An All-American Nightmare

Afghanistan and Iraq Have Been Disastrous For The US, But Washington Continues To Delude Itself About A Pax Americana. 

By Tom Engelhardt 
Last Modified: 15 Nov 2011 09:26 
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

How about a moment of silence for the passing of the American Dream? M.R.I.C. (May it rest in carnage.)

No, I'm not talking about the old dream of opportunity that involved homeownership, a better job than your parents had, a decent pension, and all the rest of the package - that's so yesterday, so underwater, so OWS. I'm talking about a far more recent dream, a truly audacious one that's similarly gone with the wind.

I'm talking about George W Bush's American Dream. If people here remember the invasion of Iraq - and most Americans would undoubtedly prefer to forget it - what's recalled is kited intelligence, Saddam Hussein's nonexistent nuclear arsenal, dumb and even dumber decisions, a bloody civil war, dead Americans, crony corporations, a trillion or more taxpayer dollars flushed down the toilet ... well, you know the story. What few care to remember was that original dream - call it The Dream - and boy, was it a beaut!

An American Dream

It went something like this: Back in early 2003, the top officials of the Bush administration had no doubt that Saddam Hussein's Iraq, drained by years of war, no-fly zones, and sanctions, would be a pushover; that the US military, which they idolised and romanticised, would waltz to Baghdad. (The word one of their supporters used in the Washington Post for the onrushing invasion was a "cakewalk".) Nor did they doubt that those troops would be greeted as liberators, even saviours, by throngs of adoring, previously suppressed Shia strewing flowers in their path. (No kidding, no exaggeration.)

How easy it would be then to install a "democratic" government in Baghdad - which meant their autocratic candidateAhmad Chalabi - set up four or five strategically situated military mega-bases, exceedingly well-armed US small towns already on the drawing boards before the invasion began, and so dominate the oil heartlands of the planet in ways even the Brits, at the height of their empire, wouldn't have dreamed possible. (Yes, the neocons were then bragging that we would outdo the Roman and British empires rolled into one!)

As there would be no real resistance, the US invasion force could begin withdrawing as early as the fall of 2003, leaving perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 troops, the US Air Force, and various spooks and private contractors behind to garrison a grateful country ad infinitum (on what was then called "the South Korean model"). Iraq's state-run economy would be privatised and its oil resources thrown open to giant global energy companies, especially American ones, which would rebuild the industry and begin pumping millions of barrels of that country's vast reserves, thus undermining the OPEC cartel's control over the oil market.

And mind you, it would hardly cost a cent. Well, at its unlikely worst, maybe $100bn to $200bn, but as Iraq, in thephrase of then-Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, "floats on a sea of oil", most of it could undoubtedly be covered, in the end, by the Iraqis themselves.

Now, doesn't going down memory lane just take your breath away? And yet, Iraq was a bare beginning for Bush's dreamers, who clearly felt like so many proverbial kids in a candy shop (even if they acted like bulls in a china shop). Syria, caught in a strategic pincer between Israel and American Iraq, would naturally bow down; the Iranians, caught similarly between American Iraq and American Afghanistan, would go down big time, too - or simply be taken down Iraqi-style, and who would complain? (As the neocon quip of the moment went: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.")

And that wasn't all. Bush's top officials had been fervent Cold Warriors in the days before the US became "the sole superpower", and they saw the new Russia stepping into those old Soviet boots. Having taken down the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, they were already building a network of bases there, too. (Let a thousand Korean models bloom!) Next on the agenda would be rolling the Russians right out of their "near abroad", the former Soviet Socialist Republics, now independent states, of Central Asia.

What glory! Thanks to the unparalleled power of the US military, Washington would control the Greater Middle East from the Mediterranean to the Chinese border and would be beholden to no one when victory came. Great powers, phooey! They were talking about a Pax Americana on which the sun could never set. Meanwhile, there were so many other handy perks: the White House would be loosed from its constitutional bounds via a "unitary executive" and, success breeding success, a Pax Republicana would be established in the US for eons to come (with the Democratic - or as they said sneeringly, the "Democrat" - Party playing the role of Iran and going down in a similar fashion).

An American Nightmare

When you wake up in a cold sweat, your heart pounding, from a dream that's turned truly sour, sometimes it's worth trying to remember it before it evaporates, leaving only a feeling of devastation behind.

