PNAC takes state socialism to the international field?

Ken Brown k.brown at ccs.bbk.ac.uk
Mon Apr 14 07:26:08 PDT 2003


It occurs to me that the "Project for the New American Century" people's
well-known despite for international law and treaties and the UN is 

At first sight it is absolutely nothing but "might is right".  They are
the strongest, they will do what they want to do and not let anyone stop
them.  That want they want to do is much more congenial to us than what
some other people might want to do doesn't change the nature of it. 
They might well want to use their power benevolently - even liberally -
but they will be the ones to choose how to use it.

They recognise that the USA is the strongest military power in the
world, at least for the next few decades, and they want to use those few
decades either to prevent anyone else catching up with them or (because
they aren't so stupid as to believe they can get away with that for
ever) to remake the rest of the world in their own image so that if
Europe, China, or India ever again draw close to them in economic or
military power we will have been conditioned to behave in American ways.

They despise the idea of international law or treaty obligations. 

They think of the world as made up of states and governments rather than
of individual people,  and they also think that relations between states
must necessarily  be hierarchical, rather than consensual or by
agreement. 

They have a huge emotional desire for stability  and predictability and
think that that is best secured by concentrated power rather than 
dispersed power, by dictation rather than negotiation, by unilateral
action rather than by mutual agreement.  They want to simplify the world
in order to do it good.

They are, in fact, in international affairs, taking up a position very
similar to the old discredited state socialists in national affairs.

Just as the apparently benevolent Fabians and the obviously vicious
Soviets saw that state power was overwhelmingly supreme within a nation
state, and wished to simplify and organise and dictate relationships
between peoples and communities within the nation, in order to better
control the nation for its own good; and therefore preferred a strong
central government and top-down rule by civil servants and bureaucrats
to the messy business of democracy, markets, and mutual aid; so the PNAC
sees US power as overwhelmingly supreme between nation states,  and
prefers an  international system based on the one-to-many relations of
the USA with everybody else  to the messy business of many-to-many
relations of treaties and international law.





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