The Peace Movement Today
The history of the peace movement is
complicated, with successes and failures. First, the history of peace movement
solidarity has been intimately connected to anti-racist, pro-labor, women’s,
and environmental struggles for decades. When Dr. King and Mohammed Ali
connected the evils of Vietnam with racism and poverty at home proponents of
peace and social and economic justice gained in strength.
Second, the relative strength in number,
message, and organization of the peace movement has varied significantly over
time. Since the onset of the Cold War peace and solidarity activities have been
most vibrant during the Vietnam War, the wars against Central America, Gulf War
One, the bombing of Serbia, the Iraq War, Israeli bombing of targets in Gaza,
and threats of bombing Syria in 2013.
Today the movement is dormant because of peace
activist energies being targeted against threats to whatever remains of democracy by the Trump
administration. Paradoxically, with the continuation of war and terrorism on
the world stage, the systematic use of hybrid war techniques to starve
populations in states defined as enemies, to the spread of new high technology
instruments of slaughter, the danger of the return to big power conflict, and
continuing increases in military spending, the voices of the peace movement
have been dispersed and hence weakened. This is a dilemma not only for peace
but for economic justice, saving the environment, and ending racism and sexism.
During this disturbing period in world history the end of the Trump
Administration and its replacement by the new President Biden with foreign
policy influentials long associated with prior Democratic and Republican
administrations, it is useful to step back and analyze “the time of day” on a
worldwide basis: as to global class forces and their ideologies; contemporary techniques
of empire and their consequences for the lives of billions; individual global
crises; and where President Biden stands on issues of war and peace and foreign
policy in general. Much of the material below was assembled in the summer,
2016 in anticipation of an electoral victory by Hillary Rodham Clinton. While that prediction was incorrect, the
issues involving the United States in the world remain remarkably (and sadly)
the same today, 2021, as 2016.
The Ruling Class Agenda for the United States
Role in the World
From a Washington Post editorial,
May 21, 2016:
HARDLY A day goes by without evidence that the liberal international order
of the past seven decades is being eroded. China and Russia are
attempting to fashion a world in their own illiberal image…This
poses an enormous trial for the next U.S. president. We say trial because no
matter who takes the Oval Office, it will demand courage and difficult
decisions to save the liberal international order. As a new report from the Center for a New American Security
points out, this order is worth saving, and it is worth reminding ourselves
why: It generated unprecedented global prosperity, lifting billions of people
out of poverty; democratic government, once rare, spread to more than 100 nations;
and for seven decades there has been no cataclysmic war among the great powers.
No wonder U.S. engagement with the world enjoyed a bipartisan consensus.
The Washington Post editorial
quoted above clearly articulates the dominant view envisioned by US foreign
policy elites for the years ahead: about global political economy, militarism,
and ideology. (And there is not much evidence that this vision is different in
2021 from 2016). It in effect constitutes a synthesis of the "neocon"
and the "liberal interventionist" wings of the ruling class. First,
it is inspired by the necessity of 21st century capitalism to
defend neoliberal globalization: government for the rich, austerity for the
many, and deregulation of trade, investment, and speculation.
Second, the Post vision
of a New World Order is built upon a reconstituted United States military and
economic hegemony that has been a central feature of policymaking at least
since the end of World War II even though time after time it has suffered setbacks:
from defeat in Vietnam, to radical decolonization across the Global South, and
to the rise of competing poles of power in Asia, the Middle East, Latin
America, and even Europe. In addition, despite recent setbacks, grassroots mass
mobilizations against neoliberal globalization and austerity policies have
risen everywhere, even in the United States. The Washington Post speaks
to efforts to reassemble the same constellation of political forces, military
resources, and concentrated wealth, that, if anything, is greater than at any
time since the establishment of the US “permanent war economy” after the last
World War.
Historian, Michael Stanley, in an essay
entitled “‘We are Not Denmark’: Hillary Clinton and Liberal American Exceptionalism,”
(Common Dreams, February 26, 2016) points to the ideological glue that is used
by foreign policy elites, liberal and conservative, to justify the pursuit of
neoliberal globalization and militarism; that is the reintroduction of the old
idea of American Exceptionalism, which in various forms has been used by elites
since the foundation of the Republic.
