All The Bridges Are Burning

The United States’ foreign policy has historically oscillated between recklessness of unilateralism and the cautious nature of multilateralism. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the United States discovered itself to be in a position of global pre-eminence in a diplomatic, economic, military and a cultural sense and it was tempted to define a new role for itself in the affairs of the world. In trying to carve a role for itself, the United States seemed to have forgotten the lessons of its diplomatic history as it adopted a neo-imperialist arrogance and seemed eager to lift the “white man’s burden”, which was re-characterized as “America’s responsibility towards the world and to bring it the benefits of the American civilization”. The United States is not an imperial nation, but was created as the anti-thesis to imperialism and colonization and for the United States to articulate imperialism as its “cause celebre”, only ends up by displaying the schizophrenic nature of the United States’ foreign policy. The origins of the United States’ foreign policy was grounded in the idealism of George Washington’s admonishment to his country, delivered as his presidential farewell address to the nation, to “avoid the embroils of Europe” and to base the nation’s foundations on the twin pillars of “religion and morality”. James Monroe would later personify this by establishing the “Monroe Doctrine” in 1820s, which stated that the United States regarded the western hemisphere as its preserve of political influence and would not tolerance any external interference in its sphere of influence.

The “Monroe Doctrine” highlighted the inability of the United States to implement its idealistic foreign policy, which slowly, as it emerged, resembled an argument for isolationism and this sense of isolationism was not because the United Stated chose it, but because the United States was realistically forced to accept its weakened military position as being incapable of deterring serious foreign interventions in its sphere of influence. The illusion of the “Monroe Doctrine” was maintained by the British Royal Navy, which acted as a military barrier maintaining and reinforcing the credibility of President James Monroe’s diplomatic intentions. If it had not been for the indulgence of the British and their navy, the United States would have been greatly tasked with protecting the sanctity of the “Monroe Doctrine” and ensuring its political isolationism from Europe. In reality, the “Monroe Doctrine” was the diplomatic rationale to keep the European powers out of the North American continent as the United States realized its “manifest destiny” of spreading its influence westward and politically integrating the vast continent within the territory of the United States. This was one of earliest documented cases of the United States using diplomacy as a political leverage to offset its inferior military capabilities to safeguard its political, and more importantly, economic interests. The United States was acutely aware that it did not have the political will or the military capabilities to resist a serious European intervention beyond the Mississippi River, which limited the United States’ territorial influence in North America. At this stage of the United States’ diplomatic history, it was much cheaper and logical to “buy an empire” than to fight for one in order to complete its’ “manifest destiny”. The famous “Louisiana Purchase” by the United States was also undertaken within a realization of its own weakness, because even though the United States had a desire to assume an imperial role in North America, it did not have necessary tools to create an imperial façade for itself. Hence, it adopted a moralistic approach to cover its weak diplomatic, political and military position by adopting a “live and let live” attitude.

The United States’ announcement of its diplomatic isolationism was nothing more than a multilateral excuse to overcome its unilateral weakness. The United States wanted to consolidate its influence on the North American continent and the only way it could attain this aim, was to keep the other contenders out of North America. This gambit succeeded as it consolidated its political authority in North America in the nineteenth century and by the beginning of the twentieth century, was poised on the threshold of being a great power. It was at this juncture that the United States’ diplomatic intentions were counter-poised with the tradition of European diplomacy, as the United States sought to establish itself as a world power. The problem confronting the United States was that the measure of a “great power” was considered by its imperial might and thus, with this as criteria, the United States embarked on an imperial adventure in Central America, notably fighting a brief but successful war with Spain over Cuba in 1898. With the defeat of Spain, the United States acquired Cuba and the Philippines as its colonies. The point to be noted here is that the United States fought a war with Spain, because Spain was a relatively weaker power and offered the easiest route to an imperial status. In contrast, the United States’ had officially expressed no interest as an imperial power during the Berlin Conference in 1880, which it attended as an observer, where Africa was divided between the European nations as the last prize of European colonization. The reason, why the United States opted to remain aloof from the carving of Africa was not because it was morally against it, but because it did not possess the diplomatic or military logistical strength necessary to protect its interests in Africa. By this time, the first clear indications of the United States foreign policy had started to emerge, which was that the United States would be multilateral where it had to due to its political and military vulnerabilities (Europe) and unilateral, where it had the power and influence to achieve its ends (Central America and the western hemisphere). Nearly a hundred years later an American secretary of state, Madeline Albright, would officially state this sub voce commandment of the United States’ foreign policy as being the de jure policy of the United States.

