La pérdida
sostenida de “poder blando” (persuasión por propio peso, diplomacia, influencia cultural, etc.) por parte del Imperio va de la mano con la
militarización exacerbada de conflictos en todo el globo. El mapa de arriba muestra la distribución de bases militares y personal de los EEUU a escala planetaria. Rocanrol es lo que toca,
chicos: habrá que hamacarse. La nota que sigue es de Nicholas Davies para el sitio web
Strategic Culture Foundation:
Título: A
National Defense Strategy of Sowing Global Chaos
Texto: Presenting
the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States on Friday at the Johns
Hopkins University, Secretary of Defense James Mattis painted a picture of a
dangerous world in which U.S. power – and all of the supposed “good” that it
does around the world – is on the decline.
“Our competitive
edge has eroded in every domain of warfare – air, land, sea, space, and
cyberspace,” he said. “And it is continually eroding.”
What he could
have said instead is that the United States military is overextended in every
domain, and that much of the chaos seen around the world is the direct result
of past and current military adventurism. Further, he could have acknowledged, perhaps,
that the erosion of U.S. influence has been the result of a series of
self-inflicted blows to American credibility through foreign policy disasters
such as 2003 invasion of Iraq.
There were also
two important words hidden between the lines, but never mentioned by name, in
the new U.S. National Defense Strategy: “empire” and “imperialism.”
It has long been
taboo for U.S. officials and corporate media to speak of U.S. foreign policy as
“imperialism,” or of the U.S.’s global military occupations and network of
hundreds of military bases as an “empire.”
These words are on a long-standing blacklist of “banned topics” that
U.S. official statements and mainstream U.S. media reports must never mention.
The streams of
Orwellian euphemisms with which U.S. officials and media instead discuss U.S.
foreign policy do more to obscure the reality of the U.S. role in the world
than to describe or explain it, “hiding imperial interests behind ever more
elaborate fig leaves,” as British historian A.J.P. Taylor described European
imperialists doing the same a century ago.
As topics like
empire, imperialism, and even war and peace, are censored and excised from
political debate, U.S. officials, subservient media and the rest of the U.S.
political class conjure up an illusion of peace for domestic consumption by
simply not mentioning our country’s 291,000 occupation troops in 183 other
countries or the 39,000 bombs and missiles dropped on our neighbors in Iraq,
Syria and Afghanistan since Trump took office.
The 100,000 bombs
and missiles dropped on these and other countries by Obama and the 70,000
dropped on them by Bush II have likewise been swept down a kind of real time
“memory hole,” leaving America’s collective conscience untroubled by what the
public was never told in the first place.
But in reality,
it’s been a long time since U.S. leaders of either party resisted the
temptation to threaten anyone anywhere, or to follow through on their threats
with “fire and fury” bombing campaigns, coups and invasions. This is how empires maintain a “credible
threat” to undergird their power and discourage other countries from
challenging them.
But far from
establishing the “Pax Americana” promised by policymakers and military
strategists in the 1990s, from Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney to Madeleine
Albright and Hillary Clinton, the results have been consistently catastrophic,
producing what the new National Defense Strategy calls, “increased global
disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing, rules-based
international order.”
Of course the
drafters of this U.S. strategy document dare not admit that U.S. policy is
almost single-handedly responsible for this global chaos, after successive U.S.
administrations have worked to marginalize the institutions and rules of
international law and to establish illegal U.S. threats and uses of force that
international law defines as crimes of aggression as the ultimate arbiter of
international affairs.
Nor do they dare
acknowledge that the CIA’s politicized intelligence and covert operations,
which generate a steady stream of political pretexts for U.S. military
intervention, are designed to create and exacerbate international crises, not
to solve them. For U.S. officials to
admit such hard truths would shake the very foundations of U.S. imperialism.
Opposition to the
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran – the so-called nuclear deal –
from Republicans and Democratic hawks alike seems to stem from the fear that it
might validate the use of diplomacy over sanctions, coups and war, and set a
dangerous precedent for resolving other crises – from Afghanistan and Korea to
future crises in Africa and Latin America.
Iran’s success at bringing the U.S. to the negotiating table, instead of
falling victim to the endless violence and chaos of U.S.-backed regime change,
may already be encouraging North Korea and other targets of U.S. aggression to
try to pull off the same trick.
But how will the
U.S. justify its global military occupation, illegal threats and uses of force,
and trillion-dollar war budget once serious diplomacy is seen to be more
effective at resolving international crises than the endless violence and chaos
of U.S. sanctions, coups, wars and occupations?
