America’s Moment, or
How to Turn a Crisis into an Opportunity
President Obama’s recent visit to the United Kingdom to
intervene in support of the Remain (in the European Union) campaign was an
attempt to prevent the further unravelling of the US-led world system which is
in severe crisis at home and facing significant problems abroad. A united
Europe – as a bulwark against the Soviet ‘threat’ and as a market for US goods
and investment – was an American project. It threatens to disintegrate under
the pressure of the Eurozone crisis, the refugee problem engulfing the continent
as result of past US interventions in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and the rise of
European nationalisms on the Left and extreme Right. The solution: forge a new
grand bargain at home and abroad that allows for diffused leadership serving a broader
range of national and class interests in the global polity. More democracy and
equality, and less liberty and more state regulation or outright control of the
forces of the market that have devastated working class and poor communities
through unrestrained globalisation.
Obama’s intervention in the Brexit debate links his position
therein to the crisis of Europe, where the Right is on the march, and received
the hardly-coded race card response from Boris Johnson and others from the Vote
Leave (the EU) campaign (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-suggests-part-kenyan-obama-may-have-an-ancestral-dislike-of-britain-a6995826.html);
in the Middle East, where the US and Britain actively disordered the region
after 9-11 that led directly to the rise of Islamic State; and at home, as
demonstrated by the anti-establishment turmoil of the US primaries. Obama’s
intervention points to the crisis of an international order established in the
1940s that froze power relations and has changed little over the past 70 years,
and a domestic party system inaugurated by Reaganomics and social conservatism
in 1980 that has yielded power to the market and Wall St corporations.
Yet, the
world has changed and power relations need to change with it. America’s
imperial paternalism, that brooks no one else’s nationalism, and even brands
some variants of its own as ‘isolationism’, needs to diminish to permit others
to exercise the responsibilities of statehood, to develop a stronger stake in the
global order, and better manage the world of the twenty-first century. And that
grand bargain must be reflected and anchored at home in a political realignment
– currently being fashioned by the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders insurgencies
- that takes into account the interests of young people, the working poor and
the squeezed middle, and engineer and discipline a more socially responsible
and politically-accountable financial elite, the 0.1% that since the 1990s has
led the corporate takeover of American politics and the current inequalities of
income, wealth and power.
Many frame the issue from conservative positions – producing
blueprints for a slightly reformed US-led order. One has only to look at the
reports coming out of Brookings, the Council on Foreign Relations and the
legion of scholars at America’s many elite academies – such as Princeton’s Woodrow
Wilson School (for example, http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/order-from-chaos/posts/2016/02/17-five-countries-international-liberal-order-piccone).
But their flawed US-centric framing leads to a status quo set of conclusions,
while actually there is an historic opportunity presented by crisis for a renegotiation
of global order or perhaps a series of negotiations – thematic and regional and
other - to reshape and fashion a new settlement for the new century.
Dominant framings of the issue leads to an
omission of any serious consideration of the opportunities presented by Donald Trump’s
critique of the US role in world – the questioning of its principal post-1945
institutions and relationships. For raising those questions alone, the GOP’s
primaries front-runner is branded an isolationist. But Trump’s challenge is
more than “isolationism”; isolationism is an epithet used by foreign policy
establishment people to undermine practically any opposition to their
interpretation of America’s global role. Trump is an “America First-er”, not an
isolationist, and questions the various alliances and institutions that the
US-led order built and rests upon. Trump’s challenge – whether or not he wins
the nomination or the general election – will not go away, because it’s one
raised on the Left by Bernie Sanders too. Between Trump and Sanders, and the
ratchet effect of Sanders on Clinton, there is a structural problem highlighted
by their current popularity that is deep-seated and enduring and has now come
to a head in a popular revolt against the American elite.
The
conservatism of entirely US-centric solutions and critiques of Trump (and
Sanders) also elides serious critiques of either the inequalities of the US-led
international order or of its effects at home on the majority of Americans
whose income shares and wealth have diminished steadily since the 1970s and who
are fully aware of the inequities of power and wealth distributions and reject
the elites of both parties in such great numbers.
The
domestic crisis of US liberal order and its global problems are related but are
not insoluble. They require a realignment at home and abroad. Otherwise, narrow
nationalist impulses will come to the fore while at the moment there is an opportunity
to redefine and reshape globalisation to benefit and not damage so many people,
to hollow out the state in its social functions, cutting adrift large swathes
of people.
This
may be an historic moment of opportunity presented by crisis; the dominant
concepts are no longer working adequately, fixed in old global power relations
from 1945, slightly tweaked and absorbed in the 1970s, broadly incorporating as
apprentices global south ‘middle class’ powers like India, China, Brazil etc..
– what are today called the BRICS. When the West was confronted with the
triumph of the oil producing states of the Arab world and the challenge of the
G-77 third world states demanding a New International Economic Order, elites
did what they’d done with the domestic rise of working class reform movements –
buy them off (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1975-10-01/united-states-and-third-world-basis-accommodation).
Those days, and that kind of thinking, may be long gone.
Defending
the status quo is to defend the iniquitous past. A defence of the status quo
that focuses too much on Trump and Sanders (and Brexit) as threats, rather than
as pointing the way to a new order, is a road to nowhere but the rise of the
radical Right and the forces of backward-looking nationalism and chauvinism. There
is sufficient force in the rise of Trump and Sanders which suggests there are
significant bases for future positive change.
What
the new order will look like is the big issue, not whether there should be one
at all. This is the major question of our time.
Inderjeet
Parmar is professor of international politics, and co-director of the Centre
for International Policy Studies, at City University London
Follow
him on twitter - https://twitter.com/USEmpire
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