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.

Comments

[mommadona]

Let's just cut this crap about "winning" and "losing" in this context.

WAR is the FAILURE of CIVILIZATION.

WAR is not a SPORT.
No matter how much the neo-cons enjoy their little
'chess pieces moving about'.

Stop it now.

[Elitnaurista]

I really like your post. I copied it.

[bugdog]

Nope. War is the mechanism evolution built into us to limit our numbers.

[PensacolaTiger]

Sorry, wrong answer. Famine and plague are those mechanisms.

[Edgy]

There's only one thing different today and that is the world's supply of nuclear weaponry. Unfortunately, I could see some of the leadership in this country, especially on the Republican side of the aisle, being all too willing to wage what they think would be a limited nuclear war.
Oh well, it was a nice run..

[bronceye]

Thanks, Damacles.

[DuttonPeabody]

China clinches first Iraq oil deal

* Damien McElroy Acre, Iraq
* September 9, 2008

CHINA has secured Iraq's first post-Saddam oil deal by reviving a 1997 concession to exploit reserves on the al-Ahdab field south of the capital, Baghdad.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/china-clinches-first-iraq-oil-deal-20080908-4caf.html?page=-1

Iraq Cancels Six No-Bid Oil Contracts

By ANDREW E. KRAMER and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Published: September 10, 2008

An Iraqi plan to award six no-bid contracts to Western oil companies, which came under sharp criticism from several United States senators this summer, has been withdrawn, participants in the negotiations said on Wednesday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/world/middleeast/11iraq.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

[cjger]

We use our power to control the flow of oil. If that commodity declines in cost, the influence of OPEC and other Middle Eastern countries declines also. Our challenge is to become energy independent and then --equally daunting -- to rebuild a producer economy. But too many very rich, very lazy players in the game of high finance control our elections. I think they will make John McCain the next president, distracted as we are by irrelevancies. Our hope should be that John McCain is better than we could ever have believed, his campaign notwithstanding. Long ago, in a comic strip still prescient, it was said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Pogo.

The question I have is, "Can reasonable men like Kevin Phillips protect us from ourselves?"

[RobinLandseadel]

You tell like it is Mr. Phillips.

The whole neo-con fantasy of the United States hegemony unravelled nearly as soon as it was trotted out. Simply speaking, we are not the cops of the world. Bush is bankrupting this nation based on a power grab that's doomed to failure.

[boophus]

War is expensive, that is why it should be used sparringly. This gambit of striking out wildly all over is probably the calculated result the terrorists wanted. Add in several more wars that we are mostly fighting alone and the reconstruction costs and we will be broke (IE no one will borrow a dime to us). Especially if the repubs insist on tax cuts. I oppose tax cuts for anyone until we pay the debt we have run up for our grandchildren and thier grandchildren. I don't think like McCain that the budget should be balanced on the back of our soldiers who have sacrificed so much in a meaningless and actually America-damaging war.
I think our leaders should sit down and work hard to save us from sliding into oblivion. Many elderly are repubs and yet they depend on the massive social security system which is being drained by those same repubs leaving each working grandchild to pay for ss for one senior, not to mention medicare. SS is a good thing but it should be protected to be actuarialy sound. Many farmers are repubs who nevertheless depend on thier form of entitlements - subsidies. I could go on and on. But the greatest disaster is too many wars.

[jcwtts1]

I think your view of America and the fall of our hegemony is a bit over stated. What we need is a renewal of the domestic agenda. Rebuild America and then deal with the world. It may appear on the surface that an inward shift would hasten the end of our dominance in the world, but it will not. Our hegemony is built in part on economic strength and more resolutely on military strength. The greater middle east remains a factor and an area of danger/instability as long as the world needs oil to the extent that it currently does. The Manhattan project, or the Apollo project being proposed by Barack Obama would solve the energy crisis, the real shift of power in the global economic power struggle, and concomitantly create a new new deal at home, jobs that couldn't be farmed out and jobs that were integral to the success of our nation. Further, by regaining our stature as scientific innovators we strengthen our control over the worlds emerging markets, or rather, our hegemony. This isn't a goal it is a reading of events that runs counter to the soothsaying of the last 30 years. The world functions better for America when in a bi or multi polar paradigm.

J

[akhmatova]

Yes, US needs rebuilding and deserves to have to for all its hypocrisy and hubris. But, world is far too interconnected and nuclear for such a short-sighted and introspective 'Rebuild America' focus.

[LiberalBuzz]

Great report and one that politicians have no use for. They, for the great part, do not have the intellect to understand this problem much less convince the voting public of the dangers we face in these modern times and how the lessons of the past should be directing our future actions.

Instead we have politicians getting outraged at a hundred year old phrase about liptstick, who's sexist, who is for gay marriage and who is for abortion and who is for more war, and on and on. These people will STILL be doing the same childish bickering while the country sinks and we have no one but ourselves to blame because we keep electing mo rons to office who don't have the strength of character to stand up and get this message out.

