Harry Targ
An
Empire in Decline
United States global hegemony is coming to an end.
The United States was the country that collaborated with the Soviet Union to
defeat fascism in Europe and with Great Britain to crush Japanese militarism in
Asia in 1945. The Soviet Union, the first Socialist state, suffered 27 million
dead in the war to defeat the Nazis. Great Britain, the last great imperial
power, was near the end of its global reach because of war and the rise of
anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa.
As the beneficiary of war-driven industrial growth
and the development of a military-industrial complex unparalleled in world
history, the United States was in a position in 1945 to construct a post-war
international political and economic order based on huge banks and
corporations. The United States created the international financial and trading
system, imposed the dollar as the global currency, built military alliances to
challenge the Socialist Bloc, and used its massive military might and capacity
for economic penetration to infiltrate, subvert, and dominate most of the
economic and political regimes across the globe.
The United States always faced resistance and was by
virtue of its economic system and ideology drawn into perpetual wars, leading
to trillions of dollars in military spending, the loss of hundreds of thousands
of American lives, and the deaths of literally millions of people, mostly
people of color, to maintain its empire.
As was the case of prior empires, the United States
empire is coming to an end. A multipolar world is reemerging with challenges to
traditional hegemony coming from China, India, Russia, and the larger less
developed countries such as Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, South Korea, and
Thailand. By the 1970s, traditional allies in Europe and Japan had become
economic competitors of the United States.
The United States throughout this period of change
has remained the overwhelming military power, however, spending more on defense
than the next seven countries combined. It remains the world’s economic giant
even though growth in domestic product between 1980 and 2000 has been a third
of its GDP growth from 1960 to 1980. Confronted with economic stagnation and
declining profit rates the United States economy began in the 1970s to
transition from a vibrant industrial base to financial speculation and the globalization
of production.
The latest phase of capitalism, the era of
neoliberal globalization, has required massive shifts of surplus value from
workers to bankers and the top 200 hundred corporations which by the 1980s
controlled about one-third of all production. The instruments of consciousness,
a handful of media conglomerates, have consolidated their control of most of
what people read, see, hear, and learn about the world.
A policy centerpiece of the new era, roughly
spanning the rise to power of Ronald Reagan to today, including the eight years
of the Obama Administration, has been a massive shift of wealth from the many
to the few. A series of graphs published by the Economic Policy Institute in
December, 2016 show that productivity, profits, and economic concentration have
risen while real wages have declined, inequality has increased, gaps between the
earnings of people of color and women and white men have grown, and persistent
poverty has remained for twenty percent of the population. The austerity
policies, the centerpiece of neoliberalism, have spread all across the globe.
That is what globalization is about.
Paralleling the shifts toward a transnational
capitalist system and the concentration of wealth and power on a global level, the
decline of U.S power, relative to other nation-states in the twenty-first
century, has increased. The wars in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and the spreading violence throughout the Middle East have
overwhelmed US efforts to control events. Russia, Iran, China, and even weaker
nations in the United Nations Security Council have begun to challenge its
power and authority. Mass movements increasingly mobilize against vial regimes
supported by the United States virtually everywhere (including within the U.S.
as well).
However, most U.S. politicians still articulate the
mantra of “the United States as the indispensable nation.” The articulation of
American Exceptionalism represents an effort to maintain a global hegemony that
no longer exists and a rationale to
justify the massive military-industrial complex which fuels much of the United
States economy.
Imperial
Decline and Domestic Politics
The narrative above is of necessity brief and
oversimplified but provides a back drop for reflecting on the substantial
shifts in American politics. The argument here is that foreign policy and
international political economy are “the elephants in the room” as we reflect
on the outcomes of the 2016 elections. It does not replace other explanations
or “causes” of the election but supplements them.
First, the pursuit of austerity policies,
particularly in other countries (the cornerstone of neoliberal globalization)
has been a central feature of international economics since the late 1970s.
From the establishment of the debt system in the Global South, to “shock
therapy” in countries as varied as Bolivia and the former Socialist Bloc, to European
bank demands on Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, to Reaganomics and the
promotion of Clinton’s “market democracies,” and the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
the wealth of the world has been shifting from the poor and working classes to
the rich.
