Part 1: Theatrical militarism

RIO DE JANEIRO - At the end of his autobiography "Interesting Times - a Twentieth-Century Life", British historian Eric Hobsbawm notes that today nobody controls the United States and for this reason its enormous power is capable of destabilizing the world. The world has indeed become unstable since US foreign policy was hijacked by a group of neo-conservatives - a kind of neo-imperialist school.

Washington has tried by any means necessary to portray al-Qaeda as a well-established, ubiquitous Ultimate Evil Power, responsible for terrorism from the Philippines to Palestine, from Kashmir to Chechnya, from Afghanistan to Yemen, from Lebanon to Bali. This enthronement of terrorism as a Universal Force has institutionalized nothing less than a state of permanent global war. Some extremist American pundits like Norman Podhoretz already consider this to be the Fourth World War, the Third being the Cold War. But the current situation is rather what The Nation's Katrina van den Heuvel describes as "perpetual war fever used for political purposes".

The expected US war against Iraq is being packaged and sold as an episode in the non-stop war against terrorism. But the fact is, most of the planet is largely peaceful. There are only a few hot spots: the Middle East, Chechnya, Kashmir, Colombia, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Congo, Nepal, and the Philippines.

US allies and client-states are extremely uneasy in the brave new world dominated by the interventionist, preemptive Bush Doctrine, where "either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" and international treaties are regarded as subversive documents. South Korea has constantly reiterated that it does not feel threatened by the North's archaic Stalinism. And since the Beirut Arab summit last March, Kuwait has made clear that it has solved its problems with Iraq. As far as US strategic competitors are concerned, the absolute priority for Russia and China - and also for a regional power like Iran - is economic development. Their exclusive strategic imperative is to resist provocations by Washington's hawks - the Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle club.

All over Latin America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the US after September 11 is increasingly perceived as a dangerous, aggressive, narcissistic imperial power, and no longer as the "indispensable nation" (copyright 1998, then-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, justifying a 200-missile attack on - who else? - Iraq).

The recent string of US financial scandals - Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, etc - has revealed the true face of the "greed is good" ethic, and the moral weakness associated with unbridled greed. And this is the key question the world is now asking the US: Why is it that no-holds-barred liberalism can only conceive and promote an ethic by which Good coincides with Greed? Could America - and the liberal West - live by values other than Greed?

As the Bush administration's propaganda machine went into overdrive after September 11, it was clever enough to present war not as a conflict of material interests, but as a struggle between irreconcilable worldviews - while taking pains to emphasize at every available opportunity it was not a war against Islam. This may sound paradoxical, but it was an offer many could not refuse. More than one year after September 11, and after a string of corporate scandals, war is now also being sold as a demonstration that America, in spite of greed, still has values to promote and uphold. The Bush administration is selling war as moral behavior: US idealism will lead to a world that is freer and safer.

The rest of the world is not convinced of this idealism, and large sections of the Muslim world are not convinced this is not a war against Islam. Hobsbawm believes that "there will be a period of great instability, because Americans believe they can engage in aggressive wars in any part of the world which will be won under any circumstances". Due to the US's undisputed military, political, economic and cultural preeminence, any criticism of Washington's policies, especially in the Anglo-American media, is immediately branded as "anti-American". So we set out to check what those in power in Washington are up to by examining the thoughts of key authors and personalities of the American Establishment, like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Paul Kennedy and Henry Kissinger.

The result is surprising: these eminences all have their nuances, but they present the same view of a US that is not invincible. On the contrary: the US now has to deal with the irreversible loss of its power in an increasingly developing world. These authors do not diagnose an empire at its apex, but rather a reluctant empire, increasingly fragile and threatened. Washington's geopolitical bible is still "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives" (Basic Books, 1997), in which former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski stresses the necessity and the means for the US to establish an asymmetrical domination over Eurasia.

In a January 1998 interview to the respected French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, Brzezinski went on record to confirm that the US in fact created the jihad in Afghanistan against the former Soviet Union on July 3, 1979, almost six months before the Soviet invasion of December 24, 1979 (according to the official version, the CIA only started helping the mujahideen in 1980).

