American Expansionism Explored

Professor Philip Golub, of the University of Paris, spoke about his new book recently, and posted the article below on the LSE IDEAS blog. I reproduce it here in full because it chimes so well with themes that I have explored on USBlog and which may be of interest more generally. Philip's book is entitled Power Profit and Prestige: A History of American Expansionism Pluto Press)

On 5th October 2010, Philip S Golub spoke at IDEAS to launch his new book, 'Power, Profit and Prestige: A History of American Expansionism'. Here he sets out the core rationale behind his argument for the emergence of an 'imperial cosmology' among American leaders.

In the 1990s, after decades of hand wringing over American “decline”, influential parts of the US power elite began dreaming of a new “American Century” and an expanded “American peace”. This was a broad ideational trend, encompassing nationalist and internationalist segments of the foreign policy and security establishment who, notwithstanding varying prescriptions regarding world order, interpreted the end of the Cold War as an historic opportunity to reassert and expand US power and authority. By the end of the decade the main strands of elite opinion, casually comparing the US to Rome at its height, were celebrating the US’ “unparalleled ascendancy around the globe...unrivalled by even the greatest empires of the past” (Henry Kissinger).

Imperial imaginings were particularly pronounced in the national security complex and the neo-conservative right, which harboured extravagant visions of “global empire” and lasting strategic monopoly. At the turn of the century, imperial outlooks pervaded a new administration that sought, in Condoleezza Rice’s words, to “capitalize on [the opportunities offered] by the shifting of the tectonic plates in international politics” and establish a new world order under exclusive US authority. Striving for unbounded autonomy, the Bush administration launched a methodical assault on the UN system, abandoned international law, and initiated a new phase of military mobilization and imperial expansion in Central Asia and the Gulf. The unintended but predictable result of this effort to curb pluralism was a severe erosion of US political legitimacy and an accentuation of the systemic movement towards polycentrism that it was intended to inhibit.

Power, Profit and Prestige aims to make sense of this turbulent phase of world politics and assess its consequences by situating contemporary change in historic and comparative perspective. Rejecting lazy explanations that dismiss US monopoly-seeking behaviour as an aberration or a “mistake”, and contesting structural realist assumptions that it was simply induced by the power maximising mechanics of international anarchy, the book argues in favour of a historical sociological approach that studies state formation and collective identity construction in the longue durée.

Excavating an imperial past that never passed, it weaves together the material and ideational dimensions of the long US expansionary experience and shows how the post-Cold War imperial urge, the conditions of possibility of which were created by the new power asymmetry, can be traced back to a causa remota: a pervasive culture of expansion and force, rooted in deep currents of late-modern transatlantic imperial history. The book thus highlights the remarkable kinship between the worldviews of late nineteenth century expansionists and those of their successors who presided over the post-1945 American Pax. It argues that this continuity reflects an underlying imperial cosmology, which US elites shared with their European counterparts, that emerged in the late modern period about the ordering of the world, cultural hierarchy, and the destiny of the West to be at the centre and the apex.

Like late nineteenth century expansionists who imagined American world-empire as destiny, since the 1940s US leaders have conceived of Pax Americana as the natural and necessary outcome of a historical process of imperial selection and succession. Notwithstanding changing international and domestic circumstances, foundational assumptions regarding the US’ world historical role and international hierarchy have varied only slightly from one period and one administration to another. With very few exceptions, leaders have perceived the US as the necessary centre of the cosmos, with other nations and societies in orbit around it.
New leaders, however liberal and democratic in outlook are constrained by the US’ logic of world power and its structures of reproduction. Even if he so wished, Barack Obama cannot erase the past or simply decide to liquidate the imperial system that he has inherited and will briefly preside over. Like many of his predecessors, he is caught in the same bind as reformist British Liberal and Labour leaders in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries who found, once in power, in Elisabeth Monroe’s words, that “a worldwide empire...cannot change direction overnight”. Looking to the future, Power, Profit and Prestige argues that the US will nonetheless have to come to terms with the fact that globalisation has shifted the world’s tectonic plates in unforeseen ways and that the western era of dominance is now slowly coming to an end.

Philip S. Golub is a widely published author and Contributing Editor of Le Monde Diplomatique. He teaches International Relations and International Political Economy at the Institut d'etudes europeennes, Universite Paris 8 and at the American University of Paris (AUP).

