President George Bush and his principal allies—the whole three
of them, Britain, Spain and Portugal—arranged an emergency
weekend summit in the Azores to discuss their failure to achieve
United Nations approval authorizing war, in effect a summit designed
to set a course toward imminent military action, since it was now
too late for Iraq to disarm, too late for further weapons
inspections and too late for more diplomacy.
And in a poll
released last Friday by Fox News, 71 percent of Americans agreed with
the statement.
What Bush’s administration needs at this time is a Copernicus,
so to speak, to tell it that the United States is not really at the
center of the universe. And what those Americans who just want to
get it over and done with
need to do is re-read Paul
Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers
(1987).
You would not have imagined a seemingly obtuse work like that to head the best-seller lists and to enjoy critical success as well, becoming the talk of editorialists, columnists and critics everywhere.
To resurrect these declinists’ thesis in context of impending war in the Middle East and America’s isolation in the world today is to rescue America, as it were, from its illusion of omnipotence.
If those 71 percent of Americans, who believe that their leaders
should get this war over and done with already, are convinced that
their troops could effortlessly invade Iraq, get Saddam Hussein,
impose regime change, export democracy
to the entire region,
and be back home in a jiffy, then they ought to think again.
The case of rebuilding
Iraq under American occupation, benign
and well-intentioned though it may be, will not be like that of
rebuilding, say, a prostrate Japan and a devastated Europe in the wake
of World War II. American occupiers of Japan wielded absolute power,
and Gen. MacArthur could do there what he wished, expecting a
defeated, isolated nation to go through the motions of what was
demanded of it. And the transformation of Europe, including Germany,
under the Marshall Plan, was even less remarkable in the sense that
the population of the continent, who shared with the United States its
intellectual and political tradition, welcomed American occupation as
an instrument of change and postwar prosperity.
The case of Iraq, and the Middle East in general, however, is entirely different. The US will not succeed there in effecting, or imposing, regime changes on a region with an overwhelmingly hostile tradition of opposition to outside colonial interference, a region already smarting under the humiliation of American blatant support of Israeli designs on it.
America, in short, will not find easy to create by fiat a free,
democratic Iraq,
and to regroup the cultural, political and social
values of a part of the world vehemently opposed to coercion and
military force by outsiders aimed at reshaping its destiny at this
late date in the postcolonial era. This is not the early 1950s, when
the US, through its great wealth and military prowess, towered over
the world like a colossus.
Thus for leaders in Washington today to continue acting as if the
world has not changed, and the trust in them by the international
community has not dried up, is to invite catastrophe—and to
accelerate that process of descent that the declinists have predicted
for it. It is folly for the US, in other words, not to recognize the
finite nature of the power it can wield, and the limitations it should
place on its ambitions to spur on a worldwide democratic
revolution.
It was imperial overstretch, the declinists continue
to assert, that was behind the long saga of the rise and fall of
empires, from ancient Egypt to colonial Britain.
To these astute scholars, including Walter Meade, who in an interview
with the Washington Post last Sunday compared this moment in American
history to the birth of the Cold War era around 1948, the exercise of
American power today could be leading America to wanton arrogance, or
hubris, hubris to overreaching, and overreaching to collapse. To a
world, including our part of it, that considers the US a country
unilaterally taking upon itself the task of subduing other countries
to forcibly democratize
them, there is confirmation of the
declinists’ convictions about the inevitable fate of the
American polity.
As Walter Meade put it, in his seminal work, Mortal Splendor (1987): The tides of history
created the American empire ... Once tides begin to flow against the
empire, no president and no congress could stop them.
And, trust me on this one, neither could the name change that frivolous legislators give fried potatoes
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