US power has its limits

S P SETH

A series of books on US foreign policy, reviewed in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, seek to grapple with the issue of limits on US power. It is a difficult issue for any country but when that country is a superpower, though not at its old heights, it is all the more problematic. Any empire or country with imperial interests tries to project its foreign policy as high ideals. In the process, these two—imperial interests and high ideals--- become indistinguishable. And such convergence of national interests and ideals is, therefore, considered not only good for the United States but also for the world. In other words, the US is doing it all for the good of humanity.

Americans, for instance, pride themselves on their ‘exceptionalism’, which puts them apart from the rest of the world. The world will be better off, it is argued, if it followed the US. And because the Americans are exceptional, imbued with high idealism, their version of democracy is a global recipe for good government. Hence, they are justified in promoting/pushing it elsewhere in the world. And since political democracy and liberal capitalist system are indistinguishable, ‘free’ markets and ‘free’ trade are good for the world.  And where it has been tolerating dictators and monarchs, as in the Middle East, these are temporary aberrations that would be fixed up in due course.

Another feature of US imperialism, as of empires before it, is a liberal sprinkling of religious and moral precepts, like ‘axis of evil’ and so on. The world is thus reduced to moral aphorisms of good and evil. In that case, if a country is not on the side of the United States as in its war on terrorism, it is unquestionably on the side of evil and might as well be damned.

There are a few broad divisions in the delineation of US foreign and strategic policy since the end of the WW11.  And it is generally defined and couched in terms of high idealism even when its real thrust is to promote US political and strategic interests. All through the Cold War period, for instance, the US-led “free world” was trying to keep the world out of the nefarious designs of the Soviet-led “iron curtain”. And it was this ‘high idealism’ which led to the Korean war early in the fifties during which communist China’s entry into the war on behalf of North Korea almost brought the world into another big war, with even talk of using the atom bomb to stop China. And it was the same fear of communist advance into Asia, the so-called ‘domino theory’, that led to the Vietnam war. In the early sixties, it created the scary specter of a nuclear confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union after the latter stationed nuclear missiles in Cuba.

As with all simplifications, the threat from a ‘monolithic’ global communist bloc was overhyped, so clearly revealed with the developing Sino-Soviet schism in the sixties, when the communist giants of China and the Soviet Union sharply clashed ideologically as well as their borders. Who could have imagined that the dispute between the Soviet Union and China would reach a point where the US and China entered into a virtual strategic partnership against the backdrop of a their shared strategic rivalry with the Soviet Union? And even more surprisingly, China and Vietnam started drifting apart from the seventies after China occupied some of the South China Sea islands claimed by Vietnam. The issue of contested sovereignty in the South China Sea between China and some regional countries is now creating/reviving new friendships and alliances around the US.

The US ‘victory’ in the Cold War created new problems. The US not only regarded it as assertion of its political and strategic dominance, being now the only superpower, but also the manifest superiority of its system of political democracy and free market capitalism. As the US political philosopher Francis  Fukuyama wrote at the time that it marked the ‘end of history’.  To quote him from his book, The End of History and the Last Man, liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government.” In other words, the US has evolved the perfect system and there is nothing after that.

But as we know it was all hyperbole. The world didn’t rally behind the US as its undisputed global leader. Rather its ham-handed efforts to assert supremacy created more problems. As Jessica T. Mathews writes in the New York Review of Books, “Freed from the constraints of the cold war… the US turned more and more from diplomacy to its unparalleled military power.” As a result, “America has been engaged in conflict for nearly all of the past quarter-century, having undertaken nine military actions, including the two longest wars in its history,” in Iraq and Afghanistan, still plunging the region into an unending nightmare.

As for Europe where the end of the Cold War was supposed to bring Russia into a new peace compact, that too has vanished. While the Soviet Union’s collapse also spelled the end of the Warsaw Pact, the US-led NATO Pact tended to expand coopting as its members some former members of the once-Soviet-led military pact. Simultaneously, these former Soviet zone countries were either joining or lining up to join the European Union making Russia increasingly edgy. And when Ukraine moved closer to do the same, after its pro-Russian president was overthrown, Moscow used its leverage in its eastern region to frustrate the attempt. Ukraine is now a divided country and diplomatic efforts to resolve the situation have so far proved unsuccessful.

In the process, Russia is now virtually a pariah state in the west subject to the US and western economic sanctions. Which is further skewing US foreign policy, creating uncertainty all around the world. For instance, Russia is now openly on the side of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, seeing no viable alternative to even worse chaos. Despite international peace efforts, the situation remains murky.

In the post-Cold War period, the US has tended to overreach itself in all sorts of directions, particularly in the wake of 9/11 terrorist attacks on its soil, thus creating serious weaknesses and flaws in its foreign and strategic policy. And when one considers the challenge posed by China’s projection of power, particularly in Asia-Pacific, the US would need to have another serious look at its currently disjointed foreign policy. And the first requirement for this is to recognize that the US power has declined and has clear limits. But this is hard to come by in the supercharged US political system. In the new ‘Trump’ world, there are no boundaries.

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.