Common Dreams / Published on Monday, July 7, 2003 by the International Herald Tribune
From the 1920's to the 1960's, America's students were taught a simple cautionary tale about international relations. Until the 20th century, according to the story, the United States had wisely heeded the advice of George Washington that the new American republic should avoid "entangling" alliances with the old nations of Europe. The latter practiced ignoble "power politics," inspired by imperial rivalries and dynastic quarrels. The United States instead had launched a "new order of the ages" to replace the old European order.
In 1917-1918, the story explained, the United States was forced to re-engage with Europe, but brought with it Woodrow Wilson's plan for universal peace, based on national self-determination and a new parliament of nations. When the League of Nations failed, Europe was left in disorder. World War II followed.
After that war, the story continued, a new American plan to bring peace to the world, the United Nations, was blocked from functioning by the Soviet Union, which launched the cold war.
This was a simplistic, sentimental and fundamentally misconceived story, yet its essential elements reappear in the policy of the Bush administration.
The Bush version might be called a muscular and well-armed version of the conceived American mission to bring peace to the world - this time identified as victory in the war on "terrorism."
One obstacle to this victory is the notion that a "multipolar" and balanced international system, composed of several centers of power, is more conducive to the national interests of all than is a system where there is a single leader and centralized or hegemonic power; the latter system is inherently unwieldy and oppressive, generating resistance and disorder.
Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, recently offered her version of the traditional American story, speaking to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
She said the time has come "to break the destructive pattern of great power rivalry that has bedeviled the world since the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century."
Europe must repudiate the "multipolarity" that in the past "was a necessary evil that sustained the absence of war but did not promote the triumph of peace," she said. "Multipolarity is a theory of rivalry, of competing powers - and at its worst, competing values. We have tried this before. It led to the Great War."
There must be a new mechanism for enforcing peace. The national security adviser asked "why should we seek to divide our capacities for good, when they can be much more effective united? Only the enemies of freedom would cheer this division."
Extrapolating from her words, instead of an allegedly discredited multipolar international system making use of the United Nations (now declared irrelevant), there should be a new system that goes beyond the limitations of NATO.
The existing NATO alliance is unsatisfactory because it actually incorporates an internal multipolarity. Some NATO allies have policy visions rival to that of the United States, and competing values - as in the case of invading Iraq. Since NATO is an alliance of equals, these allies are obstacles to united action.
This judgment would be consistent with the idea widely heard in Washington that a new NATO is needed, transferred eastward and incorporating the "new" Europeans. To judge from the current Washington debate, this should take the form of an enlargement of the present Iraq war coalition. Coalitions are not composed of equals.
The merits of such a change may be disputed, and will be. Rice's version of history, and of the workings of international systems, must be challenged.
World War I did not happen because there was a balance of power. It happened because Germany attempted to overturn the balance. War did not break out in the Balkans because multipolar power existed there, but because of resistance to hegemonic power. The war was ignited by the efforts of radical nationalists to break free from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
World War II was not caused by a multipolar power system, but by the failure of the Versailles settlement to re-establish balance - either among the major powers or in the Balkans, where the Versailles treaty created disputes rather than ending them.
Unmistakable in Rice's argument about multipolarity is notion that Washington is no longer willing to deal with its allies as equals.
