Limits to Super Power

Two excellent articles illustrate America’s dilemma as the “worlds only superpower.” Pierre Tristam writes in Candide’s Notebooks that the United States has come face to face with the limits of its power in Iraq. Tristam begins by quoting Chief of Staff General Peter Pace at last week’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing:

“I believe that U.S. armed forces today can continue to do what we’re doing, which is to help provide enough security inside of Iraq for the Iraqi government to provide governance and economic opportunity for their citizens.” But here was the catch: “The weight of that opportunity rests with the Iraqi people. We can provide support. We can help provide security. But they must now decide about their sectarian violence.”

In other words, the U.S. military’s mission is confessing its limits—and unwillingness to go beyond them. It is as good as a green light to the warmongers, not dissimilar from the implicit green light to warmongering in Lebanon , and not with entirely different results. In either case, radical Shiitism is ascendant, American influence in decline. The Bush doctrine, intended as the wildfire of democratic reform, proved to be the accelerant of that decline.

[...]

It’s not, as Bush claim[s]..., that the war there “is part of a larger struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of terror in the Middle East .” It’s that overwhelming military force in the 21 st century is meaningless when it’s up against the flammables of what the West is neither equipped nor willing to understand, let alone deal with in less than embarrassing, savage ways: a mixture of sectarianism and tribalism paradoxically wedding itself to nationalist mantles: Hezbollah’s Shiitism in the name of Lebanese independence (however alleged), Sunnis and Shiites battling it out in Iraq in the name of supremacy of the faith and the nation—Umma, Oprah. For now, only Sartre seems to have the answer of what so many analysts have been calling an “existential” struggle on all sides: “No Exit.” (emphasis added)

That theme is similar to Jonathan Schell’s much longer article in The Nation. Schell traces American ascendancy as a world power, noting the irony of great power often checked by nationalist movements (China, Vietnam) or rivals’ nuclear weapons (Soviet Union, even North Korea).

The United States, to be sure, is a great power by any measure, surely the world's greatest, yet that power is hemmed in by obstacles peculiar to our era. The mistake has been not so much to think that the power of the United States is greater than it is as to fail to realize that power itself, whether wielded by the United States or anyone else--if conceived in terms of military force--has been in decline. By imagining otherwise, the United States has become the fool of force--and the fool of history. (emphasis added)

Schell also traces the ominous consequence of America’s failure to understand the limits of military power. In addition to the costs of war are the threats to Constitutional government from the politicians–Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon and Richard Cheney–who blame internal weakness and domestic traitors for the failure of American arms.

Supposedly, the United States learned those lessons in Vietnam and the Watergate scandals that flowed from that bitter experience. I guess Americans still need remedial education. The costs are high for this nation and the world.