The news that the US is planning to send 3,000 extra marines into Afghanistan in a ‘micro-surge’ means that it is finally giving up on any hope that the Europeans will provide any significant military support where it matters - in the field.

The Afghan Problem

The talk is now less of a Western Spring Offensive than of resisting a Taliban Spring Offensive and presumably ensuring that the country can be held against a sharp deterioration of events in Pakistan.

NATO is in trouble politically and it is worth pausing and asking what has gone wrong at the macro-level, the level of grand politics. The strategy in Afghanistan seems to be little more than to hold the line until better times.

NATO, which for many members is, at the end of the day, merely a means to create collective security against the Russian bear, is now not much more than the Atlanticist political operation within a wider 'West'.

In fact, many in the Pentagon quite rightly see security no longer in terms of Cold War thinking based on the northern part of one great ocean but view it as a global system of security involving powers and interests with no hang-ups derived from the 45 settlement. They have moved on and so should we ...

Back to Butter and Guns

The problem that Afghanistan represents is the one that Atlanticist countries like the UK can no longer afford the cost of their presence in overseas theatres. This must be crystal clear to anyone on the day that the Financial Times reports that budget cuts may cause the national aircraft carrier programme to be delayed.

We will, it seems, see no significant increase in defence spending in the next three year. Similarly, the French (for all their talk) will not join the NATO operation in any depth. Political support for any worthwhile increase in presence amongst the allies is not there.

The majority of what passes for the European and Pacific West may be highly sympathetic to American requests at an elite level but it is not in a political position domestically to send its soldiers to die against tribal fanatics in a far-away country for a strategy of Western expansion for which there is no understanding or enthusiasm.

There are, of course, token presences by a number of countries (France, Slovakia, Hungary) where ‘increases’ have been promised but, be in no doubt, these increases are small and sometimes the trade-off for avoiding duties in Iraq.

Caught between the US and the harsh realites of expense and death, many small countries (starting with Poland this week) will send their promised contingents but on terms that will probably increase policy co-ordination problems (just observe the recent vicious spat between the Pentagon and 'MI6' over chats with Taliban allies over tea and Afghan crumpet).

The new contingents will merely relieve Anglo-Saxons for worse duties. They will probably not join the front line. The hope (for NATO) is now that the Anglo-Saxons can ‘win’ sufficiently in the next few months so that other allies can take on more political and military risks and perhaps show a bit of heroism to rekindle some national pride back home.

The Nature of the 'West'

France is making it clear that it will contribute extra troops and equipment for ‘European’ peacekeeping missions in Chad and the Central African republic. Surely, this is the problem for the 'West'.  It is in multiple theatres, political pressures make it hard to prioritise and the allies can pick and choose where to play their hand.

The Western alliance is no more than a loose federation of national interests which can exert its collective power only to the extent that its members feel obliged to accept American leadership and American disposition of their resources.

Elite groups in most of the West are, to a greater or lesser degree, committed to the theory of the 'West' (that it exists and needs a global security strategy) and so to NATO.

However, they find it increasingly difficult to take ‘Churchillian’ political risks. given the feelings in their own countries about US conduct under the current Administration and, equally importantly, any real sense in the general public that current assessments of threat are worth increased defence expenditures and the loss of lives overseas.

Hidden away, difficult to explain to the public, are complex political and diplomatic games involving control of energy flows, the containment of rising powers (including Russia) and fears of nuclear proliferation (which are confused with other Middle East and West Asian concerns such as the Peace Process, Iran and Pakistan).

In addition, the core post-Cold War security theory, centred on the containment and management of anarchy, of failed states, of organized illicit trades and of insurgencies (or, as the political warfare strategists would prefer to term it, of ‘terrorism’) has not taken root as something for which public opinion demands action - except, inconveniently, when humanitarian issues are at stake.

Lack of Engagement

The Blairite progressives and neo-conservatives, and wild-eyed security freaks, have their constituencies, but a realist approach to threat is constantly kicked into the long grass by the need, for political reasons, to demonstrate in public that motives are liberal and progressive.. 

Most of us just don't care enough and we are probably right not to do so because we cannot see that action is credibly in our interest as opposed to the interest of an elite group who we do not trust to be either honest or competent. 

The theorists behind the security management of globalization have failed to create a sustained sense of fear. This gripped America after 9/11 and even parts of Europe but failed to take hold as an informed public will in support a set of clear and consistent policies.

The theoreticians of terror fired their bolt and missed. There is an analysis to be done of their attempt to manage domestic democracy and to chip away at liberty for the sake of order and of its role in an imperial security model designed to handle the perils of globalization, but that is for some other time.

Suffice it to say that the globalisation that brought global 'terror' also brought uncontrolled information flows and the decline of managed 'public opinion' - small elites cannot any longer (as the communists and imperialists once did) hold on for long to an agenda that is based on disinformation and contextual manipulation. Fail to use a political space decisively, as Hitler did in 1932/1934, and you will lose it forever.

What we should hold on to here are three salient developments that mean that the drive in the 1990s for acceptance of the narrative of a single coherent West, operating within an ideological 'grand narrative', both to spread markets and contain threats is no longer credible unless, perhaps, it declines into identity politics and quasi-fascism. That is a political choice that we would consider stark.

There Is No Central Command

There is and can be no central command for the West. The invasion of Iraq and the way that US policies have been consistently driven by Congressional concerns more than alliance concerns in recent years have shown that any satrapy or dependency of the empire cannot trust in the wisdom of Washington without risking serious difficulties in its domestic political base.

The elites of the West may welcome a change of US Administration in 2009, but there is no going back – the US now has to ‘sell’ its policies as in the interest of the West in such a way that it can be re-sold by its allied elites to their peoples as in their interest.

