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?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.