by Tom Milstein
June 24, 2011
The American Paradigm was intended to dispose of the remains of socialism, and
it did. True, the American Paradigm collapsed as a model when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Temporarily I thought – the same thing had happened during the American Civil
War when the Southern slavocracy capitulated. After an interregnum lasting several
years, though, a diluted slavocracy was reborn in the South’s Bourbon-Dixiecrat oligarchy,
which was taken into junior partnership by the victorious Yankees to form the
Dixiecrat-GOP alliance. My Paradigm was reborn.
But no similar partnership has emerged between the former Soviet Union and the
United States. As a result, bipolarity also failed to reemerge. Instead, the United States of
America became the “world’s only Superpower.” This condition has endured now for
over two decades. Two decades is not long enough to discredit the American Paradigm
theory – after all, the victorious North ruled America alone from 1865 until 1876, when
the Hayes-Tilden disputed Presidential election was resolved at the expense of Reconstruction.
But it raises severe doubts about the theory’s validity, doubts which could only be dispelled through a restoration of international bipolarity. No such restoration appears to be in view.
Truly, bipolarity seems the least likely thing to emerge from present-day world politics. Many thinkers have sensed the inherent instability of America’s monocracy (or “Empire,” as it has come to be commonly called). But almost all of them believe that the trend is toward “multi-polarity,” an international system featuring an uneasy equilibrium between several powerful states, or alliances of states. Thus would Bush Sr.’s incipient
“New World Order” be supplanted by a new world balance of power.
The trouble with multi-polarity is that it was tried as an international system in Europe and World War I was its result. But the historical record of monopolarity is also dubious. Imperial systems are driven by their internal dynamic toward totalitarian domination. America’s core values conflict spectacularly with despotic rule. And even if the American ethos could be squeezed into this mold, no one should expect that the result
would be durable. Such systems are not immune to Waltz’s law of the international system. The “deep structure of anarchy” would inevitably generate a competing center of Imperial power. The last great Imperial system, Rome’s, lasted only 300 years before splitting into Western Rome and Byzantium. What took 300 years in the ancient world would emerge much faster under modern conditions.
In “Marx, the Anti-Semite” I investigated a bipolar system that prevailed in the Middle East between Egypt and Babylon. Along the frictional edge of these two empires Jews had the divine good fortune but bad geopolitical judgment to found a third regime,rather insignificant in the secular annals of the time, called “Israel,” out of whose travails emerged a refined concept of monotheism, at the root of which we found the same totalitarian principle – albeit expressed in theological rather than institutional terms – that governed Egypt and Babylon.
Later, we looked at another bipolar system, called the “Cold War,” that emerged between the two great successor powers of the Second World War, America and Russia. We found in this bipolarity a remarkable parallel to that which arose on the North American continent between North and South. This parallel we developed into a theory called the American Paradigm, and used it, among other things, to analyze the politics of the Cold War.
A third bipolarity has not emerged in world politics. If it does not, the American Paradigm is destroyed. Therefore, a third bipolarity will have to emerge. It will therefore be necessary to construct this third bipolarity from out of the debris of unipolarity, or multipolarity, or whatever precedes it. West of America lies China, clearly Asia’s leading candidate for superpower status. Across the Atlantic is Germany, Europe’s natural master. If America loses its world dominion, there can be little doubt that these two states will acquire superpower status by default.
But neither of these two states is qualified for world leadership. Indeed, neither of them probably wants it. Germany, although democratic, is quite well aware of its criminal record as a nation, probably even more so than its neighbors. China must cope with the contradiction between its remarkable economic progress and its crumbling and dysfunctional internal Communist system.
And how will senescent America react to its loss of power? The answer is not a pretty one. Russia went quietly. Would the U.S.A.?
Former American Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said, “We go to war with the army we have.” To build a new bipolarity, so must we.
The coming American Presidential election holds the key to building a new world bipolarity. The Republicans will grudgingly run Palin; the Democrats, no less grudgingly, will run Obama. Palin may win a popular victory. But her victory would tear the country apart. A wide swath of the electorate simply will not accept her. It will see in her election many unmitigated evils. But the worst one from the Eastern elite’s standpoint will be its
affect on America’s cherished alliance system, which is based on the Atlantic and emphasizes Europe over all others. Palin’s election would threaten America’s national security.
