Practice to Deceive Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks’ nightmare scenario–it’s their plan.

By Joshua Micah Marshall

Imagine it’s six months from now. The Iraq war is over. After an initial burst of joy and gratitude at being liberated from Saddam’s rule, the people of Iraq are watching, and waiting, and beginning to chafe under American occupation. Across the border, in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, our conquering presence has brought street protests and escalating violence. The United Nations and NATO are in disarray, so America is pretty much on its own. Hemmed in by budget deficits at home and limited financial assistance from allies, the Bush administration is talking again about tapping Iraq’s oil reserves to offset some of the costs of the American presence–talk that is further inflaming the region. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence has discovered fresh evidence that, prior to the war, Saddam moved quantities of biological and chemical weapons to Syria. When Syria denies having such weapons, the administration starts massing troops on the Syrian border. But as they begin to move, there is an explosion: Hezbollah terrorists from southern Lebanon blow themselves up in a Baghdad restaurant, killing dozens of Western aid workers and journalists. Knowing that Hezbollah has cells in America, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge puts the nation back on Orange Alert. FBI agents start sweeping through mosques, with a new round of arrests of Saudis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, and Yemenis.

To most Americans, this would sound like a frightening state of affairs, the kind that would lead them to wonder how and why we had got ourselves into this mess in the first place. But to the Bush administration hawks who are guiding American foreign policy, this isn’t the nightmare scenario. It’s everything going as anticipated.

In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints. In February, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq, the United States would “deal with” Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Meanwhile, neoconservative journalists have been channeling the administration’s thinking. Late last month, The Weekly Standard’s Jeffrey Bell reported that the administration has in mind a “world war between the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism … a war of such reach and magnitude [that] the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders, should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well into the future.”

In short, the administration is trying to roll the table–to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism. So events that may seem negative–Hezbollah for the first time targeting American civilians; U.S. soldiers preparing for war with Syria–while unfortunate in themselves, are actually part of the hawks’ broader agenda. Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments–or, failing that, U.S. troops–rule the entire Middle East.

There is a startling amount of deception in all this–of hawks deceiving the American people, and perhaps in some cases even themselves. While it’s conceivable that bold American action could democratize the Middle East, so broad and radical an initiative could also bring chaos and bloodshed on a massive scale. That all too real possibility leads most establishment foreign policy hands, including many in the State Department, to view the Bush plan with alarm. Indeed, the hawks’ record so far does not inspire confidence. Prior to the invasion, for instance, they predicted that if the United States simply announced its intention to act against Saddam regardless of how the United Nations voted, most of our allies, eager to be on our good side, would support us. Almost none did. Yet despite such grave miscalculations, the hawks push on with their sweeping new agenda.

Like any group of permanent Washington revolutionaries fueled by visions of a righteous cause, the neocons long ago decided that criticism from the establishment isn’t a reason for self-doubt but the surest sign that they’re on the right track. But their confidence also comes from the curious fact that much of what could go awry with their plan will also serve to advance it. A full-scale confrontation between the United States and political Islam, they believe, is inevitable, so why not have it now, on our terms, rather than later, on theirs? Actually, there are plenty of good reasons not to purposely provoke a series of crises in the Middle East. But that’s what the hawks are setting in motion, partly on the theory that the worse things get, the more their approach becomes the only plausible solution.

Moral Cloudiness

Ever since the neocons burst upon the public policy scene 30 years ago, their movement has been a marriage of moral idealism, military assertiveness, and deception. Back in the early 1970s, this group of then-young and still mostly Democratic political intellectuals grew alarmed by the post-Vietnam Democrats’ seeming indifference to the Soviet threat. They were equally appalled, however, by the amoral worldview espoused by establishment Republicans like Henry Kissinger, who sought co-existence with the Soviet Union. As is often the case with ex-socialists, the neocons were too familiar with communist tactics to ignore or romanticize communism’s evils. The fact that many neocons were Jewish, and outraged by Moscow’s increasingly visible persecution of Jews, also caused them to reject both the McGovernite and Kissingerian tendencies to ignore such abuses.

In Ronald Reagan, the neocons found a politician they could embrace. Like them, Reagan spoke openly about the evils of communism and, at least on the peripheries of the Cold War, preferred rollback to coexistence. Neocons filled the Reagan administration, and men like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, and others provided the intellectual ballast and moral fervor for the sharp turn toward confrontation that the United States adopted in 1981.

But achieving moral clarity often requires hiding certain realities. From the beginning, the neocons took a much more alarmist view of Soviet capacities and intentions than most experts. As late as 1980, the ur-neocon Norman Podhoretz warned of the imminent “Finlandization of America, the political and economic subordination of the United States to superior Soviet power,” even raising the possibility that America’s only options might be “surrender or war.” We now know, of course, that U.S. intelligence estimates, which many neocons thought underestimated the magnitude and durability of Soviet power, in fact wildly overestimated them.

