In this respect, at least, reports of US decline are wildly exaggerated. Even with the rise of China, the vast wealth of the European Union, and the embarrassing spectacle of the Trump presidency, people around the world still look to America for their cultural and political cues.
Verschijnselen als Trump en QAnon rechtvaardigen in zijn ogen de claim dat ‘mensen in de hele wereld nog steeds naar America kijken voor hun culturele en politieke richtlijnen.’ Deze gevolgtrekking is allereerst lachwekkend, behalve dan voor degenen die professor Buruma’s woorden met een zekere opluchting zullen lezen. Goddank, onze ‘Pax Americana’ spreekt toch nog een woordje mee, niet alles is verloren. Zelfs voor de ‘liberal elites’ is dus het extreem rechtse gedachtegoed een strohalm waaraan zij zich kunnen vastklampen. Kennelijk geldt voor hen: beter iets dan helemaal niets. Maar in plaats van dat Buruma’s zienswijze getuigt van optimisme, toont het in werkelijkheid hoe het pessimisme aan kracht wint. Buruma’s betoog bewijst namelijk hoe snel de ‘Super Power’ is veranderd in een reus op lemen voeten. Erger nog, het feit dat de keizer geen kleren aan heeft is inmiddels vooral voor iedere niet-westerling zichtbaar geworden. Dit wordt opnieuw zichtbaar nu het Amerikaans militair-industrieel complex en zijn NAVO zich voor het merendeel terugtrekt uit Afghanistan. Dat het Westen ook daar de oorlog heeft verloren beseft het voormalig gekoloniseerd deel van de wereld beter dan de westerse mainstream-opiniemakers, die even wanhopig als Buruma met allerlei tromgeroffel trachten het verval te maskeren. Wat zich vandaag de dag voor onze ogen afspeelt is overigens niets nieuws. Net als elk fenomeen kennen ook imperia opkomst, bloei en verval, voordat ze ineenstorten.
Wie dat niet begrijpt raad ik aan het door Paul Syrier schitterend vertaalde Verval en Ondergang van het Romeinse Rijk (2000) nauwkeurig te bestuderen. Dit meesterwerk van de Britse historicus Edward Gibbon verscheen voor het eerst tussen 1776 en 1781, het tijdperk waarin de VS gestalte kreeg. Al meteen in het begin wijst Gibbon erop dat ‘Onder een democratische regering de burgers de soevereine macht uit[oefenen],’ maar dat ‘die macht aanvankelijk [zal] worden misbruikt en later verloren zal gaan als hij aan onbeheersbaar grote massa’s wordt toegekend.’ En dit gaat zeker op in het geval van de Verenigde Staten, waar geld de doorslaggevende 'waarde' vertegenwoordigt, en de massa door de propaganda van een corrupte elite en haar lictoren voortdurend wordt gehersenspoeld. Zoals nu toch wel bekend mag worden geacht eindigt elke beschaving in corruptie, een wijsheid die nog eens werd verwoord door de negentiende eeuwse Lord Acton toen deze Britse politicus schreef dat ‘Power always corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ In tegenstelling tot de mentale lichtgewichten van de ‘corporate press’ plaatst Gibbon zijn geschiedschrijving in een brede context. Zo stelt hij:
Aan de volmaakte inrichting van het Romeinse Rijk waren eeuwen van geweld en plunderingen voorafgegaan. De slaven waren voor het grootste deel barbaarse krijgsgevangenen die tijdens de wisselvalligheden van de oorlogen bij duizenden waren gemaakt, goedkoop waren aangeschaft, gewend waren aan een onafhankelijk bestaan en ongeduldig het moment afwachtten dat ze hun ketenen konden verbreken en wraak konden nemen. Tegen dergelijke interne vijanden, wier wanhopige opstanden de republiek meer dan eens aan de rand van de ondergang handen gebracht, schenen de strengste regelgeving en de wreedste behandeling bijna gerechtvaardigd door de allesbeheersende wet van het zelfbehoud. Toen echter de belangrijkste volkeren van Europa, Azië en Afrika onder de wetten van één soeverein waren verenigd, vloeide de bron van buitenlandse rijkdommen veel minder overvloedig en dienden de Romeinen hun toevlucht te zoeken tot de zachtaardigere doch tragere methode van voortplanting. In hun omvangrijke families, en vooral op hun landgoederen, moedigden ze huwelijken tussen hun slaven aan.
