In These Times
Wake Up!
Washington's alarming foreign policy
By Chalmers Johnson
The Sorrows of Empire : Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the
Republic [The American Empire Project]
By Chalmers Johnson
Metropolitan Books á $25.00
The Rubicon is a small stream in northern Italy just south of the
city of Ravenna. During the prime of the Roman Republic, roughly the
last two centuries B.C., it served as a northern boundary protecting
the heartland of Italy and the city of Rome from its own imperial
armies. An ancient Roman law made it treason for any general to cross
the Rubicon and enter Italy proper with a standing army. In 49 B.C.,
Julius Caesar, Rome's most brilliant and successful general, stopped
with his army at the Rubicon, contemplated what he was about to do,
and then plunged south. The Republic exploded in civil war, Caesar
became dictator and then in 44 B.C. was assassinated in the Roman
Senate by politicians who saw themselves as ridding the Republic of a
tyrant. However, Caesar's death generated even more civil war, which
ended only in 27 B.C. when his grand nephew, Octavian, took the title
Augustus Caesar, abolished the Republic and established a military
dictatorship with himself as "emperor" for life. Thus ended the great
Roman experiment with democracy. Ever since, the phrase "to cross the
Rubicon" has been a metaphor for starting on a course of action from
which there is no turning back. It refers to the taking of an
irrevocable step.
I believe that on November 2, 2004, the United States crossed its own
Rubicon. Until last year's presidential election, ordinary citizens
could claim that our foreign policy, including the invasion of Iraq,
was George Bush's doing and that we had not voted for him. In 2000,
Bush lost the popular vote and was appointed president by the Supreme
Court. In 2004, he garnered 3.5 million more votes than John Kerry.
The result is that Bush's war changed into America's war and his
conduct of international relations became our own.
This is important because it raises the question of whether restoring
sanity and prudence to American foreign policy is still possible.
During the Watergate scandal of the early '70s, the president's chief
of staff, H. R. Haldeman, once reproved White House counsel John Dean
for speaking too frankly to Congress about the felonies President
Nixon had ordered. "John," he said, "once the toothpaste is out of
the tube, it's very hard to get it back in." This homely warning by a
former advertising executive who was to spend 18 months in prison for
his own role in Watergate fairly accurately describes the situation
of the United States after the reelection of George W. Bush.
James Weinstein, the founding editor of In These Times, recently
posed for me the question "How should U.S. foreign policy be changed
so that the United States can play a more positive role on the world
stage?" For me, this raises at least three different problems that
are interrelated. The first must be solved before we can address the
second, and the second has to be corrected before it even makes sense
to take up the third.
Sinking the ship of state
First, the United States faces the imminent danger of bankruptcy,
which, if it occurs, will render all further discussion of foreign
policy moot. Within the next few months, the mother of all financial
crises could ruin us and turn us into a North American version of
Argentina, once the richest country in South America. To avoid this
we must bring our massive trade and fiscal deficits under control and
signal to the rest of the world that we understand elementary public
finance and are not suicidally indifferent to our mounting debts.
Second, our appalling international citizenship must be addressed. We
routinely flout well-established norms upon which the reciprocity of
other nations in their relations with us depends. This is a matter
not so much of reforming our policies as of reforming attitudes. If
we ignore this, changes in our actual foreign policies will not even
be noticed by other nations of the world. I have in mind things like
the Army's and the CIA's secret abduction and torture of people; the
trigger-happy conduct of our poorly trained and poorly led troops in
places like Iraq and Afghanistan; and our ideological bullying of
other cultures because of our obsession with abortion and our
contempt for international law (particularly the International
Criminal Court) as illustrated by Bush's nomination of John R.
"Bonkers" Bolton to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Third, if we can overcome our imminent financial crisis and our
penchant for boorish behavior abroad, we might then be able to reform
our foreign policies. Among the issues here are the slow-moving
evolutionary changes in the global balance of power that demand new
approaches. The most important evidence that our life as the "sole"
superpower is going to be exceedingly short is the fact that our
monopoly of massive military power is being upstaged by other forms
of influence. Chief among these is China's extraordinary growth and
our need to adjust to it.
Let me discuss each of these three problems in greater depth.
In 2004, the United States imported a record $617.7 billion more than
it exported, a 24.4 percent increase over 2003. The annual deficit
with China was $162 billion, the largest trade imbalance ever
recorded by the United States with a single country. Equally
important, as of March 9, 2005, the public debt of the United States
was just over $7.7 trillion and climbing, making us easily the
world's largest net debtor nation. Refusing to pay for its profligate
consumption patterns and military expenditures through taxes on its
own citizens, the United States is financing these outlays by going
into debt to Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and India.
