The Pursuit of Supremacy

George Szamuely has worked as an editorial writer for the Times (London), the Spectator (London), and the Times Literary Supplement (London). He has also contributed to several US publications, including Commentary, the American Spectator, the National Review and the Wall Street Journal.

On 11 September 2001, the United States came under attack on its own soil. Most Americans, waking up that morning, were baffled by this turn of events. Why would anyone hate them with such intensity? Wasn’t America a beacon of light unto other nations? Didn’t America stand for freedom and democracy and human rights? In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., it seemed as if US foreign policy, normally happily free from uncomfortable public scrutiny, would be debated outside the esoteric confines of the Washington think-tanks. In no time, however, the media—with no small assistance from the Washington policymaking elite—settled on an explanation readily acceptable to the extraordinarily apolitical American public: America was hated because it was so good. The remedy was therefore as self-evident as it was just: America had to find and punish the bad guys.

 

President George W. Bush’s declaration of war on terrorism served to close the foreign policy debate. Uncomfortable questions were swiftly taken off the table. And so Americans were left none the wiser about what had taken place over the previous decade and the intense and widespread hostility towards the United States that US foreign policy had aroused. For more than a decade America has decided pretty much on its own, bar predictable cheerleading from London, which countries are to be bombed, which to be starved, who would get loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who wouldn’t. It was so much fun. No one could defy the US-led New World Order. Russia had been bribed into submission, the bomber at thirty thousand feet could not be shot down and the international financial institutions were run from Washington. This order came crashing down on 11 September, along with New York’s twin towers.

Planning for Hegemony

At the end of the Cold War the United States resolved on a policy of global supremacy. This policy was first articulated early in 1992 by the current deputy secretary for defence, Paul Wolfowitz, who at the time was undersecretary for policy at the Pentagon. In “Defense Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years 1994–1999”, a memorandum drafted for his then-boss Defence Secretary Richard Cheney—today vice-president of the United States—Wolfowitz argued that the primary objective of US foreign policy should be “to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power”. In addition, he went on, “the US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.” Furthermore, the United States “must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order ... [W]e must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role”.¹

 

This was a programme breathtaking in its ambition. Wolfowitz was advocating total global dominance by the United States. In every single region of the world the United States was to ensure that no power or coalition of powers could emerge that would challenge the rule there of the United States. The right of the United States to dominate everywhere was not in question. Nations were to be deterred from even “aspiring to a larger regional or global role”. Needless to say, the “established political and economic order” was one that would suit the interests of the United States. Any power seeking to challenge this order could expect a vigorous and forceful US response.

 

What was interesting about the Wolfowitz doctrine was the ease with which US policymakers had abandoned official Cold War ideology. This had held that the United States was entirely a defensive power seeking nothing more than to bolster the capabilities of small countries to resist aggressors. Such subordination to the United States as there was in the world was something countries undertook freely and voluntarily in order to preserve their independence.

 

During the Cold War the United States established military bases, naval stations, intelligence listening posts, military alliances, multilateral military pacts and bilateral security arrangements; it littered the skies with satellites and spy planes and the seas with submarines and aircraft carriers; and it deployed armed forces and nuclear missiles around the globe—all with a view to defending the “free world” from communism. And now, although the communist menace was a thing of the past, here was Wolfowitz arguing that the United States should continue to do all that it had been doing, and more—but this time exclusively in order to ensure US global supremacy. Justification was scarcely necessary since the United States was so self-evidently on the side of good. Only “mischief-makers” or “rogue states”, to use the appropriate Washington derogatory terminology, could possibly raise objections to US dominance. Indeed, the very act of objecting would be interpreted as evidence of the need for US dominance. There were a lot of bad guys out there.

Seeking a Role

Over the next ten years the United States undertook to realise the Wolfowitz doctrine. It is strange to recall today that Wolfowitz drafted the memorandum in response to the gloomy prognostications that had become de rigueur among the US policymaking elite following the end of the Cold War. According to the conventional wisdom of the time, with the Cold War won, the United States had nothing left to do. As Francis Fukuyama argued in his famous 1989 essay, “The End of History?”, published in the neo-conservative journal The National Interest, all the great ideological conflicts were over, liberal democracy was triumphant and America was left with nothing to tax its imagination.

