Paris, February 14, 2012 – When the first international effort to impose
an economic austerity regime upon Greece was completed George
Papandreou, the prime minister, surprised and infuriated the negotiators from the IMF, European Commission and European Central Bank by proposing that the draft agreement be submitted to a popular referendum. The negotiators and their governments knew very well that the Greek people would reject it. Mr. Papandreou was hustled out of the limelight, and foreign leaders, the EU, international financial officials, and right-thinking commentators in Europe and the United States all deplored his proposal, since democracy was not part of the deal.

If it had been, some forty-five buildings would not have been burned down in Athens last Sunday night and a hundred thousand or so Greeks taken to the streets, smashing the marble walls of banks and the show windows of luxury shops. If they couldn’t express their opinions one way they would do it in another.

This gives reason to doubt that the international austerity plan, or the Diktat, as the Greeks prefer to call it, presented in Athens and reluctantly voted, will actually be carried out. (The vote was 199 members of the National Assembly for, 74 opposed, with 27 abstentions.) That will have the disastrous consequences for Europe, the monetary union and Greece that nearly all have predicted. The figures are such that of the money now promised Greece (assuming that the EU’s other national parliaments approve), three-quarters will go to pay current debts. What remains is unlikely to stave off national bankruptcy this spring, and probably Greek exclusion from the Euro Zone. So what has it all been about?

In Greece the opinion is widespread that once again, as in 1917, 1940 and 1947 when, as they are convinced, they were ill-used by the Western great powers, they once again are victims of Western Europe, and especially Germany. They cannot deny the reproaches of economic mismanagement and corruption since joining the EU, but they did not need a German official to propose that a German Gaulieter be sent to take charge of Greece’s economy – which, after all, is only 2% of the European economy. Another German was overheard confiding to a Portuguese official that if Portugal, also in grave difficulties, needs help, there would be no trouble providing it -- implying that a certain “racial” hierarchy prevails in European and international economic circles.

Paris, February 7, 2012 – The annual security conference
in Munich is regularly the scene for the complaints of American
official and semi-official participants deploring Europe’s failure
“to pull its weight” in defense, “free-riding” on American efforts,
and failing to spend more money on transatlantic arms purchases.
Instead they spend money on their own-make arms and military
aircraft, such as the French Rafale and EAD’s Eurofighter, which they
sell to such overseas markets as India, which otherwise might buy
American.

Courtesy restrains the European participants from asking
what this threat is, against which Europe is being defended by the
United States. The complaint reasonable Americans usually make in
this matter is that the U.S. is massively over-armed against any
existing or plausible future threat to the United States itself.
Surely eleven nuclear carrier groups with accompanying support is not
required to fight the remnants of al Qaeda, nor have they proven
decisive against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Western Europe is modestly and inexpensively armed
because its governments perceive only very modest threats to their
national security, nearly all of them appropriately dealt with by
police and other civilian agencies. The Europeans make combat
airplanes, ships, and other high-technology military equipment,
because on occasion they need them – as in the Libyan intervention,
the Falklands affair, and Afghanistan – and to maintain their design
capacity and technological and industrial means to manufacture such
things in quantity should they ever be needed, and because they can
be profitably exported.

Stephen Hadley, an former official in ex-Vice President
Rchard Cheney’s office, said in Munich that Europe must spend more if
it wants to be a global player. The Europeans regard the George W.
Bush administration record, and now the Obama administration’s, and
see the results of “global playing:” Iraq in wreckage and under
Iran’s sway, Egypt and Turkey hostile to the United States, Israel
claiming to live in fear for its national existence, and the NATO war
in Afghanistan being lost.

On Afghanistan, Washington is taking stumbling steps towards
accommodation with the Taliban. An American diplomat is now in Qatar
“to prepare the ground” for “preliminary negotiations” with the
Taliban. The government of Hamid Karzai has repeatedly threatened to
expel American troops and operations from his country, and the United
States and Pakistan, and its army, are at swords-drawn.

Paris, January 31, 2012 – The framework in which most
Americans, including the foreign policy specialists, see the world
has totally changed in a decade. In February 2002 the United States
and Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance had just won their Blitzkrieg
unseating the Taliban government of Afghanistan, and a new client
government was being set in place. The Economist was to say of it a
year later that optimists believed “Afghanistan more stable than at
any time in the past 24 years.” Another war, against Iraq, was
confidently being prepared to avenge the Trade Towers
and Pentagon attacks (to which, it was to turn out, Iraq had no
connection), and to create a “new Middle East.”