Disaster in Afghanistan

This article appeared in the excellent NATO WATCH Observatory, October 2010: it clarifies matters in regard to Afghanistan today and places in context the statements being made by President Obama, Premier Cameron, and General Petraeus. It is reproduced in full below:

NATO Watch Editorial:

Blowing security bubbles in Afghanistan

By Ian Davis and Ben Thomas

When British forces handed over control of Sangin to the Americans recently Prime Minister David Cameron was adamant that the 106 servicemen killed in action in that country over the last nine years had not died in vain, stating that “they made Afghanistan a safer place and they have made Britain a safer place and they will never be forgotten”. Meanwhile General Petraeus has been talking about his work over the last two months to get a "feel" for the security situation in Afghanistan. He drew comparisons between the current situation in Afghanistan and the situation in Iraq a few months after the 2007 surge began there. With the surge forces ordered last year to Afghanistan by President Barack Obama now in place, the current strategy, General Petraeus said, revolves around expanding what he calls
"security bubbles".

Under the security-bubble strategy, troops are expected to create a continuous safe zone in the most populous areas of the south, where the Taliban are strongest, and push violence to rural areas on the fringes. "I am constantly looking at the shape of the security bubble and how we can link one security bubble to another," said General Petraeus. With similar efforts playing out in northern and eastern Afghanistan, the counterinsurgency campaign is focused on lessening violence and restoring confidence in President Hamid Karzai's government. Within established security bubbles General Petraeus plans to thin out international forces and replace them with Afghan forces.

However, such announcements are increasingly at odds with the realities of the political and security situation in Afghanistan where levels of violence remain high. A helicopter crash that killed nine troops in the NATO-led mission last week made this the deadliest year for the force, bringing the total number of ISAF troops killed this year to at least 529. Afghanistan civilian casualties are spiralling even higher: up 31% on the first six months of this year. Nearly 2,000 Afghan policemen and some 3,600 Afghan civilians were killed or injured in the insurgency period.

Moreover, widespread reports of rigging during the parliamentary elections in Afghanistan have reinforced doubts over the capacity of Afghanistan’s patronage-based political system to deliver the reforms envisioned by NATO membersand further undermine efforts to find a workable solution to the Afghan problem.

At the heart of the problem is the lack of any real unified political purpose in NATO’s Afghan strategy or any realistic and acceptable end state for operations there. Al Qaeda—the very reason for intervention in the first place—has been
reduced to a peripheral entity (at least in Afghanistan), while the Taliban retain enough residual support, especially in rural areas, to ensure that no acceptable political outcome is likely to succeed without their inclusion. As such,
NATO forces seem to have become stuck in a quagmire – the initial mission having largely been accomplished while the realities on the ground have surely put paid to any grandiose conceptions of building a democratic Afghan nation.
Essentially all that appears to be left is the search for a face-saving exit strategy.

This, then, is the dilemma that faces military commanders on the ground, who, lacking any real political guidance as to how to proceed, are desperately seeking to establish a security space within which some form—any form—of political progress can be made. This seemed to be the message from Major General Nick Carter when he spoke of the need to ‘dominate’ Kandahar in order to create a security space (he avoided calling it a bubble) within which a political solution could be found. At a carefully choreographed media briefing on 7 September, Maj. Gen. Carter outlined current military operations in the province and efforts to build the capacity of Afghan Security Forces. He told
the audience that if NATOtroops could improve the security situation in Kandahar whilst building local services and
governance capacity then over time the Afghan people’s confidence in government might gradually be restored.

Like General Petraeus, the British commander was essentially placing the NATO effort in Afghanistan in the same context as the US surge in Iraq. While force in Iraq did bring a temporary halt to the deadly sectarian violence that was threatening to engulf the country in civil war, and as such could be regarded as a qualified success,
it did so mostly because of a confluence of factors: Muqtada al-Sadr’s unilateral ceasefire, the American-sponsored ‘Sunni awakening’ as well as the military surge (and perhaps also the rather inconvenient truth that much of the country had in reality been 'ethnically cleansed' by the time the surge was fully underway). In Afghanistan, however, the coalition is battling an insurgency drawn almost entirely from Pashtuns, the country's largest and traditionally
dominant ethnic group. In addition, rampant levels of corruption, weak governmental structures and the fragmented nature of Afghan society (especially increasing tension between the Pashtuns and the smaller Tajik, Uzbek and
Hazara ethnic groups) make it unlikely that any successful military campaign would be accompanied by the sort of political improvements that were trumpeted in Iraq. What is perhaps hoped for, but largely left unsaid, is that NATO will leave behind an Afghan security force competent enough to strong-arm enough of the country to maintain a relatively stable order into the near future (or at least until the next US and British election cycle). So the reality is that
NATO troops are being sacrificed for short-term political expediency in Western capitals and the creation of a corrupt
and authoritarian regime of questionable efficiency in Kabul.

