I was (re-)reading Zbigniew Brzezinski’s recent, shortish book Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower, actually looking for a short couple of sentences that might work as an epigraph in the new book. Brzezinski is a consummate “Realist” in terms of his view of the world. Of proudly Polish heritage, he was a strong Cold Warrior back in the day… (Including, the day when he was Pres. Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor.)
Well, I haven’t found the perfect epigraph-quote yet. May still happen. But I did come across one absolutely riveting quote on the utility (or otherwise) of raw military power in the present era that I want to explore more a bit later in this post. First, though, for anyone who wants to see Zbig talking about the book on the Lehrer News Hour, you can see a Youtube clip of that here.
Okay, so the quote in question is on p.215. It runs thus:
- In the past, power to control exceeded power to destroy. It took less effort and cost to govern a million people than to kill a million people.
Today the opposite is true: power to destroy exceeds the power to control. And the means of destruction are becoming more accessible to more actors, both states and political movement. Consequently, with absolute security for a few (notably America itself) becoming only relatoive security for all, collective vulnerability puts a premium on intelligent, cooperative governance, reinforced by power that is viewed as legitimate. Global leadership must now be accompanied by a social consciousness, a readiness to compromise regarding aspects of one’s own soveriegnty, a cultural appeal with more than just hedonistic content, and a genuine respect for the diversity of human traditions and values.
Okay, well maybe the epigraph-quality quote is in there somewhere, now that I think of it. But really, it is the whole thought/argument there that I am most intrigued by– starting with his opening observation.
“In the past… [i]t took less effort and cost to govern a million people than to kill a million people. Today the opposite is true: power to destroy exceeds the power to control.” That is a very important– and, I believe, true– observation. But then, there are two directions you can take an argument based on it. He takes the argument primarily in the direction of noting how easy it has become for groups/organizations– non-state actors as well as states– to acquire and deploy mega-lethal devices; and from that to the question of the “new” vulnerability of Americans. (Americans were, of course, vulnerable to far more lethal, rapid, and loomingly “imminent” destructive power during the Cold War; and then we had, I guess, a brief decade, 1991-2001, when most US citizens felt largely “invulnerable”.)
But you could take an argument based on his initial observation there in the other direction, too: to note that controlling other people in the days of broadband international connectivity is much, much harder nowadays than it was in the old days of European (or Japanese) colonialism. Indeed, if you go to the Youtube clip, he doesn’t make exactly that point; but he does say that Bush’s foreign policy has been one of trying to enact colonial policies “in the post-colonial era”, etc.
The difference between today and the classic colonial era is, it seems to me, twofold. First, nowadays we have the fairly well-established “global norms” of human rights, human dignity, the right to self-governance, etc… and most people around the world really do value and uphold those norms even if large numbers of US citizens really do not seem to. And secondly– possibly even more importantly– we have the new capabilities of international communications… so that even if the Bushist spinmeisters are assuring us that everything is going just peachily in Iraq, we can still find out from numerous sources that that is not at all the case.
Indeed, it is that new connectivity between the different parts of the world that makes the “control” paradigm Zbig wrote about so hard to maintain, and that has so radically changed the balance between the “ability to control (or govern)” and the “ability to destroy.”
In my view, it is the ability to control that has been eroding in recent decades– due to the two factors I identified above– much faster and more significantly than the ability to destroy has been increasing.
After all, fuel-filled airliners are not “new”, and nor even was the possibility they might be used as “weapons” new. And roadside bombs and suicide belts are not new, either. What is “new” is the fear– luckily unsubstantiated as of now– that rogue elements might get hold of nuclear weapons. But even that fear is not particularly new. (And hey, if we didn’t have any nuclear weapons in the world, we wouldn’t need to be nearly so fearful about them getting into the wrong hands, would we? Also, are anybody’s hands in the world the “right” hands to have nuclear weapons, if nobody else has them? I believe Brzezinski was one of those “wise men” who a few years ago wrote an article saying that the only possibly valid use for nuclear weapons is to deter the use by other people of their nuclear weapons– in which case, why on earth not go along with the idea of verifiably dismantling everyone’s nuclear arsenals all together??)
