The Geopolitics of American Insecurity

Terror, Power and Foreign Policy

Francois Debrix, Mark Lacy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415577540
• eBook ISBN: 9781134045396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This edited volume examines the political, social, and cultural insecurities that the United States is faced with in the aftermath of its post-9/11 foreign policy and military ventures. The contributors critically detail the new strategies and ideologies of control, governance, and hegemony America has devised as a response to these new security threats.

The essays explore three primary areas. First, they interrogate the responses to 9/11 that resulted in an attempt at geopolitical mastery by the United States. Second, they examine how the US response to 9/11 led to attempts to secure and control populations inside and outside the United States, resulting in situations that quickly started to escape its control, such as Abu Ghraib and Katrina. Lastly, the chapters investigate links between contemporary regimes of state control and recently recognized threats, arguing that the conduct of everyday life is increasingly conditioned by state-mobilized discourses of security. These discourses are, it is argued, ushering in a geopolitical future characterized by new insecurities and inevitable measures of biopolitical control and governance.

1 Hyper-power or hype-power?

The USA after Kandahar, Karbala, and Katrina

Timothy W. Luke

This brief critique explores the hollowness of today’s pre-eminent sovereign power, or even hyper-power—the United States of America. With its various associated coalitions of the willing from other nation-states, the USA allegedly still stands tall during an era in which sovereignty is less certain, territoriality is contested, power is unclear, and preeminence is resisted by misunderstood and ill-named jihadists of multiple stripes. The misadventures of Kandahar, Karbala, and Katrina, however, are exposing some all too common mistakes: the vehicles of international affairs are driven across the landscape of world events at high rates of speed, their drivers glancing occasionally out of the windshield as they stare into the rearview mirror at images and ideas long since past, believing somehow that they will guide them through what lies ahead. Not knowing where they are, not certain where they are going, they believe that they remember where they, or at least their precursors, have been. Memories and myths of the Cold War, World War II or Victorian imperialism pop up in the rearview mirrors or on the passing terrain, but the troubled travel across it should never be guided by the cloudy reflections in the mirror or on the windows. Disaster ensues.

This chapter asks all on board the vehicles of state to stop staring at what has passed, and immediately glance out of the windshield and side windows anew. Their field of vision, across the troubled terrain of contemporary world affairs, must shift. This study of power, then, probes the merits of Paul Virilio’s assertion about analytical vision, namely that “to see is to be lying in wait for what must spring up from the ground, nameless; for what presents no interest what so ever, what is silent will speak, what is closed is going to open, it is always the trivial that is productive, and so that constant interest in the incidental, in the margins of what ever sort, that is, in the void and absence.”¹ These features are not to be found easily in the rearview mirror, but they sit silent and nameless at the margins, closed out by inattention, full of significance in the voids, absences, and incidences as change lies in wait across the ground and all around. Kandahar, Karbala, and Katrina are but a handful of them.

“Shock and awe,” as “hype-power” uses it, very plainly rests upon “the sudden militarization of mass information” by interventionist powers as well as local resistances that recognize and reconfigure this reality as they “democratize ubiquity, instantaneity, omniscience, and omnipresence” with their own insurgent weapons of mass communication.² A new balance of terror, or a ballet of violence, begins as the warhead videos of precision-guided munitions (cruise missiles, laser-guided artillery shells, smart bombs, etc.) are counter-poised against improvised explosive device (IED) explosions on the six o’clock news, jihadist snuff films of foreign hostages or video of victims hit by suicide bombers detonating their shrapnel vests in the noontime market place. Hype plays a major role in all these maneuvers.

Indeed, as of this moment on September 2, 2008, the duration of this war already exceeds America’s involvement in World War II against Japan by many days (1,993 in 2008 vs. 1,365 in 1945 on V-J Day, September 2, 1945) and against Germany by almost as many days (1,943 in 2008 vs. 1,248 in 1945 on V-E Day, May 8, 1945). Rumsfeld, as we know now, and as many feared before it all began, was dead wrong. Six days has become nearly 2,000, six weeks has piled up to 285 weeks, and six months is now pushing 65 months—and the clock is still ticking. The “short war in Iraq” sought by the world’s sole hyper-power has morphed into what is now being advertised by its architects as a stupendous and colossal “Long War for the World.” Whether it is or is not remains “to be determined.” Yet, today’s peculiar hyper-power wars would have been impossible to launch, wage, or continue without the “hype-power” that sustains them.

