Chalmers Johnson - Blowback, Second Edition - The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

There was, I believe, far more symmetry between the postwar policies of the Soviet Union and the United States than most Americans are willing to recognize. The USSR in Eastern Europe and the United States in East Asia created their satellite systems for essentially the same reasons. In the course of the Cold War, the USSR intervened militarily to hold its empire together in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The United States intervened militarily to hold its empire together in Korea and Vietnam (where it killed a great many more people in losing than the USSR did in its two successful interventions).

The richest prize in the Soviet empire was East Germany; the richest prize in the American empire is still Japan. Today, much like East Germany before the Berlin Wall came down, Japan remains a rigged economy brought into being and maintained thanks to the Cold War. Its people seem increasingly tired of the American troops stationed on their soil for the last half century and of the gray, single-party regimes that presided in Tokyo for almost all of those years. East Germany’s dreary leaders Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker can appear almost dynamic when compared to the prime ministers Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party has put in office since 1955.

Just as the two satraps of the German Democratic Republic faithfully followed every order they ever received from Moscow, each and every Japanese prime minister, as soon as he comes into office, gets on an airplane and reports to Washington. And as in the former East Germany, so Japanese voters long ago discovered that as long as they continue to be allied with the United States, nothing they do ever seems to change their political system. Many ordinary Japanese have learned to avoid politics like the plague, participating only in local elections, where a surprising number vote Communist both to register a protest and because the party is competent and honest. In Japan, political idealists tend to become nihilists, not unlike their German brethren before 1989.

The Soviet Union started setting up its satellites largely because it could not compete with the largesse of the United States’ Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of war-torn Europe. (This, of course, reflected a major outcome of World War II: much of the Soviet Union had been reduced to rubble, while the United States emerged unscathed.) The USSR quickly recognized that in the conflict between democracy and totalitarianism developing in postwar Europe, it was on the less popular side. In Eastern Europe it could not bring its supporters to power through the ballot box, and so it ruthlessly ousted local democrats. In a Czech coup in February 1948 and elsewhere it imported Stalinism, claiming it was merely a version of socialism.

The Soviet Union had a defensive need to secure its Western approaches. By contrast, after Japan’s defeat no regime in East Asia was capable of threatening the United States itself, least of all a China devastated by war and revolution. We therefore built our system of satellites for more genuinely imperialist reasons, although the government argued that our efforts were necessary due to the natural aggression of Sino-Soviet communism and the possibility that the fall of any country, however minor, to communism would lead other countries to topple like a set of “dominoes,” until the chain reaction might reach the heartland of capitalism itself.

The American decision to create satellites in East Asia followed in part from the Communist revolution in China, which meant that American plans for a new postwar international order in East Asia based on an alliance with China, its wartime ally, were no longer viable. Although unwilling to go to war against the popular forces of Chinese communism to prop up the failing Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, we reversed our policies for occupied Japan, giving up on further efforts to democratize the country and committing ourselves instead to its swift economic rehabilitation. Japan, the former implacable enemy, replaced China as America’s primary East Asian ally. The U.S. government now devoted its energies to defending Japan and building it up as an East Asian alternative to the Chinese revolution. Even though we did not try to “roll back” that revolution, President Truman’s decision in 1950 to order the Seventh Fleet to defend Taiwan and police the Taiwan Strait, and General Douglas MacArthur’s decision to march north to the Chinese border during the Korean War, nonetheless ensured Chinese hostility for at least two decades.

Needless to say, the United States did not consult the defeated Japanese people about these decisions or about the decision to cultivate the remnants of that country’s unquestionably anti-Communist wartime establishment. Our reliance in some cases on literal war criminals—for example, Nobusuke Kishi, former minister of munitions in Tojo’s wartime cabinet, who became the country’s prime minister in 1957—and on a CIA-financed single-party regime were the mirror image of Soviet policies in the former German Democratic Republic. Such policies actually led to an anti-American revolt in 1960. In the largest mass demonstrations in postwar Japanese history, protesters surrounded the parliament building and demanded that lawmakers not ratify a renewal of the Japanese-American Security Treaty. The situation became so tense that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was forced to cancel a proposed visit. (The first sitting American president ever to visit Tokyo would be Gerald Ford.) Using its rigged majority, the conservative party forced through ratification, keeping American troops in Japan, and the political system never again fully regained the trust of the public. For thirty years, the Liberal Democratic Party successfully prevented any alteration in political power and dutifully legitimated Japan’s status as a satellite of the United States. Unfortunately, it did little else, leaving the actual governance of the country to the state bureaucracy, ensuring that any impulses the citizenry might have had toward self-government would atrophy. By the 1990s Japan was the world’s second-richest country, but with a government remarkably similar to that of the former East Germany.

In order to support Britain, France, and Holland in the face of fears that the rest of Europe might “go Communist,” the United States abandoned its wartime promises to help liberate those nations’ colonies. Instead, the United States came to support or replace the former imperialists in wars intended to secure their prewar possessions. This meant that in East Asia, except in our own colony, the Philippines, we wound up on the wrong side of history. (Even in the Philippines, which we granted formal independence on July 4, 1946, we kept enormous military base complexes until the Filipinos expelled us in 1992.)

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 postindependence 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. Nixon’s opening to China was the first sign that some understanding of East Asian history was finally starting to penetrate Washington minds.