It's the Empire, Stupid! posted by Richard Seymour

"Is the United States a Rogue State?"


While the conflagration went down in Washington and New York, President Bush sat in a classroom. Some have since been eager to educate America about exactly why it is “so hated by so many”. "Why Do People Hate America?"1 explored various levels at which American political, economic and cultural output generates resentment, while William Blum chose to call his book about America's military and covert operations from 1945 onward "Rogue State".2 It would seem a straightforward formula: "rogue states", Noam Chomsky avers, are those "states that do not regard themselves as bound by international norms".3. And which state has displayed more contempt for these norms?


The end of "anarchy".

Richard Perle, writing for the Guardian4, heralded the decline of the UN with typical bravado, suggesting that the world would be safer under a benign American imperium than under UN "anarchy". President Bush added that if the UN did not back war on Iraq, it would "fade into history as an ineffective, irrelevant debating society".5 Six months and one war on, the UN is working busily inside occupied Iraq, incurring great physical danger while trying, as Kofi Annan put it, to "confer legitimacy on the process" of building the new Iraq.6 Annan could not have put the matter more succinctly. Ineffective it may be, the UN still has relevance as a sanctifying symbol. That is, the UN is trusted where the US is not.

In his way, Perle was expressing a characteristic neoconservative disdain for the United Nations. The UN, according to Joseph Farah, hates "the Jewish State" yet allows Syria to head the Security Council.7 Newt Gingrich observes with suitable sanctimony that Libya now heads the UN Human Rights Commission while America was expelled from that body, partly because of French perfidy.8 This seems reasonable: the UN has passed innumerable resolutions against US behaviour and that of its allies.9 As an institution, it would seem to be constitutionally hostile to everything the United States, particularly its hard right, stands for.

But American conservatives might show some gratitude. The UN has been enormously useful in various ways. In particular, by supporting American intrusions into Panama, Haiti and Somalia. By assisting in the governance of post-war colonial states in Bosnia and Kosovo. And by helping to administer sanctions against Iraq which the Defence Intelligence Agency considered murderous10 and which a report for the Secretary-General by Professor of International Law Marc Bossuyt considered illegal.11 The latter point is of especial importance. Almost every American intervention since 1945 has been described by critics as "illegal" or "violating the UN Charter". But if the critics are right, the UN has been instrumental to apparently violating its own laws at times.


The "marriage made in hell".

In a debate hosted by the London Review of Books in 2002, Jacqueline Rose offered the audience three quotes and challenged them to guess the authors. All three were similar in tone, evoking some "evil" which had to be confronted on pain of assured destruction, so it was only mildly surprising to learn that the authors were, respectively, Ariel Sharon, Tony Blair, and Osama bin Laden. The “extraordinary proximity” of this language, far from suggesting a "pure antagonism" between these figures, connoted something more like a "marriage made in hell".12 To further emphasise the point, we might borrow the analogy from Slavoj Zizek of the Gestalt drawing which appears to be an outline of a goose's head or a rabbit's head, depending on how one looks at it. Zizek, referring to the Balkans war, says:

If we look at the situation in a certain way, we see the international community enforcing minimal human rights standards on a nationalist neo-Communist leader engaged in ethnic cleansing ... If we shift the focus, we see NATO, the armed hand of a new capitalist global order, defending the strategic interests of capital ... attacking a sovereign country...13

Against this "double blackmail", he suggests that rogue states like that headed by Milosevic are not the opposite of Western civilisation, but rather "its symptom, the place at which the hidden truth of the New World Order emerges". Instead of "rogue states" opposing "international norms" defended by Western democracies, we might see them as constitutive of the international norm. It was, presumably, normal conduct for the United States to assist Mobutu, just as they had Suharto, Hussein and so on.14

Al Qaeda, too, are not mere creatures of fanaticism reacting against degenerate liberalism. As John Gray points out, the loose networks that put the Al Qaeda idea into practise are part of the modern world of inter-imperial rivalries, intelligence gathering, elaborate funding networks etc.15 Having worked with the CIA, Mossad and the ISI,16 Islamist footsoldiers are as comfortable with a laptop as they are with the Holy Qu'ran. Bombed marketplaces and falling towers are part of the same world of shifting alliances, changing rivalries, of centripetal and centrifugal reactions, and of imperial power.


The "Hegemon".

