Not all Americans are Neocons
But the ones that run US foreign policy are. Matthew Hooton in a typical smear wants to label Helen Clark as anti-American because she warned that involving us in attacking Houthis was a ”slippery slope.” She’s not and he’s wrong.
And the downward run has started. US and UK aircraft have started bombing the rocks in Yemen in what will be a futile attempt to prevent the Houthi targeting Israeli-linked cargoes in their vicinity.
The British have been bombing tribesmen since the days of the Westland Wapiti, bombing Iraqi tribesmen in the 1920s. But the tribesmen didn’t have missiles then, still less accurate ones. They do now. Escalation dominance is with the Houthis, and this situation could get really nasty. Hence Helen Clark’s wise warning.
Hooton’s anti-American slur on Helen Clark is reminiscent of the anti-semitism slur that was used to attack Jeremy Corbyn. His attack gets personal
Yet sometimes Clark’s prudent scepticism about US intentions risks crossing into something closer to knee-jerk anti-Americanism, as is probably only to be expected of any liberal academic of the Vietnam era.
What a tosser! It is perfectly possible to be pro-American and anti-neocon. I’ve been a chaplain to the US Air Force, went to University and taught high school in the US, and now link with many wonderful American peace activists fighting the neocons’ predilection for war.
However Hooton goes further to develop a neocon geopolitical theory. He states that “liberal internationalism is the best system for the world in general,” which one can debate in the detail, but then goes on to say:
But the advances in liberal institutionalism in the 1940s and 1990s didn’t occur because all the countries of the world decided to live and trade in peace together. They happened because those were the two eras of the last 80 years when there was a unipolar system, with the US having complete global hegemony.
It was the US, if you like, that used its complete military and economic dominance to put the rules-based system in place. As Clark seems no longer to accept, liberal institutionalism always needs to be underpinned by the most uncompromising realism, and a single dominant power – whether the Roman, British or American empires.
Without that underpinning, the rules-based system that Clark and anyone remotely sensible prefers is impossible.
That is the total neocon position – “full spectrum dominance,” and complete global hegemony for the United States. What that translates into is when it comes to the so-called rules-based order, it is the US that makes the rules and the US that gives the orders. Always and by definition in the interests of the US in all the institutions that Hooton lists.
But just like the Roman and the British empires mentioned by Hooton, the American empire is falling apart. The rest of the world is resisting, preferring co-operation to US-style winner-take-all competition. But dying empires are dangerous, and these are very dangerous times.
One of the many great things about Helen Clark is that she has always been a consistent advocate for peace. In my view her advice on the awful crisis in Gaza is far better than bombing the Houthis:
@HelenClarkNZ IMHO This is a slippery slope. Of course it is wrong to threaten key trade routes. But an end to the Gaza conflict & serious efforts to find a political solution there leading to a Palestinian state as key to 2-state solution would go a long way towards addressing root causes.
And there are some wiser heads in the US as well. Thus
Alexandra Stark of the RAND Corporation writing in the prestigious Foreign Affairs magazine: “Don’t Bomb the Houthis – Careful Diplomacy Can Stop the Attacks in the Red Sea.”