Extracted and revised from:
https://mronline.org/2019/10/23/united-states-foreign-policy-yesterday-today-and-tomorrow/
Harry Targ
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
Thursday, September 24, 2020
The Long Troubled United States Relations With China: U.S. Globalism, the Open Door Notes, and the Centrality of China for Building A Global Empire
The developing United States international obsession with China (leaving aside the super-exploitation of Chinese labor and profound anti-Chinese racism in the United States), has its roots in the rise of the US as a great power. As historians such as William Appleman Williams have pointed out, the United States emerged as an industrial power on the world stage between the end of the Civil War and the 1890s. Not only was the US economy experiencing industrialization, but private entrepreneurs were building a transcontinental railroad, with Chinese labor, to create a vast continental empire. Coupled with industrialization, a vast transportation network, was the development of agricultural surpluses, well-beyond the consumer needs of persons in the United States. Williams concluded that by the 1880s the United States, because of increased agricultural productivity, began to seek world markets for its goods (The Contours of American History, 1961).
Increasingly the industrial and agricultural
revolutions in the United States were leading to increased competition with
European imperial powers and the rising Japanese empire. A sector of the United States political class,
exemplified by former Secretary of the Navy and soon-to-be President Theodore
Roosevelt, argued for the United States to develop a global vision and a naval
military capability to facilitate becoming a global empire, particularly to
challenge Europe. After diplomatic skirmishes with Great Britain over who
should have dominant influence in Latin America, the United States entered the
Cuban anti-colonial war against the Spanish empire in 1898. (Over the
subsequent years until 1959 the United States replaced Spain as the colonial
overseer of Cuba). In addition, the United States took Puerto Rico, reaffirmed
its dominance over the Hawaiian Islands and seized control of the Philippines.
To further the globalization of US empire President Roosevelt was able to get
Congressional support for a “two-ocean” navy. The United States was on the road
to becoming a world power.
But the lack of control of the political economy of
China remained an obstacle to the completion of the imperial project. The 4,000
years old Chinese empire, controlling vast amounts of land, people, and neighboring
countries had begun to deconstruct in the nineteenth century. The Opium Wars of
1839-42 and 1856 were carried out by Great Britain and later France, Germany,
and Russia to force China to open its domestic markets to foreign penetration,
and further, to the development of spheres of influence for each of these
countries (and Japan). The devolution of the Qing Dynasty and the defeat of
Chinese nationalists during the Boxer Rebellion in 1901-1902 seemed to solidify
European and Japanese control over the vast Chinese empire.
Fearful of being frozen out of the vast potential Chinese market, President William McKinley’s Secretary of State, John Hay, issued two “notes” to European powers in 1899 and 1900 indicating that the United States would insist upon equal access to Chinese markets, even in areas of the country that had been seen as part of the “spheres of influence” of the colonial powers.
Traditional interpreters of United States foreign policy, such as George Kennan, regarded John Hay’s Open Door Notes as examples of typical U.S. diplomatic bluster; empty threats that could not be backed up by economic or military power. Williams in his classic, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, argues that the Notes were emblematic of the development of United States global imperial power.
What had been the nineteenth century
vision of U.S. domination of Latin America, the Monroe Doctrine, was being
applied to Asia as well. The defeat of the Spanish, the occupation of the
Philippines, the development of a two ocean navy, burgeoning agricultural
products, a vision of American exceptionalism often articulated by Theodore
Roosevelt and spokespersons of both political parties, all made it clear that
domination of China was to be a key global project of the twentieth century.
Wednesday, September 16, 2020
BUILDING A SOCIALIST FUTURE
THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AT THE OUTSET OF TRUMPISM AND THE BRAZEN RISE OF WHITE SUPREMACIST MOVEMENTS. ALSO IT WAS WRITTEN AT A TIME WHEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, INCLUDING THE BERNIE SANDERS CAMPAIGN, HAD CAPTURED THE IMAGINATION OF MANY YOUNG PEOPLE, PEOPLE OF COLOR, IMMIGRANT ACTIVISTS AND OTHERS. MOST RECENTLY GEORGE FLOYD WAS MURDERED BY POLICE AND THE COVID 19 PANDEMIC EXPOSED TO ALL THE FAILURES OF OUR ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL SYSTEM. WHILE CHANGES ARE OCCURRING AT BREAKNECK SPEED THE ANALYSIS OF CAPITALISM AND THE ENVISIONING OF SOCIALISM DESCRIBED BELOW SEEM STILL RELEVANT, EVEN AS WE APPROACH THE NOVEMBER, 2020 ELECTIONS.
