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Volume XVI, No 2, Summer 1999
Since the Second World War, the United States has led the effort to develop and support international institutions to grapple with international problems that are difficult for a single government to resolve or that no single country has an interest in solving by itself. These include questions of peace and security, development and growth issues, trade issues, and a host of functional problems in such areas as air safety, telecommunications, and the environment. Until about the mid-1970s, there was no greater champion of these institutions than the United States, which demonstrated its commitment through its financial support of the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and a host of other functional institutions.
In recent years, this postwar tradition has come under attack, primarily from America’s political elite rather than from its ordinary citizens. That elite began to sour on international institutions, which it viewed as dominated by Third World governments, in the 1970s. For in that decade, American policy suffered a number of painful setbacks at the hands of Third World states.
North Vietnam inflicted a military defeat on the United States. The oil-producing states inflicted an economic defeat on the United States with the oil embargo of 1973. And Iran humiliated the United States politically when Iranian students occupied the American embassy in Tehran in November 1979, and the United States could do little in retaliation, its massive military power notwithstanding. The task of the 1980s for many in the political elite was to exorcise these humiliations.
The Reagan administration was therefore able to exploit the political elite’s anger against the Third World, which had built up in response to the setbacks of the 1970s. It succeeded in making the “anti-Americanism” of Third World-dominated institutions a key political issue within the conservative movement in the United States and among policymakers generally. Conservatives were already predisposed to view international institutions with hostility because of the fear that the decisions and actions of these organizations would erode national sovereignty: that faceless foreign bureaucrats would make decisions affecting the American people.
Today, for the first time since the end of the Second World War, one can imagine an American repudiation of the Roosevelt–Truman–Eisenhower legacy of liberal internationalism.
In the geopolitical world of the Cold War, the shrunken Europe of twelve essentially West European member states was a subordinate partner to the United States. In the post-Cold War world, the larger European Union of 15 members, on track to become 21 and eventually 26 members including the Baltic states, has become in effect the equal to the United States. Its new single currency, the euro, is likely to take its place alongside the dollar, in an effective duopoly of money that reflects the fact that the EU and the United States between them account for almost half the world’s wealth, almost two-thirds of its trade, and almost three-quarters of its investment.
In the final year of the millennium, which saw the birth of this enlarging Europe’s new single currency, three parallel events took place that accelerated, and indeed required, the development of a common European foreign policy. These were: the ratification of the Amsterdam Treaty, which committed the EU members to establish mechanisms and staff to develop such a foreign policy; the formal enlargement of the NATO alliance to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, which finally ended the Cold War division of Europe; and NATO’s approval of a “separable but not separate” European Security and Defense Identity. This gave American blessing to the use of NATO assets by the European powers in operations that do not require the hitherto essential presence of U.S. forces.
These various developments unfolded in a context of potential crisis, with European leaders uncomfortably aware that they inhabited a perilous neighborhood.
Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the war currently raging in Kosovo, Western perceptions of Russian security issues have changed remarkably little in the last decade. In our mental maps, Russia is commonly at the center of “concentric rings”—the “Near Abroad,” which we basically leave to Russia (albeit with a bad conscience); buffer zones—which Russia contests; and the rest of the world—in which Russia has no business. Such an approach is glamorized encirclement. It coexists with, and indeed feeds on, our other unacknowledged image of Russia as the “eternal periphery”—on the edge of Europe, on the edge of Asia: a presence to be fended off or balanced against and, at most, a troublesome poor relation in any “family” approach to regional affairs.
The Cold War balance of power was a straightforward issue of East versus West. Containment worked because international security was an “either/or” question—either you were in the Western camp, or you were not. This was not simply a battle over Europe, but the underlying strategy for dealing with Communists everywhere—in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Cuba. To maintain security, it was imperative to identify and combat Soviet influence in every corner of the globe.
The Cold War is over. But this has not laid to rest perceptions of Russia as the “other,” or to categorizing Russian behavior on the basis of a West-determined scale.
Shaping A World Order
If pollsters measured the pulse of world politics as they do domestic politics, they would conclude that the world has gotten seriously off track over the course of the post-Cold War world. Eight years ago, an American-led international coalition had just evicted Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, establishing what many believed would be the basis for a new system of collective security headed up by Washington. In Moscow, Boris Yeltsin had prevailed over old-guard Communists, ushering in a new era of democracy and free enterprise in which Russia would become a peaceful extension of the West. Potential great powers from Brazil to South Africa to China had either renounced the nuclear option or had subordinated their great power ambitions to the new logic of geoeconomics. And, despite a world economic slowdown, a new consensus had formed around a neoliberal agenda of deregulation, privatization, and export-led growth that would bring prosperity to developing economies as well as the developed world. Democracy would follow if not accompany neoliberal economic reforms, as countries realized they had no choice but to open up, politically as well as economically, or stagnate.
