For Europeans, the current state of the dynamic global system best resembles a popular Guns n’ Roses tune.
We’re on the Night Train, ready to crash and burn, and we’ll never learn, cause’ we love that stuff.
Hubris, that is. Drunk with power, the U.S. foreign policy-making elite is edging the world closer to war.
Resorting to military force might be a more cost effective and entertaining way to reshape the Middle East region than say, the difficult process of reducing U.S. dependency on oil and cutting ties with the corrupt regimes that supply it, or railroading a peaceful settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But it also spells doom for the future of international cooperation.
U.S. foreign policy-making elites have their amps cranked up, and are drowning out 58 years of institutions that they themselves like to jam to once and a while.
With the end of the Cold War, no one’s left to check the ambitions the of the world’s only remaining superpower.
Except maybe for the EU.
It’s hard to believe in 2003, just 14 years after the Berlin Wall came down, a larger wall is going up between Europe and the U.S.
To Washington’s chagrin, Germany, along with France and Belgium, vetoed a NATO resolution strengthening Turkey’s defenses in preparation for war against Iraq.
In retaliation, a group of U.S. Senators is urging the phased withdrawal of some 70,000 troops from Germany, and the leveling of huge trade sanctions against the EU. They’re promising to unleash a trade war unless the Europeans help the U.S. to achieve its goals in Iraq.
Deafened by the beating of its own war drum, the U.S. seems to have forgotten a few of the lessons on cooperation that it once taught to an eager pupil, Europe.
Before throwing out its notes on the significance of the post WWII political-economic and military alliances the U.S. should decide if it really wants to be a G.I. Joe solo act on the world stage.
For sure, the U.S. military is strong enough to go it alone in Iraq.
But the U.S. foreign policy-making elite must be equally sure that they want to make brute force the new, if quite familiar language of diplomacy in the modern global dynamic system, leading to spiraling defense costs, arms races, and a general lack of mutual trust.
The laws of the jungle are fast returning to international relations, after a brief absence of war between the great powers.
As the U.S. gears up for war against the “Axis of Evil,” we see nothing but endless military deployments in sight.
If Axl Rose were smart, he’d start thinking about a USO comeback tour.