Pakistani intelligence sources also remember that when Pakistani military intelligence wanted a Saudi prince to direct the Afghan jihad, there were no takers. Saudi Arabia's rulers then recommended one of the heirs of a rich family very close to the monarchy - none other than Osama bin Laden. Osama arrived in Peshawar just in time to listen to Zbig - then Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser - manifest his full support for the jihad. Brzezinski's intuitions that Uzbekistan and Ukraine were vital for the US may be debatable: he believed it was crucial to annex Ukraine to the West and to use Uzbekistan to detach Central Asia from Russian influence. But he was right on the mark on Eurasia: it is the center of the economy and population in the developed world in the 21st century, and he was positively alarmed by the fact that the US, isolated by two oceans, was so far away from the action. At the time his book was published in 1997, Brzezinski knew for sure that the goods and money essential for maintaining the US's very high standard of living came from Eurasia.

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Perhaps the crucial myth of America is that it pursued a completely different road to development from a corrupted and cynical Europe. But America's isolation in the 19th century was only military and diplomatic: its whole economic development was based on two vectors imported from Europe: capital and labor. Europe invested heavily in America - by exporting cargos of literate and cheap overseas immigrants. At the end of the 19th century, America was largely self-sufficient, a massive producer of raw materials with a large trade surplus.

One century later the picture is completely different. The US current-account deficit - the broadest measure of the US foreign-trade gap - shot up in the go-go '90s and reached $417 billion in 2001. To balance its external debt, the US needs to swallow foreign capital. The US today cannot live on its own production. As we move to a more stable world in terms of more democracy, more educational opportunities, and more demographic control, we are confronted by a frightening possibility: the world might find out that it can live without the US, while the US discovers it cannot live without the world.

For all the talk about the merits of globalization, economists like Brazil's Jose Fiori would say globalization in the end is little else than a technique for profit optimization in a historically-specific world environment, ie, the situation today of a relative abundance of literate workforces outside the main industrialized countries.

Washington's hawks certainly know that their main objective is not to defend a liberal and democratic order that is becoming meaningless inside the US itself. Nothing much changed since State Department planner George Kennan set out the basic framework for understanding US foreign policy in 1948: "We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population … In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming: and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives." (State Department Policy Planning Study, cited by Noam Chomsky in On Power and Ideology: the Managua Lectures.)

In the Middle East, Kennan's "pattern of relationships" has included a stream of client regimes serving US interests - Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia (before Osama). US interests were also handsomely served by Iraq before fateful August 2, 1990, the day Saddam Hussein, from a trusted ally and friend of Washington and London, instantly became "the new Hitler" (in George Bush senior's phrase). CNN may find in its archives splendid footage of a beaming Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983 (a photograph of the event exists in the Globo Network archives).

America of course will always need staggering provisions of goods and capital. To make this happen, the strategic objective was long ago amplified to exercising total political control over the world's resources. But how to control these resources and eliminate competition when there are too many literate people and too many democracies around? The US is not really threatened by the Axis of Evil: Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il or the intolerant mullahs faithful to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have only rhetorical firepower. The real strategic competitors are in fact the European Union, Russia and Japan in the short term, and China in the long term. It's unthinkable to apply the preemptive Bush doctrine against these players. In each of these cases, the US has to negotiate.

The problem of its economic dependency remains, but the US also has to find a way to be at the center of the world - at least symbolically - to convince all of its "hyperpower". This mechanism is what French historian Emmanuel Todd describes as "theatrical militarism".

The strategy means that Washington should never come up with a definitive solution for any geopolitical problem, because instability is the only thing that would justify military action ad infinitum by the only superpower, anytime, anywhere. In practical terms, this means there is no real initiative to find an acceptable solution for both parties of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This means there will be no comprehensive solution for Afghanistan - where the US is now confronted by a jihad launched by disgruntled Pashtuns to kick out foreign invaders. This means no American push for a definitive solution in Kashmir. This means the usual, endless litany of "special envoys" playing for the cameras in assorted trouble spots with off-the-cuff "peace plans".

