Beyond Hegemony

Ragusa · Jun 5, 2007

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I just read an excellent article my Michael Lind, who explains the American post-Cold War hegemony strategy, and the article is worth reading for that alone. It allows to make some sense of much of the policy we have seen the last seven years and even in the time before.

That the foreign policy of George W. Bush has been a catastrophic failure is disputed by none today except for a dwindling number of diehards on the neoconservative right. But there is no consensus on the scope of the failure. Has a sound global grand strategy been poorly implemented, at the operational and tactical level, in Iraq and elsewhere? Or is the failure much deeper than that? Is the grand strategy the Bush Administration has pursued inherently flawed?

This matters because what has become known as the "Bush Doctrine" did not originate with George W. Bush. Rather, it is rooted in a bipartisan consensus that America’s temporary Cold War hegemony in Western Europe and east Asia should be converted into permanent U.S. global hegemony....

....During the Cold War, the United States was the stronger of two superpowers in a bipolar world. The anti-Soviet alliance was not a traditional alliance of equals, but a hegemonic alliance centered on the United States. West Germany, Japan and South Korea were semi-sovereign U.S. protectorates. Britain and France were more independent, but even they received the benefits of "extended deterrence," according to which the United States agreed to treat an attack on them as the equivalent of an attack on the American homeland. America’s Cold War strategy was often described as dual containment -- the containment not only of America’s enemies like the Soviet Union and (until the 1970s) communist China, but also of America’s allies, in particular West Germany and Japan. Dual containment permitted the United States to mobilize German and Japanese industrial might as part of the anti-Soviet coalition, while forestalling the re-emergence of Germany and Japan as independent military powers.

The Cold War officially ended in Paris in 1990, but the United States has continued to pursue a dual containment strategy based on three principles: dissuasion, reassurance and coercive non-proliferation.

Dissuasion -- directed at actual or potential challengers to the United States -- commits the United States to outspend all other great military powers, whether friend or foe. This policy’s goal -- in the words of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance draft leaked from then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney’s Pentagon -- is the dissuasion or "deterring [of] potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."

By the end of the 1990s, as Charles Krauthammer noted in these pages four years ago:

"The result is the dominance of a single power unlike anything ever seen. Even at its height Britain could always be seriously challenged by the next greatest powers. Britain had a smaller army than the land powers of Europe and its navy was equaled by the next two navies combined. Today, American military spending exceeds that of the next twenty countries combined. Its navy, air force and space power are unrivaled."

This approach flies in the face of the strategy usually adopted by traditional status quo great powers, which sought to ensure that they belonged to alliances with resources that exceeded those of potential challengers. It is no surprise that, despite the absence of any threat to the United States equivalent to that of the Soviet Union, our defense spending today, as a share of our total GDP, is nearly at the Cold War average.

High levels of defense expenditures are not merely to overawe potential challengers. (In outlining possible competitors, Krauthammer noted, "Only China grew in strength, but coming from so far behind it will be decades before it can challenge American primacy -- and that assumes that its current growth continues unabated.") To again quote from the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, "we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order." Reassurance, the second prong of the hegemonic strategy, entails convincing major powers not to build up their military capabilities, allowing the United States to assume the burdens of ensuring their security instead.

In other words, while outspending allies like Germany and Japan on defense, the United States should be prepared to fight wars on behalf of Germany and Japan, sparing them the necessity of re-arming -- for fear that these countries, having "renationalized" their defense policies and rearmed, might become hostile to the United States at some future date....
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That means when today the US outspends the rest of the world in military expenses that has a reason and is not because those Americans are crazy and love nukes so much.

....the global hegemony strategy insists that America’s safety depends not on the absence of a hostile hegemon in Europe, Asia and the Middle East -- the traditional American approach -- but on the permanent presence of the United States itself as the military hegemon of Europe, the military hegemon of Asia and the military hegemon of the Middle East. In each of these areas, the regional powers would consent to perpetual U.S. domination either voluntarily, because the United States assumed their defense burdens (reassurance), or involuntarily, because the superior U.S. military intimidated them into acquiescence (dissuasion).