Indeed, the evidence strongly suggests that the NATO presence in Afghanistan is itself acting as a radicalising process for young Islamic militants, and rather than ‘making Britons safer’ the mission is actually making them less so. Indeed, even General Petraeus attributes the rise in violence in the past two years in Afghanistan in part to the massive spike in allied forces. "I can trace the line of the violence, right along the security bubble," Gen. Petraeus said. "When we have an operation going on, people shoot back from their sanctuaries and safe havens", he added. Well, there’s a surprise, the blighters have the audacity to shoot back! The National Army Museum in London currently has an exhibition entitled ‘The Road to Kabul: British Armies in Afghanistan, 1838–1919’. The
advertising poster, in an uncanny echo to modern times, quotes Field Marshal Frederick Roberts, one of the most successful commanders of the Victorian era, as saying (in 1880): I feel sure I am right when I say that the less
the Afghans see of us, the less they will dislike us.

The current strategy rests on the hope that NATO forces can batter the Taliban to the negotiating table. And while Maj. Gen. Carter was adamant that the initiative had swung back in favour of NATO forces in Kandahar, without further political progress military action is only likely to provide limited and short-term success. In the meantime politicians back home continue to give their citizens platitudes that have long ceased to be relevant and NATO troops and Afghan civilians continue to die for an unpalatable but ‘necessary’ end state.

A recent report by the US-based Afghanistan Study Group claims that “US interests at stake in Afghanistan do not warrant this level of sacrifice” and that “prospects for success are dim”. It is hard to disagree with that conclusion as well as the report’s main recommendation: the need for a “new way forward” based on reconciliation among the warring parties, economic development, and region-wide diplomatic engagement. The real tragedy of the conflict is that none of the options left open are very appealing and any outcome is likely to be riddled with uncomfortable compromises. However, while the focus remains on expanding security bubbles, the prospects for a comprehensive peace settlement in Afghanistan continue to fade and die.

Ian Davis is director of NATO Watch and
Ben Thomas is a post-graduate student at
Kings College, London

Neo-Cons, having Declared History's End, Try to Reclaim the Past

Having declared that History ended around 1989, it seems that some neo-conservatives are keen also to reclaim aspects of History as 'their' achievement. In particular, it was claimed by a prominent scholar that the Marshall Plan, among other postwar US foreign policies, was a "quintessentially neo-conservative" policy. This was at a recent (excellent) conference of the BISA US Foreign Policy Group at Leeds University.

In later exchanges, the neo-conservative scholar marshalled arch-neo-conservative, Joshua Muravchik, to the cause:
Cold War policies, Muravchik argues, "were muscular policies (we were spending roughly 10 percent of our GNP on defense), to which today's neoconservatism is the heir much more than today's liberalism. While realist policy following the First World War led to unparalleled disaster, neocon policies after the second achieved what was arguably the most perfect success in the history of statecraft-our relatively bloodless victory over a foe possessing the most ponderous military machine ever assembled".

Further more, the argument, it is claimed, was endorsed by no less a source than (neo-conservative?) President Barack Obama in December 2009:
"the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions-not just treaties and declarations-that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms".

I don't think that we are in disagreement about fundamentals: the bigger point is correct: the dispute seems to be over what label one applies to the sources of such cold war policies. Perhaps we shd call it 'liberal-internationalist realism' as neither liberal-internationalism nor realism fully captures the blend.

Neo-conservatism, on the other hand, seems to over play the hand: solid conservatives in the 1950s were frequently opposed to Korea, NATO, Marshall aid, Point 4, the UN. So, to the extent that 'neo-cons' (who were they? Was Paul Nitze a neo-con?) can claim to be heirs of Truman, it was in their liberal anti-communist crusade and in their militancy. That unifies them (whoever they were) with the dominant US national security tendency arguing for US preponderance: the US FP establishment. Since neo-cons were not anywhere close to being the tendency they became in the 1970s and after, I doubt that they can be considered the authors of Truman's liberal internationalist realism: that lies much more closely in the contributions of Dean Acheson, partly of George Kennan, in the post-June 1950 period of militarised containment (so ably documented by Jerry Sanders in Peddlers of Crisis), and in activities of a range of elite organisations of which the CFR is a good representative.

