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

The indispensable instrument for maintaining the American empire is its huge military establishment. Despite the money lavished on it, the endless praise for it in the media, and the overstretch and blowback it generates, the military always demands more. In the decade following the end of the Cold War, military budgets consistently gave priority to an arms race that had no other participants. For example, the Pentagon’s budget for the fiscal year 2000 called for replacing the F-15, “the world’s most advanced aircraft,” with the F-22, also “the world’s most advanced aircraft.” The air force wanted 339 F-22s at $188 million each, three times the cost of the airplane it is replacing. The United States already has 1,094 F-15s, against which there is no equal or more capable aircraft on earth. The last Clinton defense budget included funds for yet more nuclear-attack submarines, for which there is no conceivable use or contingency. They merely provide work for local defense contractors and will join the fleet of America’s “floating Chernobyls,” along with its nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, cruising the seas waiting for an accident to occur.

The American military at the end of the century is becoming an autonomous system. We no longer have a draft army based on the obligation of citizens to serve their nation. When the Vietnam War exposed the inequities of the draft—for example, the ease with which college students could gain deferments—Congress decided to abolish conscription rather than enforce it in an equitable manner. Today, the military is an entirely mercenary force, made up of volunteers paid salaries by the Pentagon. Although the military still tries to invoke the public’s support for a force made up of fellow citizens, this force is increasingly separated from civilian interests and devoted to military ones.

Equipped with the most advanced precision-guided munitions, high-performance aircraft, and intercontinental-range missiles, the American armed forces can unquestionably deliver death and destruction to any target on earth and expect little in the way of retaliation. Even so, these forces voraciously demand more and newer equipment, while the Pentagon now more or less sets its own agenda. Accustomed to life in a half-century-old, well-established empire, the corporate interests of the armed forces have begun to take precedence over the older idea that the military is only one of several means that a democratic government might employ to implement its policies. As their size and prominence grow over time, the armed forces of an empire tend to displace other instruments of foreign policy implementation. What also grows is militarism, “a vast array of customs, interests, prestige, actions, and thought associated with armies and wars and yet transcending true military purpose”—and certainly a reasonable description of the American military ethos today. 7

“Blowback” is shorthand for saying that a nation reaps what it sows, even if it does not fully know or understand what it has sown. Given its wealth and power, the United States will be a prime recipient in the foreseeable future of all of the more expectable forms of blowback, particularly terrorist attacks against Americans in and out of the armed forces anywhere on earth, including within the United States. But it is blowback in its larger aspect—the tangible costs of empire—that truly threatens it. Empires are costly operations, and they become more costly by the year. The hollowing out of American industry, for instance, is a form of blowback—an unintended negative consequence of American policy—even though it is seldom recognized as such. The growth of militarism in a once democratic society is another example of blowback. Empire is the problem. Even though the United States has a strong sense of invulnerability and substantial military and economic tools to make such a feeling credible, the fact of its imperial pretensions means that a crisis is inevitable. More imperialist projects simply generate more blowback. If we do not begin to solve problems in more prudent and modest ways, blowback will only become more intense.

David Calleo, a professor of international politics, has observed, “The international system breaks down not only because unbalanced and aggressive new powers seek to dominate their neighbors, but also because declining powers, rather than adjusting and accommodating, try to cement their slipping preeminence into an exploitative hegemony.” 8I believe that the United States at the end of the twentieth century fits this description. The signs of such an exploitative hegemony are already with us: increasing estrangement between populations and their governments; a determination of elites to hang on to power despite a loss of moral authority; the appearance of militarism and the separation of the military from the society it is supposed to serve; fierce repression (the huge and still growing American prison population and rising enthusiasm for the death penalty may be symptomatic of this); and an economic crisis that is global in nature. History offers few examples of declining hegemons reversing their decline or giving up power peacefully, although Gorbachev’s policies at the end of the Cold War may constitute one. Given that it is close to inconceivable that any American leader could have the authority and vision to act with similar restraint in dealing with our client states (for example, by withdrawing our military from the Korean peninsula), one must conclude that blowback will ultimately produce a crisis that suddenly, wrenchingly impairs or ends America’s hegemonic influence. Given the almost sacred position empire bestows on the American military, it seems unlikely that the crisis will occur in that area. Thus, barring an unforeseen reform movement, it seems most probable that economic contradictions will force the unraveling of the American empire.

Marx and Lenin were mistaken about the nature of imperialism. It is not the contradictions of capitalism that lead to imperialism but imperialism that breeds some of the most important contradictions of capitalism. When these contradictions ripen, as they must, they create devastating economic crises.

Once the Cold War had ended and the United States had decided to try to convert its “slipping preeminence into an exploitative hegemony,” it set out to compel every significant economy on earth to remodel itself along American lines. This ignorant project has not only failed but has brought discredit to the very idea of free trade and raised serious questions in the minds of economists in East Asia and throughout the Third World about the motives of the United States in the global economy. The world remains poised on the edge of a possible, United States–induced recession, although the United States itself has thus far been the least affected by the economic crisis. Even if a collapse of global demand is avoided, misguided American economic policies have set back thirty years of economic progress in Southeast Asia and laid the foundation for unpredictable forms of economic, political, and military retaliation by the devastated nations.

Ashok Nath, executive director of the Asialink Advertising Corporation and a strong voice in Asian business affairs, asks about the United States’ push for globalization: “Is there no way to go but a generic world order in which every country is forced to have the same interpretation of democracy as the U.S.?” “Will speculators, the non-value-adding but crisis-providing segment of ‘modern society,’ continue their activities unbridled?” “Is the U.S., boosted by consumer spending but lacking strong savings, the next bubble economy?” 9Such questions have become ubiquitous in East Asia in the wake of the near economic meltdown. They constitute an antiglobalization time bomb that, if it explodes, could lead to mutually destructive protectionism and a huge contraction of global economic activity.