Reflections: 60 years of empire
By
Saul Landau Read Spanish Version
Look
at 2008 symbolically! Some 60 years ago, the United States emerged as
the world power. Henry Luce formally announced the arrival of “The
American Century” even before the country entered World War II.
Luce thought the United States should become the world’s
missionary, spreading Christian values and democracy. U.S. history
had woven together a people with noble purpose, Luce argued, and had
“the most exciting flag of all the world and of all history,”
blowing toward the “triumphal purpose of freedom.”
Luce,
owner of the publishing empire (Time,
Life and Fortune),
waxed eloquent, calling on all Americans “each to his own measure
of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create
the first great American Century. (February 1941 Life;
see also Philip S Golub’s October 2007 essay in Le
Monde Diplomatique.) `
It
happened. After World War II, Luce’s dream conditions became
reality. The United States possessed more than 50% of the world’s
manufacturing capacity. The powers of Europe and Asia lay in ruins.
But politicians and media eschewed the word “empire” to describe
the nation that used its dollar as world currency base, set up vast
military alliances (NATO, CENTO and SEATO) and, by the early 1950s,
had established military bases in scores of other countries and begun
to stockpile nuclear weapons.
U.S.
leaders used the Soviet “threat” — the wicked commies would
overrun all other countries — to justify such an extension of might.
As they “checked” Soviet desires of expansion, U.S. corporations
and banks moved quickly into much of the non-Soviet world. (The media
did not make public the fact that Soviet railroad gauges did not
coincide with those in their East European colonies, thus making the
supply of a potential invasion nearly impossible.)
Washington
invented a Marshall Plan and other popular schemes to help rebuild a
thriving capitalism in (and a junior partnership) with Western
Europe. Such behavior did frighten a defensive Soviet Premier Stalin
who, in the immediate post war period, refused support comrades in
Greece and Iran apparently in response to threats by President
Truman.
The
Cold War posited a good West against an evil East. Stalin’s
behavior helped meet that stereotype, but the Soviets never built a
rival economy. Indeed, they possessed no corporations or banks to
loot Eastern Europe. Without them, the Soviets had few means with
which to transfer wealth from their supposed colonies.
No
matter. Facts did not intrude on the political axioms developed by
the Cold Warriors. The United States became the protector of the free
world. Then, around 1990, the Soviets imploded. But the institutions
designed to protect the West from the threat of that wickedness not
only remained but grew. NATO, for example, expanded. Indeed, in 2002,
Washington even sponsored a NATO-Russia council. The number of U.S.
bases abroad grew to some 800.
At
home, politicians’ rhetoric denied the existence of empire as the
very context of U.S. life even as the military consumed giant hunks
of the budget (some $700 billion) at a time when no nation even
remotely threatened U.S. security militarily.
Leading
presidential aspirants and Congressional leaders continue to ignore
this issue lest the public get a glimpse of the empire without a
wardrobe. They enable the naked miscreants of power — Bush, Cheney
and the neo cons — to continue to bleed the treasury through a
capricious war and occupation.
In
the 2008 election over whom shall run the empire, Republicans and
Democrats ignore the lingering toxicity of U.S. defeat in Vietnam.
“Patriotism” still entails chanting slogans (support our troops)
and rejecting the syndrome that followed the Vietnam War — don’t
fight anyone who can fight back. The Republicans still want to revive
the U.S. reputation as a “winner.” (The last time the U.S.
actually won a war — where the enemy fought back — was 1945.)
The
Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation has proven beyond unpopular
with the public. Upper national security bureaucrats have begun to
express their deep unease about the predicament. In 2006, retired
generals, senior intelligence, diplomatic and security officials also
made public attacks on the Bush policy, led by General William Odom
and Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff.
Odom, who headed the NSA under Reagan, called the invasion of Iraq
the “greatest strategic disaster in United States history.”
(Associated Press – Oct. 5 2005)
Wilkerson
labeled it a “blunder of historic proportions.” (Washington
Post – Jan.
