they would be taken hostage by better-armed Serbs. 106 The troubles of the UN forces in Bosnia offered an example of what it would take to accomplish a 'peace enforcement' mission: the 20,000 or so UN troops were hard-pressed to maintain humanitarian relief to the suffering, and tried to concentrate the threatened civil- ian population in several large towns which were designated UN 'safe havens'. By 1995, however, these 'havens' were coming under concerted attack from advancing Bosnian Serbs. A larger international force would have found the task easier, but would have required more troop contributions and more funding from UN member states; the US, the richest and most heavily armed nation in the world, was ready to commit neither. 107 Only in the summer of 1995, after the disastrous collapse of one of the 'safe havens', Srebrenica, did the American policy become untenable. It was obvious that the UN forces lacked the numbers or the weapons to do an effective job, and that only the US was in a position to turn the situation around; and so the Clinton administration had to choose between simply aban- doning Bosnia or making a firm commitment. This was the environ- ment in which the UN troops were withdrawn, NATO air strikes were carried out, and the US pledged ground troops to enforce a political agreement. 108 Once again in Bosnia, the UN was maligned for its role, especially after the humiliating (and bloody) fall of Srebrenica to the Bosnian Serbs. The American media had already castigated Boutros-Ghali for THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 89 his weakness in failing to support US calls for air strikes, even though the UN had primary concern for the safety of its forces on the ground. 109 In the autumn of 1995, as if to punish Boutros-Ghali and his colleagues, the US excluded the UN from the diplomatic process and began to broker peace talks entirely on its own authority. This seemed to confirm the sense of UN officials that they had been duped by the US all along. Boutros Boutros-Ghali wrote in his memoirs that 'the UN had been used to "internationalize" the United States' and NATO's desire to avoid the war in Bosnia.' In Boutros- Ghali's view, the weak UN troops had been forced to create a peace while the better-armed and more numerous NATO troops eventually assumed a less hazardous peacekeeping role: By pushing the UN to the fore yet depriving it of the tools it needed and using it as a scapegoat, the United States and the West bought time, but at an unwarranted cost. The harm done to the mangled and nearly bank- rupt United Nations would not be easily reversed, nor would the damage done to key principles of international behavior: no acquisition of territory by force; no genocide; and guarantees of integrity and existence of UN member states. For Boutros-Ghali, the Bosnian war had claimed two main victims: 'the people of this unfortunate land, and the United Nations, charged with failing to find a solution to the catastrophe'. 110 The UN emerged from the Bosnian war with a crippling budget deficit of more than $3 billion; the US, meanwhile, enjoyed a diplo- matic triumph as it shepherded the various Balkan parties towards an agreement. 111 In Bosnia, a renewed Croatian military offensive had scaled back the territorial gains of the Serbs, and the UN negotiators effectively backed these offensives with a view towards an eventual settlement. The presidents of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia were flown to the US to hammer out the peace deal, pressured by American negotiators to stay on American soil until an agreement was signed. Although these negotiations, conducted at an air-force base in Dayton, Ohio, were co-chaired by the European Union and Russia, there was little doubt that they proceeded on an overwhelm- ingly American agenda. Confirming that the US sought no outside interference in the peacemaking process, the leader of the US team 9O ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? at Dayton, Richard Holbrooke, agreed with Madeleine Albright that a UN presence in the talks 'would further complicate them'; and so the UN representative was excluded. 112 The result of these talks, the Dayton Agreement, was a precarious pledge to preserve the integrity of Bosnia even as the country was divided into a Serb and a Muslim—Croat sector. Under the Vance- Owen plan of 1993, which the US had opposed, the Serbs had been given 43 per cent of Bosnian territory, scattered in small regions within a single, unified state; the Dayton plan gave 49 per cent of the territory to Serbs, and concentrated these holdings in one bloc, contiguous with Serbia. Given the tenuous nature of the Muslim- Croat 'Federation' within Bosnia, the US-brokered plan appeared to have laid the ground for the eventual partition of the new country between Serbia and Croatia, an ambition of Serb and Croat leaders since the war's first days. That this outcome could be considered a success, even a diplomatic triumph, says much about the discrediting of the UN and the American domination of the Dayton proceed- ings. The speed of the conference attracted the attention (and admi- ration) of the assembled media, whilst the agonisingly slow US reaction to the crisis since 1991 had fallen from view. 113 Two further consequences of the Bosnian example are worth noting. First, the US affirmed its right not only to act unilaterally but also to assume control over the direction of an international peace process. In arguing for air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs, and then managing the Dayton agreement, the US appeared to be pressing for a greater role in international affairs. In reality, the US had been forced into this position by the weight of public opinion and the grim defeat of the overstretched UN forces inside Bosnia. Behind the tough talking of Holbrooke and Albright lay very little political or military will to defend the rights and values of inter- national law, which may explain why the eventual Dayton agreement threatened to compromise the territorial integrity of Bosnia- Herzegovina. It was obvious, however, that an agreement could not be reached without US approval, even though American officials had tried to keep out of the war for three years. That the Dayton agree- ment was brokered by the US in spite of American apathy prompted much pride in the US at the 'indispensable' American role in world affairs; few people commented on the flip side of this truism, that THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 91 the international community had become too weak to assert itself without major American involvement. 114 The second consequence of the Bosnian crisis was that the US effectively declared war on the UN, and particularly on its secretary- general. By late 1994, Boutros-Ghali's candour in condemning the international community over Rwanda had already prompted some American commentators to question his chances of a second term as secretary-general, a privilege extended to each of his predecessors in the job. 115 His reluctance to sanction US air strikes against Bosnian Serbs in 1995, given the danger of such strikes to UN personnel on the ground, enraged American government officials who were used to getting their own way with the UN bureaucracy. Unsurprisingly, Boutros-Ghali's strong and independent view of the UN had won him many supporters outside of the US; but an American veto would end his chances of re-election to a second term when the issue came before the Security Council in November 1996. The US desire to be rid of Boutros Boutros-Ghali translated into a bizarre campaign to remove him from the running, with American tactics ranging from flattery (Boutros-Ghali would retire with the title 'Secretary-General Emeritus', promised Madeleine Albright and her unlikely messenger to Boutros-Ghali, Barbara Walters) to threats (nations eager to vote for re-election were asked if they would rather have Boutros-Ghali or Clinton as their friend). As the US became more explicit in its suggestions that it would withdraw from the UN if Boutros-Ghali was reappointed, it was apparent that the overwhelming international support for the secretary-general would weigh less than the American view. On 18 November 1996, the Security Council voted 14 to i for the appointment of Boutros-Ghali to a second term. The single US veto meant that the vote would not carry, and a round of behind- the-scenes arguments followed, in which the US offered a list of alternative candidates that it would be prepared to accept. Although the international community was united in its condemnation of US tactics, the American veto could not be revoked by any measure of international disapproval. After three weeks of US obstinacy, then, the other nations reversed their decision for Boutros-Ghali, and approved the US-favoured candidate, Kofi Annan. 116 If Boutros-Ghali's removal gave some indication of the drift of the US-UN relationship, the appointment of his successor was also 92 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? not without significance. Kofi Annan had been in charge of UN peacekeeping operations under Boutros-Ghali, but appeared much more sympathetic to the US view of limited engagement than to his boss's vision. Moreover, he had given UN approval for NATO air strikes in Bosnia in the summer of 1995, endearing himself to those American officials who had grown frustrated with Boutros-Ghali's obstinacy. Annan had been, in the words of Richard Holbrooke, 'the UN official in whom we had the greatest confidence', a fact that suggested to other UN employees that loyalty to the US might bring grand rewards. By forcing the other Security Council members to choose Annan, the Clinton administration effectively domesticated one of the most important international posts; in December 1996, in the wake of Clinton's re-election to the presidency, the New York Times even described Annan as 'another key appointment' for Clinton's second term, as if the UN were a division of the US government. 117 Meanwhile, Madeleine Albright's campaign to oust Boutros-Ghali was also rewarded. In spite of her volte-face on 'assertive multilateral- ism' in 1994, the tragic US policies toward Somalia and Rwanda, and the disastrous fate of the UN's peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, Albright was named secretary of state just as Boutros-Ghali was dis- missed. The impression that Clinton favoured those who could over- come or bypass the UN was confirmed by the July 1999 appointment of Richard Holbrooke, the impresario of Dayton, to Albright's old job as American ambassador to the UN. Albright had led the charge against the UN after Somalia; Holbrooke helped Albright to exclude the UN from any role in the Bosnian peace negotiations. Each had contributed to the US rejection of multilateralism and collective responsibility under the Clinton administration, and each was re- warded for their services with promotion to higher office. In his account of the Dayton negotiations, Richard Holbrooke re- called the American decision to remove Boutros-Ghali with sadness, but without regret: Although the American campaign against Boutros-Ghali, in which all our key allies opposed us, was long and difficult — especially for Albright, who bore heavy and unjust criticism for her role - the decision was correct, and may well have saved Americas role in the United Nations. 118 2 THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 93 Holbrooke did not go on to explain what he meant by this, an unfortunate omission since the question of America's role in the UN seems as vexed as ever. Although Kofi Annan initially enjoyed better relations with the Clinton administration than Boutros-Ghali, the US arrears in UN contributions actually worsened during Clinton's second term. Moreover, Annan himself committed some of the same mistakes as his predecessor, pursuing his own line on some issues and suggesting that all military actions throughout the world should be based on UN authority. This did not endear him to the Clinton administration or to the American Congress, and more than $1.6 billion dollars in American debt to the UN had amassed by the century's end. It would be hard to overstate the extent of US hostility to the UN, especially on the part of those lawmakers in Congress who are responsible for the appropriation and delivery of the American contribution to the UN's administrative and peacekeeping funds. Even the unexpected budget surplus in the US in the late 19905 was diverted from payment of outstanding American debts to the United Nations; the House of Representatives and the Senate voted to approve nearly $800 billion in tax cuts in 1999, even though the settlement of the UN debt would represent only a fraction of this sum. 119 The eventual decision of the US Congress in November 1999 to pay around $i billion in dues to the UN, across four years and in return for a reduction in the US assessment of UN upkeep, merely confirmed the diminished stature of the United Nations in the US Congress: American legislators voted to settle part of their debt mainly to avoid the loss of the US vote in the General Assembly, and combined their gesture with an effort permanently to lower the American contributions to the UN. With the UN desperate for further funds, struggling to maintain its many operations around the world, its most powerful member continued to withdraw its support. The consequences of the funding crisis are grave. In addition to cutting back on peacekeeping missions and slashing its administrative staff, the UN has been forced to limit funds to projects in other areas — health, education, development - which can scarcely afford any reduction. 120 If the US continues to default on its debts, the UN will have either to declare itself bankrupt or to turn to other sources for funding. In September 1997, media magnate Ted Turner, owner of CNN, offered a $i billion donation to the UN which may set a 9 94 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? precedent for future funding. Although Turner's money was a gift, UN agencies have been courted by corporations which see a 'part- nership' with the UN as good for business. In December 1999, the New York Times noted that companies had once given money or products for use in developing countries on a philanthropic basis; now, however, 'the new trend is for companies to use UN collabo- ration as a market tool'. The UN's original aims may therefore be subverted under these new financial constraints, with the private sector eager to supply some of the funds which the US continues to withhold, in return for favourable treatment from the UN or access to this globally recognised 'brand'. 121 To some extent, the UN has reached this lamentable state through the apathy and mismanagement of the Clinton administration. It would be a mistake, however, to overlook the fundamental difficulties which underpin the relationship between the US and the UN. The UN has found it nearly impossible to function without American support; the US, on the other hand, is well able to pursue its objec- tives without UN approval. Madeleine Albright told a Congressional committee in March 1995 that the UN was no more than an addi- tional resource in the American arsenal: UN peacekeeping adds to our capabilities, without subtracting. It offers us a choice between unilateral action and standing aside while conflicts fester. It allows us to influence events without assuming the full burden of costs and risks. And it lends the weight of law and world opinion to causes and principles we support. 122 For all the usefulness of the UN, it remains a peripheral concern for American policymakers, who are used to acting unilaterally when- ever they see fit. Albright's language here is grimly appropriate: the UN has no means of 'subtracting' an American commitment to pay its dues, nor can it force the US to uphold international law or to intervene where human rights are threatened. The US, meanwhile, can choose not only to cooperate with the UN, but to delegate responsibility for those international disasters and conflicts which hold little interest for an American audience. Thus the UN offers the US not only 'a choice between unilateral action and standing aside', but a way of doing each and maintaining a posture of international engagement — as in the Gulf War of 1991, or Madeleine Albright's 4 THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 95 stalling of a Rwandan relief mission in 1994. Albright correctly argued that the cost of selective American engagement, and of regular US apathy towards human-rights violations and humanitarian catastro- phes, was relatively cheap for the United States. Predictably, the 'full burden' of this self-interested policy is carried by those — in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda and elsewhere - least able to bear it. NOTES 1. Delivered on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, 19 January 1999. 2. On the founding of the League of Nations, see Gary B. Ostrower, The League of Nations from 1919 to 1929 (Garden City Park, NY: Avery 1996), and F.S. Northedge, The League of Nations: Its Life and Times, 1920—1946 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986). General accounts of the American role in the creation of the United Nations are offered by Robert C. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 3. Roosevelt appears to have been a strong advocate of veto power from the earliest stages of planning the UN, which was built around a con- ception of the 'Big Four' (the US, Britain, China and the USSR; France would soon be added to this elite club) acting in concert: Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 32—6. The hardening of the veto power in the Ameri- can conception of the UN is discussed by Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 116-17. For a comparison of the relatively weak but democratic General Assembly and the much stronger but autocratic Security Council, see Geoff Simons, The United Nations: A Chronology of Conflict (London: Macmillan, 1994), 56—60. 4. Stanley Meisler observes that the US exerted a strong influence over the General Assembly until the mid-1960s, but then effectively ceded control to a bloc of developing nations and essentially bypassed or ignored the Assembly. United Nations: The First Fifty Years (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995), 295-7. Simons, 58, confirms that 'there is no sense in which the General Assembly is a world parliament,' and notes that the US 'became increasingly hostile' to the Assembly with the growth of an 'Afro-Asian bloc'. 5. On the inequitable distribution of power in the Security Council, and the regrettable effects of the veto, see Sydney D. Bailey and Sam Daws, The Procedure of the UN Security Council, third edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 227-39, 386-90. 6. On the deterioration of relations between the US and the USSR, and t 96 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? the subsequent effect of the Cold War on the workings of the UN, see Simons, The United Nations, 81-105. The US achieved some early successes in subverting the UN mechanism to its own foreign-policy purposes, most notably in Korea where the UN offered its sanction to an overwhelmingly American invasion force (after the USSR had absented itself from a Security Council meeting authorising the Korean operation); see Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 634-7- 7. For an account of the early freezing of relations between the US and USSR in the context of the UN, see Meisler, United Nations, 23-6; Meisler points to George Kennan's famous 'long telegram' of February 1946, dispatched from the US embassy in Moscow, as a founding docu- ment of Cold War hostility: according to Kennan, the USSR had insisted that 'our traditional way of life be destroyed' and 'the international authority of our state be broken' as a prerequisite for the maintenance of'Soviet power'. The 'evil empire' figure was employed most extensively and explicitly by Ronald Reagan in the 19805, although it merely clarified polar understandings of the Cold War which had predominated since Kennan's first warning. 8. On the development of 'New Thinking' towards the UN from the USSR in the late 19805, see Linda Melvern, The Ultimate Crime: Who Betrayed the UN and Why (London: Allison & Busby, 1995), 283-7. 9. Bush employed this phrase in his victory address to the US Congress on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, 29 January 1991: the UN-sanctioned operation against Saddam promised a new order 'based on respect for the individual and for the rule of law, a new world order that can lead to the lasting peace we all seek'. 10. For an analysis of the proposals to give the UN a standby military force, and the influence of this debate on the 1992 US presidential election, see John M. Goshko, 'Idea of a Potent UN Army Receives a Mixed Response', Washington Post, 29 October 1992. Clinton had pledged to 'explore the possibility of creating a standby, voluntary UN rapid deployment force to deter aggression against small states'. 11. Although Boutros-Ghali was generally presented at the time of his nomination as a force for change in the UN system, the US seems to have reacted coolly to his candidature because it feared that he would not be assertive or radical enough in office. This is especially ironic given the outright US opposition to Boutros-Ghali's re-election in 1996, on the grounds that the secretary-general had been much too assertive and radical. See Meisler, United Nations, 278-9. 12. Meisler s conclusion, 330-33, summarises the UN dependence on the US, and the corrosion of the UN's credibility under the attack of US domestic political opponents. Geoff Simons, The United Nations, 163, is more explicit: 'The end of the Communist threat quickly induced American policymakers to speculate on how the United Nations could THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 97 be further exploited to US advantage.' Rosemary Righter has argued in Utopia Lost: The United Nations and World Order (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995), 121-4, tnat the relative power of the US and'the West' might have the opposite effect of encouraging the strongest powers to seek solutions to their problems outside the UN — Righter suggests that Bush's 'new world order' was imagined as an alliance between great powers rather than as the apotheosis of the UN. This analysis seems persuasive given the cavalier disregard for the UN in right-leaning policymaking circles in the US. 13. Meisler, United Nations, 332, puts the case bluntly: 'When the United States reined itself in to play an ineffectual role at the UN, the UN became ineffectual.' Meisler depicts this US posture of non-engagement as a kind of benign neglect; the examples of Rwanda and Bosnia, which we will explore in this chapter, suggest a more deliberate and hard- nosed effort to stymie international peacekeeping operations for reasons of American apathy and a desire to avoid incurring the costs of a UN operation in personnel and, especially, money. 14. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished: A US-UN Saga (New York: Random House, 1999), 12. 15. For an overview of UN funding issues, see Ronald I. Spiers,'Reforming the United Nations', in Roger A. Coate, ed., US Policy and the Future of the United Nations (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1994), 19-40 at 35-8; and Ruben P. Mendez, 'Paying for Peace and Develop- ment', Foreign Policy too (1995): 19-31. An extreme perspective on 'fraud and inadequate financial controls at the United Nations' is offered by Stefan Halper, 'Systemic Corruption at the United Nations', in Ted Galen Carpenter, ed., Delusions of Grandeur: The United Nations and Global Intervention (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1997), 127-36. Richard Sklar, the Clinton administration's 'Representative for UN Management and Reform', told Congress in 1997 that other member countries 'deeply resent the US position and attitude' on a reworking of the scale for national contributions: 'They see the richest nation in the world demanding a discount from an assessment rate that they believe should be predicated on, quote - the words I hear night and day - capacity to pay, i.e. gross national income.' Testimony before the Sub- committee on International Operations, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, i05th Congress, ist session, 6 November 1997. 16. Although Congress had agreed to settle part of the US debt in April 1998, the addition of a rider to the funding bill which would effectively prevent federally funded organisations from working to facilitate birth control and abortion in other countries led President Clinton to veto the proposal. It is unclear whether this pro-life rider was intended to produce a presidential veto, or merely reflected the low priority given by the Congress to the settlement of American debts. For contrasting perspectives, see Ambassador Peter Burleigh,'Remarks at the New York Foreign Press Center', press release of the US Mission to the UN, 18 that 98 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? September 1998; and Jesse Helms, 'A Day to Pay Old Debts', NewYork Times, 21 September 1998. A repeat of this situation took place in the summer of 1999: see Philip Shenon, 'Senate Backs UN Payment, But More Hurdles Remain', New York Times, 23 June 1999. Stefan Halper praised Congress for holding the UN to ransom in this way, arguing that 'no avenue other than the threat to withhold payment is available to force the UN bureaucracy and the hallucinogenic salon that passes for the General Assembly to reexamine their practices': 'Systemic Cor- ruption', 129. Unfortunately for Halper, the 'Third World domination' of that 'hallucinogenic salon' seemed set to continue given the prospect of the mandatory exclusion of the US from General Assembly voting for its serial and prolonged failures to pay its dues: see Paul Lewis, 'UN Warns US on Payments', NewYork Times, 23 March 1999. It is not clear how the UN will respond to the US offer in late 1999 to pay off part of its debt, and to write off the rest. 17. Clinton's handling of the UN funding issue is a particularly good example of the gulf between rhetoric and action that would characterise many of his policy initiatives as president. Although Clinton consistently promised the UN that he would resolve the funding difficulties and persuade Congress to settle the American dues, the US was the largest debtor to the UN throughout his presidency. Understandably, UN personnel were exasperated by the American failure to pay, particularly given the many unkept promises to do so. One official indicated the depth of Clinton's dereliction by comparing him unfavourably to Ronald Reagan: 'At least with Reagan we knew where we stood and the United States more or less paid its bills on time. But Clinton has made so many unfulfilled promises, then he stabs us in the back and tells us that he feels our pain.' Judith Miller, 'As US Relations with UN Languish, is Clinton or Congress to Blame?', New York Times, 5 August 1999. 18. The comments were made by Senator Paul S. Sarbanes before the Subcommittee on International Operations, 6 November 1997. 19. Remarks of Senator Rod Grams before the Subcommittee on Inter- national Operations. 20. Remarks by President Clinton at 49th Session of the UN General Assembly, NewYork, 26 September 1994. 21. For an overview of the landmines issue, see Landmines: A Deadly Legacy (NewYork: Human Rights Watch, 1993); and Shawn Roberts and Jody Williams, After the Guns Fall Silent: The Enduring Legacy of Landmines (Washington, DC: Vietnam Veterans of America Association, 1995). 22. Dana Priest and Charles Truehart, 'US Makes One Last Pitch on Mine Treaty', Washington Post, 16 September 1997. 23. Raymond Bonner, 'US Seeks Compromise to Save Treaty Banning Land Mines', NewYork Times, 17 September 1997. 24. Steven Lee Myers, 'Clinton Says Ban on Mines Would Put US Troops At Risk', NewYork Times, 18 September 1997. 25. The Korean exception failed to convince many independent analysts THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 99 and even some famous US military personnel, including H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of US/UN forces in the Gulf War: Norman Kempster, 'Pentagon Prevails on Land Mines But Takes Heavy Fire', Los Angeles Times, 19 September 1997. For a specific rebuttal of the Korean exemption to the treaty's terms, see Michael O'Hanlon, 'US and Landmine Ban', Christian Science Monitor, 4 June 1998. Even Bill Clinton's former adviser George Stephanopoulos decried the US fail- ure to sign as 'a surrender to the military': 'The President is Wrong', Newsweek, 22 September 1997. Since his election in 1992, Clinton had been vulnerable to attacks on his alleged 'draft-dodging' in Vietnam, and his relationship with the Pentagon began with the fiasco of his policy contortions on the subject of gays in the military. The decision to give in to Pentagon advice on the landmines issue may well be rooted in this anxiety over his own credibility to make military deci- sions. Note the euphoria in the Pentagon over Clinton's 'courageous' action: Dana Priest,'Mine Decision Boosts Clinton-Military Relations', Washington Post, 21 September 1997. 26. For a brief history of the US development of these 'aerial mines', and an account of their devastating effects, see Eric Prokosch, The Technology of Killing: A Military and Political History of Antipersonnel Weapons (London: Zed Books, 1995), 107-14. 27. Allan Thompson, 'Canada's Land Mine Plea Gets US "No"', Toronto Star, 18 September 1997. 28. White House Briefing, Washington, DC, 17 September 1997. 29. Dana Priest, 'Clinton Directive on Mines: New Form, Old Function', Washington Post, 24 September 1997. 30. The New York Times described Clinton's pledge as 'symbolic', given his impending retirement from office. Steven Lee Myers, 'Clinton Agrees to Land-Mine Ban, But Not Yet', New York Times, 22 May 1998. See also Julian Beltrame, 'US Derided for its Latest Initiative', Montreal Gazette, i November 1997. 31. Clinton announced that the US would sign the treaty in 2006 only 'if the Pentagon is successful'. Anthony DePalma, 'As US Looks On, 120 Nations Sign Treaty Banning Land Mines', New York Times, 4 December 1997. 32. Mark Fritz, 'Pentagon Seeks Funds for New Type of Land Mine', Los Angeles Times, 20 February 1999. 33. Peter Baker, 'A Dispute Between Neighbors', Washington Post, 24 November 1997. 34. George Stephanopoulos emphasised Clinton's insalubrious allies in his opposition to the treaty: 'So it's Clinton, Castro, Kaddafi and Helms against the world.' 'The President is Wrong'. 35. For perspectives on the likely dilution of the treaty's effects given the US refusal to sign, see Norman Kempster and Craig Turner, 'Clinton Says US Won't Join Treaty to Ban Land Mines', Los Angeles Times, 18 September 1997; and James Carroll,'The People vs. Land Mines', Boston s IOO ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Globe, 9 December 1997. At the signing ceremony in Ottawa, Senator Patrick J. Leahy announced that 'by not signing, we weaken the treaty; we give others an excuse not to sign, and thereby we become part of the problem.' Craig Turner, '125 Countries Line Up to Sign Land- Mine Ban', Los Angeles Times, 4 December 1997. 36. For a sense of the Pentagon's priorities, we might note the announce- ment in 1999 that the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was investing not only in mines but in mine-detecting wasps, each one to be equipped with 'an electronic backpack and a helmet' and instructed to clear mine-fields. According to DARPA, the wasps 'are highly trainable and respond well to positive reinforcement and rewards'. Jeff Nesmith, 'Uncle Sam's Unlikely Allies', Atlanta Journal and Constitution, i August 1999. 37. For Annan's remark, see Turner, '125 Countries'. 38. For a brief argument in favour of a permanent court over the temporary tribunals, see Ruth Wedgwood, 'The Case for a Permanent War Crimes Court', Christian Science Monitor, 16 August 1995. 39. As with the ban on landmines, the speed with which other countries tackled the issue of the ICC may have discombobulated the US. Ameri- can support for a court was directed towards a slow process of UN committee meetings before the drafting of proposals; Canada led a fast- track negotiations process, much to the annoyance of Clinton admin- istration officials. See the editorial 'Time for a Global Criminal Court', New York Times, 21 November 1994. 40. Remarks by the president to the 52nd Session of the United Nations General Assembly, New York, 22 September 1997. 41. On the contrast between the enthusiasm of many countries and the alarm of the US at the broader conception of the ICC, see John M. Goshko,'UN Moving Toward Creation of Criminal Court', Washington Post, 21 April 1996. 42. Scheffer's original remark was recalled by John Bolton at a special meeting of the Subcommittee on International Operations, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, iO5th Congress, 2nd session, 23 July 1998. The meeting was entitled 'Is a UN International Criminal Court in the US National Interest?' and timed to coincide with the completion of the Rome negotiations which finalised the ICC treaty. On the US refusal to sign, see the testimony of Scheffer delivered before this committee; and, for the State Department view, James P. Rubin, State Department daily press briefing, 20 July 1998. Rubin feared that the Rome treaty would create a court that would hear 'complaints from well-meaning individuals in organizations that will want the court to address every wrong in the world. This will turn the court into a human rights ombudsman', a prospect which the US was keen to avert. A useful critique of US fears was offered by Thomas W. Lippman, 'America Avoids the Stand: Why the US Objects to an International Criminal Court', Washington Post, 26 July 1998. THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' IOI 43. Testimony of Michael P. Scharf, Subcommittee on International Operations, 23 July 1998. 44. A good example of such a 'supporter' of the ICC is Ruth Wedgwood, Professor of Law at Yale Law School, who argued that the American team in Rome lost 'an historic opportunity to shape the court in America's image', but that the US might still sign up in the future, providing the court behaves itself in the meantime:'The court's future will hinge ... on the enunciation of prosecutorial priorities. The ICC was set up to address the horrors of contemporary civil wars, not cut down America's preeminence in the post-Cold War world.' 'Fiddling in Rome: America and the International Criminal Court', Foreign Affairs 77, no. 6 (1998): 20-24. Wedgwood's rather direct injunctions are an odd inversion of the usual relationship between courts and individuals; and the tenuous nature of her 'support' was heightened by her accom- panying boast that 'The US military role in international security will not be altered by the evangelism of an international court, and the ICC would be foolish to try.'With friends like these... 45. Remarks of Rod Grams et al., Subcommittee on International Opera- tions, 23 July 1998. 46. Testimony of John Bolton, Subcommittee on International Operations. Bolton was specific in his warning: 'Our main concern should be for the President, the cabinet officers on the National Security Council, and other senior leaders responsible for our defense and foreign policy. They are the real potential targets of the ICC's politically unaccountable prosecutor and that is the real problem of universal jurisdiction.' 47. Statement of Jesse Helms, Subcommittee on International Operations. Of course, Helms's view of the Court's dangers is similar to that of Ruth Wedgwood, putatively at the other end of the US political spectrum; the main difference between them is that Helms has less faith that the ICC will behave itself, or (in Wedgwood-speak) 'enunciate' the correct 'prosecutorial priorities'. 48. See John Vinocur, 'World Court Acts to Overrule US in Nicaragua Case', New York Times, 27 November 1984; and Paul Lewis, 'World Court Supports Nicaragua After US Rejected Judges' Role', New York Times, 28 June 1986. 49. However fantastic this possibility might have seemed, the pulse rate of many State and Defense Department officials and alumni must have quickened at the news of General Augusto Pinochet's arrest in the UK in October 1998. For a sense of the fears, see Mary McGrory, 'Pinochet Ricochet', Washington Post, 15 August 1999. The US citizen often described as most vulnerable to a similar indictment is Henry Kissinger, one of the chief architects of the American destabilisation programme in Chile which brought Pinochet to power in 1973. One Amnesty International official told McGrory that the claim that Kissinger was in danger of prosecution (which led to an American reluctance to engage with the ICC) had been repeated so often in the US in 1999 that IO2 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? human-rights workers had taken to calling it the '"Poor Henry" argument.' 50. We should also note the hypocrisy of US statements on its putative leadership of the international community, given its dissent on issues like the ICC. Note Bill Clinton's 'apology' to Rwanda in March 1998, in which the president promised 'to remedy the consequences of genocide', in part through support of the ICC. Remarks by Bill Clinton to genocide survivors, Kigali Airport, Rwanda, 25 March 1998. 51. Scharf, 'Testimony'. 52. See John Hooper, 'US Troops Will Quit, Allies are Warned', Guardian, 15 July 1998. 53. Remarks of Senator Joseph Biden, Subcommittee on International Operations, 23 July 1998. Biden suggested that if the US made such a threat, 'we may very well get [the ICC supporters] to focus on aspects of the treaty I suspect they have not really fully focused on.' 54. Statement by Kofi Annan at the signing ceremony of the ICC, Rome, 18 July 1998. 55. Jesse Helms, 'We Must Slay This Monster', Financial Times, 31 July 1998. 56. Boutros-Boutros Ghali, An Agenda For Peace (New York: United Nations, 1992). On the proposal to create a permanent UN response force, see 25. 57. See supra note 10. 58. A number of accounts of the UN/US intervention in Somalia have been published in the US. General accounts are offered by John L. Hirsch and Robert B. Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope: Reflections on Peacemaking and Peacekeeping (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995); Terence Lyons and Ahmed I. Samatar, Somalia: State Collapse, Multilateral Intervention, and Strategies for Political Reconstruction (Washington, DC:The Brookings Institution, 1995); and Mohamed Sahnoun, Somalia: The Missed Opportunities (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1994). Oakley and Sahnoun each has his own axe to grind: Oakley was responsible for the original UNITAF mission, and was sent by the US to broker its withdrawal from Somalia in October 1993; Sahnoun, the original head of UN negotiations in Somalia before the UNITAF mission, fell out with Boutros-Ghali over his close relationship with Somali faction leaders and the putative entanglement of UN relief operations with Somali organised crime. A variety of views are collected in Walter Clarke and Jeffery Herbst, eds, Learning from Somalia: The Lessons of Armed Humani- tarian Intervention (Boulder, CO: Wescview Press, 1997). Perhaps the most compelling account of the UN/US effort, which locates the 1992/3 events in a broader context of international intervention in Somalia, is Michael Maren's The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity (New York: The Free Press, 1997), especially 203— 56. 59. For an early idea of the Clinton administration's drift towards 'assertive THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' IO3 multilateralism', see the confirmation hearing of Madeleine K.Albright as US Ambassador to the United Nations, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, iO3rd Congress, ist session, 21 January 1993. On PRD-I3, see R. Jeffrey Smith and Julia Preston, 'United States Plans Wider Role in UN Peace Keeping', Washington Post, 18 June 1993. Albright's testimony before the International Security Subcommittee of the House Foreign Relations Committee, io3rd Congress, ist Session, 24 June 1993, offers a useful clarification of'assertive mulitlateralism', and in- cludes an ominous exchange between Albright and a Congressman who wondered if the new policy was oxymoronic. In 1993 and especially 1994, the original phrase seems to have mutated in US political dis- cussion into 'aggressive mulilateralism', perhaps reflecting the increasingly violent US operation in Somalia. Since the Clinton administration had mothballed the concept by the autumn of 1993, the malapropism was allowed to stand in the media and even in Congressional debates. 60. On Boutros-Ghali's push for disarmament, see John Drysdale, 'Foreign Military Intervention in Somalia: The Root Cause of the Shift from UN Peacekeeping to Peacemaking and its Consequences', in Clarke and Herbst, eds, Learning from Somalia, 118-34 at I2 8~9; Hirsch and Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope, 102—6; and Boutros-Ghali's Unvanquished, 59-60, 99-102. 61. On the 'undulating' and 'erratic' US approach to disarmament, see Jonathan Stevenson, Losing Mogadishu: Testing US Policy in Somalia (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995). On US support for the Somali dictator, Mohammed Siad Barre, in the 19708 and 19805, see Maren, The Road to Hell, 14, 33, 36-37. 62. It should be noted that the restriction of the US mission was an initia- tive of the Pentagon as much as the Clinton administration; the US military's Central Command (CENTCOM) was involved in the plan- ning of the mission from its earliest stages, and exercised control over the direction of operations in Mogadishu throughout 1993. See Hirsch and Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope, 40-47; and Stevenson, Losing Mogadishu, 50—53.The new UN mission in May 1993 was actu- ally referred to as UNOSOM II, in deference to the UN operation which preceded the US intervention of December 1992. 63. Estimates of the numbers of Somalis saved from the immediate threat of famine vary wildly, from hundreds of thousands (in many US esti- mates) to a fraction of that number. Maren, The Road to Hell, 213-15, explores the tangled methodology of calculating such statistics (and the inevitable contamination of the process by political imperatives), and himself favours a much lower estimate of around 10,000 lives saved after December 1992.Virtually all commentators note that the handover from UNITAF to UNOSOM II was extremely problematic. For con- trasting views, see Hirsch and Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope, 106—14; and Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished, 92—4. 64. UNOSOM II comprised around 18,000 personnel at the time of the at d IO4 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? handover from UNITAF, but the 4,000 US troops were easily the best equipped and most powerful element in the mission; they also took orders independently from the US government and the military's CENTCOM, and were obviously the most familiar and immediate resource in the mind of the UNOSOM II commander, Admiral Jonathan Howe. Howe himself was appointed under duress by Boutros-Ghali, at the insistence of the US State Department. On UNOSOM II's composition, see Hirsch and Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope, in—12. On Howe's appointment at American urging, see Maren, The Road to Hell, 228; and Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished, 92. Boutros-Ghali writes that he was personally instructed to appoint Howe by Anthony Lake. 65. The details of the Pakistani operation are still unclear. Maren, The Road to Hell, 222—6, offers the most complete investigation, and is scornful of the hasty UN enquiry which levelled blame directly at Aideed. See also Hirsch and Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope, 117—19. 66. Although Boutros-Ghali stood by Howe throughout UNOSOM's operation, the admiral's earlier role in the US invasion of Panama in 1990 (Howe was involved in the efforts to capture Manuel Noriega, Panama's embattled leader and former US client) might have given some indication of how he would respond to a 'warlord' like Moham- med Aideed. See Maren, The Road to Hell, 227. 67. T. Frank Crigler, testimony before the Subcommittee on Africa, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, I03rd Congress, ist session, 29 July 1993. Crigler went on to describe the mutation of'Operation Restore Hope' (UNITAF) into 'Operation Inflict Punishment' as 'a throwback to gunboat imperialism'. 68. On the escalating violence of the US mission, see Drysdale, 'Foreign Military Intervention in Somalia', 132-3; and Hirsch and Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope, 119-127. Stevenson, Losing Mogadishu, 91- 2, narrates the arrival of US Rangers and Delta Force Commandos, after Howe's request for an elite force to capture Aideed received 'civil- ian Washington's rubber-stamp'. The military appears to have been a little more cautious, but then to have sent more troops when its initial contingent proved ineffective. The CIA also appears to have been on hand to provide 'intelligence' which confirmed the importance of ap- prehending Aideed - as well as specific tip-offs for elite US commando operations, which ended, in one notorious case, with the mistaken arrest of eight employees of the UN Development Program. 69. Relations were bad enough between the US forces and the rest of the UN operation; the limited mandate of UNOSOM, the reluctance of US commanders to make relief work a priority for their soldiers, and the near-absolute ban on fraternising between the UN forces and or- dinary Somalis led to fear and suspicion on both sides. See the testi- mony of Major F.Andy Messing, Jr., before the House Armed Services Committee, iO3rd Congress, ist session, 21 October 1993; see also THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' IO5 Stevenson, Losing Mogadishu, 56-65, who offers a detailed and scathing account of the breakdown (or non-existence) of trust between US personnel and Somalis. 70. Lieutenant General Robert Johnson admitted in testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, 21 October 1993, that US forces had referred to Mogadishu as 'Dodge City'; Mark Bowden notes the racial epithets used to describe Somalis in Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999), 8-9, and observes that the US Rangers company was 'nearly all white'. Bowden also believes that US military personnel longed to end the phony war of the summer of 1993 and engage in 'a genuine balls-out firefight'. Racism, implicit and explicit, was not limited to the soldiers in the field: Defense Department spokesperson Kathleen DeLaski clumsily described the encirclement of US forces by 'a swarm of Somalis' in a Pentagon press briefing, Washington, DC, 5 October 1993. 71. The most complete account of the battle is Bowden's Black Hawk Down, which is packed with details of the fighting but much less interested in the context of American involvement in Somalia. Estimates of Somali casualties are complicated by the absence of any government in Somalia, the hasty departure of US forces, and the indiscriminate nature of the fighting. 72. Note Clinton's harried initial response to the Mogadishu battle, antici- pating the questions of his audience: 'Why are we still [in Somalia]? How did a humanitarian mission turn violent?' Statement by Bill Clinton on Somalia, White House, Washington, DC, 7 October 1993. 73. Warren Christopher's remark was broadcast on 'Nightline', ABC News, 7 October 1993. 74. For Clinton's argument that the UN had forced the US into playing 'police officer' and waging 'a highly personalized battle' in Somalia, see the presidential press conference, The White House, Washington, DC, 14 October 1993. Madeleine Albright offered the most concise abdication of US responsibility for the UNOSOM disaster in her testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, iO3rd Congress, 2nd session, 12 May 1994. Of course, these attacks on the UN, and the general strategy of suggesting that the UN had expanded an operation which the US sought to limit, were extremely effective, ministering to a need felt by the US military to explain its awn disastrous actions and the need of the US media to explain the transition from Somalis cheering the arrival of the US Marines to Somalis cheering the desecration of American corpses. In the face of this damage-limitation operation, commentators could say nothing except the one unutterable fact that it wasn't true. For a succinct rejection of the official US line, albeit after the fact, see Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst, 'Somalia and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention', in Clarke and Herbst, eds, Learning from Somalia, 239-53 at 241: '[I]t is simply not true that the UN greatly broadened the mission that the United States had decided to limit. In IO6 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? fact, all the major Security Council resolutions on Somalia ... were written by the United States, mainly in the Pentagon, and handed to the UN as a fait accompli.' 75. For an early articulation of'Somalia syndrome', see Daniel Williams, 'Joining the Pantheon of American Missteps', Washington Post, 26 March 1994. 76. Press briefing by Anthony Lake and General Wesley Clark, The White House, 5 May 1994. A summary of the contents of PDD-25 was provided in a briefing released by the Bureau of International Organizational Affairs, Department of State, 22 February 1996. 77. See ibid, for details of the US efforts to 'reduce the US share of peace- keeping costs'. 78. US interests were the lodestar of Lake's presentation to the press on 5 May 1994: 'We'll choose between unilateral and collective approaches, between the UN or other coalitions depending on what works best and what best serves American interests.' 79. Boutros-Ghali later described PDD-25 as dealing a 'deadly blow to cooperative multilateral action to maintain peace and security'. The secretary-general was particularly incensed by the wrecking efforts of Albright: 'It was one thing for the United States to place conditions for its own participation in UN peacekeeping.... It was something else entirely for the United States to attempt to impose its conditions on other countries. Yet that is what Madeleine Albright did.' Unvanquished, 134-5. Albright's dismissal of a Boutos-Ghali 'veto' on US/UN policy is quoted in Jacob Heilbrun, 'Albright's Mission', New Republic, 22/29 August 1994. 80. For Albright's declaration of'a new realism' in the US/UN relationship, see her interview with Margaret Warner,'Macneil/Lehrer NewsHour', PBS, 19 May 1994. See also Stanley Meisler, 'Crisis in Central Africa', Los Angeles Times, 23 May 1994. 81. For general accounts of the Rwandan genocide, see Gerard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, 1959-1994: History of a Genocide (London: Hurst, *995); Philip Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998); and Alison Des Forges s massive and impressively docu- mented Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999). 82. The identity of President Habyarimana's assassins has still not been determined. For an account of the plane crash, and the theories of its provenance, see Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, 213—29; and Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 181-5. 83. On Dallaire's initial warnings of genocide, and the failure of Kofi Annan's peacekeeping office to respond, see Gourevitch, 103-7; and, for an extensive and detailed account, Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 141-79. The obvious mistakes made by UN personnel, as opposed to the reluctance of UN member states to take action, were effectively THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' IOy covered up by Kofi Annan (in his new role as secretary-general) as he refused to allow UN employees to testify before a Belgian investigation into the genocide in 1997; see Alan Zarembo,'Toward a True History', Newsweek, 17 November 1997. Annan finally allowed a UN investigation to take place in 1999, although some commentators feared that it would amount to little more than a whitewash of the peacekeeping division under Annan's direction. See Joe Lauria,'Probe Begins of UN Response to Rwanda', Boston Globe, 19 June 1999; and Peter Worthington,'Don't Expect Miracles from Rwanda Probe', Toronto Sun, 22 April 1999. Al- though Gourevitch and especially Des Forges are clear about the mas- sive UN failure in Rwanda (the genocide of April was planned and staged under the noses of the UN troops based in the capital), the question of UN culpability is inevitably entangled with the reluctance of the international community (and, especially, the US) to agree to any reinforcement of UNAMIR. See Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 172-4. 84. On the perpetrators and methods of the genocide, see Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, 237-50; Gourevitch, We wish to inform you..., 114 ff.; and Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 205-16, 222-62. 85. On Dallaire's commitment to put down the genocide with modest reinforcements of UNAMIR, see Gourevitch, We wish to inform you..., 150; Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 598, 606-9; and Boutros- Ghali, Unvanquished, 135, 139. Julia V Taft, president of the American Council for Voluntary International Action, told a joint House/Senate Subcomittee on African Affairs (iO4th Congress, ist session, 5 April 1995) that Dallaire had been 'telling Senators, the Secretary-General and anyone who would listen that if he could just get about 5,000 to 8,000 troops, he could stop the genocide.' Some observers (both at the time and in subsequent enquiries) suggested that an even smaller force, albeit with a more assertive posture, could have prevented the killings in the first few days of the genocide. 86. On the US suggestion of 7 April that UNAMIR be withdrawn entirely, see Des Forges, 603—4.The United Kingdom may have provided support for the US position. 87. For this estimate of the number of Rwandans saved by UNAMIR, see Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 24. For a slightly lower estimate, see the testimony of Jeff Drumtra of the US Committee for Refugees before the Subcommitee on African Affairs, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, iO3rd Congress, 2nd session, 26 July 1994. 88. On the specific influence of'Somalia syndrome' on US thinking over Rwanda, see Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, The International Dimension of Genocide in Rwanda (London: Macmillan, 1998), 95—9. Klinghoffer notes that 'Somalia syndrome' was merely the latest version of'Vietnam syn- drome', which had cast its shadow over US policymaking since the early 19705. On the influence of Somalia on the UN effort in Rwanda even before the genocide, see Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, IO8 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? 132; and the PBS interview with Iqbal Riza, assistant to Kofi Annan in the UN Peacekeeping Operations department (reproduced on the Web at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/fix)ntline/shows/evil/interviews/riza.htrnl). The eventual UN report into the disastrous international response to the genocide largely avoided ascribing responsibility to particular countries (preferring to place the blame on the anonymous-sounding 'member states' as a whole); however, it did make explicit reference to PDD-25 and 'the shadow of Somalia'. Ingvar Carlsson, Han Sung-Joo and Rufus M. Jupolati, 'Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda', United Nations, 15 December 1999. 89. See the remarks of spokesperson Michael McCurry, State Department daily press briefing, n April 1994. 90. Christine Shelly, State Department daily press briefing, 28 April 1994. In an effort to dispel any sympathy from the media for the victims of the genocide, Shelly claimed to have 'pretty solid information that there are savage acts being undertaken by a variety of different parties over there.' 91. On the Convention's influence on the international response to Rwanda, see Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 639, 644. 92. For an overview, see Klinghoffer, The International Dimension, 99-100. 93. Christine Shelly was the unfortunate State Department spokesperson charged with the job of finessing'genocide': see Gourevitch, We wish to inform you..., 152-3, for an account of her efforts; and the State De- partment daily press briefings of 28 April, 10 June and especially 16 June 1994 for examples of Shelly at work. The doggedness with which some reporters questioned her on the terminology (Shelly referred to 'acts of genocide' rather than 'genocide', and then became irritated when asked to clarify the difference) gives some indication of how generally accepted the facts of the genocide had become to those with even cursory knowledge of the situation, except the US government. Shelly gave an indication on 10 June of the reason for American reluc- tance, noting that US 'lawyers' had been alerted to the use of 'geno- cide' since 'there are obligations which arise in connection with the term'. This implied that the State Department was at least aware of its commitments under the Convention Against Genocide. 94. On 28 April 1994, Shelly told reporters that, under the Genocide Convention, 'there is not an absolute requirement if a determination on genocide is made to intervene directly in the particular crisis under international law.' Shelly dodged the question altogether when it was asked directly on 10 June. Jeff Drumtra, in his 26 July 1994 Senate testimony, addressed the 'massive failure' of the US to acknowledge the genocide: 'US officials compounded their egregious error by issuing dubious interpretations of the Genocide Convention that, if allowed to stand, may leave it permanently eviscerated as a component of inter- national law.' On the State Department's policy of forbidding its THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' IO9 spokespeople to recognise the genocide, see Douglas Jehl, 'Officials Told to Avoid Calling Rwanda Killings "Genocide"', New York Times, 10 June 1994. 95. Madeleine Albright, testimony before the International Security, International Organizations and Human Rights Subcommittee, House Foreign Relations Committee, i03rd Congress, 2nd session, 17 May 1994. 96. On Albright's stonewalling, see Stanley Meisler, 'Albright Defends Rwanda Troop Delay', Los Angeles Times, 18 May 1994; Meisler, 'Crisis in Central Africa'; Paul Lewis, 'US Opposes Plan for UN Force in Rwanda', New York Times, 12 May 1994; Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished, 135-6; and Gourevitch, We wish to inform you..., 150-51. Gourevitch is particularly incensed by Albright's actions: 'Her name is rarely associ- ated with Rwanda, but ducking and pressuring others to duck, as the death toll leapt from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, was the absolute low point in her career as a stateswoman.' 97. Albright's 'maelstrom' remark was made in her testimony before the International Security Subcommittee, 17 May 1994. On the US efforts to atrophy an international response to the crisis, see Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 644—6; and Klinghoffer, The International Dimen- sion, 50-55. 98. 'Macneil/Lehrer NewsHour', PBS, 19 May 1994. 99. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, remarks to reporters, UN Headquarters, New York, 26 May 1994. 100. See Gourevitch, We wish to inform you..., 151; Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 646; and the State Department daily press briefing by Christine Shelly, 16 June 1994. 101. The original (1994) UN estimate of numbers killed in the genocide was 800,000; this is adopted by Gourevitch, and supported by Prunier (261—5), who reached a similar figure from his own calculations. Des Forges, however, believes that 500,000 deaths may be a more accurate estimate. Leave None to Tell the Story, 15-16. The unreliability of popu- lation surveys before the genocide is a strong complicating factor in calculating the toll. Although the exact figure is important, the uncer- tainty should not distract us from the fact and the horror of the geno- cide. 102. The American response to the 1999 UN Carlsson inquiry into the international failure in Rwanda hardly suggests that the US has learned lessons from the experience. Briefing the media on the publication of his report, Ingvar Carlsson noted that the US had provided little help to the inquiry, either in terms of documents relating to American policy, or access to key policymakers who had made the decisions concerning US non-intervention and stonewalling at the UN. The United States also failed to initiate its own inquiry into its actions, despite the efforts of other countries involved in the Rwanda events (Belgium, Canada and France) to investigate what had happened. Barbara Crossette, 'Inquiry u n IIO ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Faults US Inaction in '94 Rwanda Genocide', New York Times, 17 December 1999. 103. Madeleine Albright, testimony before the Foreign Operations Subcom- mittee of the House Appropriations Committee, iO4th Congress, ist session, 15 March 1995. 104. For general accounts of the Balkan conflict, see Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War, third edition (New York: Penguin, 1996); and Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, revised edition (New York: Penguin, 1997). On the response of other nations to the conflict, see James Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War (London: Hurst & Co., 1997); and the essays collected in Richard H. Ullman, ed., The World and Yugo- slavia's Wars (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996). For a detailed account of the American perspective on intervention, see Wayne Bert, The Reluctant Superpower: United States' Policy in Bosnia, icjcji—Qj (London: Macmillan, 1997) 105. Vance's proposal was brokered with the European Union mediator David Owen, and proposed the creation often regions within a single Bosnia- Herzegovina, each one (with the exception of Sarajevo) ethnically homogeneous. The Vance—Owen plan allotted more territory to the Bosnian Muslims than the 1995 Dayton Agreement and, unlike Dayton, did not lay the ground for a simple partition of the country. For an account of the plan and its ultimate rejection by the US, see Silber and Little, Yugoslavia, 276-90; and Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, 224—32. Glenny, 224, describes the plan as 'an exceptionally good document which has been roundly abused by politicians and media throughout the world and particularly inside the former Yugoslavia and the United States'. Silber and Little note that the US rejection of Vance-Owen coincided with the Clinton adminstrarion's effective abandonment of the Bosnian issue, and peddling of the line that the Balkan conflict was intractable, driven by 'ancient hatreds'. 106. Clinton's advocacy of 'lift and strike' (air strikes accompanying the lift- ing of the arms embargo on the region, and the consequent arming of the Bosnian army) is discussed by Bert, The Reluctant Superpower, 175— 9. Boutros Boutros-Ghali outlines the threat of 'lift and strike' to UN forces on the ground in Bosnia in Unvanquished, 68-71. James Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will, 213, suggests that the US rejection of the Vance—Owen plan was based in part on an American 'determination to avoid deploying ground forces'; the resulting notion that air strikes alone could bring peace to Bosnia was thus an unpleasant blend of moralism and realpolitik: 'the impulse of moral indignation to act was in conflict with an overriding desire to protect an all-important domestic agenda from the damaging intrusion of foreign policy entanglements.' 107. The UN Security Council created the 'safe areas' policy on 16 April !993» but the member states were unwilling to commit more than 7,000 additional troops to police the 'havens' (as opposed to the 34,000 THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' III requested by Boutros-Ghali). Silber and Little, Yugoslavia, 274-5, detail the contradictions which produced the 'safe areas' resolution, and note that the Security Council 'saddled itself with a responsibility it was not prepared to honor'. 108. On the fall of Srebrenica, see Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime (London: Penguin, 1996); and David Rohde, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997). On the influence of this disaster on US policy, see Silber and Little, Yugoslavia, 351-2; Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will, 274-5; anc *, for an insider's view, Richard Holbrooke, To End a War, revised edition (New York: Random House, 1999), 68-72. It is worth noting that, alongside its simple embarrassment at the fall of Srebrenica, the Clinton administration realised that the failure of the 'safe areas' policy would probably lead to a withdrawal of UN troops from Bosnia, which would oblige the US to send ground troops (possibly in huge numbers) to oversee the retreat. The prospect of some kind of meaningful US military involvement was therefore not simply an option for Clin- ton after Srebrenica, but a certainty. 109. See Tom Prost et al.,'Blues for the Blue Helmets', Newsweek, 7 Febru- ary 1997, which suggested bluntly that the UN operation in Bosnia, and especially the UNPROFOR (UN Protection Force) troops on the ground, were an expensive way for the US to avoid deploying troops. 'UNPROFOR can't end the war in Bosnia. But it still serves a useful purpose - as a whipping boy for the West.' no. Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished, 247-8. in. On the Dayton talks, see Holbrooke, To End a War, 231—312; Boutros- Ghali recounts the $3.24 billion UN deficit in Unvanquished, 249. 112. Holbrooke, To End a War, 201; Silber and Little, Yugoslavia, 364-81. 113. For assessments of Dayton, see Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, 290-93; Silber and Little, Yugoslavia, 386—90; Holbrooke, To End a War, 362-6. Glenny observes that, in spite of Holbrooke's protestations, 'most com- mentators' agree that Dayton 'amountfs] to the partition of Bosnia'. Silber and Little note that Bosnia-Herzegovina's fate was 'the most tragic' of all the Balkan countries: 'From the Vance-Owen plan to the Dayton summit, despite the intervention of Washington, each successive peace plan gave the Muslims less territory than that which preceded it.' 114. Madeleine Albright had taken to calling the US the 'indispensable nation' by the end of 1996, most notably in the January 1997 Senate hearing on her nomination as secretary of state. We will return to this perspec- tive on the US in Chapter 4. 115. For an early indication of the shift in American attitudes towards Boutros- Ghali, see Richard Dowden, 'Too Blunt for His Own Good', Independ- ent (London), 31 October 1994. 116. On the US campaign to oust Boutros-Ghali, which pitted Madeleine Albright against virtually every other nation represented at the UN, see Thomas W. Lippman and John M. Goshko, 'Albright Led Challenge to 1 112 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? UN Chief, Washington Post, 7 January 1997. The extraordinary efforts to replace the secretary-general were widely and critically reported in the US; an editorial in the Boston Globe ('The Misuse of US Power', 26 January 1997) lamented the 'disgraceful campaign on the part of the Clinton administration to get rid of Boutros-Ghali. For the victim's perspective, see Unvanquished, 267—335. 117. For Holbrooke's enthusiasm towards Annan, see To End a War, 200—202. On Annans 'key appointment', see 'Cast of Characters is Set for Clin- ton's Second-Term', New York Times, 15 December 1996. 118. Holbrooke, To End a War, 202. 119. For a snapshot of the moribund relationship between the US and the UN in 1999, see Judith Miller, 'As US Relations With UN Languish, is Clinton or Congress to Blame?', New York Times, 5 August 1999. On the massive tax-cut proposals, see John Aloysius Farrell and Aaron Zitner, 'Awash in Spending Ideas, Parties Put Their Faith in the Numbers', Boston Globe, 6 August 1999. Of course, none of these 'spending ideas' involved settling the US debt to the UN. On the eventual deal to settle some of the US debt to the UN, see Jeffrey Bartholet and Debra Rosenberg, 'Victory or Sellout?', Newsweek, 29 November 1999. The Economist noted that the US 'concession' to pay off only a part of its debt, and to insist on a reduction in its future contributions and a series of other demands, marked a low point in the history of US—UN rela- tions: 'If there was ever any doubt about how little the United Nations expects from the United States, this week probably ended the argu- ment. The deal that has been hashed out by Congress and the White House ... has been hailed as a victory for the world's foremost inter- national organisation. That the world's richest country still owes the UN some $6oom, and that the deal includes the sort of constraints no national government would ever dream of accepting, have barely reg- istered as footnotes.' 'Don't Ask for More, Mr. Annan', Economist, 20 November 1999. 120. For an example of the funding squeeze within the UN Development Program, see Judith Miller, 'UN Poverty Agency Vying with Aid Offices for Cash', New York Times, II July 1999; and Miller, 'Outgoing UN Development Chief Berates US', New York Times, i May 1999. 121. On Turner's gift (which was actually used to establish the 'UN Foun- dation', an independent organisation which considers applications from the UN for funding), see David Rohde, 'Ted Turner Plans a $i Billion Gift for UN Agencies', New York Times, 19 September 1997. Kofi Annan pledged in his 1998 Report of the Secretary General on the Work of the Organization (New York: United Nations, 1998), paragraph 10, to 'es- tablish a mutually beneficial dialogue with the international business community' - 'business,' suggested Annan, might be happy to help the UN if the UN can 'lay the stable foundations that the expansion of its own opportunities requires'. For the suspicion that such corporate gifts would put 'this public institution far too much under the sway of a , THE 'INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY' 113 private institution', see Colin Woodard, 'Turner's $i Billion Gift Starts Giving', Christian Science Monitor, 7 July 1999. See also Claudia H. Deutsch,'Unlikely Allies Join with the United Nations', NewYork Times, 10 December 1999. 122. Madeleine Albright, testimony before the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Senate Committee on Appropriations, 8 March 1995. CHAPTER 3 THE US AND MILITARY POWER As we work for peace, we must also meet threats to our nations security - including increased dangers from outlaw nations and terrorism. We will defend our security wherever we are threatened. William Jefferson Clinton, 1999 State of the Union address 1 The United States has the most powerful and well-equipped military in the world, and intervenes abroad more often than any other country. Although Soviet armed forces rivalled the US during the Cold War, the collapse of the USSR left the American military with an enormous advantage over every other nation. By the early 19905, commentators in the US and elsewhere routinely referred to the US as the world's last remaining superpower, a designation which recog- nised the ability of the US to project its military power decisively around the globe. 