The Emergence of a New World Order
Last Thursday I went to hear a lecture on international politics by Carlos Rizowy. He came all the way out here from New York just to give this talk to a small group of business men. He was an excellent speaker. He was very clear and had lots of energy. I think my parents may get a recording of his talk. In the rest of this post I will summarize a few of his main points.
The rest of the world views America as a bully. Even our closest allies are nervous because we have so much power. They have no negotiating power against us. While we tend to see our expansion as globalization, the rest of the world reacts with regionalism. Regionalism is where other countries form strong bonds with the countries near them and move away from the U.S. This is equivalent to groups of kids moving past the bully in groups to feel safer. One example of our bullying is how we placed our military forces in Europe to combat Nazism and Communism, but now that those threats are gone we don’t leave. We had no exit strategy from Europe, not because we lacked foresight, but because we had no intention of ever leaving. Europe has since banded more tightly together, creating the euro to directly compete with the American Dollar. The world today is dominated by one superpower: us. This has never occurred before in all of history so we cannot learn what will happen by studying the past. During the cold war there were two superpowers, which created more tension, but was actually more stable than our world today. We need to begin reversing regionalism so that it is no longer competing with globalization.
When Reagan came to power the U.S. was fighting the cold war using the “second strike” strategy. We had enough nuclear weapons spread out around the world so that even if the Soviet Union destroyed most of them with a first strike, we could destroy them entirely with only 3% of our weapons. Reagan decided that this was not a good plan because they could do the same to us with only 3% of their weapons. Reagan wanted a first strike plan that would be able to beat the soviets. His first strategy was to put the MX nuclear missiles in Europe. When Europe protested this he finally succeeded in putting them in Germany because Germany was still technically occupied territory from WWII. His second plan was to build the Star Wars missile defense shield. The U.S. and the Soviet Union had the ABM treaty to prevent anyone from building a Star Wars like system. Reagan began to move away from the treaty. Reagan lobbied Star Wars as the ultimate defense against a nuclear strike because it would destroy incoming missiles in outer space where they couldn’t hurt people, property, or the Earth. In reality Star Wars was the ultimate offensive weapon. It created a one way umbrella that would allow us to strike without any fear of retaliation. The Soviets cold not develop a counter to this because of their internal problems. The Soviet Union was forced to surrender the cold war without ever firing a shot.
In the Middle East there has been a conflict across the Persia Gulf between Iran and the six oil rich monarchies (like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait). Iran had enough power to destroy all of these six nations. In the war between Iraq and Iran we supported Iraq to counter Iran, but in reality we supported both sides. The monarchies outsourced their security to the Ottoman Empire. When the Ottoman Empire failed they outsourced their security to the British. The British defended Kuwait the first two times that Iraq invaded them, but the third time that Iraq invaded Kuwait it was our turn to defend them. Saddam misjudged how quickly we could fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and we pushed him out of Kuwait quickly. We could have taken Saddam out of power but we didn’t. If we had taken him out of power, Saudi Arabia would have thanked us and then told us to leave. We created a system of parallels where the bottom third is set aside to protect the Shiites from Saddam. The top third is protected for the Kurds. The Kurds are the largest ethnic group to not have a country of their own, and we don’t want to give them a country because we would have to carve one out of Iraq or Turkey, which is not in our best interests. The general policy of the United States is to try to match moral decisions with national strategic interests. If both cannot be met we protect our strategic interests. Protecting the Shiites and Kurds was morally right, but at the same time we were protecting Saddam from them to keep him in power. The stability created by the parallels system allowed the U.S. the ability to establish larger military bases in the area. Once again we had no exit strategy for the Middle East because we had no intention of leaving.
Even though we had good moral causes in the first Iraq war we still made much of the world nervous. Other countries are not only afraid of our military power, but they also fear a cultural and linguistic invasion. There are two kinds of power: a strong society and a strong military. The Greek city of Athens had a very strong society but a weak military so they were easily conquered. Sparta had a very strong military but no one wanted to live there. The ideology of the average American is that we would like the rest of the world to be like us. But in reality we don’t. We can only be like we are because the rest of the world isn’t. If a country gets human rights for their workers the American industries will move their factories to a different country that doesn’t have human rights.
