IF REGIME CHANGE IS INEVITABLE...:

POWER RANGERS: Did the Bush Administration create a new American empire—or weaken the old one? (JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL, 2004-01-19, The New Yorker)

Last March, after Jacques Chirac, the French President, announced that he would veto any new United Nations resolution sanctioning war against Iraq, the White House saw a chance for a different sort of victory. If a majority of the fifteen Security Council members voted for a new resolution and France vetoed it, the United States could claim that the problem was not American unilateralism but French obstructionism. And that hope set the United States scrambling to line up the votes of Chile, Mexico, Pakistan, and a trio of impoverished states from the west coast of Africa. “No matter what the whip count is, we’re calling for the vote,” President Bush said at a news conference broadcast worldwide on March 6th. “It’s time for people to show their cards, let the world know where they stand when it comes to Saddam.”

But, apart from Britain, Spain, and Bulgaria, the countries on the Security Council declined to side with the United States. Emissaries threatened and cajoled, to no avail. Pakistan, admittedly, had a restive Muslim population to contend with. But Mexico and Chile said no, too, and so did Cameroon and Guinea and Angola, a country that is heavily dependent on American trade and good will. In the end, Bush didn’t call for a vote.

At the time, this moment of mortification received scant attention; the outbreak of war was imminent. It was a curious spectacle, though. No country in the world could stand in the way of America’s determination to remove Saddam. But the United States seemed powerless to persuade even the smallest nations to legitimatize its power with a symbolic vote.

As hard-liners in the Bush Administration saw it, the real humiliation was that we had sought the approval of a quarrelsome international body in the first place. During the previous year, a growing number of them had become fascinated with the notion of empire. It was time for America, unabashedly and unilaterally, to assert its supremacy and to maintain global order. The U.N. debacle—the mismatch between our diplomatic sway and our military might—could be taken as confirmation of this view. And yet, if our overtures carried so little weight, just what was the nature of our imperial power? [...]

The Bush doctrine, with its tenets of preëmptive war, regime change, and permanent American military primacy, promised a new global order. The best way to think of that order is by analogy with the internal organization of a nation-state. What makes a state a state is its monopoly over the legitimate use of force, which means that citizens don’t have to worry about arming to defend themselves against each other. Instead, they can focus on productive pursuits like raising families, making money, and enjoying their leisure time. In the world of the Bush doctrine, states take the place of citizens. As the President told graduating cadets at West Point in 2002, America intends to keep its “military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.” In other words, if America has an effective monopoly on the exercise of military force, other countries should be able to set aside the distractions of arming and plotting against each other and put their energies into producing consumer electronics, textiles, tea. What the Bush doctrine calls for—paradoxically, given its proponents—is a form of world government.

The new order envisaged by the Bush doctrine hasn’t quite worked out as it was meant to. That’s because, from the beginning, the White House has acted on the assumption that bold action would make our allies rally behind us and our enemies cower. Building a consensus with our friends before we acted only encouraged quarrelsomeness. The point wasn’t that dictation was superior to consensus; the point was that it created consensus. [...]

Conservative ideologues, in calling for an international order in which America would have a statelike monopoly on coercive force, somehow forgot what makes for a successful state. Stable governments rule not by direct coercion but by establishing a shared sense of allegiance. In an old formula, “domination” gives way to “hegemony”—brute force gives way to the deeper power of consent. This is why the classic definition of the state speaks of legitimate force. In a constitutional order, government accepts certain checks on its authority, but the result is to deepen that authority, rather than to diminish it. Legitimacy is the ultimate “force multiplier,” in military argot. And if your aim is to maintain a global order, as opposed to rousting this or that pariah regime, you need all the force multipliers you can get.

Perhaps we've been living in an alternate reality from Mr. Marshall, but from what we saw no one opposed the American use of force in Iraq except for Saddam himself. Sure, some nations refused to sign on for the task of regime change, but none of them did anything about it. After all, Frenchmen don't show much interest in dying to protect France--they certainly aren't going to fight to preserve the concept of a foreign dictator's sovereignty.

What's more, the regime no sooner was changed than the war became de facto legitimate. No one refuses to recognize the new Iraq and those who were owed money by the old Iraq have been forced to abandon hope of collecting, while the rush is on to enter into new business deals in the new nation. Cheap rhetoric yielded rather quickly to geopolitical reality.

Obviously if America were to start toppling governments just because they're annoying--France, Germany...--it could lose legitimacy. But so long as we bring our power to bear exclusively on regimes that are genuine threats to the lives and liberties of their own people and of their neighbors, there'll be some grumbling from the usual quarters but our neo-imperialism will be essentially consensual.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 27, 2004 9:44 AM