Apostolos L. Pierris

ATHENS, ROME AND THE AMERICAN UNIVERSAL IMPERIUM:

STRATEGIES OF UNIPOLARITY

A historical warning: Athens

τὸν γὰρ ἐχθρὸν οὐχ ὦν δρᾷ μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ τῆς διανοίας προαμύνεσθαι χρή.

Thucydides VI, 38, 4

[One must take retaliatory measures before hand against the enemy not in response to his acts only, but for what he has in mind also]

ἐκ πολέμου μὲν γὰρ εἰρήνη μᾶλλον βεβαιοῦται, ἀφ᾿ ἡσυχίας δὲ μὴ πολεμῆσαι οὐχ ὁμοίως ἀκίνδυνον.

Thucyides I, 124, 2

[Peace is rendered more secure as a consequence of war, whereas it is not similarly free from danger not to go to war because of a pacific disposition]

A historical warning: Athens

After the defeat of the Persian expansionism and the consequent breakdown of the Achaemenidean attempt to integrate the vast geopolitical space extending from the Balkans to Central Asia and the Indus, the Greek Coalition, such as it existed, which effected the mighty result, rapidly disintegrated. Athens, a pivotal factor in the Allied resistance and final victory, embarked immediately afterwards in an urgent and huge programme of coordinated power-building which was aimed in fact as much at least against her chief former Allies (and their head, Sparta) as against the common Persian enemy.

In peace, Athens, following Themistocles' policy, intensified, instead of relaxing, her security arrangements, by strengthening both her defensive and offensive capabilities. Extensive fortifications were designed and hastily constructed under the idea of rendering the Athenian city-harbour complex virtually an island on land. This "fortress Athens" was endowed with a mighty navy considerably superior to all other existing sea forces. Military preeminence was then used to make of the Aegean Sea practically an Athenian lake, a strategic goal which was institutionalised in the Delian Confederacy, the new Coalition of the Aegean island states and most coastal ones in Western Asia Minor, the Straits, Thrace and Macedonia. The new sea-centered Athenian Alliance had nothing to do with the old Panhellenic (in principle) and continental (primarily) one: in fact it mostly consisted of the states previously collaborating with, or under the jurisdiction, control or varying influence of, the Persian Empire.

Athens' military aggrandizement was correlated systematically to converging policies in the broader political and economic field. Increased and thorough democratization of the internal power structure released potential traditionally bound to positions and activities of inferior productivity while simultaneously it enhanced the acutely antagonistic spirit of the ancient Greek experience of life. This established in its turn conditions of unparalleled economic freedom, attracted by which, foreign resources (human and other) flew into the dominant State and worked for its further advancement. Under the security arrangements firmly sustained by the Athenian naval power, commerce flourished in the whole region (Aegean Sea and its "hinterland"), causing increased demand and rousing the productive forces into higher degrees of efficiency involving necessarily relevant structural extensive and intensive readjustments. The Attic Maritime League became, thus, also a common trade area of throbbing economic activity, supported (as Corinth has taught before in the West) by Athens' strong fleet.

Military might, political structure of full and perpetual accountability, intense and free economic enterprise - all worked together during the first half of the fifth century B.C. in promoting Athenian hegemony: it was a full-blown strategy of decisive superiority.

The implications of such a strategic doctrine cannot stop permanently at any given limits. Stabilization of the Aegean area under Athenian hegemony could not be maintained for long without struggle, and progress in it, toward broader and broader predominance. In fact, Athens pursued during the corresponding period an overtly aggressive foreign policy against both Persia and Sparta. Ominous strategic vacillation and partial reorientation of attitudes in the 60's reflected the violent political strife in Athens which led to Themistocles' ostracism and left prevailing for a time Cimon's oligarchic Philolaconism in foreign affairs. Full scale military operations against Persia were then accompanied by a policy of understanding towards Sparta and the other continental powers. But the failure of Cimon's policy, leading in turn to his ostracism some years later, brought things again into full compliance with the Themistoclean strategic doctrine, and with a vengeance.