The other point of course is that programmes like Marshall aid, but also IMF/World Bank, and even German/Japanese reconstruction, were heavily reliant on the almost two decades of New Deal economic thinking, at the heart of which sat economic and social planning. The recently published excellent book by Jeff Bridoux, American Foreign Policy and Postwar Reconstruction, makes the point brilliantly and with powerful historical evidence.

The neocons of today are not noted for their support of such tendencies, even if some of their ancestors might have been relatively liberal on domestic affairs, except McCarthyism. Their general bent was towards economic liberalism/neo-liberalism; that came to fruition in the 1970s in particular and via the Reagan revolution.

Having declared the End of History, neo-conservatives (minus Francis Fukuyama) seem to want to claim their heroic role in its demise.

Guess what? History marches on and simply asserting that neo-conservatives shaped it does not make it so. And the historical record more than amply demonstrates that.

“What Soviet Threat?” What If Attlee’s Radicalism Had Prevailed?

“What Soviet Threat?” What If Attlee’s Radicalism Had Prevailed?

Although British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee (1945-51), is properly known as a Cold Warrior no less gung-ho than his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, or the American president, Harry Truman, less well known is Attlee’s rejection of the salience of the Soviet ‘threat’ and promotion of a policy of closing British bases in the Mediterranean and Middle East. Had he prevailed, Clement Attlee may have changed the the role of Britain in the postwar world, prevented the Americans from relying on Britain’s support in numerous foreign wars, and thrust a relatively disarmed, more prosperous Britain into a leading role in a European superstate.

But, of course, Attlee did not get his way and we all know where that led: the 'special relationship' with the United States that lasts till today, a position of subservience in defence of a particular interpretation of British interests as world-wide and requiring very high levels of military spending and an ability and willingness to ‘punch above its weight’ in world affairs. This not only caused Britain (under Attlee) to follow America’s intervention in Korea (1950-53), but also to Harold Wilson’s support short of war (i.e., ground troops) to President Lyndon Johnson’s war on Vietnam, and to Tony Blair’s unflinching backing for George W. Bush’s wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.

What precisely did Attlee do that was, on the face of it, so radical? And how did the British military and foreign policy establishments react?

It seems that Clement Attlee (rather naively, according to Churchill’s more ‘realistic’ foreign secretary, Anthony Eden who, it must be recalled, was later to attack Nasser’s Egypt for the temerity to desire control of Egypt’s Suez Canal) took seriously the idea of the United Nations as an international organisation for peace. Attlee thought that rather than holding on to a series of expensive naval and military bases in the Mediterranean Sea and in Egypt, and thereby constitute to Soviet eyes a military threat to the communist superpower, Britain ought to internationalise the defence of the route to India and the east, as well as come to an understanding with the Soviet Union. To Attlee, what looked like defence of British interests to his colleagues in the Foreign Office looked like aggressive preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union to Stalin. This remarkable insight, because of its novelty among the political establishment, earned Attlee opprobrium from the Admiral Cunningham, the First Sea Lord: “What an ass!” retorted Cunningham.

Yet, for a time, Attlee was undaunted. “Where’s the [global] danger now?” he asked: “there was no one to fight.” In almost panto-fashion, Cold Warrior, Ernest Bevin invoked the Soviet Threat – positions vacated by Britain would fall under Soviet control and, one by one, the dominoes would fall. Yet, the Joint Intelligence Committee estimated that the Soviets were unlikely to risk a major war for at least 5 years, given the devastation visited upon that country by Nazi bombardment. But Bevin was undeterred: “It would be Munich over again, only on a world scale, with Greece, Turkey and Persia as the first victims in place of Czechoslovakia. If I am right about Russian ideology, Russia would certainly fill the gap we leave empty whatever her promises…” Attlee refused to budge.

Then, quite suddenly, Attlee changed his mind. Why? The Chiefs of Staff, under Lord Montgomery of Alamein, threatened en masse to resign should Attlee persist in opposing their desire to hold Britain’s positions in the Middle East. And that is pretty much the last the world was to hear of Attlee’s foreign policy radicalism.

