蓝月亮洗衣液杀菌:US loses its appetite for job as the world's policeman?

来源：百度文库 编辑：九乡新闻网 时间：2024/04/30 02:06:52

US loses its appetite for job as the world's policeman?

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2011-3-7 08:55




As Washington and its allies began quietly talking about a forceful response to the Libyan crisis last Friday, the US defence secretary mounted the podium at the US Military Academy in West Point, New York, to make a surprising declaration.


Robert Gates said that any future defence secretary who advised the president to send a big US land army to Asia, the Middle East or Africa “?‘should have his head examined’, as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”


It was a remarkable statement from one of the country’s most experienced national security bureaucrats, and someone who has overseen a surge in troop deployments to Iraq and, more recently, to Afghanistan.


These few lines – in a considered speech to cadets at the academy on how the US army should train modern-day officers – garnered few headlines, falling as they did late in the weekly news cycle.


But in combination with the strangely sober debate in Washington over how the US should respond to the epochal changes in the Middle East, it crystallised the arrival of a new era in US foreign policy.


Political debate in Washington these days is propelled by an incendiary combination of deep partisanship and the jet fuel of 24-hour cable news. But such rancour has largely been absent from discussion about President Barack Obama’s response to the unfolding drama in the Arab world.


The administration has struggled at times to keep up with the dizzying pace of events across Middle Eastern countries, and some critics say the White House did not emphatically back pro-democracy protesters early enough.


Senators such as John McCain have urged a more aggressive military posture with Libya to prise Muammer Gaddafi from power. The neo-cons, who combined democratic idealism with brute military force with devastating political effect in the wake of 9/11, have also resurfaced, but only mildly and at the margins of the debate.


The Republicans once owned the national security issue in Washington. But in the current environment, few are willing to second-guess Mr Obama’s handling of the crisis. Most debate recognises that the administration is largely a bit player on the Arab street, and that it is no easy job in any case to square traditional foreign policy interests with democracy promotion.


The reticence to politicise the crisis has deeper roots than merely concern about being caught backing the wrong side in distant civil conflicts.


The US is a different country today after 10 years of war, struggling with record deficits and suffering from “intervention fatigue”, in the words of Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank.


In such a context, Mr Gates’s statement about the madness of dispatching US ground troops overseas simply seems like common sense. “It is a very rare admission of something that is all too true but very rarely articulated by someone of that stature,” said Aaron David Miller, a former state department official.


Mr Gates was quick to dampen down what he called “loose talk” about the west enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya. Such a policy, he reminded Congress in testimony on Wednesday, would start with an attack on Libya’s air defences.
The drift from robust interventionism towards relative isolationism has homegrown roots as well. The Republicans’ political focus is squarely on the budget deficit and making sure that any fallout from the tough economy is hung on Mr Obama.


For Republicans, the protests over benefit cuts in Madison, Wisconsin, are more important than the rebels in Benghazi, Libya. While the Middle East protests may have gripped public attention in the US, Mr Haass says “they have not really galvanised public opinion”.


Following Mr Gates’s West Point speech, both he and his spokesman have been quick to clarify that the defence secretary’s real intent was to force the army to focus on how to fight new kinds of wars.


Whatever message he wanted to send, Mr Gates probably knows better than anyone that the US is not just less able to be the world’s policeman. The country and its people have, for the moment, lost all appetite for the job as well. (FT)

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