In Defense of America (15 page)

International Reaction

Britain has been the sharpest of the United States’ close allies in criticizing Guantánamo, the procedures for trial, and the flirting with torture. Given Britain’s stand in supporting America in Iraq and Afghanistan, this criticism has been particularly high-profile and has become a point of difference between the two countries. “The historic tradition of the United States as a beacon of freedom, liberty and of justice deserves the removal of this symbol,” said Lord Goldsmith, attorney general, on May 10, 2006.
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Since Tony Blair stepped down as prime minister, and since Britain began to pull out of Iraq, politicians have been even more sensitive to the political damage that association with Britain’s closest and more controversial ally can bring. In early 2008, David Miliband, foreign secretary, had to apologize to Parliament that the United States had only just told Britain that the CIA had used the British overseas territory of Diego Garcia for two secret “rendition” flights of prisoners to Guantánamo and Morocco. His predecessor Jack Straw and Tony Blair had previously assured the House of Commons, based, they said, on assurances from Washington, that no such flights had taken place.

Other than Britain, European countries have been more muted in direct criticism of Guantánamo, although wanting to distance themselves from practices of rendition and torture. But they, too, have seized on the base as evidence of America’s apparent inhumanity and indifference to legality in the pursuit of its “War on Terror.”

Many Americans argue that their response to 9/11 is their business alone. As one
Times
online reader in Ohio put it: “Please tell me why I should give a damn about what the world thinks when 3000 AMERICANS (let me repeat: AMERICANS) died on 9/11. Had 3000 Euros died, then maybe you could have a say.”
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The most trivial response to this sentiment is to note that a sixth of those who died on 9/11 were not American. Another point worth mentioning is that the United States is relying on other countries’ help in the war in Afghanistan and generally, in pursuing terrorism. But the strongest argument is that if America shows no interest in international constraints on such behavior —even the laws and conventions it has drawn up itself —others need not either.

Britain and Terror Laws

That charge of treating such principles too lightly might be directed at Britain as well —and unlike America, it cannot argue that it has a Constitution that might correct the tendency. Although Britain has taken a stand of high principle on Guantánamo itself, the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have pursued a murkier approach to the protection of civil liberties in the pursuit of terrorism. In the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, the government brought in “control orders” which impose an unlimited range of restrictions on a person it suspects of terrorism, including bans on speaking to other named people, on leaving the house, and on where the person can go. As Liberty, a British civil liberties advocacy group, has argued, these rules “undermine the presumption of innocence —allowing ministers to punish someone without requiring them to prove that they have committed any crime.” The government has also extended the period during which terrorism suspects can be locked up from fourteen days to twenty-eight days, the longest among Western democracies, and it may try for a further extension.

As Britain lacks a unified written Constitution, its protection for individual rights is drawn from historic laws and principles. Legal challenges and a few stubborn judges have upheld the principles in some cases, but the protections are fragile compared to those laid down in the U.S. Constitution. That remains America’s best answer to the abuses of Guantánamo.

The “War on Terror” Does Not Demand Extreme Remedies

The common retort to everything I have argued here is that the “War on Terror” demands new measures —that faced with terrorists who are prepared to lose their lives, we cannot afford the luxury of civil liberties. Tony Blair has used this justification, and Gordon Brown, as well as George W. Bush. But the claim that current threats require novel measures is always made by democratic governments seeking a justification for spying on their citizens, for censorship, or for moving briskly against those they think might be their enemies without the irritating constraints of law. It was invoked during the Second World War, when America interned about 120,000 people of Japanese descent, nearly two-thirds of them American citizens.

Yet that is to set aside what makes Western democracies civilized and humane. As
The Economist
put it: “To eschew such tools is to fight terrorism with one hand tied behind your back. But that —with one hand tied behind their back —is precisely how democracies ought to fight terrorism.”
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If the “War on Terror” were truly a war, it would have a definable end, as well as a definable enemy. It would then be easier —although still not trivial —to make a case for the temporary removal of some liberties. The West did not, by and large, define the Cold War as that kind of war, demanding special intrusions into civil liberties (the ugly spasm of McCarthyism and its residues being an exception). You might argue that this played some part in its “victory” in that contest, making Western countries more successful, and more attractive by comparison with the Soviet bloc.

Terrorism may make people in the United States —or Britain —feel personally vulnerable to attack in a way that the Cold War did not. But it takes an enormous distortion to portray it as being as much of a threat to the existence of Western democracies as was the hostility of the Soviet Union, let alone one that justifies suspending the principles the West says it is defending.

In America’s case, the behavior of President Bush’s successors will be the only test of whether Guantánamo was an aberration or whether it comes to represent the settled views of a majority of Americans. Fortunately, the increasingly robust challenges mounted by Congress and the courts are signs that the Guantánamo mistake will be corrected, and America will be able to reclaim a moral authority more in line with its traditions.

Chapter 9

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Critics of America should consider carefully whether they really want what they have wished for: an America more restrained, “back in its box,” deferential to other countries —or, even, less successful. They are deluding themselves if they think this would make them better off. Luckily (for them as well as for the United States), for all the threats the United States now faces, it is likely to keep its position as the world’s superpower.