These were the pillars by which first the Bush administration and then the Clinton administration had sought to erect an American world order: American-led and directed collective security; an obedient and democratic Russia as a peaceful adjunct to the West; the denuclearization of great power politics; and neoliberalism as the guiding political and economic model of world development. Underpinning these pillars would be the foundation of American power and leadership, the base of which rested on American dominance, not just militarily and economically but culturally and politically as well.
One by one, over the course of the past decade, these would-be pillars of world order have tottered or have proven hollow.
In October 1974, exactly a year after Egypt’s stunning military achievements in the Yom Kippur War, a vast crowd of fellaheen had been assembled beneath the balconies of President Anwar Sadat’s palace in Cairo to celebrate the anniversary of the Egyptian soldiers’ triumph. The ordinary people of Egypt, however, had a different agenda. While acknowledging the success of Egypt’s president and his armies, the rhythmic chant that went up from the crowd stressed the true priorities of the slum dwellers and subsistence farmers of the Nile Valley. “Hero of the Crossing,” they asked, “where is our breakfast?” It is a potent reminder that military success, however glorious, rarely addresses the core concerns of a society. The American public is not much given to mass public displays of emotion unless sports or religion are involved. However, if they were so minded they might, on each anniversary of the coalition victory in the Gulf War, stand before the Pentagon, asking, “Heroes of the Brilliant Turning Maneuver in the Kuwaiti Desert, where is our security?”
At the time, the sweeping allied coalition victory over Iraq was hailed as a textbook example of the triumph of Western military power over a Soviet-equipped and -trained army. An Iraqi force that furthermore had remained closely wedded to traditional Warsaw Pact strategic and tactical doctrines. Well, it was. But the war was an anomaly. The victory was a useful confidence booster for a NATO alliance that for 50 years had struggled with an inferiority complex with regard to the Warsaw Pact’s conventional military power. The West at last got a chance to show that its training, doctrine, equipment, and personnel would have been superior to those of its old adversary. However, by the time the Gulf War took place, half of its longtime opposition, in the shape of Eastern Europe, was already clamoring to join NATO. In addition, its main protagonist, the Soviet Union, was so busy imploding that its once vaunted military machine found it a stretch to undertake a halfhearted pacification campaign in the rebel province of Chechnya. What truly seemed important, beyond the small matter of liberating Kuwait and protecting Persian Gulf oil supplies, was that the Western model of war worked.
Yet the Gulf War was not the first battle of the post-Cold War world. Instead, it was the last gasp of already anachronistic military machines. Few useful lessons can be drawn from its outcome. The West will wait a long time for a demon as obligingly inept in his military affairs as Saddam Hussein. It would be an unfortunate error to use this victory as a paradigm for planning and assessing the types and levels of military power the United States, its allies, and other interested bystanders will require to face the security challenges of the twenty-first century. If it is not to be the tank armies of the Fulda Gap or the air power that defeated the Republican Guards that we are to look to for peace of mind in an unfriendly, rapacious, and more than a little envious world, what are the alternatives?
Cold War habits die hard. After almost half a century of polarizing conflict with the Soviet bloc, many Americans could not believe their good fortune when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and Communist parties lost their grip on power throughout the former Soviet empire, including even the Russian heartland. In Asia, however, the Cold War paradigm eroded less dramatically, more gradually, but also less definitively. The beginning of the end of the Cold War in much of East Asia may be dated to 1971–72, when President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor, initiated their dÈtente with a China still in the throes of the chaotic Cultural Revolution. This was indeed a dramatic beginning. Since then there has been impressive progress toward peaceful and liberal international relations throughout Asia. However, as compared with Europe, there has not been a similarly dramatic or obvious demise of the Cold War in Asia. Suspicions linger. Communist parties maintain a monopoly of power in China, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. Major obstacles to free international trade and investment remain. Threats to use military force have diminished, but they have not disappeared. Some even see China ultimately replacing the Soviet Union as the superpower adversary of the United States and its allies, perhaps giving rise to a new cold war.
Such Cold War habits of thought obscure the profound changes in the world that make any recurrence of a Cold War-type global polarization most unlikely. During the last couple of decades many Asian countries, but most notably China, have been transformed from inward-looking, protectionist economies to global trading nations. This process enmeshed Asian interests in the broader success of global capitalism, international cooperation, and peace.
Reconsiderations
When the Indian prime minister A. B. Vajpayee sought to justify his country’s nuclear tests last year in a personal letter to President Clinton, he must have appreciated that a truthful account of his government’s motivation would hardly suit his purpose. Acquisition of nuclear weaponry had long been a dream of the Hindu nationalist party (now the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP) that Vajpayee leads, was proclaimed as an aim in its political platform soon after India achieved independence, and was put into effect as soon as possible after it won power. Impatience, even contempt, with India’s pretensions to extend Gandhian nonviolence into the international sphere had from the beginning marked the BJP’s approach, and the nuclear tests in 1998 were seen as the only appropriate demonstration of the emergence of Hindu India as a great power. But a less assertive and more emollient explanation than that was clearly called for if Washington’s indignation about the tests was to be assuaged.
