On Evils Abroad and America's New World Order
Rule, James B.
As I WRITE, the United States has all but entered into full-scale war in Yugoslavia. Almost forgotten in the current preoccupation with the Balkans is the endemic, smoldering combat being waged...
...Had that war brought losses to America roughly comparable to those experienced by the other side, that opportunity might well have turned into something more than an abstract possibility...
...Fair enough...
...It is striking that this mindset can come so naturally to commentators on the left...
...power promises to sustain pluralism and democracy all around the world...
...Strictly on its own, without help from allies, America ought to be able to defend its territory from foreign invasion or imminent threat...
...Indeed, the U.S...
...THE FIRST is the speed and ease with which American public opinion was sold on that vast military operation— over a causus belli that most Americans would surely have regarded with indifference if not incomprehension before this country's elite took it up...
...or the prevention of humanitarian disaster in Somalia or Haiti...
...the great thing about being the world's hegemonic power is that other countries have to do what you want them to do...
...military umbrella that extended over "the free world" in the postwar years...
...resolve" —and hence to grant approval to the farflung military operations that ensued...
...At the end of the twentieth cen50 DISSENT / Summer 1999 tury, no feature of world affairs is more basic, more axiomatic to all calculations of statecraft, than the unchallenged supremacy of America's coercive might...
...Our national interest in punishing a Slobodan Milosevic or a Saddam Hussein can rarely rise to this importance...
...The social goals of the left are eminently legitimate, some will say...
...Again, the masters of U.S...
...But military aggression is hardly a rarity, much as we deplore it...
...attention than that of Kuwait...
...It will not do to fall back on sententious formulations like Anthony Lewis's invocations of America's "special power and responsibility in the world...
...52 DISSENT / Summer 1999 With the implosion of the Soviet Union, the U.S...
...In conjunction with its allies, America ought to be able to influence—selectively—geopolitical trends around the world...
...But it's hard to make systematic sense of when and why particular ones of these "commitments" will be cashed out in the violent application of American arms...
...Inured, after decades, to their country's global overweening, most Americans seem to have lost the ability to ask this question...
...It's the comprehensive cost of maintaining the farflung, self-perpetuating military presence necessary to make or break regimes all around the world...
...Before current obsessions with the Balkans, of course, Iraq was a chronic preoccupation...
...Certainly Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was inexcusable...
...And there will be questions of feasibility—of the likelihood that any conceivable intervention will result in enduring improvements...
...But that is no reason to miss opportunities for movement in that direction...
...public expenditure that needs changing—it's Americans' view of their role in the world community...
...Since the United States was the only available agency for punishing Saddam's invasion, it fell to this country to "kick his ass out of Kuwait," in the winning phrase of George Bush...
...WE ALL understand how we got here...
...At the very least, we on the left must cast a skeptical eye on the fateful political ballet by which American opinion makers segue from expression of lofty principle to the gore and destruction of war...
...or that it is all but impossible for anyone to enter national politics without plunking down a small fortune as the price of admission...
...Such powers and responsibilities are not part of some fixed and forgone order of things...
...Even authentically demonic characters require official demonization before America's elites can unleash the full force of this country's military power against them...
...Considering these questions seriously should by itself have stopped the Somalia operation in its tracks...
...terms, of course— anywhere in the world required redress by U.S...
...Similar perplexities on the left, after all, seem all but inevitable over the conflict in the Balkans, and the same issues will surely continue to arise elsewhere...
...military action against Serbia...
...At best, I can suggest a few broad possibilities and limitations...
...How should we on the left think about allocating different levels of national interest to different regions of the world...
...I write in the hope that we can hammer out positions on these matters that reflect our core values—rather than simply reacting to initiatives for foreign intervention from this country's elites...
...It is hard to imagine that most Americans would have ascribed any special import to Iraq's invasion of its irritating neighbor, without the artful public dramaturgy orchestrated by the Bush administration...
...THUS WE on the left have no more pressing need than to articulate a coherent, critical vision of America's New World Order—a vision distinctive to the left, and consistent with left values in other domains...
...We remain, of course, political light-years from a federalist world under a single rule of law...
...Failure to reverse the invasion would be as inexcusable as acquiescence to the Nazi war machine...
