- There are plenty of things to keep Tony Blair awake at
night these days, as his grey, haggard features after last week's diplo-marathon
indicated. In his nightmares of the Pentagon cooking up new hare-brained
schemes and dirty bombs on the underground, a new anxiety must have begun
to niggle - those domestic commentators who have started being so horribly
nice to him. He's a "great statesman" now, one of the "greatest
prime ministers"; it's when things are getting really bad - you're
dying, for instance - that people start being this nice.
-
- People are beginning to feel sorry for Blair - they don't
buy his arguments on the necessity of war with Iraq, but they increasingly
appreciate the enormous difficulty of his position. A pivotal moment in
post-second world war British foreign policy has fallen to his watch. He
has a fiendishly tricky hand to play in the global bid to contain two erratic,
angry men, both of whom control quantities of lethal weapons and both of
whom are making a mockery of the UN and any concept of international law
- the one by flouting its repeated injunctions, and the other by bullying
it with bribes and threats.
-
- But even allowing for Blair having a terrible hand, is
he playing it well? The fallout from Blair's high-stakes backing of Bush
is apparent on every side: internationally, we've lost weight as the fully
paid-up US sergeant incapable of independent action; domestically, Blair's
personal ratings fall as the delicate compromises which hitched the Labour
movement to the Third Way disintegrate (why are some unpopular measures,
such as going to war with Iraq, undertaken in the teeth of domestic opposition,
and not others, such as higher taxation, ask the Labour faithful?).
-
- It seemed like it couldn't get worse - and then it did
with last week's billet-doux to Uncle Sam. There is no fatted calf Blair
won't sacrifice for Bush - not even European unity. He opted for the petty
snub to France and Germany rather than the one chance of effectively containing
George Bush through a strong unified Europe: that was the only hope, and
Blair's blown it in the company of dodgy cronies such as Silvio Berlusconi.
Now America can smugly sit back while "American Europe" and "Old
Europe" bicker: what kind of achievement is that for Blair, the European?
Set against these failures, all that Blair has to show for his pains is
a pitiful exercise of UN window-dressing to decorate American belligerence
with claimed international legitimacy.
-
- It is easy to criticise Blair's foreign policy. It's
very easy to see that going to war with Iraq is at best unwise, at worst
crazily dangerous; it has little justification, it sets a dangerous precedent
and has no clear objective. What is far less easy and a deeply dispiriting
task is to consider how the European centre-left responds to the new world
order that this crisis starkly reveals. American imperialism used to be
a fiction of the far-left imagination, now it is an uncomfortable fact
of life.
-
- How is the centre-left to accommodate the US's newly
aggressive imperialist mission emboldened by a 9/11 licence from its electorate?
Afghanistan was simply the starter, Iraq an antipasto in what could turn
out to be one of those interminable feasts - course after course until
a pot-bellied US reels punch drunk from the table.
-
- With US imperialism openly discussed on both sides of
the Atlantic, the debate centres on three critical questions: will the
empire corrupt and/or bankrupt the republic; by what administrative techniques
should it exercise power; and is it basically benign? The first prompts
one of those defining moments in a nation's understanding of itself - what
is the US will for imperial power, and what price is it prepared to pay
in living standards and civil liberties? Guantanamo Bay, the debate over
the use of torture, and growing government spending deficits are a foretaste
of what lies ahead. But the key unknown is, can a consumer culture support
empire?
-
- The second question is about whether the empire is one
of vassal states, propped up with subsidies and American arms (as in Saudi
Arabia), or one of invasion and colonisation masquerading under nation-building
(as in Afghanistan).
-
- But it is the third question on which the debate hinges.
This is where the gulf between the US and the European centre-left yawns
widest. American faith in its good intentions remains remarkably undented
by a half century of evidence that such simplicity is absurdly naive (here's
hoping the timely remake of The Quiet American will help jolt some strands
of American public opinion). Beholden to some shadow of its puritan past,
America earnestly hopes to woo the world with the promise of democracy
in Baghdad, drinking water in Saddam city.
-
- But such rhetoric has little traction on world opinion
because the track record is execrable. As Michael Ignatieff points out
in this month's Prospect, US spending on non-military means of promoting
its influence overseas (foreign aid, etc) has shrunk to a pitiful 0.2%
of GDP. In Pakistan or the Yemen, the US presence is soldiers fortified
in compounds bristling with weaponry, rather than engineers building roads
and water supplies.
-
- Furthermore, many question whether the US really has
either the skill, deter mination or the patience to sustain its good intentions
beyond a few euphoric days of Baghdad crowds staged for the TV cameras.
It has shown none of these qualities in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict,
the issue that now defines the nature of US imperial ambition in the Middle
East - and makes a mockery of its supposed benignity.
-
- The European left is lumbered with a debilitating fatalism.
The benign imperium is only a set of US interests cobbled together, and
what Old Europe - the rightful place of Britain - knows intimately from
bitter recent experience is how empires are lost: how they overstretch
themselves and collapse under the weight of their own illegitimacy. Ironically,
it was America that proved the most adept at exploiting this in the course
of the 20th century by championing the self-determination of nations.
-
- How has the US lost that wisdom? How does it overlook
the fact that imperial longevity is determined not by demonstrations of
brute force, but by securing minds and hearts?
-
- A pyrotechnic display of military force in Iraq might
assuage the national humiliation of 9/11, but it will ill serve American
interests. This is the beginning of the end of the American empire: it
has failed to focus on its true enemy, terrorism; failed to grasp how asymmetric
terror transforms the power relationships of the globe; and is choosing
instead to indulge itself in an old-fashioned war between nation states
- an irrelevant, costly and dangerous sideshow.
-
- <mailto:m.bunting@guardian.co.uk>m.bunting@guardian.co.uk
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
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