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Tuesday, 09 January 2007 16:10 |
 | | Mark West |
Dreams of empire die hard.
Itës understandable that our current administration is unwilling to let go of its belief in the notion that the United States is a superpower of some sort.
But, the reality is that weëre not a superpower. There arenët any superpowers anymore.
A
superpower would be a nation capable of bending other nations to its
will. Such a nation could arbitrarily set its own boundaries to
maximize its own self-interest and would employ extra-territorial
regions for its own economic interests. It could spread its own
religion and culture to remote areas, moving masses of people to other
lands as it saw fit.
Rome, for
example, beggared its territories through punitive taxation and
conscription of troops and used the monies they raised to provide
wealth for the privileged of Rome, and ease for the remainder of the
citizenry. Alexander of Macedon, Augustus, Trajan all had in common
that they decided that they had conquered enough and that it was time
to stop; the only limit on their power was their own judgment.
Atomic weaponry,
however, has made such a world no longer possible. As horrific as the
concept is, atomic weapons are the great leveler; a North Korea with
atomic weapons is as free from U.S. intervention as is a U.S.S.R. It is
difficult to imagine what Kim Jong-Il might do that would make an
American leader attack North Korea under the threat of nuclear
retaliation.
Imagine a
schoolyard where every kid had a machine gun. It would be a very
dangerous place, to be sure. But the biggest and meanest kid would have
no advantage over the smallest.
Thatës what
nuclear proliferation has done to our world. And people like Kim
Jong-Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad know it. We have entered an era when
negotiation and diplomacy are the only weapons in the arsenal of
international relations that arenët counterproductive.
The Bush
administration, always laughably incompetent, of course ignores that
fact by appointing John Bolton, the anti-negotiator, to the U.N., and
by attacking nations rather than cutting deals.
The interesting
thing here isnët what our administration will do; we can always count
on Bush to study to do his worst. Nor need we work too hard to guess
Osama bin-Ladenës next moves; as much as he is able, he will attempt to
provoke us into ignoring diplomacy, into acting unilaterally, into
further alienating ourselves from the rest of the world. And Al-Qaeda
will chip away at the peripheral members of the E.U. like Spain with
terrorist attacks.
The real
question is what the voters of the United States will do. Will we come
to realize that the days of empire are over, that diplomacy works and
gunfire doesnët? Or will we return to the tired "big stick" policies
that have failed so dismally in Iraq?
The answer to
that question and the future of the nation is truly in our hands in the
next presidential election ÇƒÓ which may be the most critical
presidential election since Abraham Lincoln ran against George "Little
Mac" McClellan.
ï
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at UNC Asheville.
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