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World Policy Journal
Volume XVI, No 1, Spring 1999
“The defining mode of conflict in the era ahead,” Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared in 1993, “is ethnic conflict. It promises to be savage. Get ready for 50 new countries in the world in the next 50 years. Most of them will be born in bloodshed.”
Moynihan’s apocalyptic vision is not untypical of the prevailing wisdom. History, it seems to many, has exacted its own revenge on what Francis Fukuyama so rashly suggested was the posthistorical world, in the form of conflicts sparked and sustained by ancient and incomprehensible hatreds and bloodlusts. To many analysts, class conflict is passé; the “proxy wars” of the Cold War era can, by definition, no longer occur; and even realpolitik, with rational states pursuing their clearly defined interests, seems dated. Ethnicity, it seems, is the new, dominant causality.
Of course, one of the problems of looking at the future is that the future is never quite what it used to be. There is no doubt that in some parts of the world contemporary civil conflict has an ethnic cast to it. The question is how pervasive that cast is, and whether it is possible to both recognize and look beyond ethnicity to other forms of violent confrontation in our world.
After nearly six years of appearing unable to make up its mind about what position to take on the former Yugoslavia, and of giving what could be regarded as mixed signals about its intentions, the Clinton administration in December 1998 issued a simple statement of policy for the Balkans that represented a radical break with the past. No longer would the administration waffle about where the stumbling block to a lasting peace lay. It was Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian strongman, who was “the problem” in the Balkans. And the remedy, as James Rubin, the spokesman for the State Department who is also a close confidant of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, added bluntly, was simple and unavoidable: “Democracy in Serbia”—which was commonly taken to mean Milosevic’s departure from power.
President Clinton’s plan to increase Pentagon spending by $112 billion over the next six years has more to do with domestic bud-get politics than it does with global geopolitics. There is no threat to U.S. interests that can possibly justify the largest increase in the Pentagon budget since the Reagan era. Current U.S. arms spending of $276 billion per year is already more than twice as much as the combined military budgets of every conceivable U.S. adversary, including Russia, China, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, Syria, and Cuba. Furthermore, the United States and its closest allies—in NATO, South Korea, and Japan—now account for nearly two-thirds of world military expenditures, a higher proportion of global arms budgets than obtained even at the height of the Reagan buildup.
On January 12, 1999, over a billion dollars fled Brazil. Three days later, the Central Bank attempted to bring about a limited devaluation of the Brazilian currency, the real, but it failed to prevent a free fall. Over the next two days, another $3 billion was pulled out, and by the end of the month, the real had lost over 40 percent of its value. The Central Bank president resigned, his successor lasted a week, and as speculative attacks continued, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in some desperation, sought out one of international financier George Soros’s closest associates, Arminio Fraga, for the job. Fraga used to manage a fund that took bets on macroeconomic changes, such as currency devaluations in places like Brazil. It was, as the Brazilian press pointed out, a case of putting the fox among the chickens.
The outlook for 1999 is grim. Brazil is facing a deep recession and a return of inflation; continuing volatility in the value of its currency; a political cat fight over fiscal reform legislation in Congress; acute stress in the relationship between the federal government and the states; the risk of defaults on state and federal government debt as well as in the private sector; and astronomic and unsustainable interest rates.
Secrets and lies have always been endemic to the functions of the state. In a democracy, public tolerance of official secrecy tends to shift with the tides: in times of national emergency, such as war or civil unrest, the body politic is often willing to forgo open governance in exchange for safety; in peace, the citizenry becomes assertive once again, reclaiming its right to full and informed participation.
During the long, dark winter of America’s Cold War, this traditional compact between the governors and the governed fell apart. A system of secrecy first devised in the crucible of the Second World War was not dismantled after the troops came home. It took root and grew, reaching beyond the corridors of power in Washington to taint government operations across the country and around the globe. It served to hide not only the individual misdeeds and misadventures of successive administrations but also the rationale behind them. Presidents, policymakers, and legislators used the advent of the national security state as an excuse for their new evasiveness. They assumed they could abrogate the people’s “right to know” without prior consultation—just as if the United States were engaged in an open armed conflict and American citizens would simply accept this curtailment as the price of victory. They were right, to a degree. Fearful of the prospects of a nuclear face-off, Americans allowed their freedoms to be eroded, along with the presumption of openness they had once taken for granted. As a result, secrecy spread its shadow over the crafting of foreign policy, the building of weapons, the birth of entire government agencies, the spending of federal funds, and, inevitably, the play of public debate.