Washington knows it is unable to confront the real players in the world - Europe, Russia, Japan, China. Thus it seeks to remain politically on top by bullying minor players like the Axis of Evil, or even more minor players like Cuba. The US propaganda machine will always be warning of tremendous threats (Iraq has the fourth-largest army in the world, its renewed nuclear program will incinerate us all, etc). And to keep the illusion going, Washington continues to develop new weapons designed to increase its already smashing military supremacy, fuelled by the Pentagon's astronomical budget and benefiting the US military-industrial complex. Gore Vidal is one of the few US insiders to deconstruct the process which feeds on the logic of an unending, unstoppable arms race.

Does all of this constitute an American Empire? Hardly. A little more than a decade after the implosion of the Soviet Empire, the world may be confronted by the possibility that the American Empire is beginning to decompose.

Empire or republic?

At the beginning of the Iranian Revolution, Shi'ite ideology was starkly denouncing the injustices of the world. This had tremendous revolutionary potential - just like the original Protestant metaphysics which considered Man and Society as corrupted. Luther and Calvin were in fact the Western ayatollahs of the 16th century. And they were instrumental in the birth of a pure society: America.

America was as much an offspring of religious exaltation as was Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran. The similarities don't stop there. Samuel Huntington - an expert in counter-insurgency in Vietnam during the Johnson administration - came up with a theory of the clash of civilizations that is essentially affiliated to the concept of jihad. The theory is nothing but a conceptual double of Khomeini's belief in the clash of civilizations.

In religious terms, the US is indeed involved in a jihad to purify an evil world. In military terms, it's more complicated. Until Pearl Harbor, the US was basically a naval power, like Athens was. It was certainly an isolationist power. It could never be accused of being imperialist in a Roman way. America's world came into being in 1945 - a consequence of overwhelming military and industrial supremacy. The two main prizes were what could only be named "protectorates" - Germany and Japan. Germany was the second largest industrial power before World War II, and Japan is the second economic power today. The US established its power by military means - absolutely essential for controlling the world economic system. In this context there are indeed similarities with the Roman Empire.

After its victory over Carthage, Rome took over the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Rome had unlimited resources, land, money and slaves. If we study the social history of Rome, we learn that peasants and artisans in Italy lost their value in the new "globalized" Mediterranean economy - a process that increased the social polarization between an economically worthless plebeian mob and a predatory plutocracy. This process caused the implosion of the Roman middle class. As the mob could not be eliminated, Rome came up with the sublime concept of panem et circenses - bread and circuses - to keep them pacified.

Modern American-led globalization also is not an apolitical phenomenon. A liberalized economic world with no nation, no state, no military power simply does not exist. Whether we study it through a pattern based on Athens or on Rome, the modern globalized economy is the result of a political-military process.

The Goddess of the Market remains the supreme myth in the great US universities. It's one of the major cultural exports of the US. But just like another major export - the Hollywood movie - it's not exactly realistic. The basic principle of globalization is asymmetrical: the rest of the world produces so the US can consume. There's no balance between exports and imports in the US. The new economy bubble burst, and there are plenty of traffic jams on the information highway. The general atmosphere is more like panem et circenses - this sublime concept implemented by Rome to pacify the empire's unruly mob.

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Strategically, it was Russia that won World War II on the European front. Russian human sacrifice - before, during and after the siege of Stalingrad - was lethal to the Nazis. The invasion of Normandy in June 1944 happened when the Russians had already reversed the tide and were on the brink of invading Germany. It may be difficult for Americans - and Asians - to understand that for countless Europeans, Europe's liberation was due to the fact that Russian communism had defeated German Nazism.

Observers like British military expert Liddell Hart in his History of the Second World War pointed out that in the European theater, US troops were too slow and too bureaucratic. In military terms, on the ground the US is not Athens, and much less Rome. The US, by contrast, has recently adopted the concept of zero-death war: war with minimal casualties for its own forces, and maximum damage for an enemy helpless to combat massive air power - as seen in the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. The result of such a war implies no occupation by ground troops, and so no expansion of territorial empire as we know it. All that is needed are compact military bases - like the ones in the Gulf and now all over Central Asia - and strategically-positioned aircraft carriers.

People tend to forget that the distribution of US forces before September 11 was still mired in Cold War mentality. There were more than 60,000 US soldiers in Germany, more than 40,000 in Japan, and more than 35,000 in South Korea - followed by a little more than 10,000 each in Italy and the UK, and less than 10,000 scattered around Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, Greece and Turkey.

