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

World politics in the twenty-first century will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century—that is, from the unintended consequences of the Cold War and the crucial American decision to maintain a Cold War posture in a post–Cold War world. U.S. administrations did what they thought they had to do in the Cold War years. History will record that in some places they did exemplary things; in other places, particularly in East Asia but also in Central America, they behaved no better than the Communist bureaucrats of their superpower competitor. The United States likes to think of itself as the winner of the Cold War. In all probability, to those looking back a century hence, neither side will appear to have won, particularly if the United States maintains its present imperial course.

FURTHER READING

After a lifetime spent writing academic books, I have tried to keep the notes in this one to a minimum in the hope of offering the nonexpert a provocative rather than a pedantic experience. Quotations are cited in the notes, but I believe it might be more useful with regard to general references to offer an annotated list of books, articles, and Internet sites that strike me as particularly helpful and relevant for further reading. These I have grouped under subject headings.

Arms Sales

Greider, William. Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace . New York: Public Affairs, 1998.

A short but powerful introduction to the economic implications of America’s massive military apparatus and the interests of the arms industry.

Shear, Jeff. The Keys to the Kingdom: The FS-X Deal and the Selling of America’s Future to Japan . New York: Doubleday, 1994.

A brilliant exposé of “the little state department in the Pentagon” and how and why it transferred the technology of America’s best fighter aircraft to Japan and got nothing in return.

Tirman, John. Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America’s Arms Trade . New York: Free Press, 1997.

If you read no other book on America’s arms trade, read this one. Tirman’s treatment of the U.S. stake in Turkey’s “white genocide” against the Kurds is the best available.

Aspects of American Imperialism

Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century . London: Verso, 1994. Paperbound.

A masterful treatment of the transfer of hegemony from Britain to the United States. Brilliant on the “dialectic of market and plan” as the leitmotif of the twentieth century.

Aron, Raymond. The Imperial Republic: The United States and the World, 1945–1973 . Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

A classic defense of American Cold War policy in Europe by an independent French intellectual. Aron gets it right about Europe but has not a clue to American behavior in postwar East Asia.

Cumings, Bruce. Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American–East Asian Relations at the End of the Century . Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999.

Important essays by the country’s leading historian of modern Korea. Cumings’s chapters on North Korea’s nuclear program, “area studies” during and after the Cold War, and American hegemony in East Asia are indispensable.

Engelhardt, Tom. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation . New York: Basic Books, 1995. Paperbound.

The best guide to the ideology of American “good intentions” in the world, regardless of costs, and what happened to this ideology after the Vietnam War.

Greene, Graham. The Quiet American . New York: Bantam Books, 1957. Paperbound.

Greene is unsurpassed on Americans as imperialists, “impregnably armoured by . . . good intentions and . . . ignorance.”

Hatcher, Patrick Lloyd. The Suicide of an Elite: American Internationalists and Vietnam . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

An insider discusses how the loss of the war in Vietnam was not an accident or the result of a conspiracy but the normal workings of the Cold War national security apparatus.

Lowen, Rebecca S. Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Why President Eisenhower’s epithet “the military-industrial complex” must be amended to “the military-industrial-university” complex and the blowback from lost intellectual integrity that awaits American institutions of higher learning.

China

Cohen, Warren I. America’s Response to China: A History of Sino-American Relations .

New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Paperbound.

The best short history of America’s relations with China from the Opium War to the present.

http://www.huaren.org/

The Web site of Huaren, an indispensable source of information on overseas Chinese and a compilation of worldwide articles on attacks against people of Chinese ancestry.

Li, Cheng. Rediscovering China: Dynamics and Dilemmas of Reform . Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. Paperbound.

The most insightful analysis available, put in personal terms, of the meaning of “reform” in China and why it is anything but threatening to the United States.

Mann, James. About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton . New York: Knopf, 1999.

A Los Angeles Times former Beijing correspondent offers new information and insights into official American thinking on China, from Nixon and Kissinger through the Tiananmen repression and down to Clinton’s inconsistent efforts.

McBeath, Gerald A. Wealth and Freedom: Taiwan’s New Political Economy . Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1998.

Comprehensive analysis of Taiwan today, including its state-owned enterprises, democracy, and foreign policy after the loss in 1971 of its seat in the United Nations.

Nathan, Andrew J., and Robert S. Ross. The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China’s Search for Security . New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

An analysis by two writers who have studied China about why it is not a threat to other countries but often appears to be.

Economic Meltdown and How to Analyze It

The Asian Crisis . Special issue of Cambridge Journal of Economics , vol. 22, no. 6 (November 1998).

A collection of essays on the causes and consequences of the “globalization crisis” that started in East Asia in 1997. Not the usual Washington consensus.

Fingleton, Eamonn. In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

A seasoned observer of the Japanese economy explains why it is not in the deep trouble that American theorists and triumphalists say it is.

Gray, John. False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism . New York: New Press, 1999.

A historian demonstrates that global, unregulated markets are inherently unstable. America’s experiment in imperial laissez-faire was the geopolitical expression of a Wall Street bubble.

Greider, William. One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism . New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

This is the primer for all who want to understand global capitalism and why it is coming unglued at the end of the twentieth century. Mandatory reading.

Longworth, Richard C. Global Squeeze: The Coming Crisis for First-World Nations . Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1998.

A veteran economics correspondent points out the many ways in which globalization could go wrong.

Weiss, Linda. The Myth of the Powerless State . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Paperbound.