This willingness to deceive–both themselves and others–expanded as neocons grew more comfortable with power. Many spent the Reagan years orchestrating bloody wars against Soviet proxies in the Third World, portraying thugs like the Nicaraguan Contras and plain murderers like Jonas Savimbi of Angola as “freedom fighters.” The nadir of this deceit was the Iran-Contra scandal, for which Podhoretz’s son-in-law, Elliot Abrams, pled guilty to perjury. Abrams was later pardoned by Bush’s father, and today, he runs Middle East policy in the Bush White House.

But in the end, the Soviet Union did fall. And the hawks’ policy of confrontation did contribute to its collapse. So too, of course, did the economic and military rot most of the hawks didn’t believe in, and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom neocons such as Richard Perle counseled Reagan not to trust. But the neocons did not dwell on what they got wrong. Rather, the experience of having played a hand in the downfall of so great an evil led them to the opposite belief: that it’s okay to be spectacularly wrong, even brazenly deceptive about the details, so long as you have moral vision and a willingness to use force.

What happened in the 1990s further reinforced that mindset. Hawks like Perle and William Kristol pulled their hair out when Kissingerians like Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell left Saddam’s regime in place after the first Gulf War. They watched with mounting fury as terrorist attacks by Muslim fundamentalists claimed more and more American and Israeli lives. They considered the Oslo accords an obvious mistake (how can you negotiate with a man like Yasir Arafat?), and as the decade progressed they became increasingly convinced that there was a nexus linking burgeoning terrorism and mounting anti-Semitism with repressive but nominally “pro-American” regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In 1996, several of the hawks–including Perle–even tried to sell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the idea that Israel should attack Saddam on its own–advice Netanyahu wisely declined. When the Oslo process crumbled and Saudi Arabian terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, the hawks felt, not without some justification, that they had seen this danger coming all along, while others had ignored it. The timing was propitious, because in September 2001 many already held jobs with a new conservative president willing to hear their pitch.

Prime Minister bin Laden

The pitch was this: The Middle East today is like the Soviet Union 30 years ago. Politically warped fundamentalism is the contemporary equivalent of communism or fascism. Terrorists with potential access to weapons of mass destruction are like an arsenal pointed at the United States. The primary cause of all this danger is the Arab world’s endemic despotism, corruption, poverty, and economic stagnation. Repressive regimes channel dissent into the mosques, where the hopeless and disenfranchised are taught a brand of Islam that combines anti-modernism, anti-Americanism, and a worship of violence that borders on nihilism. Unable to overthrow their own authoritarian rulers, the citizenry turns its fury against the foreign power that funds and supports these corrupt regimes to maintain stability and access to oil: the United States. As Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The great indulgence granted to the ways and phobias of Arabs has reaped a terrible harvest”–terrorism. Trying to “manage” this dysfunctional Islamic world, as Clinton attempted and Colin Powell counsels us to do, is as foolish, unproductive, and dangerous as détente was with the Soviets, the hawks believe. Nor is it necessary, given the unparalleled power of the American military. Using that power to confront Soviet communism led to the demise of that totalitarianism and the establishment of democratic (or at least non-threatening) regimes from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Why not use that same power to upend the entire corrupt Middle East edifice and bring liberty, democracy, and the rule of law to the Arab world?

The hawks’ grand plan differs depending on whom you speak to, but the basic outline runs like this: The United States establishes a reasonably democratic, pro-Western government in Iraq–assume it falls somewhere between Turkey and Jordan on the spectrum of democracy and the rule of law. Not perfect, representative democracy, certainly, but a system infinitely preferable to Saddam’s. The example of a democratic Iraq will radically change the political dynamics of the Middle East. When Palestinians see average Iraqis beginning to enjoy real freedom and economic opportunity, they’ll want the same themselves. With that happy prospect on one hand and implacable United States will on the other, they’ll demand that the Palestinian Authority reform politically and negotiate with Israel. That in turn will lead to a real peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. A democratic Iraq will also hasten the fall of the fundamentalist Shi’a mullahs in Iran, whose citizens are gradually adopting anti-fanatic, pro-Western sympathies. A democratized Iran would create a string of democratic, pro-Western governments (Turkey, Iraq, and Iran) stretching across the historical heartland of Islam. Without a hostile Iraq towering over it, Jordan’s pro-Western Hashemite monarchy would likely come into full bloom. Syria would be no more than a pale reminder of the bad old days. (If they made trouble, a U.S. invasion would take care of them, too.) And to the tiny Gulf emirates making hesitant steps toward democratization, the corrupt regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt would no longer look like examples of stability and strength in a benighted region, but holdouts against the democratic tide. Once the dust settles, we could decide whether to ignore them as harmless throwbacks to the bad old days or deal with them, too. We’d be in a much stronger position to do so since we’d no longer require their friendship to help us manage ugly regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

The audacious nature of the neocons’ plan makes it easy to criticize but strangely difficult to dismiss outright. Like a character in a bad made-for-TV thriller from the 1970s, you can hear yourself saying, “That plan’s just crazy enough to work.”

But like a TV plot, the hawks’ vision rests on a willing suspension of disbelief, in particular, on the premise that every close call will break in our favor: The guard will fall asleep next to the cell so our heroes can pluck the keys from his belt. The hail of enemy bullets will plink-plink-plink over our heroes’ heads. And the getaway car in the driveway will have the keys waiting in the ignition. Sure, the hawks’ vision could come to pass. But there are at least half a dozen equally plausible alternative scenarios that would be disastrous for us.

