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It has been estimated that the total budgetary and economic cost to the United States of the Iraq war will turn out to be around $3 trillion. [20]ven with this level of expenditure, the armed forces have come under huge strain as a result of the war. Deployments have got steadily longer and redeployments more frequent, retention rates and recruitment standards have fallen, while the army has lost many of its brightest and best, with a remorseless rise in the number of officers choosing to leave at the earliest opportunity. [21] Such has been the inordinate cost of the Iraqi occupation that, regardless of political considerations, the financial burden of any similar proposed invasion of Iran — in practice likely to be much higher — would always have been too large: for military as well as political reasons, the Bush administration was unable to seriously contemplate similar military action against Iran and North Korea, the other two members of its ‘axis of evil’. [22] The United States is, thus, already begi
A NEW KIND OF WORLD
We stand on the eve of a different kind of world, but comprehending it is difficult: we are so accustomed to dealing with the paradigms and parameters of the contemporary world that we inevitably take them for granted, believing that they are set in concrete rather than themselves being the subject of longer-run cycles of historical change. Given that American global hegemony has held sway for almost a lifetime, and that Western supremacy transcends many lifetimes, this is not surprising. We are so used to the world being Western, even American, that we have little idea what it would be like if it was not. The West, moreover, has a strong vested interest in the world being cast in its image, because this brings multifarious benefits. As a matter of course, hegemonic powers seek to project their values and institutions on to subordinate nations and the latter, in response, will, depending on circumstances, adapt or genuflect towards their ways; if they don’t, hegemonic powers generally seek to impose those values and arrangements on them, even in extremis by force. For reasons of both mindset and interest, therefore, the United States, and the West more generally, finds it difficult to visualize, or accept, a world that involves a major and continuing diminution in its influence.
Take globalization as an example. The dominant Western view has been that globalization is a process by which the rest of the world becomes — and should become — increasingly Westernized, with the adoption of free markets, the import of Western capital, privatization, the rule of law, human rights regimes and democratic norms. [30] Much political effort, indeed, has been expended by the West towards this end. Competition, the market and technology, meanwhile, have been powerful and parallel pressures fostering the kind of convergence and homogeneity which is visible in many developing cities around the world in the form of high-rise buildings, expressways, mobile phones, and much else. There are, however, strong countervailing forces, rooted in the specific history and culture of each society, that serve to shape indigenous institutions like the family, the government and the company and which pull in exactly the opposite direction. [31] Furthermore, as countries grow more prosperous they become increasingly self-confident about their own culture and history, and thereby less inclined to ape the West. [32] Far from being a one-way process, globalization is rather more complex: the United States may have been the single most influential player, exerting enormous power in successive rounds of global trade talks, for example, but the biggest wi
Prior to 1960, the West and Japan enjoyed a huge economic advantage over the rest of the world, which still remained largely agrarian in character, but since then a gamut of developing countries have closed the gap with the West, especially those in East Asia. As a consequence, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between the developed world and the more advanced parts of the developing world: South Korea and Taiwan, for example, are now to be counted as developed. But as countries reach Western levels of development, do they become more like the West, or less like the West, or perhaps paradoxically a combination of the two? Clearly the pressures for convergence indicate the former but the forces of divergence and indigenization suggest the contrary. Previously, the overarching difference between the developed and the developing world was the huge disparity in their levels of economic development. It is only with the arrival of these countries at the lower reaches of Western levels of development that the question of convergence or divergence becomes pertinent. There has been an assumption by the Western mainstream that there is only one way of being modern, which involves the adoption of Western-style institutions, values, customs and beliefs, such as the rule of law, the free market and democratic norms. [33] This, one might add, is an attitude typically held by peoples and cultures who regard themselves as more developed and more ‘civilized’ than others: that progress for those who are lower down on the developmental scale involves them becoming more like those who are higher up.
[20] Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (London: Allen Lane, 2008), Chapter 1.
[21] Adrian Wooldridge, ‘After Bush: A Special Report on America and the World’, The Economist, 29 March 2008, p. 10.
[22] George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 29 January 2002.
[23] For a discussion of the US ’s current account deficit, see Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London and New York: Allen Lane, 2004), Chapter 8.
[24] Speech by Henry Hyde, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, 26 January, reprinted as ‘The Perils of the “Golden Theory”’, Strait Times, 21 February 2006. Paul Ke
[25] The US has even become a net importer of investment: the difference between the overseas assets owned by Americans and the American assets owned by foreigners fell from 8 per cent of GDP in the mid 1980s to a net liability of minus 22 per cent in 2006; Niall Ferguson, ‘Empire Falls’, October 2006, posted on www.vanityfair.com.
[26] Steven C. Johnson, ‘Dollar’s Decline Presents a Challenge to US Power’, International Herald Tribune, 28-9 April, 2007.
[27] ‘US’s Triple-A Credit Rating “Under Threat”’, Financial Times, 11 January 2008.
[28] There is no precedent for the extent of the militarization of the US economy both during the Cold War and subsequently; Eric Hobsbawm, Globalisation, Democracy, and Terrorism (London: Little, Brown, 2007), p. 160.
[29] For an interesting discussion of the economic cost to the United States of its military expenditure, see Chalmers Johnson, ‘Why the US Has Really Gone Broke’, Le Monde diplomatique, February 2008.
[30] Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), pp. 309-22; Gerald Segal, ‘Globalisation Has Always Primarily Been a Process of Westernisation’, South China Morning Post, 17 November 1998.
[31] For a discussion on the fundamental importance of cultural difference in the era of globalization, see Stuart Hall, ‘A Different Light’, Lecture to Prince Claus Fund Conference, Rotterdam, 12 December 2001.
[32] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), Chapters 4–5.
[33] Chris Patten, East and West: China, Power, and the Future of East Asia (London: Times Books, 1998), p. 166.