Kuttner: 'After Triumphalism' Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit via portside list at yahoo.com American Prospect - November 19, 2001. Volume 12, Issue 20 After Triumphalism Robert Kuttner What a wonderful world it seemed in the 1990s. The United States had not only won the Cold War; it had demonstrated the economic, political, and moral superiority of its own system, the free market. Those abroad who had long resented U.S. global policies were finally revealed to be self-defeating nationalists or superannuated Marxists. Even the Latin Americans were scrambling to catch the laissez-faire wave, firing their planners, hiring Chicago-trained economists, slashing antiquated welfare outlays, privatizing state enterprises, and, above all, opening themselves to foreign private capital. The world's truly destitute were easily written off as hopeless cases; they were simply mired in their own corruption and lassitude. In every society, the most nimble and alert were precisely those who most wanted to be like Americans. Indeed, weren't two million of them sneaking across our borders every year as millions more were turned away? America was now the sole superpower in every sense. History had ended; and its end was liberal capitalism. Geopolitically, the Soviet Union hadn't just collapsed, it had splintered--one more sign that the nation-state was dead, overtaken by the universal market. Threats to national security had been reduced to small mopping-up operations. Clinton was somewhat energetic in trying to fix festering regional problems like Ireland, Serbia, and Palestine; Bush, less so. But these were sideshows. America's main foreign-policy challenge was not geopolitical but geo-economic: to chip away the remnants of statism overseas and open the world to market forces. The IMF and the World Bank were the stick; the prospect of private investment, the carrot. The triumphalists snickered at Europeans who tried to maintain some semblance of a universal welfare state; Europe would pay for its sins with slower growth. The globalists also found it risible that countries like France tried to protect a national culture against the relentless incursion of English or the appeal of America's most loved and hated export industry--Hollywood. Why subsidize France's film industry when French audiences were voting with their feet for American fare, however schlocky? Didn't snobbish high-culture Europe harbor a secret love for blue jeans, Bruce Willis, and le hamburger? The elements of backlash and tribalism were dismissed as minor annoyances--throwbacks. Once everyone became a modern capitalist, people could embrace whatever quaint cultural remnants they desired. At home, the triumphalists mounted a retrospective assault on liberals, not to mention radicals, for having been inconstant Cold Warriors or blame-America-firsters. Former lefties like Nicholas von Hoffman pronounced that the USSR had been an evil empire after all, that Joe McCarthy basically had it right. (Never mind that these very liberals had supported containment of communism but resisted Cold War excesses like Vietnam, blowback such as CIA and FBI infiltration of domestic politics, and the multiple hypocrisies in U.S. foreign policy.) The final victory over communism also supercharged the right-wing project of undoing the New Deal and the Great Society. Wasn't it just a slippery slope from, say, Social Security to Sweden to Stalin? To doubters who worried about global warming, the triumphalists offered SUVs. You had only to read The Wall Street Journal editorial page. Didn't everyone want to be like America? Evidently not. Immediately after September 11, the necessary policy seemed both obvious and entirely righteous. With Americans in a state of justifiable outrage against an act of plain barbarism, war was a forgone conclusion. Tactically, there was little doubt that American firepower could blow away the Taliban. Morally, it was clear that they deserved it. Politically, pacifists and doubters seemed absurdly out of touch. But a month later, the global situation looks more like the confusion, miscalculation, and unanticipated unraveling of World War I. Second thoughts about the wisdom of the bombing look less like naive pacifism and more like realpolitik. We don't have a clue how to create a stable post-Taliban regime in Kabul. In this war, alliances are shifting sands. The enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend (Iran); nor are ostensible friends truly the enemy of our enemy, as Seymour Hersh documented in his devastating New Yorker piece on Saudi protection money to bin Laden. Even loyal Pakistan plays footsie with the Taliban. The collateral damage will be massive--everything from a much more precarious Israel to the prospect of an India-Pakistan war, to the creation of millions of starving refugees. Most explosively, latent mass resentments are now activated in some of the world's least stable nations. America, it turned out, did not get off scot-free for propping up one despot after another. Nor did Washington and Wall Street get away with decimating East Asian economies in the 1997-1998 financial crisis. Inconveniently, these peoples, who were deemed minor casualties of newly liberated currencies trading, are also heavily Muslim. And, irony of ironies, the nation-state is back--for who else can mount an army, rebuild an intelligence capacity, and operate a public-health system? Yet the globalists were all too prescient when they declared the nation-state overtaken by events. Only it isn't universal capitalism that moots the power of the state, but suicide commandos and anthrax letters. We can't reverse America's global policies of the last half-century. Maybe, though, we can learn a little humility, even as we rise patriotically to the defense of our country. Copyright © 2001 by The American Prospect, Inc. [In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information see: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nyteeu-12.10.01-04:25:36-29319