The modern version, borne in the context of
continental and global expansion, serves to justify an imperial US role in the
world. Along with posturing that the United States is somehow special and has
much to offer the world, American Exceptionalism presumes the world has little
to offer the United States. The only difference between Democrats and
Republicans on foreign policy is whether the exceptionalism still exists and
must be maintained or has dissipated requiring the need to “make America great
again.” Leaders of both parties, however, support the national security state,
high military expenditures, and a global presence—military, economic,
political, and cultural. With the election of Joe Biden, the corporate media in
the main has reiterated the idea that the United States remains the
“indispensable nation” in the international system, despite temporary setbacks
resulting from Trump foreign policies.
Techniques of Empire Today
Although the imperial agenda, and the
ideological precepts justifying it, has remained the same for two hundred years
the techniques of empire have changed as growing resistance at home and abroad
and new technologies dictate. Changes in warfare, other violence, and imperial
expansion articulated in 2016 and still relevant today include the following:
-Wars are internal much more than
international and casualties are overwhelmingly civilian rather than military.
-The global presence of some form of the United
States military is ubiquitous-between 700-and 1,000 military bases, in anywhere
from 40 to 120 countries
- US military operations have been privatized.
A 2010 Washington Post report found 1,911 intelligence
contracting firms doing top secret work for 1,271 government organizations at
over 10,000 sites. Ninety percent of such work is being done by 110
contractors.
-More “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles” have been
used to kill alleged enemies over the last eight years as the entire prior
period of US military operations. Drones have come home as their use by the
Dallas police recently showed.
-US agencies, such as the CIA, have been
engaged in the increased use of assassinations and efforts to undermine
governments. One report indicated that there are 13,000 assassination
commandoes operating around the world.
-So-called “humanitarian assistance” is used
to support United States policies in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin
America. For example, a New York Times story reported that at
least 40 American groups received $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for
Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade.
-The United States increasingly has used
economic tools—economic blockades, trade sanctions, covert financing of pro-US politicians
in other countries, and condemnations by some international organizations to
undermine, starve, and ultimately, it is hoped, to entice people to overthrow
their governments. These techniques, often labeled “hybrid war,” are being used
against Venezuela, Cuba, and some thirty other countries.
Some generalizations we can draw from the new
techniques of war are the following:
-Imperial rule has become global.
-The Military/industrial complex has expanded
beyond President Eisenhower’s wildest nightmares. Large sectors of military
operations—from cooking and cleaning to killing—have been privatized.
-Military operations continue and expand
without “boots on the ground.” Empires can kill with impunity.
Nick Turse and colleagues
reported on data indicating that the United States has been engaged
in secret military training of personnel in many countries, what they called ‘a
shadowy network of U.S. programs that every year provides instruction and
assistance to approximately 200,000 foreign soldiers, police, and other
personnel.” (Douglas Gillison, Nick Turse, Moiz Syed, “How the
U.S. Trains Killers Worldwide,” Portside, July 13, 2016).
Their report is worth further quoting:
“The data show training at no fewer than 471
locations in 120 countries….involving on the U.S. side, 150 defense agencies,
civilian agencies, armed forces colleges, defense training centers, military
units, private companies, and NGOs, as well as the National Guard forces of
five states.” Perhaps most important for the peace movement is the following:
Despite the fact that the Department of Defense alone has poured some $122
billion into such programs since 9/11, the breadth and content of this training
network remain virtually unknown to most Americans.”
Impacts of 21st Century
Imperialism
By any measure the pain and suffering brought
by 21st century imperialism is staggering. US Labor Against the
War reported that sources estimate 1.3 million people, mostly in the Middle
East and South Asia, have died due to the war on terrorism initiated in 2001.
They quote a research report that estimates that one million Iraqis have died
since 2003 and an additional 220,000 citizens of Afghanistan and 80,000 from
Pakistan. Other sources claim these figures are too conservative and remind us
of the untold thousands upon thousands who have died directly from war and
violence in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and elsewhere in the Middle East,
South Asia, and North Africa.
