主题:【原创】大国利益之四大国形象 -- 沉睡的天空
The Atlantic Monthly 和 New Yorker 是俩本美国非常重要的一般性杂志。New Yorker更偏文艺。在学校时, 我英文作文老师, 就用New Yorker当教材。
我觉得这篇老文很有意思,这里面有太多东西质得反思。 一个中级军官, 可以改变别人一个国家, 四俩千斤。个人的素质, 灵活的手段, 帝国和本体的思考, 见仁见智吧。
Robert D. Kaplan
It is a cliché these days to observe that the United States now possesses a
global empire-different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless.
It is time to move beyond a statement of the obvious. Our recent effort in
Iraq, with its large-scale mobilization of troops and immense concentration
of risk, is not indicative of how we will want to act in the future. So how
should we operate on a tactical level to manage an unruly world? What are
the rules and what are the tools?
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In the late winter of 2003, as the United States was dispatching tens of
thousands of soldiers to the Middle East for an invasion of Iraq, the U.S.
Army Special Operations Command was deployed in sixty-five countries. In
Nepal the Special Forces were training government troops to hunt down the
Maoist rebels who were terrorizing that nation. In the Philippines they were
scheduled to increase in number for the fight against the Abu Sayyaf
guerrillas. There was also Colombia-the third largest recipient of U.S.
foreign aid, after Israel and Egypt, and the third most populous country in
Latin America, after Brazil and Mexico. Jungly, disease-ridden, and
chillingly violent, Colombia is the possessor of untapped oil reserves and
is crucially important to American interests.
The totalitarian regimes in Iraq and North Korea, and the gargantuan
difficulty of displacing them, may have been grabbing headlines of late, but
the future of military conflict-and therefore of America's global
responsibilities over the coming decades-may best be gauged in Colombia,
where guerrilla groups, both left-wing and right-wing, have downplayed
ideology in favor of decentralized baronies and franchises built on
terrorism, narcotrafficking, kidnapping, counterfeiting, and the siphoning
of oil-pipeline revenues from local governments. FARC (Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia), for example, is Karl Marx at the top and Adam
Smith all the way down the command chain. Guerrilla warfare is now all about
business, and physical cruelty knows no limits. It extends to torture (fish
hooks to tear up the genitals), gang rape, and the murder of children whose
parents do not cooperate with the insurgents. The Colombian rebels take in
hundreds of millions of dollars annually from cocaine-related profits alone,
and have documented links to the Irish Republican Army and the Basque
separatists (who have apparently advised them on kidnapping and car-bomb
tactics). If left unmolested, they will likely establish strategic links
with al Qaeda.
Arauca province, a petroleum-rich area in northeastern Colombia, near the
Venezuelan border, is a pool-table-flat lesion of broadleaf thickets, scrap-
iron settlements, and gravy-brown rivers. The journey from the airfield to
the Colombian army base, where a few dozen Green Berets and civil-affairs
officers and their support staff are bunkered behind sandbags and concertina
wire, is only several hundred yards. Yet U.S. personnel make the journey in
full kit, inside armored cars and Humvees with mounted MK-19 40mm grenade
launchers. As I stepped off the tarmac in late February, two Colombian
soldiers, badly wounded by a car bomb set off by left-wing narcoterrorists
(the bomb had been coated with human feces in hopes of causing infection),
were being carried on stretchers to the base infirmary, where a Special
Forces medic was waiting to treat them. The day before, the Colombian police
had managed to deactivate two other bombs in Arauca. The day before that
there had been an assassination attempt on a local politician. And the day
before that an electricity tower had been bombed, knocking out power in the
region. Previous days had brought the usual roadside kidnappings,
street-corner bicycle bombings, grenade strikes on police stations, and
mortar attacks on Colombian soldiers-using propane cylinders packed with
nails, broken glass, and feces.
As we drove through Arauca's mangy streets in a Special Forces convoy, every
car and bicycle seemed potentially deadly. Yet the U.S. troops there are
defiant, if frustrated. The U.S. government permits them only to train,
rather than fight alongside, their Colombian counterparts, but they want the
rules of engagement loosened. After a truck unexpectedly pulled out into the
street, slowing our convoy and causing us to scan rooftops and parked
vehicles (and causing me to sweat more than usual in the humid and fetid
atmosphere), a Green Beret with experience on several continents leaned over
and said, "If five firemen get killed fighting a fire, what do you do? Let
the building burn? I wish people in Washington would totally get Vietnam out
of their system."