My bottom line here: I do not in any way disagree with what Zbig wrote after he had made that initial astute observation. But I think his argument could have been a lot richer there. Also, the general point he makes can be seen as strong collateral evidence for what I have started to think and write about the radically decreasing utility of raw military power in the present era.
Regarding the bottom line of his argument in the book, it is that in 1991, the US had a first great chance to build a peaceful, stable, US-led world order, and basically the three Presidents who came along all in one way or another blew it. On p.185 he has a slightly overly cute “Report Card” in which he gives Bush I an overall B for handling of the eight listed items on the global agenda; he gives Clinton a C; and Bush II he gives a clear F.
So that was “the first chance” Washington had to– in his view– get it right. And after 2008 Washington will, in his view, have a second chance– and he warns that it had better get it right “for there will no third chance.”
As for me, I’m not sure that he (or Mike and the Mechanics, come to that) has it right. I’m not sure there is a second chance for the US, or perhaps any other power, to play a classic “superpower” role in the world in the present era. Because power has become so widely distributed. Because it is now so hard to “control” even a million people– let alone 26 million people; let alone 6.4 billion people.
Look, the US is not going to become nothing. It is not about to be invaded by anyone, or pulled apart by outsiders (as Iraq has largely been, by the Bushites), or to slip down into the ranks of being a fourth- or fifth-rank power. Life will still be very good in this country. But in the future we just might– shock! horror!– have to figure out how to be and act a little more equal to the other peoples of the world.
Actually, I think we would all become a lot more secure, and our lives a lot richer and better, if we rejoined the rest of the human race as equals.
‘First, nowadays we have the fairly well-established “global norms” of human rights, human dignity, the right to self-governance, etc…’
This is the Darf Standard. It’s a tyranny.
By the way, it’s nothing new. The combination of spurious modernity and spurious morality is precisely the brew in which the British Empire was steeped. For example in the Mau Mau time, that you so often like to quote to your advantage, and which I lived through as a boy. That was a good time to learn what well-meaning, bland-speaking people can do. Kids can see it.
This post is infused with the unmistakeable sound of war-drums (norm, norm, norm), and the shrieks of the torture-chamber (Why are you different?).
Your book of norms is on its way now. The die is cast. The flag is up the pole. Let’s see who salutes and who blows raspberries.
I have to disagree with much of what you wrote there. I would say the power to destroy and the power to control have both increased dramatically. I am amused by Zbig’s phrase “reinforced by power that is viewed as legitimate.” A lot of interesting assumptions buried in that. His solution involving “a genuine respect for the diversity of human traditions and values” is a bunch of hokum. As a citizen of corporate America, I know all about how we must learn to “celebrate our diversity,” etc., etc. I also know who is celebrating and who is not, and that’s not likely to change any time soon. What makes you think that “controlling other people in the days of broadband international connectivity is much, much harder nowadays?” I recall that broadband was around before G. W. Bush was re-elected in 2004. Why then was it so easy for his regime to control the electorate? Why, in 2007, is Congress still funding the war and expanding the regime’s domestic spying authority? We are, in Neil Postman’s phrase, amusing ourselves to death with all this connectivity.
Maybe you just mean it’s harder now to actually colonize foreign lands than it was in the 19th century. True enough, but largely irrelevant. Take oil for example. Your modern late stage capitalist no longer wants to directly control the oil (as our friend Vadim keeps pointing out). What he wants is to control the people who control the oil. Because in the end it’s not the oil he want, is it? It’s the money that the little people have to spend to buy the gas they need to drive themselves to work at Walmart. And as any gangster could tell you, if you want to get away with big piles of money on a regular basis, you have to launder it first. Enter the “friendly Arab government” (FAG).