THE MATERIAL REASONS FOR THE CURRENT INTEREST IN
SOCIALISM ( a repost from July 28, 2017)
Harry Targ
Introduction
The twenty-first century economic
reality has created a new class society with a dominant class of concentrated
wealth at one extreme and a growing class of economically insecure in the
other. More and more of those in the latter have become political
activists, particularly among the young. This new class society in the United
States parallels similar economic changes in both rich and poor countries. As a
result of the changes in global and domestic economies social movements have
arisen everywhere. From Cairo, Egypt to Madison, Wisconsin, from Greece to
Chile, from Syriza and Podemos to the Sanders campaign, the cry for change,
often a demand for socialism, is spreading. The outcome of this new activism is
unclear but for the first time in a long time, the prospects for positive
social and political change look promising.
The
New Class Society
In 1999, Robert
Perrucci and Earl Wysong published the first of four editions of a perceptive
sociological analysis that identified what the authors identified as “the new
class society.” They employed a Marxist and Weberian analysis of class that
combined workers’ relationships to the means of production with their
organizational position.
Using data
reflecting their synthetic definition of class, these authors concluded that
the popular portrait of a U.S. class system consisting of a small ruling class,
a large “middle class,” and a small percentage of economically and politically
marginalized people was, by the 1970s, no longer an accurate way to describe
society. The class system of the days of relative prosperity from the 1940s
until the late 1960s, which looked like a diamond with a broad middle, had
become a class system looking like a “double diamond.”
In the new class
society, the first diamond, the top one, consists of the “privileged class”
composed of a “super-class,” “credentialed class managers,” and
“professionals.” All together these representatives of privilege constitute
about 20 percent of the population. All the others constitute a “new working
class,” some living in relative comfort but most engaged in wage labor with the
constant threat of job loss and wage stagnation, some modestly self-employed,
and a large part-time labor force. This is the second diamond representing 80
percent of the population.
In short, the political economy that emerged nearly fifty years ago is one in
which a shrinking ruling class that owns or controls capital has accumulated
enormous wealth and dominates today’s economy. At the other end an increasingly
insecure working class in terms of jobs and income has grown exponentially.
Peter Temin,
an MIT economist, confirms the earlier sociological work in his new book “The
Vanishing Middle Class.” This book also identifies an emerging two-class
society with wealth and power concentrated at the top and poverty and
powerlessness at the bottom. In what Temin calls the “dual economy,” the ruling
class consists of the finance, technology, and electronics sectors (FTE),
representing the top twenty percent as opposed to “the low wage sector;”
clerks, assemblers, laborers, and service workers who provide the comforts and
profits for the top twenty percent.
In summary,
both volumes suggest that in terms of wealth and power conflicts of interest
have to be seen not between the one percent and everyone else but between the
twenty percent who own/control/ or administer the capitalist system and the
eighty percent who constitute increasingly marginalized labor serving the
interests of the wealthy and powerful.
The
Precariat
Guy
Standing, a British economist, has written about the “precariat,” a growing
portion of the worldwide work force, Temin’s “ low wage sector,” who live in
economic insecurity. The term, precariat, refers to a synthesis of the idea of
the proletariat, workers who sell their ability to provide labor to a
capitalist for a wage, and precarity, or economic existence that is
unpredictable, marginal, and insecure. Job scarcity and wage stagnation
increasingly is experienced by workers with professional skills and credentials
as well as the traditional working class.
Standing
argues that all across the globe workers, particularly young workers, live in situations
of economic insecurity and unpredictability, irrespective of credentials, that
in the past guaranteed jobs and living wages. Of course, the precariat do not
have any of the guarantees of union membership and their skills leave them
often working on a part-time contract basis and in isolation from fellow
workers. In addition the precariat include workers in the “informal sector.”
These are workers who often will do anything to survive from day to day: for
example, day labor, street vending, drug dealing, petty crime, or prostitution.
Accumulation
by Dispossession
David
Harvey, a Marxist geographer, revisited Marx’s description of primitive
accumulation in his book, “The Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism.”
Capitalism was created on the backs of slaves, the slaughter of
indigenous people, and the expropriation of already occupied land. In other
words, through kidnapping, forced labor, slaughter, and occupation, capitalism
was born. The expropriation of resources, people, and land led to the
accumulation of wealth that spurred development and growth.
Harvey then
argues that the primitive accumulation of the fifteenth century is similar in
outcome to the “accumulation by dispossession,” of the twenty-first century.
Today workers lose their property and their personal income in a debt system
that sucks their scarce earnings and property. Examples include defaults on
mortgage loans and bank repossessions and governmental decisions to confiscate
property for purposes of urban redevelopment. Accumulation by dispossession,
while not as violent as in the era of primitive accumulation, has the same
outcome: expropriating the value of the work of the many for the riches of the
few.