An inscription of the time commemorating Athenian dead in wars conducted during a single year, reveals the extent of simultaneous Athenian military commitments and operations: Cyprus, Phoenice and Egypt (the Persian front in Eastern Mediterranean), Argolis, Megara and Aegina (in the near front against the mainland Greek powers). Commercial States were the particular target of Athenian encroaching policies: Aegina was ruthlessly eliminated and annexed, Megara incorporated, while Corinthian influence and interest in the West were systematically undermined by a combination of direct military intervention and shrewd alliance formation that was destroying the nexus of the Corinthian Colonial Empire and Corinth's western trade dominance. Peloponnesus was destabilised for Sparta and Athenian ascendancy consolidated in the continent of Greece. All the main allies in the antiPersian coalition of three decades earlier were being neutralised one by one and step by step. The Athenian will-for-power swept away even occasional grave reversals of fortune like the Egyptian disaster: it simply called forth renewed and intensified determination. Athens was on the sure road to undisputed hegemony in the entire Greek world.

There occurred, in mid-fifth century, a fundamental change in the Athenian strategic doctrine. The Themistoclean policy was substituted by the Periclean one. Economic superiority was considered by itself a guarantee of eventual hegemony. Peace and secure sea-borne commerce were conceived as the necessary and sufficient conditions under which the economic might of the Athenian capitalism would automatically propel the state to the position of universal sway in the Greek world. Hegemony would thus be achieved without war. It was the pacifist, economic dream of the classical age, of the Periclean golden era.

Athens acted on it. A (possibly secret) compromise peace with Persia was concluded recognising in effect the Aegean as an Athenian sea, but also the Eastern Mediterranean as a Persian one. Pericles within a couple of years summoned also a Panhellenic Conference on a general peace, but Sparta, correctly estimating right from the beginning the weakness inherent in the new strategy, refused to attend, causing thereby the failure of the Athenian initiative. When successive and widespread commotions in various parts of the Athenian Naval Confederacy and related controlled space prepared the way by weakening Athens' rule, Sparta concluded with her the Thirty-Years Treaty, or rather Truce, which formally constituted the Greek world into a bipolar system with a continental (Sparta) and a maritime (Athens) super-power. Athens had (in order to win the sought after peace) to relinquish her influence in mainland Greece, while the western trade was also renounced in fact by her in favour of Corinth, the staunchly anti-Athenian commercial power with rival interests. The peace, far from providing the fertile ground for the growth into hegemony of Athens and into universal prevalence of the Athenian political and economic system, proved to be the seed of their destruction.

Athens indeed quickened her economic drive in the peace period. A contemporary decree enforced the use of Athenian coins, weights and measures throughout the Athenian Imperium. The Attic Maritime League was thus pushed into higher degrees of economic integration. On the other hand, an immense degree of economic activity was instigated in Athens (in part financed by appropriation of allied funds) accompanied by a populist policy of public subsidies within and an imperialist policy of clerouchies in foreign lands, the novel form of colonisation. The supply and circulation of Athenian currency at home and abroad sky-rocketed after the middle of the century, with no appreciable inflation, a solid testimony to heightened economic activity and an unprecedented rate of wealth-creation, as well as of clear Athenian economic dominance.

All in vain. The economic system, as well as its efficacity and successful operation, require in the last resort the anchorage of sheer power. The war was not avoided in the end. It erupted fifteen years before the lapse of the formal Peace. Despite colossal expenses (on which Pericles counted for the unwelcomeness and unacceptability of the war on the part of the economically weaker opponent and for his speedy submission once war erupted) the Spartan Alliance entered the War, and persisted in it through to a decisive outcome after almost three decades. The economic Hegemon, after all, lost the war. The Athenian power collapsed. The Athenian economy lay in ruins. That some Morgenthau plan of utter destruction was not applied to Athens after her crushing defeat had probably to do with Spartan calculations as to who would naturally benefit most in the vacuum created by such application. Athens was after all useful to Sparta if she was to be contained on a par with Corinth and Thebes, Sparta's major allies, and the powers that pressed for the thorough extinction of Athens. Anyway, the Periclean strategy failed miserably.

Athens' will-for-power slackened at the critical moment. To let yourself be driven into a position, where in order to secure by agreement less you need first to win by force more, is a fundamental strategic error in big power game. Accord must always reflect the obtaining state of affairs at the moment of its being struck. To be obliged to concentrate huge force in order to achieve a relatively minor object by the consent of an opponent, is ipso facto a defeat. Athens should not have accepted the recognition of her hegemony in the Aegean world (which she anyway possessed) on Persia's part as a result of both a resounding victorious war in the Eastern Mediterranean and the subsequent repudiation of claims in the broader area flowing from the fact of her victory. And she should not have accepted the acknowledgment of her Aegean hegemony on Sparta's part as a result of both first the de facto establishment of extensive bases of influence and control on the Greek continent and then her complete disavowal of any jurisdiction of her own in the mainland power-structure. Once in a rising course, any yielding or retreat is potentially disastrous. Even to settle then systematically for the status quo on a basis of equality is the beginning of the fall. An ascending dynamics can be sustained only by a continual raising of the stakes.

