Military Expansion Serving Economic Objectives

The wealth of the ancient city-states of Venice and Genoa was based on their powerful navies, and treaties with other great powers to control trade. This evolved into nations designing their trade policies to intercept the wealth of others (mercantilism). Occasionally one powerful country would overwhelm another through interception of its wealth though a trade war, covert war, or hot war; but the weaker, less developed countries usually lose in these exchanges. It is the military power of the more developed countries that permits them to dictate the terms of trade and maintain unequal relationships.

Defense Secretary William Cohen, in remarks to reporters prior to his speech at Microsoft Corporation in Seattle, put it this way, [T]he prosperity that companies like Microsoft now enjoy could not occur without having the strong military that we have.

The defense secretary is making the case that conflicts in faraway lands such as Bosnia, Korea and Iraq have a direct effect on the US economy. The billions it costs to keep 100,000 American troops in South Korea and Japan, for example, makes Asia more stable—and thus better markets for US goods. The military’s success in holding Iraq in check ensures a continued flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, concluded the Associated Press dispatch reporting on Cohen’s Seattle appearance [February 18, 1999].

Except for religious conflicts and the petty wars of feudal lords, wars are primarily fought over resources and trade. President Woodrow Wilson recognized that this was the cause of World War I: Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?

For the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.

In order to develop their investment strategies, TNCs, the main actors of globalization, need the assurance of political stability and security. It is an old story that military force, either from abroad or within the country, is one of the instruments for TNCs. National armies and military alliances have to assure that the interest of TNCs, the recolonialization of the world, are met first.

On November 11, 2000, Richard Haass — a member of the National Security Council and special assistant to the president under the elder Bush, soon to be appointed director of policy planning in the state department of newly elected President George W. Bush — delivered a paper in Atlanta entitled Imperial America. For the United States to succeed at its objective of global preeminence, he declared, it would be necessary for Americans to re-conceive their role from a traditional nation-state to an imperial power. Haass eschewed the term imperialist in describing America’s role, preferring imperial, since the former connoted exploitation, normally for commercial ends, and territorial control. Nevertheless, the intent was perfectly clear:

To advocate an imperial foreign policy is to call for a foreign policy that attempts to organize the world along certain principles affecting relations between states and conditions within them. The US role would resemble 19th century Great Britain … Coercion and the use of force would normally be a last resort; what was written by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson about Britain a century and a half ago, that The British policy followed the principle of extending control informally if possible and formally if necessary, could be applied to the American role at the start of the new century.

The existence of an American empire is no secret. It is widely, even universally, recognized in most parts of the world, though traditionally denied by the powers that be in the United States. What Haass was calling for, however, was a much more open acknowledgement of this imperial role by Washington, in full view of the American population and the world, in order to further Washington’s imperial ambitions. The fundamental question that continues to confront American foreign policy, he explained, is what to do with a surplus of power and the many and considerable advantages this surplus confers on the United States. This surplus of power could only be put to use by recognizing that the United States had imperial interests on the scale of Britain in the nineteenth century. The world should therefore be given notice that Washington is prepared to extend its control, informally if possible and formally if not, to secure what it considers to be its legitimate interests across the face of the globe. The final section of Haass’ paper carried the heading Imperialism Begins at Home. It concluded: the greater risk facing the United States at this juncture…is that it will squander the opportunity to bring about a world supportive of its core interests by doing too little. Imperial understretch, not overstretch, appears the greater danger of the two.

… Many of the features of contemporary imperialism, such as the development of the world market, the division between core and periphery, the competitive hunt for colonies or semi-colonies, the extraction of surplus, the securing of raw materials to bring back to the mother country, etc. are part of capitalism as a global system from the late fifteenth century on. Imperialism, in the widest sense, had its sources in the accumulation dynamic of the system (as basic as the pursuit of profits itself), which encouraged the countries at the center of the capitalist world economy, and particularly the wealthy interests within these countries, to feather their own nests by appropriating surplus and vital resources from the periphery — what Pierre Jalée called The Pillage of the Third World. By a variety of coercive means, the poorer satellite economies were so structured — beginning in the age of conquest in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — that their systems of production and distribution served not so much their own needs as those of the dominant metropoles. Nevertheless, the recognition of such commonalities in imperialism in the various phases of capitalist development was entirely consistent with the observation that there had been a qualitative change in the nature and significance of imperialism that commenced in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