To begin with, this whole endeavor is supposed to be about reducing the long-term threat of terrorism, particularly terrorism that employs weapons of mass destruction. But, to date, every time a Western or non-Muslim country has put troops into Arab lands to stamp out violence and terror, it has awakened entire new terrorist organizations and a generation of recruits. Placing U.S. troops in Riyadh after the Gulf War (to protect Saudi Arabia and its oilfields from Saddam) gave Osama bin Laden a cause around which he built al Qaeda. Israel took the West Bank in a war of self-defense, but once there its occupation helped give rise to Hamas. Israel’s incursion into southern Lebanon (justified at the time, but transformed into a permanent occupation) led to the rise of Hezbollah. Why do we imagine that our invasion and occupation of Iraq, or whatever countries come next, will turn out any differently?

The Bush administration also insists that our right to act preemptively and unilaterally, with or without the international community’s formal approval, rests on the need to protect American lives. But with the exception of al Qaeda, most terrorist organizations in the world, and certainly in the Middle East, do not target Americans. Hamas certainly doesn’t. Hezbollah, the most fearsome of terrorist organizations beside al Qaeda, has killed American troops in the Middle East, but not for some years, and it has never targeted American civilians on American soil. Yet like Hamas, Hezbollah has an extensive fundraising cell operation in the States (as do many terrorist organizations, including the Irish Republican Army). If we target them in the Middle East, can’t we reasonably assume they will respond by activating these cells and taking the war worldwide?

Next, consider the hawks’ plans for those Middle East states that are authoritarian yet “friendly” to the United States–specifically Egypt and Saudi Arabia. No question these are problem countries. Their governments buy our weapons and accept our foreign aid yet allow vicious anti-Semitism to spew from the state run airwaves and tolerate clerics who preach jihad against the West. But is it really in our interests to work for their overthrow? Many hawks clearly think so. I asked Richard Perle last year about the dangers that might flow from the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. “Mubarak is no great shakes,” he quipped. “Surely we can do better than Mubarak.” When I asked Perle’s friend and fellow Reagan-era neocon Ken Adelman to calculate the costs of having the toppling of Saddam lead to the overthrow of the House of Saud, he shot back: “All the better if you ask me.”

This cavalier call for regime change, however, runs into a rather obvious problem. When the communist regimes of Eastern and Central Europe fell after 1989, the people of those nations felt grateful to the United States because we helped liberate them from their Russian colonial masters. They went on to create pro-Western democracies. The same is unlikely to happen, however, if we help “liberate” Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The tyrannies in these countries are home grown, and the U.S. government has supported them, rightly or wrongly, for decades, even as we’ve ignored (in the eyes of Arabs) the plight of the Palestinians. Consequently, the citizens of these countries generally hate the United States, and show strong sympathy for Islamic radicals. If free elections were held in Saudi Arabia today, Osama bin Laden would probably win more votes than Crown Prince Abdullah. Topple the pro-Western autocracies in these countries, in other words, and you won’t get pro-Western democracies but anti-Western tyrannies.

To this dilemma, the hawks offer two responses. One is that eventually the citizens of Egypt and Saudi Arabia will grow disenchanted with their anti-Western Islamic governments, just as the people of Iran have, and become our friends. To which the correct response is, well, sure, that’s a nice theory, but do we really want to make the situation for ourselves hugely worse now on the strength of a theoretical future benefit?

The hawks’ other response is that if the effort to push these countries toward democracy goes south, we can always use our military might to secure our interests. “We need to be more assertive,” argues Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, “and stop letting all these two-bit dictators and rogue regimes push us around and stop being a patsy for our so-called allies, especially in Saudi Arabia.” Hopefully, in Boot’s view, laying down the law will be enough. But he envisions a worst-case scenario that would involve the United States “occupying the Saudi’s oil fields and administering them as a trust for the people of the region.”

What Boot is calling for, in other words, is the creation of a de facto American empire in the Middle East. In fact, there’s a subset of neocons who believe that given our unparalleled power, empire is our destiny and we might as well embrace it. The problem with this line of thinking is, of course, that it ignores the lengthy and troubling history of imperial ambitions, particularly in the Middle East. The French and the English didn’t leave voluntarily; they were driven out. And they left behind a legacy of ignorance, exploitation, and corruption that’s largely responsible for the region’s current dysfunctional politics.

Another potential snafu for the hawks is Iran, arguably the most dangerous state in the Middle East. The good news is that the fundamentalist Shi’a mullahs who have been running the government, exporting terrorism, and trying to enrich their uranium, are increasingly unpopular. Most experts believe that the mullahs’ days are numbered, and that true democracy will come to Iran. That day will arrive sooner, the hawks argue, with a democratic Iraq on Iran’s border. But the opposite could happen. If the mullahs are smart, they’ll cooperate just enough with the Americans not to provoke an attack, but put themselves forth to their own people as defenders of Iranian independence and Iran’s brother Shi’a in southern Iraq who are living under the American jackboot. Such a strategy might keep the fundamentalists in power for years longer than they otherwise might have been.

