Harry Targ
From
Wartime Alliance to Deadly Global Conflict
I do not believe history repeats itself but I find
myself looking back to the past for lessons which might be relevant today. For example,
during World War II an “unnatural alliance” between the United States (the new
imperial hegemon), Great Britain (the old one), and the former Soviet Union
(the revolutionary challenger to capitalist hegemony) formed to defeat fascism
in Europe. It was in the interests of all three nations to do so.
As the war was ending the leaders of the “big three”
nations--President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the Soviet
leader, Joseph Stalin--met at Yalta in the Crimea to plan for a post-war world
order. They made agreements on Eastern European borders, facilitating elections
in Poland, administering a defeated Germany, defeating Japan in the Asian war,
and planning for the first meeting of the United Nations. The three leaders
returned to their respective countries declaring that a peaceful post-war world
order would be established. “The spirit of Yalta” brought hope to millions of
North Americans and Europeans, West and East.
In April, President Roosevelt died and a new more
bellicose administration had come to power in Washington. Within three months
the United States had successfully tested its new atomic bomb and dropped two
of them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the fall, 1945 US and Soviet disputes over
treaties ending the status of war with former fascist regimes in Eastern Europe
began to destroy the comity that had been built over the course of the war and
codified at Yalta. In 1946 crises occurred between East and West over Iran and
Greece. It is clear in retrospect that ever since its ascendency to power the
new Truman administration had been working to achieve global hegemony in the
post-war period, using its military and economic superiority as tools.
In the spring of 1947, the US decided to replace the
British in Greece as the latter worked to crush a leftwing insurgency in that
country’s civil war. President Truman was warned by the Republican Chair of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he, Truman, better “scare hell out of
the American people.” This was so because most Americans favored peace over
more conflict in world affairs and many still perceived the former wartime
ally, the Soviet Union, positively.
The announcement of the new global threat and the
need to mobilize resources over the next several years to “defend” against the
demonic Soviet Union led to the recommendations for action in the famous Truman
Doctrine speech to Congress in March, 1947. These put the US on a war path that
would cost more than 10 million lives, international and American, and at least
$5 trillion by the twenty-first century.
So the decisions made between 1945 and 1947 presaged
a dramatic shift in United States foreign policy that had enormous consequences
for both its own citizens and the world. Decision-makers in the Truman administration
who favored maintaining some semblance of cooperation with the former Soviet
Union lost their influence. Even some of Truman’s hardline advisors like George
Kennan felt the evolving policies went too far in terms of bellicosity.
From
Global Conflict Management to Renewed Global Military Madness
Fast-forward some 65 years. President Obama, from
2008 to 2013, continued the Bush war in Afghanistan, ordered drone attacks on
alleged terrorist targets in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and authorized covert
support for destabilization of populist regimes in Latin America. In contrast,
at the same time, he has tried to create a more “realist” panoply of policies
based on diplomacy and modest recognition that there were limits to US power. During
the President’s second term, the United States partnered with Russia to curb
Syria’s brutal war on its citizens and Russia, Iran, and the United States
began to make progress in arms negotiations.
But then, with the aid of undercover US operatives,
rebels overthrew a Ukraine government in February 2014 that had close ties with
Russia. The US and the new Ukraine government launched a diplomatic and
military assault on pro-Russian Ukraine separatists and the government in Kiev
began to maneuver itself toward joining NATO and the European Union.
And in June the Obama administration announced a new
threat, not only to a particular geographic setting, the Persian Gulf, but to
the civilized world. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was pronounced
the new global monster (as was the Soviet Union in 1947). Beginning in August,
2014, the United States and selective allies initiated what became large scale
bombing of ISIS targets in Iraq and, by September, in Syria. Massive air
assaults and declarations of success have been coupled with announcements of
the need for more bombing and more allies to engage in this common struggle.
Since the bombing began influential foreign policy elites in the United States,
Europe, and elsewhere have spoken of the need ultimately to send troops to the
Persian Gulf to defeat ISIS.
In short, in just a matter of three months the
United States, much of Europe, and Arab states have embarked on a seemingly
insane escalation of war, enthusiastically endorsed by most of the media and
foreign policy pundits. Whether it is Ukraine or the Persian Gulf, the
emergence of crisis and war has intruded itself on an unsuspecting world the
way the Cold War transformed the spirit of Yalta to possible hot war in just
two short years. This time, the rush to war has occurred in just a matter of
months.
