'Two books, written from opposite viewpoints, help one better understand the forces at play today in America’s dealings on the global stage. A COUNTRY’S foreign policy is shaped by its notion of its place in the world and by its image of the world order. Europe, a predominant player in the global order, twice committed suicide in the last century when its powerful nations went to war, needlessly and with lasting consequences. The United States intervened in both wars. But, while in 1919 it decided to turn its back on Europe, in 1945 it decided to stay on and impose its hegemony. Charles de Gaulle, a great French nationalist, European and a realist to the core, recognised as early as in the summer of 1944, even as war was raging, that President Roosevelt was aiming for U.S. hegemony in the post-War world (Geoffrey Warner’s essay “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the post-War world” in David Duncan (ed.), Statecraft and Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century, Liverpool University Press, 1995, pages 155-156). Zbigniew Brzezinski remarks: “Roosevelt’s highly principled opposition to colonialism did not prevent him from pursuing an acquisitive U.S. policy determined to gain a lucrative position for America in the key oil-producing Middle Eastern [West Asian] countries. In 1943, President Roosevelt not so subtly told Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Lord Halifax, while pointing at a map of the Middle East, that ‘Persian oil is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it’s ours.’” But he would not let two of Europe’s most powerful leaders enter into a similar pact about their own continent. He sabotaged the Churchill-Stalin Percentages Agreement, in Moscow on October 8, 1944, on Eastern Europe on the dishonest ground that he was opposed to spheres of interest. Winston Churchill revealed the details in 1954 in the last volume of his war memo. Churchill meekly complied, hoping to resume the dialogue with Joseph Stalin later. But he toed the American line, meanwhile, under the farcical banner of “a special relationship”, which Americans ridicule. De Gaulle retained his goal and sought to build a global order with France as an equal partner or a European order in accord with the Soviet Union...' >'Pfaff has been deservedly lauded by the American Academy of Diplomacy in its Award for Distinguished Reporting and Analysis of Foreign Affairs. “Few can rival his impact on thinking about the deepest dilemmas for foreign policy and of prime movers in human society. We are inspired by his moral vision of the proper uses of power and limits on its abuse.” Recalling America’s expansionist career, he writes of the militarism that has possessed it. “Militarism is the domination of the military in society, an undue deference to military demands, and an emphasis on military considerations, spirits, ideals, and scales of value, in the lives of states. It has meant also the imposition of heavy burdens on a people for military purposes, to the neglect of welfare and culture, and the waste of a nation’s best manpower in unproductive army service.” We are no less militaristic. The future is bleak. “Americans today conduct a colossally militarised but morally nugatory global mission supported by apparent majorities of the political, intellectual, and academic elites of the nation. It has lacked from the very beginning an attainable goal. It cannot succeed. George W. Bush is quoted by Bob Woodward as having said that American strategy was ‘to create chaos, to create vacuum’, in his enemies’ countries. This was very unwise. The United States risks becoming such a strategy’s ultimate victim.”
Posted on: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 16:41:46 +0000
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