2 In this chapter, I want to explore the changing conception of the US military in the 19905, and to outline the ways in which Ameri- can policymakers have consolidated US military power following the demise of the USSR. I also want to locate the US military in the wider context of American business interests and the international arms trade, and finally to consider the recent deployment of American forces in Iraq, Kosovo and elsewhere. In the first section, I'm going to look at the debate within the US over the size of the military which followed the end of the Cold War, and the efforts of American politicians and the Pentagon to devise new threats which might justify continued military spending. I'm also going to consider American approaches to military alliances, and particularly the consolidation and expansion of NATO. In the second section, I will examine more closely the politics of defence spending, including the relation- ship between American businesses and the Pentagon, the persistent 114 THE US AND MILITARY POWER 115 pursuit of high-tech weaponry and arms sales, and the many ways in which the Pentagon has dodged public scrutiny to pursue its own priorities. In the third section, I'm going to focus on the actual use of US military forces in Iraq in the 1990$, and in Kosovo in 1999. Although the American military has produced myriad documents predicting the kinds of wars the US will face in the post-Cold War world, neither the persistent US war with Iraq, nor the bombing campaign in Kosovo and Yugoslavia, suggests that the reality of military conflict will bear out the Pentagon's predictions. Developing this theme, I want to consider the increasingly aggressive US posture towards 'terrorism', including the attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998. With these examples in mind, I will return in conclusion to American rhetoric on the use of military force, and reckon this against recent evidence of the effects of American military power. STRATEGY The elusive 'peace dividend' Between 1945 and 1985, the rationale for a large and heavily armed US military was simple: American forces were a bulwark against the Soviet Union, which might easily sweep through Europe or elsewhere if the US and its allies dropped their guard. Given the enormous stocks of nuclear weapons held by the US and the USSR by the early 19605, this argument for enormous spending on conventional forces was hardly self-evident; but the proximity of Russian forces, and the rhetorical firestorm between the sides, ensured that most American commentators supported a large and well-equipped military over the decades of the Cold War. In the late 19805, however, this argument crumbled with the collapse of Soviet rule in Europe and the eventual disintegration of the USSR itself. The economic crisis facing the new Russian nation contributed to a more relaxed Ameri- can view of the familiar enemy, and the gradual depletion of the once-mighty Soviet military eased the old tensions between the rival superpowers. Even former hawks in the US began to speak of a 'peace dividend', and of the rewards that would follow the inevitable cuts in military spending which would surely accompany this safer Il6 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? international climate: the US could afford to spend more on educa- tion or on health, and might improve its citizens' quality of life since it had no longer to divert so many resources to their defence. 3 Against this optimistic backdrop, however, many powerful players in the US were extremely nervous at the prospect of a 'peace dividend', largely because the money or power bound up in any 'dividend' would be redistributed from them to others. The most obviously reluctant party was the military itself, which was alarmed by the rhetoric surrounding the outbreak of peace in the late 19805 and early 19905. As hopeful commentators floated the idea of massive cuts in defence spending to an eager public, Pentagon chiefs who had served their country for decades found themselves in the firing line. If the military was to retain a semblance of its former might, the Department of Defense and the most influential military leaders in the US would have to declare war on optimism, to discover new threats to replace the increasingly implausible Russian challenge. Although the odds seemed against the Pentagon, the advocates of a strong military were in the fortunate position of advising or even constituting the various committees and consultative bodies which would consider the future of American defence spending. While the military obviously had a strong interest in preserving the status quo, the Pentagon's top brass and leading planners were largely respon- sible for reviewing the nation's military requirements — this inevita- bly encouraged more pessimistic and cautious assessments of the international environment, which would in turn lead to minimal reductions in the strength of US forces and American defence expenditure. 4 The Pentagon was well placed to defend its own interests against the advocates of a 'peace dividend', but might have struggled to make its case without the support of a crucial ally: the US business community. At first glance, the idea of redirecting defence funds to domestic spending priorities (including investment in infrastructure, education, health, etc.) might seem irresistible to American com- panies. Many of the largest and most prestigious US corporations, however, were major suppliers to the Pentagon: defence contracts funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars each year to companies like Boeing, General Electric, AT&T and General Mo tors. These contracts were prized by many firms, since the Pentagon was a perfect THE US AND MILITARY POWER Iiy customer: it spent huge sums of money, often spread steadily over the course of years or even decades, and it paid its bills in full and on time. Some of the largest defence contractors, like Boeing and Lockheed, were dependent on military orders to sustain their non- military operations: without the billions of dollars in Pentagon cash, Boeing could hardly hope to keep ahead in research and develop- ment, and to ensure that its commercial products remained truly competitive in the global market. New technologies — in aerospace design, computers and electronics — were essentially subsidised by the Pentagon, before private corporations eventually reaped a profit in converting these technologies to commercial use. If the American government was now to withdraw its funding following the demise of the Cold War, these subsidies - and the vital support they gave to corporate profits — would disappear. 5 Unsurprisingly, then, defence contractors (including companies whose primary business lay outside of the sphere of military hard- ware) rallied behind the military's efforts to keep defence spending high. One of the most potent arguments against a reduced military budget concerned the redundancies which would follow major defence cuts: the biggest Pentagon suppliers made it clear to the public (and to members of Congress) that large-scale job losses would attend any major cut in spending, an argument which dovetailed with the Pentagon's dire warnings of the effects of military base closures. As optimists in the media and Congress painted a happy picture of increased national spending on education and the like, defence contractors and the military mobilised local communities to protest against the job losses which would surely follow the closure of a particular aircraft plant or army base. Those Americans employed in these facilities, along with many others who depended on revenues from the bases and factories to support their own businesses, saw little prospect of a 'peace dividend' and joined the ranks of those searching the skies for a new threat to national security. 6 The final opponent of post-Cold War optimism was the US government itself, which had failed to predict the collapse of the USSR and which found itself in a position of unprecedented global supremacy in the early 1990$. Although the demise of the Soviet Union suggested a historic opportunity for a new multilateralism, the apparent 'victory' of the US in the Cold War also established the Il8 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? reality of American predominance in world affairs. Alongside the prospect of widespread disarmament and international reconciliation, then, was a singular possibility for the US to ensure its own power and supremacy. Put differently, the disappearance of the USSR suggested a choice between two possible visions of the future: a global arrangement based on multilateralism, disarmament and a resurgent UN, or an international configuration dominated by a single super- power. Since the Soviet collapse had effectively left the US in this second position, American policymakers would have actually had to renounce US dominance and dismantle the American military had to bring about a more multilateral world order; unsurprisingly, they chose instead to preserve and even to make permanent the US advantage. 7 Although George Bush began the process of reviewing the size and make-up of the military, the most complete and radical overhaul of US forces was expected from the new, Democratic administration of Bill Clinton. By the time of Clinton's inauguration in January 1993, however, the post-Cold War environment had already shifted some- what from the optimism of 1989. The US-led war with Saddam Hussein in the first months of 1991 had given the American military its first major outing since Vietnam, and the success of US forces had strengthened the military's credibility and its case for substantially preserving the defence budget. Although we will look at the Gulf War in more detail in the third section of this chapter, it is worth noting here that the conflict was integral to the Pentagon's domestic battle with the advocates of a 'peace dividend'. Not only was Saddam Hussein enshrined as the perfect example of the post-Soviet 'threat' to world peace, but the method used to defeat him - overwhelming military power - was established as the proper way in which the US should assert its armed forces. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, espoused the view that the US should only enter military situations with clear goals and ample resources (personnel and equipment) to get the job done quickly and deci- sively. This approach to military actions, which became known as the 'Powell Doctrine', quickly became an orthodoxy in Washington and informed the ongoing debate over defence spending. 8 THE US AND MILITARY POWER lip Les Aspin, Bill Clinton's secretary of defense, finally announced the results of the US government's spending assessments in September 1993. The 'Bottom-Up Review' (BUR) was the culmination of ex- tensive consultation within the Pentagon, Congress and the various armed services, and constituted the most complete US assessment of the post-Cold War environment and the likelihood of any peace dividend. To the surprise of many observers, the cuts in spending and in the military's size were relatively modest. The Pentagon and the defence industry had resigned themselves to a reduction in military expenditure and force strength from their Cold War peak, but they had succeeded in averting the most dire predictions of a settled international climate and a commensurately reduced US military. Moreover, the Clinton administration had accepted the military's basic strategic assessments without argument. At the heart of these assessments was the Pentagon's demand that the US main- tain sufficient forces to wage two 'Major Theater Wars' (MTWs) simultaneously, and without allies. The US, according to the BUR, should always be ready to fight two conflicts on the scale of the Gulf War at once, and without the assistance of any of the nations (NATO allies and others) that had contributed to the coalition against Iraq. Although there has been no sign of another MTW since 1991 (with the possible exception of Kosovo), this policy of readiness for two conflicts simultaneously was reaffirmed in the next major defence review in 1997, and formed the basis of Bill Clinton's vision for a twenty-first century American foreign policy, the minimum require- ment for US military spending and force levels. 9 As we have seen, the modest changes of the BUR reflect the desire of the Pentagon, many US companies and many defence- industry-dependent local communities to keep the status quo intact even after the eclipse of the Soviet Union. The power of this coali- tion is evident, moreover, from the skill with which they sold the BUR and its successors to an American public that had cheered the demise of communism. The BUR, and the requirement to maintain forces sufficient to fight two major wars at once, were hardly self- evident to many Americans. In the first place, the huge US conven- tional and nuclear arsenal was an effective check to any regional power which might challenge a neighbour or US ally; the same weapons which had deterred the USSR and its massive conventional I2O ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? forces for forty years might also contain the much smaller armies of North Korea, Iraq or Iran. Second, the US plans for waging two MTWs simultaneously ignored the likelihood that traditional US allies — such as the UK - would quickly side with the US against any potential adversary. The disregard for such allies in the minds of US planners seems the more bizarre when we consider the sub- stantial sale (or donation) of high-tech US weaponry to American allies throughout the world - the Gulf states and Israel have developed extensive military power with US assistance, making the prospect of a unilateral American war effort in the Middle East seem highly unlikely; the same is true for South Korea, frequently mentioned by Pentagon planners as a vulnerable nation in need of US assistance. If the sophisticated US airplanes, missiles and computers supplied to these nations count for nothing in the US defence reviews, why does the United States make them available in the first place? 10 The final premiss on which the BUR was made to rest is more fundamental: the notion that, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, the greatest threat to global stability comes from a number of'outlaw nations' or 'rogue states', which have noted the end of superpower rivalry and stand ready to exploit international complacency and threaten the new pillars of global order. With Saddam Hussein as their chief of operations, these 'rogue states' and leaders were charac- terised by Les Aspin and Colin Powell as 'demons and dangers', distinctly echoing the old American rhetoric of the Soviet 'evil empire', but refracting the threat through the developing world. Forced to find a threat to justify a continued posture of overwhelming military predominance, US policymakers had, within two years of the fall of the Berlin Wall, created a new international menace which required vigilance and American military deterrence. 11 Rogue states, failed states When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, he inadvert- ently provided the Pentagon planners with exactly what they had been looking for since Gorbachev had taken over the USSR: a new enemy against which the US could rail and a security threat which might justify the maintenance of Cold War military spending. Before and during the US-led war with Iraq in January and February of THE US AND MILITARY POWER 121 1991, President Bush and his military staff frequently alluded to the severity of Saddam's mischief: he was a threat to world order, a proponent of totalitarianism, or even a new Hitler. Although some of this rhetoric was surely intended to persuade a wary American public to accept a distant war, the demonisation of Saddam marked a shift towards a new vision of world politics: the simple conflict between US and USSR had given way, in the speeches of US policy- makers, to a more complex world of law-abiding nations — the 'inter- national community' — and lawless, anarchic 'rogue states', hell-bent on challenging the peace and security of the former. 12 At first glance, the roster of'rogues' seemed rather anticlimactic - the Pentagon identified Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Cuba and North Korea as 'outlaw' nations, but the relatively marginal status of most of these in world affairs hardly suggested a threat to global security comparable to the Soviet challenge. The Bush and Clinton administrations, therefore, set about a multi-level strategy of im- pugning and inflating the 'rogues'. In the first place, the leaders of these countries were frequently portrayed not only as undemocratic (a charge with some validity, but one which might as easily be leveled at many US allies) but as fanatical or crazy. In the case of Iraq and Libya, the strategy was simply accomplished by questioning the sanity of Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi; in the case of Iran, the spectre of 'Islamic fundamentalism' was invoked to stress the rejectionism and impenetrability of the Iranian leaders and people. Having established the irrational and erratic mindset of the 'rogues', US officials played up their efforts to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological weapons (weapons of mass destruction, orWMDs), as well as the missiles and delivery systems necessary to use them against their law-abiding, legitimate neighbours. Just as fears of a 'missile gap' with the USSR had fuelled US military spending in the 19605, so talk of the 'nuclear outlaws' persuaded US congressional repre- sentatives in the 19905 to fund a huge American army, many new weapons programmes, and an array of 'anti-missile missiles' which might defend the world from the rogue 'threat'. 13 The apparent acceptance of the rogue threat by the American public suggests that this demonisation strategy has been successful; moreover, the evidence from Iraq and North Korea in particular suggests that these countries have, indeed, made strides towards the 122 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? acquisition of WMDs. It should be noted, however, that this hardly distinguishes the 'rogues' from other nations — such as India, Pakistan and Israel - which have developed an independent nuclear arsenal, or from countries like the US which retain huge stockpiles ofWMDs. The principal distinction between 'rogues' and full members of the international community has less to do with some essential evil or malfeasance which would separate, say, Egypt and Iran, and more to do with the economic, cultural or political reluctance of the 'rogue' states to acquiesce in the US vision of a global family of nations. By this logic, states such as Turkey, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Egypt — all of which have been accused of serious human-rights violations against their own people, and none of which enjoys a genuinely democratic government — can be allies of the US, and members of the international community; while nations such as Cuba and Libya are decried as outlaws. 14 The effect of this US taxonomy has been to lump together countries which have very little in common save for the distaste with which they are regarded by Washington; and to provide a rationale for constant and substantial American military readiness, given the alleged propensity of the 'rogues' to attack at any time. 15 Although the US effort to magnify the danger posed by the 'rogues' has suffered a few setbacks in the 19905 - the election of a more moderate government in Iran; the willingness of Gaddafi to give up Libyan suspects to be tried in connection with the Lockerbie bombing; peace feelers from North Korea — the State Department is committed to the idea of the 'outlaw' nation, and to tracing the implications of this threat for US foreign policy. 16 In an article in Foreign Affairs in November 1998, Madeleine Albright offered 'four basic categories of countries' which made up the post-Cold War world: Full members of the international system; those in transition, seeking to participate more fully; those too weak, poor, or mired in conflict to par- ticipate in a meaningful way; and those that reject the very rules and precepts upon which the system is based. As we saw in the last chapter, Presidential Decision Directive 25 marked the end of the Clinton administration's interest in 'failed states'; Albright's creation of a separate category for these countries completed THE US AND MILITARY POWER 123 the American abdication, at least in terms of peacekeeping commit- ments. Her characterisation of the 'rogues', meanwhile, captured the dogmatism and posturing of the US position: the rejectionist states are firm in their opposition to the international community, violating 'global norms' and presenting a threat which must be repelled. 17 We have already seen the effects of this US perspective on military planning and defence spending; its consequences for the 'rogues' are less certain. The relentless American effort to isolate, demonise and contain 'rogue states' has certainly subjected the civilian populations in these countries to substantial hardship. In many cases, it has hardened autocratic regimes, creating a common enemy (the US) and distracting ordinary people from the iniquities of their own leadership. It has also contributed to a widespread suspicion in these countries of American power and intentions, and to the view that the only means of challenging American coercion are military force or, more plausibly, terrorism. In this way, the US 'rogue doctrine' is ultimately self-fulfilling — the threat alleged in the first instance will surely be produced given prolonged exposure to economic hardship, sanctions, or American bombing. Although the consequences of this •will be dire, for the civilians of the 'rogue states' and for the victims of terrorism in Western states, the danger of the 'rogues' will finally be real, and the US defence budget will once more be justified. Military alliances and NATO expansion The various reviews of US defence spending have been premissed on the idea that the US will fight its overseas battles without any foreign assistance. As we have seen, this argument has been used to sustain a military budget at near-Cold War levels; but, in reality, the US has made use of allies and coalitions in the planning and execution of recent military operations. In the Gulf War, the US assembled a coalition of fifteen nations in its conflict with Saddam Hussein. 18 Although the superior technology of the US, and the American insistence on a US command structure, restricted the military con- tribution of these allies, their participation in Operation Desert Storm bestowed the priceless appearance of multilateralism on what was essentially an American fight. The US need to claim a multilateral motive in its foreign wars suggests that this kind of ad hoc alliance 124 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? will appeal to American policymakers in the future, even if the military contribution of any 'allies' is a token one. 19 The largest and most enduring Western coalition during the Cold War was the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), a collec- tive security agreement signed in 1949 by ten European nations as well as Canada and the US. During four decades of impasse with the USSR, NATO served as an effective division between eastern and western Europe, paralleling the line of the Iron Curtain. Although NATO forces did not exchange a single shot with the Warsaw Pact armies, the sheer fact of the huge Western military build-up effectively kept the status quo. In 1989, as the Warsaw Pact collapsed, it seemed as if NATO's reason for being had also disintegrated. Given the rapid decay in Russian force strength and the withdrawal of the Soviet army, it seemed there was no longer an enemy for NATO to confront. However, the US argued strongly for the perpetuation of the Alli- ance, and even suggested the expansion of NATO into eastern Europe. In 1994, the US Congress passed a bill authorising President Clinton to invite Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to join NATO; in 1999, these countries were formally admitted to the Alliance. 20 Given the continuing decline of Russia's military in the 19905, we might justifiably wonder why the US has placed a premium on NATO's survival, let alone its expansion. There are several explana- tions for this. Most obviously, the US is keen to preserve NATO since the Alliance constitutes a strong political bond between the US and Europe. With the rapid consolidation of the EU in the 19905, the possibility of a strengthened and more independent European foreign policy has increased; NATO, which is heavily slanted towards US command, can serve as an American counterweight to this process. Beyond the existing EU boundaries, the US has used the prospect of NATO membership to entice the former Warsaw Pact countries into an American sphere of influence. The language of the 1994 NATO Expansion Bill in the US Congress required eastern European NATO aspirants to 'maintain their progress towards estab- lishing free-market economies', a powerful bulwark against a resur- gence of communism or socialism in the nascent democracies of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. 21 The fear of alternative economic development, or of those Madeleine Albright has described as 'communist backsliders', is a THE US AND MILITARY POWER 125 powerful force behind NATO expansion. 22 Although some policy- makers in the Clinton administration have talked of the promise of a democratic, free-market Russia as a future ally of the US, others have been more sceptical, and have looked to the past in defining Russia as a future threat to European security. Such distinguished State Department alumni as Henry Kissinger have echoed this view, playing up Russia's 'four hundred years' as an 'imperialist country' and suggesting that, as in the Cold War days, the correct US policy is to stare down and contain the Russian menace. 23 The practical consequence of this mindset has been to reassert the old Cold War divide in Europe, but merely to move the boundary a few hundred miles to the east. Instead of engaging Russia in NATO, or aban- doning the old alliance and devising a new one for the changed circumstances of the present, the US has effectively declared the continuation of the old standoff, unnerving ordinary Russians and providing inflammatory rhetoric for Russia's resurgent nationalists. 24 The most sketchy but discomfiting development in NATO's recent renaissance has been the tentative American suggestion that the Alliance shift towards endorsing an offensive rather than a defensive posture, and respond to 'threats' outside Europe. Although NATO was conceived as a defensive league, a collective security agreement which would deter Russian invasion, the reconfiguration of NATO's mission in the 19905 has licensed NATO forces to strike first against potential 'threats' or sources of instability. The limited NATO air- strikes in Bosnia in 1994/5 offered a glimpse of this new policy; the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 was its first significant application. 25 Given that the NATO charter allows for first use of nuclear weapons by NATO in any conflict, the shift to an offensive stance is alarming; the more so if we consider Madeleine Albright s December 1998 suggestion that 'tomorrow's NATO' must be prepared to act 'beyond NATO's immediate borders'. Albright's vision pushed the European collective security pact towards an offensive force targeting the new US enemies outside North America and Europe; a NATO with a global reach, reserving the right to make first use of weapons of mass destruction against the leaders and people of the world's 'rogue states'. 26 The initial European reaction to a global NATO was lukewarm at best, but the prospect of a much-expanded sphere of NATO 126 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? operations is a real one. 27 Western Europe vacillates between asser- tions of its independence and acquiescence in US-led foreign-policy initiatives and conflicts - the spectre of Bosnia, and the EU's failure to resolve that crisis, still lingers over the various foreign ministries and makes deference to the US seem easy and attractive. Eastern Europe, meanwhile, has a still greater interest in toeing the American line, hungrily eyeing the possibility of economic and military assist- ance. Given the strictness of qualifying criteria for the European Union, membership of NATO can seem to such countries a conso- lation prize, a badge of identification with the West to substitute for the full political and economic integration of the EU. This has cast a shadow over the efforts of EU countries to create common defence institutions and a single policy on the use of force. As long as NATO is more solicitous of the eastern European nations, it seems unlikely that Europe as a whole will achieve much distance from American perspectives and priorities in foreign policy. 28 Looking to the future, the redivision of the European continent along NATO's expanded borders, and the American desire to globalise its offensive capabilities, do not inspire confidence in the security of Europe or the rest of the world. The opponents of NATO expansion in the US pointed out the dangers of isolating Russia at a time when the more placid security environment should license dialogue and inclusion — to no avail, as NATO's advocates (and the Cold War Russophobes) trumpeted the expanded Alliance. 29 Meanwhile, the prospect of NATO mobilising against Iraq or Korea has been floated by the US, eager to bolster its 'rogue doctrine' with the appearance of multilateralism. 30 Once again, the US has chosen to define its purpose and interest in foreign policy away from the UN, preferring a heavily skewed military coalition for the resolution of international problems. The Russian 'threat', then, is not only military but diplomatic - as Henry Kissinger observed in testimony to a 1997 Congressional committee on NATO expansion: You asked me, one of you asked me, what is the Russian strategy? The Russian strategy cannot be to build NATO. It is against their whole tradition. So they have every interest to water down NATO into some vague multilateral UN-type talk shop. THE US AND MILITARY POWER 127 Kissinger's candour is instructive: NATO expansion is not only a way of containing Russia militarily, but of containing many countries diplomatically which might otherwise object to US foreign-policy imperatives. An expanded NATO gives the appearance of multi- lateralism to US goals, but without the nagging dissent of a 'UN- type talk shop'. 31 The US has thus emerged from the Cold War with a largely intact military force, a dubious taxonomy of nations (including the fearsome 'rogue states'), and an aggressive assertion of its own right to act unilaterally. This has already led to tensions with North Korea, Iraq, Sudan and Cuba, and has contributed to a global environment in which the UN is largely marginalised as a truly multilateral influence. Even with the existing roster of'rogues', the new American defence strategy is extremely provocative and risky; if China or Russia slips from 'transitional' to 'rogue' status in the years ahead, the prospects for sober and reasoned resolution of disputes with the US will be bleak indeed. TECHNOLOGY In addition to the strategic rationale for a strong military, we have already seen a powerful economic argument in favour of extensive defence spending. In virtually every nation, the connections between military priorities and the commercial imperatives of defence corpo- rations are venerable and insistent; with the end of the Cold War, and the consolidation of various international industries, however, American military suppliers have attained an unprecedented control over the market. In this section, we will look in more detail at the impact of commercial factors on defence spending, and consider some of the more high-profile Pentagon technologies of the past few years in this context. We can then see more clearly the ways in which these economic factors exert their influence over debates on national security and regional stability, even those debates which seem at first glance to be free from commercial considerations. 128 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Military corporations and a corporate military In 1999, Bill Clinton pointed to declining levels of defence spending in the previous fifteen years, and argued for a major increase in the military budget to pay for weapons upgrading and modernisation. As we have seen, the argument for new weapons was seriously under- mined by the absence of a Soviet threat; and even the 'declining' American defence budget of 1985-99 exceeded the military spend- ing of every other nation by a substantial margin. Clinton, however, spoke boldly in favour of the Pentagon's request for more than $60 billion per year to 'modernise' its existing weapons, and the US Congress enthusiastically supported his initiative. Even the modest budget reduction following 1993 s BUR - which ensured that the US spent a mere three times as much on its military as any other country — failed to satisfy Democrats and Republicans, and the US prepared to enter the twenty-first century on another defence- spending spree. 32 Defence spending makes many large US corporations happy. Al- though this fact might seem self-evident, it's surprising to note just how many big American companies are boosted by major Pentagon contracts. In the 1998 fiscal year, some $70 billion of business was split between the top 100 Pentagon suppliers. Although obvious companies like Lockheed Martin ($12.3 billion) and Boeing ($10.9 billion) headed this list, hundreds of millions of dollars also went to less likely suppliers, including General Electric ($1.2 billion), CBS ($567 million), MCI Worldcom ($235 million), and Procter & Gamble ($217 million). It is worth remembering the broad base of corporate suppliers when reviewing debates in the US over the size of the military, as well as the need for new weaponry. If the armed forces were substantially reduced in size and funding, these companies (and many more like them) would lose a lucrative and reliable source of income. 33 Many of the largest Pentagon suppliers have succeeded in con- verting domestic contracts into international orders - weapons systems designed in the US, -with Pentagon money underwriting research and development, are marketed aggressively by American companies to foreign governments. Given the huge Pentagon budget, and the encouragement given by the American government to this arms trade, THE US AND MILITARY POWER I2p it should not surprise us that the US is the world's largest supplier of arms to other countries, as well as the biggest spender on its own military. Companies like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman attend and stage weapons trade fairs around the world, often with the encouragement of the State or Defense Departments. In some cases, the government's desire to help the arms industry and to prop up foreign regimes results in a kind of double bail-out: a foreign country is given billions of dollars in 'military aid', which in fact goes to US companies that manufacture planes, tanks or bombs for the foreign beneficiary. At the same time as the American taxpayer has subsidised countries like Israel, Egypt and Colombia to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, the weapons industry in the US has received a giant helping hand. 34 A cursory consideration of foreign arms dealing suggests two problems. In the first place, an international trade in arms encourages international instability, and allows destructive weapons to reach the hands of undemocratic or oppressive regimes. Although this might seem a major concern in the abstract, the US government has done relatively little to prevent this kind of arms proliferation in recent decades. During the Cold War, the doctrine of anti-communism was used to justify substantial military aid to extremely oppressive regimes around the world. Since 1989, the US has continued to train and supply the armed forces of countries like Indonesia, Turkey and Colombia, each of which has used its military to oppress its own people. Moreover, the earlier, lax policy on proliferation has left a lasting legacy, countries like Iran and Iraq became 'rogue states' only after the US had helped to arm them; and the huge international market in small arms, many of them US-made, has contributed to many casualties, combatant and civilian, especially in the developing world. Statutes which would restrict US arms sales to countries with poor human-rights records do exist in American law, but successive presidential administrations (and Congresses) have lacked the will to enforce them. 35 The other obvious problem in exporting weapons is that a country might thereby give its technology and secrets to a potential adversary. Some commentators in the US have raised this concern in view of recent US weapons sales to countries like Saudi Arabia, which might undergo a violent regime change and ultimately threaten US forces I3O ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? •with their own, technologically advanced weaponry; the solution, some have argued, is to restrict sales of such technology, or to abandon the export of high-tech weapons altogether. Of course, such a cautious approach is incompatible with the plainly commer- cial imperatives which drive the arms trade: companies and countries in Europe and the US compete with each other for foreign business, and cannot afford the luxury of these scruples if their product (a gun, a tank, a plane, or a mine) is to win 'market share'. 36 Such caution also ignores the wider context in which technology transfer coincides neatly with the interests of the American arms industry. If the US develops a technologically superior weapon, it will not need another one until other countries catch up. Since the US military budget is so much larger than that of other countries, this should mean that each American weapon enjoys a technical edge for many years, and that US taxpayers are not called upon to fund research into its successor as soon as the weapon enters service. A boon to the taxpayer is anathema to the military corporations, however, who would thereby lose substantial Pentagon research and development funds. Against this backdrop, arms sales to foreign regimes achieve two purposes. First, they maximise the profits of companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which are given access to an expanded international market for their product. Second, and more importantly, they enable those arms companies (and the Penta- gon) to argue that new US technology is required, since the 'old' weapons have proliferated around the world. This maintains the flow of development money to the big military contractors, who produce new weapons, export them to foreign regimes, and then begin designing an expensive replacement. 37 Given the absurdity of this cycle, we should remember that it continues precisely because it brings real benefits to some powerful people, even as it threatens the financial welfare (or even the lives) of others. Defence-based companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman profit on a grand scale, as do companies like Boeing and General Electric which mix military contracts with civilian production. Congressional representatives in Washington benefit through campaign donations made by such companies, and are able to claim that they have created or defended jobs at any military plants in their district. The president and the State Depart- THE US AND MILITARY POWER 13! ment can reinforce or consolidate a foreign ally, or even attempt to buy a new one through the donation of this high-tech hardware; the president can also help the defence industry by increasing foreign arms sales and guaranteeing a domestic market for even newer, more sophisticated weapons. The military, meanwhile, is given a genuine, home-produced threat against which to define its own purpose; and the chance to replace all of its toys before it grows tired of them. 38 Although we should not discount the significance of the defence industry to tens of thousands of ordinary US workers, the majority of these beneficiaries - stockholders, the military, politicians — enjoy positions of power and privilege. The losers in this game of inter- national arms dealing are less powerful and scattered throughout the world. American taxpayers largely bankroll the process, but are distracted from recognising the iniquities of arms dealing by govern- ment references to national security, regional stability, or the impor- tance of the defence industry to safeguarding American jobs. In foreign countries, meanwhile, civilian populations endure the effects of militarisation and 'internal security' without attracting much American attention, save from arms dealers on the lookout for new orders. US-made small arms have driven numerous conflicts in Asia and Africa, while major US arms sales to Turkey and Indonesia have directly abetted the efforts of those governments to oppress and kill Kurds, East Timorese and other civilian populations. It seems hardly coincidental that those who gain most from this international arms business have sought to preserve it, even though they are in a tiny minority when compared to the many millions of people who in- advertently sponsor the trade, or those who suffer directly from its effects. 39 Binding together the beneficiaries are the consistent threads of money and influence, with corporate and government officials moving easily from the public to the private sector, retired military personnel plugging the merits of new technology to foreign custom- ers and domestic politicians, and a close connection between public institutions and private interests. The NATO summit of April 1999, held in Washington, DC to mark the 5oth anniversary of the Alliance, was funded entirely by corporate donations. In return for their largesse, CEOs and salesmen from these companies were given privileged access to the politicians and military representatives of the 132 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? nineteen NATO member states. Alan John Blinken, an American investment banker who helped to coordinate this corporatisation of NATO, declared proudly to the Washington Post that 'the business community was in it from Day One. In a lot of cases, they came to us - we didn't solicit them.' 40 Given the opportunity to sell high-tech weaponry and communi- cations equipment to NATO members, especially the new entrants from eastern Europe, it is hardly surprising that US corporations should rush for the bunting. The Post report went on to describe the activities of former congressman Gerald Solomon, who had left politics to work in the more lucrative business of defence lobbying: Solomon, now a private lobbyist, said he traveled through Eastern and Central Europe spreading the message that if the United States was going to be NATO's principal military power, supplying most of its high-tech weaponry, then US defense firms should receive contracts to rearm the former Soviet states. 'We wanted them to buy American,' Solomon said. The boundaries between politics, the military and business have effectively dissolved, leaving increased military accounts for some of the most prominent US corporations, and plentiful employment for former military personnel and politicians in defence projects and lobbying efforts. 41 Even though the rhetoric of national defence makes no reference to profit margins and corporate performance, US defence policy - including the massive trade in American arms — is heavily influenced not by strategic considerations or a drive towards efficiency, but by the simple pursuit of material gain. 42 Case studies: the F-22 and 'Star Wars' To illustrate some of these points, I want to look briefly at two high-profile US defence projects of recent years: the Air Force's F-22 fighter programme, designed to replace the F-I5, and the 'Star Wars' missile defence system, originally proposed by Ronald Reagan in the 19805 to shield the US from ballistic missile attacks. Each of these projects has suffered major setbacks, technical and political, during its development; the survival of each is testament to the sacred status of expensive defence projects in Washington, and proof THE US AND MILITARY POWER 133 that the funding of high-tech weaponry in the US will not be af- fected by such minor concerns as the usefulness of the weapon, or the chances of making it work in practice. In the early 19805, as the US squared off against the Soviet Union, the Pentagon argued that the American military would need four new types of 'next generation' fighter aircraft to maintain America's technical edge. If the need for so many new planes was at all plau- sible in the 19805, it seemed highly dubious a decade later. The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the only serious threat to American air superiority, and with it the rationale for these new planes; one might suspect, then, that most or all of the new designs would be cancelled. By 1999, however, three of these four projects had survived, and tens of billions of dollars had been spent on their development. 43 Inevitably, a Congressional committee took notice of this fact, and expressed particular doubts in a July 1999 report about the viability of the Air Force F-22 programme. Congressional efforts to question the F-22S progress met with fierce resistance not only from its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, but from defense secretary William Cohen and from Bill Clinton. The relatively modest actions of Congress — amounting to a suggestion that one part of the plane's funding be suspended, pending technical results — sent the Pentagon and corporate boardrooms into apoplexy, and a massive counter- campaign was waged against Congressional sceptics. Lobbyists from the Department of Defense and from Lockheed Martin bombarded politicians with promotional videotapes, lined up to write op-ed pieces in major newspapers, and told anyone who would listen that the safety of the nation depended on the completion of the F-22 order. 44 As we have seen, companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin love projects like the F-22 for many reasons: they are very large; they create many jobs over a prolonged period; once awarded, they are ordinarily guaranteed to last until production, which could be years or decades after the original research funds reach a company; and they enable corporations to make technological advances at public expense, which can then be utilised commercially. In the case of the F-22, Lockheed Martin is looking to deliver an order of 339 airplanes to the US Air Force, with each plane costing around $200 million - a total in excess of $65 billion. If the programme had been cancelled 134 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? in 1999, Lockheed Martin would have kept the $18 billion already spent on research and development, but would have lost the additional cash from domestic sales of the finished fighter; not to mention the inevitable foreign sales, which would, in turn, create the need for another 'next generation' fighter. If US taxpayers looked to the Penta- gon to contain the greed of defence contractors, the picture was equally grim: fixated by the prospect of yet more high-tech equip- ment, the Pentagon planners (in the words of former Senator Dale Bumpers) 'want this worse than they want to go to heaven'. 45 The House Appropriations Committee, in its 1999 report on defence spending, noted that the F-22 had serious technical problems on a variety of fronts: its fuel tank was leaking, its fuselage had shown signs of structural weakness, and its advanced avionics had not even been tested. The Pentagon, however, had decided in December 1998 to put the unfinished plane into production, effec- tively committing Congress to provide funds for the aircraft in- definitely. Although less than 5 per cent of basic testing on the F-22 had been completed, the Air Force had transferred the incomplete, 'technically challenging' F-22 programme from the development stage to a production track, making it much harder for Congressional representatives to cancel or amend the final order. Although the US media reported that the House Appropriations Committee had voted to kill the F-22 programme, in reality the Committee seems to have been most offended by the underhand way in which the inchoate airplane was being transferred to 'production' status. The Committee therefore denied these production funds, but agreed to another $1.2 billion for the fiscal year 2000 to support the plane's development. Few commentators predicted that the F-22 would actually be scrapped, and a compromise between the Pentagon and Congress reached in September 1999 suggested that the sceptics had been quickly and thoroughly routed. 46 Even these limited battles between Congress and the Pentagon are rare: the deluge of defence lobbyists on Capitol Hill, and the lure of campaign dollars for politicians prepared to serve the defence industry, largely ensure that Congressional scrutiny of major military 'needs' is kept at bay. The recent furore over the F-22, therefore, may jolt the military and defence contractors from their complacency, and force them to try harder in addressing what the Committee's THE US AND MILITARY POWER 135 report tactfully described as 'issues of credibility' in their requests for funding. 47 On the question of the threat against which the F-22 was to be deployed, the report was particularly scathing: The Air Force does not have a particularly good record in making straight- forward threat assessments In the early 19905, after the Soviet Union collapsed (and the Air Force's argument for procuring the F-22 with it), the Air Force changed its threat analysis to say that some 35 countries had procured aircraft with capabilities that threatened US air domination. Only later were we surprised to learn that the Air Force included countries like Switzerland, Norway, Israel, Australia, even New Guinea as possible threat countries, all of whom possessed US-built F-i6 aircraft that we had sold to them. 48 If past form is anything to go by, the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin will ignore the suggestions that the F-22 is too costly, technically difficult or irrelevant, and will save the project using familiar methods: exaggeration of the threat from other countries, a scare campaign in the media asking Americans if they are 'ready to lose the next air war', and judicious use of financial inducements to keep Congress in line. 49 While the F-22 has been a cause celebre for the Air Force of late, the various plans for missile defence in the US have for nearly two decades inspired all branches of the military, and politicians from both major American parties. When Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (popularly known as 'Star Wars') in 1983, many scientists and commentators expressed great scepticism over the feasibility of the project. The essential goal of missile defence - to hit one missile with a laser or another missile, at incredible speeds — is extraordinarily difficult to accomplish. The political payoff from a functioning system, however, would be substantial. Ronald Reagan spoke excitedly of a nuclear umbrella, a shield of laser beams which would destroy a Soviet missile attack and keep every US city safe, even in the event of an all-out nuclear war. This noble dream managed neatly to distract from the tricky job of averting such a conflict in the first place, and from the general wisdom that the Strategic Defense Initiative was technically impossible. 50 Throughout the Reagan and Bush administrations, missile defence was seen as a Republican party project, a hawkish challenge to Russia .... 136 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? and a sop to the defence industry. Upon assuming the presidency in 1993, Bill Clinton cut funding to the various versions of missile defence, although different projects continued to receive billions of dollars for research and development. Finally, in 1999, the Clinton administration caved in to Republican pressure and promised to build a system of National Missile Defense (NMD) as quickly as possible. The Democratic Party, which had previously decried Star Wars as a choice moment of Reaganite excess, had now embraced the idea as its own. 51 Missile-defence projects come in many shapes and sizes, from small systems designed for 'theater use' (i.e. to protect US troops fighting in a particular regional conflict) to the NMD, intended to protect the cities and people of the mainland United States. There are also several technological tracks and approaches, appealing to the big defence corporations which are being paid billions of dollars to conduct the research. Boeing has been busy adapting its 747 jumbo jet to fire lasers at distant missiles (turbulence has, apparently, caused problems with the targeting); 52 Raytheon and its charmingly named 'Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle' have been trying to harness what Raytheon calls 'hit-to-kill technology' (or, in common language, ramming) to knock out enemy missiles as they pass through space; 53 and Lockheed Martin has taken overall charge of the NMD programme, even as its own Theater High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) missile chalked up its seventh consecutive failure in May 1999. 54 This diverse family of anti-missile systems does, however, have some common features: all of the programmes are hugely ex- pensive, and none of them seems to work very well. In many respects, the course of missile-defence spending has dem- onstrated that the Pentagon's most impressive defensive operations surround its own budget. The cost of the anti-missile systems has been matched only by their ineffectiveness, and the Pentagon has acquired a reputation for subterfuge and obfuscation which it would do well to incorporate in its weapons. The two successful tests of missile-defence technology in the 19805 were later shown to have been rigged by the Defense Department and its contractors. Most notoriously, one 'success' featured the interception of a target missile by the heat-seeking anti-missile system under test; but relied on Pentagon scientists heating the surface of the target missile to ioo°c THE US AND MILITARY POWER 137 before its launch and interception, thereby making it much easier to hit. Thus the Pentagon proved its ability to contain the threats of 'rogue states', providing the latter were kind enough to heat their missiles before firing them at the US. 55 Even the vaunted successes in missile-defence technology in 1999 (after a string of costly failures) proved little, and serious technical questions await a satisfactory answer even as more money is thrown at these programmes. Huge sums are poured into missile defence each year, and the Pentagon is trying (as with the F-22) to rush these systems into production, thereby to safeguard them from Congressional cancellation. Even if the various programmes were cancelled immediately, their cost to date has been immense: estimates of missile-defence spending since the 19705 range from $60 billion to an extraordinary $110 billion, and the US is still unable to name a date when even a limited system might be deployed over American skies. 56 Given the obvious technical problems, the tricks and 'creative accounting' of the Pentagon, and the immense cost of missile defence, we are again entitled to wonder why this research and spending enjoys approval across the American political spectrum. Of course, a major answer lies in the desire of defence contractors to maximise their profits, and the Pentagon's willingness to bankroll huge and prolonged projects in return for even the vaguest and most distant hope of success. 57 We should also note, however, that the various plans for missile defence are the most prominent examples of a rather common strain in US thinking, which holds that the putative enemies of the United States can be deterred or overwhelmed by technology. In effect, projects like the NMD are attempts to deal militarily with a threat that would otherwise require a diplomatic response. 58 Given their demonisation of a series of'enemies' as 'rogue states', it should not surprise us that Bill Clinton and his administration favoured the idea of an NMD. Missile defence suggests that, in the near future, the US will be able to act with complete impunity on the world stage, since it will be impervious to any kind of attack. In the mean- time, the US can simply work to 'contain' the 'rogue threat', confident that its military personnel (and patriotic defence corpora- tions) are bravely toiling to condemn this threat to obsolescence. The irony of all this defence spending is that it has, then, a parochial and disengaged aspect as well as a hawkish one: the US has embraced a 138 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? sort of technological isolationism, which insists on preserving an overwhelmingly powerful and sophisticated US military to obviate the need for real political engagement with the world s most pressing problems. If the missile-defence strategy promised success, it would hardly seem laudable given the substantial American influence on the global economy and geopolitics: for the US to manage this global situation behind an impregnable shield would not ensure the fairness or responsiveness of the system. The US perspective is more worrying, however, since the shield is hardly impregnable. With the proliferation of nuclear materials from the former Soviet Union, and the diffusion of technical knowledge in weapons-building, the US remains open both to missile attack and, more plausibly, to a terrorist operation conducted from the ground. There is nothing inevitable about this threat to the US — it arises largely from a series of local grievances based on American actions throughout the world, many of which have violated international law and traumatised civilian populations. The American goal should be to minimise these grievances, to engage the disadvantaged in dialogue, and to restore to people throughout the world some influence over the processes which govern their life. In reality, the US appears ready to ignore these grievances and to persuade its citizens that dubious technology will keep them safe. This comforting notion may well explain the persistence of massive defence spending even after the Cold War; but it hardly prepares the US for the challenges and dangers of the next century. CONFLICT Although the US military is large, well-funded and frequently deployed, American politicians are constrained by a public reluctance to see US forces in prolonged foreign combat. The spectre of the Vietnam War lingers in many American minds, and remains as an example of the destructive costs of American engagement abroad. However, the debate over the US role in Vietnam has largely con- fined itself to a discussion of strategy or of overreach: according to this skewed debate, American politicians and soldiers erred in their assessment of the task at hand, or tried too hard to save an ungrateful THE US AND MILITARY POWER 139 Vietnam from the communist 'threat'. These perspectives have en- sured that the 'lessons' of Vietnam are more schematic and technical than political or moral. As we saw in the last chapter, US politicians have sought to avoid 'mission creep', the commitment of troops in a dynamic political situation which can lead to escalation of American involvement; the 'Powell Doctrine' (stemming from Colin Powell's own experience in Vietnam) holds that US military forces should only enter conflict with overwhelming superiority in numbers and firepower; and the 19905 have seen the emergence of'smart' weapons, theoretically able to hit targets precisely and to minimise damage to nearby civilians. These developments, each linked to assessments of the American failure in Vietnam, have shaped American ideas about the kind of wars the US should fight, and the ways in which those wars should be fought. 59 In this section, I am going to look at how these post-Vietnam imperatives have shaped American military action, using the exam- ples of the US attacks on Iraq since 1991 and the 1999 assault on Yugoslavia. In both examples, we can see clearly the American desire to use overwhelming force, to employ high-tech weapons, and to reduce US casualties to virtually zero. We can also identify, however, some drawbacks of these new priorities: the sophisticated weapons have not always proven so 'smart'; the need to avoid American casualties has led to confusion over the extent of American commit- ment to a mission; and the eventual use of overwhelming force has resulted in spectacular mismatches, and extensive (non-US) loss of life. These new approaches to warfare also ignore the political problems which, in the long run, dwarf the difficulties of any military operation: why should the US go to war? Is war the best way to achieve your objectives? Will a political problem always submit itself to a military solution? I want in conclusion to consider some of these questions alongside the problem of terrorism, and to ask whether the might of the US military offers substantial protection against aggrieved nations, groups or even individuals. Iraq When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, he set in motion an American military campaign against Iraq that has endured for a decade. Saddam's own survival, then, seems rather surprising. 140 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? The US military has ample resources to level his many residences, and has reminded the Iraqi people on several occasions since 1990 that Iraq's armed forces cannot defend their territory from American encroachment. US politicians have routinely condemned Saddam as a tyrant, called for his removal from power, and pledged to 'contain' Iraq for the duration of his rule. Repeatedly in the 19905 — in 1991, T 993> J 996 and 1998/9 - extensive military power was brought to bear on Saddam, with substantial loss of Iraqi life; and yet he remained in office, showing little sign that his rule had been weak- ened by the many military attacks. His various weapons programmes continued, without US or UN supervision after 1998, and the Iraqi people continued to suffer under his rule. Iraq is an excellent example of the costs of applying a military solution to a political problem; and, more generally, indicative of the many ways in which the US can use its extraordinary military power to disguise or distract from its tangled political agenda. In 1990, the problem was relatively simple: Saddam was a former ally of the US in its own fight against Iran, but had stepped out of line by invading Kuwait. 60 Such an action constituted a major disruption to the re- gion, and particularly to the oil lanes in which the US held a sub- stantial interest — the US would therefore make a show of strength to confirm its seriousness to Saddam. 61 When troops began to mass in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Gulf the problem became .rather more complicated. Saddam had started to link the withdrawal of his own forces to an Israeli agreement to end its 25-year invasion of the Palestinian territories, an analogy which may have made some sense in international law but which was anathema to the US. 62 Mean- while, American military planners were eager to take action. In prac- tical terms, the huge number of US forces could not be billeted in the desert indefinitely, and their commanders sought word from the Bush administration on whether the soldiers would be sent into combat or withdrawn. More abstractly, the Pentagon sensed a water- shed moment as Saddam defied international calls for an Iraqi with- drawal from Kuwait. After a nervous year of watching the Soviets slump into obsolescence, US planners saw in Saddam a fresh reason for being; and this military enthusiasm in turn persuaded President Bush that a conflict with Saddam was operationally viable and a genuine option. 63 THE US AND MILITARY POWER 14! The US policy towards Iraq began to come unstuck as Bush and other American politicians laid the rhetorical groundwork for the imminent war. In truth, Saddam was a brutish, oppressive leader who largely satisfied the US (in spite of his undemocratic rule) by keeping the Iraqi state together. The State Department had long observed that the Iraqi population consisted not only of Sunni Muslims (the mi- nority from which Saddam himself had emerged) but also Shia Muslims and Kurds. The Shias alarmed State Department and CIA analysts, who predicted a possible, fundamentalist alliance between Shia-dominated Iran and a Shia-controlled Iraq; the Kurds scared American planners, who had been working hard to court Turkey, which had its own Kurdish 'problem' in the south-east of its territory, and would not respond well to Iraqi Kurds trying to form their own independent state. Although these American fears were certainly ex- aggerated, the possibility remained that in a democratic Iraq these three ethnic or religious groupings might have gone their separate ways; but Saddam, for all his intransigence and bloody oppression, kept the country together. If he could just be persuaded to keep out of Kuwait, and to carry on the good work of facing down Iran, he could still be valuable to the US, as he had been in the past. 64 Of course, George Bush did not present the issue to the American people in this way, since this brand of realpolitik usually upsets many of them and undermines the noble rhetoric more usually employed to muster Americans to war. Instead, the Bush administration tried to build support for an attack on Iraq by stressing Saddam's many crimes, and claiming that his continued survival constituted a threat to global peace. In the short run, this was a smart tactic: (true) stories of Saddam using poison gas on his own people, of the brutality of his regime, and of its undemocratic make-up established him in American minds as a thug who deserved to be punished. In the long run, however, this rhetorical move brought its own dangers. What about the many other thugs around the world who committed similar crimes, and who were on the American payroll? What about other undemocratic regimes, or other countries (like Israel, the number one recipient of US aid) which had invaded and occupied their neighbours without an American response? Even if Americans could overlook all this, one major problem remained: if Saddam was demonised, US public opinion would find it hard to tolerate his 142 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? continuing in power when Kuwait had been liberated; and yet American policy in the region depended heavily on the idea of a unified Iraq, and the reality of Saddam's oppressive role in maintain- ing 'stability'. 65 We can see, then, that the US allowed itself to be drawn into a conflicted policy on Iraq from the earliest days of the military build- up. This explains, in large part, the muddled appearance of US policy towards Iraq after 1990. When Operation Desert Storm was finally implemented in January 1991, it seemed that the US commanders on the ground would exploit their advantage in equipment and per- sonnel and sweep Saddam from power; moreover, George Bush and American military leaders urged the majority Shia population (and the Kurds) to rise up against Saddam, strongly hinting that US support for any uprising would follow. The State Department and the CIA, however, continued to stress Saddam's usefulness to the US as a 'stabilising' force in the region, even after his Kuwaiti mischief, and the US military was instructed to allow Saddam to survive. In fact, the Iraqi leader was probably strengthened, at least inside Iraq, by the flip-flop in American support for a regime change: the promise that the US would help the rebels to overthrow their leader had embold- ened Saddam's critics and brought them to the surface. Saddam, using his troops and his helicopters, calmly imprisoned or killed this resistance movement as the massive US-led military force looked on, deferring to the importance of the 'stabilising' effort. 66 The years following 1991 have produced a catastrophe for the civilians of Iraq, who have been subjected to military attacks and economic warfare at the hands of the US. Unwilling to use military force to remove Saddam, but eager to 'contain' him and to avoid the possibility of another Kuwait, the US imposed an extremely harsh sanctions regime, which amplified the material damage of the 1991 conflict throughout Iraqi society. Iraq's infrastructure, seriously dam- aged by the American bombing, was kept in a moribund state by prohibitions on imports and exports; even essential items, such as medical supplies, were kept from the Iraqi people. 67 When George Bush was defeated by Bill Clinton in 1992, all hopes of a change in US policy were swiftly quashed: one of Clinton's first foreign-policy initiatives was to launch a cruise-missile attack on Baghdad, in 'retaliation' for a supposed Iraqi plot to murder his predecessor on a THE US AND MILITARY POWER 143 visit to Kuwait. 68 Throughout the Clinton administration, Iraqis had to endure either direct military attack or the catastrophic effects of sanctions. Meanwhile, a strengthened Saddam continued to keep the country together, eliminating his domestic opponents and preserving the 'stability' of the region. To many observers in the US, American policy towards Iraq has seemed a grand failure. Despite his defeat in 1991, Saddam has out- lasted George Bush and seems set to eclipse even Bill Clinton s tenure. Moreover, the UN-authorised (but US-dominated) weapons inspec- tion team in Iraq, UNSCOM, was expelled from the country in the prelude to the major US attack on Iraq in December 1998. US commentators who had accepted their government's descriptions of Saddam's crimes and his 'rogue' status were doubly frustrated by his survival in power and his apparent evasion of an international weapons inspection regime. 69 Behind this version of the US war on Saddam, however, we can uncover a more complex agenda, and we can see that many of the goals of US policy towards Iraq have been achieved in the 19905. If we accept that American policymakers have placed a premium on a unified Iraq, Saddam's survival seems less a defeat than a victory for US policy in the region. Moreover, the ease with which the US has been able to attack Iraq in the past decade - both in terms of the military's easy access and the absence of international opposition to US strikes — illustrates the success of the American 'containment' policy. The US is hazily suspicious of Saddam himself, but basically realises his resemblance to many other regional tyrants who have happily served American interests over the decades; US policymakers are rather more scared of Shia fundamentalism or Kurdish nationalism, and so they have chosen to keep Saddam in power even as they remind him, with military strikes and sanctions, that they have him surrounded. Spokespeople from the State Depart- ment like to boast of how US 'containment' keeps Iraq from bullying its neighbours; in fact, the US fears that Iraq's internal tensions will change the make-up of the Middle East, and so US policy is in- tended to deter not Iraqi expansion but Iraqi implosion. The US has sought to freeze the status quo, actually bolstering Saddam even as Iraq is cut off from the world. 70 It is more accurate, then, to see American policy towards Iraq in the 19908 as rather successful, at least on its own terms. The problem 144 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? lies not in US military weakness, but in the brutishness of an ap- proach to Iraq which punishes those ordinary people least able to affect their destiny. As we've seen, the US encouraged the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam in 1991, only to stand on the sidelines as Saddam quashed their rebellion. American rhetoric concerning sanctions since 1991 has been equally disingenuous. What can Iraqi civilians do to overthrow either Saddam or the sanctions regime? The State Department often suggests that sanctions are intended to undermine Saddam, an outcome which might provide an opening for a concerted, internal challenge to his rule. However, in reality sanctions have had the opposite effect: they have denied resources to Saddam's enemies, have had little effect on his personal well-being, and have enabled him to reach out to ordinary Iraqis and blame their predicament on the US. 71 Of course, American policymakers are fully aware of these facts, and their continued commitment to the sanctions regime can only mean that they see the survival of Saddam (and the impoverishment of his people) as a desirable goal. Evidence to this effect was offered by Madeleine Albright in an interview with the CBS television show '60 Minutes' in 1996. The interviewer, Lesley Stahl, confronted Albright with the effects of sanctions on Iraq, noting that 'there is no longer much hope that the sanctions will inspire the people to rise up and topple the govern- ment'. Given the apparent failure of the sanctions to produce revolt, and their crippling effects on Iraqi society, Stahl questioned their continued usefulness: STAHL: We have heard that a half a million children have died, I mean, that's more children than died when - in Hiroshima. And - and, you know, is the price worth it? ALBRIGHT: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it. 72 Of course, the value of this particular arrangement stems from the simple fact that the 'price' is paid by Iraqis, rather than the United States. The US has been able to tighten the economic screw since 1991, or to bomb suspected weapons or radar sites at will; Saddam has survived intact, and any pretensions he might have towards making another foray outside his borders have been dashed. The only losers in this are Iraqi civilians, denied basic health care and THE US AND MILITARY POWER 145 food, and enduring a generation of malnourishment and poverty. The US military underpins their misery, enforcing their isolation and standing ready to attack at any time. 73 Kosovo When Iraq invaded Kuwait, a vital US interest - the regular flow of oil in the Middle East — was threatened. This certainly explains the expeditious response of George Bush, even if more complex issues of ethnic and religious rivalry have shaped American policy in the subsequent decade. In contrast, the disintegration of Yugoslavia after 1991 threatened few immediate US interests and, as we saw in the last chapter, Bill Clinton was content to keep out of the fighting even as it became clear that Bosnian Muslims were being 'ethnically cleansed' by Serbs and Croats. In the absence of an urgent US motive for involvement, the flip side of the 'Powell Doctrine' was invoked, and American forces played little or no part in the bloody conflict until the limited airstrikes of 1995. Although the 'Butcher of Baghdad' was quickly confronted in the deserts of Iraq and Kuwait, the killers of Belgrade and Pale were left to complete their 'cleansing' without American opposition. 