So hold Bush's American Dream in your head for a few moments longer and consider the devastation that followed. Of Iraq, that multi-trillion-dollar war, what's left? A US expeditionary force, still 30,000-odd troops who were supposed to hunker down there forever, are instead packing their gear and heading "over the horizon". 

Those giant American towns - with their massive PXs, fast-food restaurants, gift shops, fire stations, and everything else - are soon to beghost towns, likely as not looted and stripped by Iraqis.

Multi-billions of taxpayer dollars were, of course, sunk into those US ziggurats. Now, assumedly, they are goners except for the monster embassy-cum-citadel the Bush administration built in Baghdad for three-quarters of a billion dollars. It's to house part of a 17,000-person State Department "mission" to Iraq, including 5,000 armed mercenaries, all of whom are assumedly there to ensure that American folly is not utterly absent from that country even after "withdrawal".

Put any spin you want on that withdrawal, but this still represents a defeat of the first order, humiliation on a scale and in a time frame that would have been unimaginable in the invasion year of 2003. After all, the US military was ejected from Iraq by ... well, whom exactly?

Then, of course, there's Afghanistan, where the ultimate, inevitable departure has yet to happen, where another trillion-dollar war is still going strong as if there were no holes in American pockets. The US is still taking casualties, still building up its massive base structure, still training an Afghan security force of perhaps 400,000 men in a country too poor to pay for a tenth of that (which means it's ours to fund forever and a day).

Washington still has its stimulus programme in Kabul. Its diplomats and military officials shuttle in and out of Afghanistan and Pakistan in search of "reconciliation" with the Taliban, even as CIA drones pound the enemy across the Afghan border and anyone else in the vicinity. As once upon a time in Iraq, the military and the Pentagon still talk about progress being made, even while Washington's unease grows about a war that everyone is now officially willing to call "unwinnable".

In fact, it's remarkable how consistently things that are officially going so well are actually going so badly. Just the other day, for instance, despite the fact that the US is training up a storm, Major General Peter Fuller, running the training programme for Afghan forces, was dismissed by war commander General John Allen for dissing Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his generals. He called them "isolated from reality".

Isolated from reality? Here's the US record on the subject: It's costing Washington (and so the US taxpayer) $1.6bnthis year alone to train those security forces and yet, after years of such training, "not a single Afghan army battalion can operate without assistance from US or allied units".

You don't have to be a seer to know that this, too, represents a form of defeat, even if the enemy, as in Iraq, is an underwhelming set of ragtag minority insurgencies. Still, it's more or less a given that any American dreams for Afghanistan, such as those of Britain and Russia, will be buried someday in the rubble of a devastated but resistant land, no matter what resources Washington choses to continue to squander on the task.

This, simply put, is part of a larger landscape of imperial defeat.

Cold Sweats At Dawn

Yes, we've lost in Iraq and yes, we're losing in Afghanistan, but if you want a little geopolitical turn of the screw that captures the zeitgeist of the moment, check out one of the first statements of Almazbek Atambayev after his recent election as president of Kyrgyzstan, a country you've probably never spent a second thinking about.

Keep in mind that "Bushian" urge to roll back the Russians to the outskirts of Moscow. Kyrgyzstan is, of course, one of the former Central Asian SSRs of the Soviet Union, and under cover of the Afghan War, the US moved in, renting out a major air base at Manas Airport near Bishkek, the capital. It became a significant resupply station for the war, but also a US military foothold in the region.

Now Atambayev has announced that the US will have to leave Manas when its lease is up in 2014. The last time a Kyrgyz president made such a threat, he was trying to extort an extra $40m in rent from the globe's richest power. This time, though, Atambayev has evidently weighed regional realities, taken a good hard look at his resurgent neighbour and the waning influence of Washington, and placed his bet - on the Russians. Consider it a telling little gauge of who is now being rolled back where.

Isolated from reality? How about the Obama administration and its generals? Of course, Washington officials prefer not to take all this in. They're willing to opt for isolation over reality. They prefer to talk about withdrawing troops from Iraq, but only to bolster the already powerful American garrisons throughout the Persian Gulf and so free the region, as our secretary of state put it, "from outside interference" by alien Iran. (Why, one wonders, is it even called the Persian Gulf, instead of the American Gulf?)

What 'They' Want

They prefer to talk about strengthening US power and bolstering its bases in the Pacific so as to save Asia from ... the United States' largest creditor, the Chinese. They prefer to suggest that the US will be a greater, not a lesser, power in the years to come. They prefer to "reassure allies" and talk big - or big enough anyway.