Back at the base, Major Mike Oliver and Captain Carl Brosky, civil-affairs
specialists who between them have served in the Balkans, Africa, and several
Latin American countries, were spending the day chasing down two containers
of equipment for Arauca's schools and hospital that had been held up in
customs at the Venezuelan border. A week earlier, at Tolomeida, several
hundred miles south, I had watched Sergeant Ivan Castro, a Puerto Rican from
Hoboken, New Jersey, as he patiently taught Colombian soldiers how to sit in
a 360-degree "cigar formation" while on reconnaissance, in order to rest in
the field without being surprised by the enemy. Later he taught them how to
peel back in retreat, without a gap in fire, after making first contact with
the enemy. Castro worked twelve hours in the heat that day, speaking in a
steady, nurturing tone, working with each soldier until the whole unit
performed the drills perfectly.
Even as America's leaders deny that the United States has true imperial
intentions, Colombia-still so remote from public consciousness-illustrates
the imperial reality of America's global situation. Colombia is only one of
the far-flung places in which we have an active military presence. The
historian Erich S. Gruen has observed that Rome's expansion throughout the
Mediterranean littoral may well have been motivated not by an appetite for
conquest per se but because it was thought necessary for the security of the
core homeland. The same is true for the United States worldwide, in an age
of collapsed distances. This American imperium is without colonies, designed
for a jet-and-information age in which mass movements of people and capital
dilute the traditional meaning of sovereignty. Although we don't establish
ourselves permanently on the ground in many locations, as the British did,
reliance on our military equipment and the training and maintenance that go
along with it (for which the international arms bazaar is no substitute)
helps to bind regimes to us nonetheless. Rather than the mass conscription
army that fought World War II, we now have professional armed forces, which
enjoy the soldiering life for its own sake: a defining attribute of an
imperial military, as the historian Byron Farwell noted in Mr. Kipling's
Army (1981).
The Pentagon divides the earth into five theaters. For example, at the
intersection of 5° latitude and 68° longitude, in the middle of the Indian
Ocean, CENTCOM (the U.S. Central Command) gives way to PACOM (the Pacific
Command). At the Turkish-Iranian border it gives way to EUCOM (the European
Command). By the 1990s the U.S. Air Force had a presence of some sort on six
of the world's continents. Long before 9/11 the Special Forces were
conducting thousands of operations a year in a total of nearly 170
countries, with an average of nine "quiet professionals" (as the Army calls
them) on each mission. Since 9/11 the United States and its personnel have
burrowed deep into foreign intelligence agencies, armies, and police units
across the globe.
Precisely because they foment dynamic change, liberal empires-like those of
Venice, Great Britain, and the United States-create the conditions for their
own demise. Thus they must be especially devious. The very spread of the
democracy for which we struggle weakens our grip on many heretofore docile
governments: behold the stubborn refusal by Turkey and Mexico to go along
with U.S. policy on Iraq. Consequently, if we are to get our way, and at the
same time to promote our democratic principles, we will have to operate
nimbly, in the shadows and behind closed doors, using means far less obvious
than the august array of power displayed in the air and ground war against
Iraq. "Don't bluster, don't threaten, but quietly and severely punish bad
behavior," says Eliot Cohen, a military historian at the Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington. "It's the way the
Romans acted." Not just the Romans, of course: "Speak softly and carry a big
stick" was Theodore Roosevelt's way of putting it.
We can take nothing for granted. A hundred years ago the British Navy looked
fairly invincible for all time. A world managed by the Chinese, by a
Franco-German-dominated European Union aligned with Russia, or by the United
Nations (an organization that worships peace and consensus, and will
therefore sacrifice any principle for their sakes) would be infinitely worse
than the world we have now. And so for the time being the highest morality
must be the preservation-and, wherever prudent, the accretion-of American
power.
