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Force, Power Or Strength:
What Does America Have?

By Aseem Shrivastava

23 December, 2005
Countercurrents.org

President Ahmednejad must be delighted in his office in Teheran. Iran has won hands-down the first ever elections in Iraq. An unsurprising irony, given the ethnic composition and demographics of the land the Americans have been trying to take over. Given the Shiite majority, Washington warlords should have seen it coming. And those who wish to reduce democracy to a mere matter of conducting elections didn´t deserve any better. One can only hope that minorities and women will find voices in the Shiite Islamic democracy to come. Assuming, of course, that there is no civil war.

All the nuclear weapons in its arsenals have not allowed the US to retain much power in Iraq. Force and power are actually quite distinct things, and strength is yet another, though the three are all too easily confused with each other in our thinking these days. Let us examine them a little.

Force, the ruler of the world


What the US has in abundance is overwhelming force. Everybody has recognized that since the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. To earn this recognition from a world which had till then believed in the global supremacy of Europe - and not the purported saving of American lives (since the Russians were in fact preparing to deploy their troops on the Eastern front, which would have saved the Americans the trouble) - was in fact the precise purpose behind the dropping of the bomb. To leave the Russians to clinch victory in the Far East would have disrupted US plans to gain the status of the global hegemon after World War II.

To make the world´s perception of American dominance quite certain, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki soon thereafter. Europe´s imperial hour was over. The fact that the opportunity allowed for a real-life test of the devastating new inventions (the Nagasaki bomb was made from plutonium, while the Hiroshima one from Uranium) was a huge incidental advantage, and in keeping with the general practice of Western powers testing new weapons on remote peoples of the planet, but was not central to the quest for the assertion of global dominance. At the cost of extending and reshaping altogether the direction of the war, Washington would not have allowed the Soviet Union to terminate the Pacific War even if there were no nuclear weapons around yet.

Whenever there prevails any doubt as to who rules the world, assertion of force becomes an imperative. Only after great fears have been invoked in people´s hearts, making them conform to the demands of the new rulers, can force be suspended.

Power is not bombs and bullets

What, on the other hand, is power? While it is true that power is all too often made credible through the threat of exercise of force, it is actually quite a distinct thing altogether. It relies on something which makes the use of force necessary only in the exception: the cooperation of the public. To elicit this cooperation, power must widely be seen to be fair. In this way it earns legitimacy. To use the Americanism, it must win the ¨hearts and minds¨ of people. This legitimacy, when backed by credible force, is in fact what has ruled the world for most of its history. It is what we call hegemony. It is what the US had in abundance till the Vietnam War, even if it was somewhat challenged by an unequal superpower during the period of the Cold War.

The dent in the armour of US hegemony brought on by the loss in Vietnam was repaired to an extent by the end of the Cold War. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, it was in fact at a peak. America´s moral capital at the time was so high that if it had done nothing at all after September, 2001, it would be sitting pretty right now, coasting a new wave of global public endorsement of its hegemony. The American way of life would still be the way to go. But, perhaps from fated imperial folly, Washington squandered this moral capital.

Now, after Afghanistan, and especially Iraq, it has become all too apparent to the world that the American way of life spells death and destruction to the multitudes. If you leave aside the greedy conformity of certain governments (like that of India), the legitimacy of US hegemony is now non-existent outside the US - witness, for instance, the rapid rise of popular governments in Latin America, a source of immense annoyance to American rulers who have seen it historically as their own backyard, to be run by bosses backed by Washington. The legitimacy is also fast eroding within the US - as seen in the declining popularity ratings for the Bush administration. America has lost power.

There is another dimension to this loss of power, more long-standing and no less significant in its consequences. It has to do with the decline in American economic dominance. The process began in the 1970s, with the break-down of the Bretton-Woods system and the end of what economists call ¨The Golden Age¨. The Vietnam War boom was brought to an end by the oil crises and the rise of Germany and Japan. With the help of what is understood as Military Keynesianism, illusions of American superiority were maintained through the Reagan years when, in fact, productivity was on the decline, trade deficits and public debt were growing rapidly and East Asian economies were on the rise. Today, few informed observers believe the illusion of American prosperity. Most acknowledge that it is funded by unpayable debts to foreigners. And no one doubts that the next generation of Americans will be the first to suffer a decline in their standard of living. Here too, America has lost power.