We went into Panama to remove Noriega because he was, in reality, a very bad guy, and we wanted to make an example to the rest of Latin America. Simply speaking we went to another country and kidnapped their president. Noriega was born poor but through his intense ambition he joined the army, rose up through the ranks, got a scholarship to West Point, became a general, and then became president. When we removed Noriega we tried him and put him into our best prison, with air conditioning, exercise rooms, libraries, personal medical care, etc. Many of the problems in Panama and other parts of Latin America arise from America’s drug addiction. America consumes more drugs than any other country. In Panama all the police are corrupted and drugs lords wield huge amounts of power. These problems are directly funded by the sale of drugs to America.
While Saudi Arabia was outsourcing its external security to powerful countries it still faced internal conflict from the Whabi Islamic extremists. The Whabi believe that “Mohammed’s struggle is my struggle”. The problem is that Muhammad’s struggle involved amassing an army to tear across the land converting people to Islam by the sword. It doesn’t take much for these people to make you their enemy. They have no women’s rights, and they oppose any form of western education or western culture. But their number one enemies are the more moderate Muslims. One group of Muslims: the Sufi, believe that they can practice their faith even in a non Islamic society. They feel that this challenge makes them more faithful to their religion. The Whabi have destroyed most of the Sufi. The Saudi monarchs solved this problem by outsourcing their internal security to the Whabi. Now many of the internal systems are controlled by the Whabi. They have agreed to take their religious war to other countries. Recent bombings in Saudi Arabia suggest that this deal may be breaking down. One prominent Whabi follower is Osama bin Laden. While he can be described in many bad ways there is one thing that he is not: a hypocrite. He is one of the richest men in the world and yet he prefers to live in a hut and wear robes, using all his money for his holy war. Every major religion has radicalism, but Christianity and Judaism have managed to marginalize it. Christianity has so many different branches and sects that no matter what you believe you can find church for yourself. In many of the poor or rural areas the mosques control all of the schools, clinics, and other services. They also recruit terrorists. The United States supported the Shaw of Iran, but we only brought our western ideas to a small class of Iranians. This caused a conflict with the majority of the population and the Shaw was overthrown. We learned our lesson from this and we now realize that we must bring westernization down to the bottom level of the people. Once we get done destroying a country, like Afghanistan for example, we send in all of our reconstruction companies and their foreman. These Americans interact directly with the working people of Afghanistan and we bring them our culture. Then we establish a new set of schools and clinics in these areas. The people will then have an alternative to the classic mosque controlled services. It is at this level that the war will really be won. By establishing these services we can effectively marginalize Islamic extremism. Countries like Saudi Arabia strongly oppose this type of infiltration.
After 9/11 Bush declared a War on Terror. This really doesn’t make sense. Terror is not a thing; it is a tactic of war. There are three major types of combat: nuclear, conventional, and unconventional. Terrorism is simply one type of unconventional tactic. The War on Terror is equivalent to having declared a “War on Blitzkrieg” during WWII. Who we actually declared war on were the Islamic extremists.
Our enemy changes constantly due to our strategic interests at the time. When the soviets invaded Afghanistan the only people who had any chance of stopping them were the Mujahidin, a group of Islamic fundamentalists. We told the Mujahidin that the soviets were communists who would destroy their religion. We gave them weapons and built them tunnels and structures to fight the soviets. When we invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 we knew exactly where all of their tunnels and structures were. The Taliban were the same people that we had armed to the teeth a couple of decades before.
The twentieth century has been the bloodiest century in all of mankind’s history. Over 100,000,000 people were killed or displaced at the hands of other human beings.
