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NY Times Op-Ed, May 29, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
The ‘Liberal World Order’ Was Built With Blood
As the United States reckons with its decline, it should understand
where its power came from in the first place.
By Vincent Bevins
If you read the commentary coming out of New York and Washington, or
speak with elites in Western Europe, it’s easy to find people panicking
about the loss of “American leadership.” From Joe Biden’s campaign
pledges to trans-Atlantic think tanks, exhortations to revive American
supremacy and contain China are everywhere.
They have reason to be worried: This moment is shaking the foundations
of America’s hegemony. It is painfully clear that the United States is
ill-equipped to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, which does not play
to American strengths (we can’t shoot it, after all). President Trump
has for years been dismissing allies and antagonizing international
institutions. And China is seemingly laying the groundwork for its
arrival as a great power. American officials are now talking openly
about a “new Cold War” to confront Beijing, and China now seems such a
threat that Hal Brands of the American Enterprise Institute wonders
whether the United States should get back in the business of covertly
toppling unfriendly governments.
It’s unsurprising that establishment pundits, American policymakers and
their allies would be alarmed about American decline. The United States
and Western Europe have been the winners of the process that created
this globalized world, the main beneficiaries of Washington’s triumph at
the end of the Cold War. But a lot of people feel very differently.
In early April, I received a message from Winarso, a man I know in
Indonesia who runs an organization that cares for the survivors of the
mass murder that took place there in the 1960s. He was trying to raise
money to buy rice so his community wouldn’t starve under lockdown. A
dollar still goes a very long way in Indonesia, as Winarso knows too
well. To explain America’s economic and political power, he points to
the Cold War. It’s easy to see that Washington was truly victorious in
the 20th century, he told me, because “we all got the U.S.-centered
version of capitalism that Washington wanted to spread.” I asked him how
America won. He answered quickly. “You killed us.”
I have spent the last three years with the losers of that great game,
the individuals whose lives were shattered so this global order could be
constructed. I spent most of my time interviewing the victims and
survivors of a loose network of mass murder programs that targeted
civilian opponents of Washington’s Cold War allies. I got to know people
on four continents who lived through the coups and C.I.A. plots that Mr.
Brands is talking about. To fully understand the nature of American
power — and its future — their experiences are as important as those of
anyone in a Paris boardroom or Washington think tank.
Winarso’s country is the most significant example. In 1965 and 1966, the
American government assisted in the murder of approximately one million
Indonesian civilians. This was one of the most important turning points
of the Cold War — Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country,
and policymakers at the time understood it was a far more valuable prize
than Vietnam. But it’s largely forgotten in the English-speaking world
precisely because it was such a success. No American soldiers died;
little attention was drawn to one more country pulled, seemingly
naturally, into the United States’ orbit.
But the process was not natural. The U.S.-backed military used a failed
uprising as a pretext to crush the Indonesian left, whose influence
Washington had been seeking to counter for a decade, and then took
control of the country. Recently declassified State Department documents
make it clear that the United States aided and abetted the mass murder
in Indonesia, providing material support, encouraging the killings and
rewarding the perpetrators.
It was not the first time the United States had done something like
this. In 1954, the American ambassador to Guatemala reportedly handed
kill lists to that country’s military. And in Iraq, in 1963, the C.I.A.
provided lists of suspected communists and leftists to the ruling Baath
Party.
Indonesia in 1965 was the apex of anti-Communist violence in the 20th
century. The slaughter obliterated the popular, unarmed Partai Komunis
Indonesia, the largest Communist party outside of China and the Soviet
Union, and toppled President Sukarno, a founding leader of the
Nonaligned Movement and an outspoken anti-imperialist, replacing him
with General Suharto, a right-wing dictator who quickly became one of
Washington’s most important Cold War allies.
This was such an obvious victory for the global anti-Communist movement
that far-right groups around the world began to draw inspiration from
the “Jakarta” model and build copycat programs. They were assisted by
American officials and anti-Communist organizations that moved across
borders. In turn, leftist movements radicalized or took up arms,
believing they would be killed if they attempted to pursue the path of
democratic socialism.
In the early ’70s, right-wing terrorists in Chile painted “Jakarta” on
the houses of socialists, threatening that they too would be killed.
After the C.I.A.-backed coup in 1973, they were. Brazilian leftists were
threatened with “Operação Jacarta,” too. By the end of the 1970s, most
of South America was governed by authoritarian, pro-American governments
that secured power by mass murder. By 1990, death squads in Central
America pushed the Latin American death toll into the hundreds of thousands.
In North America and Europe, if people think about these terror
campaigns at all, the narrative is too often that the United States made
alliances with unsavory characters, who committed unfortunate abuses.
That is wrong. The United States government was behind much of the
violence, and it was far from inconsequential. Most nations in the
former third world were set on their current path by conflicts that took
place during the Cold War. The violence made possible a version of crony
capitalism that comprises daily reality for billions of people, and it
is an integral part of the version of globalization that the world ended
up with.
No reasonable person denies the great things the United States did in
the 20th century, or that many countries enjoyed prosperity while in
happy alliances with Washington. But as we move deeper into the 21st
century, Americans are going to need to confront the darker side of
American hegemony — because much of the rest of the world already has.
Part of the reason the current order is so fragile is because so many
people around the world know, indeed can physically feel in their
bodies, that Washington used brutality to construct it.
We do not know yet what the world would look like were China to take up
the position the United States is losing. There is no reason to believe
that just because this world order has blood in its roots, something
better will spring to life if it dies.
As Americans reckon with — and fret about — their country’s diminished
position in the world, we need to understand that the United States is
not, in fact, beloved as a beacon of freedom, democracy and human
rights. From Argentina to the Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor
to Iran, millions of people are skeptical of Washington’s intentions,
even if they have no particular desire to emulate China’s government,
either.
A failure to recognize reality, however, and a desperate attempt to claw
back a deeply imperfect global order, could be very dangerous for everyone.
Vincent Bevins (@vinncent) is the author of “The Jakarta Method:
Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That
Shaped Our World.”
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