by GABRIEL KOLKO
Both Europe and the United States confront great crises; while they are different in certain regards they have important similarities too. America’s crisis is both military and economic; they are interrelated because America has a huge deficit, in large part because it has the chimerical ambition to be the world’s dominating military power, which costs it immense sums of money, which its deficit spending largely funds. At the same time it has lost most of its major conflicts militarily, politically—or both. Europe is at the threshold of crucial economic decisions, and they also have grave political implications, whose effects are likely to last for many years. In essence, in Europe the question is whether or not German power or domination of the continental economy will be revived under the guise of pan-Europeanism.
The United States has been on the wrong track in terms of what it can attain. It still regards itself as having abilities which the events of the past century–wars, political crisis, and the like— have shown are beyond its or any country’s– power to control. America is having a very hard time being a “normal” nation that recognizes the limits and nature of its power. It is spending immense sums of money to be able to attain goals beyond its capacity. The German government under Angela Merkel is using pan-European methods to resurrect German power, but in ways that is developing important resistance. In their own ways both the United States and most of Europe are at important turning points—and they will affect each other.
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But even Wolfowitz was eventually aware of the problem: if you cannot predict you cannot plan, and that makes being a global superpower, which is extremely expensive, far more difficult. The U.S. cannot spend without limit–that is impossible—and spending as much as required is the prerequisite, though scarcely sufficient, of being globally hegemonic. His earlier theories have less of a sense of limits. In 1992 he thought the U.S. should and could exert its primacy everywhere, as if stalemate in Korea and defeat in Vietnam–much less the futile adventures subsequently in Iraq and Afghanistan– show that the United States does not have sufficient power to implement his grandiose notions based on theory at rather than reality. He was still an ideologue of the Right but by 2002 he had at least some sense of limits.
Wolfowitz is an ideological, deductive theorist, who refuses to acknowledge the limits of America’s power. But, as even he points out, America’s military leaders did not predict World War II (at least some of the crucial details)–but also the collapse of the USSR in 1991, an alleged threat on which they spent countless billions preparing to fight a war with. They failed to realize until the damage was done that they would not win the war against the Vietnamese Communists. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—and the war there Wolfowitz claimed would be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues—which turned out not to be true. Iraq has been left in political shambles and corruption, and while some oil is being extracted, social and political conditions there prevent oil from being pumped to the extent it might. The U.S. taxpayer paid for the cost of the war there–about a trillion dollars, excluding indirect costs like veterans benefits.
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