[casi] The U.S. Power Complex: What's New

["AS-ILAS" <AS-ILAS@DELETETHISgmx.de>]

The U.S. Power Complex:
What's New

By Tom Barry
Tom Barry <tom@irc-online.org> is a senior analyst at the Interhemispheric
Resource Center (IRC) (online at www.irc-online.org), and codirector of
Foreign Policy In Focus. A version of this essay will appear in Global Power
Trip edited by John Feffer and published by Seven Stories Press (forthcoming
Spring 2003).

- From Hegemony to Supremacy
- Campaign Against Multilateralism
- Warlordism
- Moral Absolutism
- A Turning Point


Box 1: The Terms of Power


Endnotes

To discern what's new about U.S. foreign policy and its power trip through
history, you don't need to follow the debates in the foreign policy journals
or in Beltway policy circles. The emerging grand strategy of U.S. foreign
policy is readily evident in the pronouncements of President Bush and his
top officials. It's an agenda distinguished by a "moral clarity," according
to Bush, who has told the world that the United States has launched an
"endless" war against "evildoers." His moral clarity about the "axis of
 evil" and his warning that you are "either with us or with the terrorists"
reflect an unnuanced approach to using U.S. power.

The U.S. grand strategy developed by the Bush administration extends beyond
the war on terrorism to a radical reassessment of U.S. foreign and military
policy in this unipolar world. As high U.S. officials explain, the United
States is intent on pursuing policies that prevent the rise of a "peer
competitor." Tossing aside the traditional "realist" approach to U.S.
security affairs, President Bush in a key foreign policy speech at West
Point in June 2002 outlined a supremacist or neo-imperial agenda of
international security. Not only would the United States no longer count on
coalitions of great powers to guarantee collective security, it also would
prevent the rise of any potential global rival-keeping U.S. "military
strengths beyond challenges."

The devil is in the details, so it's the small things about the Bush
administration rather than its major policy pronouncements that best reveal
the character and dimensions of the new U.S. foreign and military policy. As
part of the housekeeping underway in the administration's foreign policy
apparatus, the Defense Department in early 2002 announced the closing of the
Army's Peacekeeping Institute (PKI).1 With its $200,000 operating budget,
the PKI is the only government agency devoted to studying how to secure
peace in failed nations or post-conflict situations. "This is not our
strength or our calling," candidate Bush said in 1999 address when he
emphatically rejected a U.S. role in peacekeeping.2 Close observers inside
and outside the Pentagon said that the announced closure of the peacekeeping
institute reflected the disdain with which Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and
other hawks have for the soft side-the liberal internationalist side-of
international relations.
The decision of the Bush administration to renounce the Clinton
administration's signing of the treaty creating the International Criminal
Court made international news. However, Arms Control Undersecretary John
Bolton's statement that signing the letter renouncing the Rome Statute "was
the happiest moment of my government service" told more about the
administration's ideologically driven campaign against multilateral
constraints on U.S. power. Similarly, while the administration's opposition
to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change is well known, its determination to
undermine all efforts to establish international norms on fossil fuel usage
could be best appreciated in its maneuvering to replace Robert Watson, the
respected chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a way
to undermine the panel's credibility. And the power of petropolitics in
shaping U.S. policy was also exposed in a leaked memo from ExxonMobil that
had previously asked the White House: "Can Watson be replaced now at the
request of the U.S.?"3

