global commitments for the sake of what he likes to call ‘nation building at home’.” Stephens assiduously ignores the vast, expansive and dangerous robotic reach of American power, typified by remote drone strikes, the backing of proxy regimes and such negotiating endeavours as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
President Warren Harding, in 1921, is said to have placed the US on the pathway to isolationism with his anti-League of Nations stance, and the winding down of the post-war military machine. “Vast expenditure without proper consideration for results,” he warned, “is the inevitable fruit of war.” Wars, rather than being the efficient earners for a state, were wasteful enterprises. Avoid those security alliances that become, more often than not, stifling and awkward embraces.
Therein was born the myth of American insularity, one of considered geopolitical withdrawal. Such an assessment would ignore continued US involvement in the international financial system – as indeed, the biggest creditor economy – and its engagement in various international organisations, including, to a limited degree, the League itself. This was Washington without the fangs.
But Stephens, like his colleagues of that most myopic brand of history – the idea of empire – can see no reason for America to retreat from anything. Take, for instance, the adventurism in the Middle East. “There was no strategic or even political requirement to get out of Iraq once we had succeeded in pacifying the country.”
The efforts of such pacification continue to linger in their destructive toll, though armchair militarists get goggle-eyed when it comes to the empirical world. Conservative columnist George Will was left wondering what the missing factor was in the state building process and came to a simple, if impossible conclusion. “Iraq is just three people away from democratic success. Unfortunately, the three are George Washington, James Madison, and John Marshall.”
Then comes the issue of disorder, which takes the contractarian idea that, to achieve order in the international system, deals must be made with hegemons, whether you want to or not. Stability is something gained by bedding the brute across the ocean, and smaller states need to cosy up to bigger ones with tarted up appeal.
This system of perceived order was deemed a matter of virtue rather than avarice on the part of the great power. “By dampening great-power competition and giving Washington the capacity to shape regional balances of power,” argues Stephen M. Walt, “primacy contributed to a more tranquil international environment.” Tranquillity, however, remains a matter of degree.
Empires do check into the old home, get on the non-solids and eventually die from natural causes. Yet Stephens is cautious to suggest that, while America is in retreat, it “is not in decline.” This is in stark contrast to others, like Christopher Lane of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, who sees the US as “increasingly unable to play the hegemon’s assigned role.”
In any case, a power dedicated to causing more mayhem than policing stability doesn’t deserve any titles in the hegemonic department. The otherwise war loving David Frum had to concede after Obama pushed the US into another conflict in 2011 that, “Three wars is a lot, even for the United States.” In Layne’s final summation, “The epoch of American dominance is drawing to a close, and international politics is entering a period of transition: no longer unipolar but not yet fully multipolar.”
Excerpted from: ‘The concept of US retreat’.
Courtesy: Counterpunch.org