A historical precedent: Rome

Contrary to Athens, Rome never failed or wavered in her absolute bid for mastery, nor did she misconstrued the strategic clarity of a hegemonical drive. Her supreme principle of reaction was simple: at every challenge always raise proportionately the stakes till the adversary gives up or is destroyed. And similarly for action: always raise differentially the wager till noone can, or dares, follow up. The stakes were naturally fully backed by Roman power and determination.

During the most deadly threat to her very existence as a world-power towards the end of the third century B.C., Rome, when Hannibal was ante portas defeating Roman armies one after another and destabilising Italy, (thereby apparently succeeding in transforming the ongoing combat between Rome and Carthage for domination in Western Mediterranean into a critical Roman struggle for life), Rome not only kept vibrant the bid for Western mastery by fiercely contesting the crucial control of Iberian resources and strategic position, but compounded the situation with a bid for mastery in the Greek East as well. Upon the conclusion of a treaty between Carthage and the kingdom of Macedonia (which really consisted in little more in practical terms than an agreed division of spheres of influence in the event of a Carthaginian victory in the West), Rome declared preemptive war on Macedonia opening a new major theater of operations in Greece. She won in the end on both fronts.

With her final victory over Macedonia a little more than a quarter of a century later, - which was rendered conclusive by the application of a thorough plan of incapacitation on the defeated State (dismemberment and all) - Rome became the dominant center in the entire Mediterranean system of connected powers, establishing a global hegemony in the context, the first and sole case of universal dominance over the whole field of significantly interrelated states and regional spaces before the present American Imperium. Even so, and despite her inexorable fixation on power, she repeatedly faced challenges to her supremacy, involving the all-out duel fought on the very question of her hegemony with a marginal, third or fourth-rate state (the Pontic Kingdom), which succeeded in pooling and focusing all resentment against Roman dominion. The Mithridatean Wars constitute the loudest warning against any naive self-indulgence on the part of an ascendant, even a fully hegemonical, power. (The terrorist attacks of September 11^th, constitute a failed attempt at Mithridateisation of resistance to American hegemony. U.S.A. saw through to it).

American Imperium and Renovatio Mundi

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the World power-system became unipolar, with a signle power immensely superior to those next in line. Thus the first truly and absolutely global hegemony has been constituted in history.

The primary and fundamental strategic doctrine of unipolarity consists in the unswerving cultivation and maintainance on the part of the Hegemon of an overwhelming power superiority. No power, or realistically possible combination of powers, esp. no (constellation of) proximate second order powers, should be able to pose a serious threat to the Hegemon's position at the head of the universal order. Aggregate power has a number of aspects and calibrable parameters, military, economic, cultural, demographical. Yet the crucial factor in the hegemon's strength must always be in the last resort its capacity to coerce: hence military might should be the prime constituent of its vast power superiority.

The well-being of a unipolar system is founded on the well-being of the Hegemon: there obtains a perfect, ideal, objective congruence of vital interests between head and body.

The stability and security of a unipolar system depends ultimately on the decisive power preeminence of the Hegemon. The second order powers (sometimes misleadingly called “Great Powers” with anachronistic implications) should be kept constantly at bay. They ought never to be allowed to form fully effective combinations. In particular, the dynamics of geopolitical and geocultural spaces should be utilised to counterbalance effectively the weight and moment of such powers as formed the cardinal states of the preceding bipolar and multipolar systems, especially since such spaces had on the whole been consigned to unworthy insignificance within the old European order, in consequence had suffered under it, and therefore resent it. (For instance Islam and Asian Orient, in all their variety, have to be creatively pressed into discovering ways of positive contribution to the new World-order). The employment of the geodynamics of emerging or emergeable areas to neutralise and control the aspiring configurations of the formerly dominant powers which have now been relegated to second-order status, can proceed in a double, complementary way. First, by introducing into these potentially grave combinations corrective geopolitical and geocultural units with identities and interests of their own. Secondly, by promoting the formation and activation of such natural, strong poles of geopolitical integration along historical lines beyond the ambit and outside the prominent influence of any constellations of second-order powers. Thus e.g. the European Union should be forced to extend itself so as to cover the entire European continent, the whole geographical Europe (including specifically Turkey). While also (and before it) the Balkan-Asia Minor geopolitical complex should be conducted to its historic high unity of coordination to counterpoise both the (Franco) German European integration and the Russian consolidation, as well as to preempt against their potential partial reapproachment (prominent bipolarities in the European field now tending at opportune moments to become antihegemonic axes, unless vigorously counteracted).