American military hegemony in Europe, Asia and the Middle East depends on the ability of the U.S. military to threaten and, if necessary, to use military force to defeat any regional challenge-but at a relatively low cost. This is because the American public is not prepared to pay the costs necessary if the United States is to be a "hyperpower."

Given this premise, the obsession with the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and other Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) makes perfect sense. WMD are defensive weapons that offer poor states a possible defensive shield against the sword of unexcelled U.S. conventional military superiority. The success of the United States in using superior conventional force to defeat Serbia and Iraq (twice) may have accelerated the efforts of India, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran to obtain nuclear deterrents. As an Indian admiral observed after the Gulf War, "The lesson is that you should not go to war with the United States unless you have nuclear weapons." Moreover, it is clear that the United States treats countries that possess WMD quite differently from those that do not.

So proliferation undermines American regional hegemony in two ways. First, it forces the U.S. military to adopt costly and awkward strategies in wartime. Second, it discourages intimidated neighbors of the nuclear state from allowing American bases and military build-ups on its soil.

With this in mind, proponents of the hegemony strategy often advocate a policy of preventive war to keep countries deemed to be hostile to the United States from obtaining nuclear weapons or WMD. Preventive war (as distinguished from pre-emptive attack to avert an impending strike) is not only a violation of international law but also a repudiation of America’s own traditions. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson all ruled out preventive wars against the Soviet Union and China to cripple or destroy their nuclear programs, and President Ronald Reagan, along with Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, denounced Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak. Yet, by 2002, a bipartisan majority in the Congress authorized President George W. Bush to wage the first -- and to date the only -- preventive war in American history against Iraq. Although it turned out to be a disaster, it was perfectly consistent with the radical neoconservative variant of U.S. global hegemony strategy.

A Dirty Little Secret

Precisely because the hegemony strategy is so alien to American and international foreign policy traditions, and so potentially costly in its open-ended strategic and budgetary commitments, many of its supporters have suggested that it should be kept secret from the wider American public, since it is so at odds with what most Americans think. In the January/February 2007 issue of The National Interest, Daniel Drezner summed up the general public’s view:

To be sure, Americans are comfortable with the idea of America as a superpower. This does not mean, however, that the public endorses unilateral American leadership... .n every Pew survey since 1993, fewer than 15 percent of Americans endorsed the idea that America should be the "single world leader"... .Americans do not shrink from uses of force to advance security interests, but it is far from the first resort for the public. When acting abroad, polling demonstrates robust American support for acting in concert with allied countries and, to some extent, multilateral institutions."

Michael Mandelbaum concedes, in his book The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government in the 21st Century, that the case for U.S. global hegemony might not "persuade the American public, which might well reject the proposition that it should pay for providing the world with government services. American citizens see their country’s foreign policy as a series of discrete measures designed to safeguard the interests, above all the supreme interest of physical security, of the United States itself. They have never been asked to ratify their country’s status as the principal supplier of international public goods, and if they were asked explicitly to do so, they would undoubtedly ask in turn whether the United States ought to contribute as much to providing them, and other countries as little, as was the case in the first decade of the twenty-first century."

So he concludes that it may be necessary to keep the American public in the dark because "the American role in the world may depend in part on Americans not scrutinizing it too closely.".....

Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, noted in a recent issue that "America is a global power with global reach and responsibilities" and that, as a result, "the United States inevitably will be called upon to act." Yet, unwilling to explain the actual reasons for military interventions flowing from America’s hegemonic strategy of reassuring allies, dissuading potential peer competitors and preventing proliferation, American presidents and their allies have relied on misleading public rationales: rogue states, terrorists, WMD and genocide.

"Rogue state" is a term of emotional propaganda, not sober analysis. The rogue-state rationale is employed when American leaders wish to rally support for a policy whose actual purpose -- increasing or reinforcing American military hegemony in its European, Asian or Middle Eastern sphere of influence -- cannot be explained to the public. Instead, the American public is told that this or that rogue state -- North Korea, Iran or Iraq -- is a direct threat to the American people and the American homeland, as it will be able to lob missiles at the United States or to give terrorists nuclear bombs or other WMD for use on American soil.

