In a casual conversation at a wedding a few days ago, an Argentine businessman, a stranger to me, remarked that “it is amazing how nothing can be done in my country now without the OK of the United States.” This, he added, “has become much worse since the Soviet Union collapsed” and is true throughout Latin America.
Another guest objected by saying, “Well, but look at Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.” The Argentinean–who, as later conversation made clear, was no friend of the Venezuelan president’s left-wing populism–shrugged and replied, “Chavez is nothing today. If he becomes problem, the United States will destroy him.”
As an American, I found that a rather chilling comment, although there is not much in the recent history of Washington’s involvements in Latin America to contradict it. There is Fidel Castro, but heaven knows, the United States tried everything it could think of to destroy him–including putting a contract on him out to the Mob.
I recently heard another comment from an official working for one of the European military organizations. He said that the United States was so massive a military power that even if the Europeans were better than Americans on the ground–he was talking about the Bosnian and Kosovo operations–it made no difference. The United States got what it wanted, bull-dozing everyone else aside.
Yet this picture of the United States as omnipotent superpower doesn’t really seem to fit what is going on in the Middle East at the moment. Since the 1960s, Washington has been deeply involved with Israel, trying to shape its relations with the Arabs, whose friendship, and oil, Washington also needed. Since Egypt’s President Anwar el-Sadat flew to Israel in 1977 to make peace, the United States has given aid to Egypt second only to the aid it supplied Israel.
Since the Oslo accords in 1993, the United States has also made itself the sponsor of the Palestinians, participating in their negotiations with Israel.
Nonetheless the ultimate outcome of all that is a chaotic and violent impasse in the region today. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and President Clinton plead with Israeli and Palestinian leaders to go back to negotiations, even though they know by now that the maximum either side can give–that it is politically possible to give–is less than what it is politically possible for the other side to accept.
This is so, even though both sides want an agreement–each on its own terms, to be sure–and both have made a heavy investment in the American relationship. They were convinced that the United States could deliver the other side, but America has been unable to do it.
In other cases, U.S. pressures are rejected with impunity by states that consider themselves enemies. Washington calls them “rogue states” (though they were recently promoted to “states of concern”), imposes sanctions and boycotts, conducts economic and political warfare against them, and in some cases has gone to war against them–as in the cases of Iraq and Serbia (and indirectly, Cuba.) Yet they survive.
We have not heard the last of Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia. He is now using his influence over the Serbian presidency (and its police) to undermine the new federal president, Vojislav Kostunica. As the federal presidency is actually a weak office–while the Serbian presidency is a strong one–it is not impossible that Milosevic will succeed.
Iraq’s Saddam Hussein has politically survived his enemy George Bush, despite the Gulf War and UN sanctions (that severely harmed the population, but not the elite). Despite the punishment Iraqis have suffered from U.S. and British bombing throughout the second Clinton administration (which seems to go on because no one in Washington or London can think of an excuse for stopping it), Saddam is about to outlast the Clinton presidency, and for all we know, he may survive the next administration.
Washington has torn its clothes and gnashed its teeth about Iran ever since the Iranian revolution in 1979. The ayatollahs survive. Moderate forces have been in slow ascendance for a decade, and the country has emerged from isolation, slowly re-establishing its international relationships. We find now that it is the United States that tends to be the one isolated on Iran.
The United States is far and away the most powerful country on Earth, but its power is not really fungible. It’s not that easy to spend in the cases where Washington really wants to spend it. Such power intimidates Washington’s friends, but not its enemies.
All of this ought to be relevant to George W. Bush and Al Gore’s agreement, in their second debate, that the U.S. should use its power in a “humble” manner. That’s a pretty sanctimonious way to put it, but I think Bush is right when he says Americans should check their impulse to interfere in others’ affairs. It’s dangerous, but also not as practical as the interventionists think it is.
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E-mail: wpfaff@easynet.fr
