Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Think Globally - Act Unilaterally

Yesterday I read something in the newspaper- on actual paper, so I can't put a link to it here, which is a freedom I forfeited for the freedom of reading during outside on a bench in the sun- different from anything I had read before. It was something I don't think would have been written before a few years ago by anyone except Barry Goldwater or one of the Barry Goldwater clones that Pinochet used to keep in that cave in the Andes. It wasn't written by anyone who I recognised as belonging to a neoconservative cabal. I had a vague impression they were actually some kind of career diplomat. The general tone of the article didn't seem to be particularly right wing. The piece was about the Darfur crisis, and what I read was something like this: "A government that cannot guarantee the human rights of its people forfeits its right to non-interference in its internal affairs." Amen.

It was just put in there, unapologetically, without any effort to justify the statement. "A government that cannot guarantee the human rights of its people forfeits its right to non-interference in its internal affairs."

That is, to me, the Bush doctrine. It is also the Clinton doctrine- Clinton ordered the military into action more times than any other peacetime US President, always for humanitarian sorts of things. But what this doctrine needs is a sense of proportion; you cannot let Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Moore determine your priorities. It needs a sense of what can realistically be done, and also what is worth doing. I am sure a multinational force along the Green Line in Israel/Palestine would do some good; I am sure a few hundred Scandinavian peacekeepers in Bourke and Walgett would do some good; but I am not sure that is the best way the world should be spending its resources. At the other end of the scale, this doctrine so innocently expressed by this fellow whose name I have forgotten runs into one enormous problem. Two words: Middle Kingdom.

But leaving that aside for now. World government may or not be a good thing, but there is only one entity in the world today that can be considered an embryonic world government, and that is the United States. It is far less corrupt and far, far more powerful than the United Nations; it has a powerful motivating and unifying ideology that is exportable and adaptable, unlike the European Union or China. The best chance for peace in our time is American hegemony.

(The next bit I wrote at the beginning of last year, and now I find that the final paragraph scares me, which must mean I am becoming more mellow. Ahem:)

This is what the United States is waking up to realise: For the first time in history, a democracy has a free hand to remake the world.

At Valmy, the revolutionary army of the French sent a shudder through all the crowned heads of Europe, and the long war against the people began. The spirit of the 18th Century Revolutions was stilled by two-hundred years of obscene but necessary realpolitik, cooperation with every kind of dictator and thug to fight greater evils, but can now rise again. It is the duty of every democracy to export revolution.

We do not understand, in the bloodless republics and pale constitutional monarchies that form the rest of the West, what the United States is: it is not a collection of people whose ancestors happened to live in a particular place, but a nation founded and sustained by a ideology more human than any product of the satanic 20th century. That ideology is not necessarily english-speaking, it is not necessarily Christian, it is not necessarily rich. The 22nd century United States may well be none of these things. This is the core of the ideology: “We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

If you believe that sentence, you will not stop at Kabul. You will not stop at Baghdad. You will not stop at Teheran or Ramallah or Damascus or Pyongyang. You will take advantage of this sweet-spot in history, this transient moment before we once again have ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, to engineer a regime change in the renegade mainland provinces of China. You will fight until all government not “of the people, for the people, by the people” has vanished from the face of the Earth.

2 comments:

Dave said...

Understood. Even agreed, but with the following absolute qualifier:

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
- Theodore Roosevelt, 1918

And *that* is where I stand on it, in terms of personal morality. I will accept (believe it or not) a hegemonic US prepared to thrash any TPLAC (as Sir Humphrey termed them with hilariously acute racism), provided it is capable of holding itself *at least* to its own declared standards of conduct.

The Bush White House has manifestly failed to adhere to basic standards of truth and accountability (I'm not saying his predecessors haven't failed in various ways as well; that's kinda my point). The American people, in my view, have failed in their own responsibility to the rest of the world by standing by and letting them get away with it (particularly Rummy, who by virtually *any* standard of decency should have thrown himself on his sword over Abu Ghraib).

Dr Clam said...

Fine quote from Teddy Roosevelt- hmm, I think he was in Opposition in 1918, but I expect he was still sincere.

Here is the exact quote from the newspaper:

"States that fail to protect the human rights of their citizens forfeit the sovereign right to non-interference in their affairs." - David Clark (Special advisor to Robin Cook at the British Foreign Office, 1997-2001. He seems to be a regular columnist at the Guardian (!))