...Much of the enthusiasm on the left for America's role in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf seems to have stemmed from just such a rationale...
...Ordinary Americans might then be less certain where their next oil shipments were coming from...
...They were either carried out by U.S...
...How should we weigh the value of traditional alliances or connections, like those with Britain or Japan...
...in terms of dollars and cents, and in terms of the patterns of interstate conduct that each new action helps to constitute...
...By contrast, the fact that tens of millions of Americans have no medical coverage is not an emergency by current standards...
...Obviously, similar chains of reasoning have been evoked to justify U.S...
...There are signs that processes of this kind are taking hold...
...If things go wrong, is there an exit strategy...
...By this I mean a country capable of joining in significant, if selective, applications of force beyond its borders—yet no longer casting itself as the indispensable maker and breaker of interstate arrangements all around the world...
...According to recent reports, missiles displayed in May Day parades on Red Square in the 1960s were fakes— Potemkin ICBMs, one might say...
...This list could be much extended...
...But we on the left have no more compelling task than calling attention to authentic alternatives to never-ending U.S...
...The weight of what's at stake can hardly be in doubt...
...WHAT CHANGES, then, should the left be demanding in these matters...
...If U.S...
...There is no country, needless to say, whose participation in such movement is more crucial—or more problematic—than the United States...
...But do we want to live in a world where attacks on sovereign states are the standard response to terrorist actions...
...policy makers from gleefully seizing on the display to sell the country multibillion dollar antimissile systems...
...Among the situations with strong claims on such collective international action are the following: Threats of imminent use of weapons of mass destruction, genocide or other large-scale losses of life, flagrant violations of elementary norms of international conflict (including invasions), imminent threat of environmental disaster (for example, nuclear contamination), or grave dangers to democratic and pluralistic institutions...
...When other interests offend you, you can punish them at your convenience...
...The best that can be said for this thinking is that it reflects a touching faith in the ultimate interests animating America's elites...
...Most of them elicit little more than concerned tuttutting from the Pentagon and the State Department...
...geopolitical interests toward collective, rather than unilateral action...
...If Americans are being rallied to defend the innocent citizens of Kuwait, for example, or to attack the drug-dealing regime of Panama, can we expect the same appeals for action on behalf of other victims of military aggression or other drug-implicated elites...
...allies as Greece and Macedonia...
...Nor is the fact that thousands of U.S...
...That geopolitical equation permitted the peaceful reconstitution of Germany and Japan as nonmilitarized, democratic states after their World War II defeats...
...Curtailing that power would undercut the ability of the United States to support beleaguered peoples and constructive political tendencies from Taiwan to Macedonia...
...Should a democratic society weigh risks 56 DISSENT / Summer 1999 of life and limb to its professional military forces differently, for example, from risk to conscripted members of the military...
...By this reckoning, defense of Taiwan or South Korea surely has stronger claims on U.S...
...What does this mean, DISSENT / Summer 1999 55 practically...
...When Americans hear their leaders comparing any DISSENT / Summer 1999 51 regime to those of Hitler and Stalin, we can be sure that the ultimate extremities of this country's coercive might are about to be brought down on it...
...arms...
...The U.S...
...As Robert Keohane points out in his excellent After Hegemony, recent decades have seen the growth of new transnational norms—treaties and other arrangements on such matters as arms control, environmental affairs, and world trade...
...naval forces in the Persian Gulf...
...Though U.S...
...response to demonic events is that most of these occasions threatened no major U.S...
...Surely, it will be said, these hard-won prerogatives should not be discarded...
...Does the proposed action appear feasible in its own terms...
...Before we confront the next application of U.S...
...To these charges, I can hear a well-rehearsed response...
...Iraq's annexation of Kuwait in 1990 set the stage for the Gulf War, whereas the same country's invasion of Iran in 1980 was quietly welcomed by the U.S...
...But abroad, other players in the great game of international power understand perfectly the distinction between the political justifications for military action and what constitutes the authentic vital interests of U.S...
...But it should be acknowledged in advance that evils abroad will always be in oversupply, that many situations that deserve outside intervention must go without...
...If not, then the appeals for military action surely deserve skepticism...