Such details underscore the fundamental shifts in the policy discourse of
the Bush presidency. What's at stake for the Bush foreign policy team is the
future of U.S. power. To make the 21st century the new American century, the
hawks and neoconservatives who have gained the upper hand in the
administration want a fundamental reordering of the strategy of U.S. global
engagement. The old strategies of realism and liberal internationalism that
worked in tandem to ensure that America reigned hegemonic during the 20th
century are, they argue, outdated in today's world in which U.S. power is no
longer constrained by another superpower.4 Realism-with its attendant
balance-of-power politics, great power alliances, deterrence, and
containment-is no longer applicable in a unipolar world characterized by
major power imbalances between the United States and all other nations.
Likewise, the Wilsonian and Rooseveltan strategies of enlightened
self-interest designed to build economic and political alliances under U.S.
benign hegemony are also deemed, for the most part, unnecessary and out of
touch with today's global power structure. So, too, are liberal geopolitical
strategies such as the democracy "enlargement" policies and humanitarian
interventionism of the 1990s that stressed inclusion and rules-based
systems. For the Bush foreign policy team, the United States should now
exercise power unimpeded by partnerships, alliances, and rules-and without
apology for its imperial status.5
What's needed is a grand strategy of supremacy. No other nation has wielded
such undisputed power-economic, military, technological, diplomatic, and
cultural-over so much territory. The U.S. should rid itself of its power
complex-its liberal guilt and ambivalence about its supremacy-and pursue
with conviction a grand strategy of neoimperialism.

Proponents of this neoimperial strategy of global engagement rest their case
on two indisputable facts of post-cold war international relations: the
depth of U.S. power and the absence of alternative manifestations of global
leadership backed by military might. If one thinks first about U.S. national
interests and national security, then the objective of any grand strategy,
according to the new imperialists, should be to maintain and enhance this
U.S. power-to prolong what neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer
calls the "unipolar moment."


>From Hegemony to Supremacy

Since the 1880s America has had hegemonic ambitions to shape the development
of the international political and economic systems-first as a junior
partner to Great Britain and then in its own right as the world's military
and technological power with the leadership that proved key to defeating the
Axis powers and setting forth the ideological vision of a postwar framework
of capitalist international relations managed by a system of multilateralism
under U.S. management.

The industrialized capitalist nations commonly regarded the U.S. as a benign
hegemon-one that managed an economic system in which all major players
benefited, including former Axis nations, and provided a military umbrella
that offered security without financial burden. But the ideological and
military rivalry of the cold war checked the geographical reach of U.S.
hegemony. The lofty visions of multilateralism, international cooperation,
and international rule set forth by the architects of the UN system of
global governance still largely framed the official discourse of global
affairs, although the chessboard politics of the superpower rivalry defined
the era. The Whites under U.S. hegemonic leadership and the Reds under the
imperial sway of the Soviet Union kept global affairs firmly rooted in
balance-of-power politics.

The bipolar power balance kept U.S. in the check-constraining its
unilateral, interventionist impulses while obliging it to rely on the "soft
power" of aid and diplomacy to maintain allegiances. By the 1980s the
realpolitik constraints on U.S. power began to loosen, as the U.S. sensed
deepening deterioration of Soviet power and of the credibility of the
socialist alternative. At the same time, the Reagan
administration-benefiting from a new fusionist trend in rightwing thinking
uniting anti-socialists, national security militarists, social
conservatives, free market ideologues, and neoconservatives-mounted a
military and ideological offensive. Its confident assertion that there is no
alternative to "free-market democracies," its move from "containment" to
"roll-back" strategies, and its new military build-up foreshadowed and laid
the global power trip of the George W. Bush administration. Although the
militarism of the Reagan administration did re-ignite the type of
transnational opposition to U.S. global leadership that arose during the
Vietnam War (reviving talk of U.S. imperialism), the upsurge in backing for
U.S.-style economic and political liberalism actually strengthened U.S.
hegemonic influence.6

The end of the cold war left U.S. foreign policy without a defining legacy.
In the absence of the anticommunist core of foreign policy, no political
sector-left, liberal, centrist, conservative, right-could persuasively
articulate a new vision for U.S. global engagement. The "New World Order" of
the Bush Sr. administration was met with derision from the right, as was the
"assertive multilateralism," "strategic partner" policies, revived liberal
internationalism of the Clinton administrations. The left focused almost
exclusively on backlash politics opposing the new liberal-conservative
consensus on free trade, while alternatively supporting and critiquing the
liberal-centrist consensus around humanitarian interventionism. Also focused
largely on backlash politics against the perceived liberalism of the Clinton
presidency and largely bereft of their core anticommunism, the right
initially reacted rather than proposed a new vision of U.S. foreign and
military policy.

