Appetite For Destruction?

Appetite For Destruction?
A critique of Michael Mann’s essay “Incoherent Empire”

If one thing can be said regarding George W. Bush administration, it is that it created a small industry of essays and critiques dissecting his administration, his strategies (or lack thereof), his decision-making process, his agenda and what-not. Hundreds of investigative journalists, scholars and adventurers in the field of political analysis are presently competing for a share of space on the libraries shelves, and many of these books have acquired the relinquished status of “bestseller”. For all the alleged or real steps backward in individual freedoms, human rights and respect for the principles of international law in the post-9/11 world he his being held responsible for by a large share of the public opinion (at home or abroad), it is clear that free press and liberty of opinion is not yet under his full control!
Michael Mann’s essay Incoherent Empire, published in 2003 , is among this harvest of essays. A professor of sociology at the University of California in Los Angeles who happens to be an American and an British national, the author delivers in his essay a strong critique of the imperial policies pursued by the administration of “Bush The Young”. According to him, this administration’s policies will be failures on all counts: militarily, economically, politically and ideologically. In other words, the four P’s that are the traditional pillars of the United States foreign policy (power, prosperity, peace and principles) will be badly served by unilateralism: it will not leave the US better-off. This “paradigmatic shift” toward the moral and physical practice of unilateralism will also sever the trust relationship existing between the United States (US) and it’s allies on the political, ideological and economical plane. The author concludes his introduction uncompromisingly:

” Far from being sufficiently organized, this is an incoherent empire which militaristic presumptuousness and hyperactivity will not take long to destroy. To palliate their weaknesses, the new imperialists hung themselves ever so tightly to the only power they are guaranteed - the capacity to conduct a destructive military offensive. Consequently, I’ll demonstrate that this new American imperialism is becoming a new militarism, which cannot suffice to guarantee an empire. Whom lives by the sword...”

In this paper, it will be attempted to summarize the beliefs of the author, and to oppose to it a relevant critique based upon academic sources. This paper author believes that Mann’s Incoherent Empire points toward interesting questions regarding the limits to the feasibility of conducting a unilateral “imperial” foreign policy. Mann nevertheless exaggerates and it is reasonable to think that it is too early to simply disregard the benefits of this policy, and to call it a failure already.
This paper will be divided in four parts: the military (power), the economic (prosperity), the political (peace) and the ideological (principles) aspects. In conclusion, this critique of Mann’s essay will be summed-up and paths of thoughts will be suggested.

1- Nothing New About This: The “Power” Behind US Imperialism

Mann begins his essay with a critique of the military aspect of the situation. He brushes a portrait of the impressive American nuclear superiority and of it’s massive fire-power. The author points out the relative weakness of the American forces in term of the size of it’s standing army, but readily points out the effectiveness of it’s dominant technology over most – if not all – other powers.
He articulate his rebuttal of Bush policies by first making the point that nuclear weapon serves nothing offensively and in deterring non-national terrorist actors. He then moves on at proving how much a “planetary deployment” is unfeasible. He reminds the readers of the number of light-weight weapons (like AK-47’s) in circulation around the world, especially since the “bankruptcy sales” of the former Soviet Unions stocks in the 1990’s. He argues, with references to the Roman and English golden eras, the utility and limits of possessing a crushing military might: very effective in conquests, of little use in occupations. He also makes a fine distinction between guerilleros and terrorists.
He goes on to articulates his main argument: how Bush policy of chasing “rogue states” that possesses so-called “weapons of mass-destruction” is actually conducive to proliferation. Of all 4 ways – International good relations, deterrence, unilateralism and multilateralism - the author quotes as ‘means to avoid proliferation’, Bush chose the worst of them: unilateralism. He says of it:
“The American policy of counter-proliferation is directed primarily against poor and hostile countries, then against poor but friendly countries and finally against other rich countries, and it does not apply to the US itself. This doesn’t inspire confidence to the rest of the world”.

