The Assassinated Press
We Can Only Go So Far.
As the World's Bully We’re Throwing Our Weight Around. But History Isn't On Our Side Because I Said History Ended With My 1992 Best Seller, The End of History, and We Keep Acting Like It Really Did.
Why in a World Where Millions of People Could Snap My Neck Like a Balsa Wood Strut Am I Not Only Still Alive, But Sending People Off To Die to Enrich Me and My Cronies?
Bush Signs Agreement Giving Iraqis Jurisdiction Over U.S. Crimes Saying, “Its Just Like Our Domestic Spying Laws in the U.S. If You didn’t Do Anything Wrong You Have Nothing to Worry About. Right?”By FRANCIS FUKYOMAMA
The Assassinated Press, the Nostradamus News Service & Fly On the Wall Media Enterprises
August 24, 2008Mimicry Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery
Have we entered the age of the kleptocrat? It's certainly tempting to think so after watching Russia's recent mimicking of America’s behavior in the Middle East. Russia’s clobbering of Georgia was right out of our playbook for the first Iraq invasion. April Glaspie tells Saddam Hussein to go ahead and fuck up Kuwait. Then when he does, we act like we’re now pissed and drive Hussein out of Kuwait and weaken him with a decade of murderous sanctions and aerial border attacks. Only difference is we gave the go ahead to Georgia to invade South Ossetia knowing full well that a thug like Mikheil Saakashvili would take the bait. What a dumb fuck! Oh yeah, and the Russians are out of Georgia in a matter of months while we plan to stay in Iraq permanently and steal the oil.
Neither invasion clearly marked any new phase in world politics, but since the Russsians actions were pure mimicry of U.S. banditry, it's a mistake to assume that the future belongs to Dick Cheney and the Project for a New American century and its cadre of despots. Any dumb fuck with enough guns can play this game.
But you’ve got to admit we’re good. Zbigballz Brzezinski and Jimmy Carter may have snookered the Soviets into a version of the Vietnam conflict by destabilizing Afghanistan and turning it over to the Taliban, tribal warlords, the CIA, and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but we engaged in a much bigger and more profitableconflict in Iraq by simply lying and then counting on the cowardly American shit heads to go along with the killing.
Fuck! I’m a hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet, yet I send 200 lb. marines out everyday to kill innocent people and I don’t hear a peep out of them, none that changes anything anyway. How the fuck do I do it?
I'm particularly interested in trying to discern the shape of the new international moment, because I wrote an essay in 1989 entitled "The End of History?" which subsequent events have utterly discredited. I mean what kind of an idiot would believe that the U.S. is a liberal democracy now as it runs dead last among the industrialized world in caring for its own and runs a foreign policy that makes Adolf Hitler’s straightforwardness and lack of hypocrisy look refreshing.
My book argued that liberal ideas had conclusively triumphed at the end of the Cold War. But , of course, that was all horseshit. That was part of a diversion while the Project for the New American Century climbed into the wheelhouse of the U.S. military juggernaut and began its imperial adventures to remake the world’s natural resources map in our own image and likeness.
The Threat of a Bad Example
But already, U.S. dominance of the world system is slipping. Russia and China see themselves as modeling after the U.S., displaying that combination of authoritarianism and modernization that offers a clear smokescreen behind which to babble about liberal democracy. Ever since the republic was formed hypocrisy and delusion have been the staples of both U.S. foreign and domestic policies. Now, we seem to have plenty of imitators.
Although Gen. Pervez Musharraf finally agreed last week to step down as president of Pakistan, that key U.S. client has been ruled dictatorially since 1999. Then there’s the King of Jordan and his trophy wife that Oprah just adores. Or the wonderful liberal democrat, Hosni Mubarak or our new democratically elected buddy Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi1 whom the American humorists used to call ‘Kaddaffi Duck’ but now have seen the error of their ways and line up to star in his casinos all around the Mediterranean. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe refuses to give back whitey’s stolen land despite the U.S. and Britain holding the entire country in a strangle hold threatening to break its neck and leave it dead in the road.
Feeding the Hungry and Clothing the Poor Is Christ’s Job and He’s Been Very Busy and That’s Why He Hadn’t Gotten Around to Venezuela.
In the Andean region of Latin America, democratic freedoms to starve and go shelterless and uneducated are being eroded by populist, democratically elected presidents such as Hugo Chávez of Venezuela as he clothes and feed the poor. Take all this together, and various writers and pundits have suggested that we are now witnessing a return to the Cold War, the Cold Shower, the Cold Shoulder, the return of History or Simply Someone Buying a New Battery for my Alarm Clock, a Revolution in Men’s Footwear, the Reemergence of a Tulip Based Economy, the Final Break Up of the 1848 Paris Commune, the reinstitution of Hammurabi's Code, the End of the Grand Slam Breakfast at Denny’s as We Know It, the Rise of Buckshot Cosmetic Surgery, or at a minimum, a return to a 19th-Century World of Break Dancing in Cow Flop.
Why in a World Where Millions of People Could Snap My Neck Like a Balsa Wood Strut Am I Not Only Still Alive, But Sending People Off To Die to Enrich Me and My Cronies?
