Wanted: A New Axis

Pundits have been awfully noisy lately, but few grasp the real task at hand: checking the US's imperial ambitions

There's certainly been no shortage this past week of commentary on the big ugly mess transatlantic relations and conflicts within the EU and NATO have become. For historian-of-the-present Timothy Garton Ash, the troubles began when Europe's "three cavaliers," German Chancellor Schröder, French President Chirac and British Prime Minister Blair, galloped off in their own directions once the Bush administration announced it was aiming to topple Saddam Hussein. They could have put their heads together and come up with a common policy; and, Ash argues in The Guardian, that door is still open. That might heal the rift between "the two souls that contend in Europe's Faustian breast: the Atlantic and the Gaullist," but what it'd do for the one between the US and Europe Ash doesn't say.

For Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire, two things are clear. First, "Washington's new anti-Europeanism is really an expression of their unilateralist project." Second, it's a trap, forcing the anti-war movement to think in terms of "major nations and power blocs" rather than the vague notions of "global network connections with a global vision of possible futures" that the pre-9/11 globalization protest movements had somehow just begun to grasp. But Hardt ignores what the Bushies have accomplished. For all their investment in transnational capitalism individually, their "unilateralist project" itself casts power back to the nation states.

There have also been a few freakish sideshows such as the Washington Post guest editorial by Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democratic Union, the main opposition party to Schröder's Social Democrats. Merkel tries to have her cake and eat it, too, criticizing Schröder's anti-war position and cuddling up to the US while withholding an explicit declaration of support for the looming war. Thing is, Bush won't allow her or anyone else the luxury of fence-sitting. The sheriff has spoken: "For us or against us."

Then, in a hopeful piece in the New York Observer, Will Hutton argues that the US-European rift can't last. Like the even more hopeful DDGuttenplan, reporting on the February 15 protests for The Nation, Hutton is counting on the eventual isolation of the Bushies and a return of "the Western liberal tradition" to both continents. But if this war happens, and it probably will, and if others follow, tracing the steps outlined in Bush's "axis of evil" speech made over a year ago now, won't the Bushies actually accumulate power -- at home by sparking a fresh wave of wartime patriotism and abroad by strategically installing US-friendly governments around the globe? Waiting for the west to come to its senses could turn out to be a long and frustrating endgame.

Frankly, the best and most comprehensive chunk of commentary I've seen recently appeared on Sunday right here in Telepolis. Of the many excellent points makes (Eurasische Gegenmacht), four warrant translation. I turn the rest of this week's column over to Maresch:

"For some time now, it's no longer been about oil, toppling a dictator or the elimination of weapons of mass destruction. ... Above all, it is about one thing: checking and even countering the expansion of an empire for the sake of determining, according to Chancellor Schröder..., whether we retain a multipolar world or if, in the future, a single power will have its say in the world.

"The chancellor's rebellious stance is not irresponsible but far-sighted. As opposed to all the US vassals or the opposition's floundering around, he takes his constitutional duty seriously. By saying 'no' to an attack, he is deflecting damage to the republic.

"It was clearly not Gerhard Schröder but Dick Cheney who unilaterally declared an end to the coalition against terrorism with his speech in August of last year in which he switched strategic goals from the 'war on terrorism' to 'regime change.' And it was the US President himself who struck a pose in his bomber jacket in front of a microphone and declared that whatever the UN or the Security Council decided, he would solve the Saddam problem his way.

"With [Russian President] Putin's announcement in a radio interview that an attack by the empire without UN approval would result in the end of the anti-terrorism coalition, the new Rome had provoked precisely what many well-known US strategists absolutely hoped to avoid, namely, the creation of a genuine rival power that could challenge its expansion and put up resistance to its hegemonic ambitions of going it alone. And this could be the Eurasian Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis geopoliticians have either warned or dreamed of (depending on their political stripes), an axis to which Beijing might also attach itself."