Posted on 03/21/2002 9:11:10 AM PST by vannrox
Will Hutton 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. 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. 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. 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 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
Sunday February 17, 2002
The Observer
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 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.
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.
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.
Ahhh, we can dream, can't we?
Strangely, I agree with his central premise (but not most of the article). Britain DOES need to decide whether its future resides with the euroweenies, or with the Americans.
Wow what a choice. Hard decision. Either be a New World Order Pussy like France, or side with the only country on earth that will risk its own neck for Britain!
There's that dead horse again...sheesh. I thought the european talking points would be slightly different.
Idiot!!! Maybe the author of this article forgot (or else is as ignorant of history as anything else), but we did fly to the moon.
Reading this, you get the idea that the USA just started attacking people entirely at random.
Got a problem with that?????
Naive: A person who believes that the world is safe with Saddom on the loose.
Unilateral: A country who would pull it's troops out of the Korean Peninsula and Bosnia.
It's great to see liberals on the run accross the pond. Thanks to the internet and cable news, liberals are in trouble, even in Europe. This ones gabbing for something in desperation.
It certainly does remain the same good America and the European left remains the same stupid, wilfully ignorant Ostrich that ignored the rise of the Nazis, lauded the rise of Socialism/Communism and now wants to ignore the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and Middle Eastern tyrants. The European Axis of Ignorance and Apathy grows stronger every day.
No. It's called nipping the tyrant in the bud, something which the Europeans still haven't leaned almost 50 years after Hitler.
$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
Or maybe we've come to the conclusion that throwing money at countries who wallow in corruption is a colossal waste.
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