Failing the test of realism - Jeffery Simpson [G&M F21]
Janet M Eaton
it encourages anti-American fulminators, but that it fails the test
of logic and realism, and so turns away friends that only 17 months
ago never felt more solidarity with a valued ally.
-- jsim...@globeandmail.ca
fyi-janet
============================================
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030221/C
OSIMP21/National/Idx
Globe and Mail [Toronto]
Failing the test of realism
By JEFFREY SIMPSON
UPDATED AT 1:23 PM EST
Friday, Feb. 21, 2003
Seventeen months ago, in the wake of 9/11, the
world stood with the United States. "We are all Americans now," the
French newspaper Le Monde intoned.
Today, the whole world stands against the United States, or at least
its Iraq policy. Some governments, such as those of Britain,
Australia, Spain, Italy, Poland and others in Eastern Europe, support
the Bush administration, but their publics don't.
Everywhere, sympathy has turned to skepticism, even hostility.
Never has one U.S. administration so rapidly turned the world
against the United States. The result is dangerous for the
Americans in the long term, threatening to the Atlantic alliance and
Middle East stability, and disastrous for our common fight against
al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
The Economist, staunchly pro-American, reported from the Middle
East this week: "Muslims hate his [Osama bin Laden's] methods,
but they agree with the message: Yankee go home."
Canadian expatriate John Burns reported in The New York Times: "Polls
alone don't capture how visceral anti-American feelings have become,
spreading beyond traditional centers of hostility -- mosques and
other strongholds of conservative Islamists, Arab nationalists and
others -- across the spectrum of Arab society."
So much for the Arab world, which hubristic thinkers in the Bush
administration believe can be remade, starting with the conquest of
Iraq. But skepticism and hostility toward U.S. foreign policy are now
everywhere, extending far beyond the usual hard-core anti-Americans
of the Left Bank in Paris or the Annex in Toronto.
The United States is no different from other dominant countries of
every age whose very power produces a mixture of envy and hostility
in others. The huge economic and military gap now separating the U.S.
from the rest of the world can make some countries resent their
relative weakness, and to steer that resentment against the United
States. It can also make others bring their policies into line with
what the U.S. wants, not because they agree in their hearts but
because they fear the force of American displeasure. We see this
dilemma clearly in a front-line state such as Turkey, where everyone
from the simplest peasant to the new government thinks an Iraq
invasion is mad but where the military and political leaders fear
subsequent U.S. unhappiness.
But there's more to how the Bush administration turned the world
against the United States than resentment of the power gap. The
Americans have acted in a high-handed fashion on a variety of issues,
and senior Bush administration officials, notably Defence Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, have said things that could not have been better
scripted to give offence. It may play well in domestic politics, but
presidential speeches before preachers and soldiers, especially if
given in a flak jacket, convey to the rest of the world the image of
an administration that combines the preferences of the warrior with
the convictions of the righteous.
The Bush administration is paying in dwindling international support
for its unilateral, pre-emptive approach to abrogated treaties, trade
protectionism (steel, softwood lumber, the farm bill), the sheer
stupidity of the "axis of evil" formulation and, most obviously, the
tragic attempt to turn the justified "war on terror" into a crusade
against Iraq, a thoroughly nasty regime whose threats to peace could
have been, and still can be, contained by rigorous inspections and
military deterrence.
The world does not buy the link that the Bush administration has made
between Iraq and terror, for the simple reason that this link is thin
at best, non-existent at worst. But the world has seen a buildup of
U.S. might in the Middle East far beyond the needs of political
pressure on Iraq, suggesting that, while diplomacy has taken its
course, the Bush administration wanted war all along.
Now, in that most predictable argument of all, comes Henry Kissinger,
the doyen of the realpolitik school of U.S. foreign policy, to argue
that, having assembled such a force, a great power would be
humiliated not to use it. Did we not hear that argument, and from the
same man, for years after it became clear that the U.S. could not win
in Vietnam, so that U.S. troops stayed there and died in pursuit of
the superpower's "image" in the world?
The greatest danger in the Bush administration's approach is not that
it encourages anti-American fulminators, but that it fails the test
of logic and realism, and so turns away friends that only 17 months
ago never felt more solidarity with a valued ally.
jsim...@globeandmail.ca
© 2003 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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