Also, by this time, there was divergent diplomatic perspective emerging as the arc of United States’ foreign policy differed from the traditions of European diplomatic history. European diplomacy had traditionally operated on the principle of consensus and this consensus was molded during the Treaty of Westphalia, signed in 1648. At Westphalia, it was decided that European politics would be based on the idea of multilateralism, to accommodate the multi-polarity of European interests and more importantly, to prevent the dominance of Europe by a single European nation. European diplomacy would follow this ideal till the French Revolution, of 1789, and its ensuing period of political destabilization, caused by the French experience under Napoleon Bonaparte, would temporarily put a stop to it. At the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, where the fate of post Napoleonic Europe was being debated, it was decided to revert back to the diplomacy of multilateralism and consensus and it would be this European attitude, which would be resurrected during the Treaty of Versailles, in 1919, and resisted by the United States. European diplomacy has always differed from the United States’ diplomatic rationales, because the United States’ diplomacy is based on idea of “issue specific” policies, whereas the Europeans opted for a holistic approach to diplomacy and tended to favor precedent “case law” diplomacy unlike the favored American policy of “diplomatic constructionism”. The European diplomatic tradition eschews “diplomatic constructionism”, because it hopes to build on past experiences by forging a common consensus unlike the American “issue specific” methodology, which seeks to impose a diplomatic solution, based on its own vested interpretations of the crisis.

In the period before the First World War, the United States experimented with ending its diplomatic isolationism as Theodore Roosevelt prompted the United States to take on a more internationalist role in world affairs, including for the first time turning the American Navy into a “blue navy” and dispatching it across the globe to showcase the American flag. Roosevelt wanted to make the United States an imperial power, but was limited by the United States diplomatic and military power. To overcome this inherent weakness, Roosevelt sought to increase the American role in the world through a policy, which could be best described as, “constructive engagement”. Under this policy, the United States participated in international relations by acting as the “facilitator” on the world scene and one of its early distinctions was, when Roosevelt mediated a peace treaty between Japan and Russia ending the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-06. The period of 1900 to 1917 was a time of an internal conflict within the United States’ foreign policy as it argued whether to adhere to its policy of isolationism and concentrate on developing its influence in the western hemisphere or to actively seek an imperialist, that is a world role, in international affairs. In this sense, the United States was not bounded by considerations of a moral conscience, when it delayed its decision to enter the “imperial club”, but did so, because it could not militarily and politically sustain its diplomatic interests. The other more compelling reason was that, had the United States joined the international club, it would have discovered, like Japan did, that there was not much left to colonize and the only practical option left, in order to colonize, was to fight costly wars and win colonies. It was only for reasons of an economic realism, which precluded and limited its dreams of imperialism that the United States refrained from actively seeking an imperial role for itself.

The United States’ diplomatic experience was markedly different in the period from 1919-1945 from the pre-First World War period in relation to its policies towards Europe and Asia, and with China in particular. The United States’ Congress resisted the pleas of President Woodrow Wilson to enter the League of Nations, because the multilateral nature of the League would have undermined the United States’ interests in the western hemisphere, by opening the United States’ actions to criticism and secondly, the United States was not certain if it would protect its economic interests in the League, where its interests were in a minority. The United States’ had entered the First World War, on the behalf of the Allies – Britain and France – as an “associate power”, because its commercial banks had heavily bankrolled the allied war effort and a German victory was seen as a portent signaling the eventual bankruptcy of its financial institutions. It was in the United States’ interests to make sure that the allies were not defeated and it not coincidental that it entered the war just as the Germans were preparing a final offensive, the “Ludendorff offensive”, and it would be the arrival of the American troops, which ended up stemming the fury of the German attack, after the allies had bled their manpower over three years of warfare and were no longer capable of maintaining the defense of the western front against a reinforced German attack. The United States had fought the First World War not to make the “world safe for democracy”, but to protect its economic interests, which were pegged with the allied fortunes and the end of the world war offered the United States the financial incentive to finally emerge from its diplomatic shackles and announce its arrival on the world scene. One of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points was of “open covenants openly arrived at” and it was suggested as to offer a sense of transparency in international relations. However, in reality, it was designed to enable the United States to monitor international relations and prevent them from jeopardizing American economic interests as the secret European military alliances had done in ushering in the Great War.

