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Towards a Watershed in US Global Policy: From Neo-conservatism to Neo-rationalism By Herbert R. Reginbogin
Herbert Reginbogin, Professor at the Touro Law School in New York City
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1.
Overview of
U.S. Global Policy
Conventionally, American foreign policy aims have been interpreted
generally as vacillating between power-oriented Realists
á la
Kissinger and reform-minded Idealists
in the vein of Wilson.
While mainstream neoconservativism
aligns themselves with the free market, limited welfare, and traditional
cultural values, their key distinction is in international affairs,
where they prefer an interventionist approach that seeks to defend
national interests while rejecting social liberalism.
In his latest book, "America
at the Crossroads" leading neoconservative thinker Francis Fukuyama
analysis the mistakes that led to the Iraq debacle and concludes that we
still don't know what long-term consequences will fall out of
Washington's laying claims to hegemony and
some abandonment of its commitment to upholding the rule of law in their
pursuit of fighting the ‘Global War on Terror’,
or its wide-ranging sacrifice of diplomatic traditions that earlier
American administrations, like Harry S. Truman's, had judged so
important. But even Fukuyama fails to explain how people like the
neo-cons which are so opposed to state intervention, or "social
engineering," in their domestic politics could place such fantastic
hopes on forcing democracy on a foreign land.[1]
Paul Berman depicted in his
New York Times review
of Fukuyama's new book that “…neoconservative foreign policy thinking
has all along indulged a romance of the ruthless -- an expectation that
small numbers of people might be able to play a decisive role in world
events, if only their ferocity could be unleashed. It was a romance of
the ruthless that led some of the early generation of neoconservatives
in the 1970's to champion the grisliest of anti-Communist guerrillas in
Angola; and, during the next decade, led the neoconservatives to
champion some not very attractive anti-Communist guerrillas in Central
America, too; and led the Reagan administration's neoconservatives into
the swamps of the Iran-Contra scandal in order to go on championing
their guerrillas. Doesn't this same impulse shed a light on the baffling
question of how the Bush administration of our own time could have
managed to yoke together a stirring democratic oratory with a series of
grotesque scandals involving American torture -- this very weird and
self-defeating combination of idealism and brass knuckles?”[2] With some 130.000 American
troops occupying Iraq and in what has been acclaimed by both Democrats
and Republicans as an historical speech on November 6th 2003 by
President Bush George W. Bush Jr. to actively promote a liberal
democracy and free market economic reforms, not just in Iraq but
throughout the region, the United States has been criticized for its
‘new approach’ about the underlying norm governing the use of force by
asserting that it will use force to pre-empt ‘emerging’ threats as well
as those which are imminent.
It argues that changing circumstances
warrant new strategies.
This suggests an attempt on the part of the
USA to withdraw from the accepted norm embodied in Article 51 of the UN
Charter by support a change in the norm it sought to criminalize at the
Nuremberg Trials in 1945/46. This action has been portrayed by some as
America’s new boldness with Manifest Destiny on the one hand, and
ineluctable workings of Realism in international politics on the other.
Curious
enough the
bulk of
the Democratic Party believes in the neoconservative foreign policy
preferring an interventionist approach that seeks to defend national
interests. Thus,
America’s interventionist foreign policy started before George W. Bush
Jr. took office in 2001.
Already French Foreign Minister Hubert
Vedrine complained about the “hyper-power” in 1998 while Americans like
Samuel Huntington and others argued a year later that much of the world
saw the United States as a “rogue superpower, intrusive,
interventionist, exploitative, unilateralist, hegemonic, hypercritical.”[3]
The foreign policies of both democratic and
republican presidents show some striking parallels and criticism:
2.
Liberals &
Neo-Conservatives Join Ranks Both administrations have been
also blamed for constantly boasting about ‘American power and American
virtue’. As one of the more thoughtful neoconservatives, Robert Kagan
wrote that the origin of America’s ideological sense of moral mission
can be traced to the very beginning of the American republic.[4]
However, there is another source of the problem for America boasting
about its power and ‘American virtue’. It was the geopolitical shift
that followed the crumbling of Soviet power end of the 1980s, the fall
of the Berlin Wall and a final peace settlement popularly known as the
‘Two Plus Four Agreement’ negotiated in 1991 between the Federal
Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic (the two) and the
occupying powers of Germany, the United States, Great Britain, France
and the Soviet Union (the four), Germany was reunified as a single
sovereign state.
3.
