The
Realignment of the World
By Stanley
Kober
On March 11, the German ambassador
in Islamabad hosted a meeting at which representatives of the Chinese,
French, and Russian legations addressed the Pakistani press on the pending
vote about Iraq in the United Nations Security Council. According to
the Daily Times of Pakistan, the diplomats wanted to hear the Pakistani
point of view. But this was more than a fact-finding mission. The representatives
of those four countries had temporarily put aside their differences
to urge Pakistan to oppose the United States because, as one unnamed
official said, "a unipolar world would be a nightmare."
That meeting marked a radical
change, foreshadowing a realignment of power in the world. As the Times
of India recently editorialized: "For a country like India, the
choice is clear: It must join hands with others in Asia and elsewhere
to resist this growing U.S. intervention." Clearly, this ongoing
power-shift is not necessarily to America's advantage.
The March 11 meeting challenged
one of the fundamental precepts of the Bush administration's foreign
policy: that it can lead "coalitions of the willing" while
preventing the formation of counter-coalitions. According to the president's
National Security Strategy, "our forces will be strong enough to
dissuade potential adversaries from . . . equaling, the power of the
United States." Even more striking, it has declared it will prevent
the creation of any such opposing power by preemptive strikes, if necessary.
Foreign governments have
taken note. Some have decided to bind themselves closely to the United
States, seeing American power as the guarantee of their security. But
other countries have adopted a different approach. In November of last
year the People's Daily stressed the growing importance of the Shanghai
Cooperative Organization (SCO) and boasted that "China-Russian
relations remain better than Russian-U.S. ties."
India has also indicated
a desire to join the SCO, which would then unite the major countries
of Eurasia in a common security organization. As P. B. Mehta, professor
of law and philosophy at India's Jawaharlal Nehru University, recently
explained, "This war will almost certainly result in a greater
anti-Americanism around the world and may even occasion a more concerted
effort to build coalitions to challenge American hegemony."
Indeed, this practice of
power-balancing-power follows a pattern of history from ancient Greece
to the modern era, when Britain confronted France, France and Britain
confronted Germany, and all those countries then joined the United States
to confront the Soviet Union.
The Bush administration believes
it will break this pattern because of the virtue with which it will
exercise its power. That conviction, however, challenges the philosophy
that founded the United States: unchecked power will invariably be abused.
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary," James
Madison famously wrote in the Federalist Papers. Because we are not
angels, "ambition must be made to counteract ambition" so
that the government is "unable to concert and carry into effect
schemes of oppression." Thus, when international coalitions form
to oppose the United States, they will only be putting into practice
the philosophy of checks and balances espoused by the American Founders.
The Bush administration's
national security strategy runs counter to the Founders' aims another
way. In his Farewell Address, President George Washington implored the
American people to "avoid the necessity of those overgrown military
establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious
to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to
republican liberty." And yet, it is precisely this overgrown military
establishment that will be needed to police an implicit American empire.
Consequently, if the United
States declares it is assuming imperial responsibilities for the defense
of world order, we should not be surprised if other countries conclude
that this development signifies a threat to their own liberties. And
if the Bush administration thinks differently, it should challenge the
political legacy of our first president directly, rather than assert
that it is promoting a more democratic and peaceful world.
(Stanley Kober is a research
fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.)
This article was published
in the South China Morning Post, April 3, 2003.