Growing
Economic Inequality and Urban Decay and Gentrification
Virtually
every study of the distribution of wealth and income in the United States
demonstrates a dramatic increase in inequality. Also studies sponsored by
international organizations report that despite declines in worldwide absolute
poverty, the trajectory of growing inequality in wealth and income is a central
feature of the global economy. In addition, declining inequality between
countries, such as that between China and the countries of the European Union,
have occurred while inequalities within these countries have widened. In the
United States income and wealth inequality which declined from the 1930s until
the 1960s has returned to levels not seen since the 1920s.
The patterns
of inequality are visible in geographic spaces as well. As more and more people
are forced to migrate to cities, what Mike Davis calls “global slums,”
demarcations of areas of opulence and poverty become visible. Members of the
top twenty percent are consumers of expensive living spaces, elite schools, and
vibrant recreational facilities. They also lobby for public funds to create
recreational attractions that entice tourists to bolster local economies.
Gentrified city spaces are protected by fences and police.
On the other
hand, the bottom eighty percent live in varying degrees of poverty. Housing
stocks crumble, neighborhoods are overcrowded, public services are increasingly
underfunded, and populations are left to lead lives of quiet desperation and
intra-community violence. In the new class society different sectors of the
population live in isolation from each other, except when political conflict
and violence spread across communities.
Also in the
new class society youth become pessimistic about their futures. Despite the
fact that media and academic studies claim that upward mobility is tied to
scholastic achievement, the schools they attend are underfunded. And the cost
of higher education, the main source of credentialing the young, has become
prohibitively expensive. For those who accumulate massive student debt the
experience feels like a modern-day variant of indentured servitude. Jobs for
those who do not attend college are scarce and reside primarily in the low-wage
service sector. And so-called STEM jobs (science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics) are not as plentiful as college promotional brochures suggest.
Along with the precarity of the traditional working class is a rising precarity
of a new working class of highly educated but unemployable young people.
Racism
Manning
Marable published a perceptive essay in 2006 entitled “Globalization and
Racialization.” In it he adapted, based upon the twenty-first century global
political economy, the prophetic statement by W. E. B. Du Bois that the problem
of the twentieth century was the color line. Marable suggested that the new
global political economy was based upon capital flight, as well-paid
manufacturing jobs left the United States for sweatshops in the Global South.
Unemployment increased in the United States. Downward pressures on wages
and benefits paid workers in poor countries reduced the economic conditions of
US workers. The decline of organized labor in the United States and the Global
South weakened the bargaining position of workers everywhere.
Marable
suggested that the people most vulnerable to the massive changes in the global
economy were the already marginalized people of color. Unemployment rates in
poor and Black communities skyrocketed, particularly among youth. The new
gentrification and shift in politics from welfare state capitalism to austerity
led to declining public services in poor communities. This has had particularly
devastating impacts on educational institutions.
With
declining economic opportunities, a growing sense of hopelessness, draconian
government policies such as the wars on drugs and crime, literally millions of
African Americans, and other people of color, have become victims of mass
incarceration, what Michelle Alexander calls “The New Jim Crow.” Finally, many
states have laws that prevent former felons from voting. The Marable framework,
which he refers to as “global apartheid” and “the New Racial Domain,” thus
links globalization of production to racism; particularly growing unemployment
and urban decay, criminalization, mass incarceration, and voter
disenfranchisement.
Neoliberalism:
the Latest Stage of Capitalism
The
so-called “golden age of the US economy,” 1945 to 1968, may have been an
anomaly in American history. The United States emerged from World War Two as
the economic and military hegemonic power. The war led to a fourfold increase
in United States trade compared with the late 1930s. In 1945 it produced about
2/3 of all the industrial goods manufactured in the world and US investments
constituted about ¾ of all the world’s investments. With fears of stagnation
accompanying the war’s end, the Truman Administration launched a massive
program of military investment to forestall declining demand for US goods and
services.
In terms of
international relations, the United States played an instrumental role in
establishing powerful international economic institutions, such as the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank. It helped rebuild an anti-communist
Europe through a massive financial aid system. It later established foreign
assistance programs for newly “independent” countries requiring their
commitment to the maintenance of a global capitalist system.
At home a
United States economy was created that stimulated high mass consumption. People
were socialized to believe that their self-worth was determined by the quantity
and quality of goods and services they consumed. The new communication medium,
television, educated viewers as to the products that were available (as well as
the enemies overseas who were the threat to the domestic consumer society).
However, by
the late 1960s, markets were glutted and demand for goods lessened even though
wages and benefits for some workers increased. Federal and state governments
had been increasing services such as education, health care, and
transportation. Both profit rates and consumer demand declined. Growing
political protest against the Vietnam war and racism across the country added
to emerging economic stagnation.