Mann traces back the source of this new imperialism - that in the ends rely solely upon brute military force - fairly long before the actual “election” of George W. Bush to the White House. He says:

« The drift that would lead to this new imperialism was already under way. It seemed to be the logical consequence of the illimited power that dazes the leaders of American foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet Union».

He uses as examples to illustrate his stand excerpts from the Clinton administration’s official speeches, and the increasing tendency all over the 1990’s to go round the slowliness of the United Nations Organization (UN) by acting “more and more” unilaterally (Clinton administration’s strikes on Iraq and Afghanistan) or through NATO (Kosovo). So far, this point of view is hardly fresh news.
Evidences of the US shaky belief in a multilateral world order can be traced all the way back to the years surrounding the foundation of the UN. Throughout the 1990’s, the UN and international institutions faced crisis after crisis, showing their inability to meet up with the expectations they had help to create about a pacified world. The fiascos in former-Yougoslavia and in Rwanda stands as cruel examples of this inefficiency react adequately and in due time. Right now, another humanitarian tragedy is being played out in south-western Sudan while the World debates the definition of the word “genocide”!
This is not to say that international political institutions has no purpose whatsoever, but it is enough to circumscribe their limit when it comes to the actual implementation of security-related policies . Samuel Huntington, for one, concedes that:

” ... policies and actions of the United States, of European great powers and of international institutions helped bring democracy to Spain and Portugal, to numerous countries in Latin-America, to the Philippines, to South-Korea and to Eastern-Europe”.

But the international community had therefore made up with a potential defection of the United States from the multilateral system for a long time, especially in the field of military action. In 1992, Warren Christopher, the then US Secretary of State, said:

”The United States will act unilaterally whenever this will be necessary in order to preserve their interests and will mobilize collective responses whenever this will be appropriate. In any case, let us be clear: we will use our power”.

Lack of confidence in Pax Americana can be traced-up even further away in Cold War History. France withdrawal from NATO in the early 60’s and the conducing of it’s own nuclear deterrence policy is in part the cause of a lack of trust in the US will to strongly support allies in case of a Soviet first strike against Europe, showing how difficult it is among allies to articulate a credible common policy and to implement means to conduct such a policy. Balancing is costly and tricky, said Kenneth Waltz at Concordia University last October 15.
Consequently, and often overlooked, the US nuclear deterrence policy against the Soviet Union, articulated early in the Cold War, can hardly be think of as a multilateral approach to military and political stability. As for direct military interventionism, few can hold that the US involvement in Vietnam was based around a vast coalition of the willing: apart from the US and South-Vietnamese troops involved, only Australians dared to show up.
To put it again in the words of Kenneth Waltz, as he said lecturing at Concordia University on October 15: the United States waging wars is their general behaviour, not the exception. One should therefore be little surprised by the actual attitude of the US and if this shocks the international community, they had years and years of signals sent to them in order to organize against this empire.
Mann never the less mark points when it comes to the actual capacity of the US to implement it’s own policy of unilateralism. First, he makes the point that in this new reality, a nuclear arsenal serves little purpose. It is helpful to prevent other states from attacking, bearing the promises of a retaliation that would leave them utterly destroyed. But it as long been ruled out by most strategist as an offensive weapon, and the US has destroyed or decommissioned it’s nuclear artillery in the 1960’s.
When it comes to actual deployment of troops, Mann says:


” ... the actual strategy holds that the United States are able to fight one and a half war at once, one being an active engagement, the other being implementation operation”.