Not too big, of course, not now that those American dreamers - or mad visionaries, if you prefer - are off making up to$150,000 a pop giving inspirational speeches and raking in millions for churning out their memoirs. In their place, the Obama administration is stocked with dreamless managers who inherited an expanded imperial presidency, an American-garrisoned globe, and an emptying treasury. And they then chose, on each score, to play a recognisable version of the same game, though without the soaring confidence, deep faith in armed US exceptionalism or the military solutions that went with it (which they nonetheless continue to pursue doggedly), or even the vision of global energy flows that animated their predecessors. In a rapidly changing situation, they have proven incapable of asking any questions that would take them beyond what might be called the usual tactics (drones vs counterinsurgency, say).

In this way, Washington, though visibly diminished, remains an airless and eerily familiar place. No one there could afford to ask, for instance, what a Middle East, being transformed before our eyes, might be like without its American shadow, without the bases and fleets and drones and all the operatives that go with them.

As a result, they simply keep on keeping on, especially with Bush's global war on terror and with the protection in financial tough times of the Pentagon (and so of the militarisation of this country).

Think of it all as a form of armed denial that, in the end, is likely to drive the US down. It would be salutary for the denizens of Washington to begin to mouth the word "defeat". It's not yet, of course, a permissible part of the American vocabulary, though the more decorous "decline" - "the relative decline of the United States as an international force" - has crept ever more comfortably into our lives since mid-decade. When it comes to decline, for instance, ordinary Americans are voting with the opinion poll version of their feet. In one recent poll, 69 per cent of them declared the US to be in that state. (How they might answer a question about American defeat we don't know.)

If you are a critic of Washington, "defeat" is increasingly becoming an acceptable word, as long as you attach it to aspecific war or event. But defeat outright? The full-scale thing? Not yet.

You can, of course, say many times over that the US remains, as it does, an immensely wealthy and powerful country; that it has the wherewithal to right itself and deal with the disasters of these last years, which it also undoubtedly does. But take a glance at Washington, Wall Street, and the coming 2012 elections, and tell me with a straight face that that will happen. Not likely.

Democracy Or Defeat?

If you go on a march with the folks from Occupy Wall Street, you'll hear the young chanting, "This is what democracy looks like!" It's infectious. But here's another chant, hardly less appropriate, if distinctly grimmer: "This is what defeat looks like!" Admittedly, it's not as rhythmic, but it's something that the spreading Occupy Wall Street movement, and the un- and underemployed, and those whose houses are foreclosed or "underwater", and the millions of kids getting a subprime education and graduating, on average, more than $25,000 in hock, and the increasing numbers of poor are coming to feel in their bones, even if they haven't put a name to it yet.

And events in the Greater Middle East played no small role in that. Think of it this way: if de-industrialisation and financialisation have, over the past decades, hollowed out the US, so has the American way of war. It's the usually ignored third part of the triad. When our wars finally fully come home, there's no telling what the scope of this imperial defeat will prove to be like.

Bush's American Dream was a kind of apotheosis of this country's global power as well as its crowning catastrophe, thanks to a crew of mad visionaries who mistook military might for global strength and acted accordingly. What they and their neocon allies had was the magic formula for turning the slow landing of a declining but still immensely powerful imperial state into a self-inflicted rout, even if who the victors are is less than clear.

Despite our panoply of bases around the world, despite an arsenal of weaponry beyond anything ever seen (and withmore on its way), despite a national security budget the size of the Ritz, it's not too early to start etching something appropriately sepulchral onto the gravestone that will someday stand over the pretensions of the leaders of this country when they thought that they might truly rule the world. 

I know my own nominee. Back in 2002, journalist Ron Suskind had a meeting with a "senior adviser" to George W Bush, and what that adviser told him seems appropriate for any such gravestone or future memorial to American defeat:

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community', which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality... That's not the way the world really works anymore… We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'."

We're now, it seems, in a new era in which reality is making us. Many Americans - witness the Occupy Wall Street movement - are attempting to adjust, to imagine other ways of living in the world. Defeat has a bad rep, but sometimes it's just what the doctor ordered.

Still, reality is a bear, so if you just woke up in a cold sweat, feel free to call it a nightmare.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), is being published this month.

A version of this article was first published on TomDispatch.

