THE WORLD WOULD MISS THE AMERICAN POLICEMAN / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENT & ANALYSIS

Last updated: September 2, 2013 8:25 pm

 

The world would miss the American policeman

 

By Gideon Rachman

 

The US’s ‘red lines’ underpin global security from the Pacific to eastern Europe

 

 

In 1899 Rudyard Kipling, the pre-eminent poet of British imperialism, addressed some stanzas to America. “Take up the white man’s burden,” he urged, “The savage wars of peace/ Fill full the mouth of famine/ And bid the sickness cease.” These days America has a black president and no public intellectual would dare to use the imperialist language of a Kipling. But the idea that the US bears a special burden in policing the world is very much alive. The notion was there in Barack Obama’s call for military action over Syria: “We are the United States,” declared the president – outlining his nation’s special role in creating and defending the post-1945 global order.

 

But is America still prepared to play the role of world policeman and to wage the “savage wars of peace”? That question will hang over Congress’s debate on intervention in Syria. Mr Obama’s own hesitancy and opinion polls in the US underline that many Americans have grave doubts. They are likely to be reinforced by Britain’s decision to stay out of any military intervention in Syria. Almost 80 years after Kipling’s death, many in the UK have interpreted parliament’s decision as a signal that Britain has finally sloughed off the post-imperial instinct to police the world – even as deputy sheriff to the US.

 

Since the UK is the world’s fourth- largest military power, and a member of the UN Security Council, such a decision would have global ramifications. But if America were to take a similar path, it would be truly world-shaking. And yet the possibility is clearly there. The US is war-weary after Iraq and Afghanistan and its economy has been weakened by recession. The shale gas revolution has made the country much less reliant on the Middle East. Americans, from Mr Obama down, no longer harbour the illusion that their troops will be greeted with flowers in foreign countries. Instead, as Kipling warned, they have learnt to expect “the blame of those ye better/ The hate of those ye guard.”

As in Britain, a gap seems to have opened up in the US between a foreign policy establishment that still takes it for granted that their nation should police the world – and a more sceptical public. Opinion polls show almost three-quarters of the British public approved of parliament’s decision on Syria. Meanwhile, the congressional debate will take place against a background of opinion polls that show Americans evenly divided on the cruise missile strikes the president is planning.

 

These anxieties about Syria are entirely comprehensible. While Mr Obama has triple-underlined his intention that he is contemplating only a limited strike, there are some questions that he cannot really answer. What will happen if Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian leader, is undeterred and uses chemical weapons again? Are we prepared to ignore all other forms of human rights violation in Syria? Does the US have any viable political vision for the future of Syria? Firing a few cruise missiles into Damascus, and hoping that this will somehow improve matters, does not seem like a very sophisticated strategy.

 

There are broader questions. America has seen itself as the guarantor of global security since 1945, but that has never meant intervening in every conflict or stopping every human rights abuse. The US did not intervene in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s – which, like the Syrian conflict, was waged between two sides that America distrusted and also involved the use of chemical weapons.

 

The notion that the US’s role now involves intervening in particularly bloody civil conflicts – or enforcing a ban on particular weapons – has gained ground only since the 1990s. Its sources lie in the Rwandan genocide, the Bosnian war and the development of a new doctrine on “weapons of mass destruction” as part of a war on terror.

In a speech in 2009 Tony Blair, former UK prime minister, who did a lot to develop this doctrine of liberal interventionism, asked rhetorically: “Should we now revert to a more traditional foreign policy, less bold, more cautious: less idealistic, more pragmatic, more willing to tolerate the intolerable because of fear of the unpredictable consequences that interventions can bring?” The House of Commons has clearly answered that question in the affirmative, repudiating the Blairite legacy.

A Congressional rejection of involvement in Syria would signal that the US, too, is reverting to a more traditional and restricted view of what actions by a foreign power would justify the deployment of American military might. In theory, therefore, refusing to act over Syria need not involve a complete US retirement from the role of global policeman. The trouble is that – as well as encouraging further atrocities by the Assad regime – America’s decision would inevitably be interpreted as sending a much wider message. That is because the belief that America’s “red lines” mean something underpins much of the world’s security architecture – from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf to the Russian-Polish relationship.

For better or worse, Mr Obama drew such a red line over Syria. As he suggested over the weekend, America’s adversaries will draw conclusions if the US fails to act over Syria, and the same would be true of its allies. The governments of Japan, Israel and Poland – to name just a few – will all feel less secure if Congress votes against military action in Syria. The world relies on the American policeman more than it realices.

 

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013.