A page from imperialist domination and continuity
Peter Gowan's review of John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is a rebuttal of key assumptions in Mearsheimer's thinking. A few things have changed since the book and the review (Iraq and the economic crisis of 2008-09), but the fundamentals and the continuity of the U.S. hegemony, though not absolute and not without setbacks, remain.
I have chosen something general and mainly related to the Middle East.
"Unlike right-thinking liberals ... John Mearsheimer attributes no distinctive moral or political value to its [US's] role in the world at large."
John Mearsheimer, has for some time now been an iconoclastic voice in America’s complacent foreign-policy elite—one who, not by accident, has spent his career in scholarly work in universities, rather than serving as a functionary in the national-security bureaucracies whence conventional apologias for Washington’s role in the world are furnished. Not only is his writing refreshingly free from the cant that normally surrounds the world role of the United States, it is extraordinarily accessible: forceful, direct and clear, without a trace of the usual academic jargon. But it is also both erudite and sophisticated on compli- cated and disputed subjects within the field. Combining historical depth and theoretical vigour, it is likely—notwithstanding its heterodoxy—to have a wide readership round the world.
Mearsheimer does not mince words. ‘Henry Cabot Lodge put the point well’, he writes, ‘when he noted that the United States had a “record of conquest, colonization and expansion unequalled by any people in the nineteenth century”’. This was not, of course, how most Americans have understood their past: ‘idealist rhetoric provided a proper mask for the brutal policies that underpinned the tremendous growth of American power’.
"The United States is the most powerful state in the world, and it usually gets its way on issues it judges important. If it does not, it ignores the institution and does what it deems to be in its own national interest."
Just how free from conventional cant Mearsheimer tends to be, may be judged from his comments on Clinton’s scheme for Palestine at Camp David:
‘The plan apparently envisions a Palestinian state divided into three cantons, each separated from the other by Israeli-controlled territory. In particular, the West Bank would effectively be divided in half by Jewish settlements and roads running from Jerusalem to the Jordan River Valley. The Gaza Strip and the West Bank are already geographically separated by Israeli territory. Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem would become part of the Palestinian state, but two of these neighbour- hoods would be islands surrounded on all sides by Israeli territory—outposts cut off from their homeland. The Clinton plan lets Israel maintain military forces in the strategically important Jordan River Valley. This means Israel would control the eastern border of the Palestinian state. Israel says it might be willing to remove its forces after six years, but there is no guarantee that it would actually do so. And why should it? The strategic value of the Jordan Valley to Israel—which is great—will not diminish over time. Moreover, the Palestinians will not be allowed to build a military that could defend them, and they would have to let the Israeli army move into their new state if Israel declared a “national state of emergency”. This stricture has echoes of the infamous Platt Amendment of 1901, which gave the United States broad rights to intervene in Cuba but which poisoned Cuban–American relations for more than 30 years. Finally, Israel could hold ultimate control over the Palestinians’ water supply and air space. It is hard to imagine the Palestinians accepting such a state. Certainly no other nation in the world has such curtailed sovereignty. Even if the Clinton plan is accepted, the new state is sure to be a source of boundless anger’: New York Times, 11 January 2001. Such blunt truths are, of course, absolutely taboo for Democratic and Republican establishments alike: indeed, one can search high and low in the pages of such organs of enlightenment as the Atlantic Monthly or New York Review of Books for so much as a hint of them.
Peter Gowan reviewing John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
Gowan, A Calculus of Power, New Left Review, July-August 2002
Peter Gowan's review of John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is a rebuttal of key assumptions in Mearsheimer's thinking. A few things have changed since the book and the review (Iraq and the economic crisis of 2008-09), but the fundamentals and the continuity of the U.S. hegemony, though not absolute and not without setbacks, remain.
I have chosen something general and mainly related to the Middle East.
"Unlike right-thinking liberals ... John Mearsheimer attributes no distinctive moral or political value to its [US's] role in the world at large."
John Mearsheimer, has for some time now been an iconoclastic voice in America’s complacent foreign-policy elite—one who, not by accident, has spent his career in scholarly work in universities, rather than serving as a functionary in the national-security bureaucracies whence conventional apologias for Washington’s role in the world are furnished. Not only is his writing refreshingly free from the cant that normally surrounds the world role of the United States, it is extraordinarily accessible: forceful, direct and clear, without a trace of the usual academic jargon. But it is also both erudite and sophisticated on compli- cated and disputed subjects within the field. Combining historical depth and theoretical vigour, it is likely—notwithstanding its heterodoxy—to have a wide readership round the world.
Mearsheimer does not mince words. ‘Henry Cabot Lodge put the point well’, he writes, ‘when he noted that the United States had a “record of conquest, colonization and expansion unequalled by any people in the nineteenth century”’. This was not, of course, how most Americans have understood their past: ‘idealist rhetoric provided a proper mask for the brutal policies that underpinned the tremendous growth of American power’.
"The United States is the most powerful state in the world, and it usually gets its way on issues it judges important. If it does not, it ignores the institution and does what it deems to be in its own national interest."
Just how free from conventional cant Mearsheimer tends to be, may be judged from his comments on Clinton’s scheme for Palestine at Camp David:
‘The plan apparently envisions a Palestinian state divided into three cantons, each separated from the other by Israeli-controlled territory. In particular, the West Bank would effectively be divided in half by Jewish settlements and roads running from Jerusalem to the Jordan River Valley. The Gaza Strip and the West Bank are already geographically separated by Israeli territory. Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem would become part of the Palestinian state, but two of these neighbour- hoods would be islands surrounded on all sides by Israeli territory—outposts cut off from their homeland. The Clinton plan lets Israel maintain military forces in the strategically important Jordan River Valley. This means Israel would control the eastern border of the Palestinian state. Israel says it might be willing to remove its forces after six years, but there is no guarantee that it would actually do so. And why should it? The strategic value of the Jordan Valley to Israel—which is great—will not diminish over time. Moreover, the Palestinians will not be allowed to build a military that could defend them, and they would have to let the Israeli army move into their new state if Israel declared a “national state of emergency”. This stricture has echoes of the infamous Platt Amendment of 1901, which gave the United States broad rights to intervene in Cuba but which poisoned Cuban–American relations for more than 30 years. Finally, Israel could hold ultimate control over the Palestinians’ water supply and air space. It is hard to imagine the Palestinians accepting such a state. Certainly no other nation in the world has such curtailed sovereignty. Even if the Clinton plan is accepted, the new state is sure to be a source of boundless anger’: New York Times, 11 January 2001. Such blunt truths are, of course, absolutely taboo for Democratic and Republican establishments alike: indeed, one can search high and low in the pages of such organs of enlightenment as the Atlantic Monthly or New York Review of Books for so much as a hint of them.
Peter Gowan reviewing John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
Gowan, A Calculus of Power, New Left Review, July-August 2002
Comments