By the
1970s, the squeeze on profits and reduced demand, was exacerbated by Middle
East wars and large increases in the price of oil, which made some corporations
and banks richer while economic stagnation, including both high inflation and
unemployment, ensued. At this point, the United States economy began a shift to
what David Harvey calls “financialization.” A small number of banks and
corporations, mostly US but also European and Japanese, began to shift from
encouraging manufacturing growth to financial speculation. A “new” debt system
was encouraged, one in which oil-poor countries borrowed more and more money
from bankers to pay for continued oil imports. In exchange debtor nations would
promise to carry out new economic policies at home: cut government spending,
privatize public institutions, deregulate domestic economies, and shift
economic activities from production for domestic use to production for sale in
the world market.
Thus, the
new era of “neoliberal globalization” was initiated. The new system was driven
by financial speculators, declining autonomy of nation-states, and the
downsizing of wages and benefits everywhere. At the same time rates of profit
for speculators increased and smaller numbers of banks and other financial
institutions increasingly dominated the global economy. This system was
initiated in the Global South, spread to Western Europe and after the fall of
the Soviet Union and its allies to Eastern Europe. In the 1980s neoliberalism
was embraced by Prime Minister Thatcher in Great Britain and President Ronald
Reagan in the United States. The best way to characterize policy in the age of
neoliberal globalization is “austerity,” reducing the economic opportunities of
the many for the benefit of the few.
Neoliberal
globalization is the systemic source of the new class society (or the dual
economy), the rise of the precariat, accumulation by dispossession, growing
inequality and urban gentrification, and the expansion of racism.
A
Revitalized Interest in Socialism in the Twenty-First Century
As history
has shown, the accumulation of wealth and power by ruling elites, or dominant
classes, never goes unchecked. The drive for domination breeds resistance. And
resistance takes many forms: traditional revolutionary practices, building
alternative economic and political institutions, non-violent refusal to obey
the institutions that support economic misery and political repression, and
where practical, participation in electoral processes. Social change is
many-sided and several strategies together are most likely to bring positive
results.
History
shows also that struggles for change are broadly political, require
organization, mass mobilization, and education. Change requires analyses of the
causes of the problems needing solution and a vision of what a
better future might look like. And there is an inextricable connection between
the causes of the problems, the tactics needed to change the situation, and a
vision of a better society.
The analyses
above highlight the changing character of the global political economy,
emerging class structures, and the growing vulnerabilities of literally
millions of people: young and old: Black, Brown, and White; female and male;
gay and straight; and at all levels of education and training. At the root of
the problem is the capitalist system, a system whose reason for being is the
maximization of profit. People today are talking about a new society, a
socialist society. Socialism implies a political economy in which people
contribute their talents, their labors, for the public good and share equitably
in the product of their labor. And socialism presumes democratic participation
in work places, the political system, and the community.
References
Robert A.
Perrucci and Earl Wysong. The New Class Society, Rowman and
Littlefield, 1999 (the first of four editions).
Peter
Temin, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual
Economy, MIT Press, 2017.
Victor Tan
Chen, “The Dual Economy,” Working Class Perspectives, https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/the-dual-economy/
Guy
Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Bloomsbury
Academic, 2014.
David
Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, Oxford University Press, 2015.
Mike
Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, 2017.
Harry
Targ, Challenging Late Capitalism, Neoliberal Globalization and
Militarism, Lulu.com, 2006.
Manning
Marable, “Globalization and Racialization,” ZNET, zcom.org,
March 2, 2009.
Various articles on political economy,
social movements, peace and justice in Harry Targ, Diary of a Heartland
Radical, www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com
Monday, September 14, 2020
On Class and Race
A lecture/power point by Dr. Harry Targ
Slides by Carl Davidson
********************************************************************************************************************
Rednecks for Black Lives' Rallies White Southerners for Racial Justice
Organizer Beth Howard is calling on her fellow ‘rednecks’ and ‘hillbillies’ to stand up for Black lives
Saturday, September 12, 2020
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Friday, September 11, 2020
THE FUTURE OF UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2011
Harry Targ
9/11 in Chile
On the bright and sunny morning of September 11, 1973, aircraft bombed
targets in Valparaiso, Chile, and moved on to the capital, Santiago. Following
a well-orchestrated plan, tanks rolled into the capital city, occupied the
central square, and fired on the Presidential palace. Inside that building,
President Salvador Allende broadcast a final address to his people and fatally
shot himself as soldiers entered his quarters.