In fact, as much as a multipolar system cuts necessarily across the natural geopolitical borders, so much unipolarity favours the cohesion of geopolitical integrals as functional parts of the global order. Globalization does not mean homogenization but coordination: it consists in the co-working of different identities as parts of a common system, like in the natural realm. The stronger the identity, the higher its specialised capability, the greater its usefulness in an optimal allocation of functions. Globalization results upon ensuring that all the players in the same complex game of human activity will play in the same terrain and according to the same formal rules, in a common general framework of action, which fundamentally should upheld the principle of natural adjustment in a system free from interference. And this engagement into the same game, by heightening the significance of differential contribution, enhances the role of well-defined identity. Not enervated, recalcitrant identities are needed for optimal globalization, but strong, cooperant and coordinated agents at the peak of their self-realization.

It is inferior, even downrightly inefficient, strategy to aim at globalization by direct interference into the content of the World-constituents with a view to an infusion of particular patterns and values of human behaviour. This is in fact to reverse the real causal sequence. A unified cultural (in the most general sense involving all parameters of human action) character emerges in history as the spontaneous outcome of an integration or (at the universal level) globalization secured by forcefully keeping together all parts of a system while allowing full play to their differing individualities, rather than by attempting to enforce upon them any desired codes directly and uniformly - a counterproductive procedure consuming unfruitfully stupendous amounts of energy on all sides. It was the Roman hegemony, exercised in full military might, which provided the fertile ground for such free movements and interactions among beliefs, ideas, values and practices that yielded the Greco-Roman cultural "common", the urge to the formation of a great monotheistic religious spirit and the final prevailing of Christianity. Thus Hegemony was naturally transmuted into a unified Empire. Athens, on the contrary, chose under Pericles the converse and counternatural approach: to effect the total integration of the Greek world under her leadership by the expected spread under conditions of peace of her cultural, economic and political character, eminence and success. It is as if the U.S. had aspired to win the Cold War without the Doctrine of Containment in all its implications regarding power-building and military engagement resolve. Athens indeed kept the tightest control on her Alliance, imposing her system and will with a heavy hand which involved frequent martial interventions. But it is incoherent to expect to win merely by the automatic working of your superior system on the opposing camp, when full exercise of power is needed to keep permanently together (without erosion in your authority) those who actually participate in, and actively benefit most from, that superiority. No wonder that the Periclean strategy led Athens to disaster.

The mission of U.S. is to rejuvenate a World long declining, rapidly becoming decrepit. The European order has collapsed amidst torrents of human pain and anguish; it lies prostate, all of it: the balance of power in artificial equilibrium, the spiritual edifice confused by modernism and destructured by post-modernism, the dirigist economic model of fundamentally unfair protectionism nominally in favour of the many less well-equipped, yet really working to the benefit of incapable and ineffective leading “élites”. Simultaneously, the previously marginalised parts of the World, geopolitical spaces with rich cultural, strategic and economic potential, are striving to rediscover and redefine their identities, and recapture their active spirit, in the face of the tremendous challenges that the American drive for optimal human realisation and maximal efficiency generates at a merciless pace.

The World at large is still suffocating under residual masses of deadening unnaturalness, the unwelcome heritage of the derelict old order, distributed indeed unequally upon the earth, yet making everywhere their obnoxious presence felt: Art and Philosophy that have lost their contact with solid reality (and with human nature preeminently); manipulative overregulation masquerading as social justice; benumbing protectionism which arbitrarily delimits the actions and achievements of the best performers without really improving the condition of the genuinely needy, but rather securitising the unfair privileges of the human drones; "élites" of nonexcellence exchanging their leading role for that of the social ballast (yet without the latter’s neutrality of direction), construing systematically the golden mean of acute resonance to the potent underlying factors in each case as a mean compromise between opposing claims, disguising impotence, inability and inefficiency so as to appear moral sensitivity.

