In Defense of America

by Bronwen Maddox

  Terrorism may make people in the United States —or Britain —feel personally vulnerable to attack in a way that the Cold War did not. But it takes an enormous distortion to portray it as being as much of a threat to the existence of Western democracies as was the hostility of the Soviet Union, let alone one that justifies suspending the principles the West says it is defending.

  In America’s case, the behavior of President Bush’s successors will be the only test of whether Guantánamo was an aberration or whether it comes to represent the settled views of a majority of Americans. Fortunately, the increasingly robust challenges mounted by Congress and the courts are signs that the Guantánamo mistake will be corrected, and America will be able to reclaim a moral authority more in line with its traditions.

  Chapter 9

  BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

  Critics of America should consider carefully whether they really want what they have wished for: an America more restrained, “back in its box,” deferential to other countries —or, even, less successful. They are deluding themselves if they think this would make them better off. Luckily (for them as well as for the United States), for all the threats the United States now faces, it is likely to keep its position as the world’s superpower.

  Of course, it would be easy for critics to get some of their wishes. Potential threats to American power are real. The credit crunch of late 2007 and 2008, the slump of the housing market —these jolts to American economic success have followed straight on the shock of Iraq and its illustration of the limits that roadside bombs and AK-47s can place on the world’s most powerful military machine. Russia, under President Vladimir Putin, has been sourly aggressive and may continue that way under his successor, Dmitry Medvedev. China is grabbing superlatives for itself —the fastest-growing economy, perhaps the largest soon1 —even if it is also picking up unwanted titles, such as the largest polluter. Iran has not given an inch under American pressure to drop its nuclear ambitions and is steadily filling the power vacuum left in Iraq; the Arab world is scornful of the American project to export democracy; and the United States’ neighbors to the south, led by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, have mounted a noisy opposition to American-style capitalism.

  Of these, the threats from Russia and China are the greatest, although they are usually exaggerated. Russia’s behavior has been unpleasant, but its dreams of regaining its former power are a delusion; its oil and gas supplies are shrinking fast, and so is its population. China’s growth is running into the predictable problems of lethal pollution and the stubborn independence of the provinces. Neither is a real military threat, even if China has the world’s biggest army, at 2.1 million people, almost double that of America. It spends less than a tenth of America’s military budget (estimates are tricky) —although it has raised its budget by half in just two years. Russia spends even less, although it is also diverting some of its new oil wealth to defense.

  Iran is menacing, but it lacks support among Arab countries to be the force in the region that it wants. None of these countries is in a position to challenge American dominance. It is safe to talk about American preeminence for another generation; it is ludicrous to reckon that the twenty-first century might not be a second American Century, even if its position were less emphatically secure.

  America’s best response to those challenges is to promote its own values and rules, bringing as many countries as it can onto its side. Its powerful attractions, of openness and freedom, are its best response to the Arab world’s disdain, or to Chávez’s antagonism. It can best cope with Russia and China by drawing them into the international system of rules and institutions —and upholding them itself. That is working with China, which knows that its best economic hopes lie in trading with the rest of the world, and that the restrictions this will place on it are worth it. This approach has worked less well with Russia, but it has not entirely failed; Putin could have caused far more trouble than he chose to.

  People in other democratic countries will be enormously better off if America retains its position as the world’s superpower. To delight in its difficulties is to brush away their dependence on its prosperity and security.

  It is easy to forget, outside America, the preoccupations the United States will face in the next few decades. Huge population growth, immigration, need for energy —those are plenty of reasons to incline it to turn inward and concentrate on its own problems and opportunities, not those of other countries, as in the past it regularly has.

  An Inconvenient Truth

  The world’s close economic relationship with America is inescapable. The slide of 2007 and 2008 has been a reminder of that, as the American building boom stalled, and Americans had to grapple with falling house prices, higher oil and gasoline costs, and the drying up of credit. It is ridiculous to maintain that the rest of the world can be completely independent, although some try. In the spring of 2008, a representative of an Arab oil government walked into my office as the growing American financial crisis had just consumed Bear Stearns, looked at the television screen as reports of the renowned investment bank’s fate filtered in, and said, “That’s what I like to see, miserable Americans.”