The purpose of power is not power itself; it is the fundamentally liberal
purpose of sustaining the key characteristics of an orderly world. Those
characteristics include basic political stability; the idea of liberty,
pragmatically conceived; respect for property; economic freedom; and
representative government, culturally understood. At this moment in time it
is American power, and American power only, that can serve as an organizing
principle for the worldwide expansion of a liberal civil society. As I will
argue below, the United States has acquired this responsibility at a
dangerous and chaotic moment in world history. The old Cold War system, for
half a century the reigning paradigm in international affairs, is obviously
defunct. Enlarging the United Nations Security Council, as some suggest,
would make it even harder for that body to achieve consensus on anything
remotely substantive. Powers that may one day serve as stabilizing regional
influences-India and Russia, China and the European Union-are themselves
still unstable or unformed or unconfident or illiberal. Hundreds of new and
expanding international institutions are beginning to function effectively
worldwide, but they remain fragile. Two or three decades hence conditions
may be propitious for the emergence of a new international system-one with
many influential actors in a regime of organically evolving interdependence.
But until that time arrives, it is largely the task of the United States to
maintain a modicum of order and stability. We are an ephemeral imperial
power, and if we are smart, we will recognize that basic fact.
The "American Empire" has been discussed ad nauseam of late, but practical
ways of managing it have not. Even so, the management techniques are
emerging. While realists and idealists argue "nation-building" and other
general principles in Washington and New York seminars, young majors,
lieutenant colonels, and other middle-ranking officers are regularly making
decisions in the field about how best to train Colombia's army, which Afghan
tribal chiefs to support, what kind of coast guard and special forces the
Yemeni government requires, how the Mongolians can preserve their
sovereignty against Chinese and Russian infiltration, how to transform the
Romanian military into a smaller service along flexible Western command
lines, and so forth. The fact is that we trust these people on the ground to
be keepers of our values and agents of our imperium, and to act without
specific instructions. A rulebook that does not make sense to them is no
rulebook at all.
The following rules represent a distillation of my own experience and
conversations with diplomats and military officers I have met in recent
travels on four continents, and on military bases around the United States.
Rule No. 1
Produce More Joppolos
When I asked Major Paul S. Warren, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of
the Army's Special Operations Command, what serves as the model for a civil-
affairs officer within the Special Operations forces, he said, "Read John
Hersey's A Bell for Adano-it's all there." The hero of Hersey's World War II
novel is Army Major Victor Joppolo, an Italian-American civil-affairs
officer appointed to govern the recently liberated Sicilian town of Adano.
Joppolo is full of resourcefulness. He arranges for the U.S. Navy to show
local fishermen which parts of the harbor are free of mines, so that they
can use their boats to feed the town. He finds a bell from an old Navy
destroyer to replace the one that the Fascists took from the local church
and melted down for bullets. He countermands his own general's order
outlawing the use of horse-drawn carts, which the town needs to transport
food and water. He goes to the back of a line to buy bread, to show Adano's
citizens that although he is in charge, he is their servant, not their
master. He is the first ruler in the town's history who doesn't represent a
brute force of nature. In Hersey's words, [Men like Joppolo are] our future
in the world. Neither the eloquence of Churchill nor the humanness of
Roosevelt, no Charter, no four freedoms or fourteen points, no dreamer's
diagram so symmetrical and so faultless on paper, no plan, no hope, no
treaty-none of these things can guarantee anything. Only men can guarantee,
only the behavior of men under pressure, only our Joppolos. One good man is
worth a thousand wonks. As The Times of India wrote on July 7, 1893, the
mind of a sharp political agent should not be "crowded with fusty learning."
Ian Copland, a historian of the British Raj, wrote that "extroverts and
sporting types, sensitive to the cultural milieu," were always necessary to
win the confidence of local rulers. In Yemen recently I observed a retired
Special Forces officer cementing friendships with local sheikhs and military
men by handing out foot-long bowie knives as gifts. In a world of tribes and
thugs manliness still goes a long way.
The right men or women, no matter how few, will find the right hinge in a
given situation to change history. The Spartans turned the tide of battle in
Sicily by dispatching only a small mission, headed by Gylippus. His arrival
in 414 B.C. kept the Syracusans from surrendering to the Athenians. It broke
the Athenian land blockade of Syracuse, rallied other Sicilian city-states
to the cause, and was crucial to the defeat of the Athenian fleet the
following year. The United States sent a similarly small mission to El
Salvador in the 1980s: never more than fifty-five Special Forces trainers at
one time. But that was enough to teach the Salvadoran military to confront
more effectively the communist guerrillas while beginning to transform
itself from an ill-disciplined constabulary force into something much closer
to a professional army.