These figures, of course, address deaths
directly attributed to war and terrorism but do not include economic sanctions,
massive flight of peoples from war zones, persecution by authoritarian regimes,
environmental devastation and drone strikes and assassinations. Large areas of
the globe centered in the Middle East and North Africa are ungovernable with
foreign intervention and anomic domestic violence on the rise. In a troubling
essay by Patrick Cockburn the author asserts that:
“We live in an age of disintegration. Nowhere
is this more evident than in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Across the
vast swath of territory between Pakistan and Nigeria, there are at least seven
ongoing wars-in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and South
Sudan. These conflicts are extraordinarily destructive. They are tearing apart
the countries in which they are taking place in ways that make it doubtful they
will ever recover.” (Patrick Cockburn, “The Age of Disintegration:
Neoliberalism, Interventionism, the Resource Curse, and a Fragmenting
World,” The Unz Review: Mobile, June 28, 2016).
Cockburn suggests that this fragmentation has
core features: no winners and losers, deconstruction of states, massive
population upheavals and migrations, religious
fundamentalism replacing socialist and/or nationalist
politics, and outside interventions. The Global South project Vijay Prashad
described so well in The Darker Nations has been superseded by
competing fundamentalist projects.
Specific Cases
NATO/Ukraine/New Cold War
In 2016 leaders of the 28 NATO countries met
in summit in Poland to reaffirm their commitment to the military alliance that
was established in 1949 for the sole purpose of protecting the European
continent from any possible Soviet military intervention. With the collapse of
the former Soviet Union, rather than dissolving, NATO took on the task of
policing the world for neoliberal globalization and the states ‘victorious” in
the Cold War. NATO was the official operational arm of military operations in
the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the military force that would destroy
the Gaddafi regime in Libya.
After the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, NATO
incorporated the states in Eastern Europe that had been affiliated with it. Now
Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic States remain the frontline in the ongoing
hostilities with Russia. They and western financiers from Ukraine, with
substantial assistance from the United States, engineered the coup that ousted
a corrupt but elected President in Ukraine. This set off an ongoing civil war
between those in the population who wanted to continue ties to Russia and
others who wanted Ukraine to join the European Union and NATO. The instability
in Kiev was orchestrated by high US state department officials who advocated a
New Cold War with Russia. Some US diplomats involved in the Ukraine story may
return to the Biden diplomatic team,
At the NATO summit of 2016 it was agreed to
establish four battalion-sized “battle groups” in Poland and the Baltic states.
To use the language of the Cold War, this small force could serve as a “trip
wire” that could precipitate an “incident” and a major war with Russia. NATO
agreed to bolster the Ukraine military. The alliance would commit to
establishing a controversial missile defense system in Eastern
Europe. And NATO countries promised to spend two percent of their
budgets on the military. The continued commitment of the United States was
affirmed by President Obama. After the Trump period of reduced commitment to
NATO, President Biden wishes to resuscitate the alliance.
The Asian Pivot
In 2011, US spokespersons announced that the
country would shift resources and attention to Asia from the Middle East, an
area with demanding security and economic interests. Although US/Chinese
dialogue continues the United States has criticized China’s repositioning of
what it regards as its possessions in the South China Sea. The United States
has expanded military relations with Vietnam, reestablished military bases in
the Philippines, and has generally avoided criticizing efforts by ruling
Japanese politicians to revise their constitution to allow for a full-scale
remilitarization. The United States has threatened North Korea over their
military maneuvers and has bolstered the South Korean military. While Trump did
reach out to North Korea, tension reduction on the peninsula was short-lived. On
the economic front the United States was instrumental in building support for
the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) to challenge Chinese economic hegemony in
the region. While Trump rescinded the TPP approach, he launched a trade war
against China and engaged in attacks on Chinese corporations operating in the
West. Both Trump and Biden spokespersons have made it clear that a New Cold War
against China is ramping up. Corporations engaged in military production and
research universities have used the China threat as a justification for
increased military spending, research and development, cyber-security and a
whole panoply of tools to fight twenty-first century wars.
The Middle East
Most American politicians express their belief
that the US must maintain a special relationship with the state of Israel. One
of the few active mobilizations for peace today is the worldwide campaign to
demand governments, corporations, and other institutions boycott, and divest
holdings in what is regarded as an apartheid state, Israel, which oppresses its
Arab population and those living in the Occupied Territories. The campaign is
so effective that along with national politicians, governors and state
legislatures have taken stands against the BDS campaign. Israel continues to expand
its occupation of Palestinian land, repress Palestinians within Israel, and is
currently not distributing the covid-19 vaccine to Palestinian people, while
other Israel citizens are inoculated.