From Bhurtpoor to
Baghdad
Major Danny
Sjursen, who has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught history at West
Point, is a rare voice of sanity from within the U.S. military. In a poignant article in Truthdig, Major
Sjursen eloquently described the horrors he has witnessed and the sadness he
expects to live with for the rest of his life.
“The truth is,” he wrote, “I fought for next to nothing, for a country
that, in recent conflicts, has made the world a deadlier, more chaotic place.”
Danny Sjursen’s
life as a soldier of the U.S. Empire reminds me of another soldier of Empire,
my great-great-great grandfather, Samuel Goddard. Samuel was born in Norfolk in England in
1793, and joined the 14th Regiment of Foot as a teenager. He was a Sergeant at
the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. During
14 years in India, his battalion led the assault on the fortress of Bhurtpoor
in 1826, which ended the last resistance of the Maratha dynasty to British
rule. He spent 3 years in the Caribbean,
6 years in Canada, and retired as Commandant of Dublin Castle in 1853 after a
lifetime of service to Empire.
Danny’s and
Samuel’s lives have much in common. They
would probably have a lot to talk about if they could ever meet. But there are critical differences. At Bhurtpoor, the two British regiments who
led the attack were followed through the breech in the walls by 15 regiments of
Indian “Native Infantry.” After
Bhurtpoor, Britain ruled India (including Pakistan and Bangladesh) for 120
years, with only a thousand British officials in the Indian Civil Service and a
few thousand British officers in command of up to 2.5 million Indian troops.
The British
brutally put down the Indian Mutiny in 1857-8 with massacres in Delhi,
Allahabad, Kanpur and Lucknow. Then, as
up to 30 million Indians died in famines in 1876-9 and 1896-1902, the British
government of India explicitly prohibited relief efforts or actions that might
reduce exports from India to the U.K. or interfere with the operation of the
“free market.”
As Mike Davis
wrote in his 2001 book, Late Victorian Holocausts, “What seemed from a
metropolitan perspective the nineteenth century’s final blaze of imperial glory
was, from an Asian or African viewpoint, only the hideous light of a giant
funeral pyre.”
And yet Britain
kept control of India by commanding such loyalty and subservience from millions
of Indians that, in every crisis, Indian troops obeyed orders from British
officers to massacre their own people.
Danny Sjursen and
U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and other post-Cold War U.S. war zones are
having a very different experience. In
Afghanistan, as the Taliban and its allies have taken control of more of the
country than at any time since the U.S. invasion, the U.S.-backed Afghan
National Army has 25,000 fewer troops under its command than it did five years
ago, while ten years of training by U.S. special operations forces has produced
only 21,000 trained Afghan Commandos, the elite troops who do 70-80% of the
killing and dying for the corrupt U.S.-backed Afghan government.
But the U.S. has
not completely failed to win the loyalty of its imperial subjects. The first U.S. soldier killed in action in
Afghanistan in 2018 was Sergeant 1st Class Mihail Golin, originally from
Latvia. Mihail arrived in the U.S. in
November 2004, enlisted in the U.S. Army three months later and has now given
his life for the U.S. Empire and for whatever his service to it meant to
him. At least 127 other Eastern
Europeans have died in occupied Afghanistan, along with 455 British troops, 158
Canadians and 396 soldiers from 17 other countries. But 2,402 – or 68%, over two-thirds – of the
occupation troops who have died in Afghanistan since 2001, were Americans.
In Iraq, an
American war that always had even less international support or legitimacy, 93%
of the occupation troops who have died were Americans, 4,530 out of a total of
4,852 “coalition” deaths.
When Ben Griffin,
who later founded the U.K. branch of Veterans for Peace, told his superiors in
the U.K.’s elite SAS (Special Air Service) that he could no longer take part in
murderous house raids in Baghdad with U.S. special operations forces, he was
surprised to find that his entire chain of command understood and accepted his
decision. The only officer who tried to
change his mind was the chaplain.
The Future of
Empire
The U.S. Joint
Chiefs of Staff have explicitly told Congress that war with North Korea would
require a ground invasion, and the same would likely be true of a U.S. war on
Iran. South Korea wants to avoid war at
all costs, but may be unavoidably drawn into a U.S.-led Second Korean War.
But besides South
Korea, the level of support the U.S. could expect from its allies in a Second
Korean War or other wars of aggression in the future would probably be more
like Iraq than Afghanistan, with significant international opposition, even
from traditional U.S. allies. U.S. troops would therefore make up nearly all of
the invasion and occupation forces – and take nearly all of the casualties.