It was this cynical nature of the United States’ diplomacy, which prompted the French premier, George Clemenseau, to remark that, “Moses had given us Ten Commandments and Mr. Wilson gives us fourteen!” Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” were designed to impose an American economic influence in international affairs, because all of its provisions were crafted with the idea of minimizing the United States’ political liabilities and to allow the United States to play a critical role in the economic recovery of post-war Europe. The post-war period offered the United States the opportunity to influence the world affairs, inter alia its influence through European politics, because it offered the United States to assume a great power status, via an economic instead of a military route, and thus, was more cost effective as far the United States was concerned. Consequently, the period from 1919 to 1940 saw the United States engage in an economic multilateralism and following multilaterist policies, which maximized its economic advantages, whilst minimizing its political drawbacks and this could be clearly seen in the United States’ policy approach towards China. The United States followed an “Open Door” policy vis-à-vis China and at the heart of this policy was the idea that China, instead of being economically divided between the great powers, should be considered as a single economic unit, where all powers would enjoy an equal sphere of political and economic influence. The reason for this was that the United States, despite its overwhelming economic strengths, was a “Johnny come lately” into China and did not have the military capability to ensure the integrity of its’ economic and political interests and thus, decided to favor a multilateral policy instead of acting unilaterally, as it still did in the western hemisphere and which could be seen in its periodic invasions, within the region, to safeguard its commercial and economic interests.

The United States, after the Second World War (1939-1945), emerged as the single greatest power in the history of the world since the collapse of the Roman Empire nearly two thousand years before and this time around, it was determined to achieve its foreign policy intentions through the policies of multilateralism. This reflected the United States’ diplomatic experience at the Treaty of Versailles, where its policies of, “issue specific diplomatic constructionism” to reshape the European diplomatic and political landscape to suit its economic interests was rejected by the revival of a European consensus to try to instill a status quo antebellum in the post-war European politics. To consolidate its position as the eminent nation on the international scene, the United States suggested and encouraged European multilaterist policies, as seen in the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, which would later become the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In the post-war period lasting up to the end of the Cold War, that is from 1945 to 1989, the United States would employ multilateralism to solidify its geo-political influence in international affairs and its role, as an “indispensable nation” was based on its foreign policy framework of a multilateral engagement in the world. Towards this end, the United States would create international political institutions such as the United Nations; military alliances like NATO and financial institutions like the Brettonwood system, which were all expressively designed to shore up its influence in the world and to make the world dependent on it for its policy considerations.

Hence, in a realistic sense, the United States truly emerged as a “superpower” on the international scene, when it ignored its’ historic experience of unilateral policies, learned under the umbrella of the “Monroe Doctrine”. The lesson of the period between 1945 to 1989, and which made the United States the global colossus it would become, was that the United States’ “superpower” status and its hegemony of the world was not based exclusively on its military and economic or political power, but on the willingness of the world to accept its leadership. United States rise to power was facilitated through a multilateral engagement, which it was forced to accept as a prize of its unequalled “imperium” and the capstone of this multilateralism was enshrined in the Helsinki Accords of 1974, which legitimized the division of Europe into two spheres of influence; one dominated by the Soviet Union and one by the United States. Helsinki Accords proved the fact that multilaterism and multilateralist policies engendered a less political and diplomatic sense of hostility towards power distributions and more important than that, offered the diplomatic avenues to iron out policy disagreements. The Europeans accepted this American approach, because it borrowed directly from their own diplomatic traditions of building a diplomatic consensus and it was this reality, which enabled the United States to reap the laurels, which came its way from the end of the Cold War. The United States did not win the Cold War in a military sense, though it did contribute towards its demise by aiding and abetting the economic problems of the Soviet Union during its invasion of Afghanistan (1979-1989), but because it was able to forge a consensus, globally, that argued that it offered a better alterative than the Soviet Union, both politically and economically. It was the result of the United States’ multilateral foreign policy and its’ championing of a global worldview, which was based on the multilateral integration of political, economic and diplomatic policies, that ironically created the misimpression and more tragically, the misperception in the United States itself of the real reasons for its diplomatic success and which, invited it to revert back to its discredited unilateralist policies.

It was this flawed understanding of its post-Second World War experience, which ignited another debate within the United States foreign policy that erroneously suggested that given the overwhelming nature of the United States geo-political position, it could, finally, afford the luxury of pursuing a unilateralist foreign policy. The reason for the rise of United States’ role in international relations was its adoption of a multilateral policy framework and now, its rejection of the multilateralism in favor unilateralism offers a plausible argument for the United States eventual decline in international affairs. This is the emerging paradox of the United States power’ and influence in international relations and that, which is – the United States’ influence and power is based on an international opinion/consensus, which agrees to a “Pax Americana”. Furthermore, this paradigm suggests that any United States’ diplomatic gambit, which undermines this consensus, will ultimately risk lessening the United States’ influence in the affairs of the world by isolating the United States in the forum of international diplomatic opinion. The United States’ inability to understand this paradox and go against this paradigm will foreordain what the British prime minister, Tony Blair, warned against – the emergence of a bi-polar international opinion, which will divide the world where in one corner will be the United States and in the other corner, nations who are resisting United States’ unilateralist policies. The United States, in its’ state of political arrogance, can refuse to heed this advice and no one can force it to accept this advice, but the United States will soon realize that it needs the goodwill of the world more, if it wants to maintain its’ pre-eminence, than the world needs its leadership.

