18 Mar 2002 @ 13:29, by Julie Solheim-Roe
My friend Palden Jenkins forwarded me the following article from the UK Observer, along with his comments on 2/20... but it is as timely as the increasingly serious political situation of the world continues to warrant! Palden is a very good metaphysical historian!
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Here is an article from the UK Observer, with which I generally agree, written by Will Hutton, a notable commentator in UK. However, I have reservations about the article too, which I have included lower down. My own response was initially written to a British friend living in USA.
Palden
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TIME TO STOP BEING AMERICA'S LAP-DOG
Tony Blair is faced with a stark choice - either to ally himself to the increasingly conservative and intolerant US or be a fully engaged European
Observer Worldview
The Europe pages - Observer special
Will Hutton
Sunday February 17, 2002
The Observer
The most important political story of our time is the rise of the American Right and the near collapse of American liberalism. This has transformed the political and cultural geography of the United States and now it is set to transform the political and cultural geography of the West. Britain's reflex reactions to an ally with whom we apparently share so much and which has served us well are going to be tested as never before.
The signals are all around. It takes extraordinary circumstances to produce the kind of warnings voiced over the last week by Chris Patten, EU commissioner for external affairs and former chairman of the Conservative Party, but these circumstances are extraordinary. Patten has damned the emerging US reliance on its fantastic military superiority over all other nations to pursue what it wants as it wants as an 'absolutist and simplistic' approach to the rest of the world that is ultimately self-defeating. It is also intellectually and morally wrong. He is the first ranking British politician to state so boldly what has been a commonplace in France and Germany for weeks.
The most obvious flashpoint is the weight of evidence that after Afghanistan George Bush intends a massive military intervention to topple Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Dangerous dictator he may be, but the unilateral decision to declare war upon another state without a casus belli other than suspicion will upset the fabric of law on which international relations rests, as well as destabilising the Middle East.
American loyalists shrug their shoulders; Tony Blair is reported to have said privately that 'if we can get rid of Baghdad, we should', a devastatingly naive remark which so far stands uncorrected. This is the traditional British view that insists we stick close to the US. It remains the same good America that has been on the right side of the great conflicts of the last 100 years; worthwhile allies put up with the bad decisions as well as the good.
But it's not the same good America. The postwar US that reconstructed Europe and led an international liberal economic and social order has disappeared completely. Its former leaders would no more volunteer the scale of defence spending now contemplated in the US - a 12 per cent, $48 billion increase on an already stunning military budget - while offering the less developed countries close to nothing in increased aid flows, debt relief and market access than fly to the Moon. Yet Bush has only agreed to attend next month's crucial UN conference in Monterey on global governance and Third World development strategies if it is understood that the question of money is not to be raised.
It is this essential stance, along with the tearing down of international weapons treaties and last week's feeble move on global warming that tells us how profoundly conservative the US has become. Unilateralism, as Patten argues, is not in itself ignoble - states pursue their self-interests - but US unilateralism is uncompromisingly absolutist because it is ideological, which is what it makes so dangerous.
American conservatism, following the teaching of the influential conservative American political philosopher Leo Strauss, unites patriotism, unilateralism, the celebration of inequality and the right of a moral élite to rule into a single unifying ideology. As Professor Shadia Drury describes in Leo Strauss and the American Right (St Martin's Press), Strauss's core idea that just states must be run by moral, religious, patriotic individuals and that income redistribution, multilateralism and any restraint on individual liberty are mortal enemies of the development of such just élites is the most influential of our times.
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of state for defence pushing for an early invasion of Iraq, is a Straussian. So is John Ashcroft, the attorney-general, who has legislated for military tribunals both to try and execute suspected terrorists beyond the rule of law. Straussians build up the military capacity of the nation while invoking the Bible and the flag. This is not prejudice; this is a coherent ideological position.
The emergence of the largely reactionary south and west of the US as its new economic and political centres of gravity; the weakness of its rules on campaign finance which allow rich, usually conservative, candidates to buy elections; the inability of American liberals to fight back; the embrace of Straussian ideas, laced with traditional anti-tax, free-market nostrums - these ingredients make a deadly cocktail.
They have transformed American politics, so that even an essentially progressive President like Clinton found himself behaving, as he acknowledged, like an Eisenhower Republican, while being the object of a co-ordinated conservative conspiracy in first the Whitewater investigations and later the Starr inquiry. The Supreme Court's suspension of the Florida recount in December 2000, to gift the presidency to Bush, is part of the same story.
