Sunday, March 21, 2004
(10:09 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
News Brief: Sometimes American Foreign Policy Hurts People
With that headline, I have officially gone off the deep end. I am now part of the Chomskyan left. Any credibility I once had has now been shattered by my overwhelming irrelevance and lack of patriotism. Any troops who are reading my web page will be heartbroken at my lack of support. I am, as they say, objectively pro-fascist. A Saddamite, in all likelihood.
I still must stand behind my headline, because I have gotten a very grim picture from reading Chalmers Johnson's Blowback. Sexual assault of those whose countries our military "protects" is rampant. Countries that are facing no plausible threat are coersed into purchasing expensive weapons systems. Entire national economies, including in some respects our own, are laid waste by the movement of finance capital. And throughout the book, I kept wondering: How exactly is America supposed to be benefitting from this? In order to prop up the economies of our Asian sattelites, we have gutted manufacturing and industry in our own nation, while simultaneously undercutting the very economies who undercut us. They vastly overproduce in order to maintain an export economy, until we can't afford to buy any more of their exports, because our manufacturing and industry is gutted. We sell weapons to other countries and then are shocked -- shocked -- when they use them either against their neighbors or against randomly selected targets in their own country.
Johnson proposed several sensible changes in policy: nuclear disarmament, withdrawal of troops from Korea and Japan, imposing restrictions on imports such as requiring that manufacturers pay a certain wage if they want access to our market, etc. I can't begin to imagine a situation in which those proposals would be possible to implement, even though they would clearly be in nearly everyone's best interests.
The problem here is the use of the term "America" to refer to diverse things: the military, the investment class, and the actual normal people who live in America, with their government. It's pretty clear that the military and the flow of capital are now largely beyond the control of the government, especially when the military and capital combine in such a way that they aren't obviously under the jurisdiction of the US government. If empires impose their own social structures on the territories they conquer, then we must say that it is the US military, much moreso than US capital or the US government, that is the true imperial power. Every nation in the world is required to become ever more militarized, even as the US military shows its true colors when stationed overseas, where soldiers are allowed to do things they couldn't imagine doing back in the US -- and are then exonerated, showing contempt for civilian government and authorities.
The military, in general, is an organization set up to terrorize and kill people. We should not expect it to do anything but terrorize and kill people. We should not expect it to "keep the peace." We should not expect it to "rebuild a country." Sometimes it might seem necessary to set up a military in response to a specific threat, but we simply cannot maintain a standing, mercenary army many times larger than the nearest competitor's and expect the world to be a peaceful, stable place. We should not be surprised when the excess military capacity of the US ends up working its way into other countries and supporting rulers who want nothing more than to terrorize and kill people and maybe make some money while they're at it. This stuff is dangerous. We're stupid for keeping it lying around, especially when we're separated by two oceans from any credible threat to our country. We were stupid to help arm other countries during the Cold War, and we were stupid to instigate an arms race that led to ever more advanced weapons, such that now our mainland could be threatened from across the ocean within the next couple decades. All of that was completely stupid. It only helped the military structures and those capitalists fortunate enough to have a stake in it.
Now I can see why Hardt and Negri are arguing that we can't view empire simply in terms of a nation-state (such as the US), since things have gotten beyond the control of any one state. Hopefully once I read their book, I will have finally achieved the absolute knowledge that Hegel promised and failed to deliver. In any case, I wonder: are the governmental structures and values of the United States such that they inevitably lead to a military-capitalist overgrowth that has grown beyond our control, or was that a historical accident that could have been prevented? What role does national leadership have in all this? And what is the meaning of George W. Bush's abject pandering to the military and to capital?
All I know is that when the terrorists attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, they weren't attacking "America" as such, or at least not all of it. They weren't attacking the Southern whites still making nigger jokes. They weren't attacking young men trying to achieve literary and rock-music stardom. They certainly weren't attacking snobbish East Coast intellectuals cursing themselves for not having been born French. Yes, America is much more than just the military and the investment class -- and I think people around the world recognize that.