I keep hoping but hope dwindles as I see the polls rising for McBush. MAYBE Obama will do better maybe not, but we already know that McBush has been around that place for close to three decades and he is clearly a part of the problem and not a part of the solution which is why I have hope Obama will be a better leader than the old guy.

[PADDYWHACK]

Mr Phillips,this is up to your usual very high standards,but in BushCheneyMcCain world you suffer from two serious disabilities,a deep knowledge of history and geography.As a person of Irish extraction,I always wondered why they revolted in 1916 and continued through 1921.The rebel leaders said that all they had to do was kick down the door and the rotten house would collapse.They were right and the point of this is that those who might wish to attack us can smell the moment of weakness.The British working classes bayed the loudest for war with Germany in 1914 and paid the price in their own blood and forty years of economic hardship.The Empire was a dying fantasy from then on,even though it had it's own religion,God did not write checks.The inability to face and realize the truth has almost bankrupted us and no help is forthcoming from our putative leaders.Having failed in Iraq,both are willing to lead us into the desert of Afghanistan,hubris prevents them from admitting that the failure of others is a signpost to our own.The trappings of empire must be maintained even as the wealth base declines,so lots of luck.

[CarolinaDem]

Wull, how about a guillotine?

[bugdog]

We could use one on the losers. That would take the aura out of politics!

It would also work better than term limits...

[Zenobius]

An interesting theoretical argument, backed by a few carefully selected facts.

Agreed that the US would be better off if it retreated from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Not so sure about the larger analysis. What's going on in Pakistan alone is actually pretty complicated, and I'm not sure the factors mentioned in this post regarding Pakistan are the ones which will be decisive. Iran is also complicated.

Not that the author is necessarily wrong, mind you, but this thesis is much too broad to be usefully argued in a post on HuffPo.

[ErnestineBass]

If not here, where?

If not now, when?

[Zenobius]

Buy his books,

Better yet, buy Paul Kennedy's book, which argues that the US will fall victim to imperial overextension and decline far more persuasively.

The US will decline eventually, and maybe in the near future. But figuring out when an empire will decline is harder than it looks. Also, to a large extent the future of Pakistan will be decided by Pakistanis in response to things nearly invisible to most Americans. What's true of Pakistan is likely true of Iran, and Turkey. I have no idea what to make of a likely Likud victory in Israel's elections, except that maybe US forces should prepare for an Iranian counterattack in the expectation that Israel will bomb Iran.

[eplatypusunum]

Depressingly accurate, Mr. Phillips. I keep trying to bring the historical perspective into conversations with friends and they don't see it (because they don't know the history of empires) and I've become a sort of Oracle of Doom in my circle as a result.

I'd quibble over Afghanistan, though. I think we COULD have managed that war successfully if we'd applied massive amounts of "soft power" to help win hearts and minds, etc. But that gets equated with being some sort of wimp -- real men KILL and let fear do its work, apparently -- and the opportunity is now, sadly, all but gone. (Afghanistan having no oil and therefore nothing to "offer" us for our help has a big part in our self-defeating strategies.)

It burns me that we're being played like a dime store banjo by the likes of Putin and other autocrats. It needn't have been so. But we elected an emotionally retarded faux-cowboy and so here we are...

Cheers!

epu

[Fez]

Sadly for the US, we have no one in the government who has actually read and understood the history Mr. Phillips lays out here. He could also have added the Phoenicians, Greeks, and The Roman Empire to the list of countries that once ruled the known world (around the Mediterranean) and wasted their resources and power on military adventures, reckless spending, and spiteful arrogance. In fact, the sands of history are littered with failed civilizations (e.g., Mayan, Incan, Sumerian, Chaldean) that once ruled the roost and through their own hubris, greed, violence, and ignorance ended up dead. The notion popular with the neocons that we are at the "end of history" and that the US will create its own history in a new mold is pathetic. The more things change, the more they stay the same. What goes around, comes around. And the Law of Karma applies at all times to all people and their so-called "civilizations."

[syllepsis]

Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters wasted them while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts.


Although it's terrible for us to watch, the illiterates who believe in American exceptionalism have a refuge in their own ignorance.
They will only get more smug and stupid as the catastrophe approaches.

[Jackalheadedgod]

This is all well and good, but what about Sarah?

Cheers,
Jack

[Deputy Dawg]

Keep Sarah out of this. She's being coached in a foreign policy crash course and not ready to answer for herself

[Bedingo]

What a competent analysis. I can't say I enjoyed reading his book, Bad Money, but I found it very informative and sound. Would that our polical establishment would listen to this Cassandra in order to avoid the coming catastrophe. Thank you for the blog.

[ErnestineBass]

Meager is the glory heaped upon those who seek peaceful resolutions, Bedingo.