Thousands of Allende supporters were rounded up and held in the city’s soccer
stadium and many, including renowned folk singer Victor Jara, were tortured and
killed. For the next fifteen years, Chilean workers were stripped of their right
to form unions, political parties and elections were eliminated, and the junta
led by General Augusto Pinochet ruled with an iron fist all but ignored outside
the country until Chileans began to mobilize to protest his scheme to become
President for life.
9/11 in the United States
Of course, 9/11/01 was different. The United States was attacked by foreign
terrorists, approximately 3,000 citizens and residents were killed at the World
Trade Center, over a rural area in Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon. People
all over the world expressed their sorrow and sympathy for the victims of the
9/11 attacks as the American people experienced shock and dismay.
But then everything began to change. Within days of the terrorist attacks,
members of President Bush’s cabinet began to advocate a military assault on
Iraq, a longstanding target of the Washington militarists of the Project for a
New American Century (PNAC). Now is the time, they said, to take out Saddam
Hussein, seize control of Iraqi oil fields, and reestablish United States
control over the largest share of the oil fields of the Persian Gulf region.
Cooler heads prevailed for a time, however. We cannot attack Iraq, critics
said, because Iraq had nothing to do with the crimes in New York, Pennsylvania,
and Washington.
So it was decided that a war would be waged on Afghanistan, because the
headquarters of the shadowy organization Al Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, was
said to be in that country. On October 6, 2001, that war was initiated and
still goes on although Bin Laden has been killed.
Shortly after launching the war on Afghanistan, the neo-cons in the Bush
administration began a campaign to convince the American people that we needed
to make war on Iraq. Lies were articulated that the Iraqi dictator was really
behind the global terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. He had weapons of mass
destruction. He was part of a global Islamic fundamentalist cabal. At last,
despite evidence to the contrary, the mobilization of millions of Americans
against war, growing global resentment against the Bush Doctrine justifying
preemptive wars, the United States attacked Iraq in March, 2003. That war too
still goes on.
Over the last decade, U.S. military budgets have tripled, thousands of U.S.
soldiers have died or sustained irreparable injuries, and an estimated one
million Afghan and Iraqi people, mostly civilians, have died. Meanwhile the
United States has maintained over 700 military installations around the world,
declared the great land and sea area around the globe at the equator the “arc
of instability,” and engaged in direct violence or encouraged others to do so,
from Colombia to Honduras in the Western Hemisphere, to Ethiopia and Somalia in
the Horn of Africa, to Israel, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Libya in the Middle
East and Persian Gulf, to Pakistan, and Afghanistan in East Asia. Presidents
Bush and Obama have declared that United States military overreach to be in the
national interest of the country and to serve the humanitarian interest of the
world. Now the U.S. program includes the use of computer operated aircraft,
drones, that can target and kill anywhere based on decisions from command
headquarters half way around the globe.
Meanwhile at home, the Patriot Act has extended the prerogatives of government
to launch a program claiming to be essential to protect the people from
domestic terrorists: spying on Americans; incarcerating people from virtually
anywhere deemed to be a security threat; and establishing a political climate
that intimidates critics of United States foreign policy.
Domestically, the decade since 9/11 has been characterized by sustained
assaults on the basic living standards of the bottom 90 percent of the
population in terms of wealth and income. Unemployment has risen dramatically.
Job growth has ground to a halt. Health care benefits have declined while costs
skyrocket. Virtually every public institution in America, except the military,
is being threatened by budget cuts: education, libraries, public health
facilities, highways and bridges, fire and police protection, environmental
quality.
Support for war overseas and at home is stoked by a so-called “war on
terrorism” and an anti-government ideology, made popular earlier by the Reagan
administration that lionizes Adam Smith’s claims that only the market can
satisfy human needs. Following 9/11, the “beast,” government, has been starved
even more resulting in increased demand on workers and institutions with
reduced resources, offering “proof” that government never works.
Not all have had to sacrifice during this ten-year “war on terror” and its
attendant domestic programs. The rich have gotten richer while the income and
wealth of 90 percent of the population have experienced economic stagnation or
decline. Media monopolization has facilitated the rise of a strata of pundits
who simplify and distort the meaning of events since 9/11 by claiming that war
is necessary; the terrorist threat is a growing global threat; as a nation and
individually we need to arm ourselves; and subliminally it is people of color
who constitute the threat to security and well-being.
Where Do We Go From Here
So the United States 9/11 event was not the first. The Chilean 9/11
preceded the U.S. one by 28 years. Its people experienced a brutal military
coup. And in the United States mass murder was committed by 19 terrorists. But
in both cases the 9/11 event was followed by violence, threats to democracy,
and economic shifts from the vast majority of the population to the wealthy and
political/military elites. In both cases, draconian economic policies and
constraints of civil and political rights were defined as required by threats
to the “homeland.”