 

The existential feeling of loss pervading Washington’s think-tanks and newspaper editorial pages went together with a widespread, and perfectly understandable, anxiety about America’s supposed economic decline. Ten years ago Japan’s economic power seemed invincible. Germany had just reunited and the European Community (as it was then called) was busily consolidating itself as a single market and proposing at Maastricht to create a single currency, the euro. While the United States had expended vast resources on its military, the nation’s industrial base was collapsing under the pressure of competition from Japan and the countries of East Asia. This was indeed a consequence of the Cold War. These countries had happily accepted US satellite status in exchange for unrestricted access to the vast US domestic market. This was the basis of their stupendous rates of economic growth.

 

To the chagrin of the US policymaking elite it seemed as if the United States was about to slip into irrelevance, unless it quickly found a larger global purpose for itself. The elite makers of US foreign policy had obviously very much enjoyed the role they had played during the Cold War. Everyone likes to be top dog. On any issue of international significance the voice of the United States was the most important. Members of the elite jetted from capital to capital and issued orders Washington expected countries to comply with. To continue performing this delightful activity, they would need to come up with a new ideology, a new justification for high levels of military expenditure, for the maintenance of a vast intelligence apparat. There were economic considerations as well. Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal failed to lift the US economy out of the Great Depression, government defence outlays had been the driving engine of economic growth. A drastic reduction in defence expenditure could well send the US economy into deep recession. Pressure was soon mounting from the defence industry to maintain the vast Cold War levels of military spending.

 

Defence expenditures needed a raison d’etre, however. What was the US military now to do? Whom should it prepare to fight? Who was the enemy? During the Cold War, George Kennan’s “containment” doctrine served as official US ideology. Something similar was now needed. The goal of US foreign policy, the legendary diplomat had argued in his famous Long Telegram and in a 1947 essay in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym “X”, was to stop the expansion of the Soviet Union and thereby to bring about the collapse of communism. The doctrine was extremely popular in Washington since, although it sounded defensive, it served to justify all manner of aggressive actions. Any fight against communists anywhere could be justified by the need to thwart the expansion of Soviet power. Wolfowitz’s memo was obviously the first stab at promulgating a successor to the containment doctrine.

 

Most of the US concerns of the past decade and indeed of the present Bush administration were prefigured in Wolfowitz’s recommendations. For example, long before the European Union got around to proposing a European Security and Defence Identity, to create an independent European military force, Wolfowitz was already warning that NATO must remain “the primary instrument of Western defense and security, as well as the channel for US influence and participation in European security affairs. While the United States supports the goal of European integration, we must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO, particularly the alliance’s integrated command structure”. Bush administration officials trot out this kind of stuff today on an almost daily basis. European plans to develop an independent military capability must be thwarted, Wolfowitz argued. The United States must seek to ensure European military weakness and dependence in perpetuity. Blithely, Wolfowitz declared that the United States should “consider extending to the east–central European states security commitments analogous to those we have extended to Persian Gulf states”.²

 

Moreover, Wolfowitz must have been one of the first in Washington to call for the expansion of NATO. He even demanded that the Baltic states, formerly part of the Soviet Union, be incorporated within NATO. Lithuania was a “US vital interest”, he declared as he outlined America’s military strategy in a war with Russia over Lithuania. He envisaged the use of twenty-four NATO divisions, seventy fighter squadrons and six aircraft carrier battle groups to keep the Russian navy “bottled up in the eastern Baltic”, to bomb supply lines in Russia and to expel Russian forces from Lithuania.³ It would probably have been news to the vast majority of the American electorate that the United States had already undertaken firm security commitments to the Persian Gulf states and was now about to undertake vast and dangerous commitments right on Russia’s borders.

Wolfowitz Rewrapped

When the Wolfowitz memorandum was leaked to the media, uproar predictably ensued. What had happened to the so-called peace dividend? The administration of George Bush (Sr), facing a tough re-election battle, beat a hasty retreat. Publicly, and very loudly, it backtracked from Wolfowitz’s America über alles vision. Yet in reality the United States was not backtracking one inch. According to a New York Times story of a few weeks later, the Pentagon had issued a new draft, which sought “to preserve a leading American role in strategic deterrence and regional alliances that will, by their demonstration of military cooperation, deter hostile and non-democratic powers from seeking to dominate important regions”.⁴ It sounded different, but in reality was little more than a paraphrase of Wolfowitz.

 

Although the new document paid lip service to fashionable notions such as international co-operation and the United Nations, it made clear they would not be taken seriously:

 

While the United States cannot become the world’s policeman and assume responsibility for solving every international security problem, neither can we allow our critical interests to depend solely on international mechanisms that can be blocked by countries whose interests may be very different than our own. Where our allies’ interests are directly affected, we must expect them to take an appropriate share of the responsibility, and in some cases play the leading role; but we maintain the capabilities for addressing selectively those security problems that threaten our own interests.⁵

 

The statement is rather illuminating. International co-operation means insisting that allies follow the American lead and contribute resources of their own to US-inspired programmes.

