Harry Targ
If we are not marching against genocide,
war, economic blockades, a trillion-dollar military budget, an escalation of
nuclear weapons, we are not sincere.
The 66-year blockade has cost the Cuban economy over $100 billion dollars. Cuba has had a wonderful health care system, has sent doctors to over 160 countries, trained thousands of doctors from the Global South, and has a vibrant internal democracy (local committees, mass organizations, legislative bodies etc.).The US invaded Cuba in 1961, initiated over 500 attempts on the life of its former leader, and through legislation punished any country that engages in economic relations with Cuba. Over the years Cubans have embraced policies that did not work and after national conversations have made changes. Ironically, the policies negotiated by former Presidents Obama and Raul Castro were mutually beneficial for the two countries. Trump eliminated those agreements and they were not reinstalled by Biden.
https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/.../the-cuban...
An Empire in Relative Decline
United States global hegemony continues to be
challenged. 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 weakening. There is now the possibility of a multipolar world
emerging 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, even 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, 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. Productivity, profits, and economic concentration has risen while real wages have declined, inequality increased, gaps between the earnings of people of color and women and white men continues to grow, and persistent poverty remains for twenty percent of the US population (https://www.epi.org/publication/inequality-2021-ssa-data/ for 2021 data on economic inequality).
In addition, as United Way data shows, almost 40 percent of US households have incomes in poverty or between poverty and bare sustainability. And now the Trump Administration disgustingly parades the egregious wealth of those at the top at celebrations at Mar-a-Lago.
In addition, the austerity policies, the centerpiece of neoliberalism, spread all across the globe. That is what globalization has been about. And, of course, a major beneficiary of the imperial system established after World War Two has been a handful of military contractors, subcontractors, and universities who are the recipients of the one trillion-dollar defense budget.
But, contrary to 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. China’s economy and scientific/technological
base have expanded dramatically. The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the
spreading war and violence throughout the Middle East, including Iran today, have overwhelmed US efforts to control events. Russia, Iran, China, and even
weaker nations in the United Nations Security Council have begun to challenge
US power and authority. Mass movements increasingly mobilize against regimes
supported by the United States virtually everywhere (including mass
mobilizations within the U.S. as well). The No Kings rallies are part of this worldwide movement.
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.
(For more data on military bases https://www.davidvine.net/bases.html)
Imperial Decline and Domestic Politics
The narrative above is of necessity brief and
oversimplified but provides a backdrop 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 the rise of almost unbridled fascism in
the Trump Administration. It does not replace other explanations or “causes”
of election results 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 Obama era 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, Argentina, and Chile in the 1970s to the kidnapping of the
president of Venezuela in January,2026 to maintain US hegemony in the Western
Hemisphere. As the statement above suggests, the US government has escalated
its economic blockade of Cuba, a blockade that is starving ten million Cuban
people.
One group of foreign policy insiders, the humanitarian
interventionists, has lobbied for years to promote “human rights, democratization, and markets.” Democratic administrations and candidates and a host of “deep state” insiders advocated for support of
coups such as in Honduras, a NATO coalition effort to topple the regime in
Libya, strong support of Israel, funding and training anti-government rebels in
Syria during its civil war and the overthrow of the elected government of
Ukraine in 2014.
Humanitarian interventionists have joined forces with “neoconservatives” in the new century to advocate policies that, they believed, would reverse the declining relative power of the United States. This coalition of foreign policy influentials has promoted a New Cold War against China and Russia and an Asian pivot to challenge an 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.
And during the two Trump Administrations, defense budgets have skyrocketed and collaboration with Israel has increased. The US has reversed all the improvements in US/Cuban policy which has led to shortages of oil, food, medicine, on the island. And Trump, in his first term, reversed the Obama policies toward Iran. And right now, the US and Israel are engaging in brutal wars on Iran, Lebanon, and Syria. The vision for the US and its partner Israel is to create a “Greater Israel” which will secure oil and land in the Persian Gulf region to challenge China’s growing economic and diplomatic influence in Eastern Europe, the Middle, East, West Asia, and Africa.
Contrary to its predecessors the Trump Administration has rejected all international institutions which, while weak, have pursued multinationalism. He has also rejected diplomacy and is now recklessly escalating military policies that the Bulleton of Atomic Scientists says are bringing the world closer to nuclear war than ever before.
In sum, the “elephant in the room” for the peace
movement pertaining to US politics must include building opposition to an
activist United States economic/political/military role in the world and the
long history of United States imperialism.
Finally, it must be articulated that to the extent
that economics affects domestic politics, the global agenda that has been
enshrined in United States international economic policy since the 1970s,
coupled with humanitarian interventionism, and the new militarism of the Trump
era 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
millions of Americans struggle to survive poverty, inadequate access to healthcare,
homelessness, a variety of environmental disasters it is time to reinsert
visions of a non-interventionist, anti-militaristic foreign policy into our
progressive political agenda.