In the mid-1990s, however, a new coherent vision of U.S. foreign and
military policy started taking shape-one that brought together the
traditionalist concerns of the social conservatives (culture wars,
dominionism of Christian Right), military/industrial complex advocates, and
neoconservative ambition to reassume control of foreign policy apparatus.
Dismissive of arguments about new transnational threats to global stability
(climate change, resource scarcity conflicts, infectious disease), the new
vision was at once simple and grandiose. Simple in that U.S. foreign and
military policy should not get bogged down in conflicts and humanitarian
crises that had no direct bearing on U.S. national interests and U.S.
national security.7 Grandiose in that U.S. foreign and military policy
should embrace U.S. global dominance and do whatever is necessary to
maintain U.S. supremacy. The radical agenda, clearly articulated and
promoted by administration hardliners from the start of the Bush presidency,
quickly advanced after the September 11th terrorism.

But what's really new about U.S. foreign and military policy? After all, the
U.S. has a long history of throwing its weight around, intervening
militarily, sidelining the United Nations, allying itself with dictators and
human rights abusers, and asserting for itself high ground of morality and
the blessing of the almighty. It has even dropped the big one-twice-to
demonstrate its overwhelming power.

What's different and what's so alarming about the new U.S. grand strategy
are three qualitatively different components of U.S. foreign and military
policy: aggressive anti-multilateralism, warlordism, and moral absolutism.
Underlying and fortifying all three currents is the language of
antiterrorism, which has replaced anticommunism as the core organizing and
unifying principle.

Like anticommunism before it, a foreign policy framed by antiterrorism
assures bipartisan consensus and has popular resonance. It establishes a
logic for strategic alliances with unsavory partners (from Israel to Saudi
Arabia), justifies increases in military budgets, and provides a persuasive
rationale for an "endless war" against evil. As part of the "new realism"
emerging in Washington, the focus is on coalitions and alliance of
convenience with both minor regional powers such as Pakistan and with the
second-tier "great powers" such as Russia.


Campaign Against Multilateralism

The threat of global governance, blue-helmeted peacekeepers,
multilateralism, and international rules and treaties has always featured
prominently in right-wing agendas. In the Reagan administration, this
anti-multilateralism agenda came thundering out of the White House's bully
pulpit. Deprived of anticommunism as the belief holding disparate right-wing
forces together, the populist right in the mid-1990s found that attacks on
the UN and all forms of global governance resonated with an economically and
culturally more insecure America. Rejecting as liberal hogwash the
"assertive multilateralism" of Madeleine Albright, the Republican Congress
appealed to the individualism of Americans, making simultaneous cases
against big government and for U.S. unilateralism. The team around George W.
Bush, departing from the internationalism and moderate conservatism of the
Bush Sr. administration, steadily chipped away at a target list of
international treaties and conventions that constrained U.S. freedom of
action, while at the same time ensuring that the officials appointed to UN
agencies and commission would do the U.S. bidding.8

Critics of the different assaults on instances of multilateralism, whether
it be the climate change treaty, arms trade convention, or any other attempt
to institute international norms and rules, argued that long-term U.S.
interests and national security were being undermined, not protected. The
thickening web of multilateral regimes and treaties is regarded, as one
astute observer of multilateralism noted, as Lilliputian attempts to tie
down Gulliver.9 Even more alarming than the adverse impact on any one
international problem addressed by these multilateral efforts under U.S.
attack is the possibility that the net result may be the disintegration of
the entire post-World War II framework of multilateralism, thrusting global
affairs into a Hobbesian world where power not reason prevails.10 The vision
of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson earlier in the 20th
century of an intergovernmental framework to prevent war, promote peace and
prosperity, and protect rights is being tossed into the historical dustbin
by the Bush administration. Confident of its own military superiority, the
U.S. government believes it can respond to all security threats.

Leaving aside the concern that as global sheriff the United States will
address only military threats to its own security, the Bush administration's
dismissal of multilateralism also deprives the world of the international
mechanisms to respond to nontraditional security issues such as resource
conflicts, rise in infectious disease, international crime, and
environmental degradation. Hardliners such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Richard Cheney hold a very traditional view of
national security that leaves little or no room for inclusion of threats to
"human security," let alone for consideration of proposals for new forms of
global governance to address these nontraditional yet very real threats.