Therefore Vajpayee had recourse to an old fiction, almost a fable perhaps in that he probably believed in its essential truth. He cited China’s “armed aggression against India in 1962” and the unresolved Sino-Indian border dispute as justification for the tests, presenting them as essential to meet the threat to India’s security posed by China’s nuclear weapons. The prime minister’s letter was not intended for publication, but the “threat from China” was the essence of the Indian government’s orchestrated and prearranged public justification for its nuclear tests.
The myth that the 1962 border war resulted from an unprovoked surprise attack by an expansionist China has been cherished ever since by India’s political class as explaining the humiliating military defeat their country suffered. That the Indian account of the dispute was almost universally accepted outside India at the time, and even now enjoys some international credence, will have encouraged Prime Minister Vajpayee to try it out again on the Clinton administration. But the truth of the Sino-Indian dispute and the border war that climaxed—but did not resolve—it is precisely the opposite. It was India that created the dispute, India that refused to submit it to the normal process of boundary negotiation, and India that confronted China with a sustained military challenge which finally allowed Beijing only one possible response: a preemptive counteroffensive.
Reflections
“I live as a novelist marked by the deep wounds of Japan’s ambiguity,” Kenzaburo Oe told the Swedish Academy in accepting the 1994 Nobel Prize in literature.1 He depicted how Japan’s ambiguity casts a dark shadow over the country’s achievements in the modern era, and how it traps the intellectual class, a trap from which no modern Japanese intellectual has been able to escape.
This ambiguity, Oe explained, began 120 years ago, when Japan opened itself to the world, bringing to an end more than two centuries of seclusion, and embarked on a frenzied program of modernization. To this day, long after Japan became a modern economy, this ambiguity wields tremendous power and continues to tear the country and its people apart. In the international realm, Oe fears, Japan’s ambiguity means isolation and the inability to relate to the rest of the world:
Japan’s modernization took place using the West as model. But Japan is situated in Asia, and the Japanese have sought to preserve their traditional culture. On the one hand, this ambiguous path pushed the country and its people into the role of aggressors in Asia. On the other hand, Japanese culture, which is supposed to have become completely open toward the West, remains obscure, if not incomprehensible, to the West. Furthermore, this ambiguity has led to Japan’s political, social, and cultural isolation in Asia.2Oe is expressing an enduring theme in the history of modern Japanese thought (Nihon shiso-shi), which saw its beginning with the country’s opening to the world. The primary goal of Japanese thought has been to establish a national identity in an alien world. Torn between the idealized poles of the West and Asia, the Japanese intellectual search for identity has been an elusive affair. Because the search has been framed between two imagined extremes, there is no way to reconcile the two; thus any definition of Japan can only be paradoxical.
The crisis in Kosovo and NATO’s aerial campaign against Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian forces have once again put foreign affairs in the headlines. Although the investigation, impeachment, and trial of President Clinton may have dominated the news throughout much of 1998 and early 1999, the issues that make up international relations and foreign affairs were never far from sight during those tumultuous months. From time to time, some of those issues even became the lead story on the evening news and in the morning papers. The president’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky had to share headlines with the Brazilian economic crisis, nuclear weapons tests by India and Pakistan, monetary union in Western Europe, and Saddam Hussein’s challenge to the United States and U.N. weapons inspectors. The American public may not always be as interested in these and other international issues as it is in matters closer to home, but if filmmaking and filmgoing are an accurate barometer of such things, foreign affairs—at least when seen in the context of “the good war”—are still good box office.
Supporting evidence may be found in the fact that Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, two films recalling the price of American victory in the Second World War, were among the best picture nominees for Academy Awards in 1999. Moreover, Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog enjoyed unanticipated notoriety in 1998, when President Clinton ordered attacks on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan and Sudan at a critical juncture in the special prosecutor’s investigation of presidential wrongdoing. Critics and public alike were quick to spot a parallel between Clinton’s action and the film’s plot, in which White House and Hollywood spinmasters create a phony war to divert public attention from a presidential sex scandal.
The depth of public knowledge of world politics and foreign policy issues may leave something to be desired. But in view of the moviegoing habits of the public, it is at least arguable that films can enhance our understanding of international relations, both past and present.
Books
Benito Mussolini is one of those major historical figures who will invariably be reevaluated by each passing generation, often in service to the political needs of the present. Glorified during his lifetime as the infallible leader, Il Duce, Mussolini was vilified after his death by a generation of Italians who needed to distance themselves from fascism.
A gradual revisionism began during the 1970s, as historians acknowledged Mussolini’s genuine popularity in Italy before the disaster of the Second World War. Now that the Cold War is over, Italy’s neo-fascist party, which has tried to shed its ideological baggage, has been admitted into the political mainstream. As a result, the biographical treatment of Mussolini continues to assume signal political importance.
If each generation gets the Mussolini it deserves, we must ask what we have done to warrant Jasper Ridley’s Mussolini, published late last year.
Correspondence
Coda