The Continuity of U.S. Imperialism

AS I WRITE, COURTS AND COMMENTATORS are debating whether Augusto Pinochet, the head of Chile's bloody dictatorship from 197390, should be turned over for trial on charges of crimes against humanity.

Conservative pundits complain that Pinochet was just doing his job and worry how any tyrant could feel safe if the Chilean strongman is brought to justice. Liberals reply that it is important to establish the principle of no immunity for gross violators of human rights. Some go further and urge the Clinton Administration to provide assistance to any court trying Pinochet. Since the U.S. Government was heavily involved in the 1973 coup which overthrew Salvador Allende, secret files in Washington contain many documents that would be of value in any prosecution of Pinochet.

Few, however, have drawn the logical conclusion. If international courts should place in the docket killers whose own countries cannot or will not bring them to trial, and if the United States helped to depose the legally and democratically elected government of Chile, then there are other criminals at large aside from Pinochet. Richard Nixon is dead, but Henry Kissinger, the key U.S. foreign policy official at the time, is still around, seemingly immune from prosecution. And the list of war crimes that might be charged to Kissinger, of course, goes far beyond Chile: there was the unspeakable horror of Indochina; East Timor (where Kissinger and Ford gave the Indonesian invasion a green light in December 1975); Bangladesh (where U.S. policy "tilted" toward the Pakistani military as it raped and massacred); Iraq (where Kissinger betrayed the Kurds because "covert action should not be confused with missionary work"); and on and on.

To be sure, U.S. military power makes it difficult to actually bring Kissinger and other U.S. war criminals to justice. But what is striking is how such calls for justice are so rarely heard nowadays, even from progressives. The reality of U.S. imperialism seems to have been forgotten or treated as a historical oddity of no relevance to the current post-Cold War world. Many seem to believe that an undemocratic U.S. foreign policy of militarism and interventionism, if it existed at all, was a response to the Soviet Union, and the Soviet collapse has rendered that sort of foreign policy -- and any opposition to it -- obsolete.

In fact, however, the Soviet Union was never the exclusive force behind U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War and the absence of the Soviet empire today has not ended U.S. militarism or interventionism. This does not mean that the end of the Cold War is of no consequence. The U.S.-Soviet nuclear confrontation -- with the potential to incinerate the entire planet -- was a great danger during the Cold War years that thankfully is reduced today. Everyone certainly hopes that the lunacy in Washington and Moscow that nearly triggered a nuclear exchange during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 will never be repeated. But the bitter struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union was never all that was going on during the Cold War years. This can be seen most clearly by examining U.S. foreign policy in the aftermath of the Soviet break up.

DURING THE YEARS OF THE COLD WAR, there were two main theories for explaining U.S. foreign policy. The conventional view held that Washington's huge military budget and its many foreign interventions were driven by the Soviet threat. Liberal versions of this view thought Pentagon spending higher than necessary and some interventions ill-advised, while conservative renditions considered the military spending inadequate and some interventions insufficiently ferocious. But what was common to both versions of the conventional view was the exclusive focus on the Soviet Union as the impetus for U.S. policy.

The radical view, on the other hand, doubted that the Soviet Union alone could account for Washington's international behavior. That the Soviet Union was a horrific dictatorship was not disputed by principled radicals, nor that it ruled over its East European empire with an iron hand. But, from this perspective, these evident evils were not the crucial determinants of U.S. policy. Rather, according to this view, U.S. officials have sought to construct and maintain global arrangements favorable to the interests of the major corporations that dominate the U.S. political system. This means control over crucial resources and access to investment and trade opportunities on terms advantageous to -- if not dictated by -- the United States. The Soviet Union interfered with this "world order" and thus was an enemy of the U.S. government -- a major one, the best armed one -- but not the only one. U.S. policymakers focused on at least two other major adversaries: Third World nationalists and First World competitors. The nationalists of the global South, who hoped to reduce their countries' grinding poverty and subordination had to be subverted, crushed, or contained, and the advanced capitalist countries had to be tied into a system of dependency under U.S. hegemony.