Bovendien werd:
Maar gelijk elke vooruitgang een schaduwkant kent, zo goot de combinatie van een:
langdurige periode van vrede en uniforme regering door de Romeinen een langzaam werkend gif in de vitale organen van het rijk. De geesten van de mensen werden geleidelijk tot hetzelfde peil genivelleerd, het vuur van het genie werd gedoofd en zelfs de militaire geest verdampte. De inheemsen van Europa waren dapper en robuust. Spanje, Gallië, Brittannië, en Illyrië voorzagen de legioenen van uitstekende soldaten en vormden de werkelijke kracht van de monarchie. De persoonlijke heldhaftigheid van de Romeinen bleef, maar ze bezaten niet meer de burgermoed die gevoed wordt door liefde voor onafhankelijkheid, gevoel voor nationale eer, aanwezigheid van gevaar en gewoonte bevelen te geven en te krijgen.
In De Groene Amsterdammer van 12 maart 2014 beklaagde zich de toenmalige éminence grise van de polderpers, Henk Hofland, dat ‘[z]owel in West-Europa als in Amerika bij een zeer groot deel van het publiek de vaderlandslievende eerzucht en de strijdlust verloren [zijn] gegaan.’ Vanzelfsprekend beschouwde een aanzienlijk deel van de hedendaagse lezers dit terecht als gevaarlijke nostalgie van een hoogbejaarde naar de goede, oude tijd, die Auschwitz en Hiroshima mogelijk had gemaakt, gezien de westerse geschiedenis onvermijdelijke gruwelijkheden die nog eens worden onderstreept door de Amerikaanse neoconservatieve politicoloog Samuel Huntington in zijn opzienbarende werk The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), waarin hij de lezer erop attent maakt dat:
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.
Let us hope that we at last understand this legacy. It is a weighty and sometimes ominous heritage that we must neither deny nor feel ashamed about — but insist that our deadly manner of war serves, rather than buries, our civilization.
De emeritus hoogleraar Hanson schreef dit evenwel niet in de tijd van Gibbon, maar vijf decennia na Auschwitz en Hiroshima, en na alle koloniale westerse genocides. Desondanks hoeven ‘wij’ ons niet ‘beschaamd’ te ‘voelen’ over de barbaarse westerse ‘wijze van oorlog voeren,’ maar moeten ‘wij’ juist ‘benadrukken’ dat deze ‘zware en soms onheilspellende erfenis,’ onze ‘beschaving’ eerder ‘dient’ dan ‘begraaft.’ Typerend is dat Hanson door het Amerikaanse establishment geenszins wordt gezien als pleitbezorger van fascistische, genocidale terreur, maar als een gerespecteerde historicus die de opvattingen van de gevestigde orde helder formuleert.
Nog steeds beschikt de westerse elite niet alleen over een onuitputtelijke reserve aan half geschoolde huursoldaten uit de lagere klassen, maar is zij er tevens in geslaagd het geschoolde deel van de bevolking mentaal te mobiliseren om de belangen van de elite met massaal geweld te beschermen en zelfs uit te breiden. Maar ook dit ‘voordeel’ kent zijn nadeel. De in Martinique geboren Franse zwarte auteur Aimé Césaire wees er in zijn essay Discourse on Colonialism (1950) dat het superioriteitsgevoel van de witte kolonisten en ‘their sense of mission as the world civilizers’ berust ‘on turning the Other into a barbarian.’ Het is evenwel een oude kolonialistische wetmatigheid dat:
The colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal... They thought they were only slaughtering Indians, or Hindus, or South Sea Islanders, or Africans. They have in fact overthrown, one after another, the ramparts behind which European civilization could have developed freely,
According to a Washington Post article, the president is always accompanied by a military aide carrying a 'football' with launch codes for nuclear weapons. The football is a metal Zero Halliburton briefcase carried in a black leather ‘jacket.’ The package weighs around 45 pounds (20 kilograms). A small antenna protrudes from the bag near the handle.
In his book Breaking Cover, Bill Gulley, the former director of the White House Military Office, wrote:
There are four things in the Football. The Black Book containing the retaliatory options, a book listing classified site locations, a manila folder with eight or ten pages stapled together giving a description of procedures for the Emergency Alert System, and a three-by-five inch card with authentication codes. The Black Book was about 9 by 12 inches and had 75 loose-leaf pages printed in black and red. The book with classified site locations was about the same size as the Black Book, and was black. It contained information on sites around the country where the president could be taken in an emergency.
Operation
Before the order can be processed by the military, the president must be positively identified using a special code issued on a plastic card, nicknamed the ‘biscuit.’ The United States has a two-man rule in place, and while only the president can order the release of nuclear weapons, the order must be confirmed by the Secretary of Defense (there is a hierarchy of succession in the event that the president is killed in an attack). Once all the codes have been verified, the military would issue attack orders to the proper units. These orders are given and then re-verified for authenticity.