Then there is the mother of all problems, Iraq. The hawks’ whole plan rests on the assumption that we can turn it into a self-governing democracy–that the very presence of that example will transform politics in the Middle East. But what if we can’t really create a democratic, self-governing Iraq, at least not very quickly? What if the experience we had after World War II in Germany and Japan, two ethnically homogeneous nations, doesn’t quite work in an ethnically divided Iraq where one group, the Sunni Arabs, has spent decades repressing and slaughtering the others? As one former Army officer with long experience with the Iraq file explains it, the “physical analogy to Saddam Hussein’s regime is a steel beam in compression.” Give it one good hit, and you’ll get a violent explosion. One hundred thousand U.S. troops may be able to keep a lid on all the pent-up hatred. But we may soon find that it’s unwise to hand off power to the fractious Iraqis. To invoke the ugly but apt metaphor which Jefferson used to describe the American dilemma of slavery, we will have the wolf by the ears. You want to let go. But you dare not.

And what if we do muster the courage to allow elections, but the Iraqis choose a government we can’t live with–as the Japanese did in their first post-war election, when the United States purged the man slated to become prime minister? But if we do that in Iraq, how will it look on Al Jazeera? Ultimately, the longer we stay as occupiers, the more Iraq becomes not an example for other Arabs to emulate, but one that helps Islamic fundamentalists make their case that America is just an old-fashioned imperium bent on conquering Arab lands. And that will make worse all the problems set forth above.

None of these problems are inevitable, of course. Luck, fortitude, deft management, and help from allies could bring about very different results. But we can probably only rely on the first three because we are starting this enterprise over the expressed objections of almost every other country in the world. And that’s yet another reason why overthrowing the Middle East won’t be the same as overthrowing communism. We did the latter, after all, within a tight formal alliance, NATO. Reagan’s most effective military move against Moscow, for instance, placing Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, could never have happened, given widespread public protests, except that NATO itself voted to let the weapons in. In the Middle East, however, we’re largely alone. If things go badly, what allies we might have left are liable to say to us: You broke it, you fix it.

Whacking the Hornet’s Nest

If the Bush administration has thought through these various negative scenarios–and we must presume, or at least pray, that it has–it certainly has not shared them with the American people. More to the point, the president has not even leveled with the public that such a clean-sweep approach to the Middle East is, in fact, their plan. This breaks new ground in the history of pre-war presidential deception. Franklin Roosevelt said he was trying to keep the United States out of World War II even as he–in some key ways–courted a confrontation with the Axis powers that he saw as both inevitable and necessary. History has judged him well for this. Far more brazenly, Lyndon Johnson’s administration greatly exaggerated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to gin up support for full-throttle engagement in Vietnam. The war proved to be Johnson’s undoing. When President Clinton used American troops to quell the fighting in Bosnia he said publicly that our troops would be there no longer than a year, even though it was widely understood that they would be there far longer. But in the case of these deceptions, the public was at least told what the goals of the wars were and whom and where we would be fighting.

Today, however, the great majority of the American people have no concept of what kind of conflict the president is leading them into. The White House has presented this as a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction–a goal that the majority of Americans support. But the White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn’t even tried. Instead, it’s focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind.

The brazenness of this approach would be hard to believe if it weren’t entirely in line with how the administration has pursued so many of its other policy goals. Its preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration’s broader agenda almost impossible not to pursue. During and after the 2000 campaign, the president called for major education and prescription drug programs plus a huge tax cut, saying America could easily afford them all because of large budget surpluses. Critics said it wasn’t true, and the growing budget deficits have proven them right. But the administration now uses the existence of big budget deficits as a way to put the squeeze on social programs–part of its plan all along. Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it’s just a straight-up con.

The same strategy seemed to guide the administration’s passive-aggressive attitude towards our allies. It spent the months after September 11 signaling its distaste for international agreements and entangling alliances. The president then demanded last September that the same countries he had snubbed support his agenda in Iraq. And last month, when most of those countries refused, hawks spun that refusal as evidence that they were right all along. Recently, a key neoconservative commentator with close ties to the administration told me that the question since the end of the Cold War has been which global force would create the conditions for global peace and security: the United States, NATO, or the United Nations. With NATO now wrecked, he told me, the choice is between the Unites States and the United Nations. Whether NATO is actually wrecked remains to be seen. But the strategy is clear: push the alliance to the breaking point, and when it snaps, cite it as proof that the alliance was good for nothing anyway. It’s the definition of chutzpah, like the kid who kills his parents and begs the judge for sympathy because he’s an orphan.

Another president may be able to rebuild NATO or get the budget back in balance. But once America begins the process of remaking the Middle East in the way the hawks have in mind, it will be extremely difficult for any president to pull back. Vietnam analogies have long been overused, and used inappropriately, but this may be one case where the comparison is apt.

Ending Saddam Hussein’s regime and replacing it with something stable and democratic was always going to be a difficult task, even with the most able leadership and the broadest coalition. But doing it as the Bush administration now intends is something like going outside and giving a few good whacks to a hornets’ nest because you want to get them out in the open and have it out with them once and for all. Ridding the world of Islamic terrorism by rooting out its ultimate sources–Muslim fundamentalism and the Arab world’s endemic despotism, corruption, and poverty–might work. But the costs will be immense. Whether the danger is sufficient and the costs worth incurring would make for an interesting public debate. The problem is that once it’s just us and the hornets, we really won’t have any choice.

