主题：【原创】大国利益之四大国形象 -- 沉睡的天空
家园 【原创】大国利益之四大国形象 这凡是有人，就有一个形象，这国家虽然不是人，但是也要有个形象。
为什么要这么一个形象呢，我们知道这人有形象是给别人看的，假如这世间只有一个人，那他再搞多么高大全的形象那也是没用，所以现在各大宗教都在想象上帝是什么样的，但是我想，这上帝一定是很没形象的，因为没人可以看到他老人家啊。
话还是说回来，这大国形象和个人形象略有不同，这国家是人的组合体，自然要有两种形象，这一种是对内的，一种是对外的，而本文着重要说的是对外的大国形象。
这首先要说一下，形象有什么用。是啊，形象又不能当饭吃，有什么用呢？
我们现在都在说企业形象，名牌效应，还常喜欢举一个例子，就是可口可乐的老板说自己家工厂烧光了，他也不担心，因为马上就会有银行贷款给他。这就是说企业形象和品牌的重要性。当然了，这国家要是一把火烧没了，也不要指望有人贷款给你重建了，不趁机灭了你才怪。但是这国家形象还是很重要的，一个好形象和一个坏形象那就是天差地别啊。你说一个国家给人的形象是超级坏蛋，一个国家给人的形象是救世主，假如你需要帮助的时候，你会象哪家伸手？想来也是救世主吧。尽管这世间舍己救人不求回报的国家几乎是没有。
当然，一般人不会考虑这么多，他们只会觉得，这个国家不错，那个国家很坏，但是就是这样的一般人，决定了国家的民意，而政府在选择对外政策上不得不考虑这些民意。不然你要民众去魔鬼那做炮灰，那不造反才怪。象美国要打伊拉克，就要先把伊拉克塑造成一个恶棍，自然这恶棍是当年自己扶植的就不说了，当然这还不行，这世界上的恶棍又不止伊拉克一家，所以还要说这恶棍有多少能杀死多少人的武器，还和那个恶棍拉登是一伙的，把国民对伊拉克的形象完全导向仇恨面才可以发动战争。不然你说我们要为了伊拉克的石油作战，美国人不把你抽一巴掌，这美国人天下首富，又不是欧洲中世纪的穷农民，值得为点石油卖命吗？何况还是几家石油公司而已。至于打下来之后，就不用管了，实惠到手了，谁还想研究这伊拉克形象就自各研究去吧，反正伊拉克的形象已经深深刻在国民脑海了，只要我不说，自然会有N个人抢着说话的。要不是为了大选，谁有空找哪大规模杀伤武器啊。
这点说明，国家形象这东西，实在是太容易被改变了，我们再举个早一点的例子，二战时期，这美国要对德国动手，和苏联联合。这下有点犯愁了，这美国和苏联两个主义代表，一向是不对板，这美国国民对苏联印象不好，而对德国却没有什么深仇大恨，反而有些好感。（毕竟是日本而不是德国发动珍珠港事件，当然德国后来跟着日本向美国宣战那是让美国人找到借口了。）怎么办呢？这有什么难的，这美国人最擅长的就是宣传战啊，于是广告满天飞，公关天天做，所有的媒体都开始说苏联人好话，想说坏话，可以，回家自己说去，这广播报纸大众媒体反正是一边倒，于是一日间苏联成了伟大的盟友，连暴君斯大林也成了仁和爱抽烟斗的大叔了。这苏联离美国这么远，又有几人可以亲眼看到苏联，自然相信大众的话，对苏联的印象大为改善，（至于德国嘛，要说坏话还不简单，这都能把苏联说成这样了，德国要变个样不要太方便，尤其是希特勒，成了同性恋，瘾君子，恶棍，坏蛋，白痴外加三级，真不知道这么多坏毛病怎么上一个人的身的，尤其又说他玩弄多名女性，又说他是同性恋，这两者居然能同时在一起，说到后来自己人差点都相信了。）不过好景不长，这二战结束了，冷战开始了，于是苏联人又从盟友一下子变成了恶棍，坏蛋，垃圾，斯大林重新变成了暴君。其实也简单，只需要把当年被自己禁止的那些言论恢复再放大就可以了。这招数后来在中国上面又用了一次，美国人玩这手炉火纯青了。