The primal role of America is to free the World from such paralysing burden of artificiality - to liberate the natural man from the bondage of obstructing convention, from the enormous frictions of overregulationism, thereby unleasing vast human resources imprisoned in the obsolete structures of the past. To effect the longed for rejuvenatio mundi, she must become true liberatrix mundi.

To do her job and fulfil her mission, America must simply keep the entire World together: this is the second grand strategic doctrine of unipolarity. The World system becomes thus a global arena from which no player can withdraw into isolation or protection. Full exposure onto the universal scene compels by itself all actors into interplay. Such interaction is automatic, for it does not depend on the agent's volition: even if some state or group wants to stay aloof in the midst of the exhilarating process of restructuring the World-order, others will not let it alone. The situation has a progressive, contagious dynamism of its own. Interaction, further, implies intercommunion. By keeping the World-factors together, the U.S. can ensure without much ado (except for an occasional, wise push in the right direction at a critical juncture) gradually opening lines of communication for ideas, values, codes, experiences, goods in general (spiritual, capital or material) and services. A unipolar World is a system of no escape and of optimal self-realisation for its members. The intercommunion necessitated between the World-factors in such a formal environment engenders antagonism, as it relates to the appropriation of power and weight of influence. Competition freely indulged will result, after a number of adjustment-shocks, into an overall stable system of co-ordination, whose structure would generally correspond to the multiple relations of aggregate power among its members. The U.S. need, and must, not worry in principle about the emerging particular pattern of power distribution in each region, provided that it correlates positively to the global order. The regional power(s) most able and willing to organise their broader geopolitical space in consonance with the global unipolar field should be left, indeed encouraged, to do so, provided they do not overreach themselves by impinging seriously on the rights of other cooperative regional states, on such rights, however, as the power and resolution of these states actually confer and justify. A value right can only in the last analysis be a right to do what one is able to do by way of creative contribution within the natural order of things.

The U.S. should not in principle strike deals in regional contests, unless there is a question of interregional adjustment which the regional players are not entitled to address, or if the leading power in the conflict is suspected of incoordination to the global field. Barring such overriding considerations, it is best to allow the combating parts themselves to reach in one way or another an effective common understanding of their respective roles in the regional order based on their relative powers; it is reasonable in the interests of maximal efficacy and stabler security that the more potent player should possess proportionately larger scope of action. The U.S. must only make sure that the contestants do reach within a reasonable interval a complete agreement of creative coordination, and that such an agreement enhances the potential of the global unipolar system. Military engagements and controlled, limited wars are naturally not excluded from the internal processes of necessary regional harmonization, in the interest of solid security architectures, durable peace and optimal convergence.

It should in this connection be emphasized that no regional structure can be allowed to develop self-determinable capabilities beyond a certain limit (different for different areas and configurations), which is defined by the potential threat it may pose to the unipolar world-order, even if the structure in question is acting in tune with the global power-field. Regional coordination must on no conditions exceed a safe level of depth, except in circumstances of direct dependence on the focal center of the world-system. The degree of regional integration is a crucial parameter of global stability. Regionalism, pursued in itself (in deed or intention), is incompatible with globalization. At most, it can be fostered as a step towards globalization – an always inherently risky procedure, esp. if it involves second-order (“Great”) powers.

The U.S. must be prepared to act ruthlessly in applying the two strategic principles of unipolarity, and to act essentially of, and if need by on, her own. A unipolar global order requires systematic strategic unilateralism: the third strategic principle of unipolarity. For example, any idea that the World, after the end of bipolarity, may lapse back into a multipolar structure must be conclusively eradicated to the extent that not even saving appearances ought to be allowed to those that concoct it upon occasion. (This is the main reason why the U.S. should have struck militarily Iraq in the late circumstances without express U.N. authorization and against the strong resistance of some second order powers. An attack against Iraq, coupled with an enhancement of Turkey's role as a stabilising regional power and an enforced opening of Iran to a significant amelioration of U.S. - Iran relationships would have been the proper American response to the 1988 crisis as well as constitute the permanent principles of American engagement in the area. Such strategy, decisively implemented, could have also provided the impetus towards a natural solution of the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire, contrary to what the established clamour of opinion holds). Again, every regionally destabilising state should be brought into order at the earliest appropriate opportunity, preferably in the hands of the stabilizing regional power. By definition such power is stabilizing as it has the capability and the will to actively promote the integration of the regional geopolitical space in conformity with the global field. Whereas the state which de facto obstructs such local coordination, destabilizes the area for the U.S., especially if it is drawn into a circle of close combinations of second-order powers.

