Blowback:
The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
by Chalmers Johnson
Henry Holt, 2000
Northern Italian communities had, for years, complained
about low-flying American military aircraft. In February
1998, the inevitable happened. A Marine Corps EA-6B
Prowler with a crew of four, one of scores of advanced
American jet fighters and bombers stationed at places
like Aviano, Cervia, Brindisi, and Sigonella, sliced
through a ski-lift cable near the resort town of Cavalese
and plunged twenty people riding in a single gondola
to their deaths on the snowy slopes several hundred
feet below. Although marine pilots are required to
maintain altitude of at least one thousand feet (two
thousand, according to the Italian government), the
plane had cut the cable at a height of 360 feet. It
was traveling at 621 miles per hour when 517 miles
per hour was considered the upper limit. The pilot
had been performing low-level acrobatics while his
copilot took pictures on videotape (which he later
destroyed).
In response to outrage in Italy and calls for vigorous
prosecution of those responsible, the marine pilots
argued that their charts were inaccurate, that their
altimeter had not worked, and that they had not consulted
U.S. Air Force units permanently based in the area
about local hazards. A court-martial held not in Italy
but in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, exonerated everyone
involved, calling it a "training accident."
Soon after, President Bill Clinton apologized and
promised financial compensation to the victims, but
on May 14, 1999, Congress dropped the provision for
aid to the families because of opposition in the House
of Representatives and from the Pentagon.
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This
was hardly the only such incident in which American
service personnel victimized foreign civilians in
the post-Cold War world. From Germany and Turkey to
Okinawa and South Korea, similar incidents have been
common-as has been their usual denouement. The United
States government never holds politicians or higher-ranking
military officers responsible and seldom finds that
more should be done beyond offering pro forma apologies
and perhaps financial compensation of some, often
minimal sort.
On rare occasions, as with the Italian cable cutting,
when such a local tragedy rises to the level of global
news, what often seems strangest to Americans is the
level of national outrage elsewhere over what the
U.S. media portray as, at worst, an apparently isolated
incident, however tragic to those involved. Certainly,
the one subject beyond discussion at such moments
is the fact that, a decade after the end of the Cold
War, hundreds of thousands of American troops, supplied
with the world's most advanced weaponry, sometimes
including nuclear arms, are stationed on over sixty-one
base complexes in nineteen countries worldwide, using
the Department of Defense's narrowest definition of
a "major installation"; if one included
every kind of installation that houses representatives
of the American military, the number would rise to
over eight hundred. There are, of course, no Italian
air bases on American soil. Such a thought would be
ridiculous. Nor, for that matter, are there German,
Indonesian, Russian, Greek, or Japanese troops stationed
on Italian soil. Italy is, moreover, a close ally
of the United States, and no conceivable enemy nation
endangers its shores.
All this is almost too obvious to state-and so is
almost never said. It is simply not a matter for discussion,
much less of debate in the land of the last imperial
power. Perhaps similar thinking is second nature to
any imperium. Perhaps the Romans did not find it strange
to have their troops in Gaul, nor the British in South
Africa. But what is unspoken is no less real, nor
does it lack consequences just because it is not part
of any ongoing domestic discussion.
... it is past time for such a discussion to begin,
for Americans to consider why we have created an empire-a
word from which we shy away-and what the consequences
of our imperial stance may be for the rest of the
world and for ourselves. Not so long ago, the way
we garrisoned the world could be discussed far more
openly and comfortably because the explanation seemed
to lie at hand-in the very existence of the Soviet
Union and of communism. Had the Italian disaster occurred
two decades earlier, it would have seemed no less
a tragedy, but many Americans would have argued that,
given the Cold War, such incidents were an unavoidable
cost of protecting democracies like Italy against
the menace of Soviet totalitarianism. With the disappearance
of any military threat faintly comparable to that
posed by the former Soviet Union, such "costs"
have become easily avoidable. American military forces
could have been withdrawn from Italy, as well as from
other foreign bases, long ago. That they were not
and that Washington instead is doing everything in
its considerable powers to perpetuate Cold War structures,
even without the Cold War's justification, places
such overseas deployments in a new light. They have
become striking evidence, for those who care to look,
of an imperial project that the Cold War obscured.