The Palin forces, on the other hand, while paying lip service to the Atlantic Alliance as the shield of Western civilization, find the George W. Bush administration’s emphasis on “Old” Europe a more comfortable posture. Palin, needless to say, finds the Pacific and Asia a much richer field for American enterprise. She will therefore be attacked as “soft on China,” whether or not she actually is. In self-defense, she will revive
the nasty Populist charge that the East Coast is dominated by a treasonous cabal of Anglophile Europe-worshippers.
Domestic political issues will be reduced to secondary status by the rising ferocity of these “foreign policy” recriminations. As they take on a life of their own, a Lincolnian Obama may resurrect himself in the eyes of broad sections of the electorate. It is not inconceivable that his campaign could win enough states to throw the result into the Electoral College. Whichever candidate wins in this arena, it is guaranteed that the other will not accept the result. Just as in 1861, and again in 1876, the Republic will start to crumble.
In 1876, America withstood the legitimacy crisis posed by an Electoral College outcome by means of a “Grand Compromise” involving the withdrawal of Federal troopsfrom the South and the end of Reconstruction. In 1865, no such compromise could be fashioned, and the Republic disintegrated. Lincoln was inaugurated President of an imaginary Union and proceeded to build a second one on the dry bones of the wrecked Constitution.
Victory in war recreated the American paradigm, this one secured by a dominant Yankee elite in partnership with a now-subordinate Southern Bourbon oligarchy. The New America resumed its march to world leadership, no longer encumbered by its stifling entanglement with domestic slavery.
In 2012, when the Republic splits once again, neither of these options will be available. There can be no war when neither side professes a program worth fighting for. But that doesn’t mean that compromise is inevitable. Too much is at stake. Foreign policy may not mean much to the people, but vital interests are involved. Thus America will find itself in the incongruous position of being ruled by elite factions which hate each other’s guts, but which cannot mobilize the passions of their respective constituencies.
“Let our errant sisters go in peace.” Our Eastern seaboard will suppose it can rule a German-dominated Europe. Toward this enterprise, it can offer Germany the political legitimacy it needs. But of course this legitimacy is not theirs to give. They will have to borrow it from Israel, which will be only too eager to supply it, for by such means Israel can bind the Atlanticists to support the Jewish state against its enemies.
As for Palin and her Western American supporters, the gravitational force of China will pull Pacific America into its long-sought Asian destiny, which, like its disowned Europe-oriented Eastern sisters, it will imagine itself capable of managing.
For both the Palin faction and its Eastern rivals the main enticement is financial. China sits engorged atop a mountain of American wealth which it cannot deploy into realms it considers politically unsafe, especially the Chinese homeland. Similarly, the European Union needs to invest its surplus capital, which it cannot entrust to the vagaries of American politics or European “PIGS.” The solution is obvious: another Grand Compromise, but this time not to preserve but to divide the American Republic. The great principle which previously united this continent, Federalism, will now sanctify its two global sections into a new bipolarity.
Both the dreams of Atlantic Union and Pacific Manifest Destiny will come to life, but not in the same bed.
Yen and Euros will pour into Pacific and Atlantic ports, in a kind of reverse Marshall Plan. A new American renaissance will be proclaimed by everybody. In repayment, America’s federal principle will be exported: the United States of Europe, and the United States of the Pacific. Realizing the goal which two World Wars could not achieve, Germany will push eastward into Russia as far as China will allow. China likewise will
achieve mastery over Asia. And it will all happen rather peacefully.
This final form of the American paradigm will someday result in a United States of the World. The American exception will then truly become the world’s rule. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans will dry up and become ponds. Vespucci’s cartographic label, named after him for lack of anything better, will disappear from the maps. Sovereignty will devolve into a welter of jurisdictional boundaries.
But life will still be as vicious as The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, as sublime as Jim and Huck on the River.