The football is carried by one of the rotating presidential military aides, whose work schedule is described by a top-secret rota (one from each of the five service branches). The aide is occasionally physically attached to the briefcase via a security cable around the wrist. This person is a commissioned officer in the U.S. military, pay-grade O-4 or above, who has undergone the nation's most rigorous background check (Yankee White). These armed officers are required to keep the football readily accessible to the president at all times. Consequently, the aide, football in hand, is always either standing or walking near the president, including riding on Air Force One, Marine One, or the presidential motorcade with the president.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_football
In zijn mei 2016 verschenen boek Who Rules the World werpt de Amerikaanse geleerde Noam Chomsky de dringende maar door de mainstream-media over het algemeen genegeerde vraag op: ‘Will we destroy ourselves?’ Chomsky schrijft:
In January 2015, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced its famous Doomsday Clock to three minutes before midnight, a threat level that had not been reached for 30 years. The Bulletin's statement explaining this advance toward catastrophe invoked the two major threats to survival: nuclear weapons and ‘unchecked climate change.’ The call condemned world leaders, who ‘have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe,’ endangering ‘every person on Earth [by] failing to perform their most important duty -- ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization.’
Since then, there has been good reason to consider moving the hands even closer to doomsday.
As 2015 ended, world leaders met in Paris to address the severe problem of ‘unchecked climate change.’ Hardly a day passes without new evidence of how severe the crisis is. To pick almost at random, shortly before the opening of the Paris conference, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab released a study that both surprised and alarmed scientists who have been studying Arctic ice. The study showed that a huge Greenland glacier, Zachariae Isstrom, ‘broke loose from a glaciologically stable position in 2012 and entered a phase of accelerated retreat,’ an unexpected and ominous development. The glacier ‘holds enough water to raise global sea level by more than 18 inches (46 centimeters) if it were to melt completely. And now it's on a crash diet, losing 5 billion tons of mass every year. All that ice is crumbling into the North Atlantic Ocean.’
Yet there was little expectation that world leaders in Paris would ‘act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe.’ And even if by some miracle they had, it would have been of limited value, for reasons that should be deeply disturbing.
When the agreement was approved in Paris, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who hosted the talks, announced that it is ‘legally binding.’ That may be the hope, but there are more than a few obstacles that are worthy of careful attention.
In all of the extensive media coverage of the Paris conference, perhaps the most important sentences were these, buried near the end of a long New York Times analysis: ‘Traditionally, negotiators have sought to forge a legally binding treaty that needed ratification by the governments of the participating countries to have force. There is no way to get that in this case, because of the United States. A treaty would be dead on arrival on Capitol Hill without the required two-thirds majority vote in the Republican-controlled Senate. So the voluntary plans are taking the place of mandatory, top-down targets.’ And voluntary plans are a guarantee of failure.
Nu de leider van de NAVO de komende decennia zijn gehele nucleaire arsenaal vernieuwt en meer ‘usable’ kernwapens gaat inzetten is het zinnig te lezen wat Chomsky hierover te vertellen heeft:
The last time the Doomsday Clock reached three minutes before midnight was in 1983, at the time of the Able Archer exercises of the Reagan administration; these exercises simulated attacks on the Soviet Union to test their defense systems. Recently released Russian archives reveal that the Russians were deeply concerned by the operations and were preparing to respond, which would have meant, simply: The End.
We have learned more about these rash and reckless exercises, and about how close the world was to disaster, from U.S. military and intelligence analyst Melvin Goodman, who was CIA division chief and senior analyst at the Office of Soviet Affairs at the time. ‘In addition to the Able Archer mobilization exercise that alarmed the Kremlin,’ Goodman writes, ‘the Reagan administration authorized unusually aggressive military exercises near the Soviet border that, in some cases, violated Soviet territorial sovereignty. The Pentagon's risky measures included sending U.S. strategic bombers over the North Pole to test Soviet radar, and naval exercises in wartime approaches to the USSR where U.S. warships had previously not entered. Additional secret operations simulated surprise naval attacks on Soviet targets.’
We now know that the world was saved from likely nuclear destruction in those frightening days by the decision of a Russian officer, Stanislav Petrov, not to transmit to higher authorities the report of automated detection systems that the USSR was under missile attack. Accordingly, Petrov takes his place alongside Russian submarine commander Vasili Arkhipov, who, at a dangerous moment of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, refused to authorize the launching of nuclear torpedoes when the subs were under attack by U.S. destroyers enforcing a quarantine.
