Authors: Kim Ghattas
He went through the list. More desperate efforts to get peace talks going in the Middle
East had resulted in nothing, despite high-profile summitry at the White House and
in the region over the summer. The Israelis were being a pain, demanding rewards for
doing what they were meant to do anyway, and mostly, the official complained, the
Israelis didn’t care that their obstructionism was further eroding America’s credibility
in the Arab world. The Palestinians refused to yield to any pressure or make any gesture
whatsoever. They were stuck in their own version of a Greek tragedy. Afghanistan’s
president Hamid Karzai was being his unreliable, moody self. The Pakistanis were as
impossible as always, gobbling up American money but dragging their feet on anything
that could be helpful to the United States. And Iran? Let’s not even go there. Nothing
was going America’s way. It felt as though everybody was testing the limits of American
power, pushing Washington around to see how much ground they could gain themselves.
“Success begets success,” the official went on, obviously implying that the opposite
was true as well. If a sense of failure settled in, things could unravel, and America’s
prestige would be eroded even further, its power reduced even more. The foundations
that the Obama administration had been carefully laying for two years to position
America for the twenty-first century were still extraordinarily fragile. Nothing had
really taken root yet, except in Asia. But even that progress could be jeopardized
if the trajectory took a downward turn.
I went home feeling deeply unsettled. Gum and rubber bands? I was stunned by the candor.
I knew America couldn’t get things done just by pushing a button. I’d heard Hillary
say there was no magic wand, and for two years I had watched American officials do
the heavy lifting required to get anything done around the world. But this was too
vulnerable, too raw. Was this what decline looked like? I thought back to those days
in Beirut, when America had taken a beating. The headlines had been all about decline
then too. Were we wrong then but right now? Were things really worse? It was one thing
to believe that mighty America was wilting because you were looking at the ruins of
its embassy in Beirut and you believed history started and ended in your country.
It was quite another to be sitting in Washington with American officials who had all
the pieces of the puzzle in their hands but felt they were losing control.
I read former secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s memoir and found she had shown
some of the same despair when writing about 1998. “It seemed that wherever I looked,
I saw either gridlock or peril. For all the power of the United States, we were not
able to dictate events. The North Koreans, Serbs, Israelis and Palestinians, Indians
and Pakistanis, Iraqis, Russians, African leaders, even our allies seemed indifferent
or hostile to our requests. My personal confidence level was down.” I was surprised.
The Clinton presidency was thought of nostalgically by some as the heyday of American
hegemony and unchallenged power in a unipolar world in the years after the Soviet
Union collapsed.
I dug further. In early 1975, American diplomacy, with Henry Kissinger at the helm,
seemed to lie in tatters around the world as well, especially in Asia: the Vietnam
War had been a disaster; the Khmer Rouge was about to take over Cambodia; a key ally
of the United States, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, had been assassinated by a member
of his own family; and the Israelis were making Washington’s life so difficult in
the aftermath of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War that President Nixon was ready
to go toe-to-toe with Israel no matter what the domestic political consequences.
29
During the war, the “oil-for-arms” agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, which
had started back in 1945 with Truman, had broken down for the first (and so far last)
time. Saudi Arabia and other Arab oil producing countries had decided to use oil as
a weapon to punish the United States for its military support for Israel. They imposed
an oil embargo, which caused oil prices to quadruple and provoked lines at gas stations
in the United States.
All the way back in 1950, there had been dire warnings, including a key National Security
Council document about America not having the military or financial means to meet
all its global strategic commitments, and fears there could be a serious relative
decline of America and the free world in the face of a rising Soviet Union. Chairman
Mao was convinced that the United States was in decline, that it could not take on
any more commitments around the world and would be incapable of maintaining its hegemony
in its part of the world.
30
This all sounded rather familiar.
The talk of decline seemed cyclical; feelings of confidence ebbed and flowed. It was
not a clear curve going up or down. But there were some inevitable facts showing that
America was no longer the giant it had been, especially economically. America’s share
of the world’s GDP was 50 percent after World War II; it had fallen to 25 percent
in the 1970s as Europe rebuilt itself, and has lingered there ever since. The rise
of other economic powers was often a benefit to America itself. They traded with the
United States, and American companies found new markets. But there was no doubt that
as other countries prospered and lifted their populations out of poverty or found
political stability, they started vying for a bigger share of the pie.
If America had less and less of a say in the world, where did that leave me? Would
I be better off if America was less powerful? Would Lebanon? The Middle East? Pakistan?
Like so many around the world, growing up in Lebanon I had often thought America should
mind its own business, go home, and leave us to sort out our own affairs. But I had
never seriously thought about what or who would replace America as a superpower. I’m
not sure anyone who ranted against America around me had gone to the end of that thought
process. And Americans who wanted their government to retreat from the world didn’t
seem to have fully thought through the consequences on their daily life. What would
happen if China monopolized shipping lanes in the South China Sea unchallenged and
the price of rice or iPads shot up? Or if Turkey and Brazil enabled Iran’s nuclear
ambitions and Tehran developed an atomic bomb, using its newfound power to further
assert its control over Lebanon? In part it was perhaps because American power seemed
to be a given and no one could actually imagine a world without it or picture the
far-reaching consequences on the world system if America suddenly “went home.”
And yet the United States hadn’t been a superpower long enough to have perfected the
art of governing the world. On a historical scale, six decades were nothing. America
was still maturing and finding its footing, but was American power benign or nefarious?
America’s faults were many: from fomenting coups in Latin America to backing dictators
in the Arab world. So why did so many countries and people appeal for American help?
I had come to appreciate many of the officials I dealt with on a daily basis. There
was something rather earnest about American diplomats. But did their actions amount
to making America a force for good around the world? Surely, their primary concern
was protecting their country’s national interests. Were national interests and moral
choices mutually exclusive?