Compared to the list of “rogue states” enumerated by President Bush, and looking at all the potential “rogue states” that could be added to this list if they do not meet the “with or against us” requirements of the current administration creed, one can clearly see the massive burden the United States are putting upon themselves.
In a landmark article, A New Grand Strategy, published in the January 2002 delivery of The Atlantic Monthly, Benjamin Schwartz warns against potential overstretch of American forces. In the November 2002 issue of the same magazine, James Fallows estimates to 17 billions the first year of an American military occupation of Iraq, and to 50 thousand the troops required to do so . The financial abyss of the sole Iraq invasion is troubling. This same “with or against us” attitude is an invitation for the international community not to share the bill of such military interventions.
But some arguments play against Mann’s position as well. The massive military intervention already paid in some instances: Libya as sought for a normalization of its relations with the world community and has gone to a great length to be seen more favourably by the US; and recent news updates hints that even North Korea, following Bush re-election, is now suddenly multiplying “signs” that it wants to reach a settlement. The over-exposed destruction of the Iraqi state may also account for many non-events: it is far more “exciting” to imagine a world dominated by chaos and social unrest, but for all the shenanigans very few “rogue states” have yet defied the US since the invasion of Iraq. Consequently, It may as well be argued that Bush policy is working. Power is being asserted.

2- Economy: Is Bush Economically Stupid?

Mann sums-up in this short chapter the role of the US in maintaining an economic system based upon an unequal distribution of wealth, and illustrates the duplicity of economic policies that only exacerbates resentment on the part of the ‘Global Village’ have-nots.
He starts is presentation on the state of the US economy by showing it’s decline from the dominant position it had at the end of WWII until the present day. He nevertheless mentions that:

«…the (US) dollar remains the world reserve, meanwhile values of transactions in Wall Street represent almost two thirds of the volume of stock markets worldwide».

And that:

« ...foreign investors would not abandon the dollar, and the United States, unless they would come to loose confidence in the American economy and in America’s capacity to guarantee economic and worldwide geopolitical stability».


The author specifically points the accuser’s finger to where the US spends his “international aid”: Israel, Egypt, Jordania and Columbia gets the lion’s share of this money, of which a large part is in fact assorted to agreements of a military nature.
International US aid is therefore not directed at actually relieving the legions of people around the world that suffers from inequalities (famine, wars, repressive and inhumane treatments), but is distributed in machiavellian fashion to serve both the strategic and geopolitical interest of US policies, and the benefits of US trans-nationals companies.
Policies like the Millennium Challenge Account (an international aid program announced in 2002 attached to a series of commitments from the receiving end, like “principles of good-governance”), free-trade and free flow of capital are neo-liberal policies pursued by the Bush administration to serve private American interests, but they also happen to directly hit the economies of weaker countries and they produce as a boomerang effect, in Marxist fashion, masses of laid-off, angry and humiliated people.
Moreover, Bush administration is flip-flopping on free-trade, multiplying protectionist means that this time not only broke different sorts of industries around the world, but prompted the election of governments strongly opposed to the US with regards to economic policies. South-America (especially Brazil, Venezuela and Chile), once a strong exporter of neo-liberal economic models, is now one of the leaders in the economic iron-arm challenge between the US and the rest of the World.
While the question of economic human rights and of a more equal re-distribution of wealth is a profoundly important problem, and that the author is right in denouncing the blatant hypocrisy of US economic policies, one may be reminded three things.
First, economic policies designed to expand the market for US goods is the norm rather than the exception in US foreign policies. The Marshall Plan helped meet those three US objectives of serving geopolitical interest, selling arms and opening-up markets for US goods. The Keynesian economic institutions were put in place with the strong support of US administrations precisely because they calculated they would benefit from them.
Second, the habit of selling weaponry of various sort to whomever is not only a US thing. Saddam Hussein’s army was equipped with arms coming from the US, France, the former-USSR, North-Korea…
Third, it is part of the US founding-fathers spirit (only need to be seen the US constitution and its emphasis upon the protection of private property) – and especially at the very heart of the Republican party – to foster by any means and often at whatever cost opportunities benefiting corporations and a limited number of wealthy individuals. They did this in their own country, and people nevertheless ask more of it:
“…it is these economic achievements that are the movement’s greatest monument. The backlash is what has made possible the international free-market consensus of recent years, with all the privatization, deregulation, and de-unionization that are its components. Backlash ensures the Republicans will continue to be returned to office even when free-market miracles fail and their libertarian schemes don’t deliver and their “New Economy” collapses. It makes the policy pusher’s fantasies of “globalization” and free-trade empire that are foisted upon the rest of the world with such self-assurance. (…) The backlash imagines itself as a foe of the elite, as the voice of the unfairly persecuted, as a righteous protest of the people on history’s receiving end. That its champions today control all three branches of government matters not a whit. That its greatest beneficiaries are the wealthiest people on the planet does not give it pause”.

