What have the Bushites done to US national power?

So as you may all have gathered, I’m deeply into a bit of Realist thinking this week. This is all part of the intellectual work that is mulching down into Ch.6 of my current book project. But since the final text itself will have to be the merest digest of all my thinking, I thought I would share with you this fine table I made today, for which I have now figured the book won’t in the end have room. (You’ll see, though, that it is all still written in the kind of past-simple tense that I have to use for a book that won’t be in readers’ hands before next spring. This, even though many of the processes it describes are still ongoing.)

One of my aims here is to chart the ways in which the actions of the Bush administration in the international arena– reckless? criminal? immoral?– have considerably set back the true interests of the US citizenry (in contradistinction, as I shall explain in greater length in Ch.7, to the interests of the handful of big US corporations whose interests have driven most of the administration’s actions to date.)

So I made this little table that you see below, in which I teased apart what has happened to each of the main elements of “national power” during the Bushite era. In most of these dimensions, as you can see, there was an actual– sometimes precipitous– decline. Not all of these decreases were caused by the Bushites’ own actions (or, in the case of Hurricane Katrina, inactions); but most of them were.

But in addition something else was happening at a broader level– and once again, this was largely the result of the Bushites’ own actions. And this was a significant decline in both the actual and the perceived utility of raw military power (see line 3.) In other words, in the world of 2007-2020, the other, non-military elements of national power will almost certainly come to count for considerably more, relative to military power, than they have until now.

In a way this is a quite foreseeable result of one of the main phenomena of the present age: the sheer interconnectedness and transparency-to-each-other of nearly all the different parts of the world. And that phenomenon is surely going only to increase, not decrease, as the years go by.

Another thing I was doing with this table was trying to tease out what “soft power” actually means these days. I broke it out into four different dimensions here. What do any of the rest of you think about that scheme?

Okay, here it is:

The fate of the basic elements of US national power under the
Bush administration


by Helena Cobban for ‘Just World News’

Element of
national power 		The US
situation at the end of 2000 		The US
situation by fall 2007
1.  Economic performance Very strong, both relatively and
absolutely. 		Still very strong absolutely,
but noticeably less strong in the “relative” stakes.  The amount
of US government and private debt held by foreigners had increased
greatly.  Of the federal government’s external creditors, Japan
and China held first and second place.
2.  Human resources Our skill-set was strong but our
numbers were nowhere near those of China or India! 		The skill-set was still strong–
though many other countries had been catching up.  The EU’s
expansion had meanwhile increased its (very well-educated) population
to more than 50% greater than ours.
3.  Military power Unassailable, and either
respected or feared by all others around the world. 		Significantly dented, since
Washington by then held almost nothing in reserve for contingencies;
but otherwise still unmatched in technical and power-projection
capacity.  However, the usefulness
of raw military force as a factor that, on its own, can
realize important strategic objectives came under strong new
questioning after Israel’s experience in Lebanon and our country’s, in
Iraq.
4.  “Soft” power:
4-a.  Appeal of US ideals
and culture 		Our ideals were widely shared
and even more widely respected.  Our culture was generally (though
not everywhere) considered appealing 		Both our ideals and the
sincerity with which our leaders held them were strongly questioned by
many people around the world.  The violence and hypersexualized
nature of our culture had become widely commented on and reviled.
4-b. Recognition and
appreciation of US achievements 		The US had a strong reputation
as a competent, “can-do” nation that had put a man on the moon, helped
topple the Soviet empire through largely peaceful means, and provided a
decent life and good opportunities for its own people.		 The gross incompetence that our
country demonstrated in  rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan, and in
our national response to Hurricane Katrina, shocked even many of the
US’s staunchest friends around the world.  Actions undertaken by
US government and non-governmental bodies that did provide good, solid
services to others went largely unrecognized.
4-c.  Perceived
truthfulness of US leaders 		President Clinton’s affair with
Monica Lewinsky raised some eyebrows around the world. (It also
generated laddish smirks from many men).  But that episode did
little to dent a broad perception of US leaders as more open and
truthful than most of their counterparts around the world. 		The ideological zeal with which
Bush was seen as bending the evidence regarding Saddam’s WMDs and links
to Al-Qaeda generated a very broad international questioning both
of  his truthfulness, and of the integrity of a national political
system seen as having failed to hold him to adequate account at any
stage along the way to, or since, the invasion of Iraq.
4-d.  Reputation of US
leaders as fairminded  upholders of global norms. 		Many around the world were
mystified and concerned that the US had stayed out of so many global
treaties in the 1990s– and also, that our agricultural and other
subsidies seemed to violate strong norms on fair trading.  But
many non-US people were still prepared to cut us some slack on these
issues because of our strength on factors 4a, 4-b, and 4-c. 		The Bush administration’s
decisions (i) to invade Iraq in the absence of any compelling casus belli and then (ii) to commit
so many serious jus in bello
infractions there, in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and elsewhere shocked
nearly all those around the world who had hitherto seen Washington as a
broadly status quo-preserving power that at least stuck by the existing
rules and norms of international behavior.  The Bushites almost
completely shredded this dimension of the US’s soft power.  It
might take his successors a long time to reconstitute it.