This situation has become increasingly unstable, as the United States
requires capital imports of at least $2 billion per day to pay for
its governmental expenditures. Any decision by Asian central banks to
move significant parts of their foreign exchange reserves out of the
dollar and into the euro or other currencies in order to protect
themselves from dollar depreciation will likely produce a meltdown of
the American economy. On February 21, 2005, the Korean central bank,
which has some $200 billion in reserves, quietly announced that it
intended to "diversify the currencies in which it invests." The
dollar fell sharply and the U.S. stock market (although subsequently
recovering) recorded its largest one-day fall in almost two years.
This small incident is evidence of the knife-edge on which we are
poised.
Japan possesses the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, which
at the end of January 2005 stood at around $841 billion. But China
also sits on a $609.9 billion pile of U.S. cash, earned from its
trade surpluses with us. Meanwhile, the American government insults
China in every way it can, particularly over the status of China's
breakaway province, the island of Taiwan. The distinguished economic
analyst William Greider recently noted, "Any profligate debtor who
insults his banker is unwise, to put it mildly. É American leadership
has É become increasingly delusional-I mean that literally-and blind
to the adverse balance of power accumulating against it."
These deficits and dependencies represent unusual economic statistics
for a country with imperial pretensions. In the 19th century, the
British Empire ran huge current account surpluses, which allowed it
to ignore the economic consequences of disastrous imperialist
ventures like the Boer War. On the eve of the First World War,
Britain had a surplus amounting to 7 percent of its GDP. America's
current account deficit is close to 6 percent of our GDP.
In order to regain any foreign confidence in the sanity of our
government and the soundness of our policies, we need, at once, to
reverse President George W. Bush's tax cuts, including those on
capital gains and estates (the rich are so well off they'll hardly
notice it), radically reduce our military expenditures, and stop
subsidizing agribusinesses and the military-industrial complex. Only
a few years ago the United States enjoyed substantial federal
surpluses and was making inroads into its public debt. If we can
regain fiscal solvency, the savers of Asia will probably continue to
finance our indebtedness. If we do not, we risk a fear-driven flight
from the dollar by all our financiers, collapse of our stock exchange
and global recession for a couple of years-from which the rest of the
world will ultimately emerge. But by then we who no longer produce
much of anything valuable will have become a banana republic. Debate
over our foreign policy will become irrelevant. We will have become
dependent on the kindness of strangers.
Ugly Americans
Meanwhile, the bad manners of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their
band of neoconservative fanatics from the American Enterprise
Institute dominate the conduct of American foreign policy. It is
simply unacceptable that after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal
Congress has so far failed to launch an investigation into those in
the executive branch who condoned it. It is equally unacceptable that
the president's chief apologist for the official but secret use of
torture is now the attorney general, that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld
did not resign, and that the seventh investigation of the military by
the military (this time headed by Vice Admiral Albert Church III)
again whitewashed all officers and blamed only a few unlucky enlisted
personnel on the night shift in one cellblock of Abu Ghraib prison.
Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate and a veteran of 23 years of
service as an army officer, says in his book The New American
Militarism of these dishonorable incidents: "The Abu Ghraib debacle
showed American soldiers not as liberators but as tormentors, not as
professionals but as sadists getting cheap thrills." Until this is
corrected, a president and secretary of state bloviating about
freedom and democracy is received by the rest of the world as mere
window-dressing.
Foreign policy analysts devote considerable attention to the concept
of "credibility"-whether or not a nation is trustworthy. There are
several ways to lose one's credibility. One is to politicize
intelligence, as Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney did in preparing
for their preventive war against Iraq. Today, only a fool would take
at face value something said by the CIA or our other secret
intelligence services. China has already informed us that it does not
believe our intelligence on North Korea, and our European allies have
said the same thing about our apocalyptic estimates on Iran.
Similarly, our bloated military establishment routinely makes
pronouncements that are untrue. The scene of a bevy of generals and
admirals-replete with campaign ribbons marching up and over their
left shoulders-baldly lying to congressional committees is familiar
to any viewer of our network newscasts.
For example, on February 3, 1998, Marine pilots were goofing off in a
military jet and cut the cables of a ski lift in northern Italy,
plunging 20 individuals to their deaths. The Marine Corps did
everything in its power to avoid responsibility for the disaster,
then brought the pilots back to the States for court-martial,
dismissed the case as an accident and exonerated the pilots. The
Italians haven't forgotten either the incident or how the United
States treated an ally. On March 4, 2005, American soldiers opened
fire on a civilian car en route to Baghdad airport, killing a
high-ranking Italian intelligence officer and wounding the journalist
Giuliana Sgrena, who had just been released by kidnappers. The U.S.
military immediately started its cover-up, claiming that the car was
speeding, that the soldiers had warned it with lights and warning
shots and that the Italians had given no prior notice of the trip.
Sgrena has contradicted everything our military said. The White House
has called it a "horrific accident," but whatever the explanation, we
have once again made one of our closest European allies look like
dupes for cooperating with us.
In its arrogance and overconfidence, the Bush administration has
managed to convince the rest of the world that our government is
incompetent. The administration has not only tried to undercut
treaties it finds inconvenient but refuses to engage in normal
diplomacy with its allies to make such treaties more acceptable.