… In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the principal global reality was the decline in British hegemony and the increased rivalry among the advanced capitalist states that followed, leading to the First and Second World Wars. The rise of the Soviet Union in the context of the First World War posed an external challenge to the system eventually leading to a Cold War struggle between the United States, the new hegemonic power of the capitalist world economy following the Second World War, and the Soviet Union. The fall of the latter in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. By the end of the 1990s the United States had gained on its main economic rivals as well. The result of all of this by the beginning of the new century, as Henry Kissinger declared in 2001 in Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, was that the United States had achieved a pre-eminence not enjoyed by even the greatest empires of the past.

This naturally led to the question: What was the United States to do with its enormous surplus of power? Washington’s answer, particularly after 9/11, has been to pursue its imperial ambitions through renewed interventions in the global periphery — on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War. In the waging of its imperial War on Terrorism the US state is at one with the expansionary goals of US business.

Richard Haass (whose responsibilities in the present administration were extended to include those of US coordinator of policy for the future of Afghanistan) pointed out in his book Intervention, that regime change often can only be accomplished through a full-scale military invasion leaving the conquered nation in ruins and necessitating subsequent nation-building.

… Such a nation-building occupation, Haass stressed, involves defeating and disarming any local opposition and establishing a political authority that enjoys a monopoly or near-monopoly of control over the legitimate use of force. (This is Max Weber’s well-known definition of a state — though imposed in this case by an invading force.) It therefore requires, as Haass observed quoting one foreign policy analyst, an occupation of imperial proportions and possibly of endless duration.

It is precisely this kind of invasion of imperial proportions and uncertain duration that now seems to be the main agenda of Washington’s War on Terrorism. In the occupation and nation-building processes following invasions (as in the case of Afghanistan), explicit colonialism, in the most brazen nineteenth century sense, will be avoided. No formal annexation will take place, and at least a pretense of local rule will be established from the beginning, even during direct military occupation. Nevertheless, a central goal will be to achieve some of what colonialism in its classic form previously accomplished. As [a co-editor of Monthly Review, Harry] Magdoff pointed out,

Colonialism, considered as the direct application of military and political force, was essential to reshape the social and economic institutions of many of the dependent countries to the needs of the metropolitan centers. Once this reshaping had been accomplished economic forces — the international price, marketing and financial systems — were by themselves sufficient to perpetuate and indeed intensify the relationship of dominance and exploitation between mother country and colony. In these circumstances, the colony could be granted formal political independence without changing anything essential, and without interfering too seriously with the interests which had originally led to the conquest of the colony.

Something of this sort is occurring in Afghanistan and is now being envisioned for Iraq. Once a country has been completely disarmed and reshaped to fit the needs of the countries at the center of the capitalist world, nation-building will be complete and the occupation will presumably come to an end. But in areas that contain vital resources like oil (or that are deemed to be of strategic significance in gaining access to such resources), a shift back from formal to informal imperialism after an invasion may be slow to take place — or will occur only in very limited ways. Informal control or the mechanism of global accumulation that systematically favors the core nations, constitutes the normal means through which imperialist exploitation of the periphery operates. But this requires, on occasion, extraordinary means in order to bring recalcitrant state back into conformity with the market and with the international hierarchy of power with the United States at its apex.

At present, US imperialism appears particularly blatant because it is linked directly with war in this way, and points to an endless series of wars in the future to achieve essentially the same ends. However, if we wish to understand the underlying forces at work, we should not let this heightened militarism and aggression distract us from the inner logic of imperialism, most evident in the rising gap in income and wealth between rich and poor countries, and in the net transfers of economic surplus from periphery to center that make this possible. The growing polarization of wealth and poverty between nations (a polarization that exists within nations as well) is the system’s crowning achievement on the world stage. It is also what is ultimately at issue in the struggle against modern imperialism.