What if he had prevailed? Would Britain have withdrawn from its military commitments across the Middle East, Asia and the Far East? Could it have then done without American financial support and built an even stronger welfare state? Would it have seen the ‘loss’ of Korea as just one more domino or, more likely, refused military support for American intervention in Korea? Britain would probably have been unlikely thereafter to intervene in Middle Eastern affairs, perhaps, including helping overthrow the Mossadegh regime in Iran in 1952, invading Egypt with the French and Israelis in 1956 or, perhaps, in putting down the communist-nationalist insurgency in Malaya in the 1950s and 1960s.

Of course, we will never know, though Attlee was still committed to defending the British Empire: but the question is still worth pondering.

Clement Attlee, David Cameron and the Special Relationship With India

British Prime Minister David Cameron recently declared his wish to build – or rather renew – Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with India. The likelihood of that, I suspect, is strong mainly because of the character of India’s elite, and the evolution of that society since 1947 when India won its freedom from British rule. But what kind of independent Indian elite did Britain leave behind? How independent was it?

As Indian independence day approached - August 15 1947 – an Indian ‘nationalist’, one M.R. Jayarkar, wrote to the-then British prime minister, Clement Attlee, that Attlee had “enabled Macaulay’s hope to be fulfilled”. Attlee himself regarded Indian independence “probably” to be his greatest achievement – ahead of the formation of NATO, sending British troops in support of the American war in Korea, building the welfare state and socialising large sectors of the British economy. That the transition to Indian rule occurred relatively peacefully (that is, British forces withdrew rather than being driven into the sea) and into the ‘right’ hands was central to Attlee’s evaluation.

But what sort of ‘independence’ did Attlee have in mind and negotiate with Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders of the ‘freedom’ struggle? There is an interesting clue in Attlee’s private papers which I have had the privilege of reading over the past few weeks.

Among those papers, held at Oxford’s Bodleian library, there is an interesting item dated 8 July 1947, just a few weeks ahead of India’s ‘tryst with destiny’. One entry of special interest contains quotations from two nineteenth-century imperial administrators – Sir Henry Montgomery Lawrence and Mountstuart Elphinstone – both of whom foresaw the ‘end of empire’. Rather than despairing of what they both believed to be an historical inevitability, Lawrence and Elphinstone, among others, urged British rulers to prepare the way for a peaceful, negotiated settlement with the sort of people that could be trusted to govern India in an ‘enlightened’ and noble manner, i.e., ensure the security of British interests. Which brings us to Lord Macaulay, according to whom Britain needed to foster a class of Indian middlemen “who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect.”

Henry Lawrence argued the same: “We cannot expect to hold India for ever,” he noted in his Essays, Military and Political. “[W] hen the connection ceases [let us hope] that it may do so, not with convulsions….”, presumably because ‘convulsions’ might bring ‘disorder’ and ‘chaos’ and a movement for revolutionary change as well as political independence. Lawrence hoped for an India that would be “a noble ally, enlightened and brought into the scale of nations under her guidance and fostering care.” This was in the 1850s, before the Indian ‘mutiny’ or, rather, the first war of independence.

Montstuart Elphinstone, before he rose to become Governor of Bombay in the 1850s, noted in his journal that, “The moral is that we must not dream of perpetual possession, but must apply ourselves to bring the natives into a state… beneficial to our interest as well as their own, and that of the rest of the world.” Twenty years earlier, Elphinstone wrote in his diary that “The most desirable course for events in that country to take is that European opinions and knowledge should spread until the nation becomes capable of founding a government of its own, on principles of which Europe has long had exclusive possession.”

India today is a ‘rising power’ and has come a long way since 1947 and all that. No point blaming the British now. Yet, its self-conscious Anglophile and English-speaking elite is open for business, eager for a place at the world’s top table, while over half its one billion+ people live and die in shameful poverty. Did India merely exchange one set of elites for another to preside over a subcontinent, making a mockery of the term ‘independence’? I suspect that this is the vision Attlee had for India. Certainly he appreciated Nehru’s role at the UN and as Britain’s virtual shadow during the Korean war, boosting Attlee’s stance in ‘moderating’ the more aggressive President Truman, and in his jockeying for position – another special relationship - with the United States. India’s elite may very well believe that their time has come and Lawrence, Elphinstone, Macaulay, and Attlee, having laid the foundations, may well have got what they hoped for: the Indian elite is ready to serve its own interests, Britain’s interests, and probably America’s broader strategy towards China. But they all forget one thing: all those people who don’t figure in the Indian dream – the bulk of the country’s population who, it now seems, are not even worthy of Britain’s foreign aid.

