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An affair with Pax Americana|Kelvin Wong

蘋果日報 2021/03/06 09:22


Progressives in the West have had an ambivalent relationship with American dominance on the world stage. From Vietnam to the Middle East, the take has been that post-war American diplomacy is the leading contributor to the continuation, if not aggravation, of miseries and injustices suffered by innocent people across the world, with foreign aids seen at best as misplaced generosity of the ‘white savior’ but more often a disingenuous gesture which ultimately serves selfish political goals.
An open immigration policy has therefore become the lowest common denominator for a progressive electorate in search of compensatory justice. From the Mediterranean crisis to the Mexican border wall the same hymn sheet was sung – rather than simply to offer a safe haven for those who are displaced by wars and conflicts, a new argument has arisen which justifies unauthorized border crossings as a means to rectify international inequality conveniently explained by colonial conquests and slavery in history – and any attempt to discourage migrants from embarking on a journey to their ‘promised land’ swiftly condemned. Any version of counter argument, most of which focused on a lack of sufficient socio-economic infrastructure to cater for significant migrant populations and issues of cultural integration, are dismissed as the pretext for a xenophobic agenda. The progressives find consolation in an open-door policy to atone for crimes committed by the US government and their allies abroad.
Donald Trump and his diplomatic mantra – America First – has reinvigorated the debate on American foreign policy. By scaling down its presence in arenas where the United States have historically played a significant part and acting without consensus from traditional allies such as Canada and the EU, the Trump administration created an impression of an isolationist America – despite the reality being more akin to realignment than withdrawal – that brought discomfort to the centre-right, which, as the sponsor of the neoliberal philosophy, have dominated politics in the West for over three decades, with the majority likely to have subscribed to a view proposed in the 1990s by the scholar Francis Fukuyama, that humanity has reached the end of history and liberal democracy will prevail in the form of Pax Americana. Regardless of the truism of the proposition, its popularity is easily explained by the demography of its supporters, as many witnessed the dissolution of the Soviet Union in their early adult years. Millennials and Zoomers, though less likely to find themselves trapped in such historical determinism, inevitably have their world view shaped by the neoliberal political order, which are twofold, mistrust of the way the economy is run on one hand, and optimism in liberal society free from existential concerns on the other. While the former gave rise to calls for redistributive justice, the latter provided the condition for a shift in the orientation of social attitudes, from preservation of self (or in-group) interest to more altruistic causes, of which a concern for the disadvantaged – migrants and refugees included – is an example. However, such altruism born out of a confidence in the condition of the self, rather than a preparedness to countenance difference, if anything, has over the years been proved to resemble a conviction of the privileged position of their assumed cultural position, that their values were ‘universal’ and espoused irrespective of lived context, from sexuality to gender, from ethics to religion.
The unintended consequence is that there exists between the neoliberal establishment and young progressives a symbiotic relationship which, until the Trump presidency, had largely been overlooked, in that a paradigm shift in diplomacy from the pursuit of the ideal state of Pax Americana to America First, which is better understood as an acknowledgement of the end of American supremacy than a facile expression of hubris, would negate the moral duties the United States are summoned to shoulder. To the neoliberals, Pax Americana implies an international order of which their interests and values are central to its design, backed by an unrivalled military presence in the world. To the progressives, while Pax Americana is complicit in the creation and continued existence of an oppressed population, it also creates the necessary condition their linear view of progress and confirms their idea the universality of social conditions. Unless and until replaced by a political project of a similar scale – one sees the potential in the EU – the infrastructure built to maintain Pax Americana remains indispensable in the crusade of internationalism. From a European point of view, Pax Americana not only ensured peace on the continent unseen in recent history, but also guaranteed continuation of their role as the joint arbiter of the post-war international order. It was therefore no surprise that Donald Trump’s threat of withdrawing support were met with vehement opposition.
America First, which signalled a wish to reorient from a model of global governance to a localized approach guided by the geopolitical interests of the US, were often read as political expediency by offering a regressive alternative to globalization. Such analysis however overlooked that America First, contrary to what its name suggested, was also an acknowledgement of the American supremacy, for the very condition which enabled the pursuit of Pax Americana no longer exists. The existing model, built primarily on inter-governmental cooperation between nation states founded on the principles of liberal democracy, is challenged on one hand by non-governmental players wielding global influence including multinational corporations, tech giants and terrorist organizations, and on the other the rise of alternative, if not also antithetical, models of governance which, unlike the Cold War era where the spread of ideologies could be contained by physical warfare, have found their ways to infiltrate the fabrics of Western society, which is the buttress of Pax Americana. As some British politicians have commented, sanctions on China’s human right violations are heavily lobbied against by the business community in a way never seen when the same was done to the Soviet Union decades ago.
It is no question that Donald Trump has his own limitations as a president. His downfall signifies a return to ‘normal’, or at least expresses a wish, as deliberated above, to return to the good old days of Pax Americana, as Joe Biden claimed that the US is back as a leader of the free world, an out-of-date descriptor which, unsurprisingly, finds currency as he came into power.
In the final debate preceding the presidential election in 2020, Biden claimed that he wished to make China ‘play by the international rules’, when it is apparent that admission of the authoritarian regime into the international economic and political system, instead of bringing it into the orbit of Pax Americana, has given rise to a robust alternative system with a gravitational field so powerful as to steer her allies away:
“A situation to join all together against China, this is a scenario of the highest possible conflictuality. This one, for me, is counterproductive,” as Emmanuel Macron has been reported saying recently.
There is little else than to pray, ‘in Pax Americana we trust.’
(Kelvin Wong is a linguist currently based in the UK with interests in politics and current affairs.)
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