The byproducts of this project are likely to build
up reservoirs of resentment against all Americans-tourists,
students, and businessmen, as well as members of the
armed forces-that can have lethal results.
For any empire, including an unacknowledged one, there
is a kind of balance sheet that builds up over time.
Military crimes, accidents, and atrocities make up
only one category on the debit side of the balance
sheet that the United States has been accumulating,
especially since the Cold War ended.
What we have freed ourselves of, however, is any
genuine consciousness of how we might look to others
on this globe. Most Americans are probably unaware
of how Washington exercises its global hegemony, since
so much of this activity takes place either in relative
secrecy or under comforting rubrics. Many may, as
a start, find it hard to believe that our place in
the world even adds up to an empire. But only when
we come to see our country as both profiting from
and trapped within the structures of an empire of
its own making will it be possible for us to explain
many elements of the world that otherwise perplex
us.
The term "blowback," which officials of
the Central Intelligence Agency first invented for
their own internal use, is starting to circulate among
students of international relations. It refers to
the unintended consequences of policies that were
kept secret from the American people. What the daily
press reports as the malign acts of "terrorists"
or "drug lords" or "rogue states"
or "illegal arms merchants" often turn out
to be blowback from earlier American operations.
One man's terrorist is, of course, another man's
freedom fighter, and what U.S. officials denounce
as unprovoked terrorist attacks on its innocent citizens
are often meant as retaliation for previous American
imperial actions. Terrorists attack innocent and undefended
American targets precisely because American soldiers
and sailors firing cruise missiles from ships at sea
or sitting in B-52 bombers at extremely high altitudes
or supporting brutal and repressive regimes from Washington
seem invulnerable. As members of the Defense Science
Board wrote in a 1997 report to the undersecretary
of defense for acquisition and technology, "Historical
data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement
in international situations and an increase in terrorist
attacks against the United States. In addition, the
military asymmetry that denies nation states the ability
to engage in overt attacks against the United States
drives the use of transnational actors [that is, terrorists
from one country attacking in another]."
The most direct and obvious form of blowback often
occurs when the victims fight back after a secret
American bombing, or a U.S.-sponsored campaign of
state terrorism, or a ClA-engineered overthrow of
a foreign political leader. All around the world today,
it is possible to see the groundwork being laid for
future forms of blowback. For example, is estimated
that from the Gulf War of 1991 through 1998, the U.S.
In pursuing the war in Vietnam in the early 1970s,
President Richard Nixon and his national security
adviser Henry Kissinger ordered more bombs dropped
on rural Cambodia than had been dropped on Japan during
all of World War 11, killing at least three-quarters
of a million Cambodian peasants and helping legitimize
the murderous Khmer Rouge movement under Pol Pot.
In his subsequent pursuit of revenge and ideological
purity Pol Pot ensured that another million and a
half Cambodians, this time mainly urban dwellers,
were murdered.
Americans generally think of Pol Pot as some kind
of unique, self-generated monster and his "killing
fields" as an inexplicable atavism totally divorced
from civilization. But without the United States government's
Vietnam-era savagery, he could never have come to
power in a culture like Cambodia's, just as Mao's
uneducated peasant radicals would never have gained
legitimacy in a normal Chinese context without the
disruption and depravity of the Japanese war. Significantly,
in its calls for an international tribunal to try
the remaining leaders of the Khmer Rouge for war crimes,
the United States has demanded that such a court restrict
its efforts to the period from 1975 to 1979-that is,
after the years of carpet bombing were over and before
the U.S. government began to collaborate with the
Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese Communists, who
invaded Cambodia in 1978, drove the Khmer Rouge from
power, and were trying to bring some stability to
the country.
Even an empire cannot control the long-term effects
of its policies. That is the essence of blowback.
Take the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in
which Soviet forces directly intervened on the government
side and the CIA armed and supported any and all groups
willing to face the Soviet armies. Over the years
the fighting turned Kabul, once a major center of
Islamic culture, into a facsimile of Hiroshima after
the bomb. American policies helped ensure that the
Soviet Union would suffer the same kind of debilitating
defeat in Afghanistan as the United States had in
Vietnam. In fact, the defeat so destabilized the Soviet
regime that at the end of the 1980s it collapsed.