无独有偶，这中日关系也是如此，其实七十年代八十年代甚至到九十年代初期，中日关系还是很好的，虽然中国民间一直没忘记那次战争，但是双方政府关系甚佳，这两边宣传媒体都是把中日友好放在首位，甚至有些时候说到中国那叫那个亲啊，以前有本书《明斯克号出击》后来还有续集《明斯克号沉没》，那是把中国看作保卫亚洲的天使，日本的维护者了。还有一部影片《日本沉没》对中国也是极度亲善，看作恩人的。即便那时的中国政治制度完全不同于日本，但是不妨，因为那时日本受到苏联威胁，和中国在一条船上，所有的恩怨都要先放过去。就算有右翼的声音，也被压下去了，其实有一度，日本政府甚至还说中日关系是对外关系的基石，自然这是不实际的。有美国在呢。但是随着苏联解体，威胁解除，而两者的竞争越来越强烈，日本右翼开始上升，自然中国的民族主义也抬头，这本来就是两方面的，所以说日本有时说中国政府煽动也是没道理，既然你那边以舆论自由的说法不打击右翼，我这边自然也要舆论自由一下了。
大国形象是要看实力的，象美国和当年的苏联，这就算再兄巴巴的，别人也怕啊，毕竟腰杆子粗啊，但是其他国家不一样，而且实力也要有展示的一天，不然你闷在家里不出声，谁知道你啊，这世界上的人民大都是看本国甚至本国新闻，没几个准备做世界通的，这中国现在对外开放了，对外面好象很了解，但是这外国人谁会来了解你呢，只能靠国家的形象，或者说对你国家的印象来说说。比如美国，那就是强大啊，虽然有时有点过分，但是也是强大，比如日本啊，那就是富有啊，虽然有点犯傻，但是还是富有，比如德国，严谨啊，虽然太严肃也不好，英国是绅士，法国是浪漫，甚至巴西还有桑巴。
好了，我们应该问问中国了，这下傻眼了，神秘的文明古国，这下不太好吧，模糊了点，埃及也是神秘的文明古国呢，要不人口众多的国度？这好象也太广泛了，或者你们每人都留大辫子……这八成还停留在清代，或者是看某些艺术片看的，要不每人都是武功高手，那是李小龙的迷。要不……毛主席老人家还好吗？这哪跟哪呢。
当然，这都是我看玩笑的，据说真有这样的情况，不过我在国内，遇到的外国人已经看到中国，不会这样回答。但是这确实是一个国家形象的问题。世界上想必没有几个国家不了解美国，因为美国文化随着可口可乐，大片已经将美国梦席卷到全球，这便是实力的差距，形象是靠着各种不同的方式传播的，战争时期是军队，和平时期是经济文化。
现在对朝鲜战争诸多非议，但是说实在的，假如没有朝鲜战争，世界对中国的形象只会停留在清代，不是还有人认为抗日战争不是中国人的胜利吗？假如没有朝鲜战争和后面的几次战争，我们在世界中的形象就是虚无，根本不可能作为中美苏三角中的一角，就是说，连被利用的价值也没有。至于苏联，他们对外的形象几乎就可以说是打出来的。
至于和平时期，那就是文化了，美国的大片，将文化席卷到全球，当然，这大片不会象我国某些艺术片导演一样对自己家的裹脚布津津乐道。而是将自己的文化的雄壮的一面通过高科技手段展示给世界。
历史是先人制造的，但是只有在现代人的手中才决定是光辉还是黯淡。同样的历史，在不同的人看来就有着不同的一面，美国人把自己短短几百年的历史翻来覆去讴歌，还要去祖辈的欧洲发掘，而中国人却似乎把自己历史忘却了，迷恋着外国的历史如此的光辉灿烂伟大，而自己的历史却都是帝王将相，阴谋诡计，尔虞我诈。这并非是中国历史比外国历史低下，而是因为现代人的心理问题，同样的中国历史题材，中国，日本，美国选择的视角就不同，中国近代以来的屡屡不利，使得心理上落人一步了。
有些扯远了，说到了国民心理的问题去了，其实国民心理对国家形象也很重要，以前出去的人少，李鸿章和留学生们就能代表中国的形象了，现在不同，出去的人多了，整体的国民素质代表着国民形象。
当然，人是活的，我们也不可能以一个人的表现来决定一个国家形象，这样就需要一些物的帮助，比如品牌，日本的国家形象很大取决于他的经济实力，他的经济实力又取决于他那些品牌，正是那些品牌代表着日本，虽然说那些品牌便是日本也不为过。而中国目前的经济实力还弱小了点，或许只有中国制造的商品由超市走上展示大厅，走进每个人家里，成为质量的保证，才会好些，当然，希望是真正的民族品牌，不要闹出那种外资品牌在中国就是民族品牌的笑话。