74 After 1995, this reluctance to engage in the Balkans was challenged by events. The US had brokered the Dayton Agreement, and had therefore acquired a stake in the region, if only at the level of saving face. 75 The American public, meanwhile, was perturbed by new re- ports of ethnic cleansing, and hardly persuaded that the US and its allies had performed admirably in their 'peacekeeping' efforts before 1995. Finally, the NATO alliance had emerged from the Bosnian war with a serious credibility problem. Although NATO had been installed as a kind of military arm of the UN in 1994, its forces had enjoyed very little success in preventing Serb offensives, or defending the 'safe areas' which had been promised by the UN. The most powerful military alliance in history had failed comprehensively to stop Croatia and Serbia from carving up Bosnia, a fact which hardly recommended NATO as a force for peace and stability in the post- Cold War world. This left NATO looking for a chance to redeem itself, desperate to improve its image in Europe and the US after its earlier humiliation. 76 146 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Unsurprisingly, the Dayton Agreement did not secure a conclusion to the Balkan conflict. Slobodan Milosevic turned his attention to the small province of Kosovo, formally a part of the Yugoslav federa- tion but traditionally (and politically) a separate entity from Serbia, the federation's dominant member. In 1997 and 1998, troops from the (Serb-controlled) Yugoslav army, as well as Serb paramilitary groups, waged a war inside Kosovo with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an armed band of Kosovar Albanians seeking independence from Serbia. Kosovo, with 90 per cent of its population being Koso- var Albanians, had been subjected to an increasingly centralised and direct rule from Belgrade, a development which cut against the former autonomy enjoyed by the region and which scared many Kosovar Albanians. By 1998, the Serbs were running a campaign of intimidation against the KLA and many Kosovar civilians, and inci- dents of violence and reprisal increased accordingly. 77 The US en- couraged NATO to threaten Milosevic, and to promise some form of intervention if Serbia continued to undermine Kosovo. As in the Bosnian war, these threats seemed at first to be empty; until the Serbs rejected a peace deal brokered in March 1999, and NATO finally made good on its pledge to intervene. Over the next eleven weeks, the overwhelmingly American forces of NATO launched a huge aerial attack on the Serbs in Kosovo and on Serbia itself, destroying thousands of targets and finally bringing Belgrade to a standstill. In June 1999, Milosevic at last agreed to surrender terms, and NATO forces entered Kosovo on the ground, without opposition from the Serbs. 78 The American-led intervention in Kosovo created a bitter debate in the US, and produced some unlikely allies amongst commenta- tors. Right-wing politicians urging a more robust response to Serbia were supported by left-leaning activists who were pleased at last to see the US acting on behalf of the powerless. 79 Other commentators on the left, meanwhile, banded with isolationists and suggested that the US would do better to stay out of the conflict altogether. 80 It's fair to say that those on the left of the political spectrum were most divided by the war in Kosovo. Many activists who had bemoaned the American abdication from other conflicts, or US participation on the side of injustice when the American military had been employed, were confronted by a US/NATO operation which seemed to target THE US AND MILITARY POWER 147 an unjust power. Could one forget about the US military's assaults on Iraq, Panama or Sudan, and cheer on the effort against Serbia? Was the Kosovo operation a rare but admirable instance of the US backing the right side? 81 To answer this question, we need to put the Kosovo crisis into a broader context. Although it is hard to decry the new US desire to stand up to Milosevic, it's worth remembering that the US had overseen Milosevic's international rehabilitation at Dayton. Most analysts of the recent Balkan conflicts have heaped blame for the fighting since 1991 on Milosevic's various nationalist and expansion- ist projects; at Dayton, the US negotiators essentially closed the book on Milosevic's war crimes and treated him as a serious and sincere proponent of peace in the region. 82 I stress this point because the US government and media largely gave Milosevic the Saddam Hussein treatment in 1999, and emphasised his undemocratic and brutal role in the break-up ofYugoslavia. 83 This was common knowl- edge before the Dayton talks in 1995, but the State Department preferred to deal with Milosevic rather than to isolate him politi- cally or militarily. Since Dayton certainly strengthened Milosevic's position within Serbia, it was disingenuous of the American govern- ment to blame him wholly for the mess in Kosovo. From 1991 onwards, Milosevic had been rather consistent in his pursuit of a racist, nationalist and expansionist agenda of ethnic cleansing and •war; any inconsistency came from the US, which was prepared to tolerate Milosevic's destructive behaviour for most of the time, while launching into occasional (and often flimsy) condemnation at random intervals. This was not the foundation for the preservation of human rights in Kosovo, and Milosevic can hardly be blamed for thinking that the US would again avert its gaze as he resumed his oppression within Yugoslavia. 84 If the US played a role in Milosevic's survival after Dayton, it was entirely responsible for the conduct of the Kosovo war and its effects on the Kosovar Albanians. Although Milosevic's forces in Kosovo had substantially honed their intimidatory tactics in the weeks and days before NATO commenced its aerial attacks, the bulk of the Kosovar Albanian population remained inside Kosovo until the shooting began. At this point, the American strategy for pursuing the war had grave and direct consequences for Kosovo's civilian population. Bill 148 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Clinton, with the examples of Vietnam and Somalia lodged im- perfectly in his mind, insisted that any US intervention should be limited to an aerial campaign. Although this would certainly satisfy the strategic goal of limiting US casualties, the cost of this achieve- ment was the vulnerability of Kosovar Albanians on the ground. Unsurprisingly, the Serb forces inside Kosovo used the NATO bombing as an excuse to empty Kosovo of its non-Serb majority population, burning homes and killing refugees without any NATO opposition on the ground. Although the US may not have intended or desired this outcome, the expulsion of virtually the entire Kosovar Albanian population was a direct result of the limited military tactics chosen by President Clinton. While US planes soared high above Kosovo, battling poor weather and restrictions on low-level flying (imposed to reduce pilot risk), the Serbs committed ethnic cleansing on an enormous scale, with minimal resistance. 85 It could be argued that the eventual NATO victory in Kosovo justified the means used to achieve it, and that the completion of the air campaign with virtually no military casualties vindicated the cautious tactics. However, this would be to overlook not only the thousands of Kosovar Albanians who were killed in the various Serb expulsions, but also the unsettled outlook for Kosovo's future after the conflict. The Kosovar Albanians forced into Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro were predictably distraught at their experience, and eventually returned to Kosovo (under NATO escort) with a much- reduced commitment to coexistence with their former Serb neigh- bours. This brittle circumstance has forced many of the minority Serb population in Kosovo to leave their homes, further inflaming the situation and inspiring more nationalist hatred inside Serbia. 86 Meanwhile, the US-led NATO forces which helped to create the refugee problem made every effort to avoid this difficult task of policing a post-war Kosovo, and the US revived its familiar strategy of dumping intractable problems on the UN. Although the prognosis is not clear, early indications suggest that the ethnic and political tensions which caused the Kosovo crisis remain as strong as ever; and that the US desire for involvement in the region, even after pum- melling Yugoslavia for nearly a hundred days, is waning once more. Against this backdrop, it's easier to see the continuity between the established contours of US foreign policy and the 'selfless' American THE US AND MILITARY POWER 149 role in Kosovo; and it's harder to praise the US military for its partial, problematic, and unfinished role in the defence of human rights in Kosovo. 87 Isolationism and terrorism One of the most striking news stories to emerge from the war in Kosovo concerned the pilots of the B-2 bombers which flew many offensive sorties over Yugoslavia. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, many B-2 crew members based in Missouri flew missions directly from the US to their Yugoslav targets, before re- turning to Missouri for landing. These pilots could find themselves bombing Milosevic one day, then returning to the US to mow their lawns or take their families for a meal the next. The Wall Street Journal noted the surreal effect of this kind of combat, and the contrast between the heat of battle and the absolute ordinariness, even banality, of life in the US. During the Kosovo conflict, there was little sign in the US that the country was fighting a major war; and even the pilots involved in combat could return easily to their undisturbed homes, and familiar surroundings. 88 This story nicely illustrates the extent to which the US, and especially the American public, is cushioned from the effects of American military action. The size and strength of the US military has not only allowed the US to achieve its objectives quickly, but it has also enabled the American public to enjoy the benefits of isolationism and of military engagement. While US bombs rained down on Yugoslavia, the conflict struggled to make the headlines in American newspapers and on television shows. The low-level war with Iraq, meanwhile, took place throughout 1999 beneath the public radar altogether. Where the US public does exhibit awareness of US military involvement, popular perspectives tend to bear out a series of stories which the Pentagon and the State Department have been selling since the GulfWar: the US uses moderate force, targeted with pinpoint accuracy, to achieve a series of just political goals with minimal civilian casualties. Given the prevalence of these interpreta- tions of US military action, commentators have noted that Americans have been numbed to the effects of war; and are too ready to believe the Pentagon/State Department line on the restraint and effectiveness I5O ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? of US military action. I want to critique these ideas about American military efficiency, and to trace some of the possible consequences of a desensitised US public as we contemplate sources of conflict in the twenty-first century. 89 The most obvious weakness in the argument for the military's efficiency would simply hold that 'precision bombing' is an oxy- moron. Even with the technological advances of recent decades, the 1991 Gulf War still featured huge quantities of 'dumb' weapons, including the use of carpet-bombing techniques which had been the mainstay of air power in World War II and Vietnam. 90 In Kosovo, meanwhile, efforts to avoid 'collateral damage' (civilian casualties) were hampered by several factors. The sheer number of US attacks in or near heavily populated areas was hardly compatible with a safe environment for enemy civilians, particularly since the many cluster bombs and bomblets dropped during the campaign remained a hazard to civilians even after the fighting was over. 91 Conversely, the ad- vanced technology employed in missile guidance systems could not compensate for poor reconnaissance and research, a fact made amply clear by the disastrous US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. While the American government has tried to emphasise the possibilities for more humane and accurate combat tactics, the evidence from Iraq and Kosovo suggests that military conflict is as bloody and destructive as it ever was. 92 The ironic corollary to this persistence of 'collateral damage' is that those who understand the workings of the high-tech US arsenal may be best placed to defend against it. In practice, this can shift the advantage back to an enemy military force, which can use a variety of tactics to outwit the 'smart' bombs and guided weapons. In Kosovo, where the US insisted on keeping its pilots above 15,000 feet, and NATO eschewed the use of ground forces, a great deal depended on the efficacy of the new generation of'smart' weapons. In the aftermath of the war, however, it appeared that the Serbs had been very effective in disguising their tanks and planes, and in setting up decoy targets for US pilots to waste their expensive missiles on. 93 In fact, the resilience and ingenuity of the Serb forces, which re- mained in Kosovo even after weeks of intensive NATO bombard- ment, played a large part in diverting the bombing campaign to Belgrade and other large cities, with the consequent casualties and THE US AND MILITARY POWER 151 damage to civilians and their infrastructure. Even given the most recent technology and overwhelming air superiority, the US and NATO could only persuade Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his forces from Kosovo by threatening to destroy large parts of Belgrade. This logic suggests that 'smart' weaponry has not so much obviated the need for civilian casualties, as postponed or drawn out the threat to non-combatants. The Kosovo example demonstrates that an effective war continues to depend on the killing and intimidation of large numbers of people, many of them civilians. 94 In addition to these issues of technological effectiveness, there is a broader difficulty with the American notion that a military offensive can provide an immediate or a lasting solution to a political problem. As we have seen, the American military has been used in Iraq to postpone the moment when the US has finally to engage with the political realities of Iraq's diverse population. With the twin weapons of airstrikes and economic sanctions, the US has been able to main- tain Saddam's oppressive hold over the country, and to prevent Iraq from emerging as a strong regional power. The cost of this policy has been the alienation of most Iraqis from the US, and the radicalisation of many Iraqis (and other Arabs) who reject this instance of Ameri- can imperium. In the Balkans, we can see a similar dynamic. Since at least 1993, the US has shown extreme reluctance to deter ethnic cleansing and its proponents, or to employ an effective mixture of political and military pressure necessary to defend the victims of these 'cleansing' campaigns. Even the Dayton Agreement, which represented the first substantial US engagement in the region since the wars began, pandered to Slobodan Milosevic and legitimised his role in a Balkan peace process. Since 1995, the US has been reluctant either to urge the arrest of Milosevic's chief lieutenants, or to counter Serb moves against non-Serbs in and around Serb-controlled territory. 95 Although the attack on Milosevic in 1999 therefore repre- sented a shift in US commitment to the region, it is hard to see the usefulness of American action unless it is backed up by a long-term commitment, political and military, to peace in the Balkans. Given the US track record, it's more reasonable to suppose that the conflict in Kosovo was a short-term measure enacted by the US in the absence of a long-term strategy; and that the problem of an expan- sionist, nationalist Serbia will persist in the years ahead. 96 r r 152 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? I have been tracing the curious ways in which American techno- logical and military power has allowed many in the US to be simul- taneously engaged with and isolated from the world. Given the ability of the US military to overwhelm enemy forces at relatively little cost in American lives, the big military operations of the 19905 have offered Americans a version of war which looks nothing like Viet- nam or World War II. Moreover, the requirement that US forces defeat their enemy quickly and decisively has shifted more of the cost of war onto those nations which bear the brunt of an American attack. Even sceptical US citizens can sleep safely in the knowledge that war with Iraq or Yugoslavia is unlikely to have any effect on their daily life in New York or Los Angeles. Recent conflicts have thus made clear the disparity not only between US power and the strength of other nations, but between the consciousness of war in some parts of the globe and the awareness of conflict in the US. The Iraqi people, for example, have spent virtually a decade living in a state of siege, enduring US bombing and sanctions which many Americans are barely aware of. The distance between the two countries can be spanned in a few hours, but this disjunction of experience is massive. 97 It seems prudent, then, to note that many people around the world are frustrated by the complacency and impenetrability of the US, and that the apparent absence of political solutions to this (such as a genuinely multilateral and independent United Nations) is likely to drive many towards more radical and extreme measures. The US government has paid great attention to the threat from weapons of mass destruction, and has based its definition of'rogue states' on the maniacal desire of some nations to acquire these weapons. In the case of some of the nations on the US list, however, the motivation for acquiring a nuclear or biological capability seems more straight- forward: from the perspective of Iran, Iraq or Libya, each frozen out of the international community by American 'containment' policies, is there another route by which one can bring pressure on the US? I don't mean to endorse the acquisition or the use of these weapons, but merely to suggest that the WMD problem has stemmed not from the mania of the 'rogues', but from the effective breakdown of meaningful and equitable dialogue with the US. There is a danger- ous imbalance here which has exacerbated the problem: the US can THE US AND MILITARY POWER 153 continue to function without interruption when its relations with such countries deteriorate; but, thanks to US economic, military and political power, other nations face effective ruin when the US shifts to a 'containment' strategy. In a genuinely multilateral world, the isolation of supposed 'rogue states' would not produce this in- tense anger on the part of the civilian population of a 'rogue', and wouldn't focus this rage onto a particular country; but given the overwhelming US influence in political and economic terms, and the relative marginalisation of the UN, such emotions are inevitable. This has created large and dangerous pockets of resentment towards the US around the world, grounded not in fundamentalism or in- sanity but in a real perception of the imbalance of power, and a real frustration at the impotence of political means of change. Given the large US military forces deployed around or near many of the 'rogues', the US may be able to 'contain' a WMD threat by starving populations or bombing them at will. A more troubling prospect, from a US perspective, is the threat of individuals initiating terrorist actions against American property, either abroad or within the United States. In 1996, terrorists proved the vulnerability even of the US army as they bombed the Khobar Towers apartment building in Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen American soldiers. 98 In 1998, the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were attacked, leaving hundreds dead and thousands injured. The American government's response to each case was hardly encouraging. US forces in Saudi Arabia were moved to a new, fortified base deep in the desert, but the perpetrators of the original attack remained unknown. In response to the embassy bombings, meanwhile, the US launched cruise missile attacks against Sudan and Afghanistan and blamed a Saudi businessman, Osama bin Laden, for all the trouble." The temptation in the US has been once more to drain terrorism of its political significance and to sell the American public on the idea that lunatic-masterminds are responsible for these actions, before setting out to apprehend or kill them with extensive force. The folly of this approach is substantial. In the first place, the demonisation of figures like bin Laden ignores the extent to which their actions are grounded in political reality. Spinning its attack on bin Laden in Afghanistan, the US claimed that it had bombed a 'terrorist university' in 1998, as if this were a simple act of right squashing wrong. 100 In r 154 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? subsequent months, reports in newspapers began to trickle down and confirm that 'Terrorist University' was actually created by the US in the 19805, a part of the CIA's covert campaign to arm and train Afghan rebels in their fight with the USSR; and that TU's presumed Dean of Studies, Osama bin Laden, had been on the American payroll at that time. 101 These facts are crucial not only to making sense of what happened in 1998, but to establishing the political (rather than the military, or psychological) foundation for this par- ticular terrorist threat. The facts are largely ignored, however, since their admission would force exactly the sort of broad debate on US foreign policy which many Americans are reluctant to have. If the avoidance of politics in the US response to terrorism is a bad idea, the speedy resort to military force (as in the cruise missile attacks of 1998) is no better. The unilateral US bombings of Sudan and Afghanistan were in contravention of international law, and hardly seemed an appropriate or measured response to a complex and terrible problem. It's hard to imagine how the US would respond if, say, China bombed two countries in Latin America after declaring that they had sponsored or harboured terrorists. Moreover, the two targets chosen by US planners in 1998 each had its own drawbacks. In Afghanistan, the missiles failed to kill bin Laden, the supposed target of the bombing. 102 In Sudan, the US claimed to have attacked a chemical weapons plant owned by bin Laden and intended to support terrorist operations. It soon transpired that the plant was neither associated with bin Laden nor engaged in the production of chemical weapons. Instead, the US had bombed the most important pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, and had stopped production of vital medicines on which the Sudanese population depended. The fact that thousands of Sudanese died in subsequent months in the ab- sence of these medicines made little impact in the US. The terrorist menace, exemplified by the embassy bombings, had been answered by a show of strength — even if the chief terrorist had escaped unscathed, and yet another civilian population had been made to suffer by the US military. 103 In the past decade, the US has been able to project its power in these ways at very little cost, and even to preserve an illusion of American isolation which comforts many ordinary people in the US. The American military has overwhelmed its opponents abroad, THE US AND MILITARY POWER 155 and an increasing reliance on air power and guided missiles has minimised disruption — or even awareness of these conflicts — at home. Given the increasing pace of technological change, however, it is hard to believe that the US will continue to go undisturbed in its repose over the coming decades. The American failure (or refusal) to engage politically with 'rogue states' or disaffected populations will ultimately encourage a small minority to express their griev- ances in horrific ways: by attacking American interests abroad, and even targeting cities within the US. In 1993, Egyptian terrorists pro- tested against the iniquities of US foreign policy by bombing the World Trade Center in New York City, a spectacular target in the heart of the world's financial capital. Although the explosion caused relatively minor damage, it raised the prospect of truly calamitous terrorist actions, on a scale never previously seen. The American response, once again, was to stress the fanaticism of the perpetrators, to depoliticise their actions, and to downplay the threat, lest it un- nerve the American people and cast doubt on their security. 104 We can see, then, that the debate over defence and the military in the US has focused on one supposed threat and largely ignored the other. The American military has continued to arm itself with the latest weapons, to knock the 'rogue states' into line, and to generate an aura of invincibility which reassures Americans of their own safety. Floating above American cities, the rhetoric suggests, will be planes, satellites and 'kill vehicles' which can zap any 'rogue' missile and underwrite the security of the American heartland. The US military thus promises a stable environment in return for massive defence spending: on conventional forces to contain and occasionally pulverise 'outlaws'; and on 'Star Wars' technology to insure against any nasty surprises. The American Congress and successive presidential admin- istrations take the military at its word, and channel huge sums of money to the Pentagon and its suppliers to complete this bargain. Meanwhile, all of this spending offers little or no defence against the individuals or groups who may try to cause havoc inside the US, exploiting the relative freedom of movement within America and employing high technology to wreak terrible devastation. The US military is hardly an effective weapon against such people, and a system of missile defence — however spectacular and expensive - will be unable to contain the threat they embody. 105 The only effective 156 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? deterrent would involve an effort on the part of the US to rethink its foreign policy fundamentally, and to minimise the many situations in which American military or economic power has led to profound and enduring suffering in other countries. As long as the US remains insulated from the effects of its actions it will have little sense of the true desperation they produce in others; and of the terrible predica- ment of those — in Iraq, or Sudan, or the Palestinian territories - who can find meaning and promise in an act of recklessness and destruction. NOTES 1. Delivered on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, 19 January 1999. 2. For a representative example of this strain of commentary, see Charles Krauthammer, 'The Unipolar Moment', Foreign Affairs 70, no. i (1991): 23-33. Krauthammer corrected those who had suggested that the post- Cold War world might be grounded in a broad distribution of military and political force: 'The center of world power is the unchallenged superpower, the United States, attended by its Western allies.' 3. In this sketch and what follows, I have drawn on Michael Klare's Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: America's Search for a New Foreign Policy (New York: Hill &Wang, 1995); William Greider, Fortress America: The Ameri- can Military and the Consequences of Peace (New York: Public Affairs, 1998); and Sanford Gottlieb, Defense Addiction: Can America Kick the Habit? (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). 4. On the military's role in formulating post-Cold War defence strategy, see Klare, Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, 6-u. 5. For general accounts of the relationship between defence contractors and the Pentagon, see John L. Boies, Buying for Armageddon: Business, Society, and Military Spending Since the Cuban Missile Crisis (New Bruns- wick: Rutgers University Press, 1994); William H. Gregory, The Price of Peace: The Future of Defense Industry and High Technology in a Post-Cold War World (Macmillan: New York, 1993); and Ann Markusen and Joel Yudken, Dismantling the Cold War Economy (New York: Basic Books, !99 2 ), 33~<58. One study undertaken by the RAND corporation in 1994 noted that some defence contractors with a healthy commercial business (like Boeing) were less dependent on the Pentagon than others, but that the 'technology spillovers' from military to civilian projects would keep Boeing in the defence business: Ellen M. Pint and Rachel Schmidt, Financial Condition of US Military Aircraft Prime Contractors (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1994). The subsequent takeover of rs THE US AND MILITARY POWER 157 McDonnell-Douglas (and its large military division) by Boeing suggests that these 'spillovers' were enticing; and the general consolidation in the aerospace and defence industries in the late 19905 has ensured that each major corporation left standing has a substantial defence division. For details of the extent and ramifications of this corporate consolida- tion, see Donald M. Pattillo, Pushing the Envelope: The American Aircraft Industry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 344-66. 6. For an account of the priorities and perspectives of those 'Cold War communities' in the US which have come to depend upon the defence industry, see Markusen and Yudken, Dismantling the Cold War Economy, 170-207. On the politics and social effects of military base closures, see Betty G. Lall and John Tepper Marlin, Building a Peace Economy: Oppor- tunities and Problems of Post-Cold War Defense Cuts (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992). 7. This was, in essence, Charles Krauthammer's point; see note 2 above. Although Krauthammer's arguments about the 'unipolar' world were popular in the early 19905, a subtle shift has taken place in policy- making circles since Bill Clinton's arrival in the White House: with no challenge to the US on the horizon, and numerous instances of ethnic or religious conflict demanding some kind of international response, it has become fashionable to stress the relative weakness of the US, even as the American military continues to eclipse any other fighting force in equipment and funding, and continues to intervene when US interests are at stake. See, for example, Robert J. Lieber, 'Eagle Without a Cause: Making Foreign Policy Without the Soviet Threat', in Lieber, ed., Eagle Adrift: American Foreign Policy at the End of the Century (New York: Longman, 1997), 3—25; and Richard N. Haass, The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States After the Cold War (New York: Council on Foreign Rela- tions, 1997). I will examine this shift in perceptions of American power in Chapter 4. 8. For an early account of the 'Powell Doctrine', see Rick Atkinson and Bob Woodward, 'Gulf Turning Points', Washington Post, 2 December 1990. The general himself codified his perspective in a 1992 article:'US Forces: Challenges Ahead', Foreign Affairs 72, no. 5 (1992): 32-45. It should be noted that although Washington insiders referred to a 'Clinton Doctrine' (stressing the desirability of intervening in small conflicts and/ or for humanitarian reasons) in competition with the 'Powell Doctrine', neither Democrats nor Republicans seriously questioned Powell's definition of military needs; merely the conditions under which the military should be employed. After Somalia, the 'Clinton Doctrine' was hardly a convincing pillar of US foreign policy. For a recent perspective on the durability of Powell's ideas among policymakers, see Eric Schmitt, 'The Powell Doctrine is Looking Pretty Good Again', New York Times, 4 April 1999. 9. Les Aspin, 'Report on the Bottom-Up Review', US Department of Defense, Washington, DC, September 1993. For an analysis of the BUR, y rs rs 158 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? see Andrew F. Krepinevich, The Bottom-Up Review: An Assessment (Wash- ington, DC: Defense Budget Project, 1994); and Klare, Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, 111—19. The goals of the BUR were reasserted in 1997: The 'Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review', US Depart- ment of Defense, May 1997, declared that 'US forces must be capable of fighting and winning two major theater wars nearly simultaneously.' 10. The issue of nuclear weapons was excluded from the BUR, which circumvented debates over their deterrent value (and the consequent obsolescence of a huge conventional military force) and the desirability of reducing the colossal US stocks of warheads; see Klare, Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, 119—25. Essentially, then, the US has chosen to keep both a large conventional military and a large nuclear arsenal, a strategy which can only be described as overkill. See Lawrence J. Korb, 'Our Overstuffed Armed Forces', Foreign Affairs 74, no. 6 (1995): 22—34. Korb elaborated on this topic in a speech at the US Information Agency, Washington, DC, on n December 1996, and took issue with the exclusion of US allies from most Pentagon assessments of military planning needs: 'Take a look at the United States, you add NATO's allies, you add Japan, you add South Korea, and you add Israel, we have 80 percent of all the world's military expenditures. (Chuckling) So, I mean, this idea that somehow or another, you know, that we're being jeopardized, I mean, to me just doesn't make a great deal of sense.' 11. Colin Powell warned of the emergence of new 'demons and dangers' at the Pentagon press conference accompanying the release of the BUR, i September 1993. Ironically, Powell had told Army Times newspaper in April 1991 that Tm running out of demons. I'm running out of villains. I'm down to Castro and Kim II Sung.' Of course, this was before the emergence of those fearsome rogues named by Powell and Aspin in 1993 — Mohamed Farah Aideed and Ratko Mladic — and Saddam Hussein's reassignment to the rogue's gallery; as Powell put it to reporters, noting his earlier remarks on the paucity of 'demons': 'History and central casting have supplied me with new ones along the way.' For this earlier scepticism on Powell's part, see Fred Kaplan, 'Powell Says Cuts Can Be Made', Boston Globe, 9 April 1991. 12. On the US demonisation of Saddam, see Dilip Hiro, Desert Shield to Desert Storm: The Second Gulf War (London: HarperCollins, 1992), 135- 6; John Mueller, Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War (Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1994), 40-42; and, for some sense of the bi- partisan nature of the US campaign, Democratic Congressman Stephen J. Solarz's January 1991 essay 'The Case for Intervention', reprinted in Micah L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf, eds, The Gulf War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions (New York: Random House, 1991), 269-83. 13. For the Clinton administration's perspective on the 'rogues' (also known as 'outlaws' or 'backlash states'), see the essay by National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, 'Confronting Backlash States', Foreign Affairs 73, no. i (1994): 45—55. Lake's core group of'rogues' comprised Cuba, North THE US AND MILITARY POWER 159 Korea, Iran, Iraq and Libya; these nations shared a 'siege mentality', Lake argued, and had 'embarked on ambitious and costly military programs - especially in weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems'. An updated list of'rogues' (including Syria) was provided by former Reagan adviser Raymond Tanter, Rogue Regimes: Terrorism and Proliferation (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), in a monograph which essentially endorses the fears and exaggerations of the Clinton admin- istration. The best guide to the hysteria and constructedness of the 'rogue threat' is Michael Klare's Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, especially 130-68. 14. Of course, the obverse of this fact is that those nations which are governed undemocratically, and which have sought to acquire WMDs, are potential 'rogues' of the future. For an analysis of proliferation and of the likely candidates for future 'roguery', see Klare, Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, 169-231. Klare makes the important point that US efforts to control the spread of WMDs have been patchy at best; and that an American desire to exclude US stocks of WMDs from any international monitoring has hampered multilateral efforts to control WMD proliferation. The substantial battle in the US Congress over the Chemical Weapons Convention is one example: see Michael Krepon, Amy E. Smithson and John Parachini, The Battle to Obtain US Ratifica- tion of the Chemical Weapons Convention (Washington, DC: Henry L. Stimson Center, 1997). The US government, under pressure from the American biotech industry, has also shown great reluctance to accept international monitoring of biological WMDs: see Debora MacKenzie, 'Deadly Secrets', New Scientist, 28 February 1998. 15. The original roster of'rogues' was offered by Colin Powell at the i September 1993 Pentagon press conference announcing the BUR. Powell's identification of Saddam Hussien, Ratko Mladic and Mohamed Farah Aideed as founding members of this new international guild of roguery hardly allowed for the many differences between them, or their markedly different relationship with (and threat to) the United States. 16. An influential and high-profile demand for better relations with Iran was offered by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft and Richard Murphy, 'Differentiated Containment', Foreign Affairs 76, no. 3 (1997): 20-31. On Gaddafi's handover of the Lockerbie suspects, see Marlise Simons, '2 Libyan Suspects Handed to Court in Pan Am Bombing', New York Times, 6 April 1999. The partial detente between North Korea and the Clinton administration is the subject of Warren I. Cohen's 'Compromised in Korea, Redeemed by the Clinton Administration?', Foreign Affairs 76, no. 3 (1997): 106-12. 17. Madeleine K. Albright, 'The Testing of American Foreign Policy', Foreign Affairs 77, no. 6 (1998): 50-64. Albright had been using this taxonomy of nations for some time previous to this article, which probably reflects the shift in Clinton administration policy after the Somalia debacle and PDD-25. rs rs rs I6O ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? 18. This figure refers to the number of nations which contributed combat forces to Operation Desert Storm; around twice this number partici- pated in Operation Desert Shield or contributed financially to the Coalition effort. For details of the participants, see Alberto Bin, Richard Hill and Archer Jones, Desert Storm: A Forgotten War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), xvii. 19. The first night of the air campaign against Iraq set the tone for the dominant role of the US forces: 93 per cent of the 1,300 sorties flown in the first twenty-four hours involved American aircraft; see Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict 1990—1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)) 301. Over the course of the entire campaign, US pilots flew around 85 per cent of the sorties, and dropped around 9,000 'smart' bombs in addition to 210,000 'conventional' bombs: Bin et al., Desert Storm, 235. 20. For upbeat accounts of the debates surrounding NATO's role in the post-Cold War world, and the eventual decision to push for the expan- sion of the Alliance, see Gerald B. Solomon, The NATO Enlargement Debate, 1990-1997: Blessings of Liberty (Westport: Praeger, 1998); Piotr Dutkiewicz and Robert J. Jackson, eds, NATO Looks East (Westport: Praeger, 1998); and Clay Clemens, ed., NATO and the Quest for Post- Cold War Security (London: Macmillan, 1997). A rather more critical perspective is offered by some of the essayists in Philip H. Gordon, ed., NATO's Transformation: The Changing Shape of the Atlantic Alliance (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997); and by George W Grayson, Strange Bedfellows: NATO Marches East (Lanham: University Press of America, I999)- It should be stressed, however, that the overwhelming majority of studies of NATO expansion have warmed to the idea. 21. On some of the reasons for US interest in NATO expansion, see Stanley Hoffmann, 'The United States and Western Europe', in Lieber, ed., Eagle Adrift, 178-92; and Grayson, Strange Bedfellows, xxii-xxiii. The NATO Expansion Act, HR 4210, i03rd Congress, Second Session, was introduced in the House of Representatives on 14 April 1994. 22. Albright used this term in 'The Testing of American Foreign Policy', 52- 23. Kissinger offered his views to this effect in the hearing on NATO expansion of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 30 October 1997. On the prevalence of 'virtually racialist' views of Russia within the US policymaking establishment, see Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tomb- stone of Russian Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 5-6. 24. The danger of 'recreating a kind of iron curtain' with an expanded NATO is addressed by Hoffman, 'The United States and Western Europe', 183. This was also on the minds of some congressional repre- sentatives who were sceptical towards NATO expansion. Note the questioning of Madeleine Albright by Senator Jeff Bingaman at the hearing on NATO enlargement of the Senate Armed Services Com- THE US AND MILITARY POWER l6l mittee, 23 April 1997. Bingaman noted Albright's remark that the Iron Curtain should not be recognised by NATO as a block to expansion, lest such action should validate Stalin's dividing line in Europe: 'But [NATO expansion] does validate the notion that there is going to be a dividing line. And instead of eliminating the dividing line, it essentially sets out to move it. And we are saying that — we're putting the empha- sis on moving the dividing line, rather than on eliminating it. And that concerns me.' 25. A detailed (but jargon-filled) summary of the shift towards offensive operations and missions outside NATO's traditional sphere of influence is offered by Charles Barry,'Combined Joint Task Forces in Theory and Practice', in Gordon, ed., NATO's Transformation, 203-19. 26. See Madeleine Albright's statement to the North Atlantic Council, Brussels, 8 December 1998; and her subsequent press conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Rather cryptically, she told one reporter that 'we are not trying to get NATO to go global.... What we want is for NATO to be able to act in the area that it now acts in and also to be able to have missions out of area that affect the interests of NATO members.' 27. On European reservations, see William Drozdiak, 'Albright Urges NATO to Take Broader Role', Washington Post, 9 December 1998. For a more direct sense of European anxieties over American intentions, see Jonathan Steele, 'Nuking the Neighbours', Guardian, 5 January 1999. 28. The context of EU failures or reluctance since 1990 is an important one for NATO expansion; the inability of the EU either to mobilise independently in Bosnia, or to persuade the US to take an interest before 1995, hardly established the EU's claims to a separate European defence policy; while the increasing emphasis on stringent economic criteria for European Union membership largely and indefinitely alien- ated the former Warsaw Pact nations from the EU, making NATO the next best option for a gesture of Western integration. On NATO membership as a consolation prize, see Hoffmann, 'The United States and Western Europe', 183; on the inability of the EU to organise ef- fectively away from NATO, see Philip H. Gordon, 'Introduction', in Gordon, ed., NATO's Transformation, 4-5. 29. See, for example, the remarks of Professor Jack Matlock of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, at the hearing on NATO expansion of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 30 October 1997. In the panel discussion that followed Henry Kissinger's appearance, Matlock lamented the perspective of Cold War triumphalists on Russia: 'So to treat [the Russians] now as if they were somehow a defeated enemy and a potential threat to the future would be making the same mistake we made after World War I when we blamed Germany exclusively for the First World War.' 30. Although it is couched in the language of the seasoned US strategy- wonk, Robert Joseph's 'NATO's Role in Counter-Proliferation', in 162 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Gordon, ed., NATO's Transformation, 235—55, offers an ominous pros- pect of NATO's future: 'While the Alliance must retain the option for an effective nuclear response [against possible 'rogue' users of weapons of mass destruction], it is essential to complement NATO's nuclear forces with a mixture of conventional counter-force enhancements and active and passive defences.' Somewhat improbably, Joseph recommends this aggressive posture to combat, among other threats, the danger that North Korea may bomb 'substantial sections' of western Europe 'in the next few years.' 31. Testimony of Henry Kissinger before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 30 October 1997. 32. Clinton announced his new policy in the 1999 State of the Nation address: 'It is time to reverse the decline in defense spending that began in 1985.' His policy shift was welcomed by Democrats and especially by Republicans, who controlled Congress and would vouchsafe the extra funds. For some indication of the Republican ardour for military spend- ing, note the widespread opposition to the Kosovo war in Congress in May 1999, followed immediately by a Republican emergency-spending bill which made available an extra $5 billion for 'military programs that the Pentagon never asked for'. Tim Weiner,'Bill on Emergency Spend- ing Hits $15 Billion at the Finish', New York Times, 14 May 1999. 33. These figures are drawn from '100 Companies Receiving the Largest Dollar Volume of Prime Contract Awards - Fiscal Year 1998', US De- partment of Defense. 34. For an overview of the leading American role in the international arms trade, see Jane E. Nolan, 'United States', in Andrew J. Pierre, ed., Cascade of Arms: Managing Conventional Weapons Proliferation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), 131-49; Ian Anthony, 'The United States: Arms Exports and Implications for Arms Production', in Herbert Wulf, ed., Arms Industry Limited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 66-83; an d William W. Keller, Arm in Arm: The Political Economy of the Global Arms Trade (New York: Basic Books, 1995), especially 51-96. On the importance of foreign sales to US military contractors, see Greider, Fortress America, 61-5. Although the 19905 have seen a proliferation of weapons trade fairs around the world, the use of US military equip- ment in actual conflicts (accompanied by intense interest from the inter- national media) has been the best advertisement for the American prod- ucts on offer to other countries. Ethan B. Kapstein has described the 1991 GulfWar, for example, as 'the greatest arms sale show on earth'; 'America's Arms-Trade Monopoly', Foreign Affairs 73, no. 3 (1994): 13— 19 at 15. 35. On the US efforts to dominate the trade in conventional arms, and the political consequences of this policy, see Stephen D. Goose and Frank Smyth, 'Arming Genocide in Rwanda', Foreign Affairs 73, no. 5 (1994): 86—96; and the testimony of Holly Burkhalter, program director for Human Rights Watch, before the Foreign Operations Subcommittee of THE US AND MILITARY POWER 163 the Senate Appropriations Committee, 23 May 1995. President Jimmy Carter was responsible for legislation in the US to curb the arms trade, but his efforts met with considerable opposition from the very begin- ning, and subsequent presidential administrations (and Congresses) have made little effort to comply with the letter of the law. See Joanna Spear, Carter and Arms Sales: Implementing the Carter Administration's Arms Transfer Restraint Policy (London: Macmillan, 1995). Burkhalter noted in her testimony that, since the late 19705, 'weapons have flowed to ex- tremely abusive countries as if this provision of law did not exist, with disastrous consequences for human rights.' 36. William D. Hartung, in his testimony before the 23 May 1995 Foreign Operations Subcommittee, noted that US troops had faced US-developed weapons in Panama, Iraq, Somalia and Haiti; Hartung called this element of American export policy 'the boomerang effect': 'Our "carefully considered" arms transfer policy is batting i.ooo [i.e., 100 per cent] in putting US weapons in the hands of our adversaries in every major war this nation has been involved in during the post-Cold War era.' Hartung's points were reinforced by Lawrence J. Korb in testimony before the same committee: 'Imagine the outcry in this nation if American military men and women are killed by the late model F-i5, F/A-i8 and F-i6 aircraft, Bradley tanks, or Patriot missiles, all of which have been exported in the last 5 years to nations with a history of instability.' 37. As we will see in the debate over the proposed F-22 fighter, the proliferation of high-technology military hardware is a powerful argument for the acquisition of even more advanced equipment. For a recent articulation of this argument, see the essay by Oscar Arias Sanchez, former president of Costa PUca,'Stopping America's Most Lethal Export', New York Times, 23 June 1999. Arias noted the two components of US defense contractors' strategy - to encourage domestic military spend- ing, and exports to 'friendly' regimes - and then linked the two: 'This two-pronged approach serves the manufacturers well: by shipping top- of-the-line arms overseas, they create greater dangers to surmount.They can then argue that continued American supremacy requires the develop- ment of even more sophisticated weapons systems — weapons that translate into lucrative defense contracts.' 38. For a sense of the harmony of (elite) interests preserved by this policy, see Gottlieb, Defense Addiction, 123-36; at 124, Gottlieb laconically notes that 'everybody gains from this arrangement except the taxpayers.' Greider, Fortress America, 11-13, notes that the US has offloaded a 'virtual army' of tanks in the past decade, giving them away to other nations, encouraging local museums to preserve them, and even dumping them in the sea to form artificial reefs for bemused fish. Greider quotes from a 1997 Federation of American Scientists report which notes the coinci- dence of the early retirement of such weapons and the massive procure- ment of newer models: 'The services appear to be giving away still useful equipment in order to justify procurement of new weaponry.' 164 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? 39. Boies, Buying for Armageddon, 27—40, offers a detailed account of the entanglement of Congress, the Executive, the Pentagon, and defence contractors, paying particular attention to the web of consultative com- mittees and policy recommendation boards which are staffed by 'experts' who move easily from private to public work. Top officials, even members of presidential cabinets, abide by the 'revolving door' principle and see no conflict of interest in a career which takes them from the corporate boardroom of a military contractor to the Pentagon or State Department, and then back again. Gottlieb, Defense Addiction, 113-18, makes the important point that employees of defence corporations did much worse in the 19905 than the shareholders and the executives of those corporations: blue-collar workers enjoyed only a slight share of government 'conversion' assistance (only a quarter of which was dedicated to employee re-training) and were laid off in huge numbers; whilst bosses and shareholders enjoyed huge bonuses and dividends as corporate efficiency and profitability increased, a consistent feature of'downsizing' across all branches of US industry in the past decade. 40. Tim Smart, 'Count Corporate America Among NATO's Staunchest Allies', Washington Post, 13 April 1999. 41. We should also note, in passing, that the military's lengthy affair with corporate America has led some to suggest corporate solutions for the military's problems. David McCormick, a former army lieutenant and now a consultant with McKinsey and Company, suggested in 'The Draft Isn't the Answer', New York Times, 10 February 1999, that the armed forces could solve their recruitment problems with performance-related pay. How this would be calculated — the number of bombs dropped, the number of bad guys killed, avoidance of 'collateral damage' — was less clear. 42. Senator John Harkin expressed his scepticism towards NATO expansion at the hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee, 21 October 1997: 'My fear is that NATO expansion will not be a Marshall Plan to bring stability and democracy to the newly freed European nations, but rather a Marshall Plan for defense contractors who are chomping at the bit to sell weapons and make profits. Billions of dollars in military upgrades are at stake in this agreement.' On the contractors' special deals for eastern European NATO ingenues, and the Pentagon's efforts to assist the new customers for US weapons, see Greider, Fortress America, 97-101. 43. On the F-22's development, see James P. Stevenson, 'The Long Battle', Aerospace America, November 1998; and Greider, Fortress America, 40, 44-5- 44. On the Congressional action, see Bradley Graham, 'House Passes Defense Bill, Omits Funding for F-22 Jet', Washington Post, 23 July 1999. Bill Clinton confirmed his support for the F-22 in a press conference at the White House, 21 July 1999. On the frantic efforts of Lockheed and the Pentagon to reverse the funding freeze, see Elizabeth Becker, 'Lockheed THE US AND MILITARY POWER 165 Lobbies Furiously to Restore Financing for the F-22*, New York Times, 23 July 1999; and 'Air Force Jet in Fierce Fight, in Capitol', New York Times, 8 September 1999. The Air Force Association made its own contribution by sending members of Congress the provocatively tided promotional puff F-22: Does Air Superiority Matter? Becker notes that Lockheed Martin had spent more than $2 million on lobbyists in the first six months of 1999, and contributed more than $i million to political candidates of all parties in the 1998 Congressional elections. 45. For an account of the spiralling costs of the programme, see Tim Weiner, 'House is Prepared to Cut Off Funds For F-22 Fighters', New York Times, 17 July 1999. On the prospect of F-22 sales to Israel, see Abdel Monem Said Aly, 'The Middle East and the Persian Gulf: An Arab Perspective', in Pierre, ed., Cascade of Arms, 253-83 at 261. Bumpers's remark was noted by Becker in 'Air Force Jet in Fierce Fight'. 46. Report of the Committee on Appropriations on the Department of Defense Appropriations Bill, io6th Congress, ist Session, 20 July 1999. Initial scepticism about the chances of the cancellation of the F-22 programme came from Lawrence J. Korb, 'Why One Vote Won't Kill The F-22', New York Times, 26 July 1999; and David A. Fulghum, 'F-22 Headed for Reprieve from Congressional Ax', Aviation Week and Space Technology, 9 August 1999. After the Pentagon's furious response to the Congressional hesitation, and Lockheed's expensive lobbying effort, a 'compromise' was reached which affirmed the Pentagon's plan to move the plan to a production/procurement track, even as the military and Lockheed agreed to more F-22 testing. See Juliet Eilperin, 'Hill Com- promise Saves F-22 Fighter Jet, Funds Further Testing', Washington Post, i October 1999. 47. Many commentators noted that the military and its contractors, and even many Congressional representatives, were stunned by the action of the House Appropriations Committee in July 1999; and the rhetoric emanating from the Pentagon and Lockheed all but conceded that the proponents of the F-22 hadn't tried as hard as they could to persuade Congress of the merits of the programme. The speedy Congressional volte-face of September and October 1999 suggests that just a little more alarmist rhetoric and a few more campaign dollars might be sufficient to circumvent Congressional scrutiny. On the surprise of Lockheed and the Pentagon at the Appropriations Committee decision, see Robert S. Dudney,'Battle of the F-22', Air Force Magazine, Septem- ber 1999. Michael O'Hanlon, a researcher at a think-tank which ex- pressed doubts about the viability of the F-22, complained about the number of Pentagon and defence industry advisers who blanketed Congress with literature supporting the fighter: 'The Pentagon says it's not lobbying, but there's about a half dozen of us in the think-tank world and about a thousand of them talking to Congress.' Becker, 'Air Force Jet in Fierce Fight'. 48. Report on the Department of Defense Appropriations Bill. 166 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? 49. For a representative sample of the military's scaremongering, see the op-ed piece by acting secretary of the Air Force, F. Whitten Peters, 'Are We Ready to Lose the Next Air War?', New York Times, 24 July 1999. The likelihood of any threat to existing US fighters from Russia is very low. Although the Russian firm Sukhoi unveiled its 8-37 airplane in 1998, one aerospace commentator noted that it was 'seen more with curiosity than caution by aircraft experts', and that the design would require massive funding (money which Russia does not have) and a decade of development to realise:'The threat to the West ... may be in setting up the 8-37 as a 'straw man' in order for Western air forces to obtain scarce funding for weapons to counter it.' Rick DeMeis, 'Russia's Golden Eagle Challenges US Raptor', Design News, 2 February 1998. 50. For an account of Reagan's enthusiasm for Star Wars, see Philip M. Boffey et al., Claiming the Heavens: The New York Times Complete Guide to the Star Wars Debate (New York: Times Books, 1988). This account was published before the revelation of serious exaggerations and errors in the technical planning of the original laser concepts. For a more critical perspective on the faulty science which went into the Star Wars project, see William J. Broad, Teller's War: The Top-Secret Story Behind the Star Wars Deception (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). Broad sketches a key role in missile defence for Edward Teller, the inventor of the hydrogen bomb, who kept alive Reagan's hopes of a laser-based system in the 19805, before switching allegiance (after the discrediting of his views on lasers) to 'kill vehicle' technology in the 19905. This second strand of Star Wars continued to enjoy billions of dollars of research funding at the century's end. 51. For an overview of the politics in this shift, see Eric Schmitt, 'Missile Defenses Leave Fantasy Behind', NewYork Times, 21 March 1999. Analysts speculated that the Democrats feared their opposition to NMD would expose them to the charge that they were 'soft on defense', and that with the 2000 election in view, they could not afford to allow this impression to go uncorrected. The fact that NMD experiments con- sistently failed seems not to have bothered either party. 52. For a description of Boeing's work on the laser track, and the problems with this programme, see the United States General Accounting Office report, 'Theater Missile Defense: Significant Technical Challenges Face the Airborne Laser Program', October 1997. 53. On Raytheon's contribution to the NMD, see Michael A. Dornheim, 'National Missile Defense Focused on June Review', Aviation Week and Space Technology, 16 August 1999. It's hard to tell if the 'Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle'was so designated because Raytheon's euphemisms depart- ment was on vacation, or to compensate for the fact that the 'kill vehicle' resembles an inverted blender. 54. For details of this failure, see Reuters, 'Antimissile Test is Aborted', New York Times, 26 May 1999. 55. On these early efforts to rig Star Wars tests, see William J. Broad, 'New THE US AND MILITARY POWER l6j Anti-Missile System to be Tested this Week', New York Times, 24 May 1999. 56. On efforts to rush missile-defence programmes to production tracks, see Bradley Graham, 'Pentagon Gives THAAD a Boost', Washington Post, 20 August 1999. After reporting two successful tests of THAAD - after seven consecutive failures - a Pentagon spokesman declared that the US military would now skip more prototype testing 'rather than spending months and millions of dollars on another THAAD prototype launch only to prove a point'.This confidence belied the fact that, with a success rate of around 30 per cent, THAAD had still to prove the point that it could be made to work consistently. Broad, 'New Anti- Missile System', estimates the cost of missile defence in the past few decades at $110 billion; Robert Park, Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, puts Pentagon spending on missile defence at $60 billion since 1980 in 'Another "Star Wars" Sequel', New York Times, 15 February 1999. 57. Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the Los Angeles Times that Pentagon planners 'don't want a limited system' of missile defence: 'They want a lot more. That's what's got these contractors salivating.' Paul Richter, 'Deployment of US Missile Shield Looks Ever Likelier', Los Angeles Times, 21 March 1999. 58. Although many commentators have observed in the Star Wars pro- gramme this privileging of a military over a diplomatic approach, the argument was put most directly by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans A. Bethe, who observed the various experiments and research efforts from the beginning: 'These people want to eliminate the danger of nuclear weapons by technical means. I think this is futile. The only way to eliminate it is by having a wise policy.... The solution can only be political. It would be terribly comfortable for the President and the Secretary of Defense if there was a technical solution. But there isn't any.'William J. Broad,'Star Wars is Coming, But Where is it Going?', New York Times, 6 December 1987. 59. A focus for debate on the American recollection ofVietnam was Robert McNamara's In Retrospect (New York: Times Books, 1995). For a cogent critique of McNamara and his extremely conditional regrets, see Noam Chomsky, 'Memories', Z Magazine 8, no. 7/8 (1995): 28-40. For an account of the skewed lessons learned in Vietnam, as applied to the US-Iraq conflict, see Bruce Cumings's 'No More Vietnams: The Gulf War', in his War and Television (London: Verso, 1992), 103-28. 60. On US support for Saddam, even into 1990, see Alan Friedman, Spider's Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq (New York: Bantam Books, 1993); Bruce W. Jentleson, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush, and Saddam, igSz—icjCjo (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994); and Mark Phythian, Arming Iraq: How the US and Britain Secretly Built Saddam's War Machine (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997). 61. Although many in the US media were complicit in spinning the Iraqi 0 , s 168 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? crisis towards ideas of tyranny, invasion and stability, the obviously undemocratic nature of the Kuwaiti and Saudi regimes, and the un- avoidable fact of the oil riches of the region, forced many commenta- tors to accept the truth of American interest. Thomas Friedman, hardly the most critical observer of US foreign policy, told New York Times readers soon after Saddam's invasion, and the American response, that 'this is about money, about protecting governments loyal to America and punishing those that are not, and about who will set the price of oil.' Thomas L. Friedman, 'Confrontation in the Gulf: US Gulf Policy -Vague "Vital Interest'", New York Times, 12 August 1990. 62. On Saddam's 'linkage' peace plan of 12 August 1990, which would also have required Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, see Walid Khalidi,'Why Some Arabs Support Saddam', in Sifry and Cerf, eds, The Gulf War Reader, 161-71. 63. For a contemporary account of the pressure on Bush to 'lose or use' his huge army in the Gulf, see Pack Atkinson and Bob Woodward, 'Gulf Turning Points', Washington Post, 2 December 1990. On the Pentagon's broader strategic objectives during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, see Klare, Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, 51—64. 64. On the ethnic and religious make-up of Iraq, and its influence on US foreign policy, see Hiro, Desert Shield to Desert Storm, 400-407; Faleh 'Abd al-Jabbar, 'Why the Intifada Failed', in Fran Hazelton, ed., Iraq Since the Gulf War: Prospects for Democracy (London: Zed Books, 1994), 97-117; and Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi'is of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 273-81. 65. For a contemporary view of the shift from demonising Saddam to vouchsafing his survival, see John Pearson et al., 'Gulf Politics Have Bush Treading Softly in Iraq', Business Week, 8 April 1991. 66. Until more classified documents come to light, it is difficult to assess the degree to which the events of March and April 1991 were intended by the US. Some facts, however, are clear. For an overview of the shift in US policy, and the fear of instability in a post-Saddam Iraq, see Freedman and Karsh, The Gulf Conflict i^o-iggi, 410-21; and Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 37-41. Freedman and Karsh quote a State Department official as saying (in February 1991, before the uprising) that 'if [Saddam] survives, and is defanged, so what, why worry about it? He can make all the speeches he wants. A weakened Saddam with a weakened political reputation is maybe better for us if he is in power than if he is martyred.' On the encouragement offered by American leaders to the Iraqi resistance, and the rapid collapse of this encouragement when Saddam began his counterattacks, see Nakash, The Shi'is of Iraq, 274-5; al-Jabbar, 'Why the Intifada Failed', 97; Cockburn and Cockburn, Out of the Ashes, 12-13; and John Simpson, From the House of War (London: Hutchinson, 1991), 360-61. For a corollary in the Kurdish uprising in the north of Iraq, see Michael THE US AND MILITARY POWER 169 Kelly, Martyrs' Day: Chronicle of a Small War (New York: Random House, 1993), 279—280; and Sheri Laizer, Martyrs, Traitors and Patriots: Kurdistan after the Gulf War (London: Zed Books, 1996), 30-31. The most direct accusation of US complicity in the massacre of thousands of Kurds and Shia Muslims by Saddam's forces is offered by Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time: US War Crimes in the Gulf (New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 1992), 55-8. The American belief that the 'stability' of the region depended on a military strongman in charge of Iraq was reflected in the original US hope that a 'palace coup' would simply substitute an- other military despot for Saddam: see Freedman and Karsh, The Gulf Conflict 1990-1991, 415. 67. For general accounts of the effects of sanctions, see Geoff Simons, The Scourging of Iraq: Sanctions, Law and Natural Justice (London: Macmillan, 1996); and Sarah Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam: The Politics of Intervention in Iraq (London: I.E. Tauris, 1999). 68. For the US justification for this attack, which reached improbably for the self-defence provisions of Article 51 of the UN Charter, see Bill Clinton's 'Address to the Nation', The White House, 26 June 1993. 69. This interpretation of US policy as a failure is exemplified by Caspar Weinberger and Peter Schweizer, 'A Strategy with No End', USA To- day, 18 December 1998. 70. A rather blunt version of this position was offered by former US ambassador to Iraq, Edward Peck, in a 1996 television interview: 'You get rid of Saddam, and what's going to happen? You know, it isn't that he's a neat guy. He serves as the rather vile totalitarian cork that bottles that place into a country.' Peck dismissed the notion that Saddam posed some external threat — 'He doesn't pose a threat to anybody in the region. We've taken care of that and we're watching very carefully to make sure it won't happen again' — and chose instead to paint a picture of the 'bloodbath' of ethnic violence that would supposedly follow Saddam's demise. As Peck put it, as if the message was not already clear: 'I mean - Can you spell Bosnia?"The World Today', CNN, 12 September 1996. 71. Most commentators have agreed that, since his suppression of the uprising in 1991, Saddam has consolidated his rule over Iraq; and that the sanctions have enfeebled the Iraqi people. For perspectives on this unfortunate outcome, see Maggie O'Kane,'The Wake ofWar', Guardian, 18 May 1996; and Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam, 92-3, 194-5. Of course, the goal of keeping Saddam 'in his box', as State Depart- ment planners have put it, does not necessarily require that the civilian population of Iraq is happy or healthy; quite the reverse. A recent assessment by the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) suggested that the sanctions regime since 1991 has 'been a success to date', given the containment of Saddam and his inability to threaten his neighbours. The cost of this success - the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians - is unfortunate, but bearable, at least from an American I7O ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY ? perspective. As the CFR report puts it, 'The sanctions have not created conditions enabling forces within Iraq to depose him. (However, this was a desire rather than an explicit objective of the sanctions.)' Eric D.K. Melby, 'Iraq', in Richard N. Haass, ed., Economic Sanctions and American Diplomacy (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1998), 107-28 at 123. 72. '60 Minutes', CBS, 12 May 1996. For details of the US efforts after 1994 to alter the interpretation of the UN resolutions against Iraq to maintain a sanctions regime, see Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam, 79-80. 73. On the devastating effects of sanctions, see John Mueller and Karl Mueller,'Sanctions of Mass Destruction', Foreign Affairs 78, no. 3 (1999): 43-65. Noting that US rhetoric frequently employs the threat ofWMDs to justify sanctions, Mueller and Mueller argue that the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths under the sanctions regime demon- strate that the sanctions are themselves a WMD: 'If the US estimates of the human damage in Iraq are even roughly correct, therefore, it would appear — in a so far futile effort to remove Saddam from power and a somewhat more successful effort to constrain him militarily - economic sanctions may well have been a necessary cause of the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history.' For recent UN estimates which suggest that child and infant mortality rates in Iraq have doubled in the decade since the Gulf War, resulting in hundreds of thousands of child deaths, see 'Child and Maternal Mortality Survey, Preliminary Report: Iraq', UNICEF, July 1999. Even Dennis Halliday, the UN official responsible for humanitarian policy in Iraq, was unable to support the continuing sanctions regime, resigning in August 1998 and lamenting 'our level of complicity in the suffering'. Michael Powell, 'The Deaths He Cannot Sanction: Ex-UN Worker Details Harm to Iraqi Children', Washington Post, 17 December 1998. 74. For an explicit comparison between US interests in (and understanding of) the Gulf situation and Bosnia, see Wayne Bert, The Reluctant Super- power: United States' Policy in Bosnia, iggi-igg^ (London: Macmillan, I 997)> 108—10; and James Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War (London: Hurst & Co., 1997), 203-8. Gow, 208, suggests that the arrival of the Clinton administration, for all its rhetoric of principle and morality in foreign affairs, signalled very little: 'US policy approaches graduated from virtually no action to little action.' 