Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (6 page)

In particular, you are free as far as your other religion is concerned. Despite fears to the contrary, the founding insistence on the separation of church and state was a stroke of genius for ensuring the vigor and power of the churches. While established churches in Europe became entwined and synonymous with aristocracies and authoritarian governments and began gradually to die, the independent churches of America thrived. Tocqueville noted in the 1830
s
that Americans were the most religious of people, and that has remained true to this day. On any given weekend, more than half of all Americans will attend a place of worship, as compared with 10-20 percent in most European countries and Canada. In this regard, America is more like the Muslim societies.

The tone of religious life in the United States has always been set by the Protestant sects, which emphasize an individual and personal relationship with God and thus promote strict adherence to a moral code established directly between man and God. The result has been a strong strain of moralism running through American history and particularly through the American view of other nations.

The combination of this religiosity with the anything goes spirit of equal opportunity has produced mixed results. The most dramatic and powerful has been the flowering of talent that has produced America’s great wealth and its leadership in technology, medicine, the arts, and university education. Not only does America have the highest standard of living in the world and the overwhelming majority of the world’s richest people, it is also by far the leader in charitable giving. Great universities such as Stanford, Harvard and Yale owe their existence to the generosity of philanthropists. Andrew Carnegie, who proclaimed that ‘the man who dies rich dies disgraced,’ lived up to his words. Americans with a personal fortune of $10 million give away about 9 percent annually, and the average American gives to church and charity more than 2.2 percent of his or her income. Altogether, U.S. contributions make up about 1 percent of national income compared with about a half percent for Europe and less elsewhere.
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Part of the reason for this, and for the success of equal opportunity, has been a steady improvement in social justice over the years. Although it lasted for a long time, the contradiction of a religious people dedicated to the proposition of equality, while practicing racial discrimination, ultimately could not be maintained. Not only has it been resolved by a slow cessation of discriminatory practices (a process that is still working itself to completion), but this resolution has occurred largely non-violently, because the morality of Americans can’t, in the end, accept brutality.

On the other hand, a good mythology can cover a multitude of sins. It is an interesting contradiction that a country whose religious views have circumscribed abortion makes frequent use of the death penalty. This mystery highlights other peculiar aspects of U.S. society. More than fifteen thousand people are murdered in the United States each year – far more per capita than in any other industrialized country and a rate that may or may not be related to the fact that the U.S. civilian populace is armed to the teeth.
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American jails are also fuller than those of any other major country. Nearly one in every eight American men has been convicted of a felony, and one in twenty has been in jail (for black men the ratio is one in five).
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With 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. accounts for about a fourth of the world’s prisoners.
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The economic contradictions are equally striking. The gap between rich and poor in the U.S. is very large for such a wealthy country. In 1998, for example, about one in eight Americans was living below the poverty line, and about 20 percent of them were children – in each case about double the figure found in Western Europe.
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The lack of a national health plan means that more than 40 million Americans lack health insurance. At the same time, the rich are doing outstandingly well: The top 1 percent of American households have accumulated more wealth than the entire bottom 95 percent. In this, too, America leads the developed world. Interestingly, none of this seems to make its citizens terribly unhappy. The myth of equal opportunity is so powerful that Americans don’t scheme how to bring the rich down; instead, they focus on how they can get rich, themselves.

So when American leaders speak of enlarging the realm of freedom, what does this mean for the outer reaches of the empire?

The American creed is inherently generous. To the extent that they think about it, Americans want opportunity not only for themselves but for the world. Unfortunately, Americans don’t think too much about the world because they see themselves as the only world that matters. It was no accident that during the Vietnam War, soldiers would talk about going home as ‘going back to the world.’ Americans, in general, don’t learn foreign languages (U.S. universities graduated nine Arabic speakers in 2002)
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or travel abroad, and most couldn’t find the ‘Axis of Evil’ countries (Iraq, Iran, North Korea) on the map. America is where the opportunity, the new ideas, and the stars of whatever profession are, and anything outside is marginal almost by definition. An important aspect of the American empire is that because Americans don’t see it as such, few look at the totality or thinking about where it is going and what it needs, and certainly no one is in charge. This inattention creates neglect and incoherent, often contradictory policy initiatives.

Indonesia, for instance, is not only the world’s largest Muslim country but also one of the few Muslim countries with a secular, democratic if fledgling government. When I met with its leaders in the summer of 2002, they were desperately trying to create the basic structures of democracy – things like a constitution, town councils, non-military police forces, and independent judges and magistrates. Some of the top Indonesian officials pleaded for American assistance, and U.S. Ambassador Ralph L. Boyce did his best to respond. But since the Cold War, U.S. diplomatic representation in Indonesia had been cut by more than 50 percent, and Boyce was severely limited in what he could do.

Nor is this true only of Indonesia. The
New York Times
reported in July 2002 that U.S. diplomatic posts in countries ranging from Saudi Arabia, to China, Russia, and Pakistan are severely understaffed.
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A few months earlier, the
Times
had reported the rapid growth in Pakistan of fundamentalist Islamic Madrassas (schools) that are filling the void left by the collapse of the government’s budget. Canada, in response, was foregoing – as the U.S. was not – repayment of its loans to the Pakistani government in exchange for spending on education.
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Another
Times
story in July 2002 reported that the United States had withheld $34 million in funds designated for the U.N Population Fund because of fear that the money might help the Chinese government implement its programs of coercive abortion.
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Never mind that only $3 million would have been spent in China, or that its purpose was specifically to counter coercive abortion by demonstrating the effectiveness of voluntary family planning. Nevermind that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was simultaneously announcing cooperative programs with the same Chinese Health Ministry being denied the population funds. The denial of funds to the UN still makes no sense except as political grandstanding. As the American writer Gary Wills has asked, ‘How can we tell other countries they can’t have abortion counseling when it is legal here?’
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We can and do because in the United States abortion is an issue freighted with religious significance, and we see all these other countries as America wannabes. Other than in that light, nobody thinks about them very much.

