DON'T SOIL MY BEAUTIFUL IDEAS WITH FACTS

Drifting toward multi-polarity (Michael A Weinstein, Asia Times, June 12th, 2004)

Now that the experiment in American unilateralism has failed with the collapse of the adventurist campaign in Iraq, the world returns to the two foundational models for global power relations: multilateralism and multi-polarism.

Whoever occupies the Oval Office after the November 2004 election will have to try to recoup the power that the United States lost during its rendezvous with neo-conservative fantasy. That can only be done - if at all - through an attempt to reconstitute a multilateral consensus on globalization in which the United States is primus inter pares, guaranteeing the security of world capitalism militarily, but not using its military power to impose its policies on its allies and independent limited collaborators (China and Russia) without genuine negotiation and compromise. Under multilateralism, the United States usually gets its geopolitical way, but forbears from acting in opposition to significant resistance from other major power centers. The Iraq adventure has demonstrated that unilateralism alienates allies and collaborators, resulting in the loss of American credibility and clout. Multilateralism remains the path that leads to the maximization of American power in the world.

The question is whether the Iraq adventure marks a watershed in world politics, in which the currents that once ran toward multilateralism in the decade following the fall of the Soviet Union have now shifted in the direction of multi-polarism. Well before the second Gulf War, China, Russia and France had voiced preferences for multi-polarism, in which American leadership is replaced by negotiation among regional power centers, among them North America. The Iraq war may have tipped the balance so that it favors the multi-polarists. If the United States cannot be trusted to take the interests of allies and collaborators into account in its strategic policy, these governments will seek to retrench, moving to gain as much control as possible over their regions, so that they can exert a veto on American interventions into them. Although each regional power center has its own independent interests, they all have a shared interest in fending off American dictation and, therefore, constitute an incipient defensive alliance.

Multi-polarism is a containment policy against the United States - the one-time hyper-power that has revealed its vulnerability and the limits of its military control.

Isn’t this fun? When you jump into the world of abstract conceptual analysis and don’t bother much with strategic, economic, moral, political or historical factors, you get to go to the most exciting places. Here we learn that multilateralism is the surest guarantee of American hegemony and international deference to Washington because the rest of the world has a Rodney Dangerfield complex and is very touchy about not being consulted. Once consulted, they will generally let the U.S. have its way and be perfectly happy to sit back and watch. Failure to consult, however, will upset them no end, lower their self-esteem and cause them to “drift” resentfully into a competitive arms race in order to thwart the pompous hyperpower.

Didn't the left talk this way about Hitler in the 30's?

Posted by Peter Burnet at June 13, 2004 7:52 AM