Tomgram: John Brown, Invading Washington

[pinto]

Over the last seven years, it's often been said that George W. Bush exists in a bubble. When it comes to the cast of characters in his administration -- and the Washington Consensus generally -- it turns out he isn't alone. The other night I watched Harvard academic Joseph Nye and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage discuss the crisis in Pakistan with talk-show host Charlie Rose. The two of them had just finished co-chairing a Center for Strategic and International Studies commission that produced a report, clearly meant for the next administration, on wielding American "smart power" in the world.

Nye is an exceedingly conventional American internationalist; Armitage is a former "Vulcan" who, in the first years of the Bush administration, though Colin Powell's deputy at the State Department, was close to the neocons of the Pentagon, but may now be repositioning himself for a Democratic administration. They could be said to represent the heartland of the present Washington Consensus.

Yet when they talked of Pakistani autocrat Pervez Musharraf ("I mean, Musharraf has been our boy, but we`ve not been able to do much with it..."), of the Pakistani situation more generally ("I mean, after Musharraf, there are other secular generals…"), and of the American role there ("Well, we have to be working with both Benazir Bhutto and also with our contacts in the army to make sure this doesn't turn into chaos…" "If you do anything to help Benazir, it has to be done very quietly and behind the scenes…"), they might as well have been discussing deploying federal "smart power" to Maryland, or more appropriately, to the U.S. Territory of Guam. Conceptually, they remain deep inside Washington's Pakistan, Washington's dream of a controllable world.

The Bush administration, too, had its dreams of a controllable Pax Americana to go along with a Washington-based Pax Republicana; but, as former diplomat John Brown makes clear below, these were the most provincial of global dreams, hatched at think-tanks inside the Washington Bubblesphere. The world was reimagined as a kind of imperial dreamscape for a go-it-alone group of armed imperial isolationists who, unlike most imperialists, couldn't even imagine a way those elsewhere could join in their imperial project. As Brown indicates, Bush and his top officials were the most bubblicious of non-diplomats. In the language of another era, they were not just Ugly Americans, but the ugliest of all -- and proud of it.

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