The Times U.K.
THURSDAY FEBRUARY 07 2002

Arrogance and fear: the American paradox

ANATOLE KALETSKY

Is America about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? To judge by the incoherent, paranoid mood of the World Economic Forum in New York, American politicians, businessmen and media commentators appear to be on the brink of a collective nervous breakdown.
Consider what America has achieved in the past six months. It has won a war that was said to be unwinnable. It has coped with a human and social tragedy on a scale not seen in the West since the Second World War, responding with an admirable combination of dignity, restraint and courage. On the economic front, a recession described by many experts as the greatest peril to face the world economy since the 1930s has ended almost before it began. The bursting of the Internet bubble — widely described as the greatest financial speculation in history — has left some investors severely chastened, but has done no permanent harm to the US economy or even to confidence on Wall Street.

How have Americans responded to all this good news? Not since the early 1980s have I seen America’s business elite so lacking in confidence, not just about their immediate economic prospects, but about the long-term outlook for capitalism and the world. The arrogance of American politicians on the world stage is a natural reaction to this fundamental lack of economic and social self-confidence, as it was in the early Reagan years.

Whether the wider American public shares this manic-depressive paranoia is uncertain, but opinion polls suggest that it does. How else can one explain the record approval ratings of a President who tells them that — far from celebrating their Afghanistan victory — they should prepare for a third world war that will last for decades and expose them to unprecedented dangers? Objectively, Americans should now feel more secure than ever. The Taleban have been overthrown with little loss of American lives. An unprecedented global coalition has defended modern civilisation from a perverted medieval fundamentalism. The round-up of terrorists has been successfully extended to every corner of the world, helping to stabilise pro-Western regimes from the Philippines to Peru.

Let me quote President Arroyo of the Philippines, who has far more reason to fear Islamic terrorism than any American. Speaking at the forum she said: “Victory is now at hand. When President Bush said he would go into Afghanistan, everyone predicted that it would be a long drawn-out war, but it took only a few weeks for the back of the terrorist movement to be broken.”

President Arroyo is clearly right. Hundreds of terrorists have been arrested, their plans uncovered and their networks opened to infiltration. Laws have been tightened around the world. New security measures have been introduced making aircraft and public buildings far safer than before. Technologies are being deployed to make terrorist attacks even more difficult and a repeat of September’s massacre literally impossible. An anthrax attack on the US Congress has been dealt with and has turned out to be much less lethal than expected.

Yet the Bush Administration’s response to all these victories has been to terrify the American public with bloodcurdling rhetoric about the infinitely greater horrors of nuclear and biological terrorism that lie in wait.

There are many possible reasons why Mr Bush may prefer to whip up irrational war hysteria rather than rest on his laurels.He may be genuinely convinced that terrorists are about to acquire nuclear weapons from Iraq, North Korea or Iran, but this seems unlikely, if only because there are more plausible sources of supply in Russia and the former Soviet republics, not to mention India and Pakistan.

Any pretext to topple President Saddam Hussein would obviously be attractive to the White House. This would also be a great boon for the world and the Middle East, if the job could be done by internal dissident forces and accomplished with as little bloodshed as the overthrow of the Taleban. Unfortunately, this is a very big if, since there is no military opposition in Iraq comparable to the Northern Alliance and Saddam runs a modern police state, very different from the ramshackle medieval theocracy of the Taleban.

There are other less creditable reasons for whipping up war hysteria. Mr Bush wants to make sure that he cannot be blamed for a lack of vigilance in the event of some totally unpredictable and random terrorist outrage, which could occur, by the law of probabilities, regardless of whatever precautions might be taken sometime in the next few years. The Pentagon has been looking for an enemy ever since Mr Bush’s election, to justify a vastly expanded defence budget. Moreover, the interests of Israel have a commanding influence on some of the key policymakers in Washington — and Israel’s interests are unfortunately identified at present with the extreme Zionism of Ariel Sharon. For Saudi Arabia, which is increasingly recognised in America as the main wellspring of the fundamentalist poison seeping through all Islamic countries, it is convenient if America’s anger is deflected on to Iraq and Iran.

America’s new paranoia is also driven by a domestic political agenda. The social conservatives on the Republican Right are praying (literally) that a revival of the Cold War mentality of the 1950s might restore some of the conservative moral values that were weakened by the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s, which were totally swept away by the Clinton Administration. War fever has given Mr Bush an excuse to tear up his promises about balanced budgets and to propose additional tax cuts that would benefit America’s biggest corporations and richest citizens. Last, but not least, it is clearly in the Republicans’ interest to sustain the war fever until the crucial congressional elections on November 5.

All this is obvious enough — and all of these themes were widely discussed in the background of the New York forum, if only sotto voce. It is also obvious that America’s paranoia and arrogance will pose at least a temporary danger to the global anti-terrorist coalition. What is less obvious, but may prove more insidious and lasting, is the effect of the new paranoia on the global victory of American capitalist values, which seemed so decisive in the past decade.

By identifying America primarily as a military power, by asserting that it will pursue its perceived national interests regardless of international laws, coalitions or treaties, by emphasising its unchallengeable superiority over every other nation and global institution, by claiming an unconditional moral hegemony over any adversary he cares to identify, and by acting so blatantly in the interests of the US business establishment, Mr Bush is weakening America and playing into the hands of its opponents.

He is fostering the belief that America’s wealth and power are illegitimate and coercive when, in reality, America is powerful because people all over the world volunteer to buy its products and absorb its values. But that is not how the world perceives things. And the more America brandishes its military power, the more it will be met with antagonism, revulsion and misunderstanding.

Even US businessmen seem to be losing confidence in the legitimacy of the system that made them rich. The millionaire corporate executives at the World Economic Forum applauded enthusiastically whenever speakers mentioned injustice, inequality and the need for more government, regulation and income redistribution on a global scale. Every mention of the global triumph of US capitalist values was greeted with embarrassed silence.

All this may be no bad thing. Perhaps global inequalities have become intolerable. Perhaps the imbalance between materialism and spirituality does need redressing. Perhaps Europe — and especially Britain — could benefit by distancing themselves further from brash American values. But as Mr Bush pushes America ever further towards the extremes of military unilateralism, there is a growing danger of a repeat of the global ideological backlash of the 1960s — and a near certainty that US influence in the world will diminish.

The greatest danger to America’s dominant position today is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is the arrogance of American power.