The Rise and Decline of American ‘Leadership’ ?
The Rise and Decline of American ‘Leadership’ ?
Source: Wikimedia Commons
By: Demos Tunisia
August 29, 2024
As a “highly penetrated” region subjected to extensive foreign encroachment for over 150 years, the Arab world cannot afford to ignore contests over “global leadership.” Arabs continually struggle to the break the shackles of (post)colonial dependency and interference. Aspirations for popular sovereignty have been at the heart of the anticolonial movements of the 1940s-1960s, the Arab Spring of 2011-, and ongoing Palestinian resistance against 76 years of Israeli occupation and violence. Insofar as they pursue self-emancipation, the region’s peoples must (and do) pay rapt attention to great power competition and designs on the Arab homeland.
In a recent essay published by the widely influential Foreign Affairs magazine, former National Security Advisor (2001-2005) and Secretary of State (2005-2009) under American President George W. Bush makes the case against US “isolationism.” An international climate even “more dangerous” than the Cold War era, this Stanford political scientist writes, means the US simply cannot afford to shirk its apparently natural duty to lead the world of democracies and free markets. The view of globalization as a “positive force” in the world dwindles. Technological-economic powerhouse China, whose dizzying economic advancement gave rise to “political control” under Xi instead of liberalization, drives up the risk of direct conflict, not least over Taiwan. Russian imperialism is back with a vengeance, as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine attests. In the Middle East, Iran is the looming, nuclearizing threat that according to her “terrifies both Russia and China” by wreaking havoc in the neighborhood.
That “revisionist powers” China and Russia have become more amenable to cooperation suggests the US must act fast and act strong, according to Rice. It should keep up the grinding war and sanctions against Russia (and eventually admit Ukraine to NATO and the EU), rise to China’s technological challenge in an investment frenzy, and beef up its defense budget and strategy. A bit of soft power (American university education, support for opposition movements) can soften the edges of US deterrence, courting pliable cohorts among the Russian and Chinese people. The “global South” gets a brief mention from Rice. There the US should “demonstrate sustained engagement” on issues of “economic development, security, and climate change,” ideally before China beats them to it. The bottom line, says this former Secretary of State, is that the US must not hold back from trying to “shape the global order” to its liking.
American exceptionalism, the idea that the US is a unique nation chosen by God to be a ‘shining city upon a hill,’ a pioneering model of freedom for the world, has long been a hallmark of political discourse. As constructivist scholars see it, the centrality of the US’s self-propagated identity as the world’s leading democracy patterns some of its foreign policies, including democracy promotion. Predictably, Rice argues that the US must stand at the vanguard of an “alliance of democratic, free-market states” lest revisionists remake the world in a return to “territorial conquest abroad and authoritarian practices at home.”
From the perspective of (many) Arabs, the flaws in Rice’s propositions are glaringly obvious. Perhaps, however, they bear spelling out. First, peoples around the world, on the receiving end of US power, Arabs included, will beg to differ about the benefits reaped in the last 80 years of American-led global (dis)order. Like many foreign policy elites, Rice’s sense of American exceptionalism is so engrained as to render the feedback of empirical evidence dispensable. Gaza is a gaping hole in her narrative. She ignores the beating endured by the US’s global, including its democratic standing, in global public opinion, since the war in Gaza. In fact, as she lays out a vision for US policy in the coming years, Rice does not mention Gaza (much less Palestine) at all. She does not bring up how US funding, political cover, and intelligence involvement in Israel’s genocide in Gaza has impacted people’s views of the United States. She does not consider how the US Congress’s hosting of a war criminal seeking to delay his ICC arrest warrant this past July reflects on America’s declared commitments to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.
Rice’s only acknowledgment of the drawn-out bloodbath that has killed at least 40,000 Palestinians, 70% of them women and children, is a war that “Hamas recklessly launched.” We may not expect the Secretary of State who was the second (after the late Colin Powell) diplomatic face of Bush’s War on Terror to express too much pain at slaughtered Arab and Muslim children. Yet some recognition of US involvement in Gaza, not least its tens of billions of arms transfers to Israel, and subsequently plummeting world public opinion, would have lifted her argument out from the convenience of ideological abstraction.
