The debacle in Iraq has discredited the American neoconservative
dream of a benevolent US empire, freed from the petty restraints of
multilateral diplomacy and international law. But the
neoconservative vision is not the only dream that has died in the
rubble of Falluja and torture cells of Abu Ghraib prison. What until
recently was the alternative endorsed by many Democrats and some
centrist Republicans - US world leadership exercised through
multilateral security institutions - can also now be included in the
collateral damage done by George W. Bush's war in Iraq.
Since the cold war, many American neoliberals - sometimes
described as "humanitarian hawks" or "muscular internationalists" -
have supported a highly interventionist US military policy. Unlike
the neoconservatives, however, the neoliberals believed the US
should pursue ambitious programmes of global reform by means of the
United Nations and Nato - not in spite of them. The first Gulf war
and the Clinton-led Nato intervention in the Balkans provided models
for those who sought to combine multilateral diplomacy with unipolar
power.
While neoconservatives have focused on "rogue states" such as
Iraq, neoliberals have seen opportunities for muscular
multilateralism in "failed states" such as Liberia. They hoped that
US-dominated international protectorates could provide law and order
until such societies could be rebuilt. Some suggested the
establishment of a UN-Nato protectorate in Palestine in the period
between an Israeli withdrawal and the formation of a fully sovereign
Palestinian state.
The idea was promising: American power in the service of
multilateral legitimacy, rather than American power without
multilateral legitimacy or multilateral legitimacy without American
power. Tragically, this alternate strategy for the US is now moot.
Mr Bush, in discrediting his own neoconservative strategy, has
unwittingly destroyed any possibility that a successor
administration would adopt muscular multilateralism on a large
scale. The reason is simple: neoliberalism, like neoconservatism,
depended on the mystique of American power.
The American mystique always had two components: material and
moral. The mystique of US material power was the first to be
destroyed unintentionally by this administration. After 1989, the
argument that America was an awesome superpower similar to ancient
Rome, erroneous though it was, arguably served the US and its allies
well. Ironically, it was a neoconservative-led war that refuted
neoconservative claims about US power. Even with the help of allies,
the US has not been able to impose countrywide order in Afghanistan
and Iraq. Lacking the troops to do so, the Pentagon turned to
private contractors for basic US military functions, including the
interrogation of prisoners of war. Some Rome; some empire.
Even more important to the mystique of American power was the
moral element. The dark side of US history - including the treatment
of the Indians, slavery and segregation - has not been forgotten by
the world. Still, in the eyes of many, the US was the liberal,
democratic superpower that opposed the fascist and communist
empires. Now, the image of America the liberator has been replaced
by the image of America the occupier and America the torturer. The
atrocities at Abu Ghraib can no longer be dismissed as isolated
incidents in light of accumulating evidence that the Bush
administration either instituted or permitted tortures in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and perhaps on US soil.
The horrors that we know about, and those about which we have yet
to learn, are even more fatal to the neoliberal project than to its
neoconservative rival. After all, the neoconservatives are willing
to invade countries without permission either of locals or of
allies. The neoliberals, however, want US troops to be invited as
part of multinational forces. What population now will want US
soldiers in their country - even as members of a multilateral UN or
Nato force? And how many US allies will risk being tainted by
association with US soldiers? Without US forces doing the heavy
lifting in UN or Nato interventions, the ambitious neoliberal
strategy of muscular internationalism becomes impossible.
Then there are failed states, the subject of so much neoliberal
strategic thought in the 1990s. Iraq has proven that Washington does
not know how to bring order to anarchic societies.
The implications of Mr Bush's inadvertent destruction of the
American mystique have yet to sink into America's progressive
internationalists. Many hawkish neoliberals hope that if John Kerry
is elected, Europeans, Arabs and others will let bygones be bygones.
If only it were so. A new administration could do much to repair the
damage that Mr Bush and his team have done to America's reputation.
But it will take a generation or more to rehabilitate America's
image.
The spring of 2004 may prove to be a turning point not only in
the history of America but also in that of the world. Until
recently, Bush critics could hope the Iraq war would be an
unfortunate but minor episode ahead of a long period of benevolent
US global hegemony. Now that America's reputation for benevolence
and irresistible power has been severely damaged, the US will be
forced to settle for a far more modest role in the world than that
sought by both neoliberals and neoconservatives. Whether Mr Bush is
re-elected or not, his legacy is already apparent.