In the original draft of his best selling autobiography the new US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, wrote, "I believe in the bully's way of going to war ? I'm on the street corner, I got my gun, I got my blade, I'ma kick you' ass." In the end Powell deleted the line, deciding "it sounded a little, shall we say, ethnic and a little too Bronx."
At the moment attention is focused on the other side of Powell's character -- his aversion to intervention overseas. This, indeed, is a man who draws lines where others fear to tread -- who was prepared to argue to his then boss, president George Bush senior, that the US should not go to war against Iraq to reverse the conquest of neighboring Kuwait. And who, later in the conflict, exploded right in the face of his immediate superior, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, when Cheney intimated that the US should be prepared to use nuclear weapons in the war against Saddam Hussein that America and its allies eventually launched.
Yes, bold and outspoken though the man is, is he prepared to work to put the machinery of imperialism and war-making (that is the lot of an unopposed superpower) out of order? I do not think so. President Bill Clinton bequeathed three important policy juggernauts, which now go at such a speed that Powell, even if he was willing, would find it all but impossible to derail.
The first was Clinton's decision to increase defense spending, even though the US already outspends all its allies added together and outspends Russia by a factor of 20. The second was Clinton's policy of "democratic enlargement" which was, in effect, a Brezhnev Doctrine in reverse: states that are authoritarian may become democratic, but democracies will not be allowed to slip back. This led to the expansion of NATO eastward, involving a rigorous and expensive military commitment to all of Europe, east and west. And it was complemented by Clinton's third innovation: an apparent desire to outmaneuver Russia in the oil-rich Caspian basin, an area that until recently was part and parcel of the Soviet Union and which today remains an economic lifeline for Russia. By the end of the Clinton era, Russia felt half encircled.
For Powell, a man who, from what we know of him, seems determined to avoid belligerency and to push the cause of disarmament, it will be extraordinarily difficult to rein in the sheer momentum that is built into the lifestyle of any great power, and in the almost unique era of a lone superpower is all but unstoppable.
Nothing illustrates the American superpower malady more than its fixation with anti-missile defense. The new Administration seems determined to pursue the chimera of perfect defense (against whom it has not made clear) at the cost of destroying long-standing understandings, confidence building and, not least, a solemn international treaty -- the net effect of which, quite counterproductively, will be to make America confront more antagonism and animosity that it would if it simply accepted the status quo. No wonder its European allies are determined to reverse this policy. But all this does is seemingly antagonize Washington to the point where it is now petulantly but angrily denouncing Europe's intention to build its own unified defense forces, partially independent of NATO.
"The prime threat to the security of modern great powers is ? themselves. Their greatest menace lies in their own tendency to exaggerate the dangers they face and to respond with counterproductive belligerence." This was the astute conclusion of Stephen Van Evera of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in his recent monumental book Causes of War.
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