The U.S. - "Lonely At the Top" (Interesting Read ON an Interesting Read)

Lonely at the top

By Shlomo Avineri

The place: the Pakistani-Afghan border. The time: 1980. On one of the mountain ridges, the Mujahideen warriors on their way to fight the Soviets have gathered to listen to the person who is standing at the top of the mountain and whose finger is pointing to the peaks of the Afghan mountains piercing the clouds of fog. His message is clear and direct: "This is your God-given country; go and liberate it in a Holy War against the godless communists; go ahead and God bless you in liberating your country."

No, the speaker was not Osama bin Laden. He was not even a Muslim - he was a Catholic. His war speech was delivered not in Arabic (nor in any of the Afghan languages) but rather in English, with the faint trace of a Polish accent. The speaker was Zbigniew Brzezinski, then national security adviser to U.S. (Democratic) president Jimmy Carter, who had decided to recruit fundamentalist Muslim volunteers, many of them from Saudi Arabia, to fight a guerrilla war against the Soviets, who had recently taken over control of Afghanistan.

The scene is from a documentary film on the beginning of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, although, in its absurdity, it would have been more appropriate in a Fellini film. Nonetheless, it is cogent evidence of the complexities and complications of American involvement in the Muslim world, as well as the complexity of the strategic positions of Brzezinski himself. Like former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, he is not only an academic, but also an individual with considerable practical experience in foreign policy matters.

This complexity is also evident in Brzezinski's recent book, which tries to tackle the United States' problems as an hegemonic superpower facing the challenges of the post-9/11 world. Essentially, "The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership" is a harsh critique of the policies of U.S. President George Bush, and has already been given a starring role in the current presidential campaign in the U.S. However, the book will be a disappointment for readers trying to find in it support for simplistic multilateral positions calling on the U.S. to waive its hegemony and to prefer "soft power" over "hard power." For instance, the United Nations is given only one marginal reference, and anyone trying to find the name of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan will be disappointed.

Brzezinski's basic assumption is America's global hegemony, whose validity he does not challenge. Unlike other critics - primarily Europeans but also left-wing Americans - Brzezinski does not bewail American hegemony. He regards it as an unequivocal fact that must be recognized so that various political options can be developed.

Brzezinski baldly states, "Never has there been a power capable of carrying out its power as globally as the United States is at the beginning of the 21st century." The U.S. is a hegemonic superpower in political, economic, military and cultural terms, and its advanced technological capabilities enable it to unleash its power relatively quickly anywhere in the world. Not even the Roman and British empires at their zenith had the capacity for such rapid universal response.

In the first chapters of his book, Brzezinski argues that, in the foreseeable future, American hegemony will have no challengers: He considers as unrealistic the perception that a unified Europe, China or Japan (he rules out Russia completely) will emerge as rivals in the near future.

Global vulnerability

Up to this point, it would appear that there is no difference between Brzezinski and the neoconservative ideologists in Bush's entourage. But this is not the case. After establishing the incontestable fact that American hegemony cannot be challenged in today's global network, he devotes the bulk of the book to a description of the dangers inherent in such an unprecedented hegemony and to a description of the equally great dangers inherent in the unwise use of that hegemony.

It is thus not surprising to hear Brzezinski issuing the warning (which today sounds extremely relevant) that the U.S. may find itself isolated within its own hegemony. There is also the danger, he notes, that a "country of liberty can become a garrison state." These dangers stem from the paradox that the world's first absolute hegemonic superpower is also a democratic state; thus, flawed policies could jeopardize not only the effectiveness of America's hegemony, but also the democratic nature of its regime.

In the chapter on the connection between American hegemony and the processes of globalization, the author notes that the U.S. capacity for global reach - a product of modern technology - also has a mirror-image: America's global vulnerability. The Germanic tribes that threatened to shatter the Roman Empire eventually brought about its downfall. It took them centuries to proceed from the fringes of the empire to the conquest of Rome itself. Today, just as the U.S. can reach Afghanistan and Iraq - or any other place on earth for that matter - Muslim fundamentalist terrorists, with relative ease, can strike - and have indeed done so - New York and Washington.

The consequences of this global vulnerability - and here is decisive proof of the limitations of power - are that, in contrast with other hegemonic world powers, the U.S. cannot defend itself from within its own borders nor can it rely exclusively on the creation of buffer zones along its borders, which is what the Soviet Union set up in Eastern Europe. In its defense policies, America must be able to spread its wings globally. In other words, the U.S. must be prepared to strike its enemies anywhere on the globe, and it therefore needs allies.

