American Globalization Staggers

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

It appears that America’s hopes of globalizing the world in the American manner are now turning into confused dreams, and it appears that all the intellectual, cultural, economic, and military programs America adopted to achieve those hopes are on their way to being shattered. America grew optimistic to the point of delusion, and surged forward to the point of folly, thinking with its horns and its muscles more than it used its mind, and it was unable to weigh matters with sound, wise judgment, and it strayed from the circle of what is right. In the end, it has no escape but to pay the price.

Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has worked to establish itself as the great power of the world, possessing the magic wand for spreading happiness across every corner of the earth. The Soviet Union curbed its rush toward world domination, checked it in numerous places, and helped defeat it in others. Yet despite the greatness of the Soviet Union, America still adopted policies suggesting that it alone decided for the world.

American necks craned upward after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Americans began to tower over the world with impudence, without the slightest respect for peoples, states, or governments. The Americans began interfering in the internal affairs of states, imposing certain policies over others, and some began to imagine that the Americans would tomorrow interfere in marriages, working to deprive their rivals of the right to marry and form families. America began to speak of globalization with complete clarity, and of the policies it was adopting toward globalizing the world.

Subjective Globalization and Objective Globalization

There is an objective globalization that inevitably imposes itself on peoples and nations, one connected mostly to scientific discovery and technological development. The automobile, for instance, imposed itself on the world, and is used across the entire world in the same manner, having fed on the various means of transport that had prevailed in different cultures. It has replaced traditional roads, and wherever one goes in the world today, one finds the automobile traveling on paved roads, driven in the same way. The same applies to television, the refrigerator, the rocket, the mobile phone, and so forth. This is an objective globalization that no nation can bypass, or turn its face away from, or refuse to use over any long stretch of time.

Subjective globalization, on the other hand, is the kind the United States has been working to entrench; it rests on replacing the world’s diverse cultures with American culture and thought, and re-educating the world in a manner that conforms to the two American systems, political and economic — American democracy and modern liberal capitalism. America saw itself as the sole possessor of absolute truth, and its two systems, political and economic, as the best in the world, systems that would never be surpassed by better ones no matter how far history might extend into the future.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, America intensified its efforts to Americanize the world, establishing thousands of non-governmental organizations in numerous countries in order to spread American thought and culture, recruiting for this purpose thousands of intellectuals, thinkers, and writers across the world and showering them with money. These organizations were set up to focus on three principal axes: human rights, democracy, and the status of women — all of them attractive axes, particularly for the peoples of oppressed developing nations. America appeared before hundreds of millions as the possessor of the great heart that defends the human being and his rights everywhere, and it drove the non-governmental organizations it had created to entrench this notion. In the economic sphere, America used its economic and military power to induce states to adopt the free capitalist economy and free trade across the oceans.

Between Iraq and al-Qaeda

Iraq’s entry into Kuwait was America’s post-Soviet opportunity to establish its leadership beyond challenge. It marshaled around thirty states, symbolically, including Arab states, to fight the Iraqi forces in Kuwait. Its naval and air fleets were what carried out the war, and they were what dominated the battlefield, while the other forces mostly watched their own military dwarfism next to the American giant. America emerged from the war speaking the language of the self, finding no one to challenge it.

The United States was shocked after the New York bombings of September 11, 2001, because the bombings were exceedingly painful, and because its lofty standing and prestige had been struck hard. For this reason, it did not hesitate in its response, and began marshaling military capabilities to restore its prestige as quickly as possible. It bore down swiftly on Pakistan, which had supported the Afghan Taliban, forced states in Central Asia to open their borders and airspace to American forces, and boxed Arabs and Muslims into the dock of accusation. Russia, for its part, chose to keep its distance, contenting itself with condemning what had happened in New York.

America repeated in Afghanistan the military scenes it had carried out against Iraq in 1991, though with less intensity and a more modest military effort. It overran Afghanistan easily, expelled al-Qaeda and the Taliban from remote areas of influence, and took control of the entire Afghan territory. America thought matters had been settled in its favor, which whetted its appetite for further military action, to convince friend and foe alike that it was a power beyond challenge.

America’s Stumbles

American dominance did not last long, and American efforts soon began colliding with difficulties and growing slack. Among these successive stumbles:

First: Iraq. Things did not go as America wished, and its great stumble came in Iraq. Perhaps Afghanistan was never the state that could serve as an example from which the world’s nations would take a lesson, since it was a weak state with limited military capabilities. America wanted Iraq to be its rich prey, whose defeat would count as a harsh lesson for anyone tempted to challenge American leadership. But the American forces were not received with roses by the Iraqis, and immediately after the occupation of Baghdad, the Iraqi resistance became active, turning the expected military stroll into a bitter nightmare.

Things turned upside down in Iraq, America became mired in the mud, and the American president’s declaration of victory in Iraq turned into material for mockery and ridicule even inside the United States. American hopes were dashed, and now, several years later, America still finds no way to exit Iraq honorably. Perhaps the great development in this regard is that al-Qaeda revived in Iraq, forming an important wing of the resistance that turned the American military legend into a mere brutal occupying force. Instead of al-Qaeda falling into America’s hand, America fell under al-Qaeda’s weight.

Second: Palestine. America found itself a state opposing democracy after Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian legislative elections. America refused to recognize the results of the elections, and decided to besiege Hamas in order to bring it down. America consented, for itself, to intervene against democracy, and brought in a Palestinian prime minister according to its own wishes. In doing so, America undercut all its own arguments regarding democracy, and it became clear that it seeks to establish a democracy whose results suit only its own interests, not the declared principles of American democracy. In this there was confirmation of the United States’ self-centeredness, and its concern for its own interests at the expense of the principles it had tried to market to the peoples of the earth.

