What the Democrats and the Republicans Won't Talk About: Defeat in the "Greater Mideast"
Are Georgia, South Ossetia and the rest of the Caucasus part of the nearby Middle East? Do Afghanistan and Pakistan belong to that same potential geographic Waterloo? Does Turkey, with its new ties to Russia and radical Iran?
Not that the cartographic quibbles and definitions really matter. More central is how the potential embarrassment of the United States -- the curtain that seems to be descending on its fading hegemony -- now extends beyond the older, narrower Middle East ranging from Egypt and Israel to Arabia, the Persian Gulf and Iran. The unfolding battleground reaches from Turkey, the Black Sea, southern Russia and the Caucasus in the west, to the Sudan and Somalia in the south, and in the east to Afghanistan, Pakistan and the nearby roof of the world where Pakistan and India meet China. And the tide is hostile.
Three or four decades from now, historians will write more precise epitaphs. However the West, especially the United States, undertook the hubris-driven commitment now boomeranging between the mid-1990s and 2003-2004. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and then George W. Bush predicted and proclaimed a New World order of democracy, Western oil access and the marketplace from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. In 2003 and 2004, remember, Washington leaders and pundits all but announced a new Rome on the Potomac. Sadly, highly relevant historical precedents made it a joke almost from the first.
Each of the the three nations that preceded the U.S. as the leading world economic power -- Hapsburg Spain in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Holland when New York was still New Amsterdam, then Britain from the Industrial Revolution to the early 20th century -- has met a roughly similar fate: global diplomatic and military over-reach, a transformation of its economy to rely on finance and globalism, misplaced hubris, wars it cannot afford and ultimately, debt it can no longer manage. Each comeuppance has been harsh. The Spanish finally drained their wealth in Europe's bloody Thirty Years War (1618-1648), the Dutch lost ground steadily after they ballooned their debt fivefold during the wars between 1688 and 1713, and the British were all but bankrupted by the two world wars, finally enduring a half-decade of food rationing after "victory" in 1945.
Since the early 1990s, I have been describing in various books the ever-growing relevance of these precedents to the United States, not that politicians or policymakers were inclined to pay much attention (nor did those in earlier nations heed warnings). Overall, the American self-deception is bipartisan, but the three terms of Bush presidencies bear the greatest responsibility, especially the years of George W. Bush.
The transformation since 2005 has been particularly frightening. Turkey, right next door to Europe, is now home to growing anti-American violence. This summer, Turkey hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on a working visit, and some Turkish officials share Russia's concerns that their government should not let U.S. Navy ships enter the Black Sea to aid Georgia. Besides flexing its new energy muscle with Turkey, Russia is also repaying Washington for Moscow's late 1990s embarrassment in the Balkans when the West promoted the ethnic breakway republic of Kosovo. Now the Kremlin has replied in the strategic Caucasus by embracing the ethnic South Ossetian breakaway from the U.S.-supported Republic of Georgia. Overall, Washington's plan to bring Georgia, which borders Russia, into the NATO military alliance -- a classic of both hubris and over-reach -- now looks more like self-entrapment.
Within the old core Middle East, Lebanon and anti-America Syria have just established diplomatic relations for the first time in sixty years. In next-door Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, expected to win the upcoming national elections,is a Dick Cheney-style sabre-rattler. As for Iran, the souring of U.S. relations with Russia, means that the Kremlin will no longer help American attempts to restrain Iran's nuclear ambitions. This should further enable Iran to use its oil resources as a regional political and economic weapon. Although part of the reason why the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 was to take over its oil, start pumping and break OPEC's hold on oil production, Washington's provocation and mismanagement so offended the Middle-East dominated OPEC producers that they let oil prices soar from the $22-28 dollar a barrel range of 2003 to over $100. Against this backdrop of Iraq as a petro-disaster, the military progress and Sunni-Shiite-Kurd political collaboration the White House now boasts of will probably do no more than postpone the ultimate unraveling of Iraq until 2009 or 2010. Half of its territory could become an Iranian sphere of influence.
Further to the east, the geopolitical quicksand is getting steadily oozier. Ever more Western soldiers are now dying in Afghanistan, and just as it took the Islamic hardliners a decade to drive out the Russians in the 1980s, by 2011 the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion could yield a kindred embarrassment. Next door, Pakistan, a longtime U.S. ally, is on the verge of economic calamity. At the same time, anti-Americanism is surging because U.S. troops based in Afghanistan are violating Pakistani borders. Alas, the newly chosen Pakistani President, Asif Ali Zardari, is a mediocrity who earlier served eleven years in jail on corruption charges. His nickname at the time was Mr. Ten Percent. To the north, under the auspices of the burgeoning Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Russia, China and four central Asian republics held first-ever joint military maneuvers last summer. They do not seem to have held any this summer, probably wise given August's other Russian provocations taking place in the Caucasus.
