Yesterday, Brenda Stewart drew our attention to an article by Dilip Hiro about the decline of American power during the Bush era. The article does, indeed, paint a disturbing picture. But it also shows how The Establishment keeps score. And I want to say that there is some merit in how The Establishment keeps score, but we must first understand their metrics before we can make a rational critique of our foreign policies. Hiro marks out some areas where the U.S. is losing influence.

While visiting Moscow in June 2007, [Hugo Chavez] urged Russians to return to the ideas of Vladimir Lenin, especially his anti-imperialism. “The Americans don’t want Russia to keep rising,” he said. “But Russia has risen again as a center of power, and we, the people of the world, need Russia to become stronger.”

Chavez finalized a $1 billion deal to purchase five diesel submarines to defend Venezuela’s oil-rich undersea shelf and thwart any possible future economic embargo imposed by Washington. By then, Venezuela had become the second largest buyer of Russian weaponry. (Algeria topped the list, another indication of a growing multipolarity in world affairs.) Venezuela acquired the distinction of being the first country to receive a license from Russia to manufacture the famed AK-47 assault rifle.

The U.S. has clandestinely manufactured AK-47’s for years, but we never asked Russia for a license. The way The Establishment scores things, it is a loss when a country turns to the Soviets for their military equipment. Not only do we lose the revenue, we also lose the ability to dictate foreign policy by withholding replacement parts and military advisers and trainers.

Another way we can dictate to other countries is through energy policy. Zbigniew Brzezinski explained this in his 1998 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. Some choice quotes:

“In that context, how America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.”

…“The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea.”

“It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.”

…”For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia… Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia – and America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”

In case this isn’t clear, here is the bottom line:

“The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role.”

But, as Tom Dispatch points out, that is exactly what is happening.

…when President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan arrived in Washington a couple of weeks back and promptly described Iran as “a helper and a solution” for his country, even as President Bush insisted in his presence: “I would be very cautious about whether or not the Iranian influence in Afghanistan is a positive force.” At almost the same moment, Iraq’s embattled Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki paid an official visit to Iran, undoubtedly looking for support in case the U.S. turned on his government. Maliki “held hands” with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, met with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and called for cooperation. In response, all President Bush could do was issue a vague threat: “I will have to have a heart to heart with my friend, the prime minister, because I don’t believe [the Iranians] are constructive…. My message to him is, when we catch you playing a non-constructive role, there will be a price to pay.” (Later, a National Security Council spokesman had to offer a correction, insisting the threat was aimed only at Iran, not Maliki.) Then, to add insult to injury, just a week after Bush and Karzai met in Washington, Ahmadinejad headed for Kabul with a high-ranking Iranian delegation to pay his respects to the Afghan president “in open defiance of Washington’s wishes.” Think slap in the face.

What made this little regional diplomatic dance all the more curious was the fact that Karzai and Maliki are such weak (and weakening) American-backed leaders — Maliki of a government in chaos whose purview hardly extends beyond the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, and Karzai, sometimes dubbed the “mayor of Kabul,” as head of a government visibly losing control over even the modest areas it has ruled. In another age, each would have been dubbed an American “puppet” and yet, here they were, defying an American president in search of support from a hated regional power on whose curbing Bush has staked what’s left of his presidency.

The Establishment see the fiasco in Iraq as part of much larger defeat that extends from Lebanon to Tajikistan. They blame the neo-conservatives for this…sure…but their primary goal is to manage the fallout. To leave Iraq in chaos, with the vacuum filled by Iran, would be a betrayal of our allies in Cairo, Ankara, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, and Amman. It would cripple our influence in Eurasia.

That’s how The Establishment sees it, as well as advocates for our allies in the region. And, yet, are we sure that this is a bad thing for America in the long-term?

Canada does not have a terrorism problem. We have a terrorism problem. We have a terrorism problem because we have been trying to dominate Eurasia ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It has not worked out well for us.

Those of us that want America to give up the effort to dominate Eurasia are hoping to find a Democratic candidate for office that is willing to carry our banner. What are the key words? No residual forces. Bill Richardson is saying them. I’m not convinced he means it.