Responses
Peretz, Martin
Stanley Hoffmann seems to believe that the United States cannot and really should not behave as the singular great power that it is. He offers as an alternative full American membership in "a...
...Wherever we assert our power in behalf of democracy and of life, our interests will not suffer...
...During the Gulf crisis, I heard Hoffmann tell a Harvard audience that a model for solving the problems of these groups might be found in the minorities treaties that followed from Versailles...
...They have been persuaded by arguments like Hoffmann's...
...I am thinking of the Palestinian issue," writes Hoffmann...
...The one state-one vote principle in the General Assembly is a joke...
...Their search for an elusive consensus is the standing excuse for doing 510 • DISSENT nothing...
...As a consequence of the veto the United States gave various regional powers in exchange for allowing us to turn back the Iraqi invasion, the Kurds and Shi'a of Iraq have had visited on them the most excruciating forms of death and destruction...
...There is a sleight-of-hand in this proposal in that it equates the palpable capabilities of the United States with the capabilities of lesser states...
...This is a development that doesn't fit any of the received models of international relations behavior...
...But as soon as the limited ends of the Gulf War were achieved, this newly mobilized and ad hoc version of Hoffmann's committee made clear that it wouldn't sanction the overthrow of Saddam, let alone Iraq's dismemberment into a more logical and humane cartography...
...The Israelis went it alone because they feared that by working directly with Washington on agreements with their neighbors they would enmesh themselves precisely in the kind of process envisioned by Hoffmann...
...The lives of the "peacekeepers" became more important than the lives of the ordinary populace...
...Were the five permanent members of the Security Council united in their purposes and in their values, the UN might be more effective though not necessarily more just...
...One reason it has come to this pass is that many around the president, and many Democrats generally, prefer that regional and international alliances and authorities take up the multiple burdens of a distressed world...
...But, right now, under President Clinton, it does not have the will to do so...
...So what are these festering feeds...
...One of them is the conflict between India and Pakistan...
...As I write, the powers are now pushing on the poor Bosnians a map designed, as it were, for genocide...
...This could not be said of the former Soviet Union or, let us say, of France, the Charles Boyer of the international arena...
...It merely routinizes the enmities and competing ambitions of the countries that comprise it...
...He is also impressed by how one problem relates to another...
...He offers as an alternative full American membership in "a kind of world steering committee" of various regional and global powers that would regulate their own behavior and make rules as to the permissible behavior of others...
...Whatever challenge Islamic militancy poses to, say, the Mubarak regime in Cairo would not be diminished a whit were Arafat to be crowned before an assembly of the faithful in Jerusalem...
...Unafraid, the Serbs pursued their war...
...These regimes were also neutralist and internationalist, in their way, and they promised their peoples a big role in world affairs, a big role in the concert of nations...
...Hoffmann's faith in the United Nations is endearing...
...When I was growing up in New York, on the wall of one of my classrooms hung a poster proclaiming the United Nations "mankind's last best hope...
...Such progress as has been made to resolve it was made altogether outside the concert of nations...
...Big surprise...
...Great wars no longer threaten our instinct to behave idealistically in world affairs...
...This is the meaning of the calvary in Bosnia...
...Let's be concrete: this means we will let Yeltsin have his way in NagornoKarabakh, Georgia, Moldova, and perhaps in the Baltics, as well, because otherwise, we fear, he will fall to his enemies...
...For example, he calls for "the resolution of those disputes whose festering feeds the onslaught of Islamic fundamentalism not only against 'the West' but against secular Muslim forces and regimes...
...This interest, by the way, is why the Clinton administration should have declared the shelling of the civilian population of Aden in South Yemen "intolerable...
...Alas, decency still depends on us...
...Russia will not unleash nuclear weapons against us, or even tanks...
...Both Talbott and Hoffmann hanker for the structural clarity of the cold war, which put its obvious constraints on Washington, and they would prop Russia up to simulate the old equilibrium...
...This development brings no credit to the United States either...
...The true reasons for the rise of the chiliasts in Islam happen also to be reasons that can't be ameliorated by an executive committee of weighty states...
...Getting used to it will take time...
...Had that happened, the neighboring Arab countries would have taken care by themselves of Saddam Hussein's wartime ally in Sana, North Yemen...