Even during the Cold War there was a great deal of evidence showing that the radical view was closer to reality than the conventional view. For example, U.S. policymakers moved to eject the European powers from the Middle East with its stupendous oil resources long before the Soviet Union was a player in the region. Or, to take another example, rather than trying to weaken the ties between the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Moscow, as might be predicted by the conventional view, U.S. policymakers attempted to do exactly the opposite -- that is, increase Managua's dependence on the Soviet Union -- which makes sense from the radical view if the real enemy is Third World nationalism that must be discredited to justify waging war against it. (And, of course, the same phenomenon took place on the other side: Moscow used the excuse of Western aggression to rationalize its interventions in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan.)

Despite the plentiful evidence showing that the Soviet threat was not the sole determinant of U.S. foreign policy, the fact that the Cold War was characterized both by U.S. hostility to the Soviet Union and U.S. efforts to assert its global preeminence made it difficult to conclusively sort out these separate motives. But now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, we have a natural experiment of sorts, a way to test the separate importance of each of these two factors. If the Soviet threat drove U.S. international behavior, then we would expect that the demise of that threat would lead to a drastic reduction in military spending and an end to military interventions, nuclear weapons development, and foreign military bases. On the other hand, if the Soviet Union was just one source of U.S. policy, then we would expect Pentagon spending to remain high and the interventions and other features of U.S. Cold War foreign policy to continue.

Consider the following:

1. Military spending. As a former Pentagon official in the Reagan administration recently noted, military spending (after correcting for inflation) during Clinton's first term in office was only 12% below the average level from 1976 to 1990 (Lawrence J. Korb, Boston Globe, 21 Jan. 1998). President Clinton and the Congress have just agreed on a new military budget -- felicitously named (with Clinton's endorsement) the "Strom Thurmond National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1999" after one of the Senate's leading militarists -- which increases Pentagon funding in real terms. Russia and the other Soviet successor states together in 1997 spent one tenth of what they spent on the military in 1988. That the disintegration of the Soviet Union -- which in the mid-1980s had 199 army divisions, 52,000 main battle tanks, 6,135 tactical aircraft, 287 principle surface combatants, 380 submarines, and tens of thousands of nuclear warheads -- has had so little effect on the U.S. military budget strongly suggests that Pentagon spending derives from other motives.

One motive has been to subsidize defense industries (the leading military contractor, Lockheed-Martin, has major facilities located in the district of recent House Speaker Newt Gingrich). A second motive has been to subsidize high-tech industries in general. But one further motive -- during the Cold War years and today -- has been to ensure U.S. global hegemony. The key U.S. objective, said a 1992 Pentagon planning document (later revised into more diplomatic language after much criticism), was to prevent the emergence of a new superpower -- only the United States is entitled to this status. "We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role" (NYT, Mar. 8, 1992).

2. Interventions. The U.S. invasion of Panama in December 1989 took place two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Described as a mission to thwart narco- trafficking, Panama has played a larger role in the drug trade following the invasion than it did under Noriega. In January 1991, Washington wet to war against Iraq. The announced purpose was to demonstrate that it was unacceptable for nations to occupy foreign territory -- a noble principle, but one conveniently ignored by Washington in the case of East Timor or occupied Palestine. U.S. officials resisted all efforts to resolve the situation peacefully, determined to demonstrate, in George Bush's words, "that what we say goes" (see Noam Chomsky in Collateral Damage, ed. Cynthia Peters, South End, 1992). At the end of 1992, after the demise of the Soviet Union, Bush sent U.S. troops to Somalia, ostensibly to save people from starvation, but, since the famine was essentially over by the time Bush acted, the real motive was far more likely a public relations operation for the Pentagon, which feared post-Cold War downsizing (see my articles in Z, Feb. 1993, and New Politics, #17). In 1993, the Clinton administration launched missile strikes on Baghdad, claiming self- defense against an earlier unsuccessful Iraqi assassination attempt on Bush -- legally preposterous and, as Seymour Hersh showed (New Yorker, Nov. 1, 1993) based on dubious evidence. In 1994, U.S. troops landed in Haiti, restoring President Jean- Bertrand Aristide to office. U.S. benevolence, however, was rather suspect, given Washington's connivance with those who had overthrown Aristide and Washington's refusal to institute effective sanctions against the junta. And just this past August, Clinton rained cruise missiles on targets in Afghanistan and Sudan, allegedly in response to bombings at U.S. embassies in Africa, though the evidence connecting the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant to the terrorism dissolved on the merest inspection (see Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, Oct. 12, 1998).

