Analysis by Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Dec 29 2004 (IPS) — With the United States piling up unprecedented trade and budget deficits and bogged down in Iraq without a clear exit strategy, the neo-conservative vision of a U.S.-dominated, unipolar world over which Washington would rule as the ”new Rome” is seen increasingly by foreign policy elites here as a chimera.

So the question arises, if the Bush administration cannot impose its ”Pax Americana” on the rest of the world, what will take its place?

Three alternatives are most widely discussed here.

Among elites outside the administration, which, with Secretary of State Colin Powell’s departure, remains dominated by the coalition of neo-conservatives, aggressive nationalists and the Christian Right that championed war in Iraq, the favoured view is a return to the ”realist” philosophy embodied by Bush’s father.

In it, Washington retains its overall hegemony but nonetheless feels constrained (by its own relative economic weakness) to take the interests of other important and emerging powers into account in major foreign-policy initiatives.

This vision, to which former President Bill Clinton remained fundamentally faithful and which Democratic candidate John Kerry extolled during his unsuccessful presidential campaign that ended with Bush’s victory in November, gave priority to the strengthening of traditional U.S. alliances, especially the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

The realist approach also preferred acting multilaterally, rather than unilaterally; and supported ”humanitarian intervention” under limited circumstances, a principle embraced more strongly by the ”liberal interventionists” who favoured U.S. involvement under U.N. or NATO auspices in the Balkans, Haiti and East Timor.

In the second alternative, one championed by France and China, the United States is just one of a number of great and emerging powers in a more ”multipolar” world. Here, a general balance of power is maintained, and collective action – be it against ”rogue states” or for humanitarian intervention – is authorised and coordinated by the (possibly enlarged and more representative) U.N. Security Council.

Like that of Bush Senior, this vision would be essentially designed to ensure stability, but Washington would no longer be hegemonic.

Moreover, if it, or any other power, did act unilaterally against the interests of the other powers – as Bush did in Iraq – the others would be expected to constrain it via diplomacy, economic sanctions or even military power. Given Washington’s overwhelming military superiority, the most effective means to constrain it is likely to be economic, such as denying critical financial aid to its overseas adventures, or, possibly more potent still, selling dollars, despite the risks that might entail for the international economy.

To a faster-than-anticipated extent, this model of a future international order is already taking shape. As noted by ‘Slate’ columnist Fred Kaplan in the ‘New York Times’ on Sunday, central bankers in Middle Eastern oil-producing countries, along with Russia and China, are shifting a greater percentage of their reserves out of dollars and into euros which, as noted by ‘Washington Post’ correspondent T R Reid in his new book, ‘The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy’, ”was specifically designed to challenge the global hegemony of the dollar”.

Even in the military sphere, what realist theorists call ”balancing” against U.S. power is also underway, signalled most intriguingly this past week when Russia and China announced they will hold their first large-scale joint military exercises, including the deployment of submarines and possibly strategic bombers.

That announcement followed the biggest exercises China has ever held with a foreign force last March – the French Navy, a development that clearly got the attention of administration hardliners, especially in the Pentagon, which has not only mounted a major campaign to prevent the European Union (EU) from lifting a 15-year arms embargo against Beijing, but also has exerted heavy pressure on favoured ally Israel to stop selling China weapons or even refurbishing older equipment.

A third possibility, which is not necessarily inconsistent with the second, is global chaos in which the major powers simply fail to impose order and stability over vast stretches of the globe, even, in some cases, within their own spheres of influence, as – in the EU’s case – during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, or, in Washington’s case, the effective abandonment of Haiti in the past 10 months.

This ”world without power”, the subject and title of an article by the British neo-conservative historian, Niall Ferguson, in ‘Foreign Policy’ magazine last summer, suggests that, in the absence of U.S. domination – a scenario much favoured by Ferguson himself – a serious ”power vacuum” could easily emerge in coming years, leading to an ”anarchic nightmare of a new Dark Age: an era of waning empires and religious fanaticism, of endemic plunder and pillage in the world’s forgotten regions; of economic stagnation and civilization’s retreat into a few fortified enclaves”.

Ferguson argues that the two most likely rivals to U.S. "hyperpower," the EU and China, are much weaker than they appear – Europe because its aging population and dropping fertility rates condemn it ”to decline in international influence and importance”; China, because its corruption and governance problems, its heavy dependence on exports and weak banking system make it ripe for a major breakdown.

Ferguson also concedes, with regret, that the U.S. colossus itself has ”clay feet” – the imbalance between its ”hard” and ”soft power”; its dependence on foreign capital; and its lack of experience in and patience for nation-building and empire maintenance, which have begun to assert themselves in public opinion, despite last month’s election results.

At the dawn of 2005 and Bush’s second term in office, the question is which scenario is most likely to be pushed – either deliberately or negligently – by his administration which, despite its revived multilateralist rhetoric, still appears committed to the unipolar world that most analysts believe is now quite beyond its grasp.

”Isolationism is the default option” of U.S. foreign policy, noted Kenneth Adelman, a prominent neo-conservative and member of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board (DPB) at the beginning of Bush’s ”war on terror”, and, indeed, as the frustrations of the Iraq war and the failure of U.S. allies to support it have piled up over the past 21 months, the populist rage against and contempt for ungrateful Arabs, France, the United Nations and multilateralism in general has become ever louder.

Fuelled by the moral self-righteousness of the Christian Right and the neo-conservatives, these voices – which historian Walter Russell Mead identified several years ago as ”Jacksonian” after the seventh U.S. president, frontiersman and Indian fighter, Gen Andrew Jackson – are now more strongly represented in both Congress and the executive branch than ever.

For them, Bush Senior’s multilateralism and Jacque Chirac’s ”multipolar world” – like Kerry’s ”global test” – are objects of scorn. They tend to their own and those who are suitably grateful. The rest be damned.

(*The second of two parts. The link to Part 1 is below).