Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

in activities such as drug smuggling that were extremely deleterious to the welfare of Americans. The establishment press—the Washington Post, the New York Times, or the Los Angeles Times—then accuses the regional paper of sloppy journalism; the publisher of the regional paper apologizes and fires the reporters who filed the story.

Meanwhile, the CIA orders its inspector general to investigate the charges. He duly releases a report saying that not a shred of evidence can be found in the official files to support the story. Months or even years later, a research organization, such as the National Security Archive at George Washington University, discovers that there was a second internal report by the inspector general. The second report still disputes the newspaper account but also acknowledges that the substance of its charges was accurate. As the CIA’s internal response to the Baltimore Sun’s report put it in the gingerly and euphemistic language of imperialism, “CIA reporting to Congress in the early 1980s underestimated Honduran involvement in abuses.”¹⁷

The United States now faces an agenda of problems that simply would not exist except for the imperial commitments and activities, open and covert, that accompanied the Cold War. The most common government argument for such continued imperialist activism in the wake of that half-century-long superpower confrontation is still a version of the old “domino theory,” discredited during the Vietnam War: America’s armed forces and covert warriors—for the sake of the world’s good—have no choice but to hold off “instability” wherever it may threaten. The Department of Defense’s East Asia Strategy Report of 1998 explains the one hundred thousand troops “forward deployed” in Okinawa and South Korea as necessary to maintain “stability” in the region. But instability, a nebulous concept at best, is the normal state of affairs in an international system of sovereign states. Instability as such does not threaten the security of the United States, particularly when there is no superpower rival eager to exploit it.

Actual military intervention in brutal civil wars or civil strife in places like Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo has been justified as “deterrence by example.” Even though the United States may have no obvious or vital interest in the outcome of ethnic, religious, or internecine struggles in such places, advocates of military activism argue that it is a good thing for us to intervene because it shows allies and adversaries alike that we will not be “bullied” or “blackmailed.” Such interventions, it is thought, will cause others to respect our power and authority—and hesitate to plunge into similar bloody strife in their own areas. But deterrence by example does not work. As foreign policy analyst Barbara Conry puts it, “The aborted U.S. intervention in Haiti . . . is not going to lead to a rash of military dictatorships any more than strong American responses to Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein deterred Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic from pursuing his aims in Bosnia.”¹⁸

Not only are such military interventions often ineffective, but the use of military force in the name of democracy or human rights regularly makes a mockery of these very principles. More serious yet, an injudicious intervention can create threats where none existed before, as was the case in Truman’s intervention in the Chinese civil war and in General MacArthur’s menacing of China’s borders during the Korean War.

Thirty years ago the international relations theorist Ronald Steel noted, “Unlike Rome, we have not exploited our empire. On the contrary, our empire has exploited us, making enormous drains on our resources and energies.”¹⁹ Our economic relations with our East Asian satellites have, for example, hollowed out our domestic manufacturing industries and led us into a reliance on finance capitalism, whose appearance has in the past been a sign of a hitherto healthy economy entering decline. An analogous situation literally wrecked the former USSR. While fighting a losing war in Afghanistan and competing with the United States to develop ever more advanced “strategic weaponry,” it could no longer withstand pent-up desires in Eastern Europe for independence.

The historian Paul Kennedy has dubbed this condition “imperial overstretch.” In an analysis of the United States in his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, he wrote that it too

cannot avoid confronting the two great tests which challenge the longevity of every major power that occupies the “number one” position in world affairs: whether, in the military/strategic realm, it can preserve a reasonable balance between the nation’s perceived defense requirements and the means it possesses to maintain these commitments; and whether, as an intimately related point, it can preserve the technological and economic bases of its power from relative erosion in the face of the ever-shifting patterns of global production. This test of American abilities will be the greater because it, like Imperial Spain around 1600 or the British Empire around 1900, is the inheritor of a vast array of strategical commitments which had been made decades earlier, when the nation’s political, economic, and military capacity to influence world affairs seemed so much more assured.²⁰

I do not believe that America’s “vast array of strategical commitments” were made in past decades largely as the result of attempts to exploit other nations for economic gain or simply to dominate them politically and militarily. Although the United States has in the past engaged in imperialist exploitation of other nations, particularly in Latin America, it has also tried in various ways to liquidate many such commitments. The roots of American “imperial overstretch” today are not the same as those of past empires. Instead they more closely resemble those that brought down the Soviet Union.

Many Americans do not care to see their country’s acts, policies, or situations compared with the Soviet Union’s; some condemn such a comparison because it commits the alleged fallacy of “moral equivalence.” They insist that America’s values and institutions are vastly more humane than those of Stalin’s Russia. I agree. Throughout the years of the Cold War, the United States remained a functioning democracy, with rights for its citizens unimaginable in the Soviet context (even if its more recent maintenance of the world’s largest prison population suggests that it should be cautious in criticizing other nations’ systems of criminal justice). Comparisons between the United States and the former Soviet Union are useful, however, because those two hegemons developed in tandem, challenging each other militarily, economically, and ideologically. In the long run, it may turn out that, like two scorpions in a bottle, they succeeded in stinging each other to death. The roots of both modern empires lay in World War II and in their subsequent contest to control the forces that the war unleashed. A stress on the costs of the Cold War to the United States also draws attention to the legacies of that struggle. America’s role as the planet’s “lone superpower”—as leader of the peace-loving nations and patron of such institutions as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization—is made much more difficult by the nature of the harvest we continue to reap for imprudent, often secret operations undertaken in the past.

The most important of our Cold War legacies may be in East Asia. The wealth of that region today has fundamentally altered the world balance of power. Starting with Japan, many East Asian countries adapted to the bipolar confrontation of the Cold War years and took advantage of its conditions to engineer their own self- sustaining economic growth. Even though the high-speed economic growth of some countries in the area stalled or even collapsed with the economic crisis of 1997, that in no way alters the basic shift in manufacturing’s global center of gravity to East Asia.

The American political and intellectual establishments remain mystified by and hostile to the economic achievements of Asians, just as the Soviet establishment remained mystified by and hostile to the economic achievements of Anglo-American and Western European capitalism. It is time to realize, however, that the real dangers to America today come not from the newly rich people of East Asia but from our own ideological rigidity, our deep-seated belief in our own propaganda. As sociologists Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver warn, “There are no credible aggressive new powers that can provoke the breakdown of the U.S.-centered world system, but the United States has even greater capabilities than Britain did a century ago to convert its declining hegemony into an exploitative domination. If the system eventually breaks down, it will be primarily because of U.S. resistance to adjustment and accommodation. And conversely, U.S. adjustment and accommodation to the rising economic power of the East Asian region is an essential condition for a non-catastrophic transition to a new world