Gwynne Dyer holds a Ph.D. in Military and Middle East History from the University of London. A military historian, independent journalist and documentary filmmaker, he has served in the Canadian, American and British navies. He is best known for his documentary television series, War, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1985. His syndicated column on international affairs is translated into a dozen languages and appears in 175 newspapers in more than 40 countries. He spoke to me from his home in London in April 2003.

Deborah Campbell: You’ve talked about the forces shaping the world, one of which is Pax Americana. Can you talk about what this means and what its goals are?

Gwynne Dyer: Pax Americana is the project of the neocons and the current American administration. And it’s much more ambitious than simply dealing with terrorist threats though that’s their sort of ramp to sell this to the public—or even reordering the Middle East, ridiculously ambitious though that is. It really is about restructuring the world and substituting Pax Americana for the system that, however flawed, we have had for the past 50 years, which is the United Nations system and so on. And they present this as a new idea, a new way of dealing with the things.

The United States is now so powerful and since we know that it is also good, therefore it should use that power to order the world far better than that shabby clumsy United Nations ever did and in that way democracy will spread across the planet and in the end there will be a world of happiness and peace. They actually believe this stuff to the extent that some of these neocons actually talk about the project as being Wilsonian, to the extent that they see in Wilson this American idealism of spreading democracy, self-determination around the planet. They forget that Wilson also believed in a world of laws and rules. And Wilson was quite aware that without a world of rules, what you get is World War I. So Wilson, while he did believe that America was the only truly idealistic nation, and did believe—I don’t, but I can see why they did at the time—that first of all the democratic nations had the role of spreading democracy around the planet. But he didn’t imagine you could do it with troops.

DC: You’ve mentioned that for the unilateralists, 9/11 was a godsend.

GD: It’s brilliant, because here you have a world full of enemies who can only extirpated by changing the world into the image of America, which we had in mind to do all along. It’s very old-fashioned thinking. It’s as though these guys haven’t actually noticed what’s happened over the last 20 years. That you don’t actually need to bring democracy with heavy artillery. People can do it for themselves and they can do it in places where there is virtually zero American presence. This is not a missionary activity that has got to be transmitted with the 101st airborne from democratic America to benighted Iraq. It’s something Iraqis can perfectly well do for themselves. As Filipinos, South Koreans and Bangladeshis and Russians and South Africans and Indonesians have all managed to do without any help from the United States. In fact quite often the United States trying to hinder them in the process. So they are still living in a world where they believe that real democracy can only come to the rest of the world if America brings it and brings it of course on treads and tracks.

DC: Is democracy perhaps a canard?

GD: You’ll notice its always market democracy. In America, democracy is market democracy. It all fits together and certainly this is not going to harm American business in any way. In fact the non-American-led changes on the planet in the last 20 years in terms of dismantling the various totalitarian regimes and the military dictatorships have opened a lot of the world to American capitalism, and the Americans didn’t actually do this. The Reagan crowd tried to take credit for it, but I was in the old Soviet Union at the time and I didn’t see a lot of Americans bringing Russia down.

The neocon project, the unilateralist project, is about destroying the old world order, which is the New World Order, what George H.W. Bush was talking about in 1991. People thought he made the phrase up, New World Order, to serve the current situation in 1991, but what he was referring to was the whole UN project that had been underway since 1945. You know: "thou shalt not invade thy neighbour and if thou dost we will come and kick you out." A world of rules with a Security Council at the UN that finally works—you don’t have the competing vetoes, Russia has finally democratized. That’s the world he was touting and though the ‘90s it did stagger from one crisis to another reasonably competently. It took us awhile, but we did get around to dealing with Bosnia, Kosovo, and so on. So what the neocons are attacking is the new world order, not of 1991 but of 1945.

DC: The American administration seems very distrustful of multilateral projects.

GD: Totally. The point is to destroy the United Nations and NATO and the European Union, and go with these ‘coalitions of the willing’ which will inevitably be led by the Americans for the purposes the Americans have at the moment. This concept has a pedigree of about 8,000 years. What it involves is the rule of the strong and perpetual war.

DC: You’ve said that the UN is "a blast shelter, not a soup kitchen." Do you think it risks becoming no more than a soup kitchen?

GD: Well, that is certainly what the neocons have in mind for it: bypass it, discredit it, make it irrelevant by your lack of participation. It does need American participation, obviously they’re the strongest country. That is the risk. These guys have got the bit between their teeth and the outcome they intend it that the UN be reduced to irrelevance.

DC: Could you talk about the pilot project of Iraq. Essentially why go after Iraq?