Posing preposterously as the champions of labour and small-time owners in order to better serve the interests of the happy-few is merely nowadays the global expression of US capitalism as it always was. This triumphant economic model is not the invention of George W. Bush, and it is the practice by almost all leaders worldwide of neo-liberal policies that constitute a problem.

3 – “Elephant-Male Diplomacy”
The third chapter of Mann’s essay is about nation-state sovereignty, the principle of non-interference and the US “imperial” policy of curtailing nations sovereignties if it wants to (especially by promoting openly “regime changes” in specific countries), whatever principles of international law says. Under the new paradigm, the pressure put upon nations that feel their sovereignty threatened by the potentiality of an American attack will simply disrupt the structure of trust-relationships built over the last 50 years by institutions like the UN over conflict-resolution between nation-states. Therefore, this new policy will lead to violent reactions to US unilateralism, will trigger all-out arms-races and will disserve the peace objective.
In a recent interview with the Atlantic Monthly’s P.J. O’Rourke, Secretary of State Colin Powell described is outlook of the role of the US to achieve a stable, peaceful World as follow:
“I think our historical position is we are a superpower that cannot be touched in this generation by anyone in terms of military power, economic power, the strength of our political system and our values system. What we would like to see is a greater understanding of power, of the democratic system, the open market economic system, the rights of men and women to achieve their destiny as God has directed them to do if they are willing to work for it. And we really do not wish to go to war with people. But, by God, we will have the strongest military around. And that’s not a bad thing to have. It encourages and champions our friends that are weak and it chills the ambitions of the evil. (…) You’ve heard the wonderful story about the elephants? This was at a game reserve in Botswana. They found that a gang of elephants, male elephants, were killing rhinoceros. They were young elephants that had been brought from another reserve far away as adolescents. (The keepers) just went and got some older male elephants, adult males, and within a few months, problem solved. The teenagers didn’t know how to act. The male elephant made it clear to them” .