Other recently revealed examples enrich the already frightening record. Nuclear security expert Bruce Blair reports that ‘the closest the U.S. came to an inadvertent strategic launch decision by the President happened in 1979, when a NORAD early warning training tape depicting a full-scale Soviet strategic strike inadvertently coursed through the actual early warning network. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was called twice in the night and told the U.S. was under attack, and he was just picking up the phone to persuade President Carter that a full-scale response needed to be authorized right away, when a third call told him it was a false alarm.’
This newly revealed example brings to mind a critical incident of 1995, when the trajectory of a U.S.-Norwegian rocket carrying scientific equipment resembled the path of a nuclear missile. This elicited Russian concerns that quickly reached President Boris Yeltsin, who had to decide whether to launch a nuclear strike.
Blair adds other examples from his own experience. In one case, at the time of the 1967 Middle East war, ‘a carrier nuclear-aircraft crew was sent an actual attack order instead of an exercise/training nuclear order.’ A few years later, in the early 1970s, the Strategic Air Command in Omaha ‘retransmitted an exercise... launch order as an actual real-world launch order.’ In both cases code checks had failed; human intervention prevented the launch. ‘But you get the drift here (een indruk krijgen. svh),’ Blair adds. ‘It just wasn't that rare for these kinds of snafus (chaotische situaties. svh) to occur.’
Blair made these comments in reaction to a report by airman John Bordne that has only recently been cleared by the U.S. Air Force. Bordne was serving on the U.S. military base in Okinawa in October 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a moment of serious tensions in Asia as well. The U.S. nuclear alert system had been raised to DEFCON 2, one level below DEFCON 1, when nuclear missiles can be launched immediately. At the peak of the crisis, on October 28th, a missile crew received authorization to launch its nuclear missiles, in error. They decided not to, averting likely nuclear war and joining Petrov and Arkhipov in the pantheon of men who decided to disobey protocol and thereby saved the world.
As Blair observed, such incidents are not uncommon. One recent expert study found dozens of false alarms every year during the period reviewed, 1977 to 1983; the study concluded that the range is 43 to 255 per year. The author of the study, Seth Baum, summarizes with appropriate words: ‘Nuclear war is the black swan we can never see, except in that brief moment when it is killing us. We delay eliminating the risk at our own peril. Now is the time to address the threat, because now we are still alive.’
These reports, like those in Eric Schlosser's book Command and Control, keep mostly to U.S. systems.The Russian ones are doubtless much more error-prone. That is not to mention the extreme danger posed by the systems of others, notably Pakistan.
Sometimes the threat has not been accident, but adventurism, as in the case of Able Archer. The most extreme case was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the threat of disaster was all too real. The way it was handled is shocking; so is the manner in which it is commonly interpreted.
With this grim record in mind, it is useful to look at strategic debates and planning. One chilling case is the Clinton-era 1995 STRATCOM study ‘Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence.’ The study calls for retaining the right of first strike, even against non-nuclear states. It explains that nuclear weapons are constantly used, in the sense that they ‘cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict.’ It also urges a ‘national persona’ of irrationality and vindictiveness (wraakzucht. svh) to intimidate the world.
Current doctrine is explored in the lead article in the journal International Security, one of the most authoritative in the domain of strategic doctrine. The authors explain that the United States is committed to ‘strategic primacy’ -- that is, insulation from retaliatory strike. This is the logic behind Obama's ‘new triad’ (strengthening submarine and land-based missiles and the bomber force), along with missile defense to counter a retaliatory strike. The concern raised by the authors is that the U.S. demand for strategic primacy might induce China to react by abandoning its ‘no first use’ policy and by expanding its limited deterrent. The authors think that they will not, but the prospect remains uncertain. Clearly the doctrine enhances the dangers in a tense and conflicted region.
The same is true of NATO expansion to the east in violation of verbal promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev when the USSR was collapsing and he agreed to allow a unified Germany to become part of NATO -- quite a remarkable concession when one thinks about the history of the century. Expansion to East Germany took place at once. In the following years, NATO expanded to Russia's borders; there are now substantial threats even to incorporate Ukraine, in Russia's geostrategic heartland. One can imagine how the United States would react if the Warsaw Pact were still alive, most of Latin America had joined, and now Mexico and Canada were applying for membership.
Aside from that, Russia understands as well as China (and U.S. strategists, for that matter) that the U.S. missile defense systems near Russia's borders are, in effect, a first-strike weapon, aimed to establish strategic primacy -- immunity from retaliation. Perhaps their mission is utterly unfeasible, as some specialists argue. But the targets can never be confident of that. And Russia's militant reactions are quite naturally interpreted by NATO as a threat to the West.
