Harry Targ originally posted on Tuesday, October 1, 2019
As we enter the national election season we are gripped with a very
complicated constellation of forces. The Republican Party, once a “respectable”
advocate for “limited government,” benefits for the wealthy, and in general a
celebrant of the “magic of the marketplace,” has been transformed into a party
of racism, xenophobia, and a critic of whatever democracy exists in the US.
They are opposed to women, people of color, and many endorse the establishment
of the United States as a “Christian nation.”
While large percentages
of the US population, including radicals and progressives, oppose the
Republican agenda, the alternatives offered by much of the Democratic Party, while woefully inadequate, sometimes have begun to address the needs of the majority of people. In addition to criticisms that can be raised
about domestic policies advocated by many Democratic spokespersons, “the
elephant in the room,” that is foreign policy, remains the Achilles heel of
Democratic Party platforms. Since this essay was written and rewritten, the US
has escalated support for the war in
Ukraine, dramatically increased its commitments to Israel, maintained military
bases in over 170 countries, expanded NATO-type connections in Africa, and maintained sanctions in over 30 countries. It continues to engage in efforts to
crush the Cuban and Bolivarian Revolutions and is launching a “New Cold War”
against China.
Given this reality,
thousands of protestors came to Milwaukee to protest the Republican convention,
and similar numbers are expected to protest at the Democratic Convention in
Chicago.
What the essay below
argued in 2016 and 2020 is still relevant today; that is there is an
inextricable connection between domestic and foreign policy. A deep dive into
the history of the Cold War from 1945 on, the changing US economy, and the
perpetual wars that have occurred from then to now make it clear that the tasks
of progressives remain combatting rightwing dictatorship at home AND
imperialism overseas. And foreign policy remains “the elephant in the room.”
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 showed that
productivity, profits, and economic concentration had risen while real wages
declined, inequality increased, gaps between the earnings of people of color
and women and white men grew, and persistent poverty remained for twenty
percent of the population. The austerity policies, the centerpiece of
neoliberalism, spread across the globe. That is what globalization has been
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 the myth 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 recent elections
and their ongoing consequences. It
does not replace other explanations or “causes” of United States politics today
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,” 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.” 2016 presidential 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 antigovernmental rebels in Syria, and the overthrow of the
elected government of Ukraine. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was a major
advocate for humanitarian interventionist policies in the Obama administration,
as was Vice President Joe Biden. These policies continued since 2020. In addition, this perspective has been broadly
accepted by Democrats and Republicans alike.
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, largely a result of the rising economic and
diplomatic influence of China. 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 and still does in 2024 is 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 in 2016 and the incumbent administration today 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 fear a Democratic Party victory presidency in November, 2024 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 affect electoral outcomes, 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. And more and more Americans see the connections between burgeoning military expenditures and inadequate resources for healthcare, protecting the environment, ending homelessness, and generally providing for the economic needs of the population (rather than the major military contractors).
In sum, foreign policy continues to be an “elephant in the
room” as millions of Americans struggle with the devastatingly
inhumane policies at home and abroad.