...It ought to give pause that Dissent, and commentators on the left more generally, have given so little attention to the programmatic question of where we stand—not just on specific conflicts, but on the unipolar system of U.S...
...Finally, there are the costs of that wide swath of political attention—both from elites and ordinary citizens —absorbed by the never-ending preoccupation with managing America's New World Order...
...The left must not miss its opportunity to open this discussion...
...geopolitical interest...
...dominance that makes U.S...
...But they will always be dreaming different dreams...
...To many on the left, it appears, these bright examples suffice to justify acquiescence, if not active support, for the indefinite militarization of America...
...In a political order less addicted to military activities as a source of economic redistribution, such a situation would surely have led to a drastic drop in expenditures...
...There are grave evils abroad in the world, and the desire to see them redressed is no more than decent...
...What kind of global role should we expect of America, and how can we reconcile such expectations with the rest of our political vision...
...But American public opinion, far from displaying the isolationism fearfully ascribed to it by some commentators, was quickly moved to define Iraq's aggression as a test of U.S...
...protection...
...But the lack of a full public accounting of this outrageous manipulation of U.S...
...Here a consensus position has been difficult for the left...
...The very unchallenged position of the United States gives a hollow ring to standard arguments that questioning this country's military posture might somehow give comfort to the enemy...
...What will be the cost—in lives and well-being...
...But experience shows that, when America does apply its coercive might, there is no assurance that the targets will be ones favored by the left...
...allies or the victims simply did not matter to U.S...
...These, we must insist, are the real emergencies —emergencies of a far more pressing kind than any danger posed by the world's regional dictators...
...Resources to right geopolitical wrongs will always be scarce...
...Does the proposed action promise to strengthen democracy, pluralism, and egalitarianism...
...On the one hand, most of us find it natural to embrace the high principles invoked by policy makers to justify U.S.-led military interventions—the protection of Albanian Yugoslays from the tender mercies of Serbian ethnic supremacy, for example...
...Such initiatives arrive predictably—typically packaged with appeals for "demonstrating American resolve," "defending freedom," or "giving no comfort to aggressors" or the like...
...commitments" in the most diverse and distant corners of the world—from Iraq to Haiti to Korea to Panama...
...Then there is the corrosive effect of the constant flow of military dollars back into the political process...
...political culture dominated by military mind-sets to an extent well beyond what prevails in other Western democracies...
...THESE SIMPLE reflections leave unanswered all sorts of pressing questions...
...Any thorough answer to this utterly legitimate question is beyond my powers here...
...The growth of these new patterns makes it plain that sovereign states are capable of putting aside short-term self-interest in support of principles that have wide international support...
...In 1990, the first symptoms were often rhetorical —beginning with reflexive reliance on the pronouns "we" and "us...
...No doubt, much good could come from a world system policed by U.S...
...Any such examination needs to begin with a hard look at opportunity costs—at what America gives up in order to preside over its New World Order...
...The approximately two billion dollars spent on America's Persian Gulf operations last year would have afforded a quarter of the nation's eligible children the benefits of participating in Head Start programs...
...One positive repercussion of such a development might well be to shift pursuit of U.S...
...military might in a part of the world most Americans can scarcely identify, we ought to have our speech prepared...
...A prime example is the ability to respond to a terrorist bombing of an embassy by dispatching cruise missiles against the suspected perpetrators— located in countries that may (or in the most recent case, may not) have been implicated in the bombings...
...At issue here is not the cost of any specific weapon system or military operation...
...Such proposals will surely trigger charges of "abdication" of America's "international responsibilities," of appeasement-in-the-making —quite likely of "isolationism...
...But this country would face less hostile action abroad if it were less involved in micro-management of affairs in distant parts of the world...
...and before (and during) the Iraq period were worries over the Korean peninsula, Taiwan, Somalia or Haiti...
...military establishment faced what one might have expected to be a grave crisis—the need for a credible enemy...
...In fact, evils of the sort invoked to justify these operations are anything but scarce...
...Reading from a text that might have originated at the Pentagon, they took it as axiomatic that international misbehavior —defined in U.S...