Next to the historic US ties to Israel, most
analysts see the deconstruction of the Middle East that Cockburn wrote about as
a direct result of the Iraq war initiated in 2003. Over the next decade, Syria,
Libya, Yemen and other countries have been torn apart by civil war fueled by
western, primarily US, intervention, continuing US support of Saudi Arabian
militarism, and the fractionalization of states in the region. The Trump
administration increased the threat of
war with Iran. President Biden
might be open to returning to the Nuclear Treaty with Iran from which Trump
withdrew.
This ten year war on the Middle East has created
a growing terrorist response directed at western targets and an ideological
campaign, including calls to violence, against all the traditional imperial
powers who dominated the region for one hundred years. With this as a
backdrop, the United States response to violence has been stepped up
high-tech killing justified by a public campaign that demonizes Muslim people
in the United States and everywhere in the world.
AFRICOM
Nick Turse described the growing US military
presence on the African continent. A special command structure, AFRICOM, was
established in 2008 to oversee US security interests on the continent.
Initially, Turse reported, the Pentagon claimed that it had one larger base,
Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. But enterprising researchers discovered that the US
military had a dense network of “cooperative security outposts,” bases and
other sites of military presence, at least 60 across the continent, in 34
countries. The US has defense attaches in 38 countries.
An Oxford researcher was quoted by Turse on
the new oversite of the African continent.
“AFRICOM, as a new command, is basically a
laboratory for a different kind of warfare and a different way of posturing
forces…Apart from Djibouti, there’s no significant stockpiling of troops,
equipment, or even aircraft. There are a myriad of ‘lily pads’ or small forward
operating bases…so you can spread out even a small number of forces over a very
large area and concentrate those forces quite quickly when necessary” (Nick
Turse, “America’s Empire of African Bases,” TomDispatch.com,
November 17, 2015).
Latin America
United States foreign policy toward Latin
America has taken a variety of forms since the onset of the 21st century.
The United States, in the older mold, encouraged and assisted in the failed
military coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002 and gave at least quiescent support
to the military overthrow of Honduran President Zelaya in 2009. At the same
time the United States has curried the favor of upper class opponents of the
regimes transformed by the Bolivarian Revolution: Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador,
Paraguay, and Uruguay. Two larger countries Argentina and Brazil have
experienced domestic political turmoil in recent years, to some extent driven
by internecine politics and corruption. The United States, in all these cases
has networked with opposition political forces, sometimes encouraging wealthy
citizens of countries such as Brazil and Venezuela to launch votes of no
confidence or impeachment proceedings against their governments that have stood
against the US neoliberal economic agenda. Some have referred to the new US
strategy in the region as one of creating “silent coups.”
The influence of the United States has
weakened since the onset of the Bolivarian Revolution and the distain Latin
Americans hold toward the United States because of its long-standing efforts to
isolate Cuba. President Obama in collaboration with President Castro announced
a new opening of relations between the two countries in December, 2014 and until 2017 US economic constraints on travel, trade, and investment were reduced
(although the blockade remains) until Trump reinstated new draconian
sanctions. Whether in the Obama Administration or during the Trump presidency,
what remained similar to past US policy toward Cuba, however, was the stated
aims of United States policy: the promotion of democracy and markets. It was no
mere coincidence that President Obama visited Cuba in March, 2016 and then flew
to Argentina to negotiate with the newly elected neoliberal President Macri of
Argentina. The Trump Administration reversed the Obama “soft power”
approach to Cuba, returned to sanctions and tightened them further than they
had been for years. In addition, Trump escalated “soft coup” attempts and
economic sanctions against Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba. Biden spokespersons
have spoken in favor of “more effective” sanctions against Venezuela. It is
unclear whether Biden will pursue the “soft power” diplomacy with Cuba that
Obama initiated. Meanwhile most of the countries of the world have called for
an end to the US blockade of Cuba.
The Idea of the National Security
State
The contradiction that still needs an
explanation is the fact that for the most part the American people oppose wars
and intervention. This is particularly so in the twenty-first century when so
much pain and suffering has been caused by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In
2008 Americans elected Barack Obama, in part because he had opposed the war in
Iraq and had called for a new American foreign policy based on respect for
other nations and peoples. He promised to use diplomacy not war as the primary
tool of international relations and in some instances has tried to do that. He probably
wanted to end the two awful wars and show some respect for others, even while
promoting a neoliberal global agenda in a world of diverse centers of power and
wealth. But why have Obama’s cautious efforts to promote United States economic
and political interests been contradicted by the patterns of interventionism
and the rhetoric of military globalization so common over the last few years?