"You produce a product and let him loose," explains Sidney Shachnow, a
retired Army major general. "The Special Forces that dropped in to help [the
Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid] Dostum, the guys who grew beards, got on
horses, and dressed up like Afghans, were not ordered to do so by Tommy
Franks. These were decisions they made in the field."
Shachnow himself is a perfect example of the kind of man he describes. Hard
and chiseled, he calls to mind Ligustinus, a Roman centurion who spent
nearly half his life in the Army-in Spain, Macedonia, and Greece-and was
cited for bravery thirty-four times. Shachnow is a Holocaust survivor. Born
in 1933, in Lithuania, he endured a Nazi concentration camp as a boy;
emigrated to Salem, Massachusetts; joined the Army as a private out of high
school; after reaching the rank of sergeant first class attended officers'
training school; and served two combat tours in Vietnam, where he was
wounded twice. He rose to be a two-star general and a guiding light of the
Special Forces. His success resulted from decisions made on instinct and
impulse, and from an ability to take advantage of cultural settings in which
he did not naturally fit-exactly the ability that U.S. trainers and
commandos in El Salvador, Afghanistan, and so many other places have had to
possess.
"A Special Forces guy," Shachnow told me, "has to be a lethal killer one
moment and a humanitarian the next. He has to know how to get strangers who
speak another language to do things for him. He has to go from knowing
enough Russian to knowing enough Arabic in a few weeks, depending on the
deployment. We need people who are cultural quick studies." Shachnow was
talking about a knack for dealing with people, almost a form of charisma.
The right man will know how to behave in a given situation-will know how to
find things out and act on them.
Rule No. 2
Stay on the Move
Xenophon's Greek army cut through the Persian Empire in 401 B.C., with the
troops freely debating each step. We should be mobile in the same way-get
bogged down militarily nowhere, but make sure we have military access
everywhere. Because we have to manage a world in which-as always-old regimes
periodically crumble, disaster lies in becoming too deeply implanted in more
than a handful of countries at once. Here our provincialism helps. As
Hayward S. Florer, a retired Special Forces colonel, told me, "Even our
Special Ops people are insular. Sure, we like the adventure with other
cultures, learning the history and language. But at heart many of us are
farm boys who can't wait to get home. In this way we're not like the British
and French. Our insularity protects us from becoming colonials."
Colonialism is in part an outgrowth of cosmopolitanism, the intellectual
craving to experience different cultures and locales; it leads, inexorably,
to an intense personal involvement in their fate. "We want an empire not of
colonies or protectorates but of personal relationships," a Marine
lieutenant colonel at Camp Pendleton, in California, told me. "We back into
deployments. There doesn't need to be a policy directive from the Pentagon-
half the time we don't know what the policy is. We get a message from a
Kenyan or Nigerian officer who studied here that his unit needs training. We
try to do it. We help decide, based on our needs in a region, who we want to
help out." The U.S. military is constantly doing favors for other
militaries, favors we call in when we need to. This is how we sometimes get
access to places. The formal base rights that we have in forty countries may
in the future be less significant than the number of friendships maintained
between U.S. officers and their foreign counterparts. With that in mind, the
military needs to establish a formal data system for tracking such
relationships. At present the method of keeping abreast of these crucial
ties is largely anecdotal.
The best tools of access are the so-called "iron majors," a term that really
refers to all mid-level officers, from noncommissioned master sergeants and
chief warrant officers to colonels. In a sense majors run our military
establishment, regardless of who the Secretary of Defense happens to be. Up
through the rank of captain an officer hasn't closed the door on other
career options. But becoming a major means you've "bought into the
corporation," explains Special Forces Major Roger D. Carstens. "We're the
ones who are up at four A.M. answering the general's e-mails, making sure
all the systems are go."
The United States has set up military missions throughout the formerly
communist world, creating situations in which U.S. majors, lieutenant
colonels, and full colonels are often advising foreign generals and chiefs
of staff. Make no mistake: these officers are policymakers by another name.
A Romanian-speaking expert on the Balkans, Army Lieutenant Colonel Charles
van Bebber, has become well known in top military circles in Bucharest for
helping to start the reform process that led to Romania's integration with
NATO. Such small-scale but vital relationships give America an edge there
over its Western European allies. One of the reasons that countries like
Romania and Bulgaria supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq is that they now
see their primary military relationship as being with America rather than
with NATO as such.