Joshua Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly contributing writer, is author of the Talking Points Memo.

The decline and fall of the American empire An expert on geopolitics says forget Islamic terrorism — the real future threat to America’s supremacy will come from Europe.

– – – – – – – – – – – – By Suzy Hansen

Dec. 2, 2002 | The title of Charles A. Kupchan’s new book, “The End of the American Era,” sounds grim, but after a year of terrorist violence, “spectacular” attack warnings and ominous analyses of fundamentalist Islam, his argument is almost refreshing. According to Kupchan, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, it isn’t radical Islam that we should be most concerned about. It’s our friends across the Atlantic, the European Union, that pose the greatest threat to American primacy.

In “The End of the American Era,” Kupchan compares the current world situation to past turning points in history — the end of World War I, the federation of the American colonies, the Great Depression — to suggest ways in which the world might transform itself. In some of his most illuminating passages, Kupchan disputes the predictions of such optimistic leading thinkers as Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman, who perceive democracy and globalization as great panaceas, and pessimists such as Samuel Huntington who foresees a “clash of civilizations.” Instead, Kupchan’s global map resembles that of the 19th century, when the reigning empire, Great Britain, gave the rising United States entree as a world power. This time, Kupchan says, it’s America’s turn to make room for Europe.

Kupchan spoke to Salon from his office in Washington, D.C.

I know historians and scholars hate the word “inevitable,” but you imply that sooner or later all great empires will fall. Is that right?

If there’s any trend that keeps coming back, it’s that great powers come and go. No one stays at the top forever. Rome was a great empire with a huge territory under its weight for probably 300 to 400 years, which is a pretty long time. Some have come and gone much more quickly.

One of the reasons that America’s moment at the top will be short-lived is that history is moving much more quickly than it used to. The countries that get into the digital age go into fast-forward. If you take a snapshot of the world today and say, “A-ha! This is what the world’s going to look like for the next century,” it’s very dangerous. Tomorrow could look very different.

Which empire do we compare most to? Is it Rome?

Two analogies come to my mind as most insightful to the present. First, the Roman case. The split that we’re now seeing between Europe and America reminds me of the split between Rome and Byzantium that occurred in the end of the third century and into the fourth century. You had a unitary imperial zone divided into two, and once you had two separate capitals, Rome and Constantinople, you immediately had rivalry rather than unity. The same thing is happening between Washington and Brussels.

As far as the nature of our empire, I’d say the British probably comes closer to ours. The Roman empire was more contiguous. We have a more far-flung empire that relies on offshore balancing, which is what the Brits did: Send troops abroad but more to keep the balance than to occupy. You could almost call it Empire Lite. That’s more or less how we run the show. One of the benefits of that is that Empire Lite is cheaper and it also provokes less resistance.

But one of the real dangers that we face at the moment is that Empire Lite might become Empire Heavy and rather than reassure others, we’ll alienate them. Rather than appear as a benign hegemon, we appear predatory. We appear to lose our legitimacy as a great power, which is probably our most precious commodity. If that happens, then all bets are off. Then you really see countries run for cover and join arms against the United States.

What mistakes do historians and scholars make when they say that America is different, that for some reason American primacy will last indefinitely?

Part of it stems from looking at what I would say are the wrong indicators. They look at the GDP and the military capability of the United States vs. other countries. If you do that, it doesn’t look like anybody is going to come close for many decades. I agree with that. But Europe is no longer a group of sovereign countries; it’s coming together just like [the United States] did [in the 18th century]. That’s why you have to talk about Europe as a collective entity and its ability to serve as a counterweight to the United States.

Also, oftentimes historians and particularly political scientists tend to look at the world structurally. They say, “Forget about what’s going on inside states and just look at the relations among states.” The end of America’s dominance will to some extent be made in America. It will come from America’s domestic politics, its own ambivalence about empire and its own stiff-necked unilateralism, which alienates others. In that sense, a lot of where we go as a country will come from internal factors — demographics, politics, political culture, populism. Those are issues that lots of political scientists don’t pay attention to.

Now, is that a trend that you see happening regardless of what political party is in power?

Yes. That’s a debate that I have with my colleagues here because they say, “Listen. Once the Bushies are gone everything will be fine. If Gore had won, everything would be fine.” I don’t agree. If Gore had won, the changes we are seeing now would have taken longer to come about, but both parties face the same political pressures in the end. If the Democrats win by 2015, it doesn’t matter. We’ll be in the same place.

Still, you’re basing a lot of your argument on what you’ve seen in the last year, aren’t you? The idea that American intervention and multilateralism is on the wane … that has a lot to do with what happened in the last year. And that’s just one year.

