While the Cold War is over, the habits and modes of thought produced by it persist. So we continue to project the past into the future even if in a circuitous manner. Surprising though it may appear, by far the most eloquent expression of this problem is the talk of a new world order initiated by President George Bush.
Mr. Bush is a run-of-the-mill politician who has never shown the capacity for even a turn of phrase. It is only natural that he should have fallen for this well-worn proposition in the excitement of victory in the war with Iraq. Indeed, it is also not particularly surprising that most policy and opinion-makers should have readily gone along.
Passing Of An Era
The kind of force that the United States and its allies a mounted for the war – the biggest and most potent in history, the time they took to put it in place – over four months, and the tactics they adopted – the most intensive bombing ever – should have sufficed to suggest that we could be witnessing the passing of an era, beginning with the Berlin airlift, rather than the inauguration of a new one. It speaks for the hold of old habits that instead we saw in this sorry affair the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower, willing and able to preside over the establishment and sustenance of a new world order, equitable, just and peaceful.
The hypnotic spell, of course, began to break in subsequent months. In the face of America’s continuing budget and trade deficits and recession, even ‘optimistic’ policy-makers and commentators could not ignore the only superpower’s vulnerability in the critical economic field. But this renewed talk of US weakness was also a replay of a 20-year-old discourse; after all, America began to lose the competitive race with West Germany and Japan in the late sixties and early seventies. Also missed was the central issue posed by the end of the Cold War relating to America’s own coherence as a society and polity.
The adverse consequences of a weak economy for the US leadership role in the world are obvious enough. However strong militarily, an economically vulnerable America cannot retain for long the allegiance of its European and Japanese allies and command the respect of other would-be friends and adversaries. It is, therefore, superfluous to focus again and again on this self-evident proposition unless the intention is to make the point that we are likely to witness the rise of ‘collective leadership’ (the group of seven comprising the US, Germany, Japan, Britain, France, Italy and Canada) in place of US leadership.
The critical point worthy of special attention, however, is that the United States, as we have known it in its dominant role in the post-1945 period, is the product of the bitter and prolonged struggle with the Soviet Union. And while this familiar America cannot possibly survive for long the disintegration of the adversary, it is that entity which we expect to play the leadership role.
Most Americans have also known the embattled United States of the Cold War era. But millions of them have suffered it rather than cherished it. That is why the trauma of defeat in Vietnam was so difficult to overcome. They stand ready to grapple with the new realities. America will change again and sooner than we may expect or fear.
President Bush’s self-advertised ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ trip to Tokyo under the mounting pressure of public opinion, fed up with Japan’s ever growing trade surpluses and America’s deficits was a poor advertisement for a country that is billed to recreate the world in its own image. But even more pertinent for the purpose of the present discussion is the sharp drop in the popularity rating of the President from 80 per cent at the end of the Gulf war to less than 50, his defensiveness regarding his personal involvement in foreign policy issues and the challenge the conservative right-wing Republican, Mr. Patrick C. Buchanan, has come to pose to him in the contest for party nomination for re-election.
It is notable that the ‘America First’ campaigner, who has been called an anti-Semitic, an isolationist, a protectionist and a social fascist by his critics, has polled 41 per cent of the vote in the New Hampshire primaries against 51 of President Bush. The ghosts of Senators Taft and Goldwater appear to have returned to haunt centrist Republicans keen on a leadership role for America in the world.
Other Developments
On the face of it, these and other similar developments can be explained in terms of America’s economic difficulties. But a careful scrutiny will show that the problem is deeper. The United States too cannot resist ‘structural changes’.
The United States did not quite get recast in the image of the Soviet adversary during the Cold War inasmuch as it remained a democracy. But its major institutions underwent dramatic changes of a non-democratic nature. The imperial presidency is, for example, a product of the Cold War. The enormous power US presidents have enjoyed in the past five decades represents a radical break from the constitutional scheme of checks and balances.
Similarly, the vast intelligence apparatus, authorised to conduct operations, involving attempts to overthrow governments, assassinate heads of governments, train and arm guerilla forces, if necessary in defiance of the refusal by Congress to sanction funds, an offspring of the Cold War and contrary to the spirit of the American constitution. If it were not for the obsessive fear of the ‘Red menace’ the American people would never have tolerated such activities.
Since the disaster in Vietnam, the US Congress has been trying without much success, to regain the powers vested in it by the constitution. The Iran-Contra scandal under President Reagan is only one illustration of this failure. It now transpires that the US began indirect supplies of arms to Iran at war with Iraq as early as 1982 without the knowledge of Congress. Clearly this state of affairs cannot endure in the post Cold War era.
Important Question
In one of its recent issues, The Economist, London, noted that the United States had developed a coherent foreign policy for the first time in its history in the course of the struggle with the Soviet Union. But it did not say why it lacked one earlier. The question is important in a discussion of America’s likely role in future.
To simplify a necessarily complex issue, Americans are a deeply moral people possessed by an extraordinary sense at once of exceptionalism and universalism. As such, they are possibly the most ideological people in the world. Thus, while a crusade can grip them, a routine foreign policy with its compromises and gives and takes is likely to bore them. They could live with the sacrifices of the Cold War because they saw the conflict with the Soviet Union in black and white terms. Mr. Reagan may have been the first American president to describe the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’. But that sentiment has been implicit in the US conduct of the Cold War.
Leading American commentators are beginning to be apprehensive that their government may look for another ‘evil empire’. The fears are not altogether misplaced. But they are exaggerated. With its size, military power, tradition of messianism and ideological appeal for people in the Third World reeling under the impact of the West, the Soviet Union was tailor-made as a rival for the United States. Washington cannot invent so convincing an adversary. Then there are changes that have little to do with the Cold War, though they have coincided with it. Commentator William Pfaff has argued that the US has ceased to be the white Anglo-Saxon country it was and that “immigration and the traumas of Vietnam (and Watergate etc.) have combined to produce a loss of confidence in whether it is a good thing to be an American”. If true, this is a “development of unprecedented significance”, as Pfaff puts it, not only for the United States but for the world.
The Times of India, 27 February 1992