But in Afghanistan the United States also helped bring
to power the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic movement
whose policies toward women, education, justice, and
economic well-being resemble not so much those of
Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran as those of Pol Pot's Cambodia.
A group of these mujahedeen, who only a few years
earlier the United States had armed with ground-to-air
Stinger missiles, grew bitter over American acts and
policies in the Gulf War and vis-a-vis Israel. In
1993, they bombed the World Trade Center in New York
and assassinated several CIA employees as they waited
at a traffic light in Langley, Virginia. Four years
later, on November 12, 1997, after the Virginia killer
had been convicted by an American court, unknown assailants
shot and killed four American accountants, unrelated
in any way to the CIA, in their car in Karachi, Pakistan,
in retaliation.
It is likely that U.S. covert policies have helped
create similar conditions in the Congo, Guatemala,
and Turkey, and that we are simply waiting for the
blowback to occur. Guatemala is a particularly striking
example of American imperial policies in its own "backyard."
In 1954, the Eisenhower administration planned and
the CIA organized and
funded a military coup that overthrew a Guatemalan
president whose modest land reform policies were considered
a threat to American corporations. Blowback from this
led to a Marxist guerrilla insurgency in the 1980s
and so to CIA- and Pentagon-supported genocide against
Mayan peasants. In the spring of 1999, a report on
the Guatemalan civil war from the U.N.-sponsored Commission
for Historical Clarification made clear that "the
American training of the officer corps in counterinsurgency
techniques" was a "key factor" in the
"genocide.... Entire Mayan villages were attacked
and burned and their inhabitants were slaughtered
in an effort to deny the guerrillas protection. According
to the commission, between 1981 and 1983 the military
government of Guatemala-financed and supported by
the U.S. government-destroyed some four hundred Mayan
villages in a campaign of genocide in which approximately
two hundred thousand peasants were killed. Jose Pertierra,
an attorney representing Jennifer Harbury, an American
lawyer who spent years trying to find out what happened
to her "disappeared" Guatemalan husband
and supporter of the guerrillas, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez,
writes that the Guatemalan military officer who arrested,
tortured, and murdered Bamaca was a CIA "asset"
and was paid $44,000 for the information he obtained
from him.
Visiting Guatemala in March 1999, soon after the report's
release, President Clinton said, "It is important
that I state clearly that support for military forces
and intelligence units which engaged in violence and
widespread repression was wrong, and the United States
must not repeat that mistake.... The United States
will no longer take part in campaigns of repression."
But on virtually the day that the president was swearing
off "dirty tricks" in other people's countries,
his government was reasserting its support for Turkey
in its war of repression against its Kurdish minority.
The Kurds constitute fifteen million people in a Turkish
population estimated at fifty-eight million. Another
five million Kurds live largely within reach of Turkey's
borders in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The Turks have discriminated
against the Kurds for the past seventy years and have
conducted an intense genocidal campaign against them
since 1992, in the process destroying some three thousand
Kurdish villages and hamlets in the backward southeastern
part of the country. Former American ambassador to
Croatia Peter W. Galbraith comments that "Turkey
routinely jails Kurdish politicians for activities
that would be protected speech in democratic countries."
The Europeans have so far barred Turkey from the European
Union because of its treatment of the Kurds. Because
of its strategic location on the border of the former
Soviet Union, however, Turkey was a valued American
ally and NATO member during the Cold War, and the
United States maintains the relationship unchanged
even though the USSR has disappeared.