Second, US leadership in the Middle East has for decades practiced and upheld occupation, committed untold military aggression, and bolstered despotism. It seems convenient for Rice to implicitly lay blame for rampant violence in the Middle East at the feet of Iran, emboldened by Biden’s “unfreez[ing] of Iranian assets” in exchange for a hostage release. Some of her readers may forget, but Arabs certainly cannot overlook the horrors wrought by US policy in the region under her tenure. The so-called “Freedom Agenda” in which the US kickstarted democracy promotion in the region, was one subset of the War on Terror. Such “freedom” was to befall Iraq under the false premises of weapons of mass destruction, followed by the equally false promise of democracy by invasion.
A population already reeling from half a million to over a million reported child deaths due to sanctions in the 1990s saw hundreds of thousands more combat deaths after 2003. The Costs of War Project estimates that the US’s “post-9/11 wars” (Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan) killed over 432,000 civilians by 2021, and an additional 3.6-3.8 “indirect deaths.” Destruction of the Iraqi state (remember de-Baathification?), sectarian warfare, and a US-engineered (sectarianized) constitution are legacies of the US war. Democracy is not one of them.
The Secretary of State was also at the helm during Israel’s 2008-9 ‘Cast Lead’ war in Gaza in which it killed over 1300 Palestinians. But Rice is concerned that Hamas and Hezbollah might start more wars, and that more Gulf states may fail to normalize with Israel. The narrow imperialist, Israel-centered reading of the region and the US role in it is nothing more than a falsification of very recent history.
Third and relatedly, Rice’s ‘grand chessboard’ view of the Middle East (and the world) does not see actual people with actual views. A widespread failure among most American policymakers and Western scholars to consider actual Arab publics and their agency meant the Arab Spring was a ‘surprise.’ Similarly, US dehumanization of Palestinians and indifference to the rage of Arab publics (at the US and at their enabling despots from Jordan to Egypt to the UAE) who can only occasionally protest the genocide of Palestinians next door, underestimates even latent undercurrents of people power. Expressed by Rice, this typically realist shortsightedness remarkably extends to the US itself. Hers is a circuitous acknowledgment of some American youth’s criticisms of the US position on Gaza. She redirects blame to “elite cultural institutions” that teach students to “tear down the United States” instead of idealizing its values. Remarkably, here by an infantilization of US university youth who are putty in the hands of top universities (although maybe not Stanford?). They have no well-formed opinions and judgments of their own. The “ignorance of the complexity of history” Rice bemoans is eerily reminiscent of Benjamin Netanyahu’s remark before the US Congress that many protestors “don’t have a clue what river and what sea they’re talking about” when they chant “from the river to the sea.”
People across the world, educated and intellectuals alike, all recognize that across human history and geography, great powers seek to project and expand such power. But know, Dr. Rice, that Arab publics are students of American history and their own, too. They are not fooled that US “engagement” with the world for eighty years, has ever championed democracy at least for this part of the world. As a so-called “stabilizing force,” American extractive leadership of the region has worked against peoples’ aspirations and struggles for freedom and dignity. It has entrenched despotic dependency and corrupt, military regimes, enabling unfettered support for a settler colonial state whose seeds the British colons planted in the region’s midst. For Arab peoples, a moment of introspection is in order. The Arab Spring’s promise of democracy, of leaders representing their constituencies’ interests–not just their own or those of their neoliberal, militarist Western patrons–has been shattered by numerous wars and authoritarian resurgence all around. The absence of Arab democracy allows tragedies like genocide in Gaza, worse even than the 1948 nakba, to unfold before our eyes.
It is true that liberation the Arabs seek is not on offer by the Russians or the Chinese that Rice and her ilk so fear. But it has never been truly on offer by the Americans. US leadership of the world is something Arabs at least can do without. Countries in the region should not forego engagement with the US and Europe, but they should seize on the current moment of multi-polarity. We are on the cusp of a new phase that may prove beneficial to peoples of the Global South of which Arabs are a part.
