"America's Neo-Conservative World Supremacists Will Fail:

Current US Megalomania Is Rooted in the Puritan Colonists' Certainties"

Eric Hobsbawm, Guardian (UK)

Three continuities link the global US of the cold war era
with the attempt to assert world supremacy since 2001.

The
first is its position of international domination, outside
the sphere of influence of communist regimes during the cold
war, globally since the collapse of the USSR. This hegemony
no longer rests on the sheer size of the US economy. Large
though this is, it has declined since 1945 and its relative
decline continues. It is no longer the giant of global
manufacturing. The centre of the industrialised world is
rapidly shifting to the eastern half of Asia. Unlike older
imperialist countries, and unlike most other developed
industrial countries, the US has ceased to be a net exporter
of capital, or indeed the largest player in the international
game of buying up or establishing firms in other countries,
and the financial strength of the state rests on the
continued willingness of others, mostly Asians, to maintain
an otherwise intolerable fiscal deficit.

The influence of the
American economy today rests largely on the heritage of the
cold war: the role of the US dollar as the world currency,
the international linkages of US firms established during
that era (notably in defence-related industries), the
restructuring of international economic transactions and
business practices along American lines, often under the
auspices of American firms. These are powerful assets, likely
to diminish only slowly. On the other hand, as the Iraq war
showed, the enormous political influence of the US abroad,
based as it was on a genuine "coalition of the willing"
against the USSR, has no similar foundation since the fall of
the Berlin wall. Only the enormous military-technological
power of the US is well beyond challenge. It makes the US
today the only power capable of effective military
intervention at short notice in any part on the world, and it
has twice demonstrated its capacity to win small wars with
great rapidity. And yet, as the Iraq war shows, even this
unparalleled capacity to destroy is not enough to impose
effective control on a resistant country, and even less on
the globe. Nevertheless, US dominance is real and the
disintegration of the USSR has made it global.The second element of continuity is the peculiar house-style
of US empire, which has always preferred satellite states or
protectorates to formal colonies. The expansionism implicit
in the name chosen for the 13 independent colonies on the
east coast of the Atlantic (United States of America) was
continental, not colonial. The later expansionism of
"manifest destiny" was both hemispheric and aimed towards
East Asia, as well as modelled on the global trading and
maritime supremacy of the British Empire. One might even say
that in its assertion of total US supremacy over the western
hemisphere it was too ambitious to be confined to colonial
administration over bits of it.

The American empire thus consisted of technically independent
states doing Washington's bidding, but, given their
independence, this required continuous readiness to exert
pressure on their governments, including pressure for "regime
change"and, where feasible (as in the mini-republics of the
Caribbean zone), periodic US armed intervention.

The third thread of continuity links the neo-conservatives of
George Bush with the Puritan colonists' certainty of being
God's instrument on earth and with the American Revolution -
which, like all major revolutions, developed world-missionary
convictions, limited only by the wish to shield the the new
society of potentially universal freedom from the corruptions
of the unreconstructed old world. The most effective way of
finessing this conflict between isolationism and globalism
was to be systematically exploited in the 20th century and
still serves Washington well in the 21st. It was to discover
an alien enemy outside who posed an immediate, mortal threat
to the American way of life and the lives of its citizens.
The end of the USSR removed the obvious candidate, but by the
early 90s another had been detected in a "clash" between the
west and other cultures reluctant to accept it, notably
Islam. Hence the enormous political potential of the al-Qaida
outrages of September 11 was immediately recognised and
exploited by the Washington world-dominators.

The first world war, which made the US into a global power,
saw the first attempt to translate these world-converting
visions into reality, but Woodrow Wilson's failure was
spectacular; perhaps it should be a lesson to the current
world-supremacist ideologists in Washington, who, rightly,
recognise Wilson as a predecessor. Until the end of the cold
war the existence of another superpower imposed limits on
them, but the fall of the USSR removed these. Francis
Fukuyama prematurely proclaimed "the end of history" - the
universal and permanent triumph of the US version of
capitalist society. At the same time the military superiority
of the US encouraged a disproportionate ambition in a state
powerful enough to believe itself capable of world supremacy,
as the British Empire in its time never did. And indeed, as
the 21st century began, the US occupied a historically unique
and unprecedented position of global power and influence. For
the time being it is, by the traditional criteria of
international politics, the only great power; and certainly
the only one whose power and interests span the globe. It
towers over all others.

All the great powers and empires of history knew that they
were not the only ones, and none was in a position to aim at
genuinely global domination. None believed themselves to be
invulnerable.

Nevertheless, this does not quite explain the evident
megalomania of US policy since a group of Washington insiders
decided that September 11 gave them the ideal opportunity for
declaring its single-handed domination of the world. For one
thing, it lacked the support of the traditional pillars of
the post-1945 US empire, the state department, armed services
and intelligence establishment, and of the statesmen and
ideologists of cold war supremacy — men like Kissinger and
Brzezinski. These were people who were as ruthless as the
Rumsfelds and Wolfowitzes. (It was in their time that a
genocide of Mayas took place in Guatemala in the 1980s.) They
had devised and managed a policy of imperial hegemony over
the greater part of the globe for two generations, and were
perfectly ready to extend it to the entire globe. They were
and are critical of the Pentagon planners and neo-
conservative world supremacists because these patently have
had no concrete ideas at all, except imposing their supremacy
single-handed by military force, incidentally jettisoning all
the accumulated experience of US diplomacy and military
planning. No doubt the debacle of Iraq will confirm them in
their scepticism.

Even those who do not share the views of the old generals and
proconsuls of the US world empire (which were those of
Democratic as well as Republican administrations) will agree
that there can be no rational justification of current
Washington policy in terms of the interests of America's
imperial ambitions or, for that matter, the global interests
of US capitalism.

It may be that it makes sense only in terms of the
calculations, electoral or otherwise, of American domestic
policy. It may be a symptom of a more profound crisis within
US society. It may be that it represents the — one hopes
short-lived — colonisation of Washington power by a group of
quasi-revolutionary doctrinaires. (At least one passionate
ex-Marxist supporter of Bush has told me, only half in jest:
"After all, this is the only chance of supporting world
revolution that looks like coming my way.") Such questions
cannot yet be answered.

It is reasonably certain that the project will fail. However,
while it continues, it will go on making the world an
intolerable place for those directly exposed to US armed
occupation and an unsafer place for the rest of us.

[Eric Hobsbawm is author of The Age of Extremes: The Short
20th Century 1914–1991. This is an edited extract from his
preface to a new edition of VG Kiernan's America: The New
Imperialism.]