Posted on 12/06/2002 5:18:18 PM PST by Pokey78
Regrettably, the Romans never conducted a poll of world public opinion during the Roman Imperium. But had they done so, the collective view of the various subjugated and neighbouring tribes might have been summarised: We cant bear those arrogant Romans, with their flashy chariots, aggressive foreign policy and brash modern militarism. We will tweak their snooty Roman noses at every opportunity. On the other hand, we just love that Roman culture and technology: the roads are splendid, the wines delicious and the baths are heaven. We quite like learning to read and write, too. That is also, broadly speaking, the global attitude towards the modern hegemon, the United States, as revealed in a comprehensive survey published this week by the independent Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press. The poll of 38,000 people in 44 countries found that favourable impressions of America have declined sharply in recent months. Unsurprisingly, resentment is most acute in Muslim countries, but in the past 12 months the percentage of respondents with a positive view of America dropped 22 points in Turkey, 17 in Germany, and eight in Britain. Much of the world sees America as vain, aggressive, unheeding, ignorant of world problems and increasingly oblivious to the disparity between rich and poor. Majorities in almost every country say they resent the spread of US influence, yet most also admired its culture and technology. Outside Muslim countries, the superpower is seen with a profound ambivalence. More than half of all Canadians, for example, believe the spread of American culture is bad, but three-quarters simultaneously approve of American films, music and television. Enthusiasm for America is declining worldwide, but given that the US is preparing for a war opposed by majorities in every country save Britain (where opinion is evenly split, according to this poll) it is still remarkably popular: in 35 out of the 42 countries surveyed, a majority still approves of the US. Salman Rushdie recently argued that America is facing an ideological enemy that may be harder to defeat than militant Islam: that is to say anti-Americanism, which is taking the world by storm. This poll, however, suggests a more complex and contradictory picture, in which anti-Americanism is fuelled by resentment of Washingtons foreign policy but offset by deep reserves of goodwill, emulation and envy. There is a residual Neo-Marxist train of thought which holds that anti-Americanism in general, and the attack on the World Trade Centre in particular, herald the beginning of the end of global capitalism, part of an ineluctable process in which the oppressed countries will rise and overthrow the capitalist behemoth. The most powerful objection to this thesis, as Lee Harris points out in a recent article for Policy Review, is that it relies largely on wishful thinking, the unscientific utopianism that Marx himself so vigorously eschewed. Classical Marxism holds that the workers eventually inevitably overthrow their capitalist oppressors. In the latter half of the 20th century, as it became apparent the proletariat within capitalist societies were getting steadily richer and more placid, this was adapted to argue that the true conflict was between American capitalism and the rest of the world. In Harriss words: Both the workers and the capitalists of the advanced countries became the oppressor class, while it was the general population of the less advanced countries that became the oppressed. So are September 11 and the new anti-Americanism evidence of a global revolt against American capitalism? Hardly. The World Trade Centre attacks did not undermine American capitalism but rather increased political unity within it, provoking a more bullish internationalism. The notion that al-Qaedas insane perversion of Islam represents revolution of a kind Marx would have recognised is mere fantasy. Increased America-bashing is not evidence of some economically driven uprising by the poorest countries against the richest one, but a sign that the US is not handling its hegemonic status well. George W. Bushs response to the Pew report was disquietingly trite: Weve never been a nation of conquerors; were a nation of liberators. The President has so far done a mediocre job of demonstrating this to, say, the people of Turkey, where eight out of ten oppose American use of its bases for strikes on Iraq. The most significant finding of the survey was that across the world few people are concerned by the existence of only one superpower, but many feel that the power is not being used to address world problems, or even to listen to them. Global respect and resentment of America are equally strongly reflected in the numbers, and the link between them is great but unmet expectations. The US has ridden out waves of global antipathy before in the 1940s the French National Assembly voted to ban Coca-Cola entirely, and anti-Americanism was rather more extreme during the Vietnam War than it is now. It will ride this one too, particularly if Washington continues to seek global co-operation rather than the brittle, take-it-or-leave-it attitude that characterised the first phase of the War on Terror. Hegemony, from the Greek word for leadership, is the ascendancy of one power within a league. The Greeks and Romans knew that power lay in balancing resentment and respect in a wider world, and Virgil and Horace were among the worlds first, great spin-doctors, selling Roman leadership far beyond Rome. So massive was the effort to found the Roman nation, wrote Virgil. Americas growing unpopularity will be stopped and reversed when a greater effort is made to persuade the worlds myriad Coca-Cola drinkers that the Pax Americana, for all its flaws, is still the best pax around.
L
That's why Number One is Number One and everyone else is everyone else.
Trust me, if the USSR had won the cold war, there would be absolute silence about europes new master.
They've been reading too much American press.
I am giving a good deal of thought to what might constitute a program of deliberate, stepped disengagement from first world policing, then world economy. Not the neo-isolationist theoretical fairyland of certain conservative thinkers, but real, practical steps to effect such a situation and what might be the consequences for various parties should we decide - and this we can certainly accomplish - to return the world to a multipolar Great Power configuration. Whether this would be in the long-term best interests of the United States is a matter of great difficulty (and people having a good opinion of us is not, IMHO, one of those interests); whether it is in the best interest of the world in general is another matter and quite frankly, I'm not sure we have the right to decide that. I'm not sure such a thing as "best interest of the world" even exists.