Second, to promote neoliberal globalization, the
United States has constructed by far the world’s largest war machine. With
growing opposition to U.S. militarism around the world, policy has shifted in
recent years from “boots on the ground,” (although there still are many), to
special ops, private contractors, drones, cyberwar, spying, and “quiet coups,”
such as in Brazil and Venezuela, to achieve neoliberal advances.
One group of foreign policy insiders, the
humanitarian interventionists, has lobbied for varied forms of intervention to
promote “human rights, democratization, and markets.” Candidate Hillary Clinton
and a host of “deep state” insiders advocated for support of the military coup
in Honduras, a NATO coalition effort to topple the regime in Libya, the
expansion of troops in Afghanistan, even stronger support of Israel, funding
and training anti-government rebels in Syria and the overthrow of the elected
government of Ukraine. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was a major
advocate for humanitarian interventionist policies in the Obama administration.
Humanitarian interventionists have joined forces
with “neoconservatives” in the new century to advocate policies that, they
believe, would reverse the declining relative power of the United States. This
coalition of foreign policy influentials has promoted a New Cold War against
Russia and an Asian pivot to challenge the emerging multipolar world. The
growing turmoil in the Middle East and the new rising powers in Eurasia also
provide rationale for qualitative increases in military spending, enormous
increases in research and development of new military technologies, and the
reintroduction of ideologies that were current during the last century about
mortal enemies and the inevitability of war.
The “elephant in the room” that pertained to the
2016 election was growing opposition to an activist United States
economic/political/military role in the world. Many center/left Americans, to
the extent that they were motivated by international issues, saw the Clinton
foreign policy record as emblematic of the long history of United States
imperialism. Further, given the fact that U.S. interventionism and support for
neoliberalism have generated growing global opposition, many voters feared a possible
Clinton presidency would extend foreign policies that have already created
chaos and anger, particularly in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.
Finally, to the extent that economics affected the
electoral outcome (and the degree to which this is correct is being hotly
debated), the neoliberal global agenda that has been enshrined in United States
international economic policy since the 1970s, has had much to do with rising
austerity, growing disparities of wealth and power, wage and income stagnation,
and declining social safety nets at home as well. The Trans Pacific Partnership
was both a possible reality and a metaphor for fifty years of failed
international economic policy for American workers.
Since the election, foreign policy has become even more
of an “elephant in the room” as millions of Americans struggle with the
prospects of a devastatingly inhumane new administration (perhaps one that
logically follows from the fifty year trajectory described above).
The
Post-Election Narrative: Trump Won the Election Because of the Russians!
The
Washington Post late Friday night published an explosive story that, in many
ways, is classic American journalism of the worst sort: the key claims are
based exclusively on the unverified assertions of anonymous officials, who in
turn are disseminating their own claims about what the CIA purportedly
believes, all based on evidence that remains completely secret.
Glenn Greenwald, “Anonymous Leaks to the WashPost About the CIA’s Russia
Beliefs Are No Substitute for Evidence,” The
Intercept, 12/10/16.
The “liberal” cable news outlet MSNBC, print media,
and social media went ballistic Friday night, December 9, over the release of a
story in the “objective” Washington Post
that the CIA had found a connection between Russian hackers, WikiLeaks, and the
release of damaging stories about presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.
Rachel Maddow was positively breathless as she
reported the Post story which in effect explains the Clinton loss as a result
of Russian interference. Weaving a yarn of conspiracy, Maddow also implicated
the leadership of the Republican Party in Congress for opposing any
investigation of the CIA warning before the elections. The Republican leader,
Senator Mitch McConnell questioned the credibility and partisanship of the CIA
claims about a Putin/Trump collaboration.
Maddow further linked the CIA claims that Russia
used the distribution of hacked messages to embarrass candidate Hillary Clinton
to Trump’s alleged close ties to Russia,
his investments in the Russian energy industry, and rumors that the next
Secretary of State would be an Exxon/Mobil CEO, whose corporation has close
ties to Russia. (She correctly pointed out that if Russia had sided with the
Clinton candidacy, the Republicans would have been outraged). Maddow, the Post, and many social media outlets have
suggested that all this adds up to a severe constitutional crisis. A foreign
nation, Russia, had interfered with free elections in American democracy. She
implied that the U.S. would never engage in such conduct overseas nor should it
accept outside interference in the electoral process at home.