The three principles of absolute supremacy, globalization and unilateralism provide the necessary general framework for shaping specific effective American policies in the new world-order. Inscribed within the solid nexus of these main strategic principles of unipolarity, American foreign policy can satisfy both apparently contradictory trends in its formulation: a tendency to splendid isolationism on the one hand, and an impetus to lead the World ahead on the other. Both moments are valid: both are part and parcel of the same “manifest destiny”. By looking after her own greatness and by simply holding forcibly the World together in a strictly unipolar order, America thereby institutes (within a span of time dependent on the wisdom of her unconditional leadership) a universal co-ordinated system of intense competitiveness with an open web of communications and unfettered transfers material and immaterial, without having normally to meddle in the regional or local details of the global order. Antagonism and intercommunion will do the rest by themselves. As all the best arrangements, this takes care of itself once the focal point is secured. By doing her own, America will improve the World. Conversely, by not exercising to its full potential her single-superpower, hegemonic status, America restricts the freedom, competitiveness and, therefore, progress of the World far more than she promotes the same by multilateral, content-specific, cooperative, particular agreements.

In fact, adopting this strategic doctrine, the U.S. merely would apply to the conditions of unipolar globalization the perspicuous prescriptions embodied in the Theodore Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine: American intervention in other States grows into an open possibility, is indeed called for in flagrant cases, "if it became evident that their (the States') inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American (now the World) nations". Every entity has a right, of course, to its existence and to the fullest self-realisation that is capable of; thus "rights" involve beside contractual claims and the basic entitlements of justice, also the authority of interests, especially vital ones, as well as the natural prerogatives of power.

The significance of the global application of the Roosevelt Corollary lies particularly in the emphatic endorsement of a crucial inference from the two strategic principles of Unipolarity with far reaching implications. In any regional structure of the global order no interference must be allowed from foreign states other than the Hegemon, i.e. from powers lying outside the given regional geopolitical space. In other words, no power other than the Hegemon may extend its influence outside its own geopolitical space, unless by virtue of the Hegemon's specific understanding. Only the Hegemon has really global rights and interests. One and only one power, the pole of the World-order, has determinative global security, and other, interests. The rest possess regional (however extended) rights and vital interests alone; they can merely help in the Hegemon's pursuance of global rights and interests upon request. Thus France, Russia and China could only express their perception of their own interests in the Iraqi affair, but not co-determine the way to handle it. Similarly, Germany, Russia, Britain and France enjoy in reality very limited jurisdiction in the various forms of the former-Yugoslavia Question, because they do not belong to the Balkan-Asia Minor geopolitical space, a space with high historical integrative dynamics of its own. The significant involvement of the principal European Powers in the Eastern Question is an anachronism; the Diplomacy of the Contact Group reproduces the Great Power Conferences on the subject of the last, and the beginning of this, century, but in a completely altered power structure: the Balance of Power has been succeeded by Unipolarity. (No surprise therefore that that diplomacy failed in the end). The Hegemon must systematically curtail the influence of the second order powers of the new system (which were the dominant powers of the old bipolar and multipolar ones) beyond their circumscribed geopolitical space, substituting their previous global interplay by local, regional dynamics. Nothing should intervene between the Hegemon and the various geopolitical integrals. Serious great-power multilateralism is a fatal mistake in a unipolar World-order. Institutionalised multilateralism on the larger scale (of the sort of U.N., I.M.F. and the like) is, on the other hand, more of a sport in it, a sport that can occassionally create, however, serious impediments to the fullest development of the world’s potential for progress, primarily through tendencies to interventionist protection (in-built in such organizations) that normally sever the iron link between action and consequence (between ability and success, incapacity and failure), disrupt the healing, if painful, agency of natural adjustments corrective of faulty moves and supportive of skillful ones, and thus hinder the optimal allocation of existing assets for maximal efficiency in the global system.