75. Richard Holbrooke has described the various ways in which Dayton has bound the US to Bosnia in his To End a War, revised edition (New York: Random House, 1999), 360-72. 76. For a critical perspective on NATO's role in the Bosnian war, and a sceptical treatment of NATO's future as a peacekeeping force, see William G. Hyland, 'Is NATO Still Relevant?', in Clemens, ed., NATO and the THE US AND MILITARY POWER iyi Quest for Post-Cold War Security, 154-61. Of course, European govern- ments were also embarrassed by NATO's failure in Bosnia, and more amenable to the assuaging of their guilt via offensive operations in Kosovo. See Peter Ford, 'Europe's Kosovo Aim: Redress Bosnia In- action', Christian Science Monitor, 4 February 1999. Within a few days of the start of the bombing of Kosovo and Serbia in March 1999, the New York Times published an editorial clarifying the benefits to NATO of this attack: 'The air campaign against Yugoslavia is doing what years of abstract debate could not. It is beginning to define the role for the NATO alliance to play in post-cold war Europe.' 'Inventing NATO's New Role', New York Times, 28 March 1999. 77. For a general background on the post-Dayton campaigns of Milosevic against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, see Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History, updated edition (New York: HarperCollins, 1999). 353—6; and Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1999), 28—37. 78. On the diplomatic conclusion to the bombing, see Michael Elliott, 'Getting to the Table', Newsweek, 14 June 1999. 79. Susan Sontag argued in favour of NATO intervention in 'Why Are We in Kosovo?', New York Times, 2 May 1999. Responding to critics who bemoaned US absence from other conflicts, and the 'eurocentrism' of US concern for Kosovar Albanians, Sontag was icily dismissive: 'If several African states had cared enough about the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda (nearly a million people!) to intervene militarily, say, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, would we have criticized this initia- tive as being Afrocentric?' Of course, Sontag's jibe overlooked the fact that many African soldiers were waiting for months in 1994 for the delivery of US-promised vehicles; but her advocacy of a US right to take interest in Kosovo was unburdened by such detail. For a collection of right-leaning views in support of intervention, see Don Feder, 'Why Right Went Cuckoo Over Kosovo', Boston Herald, 14 June 1999. 80. For examples of anti-war sentiment on the right and left respectively, see Charles Krauthammer, 'We Don't Need to Inflict', Washington Post, 26 February 1999; and Chomsky, The New Military Humanism. 81. The schism in the American left over Kosovo intervention is described by EJ. Dionne, Jr., 'Not Munich, But the Holocaust', Washington Post, 30 April 1999; and Michael Kazin, 'Culture Wars: For Left, It's Finally Post-Vietnam', Los Angeles Times, 30 May 1999. See also Patricia Cohen, 'Ground Wars Make Strange Bedfellows', New York Times, 30 May 1999. 82. Dayton's role in strengthening Milosevic makes the later US appeals to a 'democratic opposition' in Serbia seem the more disingenuous. Writing before the Kosovo conflict, Laura Silber and Allan Little were in no doubt that Dayton had bound the future of the region to the good behaviour of an expansionist dictator:'Milosevic controlled all the pillars of power: the police, the media and finance. In Serbia, there were only two people who mattered: Slobadan and Mira [Milosevic's wife]. This 172 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? was the legacy of Dayton. The West based its peace agreement on Milosevic and his opposite number in Croatia, bolstering their dictator- ships at the expense of any support for democracy. That was part of the price of Dayton.' Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, revised edition (New York: Penguin, 1997), 385-6. 83. Bill Clinton, in an effort to explain 'this Kosovo thing' to an audience in March 1999, suggested that Kosovo 'is about our values. What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier?' 'Remarks by the President to the AFSCME Biennial Convention', Washington, DC, 23 March 1999. One sceptical journal- ist wondered aloud at a White House press conference about Milose- vic's transition from Dayton-statesman to Kosovo-Hider: 'Joe, in the Bosnian War, there were many more Muslims massacred, perhaps 200,000, which is about 100 times more than have been massacred during the Kosovo offensive. And yet, at the conclusion of that war, Milosevic was brought to Dayton and treated with the respect that's accorded a head of state, and signed the peace agreement. Now he's apparently killed 2,000 people, and President Clinton and Gore are both calling him a junior league Hitler. How do you reconcile that?' Press Briefing by Joe Lockhart, The White House, 29 March 1999. 84. For a summary of the inconsistencies and vacillation of Washington's policy on Kosovo after Dayton, see William G. Hyland, Clinton's World: Remaking American Foreign Policy (Westport: Praeger, 1999), 44-7. 85. On the NATO tactics, see Pvichard J. Newman et al., 'Making War From 15,000 ft', US News and World Report, 10 May 1999. Although the State Department tried to pass off these tactics - including the prohibition on low-level flying - as reflecting the nervousness of their European NATO allies, many commentators in the US easily traced them to the Clinton administration's desire to avoid any American casualties, what- ever the cost in Kosovar Albanian lives. See Blaine Harden and John M. Broder, 'Clinton's Aims', New York Times, 22 May 1999; and 'Messy War, Messy Peace', Economist, 12 June 1999. The Economist editorial noted that 'this was a war to stop ethnic cleansing, but the main effect was to intensify it. The bombing campaign accelerated the killing ... and it accelerated the emptying of the population at large. In humanitarian terms, the Kosovo campaign turned into a disaster.' See also the enter- taining exchange between Pat Buchanan and Senator Joseph Lieberman, 'Meet the Press', NBC, 25 April 1999. Buchanan, contending that 'we ourselves have ignited this debacle', noted that 'the massive NATO ethnic cleansing has been caused - is a consequence of air strikes and Rambouillet' (Rambouillet was the French town in which the US-led, abortive Kosovo peace accord was proposed in early 1999). Viewing this blunder, Buchanan wondered if 'there's anybody here who would not accept immediately the status quo ante?' Lieberman responded in double-talk: 'This is an outrageous claim. The status quo ante was about to be Milosevic moving into Kosovo and doing exactly what he's done, THE US AND MILITARY POWER 173 slaughtering the Kosovars [stress added].' 86. On the difficult relations between returning refugees and Serb civilians in Kosovo, see Karl Vick,'Rage Fuels Reprisals in Kosovo', Washington Post, i July 1999. Three months later, around 100,000 Serb civilians had left Kosovo, and the UN police commissioner Sven Fredriksen was forced to admit that 'the hate is enormous'. Jeffrey Smith, 'Grenade Blast in Market Kills 2 Kosovo Serbs', Washington Post, 29 September 1999. 87. On the hasty transition from NATO/the US to the UN, see William Shawcross,'The Cleanup Crew', Newsweek, 21 June 1999.The Pentagon not only dropped the job of policing Kosovo onto the UN, it actually blamed the UN for not moving quickly enough to take up the slack. See Eric Schmitt,'UN Drags Feet in Kosovo, Pentagon Leaders Declare', New York Times, 21 July 1999; and, for the UN's testy response, Judith Miller, 'UN Says it's NATO that Lags in Kosovo', New York Times, 22 July 1999. Given that the US and its NATO allies had happily marginalised the United Nations prior to this 'clean-up' mission, the haste with which Pentagon chiefs criticised the UN over its policing operation was seen by many as unseemly: see David Hannay, 'Balkan Scapegoat', Financial Times, 16 July 1999. 88. See Thomas E. Ricks, 'These B-2 Pilots', Wall Street Journal, 19 April 1999. The wife of one pilot noted that her husband's long-distance commute was 'very strange — to drop bombs and then come home and watch my son's soccer game'. One defence analyst observed that this preference for the relatively detached method of air warfare had some precedent: 'You do it nice and cleanly. Nobody gets their feet muddy. A pilot flies over at 15,000 feet, kills only those people that need to be killed, flies home and has a cold beer with a beautiful young lady. This is not a new concept.' Harden and Broder, 'Clinton's Aims'. 89. On the implications of this sustained use of US forces, see Steven Lee Myers, 'Bomb. Missile. Bomb. Hey, It Looks Like a War', New York Times, 21 February 1999; and, for details of the military offensive against Iraq, Steven Lee Myers and Tim Weiner, 'Weeks of Bombing Leave Iraq's Power Structure Unshaken', New York Times, 7 March 1999; and Philip Shenon,'US Quietly Intensifies Attacks on Iraq', New York Times, 5 May 1999. 90. For accounts of the 'dumb' weapons in common use in the Gulf, see note 19 above. 91. Evidence of the destructiveness of these weapons arrived swiftly after the fighting: civilians and military personnel in Kosovo and Yugoslavia were killed by unexploded cluster 'bomblets' in the first month of the ceasefire. The Pentagon grimly confirmed that at least 11,000 NATO 'bomblets' might remain active throughout Kosovo and Yugoslavia, each one capable of killing civilians. Mark Fineman and Valerie Reitman, 'The Path to Peace', Los Angeles Times, 23 June 1999. 92. After NATO jets bombed a column of Kosovar Albanian refugees inside 174 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Kosovo, killing more than seventy people, Bill Clinton admitted that 'you cannot have this kind of conflict without some errors like this occurring. This is not a business of perfection.' Bill Clinton, 'Remarks to the American Society of Newspaper Editors', San Francisco, 15 April 1999. NATO forces killed Kosovar Albanian and Serb civilians both mistakenly (in the case of the refugee column, and the bombing of a train in April) and through planned attacks on Belgrade. For details of and perspectives on civilian casualties, see Chris Bird et al., 'After the Bombs, the Blame', Guardian, 15 April 1999; Robert Fisk, 'NATO Stained with Blood of Civilians', Independent, 15 April 1999; and Alexander Nicoll, 'The War Intensifies', Financial Times, 17 April 1999. 93. See Eric Schmitt,'Bombs are Smart, but People are Smarter', New York Times, 4 July 1999. Serb forces built fake tanks from wood, and placed barrels of water inside them (which would warm in the sun) to trick the thermal sensors of attacking NATO planes. This may explain the modest rate of attrition of Yugoslav tanks in Kosovo — around 200 of the 300 which entered Kosovo were unharmed at the ceasefire, despite being targeted persistently by the most powerful and sophisticated air force in the world. 94. For the view that the NATO victory was finally effected through the bombing of Yugoslav civilians, see Paul Richter, 'Crisis in Yugoslavia: Officials Say NATO Pounded Milosevic into Submission', Los Angeles Times, 5 June 1999. 95. The US has pursued a two-track strategy on the most notorious Ser- bian war criminals - those who have been indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal (including Radovan Karadic and Ratko Mladic, leaders of the Bosnian Serbs during the Bosnian war) have been al- lowed to come and go inside the NATO protectorate without arrest; and those major players, like Milosevic, who have not been charged with war crimes have been treated as statesmen and diplomats when this approach is amenable to American strategy On the failure to arrest Karadic and Mladic, or to pursue Milosevic even after his indictment by the International War Crimes Tribunal, see Michael Scharf, 'Indicted for War Crimes, Then What?', Washington Post, 3 October 1999. Jour- nalists at a White House press conference in March 1999, having heard Clinton administration officials apply reductio ad hitlerum to Milosevic over Kosovo, wondered if his simple acceptance of the Rambouillet agreement would wipe the slate clean (again): 'Joe, if I could just follow up on that interesting notion. If Milosevic did quit Kosovo and did sign Rambouillet, is he not a war criminal anymore?' Press Briefing with Joe Lockhart, The White House, 29 March 1999. 96. Milosevic survived the NATO bombardment, and may even have consolidated his political hold over Yugoslavia in the face of the US-led attack. See Scott Peterson, 'Serbia's Fracturing Opposition', Christian Science Monitor, 23 August 1999. 97. On the apathy or ignorance of most Americans towards the ongoing THE US AND MILITARY POWER 175 war with Iraq, see Myers, 'Bomb. Missile. Bomb'. Although the Kosovo situation had been discussed at length in the media in the weeks leading up to the NATO assault, public awareness remained low. One television producer in Florida told the New York Times of a flood of calls from viewers watching President Clinton s declaration of war, however: 'We kept receiving calls to the station asking us when President Clinton was going to stop speaking to the nation. These people wanted their show back on and they were really annoyed.' Rick Bragg et al.,'For Jane and Joe Public, Wariness and Ignorance', New York Times, 26 March 1999. The influence of public opinion in the US will be treated in more detail in the next chapter. 98. On the attack on Khobar Towers, see Christopher Dickey, 'Target: America', Newsweek, 8 July 1996; and Brian Duffy et al., 'Terror in the Gulf', US News and World Report, 8 July 1996. 99. On the relocation of US forces to a fortified base deep within the desert, see Douglas Jehl, 'US Military in Saudi Arabia Digs into the Sand', New York Times, 9 November 1996. US resentment at the slow progress of the (Saudi) criminal investigation was evident in Congres- sional hearings in 1998 and 1999; see the remarks of Arlen Specter to the hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on US counter-terrorism policy, iO5th Congress, 2nd Session, 3 September 1998. On the bomb- ings in Tanzania and Kenya, and the US government's attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan, see Madeleine Albright and Samuel Berger, press briefing, The White House, Washington, DC, 20 August 1998. 100. Several administration officials helped to dub bin Laden's Afghanistan camps a 'Terrorist University': see, for example, the op-ed article by Defense Secretary William Cohen, 'We Are Ready to Strike Again', Washington Post, 23 August 1998. On the contribution of the CIA to the construction of the 'university', see Tim Weiner, 'Afghan Camps Hidden in Hills', New York Times, 24 August 1998. 101. On CIA funding to the Mujaheddin and bin Laden, see Michael Dynes, 'Hunted Leader Trained By the CIA', Times (London), 22 August 1998. 102. The bombings probably strengthened bin Laden, in fact, and solidified his (previously shaky) claims to represent a genuine bulwark to American dominance in the Middle East. See John Barry et al.,'Making a Symbol of Terror', Newsweek, i March 1999. A similar boost was given to the government of Sudan, which had been mired in bitter domestic dis- pute and a de facto civil war: see Scott Peterson, 'US Attack is "Best Gift" for Sudan', Christian Science Monitor, 31 August 1998. 103. Serious reservations over the targeting of the al-Shifa plant were expressed in the days following the bombing: see Hassan Ibrahim et al., 'The Missiles, the Bungling Pentagon, and the Nerve Gas Factory that Never Was', Observer, 30 August 1998. By mid-1999, the US government had conceded that the al-Shifa plant manufactured ibuprofen and other medicines rather than nerve gas. SeeVernon Loeb,'A Dirty Business', Washington Post, 25 July 1999. A year after the attack, experts estimated Ij6 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? that the demolition of the factory — which produced around 90 per cent of Sudan's medicines - had led directly to a shortage of medicine and thousands of preventable deaths in the following months. See Jonathan Belke, 'Year Later, US Attack on Factory Still Hurts Sudan', Boston Globe, 22 August 1999. 104. The 'mastermind' of the World Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Yousef, told the court which sentenced him to 240 years in prison that he had employed violence against the US because 'this is the only language which you understand. It is very painful to innocent people and very painful for anyone to lose a close relative or a friend, but it was necessary. This is what it takes to make you feel the pain which you are causing to other people.'Yousef made specific reference to US support for Israel, the plight of the Palestinians, and to the effects of American-imposed or US-led economic sanctions against the civilian populations of Cuba and Iraq. The judge in the case, Kevin Thomas Duffy, brushed aside these political remarks and maintained that Yousef was 'an apostle of evil'. See Benjamin Weiser,'Mastermind Gets Life for Bombing of Trade Center', New York Times, 9 January 1998. 105. Oddly, American commentators seem fully aware of this threat, but have chosen largely to marginalise or ignore it, especially in their effort to promote missile defence and other high-profile military projects. New York Times pundit William Safire, in a puff for Star Wars spending in 1998, offered a bizarre rationale for disregarding the threat from terrorists working on the ground: 'Opponents of missile defense then tried a different argument: a shield in the sky would not stop a terrorist from sneaking a bomb into the US in a suitcase. True enough, and methods of detecting smuggled nuclear and germ weapons need refine- ment. But nations like China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, India and Pakistan have not been investing heavily in suitcases.' William Safire, 'Stop the "Incoming!"', New York Times, u June 1998. Safire s core argument for missile defence rests on the idea that 'rogue' governments have spent more money on long-range missile research than on luggage; a position which may reflect reality on one level, but which also ignores the fact that the threat of a 'suitcase bomb' would reside in its relatively cheap cost and the ease with which it might be brought into the US. (And, of course, the fact that statistics for the purchase of suitcases are not closely observed by Western intelligence services.) 6 CHAPTER 4 AMERICAN MISSIONS My fellow Americans, this is our moment. Let us lift our eyes as one nation, and from the mountaintop of this American Century, look ahead to the next one - asking God's blessing on our endeavors and on our beloved country. William Jefferson Clinton, 1999 State of the Union address 1 In the previous chapters, I have tried to give a sense of the shape and direction of American foreign policy at the end of the twentieth century. In order to tell this complex story in such a small space, I have largely pushed to one side the many interpretations and frame- works offered within the US to describe the course of American foreign relations. My aim in this final chapter is to redress this deficiency, and to set out some of the principal interpretations (and interpreters) of US foreign policy. I want also to give a sense of the settings in which American analysis takes place — and especially to consider the nexus of academia, think-tanks and government office which shapes the career of many policy 'experts'. Although the pre- dominant explanations for American foreign relations are seriously flawed, and occasionally absurd, we would do well to grasp these arguments, and to concede the fact that their proponents are often sincere in their advocacy. In the first section, I am going to deal mostly with academic interpreters of foreign policy, though it should be remembered that the boundary between academia and government service in the US is extremely porous. I will consider some of the most popular and resonant ideas of the past decade, before looking broadly at what the various analysts agree upon and share — in their careers and lifestyles as well as their thinking. In the second section, I want to look in more detail at the rhetoric and ideology of government officials, and 177 178 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? to examine the political context (including the relationship between the president and Congress) in which policy is made. I will also consider the role and perspective of the media, and finally the influence of public opinion on foreign-policy decisions. My aim in all this is not to give a complete picture of American politics or society, but instead to outline some of the obstacles that stand between US commentators and a clear-sighted view of American actions abroad. I've been arguing up to this point that US foreign policy is seriously flawed in its execution; to get a fuller sense of the problem, we have also to explore the problems of interpretation which have kept many Americans from a sober assessment of the US relationship with the rest of the world. THEORIES 'The need to be discriminating': foreign policy after the Cold War Although thousands of American academics and policy analysts had been fixated upon the USSR for more than forty years, surprisingly few of them managed to predict the demise of the Soviet Union in the late 19805. Consequently, the first responses to the 'new world order' were breathless and excited. The most famous interpretation was offered by Francis Fukuyama, an academic and occasional State Department adviser. According to Fukuyama, the bloodless resolu- tion of the Cold War presaged the 'end of history', at which time all the nations of the world would coalesce in a Western, liberal model of democratic capitalism. Fukuyama argued that the most significant debate in world history had ended with the Soviet bloc: although this meant that world affairs would henceforth seem more mundane, even boring, the 'end of history' also suggested quiet and peaceful times ahead for American foreign policy. 2 In the last chapter, we looked in some detail at the ways in which this optimism upset the American defence establishment, and at Saddam Husseins rude interruption of the new idyll. Fukuyama's perspective, however, was more attractive to some policy analysts. On the one hand, commentators like Charles Krauthammer cele- brated the 'unipolar moment', viewing the world as a stage cleared AMERICAN MISSIONS 179 of rival actors, and amenable to the uses and preferences of American power. 3 On the other hand, Bruce Russett, Tony Smith and others charged the US with a responsibility to promote democracy around the world, even suggesting that democratic countries were much less likely to go to war with each other than undemocratic nations. 4 The 'democratic peace' thesis attained a wide currency and the public approval of the Clinton administration; some commentators even revived the memory of Woodrow Wilson and spoke of a new US-led internationalism, with a commitment to the spread of democracy abroad as the cornerstone of American foreign policy. 5 Proponents of a new 'Wilsonianism' could take heart from the 'unipolar moment', which suggested that the US was now in a position to shape the world in any way it pleased. The speedy and comprehensive American victory in Iraq hardly discouraged this line of argument, especially as George Bush had framed the struggle in the abstract terms of democ- racy and rule of law, rather than the tangible American interest in oil and Middle East 'stability'. 6 In time, however, this euphoria subsided, and foreign-policy analysts outlined a more modest American role on the world stage, whilst simultaneously downplaying the ability of the US to solve the world's problems. It's not altogether surprising that commentators adjusted their expectations in these ways. If the US was truly the dominant power in a unipolar world, other governments and peoples might look to the US for assistance in dealing with their problems. Similarly, the 'democratic peace' argument might compel the Ameri- can government to support democracy in parts of the world - such as Africa — where few US interests were affected. Both perspectives threatened to commit American money and troops to regions of little strategic importance, with no obvious gain for the US. Beneath the resurgent, 'Wilsonian' rhetoric of democratisation and altruism, then, stronger currents of self-interest and isolationism swept away visions of a new era in foreign relations. 7 After the US intervention in Somalia in 1993, Richard Betts complained that US foreign policy had been distorted by the 'delusion of impartial intervention', and suggested that the US should either intervene heavily in foreign conflicts, or let 'the locals fight it out'; American forces might then enter an area only after the 'locals' had experienced 'exhaustion from prolonged carnage'. Sensing that the s 180 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY ? Clinton administration was poised uncomfortably between the strict pursuit of US interests and putatively humanitarian gestures, Betts essentially provided a justification for American detachment and local 'carnage'. Other analysts have tried to formalise this mandate for detachment, urging caution towards the previously feted notion of democratisation. In a 1997 article, Thomas Carothers attacked the idea that the promotion of democracy should be the lodestar of US foreign policy, claiming that those who had espoused this idea (in- cluding members of the Clinton administration) had overestimated American power: [O]nly in a very limited number of cases is the United States able to mobilize sufficient economic and political resources to have a major im- pact on the political course of other countries. If Betts questioned the ability of the US to make a difference in foreign conflicts, Carothers provided an argument for avoidance of overseas engagement based on the intractability of other nations' problems. These views reinforced each other, and undermined the more optimistic assumptions about the American role after the Cold War: that the US had the means to intervene abroad, and that Ameri- can intervention could make a difference. 8 Noting that the end of the Cold War had produced in the US the 'attractive idea' that 'US moral and pragmatic interests abroad were fusing', Carothers countered that the rest of the world was not des- tined for democracy, nor would other countries necessarily respond to US encouragement in this area. Farced Zakaria, in an essay which was highly praised by his analyst peers, even argued that democracy itself might be the problem. Noting the rise of regimes which are nominally democratic, but actually repressive or recalcitrant, Zakaria suggested that the world was increasingly dominated by 'illiberal democracy', political systems which allowed for popular elections but which failed to guarantee the rule of law. For Zakaria, 'illiberal' democratisation would be a foolish goal for the US to pursue; in fact, he suggested that undemocratic countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and even China offered more opportunities to their citizens than those nations with free and fair elections, but a volatile social or legal climate. By this logic, the US might actually help regions or nations by denying them democratic rule, a policy AMERICAN MISSIONS l8l which would seem familiar to State Department veterans who remembered US support for undemocratic regimes during the Cold War. In Zakaria's work, the US agenda had come full circle, and the rationale for a new and dynamic American foreign policy had vanished entirely. 9 The analyses of Betts, Carothers and Zakaria contributed to the notion that Fukuyama's optimism was misplaced: crucially, however, these commentators argued that international conditions dictated a more modest role for the US abroad. By exaggerating the risks of intervention, and especially by impugning the prospects or the quality of democracy in other countries, these theorists tried to shift the debate from an assessment of US interests to an assessment of US capabilities: dissociating themselves from the 'unipolar moment' and the 'end of history', analysts downplayed the potential of American action even as they emphasised the discord and instability which characterised the post-Cold War world. More optimistic or inter- nationalist perspectives have thus given way to 'realistic' strategies for US foreign policy, largely revolving around the simple pursuit of American interests. Michael Mandelbaum, in a 1996 article, lambasted the idea of 'foreign policy as social work', pointing out that 'the world is a big place filled with distressed people', and cautioning against an American commitment to alleviation of their suffering. In Mandelbaum's view, the 'American public' supports assistance to 'poor, distant' countries only 'on behalf of traditional American national interests', a perception which leads to an 'inevitable conclusion': 'the promotion of domestic interests is the default strategy of American foreign policy'. 10 Meanwhile, Mandelbaum's colleague at Johns Hopkins University, John L. Harper, applied 'realism' to the question of American alliances and partnerships abroad, concluding that 'the one indispensable factor in forming reliable partnerships is not democracy or the lack of it, but self-interest, and there is not the slightest reason to think that will change.' Both Mandelbaum and Harper used this pessimistic vision of world affairs to license American self-interest, with predictable implications for non-Americans: Harp- er's realpolitik might legitimise American support for undemocratic or dictatorial regimes, while Mandelbaum's distaste for 'social work' confirmed the US abandonment of humanitarian crises throughout the globe, unless 'domestic interests' were coincidentally threatened. 11 182 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? The culmination of this line of thinking is Richard N. Haass's The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States After the Cold War. Haass argues that the end of superpower rivalry and the threat of nuclear war has created a 'deregulated' world, in which many countries enjoy much greater freedom to pursue their interests, or their grudges against each other. Haass contends that the US should try to 'regulate' this world in two ways: by deterring aggression between countries, and by encouraging participation in the global economy. The key to Haass's thesis, however, is his terminology. The US cannot be a global policeman, enforcing order and laws wherever they are threat- ened, but must accept a more modest role: A sheriff must understand his lack of clear authority in many instances, his need to work with others, and, above all, the need to be discriminat- ing in where and how he engages. 12 Although Haass's various prescriptions seem eminently sober and sensible, they depend on the idea of the US as a kind of honest broker, and on a vision of the post-Cold War world which resembles the Wild West: we are offered a picture of a benign sheriff facing a lawless terrain (and, presumably, hordes of restless natives), reliant on his own best guesses and the occasional friend to keep the peace whenever possible. Unashamed of the metaphor, Haass even praises the 1991 Gulf War coalition as an example of American 'foreign policy by posse', recommending similar vigilante outfits for future hot spots and conflicts. In fact, Haass's framework merely codifies the recent efforts to justify US self-interest by exaggerating the instability of the rest of the world. The result is a prescription for a 'discrimi- nating' foreign policy which would ignore instances of suffering and need, and underwrite the traditional pursuit of American interests. 13 We should note two lines of criticism which are absent from this reconfiguration of US policy and the global environment. In the first place, American commentators were disinclined to probe the 'demo- cratic peace' thesis, and especially reluctant to question the sincerity with which the Clinton administration advanced this policy. As we have seen, the evidence suggests, at best, an extremely brittle and meagre American commitment to 'state-building' or humanitarian resolve in Bosnia and Somalia; however, the abortive American actions in each were largely held up by US critics as evidence of the folly of AMERICAN MISSIONS 183 intervention, rather than the folly of a very limited and fragile interest in seeing the job through. 14 Consequently, the shambolic American efforts fuelled the attempts of commentators to stress the volatility of the new world order, and the relative inability of the US to make a difference. Similarly, the inchoate and often underfunded UN operations of the 19905, frequently upset by American vetoes or US- induced budgetary restraints, were used by American commentators to marginalise the role of the UN in world affairs, and to suggest that a multilateral approach to instability and conflict was doomed to failure. We can therefore observe a reluctance on the part of these commentators to interrogate the American government's 'inter- nationalist' impulses, or the external efforts to find multilateral solutions to the world's problems. This inevitably hardened a new 'realism' in policymaking circles, and ensured the evaporation of the optimism of 1989 within a decade. The 'wild bazaar': selling global capitalism During the Cold War, foreign policy 'experts' in the US tended to be drawn from university departments of politics or international relations: these analysts were steeped in ideas of diplomacy and balance-of-power, inclined to make references to Thucydides or Hobbes or the Westphalian system, and reliant on traditional frame- works for understanding interactions between sovereign nation-states. In the 19908, as we have seen, these analysts quickly distanced them- selves from the more optimistic or progressive visions of a post-Cold War order, and realigned their thinking along traditional lines: the world was composed of nation-states - some better, some worse; some of more importance to the US, some of rather less importance. The task of US foreign policy was to define American interests against this variegated backdrop, and not to tarry on the improve- ment of the whole. 15 These traditional accounts have been challenged of late, however, by commentators from a new field of expertise: global capitalism. Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history' essay was less a prediction of social justice than a suggestion that the many nations of the world were moving towards participation in a single, interlocking economic system. Following Fukuyama's lead, a new breed of foreign-policy 184 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? analysts has emerged in recent years, with very different perspectives and biases than the old guard which had traditionally counselled the US government. These 'globalists' comprise not only professors of politics but also journalists, international lawyers, consultants, manage- ment gurus and economists. Given the onward march of global capitalism in the 19905, the globalists have also tended to sound much more optimistic, even triumphalist, than traditional commen- tators. While Haass and others have outlined a policy of cautious and selective American engagement with the rest of the world, the globalists have identified and celebrated the extensive and complex US involvement in the global economy. The first contention of the globalists is that the old foreign-policy framework of competing nation-states is nearing obsolescence. After centuries of exchange, interaction and conflict based on competing sovereignties, the world is now defined by international and multi- national interests and initiatives. In her 1997 essay 'Power Shift', Jessica Matthews argued for 'the rise of global civil society', suggest- ing that the peoples of the world would look beyond their national governments not only for goods and services, but in the process of self-identification and in an effort to improve their status. 'Nation states', opined Matthews, 'may simply no longer be the natural problem-solving unit.' The implication of this demise in national sovereignty is clear: American policymakers (and CEOs) should not become obsessed with national governments as the entryway into foreign societies, but should instead concentrate on the various non-governmental points of access and influence. Matthews looked hopefully to the business community, non-governmental organisa- tions (NGOs), and other 'non-state actors' to circumvent foreign governments and to speak directly to the would-be capitalists of the world, the latter presumably eager to participate in a transnational economy. 16 Following directly from the identification of economic change as the worlds most powerful force, globalists have plainly urged the American government to dedicate its foreign-policy resources to the promotion of American business abroad. Jeffrey Garten, who served as under-secretary of commerce in the Clinton administration, described the reorientation of traditional diplomatic goals which he had undertaken with his boss, trade secretary Ron Brown: AMERICAN MISSIONS 185 We had a mission: Brown called it 'commercial diplomacy', the intersec- tion of foreign policy, government power and business deals. We used Washington's official muscle to help firms crack overseas markets. The culture was electric: we set up an economic 'war room' and built a 'trad- ing floor' that tracked the world's largest commercial projects. Garten, in terms that would undoubtedly alarm traditional policy experts, claimed that the promotion of business was a logical basis for foreign policy 'now that we don't have a military enemy'. More- over, he held firm even against those who questioned the probity of the business deals (many involving high-level US government officials) which he had encouraged in office: 'If you open a wild bazaar, as we did, you have to expect the occasional pickpocket.' 17 Alongside the notion that American foreign policy should concen- trate on 'commercial diplomacy' by default, the globalists have tried hard to define the interests of the ordinary citizens of the world as coincident with those of American corporations. Josef Joffe has argued that the continued dominance of the US in the years after 1989 proves exactly this point: even if the US reaps greatest advantage from the world economy, other nations respect the fact that 'the United States is the ultimate guarantor of the global free trade system'. As we saw in the first chapter, this contention has little basis in fact; however, Joffe and others continue to argue for a harmony of inter- ests between US corporations and people throughout the world, a belief which leads to such sententious aphorisms as Joffe s 'great pow- ers remain great if they promote their own interests by serving others'. 18 Jeffrey Garten has developed this link between US interests and 'altruism' more fully: America's economic interest in improving the lives of people in emerging markets goes well beyond enhancing their incomes so they can purchase more goods and services - important as that may be. The issue is the rule of law. If foreign governments do not seek to protect basic human rights, they are more likely to ignore or circumvent other basic laws of great commercial importance, such as those that protect intellectual property rights, combat corruption, and mandate the disclosure of critical financial information. 19 It's interesting to note here the double displacement of any respect for human rights in the abstract. The argument that human rights should be respected for their own sake — and that this respect may 186 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? have the attendant benefit of creating more numerous and contented consumers in a particular country - is a familiar one. For Garten, however, the abstract respect is for the creation of more consumers, with the happy corollary of a better legal climate in which US corporations can do business. Given the Clinton administration's willingness to trade with countries that violate basic human rights - like China - it's fair to assume that 'more products and services' will hardly lead to the improvement of political conditions in 'emerging markets'; and that Garten's focus on income generation and the maintenance of standards for business transparency will not address chronic problems of wealth inequality and oppression. These reason- able assumptions have eluded Garten and many other globalists en- tirely, however, with the unfortunate consequence that 'globalism' is regarded by many as a kind of missionary enterprise, an American- led effort to enlighten those backward regions of the world which have yet to embrace the global market. 20 From a historical perspective, Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw have provided an account of the world since 1945 which catalogues the spread of the free-market creed. In their 1998 book The Command- ing Heights, Yergin and Stanislaw attempt to write the history of the world in the past fifty years as a battle between government manage- ment of national economies and a free-market approach. For Yergin and Stanislaw, the pioneers in this story are the economists (Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman) and the politicians (Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan) who beat back regulation, the demands of labour and the welfare state, leaving behind a world of choice, individual responsibility and multiple freedoms — including the freedom to fail rather badly and to live beneath the poverty line. The Commanding Heights is a key text in the new literature of globalism precisely because of its sweep and its easy conclusion that free-market capital- ism has triumphed around the globe. The book is also an affront to the more traditional schools of foreign-policy study, since Yergin and Stanislaw plausibly suggest that one could write a world history in the late twentieth century almost entirely in terms of economic relations, rather than strategic imperatives. By the book's conclusion, a reader could be forgiven for thinking that Fukuyama's 1989 thesis had been triumphantly vindicated in the 19905: the countries of the world, according to Yergin and Stanislaw, are bound together more AMERICAN MISSIONS 187 closely than before, and they face little distraction from any compet- ing ideology which might divide them or weaken their free-market resolve. 21 Perhaps the most widely read US proponent of 'globalism' is Thomas L. Friedman, foreign-affairs columnist for the New York Times. Friedman's 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree reads as an extended meditation on the themes discussed by Yergin and Stanislaw. Friedman is an unapologetic globalist; but he is careful to admit that globalism will face opposition, and may need its champions and defenders if it is to succeed. Friedman's tide is derived from his own sense of what is at stake in global politics today: on the one side, the Lexus, a luxury car, represents a consumer product which the good globalist can't fail to desire. On the other side, the olive tree symbolises a dedication to a particular piece of land or ideology which the good globalist correctly realises is worth very little (and can distract from the sensible pursuit of Lexus ownership). For Friedman, the central goal of US foreign policy should be to promote the Lexus at the expense of the olive tree - to encourage countries throughout the world to adopt the latest models of free-market capitalism, and to discourage debate and conflict over territory or dogma. The result will be more globalists, more Lexuses, and perhaps even a role for the 'olive tree' as a kind of ancillary comfort, taking its place not in opposition to globalisation, but as a kind of salve to its harsher effects. 22 Another useful offshoot of globalism will be a more settled inter- national climate. Noting the arguments in more traditional policy- making circles over the 'democratic peace' thesis, Friedman offers his own 'Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention', which holds that countries with McDonald's franchise restaurants never go to war with each other. To some, the equation of a hamburger outlet with the prospects for international peace might seem trite or bathetic; Friedman, however, is quite serious in his belief that the economic integration implied by the expanding McDonald's franchise will dis- suade nations from fighting each other. Friedman's faith in the eirenic potential of Ronald McDonald has survived even the Kosovo conflict, in which NATO's burger-eating forces attacked Yugoslav cities in spite of the latter s unguarded Big Macs and defenceless McNuggets. According to Friedman, the Serbs eventually capitulated to NATO because 'they wanted McDonald's reopened more than they wanted s 188 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Kosovo reoccupied'.This fast-food interpretation of Serbian surrender overlooks the possibility that Serb civilians simply didn't enjoy seeing the rest of their city destroyed, but it at least preserves the 'Golden Arches' theory from an assault by the facts of what happened in Yugoslavia. 23 Friedman's book is engagingly written, filled with easy metaphors and a heavy reliance on language derived from technology 24 It rests on two broad assumptions. First, Friedman is passionately committed to the idea that unfettered capitalism provides the best chance of global prosperity, and he is therefore sceptical of any alternative model: I doubt we will see a new, coherent, universal ideological reaction to globalization - because I don't believe there is one that can both truly soften the brutality of capitalism and still produce steadily rising standards of living. 25 Friedman's second, and more ambitious, assumption is that most people around the world agree with him. He communicates this belief by narrating stories of budding globalists from many different countries: local politicians in China struggle to defeat each other in elections by advocating the latest telecommunications technology; ordinary people in Hanoi crowd the streets to sell their wares in the hope of (one day) driving a Lexus; a street-vendor in Bangkok chats to Friedman about her stock portfolio. 26 In Friedman's view, these people are evidence of the sacred status of free-market capitalism: 'globalization emerges from below, from street level, from peoples very souls and from their very deepest aspirations.' 27 It should not surprise us, then, that Friedman's presentation of globalism has a missionary zeal: for globalisation to work, he concludes, 'America not only can be, it must be, a beacon for the whole world.' 28 Against the conservative injunctions of more traditional commentators, who would urge the American 'sheriff' to intervene in international affairs only sparingly, Friedman and the globalists have the nobler aim of civilising the wilderness, winning over the rest of the world to the ideal of US capitalism. 'It is human to hate': the clash of civilisations The final image in The Lexus and the Olive Tree presents an African- American teacher dressed as Santa Glaus leading a group of American AMERICAN MISSIONS 189 children (drawn from many races and religions) in a Jewish holiday song. This sight brings tears to Friedman's eyes, and he offers it to his readers as evidence of the possibilities for cultural harmony and societal (i.e. free-market) progress: the shared economic system of Americans has enabled them to come together despite their ethnic or cultural differences, and even to celebrate those differences with a festive glee. 29 A sharper eye might pick out the details of the story and view the scene with more scepticism — the teacher and children are performing in Bethesda, Maryland, one of the most affluent suburbs in the US, and a favoured home for wealthy commuters to Washington, DC. By the same token, we might view with caution the gathering of world leaders in Switzerland for the annual Davos Economic Forum, since the alpine bonhomie of governing elites cannot simply be imputed to the far-flung populations that these leaders represent. As we saw in the first chapter, the unevenly dis- tributed gains of globalisation make it easy for a commentator to find international harmony or cross-cultural cooperation, providing he or she limits the search to locations of power and privilege. The general picture, however, hardly bears out the stereotype. We can easily find grounds, then, for disagreement with the 'globalists', and we can question whether their vision of a techno- capitalist millennium is viable. Moreover, the more traditional policy analysts have a vested interest in doing so. Their attempts to define a new 'realism' after the Cold War are directly challenged by the perspective of Friedman et al., whose belief in the centripetal power of free markets implies the obsolescence of more venerable, strategic approaches to the study of international relations. Foreign-policy experts in the US, in government service or in academia, have trad- itionally relied on the tension between US interests and foreign in- terests in the formulation of their advice: if the globalists are correct, this tension no longer exists (or is, at most, a fraction of what it once was), and so the best course for American policy is clear: the US should keep markets open, keep capital flowing, and advocate free trade. The challenge for 'realist' thinkers, then, has been to attack the globalists' Utopian visions without seriously assailing American capitalism, which is overwhelmingly supportive of the globalist rhetoric. 'Realist' thinkers face the same dilemma as right-wing protectionists: they want to prop up a nationalist view of the world 190 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? at a time of unprecedented international integration, but are unable to offer a serious critique of capitalism, or to draw attention to its shortcomings. 30 Benjamin Barber, a professor of political science at Rutgers Uni- versity, mapped out one possible route for 'realists' in his 1995 book Jihad vs. McWorld.^ As the tide suggests, Barbers vision of globalisation is polar: the homogenising forces of American-led capitalism are ranged against the reactionary allies of local culture and traditional enmities. Barber's book, in spite of its trite tide, manages to avoid endorsing either of the 'sides', and makes some useful arguments about the emptiness of global capitalism which distinguish his perspective from that of Friedman. In particular, Barber expresses serious doubts about the democratising potential of missionary capi- talism, and notes that the benefits of economic liberalisation will not be evenly distributed throughout those societies which 'convert' to free markets. The details of his scheme, however, are hostage to the sensational framework within which he tells his story and, especially, his notion of'jihad'. Barber plucks a word with specific connotations within Islam, and uses it to categorise a myriad of protests against global capitalism: for Barber, the word connotes 'a generic form of fundamentalist opposition to modernity that can be found in most world religions'. 32 Although he seems interested in detail and nuance at various points in his analysis, Barber here collapses the diverse forms and causes of discontent into a single 'fundamentalist' move- ment, and then gives it a name which enshrines its inaccessibility and irrationality (especially when ranged against 'modernity'). Barber's legacy to other 'realists' is therefore an inadvertent one: a sense that the battle against global capitalism is based not on the economic injustice of free markets and the dismantling of government services, but on anti-modern, fundamentalist tendencies which are culturally determined. The United States has, since its earliest days, relied on cultural constructs in the formulation and legitimation of foreign policy. The dispossession of native Americans was grounded in the notion that their forms of hunting and agriculture were inimical to progress, and undeserving of the land which they occupied; in the 18408, Ameri- can perceptions of Mexican racial inferiority encouraged and then checked the extent of US expansion; and racial theorists in the 1890$ 1 AMERICAN MISSIONS IQI counselled American readiness for a coming race war, in which the various racial 'types' of the planet would engage in Darwinian conflict to decide the destiny of the world. 33 Although these concepts have held less sway in the twentieth century, the temptation to describe the prospects of the world in racial terms has persisted. It should not surprise us, then, that 'realist' thinkers have made speedy recourse to cultural difference (often a euphemism for racial difference) to describe the inevitability of conflict between nations, and to prescribe a strong defence for the US even after the collapse of the USSR. Since 1990,'experts' like Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis have issued urgent reports on the 'Arab predicament' or the dangers of'political Islam'; 34 Aaron Friedberg and Jacob Heilbrunn have looked towards China with growing suspicion, casting doubt on its ability to em- brace both capitalism and democracy; 35 and old hands like Henry Kissinger have urged caution in dealing with Russia, ignoring the plight of its impoverished population to revive the old shibboleth of 'ancient Russian imperial drives'. 36 These various American perspec- tives have presented problems and discontent throughout the world as forms of cultural inflexibility, calling for the curtailment of globalist evangelising and a more hard-headed American assessment of the world. One influential proponent of the view that ethnic and religious rivalries threaten to bring anarchy to large parts of the world is the journalist Robert D. Kaplan. In 1991, Kaplan's account of his travels in and around Yugoslavia, Balkan Ghosts, was published to great acclaim in the US; moreover, the subsequent disintegration of Yugo- slavia suggested that his gloomy view was actually visionary, and that policymakers should take heed of this new pessimism in formulating a response to (or packaging their apathy towards) the Balkan crisis. 37 Bill Clinton, whose own rhetoric in 1993 stressed the 'ancient hatreds' which barred a useful US role in the region, came to his conclusions after reading Balkan Ghosts; and the US stood on the sidelines as the Serbs and Croats carved up Bosnia, thus fulfilling the morbid proph- ecies in Kaplans book. 38 Kaplan himself, while admitting that the putative influence of his book on the Clinton administration was 'disconcerting', continued to generate visions of disaster based on his travels around the world. In 1994, he produced a doom-laden essay for the Atlantic Monthly entitled 'The Coming Anarchy', which 192 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY ? suggested that inter-ethnic strife in West Africa 'provides an appro- priate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization.' Noting that those people untouched by the 'Western Enlightenment' are inclined to 'find liberation in violence', Kaplan inexplicably suggested that the problems of West Africa would inevitably spread to the rest of the world. The US, it seemed, could only ready itself for this challenge to its 'civilization', praising Kaplan in the meantime for his timely warnings. 39 The most complete and influential version of this racial/cultural 'realism' is Samuel Huntingdon's The Clash of Civilizations (1996), a remarkable book which might easily have been written (and praised) in the US a century earlier. Huntington divides the world into eight (or possibly nine) 'civilizations', each covering a specific geographical area and holding particular values and priorities to be important. These 'civilizations' are a thinly veiled euphemism for cultures and races: in Huntington's scheme, the inhabitants of a particular part of the world will imbibe the norms and goals of that 'civilization', and will prove commensurately resistant to persuasion or coercion by other civilizations. During the Cold War, suggests Huntington, the tense and prolonged standoff between the US and the USSR sup- pressed these civilisational differences; in the 1990$ and beyond, how- ever, they are the determinants of international relations and the basic fact of any reasonable foreign policy. 40 In viewing the argument and reception of Huntingdon's book, it is hard to know whether to be more amazed by its thesis or by its apparent acceptance in US policymaking circles. Admiring readers, from Kissinger to Fukuyama, praised its 'grasp of the intricacies of contemporary global polities' and its 'challenging framework'. 41 In view of the panegyrics, we should identify some of its more obvious deficiencies. In the first place, Huntingdon's definition of 'civiliza- tions' is wildly subjective, depending on a series of historical guesses, misreadings and occasional inventions. Historians of, say, Brazil would ponder over its inclusion in an entity called 'Latin American civiliza- tion'; many European nations, as well as Australia and New Zealand, might question the integrity and homogeneity of the 'West' to which they supposedly belong. More tellingly, Huntington draws his racial/ cultural map as if the massive population movements of the late AMERICAN MISSIONS 193 nineteenth and twentieth centuries had never happened. Given the large numbers of Afro-Caribbean peoples in the United Kingdom, or North African Muslims in France, or Southeast Asians in the United States, does it make any sense to talk of Europe or North America as 'Western'? If these migratory movements represent the mixing of different civilisations, why have they taken place at all? 42 Huntington largely ducks these questions, or resorts to sensation- alist (and deeply inflammatory) predictions of race wars within those countries with large immigrant populations. This leads to the calm statement that 'while Muslims pose the immediate problem to Europe, Mexicans pose the problem for the United States'.The solution is to fold race fears into domestic and foreign policy: the US should be prepared to fight its Latino citizens for control of a Latino-dominated American south-west; and the Departments of State and Defense should ready American forces for the 'clash of civilizations' abroad, heeding Huntington's warning that 'relations between groups from different civilizations will be almost never close, usually cool, and often hostile'. 43 Huntington's vision is extremely pessimistic, and calls on American policymakers to abandon their more upbeat assessments of the international climate while there is still time to prepare for the 'clash'. At the base of his thinking is a remarkably depressing accept- ance of 'the ubiquity of conflict' which determines every expectation of social interaction: It is human to hate. For self-definition and motivation people need enemies: competitors in business, rivals in achievement, opponents in politics. They naturally distrust and see as threats those who are different and have the capability to harm them. The resolution of one conflict and the disap- pearance of one enemy generate personal, social, and political forces that give rise to new ones. 44 Ironically, hatred is the one quality which Huntington seeks to universalise in his analysis; for all his concessions of civilisational difference, his interpretation depends on the notion that human beings are invariably inclined to hate one another. Unsurprisingly, then, Huntington's predictions for the twenty-first century bear no resemblance whatsoever to those of the globalists, and his recom- mendations for a reconfiguration of American foreign policy are pro- found and extreme. 194 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? The emergence of a more hysterical body of 'realist' thinking in the US, grounded in notions of cultural difference and civilisational clash, is an angry counterpoint to the upbeat 'globalism' of com- mentators like Friedman, and the putative internationalism of the Clinton administration. One of the more bizarre consequences of the new 'realism', then, is that it juxtaposes outlandish claims of a coming civilisational war with unnervingly accurate attacks on global- ism. Huntingdon's 'The Lonely Superpower', a 1999 essay from Foreign Affairs, launched a devastating assault on US foreign policy in the 19905. The article contended that 'the US has found itself increas- ingly alone, with one or a few partners, opposing most of the rest of the world's states and peoples.'With an acuity and directness that is usually unthinkable in American foreign-policy journals, Huntington attacked the US for trying to: enforce American law extraterritorially in other societies; grade countries according to their adherence to American standards on human rights, drugs, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, missile proliferation, and now religious freedom; apply sanctions against countries that do not meet American standards on these issues; promote American corporate interests under the slogans of free trade and open markets; shape World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies to serve those same corporate in- terests; intervene in local conflicts in which it has relatively little direct interest; bludgeon other countries to adopt economic policies and social policies that will benefit American economic interests; promote American arms sales abroad while attempting to prevent comparable sales by other countries; force out one UN secretary-general and dictate the appoint- ment of his successor; expand NATO initially to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic and no one else; undertake military action against Iraq and later maintain harsh economic sanctions against the regime; and categorize certain countries as 'rogue states,' excluding them from global institutions because they refuse to kowtow to American wishes. 45 This extraordinary attack gives a clear sense of the disenchantment of many American foreign-policy analysts with US rhetoric and motives in the 19905; but the queasy alternative of 'civilizational clash' hardly suggests a better way of seeing the world or directing American policy. The most obvious critique of 'globalism' — that its benefits accrue to a narrow segment of society, and that it dis- enfranchises more people than it empowers — is largely missing from the debate, leaving a skewed typology of free-market 'idealists' and AMERICAN MISSIONS 195 xenophobic 'realists'. Since neither side plays its part very con- vincingly, each lands easy blows on the other: the globalists scoff at the sensationalism of civilisational clash, while the 'realists' point out the hypocrisy and the limits of the free-market idyll. 46 All the while, more persuasive and measured critiques of American foreign policy are largely excluded from this axis of realism and idealism, and US commentators continue to debate in narrow and confusing terms. 'The complacent, the rich, and the indifferent': US 'experts' and their surroundings In tracing some of the debates and tensions within US foreign- policy analysis, we should note some important shared assumptions and perspectives which influence commentators of all stripes. In the first place, American analysts are largely in agreement on the mis- sionary nature of US foreign policy, even if they doubt the efficacy of this mission in practice. A truism of American history holds that the US has been the harbinger of Christianity, liberty and democ- racy to a needy world, frequently acting from a sense of altruism rather than self-interest. Although the historical record hardly supports such a romantic interpretation, we should not underestimate the hold of this view in American political life, and even in the putatively dispassionate recommendations of other 'experts'. To dismiss the advocates of 'American mission' as phony or delusional is to dis- engage from an important debate over the history and purpose of American foreign relations. If we pay close attention to the ubiquitous belief in an American mission, we can see more clearly the odd context in which 'realist' and 'idealist' visions of foreign policy interact. Henry Kissinger's Diplomacy (1994) is useful in this regard. In his academic and political work, Kissinger subscribed to 'realism' in international affairs: nation- states would compete for power and influence, and would contain or challenge each other through alliances and standoffs. In Diplomacy, a kind of textbook of international relations, Kissinger carefully intro- duces Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as representatives of a 'realist' and an 'idealist' strain in American foreign policy; proponents of realpolitik and of altruistic mission, as it were. In a chapter entitled s 196 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? 'The Hinge', Kissinger suggests that successive American governments in the twentieth century have moved from one vision to the other, but that both are authentically American and worthy. Moreover, even a 'realist' (as Kissinger would describe himself) would admire the goals ofWbodrow Wilson, and seek to attain them whenever possible: 'The fulfillment of American ideals will have to be sought in the patient accumulation of partial successes', as Kissinger puts it. His blend of realism therefore infuses self-interest and realpolitik with a kind of moral edge, the sense that the US would behave still more generously if the rest of the world deserved such treatment. 47 Debates over US foreign policy more typically concern the extent of American idealism than the presence of any 'missionary' impulse: an American mission is taken for granted. 'Realists' like Richard Haass or Henry Kissinger make no serious effort to question the good intentions of the US, but merely to doubt whether the American government has sufficient resources to pursue them abroad. Samuel Huntingdon has made a more radical suggestion that the rest of the world is ill-fitted to appreciate the American gift, but his portrait of civilisational rejectionism is so extreme that few Americans will challenge their own values in the face of this supposed relativism. The 'idealists', meanwhile, are those who believe that the US has sufficient power and persuasion to make the world in its own image. Inevitably, these commentators — like Jeffrey Garten or Thomas Friedman - are cheerleaders for global capitalism, which has been synonymous in the minds of American policymakers with human rights, improved standards of living, and democracy. What is missing in all this is a substantial engagement with American 'idealism', and a more fundamental assessment of the tra- jectory and rationale of American policy. The uncritical acceptance of Woodrow Wilson as a mascot for US altruism would be a good starting point for such a re-examination: and especially Wilson's dis- astrous confusion of an American mission with a global good. 48 One of the themes of this book has been the schizophrenic American relationship with the United Nations, and an understanding of the pervasiveness of American missionary thinking may offer a clue to making sense of this relationship. American policymakers are alter- nately supportive and dismissive of the UN because they see the US as not simply a member nation, but a parallel or rival force for good: AMERICAN MISSIONS 197 a global power dedicated to improving the world, acting more from altruism than self-interest. In this sense, the US thinks that it is the UN, and it is understandably perturbed when the Security Council or General Assembly reaches decisions which expose that mistaken assumption. The UN, by its very existence as an organisation of many states, demonstrates the fallacy of seeing the US as a multilat- eral force, a global 'honest broker'; and so American governments have responded harshly, content to keep the UN in a marginal, if not a moribund condition. All the while, US 'experts' have provided the intellectual armament necessary to defend the ideal of American altruism: even when the US chooses to stay out of a conflict, the righteousness of its cause — and its right to intervene in some future conflict — is assured. The other context for understanding American 'experts' is more prosaic, but no less important. With virtually no exceptions, the principal voices of foreign-policy expertise shuttle between academia, government service and the corporate world, enjoying homogeneous and privileged lives which are hardly representative of the average American, let alone citizens of less wealthy and powerful countries. We can return to some of the figures introduced earlier for specific examples of this career path. Francis Fukuyama holds a professorial chair at George Washington University in Washington, DC, has done policy research for the government-funded RAND corporation on several occasions, and served in the Reagan and Bush administrations. Richard Haass has worked at think-tanks (the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations) and was a special assistant to President Bush. Henry Kissinger left his academic post at Harvard to work for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, before returning to academia and pursuing parallel careers in publishing and corporate consulting. Jeffrey Garten worked on Wall Street for thirteen years in investment banking and corporate raiding, served in the Clinton administration in the 19905, and eventually became Dean of the Yale University School of Management. Samuel Huntingdon left Harvard in the 19705 to work in the Carter administration, before returning to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to direct the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. 49 These stories of career achievement demonstrate that academia, government service and corporate America are linked by a revolving 198 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? door — virtually every major analyst of US foreign policy has also been (or is currently) on the government payroll, either in the White House or the State Department, or in a government-funded think tank. Although it might be argued that this experience of power has enriched the work of the various commentators, the easy passage from government practice to analysis of government action suggests a serious conflict of interest. 50 If academic posts in International Relations or Strategic Studies are linked to positions within the US government, are young (or even established) students of foreign policy likely to risk their careers by questioning the basic assumptions of the 'experts'? The ostensibly detached perspective of a university pro- fessor may even persuade the US government that it has listened to dispassionate and serious criticism merely by hiring a figure like Madeleine Albright, who used to teach International Relations at Georgetown University. The cosy relationship between academia and policymaking may therefore seem normal and proper to government officials, with the unfortunate consequence that a privileged few in American society simply talk amongst themselves about the direction of US foreign policy. 51 It is also worth remembering that the 'experts' enjoy a quality of life which marks them out from the majority of US citizens, and which bears no resemblance to the lives of the majority of the world's people. This is particularly relevant when we consider that the experts' visions of foreign policy always have a domestic corollary: the pro- motion of free markets abroad, for example, is likely further to en- rich those affluent Americans who have done so well in the Clinton years. What's surprising, however, is the lack of embarrassment or anxiety that surrounds the experts' occasional admissions of privilege. Fareed Zakaria, editor of Foreign Affairs, was hardly nervous in telling a New York Times profiler in 1999 about his privileged lifestyle and his vision of the good life: [Zakaria] is a wine columnist for Slate, the Internet magazine, speaks and dresses elegantly, but has an American approachability and a very specific American fantasy. 'The immigrant in me,' he said, 'wants to go off to some Northeastern dock and sail off in topsiders and a polo shirt.' The 'upper-class' Zakaria went on to confess his alienation from the 'more authentic, Indian India' of the 1990$, preferring the 'some- s, AMERICAN MISSIONS 199 what Anglicized India of the 19605 and 1970$' in which he grew up. Fortunately, this dislocation from modern India was no bar to his advance in American policymaking circles, and the Times indulged in heavy speculation that Zakaria would soon be drafted to a Republican presidential campaign as foreign-affairs adviser. 52 Thomas Friedman's acceptance of his own comfortable lifestyle as universal is alternately narcissistic and hilarious. When Friedman accepted the New York Times s invitation to write its 'Foreign Affairs' column in 1994, he became the first writer in the column's sixty- year history to base himself in the US, rather than abroad. 