As the ten-year anniversary of the U.S. 9/11 is remembered, it is critical to
reflect upon how the murder of 3,000 citizens and residents was defined as an
opening salvo in a perpetual “war on terrorism:” how this war trumps
traditional civil liberties afforded by the constitution; how this war must be
waged at whatever cost to the lives and economic resources of the country; and,
as with the Cold War, military spending must take priority over every other
activity for which the government has a role. 9/11/73 caused the Chilean people
pain and suffering that they are still working to overcome 28 years later.
Unless the American people mobilize to challenge the policies, foreign and
domestic, that were justified by the tragedy of 9/11, the United States will
continue to move down a similar path the Chilean people traveled after their
9/11.
****************************
United States foreign policy: yesterday, today, and tomorrow
MR Online, Posted Oct 23, 2019 by Harry Targ
Just before the Korean War started in 1950, post-World War key foreign policy advisers to President Truman threw their support behind recommendations made in a classified document, National Security Council Document 68, which recommended a dramatic increase in military spending. NSC-68 also recommended that military spending from that point on should be the number one priority of the national government. When presidents sit down to construct a federal budget, the document recommended, they should first allocate all the money requested by military and corporate elites and lobbyists concerned with military spending. Only after that the military advocates receive all they request should government programs address education, health care, roads, transportation, housing and other critical domestic issues. When the United States entered the Korean War, in June, 1950, Truman endorsed the recommendations of NSC 68 and used the war on the Korean peninsula as justification. In Andrew Bacevich’s words the United States fully committed to a “permanent war economy.” As political scientist, Hans Morgenthau wrote about that time; there was no turning back from the new war economy and a “Cold War” against the former Soviet Union. Each subsequent president expanded on the war economy and the narrative of a dangerous world that justified trillions of dollars of spending. According to Chalmers Johnson (Blowback, Sorrows of Empire), between 1947 and 1990, the permanent war economy cost the American people close to $9 trillion. Ruth Sivard (World Military Expenditures) presented data to indicate that over 100,000 U.S. military personnel died in wars and military interventions during this period. And, in other countries, nearly 10 million people died directly or indirectly in wars in which the United States was a participant.
Seventy years later,
Trump era military budgets have reached record highs, $738 billion dollars in
the 2020 fiscal year and a projected $740 billion in 2021. As William Hartung
wrote: “The agreement sets the table for two of the highest budgets for the
Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy since
World War II (in Jake Johnson, ‘Unprecedented, Wasteful, and Obscene’: House
Approves $1.48 Trillion Pentagon Budget,” Common Dreams,
Friday, July 26, 2019). Including past and present military-related spending
the War Resisters League estimates that the 2020 federal budget will consist of
48 percent of all spending, exceeding non-military spending by six percent.
Just one weapon, the notorious F-35 latest generation fighter plane is costing,
by conservative estimates, $1.5 trillion. (Manufacturing facilities for the
plane are found in 433 of 435 Congressional districts).
Rationalizing the Permanent War Economy
A factional dispute
among foreign policy elites began to emerge in the 1970s about the best
strategies and tactics which should be pursued to maximize the continued global
economic, political, and military dominance of the United States in the
international system. The dispute was not over whether the United States should
continue to pursue empire but rather how to continue to achieve it. The debates
were occasioned by the rise of the countries of the Global South, the
societally wrenching experience of the Vietnam War, the growth of power and
influence of the former Soviet Union, and since its collapse, the emergence of
China as a new global economic, political and military power. In addition, the
new international economy was becoming more global, that is to say more
interconnected. Debates about strategy, tactics, surfaced between the
neoliberal globalists who emphasized so-called free trade, financial
speculation, and the promotion of a neoliberal agenda that advocated for the
privatization of all public activities by states and the development of
austerity policies that would shift wealth from the many to the few. The
international debt system would be the vehicle for pressuring poor and rich
countries to transform their own economic agendas. This faction dominated
United States foreign policy making for generations, particularly from Reagan
to Clinton to Obama. In political/military terms, they have sought to push back
challengers to neoliberal capitalism: Russia, China, populist Latin American
countries, and they have advocated advancing US economic interests in Asia and
Africa. Many of the institutions of the neoliberal globalists, sometimes called
the “deep state” include the CIA, NSA, and other security agencies.
The other faction
represented by President Trump and some of his key aides prefer economic
nationalism, restricted trade, building walls, avoiding diplomacy, and they are
driven by a deeply held white supremacist ideology. They believe, as political
scientist Samuel Huntington argued, that we are engaged in a civilizational
conflict with Islam, a fourth world war. The neoliberal globalists undermined
Ukraine, put more NATO troops in Eastern Europe and want to depose Putin and
weaken Russia. This is not on the Trump agenda.
