In all seriousness, after reading Paul Krugman's column in the Times this morning I began to see the historical narrative unraveling before me, and arrived at an incredibly horrific conclusion: that the cosmopolitan movement, and the era of relative peace and American influence, were dead, silenced by the cumbersome roll of Russian steel.
Not that the Russian-Georgian entanglement represents any substantial or imminent threat, but rather that, for all its irrelevance, it marks a watershed moment in history.
For the first many years of my life, global relations were staid, the international economy boomed in the absence of any opposition to the American monolith, and democracy and free-trade agreements flourished. There might have been small skirmishes over borders, and indeed some petty wars in undeveloped areas still seeking stasis following the breakup of the USSR, but the United States retained the political capital, "moral" high-ground (whatever that means), and economic bargaining chips to broker peace deals, as well as the world's greatest last standing military to enforce them.
These are the characteristics of what Mr. Krugman calls the Pax Americana, a historic period of peace and the potential for seemingly unlimited possiblity that is now, perhaps irrevocably, slipping away.
How could we let this happen?
There was another part to the historical narrative of the 1990s that went largely unnoticed until 2001. As trader countries began to develop in Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and South and Central America as a result of manufacturing, regional and international energy brokers, who may not have much benefited from international trade nor experienced much development, began to fatten up on the growth of nations.
We all now know what came from this combination of resentment, bitterness, and excessive oil money in the hands of the few. "Islamo-facisim" became a well-known term, and terrorists became the hired guns for global political movements.
Because the attack on our borders came from a group of Muslim extremists, not Russians or Venezuelans, combating Islamo-terrorism became the focal point, very suddenly, of twenty-first century foreign policy, and at the fore of our historical narrative.
Perhaps it was our particular addiction to Middle Eastern oil and the frightening mystique of the Islamic world that impelled our actions in Iraq. What I mean by the latter is that, in the West, countries are expected to act in rational ways. Our entire paradigm for understanding international behavior relies on terms like "interests" and concepts like the preservation of life.
Even during the Cold War, policies like escalating nuclear armament were presupposed on the platform of “mutually assured destruction,” a position premised upon the mutually assured rationality of both parties.
The Russians may have been rash and proud to proclaim their disconnect from Europe and the West, but their ties to Western logos were sufficient enough to subdue the distinctly Russian pathos which might have otherwise annihilated all the world.
Suicide bombers targeting civilians is difficult, and perhaps improper, to attempt to understand in those rational terms. Likewise, it seems that we acted in the Middle East out of fear. Fear that we, the grandest unopposed force on Earth since Marcus Aurelius, could not, with all our gold, guns and civil guarantees, assuage these people. A fear that needed to be eradicated just as quickly as it was realized, a brash attitude that led to the unilateral invasion of Iraq, degradation of international law at Guantanamo and Abu-Ghraib, and began the slow erosion of the American monolith.
Perhaps out of foolish optimism, the Western world had seemingly decided that the "Middle East problem" was the last frontier of liberalism, and the sole distraction of an otherwise increasingly globalized and cooperative world.
Students like myself saw these developments in the Middle East for what they were and championed the progress in the European Union as a model for cosmopolitanism, looking forward to the day, and perhaps the personal opportunity, to lay the capstone to the enlightenment project.
We condemned the first four years of Bush’s presidency as having damaged the United States’ reputation, but we were steadfast in our belief that a change in Washington could restore the American legacy and, with cooperation with the EU, lead the movement for internationalism and cosmopolitanism in the new century.
But in this thinking we once again ignored perhaps the most resentful and consistently excluded and ignored country of all time.
And so the narrative goes that the brooding Bear would wake from its slumber, invigorated by the influx of capital from natural gas and almost twenty years of humiliation and hardship. For all their abrasiveness and seemingly unrefined sense of world history, the Russians have proven themselves adept at recognizing their own particular sense of Russian “moments.”
With the US having overextended its military and plumb dry of world-political capital before the November elections can oust the Bush administration, and with the EU still too incomplete to present a legitimate military opposition, the Russians made their move in the Caucasus.