...It is no hope at all...
...Nonetheless, Hoffmann has huge aspirations for what he calls the "concert policy," of which the United Nations is an intrinsic element...
...Here, at least, our very diversity makes us more sensitive to the sufferings of faraway peoples and to their hopes...
...In no significant instance where large numbers of lives were at risk and in no instance where a "small" conflict seemed destined to become "big" was the United Nations able to affect history...
...This is a time of opportunity for the United States to do good for others and for itself...
...What succeeded was a rogue Israeli operation out of the foreign ministry encountering some rogue Palestinians who weren't quite sure of their standing in Tunis...
...Alas, the world steering committee is also a fact of sorts...
...note the alliteratives...
...The problem had been addressed for years through various expressions of Hoffmann's steering committee, and each of these ventures was a failure...
...and if he were to do that, the non-violent price extracted by our government would be devastating...
...The United States still has the assets to play the defining role of the one super-power...
...Most likely, we will let these opportunities pass in the deluded belief that some steering committee of diplomats will be better motivated...
...But such bodies, when and where they exist, will not do this...
...The fact is that the UN has been utterly unable to mobilize for life even when the enemy is not an armed state or an armed doctrine but merely a natural disaster...
...Yeltsin will not, in retribution, send his troops to Serbia even if he would wish to...
...But there are no other global powers, even though France sent its epaulets and berets into Rwanda and the Russians still serve as the putative co-conveners of the Middle East peace talks...
...Religious extremism has complicated sources in the Muslim world...
...But they have produced none of this...
...The members of the steering committee are never simply agents of plausible justice...
...Sill, let's look at the Palestinian issue...
...As a result, it is frittering away its advantages, both military and political...
...But this would truly be repeating history as farce...
...They had already experienced such multilateral brokerage in which each intermediary player used the process to advance its own FALL • 1994 • 511 stake...
...But not that alone...
...Of course, the United States also acts for itself...
...But, given its complicated relations with almost all the parties to the Middle East conflict, its interests are not fundamentally inconsistent with the long-run stability of them all...
...Exactly nothing...
...But it is a fact...
...And the old principle— "Don't fuck with Dick Tracy...
...This is one reason why Islamic extremism is emerging now, and it is reprehensible for Hoffmann to put the causes of a half-planetary happening at the feet of Israel...
...The fact is that the secular, rhetorically socialist regimes in the Arab and Islamic orbits have failed, and they have frustrated the masses who gathered exuberantly under their banners...
...But Zionism is not one of them...
...But what really has this to do with Muslim extremism—a more accurate characterization than fundamentalism, which connotes literal fidelity to text and is not apposite in Algeria or the Sudan, in Afghanistan or even in Egypt...
...This is fierce prose...
...If, for example, the United States wanted to lift the arms embargo against Bosnia, it could...
...512 • DISSENT...
...they are always acting for themselves...
...If the generals ultimately take control, or the old communists, they take control of stubborn chaos...
...and their constituent nations are, in any case, not much moved by what moves Americans...
...This utter imbalance is a new experience...
...But a simulation it will remain...
...In the 1991 Gulf War, it worked as a cover for American forces that turned the Republican guards out of Kuwait and ended the immediate threat to Saudi Arabia, whose security is an undisputed U.S...
...This does not mean that we should or could take up the burdens everywhere...
...Many of the old constraints—and possibly all—no longer obtain...
...Analytic linkage leads him to prescriptive linkage...
...Whether ad hoc or institutionalized in the United Nations, concerts of nations usually find a way not to deal with the most pressing human needs...
...In this he agrees with Strobe Talbott: Moscow is to be propitiated at almost all costs...
...interest...
...they can't even produce jobs...
...But we should be willing to take them up here and there, and perhaps somewhere else...
...Hoffmann is especially concerned to strengthen the hands of the Russian government whose authority is already unclear within its own (unclear) borders...
...Issuing continuing resolutions and edicts that its sponsors will not really back, the coalitions patched together at NATO and on the East River failed to impress the Serbs, which is to say they failed to make the Serbs afraid...
...would have been reasserted...
...It has been operating for some time...
Vol. 41 • September 1994 • No. 4
