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A walk down of history indicating US ascendancy as a world power and the American psyche that prompted it to do so.Russia, America and the New Cold War
Premen Addy
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, George H.W. Bush, then president of the United States of America, issued this heraldic proclamation: "A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one, sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America." History had ended, the American nirvana had begun. The Cold War 'victory', a liturgical chant with Western leaders, brooks no denial. Retreat, however, points frequently to an unfinished contest. No footage exists of the formalities of surrender - its sacred moment, surely; and the projected Kantian peace has yet to yield its promised dividend. Oligarchs, crime syndicates and Boris Yeltsin's tomfoolery had traduced the notion of a secure Russian state. American free-market nostrums had done so too. So when Alexander Solzhenitsyn returned to his native Russia after a long exile in the US, he was struck by the distress around him. The author of The Gulag Archipelago was convinced of America's will to strip, and then dismember, the Russian world. Notwithstanding the best laid plans of mice and men, Russia's revival commenced with the arrival of the new millennium; the economy was soon in recovery, the international debt default was repaid, confidence returned. President Vladimir Putin's first foreign policy demarche restored the Indo-Russian relationship to its previous high level of trust. Sino-Russian ties, blighted for decades by ideological disputes and political suspicion, were normalized. Moscow's leading role in the formation of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization signalled Russia's pivot to Asia in a period of seedtime and remedy.
Putin's overtures to the US in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York were met with studied disdain. Against the counsel of the venerated Cold War projectionist, George Kennan - whose influential policy paper of 1947 in Foreign Affairs pressed for American containment of the Soviet Union - the Bush administration (2000-08) incorporated states from the old Soviet bloc into an enlarged Nato, something Mikhail Gorbachev's Western interlocutors had assured him personally would never happen. Nobly, Gorbachev took their word without the collateral safeguard, and was roundly deceived. Kennan had warned, shortly before his death at 92, that Nato's eastward expansion, with its unpredictable consequences, would be a grave strategic error. At the heart of the junior Bush administration, however, were gung-ho, neo-conservative hawks, among them Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. As assistant secretary of defence in the senior Bush administration (1988-92), Wolfowitz had cut his teeth as a strategic thinker with a controversial policy paper stating that the US would accept no future rival to its global dominance, that pre-emption might follow if one were to appear. Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld were the movers and shakers of the junior Bush administration's wars of intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan; these and the Obama administration's inebriated forays in Libya and Syria have led to the present Islamic State blowback.
Moscow's swift riposte to pro-West Georgia's border provocations in August 2008 had been the first shot across Nato's bows; its rapier thrust in March 2014 severed Crimea from the Ukraine, subsequent to the Western-supervised coup de main in Kiev. This carried a more robust message, which led Le Monde diplomatique to editorialize that the era of America's diktat "is now over. Its death knell sounded the day Russia had had enough of 'losing' and realized that its ritual humiliation would never come to an end, with one neighbouring country after another being persuaded - or bribed - into joining an economic and military alliance against it." Speaking in Brussels in March this year, President Barack Obama stressed that "Today, NATO planes patrol the skies over the Baltic and we've reinforced our presence in Poland. And we are prepared to do more." The Cold War mutant is now the media's "New Cold War", with its altered focus for, says Barack Obama, "unlike the Soviet Union, Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology". Put simply, it is a reversion to Kipling's Great Game, minus the 19th-century romance.
Niall Ferguson, the Harvard-based British historian, has argued in his book, Colossus, that America would be better served if it dispensed with its overloaded moral baggage and accepted, indeed welcomed, the responsibilities of its imperium. Witness the Monroe doctrine of 1823, the warning to European powers against intruding into America's space; and the decades of America's westward expansion to the Pacific Ocean. Much of this territory was acquired through conquest, blandishments and the voluntary accession of white settlements. Ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples and the confinement of their indigent descendants to arid reservations were concomitant to the commerce in black slavery and the sequential politics of segregation, upheld and sanctified by the courts as statutory law for almost a century after the end of the American Civil War (1861-65). Such injustices were applied with the utmost rigour in the southern states, to be compounded in the mid-20th century by Senator Joseph McCarthy's inquisition: each phase a fitting entry in the ledger of corporate America's Manifest Destiny.
The rubric of empire is the imprimatur of the functional aspect of America's worldly advance, says Ferguson. An extrapolated passage written in 1935 by General Smedley D. Butler, the most decorated American marine commander of his generation, illuminates his point: "I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street... I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras 'right' for American fruit companies in 1903... Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents."
Why resist the unpalatable truth for embellished fiction and risk the internalized trauma that comes with denial? argues Ferguson. An American empire (with an Anglophone construct in tow) was best suited to administer to the needs of benighted humanity. He cited post-war Germany and Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, as beneficiaries of American democratic tutelage and protection; the failed states of, say, Africa had even more to gain from benign American governance and financial aid. Such optimistic prescriptions, published in 2004, are scarcely tenable now. From the theatre of the absurd came the cascading words of George W. Bush, delivered to the Republican party faithful on November 5, 2005: "The United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East... The establishment of a free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution".
The torture chambers of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and the Extraordinary Rendition carried out in the secret dungeons of the Baltic states, Poland and Romania, tell a contrary tale of misery and death. The febrile US-led coalition in the War on Terror against the primeval ISIL, together with the desolation it has caused, was likened recently by Leon Panetta, the former Central Intelligence director, to the Thirty Years War, fought on German soil by rival continental powers in the first half of the 17th century. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648, ending the dreadful night, brought the first light of the European Enlightenment.
Syria and Iraq and the rest, trapped in a moral void, are unable to escape the darkness imposed on them from abroad. How can they, when the principal sources of global terrorism, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, are the linchpins of America's security system, whose hallowed circle also includes warring Turks and Kurds, Sunnis and Shias, and the regressive discords of local tribe and clan? The American empire is a listing Titanic barnacled with a rising national debt of $116 trillion, and weighed down by imperial overstretch, argues the French analyst, Emmanuel Todd, in After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order. American media incantations on the "dying bear" and its likely extirpation, possibly emboldened the Obama administration to pressgang the heads of the European Union into the delusional sanctions against Russia, which, Vice President Joseph Biden boasted to his young Harvard audience, was an exemplary demonstration of American leadership. History records the risks in telling detail.
Napoleon believed that his Continental System - the commercial blockade of Britain - was rendered ineffective by Tsarist Russia's non-compliance. The French invasion of compliance, in June 1812, ended in the retreat of the Grand Army from the heart of Moscow all the way back to Paris, and the nemesis of Waterloo. Hitler's gamble to subdue Soviet Russia through the Wehrmacht, in June 1941, reduced the Third Reich's projected life of 1,000 stirring years to the modest timeline of 3 years, 9 months and 17 days. The Russian bear, dying or in rude health, is best not baited, now or ever.
The author has written Tibet on the Imperial Chessboard: The Making of British Policy towards Lhasa, 1899-1925
The same psyche has continued and that is why it explains many imperfectness that plague the world of today.
While there is merits in what the author states and it appears alarming, yet it is one sided.
A similar exercise of the Russian psyche as to how it also wishes to contest, even though now a reduced power, would have made the article more balanced and better for understanding of the reader and permitted the reader to draw his own conclusion.
It is true that Russia is not a 'dying bear', but one struggling to get on its feet after having been shot, so to say.