The forbearers of the
current generation of Trumpian economic nationalists, came from the so-called
“neo-conservatives,” historically organized around the 1990s lobby group, The
Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and in the 1950s and 1970s of The
Committee for the Present Danger (CPD). Both the neoliberals and the
neoconservatives share a common vision of a global political economy controlled
by the United States but the former prefer selective use of military force and
greater use of economic and diplomatic pressure and covert interventionism
while justifying policy on humanitarian grounds, including expanding democracy.
Since, they say, the United States represents the hope of democracy in the world,
it is as Madeleine Albright called it. “the indispensable nation.” The
neoconservatives, in a sense more frank, argued that with the collapse of the
former Soviet Union, the United States was the hegemonic power. With that power
PNAC argued, the United States should have imposed a world order and state
regimes that comported with US interests and ideology. Over the years, the
policies of the two factions converged; hence economic penetration, covert
interventions, occasional wars, and support for expanding military spending.
But, often for reasons of domestic rather than international politics,
conflicts between the two factions resurface. That is the case in 2019.
The Ruling Class Agenda for the United States Role in the World:
Before the 2016 election
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. 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. (Neoliberal globalization,
the latest phase in the development of international capitalism is described in
an important recent book, Jerry Harris, Global Capitalism and the
Crisis of Democracy, Clarity Press, 2016).
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.
“Innovation and National Security: Keeping Our Edge:” Council on
Foreign Relations 2019
The influential
Council on Foreign Relations issued a Task Force report in September, 2019, on
national security. Task force members included representatives of prestigious
universities, large corporations, and staff from the CFR. In the forward, the
report pointed out that the United States had led the world in technological
innovation and development since the end of World War Two. But, it said, “…the
United States risks falling behind its competitors, principally China.” It goes
on to propose that the United States “…needs to respond urgently and
comprehensively over the next five years and put forward a national security
innovation strategy to ensure it is the predominant power in a range of
emerging technologies such as AI and data science, advanced battery storage,
advanced semiconductor technologies, genomics and synthetic biology,
fifth-generation cellular networks (5G), quantum information systems, and
robotics.” The report calls for increases in federal support for basic research
and development. This would include investments in higher education, selective immigration
of skilled scientists, and reform of military institutions to more effectively
incorporate new technologies into military capabilities.
Major findings of the
Task Force included the following:
·
Technological
innovation leads to economic and military advantage.
·
US leadership in
science and innovation is at risk.
·
US federal funding for
research and development has stagnated for years.
·
US leadership in STEM
education is declining
·
The Defense Department
and the intelligence community risk falling behind “potential adversaries” if
they do not employ more technologies from the private sector.
·
The defense community
“faces deteriorating manufacturing capabilities,” and “insecure” supply chains,
while depending on other nations for technologies.
·
There is a ”cultural
divide” surfacing between technology and policymaking communities weakening
connections between the defense and intelligence communities and the private
sector.
And, as to our major competitor China:
·
China is investing
significantly in new technologies and will be the world’s biggest investor by
2030.
·
China is closing “the
technological gap” with the United States, and it and other countries are
approaching the US as to artificial intelligence (AI).
·
China is “exploiting”
the openness of the US to secure valuable innovation by violating intellectual
property rights.
While praising
President Trump for some of his efforts the report says that increased budgets
have been too “incremental and narrow in scale.” The Administration has
inadequately moved to develop new communications technologies, and to respond
to the challenge of Huawei’s global expansion.
Therefore the United
States must:
·
restore federal
funding for research and development.
·
attract and educate a
science and technology workforce.
·
support technology
adoption in the defense sector.
·
bolster and scale
technology alliances and ecosystems.
In short, “during the
early years of the Cold War, confronted by serious technological and military
competition from the Soviet Union, the United States invested heavily in its
scientific base. Those investments ensured U.S. technological leadership for
fity years. Faced with the rise of China and a new wave of disruptive
technological innovation, the country needs a similar vision and an agenda for
realizing it.” (9)
Where Does the Foreign Policy of Donald Trump Fit?
Taking “the long view”
of United States foreign policy, it is clear that from NSC-68; to the response
to the Soviet challenges in space such as during the Sputnik era; to global
wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq; to covert interventions in the
Middle East, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the United States has pursued
global hegemony (and is suggested in the CFR statement). It is also clear that
the pursuit of empire has of necessity involved the creation of a permanent war
economy, an economy that overcomes economic stagnation by the infusion of
enormous military expenditures.