Interestingly enough, I wrote the first draft of the book before Bush was elected. The core themes were all there. What I’m quite shocked by is the speed with which all of this has happened. I thought that my general analysis would take a good decade to play out. Once Bush came to office it seemed like someone stepped on the gas. I had to rewrite the book and I put much more emphasis on America’s turning inward and its ambivalence about running the world. After Sept. 11, the unilateralists’ angry lashing-out side came back. The emphasis in the book on that was written after Bush came to office, and after Sept. 11.

So you think this trend might slow down with Democrats — if they’re ever in power again — but not halt.

Yes, and that’s partly because when I was in the Clinton administration in the early 1990s — only a few years after the end of the Cold War — I already saw trends that were seeds for the book. Congress was beginning to check out. The media was stopping its coverage of foreign affairs. Even Clinton, who was a liberal internationalist by inclination, wasn’t so wild about the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court and all this other stuff that the Bush people said no to. When it all comes down to it, I see the arrows all pointing in one direction, but the emphasis and the speed changes from party to party.

Part of your theory is that now we see isolationist and unilateralist extremes working at the same time. The alternative you propose is liberal internationalism? What does that mean? What conflicts would we have engaged in during the 1990s, and now, if we followed that line of thought?

The world I envisage is one where the U.S. enters a period of transition in which it helps other actors build up the capability to do what we’ve been doing. I just don’t believe that, given American politics, we will intervene in [situations such as] Rwanda and East Timor. I don’t think that’s the way the world works. Rather than no one doing it, we ought to work toward a world in which there are alternative centers of authority with the will and capability to do peacekeeping and intervention. I would love to see the European Union get to the point where it can take care of Kosovo and the Balkans. I’d love to see some sort of association of African states that could go into a Rwanda-type activity. The U.S. will no doubt remain willing and able to intervene in the Western hemisphere, but my view is that intervention far afield will diminish over time with a couple of exceptions — where there are clear strategic interests like Northeast Asia and the Persian Gulf.

How does the Bush administration’s desire to attack Iraq fit into these trends? You did write that we would be staying home and shoring up defenses post-Sept. 11, but here we are ready to wage another war already. What does this war represent?

The political landscape is so skewed that the unilateralist camp is essentially unchecked. In the Republican Party, there are three ideological camps: the neoconservatives, who are unilateralists; the moderate centrists, who are essentially liberal internationalists of the sort that I advocate such as Father Bush, Brent Scowcroft, Henry Kissinger; and this new, young ascendant wing of the Republican Party represented by President Bush. That’s the heartland wing — the agrarian South and the mountain West. It’s populous and its inclinations are neo-isolationist.

That’s why from Jan. 20 to Sept. 11 the centrist wing was pushed to the margins and the neoconservatives and the heartland conservatives were duking it out. That’s why one day Bush would say we can’t be everything to everybody and the next day Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz at the Pentagon would say, “We’re going to run the world.” Then comes Sept. 11 and the heartland conservatives have their legs cut off. So right now there’s no check on the neoconservatives and the Democratic Party has folded its tent, lost the midterm elections. That’s why there’s so little debate about Iraq. That doesn’t mean, however, that the heartland wing is gone. They’re in suspension now politically, but they will be back.

The other thing that is important on Iraq is that the Bush administration could, if it’s not careful, find itself in over its head and have a set of commitments on its plate — including a five- to 10-year occupation of Iraq — that ultimately causes a political backlash in which the American people say enough already.

Could that scenario speed up this whole process of the decline of the American era?

It depends on how it goes. If the war goes smoothly and Saddam falls and all goes well and there aren’t chemical weapons exploding in Tel Aviv, I think it will probably turn out OK and not change the landscape all that much. If anything, it will fuel the neoconservative view.

If it goes poorly … I think the war will go smoothly actually. What I really worry about is the occupation. You ought to see a therapist if you want to occupy Iraq. It’s just the last place I would want to set up shop. The whole region is deeply anti-American. They’ll probably be dancing in the streets for 24 to 48 hours and then they’ll take up sniper positions. That’s where I think things could go wrong with barracks exploding, etc. If that were to happen, at the end of the day it would cause us to pull in our horns and cause Americans to say, “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

And our main challenger, in your view, is not radical Islam or Saddam Hussein, but the European Union. What kind of threat do you really see the European Union posing? Do you ever see us going to war with Europe?

To work backwards, no. The likelihood of military conflict between the U.S. and Europe is very low, almost beyond the stretch of imagination. The main threat is to order. The main threat is to the stability of the world. Everyone right now is focusing on terrorism and environmental degradation, and I’m all for those things. But we’ve gotten complacent about the big picture. We’re used to a world where America runs the show. We may wake up one morning and find that we don’t have complete control, that we go to the IMF or the World Bank or the United Nations, and say, “Here’s our plan for the next week.” And the E.U. looks at us and says, “We’re not onboard. We’re not going to do that.”

In fact, everyone saw the recent voting at the U.N. Security Council as victory for the U.S. But what really happened? The U.S. went in and said, “This is our position, take it or leave it.” Most of the Security Council, save Britain, said, “Leave it.” They locked arms with France rather than with us, which is what they’ve been doing for the last 50 years. That’s just the beginning of what the world could look like — main powers not working together. If it comes to that, then these other threats will diminish in importance and pale in comparison to a world in which the key players are no longer on the same sheet of music, in which Europe sets itself against us, rather than with us.

