Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (25 page)

We also make it extremely difficult for them to collaborate with us even if they wanted to. The Pentagon is far and away the biggest arms buyer in the world, accounting for more than half of global procurement. As a supplier, if you can’t sell to the Pentagon, you can’t stay competitive. You can’t get the volumes of production or the big R & D dollars to allow you to remain at the leading edge. But the Pentagon makes it extremely difficult for foreign producers to sell to it.

The mid-1990
s
saw one of the defining moments in the American arms industry structure. With the end of the Cold War there was a drop in weapons spending and a necessary shrinkage of the defense industry. Secretary of Defense William Perry convened what came to be known as the ‘last supper,’ a dinner with defense industry CEOs to advise them to start thinking merger and shakeout. This would have been a time to consider globalizing the defense industry through international mergers, but it didn’t happen, partly because of resistance abroad, partly because it might have impaired U.S. weapons dominance and reduced imperial leverage.

TEACH THEM TO FIGHT – NOT TO WRITE

T
he United States is not only the world’s premier weapons exporter, it is also the leading instructor on war. The School of the America’s, for example, was first established in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone in 1946 and since then has graduated more than sixty thousand officers, cadets, and non-commissioned officers from all the Latin American countries as well as the United States. There are several objectives. One is to establish close relations between the military personnel of Latin America and those of the United States. It is thought that this not only can inculcate U.S. concepts of civilian control of the military but also enable training in human rights and democracy along with instruction in such things as special operations, civil military operations, and so forth. That’s the theory, but in practice, the school has been labeled the ‘school for dictators’ because of the high number of former Latin American dictators among its graduates and the high number of human rights complaints they have generated. To be fair, it is also true that some of the school’s graduates like Paz Garcia of Honduras have been instrumental in transferring power back to civilian democratic rule, and that all the countries of Latin and South America have become democracies over the past decade as the dictators have failed. But this owed little to the School of the Americas.

The same mixed bag can be seen in a more recent and diversified program. In the post-Cold War environment, the mission of the U.S. military has been in part and importantly to ‘shape the international environment.’ That has meant a proliferation of military-to-military relationships involving military training, counternarcotics programs, an-titerrorist activities, education programs, and equipment transfers. These activities are primarily carried out by U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) who are now deployed in more than 140 countries with a budget of well over $3 billion. These forces operate under the 1991 Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) law that both allows them to train abroad with foreign forces, and also allows the U.S. SOF to pick up the expenses of the foreign forces if they are unable to pay their own way.

This law was ostensibly aimed at providing critical training for U.S. SOF personnel. It may indeed do that, but it has also morphed into a broad program under which the United States is training virtually all the world’s armies. With about 4,500 U.S. troops deployed around the globe at any given time, JCET personnel outnumber the 4,000 Foreign Service officers of the State Department.

Looking at the other side of the ledger only makes clearer how strong our trust in arms is. In 1948, the first year of the Cold War, U.S. spending on aid and other diplomatic and non-military international programs totaled $6 billion 1948 dollars or more than 3 percent of GDP, about the same as the U.S. military budget at the time
 51 
or $104 billion in 2002 dollars. Today, America’s total overseas non-military spending, including the cost of embassies, aid, education, and everything else, comes to less than $17 billion or about 0.17 percent of GDP. Moreover, of that, nearly $4 billion is for military assistance, mostly through the Foreign Military Financing program, which operates as a grant program to enable foreign governments to buy U.S. military equipment.
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So, in fact, only about $13 billion or 0.13 percent of GDP is aid in the normal sense. Of this about $3 billion goes to Israel and $2 billion to Egypt (still part of the payoff for the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace deal), with the rest divided among everybody else.
 53 
These pitiful numbers – despite the end of the Cold War, the Peace Dividend, the global explosion of AIDS infections, and the spread of famine in Africa – are actually down from where they were in 1990, making the United States the smallest donor of aid as a percentage of GDP of the industrialized countries.
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We are also the most remiss contributor to international organizations. As of December 31, 2001, for example, we still owed back dues to the UN of nearly $900 million even after having paid off some of what we previously owed.
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Is it any wonder that our allies tire of all our talk about special burdens?