In 1994, a study for the Congressional Research Service worried that the United States was a victim of "self-deterrence" -- refusing to engage in an adequate number of military interventions. Unfortunately, there is no need for worry. Washington seems to have few hangups in this regard.

3. Nuclear Weapons. Given the huge nuclear arsenal deployed by the former Soviet Union, if the Soviet threat were the exclusive source of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War then Moscow's implosion should have had its most dramatic impact on U.S. nuclear posture. But despite the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which commits the United States and other nuclear-weapon states to move toward full nuclear disarmament, and despite the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, designed to freeze nuclear weapons technology, Washington has been working on the modernization of its nuclear arsenal, violating the spirit if not the letter of these agreements.

U.S. nuclear doctrine has been no better. In 1995, Clinton told Third World nations that the U.S. would not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear-armed state that was not allied with a nuclear-weapon power (reaffirming a 1978 pledge by President Carter in order to encourage countries to indefinitely extend the NPT). But, as Hans Kristensen has reported in a study for the British American Security Information Council, within months of Clinton's statement Pentagon planners were advocating the use of nuclear weapons against states using chemical, biological, or radiological weapons. Three years earlier, Pentagon officials noted that nuclear hardware and software had generally been configured for the Northern Hemisphere only, limiting U.S. capability south of the equator. The officials called for the development of a "global capability" by the late 1990s. Nor were these just abstract plans. In 1996, the Assistant Secretary of Defense noted that conventional weapons could not take out Libya's alleged chemical plant at Tarhunah and that the B6-111 -- a new generation nuclear warhead -- "would be the nuclear weapon of choice." Public concern about preemptive nuclear strikes caused the Pentagon to back off, but Washington carefully would not rule out use of nuclear weapons in response to a chemical or biological attack.

Does this mean that the use of U.S. nuclear weapons is imminent? That depends on what one means by "use." When we speak of someone robbing a bank "using a gun", we man not only robbers who fire their weapons, but those who threaten to fire as well. Likewise, as Daniel Ellsberg has noted, nuclear weapons have been used in this sense many times during the Cold War -- that is, to intimidate or threaten. And this ability to bully others is something the U.S. government clearly wants to retain. Indeed, Pentagon planners recommended (in a 1995 document released to Kristensen under the Freedom of Information Act) that the United States avoid appearing too rational or coolheaded. "That the U.S. may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be part of the national persona we project."

4. Foreign Military Bases. If nuclear weapons are to remain part of the U.S. arsenal and if military interventions are still to be relied on, then Washington will continue to need foreign military bases. And sure enough, U.S. officials have continued their persistent effort to secure military access wherever they can. Thus, though the U.S. Navy was thrown out of Subic by a nationalist Philippine Senate in 1991, the Pentagon has been working with compliant Philippine officials to find some backdoor way to obtain some form of basing rights. In Japan, despite the overwhelming opposition of the people of Okinawa, the Pentagon and Tokyo politicians are intent on maintaining U.S. military facilities. And military access agreements have been concluded with Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand.

Such U.S. bases serve two principle purposes. First, they allow Washington to intervene, to threaten intervention, or simply to act provocatively wherever it chooses. Of course we are told that these bases help to maintain regional stability. But consider, for example, the case of North Korea. Washington reached an agreement to provide the North Koreans with civilian nuclear power technology and oil in return for assurances that Pyongyang would end its nuclear weapons program. Emboldened by its regional military bases and its stepped up military exercises in South Korea, the United States has simply refused to keep its side of the deal. When North Korea responded to U.S. bad faith with reckless cruise missile tests, U.S. saber-rattling escalated. And, tellingly, Secretary of Defense William Cohen has declared that there will be a U.S. presence on the Korean peninsula even when there is a unified Korea (remarks to World Affairs Council, Los Angeles, June 29, 1998).

A second purpose of foreign bases is to ensure the dependence of Washington's major allies. Ostensibly defensive alliances, such as NATO and the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, have been intended to keep potential rivals in a state of military -- and thus political and ultimately economic -- dependency. The United States has been trying to get its allies to pick up an increasingly larger share of the costs of the U.S. bases, but Washington has resolutely blocked any effort for independent action on the part of its partners. Thus, Washington has refused to turn over any part of NATO's southern command to a European, and rejected any peacetime European planning within NATO. Military action by the allies in support of U.S. interests is welcome -- in fact, the U.S. has continually pressed Japan to ignore its constitutional prohibition on war -- whether in the Middle East or in defense of Pacific sealanes. Independent action, however, is unacceptable.

