In a recent address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Republican presidential aspirant Mitt Romney denounced proposals for so-called “defense” cuts as motivated by a desire to make America a “lesser power” — which, in turn, “flows from the conviction that if we are weak, tyrants will choose to be weak as well; that if we could just talk more, engage more, pass more UN resolutions, that peace will break out. That may be what they think in that Harvard faculty lounge, but it’s not what they know on the battlefield!”
To listen to Mitt, you’d think American foreign policy for the past seventy years has been about “defending peace and freedom” and deterring “aggressors” — America as babe in the woods, minding its own business, forced to defend itself against “tyrants” who “hate us” because, well, they’re just evil. This is wrong on so many levels, once you subject the middle school civics class view of America’s role in the world to some critical examination, that it’s hard to know where to begin.
First, American foreign policy isn’t about rainbows and puppies. It’s about promoting interests. The American government’s policies, like those of all states, serve the interests of the ruling class coalition that controls the state. This applies to foreign as well as domestic policy. American foreign policy, like that of every other state, operates in the interests of a domestic system of power.
As Noam Chomsky put it, the Cold War was — as a first approximation — a war by the United States against the Third World and a war by the Soviet Union against its satellites. In 1984, Orwell used the image of three sheaves of wheat propped up against another to describe the mutual dependency of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. The three superpowers used the perpetual conflict among themselves to justify their control and exploitation of their domestic populations.
The primary purpose of American foreign policy since WWII has been to prop up a corporate world order, and disciplining renegade countries that attempt to defect from that order. And in propping up that global system of power, the United States has usually been the aggressor in the actions it’s undertaken. The US, since 1945, has maintained military garrisons in dozens of countries, and has probably overthrown and installed more governments than any other empire in history. And it has done so not primarily in self-defense against the “Soviet menace,” but as the inheritor of Pax Britannica’s mantle as guarantor of a world order.
Most of the countries the US has attacked in recent decades were not “threats,” because they were incapable of attacking the United States. They were countries on the other side of the world, with third-rate military forces, lacking the logistical capability to project military force more than a few hundred miles beyond their own borders. If the United States wasn’t such a good sport about meeting countries like that more than halfway, we’d never get to have any wars.
What’s more, there’s a pretty good chance that the so-called “tyrants” out there were installed by the United States in the first place, to protect the interests of American ruling circles from the ordinary people of those countries. The Western Allies, after “liberating” Axis territory, dispossessed left-wing resistance movements from their gains on the ground and installed provisional governments under former Axis collaborators. Starting with Arbenz in 1954, continuing with the overthrow of Brazil’s Goulart in the 1960s, and culminating in Operation Condor and the overthrow of Allende in South America, the United States installed military juntas or backed death squads in most countries of the Western hemisphere. In the rest of the world, country after country, story: Mossadeq, Sukarno, Lumumba … to borrow a phrase from the Clash: “Those Washington bullets again.”
When the US has trouble with a “tyrant,” as often as not it’s a former client of the Pentagon and CIA who stopped taking orders and became a liability. Like, for example, when Saddam “launched wars of aggression against his neighbors” and “used weapons of mass destruction against his own people.” The folks in Washington oughtta know Saddam had WMDs — after all, they saved the receipts. And in Saddam’s biggest war of aggression, the Reagan administration had a ringside seat, cheering him on and providing aid and support against the so-called “Iranian menace.”
Sorry, Mitt. It’s the US government that needs to be deterred. Romney claims to be a “small government conservative.” He claims to distrust government. But he’s either stupid or a liar. A government doesn’t stop being a government at the water’s edge.
Translations for this article:
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, Another stupid remark from Mitt Romney — but who’s counting?, South Coast Today, 09/19/11
- Kevin Carson, Romney’s Wrong Again, Antiwar.com, 09/13/11
Great article, as always, but one minor quibble: It was Goulart, not Bosch, that the U.S. overthrew in Brazil (Bosch was President of the Dominican Republic).
First, American foreign policy isn’t about rainbows and puppies.
Umm… duh? It's about unicorns and good witches.
“… the overthrow of Brazil’s Bosch in the 1960s”
Do you mean Juscelino Kubitschek and/or João Goulart?
It's true that the leftist governments of the Third World were not threats just as the leftist governments of the Warsaw Pact were not threats…by themselves. But when they were propped up and reinforced by the Soviet Union, the situation changed. Should the United States have waited until all the nations of the Third World had leftist governments hosting Soviet garrisons and offering their soldiers as auxiliaries of Soviet conquests like the Cubans did? Remember that American nukes (which the Far Left wanted to decommission) could be countered by a blockade and by employing the Far Left as a proxy!
Facts don't matter………..
Good catch — thanks!
Hidden author: When Marxism-Leninism spread into the Third World, the Leninist regimes generally maintained friendly ties to the USSR to the extent that they were far enough removed that there was no real threat of the USSR developing any real strategic power over them. The main cases in which they hosted Soviet garrisons were those in which the dynamics of the superpower relationship required obliged them to maintain close military ties with one superpower to prevent attack by the other. China developed an independent brand of national communism, as did Vietnam — which then triangulated between the USSR and China. I think this would have been the predominant pattern had the U.S. actually minded its own business: Even if some version of Marxism had swept the Third World, it would have been some kind of national communism that only paid lip service to friendly ties with the "socialist countries," and they would have been heavily engaged in trade with the U.S.
To take it a step further, superpower competition and U.S. hostility toward radical regimes of any kind made it more likely that radical regimes would gravitate toward a Leninist model. Castro, for example, started out as a left-wing nationalist — a quite authoritarian one — who suppressed the Communist Party after the overthrow of Batista. Only as Castro became more strategically dependent on the USSR did he start making Leninist noises.
Not only that, but initially Castro was favored by Washington-you can find photos of him meeting with (then Vice President) Nixon and other politicians c. 1959. The Cuban Communist Party was not popular, since for one they had supporter Batista, which Castro obviously new. It was only when it became clear he would not be a puppet of Washington they turned against him. This is not to say Castro was a nice man-he was not, and had suppressed opposition from the beginning. US operations began after they fell out c. 1959, and Castro allied with the Cuban Communist Party as they had ties with the USSR along with a strong power structure, bringing them into his government while suppressing former allies. Major US corporations property in Cuba was nationalized, along with those of the Mafia. Not until 1961 following the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles did Castro declare himself to be a Marxist-Leninist and his revolution socialist, openly allying with the USSR. Despite claims to the contrary, before taking power he does not seem to have been either, although there were Communists in the rebel forces, but also other factions (later all suppressed). A good book about this by Sam Dolgoff (social anarchist) is The Cuban Revolution: A Critical Perspective, found here at Anarchy Archives: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bri…
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Great article but it forgot to mention General Mohammad Ayub Khan of Pakistan in 1958.
Great article. William Blum is great on this stuff.