But then, if we actually decided to spend some money, there would be hardly anyone left to spend it, and many of those who remain couldn’t talk to the recipients anyhow. Over the past decade the State Department has slashed the number of its consulates and overseas offices. We now have fewer consulates in China, for example, than we had in 1939. Still, according to the General Accounting Office the State Department faces serious personnel shortages at many critical posts, and the people who are there are frequently unqualified. For example, the GAO found in its survey that 62 percent of the Foreign Service officers assigned to China did not meet the language proficiency requirements of their posts, nor did 41 percent of those in Russia. In Saudi Arabia, the head of the Public Diplomacy Section could not speak Arabic at all. Of course, the United States Information Agency, created during the Eisenhower administration for the purpose of telling America’s story abroad, was dismantled in 1999. In the wake of September 11, the Bush administration created something called the ‘Office of Global Communications’ and hired a Madison Avenue advertising executive to run it. Whether it will be slick and savvy or just slick, however, remains to be seen. None of this should be surprising when we consider that only 14 percent of Americans carry passports, and that many universities no longer include a foreign language as a graduation requirement. In recent polls, 87 percent of Americans couldn’t locate Iraq on a map.
 56 

At the end of the Cold War, America had an opportunity like the one briefly imagined immediately after World War II, when it could consider a new world order based on a community of nations genuinely sharing responsibility for maintaining peace. With the demise of the Soviet Union and the transformation of China into a market economy increasingly integrated into the global trading and investment system, the UN became potentially a more workable body. There was also time to review the rationale for key alliances like NATO and the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, as well as the basis for American military deployments abroad. None of this was done. To be sure, defense spending fell back finally to the 3.5 percent of GDP levels of the late 1940
s
, and the military services shrank somewhat in size. But with the rapid decline of Soviet forces and the size and growth of the U.S. economy, U.S. forces actually grew in a relative sense, and the basic deployments and missions remained. Samuel Huntington has noted the tendency of America to define itself in opposition to outside threats and to look for enemies. In the absence of specific enemies after 1992, the United States still perceived threats sufficient to justify keeping more than 200,000 troops abroad.

Oddly for an ever-changing capitalist country like the United States, ‘instability’ became an enemy. Any change in existing alliances or deployments might lead to dangerous ‘instability’ and was to be avoided at all costs. The events of September 11 and the advent of the War on Terror, along with the focus on regime change in Iraq have provided new and, in a sense, less-dangerous enemies. But they also highlight another point, noted by Immanuel Wallerstein: The United States relies very heavily on one card in the international poker game, the military card. We don’t like to think of ourselves as a warlike people, but can we expect others to accept us as ‘peace-loving’ when it is really only in arms that we trust?
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7

Peaceful People, Endless War

I
n February 2002, in the face of mounting tensions with North Korea, President Bush stopped for talks with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung while traveling in the Far East. During the obligatory visit to U.S. troops stationed at the Demilitarized Zone just north of Seoul, Bush gave a speech in which he strongly emphasized that ‘we’re peaceful people.’
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The statement was unremarkable in the sense that it is true. Americans don’t think of themselves as warlike or as having territorial or imperial ambitions. Few of America’s wars have enjoyed great public enthusiasm, and public opinion polls consistently show that Americans as individuals care little about what happens overseas. If there were a referendum on U.S. deployments and commitments abroad, the American people would probably vote against most of them. Yet Bush’s speech was made in a context in which tensions had risen at least in part because the U.S. government had opposed South Koreas ‘Sunshine Policy’ toward the North, in favor of greater pressure to force the fall of the hated communist regime. This situation illustrated another aspect of America, namely that despite the peace-loving nature of the American people, the country was not only founded in war but has been almost continuously engaged in war or preparations for war since its birth. According to my count, from the signing of the Constitution in 1789 until the present, there has been scarcely a year when the United States was not engaged in some overseas military operation. Admittedly, these include a number of small skirmishes and guarding operations, but the sum comes to 235 separately named events of which perhaps 25 to 30 could be characterized as full-scale wars.

Even before the Revolutionary War, Americans were engaged in fighting the native American Indians. From the founding of the country until the closing of the frontier a hundred years later, there was hardly a year without conflict between the United States and the various tribes. One of George Washington’s first duties as president was to put down Indian uprisings in the Northwest (then Ohio and Michigan), although he was troubled by the need for doing so. He hoped that ‘all need of coercion in the future might cease,’ and urged Congress to adopt philanthropic regulations regarding the tribes. Thomas Jefferson also struggled with the problem and, while mourning the Indians’ fate, also promoted the westward expansion that sealed it. Andrew Jackson, who made his mark by driving the Seminoles out of Florida, had no patrician qualms, believing that Indians ‘can not live with a civilized community and prosper.’ Sadly, he proved to be right but perhaps for the wrong reasons. In any case, by 1890 the Indians were all dead or on reservations.
 2 