In the case of North Korea, for example, U.S. policy is motivated largely, although not solely, by the fear that if Japan loses confidence in America’s willingness to protect it, Japan may obtain its own nuclear deterrent and renationalize its foreign policy, emerging from the status of a semi-sovereign U.S. protectorate to that of an independent military great power once again. But no president can tell the American public that the United States must be willing to lose 50,000 or more American lives in a war with North Korea for fear that Japan will get nuclear weapons to defend itself. Therefore the public is told instead that North Korea might give nuclear weapons to non-state actors to use to destroy New York, Washington and other American cities, or that North Korean missiles can strike targets in North America.

If Iran were to obtain nuclear weapons, its purpose almost certainly would be defensive -- to deter the United States, Israel or any other state from attacking it. The American public would not support a preventive war against Iran on the lunatic theory that it would cheaper to attack Iran before it gets nuclear weapons than to attack Iran after it gets them. Therefore, neoconservative hawks seek to persuade the public that Iran, like North Korea, might either bombard Kansas or give nuclear weapons to Islamist terrorists, or that Iran’s viciously anti-Semitic leadership might use nuclear weapons against Israel. (Annihilating Israeli Arabs and Palestinians alongside Israeli Jews would seem to be an odd way to promote the Palestinian cause -- but then, Iran’s leaders, like the leaders of any country that opposes the United States, are said to be "insane.")

In the Balkans, a major strategic goal of the Kosovo war was reassuring Germany so it would not develop a defense policy independent of the U.S.-dominated NATO alliance. But Milosevic’s Yugoslavia could not be accused of developing WMD, so it had to be accused of something else if the American public were to support the war. In fact it was guilty of a war crime -- ethnic cleansing. But the Clinton Administration and supporters of intervention talked about "genocide", a much more serious charge. Needless to say, criminal as it is, ethnic cleansing -- using terror to frighten an ethnic group into leaving a country -- is the opposite of genocide, the extermination of an ethnic group, which requires that they be trapped, not expelled. When the Nazis settled on the Final Solution, they took measures to prevent Jews from escaping Europe.

The point is not to argue that ethnic cleansing should not be discouraged and punished by the international community, or that proliferation is not a problem or that the regimes called rogue states are not threats to their neighbors and world order. The point is rather that these phenomena have been used as public rationales for recent wars and threatened wars whose real purpose was either the reassurance of regional allies like Germany and Japan or the dissuasion of potential enemies like Russia and China (Kosovo, North Korea), or the removal of regimes that threatened America’s military freedom of action as the post-Cold War hegemon of the Middle East (the Iraq War). The genocide in Rwanda was real, but the United States did not intervene because -- unlike America’s would-be permanent protectorates in Europe, Asia and the Middle East -- Africa contains no great powers or critical power resources, and therefore is marginal to the U.S. hegemony strategy. Pakistan fits the definition of a rogue state, but it is a U.S. ally -- and as long as it remains friendly to the United States, it can be permitted to retain nuclear weapons.

This kind of hypocrisy is made inevitable by the hegemony strategy itself. Because the American public would not support wars and threats of war in the interest of reassuring allies, dissuading competitors and preventing proliferation, its supporters have a choice between abandoning the strategy or deceiving the public about the true ends of U.S. foreign policy. For the last 15 years, they have chosen the latter....
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Facinating read.

Aldeth the Foppish Idiot · Jun 5, 2007

That was a rather interesting read. It's a rational arguement, but the problem I have with it is that it seems so overarching that there would be no practical means to keep all of this information so secret. So while I agree that it is fascinating, it also makes me think of conspiracy theories when I read it. Granted, I have no proof that this is some conspiracy theory-esque thinking, but that's what makes conspiracy theories so effective - they cannot be readily disproved.

AMaster · Jun 6, 2007

My big problem with the article is the idea that deceiving the public about the purpose of American foreign policy is somehow new. I also take issue with the notion that hegemony is a break from traditional foreign policy, when even a cursory reading of the past century would demonstrate otherwise.

Well, okay, it is a break, but only if you're going to go back to before the Spanish-American War, and if you're going to pretend that the conquest of half the damn continent wasn't the exercise of foreign policy.

The Shaman · Jun 6, 2007

Well, with a more liberal reading of the Monroe doctrine (and that has certainly been done, especially in the 19th century), what happens in America is an internal matter of sorts for the US. Likewise, I believe several thinkers spoke of "natural boundaries" extending to the Pacific.