It’s been clear for many thinkers – from Rousseau to Tocqueville – that liberty and democracy is an acquired reflex. It takes time to develop the right institutions, to be put into practice, to develop the people’s maturity to use it well. Traces of suspicions against democracy and liberty can be found in many of the oldest democracies around: the founding fathers of the US preferred to grant the privilege to elect the President to an electoral college rather than to direct universal suffrage, and it’s been only two years since the United Kingdom abolished hereditary access to the House of Lords.
Unchecked democracy erupting from the bottom-up is often a bloody business. Failed examples of democratization are legion. One of the most striking of them is the failure of Germany’s Weimar Republic.
More recently, the examples of “shock conversions” to democracy in former Soviet republics turned out into a big farce. Authoritarian drifts, corruption and disrespect for “basic human rights” simply happens all the time.
In the Arab world specifically, the difficulties of democratization are so apparent that Arabs are beginning the difficult task to look into themselves and try to discover what prevents them from operating a smooth conversion toward democracy . The difficulties of Islam to balance respect of traditions and embracing modernity is a recurring theme among Muslim scholars.
In Totem and Taboos, Sigmund Freud attributes the origin of laws of society to the dominant position of one male over the rest of the tribe. He’s the one who dictates the rules of the game, and that punishes falters. He’s the father figure. Not unlike the male-elephant allegory used by Powell, the US might right now be in the position of the democratic father figure.
In this light, given the failure of “soft” politics – like Carter’s or Clinton’s – and keeping in mind that democratization is know understood as a tough, long process, the US objective of peace might be better served by an active policy that uses both the carrot and the stick.
4 – Good And Evil
American imperialists, as all the others, are convinced to hold the truth, says Mann in the opening of this chapter on US principles. The author questions whether Americans really have great principles or are merely convinced of it. He makes a virulent critique of the American society, that knows and cares little about the “rest of the World”, is obsessed by superficiality and is fuelled by fear and consumption. Ignorance engenders fear, says the author. The tendency is therefore toward an increasingly “de-politized” mass all absorb by the instant gratification of their sensorial needs.
This makes it all the more easy to accept a Manichean view of the world centred around so vague a basis as “Us versus Them”, and “Good versus Evil”. The cannot figure out that this very diminutive outlook keeps them from understanding the basic needs at the very heart of many of the world’s conflict.
The challenges to the American ideological crusade are, in the author’s opinion: the ethnic-cultural dimension of many of today’s conflicts, religious fundamentalism, and the anachronistic nature of imperialism.
In defence of Mann, it appears clear that civilizations are facing a crisis right now. The author readily agrees with Samuel Huntington regarding clashes at the meeting-points of the different civilizations: Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq being scarred examples of it. Nation-states in some instances fail to deliver the promises in terms of people auto-determination, when in other instances the nation-state apparatus simply crushes the aspirations of people. A quest for the definition of identities is under way and people all over the world are struggling against institutions and values – which are sometimes the heritage of colonialism – that do not represent their own.
Yet the struggle for the dominance of one culture over another is as old as culture is. Critiques of the United States comes oftentimes from unlikely lecturers: when did France became a champion of virtue when itself is concerned to shovel down the throats of its own colonies it’s culture and it’s goods, all the while showing that it won’t hesitate to use force as it is doing right now in Ivory Coast? France has a lot to offer, but in terms of sane political culture to export, it certainly does not possesses the moral high ground over the US.
In fact, what is US culture? It is still a question open to debate. But one thing is certain, the difficulty to define it exactly says a lot. It is malleable enough to morph and adapt to various situations. Buying a bottle of Coca-Cola doesn’t mean you buy the whole thing complete with a pistol and a Hummer 4X4.

“Nasty, Brutish And Short”
Many great philosophers all points toward the same thing: it is tough to all live together. One of the many problems that are challenges to a perfect world is the trade-off between liberties and security.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Social Contract, suggested that living in society is a compact between individuals that agrees to submit to laws of society, by definition a restriction of full liberty in a “natural state”, in exchange for increased security that will permit them to, well, keep being alive.
It’s not the Empire that is incoherent, it’s the whole world that has lived in a bubble for approximately 200 years. From the enlightenment through the Kantian, Hegelian and Marxist systems, the Western civilization fashioned a schematized and overly simplified understanding of the world. There is no empire. There’s only a number of players in a global game where one is best fitted to survive, and plays consequently according to his share of relative power.
The age of empires reached it’s end with the downfall of the USSR, sealing the faith of a imperial logic that reached global proportions during with the Cold War. There’s a lot of bleeding hearts that takes high moral stands and look down on the policies of George W. Bush administration that understands the world through the Hobbesian lenses. They should look deeper into the nature of conflicts arising since the early 1990’s and ask themselves if maybe this is the normal equilibrium of human nature taking it’s place back. For the greater part of the world, life is still “nasty, brutish and short”, and the western-centric theoretic systems and concepts of nation-states, individualism and human dignity didn’t do much against it so far. Humans are aggressive by nature, Freud argued, and therefore there will never be such a thing as a Kantian world peace. It would be hanging-on to colonialist, utopian wishful thinking to think otherwise.
Mann delivers an interesting analysis and raises interesting questions, but in a utilitarian, pragmatic universe, the US four P’s are best serve by dynamic, pro-active policies than by a global leader that won’t assume its role.