Unless, of course, something gets in the way of opportunity or something nasty occurs. Either one inevitably draws a focused response. In the event of a blockage of opportunity the response may be one of overwhelming pressure. In the mid-1990
s
, for example, massive illegal copying of Microsoft Windows software in China was killing Microsoft’s business there and elsewhere. The same U.S. government that cut diplomatic representation in Indonesia in half, and didn’t care a fig about the state of schools in Pakistan, pulled out all the stops and got the Chinese government to crack down hard on the pirates. I know, because I was an advisor to the U.S. government at the time. In the case of something nasty, the response may be much more deadly.

Samuel Huntington has pointed out that the American creed and identity have been largely developed in opposition to an undesirable ‘other,’ which is always defined as liberty’s opponents.
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Initially, the other was the aristocratic oppression of Britain and then, more broadly, of feudal, monarchic, imperialistic Europe. Later, the United States metamorphosed into the leader of the European-American civilization against threats to that civilization from imperial Germany, Nazism, fascism, and Japanese militarism. Afterward, the U.S. defined itself as leader of the free world against the Soviet Union and world communism. In each instance, the effect of America’s religiosity has been to make the contest a moral crusade. Because Americans are expected to act in accord with their conscience, they find it difficult to support what seems an unjust war, or one fought for mundane or self-interested reasons. To endorse a war, Americans must see themselves on God’s side, fighting for good against evil. And because the fight is against evil, the victory must be absolute, and surrender unconditional.

This is the response the events of September 11 have triggered. This is why President Bush says that ‘you are for us or against us’ and ‘we’ll get them dead or alive.’ And why he echoed Ronald Reagan’s ‘Evil Empire’ with his own ‘Axis of Evil.’ To be worth fighting, the enemy’s villainy must also be absolute.

It is against this background that the United States is pursuing what State Department Policy Planning Director Richard Haass calls the doctrine of integration. It is aimed at integrating ‘other countries and organizations into arrangements that will sustain a world consistent with U.S. interests and values and thereby promote peace, prosperity, and justice.’ The doctrine is to be based on persuading governments and people to sign on to the ‘nonnegotiable demands of human dignity: rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women, private property, equal justice, and religious tolerance.’ These values are ‘not narrow American values that benefit Americans only, but universal values that would benefit people everywhere.’
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Such statements pose obvious questions, the main one being how all this is to come about. The answer seems to be through continued promotion of globalization, coupled with ‘coalitions of the willing,’ to effect changes of regimes that we deem dangerous. In this context, globalization is seen as a kind of ‘soft power’
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that will induce integration within the empire by dint of others wanting voluntarily to do what we want them to do. It is believed that people will see integration as the way to prosperity, that prosperity will yield liberalization and democratization, and that these in turn will lead to permanent peace and stability. This soft power, exerted by American markets, culture, and institutions, is seen by the cognoscenti as a kind of secret, unique weapon that, in contrast to the Roman and British examples, will make the American empire a voluntary one that remains largely unacknowledged because it will be based on cooperative arrangements led by the United States and held together by the glue of American soft power. Although the experience of the past fifty years provides evidence to support this seductive scenario, there are two caveats. First, the contrast with other empires is a misreading of history. The Roman empire ruled not primarily by force but by extending its system of law, culture, and even the rights and duties of Roman citizenship to other peoples. Rome often preferred indirect rule and usually used force only as a last resort. As Montesquieu noted, ‘It was a slow way of conquering.’
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By the same token, the British empire was famously acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind.’
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And it was the British statesman George Canning who said, ‘Commerce without power wherever we can, Commerce with power if we must.’
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The Romans and the Brits eventually found that hard power not only led but also seemed to follow soft power.

The second caveat follows from the first. Thomas Friedman calls globalization the international system that has replaced the Cold War. There is no doubt that globalization can create wealth and interdependence, powerfully challenge old concepts, and spread new ideas. As former French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine says, ‘America can inspire the dreams and desires of others thanks to its dominance of global images.’ But what kinds of dreams and desires, based on what values, and within what political and social framework? (When I recently turned on the TV in a Jakarta hotel room, the first channel I found was showing
Baywatch.
) As Hong Kong’s Securities and Exchange Director Andrew Sheng told me recently, ‘American values can only thrive with huge resources at your beck and call. If we assume that what you have in the United States can be had by all, we’re crazy. For starters, just think if everyone consumed like Americans. It would be an environmental disaster.’

Globalization is driven by markets, but markets are amoral and Darwinian, and consumption is their anti-God. Michael Prowse notes that ‘utility maximization in which morality has no place has for many become a total philosophy of life, but it is not consistent with good social behavior.’
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The fantasy of the last decade that no two countries with McDonalds’ restaurants would fight each other evaporated with the Serbian repression in Kosovo and child soldiers in Sierra Leone wearing shirts with the emblems of their favorite U.S. sports teams as they lopped off prisoners’ hands. The modern democratic nation-state is a vessel of values in which the public good trumps private interests. But capitalism is inherently uninterested in nations and their values. Until now, nations have tamed capitalism by imposing certain value-based restraints. But globalization attacks and undermines the nation state and its values. Ironically, although globalization in some ways promotes interdependence and international cooperation, it also reinforces the fragmenting forces of what the writer Benjamin Barber calls ‘jihad.’ Indeed the forces of the terrorists are much more effectively globalized than those of the current integrationists, and an ironic result of the open world the United States is promoting is that it has made America less rather than more secure.