An interesting mind game for the weekend and beyond. For example, what if we suddenly decided to freeze all operations against Iraq and allow them to proceed with the NBC programs that so many seem curiously unafraid of. (This is, after all, pretty much what the "peace" movement desires insofar as it desires any coherent course of action). In one scenario Tel Aviv goes up in smoke in a year or so, and shortly thereafter in reply so do the capitols of sundry Arabic states as well. Qui bono? Assuming the biologics are restricted to that part of the world the Europeans should probably be more concerned than we, and, of course, the Indians and anyone else downwind. Not us.
I think that Rushdie may be onto something in this. Giving an ungrateful and uncooperative world a taste of Pax Americana may not be worth the very great effort it will entail, and is highly unassured of any success, lasting or otherwise. Doing anything else and not getting killed in the process, there's the rub. I haven't any answers, but I'd bet a year's salary I'm not the only one thinking about it.
I think that Rushdie may be onto something in this. Giving an ungrateful and uncooperative world a taste of Pax Americana may not be worth the very great effort it will entail, and is highly unassured of any success, lasting or otherwise. Doing anything else and not getting killed in the process, there's the rub. I haven't any answers, but I'd bet a year's salary I'm not the only one thinking about it.
You are actually on to something.
Acting as global policeman is not sustainable. I strongly suspect that once Iraq is wrapped up, we will then begin to concentrate on the Pacific while maintaining operational tempo against Al Qaeda in that phase of the war.
The fall of Hussein and the subsequent collapse (in the fullness of time) of the Iranian Theocracy will take much of the wind out of the sails of Arab radicalism. Oil will still flow, of course. It must. They can't eat it; the Arabs will have to sell it at market price, or watch their market share go to a newly confident Russian oil industry.
We will be in a position to adopt a policy of armed neutrality. This is not a return to isolationism, but rather a contraction of the defensive line to the CONUS and the Pacific Theater.
Let's face it; Europe isn't under threat from Russia, and it's not important anymore. Were it not for oil, the Persian Gulf region would be a strategic backwater. That is where it is headed.
Bush's instincts are actually leading this way. He is a strict national interest guy. That's why there is a distaste in the White House for foreign actions such as nation building. Notice that we have leapt to action overseas only because of national security concerns! A bomb that can blow up Tel Aviv can just as easily be detonated in southern Manhattan. That is the whole driving idea behind the Iraq operation-we have to get Saddam before he takes his revenge on us by way of Al Qaeda and its rather talented crew of suicide operatives.
The war on terror will be continued, but once Iraq is off the boards, I don't see another problem coming down the road until the Chicoms decide to get nasty in the Taiwan Strait. Kim Jong Il can be handled: the Chicoms want peace in their northwestern frontier and they don't want to see one trading partner, South Korea, destroyed while another, Japan, instantly resurrects the Imperial Japanese Navy (a fleet that is far more powerful than is generally imagined).
Eventually, some farsighted politician will come along and make a grand bargain with the American people: a "new citizenship" based on national service for a period of years, followed by duty in the reserves, in return for very focused and very resolute concentration on "vital national interest" (defense of the Homeland and the Western Hemisphere, Britain and the other ECHELON powers-Aussie, Canuckland, and New Zealand). In other words: we trade the National Greatness Conservatives in for something that Buchanan might be more familiar with.
War drove Rome into penury decade after decade. Very few times in its history was Rome in solid financial shape (the Dictatorship of Sulla and, for a time, that of the great Julius, were two periods of calm and prosperity). So it will be with us unless we adopt more of a neutralist, anti-imperialist, but armed foreign policy.
However, there is one thing. We could be the nicest guys on God's good earth, but someday, some Jihadist sumbitches will try to bring the ultimate in sumbitchery, atomic weapons, to one of our cities. We have to gird ourselves for the kind of response that would not only terrify the entire Muslim world in a single stroke, but also would be entirely understood by the Romans.
There comes a time when survival is in question. If it comes down to a choice between Us and Them, Americans will vote for Us.
And it won't be a very happy day for Them.
I wish I were wrong, but I don't think I am.
Be Seeing You,
Chris
God says, "I will bring all nations down to the Valley of Jehoshafat, and there I will judge them all."
yeho/shafat=YHWH judges.
I am considering the "armed neutrality" position, and it seems, of the various options that come to mind, perhaps the most feasible. But it isn't going to be straightforward - most of the world's experience in armed neutrality is in a very different overall power configuration, under much more relative economic and military parity than now. The current imbalance in that regard is unprecedented and laughable; in history it has been present regionally, but in no case has it been present worldwide. When it was present regionally we generally see outright empire, until one of two things happens: an external military/economic influence or a demographic change, either from migration or simple imbalanced population growth from different internal groups. I think Europe may be in danger of experiencing the latter no matter what we do, but that's a side issue.
But armed neutrality is only the U.S. part of the overall problem - what happens to the rest of the world, and how does that effect the U.S.'s ability to maintain its armed neutrality? The EU will collapse if it continues its present social service navel-gazing, and the question then will be what power alignment will result - I suggest that it may be regional powers with relatively little tension between regions. Should we allow a new regional power to express itself extraregionally, perhaps to become a rival? Something like that happened in the Punic Wars. Or is China already approaching that state, unstoppably? Could we keep that from devolving into another bipolar world, quivering under the threat of nuclear annihilation? Been there, done, that...it wasn't so nice.
More later - as I said, I haven't any answers, but I sure appreciate your consideration.
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