The End Of Pax Americana

BY CHRISTOPHER LAYNE
MAY 01, 2010 ISSUE
Courtesy Of THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE

The United States emerged from World War II in a position of global dominance. From this unparalleled military and economic power came a Pax Americana that has endured for more than six decades. It seemed the sun would never set on the U.S. empire.

But America is increasingly unable to play the hegemon’s assigned role. Militarily, a hegemon is responsible for stabilizing key regions and guarding the global commons. Economically, it offers public goods by opening its domestic market to other states, supplying liquidity for the world economy, and providing the reserve currency. A hegemon is supposed to solve international crises, not cause them. It is supposed to be the lender of last resort, not the biggest borrower. Faced with wars it cannot win or quit and an economy begging rescue, the United States no longer fits the part.

Still, many in the mainstream foreign-policy community see these as temporary setbacks and believe that U.S. primacy will endure for years to come. The American people are awakening to a new reality more quickly than the academy. According to a December 2009 Pew survey, 41 percent of the public believes that the U.S. plays a less important and powerful role as a world leader than it did a decade ago.

The epoch of American dominance is drawing to a close, and international politics is entering a period of transition: no longer unipolar but not yet fully multipolar. President Barack Obama’s November 2009 trip to China provided both substantive and emblematic evidence of the shift. As the Financial Times observed, “Coming at a moment when Chinese prestige is growing and the U.S. is facing enormous difficulties, Mr. Obama’s trip has symbolized the advent of a more multi-polar world where U.S. leadership has to co-exist with several rising powers, most notably China.” In the same Pew study, 44 percent of Americans polled said that China was the leading economic power; just 27 percent chose the United States.

Much of America’s decline can be attributed to its own self-defeating policies, but as the U.S. stumbles, others—notably China, India, and Russia—are rising. This shift in the global balance of power will dramatically affect international politics: the likelihood of intense great-power security competitions—and even war—will increase; the current era of globalization will end; and the post-1945 Pax Americana will be replaced by an international order that reflects the interests, values, and norms of emerging powers.

China’s economy has been growing much more rapidly than the United States’ over the last two decades and continues to do so, maintaining audacious 8 percent growth projections in the midst of a global recession. Leading economic forecasters predict that it will overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, measured by overall GDP, sometime around 2020. Already in 2008, China passed the U.S. as the world’s leading manufacturing nation—a title the United States had enjoyed for over a century—and this year China will displace Japan as the world’s second-largest economy. Everything we know about the trajectories of rising great powers tells us that China will use its increasing wealth to build formidable military power and that it will seek to become the dominant power in East Asia.

Optimists contend that once the U.S. recovers from what historian Niall Ferguson calls the “Great Repression”—not quite a depression but more than a recession—we’ll be able to answer the Chinese challenge. The country, they remind us, faced a larger debt-GDP ratio after World War II yet embarked on an era of sustained growth. They forget that the postwar era was a golden age of U.S. industrial and financial dominance, trade surpluses, and persistent high growth rates. Those days are gone. The United States of 2010 and the world in which it lives are far different from those of 1945.

Weaknesses in the fundamentals of the American economy have been accumulating for more than three decades. In the 1980s, these problems were acutely diagnosed by a number of writers—notably David Calleo, Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, Samuel Huntington, and James Chace—who predicted that these structural ills would ultimately erode the economic foundations of America’s global preeminence. A spirited late-1980s debate was cut short, when, in quick succession, the Soviet Union collapsed, Japan’s economic bubble burst, and the U.S. experienced an apparent economic revival during the Clinton administration. Now the delayed day of reckoning is fast approaching.

Even in the best case, the United States will emerge from the current crisis with fundamental handicaps. The Federal Reserve and Treasury have pumped massive amounts of dollars into circulation in hope of reviving the economy. Add to that the $1 trillion-plus budget deficits that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicts the United States will incur for at least a decade. When the projected deficits are bundled with the persistent U.S. current-account deficit, the entitlements overhang (the unfunded future liabilities of Medicare and Social Security), and the cost of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is reason to worry about the United States’ fiscal stability. As the CBO says, “Even if the recovery occurs as projected and the stimulus bill is allowed to expire, the country will face the highest debt/GDP ratio in 50 years and an increasingly unsustainable and urgent fiscal problem.”