Compared to past
empires, the cost in blood and treasure of policing the U.S. Empire and the
blame for its catastrophic failures fall disproportionately – and rightly – on
Americans. Even Donald Trump recognizes
this problem, but his demands for allied countries to spend more on their
militaries and buy more U.S. weapons will not change their people’s
unwillingness to die in America’s wars.
This reality has
created political pressure on U.S. leaders to wage war in ways that cost fewer
American lives but inevitably kill many more people in countries being punished
for resistance to U.S. imperialism, using air strikes and locally recruited
death squads instead of U.S. “boots on the ground” wherever possible.
The U.S. conducts
a sophisticated propaganda campaign to pretend that U.S. air-launched weapons
are so accurate that they can be used safely without killing large numbers of
civilians. Actual miss rates and blast
radii are on the “banned topics” blacklist, along with realistic estimates of
civilian deaths.
When former Iraqi
foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari told Patrick Cockburn of the U.K.’s Independent
newspaper that he had seen Iraqi Kurdish intelligence reports which estimated
that the U.S.- and Iraqi-led destruction of Mosul had killed 40,000 civilians,
the only remotely realistic estimate so far from an official source, no other
mainstream Western media followed up on the story.
But America’s
wars are killing millions of innocent people: people defending themselves,
their families, their communities and countries against U.S. imperialism and
aggression; and many more who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time
under the onslaught of over 210,000 American bombs and missiles dropped on at
least 7 countries since 2001.
According to a
growing body of research (for example, see the UN Development Program study,
Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping-Point for
Recruitment), most people who join armed resistance or “terrorist” groups do so
mainly to protect themselves and their families from the dangers of wars that
others have inflicted on them. The UNDP
survey found that the final “tipping point” that pushes over 70% of them to
take the fateful step of joining an armed group is the killing or detention of
a close friend or family member by foreign or local security forces.
So the reliance
on airstrikes and locally recruited death squads, the very strategies that make
U.S. imperialism palatable to the American public, are in fact the main
“drivers” spreading armed resistance and terrorism to country after country,
placing the U.S. Empire on a collision course with itself.
The U.S. effort
to delegate war in the Middle East to Saudi Arabia is turning it into a target
of global condemnation as it tries to mimic the U.S. model of warfare by
bombing and starving millions of innocent people in Yemen while blaming the
victims for their plight. The slaughter
by poorly trained and undisciplined Saudi and Emirati pilots is even more
indiscriminate than U.S. bombing campaigns, and the Saudis lack the full protection
of the Western propaganda system to minimize international outrage at tens of
thousands of civilian casualties and an ever-worsening humanitarian crisis.
The need to win
the loyalty of imperial subjects by some combination of fear and respect is a
basic requirement of Empire. But it
appears to be unattainable in the 21st century, certainly by the kind of
murderous policies the U.S. has embraced since the end of the Cold War. As Richard Barnet already observed 45 years
ago, at the end of the American War in Vietnam, “At the very moment the number
one nation has perfected the science of killing, it has become an impractical
instrument of political domination.”
Obama’s
sugar-coated charm offensive won U.S. imperialism a reprieve from global public
opinion and provided political cover for allied leaders to actively rejoin
U.S.-led alliances. But it was
dishonest. Under cover of Obama’s iconic
image, the U.S. spread the violence and chaos of its wars and regime changes
and the armed resistance and terrorism they provoke farther and wider,
affecting tens of millions more people from Syria and Libya to Nigeria and
Ukraine.
Now Trump has
taken the mask off and the world is once again confronting the unvarnished,
brutal reality of U.S. imperialism and aggression.
China’s approach
to the world based on trade and infrastructure development has been more
successful than U.S. imperialism. The
U.S. share of the global economy has declined from 40% to 22% since the 1960s,
while China is expected to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy in
the next decade or two – by some measures, it already has.
While China has
become the manufacturing and trading hub of the global economy, the U.S.
economy has been financialized and hollowed out, hardly a solid basis for
future growth. The neoliberal model of
politics and economics that the U.S. adopted a generation ago has created even
greater wealth for people who already owned disproportionate shares of
everything, but it has left working people in the U.S. and across the U.S.
Empire worse off than before.
Like the “next to
nothing” that Danny Sjursen came to realize he was fighting for in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the prospects for the U.S. economy seem ephemeral and highly
vulnerable to the changing tides of economic history.
The Rise and Fall
of the Great Powers
In his 1987 book,
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict
from 1500 to 2000, historian Paul Kennedy examined the relationship between
economic and military power in the histories of the Western empires who
colonized the world in the past 500 years.
He described how rising powers enjoy significant competitive advantages
over established ones, and how every once-dominant power sooner or later has to
adjust to the tides of economic history and find a new place in a world it can
no longer dominate.
