Posted on 4-8-2003

Little Gain Toadying To US
Paul Buchanan:

There is one pressing issue for New Zealand as it considers its international role - how to align itself in a world dominated by what many see as a culturally vacant, economically stagnant and politically bankrupt superpower run by conservative ideologues bent on reasserting American domination, but who are increasingly forced to substitute diversionary warmongering for ideological leadership in global affairs.

That raises troubling questions about our national interests, as well as the viability of adopting policies of independence and flexibility in the face of an increasingly polarised international environment.

This is particularly important when confronting the difficult links between economic policy, diplomatic relations and security concerns in the wake of September 11 and the war in Iraq. To understand the situation, we need to first know the nature of its most important protagonist.

Long-term United States economic dominance is open to challenge. Although it is a trillion-dollar economy that controls a third of the world's exchange of goods and services and has its strongest currency, American production is changing towards second and third-tier "convenience" services. These are increasingly dependent on capital-good trade partners and foreign raw material such as oil.

The anticipated drop in oil prices brought about by the restoration of Iraq's fields may yet prove to be a stimulus for the US and world alike, and the resumption of Iraqi production under American and British control could spell the end of OPEC. Both are considered best-case scenarios by American and New Zealand leaders.

But that project is going more slowly than expected and faces the prospect of a long-term guerrilla war. Meanwhile, investment stagnation, a huge federal deficit and an expanding war budget, coupled with corporate corruption, are ignored by the Bush Administration. Instead, it provides preferential treatment to its supporters.

Governmental subterfuge on matters of national security is tolerated because it occurs against a landscape of individual and collective strategies of egotism and immediate self-preservation. Abuses of domestic power are paralleled by the foreign use of military might as a policy of first recourse, and notions of legitimate differences and ideological leadership have degenerated into "us or them" mentalities between "freedom lovers" and "evil doers".

This has led to polarisation of the electorate parallel with increased income inequalities, unemployment and the curtailment of civil liberties. Limitations on personal freedom are felt especially by those from suspect regions or ethnicities now that the Department of Homeland Security has militarised internal defence against the enemy within. In the land of the free, the price of freedom is freedom itself.

The US will get more dangerous as plans for redrawing the global map give way to defensive adventurism against the backlash its warmongering generates. But within 75 to 100 years it will no longer be able to call itself the only superpower. For this reason, a longer-term, dispassionate forecast might be the wisest method of charting our foreign policy over the foreseeable future.

Externally, the US is nearing the limits of its military capacity.

Almost two-thirds of its combat-ready force are deployed overseas, ignoring the long-standing doctrine that only a third should be overseas in peacetime.

Abandoning the realist premises that are ostensibly the heart of Republican foreign policy, the US increasingly uses the threat of force as first resort in strategically debatable places such as Liberia. Shifting to Judeo-Christian justifications for deploying troops, the US is intent on extending its presence in previously neglected non-Western countries to press its war on terror and reassert its dominance.

In doing so, it risks over-extension while simultaneously increasing the levels of animosity directed towards it.

The occupation of Iraq is a throwback to the golden age of imperialism. The question is: where are those old empires now, and will the US be any more successful than its predecessors in maintaining its global reach for the foreseeable future?

The US is increasingly isolated in its view of the proper global order. Since ideas are what shape human destiny, and shared ideals are the basis for global community, this makes the American position more fragile than its military hardware would lead us to believe.

Internally, the world's superpower is a morass of commodity fetishism and escapism fuelled by a sensationalist media. As in Rome, the pabulum of the masses is dished out in two varieties, one as vulgar entertainment and the other in the form of material gratification. The emperors had a phrase for this: bread and circuses.

The circus consists of the three Ds - diversions, deceptions and deceit. The diversions are media-frenzied celebrity scandals, shock radio, reality TV and bad movies. The deceptions consist of glossing over war costs, the lack of success against al Qaeda, and inflating the degree of support the US has around the world.

The deceit lies in faulty intelligence claims that Iraq was a clear and present danger to US security.

The bread includes a tax break for the upper 10 per cent of income-earners, a mixed bag of middle-class deductions for heterosexuals legally married with children, and revisions to the elderly healthcare system. For most Americans, these are more crumbs than the bread of Romans, but the Romans did not have telecommunications to push the circus to the front of mass attention.

This means the rapidly growing pool of American unemployed and under-employed adopt individual strategies of survivalist alienation, where charity begins and ends at home. Solidarity is a lost art, and volunteerism has been replaced with a lawsuit mentality.

The question is whether New Zealand wants to tie its flag to the mast of the day's superpower to curry immediate favour, or whether, based on a calculation of its core values and interests, it chooses the path of diplomatic independence and flexibility in the court of world affairs.

Given what we know of empires old and new, and the fact that we have many trading partners and diplomatic interests outside the US, some of which involve matters of principle such as supporting the UN, the wisest choice may be the latter.

After all, following the leader is only fun when the leader has a sense of proportion and equanimity, something that appears lost in the sequels to "shock and awe".

* Paul Buchanan lectures in international politics at Auckland University.