53 Although Friedman has travelled widely, the evidence from his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, suggests that he has rarely ventured beyond 'Marriott culture', relying mostly on the counsel and perspective of global elites. 54 Friedman is hardly apologetic about this: in the ac- knowledgements to his book, he thanks investment bankers, business school professors, economists, hedge-fund managers, Fareed Zakaria, and even the Clinton Treasury team of Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. His acknowledgements also shed light on why so many of his chapters seem like straightforward advertisements for globalisation and its leading corporate advocates: The reader will notice that I quote a great deal from two outside sources. One is The Economist, which has been far, far ahead of every other news organization in understanding and reporting on globalization. The other is ads from Madison Avenue. For some reason, advertising copywriters have a tremendous insight into globalization, and I have not hesitated to draw on their work. 55 There is a delicious naivete about this: Friedman's awed appreciation of the 'tremendous insight' of the people trying to sell globalization is eclipsed only by his unhesitating acceptance of their campaigns. Again, one might argue that Friedman's extensive list of connections gives him an insider's perspective on economic change and foreign policy; however, the closeness of those connections also blunts the force of any critique, turning Friedman's subjects into his friends, and vice versa. 56 It is hard to read Friedman without the sense that he fervently believes in his vision of the world; and that both he and many other commentators on foreign policy suffer from a kind of personal and professional myopia which remains unaffected by a visit to a Japanese 2OO ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? car factory, or a cup of coffee in a Jordanian internet cafe. 57 Friedman is happy to boast of his own Lexus, or to share tales of his skiing trips, because he seems unaware that this reality is far removed from the conditions and prospects of most people on the planet. 58 Globalists like Friedman continue to counsel free-market reform even after the dislocation in Asia, Russia and Brazil in 1997/8. 'Realists' like Richard Haass or Samuel Huntington believe, instead, that the US can choose its engagements with the rest of the world sparingly, and defend itself from a chaotic landscape of ethnic tensions and irrevocable hatred. In many respects, the study of US foreign policy oscillates between complacency and indifference, underpinned by the wealth and privilege of the 'experts'. Stanley Hoffmann has drawn attention to this phenomenon: We live in a world in which apathy about what happens in 'far away countries of which we know nothing' can all too easily lead - through contagion, through the message such moral passivity sends to trouble- makers, would-be tyrants, and ethnic cleansers everywhere — not to the kind of Armageddon we feared during the Cold War but to a creeping escalation of disorder and beastliness that will, sooner or later, reach the shores of the complacent, the rich, and the indifferent. 59 Although Hoffmann clearly hopes that US policymakers and analysts may yet overcome their apathy or complacency, our brief survey suggests that a genuine shift in American policy is unlikely to come from the current crop of'experts' and their comfortable surroundings. PERSPECTIVES As we have seen, many academics and other commentators on foreign policy have crossed over into government service at various points in their careers, and we should be careful not to draw a major distinc- tion between policymakers in the US and policy analysts. These two roles are performed largely by people from the same background, who have received similar training and who live in the same areas and circumstances. In this final section, however, I want not only to suggest some of the ways in which the politicians in Washington, DC (Congressional representatives as well as the president and his AMERICAN MISSIONS 2OI advisers) think and operate, but also to extend our focus to include the media and public opinion beyond Washington's beltway. Although these are extremely complex and varied subjects for study, I want (at the risk of generalising) to give at least a sense of their contribution to, and influence on, the formation of foreign policy. Politicians The central fact of American political life is money. Although the US takes pride in the longevity and vitality of its democratic institu- tions, federal elections — for president and Congress - have been hijacked by the need to raise and reward big money donations from individuals and corporations. 60 In the 1996 presidential election, Bill Clinton and his Republican challenger, Bob Dole, spent more than $40 million on their campaigns, ensuring obligations to their sponsors which they would be expected to honour in office. 61 For Bill Clinton, some of these debts were to foreign donors, including businessmen from China and Indonesia, and encouraged the notion that the president had put US foreign policy up for sale. Clinton's political opponents repeatedly charged that his administration's policy — especially its pursuit of economic engagement with China - was directly linked to his acceptance of foreign campaign finance, a charge that both he and his vice-president, Al Gore, struggled to refute. 62 Although the issue of foreign influence through federal campaign funding is important, the malign influence of money on American political life is hardly limited to the 1996 controversy. 63 In recent decades, presidential and Congressional candidates have been forced to raise large sums of money to have any chance of 'democratic' election, hoping to buy advertisements or to stage political events and thereby to present their message to the electorate. As a conse- quence, virtually every politician in Washington is beholden to one or more 'special interests', and will serve these interests after election with a view to earning more money for a re-election campaign. The special interests vary somewhat, but are basically grouped around corporate needs and priorities. Although some national or ideological interests — like the pro-Israel lobby — have substantial leverage to influence elections (especially at the Congressional level), the major players in campaign finance are corporations. Most have a definite 2O2 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? domestic agenda, but with the extension of global markets many also have a vested interest in foreign policy. Boeing and Lockheed Martin, predictably, are major donors, and their dollars clearly persuade 'their' Congressional representatives to look favourably on defence spending. US corporations with major overseas operations — for example, the oil, mining and fruit industries - have been especially successful in focusing the attention of Congress and the president on their interests abroad, persuading the US to turn a blind eye when corporate interests would be compromised by criticism of a corporate-friendly dictatorship. 64 Perhaps the most significant source of campaign funding in the Clinton era, however, has been the financial services industry. Clinton's foreign policy has been properly criticised as reactive and inconsistent, but his dedication to the export of neoliberal policies around the world has been unwavering. Although Clinton and his Cabinet undoubtedly believe in neoliberalism to a large extent, the relationship between Wall Street and the Democratic Party has been underwritten by financial donations. 65 Banking corporations, invest- ment banks and insurance firms have poured money into Demo- cratic coffers, and the Democrats have kept their side of the bargain: not only have they removed domestic legislation impeding corporate consolidation and pressured foreign governments to open their econo- mies to US firms; they have even allowed one of Wall Street's captains — Robert Rubin - to oversee the changes in person. 66 It's worth noting that, although the influence of banks and the financial industry is hardly a new phenomenon in US history, Bill Clinton's 'New Democrats' have extinguished any scepticism on the part of the formerly left-leaning Democratic Party towards some of the most wealthy and speculative interests in the US. While many older Demo- crats lamented the takeover of their party by Rubin and his rich friends, the palace coup appeared secure: the only Democratic challenger to Clinton's anointed successor, Al Gore, in the 2000 election was Bill Bradley, who managed to raise even more campaign money from Wall Street than his opponent. 67 The promise of more dollars from the financial industry suggests that neither major party will dissent from the neoliberal consensus, and so the continued march of globalisation is unlikely to meet much resistance from within Washington's political circles. Campaign-finance reform, meanwhile, AMERICAN MISSIONS 2O3 has proceeded in halting and uncertain steps, with neither of the major political parties keen to alienate themselves from their sponsors. 68 In addition to money, the relationship between the president and Congress is an important influence on the formation of foreign policy. Under the US Constitution, Congress is obliged to play a large role in American policymaking, and the president is dependent on the approval of Congress for any major foreign-policy initiatives. 69 In practice, however, Congressional involvement in foreign affairs has been sporadic. With the exception of those politicians with links to defence corporations or other interested parties, most Congressional representatives have fixed their attention on domestic issues and conceded foreign policy to the president. 70 This trend has had un- fortunate consequences since the end of the Cold War: the president has rushed into military situations without Congressional debate and approval, and Congress has reacted with suspicion and hostility to- wards international organisations and treaties which require the sup- port of the legislature. In 1999, Bill Clinton launched the bombing of Yugoslavia and Kosovo in spite of Congress's deep-seated reserva- tions over the legitimacy and aims of the American action; later in the same year, Congress rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, intended to outlaw nuclear testing and to head off a new inter- national arms race. The effective marginalisation of Congress in times of war contributes directly to its suspicion of international agreements which might underpin peace: presidents (especially Bill Clinton) have isolated Congress from the decision-making process over foreign intervention, and have then reacted with surprise when Congress is sceptical of, say, the Test Ban Treaty or UN funding. 71 Because Congressional representatives are elected by voters from a specific region of the US, it is easy to conclude that their focus is local, or that their approach to foreign policy is reflexively isolation- ist. In fact, we would do better to think of Congress as espousing what has been dubbed 'independent internationalism': the notion that the US can and should shuttle between internationalism and self-interest, depending on its own assessment of its best interests. 72 US politicians have framed their opposition to the Test Ban Treaty in terms of the special, even unique, US responsibility to save the rest of the world: 2O4 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? The world community ... are [sic] not people that we want to make United States national defense policy. Their goals are not the same as our goals. We have an obligation, as the leader of the free world, to insure that our nuclear deterrent is safe and reliable. They don't. We may have to do things that they could never dream of doing, including nuclear testing to insure the safety and reliability of our nuclear stockpile. They don't have to worry about that. But we do. 73 While Bill Clinton and his Cabinet understand that the 'free world' is reluctant to make these concessions to American foreign policy, many Congressional representatives are serious and sincere in their belief that the US has an exceptional mission to protect itself and other nations, and that the responsibilities and obligations bound up in this mission are best determined by America alone. It could be argued that Congress operates at one remove from the formation of foreign policy, and therefore that these messianic visions of the US role in the world depend on seclusion from the actual dictates and effects of American conduct abroad. According to this line of argument, the idea that the US truly leads the 'free world', or complies with a special responsibility to promote peace and justice beyond its borders, is tenable only if one averts one's gaze from the disastrous effects of US policy in Kosovo, Iraq, Rwanda and else- where. It is ironic, then, to note that those Clinton administration officials with first-hand experience of the effects of their decisions embrace this same missionary idiom. Moreover, the notion that one can combine missionary concern with a more hard-headed 'prag- matism' has become a sort of badge of honour in Washington, par- ticularly for Democrats. Behind this lurks the same assumptions about 'realism' and 'idealism' that we saw earlier, the same effort to combine a selfless 'Wilsonianism' with the 'toughness' of Teddy Roosevelt, and to ignore the fact that either president could invade other countries or overwhelm other governments with impunity. In an interview with the New York Times magazine in 1995, Bill Clinton's national security adviser, Anthony Lake, admitted to 'some degree of missionary impulse' in his approach to foreign policy. His own career casts doubt on the success with which he carried out any altruistic mission: Lake served in the American embassy in Vietnam during the mid-1960s, and was Henry Kissinger's assistant during the covert US bombing of Laos and Cambodia in the early 1970$. AMERICAN MISSIONS 2O5 Although he eventually (and quietly) resigned over Kissinger's exten- sion of the war in Indochina, there is little evidence of any altruism in his counsel to Clinton: Lake's tenure coincided with the disastrous intervention in Somalia, the US vacillation over Bosnia, and the genocide in Rwanda. In the Times interview, however, Lake summa- rised his career and beliefs as 'pragmatic neo-Wilsonian', an un- wieldy description which nonetheless conveys Lake's hope that he blended 'realism' with 'idealism'. Lake, along with other members of the Clinton administration, framed his thinking about the US role in the world with a strong idea of what was possible and what was impossible. The response of the 'pragmatic idealist' to the charge of inaction or injustice is to claim that the US has done its best. If the political climate of another country has been adversely affected by US intervention, or hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the absence of international support, the US is much more inclined to accept these losses as 'realistic' than to question its own role in incurring them. 74 In considering the motivation and psychology of US policymakers, then, we should remember that they have developed a sophisticated way of disengaging from the horrific consequences of US foreign policy, and even of characterising themselves as 'idealists' or 'Wil- sonians' (albeit of the 'pragmatic' persuasion) as they do so. George Stephanopoulos, a Clinton aide, offered an insight into this mentality in his contribution to the New York Times profile of Lake, his former colleague: The easiest way to say it is he's moral without being a moralist. There's this quote by Camus, something like perhaps we can't stop killing children but we can limit the number of children killed. It's always struck me that Tony's internalized that message. He's deeply moral and deeply realistic at the same time. The definition of a pragmatic idealist, then, is clear: he or she recognises from the outset that children must be killed, and tries merely to limit the cull somewhat. Even though the US has dis- played its ability to intervene decisively around the world, pragmatic idealists have internalised the notion that the American reach is limited; and may even believe in the necessity of'killing children', if we are to maintain a 'deeply realistic' view of the world. 75 206 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Of course, policymakers often become associated with particular emphases or philosophies, which can seem like the bedrock of their awareness and thinking. Madeleine Albright, for example, was fond of distinguishing herself from other State Department folk by stressing her belief in moral intervention: 'My mind set is Munich. Most of my generation's is Vietnam.' 76 The typical pattern, however, is for such bullish assertions to subside in the face of the 'realism' that we have been tracing; or, to put it in Albright's terms, American officials have aimed to combine 'principles with pragmatism'. 77 What is particularly interesting in the American context is that policymakers continue to insist that they are behaving in moral or principled ways even as they concede the mitigating influence of 'pragmatism'. Those closest to power may suffer most acutely from this delusion: Dick Morris, a key adviser to Bill Clinton, described the American president in 1996 as a 'secular, global pope', a perspective which suggests that Morris has spent more time in American policymaking circles than amongst the ordinary people of the world. 78 Although we can clearly trace its intellectual and moral inconsistencies and inversions, we should note that 'pragmatic idealism' remains the standard framework in which US policymakers position themselves and present their ideas; and that this framework has proven durable and extremely resistant to the unpleasant facts it has created outside the US. 79 The media Just as American political life has become increasingly dominated by money, the American media is now fully integrated within a frame- work of corporate ownership and profit. Newspapers and television stations are obliged to maximise their revenue returns, and the ad- vertising on which they depend necessitates political conservatism and a careful pruning of controversy. Moreover, the conglomeration of the media and various entertainment corporations has created un- comfortable juxtapositions between serious news organisations and more ephemeral (albeit very rich) bodies: ABC, one of the largest American television networks, is now owned by Disney; Fox, another network, is part of News International, an entertainment and media giant comprising a movie studio and sports franchises as well as news- papers and television news channels; CNN, perhaps the most familiar AMERICAN MISSIONS 2Oy American news source to international audiences, is part of the Time- Warner company, which has recently merged with the Internet giant America On-Line (AOL).The new corporate behemoths are inclined to sell the news as if it were any other product. This inevitably has consequences, not only in the soft-pedalling of particular issues sen- sitive to business, but in the clumsy or cursory presentation of com- plex and subtle political problems, at home or abroad. 80 Public television, established in the 19705 as a bulwark against the increasing corporatisation of the media, has struggled against govern- ment reluctance to provide funding, and has gradually succumbed to corporate suitors eager to make up the shortfall, in return for advertising and an exemption from public scrutiny. By the end of the century, public radio and television was saturated with commer- cials for corporate sponsors, and the content and tone of public broadcasting had lost much of its critical edge. Although smaller organisations have continued to report the news from a more pro- gressive perspective, the vast majority of Americans still consult the major corporate networks (or corporate-funded public broadcasting) for news reporting. 81 In addition to a corporate agenda, news organisations in the US also depend on government access and, occasionally, government censors for their stories. Although the press is nominally free to write anything about American foreign policy, in practice foreign corre- spondents form a cadre which travels and works alongside government officials. The more compliant journalists are more likely to be given access to the president and his advisers, a bargain which may offer a reporter an exclusive even as it undermines his or her ability to write critically about it. During armed conflicts, the situation is even more claustrophobic: in the Gulf War, all reporting in the US (and other Western countries) was subjected to military censorship, and report- ers were forced to work in pools and to restrain their criticism of the military or the war. 82 In Kosovo, the NATO operation was carefully presented to and for the press, with a team of PR officials on hand at NATO headquarters in Brussels to gloss over any awkward mis- takes (like the Chinese Embassy bombing) or 'collateral damage' (the bombing of refugee columns). Advances in technology have made it possible for US commanders to present their war to the media at a safe distance, relaying the shooting and destruction through slides, 2O8 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? laptops and video which emphasise its cleanness and precision. Fattened on this feast of packaged information, the American media have become especially sedentary, the consumers of Pentagon news releases rather than the gatherers of the news. 83 When the media take an interest in a story, the pressures of time and the perceived need to iron out complex detail can create confus- ing or misleading reports. The usual pattern of media involvement is well established: reporters lean on a story very heavily in its opening phase, making it newsworthy and forcing it to the top of the agenda; and then editors and producers drop the story precipitously, even though it continues to develop and mutate away from public view. The television coverage of the Somalia intervention is a good example: US reporters introduced the Somalis as a desperate, starving people in need of American salvation; when US forces arrived, much more attention was paid to their 'relief efforts than to their long- term strategy. The initial media presentation of Somalis, stressing their simple suffering, drained them of political agency and established them in the minds of many Americans as needy, about-to-be grateful innocents. When Somalia returned to the headlines almost a year later, Americans had no means of understanding the transition from gratitude to (violent) rejection: the initial media blitz had fixed the Somalis in a particular frame, and editors had largely neglected the changing situation as the US 'peacekeepers' began their war against Mohamed Aideed. 84 I want to offer two examples to illustrate some of these points about the media's role in framing foreign policy. The first is a long article from Time magazine (a part of the AOL-Time—Warner empire, along with CNN) profiling Madeleine Albright and her role in the Kosovo crisis. Its title - 'Madeleine's War' — is intended to establish Albright's personal stake in the campaign against Milosevic. The author of the article, Walter Isaacson (Times managing editor) is so deferen- tial towards Albright that her prose becomes his, and the Clinton administration line on Kosovo is simply parroted by the reporter: So the war in Kosovo, and Albright's determined vision of it, has become more than just another regional conflict. It has become ground zero in the debate over whether America should play a new role in the world, that of the indispensable nation asserting its morality as well as its interests to assure stability, stop thugs and prevent human atrocities. 85 AMERICAN MISSIONS 2Op Of course, the sentiment is Albright's, as is some of the language ('indispensable nation'). Isaacson, however, erases the line between himself and his subject, adopting her vision and even her anxieties. In one hilarious passage, Isaacson looks on admiringly as Albright tries to marginalise Kofi Annan and the United Nations in the for- mulation of Kosovo policy: Most important were two calls to UN Secretary-General Annan. A potential problem was brewing: Annan, who had remained on the sidelines, was suggesting that he appoint a group of negotiators to deal with Belgrade. Annan had been reliable from the outset in supporting the NATO posi- tion, which Albright appreciated. But the last thing she wanted was a pod of UN-anointed diplomats pushing compromises. 'Kofi, we don't need negotiators running all over the place,' she said. Our 'critical' profiler has no difficulty in seeing Kofi Annan as another 'problem' to be dealt with, or sharing Albright's fear that the UN could 'broker with Belgrade in a way that could compromise NATO's positions'. In his effort to understand Albright's perspective, Isaacson actually adopts it and thereby forestalls the more obvious questions about the NATO campaign. In addition to Isaacson's essential acceptance of Albright's self- justification, his article more subtly encourages readers to sympathise with its subject in its design and layout. The pictures are carefully chosen to emphasise Albright's various (appealing) qualities: she reaches out her hand to greet smiling US soldiers; she flashes her teeth in a meeting as General Wesley Clark, NATO's commander, looks on admiringly; she helps herself to cafeteria food in a US airbase, about to share a meal with the troops; and she looks on, rapt with attention, as a soldier discourses over (and reassuringly pats) a very large missile. The photos seem to belong to a paid advertisement for Albright; part of a carefully coordinated campaign to entice the public. Across the top of each page, presumably to keep the interest of the casual reader, the Time editors have printed numbers and facts: '6:' declares one,'Number of languages she understands';'4: Number of times she received the "teacher of the year" award at Georgetown University.' Predictably, the statistics are all favourable to Albright: '500,000+' refers to the 'number of miles she has flown since be- coming Secretary of State', rather than the number killed in Rwanda after the US vetoed an international response to the genocide. The 210 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? effect of the montage is to bring us closer to Albright and to the administration, to make us see them as simultaneously statuesque and human. When Bill Clinton finally appears, he is 'relaxing in a Shetland sweater in his airborne office', no doubt ready to pour us a drink as he explains how bombing Kosovo 'served our interests as well as our values'. The Time article offers ample evidence of the pitfalls of getting too close to one's subject: travelling with the president or secretary of state, it's tempting to snap a photo of them 'relaxing' in an airplane seat, or eating with the troops, and to write copy which conveys the sensitive side of a government official. As journalists and policy- makers occupy the same space, so their interests begin to fuse, and critical perspectives fall away. As we have seen, American government officials are inclined to tell upbeat stories about the congruence of American interests and values, and journalists are inclined to believe them. Thomas Friedman, 'Foreign Affairs' columnist for the New York Times, inadvertently offers an example of the toothlessness and self- regard of the media in the final chapter of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Friedman selects a single episode from Madeleine Albright's visit to Rwanda in 1996, a photo opportunity for the State Depart- ment staff at Kigali airport, and pores over its significance: As a reporter on the trip, I didn't think I belonged in the picture, so I stood over to the side and watched the Rwandan ground crew watching the American picture-taking session. The Rwandans had a slightly quizzical look. I couldn't help wondering to myself what they were making of this scene, which represented America at its best: the spirit of community, the melting pot, the willingness to help faraway strangers in need, the free- dom and opportunity for each individual to work his way to the top and, most important, a concept of citizenship based on allegiance to an idea, not a tribe. As a picture, it represented everything that Rwanda was not. Rwanda had just emerged from an orgy of tribal warfare - Rwandan Hutus against Rwandan Tutsis - in which a million people were killed, some of them brutally hacked to death with machetes. Rwanda was all olive trees and no Lexuses, a country that was all gnarled roots choking one another, and no flowering branches. 86 Although Friedman steps out of the photo, his perspective is deter- minedly parochial: the Rwandan onlookers, doubtless mired in their tribal hatreds, cannot hope to understand an American delegation which represents 'everything that Rwanda was not'. There is an AMERICAN MISSIONS 211 extraordinary arrogance and insensitivity in these observations, coupled with a blithe acceptance of the American 'willingness to help faraway strangers in need', which could hardly seem less appro- priate given the American response to the genocide. Might the Rwandan ground crew be pondering the irony of American arrival some eighteen months too late? Might they have wondered at the self importance and pomposity of this delegation, and expressed cynicism at the new-found US interest in their country? Friedman could have asked them; but instead he puts his own thoughts into their heads, confirming a story of American mission even where the evidence to support its existence is least abundant. We might simply pass this off as bad journalism, but we should remember that Friedman has won the Pulitzer prize for international reporting on two occasions, and is the principal commentator on American foreign policy for the most influential newspaper in the United States. 87 Public opinion Before we generalise about public opinion in America, we would do well to note that this is an especially difficult thing to sketch or to quantify. The US population is extremely heterogeneous, with important tensions and affinities along lines of race, class and region. The preponderance of immigration in American history has led many Americans to retain an active interest in other parts of the world, but the intensity and specific focus of this interest varies widely. In this final section I am going to suggest some of the principal contribu- tions of the public to foreign-policy debates, and to balance the general picture of apathetic or reactionary popular feeling with a recent, more successful example of public engagement. 88 The natural resources, size and location of the United States have traditionally supported not only the idea of an American mission to the rest of the world but also the feeling that the US can successfully disengage from foreign politics and survive happily on its own. Madeleine Albright helpfully summarised these twin impulses — of mission and of isolation — in a 1998 interview: Americans are unbelievably fortunate to be between two oceans and have two friendly neighbors. Often, as I've traveled around and the President has made this comment a lot I imagine what it's like to have been invaded 212 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? by Napoleon or by Hitler. That has created a very different mindset in a lot of the world's peoples. Americans have never been invaded and occu- pied. I say this because I'm not a born American: it makes Americans feel invulnerable in a way that other countries do not. 89 This feeling of invulnerability translates into a sense that the US can choose when, where and how to engage with the outside world; and so it is a source of missionary rhetoric and also of disengage- ment, depending on foreign events and American priorities. The idea that the US could easily closet itself from the world, and still exist in prosperity and peace, tends to reinforce the notion that any kind of overseas action must be altruistic. Although the US is closely (and properly) linked in the minds of many to the spread of global capitalism, even this phenomenon has been presented as an American gift to the world, a force for civilisational progression or societal development. Those with a less optimistic sense of the recep- tiveness of the rest of the world tend to focus on domestic American missions: Pat Buchanan and others have won over a large following to the view that the US might best work out its altruistic impulses within its borders. The public is thus encouraged either to think highly of the rest of the world — other nations are deserving of and amenable to American overtures — or to give up on it, but in each case to imagine the US as a munificent and even a disinterested force in world affairs, sure of its own place in the world and happy to help other nations if they are willing. 90 If this gives a sense of the ideological climate in which many Americans find themselves, the media play a crucial role in directing public attention towards specific regions and situations. The level of public awareness of particular countries or international issues is initially low; the media then generate a wealth of information about the matter at hand, and present the issues to the public in simplified form. This typically creates the basis for public support, and the president acts accordingly. The cycle begins and ends with the govern- ment: the State Department and president ordinarily shape the infor- mation reported by the media, which is bounced off the public and often manifests itself in opinion polls which are trotted out by the government to justify decisive action. In Iraq, then, the State Depart- ment was effusive in its press releases on Saddam's crimes; with Rwanda, on the other hand, State Department officials issued AMERICAN MISSIONS 213 cautious and evasive statements for as long as they could, reluctant to name names or place blame on any side lest the public demand action to stop the genocide. Although we should be careful not to depict Americans as completely beholden to government-controlled information, this dynamic of state influence on the perception of foreign affairs is a cornerstone of policymaking. 91 The bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 offers a useful frame in which to think about the workings of public opinion. We reviewed the facts behind American involvement in Kosovo in the last chap- ter, but we might summarise some of the major difficulties in win- ning public support for NATO's action as follows: it was hard to present Milosevic as a tyrant since he had been recognised by the US as a force for stability and peace at the Dayton talks in 1995; it was hard to argue for American involvement after the Clinton ad- ministration had established a precedent for nonintervention in Bosnia and especially Rwanda, stepping aside even during massacres and human-rights abuses which dwarfed those in Kosovo; it was hard to blame Milosevic entirely for what had happened in the first weeks of the war since the mass deportation of Kosovar Albanians only began after the NATO bombing, suggesting that NATO had itself played a role in spurring the exodus; it was hard to maintain public enthusiasm as the war dragged on into its third month, in spite of the initial American expectation that the bombing would bring swift results. Some Americans needed no prompting to abdicate from the debate entirely. As one department store worker told the New York Times, 'I don't like to worry about the world's problems. I'm a happier person if I stay centered on myself.' More common was the sense that ethnic cleansing was taking place, and support for the putative American effort to deal with it. An apple farmer from New Hampshire told the Times that, in spite of the risks of inter- vention, 'cleaning out villages, killing the men and making the women and children refugees - that seems like a pretty terrible thing to let anybody get away with.' Faced with a media blitz showing displaced families in Kosovo, and their government's em- ployment of an impassioned rhetoric of US values and responsi- bilities, many Americans overlooked or remained unaware of the fact that Milosevic had been 'cleaning out villages' with impunity 214 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY ? before the Dayton agreement; and that the refugee problem in Kosovo grew to enormous proportions only after the NATO bomb- ing had begun. 92 Perhaps the most bizarre element in the public reaction to Kosovo was the way in which the issue almost disappeared from newspapers and television programmes after the first few weeks of bombing. Although the occasional waywardness of NATO ordnance would make the front pages, the daily round of bombing quickly became routine. 93 A group of residents in White Plains, a suburb of New York City, were interviewed by the New York Times at various points during the Kosovo campaign. Their responses clearly indicated an impatience not only with the Serbs but with the entire issue, par- ticularly given the perceived ability of the US to kill Milosevic if it really made the effort. David Gammons, an artist, put the point succinctly: I haven't been watching TV.... It's still going on, I know; but just shoot the man and be done with it. It's enough already. It's news that went on and went on and what else is new? 94 Although this yearning for a terminal solution to the problem of Milosevic was not widely voiced, similar sentiments about the on- going annoyance of Saddam Hussein suggest that the American public is ill-informed and therefore ill-equipped to deal with the complex- ity and longevity of many foreign-policy problems. 95 Although the speedy US demolition of Iraq in 1991 gained high (if fleeting) poll ratings for George Bush, the lengthy and monotonous pounding of the Serbs produced an impatience or apathy in the American public: fewer than 50 per cent, according to polls taken at the end of the war, shared Clinton's boast of a 'victory for a safer world, for our democratic values and for a stronger America'. 96 I have been tracing a pessimistic view of US public opinion, suggesting that popular support for overseas action is easily manipu- lated by government and by the media; or that the public becomes sceptical towards American action only through a combination of self-interested insularity and a short attention span. I want to con- clude on a more optimistic note by admitting that many Americans, in spite of government spin and complacent media, are still ready and able to think critically about foreign policy, and to point out the AMERICAN MISSIONS 215 obvious contradictions and inconsistencies in the official version of events. One New Yorker expressed scepticism in the first few days of the Kosovo bombing campaign over the logic of the US role: I don't think we should stand by idly. But there have been massive human rights violations everywhere - Tibet, Rwanda, Tiananmen Square. They say we need a stable Europe for our national security. But I'm not sure why a stable Africa or a stable Asia isn't just as important. 97 Americans who raise such objections are often dismissed by policy- makers as naifs or amateurs, unaware of the complexity of the situations that they presume to judge. As Madeleine Albright put it when asked why the US would intervene in Kosovo but not in Rwanda, 'I don't think you can make a very simple matrix.' In truth, however, the US government almost always tries to win public support by presenting foreign situations in a 'simple matrix', and a large number of Americans are sufficiently aware to point out the gulf between the simplified rhetoric and complex reality. 98 The Clinton administration did manage to have its war in Kosovo without a full-scale haemorrhage of public opinion, but the fear that the public would either lose interest in the war, or question its parameters and legality, seems justified by the ambivalent popular reaction to NATO's victory. Alongside the ranks of Americans who don't care about what happens abroad, or reflexively rally to the flag over any foreign contention, a substantial number of ordinary people are keen to assess the motives of their government and the logic of its stated policies. Perhaps the best example of this from the Clinton administration came in February 1998, as the US readied the media and the public for a new round of bombing in Iraq. Clinton's foreign- policy team correctly perceived that the public - aware of the effects of US sanctions on Iraqi civilians, but sceptical of their influence on Saddam - was not persuaded of the need for more punitive military action, and so the top policymakers in the administration were sent into the American 'heartland' to drum up support. Given the Clinton administration's ardour for media spin, folksy parochialism and globalisation, the event which emerged from this public-relations offensive was a CNN one-hour special: 'Showdown with Iraq: An International Town Meeting' was held in Columbus, Ohio and featured Madeleine Albright, William Cohen and national security 2l6 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? adviser Sandy Berger. The audience of six thousand local people, gathered in a cavernous basketball arena at Ohio State University, was complemented by viewers and telephone callers from around the US and the rest of the world. The administration put its faith in its star performers, given the need to deliver a positive message to scep- tical Americans — and the event promised both a large television audience and jealous glances from other television networks, envious of CNN's exclusive coverage." From its opening moments until its conclusion, the meeting was marked by loud protests from demonstrators in the audience, but also by numerous questions from Ohio residents which wrong-footed and embarrassed Clinton s team. The first question set the tone for what followed: 'The American administration has the might and means to attack the Iraqi state, but does it have the moral right to attack the Iraqi nation?' Even the transcript of the meeting reveals the growing horror in the voices of the 'experts', their surprise and annoyance that these 'ordinary Americans' (as CNN put it) could have the temerity to challenge the Washington insiders. Predictably, their responses were flustered: Q: I'm an ER physician here in Columbus. My question is, this admin- istration has raised concerns about Iraq's threats to its neighbors, yet none of these neighbors seem too threatened. They haven't asked for help and, in fact, have come out publicly against the bombings [cheers] - further- more, the international community has been opposed to the bombings. If nobody's asking us for their help [sic], how can you justify further US aggression in the region? [Applause, shouts] ALBRIGHT: It is very clear that the problem here is one to the region [sic]. Saddam Hussein has invaded another country before, he continues to try to develop weapons of mass destruction, [shouts from hecklers] and I have been to the region. I have talked to the neighbors. They are concerned about what is going on here. 100 The pattern of the questioning mixed more aggressive challenges to the policymakers with deceptively simple questions: why did the UN Security Council have doubts about the planned American bombing? Why didn't the US simply remove Saddam from power? If the US didn't know the locations of Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction, what would more bombing achieve? Why was the US pursuing a policy against Saddam which inflicted greatest pain AMERICAN MISSIONS 2IJ on innocent Iraqi civilians? Against the swirl of anti-war chants and more militant protests, the straightforward questions stood out in harsh relief; and the inability of the US officials to answer them seemed especially stark. One particularly heated exchange between an audience member and Madeleine Albright was widely broadcast on other television news programmes, and reported in the press. Exasperated by the persistence of protests throughout the auditorium, the CNN moderator took a spontaneous question which had not been vetted in advance: Q: Why bomb Iraq, when other countries have committed similar violations? Turkey, for example — [interrupted by cheers and applause]. Can I finish? For example, Turkey has bombed Kurdish citizens. Saudi Arabia has tortured political and religious dissidents. Why does the US apply different standards of justice to these countries? [Cheers, applause.] ALBRIGHT: Let me say that when there are problems such as you have described, we point them out and make very clear our opposition to them. But there is no one that has done to his people or to his neighbors what Saddam Hussein has done — or what he is thinking about doing [sic]. I am very [interrupted by hecklers]. Q: What about Indonesia? Well, you've turned my microphone off. Albright's typical response to this kind of question — that such relativism or scepticism implied a defence of Saddam - was roundly dismissed by the questioner, when his microphone was eventually switched on again: Q: I'm not defending [Saddam] in the least. What I am saying is that there needs to be consistent application of US foreign policy [applause, cheers]. We cannot support people who are committing the same violations be- cause they are political allies. That is not acceptable. We cannot violate UN resolutions when it is convenient to us. You're not answering my question, Madame Albright [cheers, applause]. This extremely unusual show of dissent was embarrassing to the Clinton administration, and reverberated through Washington and around the country. The New York Times described administration officials as 'stiff and stranded'; the Boston Globe noted that 'the "show- down with Iraq" quickly turned into a showdown with Clinton's team'; Newsweek was more direct:'it was a public relations disaster'. 101 2l8 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Although the Clinton administration had hoped to use the Ohio meeting as a springboard to war, the protests and the reasoned scepticism actually undermined the plan before a large television audience, and may even have contributed to the decision not to launch an attack. (Iraq would gain a reprieve until December, when the bombing finally went ahead.) Having placed great emphasis on their ability to manufacture public consent through a high-profile media event, Clinton's advisers were dealt a sharp rebuke by a public able to think independently and to question the blind use of American power. 102 Although the Ohio episode is an inspiring (if isolated) example of an engaged and critical public response to government policy, we should remember that policymakers will try to avoid such confronta- tions if at all possible. Reporting on the Ohio event, the Financial Times outlined the dilemma for the US government: It is not a handful of militant anti-war activists who have raided the Clinton administration. The most worrying conclusion from this week's effort to explain US policy on Iraq to the people is that ordinary Ameri- cans have some tough, intelligent questions about the purpose and likely outcome of the impending clash. 103 Of course, from a government perspective it is perfectly logical to see popular awareness and scrutiny as 'worrying', particularly if a reinvigorated public begins to challenge some of the more durable and effective American myths about mission, values and the like. If the squirming of the television anchors at CNN's Ohio meeting is any indication, the media will more likely side with the government in the battle over information and policymaking. An editorial in Newsweek surveyed this ground after the Ohio debacle: [The public] cannot be just told what is good for them. They need to be convinced. That is the case for sending high officials to suffer jeers and catcalls on a basketball court. The tricky question is whether this truth makes the world a safer place. On the one hand, public diplomacy makes political leaders accountable for their decisions - it acts as a rein on what might otherwise be a breakneck gallop to war. On the other hand, any country's national interest will sometimes require the use of force, and it is inherently dangerous for the world's only superpower to be constantly hamstrung by the need to satisfy public opinion — in advance — that such force is necessary. 104 AMERICAN MISSIONS 219 The immensity of the task, then, is clear. The American public has not only to break out of its apathy and its dependence on the media (and the government) for information about the world; Americans must also combat the suspicion that their dissent is 'inherently dan- gerous', and remind their leaders that the 'need to satisfy public opinion' is non-negotiable in a democratic state. NOTES 1. Delivered on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, 19 January 1999. 2. Fukuyama originally advanced his thesis in 'The End of History', National Interest 16 (1989): 3-18. He reworked and expanded this original article into The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). For critical perspectives on the thesis, see Timothy Burns, ed., After History? Francis Fukuyama and His Critics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994). 3. Charles Krauthammer, 'The Unipolar Moment', Foreign Affairs 70, no. I (1991): 23-33. 4. See Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993);Tony Smith, America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), and 'In Defense of Interventionism', Foreign Affairs 73, no. 6 (1994): 34-46. 5. The clearest expression of the Clinton administration's interest in the 'democratic peace' thesis came from Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, 'Democracy and the National Interest', Foreign Affairs 75, no. 6 (1996): 47-63- 6. The 'democratic peace' construct has a historical and a philosophical focus: political philosophers are inclined to reach back to Kant for the intellectual foundations of the thesis, while historians have looked to Woodrow Wilson. For a philosophical perspective, see Michael W. Doyle, 'Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs', in Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones and Steven E. Miller, eds, Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 3-57. Tony Smith's America's Mission frames 'Wilsonianism' in quasi-historical (albeit wildly upbeat) terms at 84-109, then returns in conclusion to describe a 'Wilsonianism Resurgent' at 311-45. On the Bush administration's embrace of the 'democratic peace' thesis, see Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, 127-9. 7. We should note that even the most optimistic boosters of the 'democratic peace' thesis had built a little caution into their original enthusiasm - note Tony Smith's suggestion that the world's dependence on 'determined rs rs 220 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? American leadership' should not make Americans forget Machiavelli's dictum: 'Men always commit the error of not knowing where to limit their hopes, and by trusting to these rather than to a just measure of their resources, they are generally ruined.' America's Mission, 345. 8. Richard K. Betts, 'The Delusion of Impartial Intervention', Foreign Affairs 73, no. 6 (1994): 20-3 3; Thomas Carothers, 'Democracy Without Illu- sions', Foreign Affairs 76, no. i (1997): 85-99. 9. Farced Zakaria, 'The Rise of Illiberal Democracy', Foreign Affairs 76, no. 6 (1997): 22-43. A rather more detailed exploration of the same argument is offered by Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, 'Democ- ratization and the Danger of War', in Brown et al., eds, Debating the Democratic Peace, 301—34. 10. Michael Mandelbaum, 'Foreign Policy as Social Work', Foreign Affairs 75, no. i (1996): 16-32. 11. John L. Harper,'The Dream of Democratic Peace', Foreign Affairs 76, no. 3 (1997): 117-21. 12. Richard N. Haass, The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States After the Cold War (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1997), 6. In addition to his Wild West terminology, we should note the economic subtext in Haass's scheme - his picture of a politically 'deregulated' world, and the inevitability of this movement, can be easily mapped onto the literature of neoliberalism and globalisation which we examined in the first chapter. 13. For a critique of Haass's terminology, and the suggestion that his 'reluctant sheriff' model is 'useful for only a fraction of foreign policy concerns', see Gaddis Smith, 'Saddle Up!', New York Times, 3 August 1997. Haass at least practised in office the same 'discriminating' philosophy which he preached as a policy commentator - Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn narrate the story of Haass's refusal to meet with Kurdish leaders in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War, when the population of Iraq had been led to believe that the Bush administration supported a democratic uprising. Haass, then director for Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council, fumed at a hapless Senate staffer who had sponsored the Kurdish overtures: 'You don't understand. Our policy is to get rid of Saddam, not his regime.' Out of the Ashes: The Resurrec- tion of Saddam Hussein (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 37. 14. John Harper's 'The Dream of Democratic Peace' specifically attacks Strobe Talbott's 'Democracy and the National Interest' without touch- ing on the details of Clinton administration policy, or questioning whether the activities of the US government in the 19905 might stem from any source other than altruism. 15. For critiques of the prevailing theories of international relations (IR), see Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994), especially 1-8; and Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduction to International Relations (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994). George, 73, complains that IR 'continues to be characterized by a crude AMERICAN MISSIONS 221 essentialism centered on a cast of caricatured historical figures'. 16. Jessica T. Matthews, 'Power Shift', Foreign Affairs 76, no. i (1997): 50— 66. 17. Jeffrey E. Garten, 'The Root of the Problem', Newsweek, 31 March 1997. Garten defended his remarks in a subsequent interview, confirming that President Clinton had himself suggested that 'we had to shift our foreign policy much more in the direction of economic and commer- cial relations', and that the inevitable consequence was some 'scandals': 'In a commercial culture, where there are lots of deals going on and lots of new markets opening, inevitably some people try to get on the train and they're not the people that you want.' Interview with Jeffrey Garten, 'All Things Considered', National Public Radio, 25 March 1997. 18. Josef Joffe, 'How America Does It', Foreign Affairs 76, no. 5 (1997): 13— 27- 19. Jeffrey E. Garten, 'Business and Foreign Policy', Foreign Affairs 76, no. 3 (1997): 67-79 at 75. 20. Garten is, in fact, an exception to this rule of globalises - he tends more towards scaremongering over the US economy, and the relative weakness of the domestic sector, in his efforts to persuade Americans to engage with the 'big emerging markets'. See his The Big Ten: The Big Emerging Markets and How They Will Change Our Lives (New York: Basic Books, 1997). 21. Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace that is Remaking the Modern World, updated edition (New York: Touchstone Books, 1999). Although their perspective is broadly triumphalist, the updated paperback edition of The Commanding Heights contains some entertainingly hasty throat- clearing about the need for 'measured prudence' and 'legitimacy' in the market system - prompted by the disastrous financial crises in Asia and Russia in 1997 and i998.Yergin and Stanislaw's admission, 398, that 'few people would die with the words free markets on their lips' suggests that the new masters of the 'commanding heights' are not yet sure of their victory. 22. Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999).The eponymous metaphor is introduced at 25- 9- 23. Ibid., 195-217. 24. Friedman is particularly keen to make use of computer-speak - he writes of a country's 'hardware' (its factories and economic base) and its 'software' (its macro-economic policies), which allows him to make bad puns - for example, the suggestion that the US and the UK are 'running' 'DOScapital 6.0'. Ibid., 128-9. 25. Ibid., 273. 26. Ibid., 60-61, 285-6, 288. 27. Ibid., 285. 28. Ibid., 378. There is, in all this, more than a hint of the founding 222 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? document of American missionary enterprise, John Winthrop's 1630 sermon 'A Modell of Christian Charitie', written aboard the Arabella in transit from England to America. Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachussets Bay colony, noted that 'Wee shall finde that the God of Israeli is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies.... For wee must consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are uppon us.' 29. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, 378. 30. One obvious weakness in the globalist vision of America and the world is that the US itself is hardly the most consistent or thorough promoter of free trade in its handling of the domestic economy - in terms of extensive government investment in the technology and aviation sec- tors, tariff barriers to cheap foreign goods, and the huge subsidies handed out to agriculture at the federal level, and to a wide variety of busi- nesses at the state and local levels. 'Realists' have largely avoided this fundamental inconsistency in American free-trade rhetoric, however. 31. Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Times Books, 1995). 32. Ibid., 205. 33. On the early intellectual rationale for the dispossession of native Ameri- cans, see Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). On the influence of racial prejudice and theorising on US expansion in the nineteenth century, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of Ameri- can Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Walter LaFeber discusses the proponents of racial imperialism in The American Search for Opportunity, 1865-1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 43-4. A good example of'Anglo-Saxon' racial expansionism is Josiah Strong, Our Country [1885], edited by Jurgen Herbst (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). 34. Bernard Lewis adopts a clear distinction between 'Western' and 'Islamic' or 'Middle Eastern' civilisations in his Islam and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Fouad Ajami has based a successful career in the US on noting (and lamenting) the resistance of many Arabs to certain phenomena in the Middle East which Ajami takes as given: American power, Israeli expansion and liberal economics. See, for example, The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice since 1967, updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). Both Lewis and Ajami are frequently praised (by Americans) for their insights into the Arab 'character' or 'mind'. For a cogent critique of this practice, and Ajami's acquiescence in it, see Bruce Cumings, War and Television (London: Verso, 1992), 107. 35. See Aaron L. Friedberg, 'Ripe for Rivalry: Prospects for Peace in a Multipolar Asia', International Security 18, no. 3 (1993): 5-33; and Jacob Heilbrunn, 'The Next Cold War', New Republic, 20 November 1995. Both commentators envisage a very similar end-point for Chinese AMERICAN MISSIONS 223 economic development: 'By 2010 China will probably have gone from being the world's fourth largest economy to its biggest. If the historical correlation between extraordinarily rapid internal growth and external expansion holds, the implications for Asian stability will be troubling indeed' (Friedberg); 'But there's no sound reason to assume that eco- nomic advances will lead to a more docile China; on the contrary, rapid economic growth has traditionally resulted in rapid expansion abroad' (Heilbrunn). For more extensive surveys which reach many of the same conclusions, see John Bryan Starr, Understanding China: A Guide to China's Economy, History, and Political Structure (New York: Hill & Wang, 1997); and Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, The Coming Conflict with China (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1997). These fears of nefarious Chinese designs reached new heights in 1999, as the Repub- lican leadership in the US Congress orchestrated a furious campaign alleging that China had stolen vital nuclear secrets from US labs. 36. See the sources in note 23 of Chapter 3, and'Beware: A Threat Abroad', Newsweek, 17 June 1996; and 'The New Russian Question', Newsweek, 10 February 1992. 37. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993). 38. For an account of the effect of Kaplan's book on Clinton's thinking, see Elizabeth Drew, On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 157-8. 39. For Kaplan's 'disconcerting' remark, see his 'After Balkan Ghosts', Weekly Standard, 18 December 1995. See also 'The Coming Anarchy', Atlantic Monthly 273, no. 2 (1994): 44-76 at 46, 72, 76. Kaplan sharpened his Cassandrising in The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century (New York: Random House, 1996). Perhaps after the Bosnian debacle, Kaplan has realised that the key to achieving success as an author is to point to real problems (such as wealth inequality and competition for resources), but to suggest that neither the US nor the UN can do anything about them - this leads to such aphorisms as 'We are the world and the world is us'; or 'No one can foresee the precise direction of history, and no nation or people is safe from its wrath.' The Ends of the Earth, 437, 438. 40. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 26-7, 33, 40-55. 41. These reviews were reprinted on the 1997 paperback edition of the book (New York: Touchstone, 1997). 42. Many commentators have questioned the usefulness of Huntingdon's categories, especially his 'Latin American civilization'. See Bruce Nussbaum, 'Capital, Not Culture', Foreign Affairs 76, no. 2 (1997): 165; and 'The Man in the Baghdad Cafe', Economist, 9 November 1996. Remarkably few reviewers - even those generally critical of Huntington's thesis - drew attention to his dubious efforts to exclude large and well- established immigrant populations in Europe, North America and y rs 224 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Australasia from his definition of 'Western civilization'. Some com- mentators were at least able to group Huntington with the present generation of anti-immigration right-wing politicians in 'Western' countries - for a juxtaposition of Huntington's thesis with the current debate over immigration in Australia, see 'A National Identity Crisis', Economist, 14 December 1996. 43. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, 206, 204. 44. Ibid., 130. This extremely gloomy diversion into philosophy seems also to have escaped the attention of Huntington's critics. 45. Huntington, 'The Lonely Superpower', Foreign Affairs 78, no. 2 (1999): 35-49 at 38. 46. The globalists have responded acidly to Huntington through predictable avenues: see 'In Praise of Davos Man', Economist, i February 1997 ('Busi- nessmen may accidentally be making the world safer.'); and Christopher Power, 'Hatfields and McCoys - On a Global Scale', Business Week, 25 November 1996. ('Another problem is Huntington's dismissal of business as a force of change.') 47. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 29- 55, 835. 48. Since World War II, most historians of 'Wilsonianism' have been notoriously loath to examine their subject in a critical light. Although an earlier historiography had exposed the inconsistencies and strategic miscalculations of Wilson's 'internationalism', the experience of another world war seems largely to have quelled this critical tendency. The most warmly received recent study, Thomas J. Knock's To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), explicitly states that 'globalism' (of the Cold War and post-Cold War kind) is the 'illegitimate' heir to Wilsonianism. Knock, 274, describes US foreign policy since 1945 as 'anti-Wilsonian', since its commitment to internationalism seems fleeting and self- interested. N. Gordon Levin, Jr.'s Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America's Response to War and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 3, argues more convincingly that post-war US policy was shaped in Wilsonian terms: 'For Wilson, then, American national values were identical with universal progressive liberal values, and an exceptionalist America had a mission to lead mankind toward the or- derly international society of the future.' 49. The biographical details for Huntington, Garten and Fukuyama are taken from the university websites of Harvard, Yale and George Wash- ington University. Pvichard Haass s resume is summarised on the dust jacket of The Reluctant Sheriff. Kissinger's colourful career has attracted the attention of several biographers, the most recent being Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). Briefer and more recent profiles of Kissinger have been offered by Nigel Farndale, 'Regarding Henry', Jerusalem Post, 12 February 1999; and Simon Hattenstone, 'Cold Warrior', Guardian, i July 1999. rs AMERICAN MISSIONS 225 50. We should also remember that corporate cash can create the conditions for a scholarly conflict of interest - one of the most extensive rebuttals to the 'democratic peace' thesis concludes that the US must be prepared for 'great power challenges from states like Japan and Germany', and must not allow itself to drop its military guard. Its author, Christopher Layne, is described in the contributors' notes as 'an unaffiliated scholar' who is 'presently a consultant to the government contracts practice group of the law firm of Hill, Wynne, Troop and Meisinger, which represents major firms in the defense industry'. Layne, 'Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace', in Brown et al., eds, Debating the Democratic Peace, 157-201. 51. For a description of Albright's 'Georgetown foreign policy salon', and some creepily prescient speculation over Albright's post-Georgetown career prospects, see Molly Sinclair, 'Woman On Top of the World', Washington Post, 6 January 1991. Albright's career, in spite of her academic position, remains 'a singularly Washington one,' according to her biog- rapher. Michael Dobbs,'Becoming Madeleine Albright', Washington Post, 2 May 1999. Dobbs also establishes Albright's perfect 'New Democrat' credentials: after her divorce from newspaper magnate Joseph Albright, 'she got the Georgetown house, a syo-acre farm near Dulles Inter- national Airport, and a stock portfolio that would be worth $3.5 mil- lion by the time she joined the Clinton administration in 1993'. 52. Elizabeth Bumiller, 'At 34, Worldly-wise and on His Way Up', New York Times, 24 September 1999. 53. For details of the history of the Times'* 'Foreign Affairs' column, see Patrick Smith, 'Globalism's Pen Pal', Nation, 14 June 1999. Smith notes that Friedman 'travels with a heavy bag of ready-made notions', and that his decision to base himself in the US had immediate consequences for his perspective on the world: 'Friedman moved the column to Washington and more or less dispensed with listening - the exceptions being the American elite and the sound of his own voice.' 54. 'Marriott culture' was coined by Janine Wedel to describe the Western environment which grew up around (and because of) the 'experts' who promoted neoliberalism in the former Warsaw Pact countries in the late 19805 and 1990s. Friedman is an unapologetic and happy guest - see The Lexus and the Olive Tree, 35. Friedman's inability to mention a hotel without identifying its corporate owner contributes to the sense that his book is an epic commercial for the Fortune 500: for some examples, see ibid., 207-8, 220. 55. Ibid., 381. 56. Some reviewers, at least, were discomfited by Friedman's 'startling' parroting of Madison Avenue copy. See David RiefF, 'The View from Davos', Los Angeles Times, 23 May 1999: 'The pity is that while hype is a copywriter's job, it should not be that of the chief foreign-affairs columnist of the New York Times.' 57. The Lexus and the Olive Tree, 26, 279-81. Even the reviewer for the 220 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Financial Times, extremely sympathetic to the project of peddling globalism, lost patience with Friedman's generalisations, strained analo- gies and 'folksy metaphors': 'I confess that by the second chapter I was getting pretty irritated by Thomas L. Friedman. After a canter through the general characteristics of the global market economy, he is soon telling us about his amazing mom, playing bridge across the internet with a man in Siberia. Then comes a rambling story about how diffi- cult it is to satisfy his passion for whole oranges in a Tokyo hotel. From this he deduces that "life is like room service".' Max Wilkinson, 'Global Warnings', Financial Times, 15 May 1999. 58. The Lexus and the Olive Tree, 378, 320-21, 377. 59. Stanley Hoffmann, 'In Defense of Mother Teresa: Morality in Foreign Policy', Foreign Affairs 75, no. 2 (1996): 172-5. 60. For general accounts of campaign finance and the influence of corpo- rate funding on elections, see Elizabeth Drew, The Corruption of Ameri- can Politics: What When Wrong and Why (Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing, 1999); Dan Clawson, Alan Neustadtl, and Mark Weller, Dollars and Votes: How Business Campaign Contributions Subvert Democracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); and Robert K. Goidel, Donald A. Gross and Todd G. Shields, Money Matters: Consequences of Campaign Finance Reform (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). 61. The actual total spent on the presidential campaigns of Dole and Clinton was many times this amount, but the byzantine rules (and loopholes) on funding deter estimates of an exact figure. Although the candidates raised around $30 million in personal contributions, their campaigns relied on commercials and logistical support from their respective political parties, and the so-called 'soft money' (mostly from corporations) which sustains them. For a guide to the financing of the 1996 election, which broke all spending records, see Brooks Jackson, 'Financing the 1996 Campaign: The Law of the Jungle', in Larry J. Sabato, ed., Toward the Millennium: The Elections of 1996 (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1997), 225- 60. Newsweek estimated the total money raised and spent by Clinton and the Democrats during the 1996 campaign at a staggering $200 million: Howard Fineman et al., 'Strange Bedfellows', Newsweek, 10 March 1997. 62. For a brief summary of'1996 Democratic scandals', including the ac- ceptance of money from Asian sources, see Clawson et al., Dollars and Votes, 199-202; Jackson, 'Financing the 1996 Campaign', 246-8. 63. One of the reasons why the foreign funding issue became so prominent after 1996 was that the Republicans sensed that they could attack the Democrats on this point without appearing untenably hypocritical; any broader critique of campaign finance would certainly implicate both parties equally. 64. On the direct connections between corporate 'soft money' and political influence, see Clawson et al., Dollars and Votes, 107—38. Investigations into 1996 election scandals continued throughout the following years; m , k AMERICAN MISSIONS 227 for the specific issue of Chinese influence (and of Boeing's eagerness to use political contacts to increase its sales in China), see Paula Dwyer et al.,'The Boeing Connection?', Business Week, 31 March 1997; and Owen Ullmann, 'A China Connection that Could Trip Clinton Up', Business Week, i June 1998. 65. On the influence of Rubin and co. on the Clinton administration, see John B. Judis, 'The Second Rubin Administration', New Republic, 10 February 1997; and Karen Breslau,'Clinton Goes Corporate', Newsweek, 17 February 1997. Rubin's former colleagues, the partners of Goldman Sachs, were the most generous donors to Clinton's cause during his presidency: see Howard Fineman et al.,'It's Dole Inc. vs. Clinton Inc.', Newsweek, 8 April 1996. Goldman Sachs may also send more of its employees to enforce the 'New Democracy' in person - Rubin's protege at the firm, Jon Corzine, launched an expensive, self-funded campaign to capture the Senate seat in New Jersey in 1999. Corzine ('New Democrat' credentials - $300 million personal fortune) was admiringly described by the New Republic as 'unusual' but 'part of a tradition of upper-class progressives that goes back nine decades'. Judis,'Gold Man', New Republic, 15 November 1999. Goldman Sachs, in return for its support of the 'New Democracy', was assured enormous profits from the Clinton-led normalisation of US relations with China, particularly as American investment banks were invited by the Chinese government to assist in the massive privatisations of former state-owned enterprises in China. See Mark L. Clifford and Brian Bremner, 'Goldman's Big Bet on China', Business Week, 6 December 1999. 