The Clinton Era

In the end, the first Bush administration’s ruminations on how to justify the expansion of US power did not matter: Bill Clinton defeated Bush Sr in 1992. Despite Clinton’s promises during the presidential election campaign that he would turn away from foreign policy concerns and concentrate on domestic affairs, it was clear from its earliest days that the new administration was even more obsessed with the future power of the United States than its predecessor. During the campaign, Clinton had drawn a sharp contrast between his exquisite concern for violations of human rights around the world and the Bush administration’s supposed indifference. Clinton, like many neo-conservative pundits and editorialists, took up the cause of the Bosnian Muslims. Knowing nothing whatsoever about the Balkans, he was nonetheless certain that the war in Bosnia was purely a question of nasty Serb bullies picking on innocent Muslim victims. Throughout the campaign, Clinton had urged Bush to adopt the then favoured policy of the pundits, “lift and strike”: lift the arms embargo on the Muslims, and strike at the Serbs. Clinton presented himself as a “new Democrat”, as someone who had shed his party’s post-Vietnam inhibitions about the use of force. Indeed, with the end of the Cold War, the Democrats seemed to be more enthusiastic bombers than the Republicans.

 

What differentiated Democrats from Republicans was that, in their rhetoric at least, the Democrats insisted that US power was to be expended exclusively on behalf of lofty, disinterested goals. Democrats like to talk ideals; Republicans prefer to talk self-interest. The Wolfowitz doctrine—the product of a Republican administration—had proposed US global supremacy for its own sake. Since America was so self-evidently on the side of good, any further justification was unnecessary. To Democrats it sounded a little brutal, a little too revealing. So they set to work to come up with a doctrine of their own, one that would be in keeping with the vaunted “idealism” of liberals. The United States sought global supremacy not for its own sake, but so as to realise ambitious dreams, to right wrongs, to help the downtrodden, to punish the vicious. It is a measure of the parochialism of Washington that such self-serving claims are taken at face value, that the rest of the world’s scepticism at America’s loud proclamations of “goodness” is met with bafflement or hostility.

‘Humanitarian Intervention’

The Clinton administration did not have to look hard for a new doctrine. In 1992 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace had published a report, Changing Our Ways: America and the New World, which announced the discovery of a new purpose for the United States in the post–Cold War era. The United States was to be the organiser of “humanitarian interventions”. Many of the people involved in the drafting of this report were to end up with jobs in the Clinton administration. According to the political analyst Diana Johnstone, the report “called for ‘a new principle of international relations: the destruction or displacement of groups of people within states can justify international intervention’. The US was advised to ‘realign’ NATO and the OSCE to deal with these new security problems in Europe”.⁶ Thus was the doctrine of humanitarian intervention born. The United States would act as a knight in shining armour, permanently on call to come to the aid of damsels in distress. The United States was not interested in grabbing land or resources, in conquering or subjecting alien peoples. Instead, it only wanted to help free victims from their oppressors.

 

The doctrine of humanitarian intervention, with its facile identifications of heroes and villains, obviously recalled the Cold War containment doctrine. It would be easier to defend in public than the Wolfowitz doctrine. Who could oppose coming to the aid of the downtrodden? Who could oppose the heroic knight as he unsheathed his sword and fought off the wicked villain? However, the Wolfowitz doctrine and the doctrine of humanitarian intervention were not that far apart. The humanitarian intervention doctrine was for public consumption, something to feed the gullible media. The Wolfowitz doctrine was for insiders, for members of the policymaking elite to share among themselves. Whichever doctrine is put into action, the results will always be the same.

 

For example, how would the United States decide which crises merited humanitarian intervention? There is no shortage of atrocities at any particular time. While the plight of the Kosovo Albanians had much exercised US policymakers since the 1980s, the Kurds in southeastern Turkey merited no attention whatsoever. Indeed, Turkey was a US ally—and a heavily armed and subsidised one at that. Washington routinely denounced the Serbs for the practice of “ethnic cleansing”. Yet the most horrifying act of “ethnic cleansing” of recent years was perpetrated against the Serbs of Krajina by Croatia. Not only did the United States fail to condemn this act, it cheered it on and provided direct military assistance to the perpetrators. In other words, the US government did not even pretend to take humanitarian intervention seriously. It used the slogan as a means of rewarding its allies and punishing its enemies.