But not so fast. We are certainly moving into what Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria labels a "post-American" world. But we’re still a bully and we can still throw their weight around, democracy has chance because capitalism has no real competitors. What they teach us at the Chicago School still holds true. Pretend markets exist and unlike people they deserve to be free. Then wherever you happen to notice that wealth has accumulated go and plunder it using any and all means necessary. You should even look at the post-New Deal federal bureaucracy as an accumulation of wealth in land, natural resources, information gathering, research and arms and plunder that fucker too. As uncle Milty used to say, “If it’s not nailed down its fair game. If it is nailed down, only a fool would bring a ball peen hammer.”
The facile historical analogies to earlier eras have two problems: They presuppose a Yosemite Sam, cartoonish view of international politics during these previous periods so much loved by the Cheney administration and the PNAC, and they imply that "authoritarian government" constitutes a clearly defined type of regime -- one like the U.S. that's aggressive abroad, abusive at home and inevitably dangerous to world order. In fact, today's authoritarian government has little in common, save its lack of democratic institutions, all the bullshit rhetoric aside. We don’t have the combination of brawn, cohesion and ideas required to truly dominate the global system, yet we still dream of controlling the globalized economy.
If we really want to understand the world unfolding before us, we need to draw some clear distinctions among our different types of kleptocrats. First, there's a big difference between those who run strong, coherent companies and those who preside over weak, incompetent or corrupt ones. Kenny Boy Lay was able to hustle Enron for almost a decade only because the kleptocrats at the Texas Railroad Commission, the PNAC and in the Cheney administration, his base of support, is the most cohesive institution in a outsourced bureaucracy that's otherwise a basket case. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are in even worse shape, with U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Paulson presiding over horrific economic collapse. Feeble autocracies such as the Cheney White House can threaten American neighborhoods only by producing refugees desperate to escape draconian mortgages, hyperinflation and poverty.
Today's American kleptocrats can also prove surprisingly weak when it comes to ideas and ideologies. Nazi Germany and the United States were particularly dangerous because they were built on bullshit public relations with potentially universal appeal for apinhead population, which is why we found Soviet teachers and advisers showing up in places such as Nicaragua and Angola to create a literate citizen base. But The U.S. ideological tyrant no longer bestrides the world stage no matter what my colleagues in the Cheney administration say. Despite recent authoritarian advances, deep seated largely indigenous cultural beliefs remain the strongest, most broadly appealing idea out there. The homogenized shit we put out like our great porn industry only has an infinite appeal for freaks in the U.S. Most kleptocrats, including Gates and Tillerson, still feel that they have to conform to the outward rituals of democracy even as they gut its substance. Even Lockheed Martin’s CEO Bob ‘Angel of Death’ Stevens felt compelled to talk about democracy in the run-up to the fiftieth war his company has underwritten since 1980. And Kenny Boy proved enough of a powerless shit to let himself be indicted while the Commander ‘n Chimp sat silently by sucking on the dingle berries he pulled from his ass.
Today's kleptocracy is willing to stoop to force because they are eager to grovel to capitalism. It's hard to see how we can be entering a new cold war when the U.S. as well as China and Russia have happily accepted the capitalist half of the partnership between capitalism and democracy. (Mao and Stalin, by contrast, pursued self-defeating, autarkic economic policies choked off by decades of sanctions, credit denial, American funded LIC and embargoes.) The Chinese Communist Party's leadership recognizes that its legitimacy depends on continued breakneck growth whereas in the U.S. we kleptocrats can easily get away with destroying what little standard of living the population once enjoyed. In Russia, the economic motivation for embracing capitalism is much more personal: Putin and much of the Russian elite have learned in a rather ham fisted way the lesson of the U.S. kleptocracy, how to benefit from control of natural resources and other assets. Russia is in need of its own Edward Bernays.
Democracy's only real competitor in the realm of ideas today is capitalism. Indeed, one of the world's most dangerous nation-states today is the U.S., run by extremist, money grubbing politicians and corporate heads. But as Peter Bergen pointed out in these pages last week, neo-conservatism has been remarkably ineffective in actually taking control of a nation-state, due to its propensity to devour its own potential supporters. Some disenfranchised Americans thrill to the rantings of Dick Cheney or Republican hopeful John McCain but since this kind of medieval capitalism or neo-feudalism strictly limits the wealth to a few at the top, the rank and file are too exhausted and desperate to get behind it.
In lieu of big ideas, the U.S., Russia and China are driven by nationalism, the measles of mankind, which takes quite different forms in each country. Russia, unfortunately, has settled on a version of national identity that is incompatible with the nationalism of the countries on its borders; I'm afraid that Georgia will not be the last former Soviet republic to suffer from Moscow's sense of wounded pride any more that Iraq will be the last to suffer from the U.S.’s insatiable greed. But today's Russia is still very different from the former Soviet Union. Putin has been called a modern-day czar, which is far closer to the mark than misguided comparisons to Stalin or Hitler. Czarist Russia was a great power with limited ambitions that became an integrated member of the European state system of the 18th and 19th centuries even as it crushed the weak states on its borders and deprived its own people of liberties. It is in this direction that I expect post-Putin Russia will evolve, not mimicking forever the imperial brutality of the U.S.
