Tides Post-Terror: Towards Stability Following The Easter Sunday Attack
Asanga Abeygoonasekera
“Men march from West to East killing their fellow creatures..” Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)
Life is nasty, brutish and short. The horror of the Easter Sunday attackin Sri Lanka will prove Thomas Hobbes was correct. The child that lost her parents or the parent that lost their child unaware why this disgraceful act of brutality came to their lives. During a visit to Berlin an expert who has studied ISIS rightly said to me, “your country was staged”. It was not an ISIS directed attack but an influenced attack. If it was staged, who was behind in staging this terror? Willingly or unwillingly, you would have to draw on geopolitics to answer the underlying question.
Western Hemisphere is ours
Four days before the Easter Sunday bombing in Sri Lanka, John Bolton, the National Security Advisor a living example of liberal hegemony, ardent supporter of regime change according to many western scholars, says “Today, we proudly proclaim for all to hear: the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well,…the twilight of socialism has arrived in our hemisphere….We will need your help in the days ahead. We must all reject the forces of communism and socialism in this hemisphere—and in this country”. He re-affirmed that the western hemisphere belongs to United States. An evil troika is in the making in the backdrop of US geography, according to Bolton. This, he describes, is Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. It seems, Fukuyama got it wrong in his 1992 “The End of History and the Last Man”. Over a visit to Sri Lanka a few months ago, Samantha Powers referred to Fukuyama’s work as a book about the global triumph of liberalism ‘that there is a common evolutionary pattern for all human societies…in the direction of liberal democracy.’
Where Bolton and Powers got it wrong was that they believed in a single theory of Fukuyama. He explains in his book there will be ‘no struggle or conflict over ‘large’ issues consequently no need for generals or statesmen; what remains is economic activity’ for the US. John Muller, Stanley Hoffman and Friedman all followed this “Golden Straitjacket” that suppressed the geopolitical theories of great power politics, pushing forward a liberal order, reinforcing the sense of optimism about democracy and human rights was the belief the economic globalization was opening the door to a new era of peace and prosperity, followed by Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump. Steven Walt explains although subsequent US administrations in post cold war differ in their diplomatic styles and policies, “liberal hegemony remained the default strategy…all of them assumed US leadership was essential to global progress and each administration sought to use American power to spread democracy expand US influence and security commitment and reinforce a rules based liberal world order” . Efforts to bring these values in the Middle East military expeditions proved the theory itself doesn’t support the outcomes.
It was Osama Bin Laden in the 80s that kept the Soviets out of the Indian Ocean, by taking the side of the US defeating the Communist Soviet Union. If this did not take place Fukuyama would not have written his masterpiece. Looking at the US liberal hegemonic foreign policy adopted from the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Soviet Russia was clearly the reason why many nations did not embrace liberal values which USA tried in its crusading expedition. When Russia fell, USA was the single power holding the balance of the global system. The holder of the balance threw its weight at the scale to promote liberal hegemony..
Unsinkable aircraft carrier
Taking the liberal hegemonic theory to the distant oceans in the Eastern Hemisphere, the Indian Ocean a vital highway of the global energy market. There is only one unsinkable aircraft carrier that the US military own in the Indian Ocean, which is in Diego Garcia. The Portuguese explorer Pedro Mascarenhas discovered the island in 1512. It is located equidistant from all points of the Indian Ocean and also called the “Malta of the Indian Ocean”. This island was a blessing to move forward the US liberal hegemonic foreign policy. In Spanish Deo Gratias means ‘Thank [be] to God’, and this really applies geopolitically when looking out the missions carried out during the last few decades. From the Iranian revolution, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Operation Desert Fox, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom and many more future military expeditions will be carried out from this forward flexible strategic hub, echoing the US foreign policy towards the entire Indian Ocean. In February 2019, a ruling of the International Court of Justice was made to transfer the islands to Mauritius, a definite signal perhaps to explore for an alternative location in the Indian Ocean.