So the really important possessions of the so-called American Empire are really what could be defined as the European and East Asian "protectorates". Without them, there would be no US world power. Before the increasing likelihood of an attack against Iraq, there were only 10,000 US troops in the Middle East - almost 13,000 if we include Turkey. Recently they have been also moving to the borders of the old communist empire: around 10,000 are in Afghanistan and no more than 1,500 in Uzbekistan. But the crucial point remains that 85 percent of American military personnel abroad were getting their bed and breakfast from the crucial "protectorates" of Germany, Japan and South Korea.

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The euphoria on Wall Street, while it lasted, was totally disproportionate to the real growth of the American economy. It was a sort of rich man's inflation. The actual exploitation of people in the developed world and the over-exploitation of people in the developing world would never pose a problem to the balance of a globalized society if ruling classes - especially in Europe and Japan - were benefiting. But the US's vulnerability to the regulatory mechanism of the whole thing is now a threat to these classes, in Europe and Japan as well as in developing countries.

When we know that a significant part of the world's profits goes to Wall Street, and when we know that the US economy is not exactly productive - hooked as it is on increasingly massive imports of consumer goods - Wall Street starts looking like a fiction. Money injected into the US falls literally into a mirage. In a Merlin the Magician syndrome, what for the privileged few living in America's orbit means capital investment, for Americans themselves means a blank cheque enabling them to consume goods bought from all over the world. Nobody knows the consequences in the long run. No economist can predict when and how the implosion of the whole system will happen.

Unbridled neoliberalism is now being acknowledged by economists from Asia to Latin America as a deterrence to growth. Professor Hobsbawm observed that the recent election of the former metalworker Lula as president of Brazil, with 53 million votes, "is a direct consequence of the application of IMF reforms, of market fundamentalism, to Brazil. It was the response of Brazilians from all social classes to what used to be called the Washington consensus. This is the proof Washington-styled globalization originates a massive, contrary political and social reaction."

In the short term, this type of globalization allows the US to perform the role of indispensable consumer, while the rise of social inequalities everywhere - a key consequence of the system - allows profits to swell. These profits feed the US with fresh funds necessary to finance all the consuming.

America's military power cannot be compared to the brute force of Rome's. America's power is fundamentally based on the consent of the ruling classes of allies, who duly pay their dues. But if the system moves beyond an acceptable level of financial insecurity, the voluntary servitude to the US imperial project becomes inevitably meaningless.

To prevent this from happening, Washington could do worse than to treat its partners as equals. A universalist America would have to convince the world - rhetorically and economically - that "we are all Americans". But in a Washington controlled by fundamentalist hawks, practically everybody else is now getting no more than second or third-class treatment.

To a certain extent, Anglo-Saxons respect differences. The British Empire was an overseas empire, established because of immense technological superiority. It never tried to integrate the conquered, to turn Indians, Africans or Malays into perfect British specimens. The key to the system was indirect rule. So no wonder the decolonization process was relatively easy.

The French, on the other hand, wanted to turn Vietnamese, Senegalese and Algerians into perfect French specimens. No wonder France went through enormous pains accepting the end of its empire. The French are eminent universalists.

The US, when it was really an empire - after the end of the World War II - had a lot of curiosity and respect for the diversity of the outside world. There was a time when the US mixed its military and economic power with a heart-warming intellectual and cultural tolerance.

The US after September 11 is far from tolerant. Its capacity for tolerance has always been limited: it stops when other countries start posing challenges, or are becoming potential opponents. The elite in power in Washington right now seek to incarnate an exclusive ideal, and to possess the key to any form of economic success. Narcissistic expansion and social and cultural hegemony betray a sign of fear. Incapable of de facto dominating the world, this version of America has unfortunately retreated to a negation of any form of autonomous existence. And it has retreated to a negation of the amazing diversity of worldviews in different societies everywhere. "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

The obsession with Islam

The model of contemporary American behavior in international relations was set by Bush senior's Gulf War. Yet nobody has told the real story behind Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 2, 1990.