  True, the slump in world markets in early 2008 prompted much talk about “decoupling” —the question of whether other countries can prosper even when the American engine is stalling. More than in the past is the answer —but no country is immune. Many hoped that the giants of the developing world —China, India, Russia, and Brazil —would be stable pillars, whatever happened in the United States. Even though their exports are now worth nearly half of their gross domestic product (doubling in less than two decades), most of that trade was with one another, or near neighbors, not the United States. In none of them does trade with the United States amount to more than 8 percent of their economies. Yet even in China, there was blunt acknowledgment of the damage an American recession could do. Zhang Tao, deputy head of the international department of the People’s Bank of China, told a financial seminar in January 2008, “If US consumption really comes down, that’s bad news for us. That will have a pretty severe impact on our exports.”2 Wang Jian, head of the China Society of Macroeconomics, agreed that China’s growing trade with Europe was unlikely to insulate it from a drop in exports to the United States, because if Europe exported less to America, it would buy less from China. “Global demand is ultimately driven by the United States,” he said.3

  Smaller Asian countries are even more dependent on the United States; Singapore and Malaysia each send it exports worth more than a fifth of their economies. They are generally in better financial shape than in the 1997–1998 Asian crisis, but a prolonged American slump will still hit them. Shaukat Aziz, the former Pakistani prime minister, said in early 2008, “For us, decoupling is a myth. America suffers, we suffer.”4

  Nor is Japan a refuge. Since 2002, it has been climbing out of a long slump, pulled along by exporting to other countries. Its sales to China and Europe outstrip those to America, but it knows that many of its products that go to China as components end up in America as finished goods. Europe is in the same trap, even though the United States accounts for just 14 percent of the exports of the eurozone (the region that uses the euro currency, which includes most of the big European countries but not Britain). Those countries hope that by looking east, not west, they can find new markets, but if those too are affected by an American slowdown, they will find no escape there.

  The cascading effects depend on the scale of the problems in America, but there is no point pretending that any country can entirely avoid them —or that it should be grateful for them.

  Russia: Belligerent and Delusional

  If there is a single reason why Europe cannot want America to be less engaged in international problems, it is Russia. The threat can easily be exaggerated —as it is by Russia itself, which insists on pretending that it is still a world power. It is not; it is the shell of a former empire, with nuclear weapons, and oil and gas, but an aging
population of just 145 million, falling by more than half a million a year from alcoholism, drugs, and disease. Men’s life expectancy is now just fifty-eight years, considerably lower than under the Soviet Union.5

  All the same, its sour aggression does need countering, and the United States will play the prime part in doing that. Europe is too close, too ambivalent, and too nervous of Moscow’s reaction (such as turning off the gas pipelines running westward, as it has shown it can) to do that well.

  Hopes that the fall of the Soviet Union would lead to the emergence of a democratic and liberal Russia are now long gone. President Putin drew for justification of his authoritarian approach on the chaos of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency and ordinary Russians’ incredulous fury at the oligarchs, who became within a few years some of the richest people on the planet. But he also drew on the hurt pride after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the belief that surely it was just a matter of time before Russia reclaimed its empire. It is a fantasy, but one that seems to have sustained Putin as he chose to step up the aggressive rhetoric against the United States in the final year of his presidency. At a dinner at his residence outside Moscow in June 2007, he used America’s plans to site missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic as provocation for announcing that he might point Russia’s nuclear missiles at Europe again for the first time since the end of the Cold War.6

  Even more striking than this declaration, which, as presumably intended, grabbed the world’s headlines for the week before the G8 summit of the biggest industrial countries, was his deep suspicion of America, which threaded through everything he said. Putin cited the latest Amnesty International report repeatedly through the four-hour dinner, finding in it an endless vein of abuses of human rights in the United States (and ignoring its lengthy criticism of Russia). Shortly afterward, he announced that Russia would suspend the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe treaty, which regulated how close to the border Russia and Europe would keep their armed forces.7

  Oil at more than $100 a barrel has fed Russia’s dream of being able to act like a superpower, albeit one temporarily shrunken. An astute eye on Europe’s need for energy, and care in signing deals on new pipelines have given Russia more leverage. But it can’t last. Not only has Russia’s wider economy not developed, but it has not invested much of this bonanza back into its oil industry, which remains wasteful and, in places, simply primitive.

  Nor is Russia tolerant of foreign investment. In the oil industry, where the Kremlin has only briefly accepted foreign companies, it is busy rewriting their contracts to turn these firms into the equivalent of hired help —a sure way to prevent the technology transfer that can benefit both sides. That was the fate Royal Dutch Shell suffered in 2006 when Russia revoked, on “environmental grounds,” its license for the $20 billion Sakhalin-2 oil and gas field, forcing it to sell a controlling stake. BP, the British energy company, has little to protect it if, as seems likely, Russia decides that its previous agreements were too generous given today’s oil prices.

  This rising tension comes at a point of particularly icy relations with Britain, because of a macabre episode in which the violent world of Russian agents and émigrés burst into the open in London’s Piccadilly. In November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former Soviet-era security agent, was murdered by polonium poisoning, apparently from lunch in a sushi bar. The radioactive substance (hard to obtain except from Russian government laboratories) had apparently been placed in his food. Litvinenko, who became a British citizen shortly before his death, used the time it took him to die in hospital to condemn the Kremlin, accusing President Putin of his murder. Russia has since refused to respond to Britain’s extradition request for the man it believes carried out the killing.

