Who Rules the World? (9 page)

In Germany, Thilo Sarrazin’s book-length lament that immigrants are destroying the country was a runaway best seller, while Chancellor Angela Merkel, though she condemned the book, declared that multiculturalism had “utterly failed”: the Turks imported to do the dirty work in Germany are failing to become blond and blue-eyed true Aryans.
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Those with a sense of irony may recall that Benjamin Franklin, one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment, warned that the newly liberated colonies should be wary of allowing Germans to immigrate because they were too swarthy, and Swedes as well. Into the twentieth century, ludicrous myths of Anglo-Saxon purity were common in the United States, including among presidents and other leading figures. Racism in our literary culture has been a rank obscenity. It has been much easier to eradicate polio than this horrifying plague, which regularly becomes more virulent in times of economic distress.

I do not want to end without mentioning another externality that is dismissed in market systems: the fate of the species. Systemic risk in the financial system can be remedied by the taxpayer, but no one will come to the rescue if the environment is destroyed. That it must be destroyed is close to an institutional imperative. Business leaders who are conducting propaganda campaigns to convince the population that anthropogenic global warming is a liberal hoax understand full well how grave is the threat, but they must maximize short-term profit and market share. If they don’t, someone else will.

This vicious cycle could well turn out to be lethal. To see how grave the danger is, simply have a look at Congress in the United States, propelled into power by business funding and propaganda. Almost all the Republicans are climate deniers. They have already begun to cut funding for measures that might mitigate environmental catastrophe. Worse, some are true believers; take for example the new head of a subcommittee on the environment who explained that global warming cannot be a problem because God promised Noah that there will not be another flood.
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If such things were happening in some small and remote country, we might laugh, but not when they are happening in the richest and most powerful country in the world. And before we laugh, we might also bear in mind that the current economic crisis is traceable in no small measure to the fanatic faith in such dogmas as the efficient market hypothesis, and in general to what Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, fifteen years ago, called the “religion” that markets know best—which prevented the central bank and the economics profession, with a few honorable exceptions, from taking notice of an $8 trillion housing bubble that had no basis at all in economic fundamentals, and that devastated the economy when it burst.
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All of this, and much more, can proceed as long as the Muasher doctrine prevails. As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, and diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

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American Decline: Causes and Consequences

“It is a common theme” that the United States, which “only a few years ago was hailed to stride the world as a colossus with unparalleled power and unmatched appeal … is in decline, ominously facing the prospect of its final decay.”
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This theme, articulated in the summer 2011 issue of the journal of the Academy of Political Science, is indeed widely believed—and with some reason, though a number of qualifications are in order. The decline has in fact been underway since the high point of U.S. power shortly after World War II, and the remarkable rhetoric of the decade of triumphalism after the Soviet Union imploded was mostly self-delusion. Furthermore, the commonly drawn corollary—that power will shift to China and India—is highly dubious. They are poor countries with severe internal problems. The world is surely becoming more diverse, but despite America’s decline, in the foreseeable future there is no competitor for global hegemonic power.

To recall briefly some of the relevant history, during World War II U.S. planners recognized that the country would emerge from the war in a position of overwhelming power. It is quite clear from the documentary record that “President Roosevelt was aiming at United States hegemony in the postwar world,” to quote the assessment of diplomatic historian Geoffrey Warner, one of the leading specialists on the topic.
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Plans were developed, along lines discussed above, for the United States to control what was called a “Grand Area” spanning the globe. These doctrines still prevail, though their reach has declined.

The wartime plans, soon to be carefully implemented, were not unrealistic. The United States had long been by far the richest country in the world. The war ended the Great Depression, and American industrial capacity almost quadrupled, while rivals were decimated. At war’s end the United States had half the world’s wealth and unmatched security.
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Each region of the Grand Area was assigned its “function” within the global system. The ensuing “Cold War” consisted largely of efforts by the two superpowers to enforce order in their own domains: for the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe; for the United States, most of the world.

By 1949 the Grand Area that the United States planned to control was already seriously eroding with “the loss of China,” as it is routinely called.
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The phrase is interesting: one can only “lose” what one possesses, and it is taken for granted that the United States owns most of the world by right. Shortly after, Southeast Asia began to slip free from Washington’s control, leading to horrendous wars in Indochina and huge massacres in Indonesia in 1965 as U.S. dominance was restored. Meanwhile, subversion and massive violence continued elsewhere in an effort to maintain what is called “stability.”

But decline was inevitable, as the industrial world reconstructed itself and decolonization pursued its agonizing course. By 1970, the U.S. share of world wealth had declined to about 25 percent.
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The industrial world was becoming “tripolar,” with major centers in the United States, Europe, and Asia, then Japan-centered and already becoming the globe’s most dynamic region.

Twenty years later, the USSR collapsed. Washington’s reaction teaches us a good deal about the reality of the Cold War. The first Bush administration, then in office, immediately declared that its policies would remain essentially unchanged, although with different pretexts; the huge military establishment would be maintained not for defense against the Russians but to confront the “technological sophistication” of Third World powers. Similarly, it would be necessary to maintain “the defense industrial base,” a euphemism for advanced industry highly reliant on government subsidy and initiative. Intervention forces still had to be aimed at the Middle East, where serious problems “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door,” contrary to half a century of deceit. It was quietly conceded that the problem had always been “radical nationalism,” that is, attempts by countries to pursue an independent course in violation of Grand Area principles.
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These principles were not to be modified in any fundamental way, as the Clinton doctrine (under which the United States could unilaterally use military power to further its economic interests) and the global expansion of NATO would soon make clear.

