Humane Effective American Hegemony

I have chosen to open Poliblog with a piece I did for WKMS Public Radio days after Bush launched his invasion of Iraq.

More of my commentaries for WKMS Public Radio are available at
http://campus.murraystate.edu/academic/faculty/bill.schell/mypage/wkms.html.

In March of 2003, as we moved toward inevitable war with Iraq, I took part in the small candlelight peace vigil at the Lincoln Memorial. Peter, Paul, and Mary took the stage took the stage and we sang the old anti-war songs. There were earnest prayers for peace. Speakers called on President Bush to allow the UN inspectors to do their job and decried a war that would trade blood for oil. Not in our name.

As hot wax dripped onto my hand from my candle, one of thousands burning that night, I listened for the speech I hoped to hear. But I didn’t hear it. Instead I heard calls for America to reject power and global responsibility.Why did no one call for America to accept its global responsibility and to make the transition from Superpower to hegemon exercising leadership by example, persuasion, and consensus building?

I even have a bumper sticker version of my vision: humane, effective American hegemony.

My embrace of the idea of hegemony may seem strange, especially given the criticism of American hegemony by the anti-war movement and the foreign press. The concept is not well understood by Americans, but there’s a sense that it’s not a compliment, particularly when it’s linked to another loaded word that we Americans understand all too well—imperialism.

President Bush has chosen to assert America's preeminence through coercive Hard Power— the least effective tool of hegemony, sustainable only in the short term. Soft Power, winning the consent of other powers by persuasion and consultation, is the usually the best option because it is self-renewing while Hard Power may only be expended.

After 9/11 the Bush administration pissed away world sympathy for the United State bought at the cost of thousands of lives. Rather than use the opportunity to assume for America the role of wise and beneficent hegemon, the President gave his infamous Axis of Evil speech, promulgated his pernicious doctrine of preemption, ran roughshod over friend and foe alike, destroyed the unity of NATO, America’s most important alliance system and cast America as an arrogant imperial power.

Historian Paul Schroeder makes this distinction between an imperial power and a hegemonic power: A hegemon is first among equals; an imperial power rules over subordinates. A hegemonic power is the one without whom no final decision can be reached within a given system; its responsibility is essentially managerial, to see that a decision is reached. An imperial power rules the system, imposing its decision when it wishes.

Hegemony is not stable but a "moving equilibrium" that must be ceaselessly negotiated, revised, and reconfigured. To be an effective, humane hegemon, to achieve a global order based on the ideals of the Four Freedoms [freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear], America must persuade and cooperate with other nations, something Bush, a unilateralist by nature, is not inclined to do.History will judge Bush's rejection of responsible hegemony and his embrace of ineffective, inhumane imperialism as a tragic failure, not only for America but the world entire.

Whoever follows, not matter what their position on the use of force prior to the war, must clean up the wreckage left by Bush's irresponsibile policies. That is the real meaning of the phrase we will soon grow sick of hearing: Stay The Course.

And Jesus wept.