The US might have encouraged Saddam Hussein to fall into the abyss, as he understood that the invasion was "acceptable" to Washington. April Glaspie, the American ambassador in Baghdad and the last American official to see Saddam Hussein eye-to-eye five days before the invasion of Kuwait, was "retired" by the State Department, and has flatly refused to talk ever since.

Kuwait was involved in slant-drilling. In Texas, people get shot for slant-drilling. Kuwait was simply pumping out something like $14 billion in oil from Iraqi territory. When Ambassador Glaspie visited Saddam, CIA photos were revealing a massive presence of Iraqi troops on Kuwait's border. Glaspie told Saddam that the US was neutral. But a few days later, Kuwait's foreign minister - encouraged by the US - was saying "Let them occupy our territory … We are going to bring in the Americans". Since late 1989, while the CIA was advising Kuwait to put pressure on Iraq, a CIA-affiliated think tank was advising Saddam to put pressure on Kuwait.

European Union intelligence sources confirm that in November 1989 there was a secret pact between the CIA and General Fahd, Kuwait's chief of internal security. The plan was to profit from Iraq's economic deterioration due to the staggering cost of the Iran-Iraq war, to keep up the pressure, and to force Iraq to accept a final border agreement with Kuwait. The CIA engaged itself to protect the Emir of Kuwait, Jaber al Sabah - under any circumstances. At the same time Saddam Hussein was convinced that the US understood his own strategy - which was to increase pressure to force Kuwait to negotiate. On July 31, 1990, only two days before the invasion, under-secretary of state for the Middle East John Kelly told Congress that the US had not ratified a treaty including the use of US forces in case of trouble between Iraq and Kuwait. This seemed to confirm what April Glaspie had told Saddam three days earlier. The outcome of the whole saga - the "liberation" of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation - sent a message to any Third World leader daring to step out of the US line. It also opened a new chapter in US history: it led to the engagement in a sequence of conflicts with military midgets, all of them categorized as "rogue states", so US might could be demonstrated for all to see.

Any rogue state is weak by definition. It's interesting to note that communist Vietnam has been left alone. Vietnam has real military capabilities, as it showed the last time the US got involved there. So, no messing with Vietnam. Now, North Korea opens an even more interesting front: it's a rogue state alright, but it has a nuclear arms program: it could possibly flatten Seoul or Tokyo. So, no messing with North Korea either: let's talk.

Iraq, on the other hand, is the ideal rogue state. Apart from the crucial economic fact that it literally floats over a sea of oil, its government is universally despised, it "may" have weapons of mass destruction, and it is located in the Arab world - which, for Washington Islamophobes, is a world of losers.

The post-September 11 New Afghan War certainly followed Bush senior's model. And the model is what historian Todd describes as "theatrical micro-militarism": "To demonstrate America's necessity in the world by slowly smashing insignificant enemies." Nothing more apt as far as the Taliban were concerned: their version of "command and control center" was two turbaned fellows holding walkie-talkies. All the props of theatrical micro-militarism, though, were not enough to apprehend or kill Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar or any of al-Qaeda's top commanders.

In Afghanistan, the US demonstrated that Hell is airborne for any country that does not have good anti-aircraft defenses, or some kind of nuclear program (like Pakistan or North Korea). When it comes to a ground battle, it's another story. All US operations in Afghanistan from Tora Bora onward were a failure. On the ground, the US relied on local warlords (usually the wrong ones, or the wiliest ones, who handed a few poor souls to their US employer).

The real structure of the so-called American Empire can be perceived by the distribution of American forces around the world. Until September 11, they were predominantly in Germany, Japan and South Korea. After Afghanistan, most of America's military force is now concentrated in the Muslim world - a prelude to the atttack against Iraq. This concentration is officially due to the "war against terrorism". But if we accept Todd's concept, we conclude that "war against terrorism" is nothing less than the latest official formalization of "theatrical micro-militarism". Which leads us to America's obsession with Islam.