Update, Thursday morning: I think that for completeness the table should include a line for “National unity”. Also, I think that item 4-d here should really come higher in the listing of soft power attributes since it includes the key attribute of international legitimacy.

18 thoughts on “What have the Bushites done to US national power?”

  1. National Leadership in crisis
    The real source of uncertainty in the US, despite its position as the most dominant power in the world, is a widespread erosion of confidence and faith in its political, financial, community, religious and cultural leaders, making the selection of the next President one of the more important in modern times.
    “This emerging scandal makes Whitewater seem puny in comparison; clearly there ought to be at least as aggressive a congressional inquiry into the connection between the Bush Administration and the Enron debacle. Facts must be revealed, beginning with the content of Lay’s private meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney to create the Administration’s energy policy.”
    http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011224/20011211
    “As the icons of business fell, so have the institutions of the private sector. For example, global accounting firm Arthur Andersen – the above reproach financial auditing and accounting firm – became a criminal partner in the brazen fraud of Enron.”’’
    http://www.swadesi.com/twmanagement/Institutions-of-US-Leadership-in-Crisis—A-Challenge-of-Presidential-Proportions.doc

  3. reckless? criminal? immoral?–
    I would say illegal, evil and very, very stupid. I think you are giving too much credit to where the USA was in 2000 though – lots of people saw right through Clinton.

  5. Who gives a monkey’s about saving “US national power”?
    If you do, why do you? No, on second thoughts, don’t bother to answer that one.
    Real “realpolitik” says that there is no before and after, just the same old US Imperialism. Susan is right.
    So much for the content. Now for the method: you are overdoing the spreadsheets, Helena old thing, if you don’t mind my saying so.
    If you must have a pro-forma, you would be better off using Tony Buzan’s “mind-map” thingy.
    Your spreadsheets are become like any other lists. Whether you put it in or not, the bottom line is always: “Er… that’s it”. Bathos.

  6. Does anyone really believe our military is weakened? We are primarily a naval and air power anyways, but even our army should not be overly extended by a 160,000 troop commitment to Iraq.
    We have a regular army of 480,000, an army reserve of 200,000 and an army national guard of 350,000. Based on various news reports, from all accounts we have at least 50,000 army national guard in Iraq, and another 50,000 army reserve in Iraq for a total of 100,000 non regular army in Iraq. That leaves the regular army making up anywhere from 50,000-60,000, depending on how many Marines we have in Iraq. Thats like what, less than 12.5% of the total regular army, and 250,000 regular army were deployed overseas at any one time even before Iraq. Since the rest of the world is relatively calm, taking 50,000-60,000 troops from Europe and Asia shouldn’t be too taxing.
    The only thing that seems to be damaged is our army reserves and national guard. Northcom by the way is preparing a massive drill in October to practice Martial Law in the US with, you guessed it, the regular army that is not in Iraq. Go figure.
    Maybe my figures are off, but thats whats out there.

