WASHINGTON: A DEAD END

By Mario Soares Reprint | | Print |

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LISBOA, Mar 3 2007 (IPS) - \’\’Will there continue to be just one superpower?\’\’, asks Mario Soares, ex-president and ex-prime minister of Portugal. In this article, Soares writes that September 11 showed the world the vulnerability of the US \’\’empire\’\’ in an absolutely unforeseeable way. Is the US about to attack Iran, albeit through its proxy Israel? In the UN Security Council a \’\’No\’\’ front has emerged, spurred on by Russia and China. Russian president Vladimir Putin allows himself to openly criticise Bush\’s policy, choosing to do so in the German city of Munich for the greatest resonance. China, as usual, continues to advance its expansionist policy, with such vast foreign reserves in US Treasury bonds –and dollars– that it could at any moment wreak havoc on the US economy. The various countries of Latin America –from the most radical to the reformists, and including pseudo-allies like Colombia– are in the process of gradually escaping, for the first time, from the control of their giant cousin to the North.

Before September 11, 2001, barely six years ago, no one would have had the slightest hesitation about answering ”Yes.” The US had won the Cold War. It was an unrivalled military superpower. It had economic and technological power without peer in the world. Then, unexpectedly, September 11 showed the world the vulnerability of the ”empire” in an absolutely unforeseeable way.

Few at the time saw that the world was on the point of entering a new era. All members of the UN Security Council hurried to unanimously declare their solidarity with the United States, as did its European allies, the majority of Arab states, and the most important countries of the five continents. It was an enormous mine of political capital for the US, which, however, Washington squandered in record time.

In effect, the Bush administration’s strategy to address terrorism threw it all away, as we can clearly see today. The causes were US arrogance and its rush to vengeance that it plunged into without reflection, going to the extreme of ignoring even the UN. Two subsequent moves have since proven to be absolutely disastrous to both global and US opinion and required foreign ministries to reassess their global strategies. The first was its use of NATO, which went from being a defensive organisation created to contain the Soviet ”enemy” to simply being Washington’s ”adjunct army”, attacking Afghanistan in order to find Osama Bin Laden, who, moreover, remains free, active, and unharmed. The second was the invasion of Iraq on the false pretext of having found weapons of mass destruction.

The ”quagmire” that Iraq was soon transformed into –along with the rest of the Middle East–, the emergence of Iran as a regional power on its way to obtaining nuclear arms, the defeat of Israel in Lebanon in a useless and disastrous war of aggression, the deepening of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — all explain, for to most part, the results of the recent US elections, which were catastrophic for Bush. The universal discrediting of the Bush administration –which lost all moral authority as a result of its disregard for international law and human rights, as seen primarily in its treatment of ”terrorism suspects” in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and above all the global disorder in which the world now finds itself with the clear impotence of the American superpower, did the rest.

When even Tony Blair, the most loyal of Bush’s allies, feels obligated to announce the withdrawal of his country’s troops from Iraq before stepping off the political stage, even recognising that he was the victim of deception, the scale of the disaster of Bush’s policies comes into a sharp focus. Then there is the critical economic state the US now finds itself in, with rising social tensions and inflation creeping to worrisome levels, all in the larger context of a globalisation that is generating terrible inequality and a flourishing of international organised crime, which reaches from ”nuclear contraband to the slave trade”, as Moises Naim, ex-executive director of the World Bank, writes in Illicit, his last book. To this add the already quite audible discontent of the military hierarchies.

Is the US about to attack Iran, albeit through its proxy Israel? In the UN Security Council a ”No” front has emerged, spurred on by Russia and China. Russian president Vladimir Putin allows himself to openly criticise Bush’s policy, choosing to do so in the German city of Munich for the greatest resonance. China, as usual, continues to advance its expansionist policy, with such vast foreign reserves in US Treasury bonds –and dollars– that it could at any moment wreak havoc on the US economy. The various countries of Latin America –from the most radical to the reformists, and including pseudo-allies like Colombia– are in the process of gradually escaping, for the first time, from the control of their giant cousin to the North.

The European Union, slow to react, is incapable, for the moment, of charting an autonomous foreign policy and speaking with one voice. However, it remains the only zone of global development able to seriously help the US exit the dead end in which it has found itself trapped. It is time to reformulate a new global strategy, open to all horizons. Once Bush disappears, naturally. But time is pressing, and this is the main difficulty. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)