LONDON: There is a US special forces dog-handler who meets journalists, diplomats and aid workers off the UN flight to Kabul. His job is to search luggage and ensure the security of US troops in Afghanistan. He is short, gingery and aggressive. His skills at persuasion are limited to shouting at the milling crowd: “Stand back! Stand back! My dog will bite!”
Last week that phrase had become the defining motto and operating credo for the military and foreign policy of the Bush administration. Already President George W. Bush has put Iran, Iraq and North Korea on notice as terrorist-sponsoring nations at the centre of an international ‘axis of evil’, despite the CIA’s own recent evidence that none of them was in the business of threatening the United States at present.
General Richard Myers, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld want the US defence budget to increase at an even faster rate. The puzzle about the latest rise in defence spending is that America at the beginning of the 21st century is already not so much a superpower as a behemoth on the planetary stage. Economically unrivalled, it exercises a military and cultural domination of the world, as the American author Robert D. Kaplan reminds us in his new book Warrior Politics, not enjoyed by any state since the emperors of the late Roman era.
Typically, it has been left to the French, traditionally suspicious of US global hegemony, to find the best words to describe it. Gigantisme militaire they call it, in a phrase that describes both the scale of America’s ambitions and also a pathological condition: an organism grown so large it is sick.
The question the rest of the world is asking itself is: Who is the enemy America is arming itself so massively against? And - critically - why? “Ostensibly,” says one European diplomat, “this is about security. But quite how a massive increase in defence spending is supposed to prevent another terrorist attack like Sept 11 remains unclear. Instead this seems to be about repairing the bruised American psyche after Sept 11. America’s powerlessness in the face of this attack requires big gestures and reassurances, even if they are ultimately counter-productive and meaningless.”
Indeed, say some analysts, if it is security that America seeks it is better sought in dialogue with potentially threatening states, rather than in reinforcing the idea already held by many anti-US groups that it is an evil empire bent on world domination.
Cynics have identified other more overtly self-serving strands in the present Republican obsession with America’s defence. The ‘war’ rhetoric - as some US liberal commentators have pointed out - serves a purely domestic Republican agenda in the post-Sept 11 mood of national paranoia: to win Bush a second presidential term and, in the shorter term, regain Congress.
The reality - even before the latest proposed increases in military spending - is that America could beat the rest of the world at war with one hand tied behind its back. The requirement that the US armed forces must be able to fight two fully fledged wars with two separate adversaries simultaneously may recently have been dropped, but only because it would be hard pushed to find two such equal foes to fight.
So why the need for more and better military power? The answer is that even the military analysts are baffled. “The current rise in US military spending,” says Dan Plesch, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, “ought to be compared to the decision in the First World War to order up more cavalry when the first wave had been mown down by machine-guns. The US has no competitor in high-tech military equipment. And what it is spending its money on is mostly irrelevant against the knives used to carry out Sept 11. The bombing of Afghanistan has created the illusion of victory.”
Professor Paul Kennedy at Yale University calculates that the US now spends more each year than the next nine largest national defence budgets combined. Indeed America is responsible for some 40 per cent of the world’s military spending.
The new defence expenditure will be paid for by a freshly dug deficit and cuts to every other federal spending programme - including social security, Medicare or urban renewal - apart from tax breaks loaded heavily in favour of the upper-income brackets. And amid all this, military might has emerged as the central tenet of America’s new power, the defining feature of the Bush administration.
Already it is causing alarm even among America’s closest allies in NATO, where the usually unflappable secretary-general, Lord Robertson, has been moved to warn some members that unless the declining European defence expenditure is reversed then Europe - and the Europeans in NATO - are in danger of becoming military pygmies.
It is not a prospect likely to worry the military hawks in the Bush administration, who favour unilateralism over alliance. Indeed the NATO alliance, built to counter the rival superpower conflict of the Cold War, is already almost redundant, say some diplomats.
“Will the Americans ever fight a war through NATO again?” asks Carl Bildt, former Swedish Prime Minister. “It’s doubtful. The US reserves the right to itself to wage war, and dumps on others the messy, expensive business of nation-building and peace keeping.”
And the Afghan war has not only put the US in sole command of the world, but fundamentally reshaped the architecture of international alliances. Central Asia is splattered with new American fortresses; the Pacific and Indian Oceans are patrolled by aircraft carriers and accompanying fleets of awesome size.
“The war on terrorism,” says Professor Paul Rogers, of Bradford University’s Department of Peace Studies, “is simply a euphemism for extending US control in the world.” —Dawn/The Observer News Service.