To a degree, this was predictable. Back in late 2002, as Messrs. Bush and Cheney prepared for their great conquest in Iraq, I contributed an essay, "Hegemony, Hubris and Overreach" to The Iraq War Reader, edited by Micah Sifry and Christopher Cerf and published just after the 2003 invasion. In it, I wrote that "The 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States produced a proper and effective retaliation in Afghanistan. There is less to be said for metamorphosis of that response into a broader ambition to subdue, dominate and reshape an area that stretches northwest from the Persian Gulf to the Caucasus and eastward to Afghanistan and Central Asia...Despite the difficulty in making comparisons across the centuries, there is a chance that such a role could begin the U.S. equivalent of the Hapsburg, Dutch and British draining experiences of 1618-1648, 1688-1713 and 1914-1945."
The negative odds seem to grow with every year that the United States remains mired in this regional Waterloo-in-Waiting. In terms of the November election, swing voters are right to see Republican John McCain as the nominee most likely to promote military and geopolitical overreach without any serious attention to its economic costs and dangers. But if the Democrats are better, it's not by much. The Clinton administration periodically over-reached, and although Democrat Obama was perspicacious in opposing the invasion of Iraq, his current positions on extending U.S. activity in Afghanistan and Pakistan and bringing Georgia into NATO underscore the bipartisan rhetoric that makes extrication seem so implausible.
The involvement is understandable. Whatever the clarity of later historical retrospect, the British, Dutch and Spanish did not slip into their fatal postures and commitments on a whim or a lark. When their decades of vulnerability arrived, they had generations, even centuries, of principles, commitments, patriotisms and religious beliefs -- a kind of moral and behavioral momentum -- underpinning their hubris and exceptionalism.
The United States of 2008 fits this pattern, too. Even today's economics of crisis -- fear of financial collapse, repetitious Washington bail-outs, intervention by foreign central banks to help a weak currency on the ropes -- has its precedents. Back in the 1920s, as British international leadership was unraveling, central banks led by the United States intervened (in 1925 and 1927) to try to support the weakened British pound. In the end, all this did was to create a bigger speculative bubble to burst in 1929-1932 . In the ensuing decades, it didn't save British finance, the pound sterling or British global hegemony. And the odds are that today's postures will not, over the coming decade, save Wall Street's financial bubble, the U.S. dollar or Washington's global over-reach.
Kevin Phillips's most recent book is Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, published by Viking in April.
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One of the biggest problems for Americans is while they wring their collective hands about war, they gleefully pocket the dividends from those companies supplying arms for those very wars. Capitalism has no moral basis, and profit can be had by selling your children, whoring out your wife and finally amputating your own limbs as transplants.
You might think that is silly, but we are selling everything we have worked so hard for to gain little pieces of paper. Perhaps a re-reading of King Midas and his gold might be in order.
As Chaplin said
Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.
Thats why war is popular, don't you see. That's why it is a sport.
hmm. Bush & Cheney as A STRATEGIC DISASTER for America in C.Asia.
Think the DC Democrats might notice?
"Overall, the American self-deception is bipartisan,
The transformation since 2005 has been particularly frightening. Turkey, right next door to Europe, is now home to growing anti-American violence. This summer, Turkey hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on a working visit, and some Turkish officials share Russia's concerns that their government should not let U.S. Navy ships enter the Black Sea to aid Georgia. Besides flexing its new energy muscle with Turkey, Russia is also repaying Washington for Moscow's late 1990s embarrassment in the Balkans when the West promoted the ethnic breakway republic of Kosovo. Now the Kremlin has replied in the strategic Caucasus by embracing the ethnic South Ossetian breakaway from the U.S.-suppo
the name america or united states of america,should be changed,from now on.
ameriwar
united states of war and destruction.
and the fnny thing is the usa,has never won a war before..is
I agree that we have become the new rogue state, but as to your other statement, it's generally agreed by historians the world over that the allies, of which the US was one, "won" world wars 1 and 2.
There was also a tiff with Spain about 110 years ago, based on another lie, but The US won that, too.
The US also won it's civil war and a couple of donneybrooks with Great Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
It might be a good idea if you got yourself a library card and a grammar book.