The dollar’s vulnerability is the United States’ geopolitical Achilles’ heel. Its role as the international economy’s reserve currency ensures American preeminence, and if it loses that status, hegemony will be literally unaffordable. As Cornell professor Jonathan Kirshner observes, the dollar’s vulnerability “presents potentially significant and underappreciated restraints upon contemporary American political and military predominance.”

Fears for the dollar’s long-term health predated the current financial and economic crisis. The meltdown has amplified them and highlighted two new factors that bode ill for continuing reserve-currency status. First, the other big financial players in the international economy are either military rivals (China) or ambiguous allies (Europe) that have their own ambitions and no longer require U.S. protection from the Soviet threat. Second, the dollar faces an uncertain future because of concerns that its value will diminish over time. Indeed, China, which has holdings estimated at nearly $2 trillion, is worried that America will leave it with huge piles of depreciated dollars. China’s vote of no confidence is reflected in its recent calls to create a new reserve currency.

In coming years, the U.S. will be under increasing pressure to defend the dollar by preventing runaway inflation. This will require it to impose fiscal self-discipline through some combination of budget cuts, tax increases, and interest-rate hikes. Given that the last two options could choke off renewed growth, there is likely to be strong pressure to slash the federal budget.

But it will be almost impossible to make meaningful cuts in federal spending without deep reductions in defense expenditures. Discretionary non-defense domestic spending accounts for only about 20 percent of annual federal outlays. So the United States will face obvious “guns or butter” choices. As Kirshner puts it, the absolute size of U.S. defense expenditures are “more likely to be decisive in the future when the U.S. is under pressure to make real choices about taxes and spending. When borrowing becomes more difficult, and adjustment more difficult to postpone, choices must be made between raising taxes, cutting non-defense spending, and cutting defense spending.” Faced with these hard decisions, Americans will find themselves afflicted with hegemony fatigue.

The United States will be compelled to overhaul its strategy dramatically, and rather than having this adjustment forced upon it suddenly by a major crisis, the U.S. should get ahead of the curve by shifting its position in a gradual, orderly fashion. A new American global posture would involve strategic retrenchment, burden-shifting, and abandonment of the so-called “global counterinsurgency” being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As a first step, the U.S. will need to pull back from its current security commitments to NATO, Japan, and South Korea. This is not isolationism. The United States undertook the defense of these regions under conditions very different from those prevailing today. In the late 1940s, all were threatened by the Soviet Union—in the case of South Korea and Japan, by China as well—and were too weak to defend themselves. The U.S. did the right thing by extending its security umbrella and “drawing a line in the sand” to contain the Soviet Union. But these commitments were never intended to be permanent. They were meant as a temporary shield to enable Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea to build up their own economic and military strength and assume responsibility for defending themselves.

There are several explanations for why the U.S. did not follow through with this policy. Fundamentally, during the Pax Americana there was no need. As the U.S. declines, however, it will be compelled to return to its original intent. If we remember that an eventual pullback was the goal of U.S. policy, strategic retrenchment in the early 21st century looks less like a radical break than a fulfillment of strategic goals adopted in the late 1940s.

Burden-shifting—not burden-sharing—is the obvious corollary of strategic retrenchment. American policy should seek to compel our allies to assume responsibility for their own security and take the lead role in providing security in their regions. To implement this strategic devolution, the U.S. should disengage gradually from its current commitments in order to give an adequate transition period for its allies to step up to the plate. It should facilitate this transition by providing advanced weapons and military technology to friendly states in Europe and Asia.

With respect to Islamic terrorism, we need to keep our priorities straight. Terrorism is not the most pressing national-security threat facing the United States. Great powers can be defeated only by other great powers—not by nonstate terrorists or by minor powers. The U.S. needs to be careful not to pay more attention to Islamic terrorists than to emerging great powers. Here the Obama administration and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates are getting it wrong.

Although many in the U.S. foreign-policy community—especially the counterinsurgency lobby, based at the Center for a New American Security, and the American Enterprise Institute—call for the U.S. to “win” the war on terror, there can be no decisive victory over terrorism. The trick is finding the right strategy to minimize its effects on American security. The strategy of the Bush and Obama administrations—invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan—is exactly the wrong approach. The U.S. is bad at counterinsurgency. Foreign occupying powers seldom are good at it, which is the main reason big powers usually lose these kinds of small wars. The U.S. also is not good at nation-building. Rather than quelling terrorism, a long-term foreign military presence in places like Iraq and Afghanistan inflames nationalism and anti-Americanism.