  7. Maybe for the sake of my friend Dominic (and my own) I should clarify why I think that “thinking like a Realist” is both appropriate and useful for what I do.
    First of all, Quakers in general tend to have a strong distrust of ideologies. “Realism” does have its own deeply embedded ideology, I grant you; but in general it strives to be anti-ideological. More precisely, it tries to rely on evidence and lived human experience. Which is precisely what Quakers do.
    In my view, Quakers are “realists” (small R? big R?) in that we try to deal with above all real peeople (not people as we would want them to be) and real human situations, ditto.
    Classical-style Realists deal only in issues of power. Where we differ with that approach, I think, is mainly that we consider there is another power, call it the Divine power, that is also at work in the world and has the ability to transform human situations.
    In the present era, I think our approach is more “realistic” than ever for the world. This, because “soft power” is becoming more and more important each year– and “soft power” is all about inter-group relationship-building, and empowering people and groups who’ve been socially excluded, and working through conflicts of interest in nonviolent ways, and things that we have been working on for centuries… And the “hard power” of militarism and coercion is becoming correspondingly less effective.
    Well, it’s true that in the post I didn’t come to any conclusion. The post was a little out-take from the book. Read the book when it’s ready!

  8. Helena,
    Another useful framework for assessing the effects of the conduct of foreign and national security affairs are the six goals of grand strategy defined by the late Air Force Col. John Boyd, the closest military thinker America has produced to the likes of Sun Tsu and Clausewitz. Or five goals, depending on how Boyd phrased them in a particular instance. Boyd asserted that these goals should be used as a standard to evaluate the effectiveness of a nation’s policies and actions in its pursuit of its interests.
    The “six” version is listed below; the “five” basically combines the first two into one:
    § Ensure the nation’s fitness, as an organic whole, to shape and cope with an ever-changing environment.
    § Strengthen national resolve and increase the nation’s internal political solidarity.
    § Weaken the resolve of the nation’s adversaries and reduce their internal cohesion.
    § Reinforce the commitments of our allies to our cause and make them empathetic to our success.
    § Attract the uncommitted to our cause.
    § End conflicts on terms that do not sow the seeds for future conflicts.
    No rational person can conclude anything other than the fact that America under the Bush-Cheney regime has lost ground in its pursuit of all six of these goals, and in most cases the losses approach the catastrophic. For example regarding the first one, a nation’s ability to “shape and cope with an ever-changing environment” is greatly diminished when its ground forces are so broken they can’t be deployed. Not to mention when its credibility is so trashed that its Sec of State can no longer get appointments to see anyone above the functionary level, as has happened on several occasions. As for the second bullet, the Bush-Cheney-Rove approach of trying to govern a deeply divided country with their 50+1 tactics in pushing their radical agenda has the effect of undermining whatever cohesion and solidarity might still exist. I could go on, but it’s too hard on my blood pressure. You get the idea.
    Here’s a link to Boyd’s Wikipedia entry in the unlikely event you’re not familiar with him.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_%28military_strategist%29
    And here’s a link to the Defense in the National Interest site where you’ll find links to much of what documentation exists about Boyd’s thought. IIRC, the grand strategy goals are addressed in his “Discourse on Winning and Losing” presentation.
    http://www.d-n-i.net/
    PS: Twice, now, your comment script has eaten my post, in spite of thanking me for it. First yesterday, then just a few minutes ago. In both cases I previewed it, then hit the post button. I got an error messaage saying something was missing, which was the verification code. However, when posting from the preview there was no prompt for it. Then when I did enter it after the error message, thats when I got the “Thanks”, but no post showed up. This time I’m posting without the preview. Let’s see how it goes.