Warlordism

Ironically, since the end of the cold war the influence of the Pentagon has
increased while the State Department control over foreign policy has
steadily diminished.11 In the 1990s, foreign economic policy trumped
traditional diplomacy, giving the imperatives of the Commerce and Treasury
Departments a central place in U.S. international affairs. While the State
Department and its Agency for International Development were being
downsized, the power and responsibilities of the regional commands of the
Pentagon deepened as training programs, joint military exercises, and U.S.
military presence expanded around the globe-particularly in Africa, Latin
America, and Eurasia.12 It was a decade framed by two post-cold war wars,
starting with the massive Persian Gulf deployment and ending with the
bombing of Yugoslavia. In this new era, the U.S. military found new freedom
to act without fear of Soviet reaction while at the same time largely free
from anti-interventionist backlash at home. Indeed, progressives and
liberals were among the main proponents of a more assertive U.S. military,
especially in cases of purported humanitarian intervention.

>From this base, the national security militarists have seized control of the
Bush administration's foreign and military policy. Strategic outlooks,
doctrinal changes, vast increases in military/homeland defense budgets, and
dismissive treatment of the traditionalists and soft-power advocates-all
summarized in the administration's "National Security Strategy of the United
States" released in September 2002-constitute the rise of a new warlordism
in the U.S. government. Reveling in U.S. military superiority, the
administration left behind the stock strategic thinking about
balance-of-power and common security arrangements. Instead of the
realpolitik that has characterized conservative foreign policy strategizing,
the United States has reverted to "machtpolitik" or the exercise of sheer
military power, unconstrained by international norms, treaties, or
alliances.

In launching its raids, policing actions, and invasions, the United States
still recognizes the need for partners to increase credibility and
logistical operating room. But these would be ad hoc coalitions of the
willing, not preexisting alliances such as NATO-and the United States will
always define the mission and lead it. In the early days of the Afghanistan
bombing campaign, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld brushed aside diplomatic
considerations and spoke with the confidence of a warlord: "The mission must
determine the coalition; the coalition must not determine the mission. If it
does, the mission will be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator and
we can't afford that."13

The doctrinal changes follow logically from this powerball perspective.
Instead of what Pentagon officials call a "threat-based" military doctrine,
they are now moving toward a "capabilities-based approach."14 Instead of
defining real and imminent threats to national security, U.S. military
doctrine is pursuing permanent military superiority that will give the
United States the capacity to defeat any conceivable attack. This
 "break-out" strategy of ensuring military predominance did not emerge
full-blown out of the Bush administration, but was developing since the
early 1990s as military strategists and military/complex lobbyists searched
for a new bogeyman to replace the Soviet Union. It is what one Defense
Intelligence Agency analyst identified as the "sum of all fears" approach.15

To ensure this "endless military supremacy," the Pentagon wants-and is
getting-lots of money. The largest increase in the military budget since the
Reagan years provides plenty of pork for the "legacy" systems of traditional
warfare along with hefty allocations for "transformative" systems, including
national missile defense, designed to ensure U.S. military supremacy far
into the future. In keeping with the supremacy doctrine, President Bush
shocked the international community with his announcement during a speech at
West Point that the U.S. was shedding the old doctrines of containment and
deterrence in favor of preemption. The U.S. would no longer wait until
attacked but would preempt future aggression with its own first strikes, not
just against terrorist networks but nation-states themselves. Richard Falk
warned that the United States is claiming "a right to abandon rules of
restraint and of law patiently developed over the course of centuries."16
Piggybacking on this new doctrine of preemption is the administration's new
nuclear doctrine. Rejecting a half-century of attempts to constrain the
proliferation and use of nuclear weapons, the U.S. new nuclear posture
proposes that the United States consider using nuclear weapons against five
non-nuclear countries if it is determined by Washington that they are
developing biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons. At the same time, the
U.S. will develop for itself a new arsenal of nuclear-tipped conventional
weapons. This is all part of what the administration calls its
"counterproliferation" policy.