History may very well remember the moment as the end of the Pax Americana and the first real cosmopolitan movement. Having recessed into a nationalism-infused twentieth century virtual free-for-all restrained only by international economic interests, it may be a long time before states and peoples begin to see themselves as global citizens once again.
Regardless of the result of the US elections and the process of the EU Treaty of Lisbon, there will be repercussions from Russia’s unchecked aggression that will permutate through the next generation.
Looking back, the world in November of 2000 was a world on the verge of the greatest socio-political revolution in human history. It was a world with the necessary components of stability, interconnectivity and growth to, at long last, institute a perpetual peace with that potential for unlimited possibility.
In 1789, George Washington refused a crown and demanded that he be referred to as “Mr. President,” and not, as John Adams had proposed, “his highness,” saving a nation before he even took office.
On January 20, 2001, George W. Bush had the opportunity to do something similar.
It was the peak of American dominance in the world, the height of the Pax Americana. Granted that world affairs were not perfect (nationalism in Eastern Europe, oppressive regimes in South and Central America, tensions in the Korean peninsula, starvation, disease, genocide, and civil war across Africa), it was the closest they had come to perfection in the common era.
The younger Bush could have accepted his presidency and his role as the most powerful individual in the world, and he could have dedicated it all to preserving the freedom and dignity of every human being henceforth by slowly indicating a compassionate devolution of that power, a process both his father and his predecessor had already begun in their foreign policies.
Throughout the past two millenia, Britain, France, Spain, Rome, and Athens had failed this test, but they had also lacked the requisite technologies and circumstances to have even had the opportunity to have succeeded. So whither America?
Indeed, we now know the answer.
Perhaps it was beyond his control, and perhaps such a response in the months and years after January 2001 was inevitable in any President.
But what if America had dedicated itself to renewable energy, global citizenship, human rights, the environment, international cooperation, and paying attention to August White House briefings about potential terrorist attacks via hijacked planes in New York in 2001, and not 2005 (as the Bush administration did mercifully, and ought to be commended for, upon realizing the catastrophic failings of their first four years)?
Maybe we couldn’t have prevented 9/11, the oil crisis, the Iraq War, Russian belligerence, and the failure of the international system and the cosmopolitan project.
But maybe we could have.
15 August 2008
12 August 2008
Russian Retreat: Ceasefire Expected Tuesday
As it was suggested here earlier, the Russians have decided that this weekend's traipse into Georgia has now satisfied the saber-rattling country's 2008 edition of "Superfluous Wars in the Near Abroad."
Furthermore, let it be noted that it seems the Russians still had plenty of testosterone to go around even after the woman's gymnastic team left for Beijing.
Furthermore, let it be noted that it seems the Russians still had plenty of testosterone to go around even after the woman's gymnastic team left for Beijing.
11 August 2008
On the War in the Caucasus
It is a shame that amid all the cosmopolitan fervor in Europe and the booming chants for change in America that a specter of the Cold War had to descend upon the Caucasus and remind us all that, in some parts of the world, twentieth century ideological battles still rage.
Russia’s regional imperialism, and to a lesser extent Georgian and Ossetian nationalism, is to blame for the blood splashed roads and villages which have colored the front pages of global newspapers, burying the Summer Olympics in Beijing, an amalgamated celebration of healthy national identities, humanity and internationalism, in a quotidian sea of black and white.
It is the same sort of unilateral hegemony and disregard for international legal institutions which led the United States into war in Iraq, except perhaps even then the US had the option to mask itself as a liberator, a card the Russians cannot honestly play in South Ossetia or Abkhazia with a straight-face.
While it is true that the 1992 Dagomys Treaty signed between the newly forged Russian federation, the South Ossetian breakaway government, and Georgia allowed for 1,500 hundred peacekeeping troops (500 of which were to be Russian) to patrol the breakaway region for some time, it still intended to resolve the 1990-92 Georgian Civil War by reaffirming the new nation’s sovereign borders, South Ossetia and Abkhazia included therein.