Most people think of peace in a prophetic way where everyone is happy and free. In reality this could never exist because some people’s definition of peace violates others. The only type of peace that can exist is a practical peace. Practical peace is created by a stable power relationship. For example: the U.S. and Mexico are at peace with each other because there is nothing that Mexico could do against us. Many people use “freedom” and “liberty” interchangeably. Freedom means that people are free to do whatever they would like. When a government is formed it takes away all of your freedoms and gives out certain liberties that people can enjoy.
The Unites States is moving towards a Pax Americana. We are trying to form an American hegemony with the United States as the superpower at the top and a collection of allies under our control. It is interesting to notice who our strongest allies are: Japan, Germany, and Russia. These countries have all lost wars to us. There are two entities that could possibly challenge the United States in the future: China and India. We cannot remain dominant over these countries without allies. In each section of the world we form coalitions of countries who were formerly enemies of each other. We created an alliance between Japan and Korea in Asian and the NATO alliance with Germany, France, Great Britain, etc. in Europe. Our pattern is to beat a country, westernize it, convert it to a democracy, and then form a coalition that is allied to us. This is what we are really doing in Iraq. We hope to create a coalition of democracies in the Middle East: Turkey, Egypt, Israel, and Iraq. Democracies have historically never fought each other. The concept of Pax Americana is not recent. Our imperialistic tendencies have been with us since our country was first created. It is really amazing how a nonexistent country became the world’s sole super power in only 200 years. All leaders of our country have followed this idea in some shape or form. While Reagan used military strength against the Soviet Union, Carter used the human rights issue against them, which lead to their internal problems.
That just about covers all of his main points. Congratulations for making it to the end of this post, I hope that you found these ideas as interesting as I did. It makes one realize that there is a bigger picture of why things happen in the world. Many people really don’t understand what’s really happening today, especially with the Iraq situation. Some people think we went there to find the WMDs, and others think we went there to get their oil. I really hope I can get to more talks like this. It also makes me want to take more political science and history classes in school. These ideas give me a framework to compare new information and new ideas to. It is amazing how much a three hour lecture can open up your mind to the world. I will continue to think about these ideas for a long time and I hope that you do as well. I love to discuss politics of any kind, and if anyone has any more information or thoughts concerning these ideas feel free to respond to this post.
The rest of the world views America as a bully. Even our closest allies are nervous because we have so much power. They have no negotiating power against us. While we tend to see our expansion as globalization, the rest of the world reacts with regionalism. Regionalism is where other countries form strong bonds with the countries near them and move away from the U.S. This is equivalent to groups of kids moving past the bully in groups to feel safer. One example of our bullying is how we placed our military forces in Europe to combat Nazism and Communism, but now that those threats are gone we don’t leave. We had no exit strategy from Europe, not because we lacked foresight, but because we had no intention of ever leaving. Europe has since banded more tightly together, creating the euro to directly compete with the American Dollar. The world today is dominated by one superpower: us. This has never occurred before in all of history so we cannot learn what will happen by studying the past. During the cold war there were two superpowers, which created more tension, but was actually more stable than our world today. We need to begin reversing regionalism so that it is no longer competing with globalization.
When Reagan came to power the U.S. was fighting the cold war using the “second strike” strategy. We had enough nuclear weapons spread out around the world so that even if the Soviet Union destroyed most of them with a first strike, we could destroy them entirely with only 3% of our weapons. Reagan decided that this was not a good plan because they could do the same to us with only 3% of their weapons. Reagan wanted a first strike plan that would be able to beat the soviets. His first strategy was to put the MX nuclear missiles in Europe. When Europe protested this he finally succeeded in putting them in Germany because Germany was still technically occupied territory from WWII. His second plan was to build the Star Wars missile defense shield. The U.S. and the Soviet Union had the ABM treaty to prevent anyone from building a Star Wars like system. Reagan began to move away from the treaty. Reagan lobbied Star Wars as the ultimate defense against a nuclear strike because it would destroy incoming missiles in outer space where they couldn’t hurt people, property, or the Earth. In reality Star Wars was the ultimate offensive weapon. It created a one way umbrella that would allow us to strike without any fear of retaliation. The Soviets cold not develop a counter to this because of their internal problems. The Soviet Union was forced to surrender the cold war without ever firing a shot.
