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American Power, Past and Present

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123456
from: Niall Ferguson
to: Robert Kagan

Can the Damage Be Undone?

Posted Thursday, May 6, 2004, at 4:13 PM ET

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Dear Bob,

Those who delight in controversy may at this stage be feeling a trifle disappointed. It appears we agree on all substantive points: the implicitly imperial character of American power, the necessity of multilateralism in the Cold War, the importance of "11/9"—the fall of the Berlin Wall—in removing the biggest single justification of harmonious trans-Atlantic relations. We might therefore conclude that the United States has had unilateralism thrust upon it; Bush's foreign policy has merely made a virtue of necessity.

But now let me widen the trans-Atlantic rift a little wider by trying to say some things you may not agree with.

There are some important distinctions we are in danger of missing when we talk about multilateralism—among internationalism, alliances, and legitimacy abroad. Let's look at them one by one.

The U.N. Security Council is not an institution I especially revere, but the rest of the world thinks differently. Sometimes over the past six decades the U.N.S.C. has endorsed American foreign policy, sometimes not. That it did not provide the explicit authorization for war last year was not surprising; that the United States went to war anyway was nothing new. The most one can say is that the Bush administration has hammered nails into the coffin of internationalism by flaunting its indifference to international agreements (and even international law) if these might limit America power, while at the same time turning to the United Nations whenever it might serve American purposes.

What of America's alliances? Nobody can pretend this administration has treated them with the respect they deserve. The central failing of American foreign policy last year was the hubris of the Defense Department, epitomized by Secretary Rumsfeld's claim that the United States could invade and occupy Iraq single-handed, if necessary without British help—a gratuitous remark that could scarcely have been better calculated to undermine the already weak position of America's most loyal ally.

Allies matter not just because they can provide effective military assistance. They matter because they help to confer legitimacy. And legitimacy is in many ways the crux of the matter. In this respect we need to emphasize a third turning point, which I would locate in the second half of last year, when the fragility of the administration's casus belli—the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction—was exposed not just as an intelligence failure but as a willful misrepresentation. Mead writes bravely that what happened in 2003 was "a perfectly justifiable military action against the rogue regime in Iraq." I agree. But the United States did not justify its action perfectly. When Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair that the WMD argument had been bureaucratically more convenient than the alternatives, I sensed at once that we had a problem in the pipeline. (How would the British public have reacted if they had discovered in 1915 that the German army had not, after all, violated Belgian neutrality? Luckily for Sir Edward Grey his casus belli was watertight.)

I fear the fourth turning point may be the latest revelations about the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners. Any defense secretary who disparages the Geneva Conventions and then fails to read a damning report detailing its violation by U.S. forces seems to me to have no option but to resign. Were Rumsfeld a British minister, the calls for his resignation would be audible from one end of Westminster to the other. On this point, I cannot express strongly enough my disillusionment—and you will find few more pro-American Europeans than I.

The chances of a truly international foreign policy were never especially good after 1989, and it was never going to be easy to reconfigure NATO as an alliance in the war against terror/tyranny after 9/11. Still, it was possible to avoid the complete loss of international legitimacy for American foreign policy that this administration has achieved. John Gaddis notes that during the Cold War the U.S. opted for containment not confrontation with the Soviet Union because "American leaders … cared what the rest of the world thought." Today's leaders do not care a jot. Gaddis also expresses some surprise that "there's still no anti-American coalition despite the overwhelming dominance of the United States in the years since the Cold War ended." I would say that it is now only a matter of time before such a coalition comes into existence.

Can the damage be undone?

One obvious answer is that it would help if "something worse" than American hegemony were to emerge. Something worse, of course, already exists in the form of militant Islamist terrorism—what Mead misleadingly calls "Arabian Fascism," but which is better understood as Islamo-bolshevism precisely because it is revolutionary and international. But Europeans do not yet regard this as a threat comparable with that posed by the old Soviet Union, and in some ways they are right. In terms of firepower, al-Qaida is not the Red Army. Nor do Europeans share the American analysis that the best way to fight terrorism is by toppling one or two "rogue regimes."

Mead notes that even if Iraq does not become a Wilsonian dream democracy there is still a good chance that the regime that emerges will be preferable to Saddam's. He is also more open to the demonstration-effect thesis than Gaddis. The overthrow of Saddam may have outraged France and Germany; but it sobered up Iran, Syria, and Libya. As Gaddis notes, however, there is a real danger that the Wilsonian assumptions of the neoconservative model may be flawed. "What if terrorism … do[es] not originate in a democratic deficit?" What if, to be more precise, democratizing the Middle East would actually bring Osama Bin Laden to power?

Mead has three modest proposals to restore American legitimacy. He suggests, first, that "a lot of money" should be paid in compensation to individual Palestinian refugees in return for the abandonment of any "right to return" to Israel. But it must be asked how the U.S. could keep this money from simply being appropriated by the Palestinian Authority in taxation and channelled to the terrorists.

Secondly, he urges reform of the U.N.S.C. to bring in Japan, India, Brazil, Nigeria, Germany, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa. This is, of course, just a way of saying that the Security Council should be permanently gridlocked—and because the existing permanent members have too much to lose, such an enlargement will never happen.

Finally, and most eccentrically, he argues that elderly Americans should be encouraged to retire to Mexico, where their Social Security and Medicare checks will go further. As a solution to the impending fiscal crisis of the American welfare state this is certainly novel—and hardly likely to fly in an election year.

The American empire has a big problem. Not only do Americans not recognize the true character of their own predicament—that un-splendid isolation against which Lord Salisbury warned the Victorian imperialists. The rest of the world now regards the United States as not just an empire but now an evil empire.

I have long suspected that this empire would be a short-lived one. But the present combination of economic, manpower, and attention deficits, in the context of a collapse of international legitimacy, suggests that its decline and fall have been proceeding, at precipitate speed, even as you and I have corresponded.

To adopt your vivid simile contrasting the diverging American and European planets, life on "Mars" is never boring, not least because of the high level of intellectual debate here. These two marvelously succinct and readable books illustrate that the American empire has not lost its gift for self-analysis. But I must say that I am not entirely sorry to be returning to "Venus" next week.

Best wishes,
Niall

P.S.: By the way, did you intend to imply that, if he had become president, Al Gore would have invaded Iraq too? I think not.

the book club
entries
123456
from: Niall Ferguson
to: Robert Kagan

Can the Damage Be Undone?

Posted Thursday, May 6, 2004, at 4:13 PM ET
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Niall Ferguson is Herzog Professor of History at the Stern School of Business, New York University, senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is the author most recently of Colossus: The Price of America's Empire. Robert Kagan is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author most recently of Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order.
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