The United States of Fear

by Tom Engelhardt

  Imperially speaking, two things are memorable about the American military effort in Libya. First, Washington doesn’t seem to have the conviction of what’s left of its power, as its strange military dance in (and half-out of) the air over that country indicates. Second, even in the military realm, Washington is increasingly incapable of drawing lessons from its past actions. As a result, its arsenal of potential tactics is made up largely of those that have failed in the recent past. Innovation is no longer part of empire.

  The Uses of Fear

  From time to time, the U.S. government’s “Intelligence Community” musters its collective savvy and plants its flag in the future in periodic reports that go under the generic rubric of “global trends.” The last of these, Global Trends 2025, was prepared for a new administration taking office in January 2009, and it was typical. In a field once left to utopian or dystopian thinkers, pulp-fiction writers, oddballs, visionaries, and even outright cranks, these compromise-minded bureaucratic documents break little ground and rock no boats, nor do they predict global tsunamis. Better to forecast what the people you brief already believe, and skip the oddballs with their strange hunches, the sorts who might actually have a knack for recognizing the shock of the future lurking in the present.

  As group efforts, then, these reports tend to project the trends of the present moment relatively seamlessly and reasonably reassuringly into the future. For example, the last time around they daringly predicted a gradual, fifteen-year soft landing for a modestly declining America: “Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor, [the country’s] relative strength—even in the military realm—will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained.”

  Even though it was being finished amid the global meltdown of 2008, nothing in it would have kept you up at night, sleepless and fretting. More than fifteen years into the future, our IC could imagine no wheels falling off the American juggernaut, nothing that would make you wonder if this country could someday topple off the nearest cliff. Twists, unpleasant surprises, unhappy endings? Not for this empire, according to its corps of intelligence analysts.

  And the future being what it is, if you read that document now, you’d find none of the more stunning events that have disrupted and radically altered our world since late 2008: no Arab lands boiling with revolt, no Hosni Mubarak under arrest with his sons in jail, no mass demonstrations in Syria, no economies of peripheral European countries imploding one by one, nor a cluster of nuclear plants in Japan melting down. You won’t find once subservient semi-client states thumbing their noses at Washington, not even in 2025.

  You won’t, for example, find the Saudis in, say 2011, openly exploring deeper relations with Russia and China as a screw-you response to Washington’s belated decision that Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak should leave office, or Pakistani demands that the CIA and American Special Operations forces start scaling back activities on their turf, or American officials practically pleading with an Iraqi government it once helped put in power (and now moving ever closer to Iran) to please, please let U.S. troops stay past an agreed-upon withdrawal deadline of December 31, 2011, or Afghan president Hamid Karzai publicly blaming the Americans for the near collapse of his country’s major bank in a cesspool of corruption (in which his own administration was, of course, deeply implicated).

  Only two-plus years after Global Trends 2025 appeared, it doesn’t take the combined powers of the IC to know that American decline looks an awful lot more precipitous and bumpier than imagined. But let’s not just blame our intelligence functionaries for not divining the future we’re already in. After all, they, too, were in the goldfish bowl, and when you’re there, it’s always hard to describe the nearest cats.

  Nor should we be surprised that, like so many other Americans, they were in denial. After all, our leaders spent years organizing their version of the world around a Global War on Terror, when (despite the 9/11 attacks) terror was hardly America’s most obvious challenge. It proved largely a “war” against phantoms and fantasies, or against modest-sized ragtag bands of enemies.

  The spasms of fear that coursed through our society in the near-decade after September 11, 2001, and the enemy, “Islamic terrorism,” to which those spasms were attached are likely to look far different to us in retrospect. Yes, many factors—including the terrifyingly apocalyptic look of 9/11 in New York City—contributed to what happened. There was fear’s usefulness in prosecuting wars in the Greater Middle East that President Bush and his top officials found appealing. There was the way it ensured soaring budgets for the Pentagon and the national security state. There was the way it helped the politicians, lobbyists, and corporations hooked into a developing homeland-security complex. There was the handy-dandy way it glued eyeballs to a one-event-fits-all version of the world that made the media happy, and there was the way it justified increasing powers for our national security managers and dwindling liberties for Americans.

  But think of all that as only the icing on the cake. Looking back, those terror fears coursing through the body politic will undoubtedly seem like Rambo’s muscles: a deflection from the country’s deepest fears. They were, in that sense, consoling. They allowed us to go on with our lives, to visit Disney World, as George W. Bush urged in the wake of 9/11, in order to prove our all-American steadfastness.

  Above all, even as our imperial wars in the oil heartlands of the planet went desperately wrong, they allowed us not to think about empire or, until the economy melted down in 2008, decline. They allowed us to focus our fears on “them,” not us. They ensured that, like the other great imperial power of the Cold War era, when things began to spiral out of control we would indeed sleepwalk right into the imperial darkness.

