National Security Strategy indicates change in United States’ imperial strategy

The Obama administration’s new Nation Security Strategy, published on May 22, is indicative of a new direction in American imperial strategy. Since the 1970’s, American economic hegemony has slowly been eroded, first by the reindustrialization of major Western European and Japanese economies that were ravaged by World War II, and more recently by the rise of new economic powers, such as China.

One of the major impetuses behind the neo-conservative project adopted by the Bush Administration was to reverse the decline of American centrality to global markets by using the one comparative advantage the US definitely held, military force, to coerce potential economic competitors through control of the global oil spigot.

The neo-conservative project of the Bush Administration failed to achieve the objectives it laid out, and was quickly abandoned by the American elites.

Political economist Giovanni Arrighi explains in his most recent book, Adam Smith and Beijing,

“In sum: far from laying the foundations of a second American century, the occupation of Iraq has jeopardized the credibility of US military might, further undermined the centrality of the US and its currency in the global political economy, and strengthened the tendency towards the emergence of China as an alternative to US leadership in East Asia and beyond. It would have been hard to imagine a more rapid and complete failure of the neo-conservative imperial project.”

This project of American military and economic unilateralism, furthermore, was met with a rebellion by the political and economic elites of much of the rest of the world, most clearly embodied in their unprecedented refusal to along with the US’ agenda at the Doha and Cancun meetings of the World Trade Organization and then the rejection by much of Latin America of the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

Furthermore, the anti-American hostility spurred on by this unilateralist adventures created a global climate unsafe for the investment of American capital, with the exception of a small group of corporations very close to the administration.

Mark Engler, a seinor analyst with Foregin Policy in Focus, explains in Bush’s Bad Business Empire,

“In short: If Bush is an oil president, he’s not a Disney president, nor a Coca-Cola one. If Cheney is working diligently to help Halliburton rebound, the war he helped lead hasn’t worked out nearly so well for Starbucks.”

By 2006, much of American capital and the American people had adopted this project, the Democrats took over Congress, and all of the true neo-conservatives with the exception of Dick Cheney were dismissed from Bush’s Administration.

In the aftermath of the failure of the neo-conservative project, any project to assert and maintain US hegemony is unrealistic. The United States is no longer in a position to pursue its own interests at the expense of the interests other major players on the international stage.

Obama acknowledges this is a certain sense, proclaiming in his speech announcing the new security strategy that “the burdens of a young century cannot fall on American shoulders alone.”

Furthermore, the May 27 issue of the New York Times ran an article entitled New U.S. Strategy Focuses on Managing Threats. The article states that “Mr. Obama argues that America faces no real military competitor but that global power is increasingly diffuse.”

In light of this new diffuseness of power, we should expect to see the US embarking on a strategy emphasizing acting in a broader network of power, including other traditionally powerful nation-states, nation-states quickly rising in power, and nonstate actors such as supra-national organizations, powerful transnational corporations, and non-governmental organizations. This will be predicated on the capacity of the political and economic elites of these diverse, and at times conflicting institutions, to find common ground and a common program.

We have already seen the outlines of this strategy begin to develop, with Obama’s concerted efforts to renew the role of NATO in America’s military ventures such as Afghanistan, rather than the US going it alone.

The article in the New York Times demonstrated the ongoing shift of power by stating that,

“both Mrs. Clinton and the principal author of the report, Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, argued that Mr. Obama recognized [this new] reality when he pressed the Group of 8 nations — the largest industrialized economies and Russia — to cede more power to the Group of 20, which includes fast-emerging powers like China, India and Brazil.”

Let us not once again get swept in vague talk of “hope.” This new strategy is not global capital becoming more just or humane, but rather it is an attempt at trimming its excesses in order to run a more efficient machine of human exploitation.