This limit of its foreign policy has manifested itself for the United States in its confrontation with Iraq. It is because of this reality, ignored by the United States but grudgingly accepted, which suggests that the United States does not have the option to wage a war against Iraq. The United States can easily defeat Iraq, but it will find the post-war situation, internationally, marked by hostility and distrust of its policies and will be forced to realize that it is a part of the world and not the other way round. It was this realization, which forced the United States to seek the United Nations blessings in dealing with Iraq, because it traditional allies, in Europe, told the United States clearly that they do not wish to see their influence and interests in the world lessened by the United States’ unilateralist policies. The other very real and limiting factor, which seems to be dawning on the United States, is that it simply does not have the resources to garrison the world and enforce its version of a “Pax Americana” if the world decides to show solidarity against its policies. Another reason, why the United States’ foreign policy seems to be heading towards a “defining moment” in its’ history is that its foreign policy is presently guided by ideologues, in the Bush administration, whose vision of the world is narrowly shaped by the political platform of the Republican Party and not by the policies of pragmatism, which charted the United States’ foreign policy from 1945 to 2000. What these ideologues also do not understand, or fail to understand, is that the United States defeated Iraq in 1991, because the world was united with it and this time, it does not have that international unity, which the present American president’s father so assiduously created in order to implement United States geo-economic interests in that war. Thus, the United States is faced with a situation of diminishing diplomatic and political gains if it persists unilaterally against Iraq in a war.
Furthermore, this United States’ unilateralism against Iraq is once again showing its schizophrenic nature; a nature marred by confusion and hesitancy and is proving that the United States’ power is based on an international consensus and that it does not have the ability to act unilaterally against those nations, which have the means to resist its unilateralism. This weakens the United States’ argument against Iraq, as compared to North Korea, and suggests that the United States still does, as it has done historically, favors confrontation to politically attain its aims by the threat of force and will seldom favor war as the first option. Iraq is a “soft” target for the United States to flex its military muscles against, because unlike North Korea, which is a “hard” target, Iraq does not have the ability or the means to retaliate against the United States and cause it damage. This lessens the United States’ argument for war against Iraq by suggesting two emerging realities of its political and military power’s limits. The first one is that the United States has always avoided confrontations, unilaterally, against comparable adversaries and when forced to do so, has opted to fight coalition wars, such as the First World War, Second War, Korea from 1950 – 1953; Vietnam and the Gulf War of 1990 – 1991. This suggests that it will refrain from attacking Iraq unilaterally, because then it has to adopt a similar logic for dealing with North Korea and its “weapons of mass destruction” and in this case, it does not favor acting unilaterally due to tangible consequences of such an action. The second emerging reality is that the United States’ unilateralist approach towards Iraq has shown that if it acts unilaterally, it runs the risk of stepping outside the norms of accepted international behavior by, ironically, becoming a “rogue nation” itself through its unilateralist policies of recklessly endangering the world’s peace by threatening the use of “weapons of mass destruction.

All these arguments suggest that the United States’ salvation as a world power resides in its ability to encourage a multilateral approach to solving its problems and by not favoring a unilateralist policy; the United States will only be undermining its own interests in the world if it ignores the lessons of its diplomatic history and goes against the grain of its political experience in international relations.

If the United States wishes to effect a “regime change in Baghdad”, it should do so for reasons of practical considerations and not because of reasons of an ideologically motivated desire to resurrect its wounded pride in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. Saddam Hussein is a darkening blight on the face of humanity and no one will miss his absence on the international stage. Should the United States present its case against Iraq on realistic assumptions of its intentions and be willing to pay the political cost of such a war – using its economic and political leverage on Israel to start dealing immediately with the Palestinian issue and resolve the political impasse in the region by forcing Israel to give the Palestinians a homeland – the United States will find its policy options against Iraq greatly enhanced and its image in the Arab/Muslim world as greatly improved. What greatly undermines the United States’ argument for a war on Iraq is that the United States needs to show a tangible political and military victory in its’, “war against terrorism” and is simply getting impatient with the policies of multilateralism, in fighting this war, and wants to act unilaterally to crown its’ endeavors in this war with an impression of a success. If that is true, then it is as Bishop Tutu of South Africa said, “sad…really sad” and it proves the United States to be simply incapable of realizing the mantle of greatness, which the world had bestowed on it, because in its sense of vindictiveness and an inflated, but shallow pride, the United States seems destined to cut off its nose to spite the whole world.