Incoherent Empire
by Noel Rooney
[ bookreviews ]
A country which spends 40% of the world's military budget also spend its time and energy attacking a selection of the world's poorest countries, apparently in self-defence. Has Alice taken refuge in the West Wing, or have all the dissident analyses missed some glaringly obvious point somewhere between oil and evil?
Michael Mann's thesis is that the new imperialism, trumpeted by supporters and critics alike, is somewhat less than it seems. Mann dissects the apparent anatomy of American power to reveal a short-sighted militarism, politically inept and economically naïve, just where the coherent erial project ought to be.
Mann's measured tone (this is not a book for fans of Michael Moore or John Pilger) initially leaves the reader wondering quite where his sympathies lie. But as the book progresses, Mann leaves us in no doubt; the cumulative effect of his patiently-built case is a comprehensive critique of American foreign policy. He doesn't say so explicitly, but we can reasonably infer that Mann considers the US administration to be rather less than brilliant.
His characterisation of the US government's neo-conservative core (he calls them 'chicken-hawks' on the grounds that their blatant bellicosity doesn't quite stretch to participation - few of the present administration have experienced combat, keen as they are for others to do so) is gratifyingly scornful and, as Mann warms to his theme, his contempt colours his language most entertainingly. Take this example:
"A neo-conservative chicken-hawk coup had seized the White House and the Department of Defense"
I loved the delicious proximity of 'coup' to 'coop' here, as if the neo-con cocks had serviced a gaggle of liberal hens.
Little of the material in this book is new; the uncomfortable facts of America's imperial arrogance have been rehearsed regularly enough to furnish a mantra for dissenters of all stripes (and a colourfully variegated lot they are too). But Mann's analysis of geo-politics (much of it based on his earlier works, such as the Sources of Social Power and The Rise of Classes and Nation-states) is insightful, even if you don't accept all of his observations.
For instance, where some observers see a world where liberal democracy is increasingly prevalent (a world tilting cosily towards a Fukuyama closure), Mann has this to say:
"...the most common type of political structure found across the world today [..] is a patron-client system, where the central re rules through local notables who can dispense government patronage to their own local networks of clients."
This, and his assertion that "nationalism is the leading ideology in the world today", serves to undermine the global project as an historical given, and to neatly hollow out the liberal rhetoric which accompanies it, for or against.
Given the depth and breadth of his critique, I was surprised how little attention Mann pays to the religious views fuelling the chicken-hawk prospectus. Armageddon is not on his itinerary, and as a consequence he sometimes struggles to make any sense of the administration's actions and, more importantly, its motives. Support for Israel at Sharonic worst is a case in point; Mann tries to make sense of a policy which makes very little, (unless you include the knee-jerk Zionism of the neo-cons, and the shadowy anti-semitism which ironically underpins it), and is left nonplussed by the attempt.
This is a decent book by a decent scholar, dealing with indecency on a practically unprecedented scale. Thousands of people have been slaughtered, and whole cultures devastated, and we are still wondering why these self-appointed oligarchs do what they do; if Mann is correct in his analysis, there is always the hope that the incompetent edifice sheltering the remote murderers will collapse before we get an answer to the question.