...His evident vision of an "Albanianfree" state, the resulting hordes of exhausted and terrified refugees—these things have made comparison to the Nazi regime an easy recourse for proponents of military action against Serbia...
...More recently, worldwide U.S...
...The entrenched interests driving these scare tactics are not difficult to discern in retrospect...
...From Taiwan to Latvia, from Chile to Saudi Arabia, the attitudes of this country are a factor in nearly every international move and arrangement...
...All sorts of military attacks or covert operations may be righteous (or cleverly expedient) in intent, but simply unworkable...
...Any relaxation in the rates of military expenditure, any slackening of U.S...
...And if there were ever a time to broach these issues, it is now...
...The problem is that the world is full of situations and personalities that lend themselves to demonization—and that the processes by which demons are selected for this purpose are anything but transparent...
...Painfully, and with many a backward lurch, an international consensus on human rights is emerging, along with tools for enforcing such understandings...
...For the left, these "commitments," and their unpredictable transformations into warfare, pose a special problem...
...intelligence continued to portray the Soviet bloc as a realistic competitor to the West...
...Eight years after the collapse of the Evil Empire, in the words of former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb, " 'defense' spending is now only 12 percent below the average level from 1976 to 1990...
...military power...
...But it should not maintain capabilities or expectations of making and breaking governments around the world to suit its needs...
...For me, two memories of those events remain incandescent—and quite chilling...
...The elusiveness of such consensus was brought home to Dissent during the run-up to the Persian Gulf War in 1990...
...Concomitant with demands for military budget reductions, we also need to insist on scaling back the sweeping ambitions of America's world hegemony...
...we on the left should not shrink from radical conclusions, especially when they 54 DISSENT / Summer 1999 derive from the most reasonable of premises...
...they have not been thrust upon Americans by the Deity or some form of Manifest Destiny...
...But they cannot safely be pursued unless this country remains strong, able to respond to emergencies that might threaten it without warning...
...On these questions, the debates that led up to the Gulf War in 1991 offer some striking cases in point...
...For America to be truly strong, its people must be well—not necessarily affluent, but healthy, gainfully occupied, meaningfully educated—and its public life vibrant...
...military action abroad all but inevitable...
...The elementary character of this ruse did not deter U.S...
...The question is—or ought to be, for the left—do we want to support the system of power necessary to continue indefinitely enforcing American rules of the international game...
...foreign policy establishment...
...in fact, America still accounts for roughly one-third of world military expenditures...
...They should hardly be exempt from critical examination...
...Among these are the vast dark regions of public expenditure and policy making that cannot be openly discussed or debated because they are part of the national security domain—"classified information," off-limits to public scrutiny...
...But in fact, a broad scaling back of America's world military ambitions would still allow for both defense of authentic national interest and even meaningful U.S...
...We now know that, for decades, these threats were outrageously bulked by interested parties on both sides...
...Indeed, much good has come from its precursor, the U.S...
...spends more on its military than the next six biggest spenders combined...
...Against such views, the left needs to project new meanings for such emotive terms as "strong" and "emergency...
...DISSENT / Summer 1999 n 57...
...It has discouraged—with mixed success, to be sure—the proliferation of nuclear weapons...
...It's bizarre, but any such notion will surely strike many as dangerously radical...
...What kind of New Domestic Order could America afford if it renounced its role of world hegemon...
...That would begin to bring this country's spending for these purposes into line with those of the prosperous allies supposedly protected by America's New World Order...
...militarism...
...The world is a dangerous place—so let us have guns before butter, even if social justice is to some degree short-circuited in the process...
...military expenditures are at a post—World War II low as a percentage of total economic activity, they continue to be high in comparison to other rich countries...
...Consider the provision of basic medical care to its citizenry—a dimension on which this country falls far short of the achievements of the other Western democracies that supposedly shelter under U.S...
...The Persian Gulf situation, as they saw it, was a replay of Europe in the 1930s...
...Does the proposed action promise to stengthen patterns of international behavior that one would like to see followed in other situations...
...or that thousands of dangerous toxic sites remain unattended to...
...Ordinary Americans should be forgiven for their bewilderment as to how their country came to be engaged in these conflicts...
...Almost forgotten in the current preoccupation with the Balkans is the endemic, smoldering combat being waged by America and its allies with Iraq...
