by A. G. NOORANI
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“The end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union left Western governments seeking a new sense of purpose on the world stage. They found it in the profession of the policeman. They concerned themselves with countries that had, in their view, offended international peace and order and also standards of good behaviour towards their own peoples. This intervention moved from that of charitable aid and exhortation to economic sanction and, eventually, military aggression. The turn of the 21st century has come to be known as the age of intervention —humanitarian, liberal, neoconservative or neoimperial according to taste. The targets were almost all small Muslim states,” Simon Jenkins writes. He is no crusader or campaigner, but a cool-headed professional journalist. Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya were destroyed; so also Syria.
This book is a most instructive collection of his writings in The Times (London) and The Guardian from 1999 to 2014. His beat is mostly London though he has visited some of the places in question, such as Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the [Persian] Gulf, Lebanon and Syria, apart from frequent trips to America. He freely admits to error on some occasions. Each article has a comment with the benefit of hindsight.
The United States which the journalist describes lives up to its critique by President Barack Obama’s favourite political philosopher, the Reverend Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote in 1958: “The American nation has become strangely enamoured with military might.”
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War did not diminish the enchantment. It saw, instead, a surge of triumphalism and militarism. The New York Times of March 8, 1992, carried a revealing report by the noted correspondent Patrick E. Tyler. The administration was working on a new version of the “Defence Policy Guidance”, a classified paper rewritten every two years. The 1992 version was the first one since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed in December 1991. It was leaked. The draft document said: “In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil.” In Western Europe and East Asia as well as the Middle East (West Asia), the goal of American policy should be “to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power”. It suggested the possibility of bringing the new states of Central and Eastern Europe into the European Union, and of giving them new security commitments from the U.S. that would protect them from an attack by Russia.
The part of the draft which attracted the most notice was its suggestion that the U.S. should work actively to block the emergence of any potential competitor to its power. The language seemed to apply to Japan, Germany or a united Europe, and to China and Russia. It said the U.S. should discourage the “advanced industrial nations” from challenging the U.S.’ leadership, in part by taking these countries’ interests into account and also through unmatchable military strength. It suggested that competition with Japan and Germany should be confined to economics; the U.S. should make sure it had no military rivals.
The White House tactically distanced itself from the leaked Pentagon document. So, for that matter, did Paul Wolfowitz (then Undersecretary of Defence for Policy). Dick Cheney (then Secretary of Defence) approved of it.
James Mann, in Rise of the Vulcans, writes: “The draft suggested that the main purpose of American military power was to preserve America’s role as a superpower and to block countries like Japan and Germany from equalling the United States.
“Two months later Pentagon officials informed reporters that the document had been recast in such a way that it was dramatically different from the original. Officials suggested to reporters that the original draft had been toned down. The Pentagon had ‘abandoned’ the idea that its strategy should be to block the emergence of a rival to American military supremacy, reported one Pentagon correspondent.
“However, the revised vision of American strategy contained most of the same ideas as the original.… The final version didn’t talk about stopping allies from emerging as rivals. But it said the United States should ‘preclude any hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interest.’ Presumably any nation that came to rival American power could be deemed potentially ‘hostile’ if its policies weren’t aligned with those of the United States.” (James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, Penguin, 2004, pages 210-212; a magisterial book which documents the aspirations, intrigues and policies of the school of strategists that had emerged. Vulcan was the Roman god of fire).
The Vulcans represented a mood and an attitude that spawned an atmosphere in the nation and facilitated their recipes to be carried out. James Mann writes: “During the 35 years from 1968 to 2003 the Vulcans reflected the moods and beliefs of America as a whole… one that pursued unchallengeable military strength for the United States. Many Americans disagreed with them, but not enough to dislodge them from power for long. When the Vulcans dealt with the world, they were a stand-in for America: its government, its national security establishment, its political beliefs and choices.
“The question remained whether the venture into Iraq in 2003 marked the point where history turned once again. Did it represent the outer limits of the expansion of American power and ideals? From the perspective of the Vulcans themselves, it clearly did not; they portrayed Iraq as merely a way station on the road toward democratising the entire Middle East.
“There was no question that the Vulcans’ venture into Iraq grew out of their previous 35 years of thinking about America’s role in the world. It represented a final step in the transfer of ideas that the Vulcans had formed during the Cold War into a post-Cold War world—the ideas that the United States should emphasise military strength, should spread its ideals and should not accommodate other centres of power.
“Over the past few years modern historians have drawn a picture of world events in which one era, the Cold War, ended in 1989 and a new era, the post-Cold War, started then. But hidden within this picture, there lay another, entirely different historical narrative, one that began in the two decades before 1989 and continued for at least 15 years afterward. It was the story of the pursuit of unrivalled American power, the story of the rise of the Vulcans.” Behind those 35 years lay a certain tradition and it continued after 2003, as James Mann notes.
Prof. John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago recalls: “The United States, it should be emphasised, did not become a hegemon in the Western Hemisphere by accident. When it gained its independence in 1783, it was a weak country comprised of 13 states running up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Over the course of the next 115 years, American policy-makers worked unrelentingly in pursuit of regional hegemony. They expanded America’s boundaries from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean as part of a policy commonly referred to as ‘Manifest Destiny’. Indeed the United States was an expansionist power of the first order. Henry Cabot Lodge put the point well when he noted that the U.S. had a record of conquest, colonisation, and territorial expansion unequalled by any people in the 19th century. Or I might add the 20th century” (The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Volume 3, 2010, pages 381-396). The U.S. has been at war for 14 of the 21 years since the Cold War ended. This was written in 2010, before the attack on Libya in 2011.
Prof. Mearsheimer belongs to the small band of scholars who are prepared to consider the other side’s viewpoint, such as Stephen Walt and Andrew J. Bacevich. India can boast of very few such, whether on China or Pakistan. Most are paperback pocket editions of the Vulcans; small in vision and slender in knowledge.
This is what Mearsheimer wrote of China specifically: “Why would China feel safe with U.S. forces deployed on its doorstep? Following the logic of the Monroe Doctrine, would not China’s security be better served by pushing the American military out of the Asia-Pacific region? Why should we expect China to act any differently than the United States over the course of its history? Are they more principled than the Americans? More ethical? Are they less nationalistic than the Americans? Less concerned about their survival? They are none of these things, of course, which is why China is likely to imitate the United States and attempt to become a regional hegemon.
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