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Thursday 16 October 2008

The chronicler of US power

‘The Arab world with its own European union’

An interview with Walter Russell Mead

America can even help to fulfil Arab geo-political ambitions, Mead suggests. ‘For most of the last 50 years the vision of Arab nationalism has been this sort of “Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer” approach to the Arab question.’ But Mead thinks there is a growing realisation in the Middle East that the Arab world ‘is not Prussia looking for Bismarck, it is more Europe looking for Jean Monnet’. He sees no reason why America could not support that kind of Arab integration — perhaps, a Middle Eastern economic community that mutates into a Middle Eastern union — as it has European integration.

On Iraq, Mead has long been convinced that the country doesn’t need to become a perfect democracy for the intervention to have been worth it: if ‘at the end of the day, Iraq is like Turkey’s ugly stepsister wearing a veil that would actually be an improvement for the Iraqis and for us’. He says the recent progress there suggests that we are moving towards at least a system of pluralism in Iraq. The improvements in Iraq since the start of the surge make him wonder, like many in the establishment, whether General Petraeus might be the next Eisenhower.

To Mead’s mind, the post-Bush era of foreign policy has already begun. It can be seen in the second-term emphasis on diplomacy, which takes America back pretty much to its default international position. Whoever succeeds Bush, foreign policy won’t change much from the second-term model. But when it comes to Iran, Mead believes — like many of the American foreign policy establishment — that all of the presidential front-runners would have been just as bullish as Bush.

Whoever succeeds Bush will have one great advantage: he (or she) will not be Bush. Mead muses that ‘the greatest service Bush has ever done to the United States is to be the sacrificial goat that carries the sins of the people with him’. And he jokes, ‘The main purpose of a war crimes trial is not to declare a handful of people guilty, but everyone else innocent. The next president of the United States, whoever it is, will have a tremendous opportunity to simply travel around the world and not be Bush: 50 per cent of the job done already.’

Mead is no romantic about the special relationship. He points out that from the time Winston Churchill left office to Margaret Thatcher’s arrival at No. 10, West Germany supplanted Britain as Washington’s most valued European partner. He’s also no fan of the consequences of the Bush–Blair partnership, which he calls an ‘unfortunate, unhappy’ combination. He regrets that Bush listened to Blair on the need for another Security Council resolution on Iraq, saying Bush should simply have moved to enforce the original ceasefire — thus putting Saddam in a position where he either had to fire the first shot or be forced from office. But despite all this, he thinks that the ‘British are too invested in the global capitalist system’ for any dramatic break with the United States.

American optimism can be contagious, as Blair found, and talking to Mead leaves one bullish about the future. After all, 300 years of success is too long a run to be down to pure chance.

More articles from: James Forsyth | this section

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