Case of the
Swiss Banks It was the
role Switzerland and its banks played during the war which became the
first most prominently known legal case, which had a dramatic effect on
US foreign policy because through the
cooperation of Clinton Administration, who was committed to help return
property to their legal owners, the plaintiffs were enabled to apply
utmost pressure against the Swiss banks and eventually other European
countries whose companies were involved in other Holocaust related
issues. Congressional hearings were held with survivors of the Holocaust
making emotional appeals for justice while politicians had an occasion
to enter the fray. Along with the politicians, public officials joined
their accusations of economic sanctions against Switzerland.
As America media picked up on the courtroom cases
and European anti-Americanism spilled over into transatlantic relations,
America portrayed itself as a crusader correcting the wrongs of the dark
past of European countries and seeking justice for the victims of the
Third Reich.
Remarkably,
the actions begun in American courts were crowned with success.
The Swiss settled in August 1998 for $1.25
billion.
Other banks settled similarly, as did
corporations for their use of slave and forced labor and, to a much
lesser extent, the insurance companies for their failure to honor
obligations to clients who were victims of the Nazis.
In all, $8 billion was paid out by European
governments and private entities for their wartime and postwar
reprehensible behavior.
By
now not only had the Swiss banks claimed a settlement, the German
industry was forced to pay billions of dollars in compensation for using
both Jewish and non-Jewish victims as slaves during the war and
profiting from their labor.[5]
4.
The Impact
of the Restitution Era on International Relations The end
of the Soviet bloc also prompted new demands to reckon with past wrongs.
Out of the wreckage of the Soviet Union
emerged new states like the Baltic States, the Czech Republic, Ukraine
and Poland lodging reparation claims, which had a major influence on the
restitution campaigns for slave and forced labor.
NATO and the European Union now thought
about expanding eastwards, and with this there were calls to harmonize
the settlements of the Second World War. The bitter warfare in the
former Yugoslavia in the 1990s forced Europeans and others to confront
memories of genocide even as they contemplated its continuing
manifestation as in the case of Srebrenica without taking immediate
prompt measures to prevent a genocide or a policy of
forcible humanitarian
intervention with the 1999 NATO bombing of
the territory of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
intended to protect the Kosovo Albanians against a potential ethnic
cleansing in the
absence of explicit authorization by the Security Council of the United
Nations and in violation of international law.
“Terms like ‘ethnic cleansing,’ a
contemporary version of Nazi euphemisms for murder, hold up the greater
Holocaust as the measure of lesser ones,”[6]
noted Jonathan Steinberg.
In Austria, the amnesia facilitated by
postwar confrontations began to wear off.
In Switzerland, there were calls to
re-examine the country's longstanding neutrality.
Such developments inevitably called forth
new kinds of memory politics that fed restitution claims, calls not only
to resolve current conflicts but to acknowledge a country’s wartime past
and for the USA to adopt a foreign policy to help recompense the Jews
and many other victims of the Third Reich, which as the American
diplomat Sumner Well in 1945 at the end of World War II said, “surely
constitutes the moral obligation of the free people of the earth…..”[7]
These
changes in international relations meshed with others led in the mid to
late 1990s to an international groundswell of popular theories emerging
in the United States related to the Holocaust Restitution Era.
Conceptions of the Holocaust were increasingly seen in the 1990s as a
search for justice carried out with it a distinct flavor of human
rights, a theme that was a rhetorical accompaniment of American foreign
policy during the Clinton Administration. Journalists, politicians and
scholars demanded that neutral European states of World War II
acknowledge their wartime pasts. Switzerland was pilloried as the major
offender while the USA - neutral until the end of 1941 - was not
subjected to the same criticism and its own dreary efforts to organize
restitution for America’s shortcomings during the Holocaust era.
According to two prominent international
legal experts on the Holocaust Michael J. Bazyler and Amber J.
Fitzgerald, “there
seems to be a double standard at play. The demands made by the United
States towards European governments and corporations to honestly
confront and document their wartime financial dealings and other
activities are not being registered in the United States itself.”[8]
The United States
did not embark
on having a commission compare the international context of their
findings with other commissions from other countries as well as
examining very closely some of America’s major financial institutions
and corporate businesses between 1933-1945, which were not deterred by
pogroms and mishandling of civilians to continue cultivating an
intertwining set of amicable relations with their future enemies before
it was forced to become a belligerent country.[9] While American courts reached out to call upon others
to account for their role during WW II in the late 1990s, history and
law in the name of justice were being ripped apart. The narrative of
history was not being completely and critically examined in different
ways as told through a comparative analysis of the neutral countries
during World War II to teach the lessons of the Holocaust to new
generations about six million who died.. Justice needed to be served,
but at what cost? Should it be at the price of a prejudicial and
distorted history incurring self-denial, rationalization and utopianism
leading to a prejudicial, hegemonic and interventionist public policy as
some criticize American foreign policy? Is the narrative we hold true
as Americans nothing else than a self righteous utopianism that the
United States, the world’s natural leader, has “a sense of mission” to
give other peoples the “blueprint that will help them be like us more”,
led America to a prejudicial and distorted truth about themselves, which
is the price paid for seeking justice and at the end a rationalization
of public policy?
