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

“The central political idea of imperialism,” wrote the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, is “expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics.” 1This is true of all empires—witness the endless wars of ancient Rome, the subjugation of Asia by the Mongols and Ottoman Turks, Spain’s rape of the Western Hemisphere, Napoleon’s ambitions to unite Europe under the French flag, Britain’s search for new investment opportunities for its capitalists, the Third Reich’s attempts to seize lebensraum for its racially defined nation, and now an insatiable American appetite for ever more military bases. Imperialism cannot exist without a powerful military apparatus for subduing and policing the peoples who stand in its way and an economic system for financing an expensive and largely unproductive military establishment. Thus far in this book I have dealt primarily with the military side of American imperialism. Now I turn to America’s attempted economic hegemony over much of the world. My intent is to examine the elaborate ideology of “neoliberalism” that has obscured America’s international endeavors before the triumph of unilateral militarism and to reveal how militarism has displaced and discredited America’s economic leadership. Ironically, it is in this economic sphere that the overstretched American empire will probably first begin to unravel.

Following World War II, America’s military might and economic assets were so great that it met with very little resistance of any sort, except from the Soviet Union and its allies and satellites. From the onset of the Cold War until about 1980, those countries that chose to belong to neither the Communist nor the capitalist camps—the so-called Third World—had room to maneuver by playing one superpower against the other. The superpowers, even though they possessed weapons of mass destruction, were often hesitant to exert direct imperial control over these contested nations because they feared that any of them might then bolt to the other camp. The nonaligned countries also had some freedom to experiment with different paths and arrangements that might lead toward “economic development” in accordance with their own cultural traditions and whatever norms they chose of distributive justice. These nations were said to be “underdeveloped,” meaning that they had little industry or technology but instead supplied agricultural products and raw materials to the developed countries of the north. In theory, this was to be a mutually beneficial trade that would eventually lead to the industrialization of the Third World, bringing it wealth and true sovereignty.

This situation started to change in the early 1980s. The threat of a superpower war receded as the United States and the USSR became accustomed to their respective roles in the elaborate pas de deux of detente and arms control. Both countries also began to show signs of economic fatigue as the Cold War ground on. The USSR, much poorer than the United States, was by far the more seriously affected as the rigidities of its economic doctrine stood in the way of most forms of entrepreneurship and industrial innovation. Still a mighty military power, the USSR became increasingly bifurcated economically into an authorized and an informal, or “underground,” sector. Without the latter it would have collapsed much sooner than it did. From the mid-1980s on, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev sought to reform the ailing economy, but he was ultimately undercut by deeply entrenched vested interests. The United States knew about these problems but pretended in its intelligence estimates not to notice so that it could continue to pour money into its own military machine.

Even though the Soviet Union had lost its potency as an economic challenger, the United States and its allies had for some time been worried by other trends. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the rules governing the opening of trade drawn up by the United States and Britain late in World War II and subsequently signed by some twenty-one other nations, had ensured spectacular growth in international trade. (The purpose of GATT was to prevent a recurrence of the economic nationalism and the collapse of international trade that had caused the Great Depression and contributed directly to the emergence of totalitarian regimes in Europe and Asia.) Between 1948 and 1995, when GATT was replaced by the World Trade Organization, international trade expanded from about $124 billion to $10,772 billion. 2This pattern was fine with the United States so long as its trade balance remained favorable and it could dictate the terms on which others participated in the good times.

The 1970s, however, had already ushered in a period of questioning about where the capitalist world was heading. The American and British economies were plagued by “stagflation” (high rates of inflation combined with low economic growth), high rates of unemployment, large public-sector deficits, two major oil crises as producer nations sought to influence the policies of consuming nations, racial strife, and, for the United States, defeat in Vietnam. Equally ominous, by the mid-1980s, Japan had displaced the United States as the world’s leading creditor nation, while America’s fiscal deficits and its inability to cover the costs of products imported from foreign countries turned it into the world’s largest debtor.

These circumstances allowed for the rise of conservative political parties and leaders—Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher—in the United States and Britain. To revive international trade and, more important, put the United States back in charge of it, the new governments committed themselves to a rebirth of nineteenth-century capitalist fundamentalist theory. This meant withdrawing the state as much as possible from participation in the economy, opening domestic markets at least in principle to international trade and foreign investment, privatizing investment in public utilities and natural resources, ending most protective labor laws, enacting powerful domestic and international safeguards for private property rights, including, above all, “intellectual property rights” (that is, patents of all sorts), and enforcing conservative fiscal policies even at the expense of the public’s health and welfare. This program, which soon became Anglo-American mainstream economic thought, was supposed to deliver “a widespread improvement in average incomes,” as Bruce R. Scott of the Harvard Business School puts it. “Firms will reap increased economies of scale in a larger market,” the thinking went, “and incomes will converge as poor countries grow more rapidly than rich ones. In this ‘win-win’ perspective, the importance of nation-states fades as the ‘global village’ grows and market integration and prosperity take hold.” 3

Because the ideas of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish and English economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, from whom the new orthodoxy derived, were associated with the political movement in Britain called “liberalism,” the new economic dispensation was often called “neoliberalism.” In policy circles it became known as the “Washington consensus,” in academic life as “neoclassical economics,” and in public ideology as “globalism” or, more proactively, “globalization.” One of the leading academic specialists on globalization, Manfred Steger, says that it amounted to “a gigantic repackaging” of two centuries of classical liberalism, relabeled “the new economy.” Steger writes: “Globalization’s claims and political maneuvers remain conceptually tied to a ... nineteenth-century narrative of ‘modernization’ and ‘civilization’ that presents Western countries—particularly the United States and the United Kingdom—as the privileged vanguard of an evolutionary process that applies to all nations.” 4