Page 2 of 2 Making America safe for the world
By Yu Bin
not want others to do the same thing to them. Indeed, "long before George W
Bush became president ... America has been turning in on itself to a point
which is self-destructive," wrote British journalist Jonathan Power three days
after 9/11. Clintonism of the yester-years, therefore, may not be as harmless
as it appears.
From multilateralism, bilateralism to unilateralist and back to what?
When Americans cast their votes next week, the man to live in the White House
for the next four years will find the world outside the United States may be
less hospitable toward, less respecting for, and even less dependent on the
world's strongest power. For the new guard in the White House, such a prospect
will be
discouraging, though not wholly unanticipated. It is a beginning, however, to
search for a different path for the security of America and the world, away
from not only the Bush administration, but also from the legacies of the past
100 years when the US first took the world stage.
In the past century, America has experimented with at least three different
approaches for its own security: Wilsonian multilateralism, Cold War
bilateralism and Bush's unilateralism. Of the three, only Wilson's collective
security was designed to offer equal security to both America and other powers.
Wilson's idealism, however, was short-lived. On the eve of the US entrance into
World War I, president Woodrow Wilson vowed to make the world safe for
democracy. The "war to end all wars", ironically, was the beginning of a
four-year carnage. Worse, it unleashed all the "evils" of the 20th century for
Western liberalism: Russian Bolshevikism, German Nazism, Japanese militarism
and Chinese communism. The rest was history.
Washington reluctantly accepted the Cold War bilateral security largely because
Moscow reached military parity with the US. America's own security, therefore,
required the recognition of the security of its strategic and ideological
opponent. The US, however, was never comfortable with the principle of balance
of "terror", which was the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). As soon as the
Cold War was over, Washington lost no time in expanding the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization and dismantling the foundations of arms control treaties
with Russia.
Meanwhile, without the balance of Western communism, both liberalism and
neo-conservatism in the US are working to project American power, value and
influence around the world as if there is no tomorrow. The hallmark of the
Clinton Doctrine was to democratize others according to the "Democracy-peace"
theory perfected by American political science.
Those who see the full picture of the democracy-peace discourse understand the
pitfalls of overplaying principles of self-determination. Scholars and
historians have repeatedly shown that young democracies are perhaps the most
aggressive political systems. This includes the Weimar Republic and the
Japanese Taisho democracy before Nazism and militarism consumed them. One
should add the newly democratized Georgia that initiated the recent conflict
with Russia. Fareed Zakaria, former managing editor of Foreign Affairs, warned
as early as 1997 that the challenge for the 21st century was "to make democracy
safe for the world". [6] (Emphasis added.)
There is perhaps nothing wrong with democracy as a political system that
evolved from Western history and culture. It deserves both respect and serious
consideration by others. Indiscriminantly imposing democracy anywhere and
anytime, however, amounts to a doctor prescribing Viagra to all patients,
regardless of their age, gender and symptoms. Ultimately, it may blowback
against one's own interests.
Meanwhile, the search for security by the United States has largely become
one-way traffic, in which the US frequently resorts to the unilateral use of
force without adequate consideration of the other side.
Make America safe for the world
In retrospect, only the bilateral security of the Cold War seems to be the
"lesser evil". Such a prospect, however, almost does not exist as neither
Europe nor China is willing to balance the US. The task for the new US
president for a sound and effective foreign policy lies squarely in the hands
of the new White House resident, who must lead a power of global reach like the
United States with global vision and responsibility, not just those of America.
When Kissinger deplored the lack of a foreign policy during the Clinton
administration, he asked if the US was to lead the world instead of turning it
into an empire. Kissinger asked a right question, but not enough. The real
question is not whether the US should lead the world or not, but how the US
will lead. Indeed, a fair, legitimate and effective leadership should emerge,
or be earned. Alternatively, it may be imposed, self-claimed, but cannot be
requested.
For a genuine world leader, the question is how to work with others,
particularly those nations and peoples with different cultural, historical,
political and economic backgrounds. Such a task may be particularly challenging
for America whose foreign policy toolbox contains only two pieces: isolationism
and interventionism. When America is weak, it reverts to its own world; when
America is strong, it sets out to shape the world. There is simply no such a
thing that the US would live and work with the existing world, which is full of
gray areas. The next American president may have to step beyond this
self-imposed, black-white and almost religiously rigid ideological confine.
In his speech to the US Democratic Party convention in late August, Clinton
stated that the US should lead by "the power of example, not example of power".