Kennedy explained
that military power is only a secondary form of power that wealthy nations
develop to protect and support their expanding economic interests. An economically dominant power can quickly
convert some of its resources into military power, as the U.S. did during the
Second World War or as China is doing today.
But once formerly dominant powers have lost ground to new, rising
powers, using military power more aggressively has never been a successful way
to restore their economic dominance. On
the contrary, it has typically been a way to squander the critical years and
scarce resources they could otherwise have used to manage a peaceful transition
to a prosperous future.
As the U.K. found
in the 1950s, using military force to try to hold on to its empire proved
counter-productive, as Kennedy described, and peaceful transitions to
independence proved to be a more profitable basis for future relations with its
former colonies. The drawdown of its
global military commitments was an essential part of its transition to a viable
post-imperial future.
The transition
from hegemony to coexistence has never been easy for any great power, and there
is nothing exceptional about the temptation to use military force to try to
preserve and prolong the old order. This
has often led to catastrophic wars and it has always failed.
It is difficult
for any political or military leader to preside over a diminution of his or her
country’s power in the world. Military
leaders are rewarded for military strategies that win wars and expand their
country’s power, not for dismantling it.
Mid-level staff officers who tell their superiors that their weapons and
armies cannot solve their country’s problems do not win promotion to
decision-making positions.
As Gabriel Kolko
noted in Century of War in 1994, this marginalization of critical voices leads
to an “inherent, even unavoidable institutional myopia,” under which, “options
and decisions that are intrinsically dangerous and irrational become not merely
plausible but the only form of reasoning about war and diplomacy that is
possible in official circles.”
After two world
wars and the independence of India, the Suez crisis of 1956 was the final nail
in the coffin of the British Empire, and the Eisenhower administration
burnished its own anti-colonial credentials by refusing to support the
British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt.
British Prime Minister Anthony Eden was forced to resign, and he was
replaced by Harold Macmillan, who had been a close aide to Eisenhower during
the Second World War.
Macmillan
dismantled the remains of the British Empire behind the backs of his
Conservative Party’s supporters, winning reelection in 1959 on the slogan,
“You’ve never had it so good,” while the U.S. supported a relatively peaceful
transition that preserved Western international business interests and military
power.
As the U.S. faces
a similar transition from empire to a post-imperial future, its leaders have
been seduced by the chimera of the post-Cold War “power dividend” to try to use
military force to preserve and expand the U.S. Empire, even as the relative
economic position of the U.S. declines.
In 1987, Paul
Kennedy ended The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers with a prescient analysis
of the U.S. position in the world. He
concluded,
“In all of the
discussions about the erosion of American leadership, it needs to be repeated
again and again that the decline referred to is relative not absolute, and is
therefore perfectly natural; and that the only serious threat to the real
interests of the United States can come from a failure to adjust sensibly to
the newer world order.”
But after Kennedy
wrote that in 1987, instead of accepting the future of peace and disarmament
that the whole world hoped for at the end of the Cold War, a generation of
American leaders made a fateful bid for “superpower.” Their delusions were exactly the kind of
failure to adjust to a changing world that Kennedy warned against.
The results have
been catastrophic for millions of victims of U.S. wars, but they have also been
corrosive and debilitating for American society, as the perverted priorities of
militarism and Empire squander our country’s resources and leave working
Americans poorer, sicker, less educated and more isolated from the rest of the
world.
When I began
writing Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq in
2008, I hoped that the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq might bring U.S.
leaders to their senses, as the Suez crisis did to British leaders in 1956.
Instead, eight
more years of carefully disguised savagery under Obama have squandered more
precious time and good will and spread the violence and chaos of U.S.
war-making even farther and wider. The
new National Defense Strategy’s implicit threats against Russia and China
reveal that 20 years of disastrous imperial wars have done nothing to disabuse
U.S. leaders of their delusions of “superpower status” or to restore any kind
of sanity to U.S. foreign policy.
Trump is not even
pretending to respect diplomacy or international law, as he escalates Bush’s
and Obama’s wars and threatens new ones of his own. But maybe Trump’s nakedly aggressive policies
will force the world to finally confront the dangers of U.S. imperialism. A
coming together of the international community to stop further U.S. aggression
may be the only way to prevent an even greater catastrophe than the ones that
have already befallen the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Honduras,
Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen.
Or will it
actually take a new and even more catastrophic war in Korea, Iran or somewhere
else to finally force the United States to “adjust sensibly to the new world
order,” as Paul Kennedy put it in 1987?
The world has already paid a terrible price for our leaders’ failure to
take his sound advice a generation ago.
But what will be the final cost if they keep ignoring it even now?
