Wayne Brown
ON CNN'S 'Larry King Live' last Wednesday, Madeleine Albright looked scared. U.S. foreign policy, the ex-Secretary of State averred, was facing 'a perfect storm'.
Afghanistan was 'out of control'; Iraq was a quagmire; there was no clear way forward with Iran. And now there was North Korea, a nuclear power which had just startlingly 'test-fired' six of its short-range and medium-range missiles, and one intercontinental ballistic missile (which failed).
The situation, Albright said, referring not only to North Korea but to what she analogised as balls on a snooker table, each capable of suddenly sending the others in unpredictable direc-tions, was 'dangerous ... very dangerous.'
Moreover, it was obvious that her fear was magnified by her assessment which, as a good diplomat, she only hinted at of the Bush administration's ineptitude in the sphere of diplomacy.
She was right, of course. In their five-plus years in office, the 'chicken-hawks' currently occupying the White House Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice have largely reduced U.S. foreign policy to the threat or reality of military attack. And in doing so, they've not merely lost the immense sympathy of a world shocked by 9/11 but generated the opposite: near-universal antipathy and resistance to their imperial designs and bullying ways.
Two months ago, a Pew poll revealed that, worldwide, people saw the U.S. as by far 'the greatest threat to world peace'. Much more so than Mr. Bush's infamous Axis of Evil. Moreso than either Israel or Hamas. Moreso, even, than Al Qaeda. And what's really scary is the unassailable hubris that prevents even well-intentioned Americans from appreciating the depth and the power of that resistance.
Quizzed about the Pew findings, Mr. Bush irritably brushed them off as 'absurd'. (Whether he meant the poll was skewed or that most of the world's people were absurd wasn't clear. What was clear, to anyone watching, was that news of the Pew poll hadn't so much as scratched the crystal battlements of Mr. Bush's awful, adolescent certitudes).
Now, in terms of moral stature, GW Bush, whom Norman Mailer once tellingly summed up as a man 'incapable of remorse,' may be inconsequential. But on the same 'Larry King Live' show, this columnist listened with increasing disbelief as one American expert after another opined that in the wake of North Korea's missile launchings it was time for the U.S. to play 'the China card.' They meant, of course, put pressure on China whose economic arrangements with Pyongyang are all that hold North Korea from collapsing into a failed state to rein in Kim Jong-il. But still: what 'China card' were they referring to?
DO THEY MEANT?
Did they mean the China upon whose cheaply manufactured goods the American voter is now entirely dependent? The same China which currently holds a trillion dollars of U.S. debt, effectively underwriting both Mr. Bush's bungled grab at Iraq's oil and his simultaneous, massive tax cuts for the rich at home?
Rhetorical questions. King's panellists may have seemed moderate by comparison with CNN's resident right-wing xenophobe, Lou Dobbs, but they seemed quite unable to grasp the fact that the U.S. has no 'China card' to play.
(Last Wednesday Dobbs was all but foaming as he cursed the Bush administration's foreign policy as an impotent joke. Rice had warned that a North Korean missile launch would be 'a grave provocation'; Bush had gone further and warned it would be 'unacceptable.' Yet, in the wake of the launchings, the first response of the President and his black-booted Secretary of State had basically been to sulk).
Now, as the coming superpower, China's strategic goals are both simple and obvious. They are to (1) draw the line against Taiwanese independence; (2) circumvent, by means of new, transnational gas and oil lines and treaties, the cordon sanitaire which the U.S. has for years been trying to throw up around China in order to starve it of the energy resources it needs to keep growing; and (3) maintain a low profile, advancing its interests quietly behind the scenes while staying out of the glare of the world's trouble spots. Moreover, the Chinese clearly have no aversion to the U.S. going on over-extending itself, economically and militarily, fighting wars it cannot win.
Meanwhile, in Russia, Mr. Putin (into whose soul Mr. Bush once claimed to have seen, and to have liked what he saw) has been closing ranks with Hu Jintao, Russia's oil exports to China have increased of late, and last year the two countries held joint military exercises for the first time while, in a mirror image of the Bush adminis-tration's unconstitutional assertions of executive power at home, using the threat of terrorism to close the book on Russia's brief experiment with democracy.
China and Russia have permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council, and have so far vetoed resolutions designed to punish North Korea for last week's missiles' launch. They've also cannily been dragging their feet on Iran, this in the face of the Bush administration's sudden ramping up of its anti-Iran rhetoric earlier this year.
CONTEXTS
Their resistance comprises the strategic context faced by the proponents and would-be executives of the 'Project for the New American Century'. As for the tactical contexts, the balls facing Mr. Bush on Ms. Albright's snooker table are:
1) A destroyed Iraq, where the U.S. invasion has grown Al-Qaeda beyond bin Laden's wildest dreams; extended the reach of Shi'ite Iran; further destabilised the Saudi sheiks; and threatened a Turkish invasion of Kurdistan, all this, while breaking the U.S. military.
2) An Iran galvanised by Bush's 'Axis of Evil' speech, and subsequent invasion of Iraq, to greatly fast-forward its nuclear programme. The Iranian regime has clearly concluded that, given its enormous influence over what happens on the killing fields of Iraq, and its control of oil lanes in the Persian Gulf, it can make the price of a U.S. attack on it unacceptably high. (This may be a misreading of the soulful cowboy in the White House).
3) An Afghanistan where, with the Bush administration hurriedly moving on to its real prize, Iraq, even as Iraqi guerrillas' tactics suicide bombers, IEDs, were being adopted by the Taliban, the situation is now 'out of control'.
4) A North Korea whose excitable leader, reacting to a crackdown earlier this year by the U.S. Treasury on some of his regime's rather more shady financial practices, made a point last week of reminding the world that he's sitting on between five and ten nuclear bombs, has the conventional firepower to raze Seoul within hours of being attacked, and has virtually nothing to lose.
American neocons now want Mr. Bush to stop being tempted by talk of carrots and set about him afresh with a big stick (presumably, not the same big stick that was just broken in Iraq).
As for the administration's riposte to such right-wing complaints, it's enough to chill the blood. Protested the White House's Stephen Hadley last week: 'In some sense [the current scenario] was destined to be, because we have a president that wants to take on the big issues and see if he could solve them on his watch.'
Let the reader give due weight to those last words: on his watch. They suggest that, for all his current talk of diplomacy, Mr. Bush doesn't intend to demit office without a bang. In which event, Albright's 'snooker table' may yet light up like a pinball machine.