...The American public is readily moved by its leaders' exhortations to "stand firm against oppression," to "demonstrate our resolve," or to "give no comfort to aggressors...
...From the late 1940s, the United States maintained a military establishment proportionally larger than that of the "free world" allies it was supposedly prepared to defend—with more than double the per capita spending level of any other country, including the USSR, as recently as 1991...
...While hardly renouncing self-interest in these crucial domains, states have been willing to redefine their interests to accept short-term sacrifices in pursuit of shared long-term goals...
...foreign policy teaches us anything, it is the trickiness of predicting freedom's next Enemy of the Month...
...What I am suggesting is simply that the United States redefine itself for international purposes as a "normal country...
...opinion ought to be a national scandal...
...But budgets are not the crux of the issue...
...Why should commentators identified with the left so reflexively have found themselves sharing the first person plural with the U.S...
...A few slender straws in the wind suggest that such principles may be gaining ground...
...military action deserves close scrutiny...
...military power has helped shield an increasingly pluralistic Taiwan from intimidation by the authoritarian regime on the Chinese mainland...
...But if we shift the focus from the Imperial Vision to the interests of ordinary Americans, matters are not so clear...
...Nor did anyone seriously imagine that this country would take up arms to oppose the Indonesian annexation of East Timor in 1976, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, or the Moroccan invasion of Mauritania in 1971...
...the entries are anything but trivial...
...At the time, many seemed to find the answer to this question self-evident...
...We are accustomed to being reminded of U.S...
...It does not come naturally to the left to engage issues like those discussed here—perhaps because we know that we are a long way from making foreign policy in our own right...
...NOT TO BE considered hopelessly naive, let me stress that I fully understand how far these notions are even from receiving serious discussion by policy makers in this country...
...One can arrest dictators or destroy their fighting capacities...
...And raising this issue in turn confronts us with the need to assess the extraordinary role played by America in the world system of military power...
...or the defense of a small country like Kuwait from military aggression...
...From the very beginning, they embraced what I call the Imperial Vision of the situation...
...The explanation for this vast variation in U.S...
...It's not just U.S...
...school buildings are in grave need of repair...
...True, America's coercive might provides certain options not available to "normal" countries...
...Together, these tendencies leave U.S...
...For starters, let us insist that America reduce its military expenditures—including the "black budget" devoted to intelligence and covert operations—by half...
...In 1996, the United States still spent more for military purposes than the NATO countries and its chief Asian allies (Japan, South Korea, and Australia) combined...
...But the tapering off of military spending has not been remotely commensurate with changes in the global balance of power...
...But they would also face fewer exhortations from their leaders on the need to "show determination" and "stand firm" in one world conflict after another...
...Indeed, at the time, even the Saudis and other "allies" supposedly being protected by the operation required a hard sell by Bush and company before allowing themselves to be defended...
...It is now America's official military docDISSENT / Summer 1999 53 trine that this country must be prepared to fight two "major theatre wars" and one "smaller scale contingency" at a time—an ambition to which, I dare say, no other nation can begin to aspire...
...If the United States (note that I do not write "we") comes down on the side of pluralism in Bosnia or Taiwan today, it may as likely lend support to Mexico's ruling party or to the authoritarian regime in Saudi Arabia or to its Turkish ally's repression of the Kurds tomorrow...
...Let us, then, attempt to draw something useful from that dissent within Dissent...
...The rationale for this vast enterprise, of course, was the menace of the Soviet bloc...
...0," THE READER will ask, "you want something considerably less for America than its present overweening role of master of the New World Order— but something considerably more than oldfashioned isolationism...
...Today, Saddam Hussein can provoke what is publicly defined as a billion-dollar "emergency" for the United States simply by refusing to act like a vanquished party...
...Millions of lives around the world stand to be lost or saved, countless individual aspirations and collective designs stand to be supported or undone, by American military might...
...But such successes are not tantamount to creating democratic institutions in their place...
...It has belatedly assisted in the transition of South Africa toward multiracial democracy...
...military and foreignpolicy establishment...
...if matters come to war, you get to do the fighting on their territory, rather than yours...