Peter Gowan, in "The Global Gamble", outlines what the book's subtitle calls America's "Faustian bid for global dominance". America, according to Gowan, is the last remaining empire, a "Hegemon" dominating economically through the Dollar-Wall Street Regime, and politically through military incursions into the former Yugoslavia.17 In this, he represents a strand of thinking relatively popular on the left. Gregory Elliot suggests that the term "hyperpower" most closely encapsulates the United States' "awesome dominion".18 Tariq Ali agrees - the United States is the world's "only superpower".19

This argument is not restricted to the left. Robert Kagan of the Project for the New American Century argues that US legitimacy is diminishing with friends and "like-minded" peoples as a result of US unipolarity. Europe prefers the “constraining egalitarian quality of international law” while enjoying the security provided by the “behemoth with a conscience”. America, contrary to common wisdom, can “go it alone”, and does so.20 According to Professor of International Law Michael Glennon the UN's “irrelevance” is actually a product of US "unipolarity" in a post-Cold War world. France, Russia, Germany and China also believe the world is becoming "unipolar". France's former foreign minister Hubert Vedrine believes "a politically unipolar world" is unacceptable, and therefore France is "fighting for a multipolar world". Russia and China formalised an agreement in July 2001 affirming their commitment to a multipolar constellation of global powers.21

Underpinning these arguments is some conception of what the "bipolar world" represented, and how the collapse of one of those poles has affected the world. Most of those cited above would assent to the suggestion that the USSR was some form of post-capitalist state, that it was an ideological, as well as military and economic, competitor with the United States. During the Cold War, local powers were almost inevitably sucked up into the rubric of one of the two main competing powers. The over-arching framework of bipolarity seemed to render other struggles and rivalries nothing more than local manifestations of the Cold War. When the Russian Empire collapsed not only Stalinism, but also most forces and discourses of resistance appeared to collapse. The various communist parties in Europe disbanded, disintegrated or dissembled. The social-democratic left, far from benefiting from this state of affairs, was dragged into the void with their embarrassing militant cousins. There remained only one serious narrative for the future - the free market capitalist one whose vanguard was a victorious US.

This is an optical illusion. Instead of treating the USSR as a leader of the global revolution, we should treat it as any other polity. Instead of US unipolarity, we have multipolarity. The fall of the Russian Empire has rendered existing tensions, such as those between the US and the EU, more visible. Trade disputes have been supplemented by geopolitical disputes, as several European countries refused to support the occupation of Iraq, denying the US a vital source of legitimacy. Additionally, nuclear states have proliferated. Local conflicts between India and Pakistan, and between North and South Korea, resonate well beyond their own borders. China, too, is a rapidly growing power which, according to the American international relations analyst John Mearsheimer, could "be much wealthier than its Asian rivals", its huge population base enabling it to "build a far more powerful army than either Russia or Japan could". China "has the potential to be considerably more powerful than even the United States."22


The broken eagle.

Another view is that the US has "crash landed". For Gore Vidal, America resembles nothing so much as "Rome before the fall", while for E.M. Wood present US strategy is “ultimately self-defeating”.23 This thesis is most eloquently espoused by Immanuel Wallerstein, who asserts that American behaviour, far from providing surety of future strength, is indicative of present weakness. The US has not won a serious victory since losing Vietnam. Having abandoned interventions in Lebanon and Somalia, the US has only been able to defeat minor powers and even those victories are not as complete as they appear. The first Gulf War, for instance, resulted in the status quo being restored, with Hussein smashing the Shi'ites and Kurds, and the Kuwaiti monarch returned to his throne.24 Another apparent victory, this time in the Balkans, does not bear close scrutiny either. The war ended with a deal, negotiated by Ahtisaari and Chirnomyrdin, which was much closer to Milosevic's proposed terms as the war began than to Nato’s terms at Rambouillet.25 With barely a tank dented, Milosevic gained a “defeat” more flattering than he had any right to expect. Not US military power, but Serbian people power, put Milosevic in the dock. American power is therefore on the wane, and its present conduct may serve to hasten that decline rather than prolong its longevity.

As a corrective to leftist alarmism and rightist triumphalism, this is invaluable. But Kagan is surely right when he says that the US is the only nation presently capable of projecting force over long distances. Neoconservatives want to use this power to secure hegemony. Whatever the moral implications of this stance, it reads the state of the world accurately – America remains the most powerful country in the world.26


A word about their sponsors.

If the UN appears to violate its own written rules in order to sponsor US military interventions, it may be that we misunderstand international law. Laws, as any student of tort knows, are open to endless interpretation and argument. The determinacy of these arguments is ensured at the level of the nation-state by a judge acting on behalf of the state. On the level of international politics, arguments only end by virtue of economic or military superiority. While the Guardian dismissed the UN as "a recipe for inaction"27 before the bombing of Yugoslavia, supporters of the action were swift to affirm its legality afterward. Experts on international law argued throughout the conflict that the war was legal, that human rights laws had trumped the protection of state sovereignty. International law had finally grown up.28

While Richard Perle cheered on the imminent demise of the UN, he was not rejecting international law, tout court. There is some version of international law to which US neoconservatives would subscribe, because they need as much as before to regulate their interactions with other states. This point is rendered eloquent by the current performance of the UN in legalising the occupation of Iraq while agreeing to help in its reconstruction.