The Nobel Prize-winning Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz and his co-author Linda Bilmes have estimated that the direct and indirect costs of the Iraq War will exceed $3 trillion. No similar projection of the Afghanistan war’s costs exists. But the Obama administration’s fall 2009 internal debate about whether to increase troop levels in Afghanistan offered a preview of coming attractions. During these deliberations, some officials argued that the U.S. needed to limit its commitment because the cost of the war effort has serious budgetary implications. According to the New York Times, when presented with an OMB projection that showed existing troop deployments and nation-building expenses combined with the cost of sending an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan for a decade would total $1 trillion, “the president seemed in sticker shock, watching his domestic agenda vanishing in front of him.”

That the United States needs a post-Pax Americana foreign policy should be obvious. But there is no guarantee that the U.S. will adjust to a transforming world. Even as the globe is being turned upside down by material factors, the foreign policies of individual states are shaped by the ideas leaders hold about their own nations’ identity and place in world politics. More than most, America’s foreign policy is the product of such ideas, and U.S. foreign-policy elites have constructed their own myths of empire to justify the United States’ hegemonic role. To move successfully to a post-Pax Americana foreign policy, Americans will need to move beyond these myths.

The foundational American myth of empire is exceptionalism, the belief, dating back to the Puritans, that the U.S. is different, better, and morally superior to the rest of the world. Americans have always looked at the outside world suspiciously and viewed it as a source of contagion: war, imperialism, militarism, religious intolerance, non-democratic forms of governance, and latterly totalitarianism, genocide, and terrorism. All these bad things, we believe, come from “over there.”

We have long thought that we cannot live safely in a world of such imperfections and that it is therefore our national duty to cure these ills by using American power to construct a world order based on our values. U.S. foreign-policy elites have extrapolated from our national experience and concluded, as Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff wrote some 45 years ago, that the United States is a model for the world and “America’s wants and values are universal”—a point George W. Bush made repeatedly in justifying his policy of exporting democracy at the point of a bayonet. Americans believe that our political and economic systems provide “a prototypical solution for the world’s disorders.” If we could just give the rest of the world a makeover so it looked like the United States, all would be well.

These assumptions invest American foreign policy with a tendency to see the world in terms of good versus evil. And because the U.S. looks through this prism, it believes it has the obligation to prevail in this global struggle. America’s security and way of life are purportedly endangered by the existence of hostile ideologies anywhere in the world because peace and freedom are allegedly indivisible. Intervention is thus the United States’ default in foreign policy.

We attempt to tame the world by exporting democracy because—we are told—democracies do not fight each other. We export our model of free-market capitalism because—we are told—states that are economically interdependent do not fight each other. We work multilaterally through international institutions because—we are told—these promote cooperation and trust among states. None of these propositions is self-evident. Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence that they are wrong. But they are illusions that “express the deepest beliefs which Americans, as a nation, hold about the world.” So we cling to the idea that our hegemony is necessary for our own and everyone else’s security. The consequence has been to contribute to the very imperial overstretch that is accelerating the United States’ decline.

Because that U.S. enjoyed such vast superiority for such a long time, it had the luxury of acting on its delusions without paying too high a price. (That is, if you discount the 58,000 names on the Vietnam Memorial or the tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel who have suffered disfiguring wounds or been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.) But as my graduate school mentor, Kenneth Waltz, one of the towering figures in the study of international politics, used to tell us about American foreign policy, “When you are big, strong, and powerful, you can afford to make the same dumb mistakes over and over again. But when your power declines, you begin to pay a price for repeating your mistakes.”

U.S. decline means that in the 21st century, the United States will pay a high price if it endlessly repeats its mistakes. To change our foreign policy—to come to grips with the end of the Pax Americana—we first need to change the way we see the world.
__________________________________________

Christopher Layne is Professor and Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at Texas A&M’s George H.W. Bush School of Government & Public Service. He is author of The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present and, with Bradley A. Thayer, American Empire: A Debate.

The Same Old Pax Americana

Obama's New Afghanistan Strategy

By Leon T. Hadar
Journalist and foreign affairs analyst
Posted: December 2, 2009 02:35 AM
Courtesy Of The Huffington Post

First, the good news (or sort of): In his much-anticipated address outlining his strategy for Afghanistan on Tuesday night, President Barack Obama refrained from employing the kind of fantasy-infused rhetoric about democratizing the Middle East that his predecessor tended to apply to the marketing his own war plans to the American public.

