Strategic Panorama 2009 - 2010 - IEEE

Florentino Portero Rodríguez
military but political factors. Those who cause them to struggle are those
who aspire not to defeat them but, once again, to bring about their retreat.
There are now so many precedents, so many political situations which
illustrate this vulnerability that any rival strategist will address the challenge
in these terms. A state is unlikely to attack the United States directly as
it will be perceived by American society as an existential enemy. In such
a case the US people will mobilise en bloc and show a high tolerance for
suffering. On the contrary, the most likely scenario is that remote crises
will lead the United States to intervene to defend its interests, the regional
balance or the nuclear non-proliferation regime, among other causes. If
the kind of fight the enemy puts up is in the form of guerrilla ambushes
and acts of terrorism to the extent of causing a large number of causalities,
both civilians and US soldiers, and is financially draining with an uncertain
outcome, American society will begin to question the point of the campaign.
At this point criticising the government will become an election
option so that part of the media and the political class will be working
for the enemy for free. We witnessed this recently in connection with the
Iraq War. Both media and leading politicians declared that the war had
been a mistake, that it was lost and that the best option was withdrawal.
As Ambassador Crocker stated, the Iraqi forces chose to abandon violence,
resulting in the isolation of al-Qaeda and the Mahdi Army, when
they accepted that President Bush, despite the very powerful campaign
against him, was going to increase significantly the troops deployed in Iraq
to eliminate the nucleuses of insurgent activity through use of force. The
radical sectors had been on the verge of securing a new US defeat against
militias that are irregular and insignificant in comparison to the US armed
forces. They did not succeed. But the whole world has witnessed the lack
of consistency of the elites and of American society in crisis situations.
They won, but their deterrent capacity has not been restored.
America’s will is fragile but there are even those who question its
might. For several decades we have been reading analyses which emphasise
that the cycle of US hegemony is coming to an end. It is stressed
from a somewhat historically deterministic view that the United States is
exhausting itself in its attempt to establish a Pax Americana and that, like
some earlier empires, it needs to adapt to a new status of merely great
power. These rather Jeremian prophecies have not been fulfilled. On the
contrary, in recent years the US economy has proved to be extraordinarily
willing and able to modernise itself and adapt to an environment
as changeable as it is global. The current economic crisis, undoubtedly
one of the deepest and most serious that the free market economy has
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