The illusion, however, is that we control the major international organizations. Also, we seem to be reaching out to NATO. How could we lose control of them?

We still do control them, but that control is slipping away in several respects. First of all, we see major institutions devolving against our wishes. The E.U. takes the lead and says, “You want to drive SUVs and drill wells in the Alaska wilderness? Well, we’re going to go ahead with the Kyoto Protocol without you. You don’t like the International Criminal Court? We’ll do it without you.” Does it hurt the ICC that we’re not there? Yes. But does it also start building a world where you have these other countries coming together with major steps forward and we’re not there? Yes. Does that degrade order? Yes.

In existing institutions we’ll find ourselves increasingly isolated. One of the reasons that we tend to have as much say as we do is that, for example, in the IMF, the U.S. has a larger share than any other country. But that’s because the countries are represented solely by their country representatives. If the E.U. starts coming together with its own single representative, then we will no longer be the dominant country. We’re not going to be able to go in and pound our fist on the table anymore.

It’s a subtle shift that I’m talking about and that’s why most people say, “Oh, it’s nothing compared to Osama bin Laden.” But, on the other hand, it’s the superstructure, it’s the guts of the international system, and that’s why the stakes are so high.

What issues and conflicts will we diverge on with the E.U.? The Middle East?

That’s probably the area where the U.S. and Europe most disagree. It’s quite striking if you go to Europe and turn on the TV. The presentation of the Arab-Israeli conflict is so different that you scratch your head and say, “What part of the world are they talking about?” That’s part of the problem. We reside in different mind-sets.

The trade and monetary issues will grow more difficult over time if the euro gradually rises. It’s a real challenger to the dollar. That’s going to make us look like we’re back in the 1930s where you had the pound sterling and the dollar together and the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of England trying to manage jointly the international economy. It didn’t work; the two went off in their own direction. Now it’s going to be the Federal Reserve vs. the European Central Bank. If we don’t get that relationship right, there could be very serious implications. We are so used to being alone at the top that it’s going to be hard for us to get used to that.

Where will England stand in all of this? They’re our best friends these days.

The Brits are right now trying to have their cake and eat it too. They’re kind of edging into the E.U. but also playing the traditional role of bridge to America. Those days are numbered. It’s a strategy that will diminish over time in terms of its utility, but also in terms of its political feasibility. The Brits will change their strategy to trying to change the Franco-German coalition into the Franco-German-British troika. That’s because if the Brits don’t get into the driver’s seat in Europe, they’ll be marginalized. My guess is that by 2005 and certainly by the end of the decade, the Brits will be buying their fish and chips with euros and they will be one of the engines behind European integration rather than lagging behind.

When Bush said you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists, was he trying to create a new map of the world, one that’s black and white and similar to the Cold War bipolar world? It’s almost nostalgic for the Cold War. Why would he want to do that, and why can’t that work with terrorism?

Part of it may be instrumental. It’s a useful talking point for both domestic and international politics. Part of it is sincere — the Bush people really do believe the world has changed and that it’s all about terrorism and either you are against the terrorists or with them.

First of all, that grossly distorts the implications of Sept. 11, in that I don’t think the world has changed all that much. Beneath the surface, the same old agenda is still relevant, it’s just got one new thing on it: terrorism. If we’re terrorism 24/7 we’re going to miss all those other issues. We’re going to miss the fact that we’re alienating the Europeans, we’re going to miss the fact that we have a potential environmental disaster looming on the horizon.

The other problem is that terrorism is a very weak reason upon which to build American internationalism. That’s partly because it’s not the type of threat that — similar to the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan — gets us riled up for the long haul. It’s elusive. We’re in this weird zone where we’re being told we’re at war but when asked what should we do about it, we’re supposed to go shopping and take vacations so that our planes have people on them. It doesn’t quite click. Something’s not right about this story. Some of the greatest successes in this battle will be the ones we never hear about — covert operations, the averted attack — and so in that sense, it’s very tough to get this country into a mode of centrist moderate internationalism on terrorism.

I also think — and this definitely cuts against the grain for now — that ultimately there will be a counterresponse. Right now, it’s, “Let’s go get the barbarians,” but over time there will be an alternative voice that says, “Let’s raise protective barriers, let’s get out of some of our overseas commitments.” Going back to the founding fathers, we can, because of our location, enjoy a sort of natural security.

Where’s that voice going to come from? The left or the right?

It’s going to come from all different quadrants. More from the right and the heartland than from the left. I make a point to give talks in Kansas and Texas, Birmingham and Nashville, and there’s just a different view of the world there. Even people who are involved in the international economy are not quite as gung ho about the American empire as we hear in Washington today. That’s why over time that voice will gain strength. It’s important to keep in mind that if you look at how other countries have responded to terrorism or how we have responded, sometimes it does make you pull in your horns. We got out of Lebanon in 1983, we left Aden when the Cole was bombed; Nigerian attacks on the French mainland got the French to leave Algeria. It’s not particularly politically correct to say so, but terrorism does engender one to hunker down.

What other alliances might we see? Where does China fit in all this?