GD: I think that the whole axis of evil speech is very interesting because the thing which was obviously noticed at the time, but which still stuns, is that none of the members of the axis of evil, so-called, had anything to do with 9/11. And nobody seriously believes they did, even within the administration. So why do you put them there? The answer is that if you are going to go over to a very different foreign policy—and I don’t think Bush is even a neocon in that sense, but he’s certainly been sold the thing since 9/11 by the people around him who are—if you’re going to go over to an essentially unilateralist preemptive foreign policy, Pax Americana, all the rest of it, you don’t do it by conquering the world one country at a time. Even America doesn’t have those kinds of resources. What you do is make a couple of horrible examples of what happens to countries who get in the way, who stand up and defy you. It’s economy of effort. If you do that sufficiently well once or twice everyone else shuts up and sits down.

So all three axis of evil countries are those whose principle claim to fame is that in the past at some point they have successfully defied the US. In Iraq in ‘91. Iran in ‘78-‘79—the overthrow of the Shah, the hostage crisis. North Korea, it was still there in 1953 at the end of the Korean war and that’s it’s fault. And so you pick these countries in order to make examples of them and bring everybody else into line. And the weakest of the three—and obviously the first one to go for—is Iraq. It was weakened by 12 years of sanctions, weakened by its diplomatic isolation in the world, weakened by the fact that you smashed up its army last time and it’s never rebuilt it. So first up Iraq, and if we whack that firmly enough at relatively low cost to ourselves, lots of other people who might defy us will get into line.

DC: And then you have North Korea, which is taking this as a lesson that they need to be nuclear ready in order to deter attack.

GD: Well, that is the downside. These guys aren’t omniscient. What they want North Korea to do is bow the head and bend the knee. The danger is that a regime like Kim Jung Il’s will respond not by bending the knee but by arming furiously to resist the attack it thinks may come whether it bends the knee or not.

DC: You write that modern terrorism is almost entirely a media phenomenon.

GD: How many people died of SARS last week and how many died of lung cancer? In a society without media, terrorism would have no impact whatever. It would be a local incident, not many hurt, and we dealt with it. Or maybe we don’t deal with it, but the rest of us are still here.

We all use the media. You and I are doing it right now. There’s nothing unique in that. What is extraordinary is that most large organizations that use the media have some other source of power and then they have to manipulate their environment through the media—the sugar association, the tobacco association, the state of Mississippi and so on. But in a sense, terrorists have nothing beyond what they can get in the media. The whole raison d’etre of terrorism is to get it in the papers.

DC: Where do you see all of this going?

Where terrorism is going, I don’t frankly care. Terrorism is a marginal issue. It was before and it still is and it always will be. I don’t care if they get a nuclear weapon, it’s still a marginal issue. What’s one nuclear weapon going to do? It’ll make a mess somewhere. So will the next big earthquake to hit San Francisco. We’re not organizing our world on what we’ll do once San Francisco gets the big one. So this is relatively small scale stuff. But where is the larger process that is riding on the back of this going, the whole neocon project: I think the new world order is in danger. This isn’t Bosnia taking it on, it’s America.

What you’ve got to hope for is this: the American public hasn’t fully bought into this yet. I mean there’s huge doubt in the United States about this whole process. The reason that the US went to the UN at all was that they had to keep Britain on board. And why did they have to keep Britain on board? Because, by and large, Americans did not trust Bush’s judgement. They needed to see some foreign ally along to validate them. So this is not easy to sell to the American public. One must not think of them as a bunch of fools who will take whatever they’re handed. They’re not all mouth-breathers who watch Fox.

But what is of concern is that they could eventually make a sale. The thing is there will be resistance. There will be resistance in Iraq, there will be resistance elsewhere. Lots more Americans soldiers will die later this year I suspect than have died so far. And if not this year, next. This is not going to end happily. But it’s a question of how quickly it ends. There’s two ways the American public can respond when, in fact, this all turns to shit in their hands. Iraq and Afghanistan and whatever they do next, and the terrorism hits again, because it probably will. And one [way they can react] is they can say, gosh Mr. Bush got sold a bill of goods by these crazies. I guess we were wrong. We’d better get back on course here and renew our support for NATO, the UN, the European Union and all the rest of it. The other thing they could do is spin off completely, go off in a corner and sulk for the next ten years. I don’t know which way it’s going to go but the sooner it ends in perhaps quite a dramatic defeat, the likelier it is the American public will respond sensibly.

DC: It seems that the current American administration doesn’t have a great fear of war.

GD: No. War is an instrument of policy. This is straightforward 18th and 19th century stuff. It is more dangerous, but the dangers lie not in World War III next year, but in essentially destroying the entire structure of world order that we’ve spent 50 years building, and at the same time creating a long-term confrontation between the Muslim world and the West, which in the short run doesn’t lead to anything horrendous except a lot of terrorism, but in the longer run could. It’s just really stupid stuff. This isn’t the end of the world yet but it’s motherfucking dumb. You can quote me on that.

Deborah Campbell