 

Moreover, a unilateral assertion of the right to intervene in the domestic affairs of other countries was a new principle of international relations. It violated the UN Charter, according to which the United Nations “is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members”. In addition, “nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state”.⁷ Unilateral intervention also violated the Helsinki Accords. Here are just a couple of the relevant provisions of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act: “1 (a) I. The participating States will ... respect each other’s right freely to choose and develop” their “political, social, economic and cultural systems” and to “determine [their] laws and regulations”. And “1 (a) VI. The participating States will refrain from any intervention, direct or indirect, individual or collective, in the internal or external affairs falling within the domestic jurisdiction of another participating State, regardless of their mutual relations. They will accordingly refrain from any form of armed intervention or threat of such intervention against another participating State.”

 

With remarkable speed during the Clinton years, treaties and restraints were abandoned. Proclaiming the extraordinary urgency of the need to intervene, the United States announced it did not have the time to wait to get the approval of the UN Security Council. Yet Article 39 of the UN Charter specifically states: “The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken … to maintain or restore international peace and security.” Essentially, the United States was asserting the right to intervene wherever and whenever it liked. The doctrine of humanitarian intervention had thus become the ideology of US expansionism.

 

The United States would devote itself to imposing free markets and “democracy” on nations everywhere because, in the words of Clinton’s first national security adviser, Anthony Lake:

 

Throughout the Cold War, we contained a global threat to market democracies. Now we should seek to enlarge their reach, particularly in places of special significance to us. The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement, the enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.⁸

 

The “market democracies” were all expected to be pro-American, of course; otherwise they would not be “market democracies”. The policy of exporting democracies is an oxymoron. Democracy is a set of institutions expressive of a people’s will to govern itself. If it is imposed by a foreign power then it is not democracy but rule by a foreign power. States, particularly great powers, do not interfere in the domestic affairs of other states out of altruism. They do so in order to sponsor political candidates who intend to pursue policies that would serve the interests of the intervening state or power.

‘Civil Society’

Yet promotion of “democracy” became a critical ingredient of US foreign policy in the post–Cold War era. Washington announced that henceforth a key US priority would be to create a “civil society” in other countries. Again, a civil society is something that is supposed to develop spontaneously. Its artificial imposition is really nothing more than a means of spreading US influence. The purpose was to push countries into pursuing “pro-US” policies. “Market democracy” meant an economy closely modelled on that of the United States. For a country to merit the label “market democracy” it would have to privatise all its public assets, open itself up to foreign investment, remove all trade barriers and shed masses of workers from enterprises deemed “uneconomic”. It would also have to prepare itself for eventual NATO membership.

 

An array of US government agencies involved themselves in this civil society enterprise: the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the US Institute of Peace (USIP), the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE). All got into the business of building a cadre of people to run other countries to serve the interests of the United States. Political parties, newspapers, magazines and television stations were all underwritten by the United States. Moreover, US government work was being buttressed by the activities of the so-called non-governmental organisations (NGOs)—for example, the various George Soros–funded groups such as the Open Society Institute, the International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, and the Institute of War and Peace Reporting. Many of the people who staff these “independent” organisations come straight from serving in the US government. For example, on the board of the International Crisis Group sit former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark, former International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia chief prosecutor Louise Arbour and former Reagan national security adviser Richard Allen.

 

The US government was heavily involved in civil society building throughout East and Central Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was probably most active in Yugoslavia. The full extent of US involvement in Yugoslavia was revealed in congressional testimony in 1999 by Robert Gelbard, at the time special representative of the president and secretary of state for implementation of the Dayton peace accords. Testifying before the Senate’s European Affairs Subcommittee, he boasted:

 

Over the past two years US agencies such as AID, as well as NGOs such as the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy have spent $16.5 million on projects aimed at the development of democratic governance and civil society in the [former Yugoslavia] ... I am working closely with the National Endowment family, including IRI and NDI, to explore the best ways to help the Serbian opposition and, crucially, to encourage all opposition groups to work together … [I]n order to increase the amount of objective news coverage reaching the Serbian population, we are nearing completion of what we call the ring around Serbia, a network of transmitters that permits us to broadcast Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other international news programs on FM frequencies throughout the country.⁹

 

What was extraordinary about Gelbard’s smug testimony was his assumption that the United States had the right to intervene on such a massive scale in the internal political process of another country—and that such intervention was somehow in keeping with democracy. Since when had it been up to the United States to decide which political parties should unite and what their political tactics should be? How can an institution be called “independent” if it is being funded by the US government? It is illegal in the United States for a foreign government to give money to a political party.

