Tarik Cyril Amar
is a historian and expert on international politics. He has a BA in
Modern History from Oxford University, an MSc in International History
from the LSE, and a PhD in History from Princeton University. He has
held scholarships at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Harvard
Ukrainian Research Institute and directed the Center for Urban History
in Lviv, Ukraine. Originally from Germany, he has lived in the UK,
Ukraine, Poland, the USA, and Turkey.
His book 'The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists'
was published by Cornell University Press in 2015. A study of the
political and cultural history of Cold War television spy stories is
about to appear, and he is currently working on a new book on the global
response to the war in Ukraine. He has given interviews on various
programs, including several on Rania Khlalek Dispatches, Breakthrough
News.
His website is https://www.tarikcyrilamar.com/; he is on substack under https://tarikcyrilamar.substack.com, and tweets under @TarikCyrilAmar.
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Israel’s assault on Gaza, as well as the
escalation of violence by Israeli settlers in the long-occupied West Bank, is, or should be, a wake-up call.
More
than 11,000 Palestinians, including some 4,650 children, have now been
killed in a war started in response to the October 7 Hamas attacks which
themselves claimed around 1,200 lives.
A halfway even-handed
international community would have to step in and protect the victims of
the disproportionate Israeli retaliation, which multiple international
voices have called a genocide and an ethnic cleansing. Failure to do so reveals profound bias and dysfunction. That much is obvious.
Yet there is another aspect of this catastrophic crisis, which
receives less attention than it should. The global failure to hold back
Israel’s aggression is due to only one part of the world, the West. And
the West follows the lead of the US. Ethically, those who fail to stand
up for the victims of a genocide or, even worse, side with the
perpetrators are responsible for their own failure. Yet, in terms of
power, US behavior is decisive. Just imagine a world in which Washington
had reacted differently and restrained Israel. Its allies and clients
would, of course, have fallen into line.
Instead, the Biden
administration deterred anyone who could have been tempted to interfere
with Israel. Washington has also supplied arms and ammunition,
intelligence, and special forces assistance, and provided diplomatic
cover. This brings us to the other fact that we need to wake up to: the
single greatest danger to a modest minimum of fair and reliable global
order, and thus stability, is the US. This is not a polemical
point but the conclusion of a dispassionate analysis of Washington’s
persistent capacities and empirical record since, roughly, the end of
the Soviet Union, which marked the beginning of America’s “unipolar moment.”
The precondition for America’s unusual ability to disturb the peace is
its historically extraordinary concentration of economic and military
capacities. Currently, the US still accounts for at least 13.5% of
global GDP – adjusted for purchasing power. By now, that is
“only” second
place after China. Yet the US is still among the upper ten in terms of (nominal)
GDP per capita, reflecting its great wealth. It also still has the “
exorbitant privilege”
(in the words of a former French minister of finance) of dollar
hegemony. It can still finance both its economy and state power
unusually cheaply and, in addition, it can misuse the dollar’s global
reserve and trade functions to confiscate and coerce. The injudicious
over-use of this leverage has
begun to backfire. Critically excessive national
debt and
the inevitable mobilization of resistance and alternatives to the
dollar’s power both point to the erosion of US monetary hegemony. For
now, it is a fact still to be reckoned with.
All this economic oomph translates into enormous military budgets.
Whether in nominal terms or adjusted for purchasing power, America outdistances other nations, with 40% of all money spent on the military worldwide in 2022.
Indicators
could be multiplied, categories refined. Yet the overall picture would
not change. At this point in time, the US is still a power giant, and,
on top of that, it remains at the top of the most powerful complex of
alliances in the world. The sheer size of American power alone tells us
little about how it is used. But what is too often overlooked is that
without it, America – whatever its policies – simply could not be so
influential.
There is clear, again quantitative, evidence that
Washington’s influence is highly disruptive. According to the
conservative journal The National Interest, between 1992 and 2017, the US has been involved in 188 “military interventions.”
This list is incomplete; it does not include, for instance, the Gulf
War of 1990 or the pivotal role Washington played in provoking and then
waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Moreover, as you would
expect, given the source, these are conservative figures. By 2022, Ben
Norton, a well-informed critic of US politics on the left found 251 military interventions after 1991.
The
US has not only shown a high propensity to pursue its perceived
interests abroad by military force – instead of diplomacy or even “merely”
economic warfare, i.e. sanctions. What is at least equally concerning
is that this preference for direct violence as a tool of policy is
accelerating. The National Interest finds that – again between 1992 and
2017 – America was engaged in four times as many military interventions
as between 1948 and 1991 (“only” 46 times). Likewise, the Military Intervention Project at Tufts University’s Center for Strategic Studies has found that the US “has undertaken over 500 international military interventions since 1776, with nearly 60% undertaken between 1950 and 2017” and “over one-third”
of these missions occurring after 1999. US bellicosity has grown over
time (though not evenly) and, recently, after the end of the Cold War
and the former Soviet Union, that growth has sped up.
These wars,
moreover, have been extremely destructive. According to exhaustive
research conducted by the Costs of War project at Brown University, the
so-called “Global War on Terror” after 2001 alone produced between 905,000 and 940,000 “direct war deaths.” The same research project notes that the “destruction of economies, public services, infrastructure, and the environment” by these wars has caused an additional “3.6-3.8 million indirect deaths in post-9/11 war zones.” The fact that most of these deaths were “indirect” shows that, even without engaging in violence directly, Washington has an extraordinary knack of spreading lethal disruption.