After Israel and Egypt, Turkey is the third-highest
recipient of American military assistance. Between
1991 and 1995, the United States supplied four-fifths
of Turkey's military imports, which were among the
largest in the world. The U.S. government, in turn,
depends on the NATO base at Incirlik, Turkey, to carry
out Operation Provide Comfort, set up after the Gulf
War to supply and protect Iraqi Kurds from repression
by Saddam Hussein-at the same time that the United
States acquiesces in Turkish mistreatment of its far
larger Kurdish population. One obvious reason is that
communities like Stratford and Bridgeport, Connecticut,
where Black Hawk and Comanche helicopters are made,
depend for their economic health on continued large-scale
arms sales to countries like Turkey. At the time of
the Gulf War, a senior adviser to the Turkish prime
minister said to John Shattuck, assistant secretary
of state for human rights, "If you want to stop
human rights abuses do two things-stop IMF credits
and cut off aid from the Pentagon. But don't sell
the weapons and give aid and then complain about the
Kurdish issue. Don't tell us about human rights while
you're selling these weapons."
The capture in February 1999 of the Kurdish guerrilla
leader Abdullah Ocalan exposed the nature of American
involvement with Turkey, in this case via a CIA gambit
that holds promise as a rich source of future blowback.
The CIA term for this policy is "disruption,"
by which it means the harassment of terrorists around
the world. The point is to flush them out of hiding
so that cooperative police forces or secret services
can then arrest and imprison them. According to John
Diamond of the Associated Press, "The CIA keeps
its role secret, and the foreign countries that actually
crack down on the suspects carefully hide the U.S.
role, lest they stir up trouble for themselves."
There are no safeguards at all against misidentifying
"suspects," and "the CIA sends no formal
notice to Congress." Disruption is said to be
a preemptive, offensive form of counterterrorism.
Richard Clarke, President Clinton's antiterrorism
czar, likes it because he can avoid "the cumbersome
Congressional reporting requirements that go with
ClA-directed covert operations" and because "human
rights organizations would have no way of identifying
a CIA role." The CIA has carried out disruption
operations in at least ten countries since September
1998. In the case of Ocalan's capture, the United
States "provided Turkey with critical information
about Ocalan's whereabouts." This was the first
time some of the details of a "disruption"
campaign were made public.
Because we live in an increasingly interconnected
international system, we are all, in a sense, living
in a blowback world. Although the term originally
applied only to the unintended consequences for Americans
of American policies, there is every reason to widen
its meaning. Whether, for example, any unintended
consequences of the American policies that fostered
and then heightened the economic collapse of Indonesia
in 1997 ever blow back to the United States, the unintended
consequences for Indonesians have been staggering
levels of suffering, poverty, and loss of hope. Similarly,
the unintended consequences of American-supported
coups and bombing in Cambodia in the early 1970s were
unimaginable chaos, disruption, and death for Cambodians
later in the decade.
Our role in the military coup in Chile in 1973, for
example, produced little blowback onto the United
States itself but had lethal consequences for liberals,
socialists, and innocent bystanders in Chile and elsewhere.
On the nature of American policies in Chile, journalist
Jon Lee Anderson reports, "The plan, according
to declassified United States government documents,
was to make Chile ungovernable under [elected socialist
president Salvador] Allende, provoke social chaos,
and bring about a military coup.... A CIA cable outlined
the objectives clearly to the station chief in Santiago:
'It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be
overthrown by a coup.... We are to continue to generate
maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate
resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented
clandestinely and securely so that United States Government
and American hand be well hidden."
No ordinary citizen of the United States knew anything
about these machinations. The coup d'etat took place
on September 11, 1973, resulting in the suicide of
Allende and the seizure of power by General Augusto
Pinochet, whose military and civilian supporters in
their seventeen years in power tortured, killed, or
"disappeared" some four thousand people.
Pinochet was an active collaborator in Operation Condor,
a joint mission with the Argentine militarists to
murder exiled dissidents in the United States, Spain,
Italy, and elsewhere. This is why, when Pinochet traveled
to England in the autumn of 1998 for medical treatment,
Spain tried to extradite him to stand trial for genocide,
torture, and state terrorism against Spanish citizens.
On October 16, 1998, the British police arrested Pinochet
in London and held him pending his possible extradition.
Although few Americans were affected by this covert
operation, people around the world now know of the
American involvement and were deeply cynical when
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright opposed Pinochet's
extradition, claiming that countries like Chile undertaking
a "transition to democracy" must be allowed
to guarantee immunity from prosecution to past human
rights offenders in order to "move forward."