Electoral Interference

“Civil society” was thus less about creating institutions that enabled people to decide how to run their lives than about generating movements to promote politicians deemed “friendly”, and to destroy politicians deemed “unfriendly”, to the United States. It was hard not to conclude that these were just the kinds of policies that the West used to condemn when practised by the Soviet Union. Increasingly, the United States took to organising elections in other countries, clearly with a view to determining the final outcome. Favoured political candidates would be bankrolled and provided with US tactical advisers, observers would be sent in to denounce an election a “fraud” even before a single vote had been cast. A case in point is the September 2000 Yugoslav elections. This is how Steven Erlanger of the New York Times described the elections:

 

The United States and its European allies have made it clear that they want Mr. Milosevic ousted, and they have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to get it done ... The money … sometimes [arrives] in direct aid, sometimes in indirect aid like computers and broadcasting equipment, and sometimes in suitcases of cash carried across the border between Yugoslavia and Hungary or Serbia and Montenegro ... [T]here is little effort to disguise the fact that Western money pays for much of the polling, advertising, printing and other costs of the opposition political campaign.¹⁰

 

Unmentioned by Erlanger is the fact that the United States applied other, more brutal, forms of pressure. There had been the NATO bombings of 1994, 1995 and 1999. There were the punitive sanctions. During the election campaign the United States carried out military manoeuvres in the neighbourhood. The United States publicly and loudly announced that it would not accept any election outcome other than the defeat of Slobodan Milosevic as the product of a “free and fair” election. In other words, if the Yugoslavs were to vote for Milosevic their decision would not be accepted by the United States. The renewal of bombing was thus a distinct possibility. In fact, the United States was already applying military pressure. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), armed and trained by the United States, unleashed first in Kosovo, was now operating in southern Serbia. Eventually it would move to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. This terrorist army was yet another way of applying pressure to force Serb compliance with US dictates.

 

Of course, there were less crude methods of ensuring a nation’s compliance with the requirements of Washington’s official “market democracy” ideology. Countries might run up a debt and find themselves unable to get any more credit. They would then be forced to turn for assistance to the IMF—a largely US-controlled agency representing the interests of international bankers and creditors. To continue receiving credits, countries would have to undertake enormous social and political changes. They would have to pledge to follow the standard economic programme devised by the IMF: cuts in public spending, currency devaluation, free trade, price liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation. Such programmes implied wholesale political transformation. “Market democracy” was what Washington wanted; what the people themselves wanted was of no importance.

 

Countries would sign “letters of intent”, promising good behaviour. The IMF would watch sternly to make sure the promises were kept. The slightest suggestion of backsliding—refusing to throw the requisite number of people out of work, say, or maintaining electricity subsidies to keep old people warm in winter—and the IMF would cease disbursing the loan. Privatisation of state enterprises went hand-in-hand with debt repayment. How else could a country repay its debt other than by selling its assets? The buyers would be the banks themselves, or industries they had ties to. Thus, economic control of nations passed into the hands of Western financial elites. To earn foreign exchange, debtor countries would have to open themselves up to foreign investment and become exporters of cheap goods for Western markets.

The New NATO

They would often also have to prepare themselves for NATO membership. This involved not only devoting considerable resources to modernising their armed forces: domestic social and economic policies also had to be in conformity with NATO desiderata. NATO enlargement thus became yet another tool for the United States to exert pressure on other countries. NATO enlargement has become one of the United States’ most important foreign policy goals. It was undertaken in clear violation of the solemn oaths made at the time of German unification that NATO would not seek unilateral advantage at the expense of the Soviet Union. “There would be no extension of NATO’s current jurisdiction eastward,” Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990.¹¹ The US government, of course, had not the slightest intention of keeping its promises.

 

The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact surely called for the dissolution of NATO. To justify NATO’s continued existence, the organisation had to be reinvented. It would cease to be a defensive military alliance and become instead the guarantor of “stability” (defined by NATO, of course) as well as the mechanism for undertaking military operations far outside the scope set by the original NATO Charter. “Out of area or out of business”, as Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana notoriously put it. The first task that had to be accomplished was to bring into NATO the countries of the Warsaw Pact.