True, it's not like it didn't happen in other countries. I doubt that if, say, Britain or France were in the place of the US in 1946, things would be so much different during the Cold War. As for hegemony... I guess it's tempting for every state ,)

[ June 07, 2007, 10:38: Message edited by: The Shaman ]

Ragusa · Jun 6, 2007

I'm somewhat short of time atm, so let me just throw in a few brief points:</font>

Aldeth, I also do not think about a 'conspiracy'.
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The 'cabalistic' aspect is what I dislike about Chomski, who with a grain of salt suggests the 'leading class' colluded since before WW-I for US empire. He's a good empiricist, and he gets his facts right, but his interpretation is 'broken' by his ideological prism. Frankly, I find him inspiring, enlighting, but sometimes simplicistic.
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I think US empire is about opportunites seen, and used.
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The explanation why the policy of dual containment isn't publicly discussed could be because it is considered self-evident by all involved. It is 'in the book', and done 'by the book'. And in this respect I have found Americans extraordinary doctrinaire. Much like the Soviets.
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Hegemony is opportunistic. The hegemony strategy didn't change dual containment, it simply added global dominance. That is, it was expanded it rather than fundamentally re-thought. After the end of the cold war, the end of history, there was no perceived need for it. It is intellectually lazy, or the reason could be institutional inertia, or intoxication by the perceived victory. Somewhat understandably so: 'We won the Cold war! Dual-containment worked for 40 years. We are the militarily strongest nation on earth. We have the end of history. We have the midas-touch that cures all the world's ills! Let's give dominance a shot (pun intended).' And then, don't forget America's sense of mission.
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Openness is self-defeating. Of course you cannot speak aloud about hegemonic policies - for obvious reasons. Common sense dictates that. Aftert 9/11 Bush decided he no longer needed to hold back and stated it openly and look at the fallout he got. It was only after Bush's new National Security Strategy the French started to loudly propose their dissenting view of a multipolar world. However, when you look especially at Air Force documents and concepts from the Clinton years, it was after the Gulf War when the US Air Force suddenly started to strategize over 'Full Spektrum Dominance' and the like.
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What needs to be examined is what benefits the US intended to and actually gained during iot's client states during the Cold War. Costs. Benefits.
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Did the US really 'win' the Cold War as Americans are fond to take for granted, or did they just not (yet) go bankrupt because they have alwas been richer than Russia? Do we reach this stage of overstretch now? Means, did it just longer for them to lose the Cold War?

Food for thought. Feel free to point out contradictions in my post.

Ragusa · Jun 13, 2007

Another bit, a backgrounder on US nuclear modernisation and the implications arising from it: The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy. That article is especially interesting in view to the ongoing missule defense debate in Europe, which is about many things except Iran.

Tiamat · Jun 13, 2007

Heh. I should probably read newspapers more often. I have no trouble following that, but can't necessarily think of anything more to contribute beyond this:

Yes, I sincerely doubt that there is some kind of global "conspiracy" in place (it's the Illuminati, hide! ) For starters, conspiracy implies covert or duplicitous actions, whereas everything America has done to ensure its primacy has been very much above-board, they simply haven't publicly stated this line of reasoning because many smaller explanations will do. Furthermore, conspiracy implies the perception of deliberately doing something you feel will be opposed, which is not how I understand US policy to function in this regard; they seem to feel they are entitled to global leadership.

As I was saying in the FAI, there's a certain view of America as a "white knight" or "crusader", which probably derives from the time when the accumulated fault lines in the European balance of power led to the world wars, where the US was initially blissfully free of entanglement; they were a new state, unburdened by these past leadership failures, and when they finally decided to take a side they charged in there and saved all our butts - or so many seem to see it.

As a result, it only became easier thereafter for the US to justify any intervention outside its borders as "saving us from ourselves", whether that be from Communism or a dictatorship or, well... it goes on. At some point, the line between protecting democracy and protecting national interests blurs. The extreme right-wing military dictatorship that oppressed Greece in the 70's was US-funded and US-supported.

(Caveat: I don't mean to offend any Americans reading this, as I'm sure this perception I'm suggesting is by no means universal, and I'm sure to be reading my own biases into things somewhere.)

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