It is thanks to the utter incompetence of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, the twisted oedipal psychology of the Bush family, and the distortion of basic American capitalism by the political influence of Christian fundamentalism and Zionist ideology, that the decades-old policy of establishing and maintaining a FAG in Iraq has gone so badly awry. It has nothing to do with “well-established ‘global norms’ of human rights, human dignity, the right to self-governance, etc.” I mean really. My goodness.
I am afraid that Dominic is correct but I’m not sure what conclusions this leads him to. My view is that war has been chosen as the preferred course and that wars tend to develop momentum. Either, then, the current US policies will lead to hegemonic empire or the US will be defeated.
The Achilles heel in the US is an unjustified sense of indefatigability, nourished by myths of “victory after victory”, which gets in the way of rational analysis of the cost of aggression. The current feeling seems to be that the USA, having won the First, Second and Cold wars is not going to lose any contests with, for instance, China. It might be argued, however, that the USA did not actually win these wars, which is why it remains prosperous and relatively harmonious: nations that “win” wars tend to emerge from them ruined economically and socially splintered. The prize they get is an understanding of the futility of war and the importance of peace.
Underneath the superficial “patriotism” of US society there are divisions just as deep as those that characterized the Austro Hungarian Empire (which seems to have become the constitutional model of choice in Washington). Any sustained war, including attacks on the (horrible word) homeland and demanding mass mobilization of people and treasure, would create enormous strains on society. There would be insistent demands for social welfare systems, health care, public education, fair taxes and economic egalitarianism. Individualism doesn’t work in wartime, ask a soldier.
In any case I don’t think that there are any “soft landings” in sight.
What you are saying in effect is that the US has become isolated, losing influence because what it wants no longer corresponds with the way the world is developing.
In fact it is a classic problem of globalisation. The consequence of globalisation is that everything is mixed up, people move everywhere, and eventually a single world economy will come into being. Only the US, and to a lesser degree the European Union, thinks it has the power to prevent that happening, and to preserve some kind of idealised past in their own country.
Even the US cannot resist, though it may take a great war to get the US to abandon their exceptionalism. I fear that war, I hope it is not Iran.
“eventually a single world economy will come into being”
Alex – there being only one world in which we live, a single world economy has been in being for quite some time now. Perhaps, like Tom Friedman, you foresee a world economy entirely based on so-called “free market” capitalist principles. If so, need we worry about US resistance?
Helena
This really for Scott who sounded surprised when I said I suspected I might end up rolling out broadband in Teheran, but I thought it might amuse you too.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/27/1
100 megabits connections do wonderful things for economic development. Ony snag is that they also contribute to the global politicisation Brezinski talks about. (just so this post is on topic) We might end up with a global rerun of 1848.
On the other hand we might be able to move confrontation into cyberspace.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/27/guardianweeklytechnologysection.it
there being only one world in which we live, a single world economy has been in being for quite some time now.
What I meant was the sort of one world economy where all the manufacturing takes place in the Far East, and US industry gets closed down. The US government thinks they can prevent that
“The US government thinks they can prevent that”
The US government (understood as a euphemism for the capitalists who actually run the country) is not so much interested in where the manufacturing takes place as in where the money ends up. It’s the classic pattern where the industrial advantages that built the empire in the first place are gradually lost to the periphery, while the rotten core tries to keep the cash flowing back to the homeland by military means. In the long run, of course, the whole structure will collapse. But the long run can be very long. In the meantime, life has never been better for the folks at the top.
“while the rotten core tries to keep the cash flowing back to the homeland by military means”
isn’t this the “power to destroy” effectively using the “power to control”?
in other words, isn’t Brzezinski’s distinction irrelevant when the instruments of hegemony have become so sophisticated?
shouldn’t we seek other means of power, other locations of power, and other uses and purposes of power?
this seems the only way to prevent those skilled in the powers to “destroy and control” from having their way with the world.
“shouldn’t we seek other means of power, other locations of power, and other uses and purposes of power?”
No. We should always seek to neutralize power, or at least to limit and contain it. This was the most important insight of our founding fathers. They did their best – now it’s up to us (speaking of US citizens).