One prominent British Ukraine scholar poses what he calls a ‘fateful geographical paradox’: that NATO ‘exists to manage the risks created by its existence.’
The threats are very real right now. Fortunately, the shooting down of a Russian plane by a Turkish F-16 in November 2015 did not lead to an international incident, but it might have, particularly given the circumstances. The plane was on a bombing mission in Syria. It passed for a mere 17 seconds through a fringe of Turkish territory that protrudes into Syria, and evidently was heading for Syria, where it crashed. Shooting it down appears to have been a needlessly reckless and provocative act, and an act with consequences.
In reaction, Russia announced that its bombers will henceforth be accompanied by jet fighters and that it is deploying sophisticated anti-aircraft missile systems in Syria. Russia also ordered its missile cruiser Moskva, with its long-range air defense system, to move closer to shore, so that it may be ‘ready to destroy any aerial target posing a potential danger to our aircraft,’ Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced. All of this sets the stage for confrontations that could be lethal.
Tensions are also constant at NATO-Russian borders, including military maneuvers on both sides. Shortly after the Doomsday Clock was moved ominously close to midnight, the national press reported that ‘U.S. military combat vehicles paraded Wednesday through an Estonian city that juts into Russia, a symbolic act that highlighted the stakes for both sides amid the worst tensions between the West and Russia since the Cold War.’ Shortly before, a Russian warplane came within seconds of colliding with a Danish civilian airliner. Both sides are practicing rapid mobilization and redeployment of forces to the Russia-NATO border, and ‘both believe a war is no longer unthinkable.’
Prospects for Survival
If that is so, a war might well destroy everything. It has been recognized for decades that a first strike by a major power might destroy the attacker, even without retaliation, simply from the effects of nuclear winter.
But that is today's world. And not just today's — that is what we have been living with for 70 years. The reasoning throughout is remarkable. As we have seen, security for the population is typically not a leading concern of policymakers. That has been true from the earliest days of the nuclear age, when in the centers of policy formation there were no efforts — apparently not even expressed thoughts — to eliminate the one serious potential threat to the United States, as might have been possible. And so matters continue to the present, in ways just briefly sampled.
That is the world we have been living in, and live in today. Nuclear weapons pose a constant danger of instant destruction, but at least we know in principle how to alleviate the threat, even to eliminate it, an obligation undertaken (and disregarded) by the nuclear powers that have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The threat of global warming is not instantaneous, though it is dire in the longer term and might escalate suddenly. That we have the capacity to deal with it is not entirely clear, but there can be no doubt that the longer the delay, the more extreme the calamity.
Prospects for decent long-term survival are not high unless there is a significant change of course. A large share of the responsibility is in our hands -- the opportunities as well.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176152/
Daar komt nog het volgende bij, zondag 5 juni 2016 werd bekend dat:
In the wake of President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima last week, renewed debates over the use of atomic weapons against Japan in August 1945 have highlighted a disturbing trend: a rise in public support for US attacks on civilians across the globe. Never having withstood a prolonged bombing campaign on their soil, many people in the United States are quick to support and justify the use of bombs -- including nuclear ones -- on others.
Academics Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino conducted research on the US public's attitude regarding nuclear bombing and recently publishing a summary of their findings in a Wall Street Journal story titled 'Would the US Drop the Bomb Again?' From a survey of a 'representative sample of 620 Americans' administered by YouGov last July, Sagan and Valentino revealed results that were 'unsettling about the instincts of the US public.' Specifically, the pair reported that, 'When provoked, [US citizens] don't seem to consider the use of nuclear weapons a taboo, and our commitment to the immunity of civilians from deliberate attack in wartime, even with vast casualties, is shallow.'
Met deze informatie als achtergrond wordt duidelijk hoe gevaarlijk de mening was van de inmiddels overleden opiniemaker Henk Hofland toen hij in het lijfblad van de polderintelligentsia, De Groene, zijn publiek verzekerde dat ‘het Westen,’ dat wil zeggen de westerse elite — de rest telt niet mee — ‘nog altijd bij voorkeur onder Amerikaanse leiding,’ tenminste ‘als het een Democraat is,’ de toekomst in wil.
Welnu, binnen de hierboven geschetste context dient de lezer de woorden van Ian Buruma te interpreteren dat ‘For better or worse, the influence of American culture remains as strong as ever,’ en dat ‘mensen in de hele wereld nog steeds naar Amerika kijken voor hun culturele en politieke richtlijnen.’ Als dit waar is dan staat niets meer de Derde Wereldoorlog in de weg. Daarover volgende keer meer.
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