America's mighty Apollo moon rockets were designed by WERNER von BRAUN's NAZI rocket scientists, and America's first electronic computer, EINAC, was designed by IBM & MIT to a DoD order, based on Polish, French, and British efforts to decode Germany's Enigma machine. And finally, the US WWII Mustang fighter was a 2nd class fighter in European skies... until it was equipped with the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine.
But more importantly, the entire US jet aircraft industry was founded when the British handed several of their WHITTLE jet-engines to GE to copy and improve upon.
As author ____ wrote, the great tragedy of the modern era is that RELIGION has HIJACKED SCIENCE.
America's righty, reactionary, throwback Religious groups have seized the notion of America's technological superiority as the result of _their own_ moral values, holy superiority, when in fact, that whole agenda is just a whitewash over the bible thumping used to justify slavery.
Yep, Kenny, "The usa has never won a war before..." is a bit of a stretch, but from the Euro pov. - Germany was set to finally overrun France & England in 1918.... except that America had the luxury of sending a couple of hundred thousand fresh troops to break the back of the German army that year.
From the Euro point-of-view, not only does that not count as "winning the war", but don't forget, while the citizens of all the other nations were bled dry from the "Great" horrendous war, Americans were actually profiting from it.
(The Germans should have hung their foreign minister Zimmerman, for his infamously stupid secret cable trying to get Mexico to attack America.)
America profited even more from WWII, which would have been over before US entry, had Hitler come back and "dealt with" England in spring of 1941 before attacking Russia and making a two-front nightmare for Germany.
Indeed, the four legs of American smug self-superiority in world affairs - our nuclear arsenal, our rocket & missile technology, our electronics & computing technology, and even our conventional air-power - were all DIRECT RESULTS of EUROPEAN TECHNOLOGY.
Albert Einstein was a product of the German education system (much as he may have despised it).
The US A-bomb was designed under prodding of Hungarian scientists Szilar, Wigner, and Teller, it was Szilard who talked Einstein into writing that letter to President Roosevelt, "Germany may be working on a new and powerful bomb."
Odd that one of the reasons advanced to stay in Vietnam was that we had never lost a war before.
This is a great article . I wish the MSM would take heed to the info in this article . That mess over there in Afghan is a death trap and not worth the oil pipe line in lives GWB and gang have been tryng to get build .
We should have gotten Bin Laden and then gotten out of Afganistan. It's their country, let them figure it out. We are so bancrupt monetarily that it's beyond a solution other than just printing money.
The USA is bankrupt financially and morally...
The problem with your Spain and Holland analogy is that the winner [err, England and England, respectively] of those wars also took on equivalent amounts of debt. It wasn't the debt or the overreach that damned them; it was the losing.
Do you have to be such a wet blanket, Mr. Phillips? Surely, we can run our would-be global hegemon on borrowed money and magical thinking forever.
Johnny Mac just stated on CNN that America is the only nation that stands for the good and the right.
Laughable.
Britain and Canada are loosing their sons in Afghanistan too.
How many Israeli troops are in Afghanistan? Ask Sarah? – Watch your line old man.
Mr. Phillips, you are a national treasure. I hope you live to be110!
Does it occur to anyone that it isn't our oil in the first place?
exactly, the natural resources of a region are the property of its native inhabitants
You are correct,, but arrogant and ignorant 'merkans' cannot understand that.
Damn shame too.
The only sane and practical way out of this mess is to commit the Nation to a massive, coordinated program of strict conservation and research & development of non-polluting energy. The goal should be to eliminate the need for imported oil within 10 years, and getting completely off of carbon-based fuels within a generation (25 years). While this may seem like a pipe-dream, so it was in 1961 when President Kennedy called for committing the Nation to landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth by the end of the decade. Such a program would have the effect of reducing (and ultimately eliminating) our need for a military presence in the middle-east (and in other oil-producing regions), as well as reviving our battered economy and handing off a much less polluted Earth to the next generations. Oil and gas are really the fuels of the 19th and 20th centuries, not the 21st. McCain/Palin and the "drill, baby, drill” crowd are living in the past. Obama/Biden, on the other hand, have proposed an energy policy that looks to the future, not the past. Wake up America and support the next generation!
Can you say nuclear? I only ask because the President can't...
There really isn't any other option. People who think otherwise just aren't doing the math. Our energy consumption is huge. it's an issue of scale.
If we went all-out, we might approach a point where oil was less vital - in a real consumption decline, not a bump - in 20 years. And that's only with increasing oil consumption in the meantime.