5. Unilateralism. Throughout the Cold War, unilateralism was the hallmark of U.S. foreign policy. U.S. officials argued that the Soviet right of veto in the Security Council made multilateral action unrealistic. But while it is true that Moscow cast its veto with great frequency in the first decades of the United Nations, in the later years of the Cold War it was Washington that far and away made greatest use of the veto. From 198186, the United States vetoed 36 draft resolutions to the Soviet Union's two. In any event, with the collapse of the Soviet Union the conventional view of U.S. foreign policy might lead us to expect the U.S. government to have dispensed with unilateralism. This has hardly been the case.

Twice this year, the United States nearly went to war against Iraq, insisting that it alone had the right and authority to decide whether Baghdad was in compliance with Security Council resolutions. The United States attacked Sudan and Afghanistan without any recourse to the United Nations or even to its allies. Washington continues its boycott on Cuba despite a disapproving 1572 General Assembly vote. It rejected an International Criminal Court, joining Libya, Iraq, Israel, and three other states in voting no while 120 voted "yes." It is one of the few nations to refuse to sign the ban on land mines. It alone opposes an international ban on children under 18 serving in combat. Secretary of State Albright well summarized the U.S. view: the United States will act "multilaterally when we can, unilaterally when we must in an area important for our interests" -- which is to say, the U.S. will act in violation of its solemn treaty obligations, including the UN Charter which prohibits the use or threat of force except in self- defence from an armed attack.

THE EVIDENCE, THEN, SHOWS CONVINCINGLY that U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War cannot be explained simply in terms of the Soviet Union. Rather, the U.S. goal was always U.S. economic, political, and military hegemony: over the Third World and First World, as well as over the Second World. In short, the problem was U.S. imperialism.

This is not, however, simply an historical observation. U.S. imperialism is still thriving. Understanding the continuities of U.S. foreign policy helps us to define where we should put our current efforts. During the Cold War, those concerned with peace and social justice had a clear agenda: oppose the arms buildup by the superpowers and their allies, oppose big-power foreign military interventions, oppose foreign military bases, oppose unilateralism, and oppose the economic domination of the South by the North. That same agenda is just as relevant today.

The U.S. claimed it acted to degrade Iraq's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, which Iraq, unlike other countries, had actually used. But when Saddam Hussein had employed chemical weapons against Iran and his own Kurdish population, he was backed by Washington which also supplied him with biological agents from labs in the United States. And to rain cruise missiles on a country for having the temerity to build ballistic missiles smacks of no little hypocrisy. To be sure, Saddam's primitive missiles were far more inaccurate than the U.S. high-tech variety which are, nonetheless short on precision (one struck neighboring Iran). But the most grotesque collateral damage comes not from explosives missing their presumed targets but from the economic sanctions on Iraq at U.S. insistence which have had negligible impact on Saddam but have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, mostly children.

Contrary to the impression given in the press, UN weapons' inspectors actually reported that Iraq's nuclear and missile programs have been largely dismantled, and even on the question of biological weapons there has been a degree of cooperation. In any case, the U.S. strikes did not significantly degrade Iraq's weapons' potential but they did play into Saddam's hands politically, not least being his ability to end all inspections. Predictably, Saddam's brutal dictatorship has not been undermined or even weakened; arguably, he is in an even stronger position as a consequence of the four-day assault. Those concerned with the production of devastating weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and throughout the Middle East should be pushing to implement the UN resolutions calling for regional disarmament -- including Israeli nuclear weapons and Saudi missiles. Of course, such a rational agenda receives no backing in Washington which will, instead, tighten the sanctions (that is, kill more Iraqi civilians) and increase the number of U.S. troops based in the Gulf.

Some attribute the U.S. attacks to Clinton's impeachment troubles. But the near unanimity among policymakers, and the vociferous criticisms of Clinton in mid-November for not striking then, suggest that the operative motive was not impeachment, but that other "I" word: Imperialism.

Contents of No. 26