The greater danger for Americans is not from terrorism but from overblown faith in their super power status, which makes them disrespect the emerging strength of the rest of the world.
The run up to the November elections suggests that many Americans think they can be safe because the US is a military and economic giant among Lilliputians. Consequently, they seem to care little for friendship and cooperation as methods of conflict resolution.
This is a serious mistake. Lasting friendships are the true secret of power. Creating more fear will force others, whether countries or groups, to improve their own asymmetrical war capabilities. That is already making Americans less safe.
In this writer’s opinion, Americans are a force for good because their hearts are in the right place. They want to help bring democracy and political freedom around the world. However, that is unlikely unless they persuade their government to start making friends again and change its methods of advancing democracy.
Offering friendship to America is not easy because of hubris that expects subservience from friends. It is worth recalling that every great people was a super power of its time. But each was destroyed through attrition by lesser powers who took advantage of its isolation as it created multiple enemies and disregarded friends.
That happened in various ways to Carthage, Rome, Cyrus of Persia, Ashok of India, and the Mughal, Austrian, French, Ottoman, Russian and British empires. It is unwise for Americans to expect that they will rewrite history by becoming the sole super power to achieve safety through fear of its weapons.
Americans are sowing the seeds of their own decline by allowing their President to disregard the advice of allies. They are forcing enemies to come together by tarring with the same brush such disparate countries as Iran, Syria and North Korea and disparate groups as Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites, and Pashtuns.
Friendship grows only on the terrain of cooperation and cooperation is not possible without listening to what others have to say. The United Nations is the world’s only universally accepted forum for talks. Americans should disparage it less and use it more.
Instead, many Americans seem to be in a flight and fight response. The flight is from the existing structures for international cooperation, including the United Nations. The fight response is to aggressively use or wave the US military stick.
The limits of using military power to impose American will are evident even in the defeated nation of Iraq. Force pulverized that country but failed to turn it into a friend. Absent UN approval, Americans put together the war coalition with great difficulty and even Britain is quietly drawing down its forces now.
In contrast, the UN-approved war in Afghanistan brought dozens of countries to America’s side. There, international forces continue to fight and accept more casualties to share America’s burdens.
US military might has not brought lasting victories. A handful of Arabs living in caves and a few thousand tribal Pashtuns are holding America and NATO at bay in Afghanistan, while flooding the West with deadly heroin.
A few hundred terrorists are fomenting a widening sectarian war in Iraq. They are so successful that the current US elections are about how to exit from Iraq without the stigma of defeat instead of staying there to achieve American goals.
Israel, America’s closest ally, vividly demonstrated the futility of military dominance when it destroyed Lebanon but came no closer to lasting peace.
Saudi Arabia, the other key regional ally, is quietly slipping out of America’s economic grip by diversifying its client base and selling more oil to China and India.
China, a potential super power, is expanding its global influence in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Some analysts expect China’s economy to dethrone America in 50 years and Goldman Sachs thinks that India, Russia, Brazil and Mexico will be among the world’s ten biggest economies by 2040. They will want influence commensurate with their wealth even if the US reigns as a military super power.
Russia is moving to rebuild its economic strength by turning to China, Iran and Turkey for markets. It is also tightening economic ties with Europe to compete with American influence there. It is well to remember that only Britain and Ireland have has close emotional ties with America. For continental European countries, Russia, now free of Soviet totalitarianism, is a natural neighbor with which they have ties going back for centuries.
Turkey feels the US is disrespecting its loyalty as a longtime Muslim ally. It is disillusioned because American power is unable to stop Iraqi Kurds from sheltering Kurdish terrorists bombing its civilians. American power is also unable to prevent the European Union from refusing Turkey’s membership bid, saying that it has the wrong religion to be a natural part of Europe.
Against this backdrop, it is time for American voters to analyze more attentively how their legislators use American military power in their name and whether that makes them safer.