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American
hegemony -
worse
or better after this election?
By JONATHAN
POWER
Nov. 8, 2000
LONDON - Will it be worse or better? Or is U.S.
foreign policy so firmly set on a course that even with a
new a president it can't be changed significantly? Some
foreign policy analysts are saying that under President
Bill Clinton's stewardship the U.S. became a "rogue
state", a term cooked up by the State Department to
describe the likes of Iraq, Libya and North Korea.
This sort of language is not just being deployed
against America by those using it for effect, like those
who described the impact of Western sanctions on innocent
Iraqi children in a landmark article last year in Foreign
Affairs magazine. It is being used by serious
commentators such as Michael M. May who is quoted in a
recent issue of Survival, the quarterly journal of the
International Institute for Strategic Studies, as listing
half a dozen damning developments in contemporary U.S.
foreign policy:
• Nato expansion, made without any prior
constraint on further expansion.
• An East Asian security policy which moves
towards a greater use of Japan in balancing China.
• Enforcement of a military containment strategy
in the Middle East which posits hostility towards the two
most powerful Moslem states in the region, while
supporting a number of weak client states susceptible to
revolutionary change.
• Active competition with Russia in the Central
Asian and Caucasus area.
• A rhetorically militant yet factually
ambivalent leadership of nuclear non-proliferation
efforts.
• Continued improvement in U.S. military forces,
with particular emphasis on those that project American
power overseas.
I would add to that a few more: first and foremost,
the bombing of a sovereign state, the Yugoslav
Federation, without an explicit mandate of the UN,
throwing overboard a precept observed since the
Westphalian Treaties of 1648 that war is not waged
against a sovereign state which has not itself attacked
another sovereign state.
Secondly, U.S.'s obsession with itself -that it
possesses a sovereignty that overrides the sovereignty of
others. This manifests itself in issues as diverse as
refusing to be party to the creation of an International
Criminal Court or the notion that U.S. legislation can be
applied extra-territorially and that domestic legislation
takes precedence over international commitments. Thirdly,
there is the double standard on human rights with one
part of the world being fair game for constant criticism
and the other, stretching from the Bosporus to the Indus,
which is almost immune from attack.
America now strides the world like a colossus. This is
not because of its economic power- the post Cold War U.S.
accounts for approximately 22% of the world's gross
domestic product which is about the same as it was in the
1918-39interwar period. It is because of its vast
military power- the U.S. accounts for about one third of
world military spending and no country can even think of
matching it.
What is surprising is that there are foreign policy
analysts who will accept the essential fairness of such a
critique but who will still argue that, weighing
everything up, they come down on the side of viewing
America as a benign hegemon. One such is the
distinguished French commentator Francois Heisbourg who
is the Chairman of the Geneva Centre for Security
Policy.
He argues that for all America's incongruities it
remains "a key element of what measure of international
order may exist". The U.S. is the "only credible ultimate
guarantor of that order….the only global-scale
exporter of security."
Yet even an observer as sympathetic to America as he
warns that "foreign perceptions of the U.S. will not
remain static. Several factors could exacerbate the
already troublesome trends generated by some of the
current perceptions."
Not least, he points out, are the consequences of
America's incredible rate of economic growth. If this
continues, even at a lesser pace, it will make the U.S.
even weightier than it is in relation to Europe and
Japan, not to mention the rest of the world. This can
produce its own backlash, especially when America seems
to be calling most of the shots on modern developments,
information technology and economic globalisation.
Second, is the inability of the executive branch of
the U.S. government to override the parochialism of
Congress as it often could in Cold War days. Clinton's
defeat on the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty is a warning of worst to come. U.S. foreign policy
may simply become unpredictable. And unpredictability can
lead to misperceptions and miscalculations.
Neither Al Gore nor George W. Bush have addressed this
debate, even tangentially. At this time of electoral
uncertainty the only thing that is clear about this poll
is that who ever wins has no idea of how to deal with the
America that the rest of the world is increasingly
worried about.
I can be reached by phone +44
385 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2000 By
JONATHAN POWER
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