Reflections
The American Century. These three words surely constitute one of the best-known expressions of modern international history. The phrase was first coined by the highly successful American publisher, Henry Luce, as the title for an article he wrote in a February 1941 edition of his own LIFE magazine. Composed months before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, it was an amazingly confident prescription for the era to come. “American experience,” exulted Luce in his article, “is the key to the future.... America must be the elder brother of nations in the brotherhood of man.” Given Congress’s desire to avoid war, the still-minuscule American army, and the massive ambitions of other, heavily armed, Great Powers, this was a risky vision to advance.
Yet how much more unlikely must the idea have seemed to foreign observers if it had been advocated 40 years earlier, at the beginning of the century Luce claimed as the “American” century?
Reconsiderations
It is now a year since the historic Good Friday Agreement brought about a settlement to perhaps the most intractable of all modern conflicts: the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, a three-way struggle between Ulster unionists who wished to remain with-in the United Kingdom, Irish republicans who sought by physical means to achieve a united Ireland, and the British state, which, though ostensibly neutral, found itself in the unenviable position of fighting a long (and costly) war to defend a part of the UK it would rather have abandoned many years ago. Over a 25-year period this limited conflict claimed over 3,500 lives, and though small beer by international standards—there was no oil in Ulster, it did not lead to a serious refugee problem, and there was hardly any superpower involvement—it was the one item of British news that was always guaranteed a place in media cover-age abroad, especially in the United States. There the Irish-American community in particular followed events in the North with enormous interest, tinged, it has to be said, with a good deal of nostalgia about the old country and a feeling that however bad Irish republican atrocities happened to be, they were nothing when set alongside the wrongs (both real and imagined) committed by perfidious Albion. You did not have to drink green beer on St. Patrick’s day in Boston or Chicago to hate the “Brits” and cheer on the boys back home.
Reportage
Once more into the breech, this time on another raw winter day whose air is as poisoned with gaseous pollutants as the streets are mined with oily puddles and muddy slush. If Moscow has yet to become Europe’s filthiest city, give it another year or two of Russian capitalism. Within the center, the senses are even more violated than outside the traffic-choked circle of road where once stood the city’s medieval inner walls. (Without irony, that fount of noxious diesel and low-octane gasoline exhaust is still called “the Garden Ring.”) A sign here heralds the existence of a bank within a sagging neo-classical building on teeming Smolensky Boulevard.
A guest of the capital checks it out. Thrusts resolutely through the ubiquitous mass of pedestrians. Pushes hard on the wooden door atop which beckons the sign promising a good exchange rate for the dollar. Sees utterly no evidence of life inside, beyond indications that the elevator’s mechanical one expired years ago, with hopes for economic reform. But perceives a staircase winding up around the derelict lift, its darkness kind enough to conceal whether it’s fully as foul as the streets. Hope to make the needed exchange revives at the top, thanks to a Western Union sign hanging on a door.
However, this stout portal does not budge, and knocks prompt no reply. Oh well, more bruised knuckles, another false hope—but wait, the climber’s stopped with an angry, “We’re serving a client now!” as he turns wearily back toward the stairs. The bark, with its standard overtone of “Get lost, you pain in the ass,” comes from a speaker fixed high on a dirty wall, next to a closed-circuit camera.
When the Hebrew production of “My Fair Lady” was held in Tel Aviv in 1969, the French philosopher Georges Friedmann was dismayed. So tacky! So provincial! he complained. Was that what the revival of the ancient Biblical language was all about? Instead of becoming a “Light unto the Nations,” Israel was providing a poor reflection of the lights of Broadway, using the language of the prophets to recreate an American musical mocking English class divisions. Something more was expected from the Zionist project than a pathetic imitation of American popular culture.
