By Paul Craig Roberts
October 26, 2008
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously,
as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities,
which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.
We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left
to just study what we do." Bush White House aide explaining
the "New Reality"
The New American Century lasted a decade. Financial crisis
and defeated objectives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Georgia brought
the neoconservative project for American world hegemony crashing
to a close in the autumn of 2008.
The American neoconservatives are the heirs of Leon Trotsky.
Their dream of American “Full Spectrum Dominance”—US
military and economic superiority over any possible combination
of states —is matched in ambition only by the early 20th
century Trotskyite dream of world Communist revolution.
The neocons used September 11, 2001, as a “new Pearl
Harbor” to give power precedence over law domestically
and internationally. The executive branch no longer had to
obey federal statutes, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act or honor international treaties, such as the Geneva Conventions.
An asserted “terrorist threat” to national security
became the cloak which hid US imperial interests as the Bush
Regime set about dismantling US civil liberties and the existing
order of international law constructed by previous governments
during the post-war era.
Perhaps the neoconservative project for world hegemony would
have lasted a bit longer had the neocons possessed intellectual
competence.
On the war front, the incompetent neocons predicted that the
Iraq war would be a six-week cakewalk, whose $70 billion cost
would be paid out of Iraqi oil revenues. President Bush fired
White House economist Larry Lindsey for estimating that the
war would cost $200 billion. The current estimate by experts
is that the Iraq war has cost American taxpayers between two
and three trillion dollars. And the six-week war is now the
six-year war.
On the economic front, the incompetent neocons overlooked
the fact that a country that relocates its industry and best
jobs abroad in order to maximize short-run profits becomes
progressively economically weaker. Propagandistic talk about
a “New Economy” built around financial dominance
covered up the fact that the US was the world’s greatest
debtor country, dependent on foreigners to finance the daily
operation of its government, the home mortgages of its citizens,
and its military operations abroad.
In Iraq,, the neocons gave up their hegemonic military pretensions
when they put 80,000 Sunni insurgents on the US Army’s
payroll in order to scale down the fighting and reduce US casualties.
In Afghanistan the neocons gave up more military pretensions
when they had to rely on NATO troops to fight the Taliban.
US military pretensions came to an end in Georgia when the
Bush Regime sent Georgian troops to ethnically cleanse South
Ossetia of Russian residents in order to end the secessionist
movement in the province, thereby clearing the path for Georgia’s
NATO membership. It took Russian soldiers only a few hours
to destroy the US and Israeli-trained and equipped Georgian
Army.
The ongoing financial crisis has put an end to the pretensions
of American financial hegemony and free-market illusions that
deregulation and offshoring had brought prosperity to America.
In a long article, “The End of Arrogance,” on
September 30, the German news magazine Der Spiegel observed:
"This is no longer the muscular and arrogant United States
the world knows, the superpower that sets the rules for everyone
else and that considers its way of thinking and doing business
to be the only road to success…
Also on display is the end of arrogance. The Americans are
now paying the price for their pride.
Gone are the days when the US could go into debt with abandon,
without considering who would end up footing the bill. And
gone are the days when it could impose its economic rules of
engagement on the rest of the world, rules that emphasized
profit above all else—without ever considering that such
returns cannot be achieved by doing business in a respectable
way…
A new chapter in economic history has begun, one in which
the United States will no longer play its former dominant role.
A process of redistributing money and power around the world—away
from America and toward the resource-rich countries and rising
industrialized nations in Asia—has been underway for
years. The financial crisis will only accelerate the process. "
Looking at his defeated adversary, George W. Bush, brought
down by military and economic failure, Iranian President Ahmadinejad
observed: “The American empire in the world is reaching
the end of its road, and its next rulers must limit their interference
to their own borders.”
Truer words were never spoken.
-----
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of
the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor
of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good
Intentions.
Paul Craig Roberts can be emailed
here
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