Aside from the Civil War and the War of 1812 that consolidated U.S. independence from Britain, America fought two kinds of engagements with foreign adversaries during the nineteenth century. There were two full-fledged wars with foreign countries and numerous incursions, skirmishes, and interventions around the globe arising from the perceived need to protect Americans and their commerce. Many were initiated by the United States and nearly all resulted in gain for the country. The determinedly unilateralist America fought none in alliance with other countries. The first skirmishes were with the pirates of the Barbary states of North Africa to whom the United States refused to pay the bribes that had become part of the cost of doing business in the Mediterranean. By the 1820
s
, America had Mediterranean, Pacific, African, and South Atlantic naval squadrons doing everything from ensuring the rights of American seal hunters in the Falkland Islands to punishing Sumatrans for stealing opium from American traders. Three incidents had particular later significance. In the 1840
s
, America obtained a concession for trade with China at Shanghai and began a century of Yangtze River patrols aimed at enforcing the opening of China’s markets and the protection of missionaries. In 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry showed up in Tokyo Bay with his famous fleet of ‘Black Ships’ and demanded that the Japanese open their market upon pain of bombardment and possible invasion. And in 1871, Admiral John Rodgers tried the same thing, but with less success, in Korea.

The real wars were the one with Mexico in 1846 and that with Spain in 1898. In the case of Mexico, war arose in connection with the U.S. annexation of Texas when President James Polk sent the U.S. army far south into Mexican territory. With minimal casualties, the United States won and gained not only Texas, but New Mexico, most of Arizona, and California. As for the Spanish-American War, in response to alleged Spanish brutality in putting down Cuban independence fighters and in the wake of the mysterious explosion of the U.S. battleship
Maine
in Havana Harbor, U.S. troops were dispatched to Cuba. In what Secretary of State John Hay called ‘that splendid little war,’ the United States again suffered few casualties and gained an empire that included Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the Philippines, and Guam. Ironically, American control of the Philippines entailed both refusing to recognize a Filipino Declaration of Independence modeled on America’s and putting down Filipino independence fighters with at least as much brutality as the Spanish had used in Cuba. But it did give us a chance, as President William McKinley said, ‘to Christianize’ the Filipinos who had been Roman Catholics for 350 years.

The history of the twentieth century for America centered on three crusades to save the world from militarism, genocidal fascism, and totalitarian communism. The first, of course, was America’s entry into World War I. Whether the Germans were really more at fault than the Russians, French, and British is a subject of debate. But there is no doubt that the American intervention saved France, Britain, and much of the rest of Europe from a militaristic German hegemony.

It also marked a major transition in the rationale of American foreign policy. While America’s nineteenth-century wars (except for the Civil War) had been largely about territorial expansion, protection of trade routes, or the defense of some vague notion of ‘honor,’ its motives in the Great War were more idealistic. Woodrow Wilson’s high-minded Presby-terianism would not allow the United States to fight a war for mere material gain. Rather it had to ‘vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world’ and ‘to make the world itself at last free.’
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If you think that sounds like President Bush, you’re right. Idealism had permanently entered U.S. foreign policy.

Wilson’s idealism foundered in the losing battle to get the U.S. Senate to ratify his beloved League of Nations. In a scenario that would be repeated frequently, the United States conceived of and sold the world a plan and an institution that the United States itself in the end rejected. Senators William Borah and Henry Cabot Lodge, who led the vote against the League in the U.S. Senate, have been cast in later history as isolationists, a term that has since become pejorative. But they were not isolationist, and Lodge had in fact been an enthusiastic supporter of U.S. imperialism. Rather, as noted in Chapter 2, they were unilateralists, jealous of America’s sovereignty, sure of its superior virtue, and suspicious of the motives and reliability of other nations. America, they believed, was better off walking alone as it always had.

If there was ever a just war, it was World War II. There is no doubt that America saved the world from what truly was an evil empire. This too was a war fought for freedom and justice and to end all wars. Thus, the objective was unconditional surrender, and we rationalized the use of some terrible weapons to obtain it. Having emerged as the world’s dominant power militarily, technologically, and economically, the United States determined that the idealism of Wilson would not be denied, and did something it had never done before. It led the creation of and actually joined the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, and other international bodies that would entangle it in long-term agreements with other countries and cause it to forego a measure of freedom of action. Of course, the United States remained the senior partner and had effective veto power over all of these bodies, but their creation represented an important evolution of American foreign-policy thinking.