Comparing
the Pursuit of Global Hegemony: 1945-47 with 2014
The starkness of the shift in United States foreign
policy and the unidimensional zealousness of media support for wars on Russia
and ISIS have shifted political discourse away from domestic police violence,
climate change, growing economic inequality, the toxic nature of gridlock in
Washington politics, and sequester-based
requirements to reduce military spending. All this has occurred in the
domestic political context of off-year elections in the United States.
The transformation of United States foreign policy
in 2014 is as dramatic as that of 1945-47 with as potentially dire consequences
as the first period. But there are differences between 2014 and 1945-47.
First,
the United States is not the emerging global hegemon today but rather a
declining world power economically and militarily. To use an old analogy, a
wounded and threatened animal is more violence prone and dangerous than a
healthy and secure one.
Second,
there emerged in the 21st century three vigorous counter-hegemonic
tendencies in world affairs that the United States and some of its major allies
oppose. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) are
increasingly demanding a transformation of major global institutions such as
the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization,
and the United Nations system to better reflect the population size, wealth,
and geography of the international system. In other words they reject the
hegemonic economic and political order established at the end of World War II.
In addition, some nations, such as those in Latin
America, are beginning to create counter-institutions, including a bank for the
countries of the Global South. Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, and to
some degree Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, Nicaragua, and, of course, Cuba are
creating a Western Hemisphere international economic order that would be a
major threat to the 150 year US domination of the region.
Perhaps the greatest perceived threat to an
international order based on US global hegemony is the spread of grassroots
mobilizations all across the world. Arab Spring in 2011 was followed by
austerity protests in Greece, Spain, and Portugal, student mobilizations in
Chile and Canada, pro-labor and anti-austerity movements in the United States,
including the Occupy movement, and the spreading Moral Mondays campaigns in the
US South. All these campaigns are inspired by older anti-globalization
activism, including the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the World Social Forum, and
endless campaigns against the IMF, the World Bank, for global climate change,
the liberation of women and indigenous people. While the slogan, “the people
united will never be defeated,” may be too optimistic in the short-run, it does
represent a source of fear for global finance capital and its leaders in the
United States, Europe, and among various Arab autocracies.
Third,
additional
anti-hegemonic movements or campaigns include brutal terrorists, various forms
of fundamentalists, who will stop at nothing to combat what they see as the
enemy. With growing worldwide poverty, social marginalization, and
powerlessness, millions of dispossessed people are drawn to reactionary,
militaristic forces which have no positive vision except offering the promise of defeating the enemies who bomb them with
impunity.
Where
Does the Peace Movement Go?
The task of the peace movement broadly defined is as
complex as that confronting its ancestors at the dawn of the Cold War. Using
the old labor slogan the peace movement needs to educate, agitate, and organize.
Educational campaigns require developing and
communicating forthright analyses of the global political economy today. They
should analyze the declining power of the traditional global hegemons, the rise
of global resistance, and incorporate theorizing that includes the salience of
non-state actors, from grassroots activists to terrorist extremists. Such an
educational campaign should fuse issues of economics, politics, the
environment, global inequality, domestic and foreign policies, and class, race,
and gender on a global scale. Education requires historical understanding,
sensitivity to cultural variations, and needs to challenge mass media
stereotypes that distort reality.
Agitation should include mobilizing campaigns at
home and across the globe around opposition to military spending, drone
warfare, nuclear weapons, terrorism and
anti-terrorism campaigns, and the oligopolistic global mass media that is a
tool of those forces that seek to maintain global hegemony.
Organization should include finding ways to develop
cross-national solidarity which makes connections between grassroots campaigns
in one geographic space with those elsewhere. Virtually no issue--such as the
environment, healthcare, labor and women’s rights, or police brutality—is
unique to one country or city or town. The new technology makes the compression
of time and space more feasible than in any prior period of history.
The qualitative shift in United States foreign policy
from 1945 to 1947 made nuclear war more possible. The Cold War led to an
atmosphere whereby escalation to nuclear holocaust was always a justifiable
fear. While nuclear war did not happen, the Cold War adversaries fought their
battles in countries of the Global South such as Korea, Vietnam, South Africa,
and Cuba.
Today’s shifting United States foreign policy could
bring global war, irreversible environmental devastation, starvation and
disease, and terrorism on a scale new to human history. The global peace
movement has an arduous but necessary job to reverse these possibilities.