Anglo-American Relations: The Special Relationship Marches On

Even as British leaders, and the media, proclaim the imminent death of the 'special relationship' with the United States, they cannot seem to help backing America's line in world affairs. Last week, when Prime Minister David Cameron was in Turkey, he rather 'boldly' (for a British leader), criticised Israeli policies in Gaza. He stated, rather obviously, that Gaza resembled a prison camp.

A day or two later, in India, Cameron found himself criticising the Pakistan authorities for supporting and exporting terrorism - again, claims controversial only because made by a British leader of a staunch ally/patron of the United States.

The previous week, of course, David Cameron, had been visiting President Obama in Washington, DC. Prior to that, Cameron had asked everyone to not obsess about the special relationship. During the election campaign, he had criticised New Labour's Gordon Brown of "slavish" dependence on the United States. In turn, Obama has been, it is said, somewhat 'cold' towards Britain (and Europe), and rather warmer towards India and China, emerging powers rather than waning ones.

Interesting how Cameron's criticisms of Israel and of Pakistan echo almost identical comments made by Obama, Clinton and other high officials in Washington, DC. And interesting too that Cameron seeks a 'special relationship' with India at precisely the moment that the United States elevates that country on its own global agenda.

Children of a Lesser God

Children of a Lesser God

All men may well be born equal but their deaths certainly betray huge inequalities. A month or so ago (24 June, to be precise), Michael Tomasky, GuardianAmerica’s editor at large, wrote that the chances were that Obama’s military strategy in Afghanistan was likely to work but that a lot of people “will die along the way”. But, he noted, at least America was doing “something decent” there, so the sacrifice – in Western lives - would not be in vain. Just yesterday (29 July), Maureen Dowd, in the International Herald Tribune, noted how America always ends up with egg on its face, and a knife in its back, despite trying to do “the right thing”, the decent thing. Dowd was referring to attempts to train a national army in that tragic land.

How easily are such sentiments expressed. Tens of thousands of Afghans have been killed in the past decade of the ‘war on terror’, waged in pursuit of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. So what are a few thousand more? They’re just Afghans, after all, and who’s really counting their casualties anyway? There are plenty more where they came from. And this from Tomasky, a liberal critic.

Around about 1983, the eminent Marxist scholar, EP Thompson, wrote an article in The Guardian about the relative worth of lives according to race and ethnicity. I don’t recall the details but its import was that if you are black or brown or, at least, NOT white, casualty numbers and deaths hardly matter, because such lives are cheap. He was employing irony and wit, long gone from the pens of ‘serious’ columnists on foreign affairs today.

And America always does the “decent” thing? In Afghanistan? Iraq? Guantanamo Bay? Backing an illegitimate and corrupt warlord like Karzai who stole the last election and still managed to get less than the constitutionally-required 50% of the vote? This is evidence of amnesia on a stupendous scale, standard fare in the media, however. The release of over 90,000 documents via Wikileaks, it is said, is “damaging” to the American effort in Afghanistan, particularly the ‘revelation’ that innocent people have been killed and that Pakistani intelligence services have been backing elements in the Taleban insurgency. This is news? In the realm of myth, weaved by media spin, Wikileaks’ ‘expose’ really shakes the world. For the rest of us, who read the very newspapers that so loudly proclaim THIS news, the leaked material was already well known.

Some neo-conservatives (remember them?) argue that the 1990s were a holiday from history – responsible leaders just weren’t taking seriously the threats that were emerging in the post-Cold War World, especially Islamic fundamentalism. What they failed to recognise then, and what liberal commentators fail to recognise today, is that those threats resulted from America’s history of doing the ‘decent thing’ in backing the Mujaheddin against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, paying the Pakistani military regime to fund, arm and train Osama bin Laden, stationing a garrison in Saudi Arabia, and steadfastly supporting Israel against the Palestinians, incubating long-term resentment and outright hatred of American double standards in the Middle East. Is it too much to expect Great Powers to learn the lessons of the past?