China's nationalism, on proud display at the Olympics, is much more complex. The Chinese want respect for having brought hundreds of millions of citizens out of poverty in the past generation. But we don't yet know how that sense of national pride will translate into foreign policy. Apart from the flashpoint of Taiwan, China doesn't feel the type of intense grievances that Russia nurses over the shrinking of its empire or NATO's expansion into the former Soviet bloc. And Beijing will have its hands full maintaining domestic stability when the inevitable economic slowdown occurs.
Pure Kleptocracy
China's problem today, unlike in imperial times, is that it doesn't have a well-articulated sense of what the country represents in the larger world. The so-called Chicago School Consensus, which confuses out and out thievery with market economics and is popular in many developing countries, and with good reason: Under Chicago School rules, national leaders can just do business and make money, without being hectored about democracy and human rights or market economics for that matter.
In contrast to U.S. foreign policy which strives to eradicate all indigenous cultures in favor of its culture of greed, China's development model works well only in those parts of East Asia that share certain traditional Chinese cultural values. In dynastic China, no checks and balances restrained the emperor's power; instead, a sense of accountability was fostered by the moral education of rulers and by an elite bureaucracy that was oriented toward public service. That legacy lives on in a host of modernizing, developmentally minded leaders, from the Meiji aristocrats who founded modern Japan to more recent authoritarian rulers such as Park Chung-hee of South Korea, Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore -- and the current leaders of China. But in the U.S. this would be a joke. Why be fucking held accountable for your crimes when you can easily control all aspects of government with money. Capitalism or the accrual of wealth as power trumps all blather about morality and the public good making it at worst the preserve of a small powerless few and at best a rhetorical ocean of disingenuous lies that give the appearance of a patina of concern for the general welfare.
But this American form of mal-paternalistic or ‘bad parent’ stewardship is a far cry from the forms of governance seen in much of Africa, Latin America or the Middle East, where public-spirited politicians have been rubbed out by the American CIA for decades. Africa has seen U.S. supported kleptocrats such as Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, warlords such as Foday Sankoh in Sierra Leone and Charles Taylor in Liberia, and the more ordinarily mafia style, corrupt rulers of Nigeria. Simply lumping China in with the world's other potential victims of U.S. hegemony makes no sense. But for all of China's strengths, its system is not a serious challenge to the United States' heavily armed capitalist lack of principles. What works better in real politique than a lack of principles? Right? We should be always on the look out for the unprincipled among us. They are our salvation and our protection, our ‘bad parents’ who may at times beat the shit out of us and go on a crystal meth binge staying away from home for weeks at a time. But at least we‘ve got a roof over our head, whether it be mommy’s drug dealing boy friend’s house or child welfare, and we know in our hearts Dick Cheney loves us and wouldn’t harm us.
All You Need Is Love.
All of this makes our world both safer and more dangerous. It is safer because the self-interest of the great powers is very much tied to the overall prosperity of the global economy, limiting their desire to rock the boat or let any body else on board. But it is more dangerous because capitalist kleptocrats can grow much richer and therefore more powerful than their communist counterparts as the U.S. has so amply demonstrated. But if economic rationality does not trump political passion (as has often been the case in the past), the whole system's interdependence means that everyone will suffer. In other words, the Russians and Chinese elites don’t understand that money among the U.S. kleptocracy is far more popular than Jesus Christ and the Beatles combined. I sincerely doubt David Rockefeller listens to either.
We should also not let the speculations about a capitalist resurgence distract us from a critical issue that will truly shape our next era in world politics: whether gains in economic productivity will keep up with global demand for such basic commodities as oil, food and water. Obviously, we at the kleptocracy think not because oil and to a lesser extent water and natural gas are what the invasion of Iraq are all about.
So primarily due to the gluttonous behavior of America we’ve entered a much more zero-sum, Malthusian world in which one country's gain will be another country's loss like our intentions in Iraq not the bullshit we feed the media. Think Haiti. A peaceful, democratic global order will be much more difficult to achieve under these circumstances and that’s why we need a huge military made up of fighting robots. Growth will depend more on raw power and accidents of geography than on good institutions though geography exerts little influence on the U.S. as we’ve seen. And rising global inflation suggests that we have already moved a good way toward such a world.
The capitalist dictatorships of the 20th century induced us to blur the distinctions between democratic and authoritarian states, a habit of mind that is thankfully still with us and keeps most Americans unaware of just how Orwellian their lives have become. But capitalist kleptocracies don't automatically all have the same interests (just look at the clashing U.S. and European views on Iraq). Eurpeans don’t seem to appreciate the American disease, the need that greed doth feed. Nor does the fact that a country is capitalist determine the way it will behave internationally. That depends on its army and its killing machines. We need a much more nuanced conceptual framework for understanding the non-capitalist world if we are not to become prisoners of an imagined past. And we shouldn't get excessively discouraged about the strength of our own greed, even in a "post-American" world. Its there strong as ever, at least among the pencil necked, devious little cocksuckers I hang with.
f.fukuyama@jhu.edu
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