The US is obsessed with Islam for a number of interelated reasons. Islam was considered by Samuel Huntington to be the number one menace because most of the world's oil production is in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. As the US is not a paradigm of economic efficiency anymore, it has to be increasingly obsessed with Arab oil: so the US suddenly "discovered" that its Saudi Arabian ally was a focus of radical Wahhabism, that this state religion plus tons of petrodollars were exported to finance all kinds of extremism all over the world, and that most of the September 11 kamikazes were Saudis. As the US is not a paradigm of military efficiency on the ground, nothing better than to attack a weak enemy - the militarily impaired Arab world. And as the US is not a paradigm of tolerance anymore, nothing better than to manifest its newfound crusader intolerance toward a civilization and culture that, according to Islamophobes, has lost its way.

If this US manipulated by Washington's hawks is more and more intolerant toward the rest of the world, it positively hates the Arab world. This is a primitive, visceral antagonism. It goes much deeper than Huntington's clash of civilizations. The problem is, this irrational confrontation has been catapulted to the core of international relations.

The war against terrorism - as conducted by the Pentagon propaganda machine - instilled a kind of Final Judgment in Americans against the Afghan, and then the Arab, anthropological systems. As the US loses its universalist perspective, it becomes increasingly difficult for average Americans to try to understand the motivations, expectations and frustrations of the Arab and Muslim world.

The US military presence in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, the pathological obsession on attacking Iraq (Bush junior: "He tried to kill my Dad") and endless confrontation with Iran may constitute what passes for America's oil strategy. But contrary to received wisdom, this is not about controlling oil for the US. It's about controlling the world's sources of energy - and most of all the sources of energy for Europe and Japan, the two key "protectorates" essential for America's world power. So in this aspect at least, the US is definitely behaving as an empire.

US historian Chalmers Johnson in Blowback compares the $50 billion spent on "defending" the Persian Gulf from Saddam Hussein in roughly 8 months from 1990 to 1991 with the $11 billion spent by the US on imported Middle Eastern oil which represented at the time only 10 percent of US consumption. But the same amount of oil represented 25 percent of Europe's consumption during the same period, and 50 percent of Japan's consumption.The average US citizen may not register the implications, but the rest of the world does.

This is never mentioned in plain English by the US media: but the US has in fact lost control over Iran since Khomeini's revolution, and over Iraq since Desert Storm. And the US now runs the risk of losing Saudi Arabia as well. One day the Saudi military base will have to go - and it will probably be under Prince Abdullah's orders. No number of aircraft carriers can sustain military bases so far away from the US without the consent of the nations of the region. The Saudi land base and most of all the Turkish land base at Incirlik are much more important for the US than a collection of billion-dollar aircraft carriers.

So maybe we're not confronted with an expansion of the American Empire, but rather with the fear of the would-be empire of losing key bases. We see a lot of angst, not a demonstration of power. The US may be afraid of becoming economically dependent on the rest of the world: lack of oil is just part of the equation. And the US may be afraid of losing control of its two key "protectorates" - Europe and Japan.

The Muslim and especially the Arab world could not be a more convenient target of theatrical militarism and for the US to demonstrate its geopolitical omnipotence. The Arab world is being pushed into the role of sacrifical lamb. The reasons can be found as we read Samuel Huntington. He pointed out that there is no Muslim core state. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Egypt, Iraq, Iran or Pakistan are capable of resisting the US in terms of population, military power or industrial power. For the US military-industrial complex, nothing is more convenient than the familiar territory of videogame victories against weak foes deprived of anti-aircraft defenses - Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan - and the constant menace of totally asymmetrical war against anyone daring to cross the US.

This is the easiest and cheapest solution in terms of economic, military and even conceptual investment. To put it in the crudest way, from the US hawks' perspective Arabs have oil and no military capabilities. And the myth of oil is strong enough for anybody to forget about what really matters - the fact that the US is globally dependent for its supplies of practically any type of goods. And to top it all, there's no reasonably efficient Arab lobby inside the US - while even CNN is now on a public relations drive, broadcasting in Arabic.

Part 2: Eurasia strikes back

RIO DE JANEIRO - In the euphoria that followed the end of the Soviet Empire, it was easy for United States planners to enjoy the benefits of a Russian knockout, the emergence of the US as the sole superpower, torrents of foreign capital flowing in, and the prospect of an everlasting life of leisure without a worry about a mounting trade deficit.

But there were plenty of risks. Nobody could tell whether Russia was dead and buried. Nobody thought that the US might become economically dependent on the rest of the world.