66. One of Rubin's greatest triumphs, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall banking legislation intended to control financial institutions and to prevent them from consolidating their activities and acting recklessly (as they had done before the Great Depression), was eventually pushed through Congress just as Rubin himself had returned to Wall Street — to head the world's largest financial corporation, Citigroup. Asked by the New York Times if he would be earning more in his new job than his old post as treasury secretary, he 'deadpanned': 'That's a fair assump- tion.' A more precise figure for his personal gain would be somewhere between $10 million and $27 million annually, although his services to the financial industry during his tenure in the Clinton administration suggest that he has earned his reward. Joseph Kahn, 'Former Treasury Secretary Joins Leadership Triangle at Citigroup', New York Times, 27 October 1999. Even the business press noted that Rubin's role in all this left a 'slightly unsavory odor': 'Rubin favored dismantling Glass- Steagall when he was in the Administration. Now, he appears to be benefiting personally from its repeal.' Robert Kuttner, 'A Requiem for Glass-Steagall', Business Week, 15 November 1999. 67. Bill Bradley resigned from the Senate in 1996, claiming that 'politics is broken'; he immediately set out to fix his own bank balance, at least, by accepting a $327,000 consultancy with investment bank J.P. Morgan. 228 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY ? It was not surprising, then, that he should take Wall Street by storm in his campaign for the presidency in 2000. See John M. Broder, 'Bradley Relies on Wall Street to Raise Funds', New York Times, 24 October 1999. The Times affected surprise at the Streets solid backing of Bradley given his earlier espousal of policies which would not promote business interests, such as an increase in capital gains tax. Meanwhile, invest- ment banker Louis Susman reminded Bloomberg News that Bradley was a reliable player in the much bigger game of neoliberal globalisation: 'I've followed Bradley's career and he's been thoughtful and visionary about the economy on a global basis.' Holly Rosenkrantz, 'Street Bank- rolls Bradley', Bloomberg News, 8 November 1999. 68. The 2000 presidential election threatened to break even the 1996 records on fundraising and campaign spending. The Republican challenger, George W. Bush, was actually smashing previous campaign finance records by as much as 300 per cent in 1999. 'The Costliest Race in the World', The Economist, 31 July 1999. Business Week even suggested in 1997 that campaign finance reform was more likely to come from corporate donors, frustrated that their enormous 'soft money' cheques to political parties and committees might escape their control after they'd been cashed.'The lack of accountability is the big complaint about soft money', grumbled one corporate lobbyist. Another promised that 'We're exploring other avenues for our soft dollars.' Mary Beth Regan and Amy Borrus,'The Fed-Up Golden Goose', Business Week, 23 June 1997. 69. The major exceptions to this rule are foreign-policy situations that demand a rapid response, and minor incidents and skirmishes which are seen as the presidential preserve. See Bruce W. Jendeson, 'Who, Why, What, and How: Debates Over Post-Cold War Military Inter- vention', in Robert J. Lieber, ed., Eagle Adrift: American Foreign Policy at the End of the Century (New York: Longman, 1997), 39-70. 70. See Barbara Hinckley, Less Than Meets the Eye: Foreign Policy Making and the Myth of the Assertive Congress (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Stephen R. Weissman, A Culture of Deference: Congress's Failure of Leadership in Foreign Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 71. On Yugoslavia, and the tied vote over the execution of the war in Kosovo, see Alison Mitchell, 'Deadlocked House Denies Support for Air Campaign', New York Times, 29 April 1999. On the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty defeat, see Eric Schmitt, 'Senate Kills Test Ban Treaty in Crushing Loss for Clinton', New York Times, 14 October 1999. 72. 'Independent internationalism' was coined by Joan Hoff Wilson in her American Business and Foreign Policy, 1920-1933 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), x—xi. Emily Rosenberg has argued that the concept is particu- larly germane to US foreign policy in the 1920$ and 19305: see Spread- ing the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890— 1945 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), 115-17. More recently, however, Joan Hoff has reasserted her belief that American policy throughout the 'American century' has been guided by independent internationalism: AMERICAN MISSIONS 229 'The American Century: From Sarajevo to Sarajevo', Diplomatic History 23, no. 2 (1999): 285-319. 73. The remarks were made on the Senate floor by Jon Kyi, the Republican Senator from Arizona, and reprinted in 'Beyond Testing: Five Senators' Views on US Role in World', New York Times, 9 October 1999. 74. Jason DeParle,'The Man Inside Bill Clintons Foreign Policy', New York Times, 20 August 1995. 75. This may explain Lake's bizarre and disturbing (or, in the words of the Times interviewer, 'idiosyncratic') suggestion that 'Mother Teresa and Ronald Reagan were both trying to do the same thing - one helping the helpless, one fighting the Evil Empire. One of the nice things about this job is you can do them both at the same time and not see them as contradictory.' DeParle, 'The Man Inside Bill Clinton's Foreign Policy'. 76. Owen Harries, 'Madeleine Albright's "Munich Mindset'", Neu> York Times, 19 December 1996. 77. John F. Kennedy, Jr., 'Interview with Madeleine Albright', George, 21 January 1998. 78. Dick Morris, Behind the Oval Office: Getting Reelected Against All the Odds, updated edition (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999), 341. 79. We should note the corollary to this ideology in the presentation of domestic policy. Bill Clinton's chosen successor, Al Gore, offered a new variant of the theme as he opened his campaign for the presidency in 1998: 'practical idealism'. Not to be outdone, leading Republican can- didate George W. Bush offered 'compassionate conservatism' as his political compass. Katharine Q. Seelye, 'Gore Floats 2000 Theme: "Practical Idealism'", New York Times, 3 December 1998. 80. On the creation of enormous entertainment/media conglomerates, see Dan Steinbock, Triumph and Erosion in the American Media and Entertain- ment Industries (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1995); and Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney, The Global Media: The New Mis- sionaries of Corporate Capitalism (London: Cassell, 1997). On the connections between the media's news agenda and revenue creation (including advertising), see Bartholomew H. Sparrow, Uncertain Guardians: The News Media as Political Institution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 73-104. Media corporations have also donated huge sums to political campaigns and parties in recent years; by one estimate, more than $31 million between 1995 and 1998. Sheila Kaplan,'Payments to the Powerful', Columbia Journalism Review 37, no. 3 (1998): 54-6. A general perspective on the decline of international news coverage and the deleterious influence of transnational corporate ownership of the media is offered by Garrick Utley, 'The Shrinking of Foreign News', Foreign Affairs 76, no. 2 (1997): 2-10. 81. For a general perspective, see James Ledbetter, Made Possible By...: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States (London: Verso, 1997), especially 154-9 f° r the influence of corporate sponsorship on the news 23O ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? coverage of public broadcasting. 82. Cumings, War and Television, 103-28. 83. In Kosovo, according to Patrick J. Sloyan of Newsday, 'the media once more were asked to sort out a few kernels of fact from a barrage of distortions and half-truths from government information manipulators.' 'The Fog of War', American Journalism Review 21, no. 5 (1999): 32—4. On the introduction of Tony Blair's chief 'spin-doctor', Alistair Campbell, to NATO headquarters, see Edward Stourton, 'Spinning for Victory', Observer, 16 October 1999. Robert Fisk of the London Independent argued that 'most of the journalists at NATO headquarters were so supine, so utterly taken in by NATO's generals and air commodores that their questions might have been printed out for them in advance.' 'Taken In by the NATO Line', Independent, 29 June 1999. 84. On the media's role in Somalia, see Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 212-14; Warren P Strobel, Late-Breaking Foreign Policy: The News Media's Influence on Peace Operations (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997), 131-42; and Peter Young and Peter Jesser, The Media and the Military: From the Crimea to Desert Strike (London: Macmillan, 1997), 204—25. Although these sources dif- fer over the extent to which media reporting influenced US interven- tion (Strobel in particular claims that the majority of the reporting on Somalia took place after US government initiatives), these authors agree that the media's coverage focused narrowly on the humanitarian, rather than the political elements of Somalia's predicament. Young and Jesser, The Media and the Military, 224, suggest that '[fjrom beginning to end in Somalia, entertainment took priority over informed analysis. The initial media optimism, based on the media's own narrow view of the situation and fed by unrealistic American predictions of a quick resolu- tion, soon turned to a disenchanted attribution of blame to the United Nations when expectations were not met.' For a general account of the media's effort to turn complex foreign policy situations into 'human interest' stories, see Susan Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (New York: Routledge, 1999). 85. Walter Isaacson, 'Madeleine's War', Time, 17 May 1999. 86. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, 349—50. 87. The New York Times hardly distanced itself from Friedman's book. Not only did it print a lengthy extract in its Sunday magazine ('A Manifesto for a Fast World', New York Times, 28 March 1999), devoting its cover to Friedman (his article was introduced, with no apparent irony, by a full-page photo of a clenched fist painted in the colours of the Stars and Stripes), but it also printed two laudatory reviews: Josef JofTe, 'One Dollar, One Vote', 25 April 1999 ('a brilliant guide'); Richard Eder, 'The Global Village is Here', 26 April 1999 ('a breathtaking tour'). 88. On the influence of immigration and immigrants on US foreign policy, see Alexander DeConde, Ethnicity, Race and American Foreign Policy t AMERICAN MISSIONS 23! (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992). 89. Kennedy, Jr., 'Interview With Madeleine Albright'. I am grateful to Andrew Graybill for correcting Albright's statement — native Americans, of course, were 'invaded and occupied' on a massive scale by European settlers from the late fifteenth century onward. 90. For examples of 'America First' thinking, see Patrick J. Buchanan, 'America First - and Second, and Third', National Interest 19 (1990): 77—92; and his A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1999). The latter aroused much contro- versy in the American media for suggesting that the US might have kept out of the Second World War; Buchanan, ever the anti-communist, was supportive of American intervention in Vietnam, however. 91. For a general account of the misleading of the public over foreign policy, see Eric Alterman, Who Speaks for America? Why Democracy Matters in Foreign Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). On the expe- ditious creation of Saddam as a monster in the second half of 1990, see William A. Dorman and Steven Livingston, 'News and Historical Content: The Establishing Phase of the Persian Gulf Policy Debate', in W. Lance Bennett and David L. Paletz, eds, Taken by Storm: The Media, Public Opinion, and US Foreign Policy in the Gulf War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 63-81. On the State Department's evasions over Rwanda, see Chapter 2 above, notes 93 and 94 and accompanying text. 92. The first quotation is from Todd Hunter Weiss; the second, from Mike Cross. See Rick Bragg, Carey Goldberg and Barbara Stewart, 'For Jane and Joe Public, Wariness and Ignorance', New York Times, 26 March 1999. 93. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair complained in May 1999 that reporters had ignored the refugee crisis in Kosovo after only a few days of coverage; Susan Moeller saw this as indicative of the media's short attention span: 'Kosovo can be preempted just like any other news story can be preempted - and when it gets preempted, it goes off the air as if it never existed.' 'Compassion Fatigue', Christian Science Monitor, 24 May 1999. On the difficulty of selling the Kosovo campaign, and keeping the public interested, see Michael Powell, 'How to Bomb in Selling a War', Washington Post, 27 May 1999. Powell quotes a San Francisco advertising executive on the unfortunate persistence of the conflict: 'It's like the NHL [National Hockey League] playoffs: People get hurt and it goes on too long.' 94. Susan Sachs,'While Some Americans are Saying, "Just Shoot the Man'", New York Times, 25 May 1999. 95. An opinion poll conducted in November 1997 suggested that 61 per cent of Americans supported a military solution to the persistent problem of Saddam Hussein. See Charles Laurence, 'Tired of Words, Americans Want End to "Beast of Baghdad'", Daily Telegraph, 13 November 1997. The most prominent advocate of the extrajudicial murder of Saddam , 232 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? was the New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman: 'Given the nature of world politics today, and given America's feckless allies, the US will get only one good military shot at Saddam before everyone at the UN starts tut-tutting and rushing to his defense. So if and when Saddam pushes beyond the brink, and we get that one good shot, let's make sure it's a head shot.' 'Head Shot', New York Times, 6 November 1997. It was left to a Times reader to point out that Friedman's suggestion was a violation of (tut-tutting?) international law: 'Yes, Saddam Hussein is a bad man. International politics is full of bad men. But there is still a law against murder.' 'Letters to the Editor' (Stanley N. Futterman), New York Times, 12 November 1997. 96. John M. Broder, 'Laurels Elude President as Public Judges a War', New York Times, 22 June 1999. 97. This comment was made by Bill Burrows, interviewed in Bragg et al., 'For Jane and Joe Public'. 98. The question of the consistency of American intervention was raised by Walter Isaacson in his otherwise hagiographical 'Madeleine's War'. Isaacson printed Albright's reply, but did not follow up on Albright's disingenuous statement of her partial multilateralism - 'Just because you can't act everywhere doesn't mean you don't act anywhere.' 99. On the Clinton administration's stage-management of the event, and the frustration of other news networks at CNN's exclusive coverage, see Howard Kurtz, 'CNN Alone to Air Town Meeting on Iraq Policy', Washington Post, 18 February 1998. In light of the disastrous perform- ance of the Clinton officials, one of the administration's motives for choosing this single network may well have backfired: 'Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his aides are known to watch CNN.' 100. 'Showdown with Iraq: An International Town Meeting', CNN, 18 February 1998. 101. Walter Goodman, 'Critic's Notebook', New York Times, 21 February 1998; David L. Marcus, 'Top Officials Take Heat at Iraqi Forum', Boston Globe, 19 February 1998; Michael Elliott, 'Cheers and Jeers', Newsweek, 2 March 1998. 102. For an overview of the Ohio State meeting, and its significance for the formation of policy on Iraq, see Alterman, Who Speaks for America?, 1-4. 103. Bruce Clark, 'Middle America Reserves Judgment on Use of Force', Financial Times, 21 February 1998. 104. Elliott, 'Cheers and Jeers'. CHAPTER 5 A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? The course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others. George W. Bush, 2003 State of the Union Address 1 GEORGE W. BUSH AND 9/11 'A humble nation': Bush before the 'war on terror' In October 2000 - before the war against Iraq, September nth and the fractious fiasco of the November election - George W Bush made a surprising announcement: if he were elected president he would try to make America a 'humble nation' on the worlds stage. Bill Clinton and Al Gore had spent the previous eight years pushing an American agenda (and, occasionally, American soldiers) onto the rest of the world; Bush thought this was bad for the world and bad for America, placing too much strain upon the military and en- couraging other countries to 'resent' the United States. Although Bush, like Clinton, had dodged Vietnam, his Republican political base allowed him to promote this apparent detachment from the world without seeming weak. Clinton and Gore, on the other hand, had spent the past decade formulating 'tough' military policies to counter the impression that they were closet peaceniks. When Bush floated the idea of national humility during the second presidential debate, Gore sensed an opportunity to reach further to the right: in the third debate, the vice-president promised to boost military spending by $100 billion, more than twice the amount that Bush had proposed. The Texas governor, when questioned on Gore's larger 233 234 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? sum, admitted that 'if this were a spending contest, I'd come in second.' 2 In describing Bush's transformation from a 'humble' foreign policy to a global crusader against 'terror', it's worth remembering this early (and apparently unlikely) distinction between Bush and Gore. At this point, before the September nth attacks altered the American politi- cal scene, Bush sought to temper what he took to be the excessive interventionism of Clinton and to place an even greater focus on domestic affairs. Bush's father had lost the 1992 election to Bill Clinton even after the first President Bush had triumphed in the 1991 Gulf War, an outcome which appeared to teach any future candidates a lesson about the relative weight of foreign and domestic issues in electoral politics. Moreover, George H.W. Bush was a relatively cautious manager of international affairs, in spite of the popular impression that his focus on the Gulf War rather than the American economy had led to his defeat in 1992. His son, then, managed two distinct legacies in his 2000 campaign: a wariness to- wards engagement with the world outside America, and an eagerness to focus on domestic issues even as the Democrats boasted of their global expertise. 3 When Bush was eventually declared the winner of the 2000 presi- dential election, he assembled an experienced but divided foreign- policy team. In addition to appointing a number of alumni from the first Bush administration, who could be relied upon to exercise caution and a measure of diplomacy in international affairs, he also called upon Republicans who expressed more fealty to Ronald Reagan than to his father. In the 19905, the view that Ronald Reagan had 'won' the Cold War through 'strength' - that the United States had outspent and finally bullied the Soviet Union into collapse — became a near orthodoxy in Republican (and some Democratic) circles, as did the attendant conviction that this victory and the method used to attain it licensed the United States to throw its weight around the world stage. 4 For example, while George H.W Bush, Colin Powell and Bill Clinton had settled into the policy of 'containing' Saddam Hussein through economic sanctions, these Reagan Republicans - including Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle — saw Saddam's survival as a rebuke to American power. It should be stressed that no one seems to have cared much A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 235 about the Iraqi people, who suffered terribly under the sanctions regime; instead, the debate concerned the correct way to ensure that the American goal of a unified and pliable Iraq was maintained. The talk of removing Saddam by force was inspired as much by the need to project an impression of American predominance as by any press- ing concerns over Saddam's threat to his neighbours or the United States. 5 Absent an event like September nth, George W. Bush's foreign policy would probably have been defined by the squabbles between these two positions: the need for America to pursue its interests through the use of diplomacy and selective multilateralism, and the attraction of using American power to cow any potential challengers. Bush's two significant crises before September nth demonstrated the split personality of his administration. The United States continued to fly its spy planes along the Chinese coast in a display of military and intelligence-gathering prowess, but then scrambled to mount a diplomatic response when one of these planes and its entire crew was forced to land in China. (Bush largely disappeared during this crisis, leaving Powell to do the talking.) Meanwhile, the president announced that the United States would withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty with Russia, which had previ- ously prevented the militarisation of outer space and which therefore obstructed the American march towards the deployment of a 'Star Wars' missile defence system. Amidst Russian objections and criti- cism from around the world, however, Bush simultaneously wooed Vladimir Putin: he praised the Russian leader's 'soul', and began his bewildering but apparently effective tactic of flattering foreign lead- ers with invitations to his Texas ranch. 6 Perhaps the most reliable bellwether of the Bush administration's policy was Condoleezza Rice, Bush's National Security Adviser, who was temperamentally located somewhere between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In a sweeping article written during the 2000 presidential campaign, Rice outlined the agenda of a prospective Republican administration: George W. Bush would promote 'free trade', engage the 'big powers' of Russia and China, and make a crucial distinction between 'im- portant' and 'trivial' events abroad. Rice, caricaturing Bill Clinton as an overstretched multilateralist, criticised his administration for 236 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? responding to every foreign issue as if it were a vital American interest, and especially for his supposed tendency to intervene in 'humanitarian crises' which had been caused by complex and shifting political forces. (With impressive chutzpah, she blamed the 'mission creep' of Somalia entirely on Clinton, even though Bush's father launched that particular adventure in the last months of his presi- dency.) While Rice's manifesto did suggest that America had a role in combating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and checking 'rogue states', the overriding impression was that America under George Bush would scale back its military presence abroad. 7 Just as Rice had caricatured Clinton, and exaggerated the differ- ences between his foreign policy and Bush's proposed alternative, many people in America and Europe seized upon the ABM treaty withdrawal and indulged a misplaced nostalgia for the Clinton years. As Bush openly stated his administrations rejection of the Kyoto protocol on climate change and the International Criminal Court (ICC), these critics hailed Clinton as a tireless multilateralist, and produced a slew of what-might-have-been stories about the 'lost' (or 'stolen') Gore presidency. Clinton, in typical fashion, had kept both Kyoto and the ICC on a kind of political life-support, albeit in a persistent vegetative state. At the end of Clinton's term, the United States had not formally dismissed the Kyoto 'track' even as Clinton had rejected the consensus developed by European nations in 2000. 8 In a still more duplicitous gesture, Clinton actually signed the ICC treaty less than three weeks before leaving office but simultaneously declared that he would not send the document to the US Senate for ratification. (Covering all the bases, he also advised Bush to follow this course.) 9 His successor, in contrast, eschewed the double-handed approach of Clinton, mistaking honesty for diplomacy by actually confirming America's opposition to these international initiatives. 10 By the summer of 2001, as Bush left Washington for a month- long vacation, commentators both within and beyond the United States sensed that the new president was adrift. The ideological clash within his administration had resulted in either a muddled foreign policy or, in several cases, no policy whatsoever. While Clinton had devoted considerable time to peacemaking efforts in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine and the Korean peninsula (with mixed A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 237 success), Bush was eager in the summer of 2001 to retreat to Texas and leave these problems in the hands of others. 11 Colin Powell, meanwhile, had virtually disappeared by August, and the Pentagon had embarked on a bizarre study of ancient empires and the causes of their downfall. 12 The raw materials for the 'war on terror' were in place by this point: from Clinton and Gore's purported 'toughness' and selective abandonment of multilateral institutions, to the Reagan Republicans' belief in the effects of American power to remake the world. Still missing was an event which would make a four-week vacation seem excessive, and the in-fighting and languor of the Bush administration seem like an unaffordable indulgence. It was fitting that on the morning of n September, President Bush was in a school classroom in Florida attempting to promote his education initiatives. Along with tax cuts, education reform was the major focus of the Bush administration, and the president could safely expect the voters to judge him on the merits of his domestic programmes rather than his handling of America's relations with the world. A little after nine in the morning, as his chief of staff whispered news of the attacks in Bush's ear, this expectation surely dissolved. Bush's facial expression on hearing the news encouraged the impres- sion that he was out of his depth: incomprehension, bewilderment and fear played across his features, an image that was hardly dispelled by his subsequent, erratic flight across the nation in Air Force One as the people of New York and Washington struggled to deal with the massive carnage created by the attacks. When Bush finally returned to the capital on the evening of n September, his hastily prepared address did little to reassure Americans either that the danger was past, or that they had elected a president with the ability to protect them from it. 13 'Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists' On 20 September, in an address to both houses of Congress, President Bush finally regained the initiative with an extraordinary speech that drew praise from both Democrats and Republicans. The Pentagon and the CIA immediately suspected the involvement of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organisation in the attacks on America, and although no concrete proof had been produced by 20 September, 2 2 238 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? the culpability of bin Laden was widely advanced in the United States. Passenger lists revealed that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers had been from Saudi Arabia, and the evidence strongly suggested that the coordinated assault of September nth was the work of radical Islamists. Although a great deal remained unknown — and, to some extent, is still unknown — about the exact motivations of the hijackers, Bush used the occasion of his Congressional address both to interpret their intentions and to map out an American response to the threat of further terrorism. Acknowledging in his introduction that 'Americans have many questions tonight', Bush set out to answer these and to win support from the American people for a sweeping and open-ended conflict with 'terror'. 14 The president offered three main arguments to explain September nth and to chart the American response. First, he claimed that al- Qaeda and other radical groups hated America because of its freedoms and its democracy. Notably absent was any discussion of motives related to American policies in and beyond the Middle East. Second, Islamic radicals sought to attack American citizens and property across the globe, and wanted to end the American way of life entirely. While ordinary Americans were properly anxious about this new and terrible enemy, Bush was thus able to offer historical reassurance. He argued that radical Islam in the twenty-first century depended on the same logic as Nazism, communism and totalitarianism in the twentieth. Although it had totalising ambitions and a global reach, it could be defeated with the same dedication to freedom and liberty that Americans had applied to the fight against Hitler and the Soviet Union. However, the power and scope of these radical Islamists meant that no nation in the world could opt for non-alignment towards America's conflict with terror. Bush's third and final point, then, was simple: 'Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.' In the days following September nth, many Americans asked a question which Bush both raised and answered in his 20 September speech: 'Why do they hate us?' The sense that American foreign policy might have played some role either in radicalising or even in fostering the assailants was widely aired, particularly as the media reminded Americans that Osama bin Laden had been at least indi- rectly on the CIA's payroll in Afghanistan in the ipSos. 15 The Bush 8 A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 239 administration's response to these problematic enquiries shifted the emphasis away from American soul-searching and towards the fanati- cism and irrationality of the assailants, grouping them with prior enemies that had already been defeated. Intellectuals and administra- tion officials enthusiastically endorsed Bush's alignment of radical Islam with totalitarianism, and some used the parallel explicitly to argue for sweeping changes in American policy. Condoleezza Rice even argued that 'this period is analogous to 1945 to 1947', the years in which the American national security apparatus (including the Defense Department and the CIA) had been established. Many poli- ticians and commentators also praised Bush's refusal to distinguish between terrorists and those who harboured or supported them, a position which led Bush in the same 20 September speech to issue an ultimatum to the Taliban government in Afghanistan. If the Taliban refused to comply with a number of American demands - including handing over bin Laden and al-Qaeda suspects to US authorities, disbanding 'terrorist training camps' in Afghanistan, and allowing an American military presence to enter their country - they would 'share in the fate' of the terrorists themselves. 16 While Bush's hawkish stance won him many plaudits within the United States, some Americans (and many more commentators abroad) raised questions about the wisdom and feasibility of declar- ing 'war on terror', particularly if this war would force every nation either to side with the US or to become an American target. The extremely vague nature of the American enemy contrasted sharply with Bush's unambiguous threats (not to mention Bush's earlier vision of America as a 'humble nation'). It was unclear how exactly 'terror' would be defined, even as Bush resolved to crush terrorism any- where in the world. Had the United States declared war on revolu- tionaries and militants throughout the world, like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories, the Mindinao separatists in the Philippines, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and Hezbollah in Lebanon? And how would the 'war on terror' affect the pre-existing 'rogue states' in the American atlas, from Cuba to Iran and North Korea? In part, the confusion may have come about from Bush's desire to avoid overt stigmatising of Islam or the Arab world. The president won particular praise for denying that this 'war' was a clash of civilisations and 2 2 2 240 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? discouraging Americans from indulging prejudices against Muslims and Arabs. This vague language, however, also enabled Bush to ex- pand the 'war on terror' far beyond the borders of Afghanistan. 17 Bush's assertions of 20 September served more to console the wounded American populace than to make sense of what had happened. In contrast to Bush's view, al-Qaeda and other radical groups attacked the United States not because they despised its democracy and freedom, but because they held America to be re- sponsible for the political problems of the Middle East. The various communications from Osama bin Laden after September nth made persistent reference to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, the American military presence in Saudi Arabia since 1990, and the devastating effects of sanctions on the civilian population of Iraq after 1991. He had identified these same issues in earlier state- ments, threatening to bring war to America if the policies contin- ued. It is impossible to say whether bin Laden would simply have ignored America if US policies in the Middle East had taken a different course, but it makes little sense to discuss al-Qaeda s motives and actions without close scrutiny of America's role in the region. Similarly, while it would be an oversimplification to attribute blame entirely to the United States for the rise of a militant form of political Islam, it would be wrong to dismiss the role of American foreign policy in encouraging forms of violent resistance to the existing political order both within and beyond the Islamic world. 18 In Bush's world-view, a form of radical Islam had developed in the Middle East like an ideological cancer. While the causes of this cancer were unknown, it threatened to spread nihilism and destruction throughout the world in the name of a fanatical Islamic piety. In fact, the rise of radical Islam has coincided with the failure of various political philosophies to generate either prosperity or independence in the Middle East. While some responsibility for this failure un- doubtedly rests upon the shoulders of Arabs and Muslims, it is impos- sible to ignore the deleterious influence of the United States in the Middle East since 1945. The record of American involvement is as unfortunate as it is extensive: a partial inventory would include Franklin Roosevelt's guarantee in 1945 to defend the repressive Saudi royal family in return for easy access to Arabian oil; the CIA-sponsored coup against the nationalist Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh in A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 24! J 953; US support for the repressive dictator Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran between 1953 and 1979; the American role in assisting Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party to assume power in Iraq in the 19605; US support for authoritarianism in Egypt during the presidencies of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak; US-sponsored sanctions against Iraq in the 1990$, which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians while strengthening Saddam's grip on the country; and the relentless and uncritical American backing of Israel and its occupation of the Palestinian territories since ig6j. 19 All these examples demonstrate that Western powers — and particularly the United States — continued to play a defining role in modern Middle Eastern history even after the region achieved 'independence' from colonial rule. The Middle East, like many other parts of the developing world, experienced a process of incomplete decolonisation in the middle of the twentieth century. While almost the entire region won inde- pendence from formal European imperialism in this period, the con- tinuing interest of Europe and especially the United States in natural resources encouraged frequent outside intervention. Thus the United States underwrote the authoritarian House of Saud in order to ensure 'stability' and unfettered extraction of oil on the Arabian peninsula. The CIA helped to remove Mossadegh from power because the latter intended to win for Iran a better deal from the Western oil corporations that controlled that country's energy resources. American support was funnelled to Sadat and to Mubarak in Egypt to ensure that a US-friendly regime controlled the Suez Canal and maintained peace with Israel. The formula in these various cases was the same: the United States (often with the support of European nations) in- stalled and defended authoritarian regimes throughout the region in order to gain easy access to resources and the routes by which they were transported to the West. Although this often meant that the populations ruled by these authoritarian regimes were brutally re- pressed, the United States chose to concentrate more on the 'stability' effected by these economic arrangements than on the instability of these repressive political cultures. 20 Within societies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the domestic political scene was further destabilised by the attempts of these corrupt regimes both to please their American paymasters and to mollify their angry compatriots. With very little room for political expression, particularly .19 .19 242 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? after the failure of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser's plan to unite the Arab world in the 19605, resistance and radicalism in both Egypt and Saudi Arabia were channelled into religious piety and, eventually, fundamentalism. For these essentially Westernised regimes, this religious challenge represented a grave threat to legitimacy: while Sadat or the Saudi rulers could easily arrest and imprison those protesters who marched under the banner of secular nationalism, Islamic radicals used the mosques as a refuge from the controlling arm of the state. Moreover, radical Islamists cleverly pressured these regimes not only to tolerate their 'religious' activities but to offer them funding as well. Thus elite Saudis poured money into Wahhab- ism, an extreme form of Islamic fundamentalism, just as the Egyptian government altered its policies to accommodate the demands of the mosques for a more Islamic legal code. This dangerous dance be- tween fundamentalist Islam and Westernised authoritarianism lurched from collusion to violence; in Egypt, in particular, militant groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad engaged in a cycle of violent conflict (including the Islamists' murder of Anwar Sadat in 1981 and Mubarak's imprisonment of Islamists in the 1980$ and 19905) and apparent coexistence. The important point, though, is that radi- cal Islam assumed its current shape through a political process that was deeply affected by the United States. 21 Successive American governments since World War II have defined Middle Eastern 'stability' very narrowly, and have largely ignored or discounted the social effects of an arrangement of power based on resource extraction. 22 In the process, Western involvement distorted the process of decolonisation throughout the region, discrediting a variety of philosophies and political systems (secularism, democracy, socialism, liberalism, and so on) that had little opportunity to take hold. The result was a series of corrupt and repressive regimes which were ostensibly 'stable' and Western-oriented, but essentially hollow: behind a veneer of 'modernity' or 'secularism' lay a political culture which had been emptied of options for popular participation or meaningful social change. Thus 'stability', when viewed from the inside of these societies, was in fact the cause of eventual instability and protest. The United States was given a clear view of this in 1979 in Iran, when the Shah (an American client ruler) was swept from power by an Islamic revolution. In 1953, Iranians had supported the A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 243 comparatively moderate, secular and nationalist project of Moham- med Mossadegh. Mossadegh was, however, anathema to American and British oil interests, and so the US and UK installed the Shah in his place. By 1979, the Islamic revolution purged the nation of the Shah and his corrupt elite, but also sidelined those secular national- ists who, a generation earlier, voted for Mossadegh. 23 It's unlikely that President Bush thought seriously about these issues in the frantic days between n and 20 September, not least because the Middle East 'experts' chosen by the Bush administration were loath to convey these harsh truths about America's involvement in the region. In addition, Bush had to sidestep the embarrassing rev- elation that bin Laden and many other members of al-Qaeda - not to mention the Taliban — might have benefited from CIA funding or even combat training in the 19805, when the United States sided with the so-called 'Afghan Arabs' who sought to expel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Just as the Egyptian and Saudi regimes had alternately funded and repressed radical Islam, the Carter and Reagan administrations looked to Islamic fighters to counter the Soviets in spite of the growing problem of radical Islam for America's client regimes in the Middle East. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, America prompdy lost interest in Afghanistan, leaving the country in a state of lawlessness ended only in 1996 by the emergence of the Taliban. Osama bin Laden arrived in the same year, though again the Clinton administration was caught between a desire to tolerate and contain the Taliban (as a bulwark against neighbouring Iran) and to push for the removal of the purported al-Qaeda presence. The pinprick cruise missile strikes of 1998, suspiciously coincident with the climax of Clinton s sex scandal at home, were a fair reflection of the confused and compromised nature of American policymaking in the region. 24 After throwing down the gauntlet on 20 September, President Bush executed a sweeping plan to destroy al-Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan and to remove the Islamic regime. The Taliban had taken power at least partly because their incorruptibility and authoritarian- ism represented a better alternative for many Afghans than the extra- ordinary internecine conflict that had plagued the country since 1989; this speaks more to the appalling state of Afghanistan in the early 244 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? 19905 than to the innate appeal of the Taliban. This was hardly a flexible regime, or a government likely to elicit much sympathy from the rest of the world in the face of American threats. While the United States had no formal evidence for the Taliban's involvement in September nth, the regime of Mullah Omar was an obvious testing ground for two precepts of the 'war on terror': an American refusal to distinguish between terrorists and the regimes that har- boured them, and the need for any American action to have a 'dem- onstration effect' and to discomfit other unfriendly regimes around the world. Finally, Mullah Omar's ideological and family ties to bin Laden made it unlikely that the Taliban could act as an American client in the elimination of al-Qaeda. For that task, President Bush relied on warlords and the militias who had been fighting the Taliban in parts of Afghanistan since I996. 25 Following an initial assault by US special forces in late September 2001, Bush soon launched a larger American military offensive. Al- though critics on the right and the left stressed the dangers in this assault - recalling the heavy price paid by the British and Soviets who had sought to take control of the country — the combination of American firepower and strategic alliances between US forces and the former Afghan warlords ensured a speedy if tenuous victory. The casualties of this war certainly outnumbered the three thousand or so people killed in the September nth attacks, but the relatively few US fatalities and the speedy US advances offered American audi- ences the impression of a walkover. This was, no doubt, helped by the decision of many Taliban fighters to walk away from the fighting, biding their time for a moment when the United States was focused elsewhere. By December 2001, President Bush had declared Afghani- stan to be 'liberated'. Bin Laden, deviating from the script, was ap- parently still at large, along with Mullah Omar and many others. From the narrow perspective of Washington DC, however, it seemed that the first battle of the 'war on terror' had been a huge success. 26 'The axis of evil', WMDs and the war on Iraq With the Taliban dispatched, President Bush employed his State of the Union address in January 2002 to expand the 'war on terror'. With the new Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in the visitors' gallery, A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 245 Bush outlined the next phase of the conflict: a small number of rogue states — foremost among them, Iran, Iraq and North Korea — constituted an 'axis of evil', and were currently seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in order to 'threaten the peace of the world'. The choice of these countries raised some eyebrows even in Washington. The US had imposed severe sanctions on Iraq since 1991, and Saddam Hussein's regime was widely viewed as ex- ternally weak even as it maintained its repression within Iraq. The Clinton administration had been engaged in tentative diplomacy with Iran, and the initial fervour of the 1979 revolution had given way to a political debate between hardline clerics and moderates like the president, Mohammed Khatami. North Korea, meanwhile, had signed a historic deal with the United States in 1994, and was itself pushing towards reform of its extremely rigid command economy. Given the sweeping American attack on Afghanistan, it now seemed that these three states were next in line for a US invasion. Moreover, Bush also hinted that he would not require proof that 'rogue states' had actu- ally succeeded in developing WMDs. 'I will not wait on events', he told Congress, 'while dangers gather.' During his presidency, America would 'not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons'. The initial members of the 'axis of evil', then, faced not only a threat if they developed WMDs, but the promise of an American attack if Washington deter- mined that they seemed likely to do so at some point in the future. 27 Bush's focus on 'rogue states' and an 'axis of evil' followed neatly from his upbeat understanding of the American war in Afghanistan. The United States had succeeded in installing a pro-US regime in Kabul, and had even persuaded its leader to offer his personal impri- matur for the 'war on terror'. However, capturing the leaders of the Taliban and al-Qaeda had proven a much more elusive task. Perhaps the most disturbing fact about the assailants of September nth was that they were non-state actors: although fifteen of them held Saudi citizenship, they had moved freely in the Middle East, Europe, central Asia and the United States, acquiring training and equipment from Sudan to Afghanistan, from Germany to Florida. In calibrating an American response to the attacks, President Bush could hardly heed the advice of his right-wing supporters - some of whom called for the Middle East to be levelled into a 'basketball court' - since 246 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? al-Qaeda did not represent any one state or regime. However, Bush was also loath to admit that these new enemies of America could easily disappear into the shadows, particularly when it seemed that bin Laden, Mullah Omar and others had made just such an escape in the aftermath of the US attacks on Afghanistan. By reviving the 19905 shibboleth of 'rogue states', then, Bush offered the American people a clear enemy which could be confronted with the traditional methods of military power. No matter that the connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq, Iran and North Korea were unproven, or prob- ably non-existent. 28 If this focus on 'rogue states' bore dubious relevance to the new threats faced by the United States, the use of'pre-emption' to nullify potential adversaries before they had even developed WMDs was antithetical to international law and the established rules of war. Political scientists and ethicists have traditionally conceded the possi- bility of a justifiable first strike in self-defence, though the burden of proving the necessity of such a pre-emptive attack falls upon the reluctant aggressor. With his policy shift in early 2002, however, Bush appeared to be arguing not only for the power to strike first in situations of imminent danger, but to fight 'preventive' wars against powers which possessed no WMD programmes and which posed a distant challenge (at most) to American military supremacy. In March 2002, a leaked Pentagon document revealed that the United States had a new 'nuclear posture' which allowed for first-strike attacks on rogue states. Condoleezza Rice, seizing upon this moment 'analogous to 1945 to 1947', told the New Yorker magazine that the Bush admin- itration would produce a major new policy statement in the summer of 2002 which would confirm the outlines of its 'rogue states' and 'pre-emption' doctrines. This document was eventually released a few days after the emotional first anniversary of September nth: it was entitled the 'National Security Strategy of the United States' (NSS). 29 The NSS was nothing if not bold. Its initial 'overview of America's international strategy' offered a two-paragraph summary of twentieth- century world history, which amounted to the victory of'freedom and equality' over 'destructive totalitarian visions'. Rather like Francis Fukuyama's argument in his article 'The End of History', the NSS suggested that the past one hundred years had seen a 'great struggle' between the American system of capitalism and 'the militant visions A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 247 of class, nation, and race which promised Utopia and delivered misery'. The struggle had ended triumphantly with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but America still faced a threat from 'failing states' which remained in denial of this mighty victory. The prefatory letter to the NSS, under Bush's own signature, confirmed that the 'decisive victory for the forces of freedom' had left 'a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise'. How- ever, the rest of the document expressed less than complete confi- dence that the other nations of the world, many of whom presumably shared in this 'victory', would affirm America's view of how best to deter the sore losers of the twenty-first century. The oxymoron at the heart of American foreign policy was expressed on page one of the NSS: 'The U.S. national security strategy will be based on a distinctly American internationalism', an orientation which would not shackle the United States to the UN or to international law when multilateralism might stymie the cause of freedom. 30 Elsewhere, the NSS also outlined the American 'right of self- defense', confirming that the United States would take pre-emptive action against terrorists and rogue states. The document pointed out that 'the United States has long maintained the option of pre-emptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security'. In this new incarnation, however, the Bush administration promised not only to take military action against any 'rogue states' deemed to be a threat to America, but also to 'dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States'. This was an extraordinary policy decla- ration: the US government had announced to the rest of the world that it would 'dissuade' other countries from developing their own military capacities to rival those of the United States. Did this com- mit the United States to go to war with China or Russia if either state invested more heavily in its armed forces? Apparently so. While there was little immediate prospect that this clause would be activated against other great powers, it seemed that the American government had declared not only WMDs but conventional military forces to be a threat which, under certain conditions, could justify a pre-emptive strike. The United States would choose which regimes were allowed to possess nuclear weapons, and would also decide when to crop the wings of any potential challenger. 31 248 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? We will return to the NSS and its implications in the next section. The immediate significance of the document, however, lay in its apparent encouragement of an attack on Iraq. Since the first days after September nth, some Bush administration officials had pressed the president to attack Saddam Hussein. These officials were concen- trated in the Pentagon and the Defense Department, and represented a Republican Party old guard which had served under Ronald Reagan but had been sidelined during the first President Bush's ad- ministration. While George W. Bush retained some of his father's advisers in the State Department — notably General Colin Powell - his Defense staff was made up of hawks like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), men who had attacked Bill Clinton's policy on Iraq as insufficiently ambitious. As early as the mid-1990s, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and (eventual vice-president) Dick Cheney had urged Clinton to overthrow Saddam Hussein and to replace him with a pro-Western government led by Iraqi exiles. While Clinton preferred the more cautious (and rather successful, from the US perspective) policy of containment — even at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives — Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others deplored the impression that the United States was somehow too weak to overthrow Saddam. When these men assumed leading posi- tions in George W Bush's cabinet, they continued to press for an opening so that their plans for removing Saddam might trump Colin Powell's ongoing commitment to the Clinton containment policy. 32 In the months after September nth, the Pentagon did its best to link Saddam to the attacks. The principal rationale for this was a purported meeting in the Czech Republic between the chief hijacker, Mohammed Atta, and an Iraqi intelligence officer. Although this supposed encounter was reported endlessly by the media, no firm evidence was ever produced to support the connection and it was eventually dropped. 33 The subject of invading Iraq was discussed as early as 15 September in a high-level meeting at Camp David. One rationale for attacking Saddam was the need for an insurance policy against problems in Afghanistan. The United States needed to attack someone to show its strength, reasoned Bush officials, but it might easily get bogged down in a war with the Taliban. Paul Wolfowitz presented Iraq as a better option, since it would 'break easily — it was doable'. Lacking any evidence that might link Iraq to September A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 249 nth, however, Bush persevered in identifying Afghanistan as his first target. 34 After the US prevailed against the Taliban, though, Bush began to argue in 2002 that Saddam and al-Qaeda were closely linked, even though the ideologies of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party (a corrupted form of secular nationalism) and fundamentalist Islam were antithetical. While Bush opted to postpone an attack on Saddam in the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center's collapse, the formal shift of policy towards pre-empting an 'axis of evil' made the prospect of war much more likely. According to Richard Haass, an official in the Bush State Department, the decision to attack Iraq was made in or before the summer of 2002. Haass met with Condoleezza Rice in July of that year to discuss the direction of Bush's Middle Eastern policy, just as Rice was putting the finishing touches to the NSS. Politely but firmly, Rice told Haass not to argue against a possible war against Saddam: 'That decision's been made, don't waste your breath.' 35 In the nine months or so between Haass s visit to Rice and the beginning of the American assault on Baghdad, the Bush administra- tion demonstrated the limitations of its 'distinctly American form of internationalism' with a disastrous effort to win United Nations support for the removal of Saddam. Colin Powell, marginalised by the Pentagon and the hawks who had persuaded Bush to invade Iraq, made his own case to the president over dinner in August 2002 that the United States should win UN approval for any action. It seems highly unlikely that Powell pursued this course in the hope of pre- venting a war. Instead, he seems to have told Bush that the US could use diplomacy to win the blessing of the international community for its pre-emptive policy. This strategy would require a shift in rhetoric, from the threats of unilateral American action and aggressive pre- emption to the language of international law and non-proliferation; but Powell promised the president that the State Department could win over the rest of the world. On 12 September 2002, President Bush went to New York to address the United Nations on the need to confront Iraq, but promised that he would commit the United States to a UN process rather than to a unilateral military assault. 36 Since the decision to attack Iraq had already been made, the UN inspections process was on shaky ground from the outset. Powell 25O ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? and the State Department needed much longer to gain a UN reso- lution than had been initially expected, enabling Bush to keep up the rhetoric of confronting Saddam through the November 2002 congressional elections but leaving only a few months for the in- spectors to provide a rationale for invasion before the arrival of the stifling Iraqi summer. When the inspectors in fact returned from Iraq empty-handed, with many unanswered questions but an almost perfect record of Iraqi compliance with their requests, the Bush administration struggled to avert a public relations disaster both within America and around the world. 37 As millions of protesters took to the streets in opposition to a war, both in the United States and around the world, Colin Powell was dispatched to the UN to offer 'evidence' gathered by US intelligence services (and withheld from the UN inspectors). 38 The inspectors subsequently struggled to verify American claims, and reported back to the Security Council that US allegations could not be confirmed. 39 With Britain in tow, American intelligence services circulated documents alleging all manner of Iraqi malfeasance, from uranium smuggling in Africa to weapons stockpiling in the deserts around Baghdad. These 'secret' documents were soon revealed to be unconvincing forgeries and, in one celebrated instance, a plagiarism from the published article of an American graduate student. As the United States and Britain continued to send military forces to the Gulf, and the seasonal window for an invasion of Iraq began to close, a chasm opened in the Security Council between sceptical nations (like France and Germany) and a United States which had made up its mind on Iraq long before this process began. 40 On 17 March 2003, the United States abandoned its effort to win UN approval for a war in Iraq. Three days later, American and British forces went ahead with their invasion, just as the NSS had promised they would if'international obligations' (the need to con- front Saddam) were not 'taken seriously' by other nations. Pundits on the left and the right offered predictions of how long the war would last, and Americans were alternately offered either a ' Cakewalk' of a few days' duration, or a Vietnam-style quagmire that might drag on for months or years. In the event, the massive deployment of American air power largely destroyed Iraq's armies without serious military engagement. The greater threat to American and British A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 251 troops came from Iraqi irregular troops and militias, and (as in 1991) the wayward aim of the massive allied military machine itself. On 9 April, with Americans streaming into Baghdad, US Marines closed off the roads leading into Fardus Square, and a crowd of a few hundred Iraqis cheered as the American forces toppled a statue of Saddam. The statue was located just opposite the hotel housing the foreign press corps, and so this scene was a ready-made photo opportunity. Beyond the closed entrances to the square, many more Iraqis began the systematic looting of their cities, and perhaps the majority remained in their homes in fear of the lawlessness raging outside. For American audiences, however, these pictures of 'libera- tion' suggested that the war was over. Although the 'missing' Iraqi WMDs that had comprised the American rationale for invasion had not been found by June 2003, the Bush administration deftly argued post-facto that the war had really been about securing liberty for oppressed Iraqis. (Hence the moniker given to the military offensive by the Pentagon: 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'.) The apparent absence of the promised biological and chemical stockpiles, however, represented another twist in the strange story of the 'war on terror' and the proliferation of WMDs. From the perspective of global security, and in the aftermath of September nth, every nation with WMDs represents a potential threat to the safety of innocent people: nuclear, biological, or chemi- cal capabilities could either pass into the hands of radicals through revolutions or the electoral process in some countries, or might 'leak' from a friendly regime to terrorist groups. From the perspective of the Bush administration, however, WMDs presented problems more in the particular than in the abstract; and, in the case of Saddam, they offered an opportunity to justify the US invasion. While the United States might have seen September nth as a powerful rationale for an international disarmament process, President Bush was per- fectly happy to allow some countries to retain WMDs - say, Britain, Israel, or Pakistan — and to transform disarmament from a diplomatic to a military challenge, to be accomplished by US troops in pre- emptive attacks on 'rogue states'. 41 Why did Bush see the WMD threat in such a selective fashion? The conspiratorial answer would be that the Bush administration viewed WMDs as the most potent argument that it could place 252 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? before the American public to justify the invasion and occupation of other countries. By pursuing a military option rather than Ailing for a broader (and peaceful) process of disarmament, Bush could use the fear and gravitas of these weapons in the service of his own foreign- policy agenda. To this end, we should remember that many Americans saw the Iraq conflict as essentially an act of self-defence on the part of the United States, precisely because they believed the president's claims both that Saddam Hussein had a hand in September nth and that he sought to develop the 'ultimate weapon' so that he might hold the United States to ransom. (California Congressman Brad Sherman, a Democrat, even suggested on the floor of the House of Representatives in October 2002 that Saddam would smuggle a nuclear weapon into an apartment building in the United States, then blackmail the United States into allowing Iraq to conquer the entire Middle East.) The apparent willingness of the American public to take the president at his word, and the understandable fears of apocalyptic terrorism after the attacks in New York and Washington, masked the outlandishness of this argument. 42 Still more probable, however, is the theory that Bush viewed nuclear weapons in the same way that the Republican right in America views guns: there's no such thing as a bad gun, in the view of the National Rifle Association (one of Bush's strongest supporters) and many American conservatives; there are just bad people who get hold of guns. Bush's WMD policy could thus be paraphrased in the language of a popular right-wing bumper sticker: 'Nukes don't kill people. People kill people.' The Bush administration may simply have taken its reflexive support for weapons of all kinds (and Americans' constitutional right to carry them) to the next level, keen to remove Saddam's arsenal but not to infringe upon the rights of responsible leaders like Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf or Israel's Ariel Sharon to bear nuclear arms. Even if we reject the more conspiratorial under- standing of WMDs and pre-emption, we are left with an extra- ordinarily dangerous abandonment of non-proliferation. While American troops scoured the deserts of Iraq in search of Saddams apparently non-existent nukes or anthrax, India and Pakistan con- tinued their perilous stand-off and Israel continued to provoke its neighbours to develop their own nuclear deterrent to counter its many warheads. Radical religious parties have gained significant A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 253 ground in all three of these countries, and yet the Bush administration was relaxed about their nuclear status. Meanwhile, Bush asked Congress in May 2003 to authorise renewed Pentagon research into 'battlefield' atomic weapons to add to the massive US nuclear arsenal. With WMDs in close proximity to a series of fundamentalist parties abroad, and an American military working hard to further miniaturise the equipment necessary to produce a nuclear explosion, it was hard to determine whether the United States had an ineffective policy for averting apocalypse, or had unconsciously embraced apocalypse as a policy goal. 43 From the evidence of Afghanistan and Iraq, we can see that the new 'Bush doctrine' has pushed the United States towards a more ex- tensive policy of foreign intervention. In the wake of the Iraq war, a State Department official added more countries to the 'axis of evil' (these new entrants comprising the 'junior varsity' axis, in a nod to the general presentation of American foreign policy as a sporting event), and Washington pundits debated whether Syria or North Korea would be 'next on the list' for an American military assault. 44 Meanwhile, the example of Afghanistan hangs over the faltering American effort to install a new government in Iraq. Presi- dent Karzai heads a fortified and Westernised regime which exer- cises sovereignty only in Kabul; beyond the capital, the warlords who tore the country to pieces between 1989 and 1996 are largely back in business, and the Taliban themselves have begun to reassert their influence. The vaunted democratic and liberal reforms - including equality for Afghan women — have withered since early 2002, and the United States has diverted its attention and its dollars elsewhere. 45 In assessing Bush's foreign policy, we need to remember this internal and external dynamic: the policy of 'pre-emption' has an initial phase of military engagement, and a much harder and more intensive phase in which civil society must be rescued from the ruins of war and recent history. To gauge the level of American interest in this extremely difficult prospect, and to assess the likely course of future US incursions, we need to look more carefully at the ideas and explanations offered by American policymakers, analysts and intellectuals for these far-flung projections of American power. 254 UNDERSTANDING THE WAR ON TERROR Imperialism, interventionism and Wilsonianism In the summer of 2001, before the attacks in New York and Washing- ton, Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon asked a group of academics and 'experts' to undertake an unusual study: the Defense Department wanted an account of the great empires of history, with an analysis of the elements which eventually caused their decline. This request makes sense when one considers the eccentric and grandiose mindset of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their ilk, but it is more improbable when set against the traditional American aversion to the notion of empire. Although the term was often applied to the expanding United States in the early nineteenth century, the desire of American politicians and intellectuals to distinguish their state-building project from Euro- pean imperialism had made 'empire' a dirty word by the turn of the twentieth century. Moreover, the notion of an expanding Soviet Union - memorably dubbed the 'evil empire' by Ronald Reagan - encouraged Americans to avoid the V word and to describe their nation as a democracy or a republic instead. What's so surprising about foreign-policy rhetoric since September nth, then, is the wide- spread use of 'empire' to describe the American situation in the world, and to prescribe further American interventions. 46 Two definitions of'empire' have predominated in recent American discussions of the US role in the world. The first holds that empire entails the military conquest and occupation of foreign countries, and an eventual transition within those countries to a friendly, client regime that will uphold American interests. From this perspective, the American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq clearly indicate that the United States has become an empire. The other definition, rather more diffuse but no less useful, identifies three pillars of American imperialism: the United States has a distinct vision of what the entire world should look like (the democracy/free markets/private property model oudined by Bush in the NSS); America hopes to spread this vision throughout the globe; and the US will brook no resistance to this missionary agenda. September nth, from this perspective, was both a challenge and an opportunity. The attacks confirmed that at least some of the world's inhabitants resent the role of the United A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 255 States as a global power, but they also encouraged the American government to make good on its promises to universalise American ideas about economics, politics and law. While sceptics might read the al-Qaeda attacks as evidence that the world is reluctant to submit to a process of Americanisation, the Bush administration has chosen instead to believe that al-Qaeda threatens not only the United States but an American way of life which is, in fact, universal. 47 This elegant understanding of the world has thus enabled the intellectual defenders of American imperialism — the journalists, academics and 'experts' who interpret world affairs in the American mainstream media — to reconcile the apparently antithetical theories of Samuel Huntington and Thomas Friedman that we encountered in the previous chapter. As Friedman argued, the world is eager to push past tribalism and tradition and to accept the promise of democ- racy and free markets. At the same time, according to this new imperial thinking, Huntington was right to identify a profound chal- lenge to this global instinct from a group of radicals and terrorists who would rather foment a 'clash of civilisations' than submit to the process of Americanisation. Friedman's mistake was to imagine that the transition to Western values and economic practices could be effected without the use of military power, that ordinary people around the world could move from the 'olive tree' (symbolising their traditional way of life) to the Lexus (the inevitable objet d'amour of the successful free-market capitalist) without the active stewardship of the American armed forces. Huntington's mistake, on the other hand, was to underestimate the capacity for change and adoption of Western values even in those areas of the world from which a terrorist/fundamentalist challenge was issued. If you add helicopter gunships and cruise missiles to Friedman's work — or subtract pessi- mism and racial/ethnic stereotyping from Huntington's — you can see clearly the proud and optimistic vision of an American empire that excited American commentators in 2002 and 2003. 