  9. I’ve been trying for two days now to put up a post I think you might find helpful for your book, but your comment script keeps eating it, in spite of saying it’s accepted. Let me know what I have to do to get it through your system.
    If your comments are moderated, I can’t imagine the post was controversial or stupid enough to get it thrown out.

  10. Hi, Chuck. I’m sorry about that. I suspect that the time-window for comments-acceptance has expired on that post. If so, I’m really sorry. Could you resend your suggestion on a comment here? Off-topic, I know, but perhaps not wholly.
    (Maybe I should open up a new post to accept suggestions re the book. I really appreciate everyone’s suggestions! Most especially the antiwar.com collection of quotes that was linked to over there.)
    Anyway, thanks for your persistence, Chuck.

  11. O.k., Helena. I see it all, some of it, as my old mate and fellow chippy Wally Coles used to say. (Another one was: “Wot? Do that? My name’s Simpson, not Samson!).
    Where is the Subject in all what you have written in your last post (no pun intended)? Where is agency and freedom and free will and sovereignty and all that? Is history a “Process Without A Subject”? Is it merely a matter of getting along and eliminating bad naughty conflict and er… that’s it? Quietism?
    Is Quakerism a Humanism? Or not? Does Quakerism recognise any of the categories of philosophy in the form in which they are otherwise universally shared, or does it insist on its own discreet and hermetic terminology, like Scientology does? Is there an interface between Quakerism and the rest of us, apart from a kind of gormless chumminess, like that of good old Wally Coles, a former working-class boy drummer in the service of the King (George V, not George II, as it happens), and proud of it?
    Clearly there is, or else there would be no blogging or books. But is this interface entire? Or is it attenuated, and incompatible with, for example, that Critical Pedagogy which also charts a (humanist) course towards “soft power”, a power which can only in practice be the mass collective Subject? The democracy that not only possesses a will and an intention, but also acts, and in acting, overcomes inevitable reaction?
    Is not “hard power” simply the reaction to this “soft power”? The Caliban to the Prospero? (“Forbidden Planet” is the US remake for the challenged). If so, then watching the rising trend of the one, and concluding that the other must therefore be waning, would be a terrible mistake. The opposite would more likely be the case.
    In fact, the near-exclusive reliance on military force is the peculiar characteristic of the Imperialism of our time, more so than ever before.
    Here we are again, happy as can be, all good friends and jolly good company. Good Companions. Pickwick. Isn’t Quakerism just an imaginary projection of the ghost of a Merrie England that never was, over the surface of the whole globe, and in the name of a very English kind of God? How is that to be separated from Imperialism?

  12. H’mm, on first blush (not that I do) that would probably be No, No, No, No, and No.
    Why the ire, anyway? I am all for agency, freedom, and those other fine things.
    Actually, Dominic, I love and agree with a lot of what you say– especially about “the near-exclusive reliance on military force”.

  13. Ire? What ire? Do you mean me or the chap behind?
    Butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth!
    (“I see no ships, only hardships!” – that was another of Wally Coles’ sayings)
    I love your writing too, by the way Helena. But you know that.
    I don’t know how to make criticism not to sound like ire. I am equally surprised at reaction to critical thinking. It just seems so natural and exciting to me.
    Wally, for example, had no time for any revolutionary speculations, or historical revisionism as he might have called it if he had been to university. I remember how grumpy, well, bad tempered actually, he got when I was going on about the film of “Oh what a lovely war”, which had been shown on television round about the time I was on the tools, paired off with Wally, and up and down the Metropolitan Line, doing building maintenance out of Neasden Depot. Reading books whenever I could, of course. Which Wally didn’t think much of, I dare say.
    I just can’t help myself, I’m afraid. Ex-PFC Chuck, my dear, how can you compare this banal “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs”-style recitation of Joh Boyd’s with Clausewitz’ sublime Hegelian spirals? Have you read Clausewitz at all?
    Contradiction is life.