The answer can be found in a variety of
explanations of United States imperialism including what Mike Lofgren has called
the “deep state.” Lofgren defined the “deep state” as “… a hybrid
association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and
industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference
to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political
process.” (Mike Lofgren, “Anatomy of the ‘Deep State’: Hiding in
Plain Sight,” Online University of the Left, February 23,
2014). Others have examined invisible power structures,
including class, that rule America (from C. W. Mills’ classic The Power
Elite, Oxford University Press, 2000 to Robert Perrucci, Earl Wysong, and
David Wright, The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? Rowman
and Littlefield, 2013).
The roots of analyses like those above are
that power to make critical decisions reside not in the superstructure of the
political process; the place were competitive games are played for all to see,
but in powerful institutions embedded in society that can make decisions
without requiring popular approval. Over and over again, the “deep state”
apparatus of the national security state
has led the American people into war or covert interventions that destroyed the
rights of people in other countries to solve their own problems. In the end
these nstitutions have involved the United States in death and destruction all
across the globe. And ironically as majorities of Americans feared that President
Trump might stage a domestic coup to stay in office or make war on Iran to
regain his popularity they hoped that sectors of the national security state
would reject presidential orders to carry out such egregious acts.
So Where Does the Peace Movement Go From Here?
Analyses of what is wrong are easier to
develop than thinking through ways to respond. This essay opened with a
dilemma; a broken peace movement locally and nationally. It then argued that
the foreign policy elites have had a hegemonic vision of the role of the United
States in the world yesterday, today,
and tomorrow. And these elites and institutions of the national security state have
at their disposal 21st century military technologies to
maintain their power in the world. The consequences of force and intervention
have been horrific for billions of people.
Having outlined the scope of the problem, we
have briefly described current US foreign policy “trouble-spots:” Russia and
Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.
Phyllis Bennis wrote in 2016 that: “An
anti-war position, in the broadest sense of reducing military budgets, calling
for diplomacy over war, condemning the ‘inevitable’ civilian casualties,
calling out how military assaults create rather than destroy terrorism…these
are enormously unifying principles among progressives….movements matter.”
(Phyllis Bennis, “What the Democratic Party Platform Tells Us About Where We
Are on War,” Portside, July 8, 2016).
Approaches the peace movement can take in the
near term include the following:
1.Develop a theory, a conceptual scheme about
the multiplicity of connected issues that affect peoples lives linking
economics, politics, militarism, and culture. Think about a diamond shaped
figure. At the base is an economic system, at this point in time finance
capitalism. Above the base at the two side points are militarism on one side
and racism and sexism on the other. At the top add destruction of nature.
Conceptualizing the war problem in this way we begin to see the connections
between the 21st century state of capitalism as a global system
and war, racism, sexism, and environmental destruction.
2.Use the theory or schema to develop an
educational program that begins with efforts to understand the fundamentals of
the war system (direct and structural violence as peace
researchers put it). Use the schema as programs on specific issues are
prepared. Always relate the specific issue at hand: Israel/Palestine, Ukraine,
undermining regimes in Latin America for example, to the diamond.
3.Participate in grassroots organizing in
solidarity with others, always linking issues to the war/peace paradigm. One
error participants in the various Moral Mondays campaigns have made is to
accede to the idea that Moral Mondays should only be about state legislative
issues, not national or international ones. And work to network with peace
groups all across the nation to rebuild the national peace movement that so
effectively fought against war and imperialism in the past.
4.Engage in global solidarity. The analysis
above has emphasized the forces of global hegemony, or imperialism. It is
critical to be aware of and support the grassroots ferment that is occurring
all across the globe; from Arab Spring; to the Bolivarian Revolution; to
anti-austerity campaigns in Greece, Spain, Quebec, and elsewhere, and the
broadening climate change movement that encompasses the globe.
The tasks of a 21st century
peace movement are not different from those of the past. They involve
education, organization, and agitation. With the growth of worldwide resistance
to neoliberal globalization, austerity, racism, sexism, and destruction of
nature, it seems natural to incorporate concerns for peace and the right
to national and personal self-determination to the budding radical movements of
our day.