The story was flawed from so many perspectives it
was difficult to disentangle the real threats to American society.
First, the United States has been interfering in
elections all across the globe at least since the onset of the Cold War. The
same CIA that is the hero in this story created Christian Democratic parties in
Europe shortly after World War Two to challenge the popularity of Communist
parties across the continent. It was instrumental in creating and supporting
virulently anti-Communist trade unions in Europe and Latin America. And it
funded the development of a panoply of anti-Communist scholarly networks inspired
by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Some of the most revered scholars,
writers, artists, were knowingly or unknowingly compromised by the CIA
political agenda.
In recent times, anti-Communist and erratic Russia
President Boris Yeltsin received aid and campaign advice from the Clinton
Administration during the Russian leader’s 1996 run for reelection. Yeltsin was
being challenged by candidates from Russian nationalist and Communist parties.
The victory of either would have slowed or reversed the so-called “shock
therapy” conversions from a state-directed to a neoliberal economy introduced
by a compliant Yeltsin.
Of course, interference in the politics of other
countries has been an unfortunate staple of United States foreign policy
throughout the world, particularly in Latin America: Guatemala, the Dominican
Republic, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and most recently,
Honduras and Venezuela. These patterns of interference have not been merely
gossipy stories leaked to the media but the funneling of money, sabotage,
training and support of coup plotters, and other direct, physical forms of
intervention.
As suggested above, inside the Beltway an
influential group of foreign policy elites have been pressuring the Obama
Administration to expand efforts to push back Russia, including undermining
Vladimir Putin’s rule (Putin is no different a political dictator and supporter
of crony capitalism than the earlier U.S. favorite Boris Yeltsin claimed Stephen
Cohen, “CNN Gets Schooled by Stephen Cohen on DNC Hack, Trump-Putin Links, Video,”
Russia Insider, Russia-insider.com
August 1, 2016).
The United States and its NATO allies, violating
promises from the 1990s, have been placing troops and bases in Poland and the
Baltic states. The United States played a significant role in the campaign that
led to the ouster of the elected leader of Ukraine (a plot organized by a
neoconservative State Department ally of Hillary Clinton). In short, leading
foreign policymakers have been lobbying for a New Cold War. And, the “liberal
media” stereotype of an aging, macho, shirtless, dictator provides a superb
visual image of the enemy. And to the contrary, candidate Trump hinted at the
possibility of reducing tensions between the United States and Russia.
Further, the aforementioned media have assumed but
not demonstrated in any way that the alleged Russian hacking and the use of
WikiLeaks (an opponent believed inside the Beltway to be almost as nefarious as
Putin) to publicize compromising e-mails determined the outcome of the
elections. This is in juxtaposition to the electronic libraries of published
articles seeking to explain the election outcomes.
Many election analyses have correctly highlighted
factors shaping the election including such variables as class, race, region,
anti-immigrant sentiments, voter suppression, and campaign tactics. “Fake News” (as opposed to the usual
mainstream media distortions) is the latest variable added to the list of
explanations. It is the case that the allegations of Russian hacking uncovered
by the CIA months ago and resurfacing now is the Washington Post, MSNBC, USA
Today, CNN version of “Fake News.”
In the post-election period serious reflection and
debate about who won and lost, why, and what can progressives do to resist and
reorganize has been overtaken by an old story about foreign intervention. The
old spies who had deviously worked in factories and tried to organize unions,
marched with civil rights activists, taught a different history in schools that
touched on the massacre of Nation Americans, slavery, the lack of voting
rights, and segregation, have been replaced by cyber spies: hackers who sit at
computers anywhere around the world bent on destroying American democracy. And
these hackers get their marching orders from, whom? The Russians! Foreign
policy remains “the elephant in the room.” Progressives need to add it to
strategizing about the future.
Harry Targ teaches United States foreign
policy at Purdue University. He is a co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence
for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) and blogs at
www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com