U.S. wardlordism doesn't tolerate rivals, validates first-strike warfare,
and spurns conflict-prevention strategies and negotiating frameworks. The
new warlordism keeps counsel not with diplomats but with arms merchants. As
is now commonly observed and acknowledged, Rumsfeld's war department "doesn'
t do windows."


Moral Absolutism

Our leaders have invariably couched U.S. foreign and military initiatives in
the rhetoric of political idealism. This practice of dressing U.S.
international engagement in the values of freedom, democracy, and rights
came to be known as "liberal internationalism." Bush's foreign policy
explicitly rejects the imperatives of liberal internationalism, but it is
nonetheless heavily value-laden. The new supremacy agenda taps America's
deep moral roots and sense of messianic mission. Instead of liberal
political values, the supremacists driving U.S. foreign policy are more
comfortable with stark moral contrasts, linking America's foreign policy
mission to the apocalyptic conflict between good and evil.

This new moral absolutism has helped ease the transition from the targeted
war on international terrorist networks to the much broader confrontation
with the "axis of evil" nation-states. The grand moral scale of Bush's
foreign policy has also been used to justify its focus on the end goal of
conquering evil and its dismissal of concerns about the means employed.
Allying ourselves with repressive regimes, overriding human rights
conditionalities on U.S. aid, violating the conventions of international
law, and standing behind a policy of "regime changes" and first strikes are
all acceptable means in Bush's endless war against evil.
The America First convictions of the Bush supremacists echoes the "city upon
a hill" belief structure of America's Puritan underpinnings, as articulated
in 1630 by John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts.17 Over the
past five centuries, American society has continued to believe in its own
moral transcendence, but our city on the hill has undergone major urban
renewal. For the first several centuries, our vision of a moral beacon was
decidedly U.S.-centric, explaining in part America's isolationist tendencies
when dealing with Europe. In the 20th century, especially after the start of
the cold war, the moral values of our blessed city were commonly regarded as
core Western principles. The neoconservative "end of history" and "clash of
civilization" interpretations of history fortified American conviction that
our Judeo-Christian transatlantic culture constituted the epitome of
civilization. With the recent rise of U.S. supremacy thinking, "West against
the rest" imaginings have been set in favor of America First principles and
exceptionalism. Our new moral absolutism regards Europeans as moral
relativists, political opportunists, and weak-kneed partners afraid to speak
evil's name.18


A Turning Point

America is suffering from a power complex that is distorting national
priorities. So wrapped up in its conviction of supremacy, the U.S.
government forges ahead with its new foreign policy directions while
ignoring the mounting global outrage, blowback, and impact of its aggressive
unilateralism.

Politics, like history itself, is marked by cycles and pendulum swings. It
may be that the recent rightward shifts in U.S. foreign and military policy
will be turned back by the next administration or Congress. There are also
signs that as the hawks and hardliners pursue their neo-imperial agenda they
are coming up hard against the exigencies of realpolitik-the need for
alliances, the importance of multilateral cover, and the successful
diplomatic maneuvering of other powers to set alternative agendas in
motion-and the need for the soft power and the moderate multilateralism of
the State Department as well as for nation-building and peacekeeping
following war.

But politics and history are also marked by turning points when the
confluence of events and human intervention cause fundamental shifts in
prevailing ideologies and systems. The creation of a multilateral framework
for managing global affairs at the close of World War II certainly was one
of those major turning points.

It remains to be seen if the supremacy agenda of the Bush
administration-with its dismissal of international cooperation, its "peace
through strength" credo, and its endless war on evil-will be only a passing
political moment or the ideological and operative framework for
international relations in the early 21st century. At least part of the
answer will depend on the willingness of Americans to reach beyond their
deeply felt sense of victimization in the aftermath of September 11, 2001
and commit ourselves to some serious soul-searching about this country's
deepening power complex. Only then might America regain the capacity to
exercise its power responsibly.


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