Special Report
November 2002

The U.S. Power Complex:
What’s New

By Tom Barry

SRpower.pdf (127 kb)

• From Hegemony to Supremacy
• Campaign Against Multilateralism
• Warlordism
• Moral Absolutism
• A Turning Point
  
  
• Box 1: The Terms of Power
  
  
• Endnotes

Endnotes

1 Jim Lobe, “Army Peacekeeping Institute Sent Packing,” TomPaine.com, July 17, 2002.

2 President George W. Bush, “A Period of Consequences,” Speech delivered at The Citadel, September 23, 1999, <http://citadel.edu/pao/addresses/pres_bush.html>.

3 Ian Williams, “The U.S. Hit List at the United Nations,” Foreign Policy In Focus, April 30, 2002.

4 For an excellent treatment of ways realism and liberal internationalism combined to shape the U.S. grand strategy during the cold war see: G. John Ikenberry, “America’s Imperial Ambition,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2002.

5 An early argument to this effect came from neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol at the American Enterprise Institute. Kristol, “The Emerging American Imperium,” August 1997, <http://www.aei.org/oti/otii7998.htm>.

6 In the 1990s, the strong U.S. hegemonic position was well illustrated by the acceptance by most governments of the neoliberal principles of the “Washington Consensus.”

7 National interests are rarely well defined, but in practice the national interests that the U.S. government has defended have been the interests of corporate America, not the broader interests of the polity. For a discussion of how national interests can be furthered by international norms and multilateralism, see Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society (Cornell University Press, 1996).

8 John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, is the most outspoken opponent of multilateralism within the administration, representing the right-wing’s ideological opposition to global governance. However, it has been National Security Adviser Condeleezza Rice who has best articulated the administration’s pragmatic posture with respect to multilateralism. During the campaign, she criticized the Democrats for subordinating U.S. national interests to “the interests of an illusory international community” and for maintaining the liberal “belief that the support of many states—or even better, of institutions like the United Nations—is essential to the legitimate exercise of power.” While not completely rejecting all instances of multilateralism, the administration would pick and choose—what the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning called “multilateralism a la carte.” It has long been accepted that nations must act unilaterally to defend their most basic interests—a practice described by the Clinton administration as “multilateral when we can, unilateral when we must.” The Bush administration, in contrast, rejects the post-World War II premise that multilateralism is generally the best route in the pursuit of national interests. For an exploration of these themes, see Stewart Patrick, “Don’t Fence Me In: A Restless Americas Seeks Room to Roam,” World Policy Journal, Fall 2001.

9 Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2002. The growing size of the multilateral web is not the paranoiac perception of rightist ideologues but a fact of international relations. “Between 1970 and 1997, the number of international treaties more than tripled, and from 1985-1999 alone, the number of international institutions increased by two-thirds.” Stewart Patrick, “Multilateralism and Its Discontents: Causes and Consequences of U.S. Ambivalence,” in Patrick and Shephard Forman, eds., Multilateralism and U.S. Foreign Policy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), p. 12.

10 The first analyst to liken the Bush administration’s philosophy of power to that of Hobbes was Jim Lobe. See Jim Lobe, “Welcome to a Hobbesian World,” Inter Press Service, March 9, 2001.

11 In the U.S. international affairs budget, 93% is dedicated to the military and 7% to the State Department.

12 Dana Priest, “A Four-Star Foreign Policy? U.S. Commanders Wield Rising Clout,” Washington Post, September 28, 2000, page A1; “Reinventing War,” Foreign Policy, November/December 2001, no. 127, pp. 31-47.

13 “Q & A with Donald Rumsfeld,” Chicago Sun-Times, November 18, 2001.

14 Michael Klare, “Endless Military Superiority,” The Nation, July 15, 2002.

15 Russell E. Travers, “The New Millennium and a Strategic Breathing Space,” The Washington Quarterly, Spring 1997.

16 Richard Falk, “The New Bush Doctrine,” The Nation, July 15, 2002.

17 In a precautionary addendum, one that may speak to U.S. supremacist hubris, John Winthrop warned that should we fail to make our city on the hill a model of hope and virtue and should we “deal falsely with our God,” then we would be cursed. James Chace, “Imperial America and the Common Interest,” World Policy Journal, Winter 2002.

18 For a representative presentation of this argument, see Robert Kagan, Policy Review, June/July 2002, <http://www.ceip.org/files/print/2002-06-02-policyreview.htm>. Kagan’s lead sentence advises, “It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world.”