In the Middle East there has been a conflict across the Persia Gulf between Iran and the six oil rich monarchies (like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait). Iran had enough power to destroy all of these six nations. In the war between Iraq and Iran we supported Iraq to counter Iran, but in reality we supported both sides. The monarchies outsourced their security to the Ottoman Empire. When the Ottoman Empire failed they outsourced their security to the British. The British defended Kuwait the first two times that Iraq invaded them, but the third time that Iraq invaded Kuwait it was our turn to defend them. Saddam misjudged how quickly we could fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and we pushed him out of Kuwait quickly. We could have taken Saddam out of power but we didn’t. If we had taken him out of power, Saudi Arabia would have thanked us and then told us to leave. We created a system of parallels where the bottom third is set aside to protect the Shiites from Saddam. The top third is protected for the Kurds. The Kurds are the largest ethnic group to not have a country of their own, and we don’t want to give them a country because we would have to carve one out of Iraq or Turkey, which is not in our best interests. The general policy of the United States is to try to match moral decisions with national strategic interests. If both cannot be met we protect our strategic interests. Protecting the Shiites and Kurds was morally right, but at the same time we were protecting Saddam from them to keep him in power. The stability created by the parallels system allowed the U.S. the ability to establish larger military bases in the area. Once again we had no exit strategy for the Middle East because we had no intention of leaving.
Even though we had good moral causes in the first Iraq war we still made much of the world nervous. Other countries are not only afraid of our military power, but they also fear a cultural and linguistic invasion. There are two kinds of power: a strong society and a strong military. The Greek city of Athens had a very strong society but a weak military so they were easily conquered. Sparta had a very strong military but no one wanted to live there. The ideology of the average American is that we would like the rest of the world to be like us. But in reality we don’t. We can only be like we are because the rest of the world isn’t. If a country gets human rights for their workers the American industries will move their factories to a different country that doesn’t have human rights.
We went into Panama to remove Noriega because he was, in reality, a very bad guy, and we wanted to make an example to the rest of Latin America. Simply speaking we went to another country and kidnapped their president. Noriega was born poor but through his intense ambition he joined the army, rose up through the ranks, got a scholarship to West Point, became a general, and then became president. When we removed Noriega we tried him and put him into our best prison, with air conditioning, exercise rooms, libraries, personal medical care, etc. Many of the problems in Panama and other parts of Latin America arise from America’s drug addiction. America consumes more drugs than any other country. In Panama all the police are corrupted and drugs lords wield huge amounts of power. These problems are directly funded by the sale of drugs to America.
While Saudi Arabia was outsourcing its external security to powerful countries it still faced internal conflict from the Whabi Islamic extremists. The Whabi believe that “Mohammed’s struggle is my struggle”. The problem is that Muhammad’s struggle involved amassing an army to tear across the land converting people to Islam by the sword. It doesn’t take much for these people to make you their enemy. They have no women’s rights, and they oppose any form of western education or western culture. But their number one enemies are the more moderate Muslims. One group of Muslims: the Sufi, believe that they can practice their faith even in a non Islamic society. They feel that this challenge makes them more faithful to their religion. The Whabi have destroyed most of the Sufi. The Saudi monarchs solved this problem by outsourcing their internal security to the Whabi. Now many of the internal systems are controlled by the Whabi. They have agreed to take their religious war to other countries. Recent bombings in Saudi Arabia suggest that this deal may be breaking down. One prominent Whabi follower is Osama bin Laden. While he can be described in many bad ways there is one thing that he is not: a hypocrite. He is one of the richest men in the world and yet he prefers to live in a hut and wear robes, using all his money for his holy war. Every major religion has radicalism, but Christianity and Judaism have managed to marginalize it. Christianity has so many different branches and sects that no matter what you believe you can find church for yourself. In many of the poor or rural areas the mosques control all of the schools, clinics, and other services. They also recruit terrorists. The United States supported the Shaw of Iran, but we only brought our western ideas to a small class of Iranians. This caused a conflict with the majority of the population and the Shaw was overthrown. We learned our lesson from this and we now realize that we must bring westernization down to the bottom level of the people. Once we get done destroying a country, like Afghanistan for example, we send in all of our reconstruction companies and their foreman. These Americans interact directly with the working people of Afghanistan and we bring them our culture. Then we establish a new set of schools and clinics in these areas. The people will then have an alternative to the classic mosque controlled services. It is at this level that the war will really be won. By establishing these services we can effectively marginalize Islamic extremism. Countries like Saudi Arabia strongly oppose this type of infiltration.
