En números crecientes, intelectuales y académicos estadounidenses van haciendo notar públicamente su disidencia con el Pensamiento Unico del Imperio, pensamiento según el cual ese país es el único capaz de proyectar su poder globalmente (poder militar, político, económico, cultural), proyección que, de hecho, sería exactamente lo que el mundo necesita. Barry Gewen es uno de los editores del New York Times Book Review. Acá va su nota, publicada ayer en el sitio web The National Interest bajo la sección "Los Escépticos". Acá va:
Título: American Power in
an Age of Disorder
Texto: Henry Kissinger’s
most recent book was called, very simply, World Order. The title may be taken
as ironic, for at present, Kissinger said, there is no such thing. “Our age is
insistently, at times almost desperately, in pursuit of a concept of world
order,” and unless the major powers, the United States and China in particular,
but not them alone, manage to reach a new kind of accommodation about their roles
on the global stage, “chaos threatens.” The outlines of that accommodation are
not yet clear, and will require all the ingenuity and imagination of which
statesmen are capable. But of one thing Kissinger was quite certain: “No single
country, neither China nor the United States, is in a position to fill by
itself the world leadership role of the sort that the United States occupied in
the immediate post–Cold War period.”
Millions of
Americans and, it would seem, the majority of our politicians have not yet
gotten the message, perhaps with reason. There is an understandable nostalgia
for the postwar period of American supremacy—military, economic, political,
cultural—and it is easy to overlook the artificiality of that supremacy, based,
as it was, on the fact that the rest of the world lay in ruins. Complacency was
possible at the time because American values seemed to be striking roots
worldwide. Liberal economics, democratic politics, human rights and respect for
the individual undergirded the system. The United States had achieved an
extraordinary congruence: its national interests and values aligned perfectly
with the movement of history. Everyone was becoming American. The British may
have done more to elaborate that indisputably indigenous American art form,
rock and roll, but it didn’t matter because rock and roll was here to stay.
The Golden Age,
or what the French called “les trentes glorieuses,” was never as golden, nor as
glorieuse, as it appears today—golden ages never are. In 1962, the two superpowers
came within a hair’s breadth of blowing the world up. Anticommunism was always
the flipside of the American credo, the team’s defense, inextricably entwined
with its liberal offense. But it contained gnawing contradictions. The “free
world” included states like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran, even though there
was nothing free or liberal about them; Turkey, forever teetering between
military dictatorship and enfeebled democracy, was a member in good standing of
NATO. There were usually sound strategic reasons for these marriages of
convenience, but they could never escape the whiff of hypocrisy, and from the
perspective of America’s liberal world order, they were intellectually
untenable. Rationalizations were necessary, usually featuring the argument that
with enlightened American encouragement the anticommunist dictatorships were
“evolving” in the direction of the West. After all, having rejected the lure of
Marxism, they had nowhere else to go.
The collapse of
the Soviet Union, and the crises that have ensued, have made it clear that in
fact there were many other places to go. When empires fall and political
legitimacy is called into question, the results are often bloody. Millions died
as the British, French, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian regimes yielded their
authority for the sake of freedom and self-determination—the freedom to kill
one’s neighbors, the self-determination to promote one’s own group or
nationality over that of others. Almost miraculously, the Soviet Union imploded
with a minimum of mayhem. The Czechs and the Slovaks went their own ways with
little fuss, although the breakup of Yugoslavia, a consequence of the Soviet
breakup, brought familiar scenes of ethnic cleansing and tribal massacre; the
Chechens have not gone quietly into the night; and the world holds its breath
over the outcome of the Ukrainian crisis. Devolution is rarely pretty.
As for the
dominance of the United States, it has always been a mistake to speak of
“American imperialism” in the same way that one speaks of Russian or British
imperialism. And yet the end of anticommunism as a meaningful force in
international affairs has diminished Washington’s global influence, with
consequences much like those that followed the collapse of the more traditional
empires. The liberal ethos that has been the foundation of American primacy is
proving to be a weak barricade against national, ethnic or religious identity,
even deep within the Western alliance. Democracy provides no answer when tribal
animosities take hold and groups are pitted against groups. The horrors of
Africa and the Middle East are one result of the force of devolution, but so
too is the more benign Brexit vote. Belgium may split in two, Scotland may gain
independence and so may Catalonia—or God knows what other neglected pockets of
European discontent. In regions where political institutions are less stable,
Syria may not be the future, but it could be a future.
All of which is
to say that American primacy, as we know it, is dead. Those who seek its restoration
by doubling down in their support of “democrats” in trouble spots around the
world are chasing a mirage, as are those who promise to make America great
again by . . . whatever. America was great. It remains great. But it will never
have the authority or power that it enjoyed following the Second World War, and
Washington would be wise to husband the power it does have. To borrow a formula
from Hans Morgenthau, America’s policymakers must learn to distinguish, first,
between what is essential in foreign affairs and what is desirable, and,
second, between what is desirable and what is possible. What is essential is
for the United States to find ways to coexist with other great powers—Russia
and China at the present time; possibly India, Indonesia, Japan and Brazil in
the future—and that means understanding that those countries have national
interests of their own that one ignores at one’s peril, even when they clash
with American values. To view compromise and accommodation as diminutions of
power while invoking images of Munich is a dangerous exercise.
To try to slow
the tide of devolution, meanwhile, may be desirable—it is surely not in the
national interest to sit passively by as the European Union disintegrates—but
it may not be possible, since it is not clear what can be done to oppose
demands for self-determination. In some cases, devolution might not make much
difference: Is anyone in Washington losing sleep over the possibility of
Scottish independence? In other cases, defining the desirable is not easy: Are
American interests best served by supporting the creation of a Kurdish state,
opposing it or promoting a solution somewhere in between?
From a longer
perspective, however, the growing demand for self-determination and
independence can be viewed only with suspicion and anxiety. The more states,
statelets and autonomous regions there are in the world, the greater the
prospects for instability and conflict. Israel offers a valuable lesson here.
Surrounded by hostile and irredentist neighbors, it has taken whatever steps it
thinks necessary to insure its security, and its existential ace in the hole is
its nuclear deterrent. Other newly created states will find themselves in
similar situations, and we should make no mistake: self-determination is a
recipe for nuclear proliferation. It is probably only a lack of technological
knowhow that prevents South Sudan or Eritrea from building nuclear weapons—and
that will change. As a general policy, therefore, it is desirable to discourage
devolution, and it may even be essential at times. The problem is that it
doesn’t seem to be possible.
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