Dispensing with Indispensability

By Fester

The recent Georgian-Russian conflict that was overtly about the territory of South Ossetia produced an interesting convergence of reactions in the United States political spectrum that was bipartisan in its intensity and origination.  This reaction of outrage, bombast and mild shock was interesting only if you believed at some point in Francis Fukuyama's proclamation that history was dead as history had just become a chronology of the waiting period as autocracies became liberal democracies that embraced the Washington Consensus. 

Secretary of State Madeline Albright proclaimed that the United States was the "indispensible nation", and President Clinton also proudly proclaimed America's indispensability in his second inauguration.  This rhetoric and worldview had as partial underpinnings of political opportunism and exceptionalism, but these are constants in all American foreign policy pronouncements, therefore they are not analytically interesting.  So what prompted this round of indispensability that is a fairly recent innovation into American foreign policy rhetoric?

For the second time in fifty five years, the United States had seen its greatest competitors lie in ruins; Germany, Japan and Russia laid in war time ruins in 1945 while Russia and the rest of the Eastern Bloc laid in economic ruins first caused by the inefficiencies and perverse incentives of Communism and centralized economic planning and then further reduced by economic Shock Therapy. In both situations, the United States or its closest allies controlled the only global expeditionary military forces backed by intact and functioning industrial might.  Furthermore, there were few hard constraints on American economic growth that were not controlled by the United States or its closest allies.  The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was an illustration of American indispensibility --- the 10 US divisions and 1,500 aircraft were the key components of an international coalition that was defending access to the choke point commodity of economic growth; cheap crude oil.  The brigade and air wing that enforced the no-fly zones was a cheap garrison that we could easily afford.   

The 1990s promoted an explosion of articles claiming unipolar worlds, a conceptual concert of a flattening world, and later on a plethora of absurd theories of global savings gluts and periphery to core financing where the periphery �happily� received security and transparency services from the United States.  Our economic prosperity was based on a hard dollar policy that sucked dollars in to build the second wave of the Internet and the DotCom boom and bust.  Even after it busted, we were still a dollar sink for the world.  Our indispensability was both enhanced and threatened on September 11th; non-state actors on a budget smaller than that of most bad B-movies was able to kill 3,000 individuals and create a massive inflection point in American foreign policy where the consensus reaction was to be stupid and irrational.  Our indispensability was seemingly enhanced as the world rallied to support the United States; Nous sommes tous Americains; oui. 

This enhancement of acceptable power was broadly supported.  A massive and unusual coalition formed to support  the invasion, occupation and reconstruction of Afghanistan.  Our non-compliance with international norms in Iraq had minimal immediate consequences.  The neoconservatives who have been the loudest advocates for American indispensiability as a get out of international norms card trumpeted their triumphs in 2003 at the failure of counter-balancing and constraints. Richard Perle wrote the seminal example of this indispensability means never being constrained:

What will die is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions.... For Lady Williams (and many others), the thumb on the scale of judgment about this war is the idea that only the UN Security Council can legitimize the use of force. It matters not if troops are used only to enforce the UN's own demands. A willing coalition of liberal democracies isn't good enough. If any institution or coalition other than the UN Security Council uses force, even as a last resort, "anarchy", rather than international law, would prevail, destroying any hope for world order. This is a dangerously wrong idea that leads inexorably to handing great moral and even existential politico-military decisions, to the likes of Syria, Cameroon, Angola, Russia, China and France......

Yet at this same time, the indispensability of the United States was becoming dispensable as our needs and whims along with the promised carrots could not overwhelm Turkish public opinion and political consensus.  The Turks did not cave to US demands to allow the 4th Infantry Division to invade northern Iraq through Turkish territory. Arrogance encouraged the whispers of US support for a Turkish military coup if the civilian and democratic government did not agree to a US invasion force for Iraq.  And this was a war for democracy, or at least it would be promoted as such a couple of years later. 

And yet American indispensability within the world system or more accurately the confluence of short term events that had elevated the United States to non-disputable prominence began to founder upon the invasion of Iraq.  Soft power has declined, the naked example of simplistic hubris and aggression negates most countervailing examples of the good of American power can do for interested stakeholders, the US military has been tied down, and the American economy has been moving sideways at best for most of the decade for most of the population.  At the same time, the loose dollar policy of the Bush administration and the Greenspan/Bernanke Federal Reserve has flooded the world with liquidity which means other nations' don't need our dollars.  We now need their savings to maintain the patina of growth. 

Russia does not need the Washington Consensus and does not need to restrict itself to a restrained and shrinking sphere of influence.  In 1998, Russia was too poor and too dependent on the United States, the West and the IMF to feed itself; now Russia holds half a trillion dollars in depreciating reserves.  It is not constrained to the same degree when it reached its economic nadir. 

And it is this thought frame that is provoking a shock; the constraints that have limited other nations no longer apply to them to the same degree; instead some of those same constraints are beginning to apply to the United States.  The foreign policy conensus in the United States has never disputed the 'rightness' of the United States invading and intervening in the Caribbean.  That is a tradition that dates back to 1798's Quasi-War.  However the previously constrained Russia is playing by great power rules which implies there are alternative great powers and great power coalitions that can legitimate their own implied authority.  And for a foreign policy consensus that is based on indispensibability that is a mind fuck.