 

NATO’s 1991 Strategic Concept still sounded the old defensive themes: “Consistent with the purely defensive nature of our Alliance, we will neither seek unilateral advantage from the changed situation in Europe nor threaten the legitimate interests of any state, but rather pursue our efforts to ensure that all peoples of Europe can live in peace and security.” Yet already a new theme was being aired:

 

Risks to Allied security are less likely to result from calculated aggression against the territory of the Allies, but rather from the adverse consequences of instabilities that may arise from the serious economic, social and political difficulties, including ethnic rivalries and territorial disputes, which are faced by many countries in central and eastern Europe … They could … lead to crises inimical to European stability and even to armed conflicts, which could involve outside powers or spill over into NATO countries, having a direct effect on the security of the Alliance.¹²

 

NATO was thus in the “stability” game. It was ready to undertake military operations to ensure “stability”. It did not seem to occur to NATO planners that an intervention by NATO—the most powerful military alliance in the world—was more than likely to destroy any hope of “stability”.

 

NATO’s 1995 study on enlargement warmed to this theme of “stability”. Declaring that NATO must be capable of responding to new risks and challenges “as they develop if stability in Europe and the security of its members, old and new, are to be preserved”, it noted that “numerous countries aspire to NATO membership in the wider context of becoming part of existing European and Euro-Atlantic structures and strengthening their security and stability”.¹³ The argument was circular and patently self-serving. The justification for NATO’s continued existence was the threat of “instability”. What exactly was “instability”? Why, the absence of NATO. Though the argument was weak, it was enough to secure invitations to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to join NATO.

 

Something more was needed, though, to justify the massive expansion that Washington was planning. NATO found it through its interventions in the Balkans during the 1990s. Ostensibly motivated by humanitarian concerns, NATO exclusively targeted the Serbs, who had been identified from the moment communism collapsed as America’s foe in the Balkans.

 

NATO’s 2001 Handbook declares that the alliance’s purpose is now to be “conflict prevention and crisis management” and that “crisis response operations like those in Bosnia and in Kosovo are likely to remain a key aspect” of NATO’s “contribution to Euro-Atlantic peace and security”.¹⁴ The Handbook talks of providing NATO with “a flexible means to respond to new security challenges, including operations involving the participation of nations outside the Alliance”.¹⁵ NATO, it declares, must have the “ability to deploy, at short notice, appropriate multinational and multiservice forces matched to the specific requirements of a particular military operation” (ibid.). “Non-NATO participants” must be thoroughly integrated in “NATO-led peace support operations” (ibid.). Note the arrogant disregard for the sovereignty and independence of states. Not only is NATO now to expand, but countries that are not even members of NATO will be compelled to take part in NATO operations.

 

According to the Handbook, “the most likely threats to security come from conflict on Europe’s fringes, such as in the former Yugoslavia, or from proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” Consequently, NATO “must now be ready to deploy forces beyond Alliance borders to respond to crises, in addition to being able to defend against deliberate aggression”.¹⁶ NATO, a supposedly defensive organisation, is now arrogating to itself the right to deploy its forces outside NATO territory, for a purpose as nebulous as thwarting a threat to security. A threat to the security of whom? The Handbook does not spell this out. Future NATO operations, we are warned, “may last for many years; and they will involve troops of many nations working closely together—principally from member states but also, in some instances, from Partner countries” (ibid.). NATO must develop “the ability to deploy forces quickly to where they are needed, including areas outside Alliance territory … [and] to maintain and supply forces far from their home bases and to ensure that sufficient fresh forces are available for long-duration operations” (ibid.).

 

Again, the arrogance is extraordinary. Imagine if Russia’s military published a blueprint in which it declared that henceforth Russia’s armed forces would be deployed far outside the territory of Russia proper, that countries with which Russia has no formal military arrangements would have to take part in military manoeuvres whether they wanted to or not. There would be uproar in the West. Russia would be denounced for returning to its bad old ways. Washington pundits would demand a massive increase in military outlays to counteract this new belligerence. Yet the United States expects Russia to sit back and not feel threatened by this proposed expansion of NATO and projection of its power right into the Russian homeland.

 

Nine countries are up for membership of NATO in 2002. They include the three Baltic states, as well as Bulgaria, Albania, Macedonia, Slovenia, Romania and Slovakia. No justification is ever presented for this expansion. Russia’s membership of NATO has been ruled out. Yet it is hard to see how Albania is closer to the values of the West than Russia is. Albania’s candidacy is obviously connected with the country’s strategic location in the eastern Mediterranean and its close links with Turkey. With NATO only a few miles from St Petersburg, NATO expansion would be a geopolitical disaster for the Russians. NATO’s military bases and submarines would effectively be in a position to block Russian access to the Atlantic.

