Power Trip: U.S. Unilateralism and Global Strategy After September 11
These are times for despair over the suffering that the U.S. military has inflicted on people in Iraq and elsewhere. But these are also times for rejoicing over the budding global movement for peace and justice that is challenging U.S. militarism. And these are times for educating ourselves so we can build our movement with intelligence and foresight. POWER TRIP gives us the critical road map we need to understand where those in power would like to take us, and how we can veer off that dangerous course to build a kinder, gentler nation and planet.
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About the Author:
John Feffer is the author of Beyond Detente; Soviet Foreign Policy and U.S. Options (Hill & Wang, 1990) and Shock Waves; Eastern Europe After the Revolutions (South End Press, 1992
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter 1: How Things Have Changed, by Tom Barry
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.
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- PublisherReadHowYouWant
- ISBN 10 1458783308
- ISBN 13 9781458783301
- BindingUnknown Binding
- Number of pages360
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