As a count-down to war begins once again in the Middle East, amid high levels of sanctimony and bluster in the Atlantic world, it is the underlying parameters of the current international situation that demand attention, not the spray of rhetoric—whether belligerently official or ostensibly oppositional—surrounding it. They pose three main analytic questions. How far does the line of the Republican administration in Washington today represent a break with previous US policies? To the extent that it does so, what explains the discontinuity? What are the likely consequences of the change? To answer these, it seems likely that a longer perspective than the immediate conjuncture is required. The role of the United States in the world has become the topic of an increasingly wide range of posturing across the established political spectrum, and only a few of the complex issues it poses can be addressed here. But some arrows from the quiver of classical socialist theory may be better than none.
American policy planners today are the heirs of unbroken traditions of global calculation by the US state that go back to the last years of the Second World War. Between 1943 and 1945, the Roosevelt administration worked on the shape of the American system of power which it could see that victory over Germany and Japan, amidst mounting Russian casualties and British debts, was bringing. From the start, Washington pursued two integrally connected strategic goals. On the one hand, the US set out to make the world safe for capitalism. That meant according top priority to containing the USSR and halting the spread of revolution beyond its borders, wherever it could not directly contest the spoils of war, as in Eastern Europe. With the onset of the Cold War, the long-term aim of the struggle against Communism became once more—as it had been at the outset of Wilson’s intervention in 1919—not simply to block, but to remove the Soviet antagonist from the map. On the other hand, Washington was determined to ensure uncontested American primacy within world capitalism. That meant in the first instance reducing Britain to economic dependency, a process that had begun with Lend Lease itself, and establishing a post-war military regency in West Germany and Japan. Once this framework was in place, the wartime boom of American capitalism was successfully extended to allied and defeated powers alike, to the common benefit of all OECD states.
During the years of the Cold War, there was little or no tension between these two fundamental objectives of US policy. The danger of Communism to capitalist classes everywhere, in Asia increased by the Chinese Revolution, meant that virtually all were happy to be protected, assisted and invigilated by Washington. France—culturally less close than Britain, and militarily more autonomous than Germany or Japan—was the only brief exception, under De Gaulle. This parenthesis aside, the entire advanced-capitalist zone was integrated without much strain into an informal American imperium, whose landmarks were Bretton Woods, the Marshall and Dodge Plans, NATO and the US–Japan Security Pact. In due course, Japanese and German capitalism recovered to a point where they became increasingly serious economic competitors of the United States, while the Bretton Woods system gave way under the pressures of the Vietnam War in the early seventies. But the political and ideological unity of the Free World was scarcely affected. The Soviet bloc, always weaker, smaller and poorer, held out for another twenty years of declining growth and escalating arms race, but eventually collapsed at the turn of the nineties.
The disappearance of the USSR marked complete US victory in the Cold War. But, by the same token, the knot tying the basic objectives of American global strategy together became looser. The same logic no longer integrated its two goals into a single hegemonic system.footnote1 For once the Communist danger was taken off the table, American primacy ceased to be an automatic requirement of the security of the established order tout court. Potentially, the field of inter-capitalist rivalries, no longer just at the level of firms but of states, sprang open once again, as—in theory—European and East Asian regimes could now contemplate degrees of independence unthinkable during the time of totalitarian peril. Yet there was another aspect to this change. If the consensual structure of American dominion now lacked the same external girders, its coercive superiority was, at a single stroke, abruptly and massively enhanced. For with the erasure of the USSR, there was no longer any countervailing force on earth capable of withstanding US military might. The days when it could be checkmated in Vietnam, or suffer proxy defeat in Southern Africa, were over. These interrelated changes were eventually bound to alter the role of the United States in the world. The chemical formula of power was in solution.
In practice, however, the effects of this structural shift in the balance between force and consent within the operation of American hegemony remained latent for a decade. The defining conflict of the nineties, indeed, all but completely masked it. The Iraqi seizure of Kuwait threatened the pricing of oil supplies to all the leading capitalist states, not to speak of the stability of neighbouring regimes, allowing a vast coalition of G-7 and Arab allies to be swiftly assembled by the United States for the restoration of the Sabah dynasty to its throne. Yet more significant than the range of foreign auxiliaries or subsidies garnered for Desert Storm was the ability of the US to secure the full cover of the United Nations for its campaign. With the USSR out for the count, the Security Council could henceforward be utilized with increasing confidence as a portable ideological screen for the initiatives of the single superpower. To all appearances, it looked as if the consensual reach of American diplomacy was greater than ever before.
However, the consent so enlarged was of a specialized kind. The elites of Russia and—this had started earlier—China were certainly susceptible to the magnetism of American material and cultural success, as norms for imitation. In this respect, the internalization by subaltern powers of selected values and attributes of the paramount state, which Gramsci would have thought an essential feature of any international hegemony, started to take hold. But the objective character of these regimes was still too far removed from US prototypes for such subjective predispositions to form a reliable guarantee for every act of complaisance in the Security Council. For that, the third lever Gramsci once picked out—intermediate between force and consent, but closer to the latter—was required: corruption.footnote2 Long used to control votes in the General Assembly, it was now extended upwards to these veto-holders. The economic inducements to comply with the will of the United States stretched, in post-communist Russia, from IMF loans to the backdoor funding and organization of Yeltsin’s electoral campaigns. In the case of China, they centred on the fine-tuning of MFN status and trade arrangements.footnote3 Assent that is bought is never quite the same as that which is given; but for practical purposes, it was enough to return the UN to something like the halcyon days at the outbreak of the Korean War, when it automatically did US bidding. The minor irritant of a Secretary-General who on occasion escaped the American thumb was removed, and a placeman of the White House, rewarded for covering the Rwandan genocide while the US pressed for intervention in the Balkans, installed.footnote4 By the late nineties, the UN had become virtually as much an arm of the State Department as the IMF is of the Treasury.
In these conditions, American policy planners could confront the post-Cold War world with an unprecedentedly free hand. Their first priority was to make sure that Russia was locked, economically and politically, into the global order of capital, with the installation of a privatized economy and a business oligarchy at the switches of a democratic electoral system. This was the major diplomatic focus of the Clinton administration. A second concern was to secure the two adjacent zones of Soviet influence—Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In the former, Washington extended NATO to the traditional borders of Russia, well before any EU expansion to the East, and took charge of liquidating the Yugoslav estate. In the latter, the war for Kuwait was a windfall that allowed it to install advanced military bases in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, establish a protectorate in Kurdistan, and tie the Palestinian national movement down in an Israeli-dictated waiting-zone. These were all, in some degree, emergency tasks arising from the aftermath of victory in the Cold War itself.