Third: Afghanistan. America was surprised, as was the world, by the rise of the Afghan Taliban movement from the rubble, and by its execution of an effective, powerful resistance program that spread across the entire Afghan territory. The Afghan Taliban became strong enough that it turned America’s swift victory over it in 2001/2002 into a kind of regret voiced by America’s own partners in the war. The Taliban still control a large portion of Afghan territory to this day, and carry out powerful military operations against the international coalition forces on an almost daily basis. Matters reached the point where the Afghan president asked Arab states to mediate with the Taliban to discuss the country’s future with him.

Fourth: Pakistan. Pakistan was supposed to remain safe ground from which American and allied forces would set out to confront the Taliban and hunt down Sheikh Osama bin Laden, but it has become a new hotbed of resistance against American forces and against the Pakistani government loyal to Washington. The Pakistani Taliban was formed, al-Qaeda spread rapidly across Pakistani territory, and Pakistan has now become a stage for bloody operations of various kinds, with the government itself under threat.

Fifth: Iran. America roared and thundered against Iran and its nuclear program, threatening bombardment and wide-ranging military operations, but Iran did not so much as blink, and continued defying the American will, and it appears America has become certain that Iran has slipped its leash, and that it is no longer wise to keep up the threats.

Sixth: Hezbollah. America and Israel were struck a powerful blow in July 2006, when Israel failed to achieve any of its objectives through the war and suffered heavy losses. The war damaged the prestige of both America and Israel, and both states discovered that the age of intimidation and nations quickly kneeling before their blows was no longer in force. America, together with its Arab allies, was stunned when Hezbollah suddenly took control of Beirut on May 7, 2008, without the other factions loyal to America managing to do anything about it.

Hezbollah forced America and Israel to think long and hard about Iran’s new military and technological developments, and both came to realize that the regional balance of power had shifted, and that there was no magic formula for returning to how things were before. The question that loomed over everyone’s heads was: what military capabilities might Iran itself possess, if Hezbollah holds all these armament and tactical capacities?

Seventh: Russia and Georgia. Perhaps the Americans wanted to test Moscow’s strength and intentions when Georgia carried out its military action against Ossetia. The Russians, in broad daylight, pounded Georgia’s capital, displayed their forces, and issued their threats, while the Americans stood by condemning and denouncing. Georgia was a harsh lesson for the Americans, and it opened the door to a clear Russian challenge, to the point of hinting at the use of nuclear force against Poland should it continue with its plans to deploy American missiles on its territory. America opened a door upon itself that placed it in an awkward position, both before itself and before its European allies, who have come to feel that American leadership is using them and dragging them into trouble.

Eighth: the financial crisis. It appears that the financial crisis the world is currently witnessing amounts to the back-breaking blow for American globalization. America had already been staggering under the weight of shifting developments, particularly in the Arab-Islamic region (called the “Middle East”), but the current financial crisis has widened the grave for the subjective globalization through which America had hoped to control the world. The effects of this crisis on America can be summarized as follows:

The crisis, and perhaps the collapse, points to the failure of the United States’ management of global financial affairs, and to the fact that it was the failed administrator who needs someone to take him by the hand and train him. America seized the world with its enormous financial capacities, tied the financial systems of most of the world’s states to the global financial system, and created an interconnected global financial network through a complex web of communications and financial rules. But the crisis now proves that America was not equal to the responsibility, and did not abide by professional safeguards that would have guaranteed stability and security to the financial market inside and outside America.

America now stands accused of greed by most states, in that its companies worked to achieve abundant, swift profit regardless of the means and methods. America stands accused of moral baseness, of favoring money even at the expense of humane values that ought to steer clear of exploitation and deception. Its companies are greedy and eager to accumulate money by every possible means, and the American administration stands accused of falling in step with these debased ethics. America used to claim that it was the world’s supreme moral leadership, and that it alone was working to entrench moral values across the world. Most states now openly challenge this claim.

There is now confusion within capitalism itself, and it is clear that the idea of modern liberal capitalism, which America promoted for years, is about to pay the price. America consistently affirmed that the modern liberal capitalist system, built on the principle of market laws, on freeing world trade, and on opening markets to competition, is the optimal system for the world — a final system that no other, better economic system would ever succeed in the future — and that the world’s states must adopt it as an absolute, unblemished truth. This system did not withstand even two decades, and it was soon proven that the American argument expressed nothing but America’s own desire for domination and acquisition.

America has friends who marched with it in its international policies, particularly its policies of war, and who stood with it in its war on terror and on states accused of harboring terrorism. Some marched with it reluctantly, while others were waiting for its defeat in Iraq and its entanglement in Afghanistan, because they saw in its policies a danger to themselves. States such as France and Germany saw a danger in the fact that American globalization was extending its claws into their own cultures. But whoever stays silent reluctantly is bound to find an opportunity one day, and here are the European states now speaking openly of the failure of American leadership.

America will certainly learn, in part, from these harsh lessons, and if it does not, then others who used to agree with it across its various policies will learn instead, and will no longer loosen their political will to America however it wishes. Things will not return to how they were; America will not continue its military, financial, and economic adventures; it will no longer break the necks of nations for the sake of economic privatization and keeping governments out of economic affairs; and it will no longer remain the master of the global financial system.

But the more important point is that the idea of American subjective globalization will not rise from its deathbed — it has departed, and forever. The idea of “internationalism” [al-‘alamiyya] will now grow in globalization’s place, meaning recognition of the world’s various cultures and their openness to one another for mutual influence. Instead of pursuing singular American domination, the world, under the shadow of internationalism, will appear more capable of mutual understanding and cooperation for the good of all.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “العولمة الأمريكية تترنح” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.