Potential threat against hegemony pose not so much various rogue states (which can be managed relatively easily in a number of ways) but the second-order powers and their potent combinations. No such combination should develop into a single, unitary subject of historical action; even its partial and temporal convergencies must be counterbalanced by others in different associations. The U.S. must follow a strategy of multiple, though differentiated, containment fundamentally directed against Germany, France, Russia, Japan, China, Britain. In particular, America must enhance (not "rebalance") her sway in N.A.T.O. affirming absolute leadership conformably to the new unipolar World-order -- or, if not, put the organization into freeze or let it atrophy. This is the significant question to be asked, to which that of the Alliance's expansion is completely subordinate. It also follows, a fortiori, that the (in)famous European pillar of security must be kept strictly under American control, conveniently through NATO – and perhaps this may turn to be one of the foremost uses for the Alliance in the developing instability of the European architecture. Any realizable task force of the European Union in connection with that pillar should be, firstly, contained within narrow limits never extending to proper defence status (for instance being restricted on the whole to peace-keeping and humanitarian activities); and, secondly, it should be clearly dependent on (NATO and) the USA for planning, decision-making, command, control and all disposable, significant material means as well. The subordination must be in effect complete structurally and functionally, on both the planning and the operational level.

As to rogue states, they have to be calibrated on two measuring dimensions: the degree of threat to the Hegemon that they actually represent (in terms of capabilities and strategy on the one hand and of its connections with international terrorism on the other); and the degree of focality they provide for other powerws (esp. “great”, i.e. second-order, powers) to utilize in anti-unipolar strategies. When either or both these calibrations exceed acceptable limits, the rogue states have to be dealt decisively (militarily) by total elimination of the threat and focality that they represent. Such military action must be then undertaken (preferably unilaterally, with those willing and capable), whatever the consequences for the area structures may be: in fact, regional reorganization will in these cases constitute a welcome additional bonus; it can also be catalytic as to developments of more general significance, like e.g. empowerment of tendencies towards more freedom in the economic and political field.

Sustained growth in the American economy, and, consequently, continual progress in the World-economy, depends on the hegemonic position of the U.S.A. And so does intellectual evolution towards the formation of a new common “language” of understanding reality and man’s place in it. The integration of the global system proceeds simultaneously, although with phase-differentials, in all three main fields of human relationships, i.e. power structure, economy and culture, whose interdependence is, furthermore, unceasingly enhanced. The focal positioning of U.S. as the world-pivot in the present stage of history, is irreversible, so long as the country’s dynamism and resolve keep alive an ascending momentum in developments, and provided that the principle of natural equilibrium is unswervingly adhered to as the ultimate pragmatic criterion of freedom and correctness. Dynamic stability belongs to systems left to their natural state of unimpeded, competitive self-adaptation.

To preserve her hegemonic position and simultaneously to accomplish her mission in renovating the World, America has, at some pain, to disengage herself from the European connection. Not only the power-structure of the new order calls for it, but also the downfall of the European system in all its aspects, the underlying universal longing for freedom from artificiality and for natural creativity, the American experience of fresh start, the American awareness of the primacy of open systems with minimal regulation, itself controlled by in-built checks and balances, the American heritage of fair-play, equal chances, strict but light lawfulness, natural aristocracy and maximal achievement, the American cardinal values of excellence and success – all significant parameters of the era into which the world is embarking in this historic moment require a novel beginning for the coming age of renaissance. The Cold War West is an encumberment for the U.S. in unipolar globalization. America must above all quickly cease seeing herself as the leader of the past West instead of as the Hegemon of the future World. Destiny elevates her far above the dubious privileges of club-exclusiveness to the grandiose solitude of the universal ruler. In politics, economy, strategy, culture, for freedom and unimpeded activity with strong values and full knowledge, for human happiness, cultural transformation and spiritual renewal, the new West is needed, west of the West, so very west that it is also the eastern horizon of the World. America must become the land of the Rising and Setting Sun. The World will accept and follow the clear leadership of America, while it demurs and rejects the confused precedence of the traditional "West".

The U.S. must articulate in full regional detail a Themistoclean Strategy of pure, uncompromising, robust hegemony. This is to her own vital interest - and to the World's own. Once in her present position, America cannot back down or even keep level without encountering sure catastrophe. What is at stake is not whether she will maintain hegemony or not, but whether she will unswervingly uphold her hegemony transforming thereby the World into a new historical phase or face utter ruin submerging simultaneously all humanity into an unspeakable ocean of misery.

The World holds its breath as America ponders and hesitates, torn between the Themistoclean and the Periclean options.

It seems that upon entering the new millennium, U.S.A. made her decision – to the relief of thinking humanity. Would that she only persevere in her resolve.