America's "dirty hands" make even the most
well-intentioned statement ~ about human rights or
terrorism seem hypocritical in such circumstances.
Even when blowback mostly strikes other peoples, it
has its corrosive effects on the United States by
debasing political discourse and making citizens feel
duped if they should happen to take seriously what
their political leaders say. This is an inevitable
consequence not just of blowback but of empire itself.
What, then, of the very idea of an American empire
or, for that matter, American imperialism? "Hegemony,"
"empire," and "imperialism" have
often been used as epithets or fighting words. They
lie at the heart of Marx's and, especially, Lenin's
condemnation of capitalism. During the Cold War, Communists
asserted that imperialism was one of the "contradictions"
of capitalism and hence a root cause of class struggle,
revolution, and war. However, the terms also evoke
images of the Roman and British empires, as well as
of the Pax Romana and the Pax Britannica that were
said to have accompanied them. Imperialism is further
associated with the racism and exploitation that accompanied
European, American, and Japanese colonialism in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries and with the violent
reactions to it that dominated the non-Western world
in the wake of the Second World War.
In 1917, the Soviet Union inherited an older czarist
empire in Europe and central Asia, a multinational
union of peoples based on conquest and a particular
civilization ... [the] seven "people's democracies"
in Eastern Europe that formed the heart of the Communist
camp until its collapse in 1989: East Germany, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Albania, and Bulgaria.
Its American equivalent was not NATO ... but the system
of satellites the United States created in East Asia.
These included at one time regimes in Japan, South
Korea, Thailand, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the
. ~ Philippines, and Taiwan.
Over time, and with the development of a nuclear arms
race between the United States and the USSR, the two
empires based on satellite regimes created after World
War 11 expanded into much more extensive alignments
based on ideology, economic interactions, technology
transfers, mutual benefit, and military cooperation.
For the Soviet Union this was the world that for a
brief moment during the 1950s stretched from Moscow
to Hanoi in the east and to Havana in the west and
that even included, at least formally, China. For
the United States it came to include most of the rest
of the world-places where the United States assumed
responsibility for maintaining some ill-defined "favorable"
military environment (what the Pentagon now likes
to call "stability") and where we insisted
on free access for our multinational corporations
and financiers (what our economists now call "globalization").
Unlike in Europe, the main Cold War conflicts in
East and Southeast Asia were not between democracy
and totalitarianism but between European colonialism
and national independence movements. The reluctance
of the main European powers to give up their colonies
led to wars of national liberation in Indochina against
the French, in Malaya against the British, and in
Indonesia against the Dutch, in all of which the United
States supported the side of imperialism. The Dutch
were finally driven from Indonesia; the British, after
a decade-long war, finally acquiesced in Malaya's
independence, followed by its becoming two independent
countries, Malaysia and Singapore. After the French
were defeated militarily in Vietnam, the United States
fought an incredibly bloody and prolonged conflict
before it, too, was forced to abandon its imperial
role there. The United States also supported a long
counterinsurgency struggle in the Philippines against
a guerrilla movement that considered the post-independence
Filipino government a creature of the Americans. Only
after our defeat in Vietnam did we begin to adjust
to the idea that East Asia was different from Europe...
South Korea has been occupied by American forces virtually
continuously since the end of World War II. It was
the scene of the most important armed conflict of
the early Cold War years, the place where the United
States and China fought each other to a standstill
and froze relations with each other for two decades.
Thanks to the United States and the Soviet Union,
which in 1945 divided the country for their own convenience,
a half century later Korea remains the last place
on earth whose borders are determined by where the
armies of World War 11 stopped. South Korea's rise
during the 1960s as a "miracle economy"
and its spectacular financial collapse of 1997 were
directly related to its status as a satellite of the
United States.
South Korea was the first place in the postwar world
where the Americans set up a dictatorial government.