The current tendency for isolationism in the US in the face of globalization has probably been exaggerated – given that elites, not peoples, run liberal democratic states in practice – but there is a tendency now for the American people (and not just Congress) to become included as a consideration in policy in this negative European way.

This means that the 'mood of the nation' (not the public opinion of the commentariat) will check the freedom of executive authority. Squaring opinion in Peoria and Padua is going to get ever more difficult if the West is ever going to be able to claim to have a coherent voice.

Eventually, we may all have to agree that there is no West any more, just a rather wishy-washy general commitment to policies that add up to an 'eating people is wrong' morality.

Threats Are Exaggerated For Policy Purposes

Media exaggeration of terror, very often manipulated by state actors and special interests, does not accord with reality after six years of war. At most, in Europe, it seems only to have fuelled a potential cultural war between identity groups - Europe’s inner demon.

The causes of what threat there is seem to be far more complicated than the cowboys and Indians analysis that works to keep republican-minded spirits up in the American boondocks.

And the waters surrounding the whole terror problem have been politically muddied by linkage with the fate of Israel – a popular American idee fixe that is irrelevant to the security of most of its allies.

Satrapies and Dependencies Dabble

We make no apologies for describing most allied liberal democracies as satrapies, for they have placed themselves in this position as a logical consequence of choosing butter over guns in their expenditures.

The satraps are caught between stools. They cannot afford to break free of their dependence on Washington but nor can they afford to become full defence partners. In the end, they ‘dabble’, supporting the US at the margins, taking up the slack, offering special skills, but doing it on the sly and on the cheap rather than raise difficult questions at home.

Their conduct ends up being driven not by the interests of some coherent mythical West but by their own historical interests and assumptions, not even by any rational national interest as measured by trade.

Thus, the satraps consent to hobble their own trade with Iran to please a US that is primarily concerned with its leverage over Israel in the Peace Process and has a Canute-like approach to global nuclear proliferation.

The British are partially stuck in West Asia because it is an old imperial concern with a large migrant community back home. The French have no intrinsic interest in West Asia so they employ their resources on their traditional imperial territory, the Sahel.

And so it goes … the British take a lead in Sudan, obsess about Zimbabwe, claim special relations with India and, through Hong Kong, in China. The Germans back Croatia against ‘Russian’ Serbia. The Spanish try to manage Latin American populism and end up with insults hurled at their king by Chavez.

The list goes on and memories are long. But these countries just don’t get it. The age of empires for these countries is over. Most of the targets of their interest do not want to know unless an 'ally' can guarantee a right to plunder the country and get rich - or, the best of them, it brings real advantages to their 'national interest'.

Back to the Centre

This leads us back to the centre of the whole game – Washington. Washington still retains important residual credit across the emerging world precisely because its formal imperial pretensions were limited and its informal imperial market-driven practice was often beneficial, able to build up local elites to stand on their own two feet.

Much of Africa, noting the real support given by the current US Administration to defeat killers such as AIDS and malaria in projects that show that the US can and does do 'good things', is generally pro-American, despite the ‘dabbling’ of its own local elites with the Chinese and Russians.

If we look back over the last two decades what we see is less America trying to create a ‘West’ that can sustain global hegemony than the convergence of a faction of Americans (the neo-conservative) trying to centre the West on the US more formally and separate but associated security and intelligence factions in countries in the ‘international community’ with their own agenda.

Notably led from within the UK but with representatives in most countries, these have been trying to force the US into a straitjacket of leadership that would maintain a mythical grand narrative of ‘Western dominance’ and deal with threats that, though real enough, are still not so important as they are claimed. They certainly do not require policy to be driven by the expense of 'security' over all other considerations.

Take NATO's expansion. Anatol Lieven, no wimp on Western collective security, has pointed out that the constant drive to expand NATO to contain Russia, driven by the strategists who dominate thinking in the organisation and member countries, is extremely risky.

Itis not just Afghanistan that shows how weak NATO is and will remain while America's empire remains informal, but its attempt to drive the inclusion of all former Soviet territories becomes counter-productive beyond a certain point.

NATO moves from territories where nearly all peoples want to be 'of the West' to ones where nations can be severely divided over the issue (such as the Ukraine). It guarantees flaky states in troubled areas from attack where local ethnic and identity squabbles may affect core Russian or other non-NATO interests. 

The spread and the risk must begin to raise doubts about the utility of NATO to populations at the far West of the project. I have to say, as a Briton, that if some guarantee is given to a Caucasian Republic that might result in Birmingham being razed to the ground in a nuclear strike, then I want out of NATO - and fast. Defending Poland in 1939 is one thing, defending the ethnic pride of some bunch of underdeveloped bandits in a faraway mountain range is another ...

An Interesting Moment in History

This is an interesting moment in history because the ‘forward movement of the West’ as a bloc seems to be coming to an end, but ‘Western values’ (the real ones, involving liberty, democracy, national self-determination and even equality) are far from finished.

The latest idea of the ‘West’ may well come to be seen as the last fling of jaded post-imperial elites manipulating each other into increasingly futile policies. ‘Western values’ require a more critical faculty, an end to attempts to limit freedoms at home to impose them overseas and much more concentration on the demonstration of effectiveness through example.

Let’s leave it there … my own interest in Obama and McCain and my lack of interest in Clinton II and Giuliani is precisely in proportion to the degree to which the US may play a leading role in understanding the need for this ‘change’.

Will we see the same old crew shifting the rhetoric but trying to do the same old failed thing with the same old failed advisers?

But I don’t have a vote on this one.  It is for those who do, in each nation within the ‘alliance’, to decide how much more nonsense they are going to put up with in order to maintain the failed group-think of yesterday’s people.

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