Other than that our best bet is a depression and a good-sized famine to set growth back a bit.
Don't be fooled. Scaling alone vetoes any alternative or any combination of them, sans nuclear. At a high enough price - where we were going, and hopefully will go again, a conservative attitude and high prices may make some alternatives situationally attractive. But as for replacing "big oil," no way. Furthermore, most of the proposed alternatives are environmentally bogus and at best a wash on energy in, energy out.
It's as simple as a high school lesson: We have two sources of energy, fission within the earth and fusion within the sun. All of our conventional sources of energy are solar, and oil is a giant solar bank account.
And like every other bank account, America is spending it like drunken sailors.
The call to go Nuclear has always been one that disregards two very large problems. The first is, of course, waste disposal. Assuming that someone will be willing to accept massive nuclear waste or if, somehow the waste can be contained economically, then that still leaves the second problem. That problem is the cost. These nuclear plants aren't cheap and everyone of them that has been built has been paid for by the users by massively increasing their electric rates. So I suppose it will be ok with the "go nuke" crowd to increase everyones electric bill or maybe the cost will be financed through loans from the Chinese. Again, we get the bumper sticker part foisted on us, but the second part, you know, those pesky hard parts like disposal and cost are always left unsaid.
Obama has made the point about what we should have done after 9/11 in terms of becoming energy independent but he hasn't gone far enough with it. Make it understandable for people and stay on it.
If we had started a program then, we would be 6+ years into it right now. Every one of our oil producers would be getting the point.
EXCELLENT article. A bit too much for the neocons to understand, but it could be watered down a bit for general consumption.
Note to Barack: back off the Bin Laden thing. You made the point for the hawks out there. We got most of the perpetrators and we can't afford to get bogged down in Afghanistan.
I think to some degree, this overreach on the part of the US was a failure to recognize certain fundamentals that have changed in warfare: availability of technology in places that we fight in.
Hilaire Belloc once quipped, "Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not."
Such is no longer the case, nor has it been the case for decades. The proliferation of modern weaponry in the developing world following WWII created a much greater envelope of economical lethality for infantry and/or guerrillas.
Example? The German panzerfaust, which became the Russian RPG, a relatively inexpensive weapon that can score a mobility kill on a multi-million dollar Abrams tank, shoot down a multimillion dollar Blackhawk helicopter, and is readily available in most developing nations.
That example doesn’t even cover more subtle factors, such as the availability of the various types of communications technology in developing world nations, that keep these countries from being isolated from the outside world by an occupier and grants a greater degree of coordination between groups that operated without such technology; not that this is a hindrance to guerrilla activity. Also, most developing world countries have at least some degree of industry and therefore familiarity with tools and the ability to improvise weaponry thanks to the technology that has come to them.
This translates to higher costs for military operations by developed world nations, such as the US, in developing countries, such as Iraq.
This is called "Relative Decline."
You know, it's just plain unfair that people in the third world have RPG's of their own and we don't...
I want equality!
Interesting.
A copy of disagreements. Turkey will not become "pro-Iran" or pro-Russia. Their interests are with Georgia and Azerbaijan.
The fact they are having better relations with Armenia is not due to Iran, but due to Russia's handling of South Ossetia. Bush may have bungled in the past, but there is nothing like a bumbling Russian overreaction to get all the neighbors in line--and against Russia. The only, and I mean only, country that doesn't mind Russia's acts is Iran, because they don't want Azeri oil getting out to market--it devalues the price of their own.
Syria and Lebanon trading top level diplomats is not a sign of American weakness, but Syrian relenting. They are relenting on their Greater Syria claim to Lebanon.
Mr Phillips thanks for your continued wisdom!
ONLY the "TRUTH" will set "us" free from this downward spiral that you describe.
America's future depends on our politicians, our media, our people demanding only the truth & no longer falling for LIES & HUBRIS.
"The truth is more important than the facts." Frank Lloyd Wright
We have all been drowning in a sea of LIES for so long. The "truth & only the truth" is our life raft in this raging sea, our only hope of returning safely home.
Lies lead to more darkness.
Truth will surely light our way.
Demand the truth.
We are all at the proverbial fork in the road; one road of lies that leads to "more of the same" & a path of truth that can take us all to a world of new possibilities & hope.
America wake up! Demand the truth!
"A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it." David Stevens
Will you accept more LIES????????
OR
Will you demand the TRUTH????????
AMERICA WAKE UP!!!!!!!!!
DEMAND THE TRUTH!!!!!
Our very FUTURE depends on it!!
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