A sound foreign policy should start from the home front, which badly needs a
"regime change" to reverse the current trends toward over-spending consumers,
over-drugged population, over-armed society, over-crowded jails and
over-lobbied politics. A society that consumes 25% of the world's energy and
has a quarter of the world's prisoners with less than 5% of the world's
population, according to the New York Times on April 23, 2008, is not a model
for others.
America will certainly be more attractive to the rest of the world if
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's millions of hockey and
soccer moms are matched by millions of SAT/ACT moms. Paradoxically, Samuel
Huntington of Harvard University, the most prominent American political
scientist, condemned America's intellectual elite, in his 2004 book Who Are We?
as "dead souls" and being not patriotic (p 264). Such a permeating
anti-intellectualism is perhaps the main reason for America's deteriorating
school system compared to many nations, rich or poor. Already, a much poorer
China has had 30 million piano moms; teenagers do homework till midnight; its
colleges turn out 10 times more engineers every year than their US
counterparts; and 300 million Chinese are learning foreign languages.
For such a soft power as China, merely increasing US military spending is not
only self-defeating, but also dangerous. America's next president needs to
understand that nobody can bring down the mighty powerful United States, except
Americans themselves. The ongoing financial crisis is a case in point.
Moreover, in a globalized world, it is in nobody's interests to see the US
declining rapidly. America's new leaders, therefore, must come out of the
besieged mentality to engage and embrace the world.
Diplomacy, however, is time-consuming, difficult and sometimes frustrating. In
the age of globalization and weapons of mass destruction, diplomacy is perhaps
the only way to handle some of the difficult bilateral, regional and global
issues, particularly those with high stakes, such as the two six-party talks on
Korean and Iranian nuclear issues, the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and more
recently, the conflict between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia.
Toward a world beyond extremes
Almost 20 years ago when Western communism started to crumble, Francis Fukuyama
declared that history was over. [7] He later retracted that. [8] With the
worldwide and still growing financial crisis, history is perhaps really ending.
This time, it is the end, or bankruptcy, or demise, of the extreme types of
Western ideologies: be it the centralized communism or its counterpart of
Western market fundamentalism.
Despite their vastly different ideological underpinnings, each tries to change
the rest of the world according to its own ideological pure type; neither wants
to live with an imperfect world full of gray areas; both see the world in
black-and-white terms; together, they drag the rest of the world into the last
phase of the "Western Civil War", which is the Cold War.
Indeed, the 20th century, which is widely claimed to be the American century,
turned out to be the bloodiest century in world history, during which all forms
of Western ideologies - be they liberalism, nationalism, Nazism, militarism,
communism, statism - pursued their pure types. It is fair to argue that there
is no such a thing as clashes of civilizations, but the clashes of extremists,
as their extreme agenda reinforce and justify each other's existence.
In the midst of the current unprecedented crisis of Western market extremism,
it is time for the world to pause, think and search for a different model of
political economy. It should be beyond and away from excessive greed, excessive
consumerism, excessive laissez-faire, to mention just a few. A major task of a
world leader is to search for a proper balance between the market and the
state, between individual need and societal interests, between equality and
efficiency, between materialistic growth and cultural/spiritual harmony, and
between nurturing the innovative business class and protecting other vulnerable
social groups.
Such an approach is also common sense, as was the choice made by the little
girl Goldilocks, who prefers things not too hot, not too cold, not too hard,
not too soft, but just right. In this regard, Europe is taking the lead.
Compared with Americans who have dismal government assistance and relatively
little saving, average Europeans in the current economic crisis are far better
protected by free health care and largely free education. China, too, is
returning to its traditional Confucian "middle approach" (zhong yong) by
pursuing a "kinder-and-gentler" public policy for a more "harmonious" society.
It is time for the new leaders in America to shift its focus away from Bush's
obsession with terrorism and to refocus on the broader well-being of the world
and Americans. And the world is waiting and watching.
Notes
1. BBC, Iraq
violence, In Figures August 6, 2008.
2. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
(Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2004), p xiv.
3. Atimes.com, October 11, 2008.
4. Steven Hook, US Foreign Policy: The Paradox of World Power (CQ Press,
2005), p 296.
5. George Kennan, American Diplomacy, expanded edition (The University
of Chicago Press, 1951), p 66.
6. Fareed Zakaria, "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy," Foreign Affairs,
76 (6) (Nov./Dec. 1997), pp 22-43.
7. Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?" The National Interest, no 16
(Summer 1989).
8. Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the
Neoconservative Legacy (Yale University Press, March 20, 2007).
Dr Yu Bin is Senior Fellow of the Shanghai Association of American
Studies. He can be reached at yu1999@hotmail.com.
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