Using Napolean as a mouthpiece, George Bernard Shaw makes a telling comment on British Imperialism, which is no less — if not more — apposite to the American imperialism of our time. He says: There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find an Englishman doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle.

• He fights you on patriotic principles;
• he robs you on business principles;
• he enslaves you on imperial principles;
• he bullies you on manly principles;
• he supports his king on loyal principles and cut off his king’s head on republican principles.

America is no different.

• It claims to act in terms of international law; but feels free to subvert international norms whenever it wants.
• It supports the authority of the United Nations but turns its back on the U.N. to suit its convenience.
• It globalises trade in the name of fairness; and most unfairly usurps the major trade benefits to its own advantage.
• It launches a war to secure the largest oil reserves in the world but pretends it fights for peace.
• It claims to act in the name of democracy, but leaves behind battered states wherever it has gone.
• It fights a war for peace, but makes huge profits by the sale of arms that follows.
• Its peacekeeping results in war.
• Its war brings no peace.
• No sooner are its interests maintained, it leaves behind a debris of enfeebled states.
• It is never at a loss for an effective moral attitude.

Shortly after the War of 1812 was fought to defeat British mercantilist trade practices, US statesman Henry Clay pointed to the necessity of the United States developing a defensive capability by quoting a British leader,

[N]ations knew, as well as [ourselves], what we meant by free trade was nothing more nor less than, by means of the great advantage we enjoyed, to get a monopoly of all their markets for our manufactures, and to prevent them, one and all, from ever becoming manufacturing nations.

This is one of the most important aspects of history, and is conveniently ignored.

The most highly decorated Marine Corps General in US history, Smedley D. Butler understood all too well the real nature of the US Marine Corps and US foreign policy in general when he concluded after his retirement in 1931 that during his 33 years as a Marine officer operating on three continents, he served as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers…a gangster for capitalism [Smedley D. Butler, America’s Armed Forces, Part 2, Common Sense, Vol. 4, No. 11 (Nov. 1935)]. But it seems that that understanding is easily forgotten. General A.M. Gray, former commandant of the US Marine Corps, in 1990 identified threats to the United States as originating from the underdeveloped world’s growing dissatisfaction over the gap between rich and poor nations, creating a fertile breeding ground for insurgencies which have the potential to jeopardize regional stability and our access to vital economic and military resources (Marine Corps Gazette, May 1990). Gray understands the structural social and economic problems, but it apparently does not occur to him that the solution might be to directly address the injustices rather than perpetuate them with the use of military force.

The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killings.

To many foreign policy experts, that worldview is a natural outgrowth of America’s preeminent position in the post-Soviet world, which it dominates militarily, economically and culturally. And while many of these scholars fault the Bush administration for a brusque, even arrogant brinkmanship at the United Nations, far fewer blame it for trying to control the international rules of the road. That, they say, is what all great powers have done through the ages.

You hear Europeans say Bush is a cowboy from Texas, said William C. Wohlforth, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth. But when the Europeans were at the top of the international heap, they were hard-bitten realists about using power, and it was the United States that was trying to outlaw war.

The fact that some elements [of the US government] may appear to be potentially out of control can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an adversary’s decision makers. … That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries. … It hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed…

We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population….In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity….To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives….We should cease to talk about vague and…unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

… We should recognize that our influence in the Far Eastern area in the coming period is going to be primarily military and economic. We should make a careful study to see what parts of the Pacific and Far Eastern world are absolutely vital to our security, and we should concentrate our policy on seeing to it that those areas remain in hands which we can control or rely on.

Soft imperialism, the export of culture and lifestyle, lasts long after the empire’s armies have gone.

[Dr Christopher Kelly, Lecturer in Classics, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge:] What’s always important to remember about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, is that the engines of that decline, the Barbarians, wanted above all, to become Roman. Long after Europe had forgotten about Roman military might the idea of Romanness and Roman culture lived on.

Rome’s most enduring gift was the formula for empire itself … its being used again now, by the new Masters of the Universe. But Rome’s story offers a warning too: No empire should ever believe in its own immortality. At the time it seems impossible to imagine a world without it. But one day, even the mightiest temples and grandest monuments lie in ruins. No empire lasts forever.