Hyper-power and hype-power

At the end of the Cold War, French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine argued that the victory of the USA over the USSR elevated it above the status of “mere superpower” to an unprecedented condition of “hyper-power.” In making this claim, Védrine archly wished to exceed the superlativity of superpower by attributing far greater, or actually even more excessive, reserves of power to the USA as it prepared to preside over a world remade by the collapse of its worn-down ideological enemy—the Soviet Union and the bloc of satellite states in the Warsaw Pact. Many have accepted this characterization of the United States as a hyper-power, the world’s sole remaining superpower or, as Niall Ferguson more apprehensively characterizes it, a true geopolitical and geo-economic “colossus” close to attaining “full spectrum dominance” over the world economy, global culture, international politics, and planetary environments.³

“Hyper” is, of course, a common prefix that denotes a condition or status that is “above,” “beyond,” or “over” that of the ordinary. It can mean “excessive” as well as imply an existential situation of being in a state with more than three dimensions, as with “hyperspace,” or unfolding with non-sequential linkages, as in “hypertext.” Védrine’s ironic characterization of “hyper-power” (hyper-puissance in the original French) clearly includes bits of all these qualities.

Where did hyper-power arise, and what does it rest upon? As Paul Kennedy’s conditional retraction of his imperial overstretch thesis from the 1980s put it, the Reagan era’s “revolution in military affairs” underpinned this hyper-powered dominion in the 1990s. Even though the United States basically quadrupled its national debt from 1981 to 1991 in a reckless military build-up, this feckless fiscal policy essentially

had paid an unforeseen dividend. Not only did the Soviet Union collapse as it strained to match the Reagan-Weinberger arms extravaganza, but the United States also went on to collect a triple peace dividend in the 1990s: falling defense spending as a share of GDP, accelerating economic growth and a quantum leap in military capability that left other powers far behind.⁴

The shock of 9/11 still lingers over many in the United States and around the world. Nonetheless, this terrorist incident also transpired within an economy that accounted for over a third of the world’s global product in 2002, as opposed to just 10 percent in 1980. The American economy now underpinning this war on terror is

two and half times larger than the Japanese economy, eight and half times larger than the Chinese economy, and thirty times larger than the Russian. U. S. military expenditures exceed the combined defense budgets of the EU, China, and Russia. Yet the cost of the U.S. military has declined steeply in relative terms, from an average of 10 percent of GDP in the 1950s to just 4 percent in the 1990s and a forecast 3.5 percent in the first half of the present decade.⁵

Hyper-power is celebrated for its neoliberal efficiency, although its real material effectiveness is much more open to question.

Strangely enough, as the hyper-power supposedly rises, there are many examples of “declinism” or “endism” for American hegemony, superpower, empire, or leadership in the world system going back to the crisis-ridden years of the 1960s and 1970s. For nearly two generations over the past four decades, one can look at critics and complainants setting their briefs out for why arrogance, poverty, racism, laziness, corruption, inequality, ignorance, or greed would very soon collapse the American state and society. Of course, year after year, it did not. This outcome could still occur, but it has not yet happened. Instead, today the United States seems to be continuously growing in power and privilege—even as arrogance, poverty, racism, laziness, corruption, inequality, ignorance, or greed can be seen as deepening and spreading at the same time. And, even more brazenly, the United States continues to cast itself as Ronald Reagan’s “shining ‘city upon a hill’,” despite all of the assertions of the declinist school of anti-American hegemony. From Paul Kennedy to Gabriel Kolko to Samuel Huntington to Noam Chomsky, critics jointly have judged the USA to have the world’s greatest power, while at the same time seeing it as ready to suffer the world’s quickest collapse. Whether it is the “distemper of democracy,” “imperial overstretch,” “the limits of power,” “military humanism,” or “blowback,” the end is, and has been, near for American hegemony for decades.⁶ And yet an unusual new order persists.