  15. Helena: Cool table! One small suggestion if I may:
    4a stands apart conceptually and perhaps
    deserves a separate and broader treatment (beyond culture alone).
    All the other items are (more or less) of the form:
    “We now look at things differently because things are different.”
    4a is of the form: “We now look at things differently even those that are the same.”
    In other words, recent events make us
    revisit old beliefs about old facts and reach new conclusions.
    Take the famed “benevolence” of US foreign policy, for example,
    by which every horror story is just an unfortunate mishap:
    2 million killed in Vietnam (yeah, but we meant well);
    half a million Iraqi children killed by sanctions (price worth it);
    helping Saddam fight Iran or approving his use of CW
    (the mullahs had it coming), etc.
    People around the world, even far from Chomsky’s orbit,
    are seriously reconsidering their blind faith in the
    creed of the gentle elephant in the china store
    that breaks stuff inadvertently.
    With Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Shock-and-awe, indifference to global warming,
    etc, that narrative has become unsustainable.
    If Pew surveys are to be believed, the problem might not
    be that Bush tarnished America’s image (in which case
    it’s nothing a new coat of paint can’t fix) but that Bush caused
    people to realize that America’s image was always
    tarnished but that they were willing to turn a blind eye to it. But now they won’t.
    In other words, the problem with Bush is not that, in the eyes of the world, America
    had bad sex: it’s that it lost its virginity.

  16. Why Wally, why now? I knew him around 1975 and he was over 60, not yet 65. He was not in WW1 but went as a boy drummer, aged I think seven years maybe sold by his mother? Another Wallyism: “[son] Dear Mother, it’s a bugger, sell the pig and buy me out. [mother] “Dear son, pig’s dead, soldier on”.
    He was sent to serve in Germany with the British occupation force that was there. This would have been iin the early 1920s. The post WW2 British occupation forces are still in Germany, but the big force that was there after WW1 was mysteriously pulled out after a few years, leaving the road open for Hitler and the Nazis.
    What I learned from Wally was that he “knew his place”, but although separated thus from the stuffy middle classes and the careless haute bourgeois and feudal remnants, yet the range of his thought was hardly distinguishable from theirs. In fact it was like photographic reproduction, and the only thing that upset Wally was any mental transgression from the orthodox. Hence the verbal space-filling nonsense sayings, funny as they seem, carried an implication of censorious menace – shut up and play along, or else it will be the worse for you.
    He would have voted for war, I think, but I’m not sure. He could not really communicate what I wanted to hear. His accounts were unforgettable but one-dimensional. His account of being a child soldier was completely without any sense of injury to himself, as I recall.
    You wouldn’t expect to meet a child soldier in Amersham or Chesham. You would rather think, Uganda, wouldn’t you? But there it is. And the child sodier himself thought nothing of it, or so it seemed.

  17. All right, but just to finish up from my point of view, Helena, let me take it from where you say “I am all for agency, freedom, and those other fine things.”
    I dare say you are all for them, as much as you may be all for motherhood and apple pie for all I know, but are we thereby of one mind on this? I think not.
    These are not just things that are nice to have, nor would it be sufficient to say they are “must haves”. Even to say that they are “to die for” would not be adequate – although plenty of people have indeed died for them down the years, as we all know. Some of them I have known personally. I guess you could say the same.
    No, the question of freedom is the whole human shtick. The clash of Subject and Object, the dialectic of mind and matter – this is what it is all about. It is what religion is about, for that matter.
    It happens from this that eclecticism, whether of content or of method, is intentionally or otherwise, but in all cases anyway incompatible with this fundamental question of philosophy. It cannot be approached by an eclectic way. Eclecticism is not a way at all, but rather it is a random scattering of spots, signifying nothing. Eclecticism therefore cancels freedom by allowing it no proper consideration.
    Freedom cannot be an item on a list with other items. The only topic that would rank with freedom is the topic of God, and that would only be because these two questions are the same question. God is a humanist, or nothing.
    Let me conclude by recommending Norman Finkelstein’s fabulous Jeremiad, included at the bottom of the article at:
    http://www.counterpunch.org/abraham09082007.html

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