Counter-Hegemony

I was tempted to agree with this from John Ikenberry at TPMCafe:

Now is the time for an honest post mortem of Bush foreign policy. Bush foreign policy has failed not just because of incompetence or bad luck in Iraq. The entire intellectual edifice of Bush foreign policy – such as it is – is deeply flawed. And let’s be clear. The Bush administration’s grand strategy is not simply a variation on earlier postwar liberal internationalist grand strategies – as some conservatives and liberals suggest. It was a radical departure from America’s postwar liberal hegemonic orientation – and the world has bitten back.

I was tempted for two reasons:

1) clearly, Bush administration foreign policy is a failure in very fundamental ways, not merely in terms of whether or not the foundational principles were effective or not in practice. The edifice is itself wrong-headed for a variety of reasons. We've spent a lot of time on this blog saying this over and over.

2) there is a certain amount of power much of the rest of the world is satisfied with the US possessing. Many believe American liberal hegemony can often be put to good use. Liberal hegemony, then, is better than Bush's autocratic hegemony.

Tempted was I.... But I don't think the view accounts entirely for the world "biting back." Yes, everyone knows the Iraq War was and is a disaster, both before and since it began - only Americans and a handful of jolly Brits bit in the first place. But much of the biting back is a tactical response to older histories of the use of American hegemony, even of the liberal variety. Such explanations as folks like Kristol, Kupchan and Ikenberry and others - though ideologically different - throw around don't cover the leftward drift in Latin America, India and China feeling their oats, Iran smirking at the American threat, the European Union, whether its acceptance or its rejection. Hegemony only goes so far, and other countries do have their own histories and interests, after all, despite the American love of talking about US hegemony.

The Iraq War provided an occasion for these responses to flourish both in the sense of broadly revealing American intentions to be far less than noble (thus collapsing its legitimacy as a global hegemon) and in the sense of providing a free space of operations as the Bush administration has been preoccupied with over-committing resources to Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps losing both wars, and thus now desperately seeking a way to save face. That's a mighty powerful position, relatively-speaking, for other countries to be in at present.