After 9/11 Bush declared a War on Terror. This really doesn’t make sense. Terror is not a thing; it is a tactic of war. There are three major types of combat: nuclear, conventional, and unconventional. Terrorism is simply one type of unconventional tactic. The War on Terror is equivalent to having declared a “War on Blitzkrieg” during WWII. Who we actually declared war on were the Islamic extremists.
Our enemy changes constantly due to our strategic interests at the time. When the soviets invaded Afghanistan the only people who had any chance of stopping them were the Mujahidin, a group of Islamic fundamentalists. We told the Mujahidin that the soviets were communists who would destroy their religion. We gave them weapons and built them tunnels and structures to fight the soviets. When we invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 we knew exactly where all of their tunnels and structures were. The Taliban were the same people that we had armed to the teeth a couple of decades before.
The twentieth century has been the bloodiest century in all of mankind’s history. Over 100,000,000 people were killed or displaced at the hands of other human beings.
Most people think of peace in a prophetic way where everyone is happy and free. In reality this could never exist because some people’s definition of peace violates others. The only type of peace that can exist is a practical peace. Practical peace is created by a stable power relationship. For example: the U.S. and Mexico are at peace with each other because there is nothing that Mexico could do against us. Many people use “freedom” and “liberty” interchangeably. Freedom means that people are free to do whatever they would like. When a government is formed it takes away all of your freedoms and gives out certain liberties that people can enjoy.
The Unites States is moving towards a Pax Americana. We are trying to form an American hegemony with the United States as the superpower at the top and a collection of allies under our control. It is interesting to notice who our strongest allies are: Japan, Germany, and Russia. These countries have all lost wars to us. There are two entities that could possibly challenge the United States in the future: China and India. We cannot remain dominant over these countries without allies. In each section of the world we form coalitions of countries who were formerly enemies of each other. We created an alliance between Japan and Korea in Asian and the NATO alliance with Germany, France, Great Britain, etc. in Europe. Our pattern is to beat a country, westernize it, convert it to a democracy, and then form a coalition that is allied to us. This is what we are really doing in Iraq. We hope to create a coalition of democracies in the Middle East: Turkey, Egypt, Israel, and Iraq. Democracies have historically never fought each other. The concept of Pax Americana is not recent. Our imperialistic tendencies have been with us since our country was first created. It is really amazing how a nonexistent country became the world’s sole super power in only 200 years. All leaders of our country have followed this idea in some shape or form. While Reagan used military strength against the Soviet Union, Carter used the human rights issue against them, which lead to their internal problems.
That just about covers all of his main points. Congratulations for making it to the end of this post, I hope that you found these ideas as interesting as I did. It makes one realize that there is a bigger picture of why things happen in the world. Many people really don’t understand what’s really happening today, especially with the Iraq situation. Some people think we went there to find the WMDs, and others think we went there to get their oil. I really hope I can get to more talks like this. It also makes me want to take more political science and history classes in school. These ideas give me a framework to compare new information and new ideas to. It is amazing how much a three hour lecture can open up your mind to the world. I will continue to think about these ideas for a long time and I hope that you do as well. I love to discuss politics of any kind, and if anyone has any more information or thoughts concerning these ideas feel free to respond to this post.