For if a people of a democratic superpower
like the USA do not engage to critically look at their role as in the
case of the Holocaust Restitution Era as they demanded from other
countries as part of U.S. Global Policy, will America continue to
develop public policies that are hypercritical intrusive,
interventionist, exploitative, unilateralist, and hegemonic as Samuel
Huntington and other scholars have voiced?
It is ironic that many in
America who had urged that the lex Americana defined in the 1990’s
continue to be applied, live in a new millennium with America laying
claims to hegemony and some abandonment of its commitment to upholding
the rule of law in their pursuit of fighting the ‘Global War on Terror’.[10]
Was the lex americana
of the Holocaust Restitution Era in seeking justice for the victims of
World War II, a prelude to the strengthening humanitarian intentions of
intervention under the Clinton Administration in seeking justice which
then turned into an opportunistic policy of hegemonic intervention under
the Bush Administration?
5.
Conclusion
The US is not a status quo power, but
rather one that regards itself as called to promote change – whether it
be political, economic or cultural , and both inside and outside its own
borders. This anti-status
quo orientation goes hand in hand with two other features of the US
culture, the firm belief that democracy is the only legitimate form of
government and the imperturbable confidence of Americans in their own
exceptional perception of themselves. This will not change. However,
there is a sea of change under way. The USA will very likely at long
last give up its problematic mix of Realist and Idealist policy approach
and embrace a down-to-earth Rationalist and at times Revolutionist
interaction and international dialogue with America’s rivals, which, if
they fail, heightens the potential risk of war.
The problem is can America’s decision makers overcome the
dominant strands in American foreign policy, which has been the
unquestioned assumption that the USA, as torch-bearer of liberal
democracy and the free market, has the capacity to transform the world
in its own image. In terms of hegemony, this means military superiority
and US-domination of international financial organizations. In terms of
empire, it means exerting formal and informal domination over the
politics of a number of other countries. While the ultimate aims of
these policy-makers are praiseworthy, at least as far as the spread of
liberal democracy is concerned, they discount contrary opinions and
ignore in part cultural differences. The result have been
inefficiencies, like recurrent transatlantic disharmonies, as well as
violent reactions, namely in the Middle East. The election
President-Elect Barak Obama is an historical watershed in American
history – the first black-American to be president of the USA.
As to US global policy changes the impression is that the Bush
Doctrine will be dismantled and Guantanomo Bay closed. The pronounced
word of ‘Change’ will imbue the spirit of neo-Kantian values for
international law thus eventually becoming a member of the International
Court of Justice, supporting the Kyoto Protocols and ever more far
reaching endeavors in reforming the international organizations in their
effectiveness to prevent genocide and alleviate poverty in the world.
[1]
Marian Lau, “Is Neoconservativism Dead,” available at
[2]
Paul Berman, “Neo No More,” in New York Times, March 26, 2006
available at
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/books/review/26berman.html
[3]
Robert Kagan, “The September 12 Paradigm: America, the World,
and George W. Bush,” in: Foreign Affairs, vol. 87, No. 5,
(2008).
[4]
Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the
New World Order. (New York, 2003), pp. 85-88.
[5]
Michael J. Bazyler and Amber J. Fitzgerald, “Trading with the
Enemy: Holocaust Restitution, The United States Government, and
American Industry”, in: Brookings Journal of International Law.
Vol.28:3, 2004, available at
www.brooklaw.edu/students/journals/bjil/bjil28iii_bazyler.pdf
[6]
Jonathan Steinberg, “Compensation Cases and the Nazi Past:
Deutsche Bank and Its Historical Legacy,” in Diefendorf,
Lessons and Legacies,
Vol. VI, New Currents in
Holocaust Research, p. 424.
[7]
Sumner Wells, "New Hope for the Jewish People,"
The Nation, May 5,
1945.
[8]
Michael J. Bazyler and Amber J. Fitzgerald, “Trading with the
Enemy: Holocaust Restitution, The United States Government, and
American Industry”, in: Brookings Journal of International Law.
Vol.28:3, 2004, available at
www.brooklaw.edu/students/journals/bjil/bjil28iii_bazyler.pdf
[9]
Walther Hofer and Herbert R. Reginbogin, Hitler, der Westen und
die Schweiz. (Zurich, 2001).
[10]
Ibid. |
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