The good (?) ole days of the "unipolar moment"
Andrew Bacevich is currently the head of the Quincy Institute that is committed to a “restrainer” foreign policy, which is arguably a variety of foreign-policy realism. In his 2002 book American Empire, he described his view of the liberal-interventionist ideology that dominated the Clinton Administration’s foreign policy and was then being supplanted by the “neoconservative” version of crass militarism that characterized the Cheney-Bush Administration.
Cold War triumphalism was in full bloom in American politics during this period. And with it came a kind of economic determinism that said the neoliberal version of a “market economy” would inevitably produce a liberal-democratic form of government which would allow the world to live in peace. Under the benevolent guidance of the United States, of course. Here is Bacevich’s portrayal of the Clintonian view:
As depicted by those policymakers, a world transformed by the forces of globalization would allow little room for power politics and coercion. In a globalized world, concepts such as spheres of influence and balance of power - always viewed by most Americans as suspect - would lose their validity. War itself would face obsolescence. Instead, a web of efficient and well-regulated networks would bind nations together in a common pursuit of prosperity. Trade and investment would flourish, to the benefit of all. Economic development, in turn, would foster liberal ideals and a thirst for freedom. Popular government would spread, and, as [Clinton’s Secretary of State Madelaine] Albright stated, “we know that democracy is a parent to peace.” Democracies behaved themselves. They were, wrote Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, “demonstrably more likely to maintain their international commitments, less likely to engage in terrorism or wreak environmental damage, and less likely to make war on each other.” Peace-loving democracies, in turn, were ideally suited to collaborate in pursuit of sustained economic growth. The ultimate promise of globalization was of peace, prosperity, and democracy, all reinforcing one another in a self-perpetuating cycle.1
I can’t help feeling a bit nostalgic reading that. Not because I think the expectation was realistic. But because the idea that the Cold War was over and there was a new, hopeful version of the world that had a chance to establish itself was attractive.
But the marriage of neoliberal economics to American arrogance - let’s call it what it was, imperial arrogance - was never going to produce the peaceful and democratic paradise on earth that the globalization enthusiasts of that day fantasized.
In the new unipolar moment, the function of foreign policy discourse was not to inform Americans or to promote a serious dialogue about the implications of global preeminence. Rather, its purpose was to reassure the public that the promotion of peace, democracy, and human rights and the punishment of evil-doers - not the pursuit of self-interest - defined the essence of American diplomacy. To the extent that interests figured at all, policymakers typically insisted that American interests and American ideals were congruent. Opening markets abroad might serve U.S. economic interests—but the real aim was to promote liberalization and democracy. Military intervention in the Balkans might be necessary to sustain American claims to leadership in Europe - but it was advancing the cause of human rights that really explained U.S. actions.2
It was an assumption of pre-First World War peaceniks that a growth of international trade would be to produce an interdependent world that would not want to go to war because it would hurt all sides too much. It didn’t work out that way in the 1910s, and also not in the post-Soviet period.
During the last year, western European countries and Germany in particular have taken criticism from Ukraine and various other countries for their supposed naiveté in pursuing economic relationships with Russia. But the idea that economic interconnections would bring peace was “the law and the prophets” in the accepted wisdom of the End of History ideologues in the 1990s and afterwards.
We can’t literally “change our past.” But in the sense that Slavoj Žižek and Jean-Pierre Dupuy give to the concept, we can recall that the choices made in the 32 years since the end of the USSR were open at the time the decisions were made. And we can certainly look at how different decisions at key points might have led to a different result that was we’ve experienced in 2022-3.
The US and international institutions that pushed “shock therapy” on Russia and other post-Soviet countries was a choice. The Kosovo War was a choice, one that left us with problems that continue in 2023: an unresolved status for Kosovo and a Serbian alignment with Russia that the latter can use to help disrupt the EU. The Iraq War was a choice, and an exceptionally bad one. US interventions in Syria and Libya were choices. Staying in a war in Afghanistan for 20 years that left a Taliban government again in power was a choice.
In retrospect, a special mention for dumb choices goes to NATO’s 2008 declaration at the insistence of the Cheney-Bush Administration that the nations of Georgia and Ukraine would become NATO members at some time in the future, even though no formal accession process had begun and both countries were years away from qualifying. No, that doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, either in 2014 or in 2022. But it was dumb arrogance and needlessly aggravated a dangerous situation.
Even more consequential were the choices by the US to pull out of key nuclear-arms-control treaties including the one with Iran, while President Trump got love letters from North Korea instead of a nonproliferation agreement. (Oh, and they have nuclear weapons, now.) The Doomsday Clock is moving closer to midnight, not farther away.3
American conservatives love to blame poor people for their “bad choices” as a way of justifying their contempt and hostility toward anyone who isn’t white and affluent.
Can anyone really imagine that the choices of the End-of-History decades led to the kind of outcome envisioned by the globalization utopians Bacevich describes above?
We can hope that in this New Cold War period, or whatever we wind up calling it, US and NATO leaders will take more account of their limitations with the kind of strategic restraint that one of Bacevich’s favorite policy foreign thinkers, Reinhold Niebuhr, recommended during the 1950s and 1960s.
As Bacevich wrote in 2008:
In Niebuhr's view, although history may be purposeful, it is also opaque, a drama in which both the story line and the dénouement remain hidden from view. The twists and turns that the plot has already taken suggest the need for a certain modesty in forecasting what is still to come.4
“Modesty” was not much evident in Cold War triumphalism.
Bacevich, Andrew (2002): American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy 2008, 42. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press.
Ibid., 46
Spinazze, Gayle (2023): Doomsday Clock set at 90 seconds to midnight. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 01/24/2022. <https://thebulletin.org/2023/01/press-release-doomsday-clock-set-at-90-seconds-to-midnight/#post-heading> (Accessed: 2023-31-01).
Bacevich, Andrew (2008): Illusions of Managing History: The Enduring Relevance of Reinhold Niebuhr. 08/15/2016 (lecture of 10/09/2007) PBS/Bill Moyers Journal <https://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08152008/profile3.html> (Accessed: 2023-31-01).