The "rogue state" vs. "free world" dichotomy is an ideology, substituting for genuine analysis, whose only recognised conflict is between the West (the good guys) and the Rest (the bad guys and their wretched multitudes). International norms are elastic, disputed terms, which have rarely impinged upon real power and have rather tended to become the form that hegemony takes. Far from being a "rogue state", the United States is an Empire, and through its power is a direct author of international norms. Power is a finite resource, however, and as President Bush points out, "a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power".29

Notes

1 Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, “Why Do People Hate America”, London, 2002
2 William Blum, “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower”, New York, 2001. These themes recur. See, for example, Chalmers Johnson, “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire”, New York, 2002; Gore Vidal, “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How we Got to be so Hated”, New York, 2002; Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, “Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq”, London, 2003; Tariq Ali, “The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity”, London, 2002
3 Noam Chomsky, “Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs”, New York, 2000.
4 Richard Perle, The Guardian, 21st March 2003.
5 Michael J. Glennon, “Why the Security Council Failed”, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2003. Foreign Affairs is a publication of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and consequently offers a vivid account of the thinking of the US foreign policy establishment.
6 The Guardian, 22nd July 2003.
7 Joseph Farah, World Net Daily, 12th June 2002.
8 Newt Gingrich, “Rogue State Department”, Foreign Policy, July/August, 2003.
9 See Blum, 2001, opt cit for a comprehensive list of UN resolutions which America has vetoed with the sole assistance of a small clutch of allies such as Israel, South Africa, the United Kingdom and El Salvador.
10 US Defense Intelligence Agency, “Disease Information”, 22nd January 1991, available at: the DIA's website .
11 New Statesman, 22nd January 2001.
12 Jacqueline Rose et al, “The War on Terrorism: Is there an alternative?” Logan Hall, Institute of Education, 15th May 2002.
13 Slavoj Zizek, “Against the Double Blackmail”, New Left Review 234, 1999.
14 See, for example, William Blum, “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two”, New York, 2003.
15 John Gray, “Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern”, London, 2003 cited in Terry Eagleton, Guardian, 6th September 2003.
16 For Mossad involvement with Islamists in Afghanistan, see Tariq Ali, “Between Hammer and Anvil”, New Left Review 2, March/April 2002; for CIA and Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) collaboration, see Ahmed Rashid “Taliban”, New York, 2001.
17 Peter Gowan, “The Global Gamble: America’s Faustian Bid for Global Dominance”, London, 1999; also, on similar themes, see Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, “Empire”, London, 2001; Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Empire of Capital”, London, 2003. Although essentially arguing that there is no unique scene of Empire given the deterritorialising effects of capital, Hardt and Negri do accept that US capitalism is, for the moment, unchallenged.
18 Gregory Elliot and John Rees, “The Balance of Global Forces”, Institute of Education, July 2001.
19 Tariq Ali, “The War on Terrorism: Is there an alternative?” op cit.
20 Robert Kagan, “Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order”, London, 2003; also, Robert Kagan, “Looking for Legitimacy in all the Wrong Places”, Foreign Policy, July/August 2003.
21 Glennon, op cit.
22 JJ Mearsheimer, “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics”, New York, 2001, p398.
23 Gore Vidal, “United States: Collected Essays, 1952-92”, New York, 1992; Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Empire of Capital”, London, 2003.
24 Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Eagle Has Crash Landed”, Foreign Policy, July/August 2002.
25 See Noam Chomsky, “Nato and the New Military Humanism: Lessons from the bombing of Yugoslavia”, London, 1999; Wallerstein, op cit, argues that US bombing did little to alter the course of Balkans history, while Kagan, in “Paradise and Power…” op cit, suggests that the war was primarily fought to preserve the unity of the transatlantic alliance, although Americans had “compelling moral reasons” to be involved – as, no doubt, did Turkey.
26 Donald Kagan, Gary Schmitt & Thomas Donnelly, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century”, Project for the New American Century, 2000. According to the authors: “At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageousness as far as possible”. See the PNAC website ; Anatol Lieven, “The Push for War…” London Review of Books, 2002, cited in Wood, op cit.
27 Leader, The Guardian, 26th March 1999.
28 See, for instance, Press Communique 99/32 and 99/23, International Court of Justice, 2nd June 1999; “Legal Standards and the Kosovo Conflict”, Appendix B, “Yugoslav Forces Guilty of War Crimes in Racak, Kosovo”, Human Rights Watch 29th January, New York; Louis Henken, “Kosovo and the Law of Humanitarian Intervention”, American Journal of International Law, v. 93, no. 4, October 1999, available at this website . The ICJs decision on Milosevic’s attempted prosecution of leaders responsible for the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia effectively legitimised the action. While Human Rights Watch do not argue the legal case for intervention, their evidence was instrumental to forming the war’s legal basis and certainly to building the moral case for it. Henken and his colleagues argue that while the intervention was clearly called for, international law was unclear on such actions. In particular, because the post-war legal framework assumed that wars would generally only be defensive if they involved a conflict between two states.
29 “Remarks by the President in Address to the United Nations General Assembly”, New York, New York, 12th September 2002, available here .

Richard W. Seymour