Any discussion of war, let alone this week’s fighting in the Caucasus, inherently involves a consideration of “right” and “wrong” principles used to justify an interruption of civil life. The jus ad bellum principles accepted by the international community articulate that a just cause must be established to start war, and that countries initiating aggression in circumstances other than to protect their own sovereignty, the sovereignty of others from invasion, or the human rights of oppressed peoples, are necessarily unjust.
Specific to the Russo-Georgian debacle is determining whether Russia’s actions in South Ossetia and Abkhazia qualifies as the second sort of permissible aggression, or whether Russia is merely meddling in a Civil War, of which it has no place.
And even if that is true, Russia’s aggression on behalf of the Ossetians would need to be evaluated as to whether or not it adheres to jus in bello principles, specifically that of proportionality. In other words, are the Russian war efforts in Ossetia merely empowering the Ossetians to fairly to compete with the Georgians, or do they exceed this threshold and apply inappropriate influence?
In answering the first question, it would be hard for even the slyest Russian diplomat to shoehorn a just cause for Russian intervention. Dagomys only permits a Russian peacekeeping force to soothe tensions in a tumultuous section of a sovereign country. As the Ossetians are not a sovereign country, they have no claim to receive international support in a Civil War. For that matter, neither do the Georgians, who are still clamoring in vain for Western intervention.
Had their human rights been stripped and civil liberties deprived, then perhaps the Ossetians could have cried oppression and hoped for the third type of just intervention. But the Ossetians were not stripped or deprived of their rights. In fact, they were begrudgingly allowed defacto self-government in their principalities.
It is all too clear from the facts that the Russian involvement in northern Georgia is a farce. But what is worse is that their illegitimate aggression exceeds even the prescribed limits a justified aggressor would have been allowed. In bombing Georgian civilians and interests in areas far south of the conflict zone, and now having pushed troop lines further towards the capital of Tbilisi, the Russians are inexcusably and egregiously out of line.
The West should not intervene in Georgia, even though just war principles would allow it in these circumstances. All strategic agreements, interests, and obligations aside, escalating aggression in the world, let alone the near middle east, is moving in the wrong direction of global citizenship, world peace, and the diffusion of human rights.
Russia and other warmongering rogue nations still in cold pursuit of lebensraum, spheres of influence, and national interests at the expense of others need to be dealt with and isolated from the growing international community, but not with force.
Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the world’s belligerents (Russia included) are ballooned by skyrocketing oil profits. The rest of the world effectively held hostage by their own poor habits is forced to pay these undesirables high sums that are then used to invade, oppress, and defy.
In the US, liberals, intellectuals, and environmentalists have long been arguing to support the development of clean renewable energy resources. Now an important lever in foreign policy, hawkish conservatives and isolationists have climbed onboard, renaming the issue “energy independence,” so as not to seem to permit liberals even the slightest policy victory. But all politics aside, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Off-shore drilling is not the solution, as it does not provide the market incentives for American households and businesses to retool their habits to continue without the availability of petroleum.
Wind, hydroelectric, natural gas, geothermal, solar, coal, and even nuclear technologies will need to power our homes. Electric and hydrogen fuel cells, sugar cane and E85 ethanol to power our cars.
We will have to raise the gas tax to provide large subsidies to Detroit automakers to meet not merely emission and mileage standards, but to develop America’s, and the world’s, automotive future once more.
When we can do this, the plan will begin to take form. Global oil belligerents like Russia, Iran, Venezuela, China, and even cartel led nations like Mexico and Nigeria, will be alienated from an increasingly integrated and cooperative international community. These nations will watch their coffers dry up, their standards of living plummet, and their citizens grow restless at the progress in other nations.
The world’s prodigal and wayward sons will then return home and plead to join the burgeoning cosmopolitan system. With a firm yet merciful grip we will embrace them, with a cool stream of investment in education, infrastructure, and clean energy.