当然，这国家形象由量变到质变还是有个过程的，假如当年日本车悄悄的卖，没人会注意，但是一旦日本车狂卖，引得美国人叫“狼来了！”这便是日本形象的一个飞跃，由只会仿照质量低劣到自行研制质量优良的飞跃。
不过，最好的办法，还是将自己的国家形象展示给世人看，这不看不知道啊，当初汉朝和匈奴大战，出使西域，要西域各国帮忙，那些国家妞妞捏捏不肯，以为汉朝是小国，等出使汉朝，一看，好大啊，好强盛啊，（这汉朝对这些使者一定也要带去看好地方了，不然带他们去看破破烂烂的房子，那些西域人会服才怪。）再一看，匈奴也被打败了，马上跟随而去。这就说明一定要展示给别人看自己的实力，才是正道。韬光养晦是要，但是假如成了缩头乌龟，那也不好，一定要一点点让大家看看自己的实力。
这自然要一个舞台，这世界上人的大都是只关心一亩三分地，最多关心一下美国在干什么而已。其他国家是没人注意的，即便是再强盛，你想巴西谁有空管你中国干吗啊。何况还有一些死角，比如对岸，某段时期连有大陆风景有大陆人参加的影视都不能在那里出现，这虽然来大陆的人多了，但是还有很多人坚信大陆人民生活在水深火热之中。
但是有一些就不一样，奥运会，世界杯。尤其是奥运会，各国都来，各国都来关注，世界的目光都在举办地，这就是展示自己的机会，（当然，也只是能改变一些人的看法，舆论的力量是强大的，他完全可以说除了北京，中国其他地方都不通电……不过能改变多少人的看法就改变多少人是不。）说是说奥运会能带来多少多少赢利，谁在乎啊，关键是奥运会能向世界展示自己，世界一看，这奥运会办的不错啊，这举办城市很漂亮啊，国家形象就好了，投资就多了，所以这日本韩国奥运会举办后都是经济来次大腾飞。（自然，美国不在乎，他们举办奥运会就为了钱，他们的国家形象不需要展示了。）奥运会展示的是国家形象，所以第一次举办，首都便是当然的举办地，其实按条件来说，上海不比北京差。（而世界杯虽然影响大，毕竟不象奥运会那样可以影响全世界各国，总有一些国家不看球的啊。这当初阿翁想把世界杯塞给中国，中国也没动心，不单是中国足球没进世界杯的缘故。）
如何展示国家形象，中国目前来看，还没摸到门路呢，一些是主观的，自己的宣传手段公关手段太幼稚，一些是客观的，比如经济力量还没到达一个火候，一些地方也不可能宣传到，比如对岸，比如美国，你就算开一千个频道，没人去看不是白搭，这世界话权在西方手里，这也是认了，只是怎么尽量挣扎，在别人的规矩里做活才是正道，不要自己有理也被说成没理，那就完了。
家园 奥运跟世界杯比 很难说究竟哪个影响更大一些．从很多方面来说世界杯影响可能更大，从赚钱来说世界杯就比奥运会强多了．足球（男足）大有脱离奥运之势．
中国不办男子世界杯是有自知之明，自己队伍太烂，申请会被别人和自己人笑话的．女足世界杯办了几届就没这个问题．
家园 光花不行，还得顶…… 这点说明，国家形象这东西，实在是太容易被改变了，我们再举个早一点的例子，二战时期，这美国要对德国动手，和苏联联合。这下有点犯愁了，这美国和苏联两个主义代表，一向是不对板，这美国国民对苏联印象不好，而对德国却没有什么深仇大恨，反而有些好感。（毕竟是日本而不是德国发动珍珠港事件，当然德国后来跟着日本向美国宣战那是让美国人找到借口了。）怎么办呢？这有什么难的，这美国人最擅长的就是宣传战啊，于是广告满天飞，公关天天做，所有的媒体都开始说苏联人好话，想说坏话，可以，回家自己说去，这广播报纸大众媒体反正是一边倒，于是一日间苏联成了伟大的盟友，连暴君斯大林也成了仁和爱抽烟斗的大叔了。