A New Credo For The Hyperpower
To improve its influence and image in the world, the US should refrain from building new nuclear weapons, scrap the Bush doctrine of preventive war and regime change, break its climate-changing oil habit, and recommit to international rule-making organisations such as the UN.
The musings of a leftwing think-tank? A liberal pipedream? Not a bit of it. These proposals come from Richard Haass, a leading light in the US foreign policy establishment and former senior official in the Clinton and Bush administrations.
As strategists ponder America's future direction amid continuing international divisions over Iraq, the "war on terror", Kyoto, trade and a host of other issues, Mr Haass' new "integration doctrine" is being taken seriously. Henry Kissinger, hardly a radical, is a fan.
This master plan for deepened international collaboration, a global version of the 19th century Concert of Europe, is set out in Mr Haass's latest book, The Opportunity: America's Moment to Alter History's Course.
As his title implies, Mr Haass does not believe the US should surrender its post-1945 leading role. But he suggests its national interests will be best served if hubristic ideas about American exceptionalism, indispensability and unilateralism are tempered by more pragmatic, mutually beneficial cooperation with emerging powers such as Europe and China.
Pointing to perhaps the biggest lesson of the neo-conservative era, Mr Haass says hyperpower has limits - and they have been reached.
"The US does not need the world's permission to act, but it does need the world's support to succeed," he writes. "No single country, no matter how powerful, can contend successfully on its own with trans-national challenges."
Iraq, for example, had become a "magnet and a school for terrorists". The US should push for a new set of international "rules of the road" before the opportunity afforded by post-Cold War American primacy is squandered, he argues. But "significant changes" to current US policies are a prerequisite.
Controversially, he urges President Bush to cool his evangelical enthusiasm for spreading democracy. Affording primacy to that aim is "neither desirable nor practical", Mr Haass says, given the many more pressing threats, such as proliferation, terrorism and protectionism, which require an improved collective response.
Mr Haass's attempt to substitute 21st century integration for 20th century containment is only one contribution to an intensifying debate reassessing America's policies.
In a devastating essay in the New York Review of Books on post-invasion failures in Iraq, Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador, condemns the American "arrogance and ignorance" that he says could produce the ultimate own goal: Kurdish secession and a theocratic Shia state in thrall to Iran.
He says the US must accept that "while the Sunni Arab insurgents cannot win, neither can they be defeated" and that the attempt to agree a lasting uni-state constitution is doomed. Only a "drastic change of strategy" involving a loose confederal structure of three self-governing communities can save Iraq from disintegration, he claims.
The wider policy debate has been lent urgency by next month's UN summit at which long-term decisions on rules governing military intervention, poverty reduction and UN reform are contemplated. But it is largely occurring without the administration's participation.
A legacy-minded Mr Bush appears more concerned at present with getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and achieving some legislative and judicial successes at home, than with crafting new global approaches.
Brian Urquhart, a former UN undersecretary-general, has some sobering words for would-be architects of a more enlightened world order. Reviewing Mr Haass's book, he highlights the formidable domestic political obstacles to change, particularly US corporate lobbying power. And he questions the quality of contemporary American leadership.
Disturbingly for America's policy potentates, Mr Urquhart also wonders whether a "rapidly changing world (will) be willing to embrace US leadership as readily as it has done in the past". Even after all Mr Bush has done, the possibility of rejection hardly seems to have occurred to them.
Simon Tisdall
Thursday August 4, 2005
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1542199,00.html
The musings of a leftwing think-tank? A liberal pipedream? Not a bit of it. These proposals come from Richard Haass, a leading light in the US foreign policy establishment and former senior official in the Clinton and Bush administrations.
As strategists ponder America's future direction amid continuing international divisions over Iraq, the "war on terror", Kyoto, trade and a host of other issues, Mr Haass' new "integration doctrine" is being taken seriously. Henry Kissinger, hardly a radical, is a fan.
This master plan for deepened international collaboration, a global version of the 19th century Concert of Europe, is set out in Mr Haass's latest book, The Opportunity: America's Moment to Alter History's Course.
As his title implies, Mr Haass does not believe the US should surrender its post-1945 leading role. But he suggests its national interests will be best served if hubristic ideas about American exceptionalism, indispensability and unilateralism are tempered by more pragmatic, mutually beneficial cooperation with emerging powers such as Europe and China.
Pointing to perhaps the biggest lesson of the neo-conservative era, Mr Haass says hyperpower has limits - and they have been reached.
"The US does not need the world's permission to act, but it does need the world's support to succeed," he writes. "No single country, no matter how powerful, can contend successfully on its own with trans-national challenges."
Iraq, for example, had become a "magnet and a school for terrorists". The US should push for a new set of international "rules of the road" before the opportunity afforded by post-Cold War American primacy is squandered, he argues. But "significant changes" to current US policies are a prerequisite.
Controversially, he urges President Bush to cool his evangelical enthusiasm for spreading democracy. Affording primacy to that aim is "neither desirable nor practical", Mr Haass says, given the many more pressing threats, such as proliferation, terrorism and protectionism, which require an improved collective response.
Mr Haass's attempt to substitute 21st century integration for 20th century containment is only one contribution to an intensifying debate reassessing America's policies.
In a devastating essay in the New York Review of Books on post-invasion failures in Iraq, Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador, condemns the American "arrogance and ignorance" that he says could produce the ultimate own goal: Kurdish secession and a theocratic Shia state in thrall to Iran.
He says the US must accept that "while the Sunni Arab insurgents cannot win, neither can they be defeated" and that the attempt to agree a lasting uni-state constitution is doomed. Only a "drastic change of strategy" involving a loose confederal structure of three self-governing communities can save Iraq from disintegration, he claims.
The wider policy debate has been lent urgency by next month's UN summit at which long-term decisions on rules governing military intervention, poverty reduction and UN reform are contemplated. But it is largely occurring without the administration's participation.
A legacy-minded Mr Bush appears more concerned at present with getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and achieving some legislative and judicial successes at home, than with crafting new global approaches.
Brian Urquhart, a former UN undersecretary-general, has some sobering words for would-be architects of a more enlightened world order. Reviewing Mr Haass's book, he highlights the formidable domestic political obstacles to change, particularly US corporate lobbying power. And he questions the quality of contemporary American leadership.
Disturbingly for America's policy potentates, Mr Urquhart also wonders whether a "rapidly changing world (will) be willing to embrace US leadership as readily as it has done in the past". Even after all Mr Bush has done, the possibility of rejection hardly seems to have occurred to them.
Simon Tisdall
Thursday August 4, 2005
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1542199,00.html
posted by R7 | 8/04/2005 06:41:00 PM
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