Speaking before an audience of West Point cadets, staff and guests on Tuesday, Obama avoided any reference to the United States promoting an ambitious Freedom Agenda that would supposedly give birth to a Jeffersonian democracy in Hindu-Kush. In fact, Obama did not mention any grandiose American plan for nation building in Afghanistan, a point stressed by his press secretary Robert Gibbs earlier in the day. "This can't be nation-building," Gibbs insisted.

Nor did Obama insert in his Tuesday address the Manichaean metaphors that former President George W. Bush liked to interject into his war addresses when he portrayed American military encounters in the Greater Middle East as a quasi-religious battle between Good and Evil.

So in a way, Obama did not sound very Wilsonian or messianic when calling on the American people to support for his plan to deploy 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan within six months. Indeed, in terms of the tenor of the speech, Obama could only be described as the anti-Bush: very cautious and very methodical; not an idealist, but a realist. "As president, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means or our interests," Obama stressed, reflecting an approach to national security that has been traditionally advocated by the kind of Realpolitik types that advised President Bush the First (which explains why that Bush decided not to occupy Iraq).

After all, it has taken Obama several months to deliberate about the Afghanistan strategy, including numerous meetings with his national security advisors and outside experts. "As your commander in chief, I owe you a mission that is clearly defined, and worthy of your service," Obama told members of the audience that included veterans of the war in Afghanistan and some who would probably be deployed there in the future.

And unlike Bush, Obama put an emphasis on the need to consider the expected economic costs of America's wars. "Over the past several years, we have lost that balance and failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy," Obama said, insisting that "our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended -- because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own."

As noted, those were the encouraging sounds of what was probably Obama's most important speech to date. But scratch the rhetorical surface of the non-Bush oratory, and you discover that the strategy proposed by Obama would probably end-up strengthening the foundations of the post-9/11 hegemonic project for the Greater Middle East; Bushchenism with an Obama face.

Indeed, notwithstanding the Realpolitik tone of Obama's address, his suggestion that the deployment of more U.S. troops would quicken the transfer of responsibility to the Afghani government and allow most U.S. troops out of Afghanistan in three years had an air of pure fantasy.

That is clearly the case if you consider the ambitious goals that Obama has set for U.S. strategy: reversing the Taliban's momentum and denying it the ability to overthrow Afghanistan's government while strengthening Afghanistan's security forces and government. That has all the making of nation-building, since it will require that Afghanistan -- one of the world's least advanced economic and political entities and a mish-mash of fighting-forever tribes -- will have a legitimate and effective government, including functioning security forces. And as any student of Afghanistan will tell you, that ain't going to happen in 3 or in 5 or even in 15 years.

Which means that the U.S. forces will either have to remain in Afghanistan for many, many years to come -- with Washington being forced to send even more troops and increase its economic assistance to Afghanistan -- or that the rising costs of the American occupation will ignite more opposition from the American public and lead to a humiliating U.S. withdrawal a la Vietnam that could prove to be detrimental to U.S. and Western interests. In short, the timeframe for transition set by Obama is unrealistic and meaningless.

Indeed, contrary to the pledge he made on Tuesday, the strategic goals for Afghanistan outlined by Obama "go beyond our responsibility, our means or our interests." These goals seem to disregard the fact that Al-Qaeda has ceased to be a viable force in Afghanistan and are also based on the dubious assumption that "Taliban's momentum" was a direct threat to U.S. interests while failing to take in consideration the nationalist Pashtun component of the Taliban insurgency or the complex relationship between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda -- in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

The bottom line is that Obama has embraced the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy elites in Washington that the United States needs to maintain its military presence in Afghanistan as part of an effort to protect the pro-American political and military elites that control Pakistan and its nuclear military installations. At the same time, one should expect that U.S. military forces with also stay in Iraq for many years to come. If anything, against the backdrop of growing tensions with Iran, the number of U.S. troops in the region would probably start rising soon.

At the end of the day, as Washington continues maintaining its costly hegemonic project and to be drawn into the military quagmires in the Greater Middle East -- let's not forget Lebanon and Israel/Palestine -- it only provides more incentives for the Europeans and other allies to continue their free-riding on U.S. military power and it helps accelerate China's emergence as the preeminent global power.