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November 15, 2004
I'm on the road. I will try and post latter when I have internet access.
In the meatime have a look at this article from Prospect Magazine on Liberal Leviathan by John Ikenberry. In the Bush administration's vision of the world an American leviathan provides security to the world and in return the world accepts US dominance. Yet the contract is not working. John says the:
"Bush administration's foreign policy has failed - and failed spectacularly. Bush sought to mobilise the world in a great campaign against new threats, but instead the world is openly questioning the legitimacy of a US-led global order. His administration is seized by the problem of terrorism and the rest of the world is seized by the problem of American unipolar power. The world may not be able to restrain the US by organising a counterbalancing coalition. But the world today is about as close as it has ever come to being in open rebellion against the one global superpower. This global rebellion is particularly intense among citizens in the advanced western democracies, America's oldest and most established allies."
So why the failure? John says:
"...there is a basic contradiction at the heart of the Bush administration's national security vision. The Bush administration wants both to serve as the global provider of security and simultaneously to pursue a traditional conservative foreign policy based on narrowly defined self-interest. That is, the administration wants to solve the Hobbesian problem of order by becoming a global leviathan but it also wants to use US power to advance nationalist goals at the expense of others and reduce its commitment to international rules and institutions. It cannot do both - it must choose."
That says it very neatly.
Go read the article.
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