For now, the Russians will realize that their continued unjustified aggression in Georgia is only scaring away customers, and that the Georgians on their own cannot muster enough of a fair fight to make it seem otherwise. When the Bear has decided that it has showed enough of its fangs, it will retreat across the Caucasus, leaving a smoldering, bleeding, bitter and broken Georgia, once and hopefully still a stout ally of the West, behind in the dust.
Random and meaningless conflicts like this can cause us to doubt our ideals and turn our backs on the promise we know them to hold. It can enrage us, tempt us to redraw our principles and bomb, bully, invade, infiltrate and confiscate our way out.
But with every step in the wrong direction of global citizenship, world peace, and the diffusion of human rights, with every bomb that goes off in Senaki, and every fallen soldier in Gori, we must not waver in our commitment to seeing these ideals through.
Russia’s regional imperialism, and to a lesser extent Georgian and Ossetian nationalism, is to blame for the blood splashed roads and villages which have colored the front pages of global newspapers, burying the Summer Olympics in Beijing, an amalgamated celebration of healthy national identities, humanity and internationalism, in a quotidian sea of black and white.
It is the same sort of unilateral hegemony and disregard for international legal institutions which led the United States into war in Iraq, except perhaps even then the US had the option to mask itself as a liberator, a card the Russians cannot honestly play in South Ossetia or Abkhazia with a straight-face.
While it is true that the 1992 Dagomys Treaty signed between the newly forged Russian federation, the South Ossetian breakaway government, and Georgia allowed for 1,500 hundred peacekeeping troops (500 of which were to be Russian) to patrol the breakaway region for some time, it still intended to resolve the 1990-92 Georgian Civil War by reaffirming the new nation’s sovereign borders, South Ossetia and Abkhazia included therein.
Any discussion of war, let alone this week’s fighting in the Caucasus, inherently involves a consideration of “right” and “wrong” principles used to justify an interruption of civil life. The jus ad bellum principles accepted by the international community articulate that a just cause must be established to start war, and that countries initiating aggression in circumstances other than to protect their own sovereignty, the sovereignty of others from invasion, or the human rights of oppressed peoples, are necessarily unjust.
Specific to the Russo-Georgian debacle is determining whether Russia’s actions in South Ossetia and Abkhazia qualifies as the second sort of permissible aggression, or whether Russia is merely meddling in a Civil War, of which it has no place.
And even if that is true, Russia’s aggression on behalf of the Ossetians would need to be evaluated as to whether or not it adheres to jus in bello principles, specifically that of proportionality. In other words, are the Russian war efforts in Ossetia merely empowering the Ossetians to fairly to compete with the Georgians, or do they exceed this threshold and apply inappropriate influence?
In answering the first question, it would be hard for even the slyest Russian diplomat to shoehorn a just cause for Russian intervention. Dagomys only permits a Russian peacekeeping force to soothe tensions in a tumultuous section of a sovereign country. As the Ossetians are not a sovereign country, they have no claim to receive international support in a Civil War. For that matter, neither do the Georgians, who are still clamoring in vain for Western intervention.
Had their human rights been stripped and civil liberties deprived, then perhaps the Ossetians could have cried oppression and hoped for the third type of just intervention. But the Ossetians were not stripped or deprived of their rights. In fact, they were begrudgingly allowed defacto self-government in their principalities.
It is all too clear from the facts that the Russian involvement in northern Georgia is a farce. But what is worse is that their illegitimate aggression exceeds even the prescribed limits a justified aggressor would have been allowed. In bombing Georgian civilians and interests in areas far south of the conflict zone, and now having pushed troop lines further towards the capital of Tbilisi, the Russians are inexcusably and egregiously out of line.
The West should not intervene in Georgia, even though just war principles would allow it in these circumstances. All strategic agreements, interests, and obligations aside, escalating aggression in the world, let alone the near middle east, is moving in the wrong direction of global citizenship, world peace, and the diffusion of human rights.
Russia and other warmongering rogue nations still in cold pursuit of lebensraum, spheres of influence, and national interests at the expense of others need to be dealt with and isolated from the growing international community, but not with force.
Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the world’s belligerents (Russia included) are ballooned by skyrocketing oil profits. The rest of the world effectively held hostage by their own poor habits is forced to pay these undesirables high sums that are then used to invade, oppress, and defy.
In the US, liberals, intellectuals, and environmentalists have long been arguing to support the development of clean renewable energy resources. Now an important lever in foreign policy, hawkish conservatives and isolationists have climbed onboard, renaming the issue “energy independence,” so as not to seem to permit liberals even the slightest policy victory. But all politics aside, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Off-shore drilling is not the solution, as it does not provide the market incentives for American households and businesses to retool their habits to continue without the availability of petroleum.
Wind, hydroelectric, natural gas, geothermal, solar, coal, and even nuclear technologies will need to power our homes. Electric and hydrogen fuel cells, sugar cane and E85 ethanol to power our cars.
We will have to raise the gas tax to provide large subsidies to Detroit automakers to meet not merely emission and mileage standards, but to develop America’s, and the world’s, automotive future once more.
When we can do this, the plan will begin to take form. Global oil belligerents like Russia, Iran, Venezuela, China, and even cartel led nations like Mexico and Nigeria, will be alienated from an increasingly integrated and cooperative international community. These nations will watch their coffers dry up, their standards of living plummet, and their citizens grow restless at the progress in other nations.
The world’s prodigal and wayward sons will then return home and plead to join the burgeoning cosmopolitan system. With a firm yet merciful grip we will embrace them, with a cool stream of investment in education, infrastructure, and clean energy.
For now, the Russians will realize that their continued unjustified aggression in Georgia is only scaring away customers, and that the Georgians on their own cannot muster enough of a fair fight to make it seem otherwise. When the Bear has decided that it has showed enough of its fangs, it will retreat across the Caucasus, leaving a smoldering, bleeding, bitter and broken Georgia, once and hopefully still a stout ally of the West, behind in the dust.
Random and meaningless conflicts like this can cause us to doubt our ideals and turn our backs on the promise we know them to hold. It can enrage us, tempt us to redraw our principles and bomb, bully, invade, infiltrate and confiscate our way out.
But with every step in the wrong direction of global citizenship, world peace, and the diffusion of human rights, with every bomb that goes off in Senaki, and every fallen soldier in Gori, we must not waver in our commitment to seeing these ideals through.
08 August 2008
With Liberty and Ignorance for All (Part II)
Krugman's column this morning is another, though perhaps more delicate, variation on the theme I explored in my previous post. Some noticeable excerpts:
For the next three months the party plans to keep chanting: “Drill here! Drill now! Drill here! Drill now! Four legs good, two legs bad!” O.K., I added that last part.
...
The debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid.
...
Know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”
05 August 2008
With Liberty and Ignorance for All: McCain in South Dakota
Awkward as ever, John McCain appears at a biker rally in Sturgis, S.D., an annual meeting of some of America's most colorful folks more famous for their world renowned crystal methamphetamine laboratories than their rich cultural history.
If there were any single gathering of Americans about whom James Madison intended his warnings regarding the perils of a popular democracy, this would have been it.
Just as Hillary Clinton had done during the primary season, John McCain is playing the "heartland" card. Effectively, Mr. McCain is boasting, as if it were some deranged and frightening source of pride, that he is the candidate who best represents the ideas and interests of America's dumbest, most politically ignorant, ethnocentric and xenophobic population.
Sadly, this appears to be one of McCain's best plays (even if his execution is painfully uncomfortable to watch), as it exposes what the public for some reason has decided is his opponent's main weakness: that Barack Obama is too intelligent and "out of touch" with ordinary (read: dumbest, fattest, most apathetic generation in US history) Americans.
Not long ago, the President of the United States was a Rhodes Scholar and intelligence was considered a presidential prerequisite, not a stigma. How a country can change when the village idiot ascends to lead the free world, inconceivably broadcasting to American children everywhere that they too can stumble through life in an inebriated coma for 35 years before waking up to find God and the White House thrust upon them.
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance," Madison wrote, and we can only hope he was right.
So help us all.
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