Nobody could imagine that a certain Vladimir Putin would one day go to Berlin and deliver - in German - an extraordinary speech stating that Europe would only consolidate itself as a really independent world power by associating its capacities with a Russia full of human, territorial and natural resources, and full of economic, cultural and defense potential.

Nobody could possibly imagine that from Europe to Latin America, from Asia to Africa, the perception of the US's relationship to the world would switch from protection to virtual aggression, as perception of Russia's relationship to the world would switch from aggression to a possibility of protection.

This is not what Washington wanted - but with the new fundamentalist ethic put in place by the Bush Doctrine, the result was pretty much inevitable. To examine what happened, we should go back to Brzezinski's geopolitical opus, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. In 1997 he was sure the only threat to the American Empire was Russia. So Russia had to be isolated and defanged. Brzezinski's advice was for the US to follow a conciliatory foreign policy with everybody except Russia. He perfectly understood that the US grip over Eurasia would depend on the consent of the "protectorates" - Europe and Japan. So the US had to care about the solidification and expansion of the European Union, and should attribute to Japan a global, and not only Asian, role.

Brzezinski also understood that the Franco-German axis was the major strategic player in Europe. So his vision seemed surefire: as long as Europe and Japan were satisfied with US leadership, the American Empire was invulnerable - an empire taking over Eurasia and concentrating the essence of the economic and technological power of the world.

Brzezinski was also clever enough to understand that China had to be appeased. He saw rivalry with China as being far in the future. And he recommended conciliation toward Iran, because its democratic evolution would not lead to confrontation with the US. By following all these precepts, Russia - the only imminent military threat to the US - would be squeezed between Europe and Japan, cut off from China and Iran, and in fact be excluded from any major role in Eurasia.

The problem is, Bush's Washington did not implement Brzezinski's vision. The US in fact expanded NATO to eastern Europe, courted Ukraine, and extended its influence in the Caucausus and Central Asia. But then came the war against terrorism. There are now between 10,000 and 12,000 US troops in Afghanistan, 1,500 in Uzbekistan, a few hundred in Kyrgyzstan and a little more than a hundred in Georgia. But this is far from representing a destabilization of Russia.

Bush's Washington - as any diplomat in Brussels will tell us - engaged in a catalogue of actions humiliating or snubbing the European Union. They despised Japan, provoked China, and put Iran into the Axis of Evil. The result is that different poles in Eurasia are now joining forces against the US. To top it all, Washington hawks guided Bush in supporting Israel against the Palestinians, thus antagonizing the Muslim world.

As we have seen, the US's military, economic and ideological capacities are limited. The only way for the US to affirm its global role is to confront and attack military midgets. This is not empire but simulation of empire, manifested by maintaining absolutely useless tensions with Cuba, North Korea and Iraq, and the usual provocations of China. Hostility toward Iran is in fact absurd, because any US senator or congressman, with a simple visit to Tehran, might see for himself how the country is yearning and already striving for democracy. If the US was really an empire, it would be striving for Pax Americana - a series of relations of patient condescension toward regimes that will not last very much longer. Kim Jong-il and Saddam Hussein might fall without a shot being fired.

But so much Washington-engendered tension entails no military risk for the US and reinforces the perception that the US is everywhere. The whole process feeds a larger-than-life illusion of an unstable and dangerous planet which needs US protection.

A reconstituted al-Qaeda has already ruined this perception. Al-Qaeda, a deadly mutant virus interlinked with myriad groups, has just rendered the planet really unstable and dangerous - and no one can rely on the US for protection.

The showdown with Iraq, threats against North Korea, provocations against China: this is all theatrical micro-militarism, able to distract the media and cause apprehension all over Eurasia. Meanwhile, the only real military adversary, Russia, is left alone. An increasingly stable Russia and the increasing autonomy of both the European Union and Japan imply only one thing: a deadly blow to US hegemony. Strategic major players Japan, Russia and the EU are drawing together. Eurasia is starting the drive for a balance without the US.

Russia is far from being isolated by the US. Bush plays for the galleries, lip-synching about cooperation with Russia. For Moscow, on the other hand, the name of the game is Europe.

