A fossilised approach to new realities spells doom for the United States, says Girilal Jain
In the spurious atmosphere created by the talk of the ‘only superpower’ by friends and foes alike, it might sound odd to say that the US is in fact flailing around for a role in the post- cold war era. But that is the reality. The Pentagon’s classified Defence Planning Guidance, leaked to The New York Times, is as much an expression of it as the criticism sparked by it.
This is not particularly surprising. The disintegration of its Soviet adversary has robbed America of the only role it has known for well over four decades. Indeed, the cold war has shaped not only its defence and foreign policies but also its domestic polity.
In a fundamental sense, the US has been as much a national security state as the Soviet Union. Unlike its erstwhile rival, it does not face collapse by virtue of being a democracy and a market economy. But it has been unhinged.
The US response to the Soviet Union in the last phase of the cold war was itself the product of a mind-set frozen in the ways of that conflict. This is well illustrated by the fact that as the USSR moved towards its terminal stage under Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov and, finally, Gorbachev, President Reagan and his aides invented the ‘window of vulnerability’ and launched the US on its costliest-ever military build-up in peacetime. The same mind-set is reflected in the Pentagon document.
The folly of it all would have been exposed with the expiry of the adversary-partner last year, were it not for the invaluable service Saddam Hussein rendered Washington. In order to avoid the pain of change, the American establishment needed a make-believe demon it could mobilise against in the simulated fury of self-righteousness and demolish without loss of too many lives of its sons and daughters. Saddam Hussein fitted the bill ideally.
Saddam Hussein has assured a new lease of life for the military-industrial complex, in President Eisenhower’s famous phrase, and to the military-industrial-academic-media complex, in K Subrahmanyam’s appropriate updating of it. And President Kim Il-Sung may add to it; for, he, too, lends himself to demonisation. But Iraqs and North Koreas of this world cannot possibly substitute for the former Soviet Union. While these may, at worst, be described as ‘kingdoms of evil’, they cannot add up to become the new ‘empire of evil’.
America is stuck. It cannot invent an adversary commensurate with its size. The Pentagon has done its best in the various reports leaked to the media in recent months but without much success. It is truly desperate. According to a report of the US General Accounting Office, it is even rushing placement of weapons in space in disregard of the risks which could threaten millions of lives. Mercifully, the system of checks and balances still operate in the United States.
The concept of a clearly defined ‘role’ is itself phoney. Up to the end of World War II, powers, big or small, pursued what they perceived to be their national interests and made and broke alliances accordingly. They did not engage in ideological jihads. That, in fact, was the logic of the rise of nation states. The British tried to pass off defence of their interests with the defence of larger principles such as democracy, like during World War I. But not many people were deceived by it. Certainly not the British themselves. Pax Britannica, with the Royal Navy as its principal instrument, was intended to protect and promote definable British interests.
The cold war involved a radical departure from this tradition. The world, for instance, witnessed the establishment of two ‘permanent’ alliance systems; something unheard of before. More important, we witnessed subordination of national interests to the requirements of alliance systems. Ironically, the leaders picked up the larger share of the bill.
It would require a long complicated argument to substantiate this proposition in respect to the former Soviet Union and it is not particularly relevant to do so in an article devoted to the United States. In the case of the US, the task is pretty easy.
Washington, it is well known, defined the magnitude of the supposed Soviet threat in Europe and set force levels for NATO which its European allies invariably failed to meet even after they had became economically strong enough to do so. Indeed, West Germany’s low military expenditure enabled it to pose a challenge to the United States in the economic field by the 60s.
The same story was repeated in Asia. America paid for the wars in Korea and Vietnam which played no small role in the rise of Japan as an economic superpower. The war in Korea made sense largely in relation to the security of Japan. At that time Japan, however, was not in a position to share the cost. But the same was not true at the time of the war in Vietnam. Not to speak of American casualties the war on American society and polity, it was then that the US first ran into a trade deficit. The US economy has been in trouble ever since.
The US, of course, did not oblige either the Europeans or the Japanese. It defined its ‘role’ in terms which excluded a fair sharing of costs. It, for instance, acted more or less unilaterally both in Korea and Vietnam. Its allies were at best lukewarm in respect of Korea and they were positively opposed to its misadventure in Vietnam.
With the end of what was clearly an aberration in international relations, it would be rational for the United States to wish to return to a normal pursuit of reasonable and definable national interests. But Washington appears keen to do the opposite. It wants to take on the ‘responsibility’ of the world policeman, knowing fully well that it is at once a costly and a thankless enterprise, and, indeed that the US can no longer afford it, reduced as it is to the status of the biggest debtor-nation.
In respect of the security Europe, Washington is justified in arguing that the situation in Russia is still too fluid to permit a significant change in Nato’s character. But that is not the main reason for its open opposition to French and German initiatives. It is opposed to a regional arrangement in Europe per se because that would involve diminution in its ‘role’.
On the face of it, this approach speaks of messianism and arrogance of power. But on a closer scrutiny, it also speaks of an establishment which is anxious not to come to grips with urgent domestic problems such as the decline in the competitiveness of US industry, budget and trade deficits, unemployment, etc.
The national security intelligentsia, more or less, shares this approach. The irrationality is only more concentrated in the case of the Pentagon. Even otherwise, it is less than honest for someone in the White House or the State Department to claim that the Defence Planning Guidance is a “dumb report” which “in no way or shape represented US policy”. On the contrary, it faithfully represents the thrust of the present administration’s policy, as President Bush has been honest enough to admit.
That is surely cause for concern. Mired in the aberrant 45 years of the cold war, the US can be a great source of instability in the world. We also cannot wait for a development like the defeat in Vietnam in the 60s to shock it into recognition of the realities. America’s friends have to assist the process and they can do so if they are willing to speak out freely and frankly.
As it happens, American opinion is already beginning to turn in that direction. President Bush is not able to summon the will even to recommend that the US meet its obligations to the IMF or the UN, or for the upkeep of UN peace-keeping forces. Pragmatism is as much an American trait as messianism and it is beginning to assert itself. America has no choice but to maintain and even extend regional alliances. It cannot become the hegemonic power.
It is too early to say whether Germany and Japan would wish to become the great military powers they were before World War II. But America cannot prevent them if they so decide. In any event, America’s own leadership in the past came from industrial and social achievements, not mere military power. In fact, military power cannot be sustained by a weak economy. To attempt to do so is to risk ending up as a “burlesque of empire”, in William Pfaff’s memorable phrase.
Business & Political Observer, 24 March 1992