Chalmers Johnson - The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

The foreign military bases of both superpowers became the characteristic institutions of a new form of imperialism. Both countries enthusiastically adopted the idea that they were in mortal danger from each other, even though they had been allies during World War II. The Cold War, and particularly the standoff in Central Europe, had conveniently defined the purpose of the approximately 1,700 U.S. military installations in about one hundred countries that existed during that period. 22The forces on these bases were all engaged in a grand project to “contain Soviet expansionism,” just as the Soviet Union’s forces were said to be thwarting “American aggression.” 23In 1989, while the Soviet Union started giving its satellites their freedom and then fell apart in the course of glasnost—of trying to explain how it had acquired them in the first place—the United States was still engaged in the brutal repression of rebellions or rebellious regimes in the small countries of Central America in the name of preventing a Soviet takeover in the New World.

The military paranoia of the Cold War promoted massive military-industrial complexes in both the United States and the USSR and helped maintain high levels of employment through “military Keynesianism”—that is, substantial governmental expenditures on munitions and war preparedness. The Cold War also promoted employment in the armed forces themselves, in huge espionage and clandestine service apparatuses, and in scientific and strategic research institutes in universities that came to serve the war machine. Both countries wasted resources at home, undercut democracy whenever it was inconvenient abroad, promoted bloody coups and interventions against anyone who resisted their plans, and savaged the environment with poorly monitored nuclear weapons production plants. Official propagandists justified the crimes and repressions of each empire by arguing that at least a cataclysmic nuclear war had been avoided and the evil intentions of the other empire thwarted or contained.

But was there ever a real threat? In 1945, at their famed meeting in Yalta in anticipation of Germany’s surrender a few months later, Roosevelt and Stalin divided Europe into “Western” and Russian spheres of influence at the Elbe River and agreed on how to apportion the spoils in East Asia after the defeat of Japan. Over the succeeding forty-five years, neither side ever showed any serious inclination to overstep the Yalta boundaries. Despite military probings in Berlin and Korea, the American decision to build a separate state in its half of occupied Germany, intense rivalry between the intelligence services of the two superpowers, bitter proxy wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and a single moment in 1962 when a nuclear conflagration seemed imminent, the Cold War became as much as anything a mutually acceptable explanation for why the world remained split largely where the victorious armies of World War II had stopped.

As the journalists Diana Johnstone and Ben Cramer put the matter: “If the danger [of a Soviet-American war in Europe] never really existed, then it can be argued that a primary mission of U.S. forces in Europe in reality has been to maintain the Soviet threat. So long as vast U.S. forces were arrayed in Western Europe in a position to attack (or counterattack) the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union would itself remain in a position to attack (or counterattack) the U.S. forces in Europe. The Soviet and U.S. ‘threats’ maintained each other, and thus their double military hegemony over the European continent.” 24These ideas have received a surprising post-Cold War endorsement from an unusual source—President George W. Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. In Bush’s National Security Statement released on September 17, 2002, he and Rice observed, “In the Cold War, especially following the Cuban missile crisis [of 1962], we faced a generally status quo, risk-averse adversary.” These are words that could not have been uttered in the White House prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Both sides used the alleged menace of the other—in the case of the United States in East Asia, the “threat” of Communist China—to justify their occupation and exploitation of foreign territories. The United States applied the same kind of reasoning in Latin America, defining the democratically elected government in Guatemala in 1954, the revolutionary government of Cuba in 1959, and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in 1979 as Communist threats. This excuse served as a cover for an ever-lengthening series of American interventions and coups against Latin American governments deemed unfriendly to American interests. From the CIA’s overthrow of the Jacobo Arbenz government in Guatemala and its catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, it was only a short step to the “falling dominoes” of Southeast Asia and the ruinous intervention in Vietnam.

The initial effect of the Cold War was to justify the grip of both superpowers on numerous territories each had defended or liberated during World War II—the Soviets primarily in Central Europe, the Americans in England, the North Atlantic, Western Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea. In 1953, for example, the U. S. government secretly forced part of the indigenous population of Greenland, an island about three times the size of Texas and a Danish colony since 1721, to move—it gave them four days’ notice and threatened to bulldoze their houses—to make way for a vast expansion of Thule Air Force Base, a strategic expanse of some 234,022 acres disguised since World War II as a “weather station.” In fact, throughout the Cold War, the Greenland base was a refueling spot for bombers scheduled to fly routes into the Soviet Union in the event World War III broke out. (Today, it is considered a critical location for the Bush administration’s ballistic missile defense scheme. 25) After more than fifty years, the air force shows no signs of leaving despite continuous protests by the Inuit of Greenland and numerous lawsuits filed in the Danish Supreme Court.

Once the military has acquired a base, it is extremely reluctant to give it up. Instead, new uses are found for it. The American presence on Okinawa, for example, was first justified by the need to mount an invasion of the main Japanese islands (made unnecessary by the atomic bombs and Japan’s surrender), then as a secure enclave for fighting the war in Korea, next as a forward base for deploying force against China, then as a B-52 bomber base and staging area for the Vietnam War, a training area for jungle warfare, and most recently a home base for troops and aircraft that might be used elsewhere in Asia or the Middle East. As Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, a historian and retired U.S. Army colonel, writes, “Foreign real estate has the same attraction for American defense planners that Nimitzclass aircraft carriers do for admirals and B-2 stealth bombers and heavy Abrams tanks do for generals.... They can never have enough.” 26In short, the imperialism of the superpowers during the Cold War centered on the deployment of military forces in other people’s countries. It took the specific form of the establishment of foreign military bases and the fostering of docile satellites in each superpower’s sphere of influence.

America’s foreign military enclaves, though structurally, legally, and conceptually different from colonies, are themselves something like micro-colonies in that they are completely beyond the jurisdiction of the occupied nation. The United States virtually always negotiates a “status of forces agreement” (SOFA) with the ostensibly independent “host” nation, a modern legacy of the nineteenth-century imperialist practice in China of “extraterritoriality”—the “right” of a foreigner charged with a crime to be turned over for trial to his own diplomatic representatives in accordance with his national law, not to a Chinese court in accordance with Chinese law. Extracted from the Chinese at gun point, the practice arose because foreigners claimed that Chinese law was barbaric and “white men” should not be forced to submit to it. Chinese law was indeed concerned more with the social consequences of crime than with establishing the individual guilt or innocence of criminals, particularly those who were uninvited guests in China. Following the Anglo-Chinese Opium War of 1839-42, the United States was the first nation to demand “extrality” for its citizens. All the other European nations then demanded the same rights as the Americans. Except for the Germans, who lost their Chinese colonies in World War I, Americans and Europeans lived an “extraterritorial” life until the Japanese ended it in 1941 and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang stopped it in 1943 in “free China.”