Posted on 10/29/2002 4:45:26 PM PST by xsysmgr
It has become fairly obvious, as Robert Kagan put it in a much-discussed article in the June-July issue of Policy Review, that we should "stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world." Kagan cogently explains that the divergence we are seeing on Iraq is much deeper than the usual carping about American power, that it reflects a vast gap in perceived interests.
Our post-September 11 world has made the power gap between America and Europe unmistakable. Over the past 20 years America has succeeded in reversing what seemed to be an inevitable relative decline. In 1960, the U.S. economy accounted for 30 percent of world output. By 1980 this figure had dropped to 23 percent, but today it is back up to 29 percent. The American economy is larger than that the next three largest economies — those of Japan, Germany, and Great Britain — combined. Perhaps most tellingly, the increase in US military spending since September 11, $50 billion, is larger than the entire British defense budget.
Given this situation, Kagan argues, the European argument with America does not really relate to this or that American leader or policy, but is "systemic" and "incurable." It is the gap between the strong and the weak. Europe will continue to resent and resist American power, even though "its passage into post-history has depended on the United States not making the same passage."
It is the height of injustice, not to say immaturity, for Europe to not only leave America to fight the forces of evil essentially alone, but to complain about it into the bargain. There is, however, a more high-minded version of the European complaint that has been adopted by some Americans: Perhaps the U.S. has to exercise power, but it should not be happy about it.
"The animating vision of American foreign policy should not be a 'Pax Americana'... but a world of law and consent," writes Hedrick Hertzberg in The New Yorker. "The Bush vision is a profoundly pessimistic one, and, as such, more than a little un-American. It is... a vision of perpetual war."
After September 11, critics of American power could no longer argue that the world needs no policeman, only that the goal should be, in Hertzberg's words, to "create an international military capability" to do the job. But don't they see that, even if such a thing were desirable, the muscular and largely unilateral use of American power is the only way to get there?
The American power that has become the liberals' whipping boy is the primary engine of liberal values in the world, such as freedom and human rights. If Europe were to suddenly shake off all its neuroses and become a responsible partner in policing the world the U.S. would not have to act so unilaterally. But short of that, the only way to both make the world safer and dilute American power is to help create more democracies.
It might be more seemly for George W. Bush to say that America's fondest hope is not to bear the burden of fighting tyranny and evil alone but to share that task more equally among nations. But why is it necessary to pretend that the inevitable is a policy?
Over the last century, America would always wait to be goaded into using its power, turning back inward at the first available opportunity. One need only recall the herculean efforts of the Clinton administration to avoid acting in Iraq even as it was being blasted as a "hyperpower" by the French foreign minister.
The other, more important, reason not to take the multilateralist carping too seriously is that America, believe it or not, has its own legitimate interests. As Kagan admits, there is something to the European image of America as a global sheriff, and even some rational basis for wishing this were not so.
"Outlaws shoot sheriffs," writes Kagan, "not saloon keepers. In fact, from the saloon keeper's point of view, the sheriff trying to impose order by force can sometimes be more threatening than the outlaws who, at least for the time being, may just want a drink." It is also follows from this that the sheriff, more than anyone in town, is not just fighting to keep the peace, but in self defense.
The whole multilateralist critique assumes that America is appointing itself global policeman rather than defending itself. But, as Fareed Zakaria note in the New Yorker, America was attacked not just because it is free — so is Denmark.
"Because America is No. 1, it is also target No. 1." That America's defense is global and involves toppling regimes does not make it any less self-defense. By going to the U.N. for authorization and couching American actions in terms of enforcing U.N. resolutions Bush essentially forfeited his self-defense card. He did not even use it as a fallback position, in which the U.S. would claim self-defense if the U.N. chose not to take its own resolutions seriously.
To some, it may be a stretch to call "starting" a war with Iraq self defense. But if this is not self defense, then what is? It makes no sense to define self defense only as Bush once colorfully described his predecessor's policy: "Fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt."
Self-defense is the opposite of aggression, and should include doing the minimum necessary to keep one's citizens free and safe. If anything, what the U.S. is doing risks falling short of this definition, not going beyond it.
— Saul Singer is editorial-page editor of The Jerusalem Post.
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