  Now that we’re so obviously there, the confusion is greater than ever. Theoretically, none of this should necessarily be considered bad news, not if you don’t love empires and what they do. A post-imperial United States could, of course, be open to all sorts of possibilities for change that might be exciting indeed.

  Right now, though, it doesn’t feel that way, does it? It makes me wonder: Could this be how it’s always felt inside a great imperial power on the downhill slide? Could this be what it’s like to watch, paralyzed, as a country on autopilot begins to come apart at the seams while still proclaiming itself “the greatest nation on Earth”?

  I don’t know. But I do know one thing: this can’t end well.

  China as Number One?

  Tired of Afghanistan and all those messy, oil-ish wars in the Greater Middle East that just don’t seem to pan out? Count on one thing: part of the U.S. military feels just the way you do, especially a largely sidelined navy—and that’s undoubtedly one of the reasons why the specter of China as this country’s future enemy has once again reared its ugly head.

  Back before 9/11, China was the favored future uber-enemy of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and all those neocons who signed onto the Project for the New American Century and later staffed George W. Bush’s administration. After all, if you wanted to build a military beyond compare to enforce a long-term Pax Americana on the planet, you needed a nightmare enemy large enough to justify all the advanced weapons systems in which you planned to invest. As late as June 2005, neocon journalist Robert Kaplan was still writing in the Atlantic about “How We Would Fight China,” an article with this provocative tagline: “The Middle East is just a blip. The American military contest with China in the Pacific will define the twenty-first century. And China will be a more formidable adversary than Russia ever was.”

  As everyone knows, however, that “blip” proved far too much for the Bush administration. Finding itself hopelessly bogged down in two ground wars with ragtag insurgency movements on either end of the Greater Middle Eastern “mainland,” it let China-as-Monster-Enemy slip beneath the waves. In the process, the navy and, to some extent, the air force became adjunct services to the army (and the marines). In Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, U.S.
Navy personnel far from any body of water found themselves driving trucks and staffing prisons.

  It was the worst of times for the admirals, and probably not so great for the flyboys either, particularly after Secretary of Defense Robert Gates began pushing pilotless drones as the true force of the future. Naturally, a no-dogfight world in which the U.S. military eternally engages enemies without significant air forces is a problematic basis for proposing future air force budgets.

  There’s no reason to be surprised then that, as the war in Iraq began to wind down in 2009–2010, the “Chinese naval threat” began to quietly reemerge. China was, after all, immensely economically successful and beginning to flex its muscles in local territorial waters. The alarms sounded by military types or pundits associated with them grew stronger in the early months of 2011 (as did news of weapons systems being developed to deal with future Chinese air and sea power).

  “Beware America, time is running out!” warned retired air force lieutenant general and Fox News contributor Thomas G. McInerney while describing China’s first experimental stealth jet fighter. Others focused on China’s “string of pearls”: a potential set of military bases in the Indian Ocean that might someday (particularly if you have a vivid imagination) give that country control of the oil lanes. Meanwhile, Kaplan, whose book about rivalries in that ocean came out in 2010, was back in the saddle, warning: “Now the United States faces a new challenge and potential threat from a rising China which seeks eventually to push the U.S. military’s area of operations back to Hawaii and exercise hegemony over the world’s most rapidly growing economies.”

  Behind the overheated warnings lay a deeper, if often unstated, calculation, shared by far more than budget-anxious military types and those who wrote about them: that the United States was heading toward the status of late, great superpower and that, one of these years not so far down the line, China would challenge us for the number one spot on the seas—and on the planet.

  The Usefulness of a Major Enemy

  You know the background here: the victor in the Cold War, the self-proclaimed “sole superpower” ready to accept no other nation or bloc of nations that might challenge it (ever), the towering land that was to be the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the Vulcans all rolled into one. Well, those dreams are already in history’s dustbin. These days, Washington appears capable of doing little with its still-staggering military might but fight Pashtun guerrillas to a draw in distant Afghanistan and throw its air power and missile-armed drones at another fifth-rate power in a “humanitarian” gesture with the usual destruction and predictable non-results.

  Toss in the obvious—rotting infrastructure, fiscal gridlock in Washington, high unemployment, cutbacks in crucial local services, and a general mood of paralysis, depression, and confusion—and even if the Chinese are only refurbishing a mothballed 1992 Ukrainian aircraft carrier as their first move into the imperial big time, is it really so illogical to imagine them as the next “sole superpower”? After all, China passed Japan in 2010 as the world’s number two economy, the same year it officially leaped over the United States to become the world’s number one emitter of greenhouse gases. Its growth rate came in at something close to 10 percent right through the great financial meltdown of 2008, making it the world’s fastest expanding major economy.

  By mid-2010, it had 477,000 millionaires and sixty-four billionaires (second only to the United States), and what’s always being touted as a burgeoning middle class with an urge for the better things in life. It also had the world’s largest car market (again, the United States came in second), and staggering traffic jams to prove it, not to speak of a willingness to start threatening neighbors over control of the seas. In short, all the signs of classic future imperial success.