48 We will explore this missionary dimension below, but we should also concede that some conceptions of American empire are more prosaic. One reason to imagine America as imperial, and to applaud the immediate and devastating application of military power to the nations of the developing world, is that these strategies may produce greater respect for America and deter those who would attack the 256 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? United States in its weak spots. Jonah Goldberg of the National Review, a conservative magazine, argued in 2002 that, in order to preserve its aura of invincibility in the Middle East, 'the United States needs to go to war with someone in the region and Iraq makes the most sense'. Noting the importance of momentum in the new imperial effort — 'winning sports teams tend to win' — Goldberg maintained that if the United States continued to roll over nations like Afghanistan and Iraq, it would force other countries or groups to abandon their plans to confront the United States in the first place. Meanwhile, Goldberg quoted approvingly from Michael Ledeen, the 'Resident Scholar in the Freedom Chair' at the Ameri- can Enterprise Institute (perhaps the Bush administration's favourite right-wing think-tank), on the uses of military power in foreign policy: 'Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.' Less elegant, perhaps, than the imperial synthesis of Huntington and Friedman, but no less potent in its promise for an American order throughout the world. 49 The idea of American empire may yet provide another ground on which Britons and Americans can cultivate their 'special relation- ship', even if the rest of the world denounces them for their past or present misdeeds. Oxford academic Niall Ferguson, newly installed in a professorship at the business school of New York University, made an enormous media splash in early 2003 with his book Empire. Ferguson's thesis had two principal components. First, the British empire had been unfairly maligned by a generation of left-leaning historians, who had tended to concentrate on its racism and violence and to dismiss its technological and political legacies in Asia and Africa. Second, the United States could reprise Britain's global role in the twenty-first century, if it simply recognised its power and moved beyond its current status of an 'empire in denial'. The fact that Ferguson not only got away with this thesis but was regularly lauded for it in the pages of supposedly liberal newspapers like the New York Times says a great deal about the weakness of progressive politics in America during the 'war on terror', and attests also to the temptation for many American liberals simply to endorse Bush's ac- tions or to imagine that, as Ferguson suggested, the positive effects of an American empire might outweigh its drawbacks and its crimes. 50 6 A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 257 While one might have expected conservatives to applaud Bush's rush to empire, the willingness of many liberal or left-leaning commenta- tors to endorse an imperial vision for America is much more surpris- ing. The New York Times and other newspapers and magazines ran several articles on the membership of the 'I-can't-believe-I'm-a-hawk club', a loose group of thinkers which included people who were never particularly progressive in the first place as well as acknowl- edged champions of the American left. 51 A largely uncritical support for Israel may have nudged some of these figures into supporting Bush, not least because the second intifada and the clever rhetorical manoeuvres of Ariel Sharon had persuaded many Americans that Israel and the United States were fighting the same war against the same enemy. 52 Other Bush supporters, however, included previously lucid figures like Christopher Hitchens who had consistently criti- cised the American order in the Middle East. For Hitchens, as for Bush, al-Qaeda represented 'fascism with an Islamic face', and was merely one facet of a much broader Islamic menace that included acid-throwing misogynists, anti-Enlightenment cultural censors, and the would-be assassins of Salman Rushdie. Paul Berman, another supporter of the 'war on terror', praised the presidents 20 September speech precisely for its identification of American freedoms as the object of al-Qaeda's hate: radical Islam was an 'antiliberal insurgency' which was 'entranced with slaughter for slaughter's sake'. Berman adopted the Bush line almost verbatim: 'America's crime, its real crime, is to be America herself.' 53 It would be churlish to stereotype anyone on the basis of what was written and said in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, particularly those (like Hitchens and Berman) who live and work in New York and Washington. However, both men have maintained their course ever since, offering much the same framework in their subsequent writing and showing very little tolerance for those who try to understand the motives or causes of the terrorist attacks (again, heeding Bush's injunction to line up with the United States or with the terrorists). 54 More generally, even liberal Americans have tended to caricature any exploration of the causes or motives of terrorism (beyond Bush's reductionism) as an endorsement of mass murder. Susan Sontag contributed an essay to a special issue of the New Yorker magazine soon after the attacks in which she rejected the standard 2 e 258 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? line that the terrorists were 'cowards', noting that they had taken their own lives through their actions and that some other word was needed to describe them; in response, she was openly pilloried, and later disavowed by her own editor. 55 In October 2001, Michael Walzer, the left-leaning theorist of'just wars', delivered a broadside against those who had argued that the terrorists had somehow opted for violence only as a last resort, or that they represented oppressed constituencies in the Middle East. For Walzer, nothing in the history of American foreign policy made the attacks 'morally understand- able', a compound of comprehension and moral evaluation which proved hard to break down after September nth. Accepting the obvious point that the attacks were hardly moral, might we at least come to understand the causes of al-Qaeda's actions? Walzer tried hard to dissuade others from even attempting such interpretations. 56 This critical paralysis — undoubtedly intensified by the location of many commentators and intellectuals on the doorstep of the attacks, in Manhattan or Washington — led to a dampening of criticism from the left of Bush's actions and his new doctrine. However, there was also a powerful and assertive constituency on the left for the new 'war on terror', a legacy of the divisions among progressive com- mentators over Bill Clinton's 1999 intervention in Kosovo. Those who supported that action — who might have agreed (with Clinton's National Security Adviser, Anthony Lake) that the US might not be able to 'save every child' but might at least save a few — saw in a Bush presidency the prospect of foreign interventions which would dwarf the limited adventures of the Clinton era. Given the extremely harsh nature of the Taliban's rule over Afghanistan, these 'liberal interventionists' largely backed the deployment of the American military in the hope that the replacement regime would be more respectful of human rights. The proposed invasion of Iraq posed a more difficult prospect. Since it was apparent that Saddam Hussein was not connected to September nth, and that the United Nations inspectors had unfettered access to all Iraqi sites in the search for WMDs, the liberal rationale for supporting a pre-emptive attack seemed thin. However, most of those who had supported the inter- vention in Afghanistan eventually endorsed the removal of Saddam, even when it became clear that this would take place without the support of the UN. 57 A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 259 Perhaps the most important of these 'liberal interventionists', at least in the case of Iraq, was Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian journalist who had done some of the most commendable reporting from the Balkans during the break-up of Yugoslavia. After the war in Kosovo, IgnatiefF became one of the leading figures in a revived American effort to undertake serious study and debate of human rights issues, an enterprise located on the cusp of academia and government which sought to articulate a practical understanding of international law and to encourage its deployment by American policymakers. As the head of a human rights centre at Harvard University, IgnatiefF built upon the liberal argument for the Kosovo intervention — that, in spite of its limited international support and its illegality, it had averted a Serb-led genocide — and sought to apply it to Iraq. The New York Times offered IgnatiefF a prominent pulpit in January 2003, just as the debate over confronting Iraq was reaching a climax. In a Times magazine article entitled 'The American Empire (Get Used to It)', IgnatiefF presented Saddam as an 'expansionist rights violator' who had been allowed to perpetrate his crimes by a United Nations 'dozing like a dog before the fire'. Noting that 'many peoples owe their freedom to an exercise of American military power', IgnatiefF suggested that ordinary Iraqis depended upon an American invasion to throw ofF the tyrannical Ba'athist regime. For IgnatiefF, the poten- tial of American power to efFect good outcomes in Kosovo or Iraq outweighed any considerations of consistency or the value of a mul- tilateral order. Although it would be preferable for America to win United Nations approval for its actions, the United States should not be bound by the need for a UN resolution if it could do good unilaterally. 58 Liberal interventionists qualified their support for Bush in some respects. Ignatieff, like many others, was adamant that the United States commit itself to reconstruction after its initial invasion effort, though his point in this regard may have been muffled by his appar- ently triumphalist turn of phrase:'The question, then, is not whether America is too powerful, but whether it is powerful enough.' The most troubling aspect of liberal interventionism, however, was its failure to hold the United States accountable for previous inter- ventions in which precisely this project of reconstruction had been either marginalised or abandoned. In 2003, the record of Kosovo and e 26O ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Afghanistan made for sobering reading in this respect: the former was still riven by ethnic hatred, exacerbated by the means of the Kosovars' expulsion following NATO's high-altitude bombing; Afghanistan, meanwhile, was lodged between a rather less draconian legal code and the utter lawlessness and violence which precipitated the Taliban's rise in the first place. 59 Could either of these outcomes provide a blueprint for a democratic Iraq? Bill Keller (a founding member of the 'I-can't-believe-I'm-a-hawk club'), speaking for the liberal inter- ventionists, summarised their deference to Bush: 'Much as we de- plore [his] arrogance and binary moralism ... we are hard pressed to see an alternative that is not built on wishful thinking.' One obvious alternative in Iraq was to allow the inspectors to complete their work, then to press for the lifting of economic sanctions. Iraqi civil society, devastated by more than twenty years of constant warfare (military and economic), might thus have developed some capacity to chal- lenge Saddam's regime. This prospect was dismissed as 'wishful think- ing', however, even though the subsequent American military invasion would kill thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of Iraqis and offer no guarantee of a better future for the country. 60 The liberal supporters of Bush were eventually reconciled with the president's core constituency on the right wing in a single (if rather unlikely) interpretation of the 'war on terror': September nth had given George W. Bush the opportunity to play the role of Woodrow Wilson in world affairs. This interpretation presented the former American president as a 'democratic crusader', eager to use the power of the United States to promote freedom and liberal values around the globe. However, the means by which one might promote 'Wilsonianism' were more ambiguous. As some critics pointed out, one could define many different Wilsons depending on your geo- political point of view. Liberal interventionists could praise Wilson's interest in multilateral institutions; conservative supporters of Ameri- can empire, meanwhile, could see Wilson as an advocate of the direct application of American power to 'make the world safe for democracy'. In fact, many liberals seemed happy just to settle for the unilateral rendition of Wilson's import. Journalist Lawrence F. Kaplan, in an article in the New Republic in 2003, dismissed a Wilsonian legacy of 'artless universalism' (presumably embodied by the League A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 26l of Nations and its successor, the UN), but enthused over Wilson's other incarnation as a unilateral crusader for freedom. According to Kaplan, it was this vision which had inspired Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman in their confrontations -with Nazism and Communism, but which then fell out of favour during the war in Vietnam. Ronald Reagan, with his talk of confronting the 'evil empire', revived the Wilsonian streak in foreign policy in the 19805, but then Bill Clinton allowed it to recede once more. Now George W. Bush, enjoined in his global 'war on terror' thanks to the horrors of September nth, would realise this Wilsonian legacy more fully than any of his predecessors. 61 The idea of a missionary dimension to American foreign policy makes much more sense as a rhetorical feint than as a description of fact; however, this notion of American altruism and interventionism has long contended with a supposed 'realist' tradition which stresses the careful management of great-power alliances and the restriction of American military operations to areas of vital self-interest. Rather than conceive of these two positions as a missionary and a self- interested one (or competing world-views of'idealism' and 'pragma- tism'), we might better characterise them as follows: Wilsonians believe that America should take control of large areas of the world and attempt to remake them in the American image; realists, while sympathetic to this ambition, have their doubts about whether it's actually viable. Before September nth, one might have imagined that American foreign policy would continue to shuttle between these interpretive positions. The terrorist attacks, however, enabled the Wilsonians to argue that realism was no longer realistic. Kenneth Pollack and Ronald Asmus, former officials in the Clinton adminis- tration, wrote in the influential Policy Journal in October 2002 that it was impossible for the United States to construct a Maginot line to defend American civilians at home. This meant that the US should 'go on the offensive to address the root causes and not just the symptoms of terrorism and the other problems we face'. Pollack built upon this position to argue for the necessity of a war against Saddam; the broader American project, in his view, was to create a 'new form of democracy in the Greater Middle East'. 62 The irony in all of this — that the United States would try to improve its standing in the Middle East by 'going on the offensive' — 262 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? was largely ignored in the United States in 2002, as the Bush admin- istration moved towards its war in Iraq with a surprising degree of support from Democrats and liberals. In fact, with the removal of Saddams regime, it seemed to Republicans that Bush's hyper- interventionism had finally transcended the 'Vietnam syndrome' that had gripped the nation for nearly four decades. Readers may recall that the United States had already learned to live with defeat in Vietnam after its swift victory in the first Gulf War, relying on the 'Powell doctrine' of overwhelming force to restore the reputation of large-scale US military operations overseas. The second Gulf War, however, encouraged an even more optimistic revision of the Ameri- can upset in Southeast Asia. Admiring the tumbling statue in Fardus Square on 9 April 2003, conservative journalist William Kristol en- thused that the new war against Saddam had been 'like Vietnam in reverse'. The Bush administration's military governor in Iraq, Jay Garner, offered a more detailed analogy. Comparing American fail- ures in Indochina in the 19605 and 19705 with the sweeping victory of 2003, Garner concluded that America's mistake in Vietnam had not been its original intervention but instead its limited conception of the fighting: Americans should have 'taken the war to the North', he argued; moreover, 'if President Bush had been president, we would have won'. 63 Perhaps the only cloud on the Wilsonian horizon, at least until the everyday inconveniences of imperial governance sink in, has been the regrettable failure of some American allies — such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt — to advance the global crusade for democ- racy by inaugurating popular rule at home. Fortunately, however, Fareed Zakaria had by early 2003 converted his article on 'illiberal democracy' (discussed in the previous chapter) into a book, provid- ing a much-needed proviso to these heady Wilsonian expectations. Zakaria had warned during the Clinton years that democratic elec- tions in the developing world might lead to 'illiberal' outcomes: regimes that failed to respect human rights and political freedoms, or which neglected the financial and legal structures necessary to support international trade and a free-market system. In securing a liberal, free-market system, then, the peoples of the world might not always be best served by democracy. (His book might thus have been tided 2 A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 263 Liberal Authoritarianism.) Zakaria's original thesis was a caution against foreign intervention that proceeded directly from the 'realist' school of thinking. While this 'realism' appeared less relevant after Septem- ber nth, Zakaria's eventual book could be read quite differently in the Bush era. Wilsonian democracy promotion was, of course, a wonderful idea, but it might not work (at least immediately) in all places and cultures. The United States should then be prepared either for a lengthy military occupation in some countries (like Iraq, for example), for the benefit of a people who could not themselves be expected to plant the seeds of civil society through the democratic process; or the US should rely on benevolent dictators (like Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan) who ruled via force rather than the ballot box but understood the need to establish trade agreements, to engage with the International Monetary Fund and to repress the forces of political Islam. 64 The New York Times, recognising the importance of Zakaria's book, elevated it to Thomas Friedman status with two separate reviews. Revealingly, the first was written by Robert Kaplan, practitioner of the view that the developing world was going to hell in a handbasket and that the United States should watch out. The other review, meanwhile, was by Niall Ferguson, the nostalgic defender of the British empire. 65 Both men were enthralled by Zakaria's 'brave and ambitious' book, admiring a thesis that might be useful not only in the Middle East but in Africa, Asia and even Latin America. The concept of illiberal democracy, noted Kaplan, would allow American policymakers to make the important distinction between Saddam and Musharraf, or Singaporean dictator Lee Kuan Yew and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. This distinction might also have proven useful, perhaps, in distinguishing Augusto Pinochet from Salvador Allende, the former respecting private property and free markets after the latter s efforts to redistribute Chile's wealth. Or, more recently, it might provide an intellectual rationale for the US antipathy towards Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, another leader who dragged his feet on the issue of'free trade' and who almost fell victim to a coup (which briefly enjoyed the support of the Bush administration) in 2002. While accepting the general appeal of the muscular Wilsonianism described above, we should remember, then, that US policymakers and commentators have not entirely succumbed to a democratic 264 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? utopianism. If American experts deem a populace to be supportive of democracy but not of 'liberalism', then that country may be re- warded with a dictatorship rather than with popular rule. These new forms of American imperialism are thus inspired by sweeping ideo- logical claims, but are not entirely inflexible. 66 'Somebody else's civil war': Middle East 'experts' Before September nth, American images of Arabs and Muslims were fairly limited. On one side was the friendly and Westernised Saudi official, like the US ambassador Prince Bandar, inclined towards race- horses, fast cars, big-screen TVs and the other accoutrements of earthly success. On the other side was the fanatical terrorist, familiar from countless movies and from the media's coverage of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, whose relentless nihilism led inexorably towards the murder of the innocent. These stereotypes bore little resemblance to most Arabs and Muslims, but before September nth they at least retained a functionality in the United States. However, the news that fifteen of the hijackers hailed from Saudi Arabia — and that the Saudi government had been funding extremist Wahabbism for decades — rendered the old ways of thinking essentially implausible. With a much more intense media interest in the Middle East, a variety of Arab 'experts' — many of them with ties to the Bush administration — defined a new political reality for an eager American public, pro- viding a vision of Islam and the world that might bolster the priori- ties of the 'war on terror'. 67 The two commentators who enjoyed the greatest influence over the Bush administration, and perhaps the most prominent interpreters of the 'Arab mind' for the American media, were Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, professors at Princeton and Johns Hopkins University respectively. 68 Serendipitously, Lewis actually had a short book in the presses on September nth that was drawn from a series of lectures he had recently given in Germany. The original tide - 'Culture and Modernisation in the Middle East' — was adapted to fit the needs of the moment; and by early 2002, What Went Wrong? had become a bestseller. Lewis offered the same arguments that he had cultivated throughout his long career: the Middle East was a backward region, struggling to come to terms with the challenges of modernity and to A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 265 halt the decline in its fortunes that had begun at the apogee of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. Just as importantly, Ameri- cans should remember that the problems of the Middle East were internal: Arabs and Muslims had to determine for themselves whether to embrace development or the suicide bomber, a choice which had always been theirs and which no amount of American good inten- tions might sway. 69 Like an octogenarian version of Niall Ferguson, Lewis had watched a generation of scholars discard his patronising and rigid framework for understanding the Middle East. Beginning with Edward Said's groundbreaking Orientalism, serious academic work in Near Eastern Studies had sought both to understand the prejudices of earlier Western scholars and to explore the Middle East on its own terms. In fairness, Lewis had hardly been shut out of the policymaking world, since the new postcolonial movement in Ameri- can universities had been divorced from the Middle Eastern 'experts' in government. With September nth, however, it seemed that Lewis's decline thesis might be ready for a more general airing, especially since it laid any blame for the state of the Middle East squarely on Arabs and Muslims themselves. 70 Fouad Ajami, meanwhile, was invited soon after September nth to explore the meaning of the attacks in a lead article in Foreign Affairs, the most important foreign-policy journal in the United States. Ajami also took advantage of the occasion to repeat his familiar line. The peoples of the Middle East, he declared, had been unable to come to terms with modernity, on a political or cultural level, or to recognise their relatively modest place in the world. Thus they had both an aggrandised sense of their own importance, and a quite fantastical notion that the United States was to blame for problems that were, in truth, of their own making. The gap between an Arab perception of American involvement and an objective reality of Arab culpability had encouraged the maniacal hatreds of September nth. To prove his case about unrealistic expectations in the Middle East, Ajami suggested that Arabs had damned Bill Clinton for being too closely involved in the Israeli/Palestinian peace process, and then had damned George Bush for being too detached. Moreover, Yasser Arafat was a fine example of the inflexibility of the Arab mind: when offered a peace deal by Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000, the Palestinian president 'turned away and headed 266 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? straight back into his people's familiar history: the maximalism, the inability to read what can and cannot be had in a world of nations'. 71 'What can and cannot be had in a world of nations'? What does this mean? Not, presumably, what can and cannot be adjudicated by international law and the international community, which had long held that Israel should vacate the Occupied Territories in their en- tirety. What Ajami was pointing towards, at least implicitly, was Arafat's failure to recognise the power of the United States in the region, and the largesse of the world's only superpower in opting to return some of the Palestinians' lands to their control. When one looks closely between the lines of Aj ami's writing, one sees the United States everywhere, in spite of Ajami's claims of Arab independence and autonomy in the crucial questions of politics and culture. Arabs expressed scepticism about Bill Clinton's role for the same reason that they expressed scepticism towards George W. Bush: both presi- dents were apparently happy to allow Israel massively to expand its settlements even during the 'peace process', and both continued to funnel billions of dollars of aid to Israel on an annual basis. The principal issue was not Clinton's or Bush's commitment to diplo- matic engagement, but the impossibility of the United States playing 'honest broker' when its strategic and financial ties to one particular party were so overwhelming. These crucial facts were nowhere to be found on the surface of Ajami s text, however, which instead reprised Lewis's arguments about Arab backwardness and bitterness. In place of political protest and a history of mutual entanglement, Ajami's account contrasted a corrosive Arab inferiority complex with the perfect innocence of the United States. 72 One of Lewis's proteges, Michael Doran, provided the readers of Foreign Affairs with an immediate political application of this thinking in 2002. According to Doran, the United States was not engaged in a 'clash of civilisations' between the West and the Middle East, but was instead being dragged into 'somebody else's civil war'. Bin Laden and his followers had reached the absurd conclusion that the United States was somehow responsible for the problems of the Middle East, but now sought to drag America into an open conflict in the hope of gaining evidence to support their prejudices about American mal- feasance. This evidence might then be used to unite the Muslims of the region in a single war against the pro-Western regimes in Egypt, 6 rs rs A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 267 Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, with the hope of eventually replacing them with radical Islamic governments. Doran, with no apparent irony, noted that bin Laden sought to use this clash with the United States to issue an ultimatum to Muslims everywhere: either you are with us or you are with the Americans. Radical Islam appeared in Doran s interpretation as a totalising force, eager to unite the peoples of the Middle East around a cataclysmic war of religion rather than specific struggles for political rights, independence or economic sov- ereignty. Doran laboured to explain the apparently limited aims of those Islamic political movements that lacked this totalising vision, especially the Palestinian Hamas. While Doran tried to group Hamas with al-Qaeda, the evidence both of Hamas s focus on Israel and of the militant organisation's reported willingness to compromise with Israel on an eventual territorial settlement suggests that radical Islam is much more varied and heterogeneous than Lewis, Ajami and Doran have argued. Moreover, a study of Islamic radicalism over the past few decades would also reveal that a more extremist and violent politics has emerged only after the failure of more moderate ap- proaches to the dominant powers (America and Israel) of the region. 73 In 2002, the United Nations published its first Arab Human Development Report, a sobering document that demonstrated the social and political problems of the region and its comparative weaknesses when compared with other parts of the developing world. The re- port was seized upon by a number of commentators to clinch the argument that Arabs and Muslims faced problems largely of their own making, and to bolster the claims of backwardness that had been revived by the neo-orientalists. Ironically, though, these lines of argument had, by the autumn of 2002, parted company somewhat with the Bush administrations 'distinctly American internationalism'. Doran had argued that 'Washington is not a primary actor' in the inter-Arab civil war over modernity, even if some American policies (such as uncritical support for Israel and the maintenance of sanctions against Iraq) had created resentment. This led to Doran's vastly dis- ingenuous conclusion that 'until the Arab and Muslim worlds create political orders that do not disenfranchise huge segments of their own populations, the civil war will continue and will continue to touch the United States.' Throwing all the responsibility for these disenfranchising political orders onto the peoples of the Middle East 2 268 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? ministered to a post-September nth desire to absolve the United States of any role in provoking or fostering Islamic radicalism. If Americans could be assured that they were mere bystanders in some- one else's civil war, they would be less inclined to consider their own role in fuelling this conflict. However, with the Bush adminis- tration eager to attack Iraq, depose Saddam and proceed with the Wilsonian agenda, these commentators had to change tack entirely or risk losing their relevance in the 'war on terror'. 74 Amazingly, then, both Lewis and Ajami spoke strongly in favour of the war on Iraq in late 2002 and 2003, in spite of building their careers on the notion that the Arab world was backward and divided. Where they had previously sketched a raging sea of hatred and rejectionism, barely a year later Lewis and Ajami sighted an ocean of democratic promise. In January 2003, Ajami, the more cautious of the two, warned the readers of Foreign Affairs to expect Arab opposi- tion to US war plans and further anti-Americanism, given 'the con- genital condition of a culture yet to take full responsibility for its self-inflicted wounds'. However, the appearance of opposition should not deter the United States as it paved the 'road to modernity'. If Arabs took issue with the unilateral invasion of Iraq, Americans should reassure themselves that 'the region can live with and use that uni- lateralism'. Ajami finally made some reference to the grounds for mistrust of American intentions in the Arab world, noting that 'American power, either by design or default, has been built on relationships with military rulers and monarchs.' Once again, how- ever, he cast America as a benign onlooker: whilst US diplomats were wont to 'toleratfe] the cultural and political malignancies of the Arab world', this new invasion plan would at last herald America's active intervention in the region. 75 Lewis, on the other hand, was less bashful. In October 2002, he accepted an invitation from the American Enterprise Institute to rubber-stamp the planned intervention. Although his career had traced the backwardness of the Arabs to the longevity of their 'im- memorial traditions of command and obedience', he sought now to present the dictatorships of recent Middle Eastern history as the consequence of'modernisation'. In an extraordinary feat of intellec- tual gymnastics, Lewis located an indigenous idea of politics as 'con- tractual and consensual' within 'the traditional Islamic perception of A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 269 government.' While in his previous work, and in his emollients to American pride after September nth, Lewis had suggested that mo- dernity had been compromised by tradition in the Middle East in the twentieth century, now he appeared to be stating precisely the opposite view. He further bolstered his optimistic assessment of a possible imperial adventure by adding a dash of the 'democratic peace' thesis to this mixture. Would a democratic Iraq threaten Israel? 'I don't think so', he suggested, since 'democratic governments are an- swerable to their electors, and most electorates in most countries do not like wars'. No matter that George W Bush, politically adrift on 10 September 2001, had been carried to stratospheric and apparently sustainable heights of public regard on the back of the 'war on ter- ror'. At this stage, Lewis gave the impression that he would say anything that might serve the administration's ends. 76 In the two phases of neo-orientalist argument since September nth, Americans were first assured that they had nothing to do with the attacks, and that they had carefully to navigate a civil war in the Middle East that was not of their making. Then, with the NSS and the sabre-rattling on Iraq in the autumn of 2002, Americans were informed that only they had the power and promise to remake the Middle East in their own image. Did people believe this? Certainly, those liberals who were inclined to support the 'war on terror' ap- pear to have done so. Michael Ignatieff, in deference to the neo- orientalists, declared in January 2003 that 'America is caught in the middle of a civil war raging between incompetent and authoritarian regimes and the Islamic revolutionaries who want to return the Arab world to the time of the prophet.' The following month, Bill Keller of the New York Times drew inspiration from Fouad Ajami's spontane- ous optimism about an American invasion of Iraq: if Ajami, a former pessimist on the subject of the democratic potential of the Middle East, could see promise in a post-Saddam Iraq under American tutelage, surely Bush's Wilsonian project stood a good chance of success. 77 In the question-and-answer session that followed his speech at the American Enterprise Institute in October 2002, Bernard Lewis offered an innovative argument for the historical problems of the Middle East in the twentieth century. While many observers would define the failure of nationalism as a cause of both authoritarianism and 2 2JO ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? radicalism, Lewis argued that 'nationalism was discredited not by its failure but by its success'. The problem, then, was that upon achiev- ing the nationalist goal - independence - the peoples of the Middle East failed to realise that independence and freedom were 'two very different things', or that they might 'at times even appear to be mutually exclusive'. Lewis went on to assert that at this triumphant nationalist moment, 'foreign overlords' were replaced with 'home- grown tyrants who were much worse'. Lewis's historical account, then, not only insisted on the retreat of Western colonialism and the central role of Arabs and Muslims in their own tyrannical repression, but laid the groundwork for an American 'return' to the region. In fact, Lewis assured his conservative audience that the 'complaints' coming from the region centred on the 'American failure to play its proper imperial role'. We should note, then, not only that Lewis offered both a fantastical and false vision of history and the 'com- plaints' of Arabs and Muslims in the present, but that he packaged this account to give his audience exactly what they wanted to hear. While there is, of course, a great deal of free and critical enquiry in the United States, Lewis's brand of 'expertise' holds sway in the highest corridors of power; and American policymakers are treated to a feedback loop of distortion and fantasy which ultimately con- firms rather than challenges their prejudices and ignorance. 78 The final 'expertise' required to license the war in Iraq came from a number of high-profile Iraqi exiles, some of whom had been circu- lating within Western capitals for many years in search of money and support for the replacement of Saddam's regime. Ahmad Chalabi, a London-based financier, was adopted by the Pentagon (and eventually installed within Iraq by the US military) in spite of his conviction for banking fraud in Jordan and a very limited base of support within Iraq. Kanan Makiya, a long-standing critic of Saddam's human rights abuses, longed for an American invasion with such zeal that he described the prospective sounds of bombs dropping on Baghdad as 'music to my ears'. Khidhir Hamza, meanwhile, defected from his position as an Iraqi weapons scientist in 1994 and styled himself within the United States as 'Saddam's Bombmaker'. Hamza quickly became a media darling, avoiding the mundane fact that Iraq's nuclear programme had been entirely decommissioned and instead choosing to portray Saddam as fanatical in his quest for the atomic bomb. 79 A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 2JI Hamza perhaps best exemplified the temptations facing these exiles during the 'war on terror', presented with ample opportunities for personal fame and power and even the chance to become America's proxy rulers in Baghdad. His autobiography — 'as rich in danger, intrigue, and personal courage as a well-crafted spy novel', according to the cover - made strenuous efforts to praise the United States ('what a great country!'), with a particularly nostalgic account of Hamza's own days as a student in America in the early 19605. Hamza rejected the tendency of his fellow foreign students to indulge 'their cynicism about America and democracy', and even found time to attack 'American liberals' carping about racial segregation'. Hamza seemed willing to absolve America even of the acknowledged in- justice of its own recent history; it's hardly surprising, then, that he and his fellow exiles found little cause to criticise America's dealings in the Middle East. We should not underestimate their role, however, in providing a dash of authenticity and local colour to the plans of the Bush administration. With Lewis and Ajami reversing their early pessimism on the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, Chalabi, Makiya and Hamza were able both to stress Saddam's threat to the civilised world and to present themselves as friendly, pro- American alternatives. 80 DEBATE AND THE LIMITS OF DISSENT Politics and the possibilities for change We've already explored a number of continuities between Bill Clinton's presidency and the Bush administration's foreign policy, and discovered a broad consistency in the 'distinctly American inter- nationalism' that has emerged since the end of the Cold War. Of the millions of Americans who opposed war in Iraq, however, perhaps a large majority believed that George W. Bush was entirely responsible for the perversion of American foreign policy. Supporters of Al Gore were particularly adamant in their belief that he would have been a genuine multilateralist, and that he would have responded to the challenge of September nth by harnessing the enormous global 272 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? outpouring of sympathy for the United States towards a genuinely international response. It's worth speculating a little on this prospect, not least because the promise (or otherwise) of this 'lost' Gore presi- dency bears upon the prospect that the Democratic Party might effect meaningful changes should it manage to unseat the Republi- cans and regain the White House. Certainly, many Democratic or- ganisers will look to harness popular dissatisfaction with the 'war on terror' as they package the next Democratic candidate in the presi- dential election of 2004. Gore himself briefly (and surprisingly) emerged as a critic of Bush's war plans in Iraq, giving several speeches in the autumn of 2002 which defended the Clinton administration's policy of'containment' and which pilloried the president for squandering the sympathies of the world after September nth. 81 Strangely, however, he subsequently pulled out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, and largely disappeared from the public scene. Gore had performed a number of about-turns on foreign policy issues, though one consist- ent element in his career had been his 'toughness' towards Saddam Hussein. Moreover, two of his closest foreign-policy advisers - Leon Fuerth and James Woolsey - were enthusiastic defenders of the war on Iraq. Fuerth, who would have occupied Condoleezza Rice's role as National Security Adviser in a Gore administration, wrote an editorial in January 2003 chastising the Bush administration for being too restrained in its pre-emption policy. Fuerth even urged Bush's team to be ready for a 'second major military enterprise' in North Korea that might coincide with a war on Iraq. Woolsey, a former CIA director under Clinton, gave firm support both to Bush's inva- sion and to the broadest possible conception of the 'war on terror'. For Woolsey, this constituted 'World War IV (the Cold War was World War III, he maintained) and required the absolute resolve of the United States and its military. Although it is hard to imagine that a President Gore would have engaged the international community as cavalierly as President Bush, it would also be misleading to imag- ine that a Gore administration would have rejected the 'pre-emption' strategy or the chance to strike at Saddam Hussein. 82 A good sense of what a Democratic approach might have looked like comes from the writing of Kenneth Pollack, a National Security Council official in the Clinton administration who became one of A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 273 the leading liberal advocates of a war in Iraq. During the Clinton years, Pollack had tried to organise a coup within Iraq, hoping that the Iraqi National Congress or another exile group might, with American funding and support, overthrow Saddam's regime; he was thus a key figure on one side of the debate, against those (like Madeleine Albright) who argued that the price of containment through sanctions — the deaths of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iraqis — was worth paying. In the spring of 2002, in a very different political climate, Pollack contributed an article to Foreign Affairs en- titled 'Next Stop Baghdad?' in which he argued that the policy of containment had failed. Offering a war plan for an Iraqi invasion that was eerily prescient of the eventual attack in 2003, Pollack sug- gested that the potential for WMD development and proliferation was too great to allow rulers like Saddam to remain in power. More- over, American backing for exile groups was less likely to overthrow Saddam than a full-scale military invasion, and so the Bush adminis- tration should make use of the military option. Pollack therefore outlined a position for Democratic hawks which diverged cosmeti- cally from the Bush administration while essentially adhering to Bush's major objectives: the United States should expel Saddam militarily, but should endeavour to give Europe a major role in this process and should commit substantial resources to the reconstruction effort. 83 The Democrats, then, had their military experts to confirm the propriety of pre-emption; they were also bolstered by the liberal interventionists, who attested to the necessity of deposing Saddam in the name of human rights even if the methods used to remove the dictator were illegal. These liberal interventionists frequently joined in the Bush administration's attack on the United Nations, arguing that multilateral institutions should not be allowed to con- strain America if the United States might thereby attain a just out- come. Anne-Marie Slaughter, a noted international law expert, told the readers of the New York Times two days before the US invasion of Iraq that the United Nations should not be 'a straitjacket, pre- venting nations from defending themselves or pursuing what they perceive to be their vital national security interests'. Similarly, inter- national law could also prove to be part of the problem rather than the solution if it was taken too literally. Yes, observed Slaughter, the war in Iraq was perhaps illegal: 'But even for international lawyers, 274 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? insisting on formal legality in this case may be counterproductive.' For Slaughter, then, the UN and international law offered guide- lines rather than rules for international action; if either constrained a nation in pursuing its 'vital national security interests', then multi- lateralism had somehow failed the cause of justice and human rights. But who was to decide when a particular nation was 'defending' itself through pre-emptive action, or when a nation was committing aggression? Who would determine when international lawyers should 'insist on formal legality', and in which situations this might be 'counterproductive'? 84 It's worth stressing these points to indicate that the current uni- lateralist craze in the United States has a distinctly bipartisan hue. Although some Democrats have offered political and intellectual chal- lenges to the 'Bush doctrine', many others have tried simply to dress up the ugly policies of the Bush administration for a liberal, domes- tic audience and for those overseas onlookers who are stunned by the brazenness of the 'distinctly American internationalism'. 85 Michael Ignatieff, Thomas Friedman, Kenneth Pollack and others have all conditioned their support for President Bush on a variety of political measures which might blunt the harsh edges of the 'war on terror': envisaging a role for Europe, a broader engagement with the Arab world, and a prolonged commitment to reconstruction after Ameri- can military invasions. However, it is less clear that these commenta- tors have rethought their support when the Bush administration has ignored their various provisos. Thomas Friedman announced in March 2003 that, in spite of his opposition to a unilateral war in Iraq, he would henceforth concentrate only on making the best of the American invasion: 'When you've got lemons, make lemonade.' 86 But this deferral to pragmatism surely inhibits the ability of liberal observers to register the lies and the broken promises of American foreign policy, and to bring these to bear on the evaluation of future prospects. If the Bush administration has made the continued recon- struction of Kosovo or Afghanistan a low priority, doesn't this affect the prospects of a better future for an American-controlled Iraq? And if the United States has chosen to ignore the UN at precisely the moment that the UN refused to authorise a US invasion, what precedent does this establish for future wars, perhaps begun by nations other than the United States? A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 275 The Democratic candidates for the 2004 election do not inspire much hope for a serious rethinking of American foreign policy, even if they somehow manage to dent Bush's adamantine popularity. Of the nine initial contenders, only a handful offered a substantially different vision of the 'war on terror' from the Bush approach. Among the most prominent candidates is Joseph Lieberman, Gore's vice- presidential running mate in 2000 and an avowed hawk. Lieberman issued a number of warnings to the Democratic Party in early 2003 that it should avoid electing a dovish candidate, since only someone who was 'strong on defense' could possibly challenge President Bush. While some of the other leading candidates disregarded this warning in February and March of 2003 - one of them even calling for 'regime change' in the United States — these laggards eventually came into line when the war was completed, rushing to catch up with Lieberman s prescient hawkishness and to 'make lemonade' from the fruits of the American occupation. 87 Genuinely anti-war candidates suffer from a small funding base and from the efforts of their fellow Democrats to impugn their patriotism or to dismiss them as unelectable. Given the harshness of many of Bush's domestic policies — including his enormous tax cuts and his slashing of public services — it should be easy for a Demo- cratic 'moderate' to embrace much of Bush's foreign policy, hoping instead to redirect the attention of the American public towards these domestic issues. The record of the Congressional elections in No- vember 2002, however, suggests that this strategy may be disastrous. At the height of the financial scandals surrounding Enron and other crooked corporations, the Democrats failed to gain any leverage and actually lost ground to the Republicans. Bush, meanwhile, was busy defining the threat from Saddam and dispatching large numbers of troops to the Middle East, largely with Democratic acquiescence. Media coverage and public opinion The public perception of events in America is, inevitably, shaped by the media. As we have seen, the American media have a number of weaknesses which limit the flow of information to ordinary Ameri- cans, not least the forms of control and censorship which attend the corporate ownership of virtually every major media source. The 1996 276 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Telecommunications Act, championed by the Clinton administra- tion, has deepened the concentration of ownership and made the American media landscape still more homogeneous. Perhaps the most dramatic example is the rise of Clear Channel, a radio corporation that moved from ownership of only 43 radio stations before the 1996 legislation to more than 1,200 stations in 2002. (Its nearest competi- tor owns around 200 stations, by comparison.) Apart from homog- enising the programming of these radio stations, Clear Channel has also displayed political ambitions in the 'war on terror': a number of rallies in early 2003 intended to 'support the troops' (and to counter the huge anti-war demonstrations in most major cities) were actually funded by Clear Channel stations. A single corporation, then, had taken advantage of government deregulation to attain a position of massive influence within the radio industry, and then employed this influence to bolster the president's war in Iraq. Given Clear Channel's deeply conservative array of news and talk-show programming, and its massive market penetration, it would be extremely hard for many Americans to dodge this wave of misinformation even if they chose not to attend one of these pro-war rallies. 88 The television analogue of Clear Channel's rise is the recent ascendance of Rupert Murdochs Fox News Channel, a cable- television news network founded in 1996 with the ambition of offering a conservative alternative to Ted Turner's Cable News Net- work (CNN). CNN, it should be remembered, was hardly very progressive in the first instance; however, its international focus and relatively serious journalism led Murdoch to identify a gap in the market for a kind of conservative, tabloid television. Fox News com- bined unabashedly conservative opinion programmes with patriotic news reporting, along with an implausible yet ubiquitous advertising slogan promising 'fair and balanced' news coverage. While the net- work built its audience during the Clinton sex scandal of 1998, it finally came of age after September nth. Quickly daubing the screen with patriotic messages and American flags, Fox News seized this moment to abandon those remnants of journalistic objectivity and detachment which still remained elsewhere in the mainstream Ameri- can media: news anchors rushed to talk of American successes in combating the 'terror goons' against whom 'our troops' were ranked in moral battle. Anti-war protesters, meanwhile, were not forgotten 6 A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 277 by another Fox anchor even in the joyous moment of Iraqi 'libera- tion': 'You were sickening then, you are sickening now', declared Neal Cavuto to any peaceniks who might be following the war on Fox. Animated by a hatred for the 'liberal media' and their supposed chokehold on ordinary Americans, Fox News executives and jour- nalists acted as cheerleaders for every aspect of the 'war on terror'. Rupert Murdoch, for his part, denied encouraging the cable channel in its drum beats for war, though in an interview with an Australian magazine he admitted parenthetically that 'the greatest thing to come of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil'. 89 Defenders of Fox News would point out that Americans have several alternative outlets, even on cable television. However, in the early days of the 'war on terror' it was apparent that a 'Fox effect' had taken hold at Fox News's rivals, CNN and MSNBC. Both stations rushed to adopt the patriotic or jingoistic formats pioneered at Fox, particularly after Murdoch's outfit overtook CNN in the ratings in January 2002 and became America's most-watched cable news channel. CNN tried to keep up by flying the American flag on its screen, and by sending its top executive to Washington to discuss the problem of 'liberal bias' with Republican leaders. 90 MSNBC, meanwhile, fired its only liberal commentator — the veteran broad- caster Phil Donahue - and replaced him with the 'shock-jock' pundit Michael Savage. Savage had risen to fame on a record of candour and fearlessness which included references to developing countries as 'turd world nations', and spent much of his broadcasts attacking those who questioned Bush's war. He even speculated on whether protesters might be rounded up for the crimes of 'sedition' and 'treason'. 91 When challenged on this rightward lurch, the head of MSNBC defended Savage and noted more generally that 'after September nth, the country wants more optimism and benefit of the doubt'. Thanks to Fox and its desperate imitators, not to mention the patriotic revival following the terrorist attacks, Americans were to be liberated from the scepticism of a 'negative' press. As one conservative media analyst put it, 'what Fox is doing, and frankly what MSNBC is also declaring by its product, is that one can be unabashedly patriotic and be a good news journalist at the same time'. 92 2 278 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? When Bush finally launched his invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon was sufficiently impressed with this 'optimistic' tendency in the American media to offer a much greater level of access to journalists than had been the case in the 1991 Gulf War. In a new strategy known as 'embedding', US and foreign journalists were given basic military training, assigned to a particular unit, and then allowed to travel with the troops into the deserts of Iraq. Although these report- ers were still subject to numerous restrictions, their proximity to the action presented a thrilling spectacle for American television viewers. Moreover, the understandable camaraderie between 'embedded'jour- nalists and their US military protectors and guides ensured that very little of this coverage was critical or negative. In the case of journal- ists attached to the US military teams searching for WMDs, disinfor- mation appeared to be more the rule than the exception: Judith Miller of the New York Times dutifully filed stories detailing the mili- tary's apparent breakthroughs in the search for WMD stockpiles, but was herself prevented from interviewing or even revealing the names of the Iraqi 'informants' responsible for these 'discoveries'. As of June 2003, however, none of these stories had proven true, and Miller's own editors questioned whether the US military and intelligence services had deliberately misinformed the American people on the WMD question - which was, after all, Bush's principal rationale for attacking Iraq. 93 Some journalists were sceptical of this approach: news organisa- tions seemed more willing to 'embed' reporters with the US military than within those Middle Eastern societies which might offer the context necessary to understand America's role in the region. One of MSNBC's star reporters, Ashleigh Banfield, delivered a lecture in April 2003 in which she criticised the Pentagon's new system, ques- tioning whether the 'embeds' had really given the American public a glimpse of the suffering and bloodshed caused by war. She also argued that it was difficult to convey information about the com- plexity of the Middle East through the prism of the American me- dia. In an extraordinary part of her speech, Banfield noted that while the name of Hezbollah elicited only images of terror and mayhem in American minds, the radical group was instead associated by many Arabs with the hospitals and social services that it provides. Predictably, Banfield received a double dressing down. The president A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 279 of her network elicited an apology for her apparent attacks on the professionalism of her colleagues; the New York Times, meanwhile, noting that Banfield's career at NBC had stalled in recent months, ran a long article on its business pages framing her remarks as a moment of pique rather than a substantive criticism of the American media. If print and broadcast journalists had somehow missed the broader stories about the Middle East in the midst of their exciting experiment in embedding, there was little reflection of this beyond Banfield's muted remarks. 94 The Bush administration based its strategic planning after September nth on the idea that the American public would be more willing to support foreign wars and interventions, and the evidence of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq supports this view. 95 We should not mistake this popular approval of military interventions, however, with a broader interest in foreign affairs and the diverse peoples and prob- lems of the world. If President Bush's approval ratings are to be believed, the bulk of the American public has largely accepted the president's logic on the 'war on terror', and has endorsed even the more outlandish claims of the administration. In spite of the total lack of evidence for the association, opinion polls suggested in 2003 that the majority of Americans believed Saddam Hussein either to have masterminded or aided the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. 96 This might in part be explained by the tendency of the press (including, as we have seen, 'elite' newspapers like the New York Times) to give much more space to the Bush administra- tion's allegations than to the eventual collapse of these claims. The Saddam/September nth connection also gives Americans an easy answer to a question of formidable complexity. Al-Qaeda s emergence was dependent on a host of political and cultural factors attending the incomplete decolonisation of the Middle East in the decades since World War II. Understanding this emergence, or formulating a policy which might effectively counter these attacks, requires a great deal of time and effort, as well as a willingness to examine America's actions in a critical and sometimes painful light. How much easier, then, to imagine Saddam Hussein, raised once more to the status of Hitler or Stalin, sending his henchmen to destroy New York or threatening to ravage the Middle East with nuclear weapons? The 2 28O ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? fallacy of this image in no way compromises its utility, particularly when so many Americans are rightly fearful of another abrupt attack. At the same time as these militant oversimplifications have abounded within the United States, one can also detect a reversion to the same eerie calm and detachment that defined the 'home front' during the war in Kosovo in 1999. American casualties in the 2003 Gulf War were, once again, very light; and, after an initial flurry of protests at the beginning of the war, the conflict appeared to have little or no effect on the rhythm of daily life in America. When US troops finally reached Baghdad, television executives offered blanket coverage of the tumbling Saddam statue but quickly reverted to the kind of sensational domestic news which ordinarily preoccupies the American media: an abducted girl had been found safe and well many months after her disappearance; a missing, pregnant woman had been found murdered, with her husband as the prime suspect. Even while conservative commentators speculated over where the 'war on terror' might next be waged, the public turned its attention back to these apolitical stories and to the ongoing craze of'reality' television. Perhaps the 'war on terror', like neoliberal economics, requires only that people understand the basic rules (tyrants must be pre-empted before they can threaten the United States) rather than that they explore the history and politics of a political region (say, the Korean peninsula). In any case, the American public seemed especially docile in the glow of the military victory in Iraq, and its confidence in Bush and his serial interventions showed no sign of diminishing. If the events of September nth focused the minds of ordinary Americans on an external threat, the evidence of the subsequent two years confirms that they have placed deep reserves of trust in the president's judgement and the world-view promulgated by his advis- ers. One indicator of this trust is the relatively muted public response to the economic policy of the Bush administration, which has seen more than two million jobs disappear since 2001 and which has implemented massive tax cuts which overwhelmingly favour rich Americans. Another is the relative equanimity with which ordinary Americans responded to the Enron debacle and other corporate scan- dals, even as these appeared to implicate the Bush administration directly. Economist Paul Krugman predicted in January 2002 that . A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 28l future historians would look back on the Enron affair as a more significant moment even than September nth; in retrospect, Krugman's assertion seems ridiculous. The terrorist attacks, along with the further stultification of the media, may have nudged the majority of Americans towards a form of complaisance that makes the somnolent political culture of the 19905 seem positively radical. The Bush line on the 'war on terror' has been accepted at face value, and the need to remain patriotic and to support the president has deterred Americans from translating their economic woes into politi- cal pressure. In part this was also a tribute to President Bush himself, who projected the kind of clueless grandeur that made Ronald Reagan so successful. None of this suggests, however, that Bush will be easily supplanted in the near future; or, if the Democrats some- how win back the White House, that they will abandon a 'war on terror' which has served the current incumbent so handsomely. 97 This pessimistic assessment should be balanced with some reference to the millions of Americans who took to the streets during the first months of 2003 to protest the prospective war on Iraq. Undoubtedly, a sizable minority of Americans are actively opposed to Bush's presi- dency, and repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to brave the cold winter climate in a series of massive rallies. These demonstrations were important in sending a message to other Americans — and to the world at large — that public opinion was not squarely behind Bush's agenda. This loose coalition of protesters, however, faced many difficulties in sustaining any political impact. Bush, for his part, quickly dismissed the rallies, stiffly reminding Americans that there had also been 'protests against trade' and that this hadn't turned him against trade. 98 More tremblingly, many protesters automatically placed their hopes in the Democratic Party and the prospect of a pro-peace candidate somehow triumphing in 2004. As we have seen, an impor- tant wing of the Democratic Party is made up of 'liberal interven- tionists' and others who actually share Bush's views about the threat of radical Islam and the importance of the Wilsonian crusade. More- over, any Democratic candidate for the presidency will have to choose between acquiescing in the apparent popularity of the 'war on ter- ror', or taking the time to outline a real alternative to the American people. The protesters would favour the latter course of action; but 282 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? since the Democratic candidate will take their support for granted, he or she will be tempted to concentrate on swing voters and to offer a vision of foreign policy that barely deviates from Bush's do- mestically successful model. If the American economy continues to weaken, and Bush de- clines to launch any further military adventures, a Democratic candi- date might yet be able both to compete for the presidency and to offer a fundamentally different vision of foreign policy than that which currently obtains. Given the continuing influence of money in the political process, however, and the time and effort necessary to explain the reasons for suspending the ill-advised 'war on terror', the chances of this outcome are slight. The challenge for those who protested the war against Iraq will be to transform their rejection of Bush into a positive vision of foreign policy; to find ways of empha- sising the importance of multilateralism and international law, especially at a moment in which America's security has been com- promised; and, most difficult of all, to translate these ideas to the majority of the American people in spite of corporate media largely unsympathetic to this project. Without this final act of translation, the optimism and vigour of the protests against war in Iraq will result only in bitterness and exclusion from mainstream politics. LOOKING AHEAD On 9 April 2003, in Fardus Square, the US Marines made a brief but revealing blunder in their efforts to choreograph the liberation of Baghdad. Before the statue of Saddam Hussein was dragged to the ground by an American crane, a soldier was dispatched to place a flag atop its imposing forehead. To the surprise of the crowd, the flag was the Stars and Stripes: an uncomfortable demonstration of the ease with which liberation could instead be read as occupation. Moments later, the American flag was withdrawn, and an Iraqi one took its place. Critical commentators within the United States and elsewhere seized upon this moment to demonstrate Americas true intentions in conquering Iraq, but we might draw a different lesson from the affair. The soldier who placed the flag was Corporal Edward A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 283 Chin of Brooklyn, New York; son of ethnic Chinese from Burma who had fled that country's turbulent political climate at the time of Edward's birth. While the Iraqis in Fardus Square temporarily fell silent at Chin's gesture, the New York Daily News reported, 'his family in Brooklyn went crazy'. 99 I've already mentioned the tendency of Americans to disparage the United Nations because they believe that the United States actu- ally is the UN, and this incident seems to exemplify both the myth and its foundations in reality. If the United Nations had organised a military effort to remove Saddam Hussein, and a Chinese soldier had placed the UN flag over Saddam's grim visage, might this have elicited the applause of the world? To many Americans, the story of liberation made sense not simply because they'd been brainwashed by the Bush administration, but because a story of American diver- sity and commitment to liberties is deeply engrained in American society. Although racism has hardly vanished from the United States, the interest of most conservatives in encouraging further immigra- tion to America attests to a powerful self-conception: Americans can remake the world both by giving its refugees a chance to succeed within the United States, and by dispatching troops beyond Ameri- can borders to bring liberty and democracy in place of tyranny. Edward Chin's parents had cause to be grateful to the United States for the opportunities it had provided their family; it was easy for the Chins, in particular, to imagine that their son's actions might lead to similar opportunities for Iraq's exhausted populace. 100 It is no coincidence, perhaps, that arguably the freest and most diverse nation on the planet is poised to enter a period of dangerous hegemony, bent upon pursuing its unilateral 'war on terror' in spite of the damage done to international law, multilateral institutions and the idea of an international community. Many Americans find it difficult to believe that their country might harbour ill motives in attacking Iraq, or that the effects of such an intervention might impact negatively on a people or a region. In this sense, Niall Fergusons depiction of America as an 'empire in denial' is not a check upon American adventures overseas, but rather a prerequisite. The current willingness to imagine a global American empire is balanced by efforts to depict such imperial activity as a democratic crusade, rather than a naked struggle for resources. Moreover, despite 284 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? the apparent emptiness of the exculpatory rhetoric, we should take very seriously indeed this American faith in the missionary nature of US actions. The suggestion that the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq are simply a conspiracy, an attempt to acquire gas or oil or the means to transport them to American markets, ignores the vital quality of American rhetoric in policymaking and the reception of US actions by the American public. The bare facts of American power and domination remain: 3 per cent of the world's population consumes 27 per cent of its oil. This inequitable distribution of resources can only be ad- dressed through a serious effort to reduce American consumption, or an American commitment to use a massive military to install or remove regimes depending on their willingness to support America's limitless appetite for natural resources. Since Americans can't even be persuaded to achieve modest savings in, say, the fuel efficiency of automobiles, the United States has traditionally favoured the military option, and is thus responsible for 40 per cent of the world's defence spending. Of course these facts have an enormous influence over American foreign policy, but they seem hollow when considered in isolation from the elaborate ideological schemes that we have been exploring. America's overwhelming dominance is hidden behind a series of rationalisations that stresses the nation's commitment to free- dom at home and abroad. Meanwhile, a popular confidence in the essential goodness of American intentions is impervious to the weight of contrary evidence. 