This destructive conservatism is contested fiercely, especially on the liberal, internationalist seaboards. Many good Americans are as bewildered by their current leaders and ideas as we are. But they are not in control. What the world has to deal with is not just the Bush administration, but the internal forces that put it there and will continue to constrain the US even without it. Iraq, the continuing defence build-up, disdain for international law and total uninterest in the 'soft' aspects of security - aid, trade, health, education and debt - are now givens in US policy.
Before this challenge, Britain, in its own self-interest, has to play the same balance-of-power politics it used to do in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. That means siding with the EU and no longer being US conservatism's lapdog. We cannot, for example, be part of the US national missile defence system if its purpose is to destroy the fabric of international law or join America's war against Iraq.
Mr Blair should beware. Trying to be both pro-European and pro-American will no longer work. There is a choice and, if he does not make it, ultimately it will wreck his premiership. In an era of globalisation, it is international affairs that determine the fate of governments, because party Whips cannot contain the consequent passions. The Tories broke over Europe. Labour will break over too-slavish fealty to this US. This is the new political drama.
Watch out.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
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My response.....
Hello Livvi
Yes, indeed, I agree with Will Hutton's general logic. But he's omitting to point out one thing. It concerns the 'internal forces' Hutton mentions - except those in Europe, which are to some extent allied with the liberal 'internal forces' within US politics. Blair and UK are playing a geopolitical game which is actually pro-European - and a ruse too. Europe has little foothold in USA nowadays, since the fall of Clinton. To some extent, the collapse of liberal internationalists in USA makes Europe the main balancing or complementary force to Bush & Co. UK still has a small foothold in US thinking.
So what's the strategy over here in Europe? - play a double game! Get Blair to act friendly, as if an ally with a half-decent army, and then get Patten and the Germans/French to act critically. Blair and Patten might come from different political parties, but they're in the same geopolitical camp! This double game acts as a strategic brake on USA which Europe cannot achieve without UK - so UK, looking as if it is acting unilaterally and dissonantly within Europe when in fact it has full European geo-strategic support, plays friend while also playing a hidden background agenda. Give them troops and support to soften up the Yanks, while keeping the ace cards hidden. This is a wise though high-risk strategy, given that the current US administration is impervious to sense or foreign influence. And given that Europe is not yet ready to act as a full counter-weight to US world strategy - and that a split between Europe and USA is a very big and dangerous question, both militarily and economically, for the whole world. It would split the 'developed world' and, in effect, weaken the global 'North-South divide' which has grown so much since the 1980s and now needs to end.
Meanwhile, Europe is working a different game with relation to the 'rest of the world', chipping away at carving a new 21st C world consensus which, eventually, will show USA to be alone and isolated. This consensus excludes superpower-politics - it concerns global inter-bloc cooperation and an increased balance of power in the world. Isolation of USA is a risky strategy, though mostly initiated by USA. This new world consensus is a sensitive and hardly-formed matter at this stage - coalescing mainly around the Kyoto accords, but taking shape in many other areas too. In this situation, simplistic and partisan positions such as that of USA are very destructive, creating a risk of undermining the nascent global process. So it needs to be step-by-step and easy-does-it. (One small factor is that USA currently holds the UN hostage - and a move of the UN HQ out of USA is almost inevitable, though where to? Most of the answer to this is to make UN increasingly networked and decentralised.)
In this context, Blair's strategy (European 'internal forces' are influential here) is entirely pro-European, appearing to act independently of Europe by using the 'special relationship' as a lever to maintain some influence in USA - for now. This strategy was decided in 2000 amongst European 'internal forces' when the US election debacle/fix took place, and it was confirmed by 9/11. Looked at in this light, the UK strategy, though high-risk, makes more sense. It isn't just Blair behind this - it's a major and multilateral European strategy. Another sign of the same strategy was the meeting of the WEF in NYC recently - since WEF is the baby of those European/globalist 'internal forces'. And the Monterey meeting, without USA, will also be poignant, being on USA's doorstep.
What USA doesn't realise is that, by empowering itself to meddle in other countries' affairs, it also unwittingly empowers other countries to meddle in its own affairs. Unilateralism is not a viable proposition longterm, whether or not God is on your side, and whether or not detractors are evil.
Palden
Glastonbury, England
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