It is axiomatic that all countries pursue their national interest. The critical question is how they define that interest. Hitler defined Germany’s interest as the conquest of much of the world and the extermination of Jews. The United States, which had long focused on the unilateral pursuit of its own freedom and happiness, now began to define its interest in terms of improving global economic conditions, rebuilding devastated countries, and establishing a community of nations on the basis of global rule of law and due process. In effect, the United States defined its interest in terms congenial to a world order based on a consensus of the community of nations. So multilateralist was the United States at this time that it even proposed to put control of atomic energy under the new UN. For perhaps the first time in history, a dominant power was actively promoting the dilution of its own power. Before the experiment could go very far, however, the century’s third crusade intruded.

THE COLD WAR

L
ess than a year after the end of the war in 1945, American military forces, which had comprised some 15 million personnel, melted away to about 1.5 million, and the intent was to shrink further. The war had been won and now it was time to ‘get the boys back home.’ No one was planning on empire. The Cold War changed that completely.

The war started in earnest in early 1946. On February 9, Joseph Stalin made a speech declaring cooperation impossible between the imperialists of the west and the peace-loving peoples of the socialist countries. On February 22, the American diplomat George Kennan cabled his famous Long Telegram from the U.S. embassy in Moscow explaining to Washington that, in the view of the leaders in Moscow, there could be no permanent peace with the United States. They therefore saw it as necessary that the international authority of the United States be broken if Soviet power was to be secure. At the same time, Kennan emphasized, the Soviets were not schematic or prone to adventurism. On March 5, Winston Churchill spoke in Fulton, Missouri, saying, ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.’ The key event occurred on February 21 when the British Ambassador to the United States announced that Great Britain was broke and could neither maintain its support for the Greek and Turkish governments battling communist insurrections nor continue to hold many of its other posts in the Middle East.

Thus, the Truman administration faced a momentous decision. Would it assume the mantle of Great Britain and take on broad responsibilities for shaping the world? Truman answered on March 12 before a joint session of Congress:

∗

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life… Our way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of the minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression…I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures…If we falter we may endanger the peace of the world – and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this nation.
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∗

George Bush couldn’t have said it better. In quick succession the United States proposed the Marshall Plan, launched the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s first atomic explosion, moved to develop the hydrogen bomb. By 1949 the United States was beginning a major build-up of forces that would last into the present.

The policy Truman articulated was not pre-emption or preventive war, but containment, on the Madisonian premise that ‘A bad cause never fails to betray itself.’
 5 
But it lasted so long on such a titanic scale that it became much more than containment. All national priorities were subordinated to the overriding objective of hermetically sealing off Soviet, Chinese, and any other communists wherever they might be. A new ‘gospel of national security’
 6 
guided the nation to a new doctrine that wonderfully synthesized all of its old and new foreign policy traditions. Containment fueled the superpatriotic, us-against-them sentiment never far from the surface of the American personality and convinced the country that its most sacred value, ‘freedom,’ was under attack. It also gave a new lease on life to the American proclivity for unilateralism that had been briefly suspended after World War II. The United States still made commitments to others and entered into ‘entangling alliances,’ but always made sure to maintain its freedom of action. Containment also provided a justification and rationale for the progressive brand of imperialism America had employed in the Spanish American War and lesser conflicts by validating the need for far-flung bases, which turned large parts of the world into client states of the United States. It incorporated Wilsonian-ism by invoking liberal internationalist values and using them as weapons, and finally it served the ends of expansionist commerce by opposing both colonial and communist empires and pushing for open markets. As Tony Smith has said, ‘American hegemony constituted a form of anti-imperialist imperialism.’
 7 
James Warburg called it isolationism turned inside out and said, ‘We are willing to become citizens of the world, but only if the world becomes an extension of the United States.’
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There should be no doubt that the Cold War was a noble crusade carried on with the best of intentions, without hope of material gain or conquest, against foes that perpetrated great evils. If we had to face the same decision again, we should, in my judgment, unhesitatingly make the same choice. But we might consider different methods of implementation. We are paying today for serious mistakes made out of ignorance, paranoia, and an excessive trust in arms and power. This is not the place for a history of the Cold War, but the Korean War and a series of American interventions show why, despite its sacrifices in the cause of freedom and justice, America is often viewed from abroad with fear and distrust.