101 September nth generated an enormous fear in America, rousing the nation from the deep slumber that accompanies global pre- dominance and an economic boom. This fear, magnified by the subsequent (still unexplained) anthrax attacks and occasional warn- ings of further terrorist attacks, inspired a renewed military build-up rather than a frank assessment of America's vulnerability to apoca- lyptic terrorism. The bombs and planes which pounded Baghdad in April 2003 carried messages of revenge for September nth, reflect- ing an American hope that the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks might be levelled as readily as one of Saddam's presidential palaces. The more uncomfortable truth, however, is that the most dangerous opponents of American power remain at large. The Bush administra- tion's policy of remaking the Middle East in America's image seems 4 A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 285 doomed to failure. Even if the United States were genuine in its promise to allow Iraqis both to govern themselves and to control their oil, it is highly unlikely that Bush will commit the resources or the personnel necessary to produce a stable society in Iraq. At the same time, the Bush administration's abandonment of the UN en- sures that Iraqis will heap blame on America alone (with perhaps a little left over for its junior partner, Britain) for their multiplying problems. Many American conservatives sincerely believe that the millions of people outside America who are suspicious of its actions, or who hold the United States to be responsible for their troubles, will look upon the war in Iraq and rethink their position. If the effort to build democracy and civil society does not compel these opponents to abandon their complaints, then the 'shock and awe' of the initial bombing campaign may at least persuade them not to mess with America. On the basis of September nth, it seems extremely doubt- ful that such a logic will deter the proponents of catastrophic terror- ism, and quite possible that American bombing or occupation of other countries may actually encourage it. The 'war on terror' con- stitutes an abandonment of international law and multilateral institu- tions, and a denial of the history of American involvement in a number of troubled regions. If those people who feel aggrieved by America have no forum in which to take their complaints, and can exact no acknowledgement from the United States of its own role in their suffering, it's unlikely either that they will be persuaded by the hollow boasts of Wilsonianism or that they will be intimidated into silence by America's military prowess. As advanced technology allows people to leverage their own suicidal actions against an increasingly large number of victims, it seems certain that the relationship be- tween America and its opponents will instead descend into terrible forms of destruction. The world urgently needs multilateral institu- tions, a more equitable distribution of resources, economic justice, and political systems that allow ordinary people to shape their des- tiny. Without these, the ability of the United States to survive in the twenty-first century without experiencing truly apocalyptic forms of terrorism is open to question. Conservative commentator John Hillen, a veteran of the first Gulf War, offered a frank discussion of America's global role just as the 286 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Bush administration was preparing its new conflict with Iraq. Hillen engaged with the problem of America's foreign discontents and acknowledged that, from their perspective, the core elements of an American blueprint for the world - 'running-dog capitalism' and 'licentious consumerism' — were unlikely to constitute a 'moral an- chor'. Since free-market capitalism has 'no real component of social justice', Hillen warned that it would 'throw up many more bin Ladens, with ever more creative ways of harming the imperial order'. Such candour is rare in American commentary on the 'war on terror', but in fairness we should note that conservatives have often proven prescient in detecting the weaknesses and dangers of a particular society. More surprising, however, was Hillen s blunt confidence that a solution to these threats was at hand: resistance 'is the nagging problem of all empires, but one that can be handled by a focused and ruthless polity'.The sweeping invasion of Iraq presumably dem- onstrated this focus and ruthlessness, warning the world that America would enforce its imperial order by any means necessary. 102 Reading Hillen's article reminded me of another conservative's understanding of empires and how they might sustain themselves against popular opposition. Author and parliamentarian Edmund Burke watched in disbelief in the 17705 as the British government repressed its colonists in North America. Britain had ignited this dispute with harsh and controlling economic policies, but then wors- ened the political crisis with a military occupation of America's prin- cipal cities. In 1775, just before the shooting began in earnest, Burke tried to persuade his British parliamentary colleagues that they could not sustain an empire through the use of force. Paradoxically, exces- sive power and control would merely hasten the cause of revolution. If Britons sought a model of imperial management, Burke suggested, they should look to the Ottomans, who, in spite of their supposedly despotic tendencies, had been forced to 'truck and huckster' to keep their vast empire intact. 'The sultan gets such obedience as he can', Burke reminded the House of Commons. 'This is the immutable condition, the eternal law of extensive and detached empire.' 103 The British government ignored Burke s pleas, of course, and the result of these draconian imperial policies was the American Revolution. If the United States repeats this mistake in the twenty-first century, however, arraying itself as a 'focused and ruthless polity' against its 6 A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 287 critics and opponents, the consequences for the world and for America itself will be very bleak indeed. NOTES 1. George W. Bush, 'State of the Union Address', Washington, DC, 28 January 2003. 2. Bush's full statement -was as follows: 'If we're an arrogant nation, they'll [the rest of the world] resent us. If we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us.' Transcript of the Second Presidential Debate, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, n October 2000. On the military spending differential, see the Transcript of the Third Presidential Debate, St. Louis, Missouri, 17 October 2000. The vulnerability of President Clinton to Pentagon accusations of weakness is a recurring theme of David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001). 3. For a contemporary assessment of Bush's foreign and economic policy, see William Schneider, 'The Old Politics and the New World Order', in Kenneth A. Oye et al., eds, Eagle in a New World: American Grand Strategy in the Post-Cold War Era (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 35- 68. 4. For a summary and critique of the variety of myths surrounding the American role in the Cold War, see Allen Hunter, ed., Rethinking the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). 5. See, for example, a letter to President Clinton protesting the latter s Iraq 'containment' policy, sent under the auspices of the Project for the New American Century, 26 January 1998 (available online at www. newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htni). Many of the signato- ries - including Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Zoellick - became part of George W. Bush's administration in 2001. 6. Clay Chandler, 'Washington, Beijing Still at Odds Over Spy Plane', Washington Post, 18 April 2001, Ai. On the decision to abandon the ABM treaty, see John Newhouse,'The Missile Defense Debate', Foreign Affairs So, no. 4 (2001): 97-109. On Bush's rapport with Putin, see Frank Bruni,'The President in Europe', NewYorkTimes, 17 June 2001, i. 7. Condoleezza Rice,'Promoting the National Interest', Foreign Affairs 79, no. i (2000): 45-62. See also Robert Zoellick,'A Republican Foreign Policy', ibid., 63-78. Zoellick became the Bush administration's prin- cipal trade representative, and was touted by administration officials as one of the smartest members of the Bush team. (Bush, echoing this in his own way, granted Zoellick the honour of a nickname: 'Z Man'.) 288 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Elizabeth Becker and Edmund L. Andrews, 'Performing a Free Trade Juggling Act, Offstage', New York Times, 8 February 2003, Ci. 8. The US media were reluctant to blame the breakdown of talks on the United States, even though the US was left isolated in its negotiating position. In an interesting foreshadowing of the diplomatic winter that lay ahead in the Bush presidency, Tony Blair opted at the last minute to break ranks with the common European position; a fact which allowed American commentators to divert blame to Europe for its inflexibility and failure to compromise. For a useful summary of the American media's reporting, see Polly Ghazi, 'Can the USA Learn?', Guardian, 30 November 2000. 9. Stephen Lee Myers, 'U.S. Signs Treaty for World Court to Try Atrocities', New York Times, i January 2001, Ai. The extraordinarily disingenuous press release which accompanied Clinton's signature — stressing America's 'strong support' for the treaty's goals, but noting that neither Clinton nor George W. Bush should send the treaty to the Senate for ratifica- tion — was a fine summary of the promise and the ultimate disappoint- ment of US foreign policy in the Clinton years. 10. The Bush administration formally rejected the ICC in May 2002, but had announced its opposition early in 2001. For a typical newspaper account that stresses Bush's unilateralism as a rupture with America's previous policies, see Thorn Shanker, 'White House Says U.S. is Not a Loner,Just Choosy', NewYork Times, 31 July 2001, Ai.The Times article discussing Clinton's half-hearted signature of the ICC in December 2000, meanwhile, praised Clinton's gesture as 'a powerful American endorsement of the treaty's goals'. Myers, 'U.S. Signs Treaty'. For an assessment of the continuities between the Clinton and Bush administra- tions, see David M. Malone, 'A Decade of U.S. Unilateralism?', in Malone and Yuen Foong Khong, eds, Unilateralism and U.S. Foreign Policy: International Perspectives (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 18-38. 11. Lee Hockstader, 'US Role as Mideast Mediator Fades to a Whisper', Washington Post, 7 August 2001, Ai. 12. On the sidelining of Colin Powell before September nth, see Jane Perlez,'Rice on Front Line in Foreign Policy Role', NewYork Times, 19 August 2001, 10. On the Pentagon study, see Michiko Kakutani, 'How Books Have Shaped U.S. Policy', New York Times, 5 April 2003, A2i. 13. For a sense of Bush's priorities and his pre-September nth aspiration to be the 'education president', see Stephen Metcalf, 'Reading between the Lines', Nation, 28 January 2002. 14. George W Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress, Washington, DC, 20 September 2001. 15. See Chapter 3 above, 153-4; and John Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghani- stan, America and International Terrorism, 3rd edn (London: Pluto Press, 2002). For thoughtful discussions of the roots of anti-Americanism in the aftermath of the attacks, see Paul Kennedy,'As Others See Us', Wall A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 289 Street Journal, 5 October 2001; and Stanley Hoffmann, 'Why Don't They Like Us?', American Prospect, 19 November 2001. 16. Nicholas Lemann, 'The Next World Order', New Yorker, i April 2002, 42-8. 17. Although Colin Powell warned as early as 15 September against includ- ing the FARC in the 'war on terror', Bush soon expanded US aid to the Colombian government and offered greater assistance to Bogota in repressing the FARC guerillas. The Bush administration also moved in the Philippines against the militant group Abu Sayyaf. On the prospect that this second tier of the 'war on terror' would lead to human rights abuses, popular resentment and still more attacks, see Joshua Kurlantzick, 'Tilting at Dominoes: America and al-Qaeda in Southeast Asia', Current History 101, no. 12 (2002): 421—6. 18. See, for example, bin Laden's statements released 7 October 2001 (translated by the Associated Press) and 3 November 2001 (translated by the BBC). 19. An excellent general history, which tracks the complex interaction between local politics and the involvement of external powers, is William L. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, 2nd edn (Boulder, CO:Westview Press, 2000). On the eve of the 2003 Gulf War, Ameri- cans were uncomfortably reminded by a former Nixon administration official of the CIA's involvement in the Iraqi coups of 1963 and 1968: Roger Morris, 'A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making', New York Times, 14 March 2003, A27- 20. On the effects of this history upon Arab impressions of American 'democ- racy promotion', see Marina Ottaway, 'Promoting Democracy in the Middle East: The Problem of U.S. Credibility', Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Working Paper, Middle East Series, no. 35, March 2003. For a sense of the rationalisations employed by American policy- makers for their handling of the Middle East, see Douglas Little, Ameri- can Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 21. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, 363—72, 443—7. On the dangerous and shifting alliances between 'secular' governments and radical Islam in the Middle East, see Mary Ann Weaver, A Portrait of Egypt: A Journey through the World of Militant Islam (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999); and Cooley, Unholy Wars, 19-34. 22. Michael Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), 27-80. 23. On Iran, see Ervand Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American—Iranian Relations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). 2 2 2pO ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? 24. Bob Woodward's reverential account of Bush's handling of the 'war on terror', Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), suggests that there was little or no discussion of the complex relationship the United States and the Middle East beyond the immediate issue of destroying al-Qaeda. Bush was, however, profoundly unimpressed with Clinton's cruise-missile foreign policy, at least in Woodward's account. Ibid., 79. On the Carter administration's involvement in Afghanistan, see Cooley, Unholy Wars, 1-18. For general accounts of the Taliban's emergence, see Peter Marsden, The Taliban: War, Religion and the New Order in Afghani- stan (London: Zed Books, 1998); Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); and William Maley, The Afghanistan Wars (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 218-50, especially 226—8. 25. Cooley, Unholy Wars, 227-32. 26. Woodward, Bush at War, 278-316. Maley, The Afghanistan Wars, 251-83. 27. George W. Bush, 'State of the Union Address', Washington, DC, 29 January 2002. 28. Steve Dunleavy,'Simply Kill These Bastards', NewYork Post, 12 September 2001, 17. 29. Lemann, 'The Next World Order'. 30. 'The National Security Strategy of the United States of America', Washington, DC, September 2002. On Bush's tendency to fold free markets and neoliberalism into his view of the 'war on terror', see William Finnegan, 'The Economics of Empire: Notes on the Washing- ton Consensus', Harper's Magazine, May 2003, 41-54. This association is not an exclusively Republican obsession, however; note the panegyric to the triad of 'peace, democracy and free markets' from Michael Mandelbaum,'The Inadequacy of American Power', Foreign Affairs 81, no. 5 (2002): 61-73. 31. Note that the boldness of Bush's declaration was extremely attractive to many commentators. For a representative sample of the praise that the NSS received, and the unlikely depiction of Bush as a big thinker, see John Lewis Gaddis,'A Grand Strategy of Transformation', Foreign Policy, November/December 2002. In one of many surreal moments, Gaddis entertainingly praised Bush's 'preference for pre-empting multilaterally'. 32. On the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Cheney axis, see Lemann, 'The Next World Order'; and Steven R. Weisman, 'Pre-emption: Idea with a Lineage whose Time Had Come', NewYork Times, 23 March 2003, Bi . Bob Woodward details the obsession of Paul Wolfowitz in particular with attacking Iraq at a meeting of top-level Bush officials at Camp David on 15 September 2001. 3 3. The principal bloodhound on this particular trail was William Safire, the veteran New York Times conservative who divided his time post- September nth between trumpeting the Iraq/al-Qaeda 'connection' and heaping praise upon Ariel Sharon. Safire, 'Prague Connection', NewYork Times, 12 November 2001, Ai9. In spite of the US govern- A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 29! merit's own denial of the story, Safire and other conservative journalists kept it alive into 2003. See Walter Pincus, 'No Link between Hijacker, Iraq Found, US Says', NewYork Times, i May 2002, Ap; and Fred Barnes, 'Mohamed Atta Was Here...', Weekly Standard, 12/19 August 2002, 10- ii. 34. Woodward, Bush at War, 82-3. 35. Nicholas Lemann, 'How it Came to War', New Yorker, 31 March 2003, 36-40. 36. On Powell's dinner with Bush, see ibid., 39. George W Bush, 'Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly', New York, 12 September 2OO2. 37. Judith Miller and Julia Preston,'Blix Says He Saw Nothing to Prompt a War', New York Times, 31 January 2003, An. 38. Steven R. Weisman, 'Powell, In UN. Speech, Presents Case to Show Iraq Has Not Disarmed', New York Times, 6 February 2003, Ai. 39. Weisman, 'To White House, Inspector Is Now More a Dead End Than a Guidepost', New York Times, 2 March 2003, Ai3. 40. Seymour M. Hersh, 'Who Lied to Whom?', New Yorker, 31 March 2003, 41-3. Sarah Lyall, 'Britain Admits that Much of Its Report on Iraq Came from Magazines', New York Times, 8 February 2003, A9. In an op-ed in the New York Times published just before the British admission that their 'intelligence' report was cribbed from a number of public sources, Condoleezza Rice suggested that one reason to distrust Iraq's claims about WMDs was that it had resorted to 'unabashed plagiarism' in its recent declaration to the United Nations. 41. George Perkovich, 'Bush's Nuclear Revolution', Foreign Affairs 82, no. 2 (2003): 2-8. 42. Speech by Representative Brad Sherman, Congressional Record, loyth Congress, ist Session, 8 October 2002, Hy2oo. 43. Joseph Cirincione, 'How Will the Iraq War Change Global Nonprolif- eration Strategies?', Arms Control Today, April 2003. Carl Hulse and James Dao, 'Cold War Long Over, Bush Administration Examines Steps to a Revamped Arsenal', NewYork Times, 29 May 2003, Ai9 - For an overview of the dangers of 'nuclear Wilsonianism' even before the September nth attacks, see Jonathan Schell, 'The Folly of Arms Control', Foreign Affairs 79, no. 5 (2000): 22-64. 44. Steven R. Weisman,'U.S.Threatens to Impose Penalties against Syrians', NewYork Times, 15 April 2003, 63. 45. On the difficulties of rebuilding Afghanistan, see Marina Ottaway and Anatol Lieven, 'Rebuilding Afghanistan', Current History 101, no. 3 (2002): 133-8; and Barnett R. Rubin, 'A Blueprint for Afghanistan', in Current History 101, no. 4 (2002): 153-7. On the Taliban's apparent resurgence, see Carlotta Gall, 'As the Iraq War Goes On, Afghan Vio- lence Increases', NewYork Times, 15 April 2003, Bn. 46. On the conservative rehabilitation of empire before September nth, see Thomas E. Ricks, 'Empire or Not? A Quiet Debate over U.S. Role', rs 2-8. rs 292 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Washington Post, 21 August 2001, Ai. The idea that the United States had shown 'anti-imperialist restraint' prior to September i ith, but should subsequently embrace empire more fully, was advanced by Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby in 'The Reluctant Imperialist: Terror- ism, Failed States and the Case for American Empire', Foreign Affairs 81, no. 2 (2002): 2-7. 47. John Hillen,'Perils of "Empire"', National Review, 24 February 2003. 48. Several commentators looked for a synthesis between the 'clash of civi- lisations' thesis and Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history' argument (which underpinned Friedman's assertions). See, for example, Stanley Kurtz, 'The Future of "History"', Policy Review, June/July 2002. For an ex- cellent critique of Friedman, Fukuyama and Huntington, see Stanley Hoffmann, 'Clash of Globalizations', Foreign Affairs 81, no. 4 (2002): 104-15. 49. Jonah Golberg, 'Baghdad Delenda Est, Part Two', National Review Online, 23 April 2002. Pace the blunt approach of Ledeen/Goldberg, one could package the same strategy in a more urbane fashion. Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis found a literary antecedent of Bush's new pre-emption policy: Shakespeare's Henry V 'understood the psychological value of victory - of defeating your adversary sufficiently thoroughly that you shatter the confidence of others, so that they'll roll over themselves before you have to roll over them.' Gaddis, 'A Grand Strategy of Trans- formation'. 50. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003). See also Ferguson,'The Empire Slinks Back', New York Times Magazine, 27 April 2003.The Times ran six articles by Ferguson between December 2002 and April 2003, giving Ferguson the opportunity to bash France, praise Bush and Rumsfeld, and beat the drums for a war in Iraq. 51. The tide was coined by New York Times writer Bill Keller:'The I-Can't- Believe-rm-a-Hawk Club', New York Times, 8 February 2003, A31. For an interesting summary of the response of left-leaning commentators to the 'war on terror', see Adam Shatz, 'The Left and 9/11', Nation, 23 September 2002. 52. Kate Zernike, 'Some of Intellectual Left's Longtime Doves Taking on Role of Hawks', New York Times, 14 March 2003, Ai3. 53. Christopher Hitchens,'Against Rationalization', Nation, 8 October 2001. Paul Berman, 'Terror and Liberalism', American Prospect, 22 October 2001. 54. Berman expanded his thesis into a book: Terror and Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003). Hitchens, meanwhile, struggled to per- suade the readership of the left-leaning Nation magazine to enlist in the 'war on terror'. In October 2002, he tendered his resignation with a final, angry column: 'Taking Sides', Nation, 14 October 2002. 55. Susan Sontag,'A Mature Democracy', New Yorker, 24 September 2001, 32. David Remnick, the magazine's editor, distanced himself from her rs rs A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 293 remarks. Daniel Lazare, 'The New Yorker Goes to War', Nation, 2 June 2003. 56. Michael Walzer,'Excusing Terror: The Politics of Ideological Apology', American Prospect, 22 October 2001. 57. An important study of the new liberal interventionism is David Chan- dler, From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention (London: Pluto Press, 2002). 58. Michael Ignatieff, 'The American Empire (Get Used to It)', New York Times Magazine, 5 January 2003. 59. On Kosovo, see the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, The Kosovo Report (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); David Rohde, 'Kosovo Seething', Foreign Affairs 79, no. 3 (2000): 65—79; and Isa Blumi, 'The Islamist Challenge in Kosova', Current History 102, no. 3 (2003): 124-8. 60. Keller, 'The I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club'. 61. Lawrence F. Kaplan, 'Regime Change', New Republic, 3 March 2003. On the 'implicit alliance' between 'internationalist liberals' and 'uni- lateralists neoconservatives', purportedly reaching back to the end of the Cold War, see William Pfaff, 'The Question of Hegemony', Foreign Affairs 80, no. i (2001): 221-32. Note, once more, that these essays predate the September nth attacks. One notable advocate of'the need for a new Wilsonianism' in the aftermath of the attacks is Newsweek editor Michael Hirsh, who has called upon the United States to adopt a 'middle choice' between 'squishy globalism' and 'take-it-or-leave-it unilateralism', with the United States continuing its 'military and eco- nomic dominance' but as the 'enforcer of the international system Americans have done so much to create in the last century'. When Hirsh s book on this subject was published in 2003, these claims were praised by disparate reviewers as revelatory. Hirsh,'Bush and the World', Foreign Affairs 81, no. 5 (2002): 18—43; an d At War with Ourselves: Why America is Squandering its Chance to Build a Better World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 62. Ronald D. Asmus and Kenneth M. Pollack, 'The New Transatlantic Project', Policy Review, October/November 2002. 63. Christopher Marquis, 'For Hawks, a Day to Sit Back and Say, "I Told You So'", New York Times, n April 2003, 89; Jane Perlez, 'U.S. Over- seer, a Retired General, Is Ready to Begin the Difficult Task of Re- making Iraq', New York Times, 15 April 2003, Ai. Note also the ten- dency of Bush administration officials to refer to their'Wilsonian'project as a form of'domino theory': this time, neighbouring states would 'fall' into US-style democracy rather than the orbit of the Soviet Union. 64. Farced Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W.W Norton, 2003). On the Bush administration's willingness to support autocratic regimes in return for assistance in the 'war on terror', see Thomas Carothers, 'Promoting Democracy and Fighting Terror', Foreign Affairs 82, no. i (2003): 84-97. rs 294 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? 65. Robert D. Kaplan, 'Here's Your Vote; Liberty Can Wait', New York Times, 10 April 2003, Ei. Niall Ferguson, 'Overdoing Democracy', New York Times Book Review, 13 April 2003, 9. 66. Noting that Washington 'appeared willing or even eager' to legitimise the short-lived coup against Hugo Chavez, Thomas Carothers warned that 'if democracy promotion is reduced to an instrumental strategy for producing political outcomes favorable to U.S. interests, the value and legitimacy of the concept will be lost'. Carothers,'Promoting Democ- racy and Fighting Terror'. 67. For a sense of the stereotypes, see Elsa Walsh's profile of Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States:'The Prince', New Yorker, 24 March 2003, 48-63; and, on the presentation of Arabs and Muslims in American films and television, Jack G. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2001). 68. Lemann, 'The Next World Order', 47. See also Kakutani, 'How Books Have Shaped U.S. Policy'. Kakutani noted that Lewis had been a par- ticipant in Donald Rumsfeld's 'pre-September nth study of ancient empires'. On the influence of Lewis and Ajami, see Robert Blecher, "Free People Will Set the Course of History': Intellectuals, Democracy and American Empire', Middle East Report, March 2003. 69. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 70. EdwardW. Said, Orientalism (NewYork: Pantheon Books, 1978).Another classic argument against the tendency of Western scholars to caricature and derogate non-secular forms of development and modernisation is Michael C. Hudson, 'Islam and Political Development', in John L. Esposito, ed., Islam and Development: Religion and Sociopolitical Change (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1980), 1-24. Hudson's hope that the work of Said and others had conclusively exposed the short- comings of the 'orientalists' makes for sobering reading given the promi- nence of Bernard Lewis and his followers since September nth. Edward Said offered a critique of Lewis, Ajami and the other 'experts' favoured by the Bush administration in 'The Academy of Lagado', London Review of Books, 17 April 2003. 71. Fouad Ajami, 'The Sentry's Solitude', Foreign Affairs 80, no. 6 (2001): 2- 16. A year later, Foreign Affairs published another article which made almost exactly the same points: Barry Rubin, 'The Real Roots of Arab Anti-Americanism', Foreign Affairs 81, no. 6 (2002): 73-85. On Ajami, see page 222 above; and Adam Shatz, 'The Native Informant', Nation, 28 April 2003, 15-24. 72. See, for example, Nicholas Guyatt, The Absence of Peace: Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1998). 73. Michael Scott Doran, 'Somebody Else's Civil War', Foreign Affairs 81, no. i (2002): 22-42. For a more nuanced sense of the relationship between Islam and nationalism in the Hamas movement, and the apparent willingness of Hamas to compromise with Israel on a two- rs rs rs A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 295 state solution, see Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence and Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 74. Arab Human Development Report 2002 (New York: Oxford University Press for the United Nations Development Program, 2002). 75. Fouad Ajami, 'Iraq and the Arabs' Future', Foreign Affairs 82, no. I (2003): 2-18. 76. Bernard Lewis, 'The Region After Saddam', paper and comments from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) conference 'The Day After: Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq', Washington, DC, 3 October 2002. 77. IgnatiefF, 'The American Empire'; Keller, 'The I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a- Hawk Club'. 78. Lewis, comments at AEI conference 'The Day After'. 79. On the exiles, see George Packer,'Dreaming of Democracy', New York Times Magazine, 22 March 2003. 80. Khidhir Hamza with Jeff Stein, Saddam's Bombmaker: The Daring Escape of the Man who Built Iraq's Secret Weapon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 45. In May 2003, Seymour Hersh produced evidence from Iraqi and American sources questioning Hamza's credibility. High-level de- fector Hussein Kamel, the Iraqi general whose testimony was frequently distorted by the Bush administration in 2002-03, dismissed Hamza in 1995 as 'a professional liar'. Meanwhile, former UN weapons inspector David Albright, who had originally agreed to write a book with Hamza on the failure of Iraq's nuclear programme, broke off contact with Hamza when the latter 'started exaggerating his experiences in Iraq' and em- barked on a more sensational account of Saddam's nuclear efforts. Hamza, like many other prominent exiles attached to the Bush administration, was returned to Iraq by the Pentagon in April 2003 to assume respon- sibility for atomic energy. Seymour Hersh, 'Selective Intelligence', New Yorker, 12 May 2003, 44-51. 81. Dean E. Murphy, 'Gore, Still Coy about Plans for 2004, Calls Bush's Policy a Failure on Several Fronts', New York Times, 24 September 2002, Ai 7 . 82. Leon Fuerth, 'Outfoxed by North Korea', New York Times, i January 2003, Ai9. James Woolsey, 'World War IV, Journal of Counterterrorism and Homeland Security 9, no. 17 (2003). 83. Kenneth M. Pollack, 'Next Stop Baghdad?', Foreign Affairs 81, no. 2 (2002): 32—47. See also Pollack's interview with the New Yorker in Lemann, 'The Next World Order', 46. Pollack expanded on his thesis in his book The Threatening Storm:The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002), which became a reference tome for the hawks who pressed for a US invasion in the winter of 2002-03 • Pollack re- iterated the usefulness of carrying Europe along in any war with Iraq in Ronald D. Asmus and Kenneth M. Pollack, 'The New Transatlantic Project', Policy Review, November 2002. It should be noted, however, that this interest in Europe was prompted partly by the crass dismissal , rs rs 2p6 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? of Europe's interest or usefulness in global policing recently offered in the same forum by conservative Robert Kagan, eventually reprinted as Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). 84. Anne-Marie Slaughter, 'Good Reasons for Going Around the U.N.', New York Times, 18 March 2003, A31. 85. At a formal dinner in the spring of 2003, I watched a former high- ranking CIA official poke fun at a table of liberals who had been com- plaining about Bush's policy of pre-emption to the point of indiges- tion. Pre-emption, the Agency alumnus announced, has been United States policy since the late 19405, and had inspired the CIA's overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, the removal of Jacobo Arbenz in Gua- temala in 1954, and many other operations. The only difference be- tween this long-established strategy and the Bush administration's 'new' policy was that Bush had gone public with the idea, and was happy to defend it openly. 86. Thomas Friedman, 'D-Day', New York Times, 19 March 2003, A2y. 87. See the transcript of the First Democratic Primary Debate, Columbia, South Carolina, 3 May 2003. 88. John Schwarz and Geraldine Fabrikant,'War Puts Radio Giant on the Defensive', New York Times, 31 March 2003, Ci. Tim Jones, 'Media Giants Rally Sponsorship Raises Questions', Chicago Tribune, 19 March 2003. See also the valuable reporting on Clear Channel by Eric Boehlert of the online magazine Salon, at www.salon.com/ent/clear_channel/. 89. Jim Rutenberg, 'Cable's War Coverage Suggests a New "Fox Effect" on Television Journalism', New York Times, 16 April 2003, 89. David D. Kirkpatrick, 'Mr. Murdoch's War', New York Times, 7 April 2003, Ci. Perhaps the best introduction to Fox's meteoric rise and its conservative tilt is Ken Auletta, 'Vox Fox', New Yorker, 26 May 2003, 58-73. 90. Rutenberg, 'Cable's War Coverage'. 91. Savage was not alone in upping the rhetorical ante in this way. Celebrated conservative Ann Coulter, who rose to prominence after September nth with her strident approach to Muslims and the 'war on terror' ('we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity'), produced a new book in 2003 which argued that 'liberals have a preternatural gift for always striking a position on the side of treason'. Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (New York: Crown Publishers, 2003). 92. Rutenberg, 'Cable's War Coverage'. 93. 'Reviewing the Intelligence on Iraq', New York Times, 26 May 2003, A18. The next day, Donald Rumsfeld offered his first public admission that Iraq might indeed have destroyed any remaining WMDs before the start of the US invasion. The Times, vindicated in its editorial but per- haps equally embarrassed by Judith Miller's numerous WMD 'revela- tions', buried the story on page 13. Eric Schmitt, 'Rumsfeld Echoes Notion that Iraq Destroyed Arms', New York Times, 28 May 2003, Ai3 . A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY? 297 94. Ashleigh Banfield, 'Landon Lecture', Kansas State University, 24 April 2003; Jim Rutenberg, 'From Cable Star to Face in the Crowd', New York Times, 5 May 2003, Ci. 95. Lemann,'The Next World Order'. 96. Tom Zeller, 'How Americans Link Iraq and Sept. n', New York Times, 2 March 2003, section 4, 3. 97. Paul Krugman, 'The Great Divide', New York Times, 29 January 2002, A2I. 98. George W. Bush, remarks at White House press conference, 6 March 2003. 99. Jonathan Lemire and Tracy Connor, 'Proud Brooklyn Family Watches as Marine Puts Flag on Statue', NewYork Daily News, 10 April 2003, 5; Andy Newman,'Atop Statue, Marine Thrills Army of Fans Back Home', NewYork Times, n April 2003, 613. 100. A notable exception concerns immigration from Arab and Muslim countries, which has been the subject of critical attention from con- servatives since September nth. For a typical example of fearmongering about the supposed separatism and extremism of American Muslims, see Daniel Pipes and Khalid Duran, 'Faces of American Islam', Policy Review, August/September 2002. 101. On the significance of Iraq's oil to the American invasion, see Michael T. Klare, 'For Oil and Empire? Rethinking War with Iraq', Current History 102, no. 3 (2003): 129-35. 102. Hillen, 'Perils of "Empire"'. 103. The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (London: T.C. Hansard, 1813), 18: 496 (22 March 1775). . INDEX Afghanistan, 115, 153-4, 238-40, 243-6, 248-9, 253-4, 2 58, 260, 274, 284 Africa, 8, 21-6, 35, 36, 179, 192 African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), 24-6, 37 Aideed, Mohammed Farah, 77-80, 208 AIDS, see Human Immunodeficiency Virus Ajami, Fouad, 191, 222n, 264-9, 271 Albania, 148 Albright, Madeleine: advocacy of Kofi Annan as UN secretary-general, 91—3; appointment as US ambassador to the UN, 75; appointment as secretary of state, 92, 11 in; and 'assertive multi- lateralism', 75-6, 79-81, iO3n; attacks on UN, 81-2, 86-7, 94, 209, 217; and 'communist backsliding', 124; and Dayton agreement, 90, 92; efforts to deter international response to Rwandan genocide, 82-6, iO9n, 209; embarrassed by the US public over Iraq, 215-18; and a global role for NATO, 125, i6in; and in- consistent application of US foreign policy, 216-18; lectures in international relations at George- town University, 198, 225n; 'Munich mindset' of, 206; 'New Democrat' credentials of, 225n; plots usurpation of Boutros-Ghali with Barbara Walters, 91-2, 11 i-i2n; political taxonomy of, 122-3; and Presidential Decision Directive 25 (PDD-25), 80-82, 84-7, 122-3; and Presidential Review Directive 13 (PRD-I3), 75-6, 80-81; profiled in Time magazine, 208-10; promotion of US as 'indispensable nation', 90, 11 in, 208-9; supports sanctions against Iraq, 144, 215-18, 273; threatens other UN members, 91; views of US geographical location, 211-12; visits Rwanda, 210 Allende, Salvador, 263 Al-Qaeda, xiv, 237-40, 243-6, 255, 257-8, 267, 279 'American Century' (Henry Luce essay), xv-xvi American Enterprise Institute (AEI), 256, 268-70 Annan, Kofi, 68, 91-3, 106—7n, 209 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty (1972), 235-6 AOL-Time Warner, 207-8 Arafat, Yasser, 265-6 Asian financial crisis (1997/8), i, 14-15, 32, 34-5 Asmus, Ronald, 261 Aspin, Les, 119-20 Aspe, Pedro, 15 'Assertive multilateralism', 75-6, 79-80, 81, 86, lO3n Atta, Mohammmed, 248 Atwood, J. Brian, 37-9 Austerity measures, see structural adjustment 298 INDEX 299 Australia, 135, 192 'Axis of Evil', 245, 249; and 'junior varsity' axis, 253 Ba'ath party, see Iraq Bandar, Prince (Bandar Bin Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz), 264 Banfield, Ashleigh, 278-9 Barak, Ehud, 265 Barber, Benjamin, 190 Barro, Robert J., 48n Belgium, 83 Bell, Robert, 66 Bentsen, Lloyd, 55n Berezovsky, Boris, 28 Berger, Sandy, 216 Berman, Paul, 257 Betts, Richard, 179-81 Biden, Joseph, 73 Bin Laden, Osama, 153-4, 237—40, 243-4, 266-7, 286 Blair, Tony, 44n, 23 in Blinken, John, 132 Boeing, 116-17, I28 > ^3°, J3 6 . I56~7n, 202 Bolton, John, 70-71 Bono (Paul Hewson), 48n Bosnia-Herzegovina: and Dayton peace process, 89-91; EU failures in, 126; failure of UN operations in, 61, 88-9, 95; and Muslim- Croat federation, 89-90; US disregard towards, 87-91, 95, 182, 191; and war crimes tribunal, 68, I74n; war in, 58, 87-9 Bosnian Serbs, 87-8, 90-91 Bottom-Up Review (BUR), 119-20, 128 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros: and Agenda for Peace, 74; appointed UN secretary- general, 60; and Bosnia, 87-91; efforts to court US, 61, 62, 74-5, 77, 81; hounded from office by US, 91-2, 194; and Rwanda, 84-5; and Somalia, 76-7; views on UN peacekeeping, 74, 81-2, 86-7, 89, io6n; US attacks upon, 81-2, 87-9, 91-2, 194 Bradley, Bill, 55n, 202, 227~8n Brazil, 35, 47n, 192, 200 Bretton Woods conference (1944), 2-4 Bretton Woods institutions, see IMF and World Bank British empire, 256, 263, 286 Brookings Institution, 197 Brown, Ron, 184-5 Buchanan, Patrick, 55n, 212 Bumpers, Dale, 134 Burke, Edmund, 286 Burma, 283 Bush, George H.W, x, 13, 30, 60, 74-6, 87, 118, 121, 135, 140-43, 145, 179, 197, 214, 234, 236, 248 Bush, George W: and 2000 election, 228n; attacks Afghanistan, 243-4; and the 'Axis of Evil', 245; and Bill Clinton, xi-xii; cabinet appoint- ments of, 248; clueless grandeur of, 281; compared to Woodrow Wilson, 260-63; and failed effort to win UN approval for 2003 Iraq war, 249-50; and future prospects in Iraq, 284-5; as hypothetical victor in Vietnam war, 262; and Israeli-Palestinian 'peace' process, 265; and 'National Security Strategy' (2002), 246-8; and policy on weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), 251-3; and pre-9/n foreign policy, 233-7; and post- 97 i i popularity, 269; receives reluctant support from 'liberal interventionists' over Iraq, 259-60; uses Texas ranch to woo world leaders, 235; views of Islam, 238-40; and 'war on terror', xv, 237-44, 255 Cable News Network (CNN), 215-18, 276-7 Cambodia, 204 Camdessus, Michel, 55n Canada, 14, 65-7 Capital flight, 16-21, 25, 29, 32-4 Carlsson enquiry, logn as 3°o ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Carothers, Thomas, 180-81 Carter, Jimmy, 16311, 197 Cavuto, Neal, 277 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): destabilisation efforts, 3, 39n (Italy and Greece), 5 (Guatemala and Chile), 5, 240-43 (Iran); fear of Shia Muslims in Iraq, 141-2; and mistaken arrests in Somalia, iO4n; as originator of'pre-emption' policy, 2p6n; support for Osama bin Laden, 154, 238, 243 Chalabi, Ahmad, 270-71 Chavez, Hugo, 263 Chechnya, 32, 69 Cheney, Dick, xvi, 248 Chiapas, 19 'Chicago School', n, 14 Chile, 5, 4in, 263 Chin, Edward, 282-3 China: and 'illiberal democracy', 180; opposition to International Criminal Court, 70; opposition to landmine treaty, 67-8; putative mili,ary threat to US, 127, 154, 191, 222-3 n, 2 47; stand-off with the US over spy plane (2001), 235; and United Nations, 59-61; and US bombing of Belgrade embassy, 150, 207; and US campaign finance, 201; US trade with, 186, 227n Christopher, Warren, 75, 79-80 Chubais, Anatoly, 27-9, 31 Clark, Wesley, 209 Clear Channel, 276 Clinton, Bill: and 1999 State of the Union address, i, 57, 114, 177; and African economic policy, 21, 23-6; and the 'American century', 177; and American debts to the UN, 62, 93-4; and anti-landmine efforts, 64-8; 'appoints' Kofi Annan as UN secretary-general, 92; and assessment of US defence needs, 118-20; attacks Afghanistan, 153-4, 243; attacks Iraq, 69, 142-5; and bombing of Kosovo and Yugoslavia, 145-9, 203, 213-15, 258-60; and Bottom-Up Review, 119-20; Cabinet appointments of, 14, 45n, 92; and campaign finance scandals, 201-3, 226n; compares Milosevic to Hitler, I72n; and Compre- hensive Test Ban Treaty, 203; criticized as 'weak on Saddam', xvi, 248; and Dayton accord, 89-90; debts to Wall Street of, 202-3, 227n; defends F-22 programme, 133; and 'democratic peace' thesis, 179-83, 2i9n; and dismissal of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, 91-2; early support for UN, 60, 74-5; economic policies of, x, i, 13-15, 34, 36, 38-9, 44n, 45n, 202-03; as 'global, secular pope', 206; increased defence spending of, 128; and International Criminal Court, 68-73; an d Israeli-Palestinian 'peace' process, 236, 265-66; and Lewinsky sex scandal, 276; and Mexican bail-out, 17-18, 47n; and NATO expansion, 124—5; policy towards Iran, 245; policy towards Somalia, 75—80; and Presidential Decision Directive 25 (PDD-25), 80-82; and Presidential Review Directive 13 (PRD-I3), 76, 80-81; and Project for a New American Century, xvi; promotion of 1996 Telecommunications Act, 276; putative commitment to multi- lateralism of, xiv, 57, 63, 74-5; reads Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts, 191; and relationship with Congress on foreign policy issues, 203-4; and reluctance to intervene in Bosnia, 87-9, 191, 213; resemblance to George W Bush, xi-xii, 234-7, 271-3; and 'rogue state' doctrine, 121-3; and Ronald Reagan, 98n; and Russian economic 'transition', 29-30, 32-4; and Rwanda, x, 83-6, i02n, 213; sends foreign policy team to Ohio for public debate on Iraq, 215-18; support for 'Star INDEX 301 Wars' missile defence, 136-8; visits Africa, 21, 23-4, iO2n; and Woodrow Wilson, 261 CNN, see Cable News Network Cohen, William, 73, 133, 215 Cold War, x, xiv, 5, 21, 30, 60-61, 74, 114-15, 117-20, 123-7, 129, 138, 178, 180-83, 189, 192, 200, 203, 234 Colombia, 129 Communism, 5, 26, 34, 48n, 60, 124, 129, 261 Convention Against Genocide (1948), 84 Corzine, Jon, 227n Coulter, Ann, 296n Council on Foreign Relations, 197 Crigler, Frank, 77-8 Croatia, 89-90, 145 Cuba, 121-2, 127, 239 Currency trading, 5-7, 15-20, 33-4, 36-7 Czech Republic, 124, 194, 248 Dallaire, Romeo, 82-3, 85, io6-7n Daschle, Tom, 66 Davos Economic Forum, 189 Dayton accords, 89-91, 92, 145-7, 151, 213-14 Debt crisis (1982 and after), 8-11, 21-2 Democratic party: embraces 'Star Wars' missile defence, 136, i66n; and 'New Democrats'/embrace ofWall Street, 13, 14, 19, 35, 45n, 55n, 202, 227—8n; and policy on Iraq, 271-5, 281-2; and 'pragmatic idealism', 204-6; views of George W. Bush, xiv, 261-2, 271-5 'Democratic peace' thesis, 179-83, 187-8, 2i9n, 269 Disney, 206 Dole, Robert, 201, 226n Donahue, Phil, 277 Doran, Michael, 266-7 East Timor, 131 Egypt, 122, 129, 155, 241-3, 262, 266 'Emerging markets', 20, 24, 32, 35, 186, 22in Enron, 275, 280-81 Eurodollar market, 6, 4in European Union, 89, 124, 126, i6in F-I5 fighter, 132 F-22 fighter, 132-5, 137 'Failed states', 122 Ferguson, Niall, 256, 263, 265, 283, 292n Ford, Gerald, 197 Fox News Channel, 276-7 Fraga, Arminio, 47n France, 60, 193, 250 Friedberg, Aaron, 191 Friedman, Milton, 43n, 186 Friedman, Thomas; and causes of the 1991 Gulf War, i68n; class myopia of, 189, 199-200; compared with Benjamin Barber, 190; extreme parochialism of, 210-11, 225-6n; favourably reviewed by his own newspaper (twice), 23On, 263; as friend of the rich and famous, 199-200; hamburger philosophy of, 187-8; and The Lexus and the Olive Tree, 187-9, 199, 210, 23on, 255-6; missionary zeal of, 188, 196, 210, 22i-2n; paean to the US over Rwanda, 210; supports extrajudicial killing of Saddam Hussein, 23 i-2n; wins Pulitzer Prize (twice), 211; views on George W. Bush's Iraq policy, 274 Fuerth, Leon, 272 Fukuyama, Francis, 178, 181, 183, 186, 192, 197, 246 Gaddafi, Muammar, 61, 121-2 Gaddis, John Lewis, 29on, 292n Gaidar, Yegor, 27 Garner, Jay, 262 Garten, Jeffrey: activities as under- secretary of commerce, 184-5; * n d human rights, 185-6; views on 'commercial diplomacy', 185-6, 196; Wall Street career of, 197; and 3O2 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? the 'wild bazaar', 185, 22in; and Yale University, 197 General Agreement on Tariff and Trades (GATT), 4 General Assembly, see United Nations General Electric, 128-9 Geneva Convention, 69 Georgetown University, 198 George Washington University, 197 Germany, 250, 264 Goldberg, Jonah, 256 Goldman Sachs, 14, 227n Goose, Stephen, 67 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 26, 120 Gore, Al, 36, 201-2, 229n, 233-4, 271-2, 275 Grams, Rod, 63, 71-2 Great Depression, 2-4, 6, 7, u Grenada, 71 Guatemala, 5, 4in Gulf Wars (1991 and 2003), see Iraq Haass, Richard N.: frozen out of George W. Bush administration, 249; government service of, 197, 22on; and 'reluctant sheriff' thesis, 182, 184, 188, 200; rosy view of American intentions, 196 Hague Regulations, 69 Hamas, 239, 267 Hamza, Khidhir, 270-71, 294 Harper, John L., 181 Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID), 26-27, 29-31 Harvard University, 13-14, 26, 30-31, 48n, 197 Hay, Jonathan, 31 Hayek, Friedrich von, 186 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, 22 Heilbrunn, Jacob, 191 Helms, Jesse, 63, 70-73 Hezbollah, 239 Hillen, John, 285-7 Hitchens, Christopher, 257 Hitler, Adolf, 83n, 238, 279 Hoagland, Jim, 38-39 Hoffmann, Stanley, 200 Holbrooke, Richard, 90, 92-3 Howe, Jonathan, 77 Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), 25-6 Human Rights Watch, 67 Hungary, 124, 194 Huntington, Samuel: and the 'clash of civilizations' thesis, 192-5, 200, 255-6; critiques US imperium, 194-5; r °l e i n Carter administration, 197 Ignatieff, Michael, 259, 269, 274 Import-substitution industrialisation (ISI), 39n India, 122, 252 Indonesia, 122, 129, 131, 201, 217 International Criminal Court, xii, 61, 64, 68-73, 236, 288n International Monetary Fund: advocacy of structural adjustment, n, 13-14; and Africa, 21-3; and Asian financial crisis, 35; and debt crisis, 10; gold sales of, 23; and loans to Mexico, 15, 18—21, 47n; and a 'new global architecture', 35; and Russian 'bail-in', 33; US influence upon, xiii, 3, 4, 10, 35-36, 194, 244 International Relations (IR), academic theories of, 183, 189-90, 194-7, 22O-2in International Trade Organisation, 4 Iran, 5, 4in, 70, 120-22, 129, 141, 152, 239-43, 245 Iraq: allies with US in opposing International Criminal Court, 70; and the American 'empire', 254; as 'crappy little country', 256; attacked by US (1991-2002), xiii, 69, 115, 140, 142-5, 147, 151-2, 156, 194, 215-18; and Ba'athist ideology, 241, 249; democratic prospects of, 268-70; early US support of, 129; effect of sanctions upon, 142-5, 151-2, 156, 169-7011, 194, 204, 235, 240, 245, INDEX 303 267; as enemy of the US, 120-21, 127, 212; and Iraqi exiles based in the US, 270-71, 273; invasion of Kuwait and 1991 Gulf War, ix, 60, 74, 94, 115, 118, 119, 120-21, 123, 139-45. J 5O, 179, 182, 207, 234, 262, 278; putative connections with al-Qaeda, 246, 248-9, 252, 279, 284, 29on; and 2003 war with the United States, ix-x, xiv, 233-4, 248-53, 258-60, 268, 280, 282-6; and US public opinion, 215-18 Iraqi National Congress, 273 Isaacson, Walter, 208, 232n Islam: George W. Bush's desire to avoid stigmatising, 239; as totalitarian ideology, 238, 240, 257-8; views of US 'experts' towards, 264-71; and Wahhabism, 242, 264 Islamic Jihad (Egyptian), 242 Islamic Jihad (Palestinian), 239 Isolationism, 63, 70, 138, 149-56, 203 Israel: buys political influence in US, 201; and Egypt, 241; and liberal commentators in the US, 257; occupation of Palestinian territories, 140-41, 240, 264-76; opposition to International Criminal Court, 70; and Oslo process, 236, 265-7; recipient of US military aid, 129, 135, 141; relationship with a post-Saddam Iraq, 269; as US ally, 120, 241; and weapons of mass destruction, 122, 251-2 Jackson, Jr., Jesse, 25, 5on Japan, 199 Joffe, Josef, 185 Johnson, Lyndon B., 6 Jordan, 200, 270 Jordan, Vernon, 45n Kaplan, Lawrence E, 260-61 Kaplan, Robert D., 191-2, 223n, 263 Karzai, Hamid, 244, 253 Keller, Bill, 260, 269 Kennan, George, 96n Kenya, 153 Keynes, John Maynard, 3, 7, 10, n Khatami, Mohammed, 245 Khobar Towers bombing, 153 Kissinger, Henry: academic, corporate and government careers of, 197; and Anthony Lake, 204-5; bombs Laos and Cambodia, 204; destabilises Chile, loin; and international relations theory, 195-6; and NATO expansion, 125-7; and the 'poor Henry' argument, ioi-2n; praises Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, 192; views on Russia, 26, 125-7, 191 Korea, 65, 120-22, 127, i62n, 236, 239, 245, 253, 272, 280 Kosovo: debates in the US over, 146-7, I7in, 187-8, 204, 208-10, 280; expulsion of civilian population, 147-8; fast-food interpretation of (Thomas Friedman), 187-8; influence of 1999 war on 2003 war in Iraq, 258—60; and Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), 146; and manipu- lation of the media, 207-8, 23 on; and post-war reconstruction efforts, 148-9, 274; and US tactics, 149-51; war in (1999), xiii, 115, 119, 145-51, 207-10, 213-15 Krauthammer, Charles, xiii, 48n, I57n, 178-9 Kristol, William, 262 Krugman, Paul, 281-2 Kurds, 131, 141-3, 217 Kuwait, 139-45 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, 236, 288n Lake, Anthony: 'pragmatic idealism' of, 204-5, 2 58; and Presidential Decision Directive 25 (PDD-25), 81, 83; and Presidential Review Directive 13 (PRD-I3), 75-6, 80-81; and Rwanda, 81, 83 304 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Landmines, 64-8, 73 Laos, 204 League of Nations, 58, 260-61 Ledeen, Michael, 256 Lee Kuan Yew, 263 Lewis, Bernard, 191, 222n, 264-71 'Liberal interventionism', 257-60, 273-4, 281 Libya, 67, 70-71, 121-2, 152 Lieberman, Joseph, i72-3n, 275 Lockerbie bombing, 122 Lockheed Martin, 117, 128-30, 133-6, 202 Luce, Henry R., xv-xvi Macedonia, 148 Makiya, Kanan, 270-71 Malaysia, 180 Mandela, Nelson, 48—gn Mandelbaum, Michael, 181 Marshall Aid (1948), 4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 15 Matthews, Jessica, 184 McCurry, Michael, 66 Media: admiration of Dayton agreement, 90; and attacks on Boutros Boutros-Ghali, 88-9; corporate ownership of, 206-7, 229n, 275-7; an d debt relief, 22; and 'embedding' in 2003 Iraq war, 278-9; and F-22 funding battle, 133-5; government manipulation of, 207-10, 23on, 278-9; and Gulf War, i68n, 207; and lack of interest in Kosovo, 149, I75n, 214, 23 in; and landmines, 66; nostalgia for Clinton presidency as 'multi- lateral', xi, parochialism of, 210-11; and 'peace dividend', 115, 117; in post-Soviet Russia, 28; and presentation of US foreign policy, 206-11; presents Milosevic as Saddam, 147; and PRD-I3, 80; and Rwanda, 83-4; and Somalia, 208; and war in Iraq (2003), 275-9 Mexico, x, 8, 14, 15-21, 36, 46n, 47n, 190, 239 Miller, Judith, 278 Milosevic, Slobodan, 146-7, 149, 151, 208, 213-14 Mindinao, 239 Montenegro, 148 Morris, Dick, 44~5n, 206 Mossadegh, Mohammed, 241, 243 Mozambique, 22, 36, 48n, 55—6n MSNBC, 277-9 Mubarak, Hosni, 241-2 Mugabe, Robert, 263 Mullah Omar (Taliban leader), 244, 246 Murdoch, Rupert, 276-7 Musharraf, Pervez, 252, 263 Muslim Brotherhood, 242 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 242 National Missile Defense, see Star Wars National Rifle Association, 252 National Security Strategy of the United States (2002), 246-50, 254, 269 Native Americans, 190, 222n, 23 in Nazism, 238, 261 Neoliberalism: effects in developing world, ii, 23—6; influence in Europe, u; influence in Russia, 26—34; intellectual roots of, n, 43n; supposed impenetrability of, 36; and the 'war on terror', 280, 286-7 New Guinea, 135 News International, 206 New Yorker magazine, 257-8, 292-3n New Zealand, 192 Nicaragua, 72 Nixon, Richard M., 6, 7, 10, 30, 197 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 14-15, 17-18, 24-5 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO): 5Oth anniversary summit, 131-2; airstrikes on Bosnia (1995), 88-9, 145; corporate alliances with, 131-2, i64n; exclusion from US defence estimates, 119; expansion of, 123-7, J 94; INDEX 305 founding of, 124; and Kosovo war, 145-51, 213-15, 260; and manipulation of the media, 207—8; possible operations outside of Europe, 125-7, i62n; quest for a post-Cold War role, 145, i7in; US domination of, 73, 126—7, J 46, 148-9, 194 Northern Ireland, 236 North Korea, see Korea Northrop Grumman, 129—30 Norway, 135 Ohio State University, 216 Organisation for African Unity, 85 Ottoman empire, 265, 286 Oxfam, 23 Pahlavi, Mohammed Reza Shah, 241-3 Pakistan, 77, 122, 252, 262-3 Palestine, 140, 156, 236, 241, 264-7 Panama, 71, 147 Payne, Donald, 85 Peck, Edward, i69n Pentagon, see United States Department of Defense Perle, Richard, 234 Philippines, 239 Pinochet, Augusto, loin, 263 Poland, 124, 194 Pollack, Kenneth, 261, 272-4 Powell, Colin, 118, 120, 139, I58n, 234-7, 248-50 'Powell Doctrine', 118, 139, 145, I57n, 262 Pre-emption, xvi, 246, 249, 252-3, 272-3, 29on, 296n Presidential Decision Directive 25 (PRD-25), 80-87, io6n, 122 Presidential Review Directive 13 (PRD-I3), 76, 80-81 Privatisation, 12-16, 23, 28-9 'Project for a New American Century' (PNAC), xvi, 287n Public opinion in the United States, ix-x, 211-19, 275-82 Putin, Vladimir, 235 RAND corporation, 197 Raytheon, 130, 136, i66-7n Reagan, Ronald, 13, 72, 96n, 98n, 132, 135-6, 186, 197, 234, 254, 261, 281 Republican Party, xiv, 36, 199, 201-2, 234, 252, 262, 277 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 239 Rice, Condoleezza: compares 'war on terror' to Cold War, 239; pre- September nth views on foreign policy, 235-6; and timing of decision to attack Iraq, 249 'Rogue states', 120-23, 125-7, !29, 137, 152-3, 155. i58-9n, 194, 246 Roosevelt, Franklin D., xv, 2, 13, 18, 59, 240 Roosevelt, Theodore, 195, 204 Rubin, Robert: connections with Wall Street, 14, 45n, 46n, 202, 227n; friendship with Thomas Friedman, 199; love of fishing, 17, 45n; massive wealth of, 14, 45n; promoter of neoliberalism, 34, 36, 202; and repeal of Glass—Steagall Act, 227n; retirement and return to banking, 37—9, 227n; role in Mexican crisis, 17-18, 20; and Russian 'bail-in', 32-4 Rumsfeld, Donald: commissions Pentagon study of ancient empires, 254; and rejection of Iraqi 'containment', xvi, 234; relationship with other members of the Bush administration, 235, 248 Rushdie, Salman, 257 Russert, Bruce, 179 Russia: and ABM treaty, 235; assault on Chechnya, 32; and Bosnia, 89; and economic crash (1998), i, 32-4, 35, 200; and NATO expansion, 124-7; opposition to landmine treaty, 67-8; post-Soviet economic history, xiv, 26-34, 115; putative military threat to the US, 115-16, 125-7, i66n, 247; recent 306 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? social conditions within, 32; and United Nations, 59-61 Rutgers University, 190 Rwanda, x, 58, 61, 68, 80-86, 95, io6-8n, 204, 209-11, 215 Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), 82-3 Sachs, Jeffrey, 27, 29, 31, 5i-2n Sadat, Anwar, 241-2 Saddam Hussein, ix-x, xiv, 60-61, 63, 118, 120-21, 123, 139—44, 151. 178, 212, 214, 216—17, 231—211, 234-5, 241, 2 45. 248, 250-52, 258-63, 268, 270, 272-3, 275, 279-80, 282-84 Safire, William, i76n, 29on Said, Edward, 265, 29411 Salinas, Carlos, 15-17 Saudi Arabia, 122, 129, 140, 153, 238, 240-43, 245, 262, 264, 267 Savage, Michael, 277 Scharf, Michael, 72-3 Schear, James, 67 Scheffer, David, 69-70 Security Council, see United Nations Serbia, xiii, 89-90, 145-8, 150-51, 187-8 Sharon, Ariel, 252, 257 Sherman, Brad, 252 Shelly, Christine, io8n 'Shock therapy', 27, 30, 31 Silva Herzog, Jesus, 8 Singapore, 180 Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 273-4 Smith, Tony, 179 Solomon, Gerald, 132 Somalia, 58, 75-80, 95, I02n, 179, 182, 208, 236 'Somalia Syndrome', 80-81, 83, 86-7, io6-8n, 148 Sontag, Susan, I7in, 257-8 Soros, George, 31, 35, 47n South Africa, 49n South Korea, see Korea Soviet Union, xi, xiii-xiv, 3, 5, 21, 26, 28, 30, 32, 59-61, 74, 96n, 114-21, 124, 128, 133, 135, 138, 140, 154, 178, 238, 243, 247, 254 Srebrenica, 88, in n Stahl, Lesley, 144 Stalin, Joseph, 279 Stanislaw, Joseph, 39n, 49n, 186-7, 22in 'Star Wars'missile defence systems, 132, 135-8, 155-6, 235 Stephanopoulos, George, 99n, 205 Stiglitz, Joseph, 29, 241-2, 244 Strategic Defense Initiative, see Star Wars 'Structural adjustment', 9-12, 14, 15, 21-2, 26 Sudan, 115, 121, 127, 147, 153-4, 156, I76n Summers, Lawrence: African priorities of, 55n; as booster of neoliberalism, 36; early career of, 14; friendship with Thomas Friedman, 199; role in Russian economic 'transition', 31 Switzerland, 135, 189 Syria, 121, 253 Taliban, 239, 243-45, 248-9, 253, 258, 260 Tanzania, 153 Telecommunications Act (1996), 275—6 'Terrorist University', 154 Tesobonos, 16-17 Thailand, 35, 180 Thatcher, Margaret, 186 'Third Way',44n Tibet, 215 Truman, Harry, 261 Turkey, 122, 129, 131, 141, 217 Turner, Ted, 93-4 Uganda, 21 United Kingdom, 60, 120, 193, 250-51 United Nations: and anti-landmine campaign, 64-5, 68; and Arab Human Development Report (2002), 267; and Bosnian peacekeeping operations, 87-9; and Carlsson enquiry into Rwandan genocide, 109-1 on; corporate sponsorship of, INDEX 307 93-4, 112-1311; creation of, 59, 95n; exclusion from Dayton negotiations, 89-93; functioning of, 59-60; funding crisis of, 93-4; and International Criminal Court, 68—73; and international law, 63; and Iraq war of 2003, 249-50, 258—9; and 'liberal interventionists', 258—60, 273—4; mission to Kosovo, 148, I73n; missions to Somalia, 75-80; and peacekeeping, 58, 60, 74-95; and proposed 1998 US attack on Iraq, 216; and proposed rapid-reaction force, 60, 74; relations with US, 58-9, 75-80, 126-7, JS 2 . 2I 7. 283; and response to Rwanda genocide, 82-6; as rival to US, 196-7; and 'safe havens' in Bosnia, 88—9; sanctions against Iraq, 74, 142-5, 169-70^ 194; and unpaid dues of the United States, 62, 93-4, 97~8n, H2n; US attacks upon, 36, 61-3, 70-73, 79-82, 86-95, 153, i?3n, 183, 196-7, 209, 217, 23on, 283, 285; and usurpation of Boutros-Ghali, 91-2, ni-i2n; and weapons inspections in Iraq (2002-03), 250-51; and World Court, 72 United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 31, 37-8 United States Congress: and 2003 Iraq war, 250, 252; and African trade policy, 24-6; and bombing of Kosovo/Yugoslavia, 203; corrupted by campaign finance, 130, i65~6n, 201-3; critiques F-22 spending, T 33~5» J 37» i65-6n; and election of 2002, 275; hostility towards UN, 61-3, 70-73, 93-4; investigates Russian economic collapse, 33-4; and Mexican bail-out, 18-20; and NATO expansion, 124; opposition to Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, 203-4; opposition to International Criminal Court, 70-73; role in foreign policymaking, 203—4; and Somalia operation, 77-8, 80; support for arms trade, 129; and UN funding arrears, 62, 93—4, 97-8n, H2n, 203 United States Department of Commerce, 184-6 United States Department of Defense: and anti-landmine campaign, 65-7; and arms inspections in Iraq, 143; and attacks on Iraq, 140; and Bottom-Up Review, 119-20, 128; corporate friends of, 116—17, 128-36, i64n; and 'embedding' of reporters in 2003 Iraq war, 278-9; encouragement of arms trade, 129, 131-2; and F-22 fighter, 132-5, 137; fixes 'Star Wars' tests, 136-7; influence within the George W. Bush administration of, 248-9; and myths of US intervention, 149; and post-Cold War spending demands, 116-23; and racism in Somalia, 78, iO5n; restrictions on reporters, 207-10; resumes research on miniaturisation of nuclear weapons (2003), 253; and 'revolving door' hiring practices, 178; sponsorship of Iraqi exiles, 270-71; and 'Star Wars' missile defence systems, 132, 135-8; and study of ancient empires (2001), 237, 254; threats over International Criminal Court, 73; urged to prepare for 'civilizational clash', 193; weapons spending, 128-38 United States Department of State: and 'axis of evil', 253; and 'clash of civilizations', 193; encouragement of arms trade, 129, 131; fear of dismemberment of Iraq, 141-4; ideological bent of, 206; and media manipulation, 212-13; and misinformation on Rwanda, 83-4, io8-9n, 212-13; and myths of US intervention, 149; and 'Operation Iraqi Freedom', 251; and 'outlaw nations', 122-3; an d policy experts as employees, 178, 198; and rehabilitation of Slobodan 308 ANOTHER AMERICAN CENTURY? Milosevic, 147; and sanctions against Iraq, 144—5; and US war against Iraq (2003), 249—50 United States Treasury: influence over World Bank/IMF, 3, 10, 35; 241-2; and Mexican bail-out, 17-21; promotion of neoliberalism during the Clinton presidency, 14-15, 34-9; and Russian financial collapse, 32-4 Vance, Cyrus, 88 'Vance-Owen plan', 88, 90, iio-nn Venezuela, 263 Vietnam, xiii, 7, 118, 138-9, 148, 150, 152, 204, 233, 250, 262 Wahhabism, 242, 264 Wallace, Henry A., xv-xvi Wall Street: influence on Democratic Party, 14, 17-18, 35, 45n, 55n, 197, 202; and Mexico, 17—20, 4<5-7n; profits from neoliberal policies, 35 Walters, Barbara, 91 Walzer, Michael, 258 'War on terror', xv, 233, 237-44, 272, 274-5, 279-83, 285-6 Warsaw Pact, 124 'Washington Consensus': apparent inevitability of, 12-13, 34; description of, 12, 43 n, 44n; effects, 12-13, 15-16; and enrichment of developing-country elites, 13, 16-20; fleeting criticism of. 35. 38-9; provenance of phrase, 12 Weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), 121-2, 152-6, 245-7, 2 49-53. 2 58, 273, 278 Wedgwood, Ruth, loin Williamson, John, 12, 43n Wilson, Woodrow: as 'idealist', 195-6; and 'Wilsonianism', 179, 204—5, 224n, 260-63, 268-9, 281, 285, 293 n Winthrop, John, 222n Wolfowitz, Paul: as early advocate of an attack on Iraq post-September nth, 248-9; and Pentagon study of ancient empires, 254; and rejection of Iraqi 'containment' policy, xvi, 234; urges Clinton to overthrow Saddam, xvi, 248 Woolsey, James, 272 World Bank: and 1982 debt crisis, 10; and Asian financial crisis, 35; and dismissal of Joseph Stiglitz, 29; origins and early policies of, 3, 7-8; and Russia, 29; US influence upon, xiii, 3, 4, 10, 14, 35, 194 World Trade Center: 1993 bombing, x, 155, I76n; 2001 destruction of, ix, 249, 279 World War I, 58 World War II, xv, 2-5, 7, 21, 57, 59, 150, 152, 242, 279 Yale University, 20, loin, 197 Yeltsin, Boris, 26, 28-9, 31-2, 69 Yemen, 70 Yergin, Daniel, 39n, 49n, 186-7, 22in Yousef, Ramzi, I76n Yugoslavia 87, 115, 125, 139, 145-9, 152, 187-8, 192, 213-15, 259; see also Serbia Zakaria, Farced: dislocation from modern India, 198-9; and 'illiberal democracy' thesis, 180-81, 262-4; tipped as Republican foreign affairs adviser, 199; plutocratic fantasies of, 198 Zapatistas, 239 Zedillo, Ernesto, 16, 17 Zoellick, Robert, 287n ABOUT THIS SERIES 'Communities in the South are facing great difficulties in coping with global trends. I hope this brave new series will throw much needed light on the issues ahead and help us choose the right options.' MARTIN KHOR, Director, Third World Network, Penang 'There is no more important campaign than our struggle to bring the global economy under democratic control. But the issues are fearsomely complex. This Global Issues series is a valuable resource for the committed campaigner and the educated citizen.' BARRY CDATES, Director, World Development Movement (WDM) 'Zed Books has long provided an inspiring list about the issues that touch and change people's lives. The Global Issues series is another dimension of Zed's fine record, allowing access to a range of subjects and authors that, to my knowledge, very few publishers have tried. I strongly recommend these new, powerful tides and this exciting series.' JOHN PILGER, author 'We are all part of a generation that actually has the means to eliminate extreme poverty world-wide. Our task is to harness the forces of globalization for the benefit of working people, their families and their communities — that is our collective duty. The Global Issues series makes a powerful contribution to the global campaign for justice, sustainable and equitable development, and peaceful progress.' GLENYS KINNOCK, MEP THE GLOBAL ISSUES SERIES Already available Walden Bello, Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy Robert All Brae de la Perriere and Franck Seuret, Brave New Seeds: The Threat of GM Crops to Farmers Oswaldo de Rivero, The Myth of Development: The Non-viable Economies of the 21 st Century Graham Dunkley, Free Trade: Myth, Reality and Alternatives Joyeeta Gupta, Our Simmering Planet: What to Do about Global Warming? Nicholas Guyatt, Another American Century? The United States and the World since 9/11 Martin Khor, Rethinking Globalization: Critical Issues and Policy Choices John Madeley, Food for All: The Need for a New Agriculture John Madeley, Hungry for Trade: How the Poor Pay for Free Trade A.G. Noorani, Islam and Jihad: Prejudice versus Reality Riccardo Petrella, The Water Manifesto: Arguments for a World Water Contract Peter Robbins, Stolen Fruit: The Tropical Commodities Disaster Vandana Shiva, Protect or Plunder? Understanding Intellectual Property Rights Harry Shutt, A New Democracy: Alternatives to a Bankrupt World Order David Sogge, Give and Take: What's the Matter with Foreign Aid? Paul Todd and Jonathan Bloch, Global Intelligence: The World's Secret Services Today In preparation Peggy Antrobus, The International Women's Movement: Issues and Strategies Amit Bhaduri and Deepak Nayyar, Free Market Economics: The Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalization Greg Buckman, Globalization: Tame it or Scrap It? Mapping the Alternatives of the Anti-Globalization Movement y Julian Burger, First Peoples: What Future? Ha-Joon Chang and Ilene Grabel, Reclaiming Development: An Alternative Economic Policy Handbook Koen de Feyter, A Thousand and One Rights: How Globalization Challenges Human Rights Susan Hawley and Morris Szeftel, Corruption: Privatization, Transnational Corporations and the Export of Bribery Roger Moody, Digging the Dirt: The Modern World of Global Mining Kavaljit Singh, The Myth of Globalization: Ten Questions Everyone Asks Vivien Stern, Crime and Punishment: Globalization and the New Agenda Nedd Willard, The Drugs War: Is This the Solution? For full details of this list and Zed's other subject and general catalogues, please write to: The Marketing Department, Zed Books, 7 Cynthia Street, London NI 9JF, UK or email Sales@zedbooks.demon.co.uk Visit our website at: www.zedbooks.co.uk PARTICIPATING ORGANIZATIONS Both ENDS A service and advocacy organization which collaborates with environment and indigenous organizations, both in the South and in the North, with the aim of helping to create and sustain a vigilant and effective environmental movement. Damrak 28-30, 1012 LJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands Phone: +31 20 623 0823 Fax: +31 20 620 8049 Email: info@bothends.org Website: www.bothends.org Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR) CIIR aims to contribute to the eradication of poverty through a programme that combines advocacy at national and international level with community- based development. Unit 3, Canonbury Yard, 1903 New North Road, London NI ysj, UK Phone +44 (0)20 7354 0883 Fax +44 (0)20 7359 0017 Email: ciir@ciir.org Website: www.ciir.org Corner House The Corner House is a UK-based research and solidarity group working on social and environmental justice issues in North and South. PO Box 3137, Station Road, Sturminster Newton, Dorset DTIO IYJ, UK Tel.: +44 (0)1258 473795 Fax: +44 (0)1258 473748 Email: cornerhouse@gn.apc.org Website: www.cornerhouse.icaap.org Council on International and Public Affairs (CIPA) CIPA is a human rights research, education and advocacy group, with a particular focus on economic and social rights in the USA and elsewhere around the world. Emphasis in recent years has been given to resistance to corporate domination. 777 United Nations Plaza, Suite 30, New York, NY 10017, USA Tel. +i 212 972 9877 Fax +i 212 972 9878 E-mail: cipany@igc.org Website: www.cipa-apex.org Dag Hammarskjold Foundation The Dag Hammarskjold Founda- tion, established 1962, organises seminars and workshops on social, eco- nomic and cultural issues facing developing countries with a particular focus on alternative and innovative solutions. Results are published in its journal Develpment Dialogue. usa Ovre Slottsgatan 2, 753 10 Uppsala, Sweden. Tel.: +46 18 102772 Fax: +46 18 122072 e-mail: secretariat@dhf.uu.se Website: www.dhf.uu.se Development GAP The Development Group for Alternative Policies is a Non-Profit Development Resource Organization working with popular organizations in the South and their Northern partners in sup- port of a development that is truly sustainable and that advances social justice. 927 15th Street NW, 4th Floor, Washington, DC, 20005, USA Tel.: +i 202 898 1566 Fax: + i 202 898 1612 E-mail: dgap@igc.org Website: www.developmentgap.org Focus on the Global South Focus is dedicated to regional and global policy analysis and advocacy work. It works to strengthen the capacity of organizations of the poor and marginalized people of the South and to better analyse and understand the impacts of the global- ization process on their daily lives. C/o CUSRI, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand Tel.: +66 2 218 7363 Fax: +66 2 255 9976 Email: Admin@focusweb.org Website: www.focusweb.org IBON IBON Foundation is a research, education and information institution that provides publications and services on socio-economic issues as support to advocacy in the Philippines and abroad. Through its research and databank, formal and non-formal education programmes, media work and international networking, IBON aims to build the capacity of both Philippine and international organizations. Room 303 SCC Bldg, 4427 Int. Old Sta. Mesa, Manila 1008, Philippines Phone +632 7132729 Fax +632 7160108 Email: editors@ibon.org Website: www.ibon.org Inter Pares Inter Pares, a Canadian social justice organization, has been active since 1975 in building relationships with Third World development groups and providing support for community-based development programs. Inter Pares is also involved in education and advocacy in Canada, promoting understanding about the causes, effects and solutions to poverty. 58 rue Arthur Street, Ottawa, Ontario, KiR 769 Canada Phone +i 613 563 4801 Fax +i 613 594 4704 Public Interest Research Centre PIRC is a research and campaign- ing group based in Delhi which seeks to serve the information needs of activists and organizations working on macro-economic issues concern- ing finance, trade and development. 142 Maitri Apartments, Plot No. 28, Patparganj, Delhi 110092, India Phone: +91 n 2221081/2432054 Fax: +91 n 2224233 Email: kaval@nde.vsnl.net.in Third World Network TWN is an international network of groups and individuals involved in efforts to bring about a greater articulation of the needs and rights of peoples in the Third World; a fair distribution of the world's resources; and forms of development which are ecologi- cally sustainable and fulfil human needs. Its international secretariat is based in Penang, Malaysia. I2I-S Jalan Utama, 10450 Penang, Malaysia Tel.: +60 4 226 6159 Fax: +60 4 226 4505 Email: twnet@po.jaring.my Website: www.twnside.org.sg Third World Network-Africa TWN-Africa is engaged in research and advocacy on economic, environmental and gender issues. In relation to its current particular interest in globalization and Africa, its work focuses on trade and investment, the extractive sectors and gender and economic reform. 2 Ollenu Street, East Legon, PO Box ANi9452, Accra-North, Ghana. Tel.: +233 21 511189/503669/500419 Fax: +233 21 511188 email: twnafrica@ghana.com World Development Movement (WDM) The World Development Movement campaigns to tackle the causes of poverty and injustice. It is a democratic membership movement that works with partners in the South to cancel unpayable debt and break the ties of IMF conditionality, for fairer trade and investment rules, and for strong international rules on multinationals. 25 Beehive Place, London SW9 7QR, UK Tel: +44 (0)20 7737 6215 Fax: +44 (0)20 7274 8232 E-mail: wdm@wdm.org.uk Website: www.wdm.org.uk