 

In addition, the United States has tacitly promised NATO membership to a number of other states including Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan. The United States has even created an informal military alliance—the so-called GUUAM—comprising Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Moldova. Its purpose is clearly to limit Russian influence in the Caucasus and to provide an informal series of military partnerships stretching from the Balkans all the way to China. To the Russians, the purpose of such a military alliance would be to sponsor ethnic separatist movements on Russia’s periphery in the hope of exhausting Russia in long and futile wars. It would also serve to lock the Russians out of the oil riches of the Caspian. An enfeebled Russia would be only too eager to sign away mineral concessions to the rapacious multinationals hovering behind NATO.

 

In addition, the United States is proposing to abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The only reason one would want to break an arms control treaty is to seek a unilateral military advantage over one’s adversaries. By building a “national missile defence system” (Star Wars), the United States would be invulnerable to a retaliatory attack. Thus, while the United States is surrounding Russia with a series of satellite client states, it is developing a missile defence system to ensure that Russia’s nuclear missiles are rendered obsolete.

The War on Terrorism

The newly declared “war on terrorism” will only serve to expand US power and threaten the security and sovereignty of other nations. Indeed, it is hard to see any objective in this “war” but the enhancement of US power. The United States is not opposed to terrorism, only to terrorism directed at Americans. Throughout most of the last decade the US government had few problems with the Taliban or Osama bin Laden. Washington knew all about Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps and the recruits they were sending out for one jihad after another. But these jihads were largely directed at perceived foes or rivals of the United States. Fundamentalist volunteers were sent to Xinjiang province in China, where Turkic Muslim Uighur insurgents are attempting to create a separate Islamic republic. Islamist volunteers also turned up in the Russian provinces of Chechnya and Daghestan seeking to carve out independent Islamic states.

 

As far as the United States is concerned, terrorism does not count as terrorism when it is directed against the Russians. In September 1999, terrorists from Chechnya went on a bombing spree in Russia, blowing up a number of apartment buildings in Moscow and other cities. Almost three hundred people were killed. The Russians accused an Islamic extremist sect, perhaps bin Laden’s al-Qaeda group, of responsibility. Yet much of the US media elite—without any evidence whatsoever—accused the Russian government of bombing its own people so as to provide the pretext for a war against the Chechens.

 

Russia’s Central Asian allies, which for years have been subjected to the most horrendous Taliban-inspired violence, have also been told that they can expect no sympathy, only strictures, from the United States. This is how a New York Times editorial opened just a few weeks before the 11 September attacks:

 

The people of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have always lived under despots ... Now, 10 years after they became independent nations, they have once again become sultanates, ruled by tyrants who maintain tight control of political and economic activity … If a Taliban-style threat arises in Central Asia, it will be because the dictatorships inadvertently helped to create it.¹⁷

 

This has also been the standard Times and US government line throughout the war in Macedonia. Every act of Albanian terrorism was justifiable because of the terrible “discrimination” the Albanians had suffered, even though no one could quite explain what the horrors were that they had had to endure.

 

What might have been in store for Russia and Central Asia can be gleaned from the example of the Balkans. Bin Laden and the various Islamist holy warriors worked hand in hand with the United States, trying to establish in Bosnia the first Islamic republic in Europe. The Clinton administration threw its weight behind the radical Islamist Alija Izetbegovic and decided to help the Iranians ship arms to the Bosnian Muslims. Almost immediately after the first arms shipments, hundreds of Iranian Revolutionary Guard fighters and trainers poured into Bosnia. Meanwhile, sinister organisations such as the Third World Relief Agency, which were clearly linked to Osama bin Laden, funnelled money and arms to the Bosnian Muslims, all with the happy connivance of the United States. According to a 1996 Washington Post report,

 

Militants in the terrorist underworld are believed to have used the relief agency to get money to the Bosnian government, including the wealthy Saudi Arabian émigré\ Osama Binladen [sic] … A senior Western diplomat in the region said the Clinton administration knew about the Third World Relief Agency and its activities beginning in 1993. Still, the United States took no action to stop its fund-raising or arms purchases, in large part because of the administration’s sympathy for the Muslim government.¹⁸

 

In other words, the United States knew throughout the 1990s that its policies were helping to create an Islamic terrorist network in Europe and yet it continued with these policies.

