“Virtuous War?”: Interview with James Der Derian

By Thivai Abhor

 

You talk about the military’s use of information as a force multiplier. How is that?
It’s a term that originally signified a sort of propaganda – psychological or psy-op – that you would have as an adjunct to the soldier in the field, officers who would provide leafleting, or even bullhorn. Consider the example we saw in Apocalypse Now, preceding battle by playing Wagner on your loudspeakers when the air cav is coming in. These are all forms of intimidation. Contemporary tactics have moved beyond that. It’s no longer about simply increasing the effect of command and control of the battlefield. It’s also about bringing to bear computers, new communication technologies, new intelligence, and multiple media, in a battle for reality in which you’re shaping – in addition to the outcome on the battlefield – the opinion, beliefs, and decisions that are part of any temporary struggle that lasts longer than the usual one or two-week international conflict. The military use of force multiplying effects is about the ever-increasing coupling of science systems and weapons systems.

Is Sun Tzu’s notion of military force based upon deception now more true than ever before?

I’m sure he could only be envious of the tools we have at hand now, compared to the gongs and drums that he would use to multiply the force of conventional arms back in 500 B.C. But if you go to military doctrine now, they call for something called “full spectrum dominance,” which means using every single available technological information tool to deceive. That’s deception on a tactical level. We need to also consider the levels beyond tactics and strategics, and the extent to which we have new levels of dissimulation taking place, on the levels of decision-making, how we read the images, and how the public is informed about foreign policy.

Interview with Paul Virilio

By James Derderian

 

Accidents

Accidents fascinate Paul Virilio. From the first train derailment to the crash of the stock market, accidents have served as a kind of diagnostic by which Virilio assesses the value and danger of new technologies. Television has become a “museum of accidents”; cyberspace ëan accident of the real”. Globalization is a hoax, virtualization is the reality, and we are fast approaching the day of the ëbig accident”, when virtual reality finally overpowers the real thing. Comprendez?

It is no accident – as French intellectuals before Virilio liked to say – that when Virilio’s dromology (the study of speed) crashes head-long into semiology (the study of signs) the order of things starts to look precarious. Over a diverse career as professor of architecture, film critic, urbanist, military historian, peace strategist, and in the course of over a dozen books, Virilio has interrogated the integral relationships of security and territory, war and cinema, speed and politics, technology and culture, and left no prisoners: what stale thought he does not liquidate with corrosive intellect, he liberates with rhetorical excess. This makes for a difficult, sometimes frustrating, but almost always an inspiring read.

Accidents surrounded our interview. In 1976, I discovered Virilio when I wandered by chance into an Paris museum exhibition on “Bunker Archeology,” Virilio’s remarkable compilation of photographs, documents, and text on Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. At the end of our interview, I discovered that twenty years ago we both had been attacked by street-fighters from the same neo-fascist party. We swapped war stories and compared scars at La Coupole Restaurant in Paris.

 

- Der Derian: Is the author dead?

 

- Virilio: There is a great threat to writing. The written work is threatened by the screen, not by the image. There have always been images in books. There have always been images in architecture, like frescoes or stain glass windows. No, it is the evocative power of the screen, and in particular the live screen. It is real time that threatens writing. Writing is always, always, in a deferred time, always delayed. Once the image is live, there is a conflict between deferred time and real time, and in this there is a serious threat to writing and the author.

Getting Hegemony Right – Analysis Of The United States As A “Hyperpower” Nation

By G. John Ikenberry

Source: National Interest, The,  Spring, 2001

 

Introduction

IN MAY 1999 the Oxford Union debated the proposition, “Resolved, the United States is a rogue state.” The resolution was ultimately defeated, but around the world there is growing unease about a global order dominated by American power–power unprecedented, unrestrained and unpredictable. The unease is felt even by America’s closest allies. “The United States of America today predominates on the economic level, the monetary level, on the technological level, and in the cultural area in the broadest sense of the word”, French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine observed in a speech in Paris in early 1999. “It is not comparable, in terms of power and influence, to anything known in modern history.” European diplomats, following Vedrine’s coining of the term, have begun calling the United States a “hyperpower.” During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States kept each other in check. Today the restraints are less evident, and this has made American power increasingly controversial.

This is an unexpected turn of events. Just a little over a decade ago many pundits argued that the central problem of U.S. foreign policy was the graceful management of the country’s decline. Paul Kennedy’s famous book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, argued that the United States would go the way of all great powers–down. Japan was on the rise and Europe was awakening. World politics after the Cold War, it was widely assumed, was to be profoundly multipolar.

But the distribution of world power took a dramatic turn in America’s favor. The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, the decline in ideological rivalry, lagging economic fortunes in Japan and continental Europe, growing disparities in military and technological expenditure, and America’s booming economy all intensified power disparities during the 1990s. Today it is not decline that the United States must manage but the fear, resentment and instabilities created by a decade of rising American power.

Democracy Promotion: A Key Focus In A New World Order

By Thomas Carothers

Americans always have had a strong interest in promoting democracy, especially as their country assumed an increasingly important role on the world stage. President Woodrow Wilson, who pledged to make the world safe for democracy, was clearly a man ahead of his time. In this thought-provoking piece focusing on democracy promotion in the last years of the 20th century, Thomas Carothers, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve, examines where we are headed and looks at how Wilson’s original call has been transformed into a national policy upon the world stage.

 

Introduction

Since the mid-1980s, especially, democracy assistance has become a significant element of U.S. foreign aid and foreign policy. By the end of the 1990s, the U.S. government was spending over $700 million a year on democracy aid in approximately 100 countries — primarily through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), but also through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the Asia Foundation and the Eurasia Foundation.

Although the current wave of democracy programs has forerunners — the Marshall Plan of the early post-World War II period, for example, and the political development or “modernization” programs of the 1960s — the current effort is the most extensive, systematic commitment the United States has ever undertaken to foster democracy around the world.

And the U.S. is not alone. Other countries, especially the prosperous democracies of Western Europe as well as a myriad of international institutions supported by many governments, also have embarked on a major effort to support democracy, especially in transitional countries that have recently embarked on the arduous process of renouncing totalitarian and authoritarian forms of rule.