With the exception of its authoritarian president,
Syngman Rhee, it consisted largely of former Korean
collaborators with the Japanese colonialists. Despite
opposition from the Korean people, America's need
for a staunchly anti-Communist regime took precedence,
given the occupation of North Korea by the USSR. In
1960, after Koreans searching for democracy overthrew
Rhee, the U.S. government threw its support behind
Park Chung-hee, the first of three army generals who
would rule from 1961 to 1993. The Americans tolerated
a coup d'etat by General Chun Doo-hwan in 1979 and
covertly supported his orders that led to the killing
of several hundred, maybe several thousand, Korean
civilians at Kwangju in 1980 (probably far more people
than the Chinese Communists killed in and around Tlananmen
Square in 1989). In order to keep South Korea firmly
under its control, during the 1980s the Americans
sent as successive ambassadors two senior officials
of the Central Intelligence Agency, James Lilly and
Donald Gregg. Nowhere else did the United States so
openly turn over diplomatic relations to representatives
of its main clandestine services organization.
South Korea is today probably closer to a genuine
parliamentary democracy than any country in East Asia,
but no thanks to the American State Department, the
Pentagon, or the CIA. It was the Korean people themselves,
particularly the students of the country's leading
universities, who through demonstrations and street
confrontations in 1987 finally brought a measure of
democracy to their country. After the democratically
elected government of Kim Young-sam took office in
1993, President Kim felt sufficiently secure to put
the two surviving dictators, Chun and Roh Tae Woo,
on trial. They were convicted of state terrorism,
sedition, and corruption. The American press gave
the trials only the most minimal coverage, while the
U.S. government ignored them as a purely internal
Korean affair.
The rule of Syngman Rhee and the U.S.-backed generals
was merely the first instance in East Asia of the
American sponsorship of dictators. The list is long,
but it deserves reiteration simply because many in
the United States fail to remember (if they ever knew)
what East Asians cannot help but regard as a major
part of our postwar legacy. U.S.-sponsored Asian dictators
include:
* Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo in
Taiwan. (Taiwan started to democratize only in the
1980s after the Carter administration had broken relations
with it.)
* Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines (brought down
by Corazon Aquino and her People Power movement after
Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush had hailed
him as a democrat).
* Ngo Dinh Diem (assassinated on American orders),
General Nguyen Khanh, General Nguyen Cao Ky, and General
Nguyen Van Thieu in Vietnam.
* General Lon Nol in Cambodia.
* Marshals Pibul Songgram, Sarit Thanarat, Praphas
Charusathien, and Thanom Kittikachom in Thailand (where
they were essentially caretakers for the huge American
air bases at Udom, Takli, Korat, and Ubon).
* General Suharto in Indonesia (brought to power with
the help of the Central Intelligence Agency and overthrown
with the help of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence
Agency).
Several others had careers too brief or obscure to
remember clearly (for example, General Phoumi Nosavan
in Laos). These men belong to the same category of
petty tyrants that the former Soviet Union used to
staff its satellites in Eastern Europe from 1948 to
l989 ...
During the 1980s, the last decade of the Cold War,
the parallelism between the policies of the United
States and the USSR continued but with a new geographical
focus. Both sought to shore up or establish puppet
regimes in territories that were on their borders
or in adjacent regions that had long been claimed
as spheres of influence. The USSR was preoccupied
with Afghanistan; the United States, with Central
America. Both superpowers utilized the rhetoric of
the Cold War to justify their aggressive actions against
much smaller states-anti-capitalism for the USSR in
Afghanistan, anticommunism for the United States in
Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, and the
island of Grenada- even though capitalism in Afghanistan
and communism in Central America were both essentially
absurd ideas. Propaganda apparatuses in the United
States and the USSR effectively disguised from their
own peoples the true roots of revolt in both regions-a
religious revival in Afghanistan, opposition to oligarchies
that had long fronted for American corporations in
Central America.
President Reagan and his CIA director, William Casey,
claimed they were trying to halt the erosion of the
"free world" in the wake of the Vietnam
War. Whether this was truly their strategy or merely
political rhetoric has never been clear, but what
could not be clearer was that, in 1981, the United
States launched Vietnam-style operations in Central
America and put large sums of money, often covertly
raised, into supporting an insurgency against a Sandinista
government in Nicaragua sympathetic to Castro's Cuba.