19 2006) Former Carter National Security Council boss Zbigniew
Brzezinski described Iraq
as a
“historic, strategic and moral calamity.” (Senate Foreign
Relations Committee – February 1, 2007)
These
establishment
attacks
stress Bush mismanagement, arrogance and incompetence — as well as
his straying from the traditional alliance system — for losing U.S.
hegemony in the Middle East and Gulf. The critics of Bush’s policy
fear that Iraq may have seriously weakened the U.S. military, the
entity that stands as central enforcer of empire. Brzezinski told
Congress that Bush’s Iraq and Afghanistan wars had undermined
“America’s global legitimacy.”
After
the United States left Vietnam with its proverbial tail between its
legs, revolutions won power in Nicaragua and Grenada — traditional
backyard areas. Similarly, the travails of the U.S. military have
gone
hand in glove with left gains in Latin America. Voters in Venezuela,
Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, and even Guatemala and Paraguay
indicated not only their disgust with U.S. economic policies, but
showed their lack of respect for U.S. power as well.
In
1959, only Cuba dared act disobediently; other nations knew the price
of such rebellion: invasion or CIA destabilization. Similarly, Bush’s
2002
“Axis
of Evil” threat did not work on North Korea or Iran. Bush had to
negotiate with a regime he had declared “off limits.” Moreover,
China, which now holds the power of being a major U.S. creditor, has
also emerged as a big time Asian player.
Sixty
years ago Washington made plans to install a primitive defense system
in Western Europe. Bush wants to extend that system to Poland and
other newly “freed” countries. But some of the old allies take
exception. Indeed, ass kissing regimes like Saudi Arabia even dare to
object to some U.S. policies. In the once monopolized sphere of the
UN and other world financial institutions, Washington cannot dictate
terms so easily.
The
world has watched George W. Bush lead the United States from a bright
dream toward an incipient nightmare. Under his rule, the dollar has
dropped in value. His Homeland Security goons have mistreated
potential tourists hoping to use the cheap dollar to get “bargains.”
A young Icelandic woman trying to enter the United States — once
symbolized by the Statue of Liberty — was imprisoned for more than
24 hours, treated inhospitably, and rudely deported. HS claimed she
had overstayed a visa by three days more than a decade earlier.
This
kind of story mixes with reports and images of U.S. behavior in Iraq
— the Abu Ghraib torture photos circulated widely — around the
world. For the U.S. power elite, George W. Bush and his neo con
partners have made the world deeply unsettling.
U.S.
leaders have assumed for sixty years that they had replaced their
British cousins as the world’s elite, that as movers and shakers of
the new dominant power they had a mandate from God or history to
maintain stability, to make the rules for the economy.
My
late professor, William Appleman Williams, lectured about how U.S.
leaders suffered from “visions of omnipotence.” Because they had
overwhelming economic and military power they believed they would
forever prevail. But they did not in Korea in 1953; nor in Vietnam in
1975. In 2008, a daily drain saps the Treasury as U.S. military
forces in Afghanistan and Iraq fail — expensively — to overcome
adverse conditions that no military could hope to achieve.
Soviet
collapse in 1990 led to the rise of the neo cons, demanding that
Washington become the new Rome. By starting with the conquest of
Iraq, they would spread the U.S. order throughout the Middle East. It
has not worked and democracy is not what the United States wants to
bring.
Presidential
aspirants of both Parties ignore this fact. None address the issue of
what role a weakened United States should play in the emerging world
of the 21st
Century when the U.S. economy no longer provides the pillar of
economic stability; when its technologically omnipotent military
failed to defeat less equipped foes. As global warming intensifies
and UN rules, created by the United States for other nations to
follow, have lost prestige, what should Washington do?
Republicans
— save for Libertarian Ron Paul — want more military. They have
become a sick joke. But Hillary? Barack? John? Is it premature to ask
them after only 60 years of the American Century? Or, in lieu of U.S.
political imagination and courage, will the answers come from abroad?
Saul
Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies Fellow.