Americans in 2002 believed themselves on top of the
world, capable of anything. They took progress for granted. A
leading neo-conservative of the time said “we have an Agency for
International Development in the hope that someday Somalia might look
like Norway.” That’s what the “New Middle East” was all about.

A decade, more than a trillion American dollars, and
uncounted thousands of lives later, the Afghan war continues, and the
Iraq war, nominally over, but (officially) with 6,000 American
staff plus their bodyguards left in the country, is not really
over at all. A third American war against a Muslim society, Iran, is
seriously likely.

At the same time Washington conducts and enlarges this
military involvement in the non-western world, the American public,
and again, many of its foreign policy experts and political leaders,
have decided that the United States is in decline, its social
coherence, its sense of unity and purpose lost, divided as never
before by economic class and a newly-felt and newly–expressed hatred
between the “one percent” monopolizing its wealth and the excluded
99%. The American and Western economies are badly weakened by a
global recession and potential depression, wrought by Wall Street.
This is no illusion, nor is the widespread conviction that the
American government and its electoral system suffer a crisis of
function, accountability, competence, and venomous political conflict.

Today a leading figure in the policy community, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, writes in his new book that America “is in serious
decline for domestic and/or external reasons” and that its loss of
international authority risks stalling international efforts to deal
“with issues of central importance to social well-being and
ultimately to human survival.”

Paris, January 24, 2012 – The obsession of the American
foreign policy community, as well as most American (and a good many
international) politicians, with the myth of Iran’s “existential”
threat to Israel, brings the world steadily closer to another war in
the Middle East.

The debate over Iran takes for granted that the country
soon will have nuclear weapons, and would use them. The same debate
back in 2002-‘03 over Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of WMD's
did the same. After the United States had gone to war against Iraq
no such weapons were found to exist.

The actual winner of the war that followed the American invasion of
Iraq was Israel, which saw Iraq, its principal regional rival,
destroyed at no cost to itself. The military victor of the war, but
politico-strategic loser, was the United States, which destroyed
Iraq, a country in no position to harm the United States, at a
trillion-dollar cost, enormous human suffering and waste, and the
effective transfer of Iraq to Iran’s zone of military and strategic
influence.

The present debate over Iran’s nuclear program, like the pre-2003
debate concerning Iraq’s non-existent WMD program, has never extended
to the most important question in the matter. What difference would
it make if Iran did have nuclear weapons? What could it do with
them, considering the nuclear deterrent force possessed by Israel,
generally thought the fifth or sixth largest and most sophisticated
nuclear power in the world?

Between the start of the nuclear era to the end of the
Cold War, tens if not hundreds of thousands of earnest scholars,
strategists, pacifist activists, journalistic commentators,
politicians, and prospective victims of nuclear war brooded over how
nuclear weapons might be used in war or cold war. So far as I know,
the only conclusive answer we found (I was, on occasion, one of those
people) was that they were only useful as a threat to deter someone
else from aggression. They cannot stop the aggression, but they will
exact a serious penalty for it.

Paris, January 17, 2012 – Now that America’s primary
elections have eliminated the more implausible contenders for the
Republican presidential nomination, it is possible to take a clearer
look at what the electorate will be up against when the conventions
are over next August, and when the newly-elected president assumes
(or resumes) command of American foreign policy.

Barring the unforeseeable, the Democratic candidate will be Barack
Obama. If the polls, and the wishful thinking of old-school
Republicans, are right, the Republic candidate will be Mitt Romney,
who has displayed the least ignorance of foreign policy issues among
the surviving primary candidates. That does not say much. His
proposal that American policy in the Middle East be wholly submitted
to the approval of the present government of Israel differs from the
other candidates (Barack Obama included; Ron Paul excluded) only by
its degree of grovel and electoral pandering. He could, however, be
elected. That is why he said it.

Nicholas Burns, now of the Harvard Kennedy School, formerly George W.
Bush’s Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, recently wrote
in the Boston Globe commending the presidential candidacies of Romney
and Jon Huntsman (now scratched) as representatives of “the rich
Republican foreign policy strength in knowledge, judgment and
experience dating back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.” One wonders what the General would think of this comment.

The Eisenhower administration, and that of the senior George Bush, who negotiated the Cold War’s end, undoubtedly constitute the peaks of modern
Republican statesmanship. The highest point was provided by Mr.
Eisenhower’s premonitory, and fatally ignored, warning against
American militarism, of which we are now the victims.

If Romney succeeds, and does what all the Republican candidates (Paul
excluded) have promised, strike Iran, or sustain Israel in attacking
that country, the United States would begin 2013 in or at the edge of
a new Middle Eastern war, estranged from the European democracies, as
well as from much of the non-western world.