However, crucially, it has not lost force. And nor have its leaders and elites lost their will to use it in their narrow interests. As argued earlier, force becomes necessary precisely when power wanes. The missiles have to be brought out of their silos. Doctrines of preventive war have to be enunciated. Patriot Acts have to be extended. Torture has to be redefined and legalized. All this to lend a veneer of legitimacy for immoral state actions and to earn legal immunity for the crimes to come. And who can say which ones and how many would be deemed necessary in various catastrophic eventualities of the future?

Strength as a basis of power

We have discussed force and power so far. What is strength, and how might we distinguish it from force and power?

There is one key which can unlock the door to peace. It is carried by every American citizen and it can unlock the door which their government, the corporate media and not least, Hollywood, have tried to keep them unaware of, by repeatedly seeking and finding evil everywhere except in the corridors of high offices. It is a door that opens inwards, not outwards, and if America is to remain a free country in the future this door shall have to remain open.

Today, it is not just the opinions, but the concerted actions of the American public that matter. Never has it been so vital for them to discharge their duties as citizens. They bear on their shoulders perhaps the greatest responsibility that any people have ever had to bear in all of human history - to see through the hoax of the war on terror and prevail on their elected representatives - Republican or Democrat - to retrace their steps from the path of conquest, or risk the increasingly probable extinction of our species. There isn´t much time for the public actions to take effect: it is, in fact, only between now and the next big attack on America, because after that it is more than likely that humanity will be on a more or less deterministic path of (mutually assured) self-destruction, like a patient who has been administered a poisonous drug awaits the inevitable.

To prevent what would otherwise be certain, the American people will have to reach out not towards force or power, as their government and corporate elite habitually do in their well-concealed weakness, but into their own inner reserves of strength. Strength is a quality of individuals who find it in themselves to resist the tide of conformity and overcome their own inertia and habitual postures, making themselves ultimately capable of standing alone.

If enough people are able to do so in a cause far greater than any that a purely patriotic disposition can conceive, an ultimately victorious movement can be achieved. The world will extend limitless solidarity towards such an effort. Recall that even the New York Times had conceded after the world-wide protests before the war on Iraq that the lone superpower now had to contend with the emerging one of ¨global public opinion.¨

One has to understand that America´s great problems - of enabling peace and prosperity - cannot be solved unless the world is offered a surprise: a true, unilateral, disarming peace. Patriotism will self-destruct without a global vision, encompassing in its moral realm all humanity. Love for one´s own country is a good thing, Albert Einstein had once written. But ¨why should it stop at the borders?¨, he had asked.

Such solidarity will derive its power (and I use the term in the precise sense) not from the exercise of force but from actions undertaken from individual and collective strength. Power, when premised on force, is cowardice. But when based on courage, it mutates into strength. It takes more courage and intelligence to prevent war today than to fight one. War, with the globalization of weaponry that we have before us, is both cowardly and foolish.

True human actions are the most unpredictable things, till they happen. But if successful, people begin to think of them in retrospect as inevitable. The gods have assigned American citizens a tough fate. The costs of failure are obvious and foreseeable. The gains of triumph, uncertain as they might be, can surprise even the most hardened cynics.

Is all this too much to ask of a people who have given birth in the past to the likes of Henry Thoreau, Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, and in our own time to people like Daniel Ellsberg, Scott Ritter and Camilo Mejia?

Time to separate the wheat of the republic from the chaff of empire. Only then can we see any hope of the realization of William Blake´s two-century-old prophecy about America, ¨Though obscured, it is the nature of the blessed land¨. Only then - when the tree of liberty sprouts new leaves - can the true American dream be embraced by the world. That is the trust that Ho Chi Minh had once reposed in the American constitution. It is for American citizens to now honour that trust.

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