In formerly communist Mongolia, U.S. Army Colonel Tom Wilhelm, a fluent
speaker of Russian who studied at Leningrad State University, is an adviser
to the local military. With Wilhelm's help, Mongolia has reoriented its
defense strategy toward international peacekeeping-as a means of gaining
allies in global forums against its rapacious neighbors, Russia and China.
The planned dispatch of a Mongolian contingent to help patrol postwar Iraq
was the result of what one good man-in this case, Wilhelm-was able to
accomplish on the ground. I recently followed him around on an inspection
tour of Mongolia's Gobi Desert border with China. We slept in local military
outposts, rode Bactrian camels, and spent hours in conversation with
mid-level Mongolian officers over meals of horsemeat and camel's milk. It is
through such activities that relationships are built and allies are gained
in an era when anyplace can turn out to be strategic.
Rule No. 3
Emulate Second-Century Rome
Provincialism is the aspect of our national character that will keep the
United States from overextending itself in too many causes. But owing to the
wave of immigration from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America that began
in the 1970s, the United States is an international society comparable to
Rome in the second century A.D., when the empire reached its territorial
zenith under Trajan and, more important, was granting citizenship to elites
in the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa. (Trajan and Hadrian, in
fact, were both from Spain.) Our military, intelligence, and diplomatic
communities must now turn to our Iranian-, Arab-, and other hyphenated
Americans-our potential Joppolos. At a time when we desperately need more
language specialists, it is shameful that we are seeking out so few of the
many native speakers at our disposal. The financial incentives we offer them
are simply insufficient, and the waiting period for security clearance has
become farcically long. This situation has been changing of late for the
better: it needs to continue to do so.
Trained area specialists are likewise indispensable. In 1976 Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger entrusted the eminent Arabist and diplomat Talcott
Seelye, in Lebanon, to carry out two discreet evacuations of American
citizens from that war-torn country with the help of the Palestine
Liberation Organization-which we did not recognize at the time. Seelye, who
was born in Beirut, may not have wholly agreed with Kissinger's foreign
policy-but that didn't matter. He knew how to get the job done. The fact
that Arabists and other area specialists may be emotionally involved,
through marriage or friendship, with host countries-often causing them to
dislike the policies that Washington orders them to execute-can actually be
of benefit, because it gives them credibility with like-minded locals. In
any case, such tensions between policymakers and agents in the field are
typical of imperial systems. We should not be overly concerned about them.
True, comparison is the beginning of all serious scholarship, and area
experts are ignorant of much outside their favored patch of ground. Their
knowledge of the current reality in a given country is so prodigious that
they often cannot imagine a different reality. That is why area experts can
say what is going on in a place, but cannot always say what it means. Still,
it is impossible to implement any policy without them, as Kissinger and
others learned.
Colonel Robert Warburton, the Anglo-Afghan who established the Khyber Rifles
regiment on the Northwest Frontier of British India in 1879, was one kind of
person needed to manage our interests in distant corners of the world.
Warburton spoke fluent Pashto and Persian, and was at home among both
aristocratic Englishmen and Afridi tribesmen. The normally cruel and
perfidious Afridis held him in such high esteem that he did not need to go
armed among them. Warburton was less a cosmopolitan than a nuts-and-bolts
journeyman, whose linguistic skills came from birth and circumstance more
than from intellectual curiosity. The American equivalents of Warburton can
be found among Arab-Americans posted to Central Command and Latino-
Americans posted to Southern Command-people who fit into places like Yemen
and Colombia, but who want only to return to their suburban American homes
afterward.
- 相关回复 上下关系8
😁专门把这个老贴顶上来,大家好好瞅瞅 6 李根 字1137 2008-08-15 14:02:50
🙂谢李根顶好贴。对西方舆论不可掉以轻心 唵啊吽 字0 2008-08-16 08:17:52
😄有意思 aokrayd 字56 2004-07-22 22:48:48
当代的班陈
【文摘】part II 高头庄 字25556 2004-07-22 10:02:20
😅这样的文章没有及时加精,斑竹之过也 萨苏 字0 2004-07-21 20:09:05
说得有理,这口气越来越向虎子看齐了。 梦晓半生 字98 2004-07-21 12:25:26
😥你把虎子弄哪去了? 群众演员 字0 2004-07-21 18:21:08