It is also clear that
justification for empire and military spending has necessitated the
construction of an enemy, first the Soviet Union and international communism;
then terrorism; and now China. The obverse of a demonic enemy requires a
conception of self to justify the imperial project. That self historically has
been various iterations of American exceptionalism, the indispensable nation,
US humanitarianism, and implicitly or explicitly the superiority of the white
race and western civilization.
In this light, while
specific policies vary, the trajectory of US foreign policy in the twenty-first
century is a continuation of the policies and programs that were
institutionalized in the twentieth century. Three seem primary. First, military spending, particularly in new
technologies continues unabated. And the CFR report raises the danger of the
United States “falling behind,” the same metaphor that was used by the writers
of the NSC-68 document, or the Gaither and Rockefeller Reports composed in the
late 1950s to challenge President Eisenhower’s worry about a
military/industrial complex, the response to Sputnik, Secretary of Defense
McNamara’s transformation of the Pentagon to scientific management in the
1960s, or President Reagan’s huge increase of armaments in the 1980s to
overcome the “window of vulnerability.”
Second, the United States continues to engage in policies recently
referred to as “hybrid wars.” The concept of hybrid wars suggests that while
traditional warfare between nations has declined, warfare within countries has
increased. Internal wars, the hybrid wars theorists suggest, are encouraged and
supported by covert interventions, employing private armies, spies, and other
operatives financed by outside nations like the United States. Also the hybrid
wars concept also refers to the use of economic warfare, embargoes and
blockades, to bring down adversarial states and movements. The blockades of
Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran are examples. So the hybrid war concept suggests the
carrying out of wars by other, less visible, means.
Third, much of the discourse on the US role in the world
replicates the bipolar, super power narrative of the Cold War. Only now the
enemy is China. As Alfred McCoy has pointed out (In the Shadows of the American
Empire, 2017), the United States in the twenty first century sees its economic
hegemony being undermined by Chinese economic development and global reach. To
challenge this, McCoy argues, the United States has taken on a project to
recreate its military hegemony: AI, a space force, biometrics, new high tech
aircraft etc. If the US cannot maintain its hegemony economically, it will have
to do so militarily. This position is the centerpiece of the recent CFR Task
Force Report.
Recognizing these
continuities in United States foreign policy, commentators appropriately
recognize the idiosyncrasies of foreign policy in the Trump era. He has reached
out to North Korea and Russia (which has had the potential of reducing tensions
in Asia and Central Europe). He has rhetorically claimed that the United States
must withdraw military forces from trouble spots around the world, including
the Middle East. He has declared that the United States cannot be “the
policeman of the world,” a declaration made by former President Nixon as he
escalated bombing of Vietnam and initiated plans to overthrow the Allende
regime in Chile. For some of these measures, Trump has been inappropriately
criticized by Democrats and others. Tension-reduction on the Korean Peninsula,
for example, should have been encouraged.
However, while Trump
moves in one direction he almost immediately undermines the policies he has
ordered. His announced withdrawal from Syria, while in the abstract a sign of a
more realistic assessment of US military presence in the Middle East was
coupled with a direct or implied invitation to the Turkish military to invade
Northeast Syria to defeat the Kurds. Also, at the same time he was withdrawing
troops from Syria, the Defense Department announced the United States was
sending support troops to Saudi Arabia. He withdrew from the accord with Iran
on nuclear weapons and the Paris Climate Change agreement. Time after time, one
foreign policy decision is contradicted by another. These contradictions occur
over and over with allies as well as traditional adversaries. Sometimes
policies seem to be made with little historical awareness and without
sufficient consultation with professional diplomats. (One is reminded of the
old Nixon idea, the so-called “madman theory.” Nixon allegedly wanted to appear
mad so that adversaries would be deterred from acting in ways contrary to US
interests out of fear of random responses).
The contradictory
character of Trump foreign policy has left the peace movement befuddled. How
does it respond to Trump’s occasional acts that go against the traditional
imperial grain at the same time that he acts impetuously increasing the dangers
of war? How does the peace movement participate in the construction of a
progressive majority that justifiably seeks to overturn the Trump era and all
that it stands for: climate disaster, growing economic inequality, racism,
sexism, homophobia, and hybrid war? Perhaps the task for the peace movement is
to include in the project of building a progressive majority ideas about
challenging the US as an imperial power, proclaiming that a progressive agenda
requires the dismantling of the permanent war economy. These are truly troubled
times, with to a substantial degree the survival of humanity and nature at
stake. The war system is a significant part of what the struggle is about.
·
About Harry Targ
Harry Targ is a
retired Professor of Political Science, Purdue University. He has written books
and articles on US foreign policy, international political economy, and issues
of labor and class struggle. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.
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