This is Brzezinski's chief argument against Bush's policies: Since the U.S. must have the capacity to operate anywhere in the world, it must not ignore the need for allies that are prepared - of their own volition, and not as vassal states subservient to the U.S. - to accept America's leadership. According to Brzezinski, America's principal challenge today is to find the golden mean between a wise reliance on allies and the superiority of American might. An important precondition for this balance is that the use of American might must not become a factor that creates resistance to, and animosity toward, the U.S.

Second, in Brzezinski's view, American cultural hegemony cannot be stopped, especially because of American superiority in mass-media technology. However, the U.S. must be aware of the political implications of that hegemony. Interestingly enough, he claims that French and Chinese resistance to American hegemony stems not just from political considerations but also from the fear of a deluge of local culture with American products - from films to a McDonald's hamburger. He might be wrong, but it would be unwise to simply ignore this perception.

Dealing with terror

Third - and here is where his disagreement with the Bush administration is deepest - it is mistaken to define the enemy as "terror." Terror is an instrument (as are aerial bombings and commando raids). As Brzezinski points out - and correctly - it is misguided to say "One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter." It is a case of strategic and moral blindness to defend this kind of relativism, because terror is concerned with means (deliberate targeting of civilians), not with goals.

The author does admit: "Terrorism rooted in ethnic, national, or religious resentments is the most enduring and the least susceptible to simple extirpation." The very roots of terrorism must be dealt with. Thus, the second chapter tries to tackle the question of why anti-American terrorism has sprung up among extremist groups in Islam and why Islamic radicals are primarily targeting the U.S.

In my opinion, this is the weakest part of the book. On the one hand, Brzezinski opposes - and justly so - the demonization of Islam that stems from Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory. Parenthetically, it should be noted that Huntington is a close friend of Brzezinski and even wrote a warm recommendation that appears on the book's cover. Brzezinski knows too much history to pigeonhole all of the Muslim world under a single rubric: The House of Islam (Dar al-Islam) has many rooms. On the other hand, he states: "Because of the fragility of secular political institutions, the weakness of civil society, and the stifling of intellectual creativity, much of the Islamic world faces widespread social stagnation."

That statement is simply not true, from at least three standpoints. First, the statement does not hold true for all Muslim states. One can think here of countries such as Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, even Iran, which have a considerable amount of internal unrest today and which Brzezinski totally ignores. Second, the above description could be applied to non-Muslim countries in Africa and Latin America as well. Thirdly, it does not explain why these social weaknesses are translated into murderous terrorism. In Africa, even in India, there were enough reasons for hatred toward oppressive, cruel colonialism; however, that hatred did not express itself in suicide bombings or in a jihad ("holy war").

On the other hand, Brzezinski rightly states that the nature of anti-American hatred stems from political factors. However, here as well, he makes a twofold mistake: He is not sufficiently aware of the fact that the hotbed of anti-Americanism is to be found in the Sunni Arab world and that anti- Americanism is not a universal Muslim sentiment. (Iran, a Shi'ite country, is seeking ways to reach a reconciliation with the U.S.; here is yet another issue that Brzezinski does not even touch upon.) In his view, the anger channeled at the U.S. stems from its policies on the Arab-Israeli dispute.

This is a viewpoint voiced by Arab states and their supporters, and, of course, it has some undeniable justification. However, it ignores two facts. First, the rise of bin Laden and the beginnings of the massive terrorism against the U.S. (the first attempt to attack the World Trade Center and the terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, as well as on the U.S.S. Cole) date from the days of great expectations that followed the signing of the Oslo accords. Second, at least in bin Laden's eyes, the prime enemies are the Arab regimes, principally the one in Saudi Arabia, which, in his view, are betraying the principles of Islam, enabling the U.S. access to Arab and Muslim resources and territories (chiefly in Mecca and Medina) and are economically robbing the Muslim masses in the name of a counterfeit, heretical Islam. As far as bin Laden is concerned, the U.S. is not the main enemy: It is assisting the Muslim heretics, chiefly the Saudi dynasty, who are making a mockery of puritanical Wahabi Islam. Brzezinski does not appear to be aware of this internal Muslim issue.

Brzezinski compares the IRA's perception of London as a legitimate target because of England's suppression of the Irish Catholics to bin Laden's perception of New York as a legitimate target because of American support for what the Arabs see as Israel's oppression of the Palestinians. The absurdity of this analogy is astounding: No matter what can be said about American support for Israel, it can certainly not be compared to the centuries of brutal English colonialism in Ireland.

Issues of style

Apparently, what is hard for Brzezinski to acknowledge - and this difficulty is related to the bizarre scene with which this article opened - is the fact that, in its war on communism, the U.S. for decades encouraged many oppressive Arab-Muslim regime: in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia. This support of oppressive regimes (which at times suppressed legitimate expressions of Islam that ran counter to the regime's dictates) carries a long-term political price tag.