Joseph Nye’s soft power thesis is one explanation for why American power continues, but it has been attacked as incomplete. Here, Ferguson is basically correct when he questions how much American soft power really matters:

If the term is to denote anything more than cultural background music to more traditional forms of dominance, it surely needs to be demonstrated that the United States can secure what it wants from other countries without coercing or suborning them, but because its cultural exports are seductive.⁷

Ferguson’s questioning raises major doubts about soft power: is American culture alone so seductive, or must its soft power also be made much more seductive? Seduction itself can be real, but does it need to be made ever more extravagant, excessive, and exaggerated to gain greater effect?

Nye trips over the branches of hype-power with his notion of soft power.⁸ His pious characterization of such power softening its subjects rests upon obtaining compliance without “force or inducement,” because “it is the ability to entice and attract soft power that arises in large part from our values.”⁹ How this occurs is essentially cast as a quasicharismatic event in which, Nye asserts, “a country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness.”¹⁰ Taken uncritically on its own terms, and particularly in the context of the 1990s, when Nye fabricated this notion, soft power might seem quite convincing. Yet, are these values as such actually all that attractive?

Force or inducement might not be operational routines in soft power, but hyper-power on its own also appears quite ominous, unattractive, or even repulsive. Something major is missing here in the foamy boundaries between the hard power and soft power of hyper-power, and the absent element seems to be hype-power. How does a country get what it wants without force or inducement? Nothing necessarily attracts on its own without intense promotion, publicity, or proclamation of some sort. How do others know about those examples to emulate, levels to aspire toward, openness to be had, prosperity to be made widespread, values to admire or leaders to follow without 24/7 hype-power? To see hype-power at work, one must recognize how mighty marketing can be, or how might itself markets its own merits. Hyper-power could predispose others to be more pliable, or even foreshadow the ill effects of noncompliance. Still, compliance itself seems to arise as much from endless excess, exaggeration, or extravagance, as it does out of excellence. Consequently, one must explore the reach and the grasp of hype to consider the degree to which soft power presumes its preparatory actions when speaking of others’ admiration, emulation, aspiration, or compliance. The ability to entice and attract is not necessarily symptomatic of anything charismatic; it might be the expression of something far more problematic.

All of the inventories of hyper-power capability in the United States are important, but one must ask if they actually energize the conduits of hype behind many American decisions and dictates. Hype essentially colloquializes the classical trope in rhetoric used to define the purposeful exaggeration, excessive emphasis, and extravagance of overstatement, or “hyperbole,” which literally means “overshooting” in Greek. Hype is a strategy of media management, spin control or mass marketing to boost public attention and engagement with exaggerated claims. Excessive coverage, extravagant marketing, or extended publicity are the tactics of hype. Arguably, even the contemporary literature of imperialism itself cannot be disconnected from this PR machine. When used by poets as a rhetorical device, hyperbole can stir powerful emotions or lasting impressions. When mobilized in politics, it aims to elicit comparable effects.

Hype relies upon “weapons of mass communication,” and thereby creates ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: US foreign policy after hype(r)-power
• 1 Hyper-power or hype-power? The USA after Kandahar, Karbala, and Katrina
• 2 American insecurities and the ontopolitics of US pharmacotic wars
• 3 Power, violence, and torture: making sense of insurgency and legitimacy crises in past and present wars of attrition
• 4 Torturefest and the passage to pedagogy of tortured pasts
• 5 Designing security: control society and MoMA’s SAFE: Design Takes on Risk
• 6 Deserting sovereignty? The securitization of undocumented migration in the United States
• 7 The biopolitics of American security policy in the twenty-first century
• 8 Human security, governmentality, and sovereignty: a critical examination of contemporary discourses on universalizing humanity
• 9 The aesthetic emergency of the avian flu affect
• 10 Over a barrel: cultural political economy and oil imperialism
• 11 Zombie democracy