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| Of neoconservatives and neoliberals: U.S. foreign policy in post-Bush America |
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 Posted by: Alecks P. Pabico on the PCIJ website | July 6, 2008 at 11:21 aTHAT the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush is finally coming to an end may be comforting a thought to many in light of elections in the United States to choose a new president this coming November. But the choices of American voters, having since been narrowed down to John McCain, the Republican Party nominee, and Barack Obama, the Democratic Party nominee, are hardly offering the rest of the world much hope in terms of any fundamental change in U.S. foreign policy. Visiting academic Dr. Jim Glassman makes such an assessment in a series of lectures last week before political science students at the University of the Philippines and civil-society groups at the Focus for the Global South office. Even Obama's campaign promise of a "Change You Can Believe In" does not evoke much optimism in the associate professor of geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. But Glassman, a leading analyst on U.S. security and foreign policy in East and Southeast Asia, says he sees no basis at all for either candidate, much more Obama, even if he were portraying himself as a radical wanting to change things, to come to power and begin effecting real changes. Listen to Dr. Glassman's talk: Part 1 Length: 00:23:17 Language: English File size: 21.3 MB Part 2 Length: 00:20:13 Language: English File size: 18.5 MB As he points out, Obama has already indicated in recent weeks that he is going to stay on a "very conservative course," citing the views recently enunciated by Richard Danzig, the former navy secretary under the Clinton administration who is among Obama's senior advisers on national security issues. Danzig had declared that there is little chance that a Democratic administration will cut the budget of the Pentagon and that it is unlikely to spend less on the military in the near term, indicating much the same Bush II administration policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, Obama's foreign policy group consists of the same Clinton people like Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher, both former secretaries of state, whom University of San Francisco professor Stephen Zunes described as "backers of failed foreign policies based upon contempt for international legal norms and military solutions to complex political problems." Moreover, Glassman thinks Obama's intention to be a candidate for serious change is impaired by the big financial capitalists supporting his candidacy, among them George Soros and William Buffett, the world's richest man. Glassman is, after all, reminded by investments firm Goldman-Sachs, Bill Clinton's biggest campaign contributor, which got repaid by way of an appointment of its former managing director, Robert Rubin, as secretary of the U.S. Treasury. Two polar blocs "Heads of state cannot just jump outside the bounds of this whole structured system," says Glassman, referring to the configuration of power between two competing political-economic blocs that have alternately held the reins of government in the U.S. and, by unwritten decree, the world. Divided along neoliberal and neoconservative lines, the two political blocs represent distinct, competitive interests but which are symbiotically linked to each other by one ultimate agenda: preserving American hegemony. Glassman describes the two U.S. capitalist class fractions as follows: Neoliberals represent the interests of highly internationalized and relatively cosmopolitan capitalist elites centered in high-tech, capital-intensive industries (i.e., financing firms and transnational corporations). They are driven by a pro-corporate globalization agenda and have a strong constituency in the Democratic Party. Neoconservatives, on the other hand, are represented by military capitalists, statist industrialists, and those with interests in highly domestic, low-tech, labor-intensive industries. Their favored form of U.S. imperialism relies on the state repressive apparatus (i.e, military force) to enforce the property rights of the military-industrial elites. Much of the Bush II administration's persona derives from the dominance of neoconservative ideology associated with a small group of policy intellectuals that included Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, erstwhile members of the Democratic Party who switched allegiance to the Republican Party at the time of the Cold War. The migration brought with it a strong right-wing Zionist orientation previously unheard of in the Republican Party. Historically, unconditional support for Israel had come from the ranks of Democrats. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, saw its institutional alliance with organized labor impaired by the breaking of the labor accord forged in the 1930s during the era of the New Deal under Franklin D. Roosevelt. The restructuring of the U.S. economy in the late 1960s led to the process of corporate downsizing that weakened labor organizations. Glassman says that by shedding its commitments to organized labor in favor of TNCs, the Democratic Party had started veering to the right. Strong continuities Despite such stark transformations, Glassman notes the very strong continuities between today's political blocs and those that were formed in the 1930s and which endured during the Cold War era. The reconfiguration of the two major parties in the U.S. in the context of the Great Depression revolved around two overlapping but fairly distinctive political-economic blocs that historical political economists at the time referred to as "liberal internationalists" and "conservative nationalists." See also Glasssman's paper: "The new imperialism? On continuity and change in U.S. foreign policy" "You can reproduce the list of characteristics (of the two blocs) today with very little, if any, alteration. It would be a very good description of the blocs that are still reigning in the U.S. system — what you now call neoliberal and neoconservative," he says. In providing a paradigm that he says is "foundational to understanding not only U.S. foreign policy but also its domestic politics," Glassman derives from the works of political scientist Thomas Ferguson and historian Bruce Cumings. >From his analysis of the political party realignment, Ferguson identified the political blocs — liberal internationalists and conservative nationalists — and their core constituencies that came to power in the 1930s. Cumings, for his part, observed how liberal internationalists, practically today's neoliberals, and conservative nationalists, the equivalent of today's neoconservatives, were distinguished by their foreign-policy approaches during the Cold War. The latter took to the "rollback" policy of direct military challenge to the Soviet Union; the former to "internationalism," or the indirect undermining of Soviet power through capitalist expansion. The third policy option of "containment" presented a compromise position in the tug-of-war between groups advocating for the two polar positions. As outlined by Cumings, the internationalism and rollback policies, says Glassman, were characterized by the following elements:
In the post-Cold War era, neoliberals and neoconservatives have continued their antagonistic jockeying for power, with the neoconservative bloc clearly gaining the upperhand under the Bush II administration. That is not to say though that neoliberalism has not been ascendant. Glassman points to transnational statist institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), which has been able to undercut national state regulatory functions as a way of regulating the global economy. |
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