Life in the United States was free of the kind of fear I had experienced in Lebanon—fear
that was a staple in so many countries. Rule of law prevailed here. There were no
thugs grabbing you out of your house in the dead of night, no extrajudicial killings,
no gangs chopping off people’s heads or militants setting off bombs in markets. I
felt safe. But if you lived on the receiving end of American foreign policy, as I
had in Lebanon, it could be painful. Was it worse to suffer at the hands of your own
government or as a consequence of American actions? Was an Iranian tortured in Tehran’s
notorious Evin prison worse or better off than an inmate in Guantánamo Bay detained
for years with no trial? Was it worse to live under Syrian occupation in Lebanon or
to live in fear of night raids by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan? Was it worse to be
humiliated in Abu Ghraib prison at the hands of American soldiers or tortured in an
Uzbek or Chinese prison?
The thoughts racing through my mind were constantly pushing me into a reductive discussion
about the essence of American power, about values that were hard to define, but I
knew the world was not good or evil, black or white; it was shades of gray. There
was no simple answer, but the difference seemed to be recourse to the law. I was astounded
by the fervor with which American officers were serving as lawyers for defendants
on trial in Gitmo. When I asked Lieutenant Brian Mizer how he could be defending a
man who was accused of having aided Osama bin Laden, America’s enemy number one, he
told me everybody deserved a fair trial. In theory, yes, except that in Lebanon, for
example, few if any would dare defend someone accused of aiding Israel, officially
Lebanon’s enemy. Both defendant and lawyer could be accused of treason. In countries
like Syria, China, or Russia, the law meant nothing if you were poor or had no connections
to the powerful. Laws didn’t protect you against the whims of your own government,
and the feeling of utter powerlessness this could engender was mind-numbing. I thought
of Brazil’s refusal to condemn the stoning of women in Iran, China’s crushing of dissent,
Russia’s hunting down of journalists. Would they help save a dissident from brutal
repression in another country? Perhaps world governing wasn’t anyone’s responsibility,
not America’s either, but I still wondered about a globe where present-day China called
all the shots.
Perhaps a real multipolar world was better, with power distributed more evenly among
the different players around the world. Checks and balances were a healthy way to
make sure might was not concentrated in the hands of one. In 1998, when U.S. dominance
was unchallenged, France’s foreign minister had compared America to a steamroller,
calling it a hyperpower. The hubris had led to the excesses of the Bush administration.
The war in Iraq had been the exception to the rule of American reluctance to intervene
abroad, and the United States had enthusiastically plunged headfirst into a war of
choice. But the end of empires and eras usually involves an outbreak of violence as
the balance of power shifts, and someone inevitably tries to take the upper hand.
For now, and probably for decades to come, no single country would have more power
than America. So the competition for world leadership wasn’t between America and China,
or America and the BRICs. It was America or no one. New rising powers pushing against
American influence, asserting themselves on the world stage, were also pushing against
each other. They may have resented America, but they disliked each other even more.
So unless America maintained the edge, a multipolar world sounded like a recipe for
global gridlock.
Suddenly, the idea of American decline seemed utterly unappealing to me. But it seemed
to be under way already or, at least, everyone was saying it was inevitable.
And just when things couldn’t get worse, a virtual hurricane engulfed the Building
and blew its classified documents to the four corners of the world.
* * *
In the summer of 2010, an organization called WikiLeaks had started to release videos
and cables from the Pentagon about Iraq and Afghanistan that showed the war effort
in its raw, unvarnished form. The logs revealed the extent of the failures in Afghanistan
and a higher number of civilian casualties than had been officially disclosed. The
group wanted to shine a light on the dark workings of governments and warned that
the information they were revealing was cause for war crimes prosecution. In the end,
there wasn’t much in the cables that hadn’t already been in the public reel, but it
was now all in one location, conveniently accessible on the WikiLeaks website. WikiLeaks
promised that the State Department was the next target. The rumblings started in late
October: the group had gotten hold of 250,000 diplomatic cables.
* * *
Bradley Manning, the young army private in Iraq suspected of having been the source
of the leak, had been arrested in the spring. Officials at the State Department were
furious that their confidential cables had been disclosed, especially by someone who
had no business reading them. The United States had tried to encourage more openness
within the government after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Lack of communication
between different agencies was one of the reasons why no one had been able to connect
the different warning signs. A new system called SIPRNet meant that State Department
and Pentagon officials could read some of their respective classified correspondence.
The cables were missives written by American diplomats posted around the world and
sent back to the Building. They contained accounts of their conversations with local
officials or dissidents and analysis of the political situation in a country or the
stability of a regime. The content helped provide other officials involved in foreign
policy decision making with a more nuanced perspective about various issues. But Foreign
Service officers wondered why a lowly soldier in Iraq should be given access to accounts
of the conversation between General David Petraeus and Yemen’s president in Sana’a,
or cables from the American embassy in London giving Hillary a background briefing
about British politics before her visit?
In the Building, no one knew exactly which cables had been leaked. Moods swung wildly
from dismay to disbelief—surely it couldn’t be that bad. The CIA had set up an investigation
into the leak called “Wikileaks Task Force” and its unfortunate acronym—WTF—aptly
summarized how people felt. Top officials like Jeff and Kurt worked with their sections
and with American embassies in their region to identify which cables might become
public and what damage their content might cause, not only to America’s relationships
with other countries but also to the secretary herself. As the days went on, the magnitude
of the problem became clear. This was going to be a long-term crisis, and it wasn’t
something that ambassadors or assistant secretaries of state could fix alone. The
top tier of the Obama administration would have to help with the damage control. Ambassadors
in capitals around the world called foreign ministers to warn them of the crisis that
was about to unfold.