Of course, it would be easy for critics to get some of their wishes. Potential threats to American power are real. The credit crunch of late 2007 and 2008, the slump of the housing market —these jolts to American economic success have followed straight on the shock of Iraq and its illustration of the limits that roadside bombs and AK-47s can place on the world’s most powerful military machine. Russia, under President Vladimir Putin, has been sourly aggressive and may continue that way under his successor, Dmitry Medvedev. China is grabbing superlatives for itself —the fastest-growing economy, perhaps the largest soon
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—even if it is also picking up unwanted titles, such as the largest polluter. Iran has not given an inch under American pressure to drop its nuclear ambitions and is steadily filling the power vacuum left in Iraq; the Arab world is scornful of the American project to export democracy; and the United States’ neighbors to the south, led by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, have mounted a noisy opposition to American-style capitalism.

Of these, the threats from Russia and China are the greatest, although they are usually exaggerated. Russia’s behavior has been unpleasant, but its dreams of regaining its former power are a delusion; its oil and gas supplies are shrinking fast, and so is its population. China’s growth is running into the predictable problems of lethal pollution and the stubborn independence of the provinces. Neither is a real military threat, even if China has the world’s biggest army, at 2.1 million people, almost double that of America. It spends less than a tenth of America’s military budget (estimates are tricky) —although it has raised its budget by half in just two years. Russia spends even less, although it is also diverting some of its new oil wealth to defense.

Iran is menacing, but it lacks support among Arab countries to be the force in the region that it wants. None of these countries is in a position to challenge American dominance. It is safe to talk about American preeminence for another generation; it is ludicrous to reckon that the twenty-first century might not be a second American Century, even if its position were less emphatically secure.

America’s best response to those challenges is to promote its own values and rules, bringing as many countries as it can onto its side. Its powerful attractions, of openness and freedom, are its best response to the Arab world’s disdain, or to Chávez’s antagonism. It can best cope with Russia and China by drawing them into the international system of rules and institutions —and upholding them itself. That is working with China, which knows that its best economic hopes lie in trading with the rest of the world, and that the restrictions this will place on it are worth it. This approach has worked less well with Russia, but it has not entirely failed; Putin could have caused far more trouble than he chose to.

People in other democratic countries will be enormously better off if America retains its position as the world’s superpower. To delight in its difficulties is to brush away their dependence on its prosperity and security.

It is easy to forget, outside America, the preoccupations the United States will face in the next few decades. Huge population growth, immigration, need for energy —those are plenty of reasons to incline it to turn inward and concentrate on its own problems and opportunities, not those of other countries, as in the past it regularly has.

An Inconvenient Truth

The world’s close economic relationship with America is inescapable. The slide of 2007 and 2008 has been a reminder of that, as the American building boom stalled, and Americans had to grapple with falling house prices, higher oil and gasoline costs, and the drying up of credit. It is ridiculous to maintain that the rest of the world can be completely independent, although some try. In the spring of 2008, a representative of an Arab oil government walked into my office as the growing American financial crisis had just consumed Bear Stearns, looked at the television screen as reports of the renowned investment bank’s fate filtered in, and said, “That’s what I like to see, miserable Americans.”

True, the slump in world markets in early 2008 prompted much talk about “decoupling” —the question of whether other countries can prosper even when the American engine is stalling. More than in the past is the answer —but no country is immune. Many hoped that the giants of the developing world —China, India, Russia, and Brazil —would be stable pillars, whatever happened in the United States. Even though their exports are now worth nearly half of their gross domestic product (doubling in less than two decades), most of that trade was with one another, or near neighbors, not the United States. In none of them does trade with the United States amount to more than 8 percent of their economies. Yet even in China, there was blunt acknowledgment of the damage an American recession could do. Zhang Tao, deputy head of the international department of the People’s Bank of China, told a financial seminar in January 2008, “If US consumption really comes down, that’s bad news for us. That will have a pretty severe impact on our exports.”
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Wang Jian, head of the China Society of Macroeconomics, agreed that China’s growing trade with Europe was unlikely to insulate it from a drop in exports to the United States, because if Europe exported less to America, it would buy less from China. “Global demand is ultimately driven by the United States,” he said.
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Smaller Asian countries are even more dependent on the United States; Singapore and Malaysia each send it exports worth more than a fifth of their economies. They are generally in better financial shape than in the 1997–1998 Asian crisis, but a prolonged American slump will still hit them. Shaukat Aziz, the former Pakistani prime minister, said in early 2008, “For us, decoupling is a myth. America suffers, we suffer.”
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Nor is Japan a refuge. Since 2002, it has been climbing out of a long slump, pulled along by exporting to other countries. Its sales to China and Europe outstrip those to America, but it knows that many of its products that go to China as components end up in America as finished goods. Europe is in the same trap, even though the United States accounts for just 14 percent of the exports of the eurozone (the region that uses the euro currency, which includes most of the big European countries but not Britain). Those countries hope that by looking east, not west, they can find new markets, but if those too are affected by an American slowdown, they will find no escape there.

The cascading effects depend on the scale of the problems in America, but there is no point pretending that any country can entirely avoid them —or that it should be grateful for them.

Russia: Belligerent and Delusional

If there is a single reason why Europe cannot want America to be less engaged in international problems, it is Russia. The threat can easily be exaggerated —as it is by Russia itself, which insists on pretending that it is still a world power. It is not; it is the shell of a former empire, with nuclear weapons, and oil and gas, but an aging population of just 145 million, falling by more than half a million a year from alcoholism, drugs, and disease. Men’s life expectancy is now just fifty-eight years, considerably lower than under the Soviet Union.
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All the same, its sour aggression does need countering, and the United States will play the prime part in doing that. Europe is too close, too ambivalent, and too nervous of Moscow’s reaction (such as turning off the gas pipelines running westward, as it has shown it can) to do that well.