 

Osama bin Laden’s links with the Kosovo Liberation Army have been amply documented. In May 1999, the Washington Times reported: “Some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has financed its war effort through the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by international fugitive Osama bin Laden … [R]eports also show that the KLA has enlisted Islamic terrorists as soldiers in its ongoing conflict against Serbia.”¹⁹ This, of course, is the same KLA whose leader Hashim Thaci famously locked lips with former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright. This is the same KLA of whom last year’s Democratic presidential running mate, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, declared that it and the United States “stand for the same human values and principles ... Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values”.²⁰ Today, America’s allies in the Balkans—chiefly Albania and Bosnia—are hurriedly expelling dozens of terrorists suspected of links to bin Laden. Yet what is extraordinary is that this had not been done up to now and that the United States had not insisted that this be done—years after the destruction of the US embassies in Africa.

 

For all the “you’re either with us or against us” talk emanating from Washington, the United States has demanded and received minimal help from key states. Saudi Arabia is the country most intimately involved in the 11 September attacks. Sixteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden is a scion of one of Saudi Arabia’s most important families and he has a long history of involvement with Saudi intelligence. Yet Saudi Arabia has succeeded in contributing almost nothing to the anti-terrorism effort. The Saudi authorities are refusing to co-operate with the FBI investigation, they have arrested no one and they have yet to close a single bank account belonging to a suspected terrorist organisation. Nevertheless, Washington professes itself satisfied with the Saudi contribution.

 

On the other hand, the United States moved with extraordinary speed to secure a position for itself in Uzbekistan. Washington has promised Uzbekistan $8 billion in aid—a staggering amount for such a tiny country—and is committing itself to Uzbekistan’s security. Uzbekistan, in other words, is now a de facto member of NATO. The Russians, understandably, are alarmed about this turn of events. It probably was not quite what they bargained for when they enthusiastically joined forces with the United States to fight terrorism. It’s business as usual in Washington.

 

The end of the Cold war has thus brought about an extraordinary reversal of roles. On the one side we have the United States armed with nuclear missiles, enormous economic and financial resources, vast intelligence networks incorporating its “civil society” project, and global media ready to propagate the Washington-approved “market democracy” message. On the other side are countries that wish to determine their own fate. National sovereignty was what the Cold War was supposed to be about. The threat then came from a Soviet Union armed with the “Brezhnev Doctrine”, which justified military intervention in other socialist states. National sovereignty is still an issue. Today the threat comes from a Washington determined to transform the world in its own image. Like the Soviet Union, the United States is ready to meet defiance with force.

Endnotes

1. “Excerpts from Pentagon’s Plan: ‘Prevent the Re-emergence of a New Rival’”, New York Times, 8 March 1992.

 

2. “Excerpts from Pentagon’s Plan”, New York Times, 8 March 1992.

 

3. “Pentagon War Scenario Spotlights Russia”, Washington Post, 20 February 1992.

 

4. “Pentagon Drops Goal of Blocking New Superpowers”, New York Times, 24 May 1992.

 

5. Ibid.

 

6. Diana Johnstone, “Humanitarian War: Making the Crime Fit the Punishment” [www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/Johnstone/crime.htm].

 

7. UN Charter, Article 2, Paragraphs 1 and 7.

 

8. Remarks of Anthony Lake, “From Containment to Enlargement”, Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, D.C., 21 September 1993.

 

9. “Prospects for Democracy in Yugoslavia”, hearing of the European Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 29 July 1999.

 

10. Steven Erlanger, “Milosevic, Trailing in Polls, Rails against NATO”, New York Times, 20 September 2000.

 

11. See Michael R. Gordon, “The Anatomy of a Misunderstanding”, New York Times, 25 May 1997.

 

12. “The Alliance’s Strategic Concept Agreed by the Heads of State and Government Participating in the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council”, Rome, 8 November 2024 [www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/b911108a.htm].

 

13. Study on NATO Enlargement, Chapter 2, Paragraph 10 [www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/enl-9503.htm].

 

14. NATO Handbook 2001, Chapter 2, “The Transformation of the Alliance: The Strategic Concept of the Alliance” [www.nato.int/docu/handbook/2001/hb0203.htm].

 

15. Ibid., “The Role of Allied Military Forces and the Transformation of the Alliance’s Defence Posture” [www.nato.int/docu/handbook/2001/hb0204.htm].

 

16. Ibid., “NATO’s Defence Capabilities Initiative” [www.nato.int/docu/handbook/2001/hb0205.htm].

 

17. New York Times, 16 August 2001.

 

18. John Pomfret, “How Bosnia’s Muslims Dodged Arms Embargo: Relief Agency Brokered Aid from Nations, Radical Groups”, Washington Post, 22 September 1996, sec. A, p. 1.

 

19. Washington Times, 4 May 1999.

 

20. Washington Post, 28 April 1999.