Why haven't we had WWIII yet? | 258 comments (258 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Why haven't we had WWIII yet? (none / 1)

We know how dominant the US is because of the fact that all of the other major powers, including all of Europe, are either allied with it through military alliances or at least participate in its global polity through its established trade and diplomatic institutions, as Russia, China, and India do.

By that logic, we also know how weak that dominance is by now through the US defeats in those established trade and diplomatic institutions (think UN SC vetoes and trade wars via the WTO) and the establishment of parallel institutions (the EU, Mercosur, the new G33, BASIC). Methinks the US now is comparable to Britain a century ago.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Wed May 2nd, 2012 at 05:12:30 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Why haven't we had WWIII yet? (none / 0)

No, those aren't defeats. A UN vote against a US President is no more a defeat for the US than the election of Tea Party candidate for governor in a US state or a US House of Representatives that fails to support the US president. Those are all examples of US institutions working the way they are supposed to work -- power is contested within the institutional framework that the US has championed for itself and others. A defeat would be Vietnam -- an institution failure of US military and diplomatic institutions -- albeit a temporary one since Vietnam is now wholly within the US trade and financial framework like the rest of Asia.

by santiago on Wed May 2nd, 2012 at 11:58:54 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Why haven't we had WWIII yet? (none / 0)

That's sophistry. A failure to get something across a body is a defeat, and what is represented at the UN is not the US President but the whole US government, thus it is a US defeat. It was at the time the USSR issued most of the vetoes (and you can't seriously claim that USSR participation in the UN was a sign of the USSR recognising and being under US hegemony), and it a defeat now. And while US defeats at the UN SC are often symbolic only (see Iraq War), WTO defeats cost money and economic influence.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Wed May 2nd, 2012 at 02:39:08 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Why haven't we had WWIII yet? (none / 1)

No, a failure to preserve the institutional framework is a defeat for an empire as a polity. A failure to get ones way within a given system is just a defeat for a particular faction within that polity. If you're talking about neoliberals versus socialists then, yes, your examples could be seen as a defeat. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about whether an institutional framework that is the American global empire is advanced or injured by various events, and not getting something the President of the US wants out of an institutional body of its own creation is no more a defeat for the polity itself than would be losing an election to a challenger for that same President -- it's all still part of the rules established for the world and itself that make up the institutional framework of an empire, as it would in any village, county, or nation state.

by santiago on Thu May 3rd, 2012 at 01:01:01 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Why haven't we had WWIII yet? (none / 1)

So, (just trying to decode your thesis here) the Bush II decade is just some sort of historical anomaly, a blip not even worth mentioning? It looks, to me, much more like the normal state of affairs, but without the habitual smiley masks.

The recent record shows that the US, rather than accepting adverse decisions in the international bodies it helped create, is always ready to upset the card table. The engineered failure of the zombie Doha round is a case in point : the US has the dominant position and administrative resources to negotiate bilateral trade relationships with whoever it damn well likes, and as leonine as possible. The charade of consulting the UN before Gulf War II showed how completely isolated Powell was in his legalist stance. The US has, for decades, successfully interdicted any effective effort towards global governance on climate change, and this, in the medium term, is enough condemn its alleged global empire.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue
- Queen Elizabeth II}

by eurogreen on Thu May 3rd, 2012 at 03:43:09 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Why haven't we had WWIII yet? (4.00 / 2)

There's a resurgence of interest today in academia today, in political theory and sociology, around the work of German sociologist Karl Schmitt. Most of the interest comes from the left in places like the New School for Social Research, although Karl Schmitt, like Martin Heidegger who also enjoys substantial interest from the left today, was an unrepentant nazi himself. Schmitt's thesis was that you can tell who the real sovereign state is in a given international system because it's the one that doesn't have to suffer the consequences of breaking the same rules that it holds other states to. What folks are calling "hegemon" here, he referred to as "sovereign." That thesis makes sense to me and it explains a lot about how diplomatic history has developed.

Of course, you can expect that such a power would eventually incur an organized opposition if it did grated against others too much, and some of the biggest criticisms of George Bush's tenure came from the military and big oil companies like Exxon, who are the ones who really think of the world in terms of an American empire, like Rome, instead of an America that is an independent nation state. They thought he was a bad emperor, essentially, because he and his neocon friends almost blew the whole game because of their un-appreciation for the fact that an empire is a polity with a constituency outside of national borders that must be attended to and listened to along with the domestic constituency if you want the system to continue. They all thought Iraq was a crazy idea that was going to incur unnecessary enemies for very little, if any, strategic benefit.

by santiago on Thu May 3rd, 2012 at 11:17:28 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Why haven't we had WWIII yet? | 258 comments (258 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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