Orient Obsess

A lackluster look at Americans abroad

Michael Young from the December 2003 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

The USSR ultimately collapsed through Mikhail Gorbachev's similarly misguided notion that a sclerotic and largely discredited system could somehow survive political and social renovation. The Soviet leader's efforts provoked much derision in the United States. Yet many forget that American policy in the Middle East was for decades based on similar logic.

Do the Bush administration's actions in Iraq portend change? One paradox, it appears, has been replaced by another very similar one: Where the U.S. had previously sought reformist change by its Arab allies to ensure steadiness, today it claims to spread liberalism through American military might but is so far finding this difficult to manage. The Bush administration is again confronting the familiar problem of introducing positive change and realizing afterward that dynamism can be a headache. In response, the U.S. can revert to familiar behavior, averting its gaze from the illiberal practices of friendly Arab regimes, or it can stick it out and turn Iraq into a liberal-capitalist showcase, whatever the regional fallout.

For the moment the administration is taking both approaches simultaneously, but ultimately only one can prevail. In calling for a new American empire to replace the Pax Britannica of the 19th century, the British historian Niall Ferguson has referred to the U.S. as "an empire in denial, a colossus with an attention deficit disorder." Yet what Ferguson forgot was that for half a century, until the 1991 Gulf War, the United States had it both ways -- managing the region like an imperial power, but doing so from a distance without getting its hands, or conscience, too dirty.

That much has changed. America has virtually become a Middle Eastern state because of its Iraqi presence. More often than not the region has absorbed its conquerors and neutralized them. Against this history stands an American tendency to impose the will of the United States and, as Mark Twain put it in Innocents Abroad, to bear down on the people of the region "with America's greatness, until we [crush] them." A liberal Middle Eastern order will emerge only if America is able to sidestep these two extremes -- absorption into the region or its gradual suffocation.

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