Israel was supposed to be different—an original masterpiece, not a distant echo of ideas produced in New York or London, which is what Tel Aviv, the first Hebrew city turned out to be. The city has become a symbol of a Western-oriented, modern, secular Israel, a “post-Zionist Israel,” to use a term coined by writers and artists who frequent the coffeehouses and bookstores in fashionable Shenkin Street. It describes an ascending ideological trend that is now affecting members of the intellectual class around the country, not unlike the way that Zionism itself was influencing the political debate among the Jewish intelligentsia in Vienna and Warsaw a century ago.
The United Kingdom has the appearance of a politically stable bulwark of the global political economy, with the British famously indifferent to any suggestion of big, unsettling constitutional changes. Of course, there have been some local difficulties in Ireland and occasional stirrings of Celtic nationalism in Scotland and Wales, but as sure as the people of the United Kingdom stand in neat queues and drink tea, it has seemed safe to assume that there would be, forever, something quintessentially, durably British—a state founded upon the rock of such apparently eternal institutions as the mother of all parliaments, a constitutional monarchy, and the pound sterling.
But, suddenly, nothing seems so certain. The creation of new regional legislatures in Scotland and Wales, for which elections are to be held on May 6, will deliver an abrupt jolt to the basic political union that comprises the United Kingdom. In many political salons the discussion is no longer whether the historic unity of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland can continue on its current pattern, but of what is likely to replace it, and when.
Books
Ten years after the end of the Cold War, the paradoxes of American power appear more and more self-evident. The Soviet Union has ceased to exist. Its economy is in free-fall, and the Red Army, which at the very least was the second most powerful military force in the history of warfare, is in shambles, unable even to feed and clothe its recruits adequately or retain its best officers, let alone win brushfire wars in Chechnya, Tajikistan, or Ossetia. In contrast, the United States remains a military and economic colossus.
The U.S. economy, at least for the up-per 50 percent of the population, is booming; there is political absurdity but no political crisis; and what security threats exist to the United States, its allies, and client states, notably from Iraq and North Korea, and from various forms of state-sponsored as well as “freelance” terrorism, are still relatively minor compared to the prospects that haunted military planners and American politicians during the Cold War of either a full-scale land war in Europe or nuclear war. Indeed, it is arguable that the current threats, with the possible exception of terrorism using chemical or biological agents, are sideshows even by comparison to the great Cold War flash points—Vietnam, or the American proxy campaigns in Central America during the 1980s.
But if the Russian Federation has yet to recover from its loss of empire, the United States is uneasy with its own superpower status. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s formulation that the United States is “the indispensable nation” may well be accurate, but it depends, for its veracity, as President Clinton said in his grand jury testimony on the Lewinsky affair, on what you mean by “is.”
“It was all for nothing...nothing had been gained except the misery of others,” was the way Whittaker Chambers summed up his testimony against Alger Hiss. Might the same be said for the Great Fear of the 1950s? All that fury, all that noise, all for nothing but emptiness and pain?
Before the Cold War, the primary function of Soviet espionage in the United States was to serve as a listening post on the wider world, with the greatest attention given to gathering intelligence on the war aims of Japan and Germany. But in the long tradition of Russian espionage services, whose roots go back to Peter the Great, the Soviet spies in the United States did what they could to buy or steal American secrets—scientific, technical, military, and political information—with the help of American agents. They worked in a world of secrecy, ignorance, and fear. The United States and the Soviet Union knew little and understood less of one another before and during the Cold War. The Central Intelligence Agency, founded in 1947, did not have a station in Moscow until the early 1960s; its director in that decade, Richard Helms, now says half jokingly that there were no files on the Soviet Union in the CIA’s early days, that the agency’s analysts were better off doing research at the Library of Congress.
Correspondence
Kosovo—An Exchange: A response by Wallace Sagendorph to Nicholas X. Rizopoulos’ article in the Fall 1998 World Policy Journal.
Coda