The world waits for America's next move
Melbourne Age January 3 2005
No one is willing to confront the US over a misconceived policy, writes Gwynne Dyer.
The world is on hold as we enter the new year. Interesting and important things have been happening in many countries, and most people have scarcely noticed that international politics was becalmed - but it is. The normal political business of the planet has pretty much slowed to a halt and we are all gently drifting downstream together while we wait to see what becomes of the United States - and, as a result, of the rest of the world, for the US is still a key player in almost every game. We may be waiting some time.
The war in Iraq is not really very important, because Iraq itself is not all that important in the global scheme of things, any more than Vietnam was a generation ago. What matters is the way that this war is shaping America's relations with the rest of the world, and in that sense Iraq has the potential to be a far bigger turning point than Vietnam ever could have been.
Vietnam, like Iraq, was a war undertaken for the wrong reasons and close to unwinnable from the start, but the Vietnam conflict happened in the middle of the Cold War. No matter how Vietnam had come out, the basic alignments in the world would not have changed: the rival alliances were practically carved in stone at the time. Iraq is different, because it is happening in a world where those alliance confrontations have dissolved and the new norm is multilateralism: the great powers are supposed to be running the world by con-sultation and consensus. But that world is now at risk.
Two popular perceptions of what is happening dominate the world at the moment. One, held mainly by Americans, sees a world beleaguered by such a huge terrorist threat that all the old rules have to be abandoned. The United States, they believe, is carrying the main burden of this "war against terror" while other countries shirk their share of the load.
Most people in other countries, and most of their governments, too, see terrorism as a much smaller threat. Certain measures need to be taken to contain it, but it is nowhere near big enough to justify scrapping all the rules of international behaviour we have painfully built up over the past half-century.
A lot of the governments also believe (in private) that the Bush Administration is deliberately pumping up the fear of terrorism to justify a unilateral strategy that really aims at establishing American hegemony worldwide. The popular American belief that the United States has the right to go anywhere and attack anybody if it feels itself threatened - "we do not need a permission slip from the UN", as Vice-President Dick Cheney frequently puts it - predates September 11, but it has been greatly strengthened by the rhetoric of the "war on terror".
Most of the other great powers on the planet are coming to see the United States as a rogue superpower. Yet everybody is deeply reluctant to confront the United States directly, since that would just hasten the collapse of the multilateral order they hope to save.
The result has been a lengthy pause in which most other major powers refuse to approve or assist the American adventure in Iraq, but avoid any open defiance of American power.
Instead, they are waiting. They waited for American voters to repudiate the Bush strategy in last month's election. They continue to wait for the resistance war in Iraq to grow into a second Vietnam that will turn the US public against the whole neo-conservative project. They half dread the collapse of the US dollar, but half look forward to it as a blow that might shift American policy.
They are on hold and they will stay that way as long as they possibly can - because the alternative is to start creating alliances and building up their own military power to contain the United States. Do that, and you have started to lay the foundations for World War III. Nobody should go there. The United States no longer dominates the international system except in terms of hard military power, and that is an instrument that often breaks in the hands of American governments because the US public hates casualties. So just wait it out, and sooner or later normal service will be restored in Washington. That is the right strategy, and there is at least a couple of years' worth of patience in other capitals before anybody gives up on it. With luck, that may be enough.
In the meantime, everybody tries to get on with their lives as if there were not some potential calamity looming over us all. And though the big picture is menacing, the fine detail is a bit more encouraging.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.