An Arab Spring, a Western Fall

The former vocation of what Rudyard Kipling called “The White Man’s Burden” — the idea behind the West’s search for global hegemony since the times of colonial expansion in the 19th Century (including the current pathetic and unfinished intervention in Libya) — is probably in a state of shock right now. Politically and economically exhausted, and attentive to voters calling for a shift in priorities toward more pressing concerns, Europe and the United States are no longer capable of imposing their values and interests through costly military interventions in foreign territories.

The U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, alluded to this notion when he recently chastised the European members of NATO for their tepid response to the treaty’s missions and their military shortcomings. Gates warned that if Europe’s attitude toward NATO did not change, the alliance would dissolve until it risked becoming a “collective military irrelevance.”

Europe’s refusal to participate in the military operations should not be viewed as a revelation. The Old World has followed a “post-historic” discourse since World War II that rejects the use of force as a way to resolve conflicts, let alone bring forth a change of regime. And now it is involved in the fateful struggle to ensure the existence and viability of the European Union. Consequently, Europe is falling back on a narrower regional perspective, assuming that the United States will bear the burden of the world’s more pressing problems.

But the United States is reconsidering its priorities. These are difficult economic times for the United States, mostly due to an aggressive imperial expansion that is funded by Chinese credit. Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States, has recently pointed out that the country’s colossal fiscal deficits are the biggest threat to national security.

In fact, at a time of such painful budget cuts, the United States should not be expected to maintain its current level of global military engagement. Nevertheless, the fiscal crisis is not the entire story. The extreme lessons learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will shape the future debate on the United States’ international role in the future of the 21st Century. In a speech held in February in front of cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Gates said, “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.”

Gates’ recent comments are by no means the comments of an isolationist in an interventionist country. He has expressed a widely perceived imperative for a strategic reassessment. Therefore, the message that the United States wishes to convey today is not a message of non-interventionism, but a strategy of restraint, showing that American power has its limits and that it intends to minimalize the risk of involving itself in foreign conflicts. As Gates said in his speech at West Point, the American military should also not be “a Victorian nation-building constabulary – designed to chase guerrillas, build schools, or sip tea.”

The bad news is that Europe’s weakness and the United States’ fatigue can also indicate the limits of noble ideas, such as the obligation to interfere in order to protect populations undergoing brutal treatment at the hands of their own government. The United States’ refusal to involve itself further in the quagmire that is Libya, or to intervene at all in Syria and prevent the slaughter of Syrians by the country’s military, today seem to be a sad guide — and a quite accurate one — to what will happen in the future.