这苏联离美国这么远，又有几人可以亲眼看到苏联，自然相信大众的话，对苏联的印象大为改善，（至于德国嘛，要说坏话还不简单，这都能把苏联说成这样了，德国要变个样不要太方便，尤其是希特勒，成了同性恋，瘾君子，恶棍，坏蛋，白痴外加三级，真不知道这么多坏毛病怎么上一个人的身的，尤其又说他玩弄多名女性，又说他是同性恋，这两者居然能同时在一起，说到后来自己人差点都相信了。）不过好景不长，这二战结束了，冷战开始了，于是苏联人又从盟友一下子变成了恶棍，坏蛋，垃圾，斯大林重新变成了暴君。其实也简单，只需要把当年被自己禁止的那些言论恢复再放大就可以了。这招数后来在中国上面又用了一次，美国人玩这手炉火纯青了。西媒妖化中国没有企图？314事件颠倒是非，李文和事件炒作莫须有的中国间谍罪，都是为什么？
舆论杀人，舆论颠覆国家。伊拉克60万死于非命和四百万战乱逃难的人，不就是美国舆论炒作大规模杀伤武器的牺牲品吗？
家园 好文章，怪不得我跟着沾光也得了个宝 多亏总统把这篇翻出来了。
恭喜：你意外获得【西西河通宝】一枚
鲜花已经成功送出。
此次送花为【有效送花赞扬，涨乐善、声望】
家园 四年前写的帖子 不错
家园 专门把这个老贴顶上来，大家好好瞅瞅 但是有一些就不一样，奥运会，世界杯。尤其是奥运会，各国都来，各国都来关注，世界的目光都在举办地，这就是展示自己的机会，（当然，也只是能改变一些人的看法，舆论的力量是强大的，他完全可以说除了北京，中国其他地方都不通电……不过能改变多少人的看法就改变多少人是不。）说是说奥运会能带来多少多少赢利，谁在乎啊，关键是奥运会能向世界展示自己，世界一看，这奥运会办的不错啊，这举办城市很漂亮啊，国家形象就好了，投资就多了，所以这日本韩国奥运会举办后都是经济来次大腾飞。（自然，美国不在乎，他们举办奥运会就为了钱，他们的国家形象不需要展示了。）奥运会展示的是国家形象，所以第一次举办，首都便是当然的举办地，其实按条件来说，上海不比北京差。（而世界杯虽然影响大，毕竟不象奥运会那样可以影响全世界各国，总有一些国家不看球的啊。这当初阿翁想把世界杯塞给中国，中国也没动心，不单是中国足球没进世界杯的缘故。）如何展示国家形象，中国目前来看，还没摸到门路呢，一些是主观的，自己的宣传手段公关手段太幼稚，一些是客观的，比如经济力量还没到达一个火候，一些地方也不可能宣传到，比如对岸，比如美国，你就算开一千个频道，没人去看不是白搭，这世界话权在西方手里，这也是认了，只是怎么尽量挣扎，在别人的规矩里做活才是正道，不要自己有理也被说成没理，那就完了。
家园 谢李根顶好贴。对西方舆论不可掉以轻心
家园 有意思 所以两岸还是应该促进交流，多一些了解。文化宣传不可忽视。
家园 当代的班陈 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.
- 复 当代的班陈
家园 【文摘】part II 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.
家园 这样的文章没有及时加精，斑竹之过也 家园 说得有理，这口气越来越向虎子看齐了。 不到最后都不知点睛之笔在哪里。
老实说中国的特大城市也就最近十年才发展到能让大家开开眼界的程度。
家园 关于国家形象， 一个有组织的公关机构，和行动实施机构还是有必要的。其实我们也有，外交部算一个吧，可是你看看那帮人行不行？
第一次想到这个问题的时候，是那一年突然冒出的xx功事件，荷，你看看，一面是国家机器，一面是业余玩票，怎么就让人给牵着鼻子，一点道德优势都没占到？
在欧美，中国产品的印象是二等，低价，劣质。还真不容易改变。
另外，为什么没有人拿起笔来帮忙呢？报纸，电台，论坛，去写啊，去讲啊。反正偶要是看到本地的报纸有不公正评论，偶立马修书，电邮给报社，偶的观点至少在读者来信一栏露过几次脸了。