  Do these kinds of actions put Russia outside international laws and treaties? On the edge of them, certainly. A country that will not recognize commercial contracts is just a whisker away from defying all kinds of international law, trading resolutions, arms treaties, and so on. So is any country that murders another’s citizens, let alone by James Bond–like methods.

  Yet it would be an exaggeration to say that Russia has become a rogue state. The hope, in the eyes of Western diplomats, is that it is still picking fights one by one, on their merits, not for the mere sake of obstructing the West. The United States, Britain, and France have persuaded Russia to join them in the United Nations Security Council in putting sanctions on Iran for refusing to drop its nuclear ambitions. Nor has Russia caused as much mischief as it might have done when the Serbian province of Kosovo declared itself to be an independent country early in 2008, even though, as an old ally of Serbia, it could easily have encouraged violent uprising. It certainly agrees with the United States and Britain about the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, even if that leads to horrors like its treatment of Chechnya (about which Europe has been shockingly silent).

  The best hope is to continue to give Russia incentive to work in line with Western interests, and the United States is better placed than Europe to do that, as the greater military power and also as an unchallengeable example of economic success.

  China: Persuading It to Work Within Rules

  There are so many forecasts of a coming clash between China and the United States that they almost count as a new kind of product, produced in bulk by both countries. Both want energy, and security, and trade on their own terms. Even though China has traditionally said the minimum about foreign policy, preferring to express itself through contracts signed, it has been openly contemptuous of democracy. In Kenya in January 2008, when protests at a rigged election killed hundreds, an editorial in the Communist Party’s People’s Daily declared that “Western-style democratic theory simply isn’t suited to African conditions, but rather carries with it the root of disaster.” China’s leaders have argued that India is handicapped by its democracy from reaching Chinese rates of growth.

  It is impossible to exaggerate the drama of the transformation China is conducting on itself. Lawrence Summers, the former U.S. treasury secretary, has pointed out that living standards in China will “rise 100-fold within a single human life span —more than living standards have increased in the United States since my country gained independence in 1776.” He added, in a speech in Beijing in January 2007, that “what happens in Asia, the changes in the lives of so many people, so quickly, and its ramifications for the global system will be the most important story when the history of our times is written.”8

  So far, China is managing to secure itself supplies of energy and resources. It has been steaming through Africa, signing deals with governments (and imposing none of the conditions about democracy and good government that high-minded development agencies such as Britain’s Department for International Development tend to attach). Its state-owned oil companies are competing hard to be among the first into Iraq, less perturbed than their Western counterparts by fears of violence or uncertain title to the resources.

  But the question is whether that can continue. China’s imports of oil will need to triple by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. Pollution is beginning to brake its growth. According to the government’s own estimates, the costs of that pollution in damaged health, undrinkable water, and lost agriculture could be a tenth of the gross domestic product.9 China’s new affluence also gives the provinces and even small communities the power to challenge Beijing, as Chinese leaders are well aware. Each year, there are tens of thousands of local protests, against everything from pollution to compulsory relocation orders. That doesn’t mean China will become more democratic as it gets richer —just that as it gets richer, its leaders will find it harder to keep control. In an Economist magazine debate held in London’s Chatham House in March 2006 under the title “India Will Overtake China in the Next 25 Years,” almost all the panel and audience disagreed with the proposition but also felt that China was more capable of sudden turmoil and instability, and that its success was more vulnerable to fracture.

  There are
signs that China is beginning to realize that its interests lie in being closely connected to other governments and in following international rules. It joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001 after a fifteen-year battle and has begun to acknowledge that this is going to mean tightening up piracy of DVDs and not selling poisonous toys abroad.

  The United States is well-placed to encourage this. As John Ikenberry, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, argued in a Foreign Affairs article in early 2008, “China . . . faces a Western-centered system that is open, integrated, and rule-based, with wide and deep political foundations . . . itself the product of farsighted US leadership.” He added: “As it faces an ascendant China, the United States should remember that its leadership of the Western order allows it to shape the environment in which China will make critical strategic choices. If it wants to preserve this leadership, Washington must work to strengthen the rules and institutions that underpin that order —making it even easier to join and harder to overturn.” 10

  China appears at least partly convinced of this case. It has agreed to back sanctions against Iran in the United Nations Security Council, even though the United States and Britain feared it would not support action against its trading partner and oil supplier. It has (if grudgingly) agreed to work with other countries to put pressure on North Korea over its nuclear program. And it was clearly shocked by Hollywood’s protest against the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, culminating in Steven Spielberg’s decision to withdraw as artistic director of the games. In a very rare move, it began putting pressure on Sudan, as its largest trading partner and international protector, leaning on it to accept an international peacekeeping force, sending engineers to help the force, and appointing a special envoy to the region. America will play a vital part in persuading China generally to take up this kind of role.