...That period presented the magazine with what its late editor Irving Howe called "an invitation to selfdestruct...
...My immediate aim in putting forward these views is to reach my colleagues on the left...
...Perhaps the most exorbitant price America pays for its geopolitical role is not fully expressed in dollars and cents...
...Do we on the left really want to support an American military order so far-reaching as to arbitrate power relations throughout the world...
...You just don't get it," these avuncular voices will gently advise...
...It is simply not realistic to imagine that all such evils, or even the most evil of evils, are subject to correction...
...At any historical moment, it would seem, some on the left will find their own reasons for sleeping in the same bed with the Pentagon...
...Should we support the social and political order necessary to sustain the Pax Americana sought by U.S...
...A former ally of the United States against Iran, Iraq had been forgiven by this country as recently as 1987 for its sly attack on U.S...
...missile raids on alleged terrorists in Sudan or Afghanistan may (or may not) dissuade the guilty parties...
...But very similar and equally horrific campaigns against the Kurds in Turkey or the Christians in the Sudan or the Tutsis in Rwanda triggered no such response...
...To some, all this will seem like vintage leftwing naivete...
...And in the last ten years, those vital interests have grown to entail the role of maker and breaker of geopolitical relations all over the world...
...elites...
...I am thinking of vital qualities of a democratic order that are stymied by the militarization of American society...
...Saddam Hussein's problem in 1990 was not that he was an aggressor, but that he ran afoul of America's New World Order, threatening client states who had been promised U.S...
...left should be in the forefront of demands for such participation...
...I simply stress the political significance of the public vilification of these figures...
...perhaps the same could be said for the Gulf War...
...Often, the response to demands to redress evils abroad will have to be negative...
...Only a political infant could imagine that the public justification of operations like the current Serbian campaign or the Gulf War of 1991 fully depict the interests that move this country's elites to military action...
...It should be capable of ensuring normal trade relations with willing partners...
...In responding to such blandishments, the left must be quick to pose questions such as the following: Do the elite proponents of military action really intend to pursue consistently the values that they are invoking, wherever in the world they are engaged...
...engagement abroad...
...My second chilling recollection of those events has to do with the response of a number of Dissent colleagues...
...Someone has to ask: what interest do ordinary Americans have in such a vast and overblown project...
...What it actually takes to start this country banging heads in one corner of the world or another is a great deal more complex, and much less high-minded...
...We see such signs in the prosecution of those accused of crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia —and more lately in the willingness of the European Community countries to consider the extradition of Augusto Pinochet for the misdeeds of his military regime...
...Let us hope that we on the left do not suffer this same loss...
...In the post-Soviet era, they might argue, U.S...
...Slobodan Milosevic, too, had been tolerable to U.S...
...Serbia's ethnic repression, for example, has been catapulted into public attention as grounds for war against Belgrade...
...policy...
...willingness to confront the communist enemy, it was said, would invite the advance of totalitarianism, from Finland to Latin America to South Korea...
...On the other hand, the actual role of such evils in triggering U.S...
...Saddam Hussein was a Hitleresque personality, his annexation of Kuwait the equivalent of the Austrian Anschluss...
...For one historical moment, America has the chance to reconsider, not just the scope of its global ambitions, but also the kind of international order we want our children to live under...
...foreign policy can be counted on to play the defense-of-freedom theme whenever it might secure support for this country's military exploits...
...policy makers...
...policy makers—until his repression in Kosovo threatened to roil relations among such crucial U.S...
...The annual cost of extending medical insurance to the 43 million Americans now lacking it would come to about eighty billion dollars per year, roughly a third of this country's annual military budget...
...The same sorts of demonization have been applied to Slobodan Milosevic and his campaigns in Kosovo...
...military power...
...Editors and friends of the magazine were divided over that war, politically estranged from one another and from other colleagues on the left...
...In noting this fact, I by no means minimize the sheer evil of Serbia's project of ethnic supremacy, any more than I condone Saddam Hussein's military aggression in 1990...
...Perhaps even more seriously, as the economic performance of the Soviet Union and its empire relentlessly declined during the 1970s and 1980s, U.S...
...JAMES B. RULE is professor of sociology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook...
Vol. 46 • July 1999 • No. 3