In the near term, the main actor is Europe because it has the clout, population and economic weight. It’s beginning to have the collective character as the states pass more and more authority up to the supranational authority.

I spent less time on China in the book because most people exaggerate China’s importance. China is still a relatively small country economically with an economy smaller than California’s. Ten years from now China will be an Italy with nuclear weapons. Once you get into the second quarter of the century, 2025 and beyond, then China starts to begin to take its place as one of the top-ranking countries. Then, you might spend a lot more time worrying about China.

But, what do I think the most volatile relationship will be, the one that changes most this decade? It’s U.S.-Europe.

How will that affect ordinary Americans? What changes will we see if it’s not a military threat? I mean, the American people can’t see past terrorism right now because we can see very clearly what that threat is.

I’d say that right across the board there are some consequences. The trade and investment with Europe is very strong and healthy. If that becomes politicized it could be a problem. There are already looming disputes over biotech, bioengineered greens.

The disputes on other areas — on the Middle East, on Iran, on Iraq — could lead to trouble. NATO, which has been our main tool in influencing Europe, is withering on the vine, partly of our own doing. We’re just losing interest in Europe.

I’d probably put it in these terms: Europe will be our competitor but not necessarily our adversary. That’s why we’re in a switching point where we really have to get it right. Negotiating a treaty, rebuilding Afghanistan, dealing with the Middle East process — all that stuff usually moves forward with the U.S. taking the lead and Europe backing off. If we wake up one day and the U.S. tries to take the lead and Europe tells us to take a hike, then we’re in a brave new world. Doing business on a day-to-day basis becomes much more difficult. At the broadest level, all the money and lives that we expended since World War II to tame the international system and give it a benign character — all of that’s at stake. It’s possible that we could wake up and it will be 1935 and I don’t think any American wants that.

You do say that the unipolar world that we have now is a peaceful one and historically unipolar worlds are always peaceful. You say that a world without American primacy will be an unpredictable and unpleasant world. For everyone, or just for Americans?

Everybody. Even though a lot of countries wouldn’t necessarily say so, they’ve had a pretty good deal. Big Daddy’s been there and he takes care of everything. The Europeans don’t have to spend much on defense. China and Japan basically don’t like each other, but they’re not gnawing at each other’s heels because the U.S. keeps a presence there. We provide stability. What we’re seeing now is the end of that. The U.S. is decamping from Europe because we’ve got nothing else to do there, but it does leave the Europeans with the new onerous task of taking care of themselves. That’s going to be scary for them even though there’s a certain schizophrenia. The Europeans are annoyed with us but scared of what Europe will look like without the American pacifier. In the same respect, the Saudis believe that the U.S. destabilizes them but what happens if the U.S. leaves? The stakes are very high.

I’ll take a wild guess that most Americans will be surprised that Europe might challenge us. Are Europeans?

Depends on what you mean. They will never be a superpower; they’re never going to spend the money to rival the U.S. in military terms. What we’ll see is that they will build up enough capability to take care of the Balkans and other small conflicts, and the U.S. will take care of other parts of the world. Sort of a division of labor. But that division of labor means the end of the Atlantic alliance.

You say most Americans will be surprised at this and I think that’s right. I don’t think most Europeans will be. This issue gets much more traction there. They are engaged in international issues in ways that we are now. There is this abiding sense that we’re all in the same family, that these are our cousins. That’s probably what will keep us from going to war, but it’s not going to keep us from drifting apart.

So how do you fear that America might react to this?

The worst that we can do is bite back. The historical analogy that is most useful here is what happened in the 19th century when America rose because it federated. Basically, history is reversing itself: This time we’re at the top and Europe is coming together, last time Europe was at the top and we came together. There wasn’t war over America’s rise because the British made room for us. They cut deals on all kinds of issues and they said we need to have a rapprochement with the rising great power, America. We ought to do the same thing.

We ought to say: Europe is rising, Europe wants voice, influence, and we’re going to make room. I don’t think that we’ve been doing that. We’re still in the mode of “How dare you challenge us?” Probably the best anecdote is about the E.U. Defense Force. The U.S. fought the war over Kosovo, and then Congress said, “This is ridiculous. This is not our problem. Europe, you need to spend more and build your own military.” So Europe said, “OK.” And then the U.S. went bonkers: “What do you mean you’re going to build your own military? You don’t love us anymore?”

Europe is growing up and leaving home to go to college and we’re just not ready for it. We ought to say, “Go to college, be independent, and just call us once a year or something.”

But you don’t think that terrorism is the unifying great threat that it’s been made out to be?

No. Everyone was saying, “Aha, the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century!” This couldn’t be further from the truth. We have quite rapidly drifted back to disengagement.

Couldn’t a couple more attacks change that?

Yes. That’s the big unknown. If a nuclear weapon goes off, God forbid, if there’s another catastrophic attack, then I think we’re in a brave new world. Do I think it will bring the country together and make us internationalist? I don’t know. It could also make us pull in and retreat. It’s dangerous to be confident that terrorism is the sort of threat that will keep us engaged in the world. It does the opposite — pushing us to both unilateralist and isolationist extremes.

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About the writer Suzy Hansen is an assistant editor at Salon.

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