Russia is beginning to wake up to the fact that it can live without the US but it cannot afford to be estranged from Europe. Trade between Russia and the EU is almost eight times bigger than between Russia and the US. Russia is capable of making an offer the EU simply cannot refuse: loads of oil and a counterweight to US military influence. Russia can always slip back into anarchy or Soviet-style autocracy. But make no mistake, Russia is back - much earlier than anybody thought. No wonder UN diplomats are happy. Russia is a very strong nation but it does not harbor hegemonic designs. It's fundamentally egalitarian. And economically - unlike the US - it does not depend on anybody else's oil or supply of goods. The US may keep floating the illusion of financial power by means of political and ideological control of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But because of its trade surpluses, Russia does not need either of these institutions, unlike Argentina, Brazil, Turkey or Indonesia. One of the most extraordinary after-effects of September 11 was, in the long run, to drive a wedge between Europe and US. The Axis of Evil hysteria, US support for Ariel Sharon and contempt for Palestinians, all led to a widespread European perception of the US as irresponsible and extremely dangerous.

The US media simply cannot digest the fact that for any European ruling class, each national history in each European country is much richer, more relevant, more complex and more interesting than three-century-old American history. Western Europe now enjoys a standard of living and a quality of life similar and in many regions superior to America's. No wonder there are widespread doubts over the legitimacy of US leadership.

Cultural differences between the US and Europe are infinite. US society is the recent product of a very successful colonial experience. America had an immensely productive soil, because it was all virgin soil. America did not create riches - rather, the original, natural wealth was exploited by an immigrant population, most of it literate.

A very long, centuries-old peasant history explains why Eurasians as a whole feel the absolute necessity of an ecological balance and a manageable trade balance. For so long, Europeans, Chinese, Indians all had to fight the exhaustion of their soil. In America, people were liberated from the past: they had unlimited access to nature as lush as paradise. The US really changed the definition of economics. All over Eurasia, economics is understood as the optimization of rare resources. In the US it is the exploitation of plentiful resources.

Europe feels threatened by the American social model. European society is far from being as mobile as American society: it is deeply rooted. And unlike the US, Europe has no problems with the outside world. Europe wants and needs peace to increase its already voluminous trade. The US, on the other hand, is now conditioned by two conflicts: one against Russia, the main obstacle to total American hegemony, and the other against the Muslim world, the universe of theatrical militarism.

Europe and Japan are the two key contemporary industrial powers. Russia remains a nuclear-military power. The US cannot control any of these three. So the US chooses to fight non-powers: the Axis of Evil and the Arab world. That's the ultimate reason for the Iraq obsession. Iraq is at the intersection of this non-power mini-universe.

Europe, Russia and Japan are two-and-a-half times stronger than the US. And US hostility toward the Muslim and especially Arab world is forcing these three powers into a long-term alliance.

So we are not marching toward an American Empire. We are evolving toward an extremely complex system - a balance among clusters of nations, disposed relatively equally. Russia will be one of the poles. Japan will be another. China, after 2020, will be another. And most of all there will be the EU - soon to be a congregation of 25 nations, and expanding.

The core of Europe will remain the Franco-German couple, finally to be enriched by America's Trojan Horse in the European Union, Britain (otherwise Britain will only survive as one more state of the US).

In South America, the pole will be Brazil - now embarked on finding the Third Way for social development that Tony Blair was not capable of conjuring. No wonder the election of former metalworker Lula as Brazil's president has generated so much attention in the developing world. Hobsbawm notes that "Lula received more votes than any other democratically-elected president, with the exception of Ronald Reagan in the '80s, and this is very significant for the world."

Britain's Will Hutton, the economist and journalist author of The World I'm In, says Russia, China, Brazil and India are crucial allies of the European Union in the struggle to uphold a multipolar model capable of offering to the world an alternative to the predatory, financial-markets-ruled, unilateralist US model.

A different US administration might be able to realize that no country in the 20th century became more powerful by waging war - or by a major increase in its defense budget. France, Germany, Japan and Russia all lost in this game. The 20th century was the American century because of the US's reluctance to get involved in military conflicts in the Old World. Today, legions around the world now see the war against terrorism as nothing but a spin-concocted denomination for the maintenance of a US hegemony that may no longer exist.

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