At the same time, superpower detente, arms control
talks, and Sino-American rapprochement virtually eliminated
any real threat of war between hostile camps in Europe
or East Asia. While the American demonization of Castro's
Cuba ratcheted upward and the government argued vociferously
that Cuban-inspired insurgencies were the hemisphere's
greatest threat, the Cold War was already essentially
over. The superpowers continued it only as propaganda
cover for their respective neighborhood imperialisms.
Thirty years ago the international relations theorist
Ronald Steel noted, "Unlike Rome, we have not
exploited our empire. On the contrary, our empire
has exploited us, making enormous drains on our resources
and energies." Our economic relations with our
East Asian satellites have, for example, hollowed
out our domestic manufacturing industries and led
us into a reliance on finance capitalism, whose appearance
has in the past been a sign of a hitherto healthy
economy entering decline. An analogous situation literally
wrecked the former USSR. While fighting a losing war
in Afghanistan and competing with the United States
to develop ever more advanced "strategic weaponry,"
it could no longer withstand pent-up desires in Eastern
Europe for independence.
The historian Paul Kennedy has dubbed this condition
"imperial overstretch." In an analysis of
the United States in his book The Rise and Fall of
the Great Powers, he wrote that it too cannot avoid
confronting the two great tests which challenge the
longevity of every major power that occupies the "number
one" position in world affairs: whether, in the
military/strategic realm, it can preserve a reasonable
balance between the nation's perceived defense requirements
and the means it possesses to maintain these commitments;
and whether, as an intimately related point, it can
preserve the technological and economic bases of its
power from relative erosion in the face of the ever-shifting
patterns of global production. This test of American
abilities will be the greater because it, like Imperial
Spain around 1600 or the British Empire around 1900,
is the inheritor of a vast array of strategical commitments
which had been made decades earlier, when the nation's
political, economic, and military capacity to influence
world affairs seemed so much more assured.
The American political and intellectual establishments
remain mystified by and hostile to the economic achievements
of Asians, just as the Soviet establishment remained
mystified by and hostile to the economic achievements
of Anglo-American and Western European capitalism.
It is time to realize, however, that the real dangers
to America today come ... [from] ... our own ideological
rigidity, our deep-seated belief in our own propaganda.
As sociologists Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver
warn, "There are no credible aggressive new powers
that can provoke the breakdown of the U.S.-centered
world system, but the United States has even greater
capabilities than Britain did a century ago to convert
its declining hegemony into an exploitative domination.
If the system eventually breaks down, it will be primarily
because of U.S. resistance to adjustment and accommodation.
And conversely, U.S. adjustment and accommodation
to the rising economic power of the East Asian region
is an essential condition for a non-catastrophic transition
to a new world order."
The United States today desperately needs a new analysis
of its role in a post-Cold War world and of the sorts
of policies that might prevent another major war,
like its last three, in East Asia. Some of the significant
changes to come in East Asia are already visible:
China's increasing attempt to emulate high-growth
economies elsewhere in Asia; the reunification of
Korea; Japan's need to overcome its political paralysis;
America's confusion over how to adjust to a self-confident
China and to a more independent Japan; the growing
importance of Southeast Asia as a new economic center
of gravity. American policy making needs to be taken
away from military planners and military-minded civilians,
including those in the White House, who today dominate
Washington policy making toward the area. American
ambassadors and diplomats in Asia should have at least
an elementary knowledge of East Asian history, languages,
and aspirations. The United States desperately needs
options for dealing with crises other than relying
on the carrier task force, cruise missiles, and the
unfettered flow of capital, just as it needs to overcome
the complacency and arrogance that characterize American
official attitudes toward Asia today.
Terrorism(by definition)strikes at the innocent in
order to draw attention to the sins of the invulnerable.
The innocent of the twenty-first century are going
to harvest unexpected blowback disasters from the
imperialist escapades of recent decades. Although
most Americans may be largely ignorant of what was,
and still is, being done in their names, all are likely
to pay a steep price-individually and collectively-for
their nation's continued efforts to dominate the global
scene. Before the damage of heedless triumphalist
acts and the triumphalist rhetoric and propaganda
that goes with them becomes irreversible, it is important
to open a new discussion of our global role during
and after the Cold War..