Postscript 1: Criticism and reply

I: Criticism

America has a preponderance of power, not hegemony in the post-Cold War world. More important, it lacks utterly an imperial appetite for the sort of mission you propose, and the nature of American democracy is such that it can never build one. Nor is it clear to us that the world as a whole really needs an empire to save it from itself. Granted, I might feel otherwise if I lived where you live and saw what you see.

II: Reply

I take, naturally, issue with your (succinct) explanations. Sacred lust of power, if commensurate to the realities and merits of the case, helps the historical movement (by providing a welcome differential increment to its dynamics) at the right point of the curve: it also can shorten a long hour of unavoidable pain and agony (for both the Leader and the World) in travail at the birth of a new era. The world now senses the change of epochs and needs to be propelled from its decrepit past to the future in the making: it is ripe for a hegemony, which it will accept with relief the more unequivocally this is exercised. America is ideally suited, for a multitude of converging reasons, to perform the Herculean task. In particular, (not to mention the revealing Athenian example) the mixed constitution of her Founding Fathers answers pretty closely mutatis mutandis to what for Polybius was the primary single cause of Roman Imperium: Rome’s constitutional structure. (A Constitution that involved, nonetheless, seemingly inborn paralyzing factors, notably the Tribuneship). The Senate’s role will most likely be crucial in such a development. American Universal Hegemony – a reality since her decisive victory in the Cold War – can only lapse through American desertion. What I also proposed in my compact piece was to show the compatibility of the American spirit of aloof self-sufficiency with her “manifest destiny”, as I view it. The proposition was explicitly addressing, without misplaced imposition, the American National Interest, even though urged, admittedly, as well on behalf of the world, and specifically of the region in which I live. Interests and destinies have a way of superseding wishes and preferences. If I am reading the message of time right, the real question may be how soon and well America adapt to her historic mission.

Fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt.

After all, our presently alternative visions can merely resolve at bottom into a question of pace: America may in fact be moving along the path ordained, at her own unobjectionable discretion. Exceptional care should, admittedly, be exercised, as in all mighty questions of right timing. But there is always a “not any more” by the side of every “not yet”.

Postscript 2: The War on Terrorism

The article was written before the events of September 11^th, 2001. But it is about terrorism, too, and about the war on terrorism. Because the really dangerous terrorism for USA and the world-system is the anti-American terrorism. And this feeds ultimately on the grand strategy employed by many establishments (esp. after 1990) to cope with American hegemony.

This strategy involves the following steps: (1) The establishment endeavours to implicate U.S. in a common front: hence multilateralism. (2) Thus its historic failure can be turned against America as well. (3) The establishment transforms popular discontent at its failure to Antiamericanism by shifting responsibility from itself to the Hegemon. (4) The establishment is double-faced: to the U.S. it argues that it can contain antiamericanism, and pursue creative policies in a number of important issues, while to its public it suggests that it unfortunately cannot but yield to the dictates of the only Super-Power.

The most serious threat to the new world-order is posed by essential multilateralism. It corrodes American power, which can only be maintained historically at the level of preeminence now consolidated by strict adherence to the principle of exceptionalism. Besides America has no reason in favour of, and every interest against, underwriting the sins of failed establishments (esp. those of the former Great Powers). Political and economic disturbances that would occur on various spots as a result of American unilateralism, are, firstly, welcome corrections (“creative destructions”) that restore the health of the system, and, secondly, can be easily contained by selective withdrawal of support from ailing establishments which will not and cannot deliver to the new order. Furthermore, the world at large (the international community at society’s level) may accept and justify measures from a liberating Hegemon which will simply not put up with if these are perceived to stem from flawed Great Power balances and policies, from unstable combinations of former or would-be Great Powers, or from the “West”.

America must in general act so that the freedom of natural movement of the human system increases. She must liberate from bonds and impediments. And to do this convincingly, she must do it unilaterally.

The single focus of a power-field has the same basic interests with those of the system as a whole (and conversely), not with those of its second-order centers. Such centers, i.e. failed former Great Powers, aspiring new ones and failed or uncooperative establishments, must be short-circuited in the vital lines of communication and action that interconnect the focal pole and the members of a unipolar system.

The American War on Terrorism cannot be won multilaterally. For it is at bottom about American Hegemony.

It is, of course, to the point to insist on the Alliance of those willing and capable, under American leadership. But it must be crystalline clear the essential difference between the principle of such Alliance and that of multilateralism.