Condoleezza Rice’s piece in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs (“Rethinking the National Interest”) rambles with the kind of mesmerizing inversion of reality we’ve come to expect from this administration, such as when she claims that Gaza is being held “hostage” by Hamas. Or when she draws on her talent for understatement by claiming that “the quest for justice and a new equilibrium on which the nations of the broader Middle East are now embarked is very turbulent”, before echoing the hollow sympathy of her famous “birth pangs” by listing a number of problems that she thinks she's fixed and that she thinks are just as bad as the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the dismantlement of society in Iraq: Syrian control of Lebanon, which is still ongoing; foreign enrichment of “self-appointed” Palestinian leaders at their public’s expense, which were happily anointed and fed American money as long as they shut their people up; and the international sanctions on Iraq, which were, of course, American-led.

The regular insanities seem hardly worth commenting on anymore. I have been away from the states so long that I find it hard to believe anyone can be so stupid. But America is vast and its knowledge is like water in a desert: it can only be found by its most eager hunters.

What is interesting in her piece is the way in which she blurs U.S. interest and the international community, conflating the two not merely as bearers of common interests, but as essentially the same entity. Of course, in the American language, the “international community” has long been used to assume the legitimacy of an imagined common interest, but in Rice’s formulation the “international community” is stripped of all such pretense it may have had. The bait-and-switch is all over her paper, but can even occur within a single sentence:

“Although Beijing has agreed to take incremental steps to deepen U.S.-Chinese military-to-military exchanges, it needs to move beyond the rhetoric of peaceful intentions toward true engagement in order to reassure the international community.”

Apparently Chinese cooperation with American interest is the litmus test for the “international community”, which begins to look suspiciously like America and its closest allies. That’s awfully “international” of us, determining and then speaking for the interests of the world.

Rice’s conception of the “international community” has a close relative: Huntington’s clash of civilizations. She places importance on the “shared values” of the “international community”, which are apparently all about democracy and human rights, “well-governed, law-abiding” states, and -- oh yeah -- also the proper implementation of trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties. Societies free and open to the penetration of American business.

In this line, she calls Iran “a state fundamentally out of step with the norms and values of the international community”. Like so many other objects of this administration’s desire, Iran is given a choice between isolation and integration. But here Rice’s “international community” comes more clearly to show itself as a reinterpretation of the civilizational discourse, a belief that opposition to American hegemony stems from social incompatibility and not reasoned resistance to global American empire. The “international community” of Rice’s imagination, like the “civilizations” of Huntington’s, extends a moral, oppositional emptiness across American empire. There is no opposition to American power, only miscreants who refuse the will of the majority.

In Huntington’s civilizations, it is the presence of incompatible communities that justified American power and gave it the right to force itself upon those who refused to understand its benevolence. In Rice’s “international community”, American power assumes its rule over a global civilization, and validates itself by speaking on their behalf.