There was a period of euphoria after the collapse of the superpower enemy, replete with excited tales about “the end of history” and awed acclaim for President Bill Clinton’s foreign policy, which had entered a “noble phase” with a “saintly glow,” as for the first time in history a nation would be guided by “altruism” and dedicated to “principles and values.” Nothing now stood in the way of an “idealistic New World bent on ending inhumanity” which could at last carry forward, unhindered, the emerging international norm of humanitarian intervention. And that’s to sample just a few of the impassioned accolades of prominent intellectuals at the time.
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Not all were so enraptured. The traditional victims, the global South, bitterly condemned “the so-called ‘right’ of humanitarian intervention,” recognizing it to be nothing but the old “right” of imperial domination tricked out in new clothing.
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Meanwhile, more sober voices among the policy elite at home saw that, for much of the world, the United States was “becoming the rogue superpower,” “the single greatest external threat to their societies,” and that “the prime rogue state today is the United States,” to quote Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard professor of the science of government, and Robert Jervis, president of the American Political Science Association.
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After George W. Bush took over, increasingly hostile world opinion could scarcely be ignored; in the Arab world in particular, Bush’s approval ratings plummeted. Obama has achieved the impressive feat of sinking still lower, down to 5 percent approval in Egypt and not much higher elsewhere in the region.
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Meanwhile, decline continued. In the past decade, South America has also been “lost.” That is serious enough; as the Nixon administration was planning the destruction of Chilean democracy—the U.S.-backed military coup on “the first 9/11” that installed the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet—the National Security Council ominously warned that if the United States could not control Latin America, it could not expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world.”
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Far more serious, however, would be moves toward independence in the Middle East, for reasons recognized clearly in early post–World War II planning.

A further danger: there might be meaningful moves toward democracy.
New York Times
executive editor Bill Keller wrote movingly of Washington’s “yearning to embrace the aspiring democrats across North Africa and the Middle East.”
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But polls of Arab opinion revealed very clearly that it would be a disaster for Washington if there were steps toward the creation of functioning democracies, where public opinion would influence policy: as we have seen, the Arab population regards the United States as a major threat, and would expel it and its allies from the region if given a choice.

While long-standing U.S. policies remain largely stable, with tactical adjustments, under Obama there have been some significant changes. Military analyst Yochi Dreazen and his coauthors observed in the
Atlantic
that while Bush’s policy was to capture (and torture) suspects, Obama simply assassinates them, rapidly increasing the use of terror weapons (drones) and Special Forces personnel, many of them assassination teams.
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Special Forces units have been deployed in 147 countries.
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Now as large as Canada’s entire military, these soldiers are, in effect, a private army of the president, a matter discussed in detail by American investigative journalist Nick Turse on the website
TomDispatch
.
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The team that Obama sent to assassinate Osama bin Laden had already carried out perhaps a dozen similar missions in Pakistan. As these and many other developments illustrate, though U.S. hegemony has declined, its ambition has not.

Another common theme, at least among those who are not willfully blind, is that American decline is in no small measure self-inflicted. The comic opera in Washington centering around whether or not to “shut down” the government, which disgusts the country (a large majority of which thinks that Congress should just be disbanded) and bewilders the world, has few analogues in the annals of parliamentary democracy. The spectacle is even coming to frighten the sponsors of the charade. Corporate powers are now concerned that the extremists they helped put in office may choose to bring down the edifice on which their own wealth and privilege relies, the powerful “nanny state” that caters to their interests.

The eminent American social philosopher John Dewey once described politics as “the shadow cast on society by big business,” warning that “attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.”
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Since the 1970s, that shadow has become a dark cloud enveloping society and the political system. Corporate power, by now largely made up of financial capital, has reached a point where both political organizations—which by now barely resemble traditional parties—are far to the right of the population on the major issues under debate.

For the public, the primary domestic concern is the severe crisis of unemployment. Under prevailing circumstances, that critical problem could have been overcome only by a significant government stimulus, well beyond the one Obama initiated in 2009, which barely matched declines in state and local spending, though it still did probably save millions of jobs. For financial institutions, the primary concern is the deficit. Therefore, only the deficit is under discussion. A large majority of the population (72 percent) favor addressing the deficit by taxing the very rich.
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Cutting health programs is opposed by overwhelming majorities (69 percent in the case of Medicaid, 78 percent for Medicare).
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The likely outcome is therefore the opposite.

Reporting the results of a study of how the public would eliminate the deficit, Steven Kull, director of the Program for Public Consultation, which conducted the study, writes that “clearly both the administration and the Republican-led House are out of step with the public’s values and priorities in regard to the budget … The biggest difference in spending is that the public favored deep cuts in defense spending, while the administration and the House propose modest increases … The public also favored more spending on job training, education, and pollution control than did either the administration or the House.”
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The costs of the Bush-Obama wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now estimated to run as high as $4.4 trillion—a major victory for Osama bin Laden, whose announced goal was to bankrupt America by drawing it into a trap.
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The 2011 U.S. military budget—almost matching that of the rest of the world combined—was higher in real (inflation-adjusted) terms than at any time since World War II, and slated go even higher. There is much loose talk about projected cuts, but such reporting fails to mention that if they take place at all, they will be from projected future Pentagon growth rates.