Thus, administration representatives simply walked away from the 1997
Kyoto Protocol on global warming that tried to rein in carbon dioxide
emissions, claiming that the economic costs were too high. (The
United States generates far more such emissions than any other
country.) All of the United States' democratic allies continued to
work on the treaty despite our boycott. On July 23, 2001, in Bonn,
Germany, a compromise was reached on the severity of the cuts in
emissions advanced industrial nations would have to make and on the
penalties to be imposed if they do not, resulting in a legally
binding treaty so far endorsed by more than 180 nations. The modified
Kyoto Protocol is hardly perfect, but it is a start toward the
reduction of greenhouse gases.
Similarly, the United States and Israel walked out of the United
Nations conference on racism held in Durban, South Africa, in August
and September 2001. The nations that stayed on eventually voted down
Syrian demands that language accusing Israel of racism be included.
The conference's final statement also produced an apology for slavery
as a "crime against humanity" but did so without making slaveholding
nations liable for reparations. Given the history of slavery in the
United States and the degree to which the final document was adjusted
to accommodate American concerns, our walkout seemed to be yet
another display of imperial arrogance-a bald-faced message that "we"
do not need "you" to run this world.
Until the United States readopts the norms of civilized discourse
among nations, it can expect other nations-quietly and privately-to
do everything in their power to isolate and disengage from us.
Future reforms
If through some miracle we were able to restore fiscal rationality,
honesty and diplomacy to their rightful places in our government,
then we could turn to reforming our foreign policies. First and
foremost, we should get out of Iraq and demand that Congress never
again fail to honor article 1, section 8, clause 11 of the
Constitution giving it the exclusive power to go to war. After that,
I believe the critical areas in need of change are our policies
toward Israel, imported oil, China and the proliferation of nuclear
weapons, although the environment and relations with Latin America
may be equally important.
Perhaps the most catastrophic error of the Bush administration was to
abandon the policies of all previous American administrations to seek
an equitable peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Bush
instead joined Ariel Sharon in his expropriation and ethnic cleansing
of the Palestinians. As a result, the United States has lost all
credibility, influence and trust in the Islamic world. In July 2004,
Zogby International Surveys polled 3,300 Arabs in Morocco, Saudi
Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. When
asked whether respondents had a "favorable" or "unfavorable" opinion
of the United States, the "unfavorables" ranged from 69 to 98
percent. In the year 2000 there were 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide,
some 22 percent of the global population; through our policies we
have turned most of them against the United States. We should resume
at once the role of honest broker between the Israelis and
Palestinians that former President Clinton pioneered.
The United States imports about 3.8 billion barrels of oil a year, or
about 10.6 million barrels a day. These imports are at the highest
levels ever recorded and come increasingly from Persian Gulf
countries. A cut-off of Saudi Arabia's ability or willingness to sell
its oil to us would, at the present time, constitute an economic
catastrophe. By using currently available automotive technologies as
well as those being incorporated today in new Toyota and Honda
automobiles, we could end our entire dependency on Persian Gulf oil.
We should do that before we are forced to do so.
China's gross domestic product in 2004 grew at a rate of 9.5 percent,
easily the fastest among big countries. It is today the world's sixth
largest economy with a GDP of $1.4 trillion. It has also become the
trading partner of choice for the developing world, absorbing huge
amounts of food, raw materials, machinery and computers. Can the
United States adjust peacefully to the reemergence of China-the
world's oldest, continuously extant civilization-this time as a
modern superpower? Or is China's ascendancy to be marked by yet
another world war like those of the last century? That is what is at
stake. A rich, capitalist China is not a threat to the United States
and cooperation with it is our best guarantee of military security in
the Pacific.
Nothing is more threatening to our nation than the spread of nuclear
weapons. We developed a good policy with the 1970 Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, which with its 188 adherents is the most
widely supported arms control agreement ever enacted. Only India,
Israel and Pakistan remained outside its terms until January 10,
2003, when North Korea withdrew. Under the treaty, the five
nuclear-weapons states (the United States, Russia, China, France and
the United Kingdom) agree to undertake nuclear disarmament, while the
non-nuclear-weapons states agree not to develop or acquire such
weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is authorized
to inspect the non-nuclear-weapons states to ensure compliance. The
Bush administration has virtually ruined this international agreement
by attempting to denigrate the IAEA, by tolerating nuclear weapons in
India, Israel, and Pakistan while fomenting wars against Iraq, Iran
and North Korea, and by planning to develop new forms of nuclear
weapons. Our policy should be to return at once to this established
system of controls.
Finally, the most important change we could make in American policy
would be to dismantle our imperial presidency and restore a balance
among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of our
government. The massive and secret powers of the Department of
Defense and the CIA have subverted the republican structure of our
democracy and left us exposed to the real danger of a military
takeover. Reviving our constitutional system would do more than
anything else to protect our peace and security.
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