Nevertheless, it can be assumed that the cooling-down of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will somewhat dull anti-American hatred, and thus readers will naturally seek constructive proposals in Brzezinski's book. Here, it must be admitted, readers will be disappointed. Although "The Choice" is brilliant in its analysis of the dilemmas of a single hegemonic superpower and is harshly critical of the crude manner in which Bush makes use of that superpower's immense power, Brzezinski's alternative proposals sound very much like sermons (justified in themselves). Yet, it is doubtful whether they can fuel a substantive policy, and this statement holds true not just for the Middle East.

For the Middle East, Brzezinski wants to see an American initiative that will involve Europe in the search for a solution to the conflict. It is hard to object to such an idea. However, how can it be translated into concrete reality? Regarding the Middle East, the Bush administration tried to involve the Europeans: The road map is, to a large extent, a response to a European initiative, and Europe is a partner in the Quartet. It is hard to see how the partnership with Europe has helped advance a process that is stuck in the mud because of local circumstances, not because of a dearth of American involvement.

This point is valid for other subjects in the book and the subtitle, "Global Domination or Global Leadership," succinctly conveys Brzezinski's message. He is right when he says that, prior to the war in Iraq (which, when all is said and done, he does not oppose, although the war is scarcely mentioned in the book), the American leadership, especially in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's arrogant declarations, managed to ruffle the Europeans' feathers and humiliate them needlessly. However, since Brzezinski does not believe in multilateralism among equals (the U.S. is absolutely hegemonic), his advice boils down to issues of style and approach rather than substance: Yes, a more refined language should be used when speaking with the Europeans. Yes, Bush's theological language ("axis of evil") repels partners and keeps them at arm's length. Yes, attempts should be made not to rile Russia, but the goal of expanding NATO should not be abandoned. Yes, more countries should be involved in the processes of setting global economic policy (the Kyoto Convention). However, ultimately, the U.S. will remain the leader, the hegemonic worldpower, and it is cold up there on top of the mountain, especially when the mountain is so high. It is no coincidence that the book contains no reference to the failure of joint American-European policies in Bosnia and Kosovo.

In short, "The Choice" points to serious problems facing hegemonic America but, as in statements by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry there are - so far - no substantial alternatives to Bush's policies (except for justifiable moralizing on his administration's brutal and, at times, deceptive style). The same holds true for this important book.

Shlomo Avineri is a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was director-general of the Foreign Ministry at the time that Zbigniew Brzezinski was U.S. president Jimmy Carter's national security adviser.

:bump:

(Now, don't all of ya reply at once!)

Well, Brzezinski makes me ashamed to be an American. NOt so much for Afghanistan, but because of his obsessive fixation on the Soviet Union, we actually supported(though I think it was only in intel and some basic aid) the KHMER ROUGE after the Cambodian Holocaust merely because it was a Chinese-aligned 'government' and thus opposed to the USSR. Sad that our former enemies the Vietnamese Communists had to be the ones to remove that evil from the face of the world.

To the points raised in the article? Where to begin? Brzezinksi's opposition to Bush's foreign policy ignores the fact that terrorism does not merely target the US. We have allies, even in the smallest places. Look at Mali, for instance. THe US foreign policy does NOT reflect anti-Islam sentiment that is becoming popular, though IMO, it is an unspoken attitude that MUST(not might but MUST) underlie the conflict. The war may not be with all of Islam, but much of Islam is surely seeking to bring the West to its knees. AQ is but one head of the hydra. The key is trying to cut off and burn the necks of these jihadis so that only the secularists or modernist Muslims remain.

Back to the issue of allies; France, Germany and Russia will not stop arresting terrorists because of temporary freezes in relations with the US. The terrorists blew up a French oil tanker off Yemen. The spokesman for the AQ-affiliated group(all these groups are drawing inspiration from AQ but not always materiel or financial aid) said "Well, we'd prefer to hit a US frigate but they are all infidels so it doesn't matter." THAT is what the US is fighting and don't think the Russians, with the memory of their POWs beheadings, apartment bombings and theater takeover emblazoned forever in their collective memory will stop fighting terror to spite the US.

My question to Zgbienew is, what allies are we losing? The ones that never WERE allies? EVery day, Saudi Arabia's elites draw closer to the US position. Musharraf is holding off the most extreme elements in Pakistani society. A more conciliatory party is now in power in India. US Spec Ops is leading the Filipino troops in battle against the Muslim terrorists there. We are training troops in anti-terrorism in Mali and the Horn of Africa.

Sorry, I just don't think we are endangered by decisive action. If the US had to please potential allies at the same time as prosecuting this war, we'd be back to pre-9/11 status. One must separate the reactionary anti-American sentiment in the world from legitimate policy makers and the obvious national interest all countries have in tamping down the terrorist threat.