  And those around the U.S. military aren’t alone in sounding the alarm. On April 25, 2011, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) quietly posted a report at its website indicating that by 2016, the “age of America” would be over and, by one measure at least, the Chinese economy would take over first place from the American one.

  With growing fears in the military-industrial complex of future cuts in the Pentagon budget, there will undoubtedly be increased jockeying among the armed services for slices of the military pie. This means a heightened need for the sort of enemies and looming challenges that would justify the weapons systems and force levels each service so desperately wants. And there’s nothing like having a rising power of impressive proportions sink some money into its own military (even if the sums are still embarrassingly small compared to the United States) to keep those fires burning.

  In the Chinese case, it also helps when that country uses its control over rare earth metals to threaten Japan in a dispute over territorial waters in the East China Sea, begins to muscle neighbors on the high seas, and—so rumor has it—is preparing to name its refurbished aircraft carrier after the Qing Dynasty admiral who conquered the island of Taiwan.

  The Unpredictability of China

  Still, for all those naval- and air-power types who would like to remove American power from a quicksand planet and put it offshore, for those who would like to return to an age of superpower enmity, in fact, for all those pundits and analysts of whatever stripe picking China as the globe’s next superstar or super evildoer, I have a small suggestion: take a deep breath. Then remember: we’ve already been through this once. Might it not be worth approaching that number-one prediction with more humility the second time around?

  Back in 1979, Ezra Vogel, Harvard professor and Asia specialist, put out a book that was distinctly ahead of its time in capturing the rise to wealth and glory of a new global power. He entitled it Japan as Number One: Lessons for America, and in praising the ways Japanese industry operated and the resulting “Japanese miracle,” the title lacked only an exclamation point. Vogel certainly caught the temper of the times, and his scholarly analysis was followed, in the 1980s, by a flood of ever more shrill articles and books predicting (in fascination or horror) that this would indeed someday be a Japanese world. The only problem, as we now know: ’tweren’t so. The Japanese economic bubble burst around 1990 and a “lost decade” followed, which has never quite ended. Then, of course, there was the 2011 earthquake-cum-tsunami-cum-nuclear-disaster that further crippled the country.

  So how about China as Number One: Lessons for America? After all, the Chinese economy is threatening to leave Japan in the dust; if you were one of its neighbors, you might indeed be fretting about your offshore claims to the mineral wealth under various local seas; and everyone knows that Shanghai is now Blade Runner without the noir, just forty-story towers as far as the eye can see. So what could go wrong?

  As a specialty line, our intelligence services offer new administrations predictions on the world to come by projecting present trends into a recognizably similar future. And why shouldn’t that be the logical way to proceed? So if you project Chinese growth rates into the future, as the IMF has recently done, you end up with a monster of success (and a military with a global reach). It’s not that hard, in other words, to end up with the U.S. Navy’s nightmare enemy.

  But so much on our present planet suggests that we’re not in a world of steady, evolutionary development but of what the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould called “punctuated equilibrium,” of sudden leaps and discontinuous change. Imagine then another perfectly logical scenario: What if, like Japan, China hits some major speed bumps on the highway to number one?

  As you think about that, keep something else in mind. China’s story over the last century-plus already represents one of the great discontinuous bursts of energy of our modern moment. To predict most of the twists and turns along the way would have been next to impossible. In 1972, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution that Mao Zedong had set in motion six years earlier, to take but one example, no intelligence service, no set of seers, no American would have predicted today’s China or, for that matter, a three-and-a-half-decade burst of Communist Part
y–controlled capitalist industrial expansionism. The pundit who offered such a prediction then would have been drummed out of the corps of analysts.

  No one at the time could have foreseen that the giant, independent-but-impoverished Communist land would become the expansive number two capitalist economy it is today. In fact, from the turn of the previous century, when China was the basket case of Asia and a combined Japanese/Western force marched on Beijing, when various great powers took parts of the country as their own property or “concessions,” followed by ensuing waves of warlordism, nationalism, revolutionary ferment, war with Japan, civil war, and finally the triumph of a Communist regime that united the country: the essence of China’s story has been unpredictability.

  So what confidence should we now have in projections about China that assume more of the same, especially since, looking toward the future, that country seems like something of a one-trick pony? After all, the ruling Communist Party threw the dice definitively for state capitalism and untrammeled growth decades ago and now sits atop a potential volcano. As the country’s leaders undoubtedly know, only one thing may keep the present system safely in place: ever more growth.

  The minute China’s economy falters, the minute some bubble bursts, whether through an overheating economy or for other reasons, the country’s rulers have a problem on their hands that could potentially make the Arab Spring look mild by comparison. What many here call China’s growing “middle class” remains anything but—and there are literally hundreds of millions of forgotten peasants and migrant workers who have found the Chinese success story less than a joy.