In The New York Times Sunday Book Review of
April 8, 2012, Jonathan Freedland considered two recent books on the above
subject (1). One book is Strategic
Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power, by Zbigniew Brzezinski. The other is The World America Made,
by Robert Kagan. Interestingly enough,
in the past both authors have had major roles to play in the United States'
current "Crisis of Global Power" and in creating "The World America Made"
(which is not so fun).
Brzezinski was, among other things, Pres. Jimmy Carter's
National Security Advisor. His major
claim to fame in that role was that he persuaded Pres. Carter to authorize the
setting of the "Afghanistan Trap" for the Soviet Union. He has boasted, correctly, that he set out to
create the "Soviet Union's Viet Nam," and indeed he did. In 1978 a pro-Communist, pro-Soviet
government was elected in Afghanistan.
There followed a complicated series of assassinations and coups among
the leftists themselves. Eventually in
1979, one of their number called in Soviet troops to protect his government. At
this point (or perhaps earlier) the United States began organizing and arming
various right-wing rebels of various ethnicities among the number that form the
non-homogeneous population of Afghanistan against the government.
One of the many foreign CIA trainees was a young
man from Saudi Arabia named Osama bin Laden.
He was a son of a powerful building contractor in that country, who
happened to be a long-time friend and business partner of George H.W.
Bush. At any rate, with persistent US
supply and training, the rebels were eventually able to force the Soviets to
withdraw, an event connected with subsequent break-up of that country in
1991-92. After a subsequent civil war among
various warlords, the Pashtun-based "Taliban" eventually came to power. Of course, bin Laden went on to form
al-Qaeda, "9/11" occurred, the US invaded the "Graveyard of Empires" (going
back to that of Alexander the Great), and now is caught in the same kind of
quagmire that the Soviet Union was in.
Ah yes, the blow-back from this Brzezinski policy has a major role to
play in creating the "Crisis of Global Power," that is the U.S. global power
that presently concerns the man.
Then there is Robert Kagan. Going back to the 1990s, he was one of the
original post-Gulf War architects of the invasion of Iraq. In a book edited by himself and Bill Kristol
(2), one of their close associates, Richard Perle, laid out the case for
invading Iraq and overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein. He even went so
far as to mention by name one long-time Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, as a really
good choice for future leader of the country once Saddam was gotten rid
of. Funny how Chalabi turned to be a
likely Iranian agent. (How ironic too
but that's another story.) Iraq and blow-back
again. Oh my. Anyway, so here we are in a world made in
part by major U.S. Presidential decisions made in major part on the recommendations
of these two authors. And we are having
the two "authorities" tell us just what needs to be done to make things right,
for the United States, of course.
According to Freedland, Brzezinski does recognize
the present parlous state of U.S. world power. Kagan is apparently sunnier,
although he does recognize that certain "things need to be done" if the U.S. is
to maintain its hegemony, or at least what Kagan imagines as its hegemony. For Brzezinski a central element is fixing
the "dysfunctional, paralyzed political system," in order (in part) to
deal with the "ever-widening inequality" between the very rich and the rest of
us. For Kagan, it's returning to/maintaining
the "liberal economic order," yes indeed, that marvelous G.W. Bush era of
environmental and finance de-regulation and unfettered finance capitalism that brought
on both the ever-widening income/wealth gap in the U.S. and the current
U.S./world economic crisis in the first place.
Both men have blinders on. Kagan doesn't recognize the connection
between the current economic crisis and the "neoliberal economics" of which he
was such a strong salesman. Brzezinski doesn't
recognize that the U.S. political system that he describes as "dysfunctional
and paralyzed" is hardly either, for those who own it. With an occasional hiccup caused by
Obama-"centrism," the political system is working very well for them to achieve
their primary goals: the ever-widening income/wealth gap and as much financial
and environmental deregulation as possible.
What both men miss is a much more important
point. It is the political economics of
capitalism that has brought the United States to its present precarious
over-militarized, over-extended, deeply-in-debt position on the world
stage. The "good old days" of
manufacturing-based American capitalism are gone forever (overseas). They will not return, the best suggestions of
folks like Thom Hartmann and Ed Schultz to the contrary notwithstanding. T he single goal of
capitalism is to make the highest possible profits for the owners of the means
of production. But, capital perpetually
experiences a falling rate of profit and then is perpetually transferred elsewhere. This pattern was established in this country
back in the 19th century when the owners of the textile industry abandoned
the rapidly unionizing New England mills for greener pastures (for themselves)
in U.S. South. Now, as that industry has
fled to even lower wages in China and elsewhere, the South is littered with
abandoned mills, just as New England still is, as well as, of course, abandoned
workers.
And so, what does capital do
domestically to get higher rates of profit than it can from manufacturing? It gets into trading pieces of financial
paper, exploiting the non-renewable sources of energy, and, when the real
estate market is good, developing as much available land as possible, then
selling and re-selling what is put on it.
The first and third are what a now-obscure Russian political economist
named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov a century ago called finance capitalism and the second
is a form of exploitation of the Earth's natural resources that even he could
not imagine. All three are unstable, as
has been and is being clearly demonstrated.
That the U.S. now stands on this economic base is the reason why it faces
its "Crisis of Global Power." Indeed the
U.S. is in decline, hoist by its own petard, in part created by the recommendations
of our two authors, in one way or another.
Its present "parlous state" as a world power will not, indeed cannot, be
fixed by straightening out its "dysfunctional, paralyzed political system,"
which indeed, to repeat, has come into being to protect its present economic
form, not reform it. Nor will more of
the same "neo-liberal" economic policy, which, to repeat, happens to underlie the
current economic form do the trick. What
will? Stay tuned. One of these days we may get back to that
one.
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References:
1. Freedland, J., "The Big Bang," The New
York Times Sunday Book Review, April 8, 2012, p. 1.
2. Kagan, R. and Kristol, W., Present
Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in America's Foreign and Defense Policy, 2000.
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