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Foreign
Policy Instructional
Understanding U.S Foreign Policy based on ZMI Lectures by Stephen Shalom Consumercide
has unpacked this from its difficult structure at znet and placed it all
in a linear mirror here.
This is a rough transcript of a course given at ZMI in June 1998. Material in quotation marks are exact quotes (not from Shalom, but from the indicated sources), while material without quotation marks are loose --sometimes very loose -- paraphrases. Regretably, the extensive discussions accompanying this material in class were not transcribed and therefore do not appear in this instructional. The Course was given in two parts and the Instructional is divided similarly, with subdivisions in each. Thank You
Part One: The Driving Forces Of U.S. Foreign Policy Introduction What I'd like to do is take five
different explanations of U.S. foreign policy and analyze them. Some of
them I think are bogus, and some of them I think are real. I'm not going
to tell you which I think is which -- but don't worry, you should be able
to figure it out. The five I'm going to talk about are: First, morality,:is
that's what's driving U.S. foreign policy? (Control your laughter, please.)
Second, democracy: is a concern for democracy what's driving U.S. foreign
policy? Third is capitalism: is that's what's driving U.S. foreign policy?
Fourth is racism, and fifth is sexism and heterosexism. So let me go through
each of these in order.
Morality As An Explanation for U.S. Foreign Policy??? Sentimental Imperialism There was a book by Charles Bohlen, a former U.S. ambassador and sometime academic, in which he said that when you're studying the foreign policy of most countries, you need to look at the material conditions, but that this doesn't apply when you're studying the United States because U.S. foreign policy is different from other countries' foreign policy in that it's not related to the material conditions of the country. This has been a constant argument among many political scientists and analysts, that somehow the U.S. is special, that the U.S. is different, that - to use the title of a book written in 1981 -- U.S. policymakers were "sentimental imperialists." Not the standard imperialism based on the usual greed and things like that, but this was a book about the U.S. experience in Asia. The United States was motivated by sentiment, by morality, by wanting to do good. Stanley Karnow wrote a book about the U.S. and the Philippines, and it talked about the colonial period, and he keeps on talking about U.S. "benign intentions," "high moral purpose," and -- one word he uses that I'd never heard of, and had to look up but couldn't find except in an unabridged dictionary -- U.S. "benison," which means the U.S. giving of benefits to Filipinos. This was why the United States was there: to help the Filipinos. I was officially trained as a political scientist and one of the founders of American political science and the American study of international relations is a guy named Hans Morgenthau, and he has a criticism of U.S. foreign policy. Morgenthau says the thing wrong with U.S. foreign policy is that it's too moralistic and too legalistic. We're just too good. We shouldn't be this way, he says, and his decisive example to prove how good we are is a story from the turn of the century. We are, as you know, now in the hundredth anniversary of 1898, which is when the United States started on its era of global expansion. It, of course, had expanded across the American continent and expanded in Latin America, but in 1898 it went worldwide, and I'm going to try to make a number of references back to that 100-year-ago event. The president at the time was William McKinley, and a group of Episcopal missionaries came to visit him, and as they were leaving the White House, he said, in rough paraphrase: Wait, hold a minute. I want to tell you why I decided to annex the Philippines. I don't mind telling you, he said, that I paced the White House floor tormented by this question: should we annex the Philippines? And then it came to me. I heard a voice, and the voice said, "William, you should annex the Philippines. That's the thing to do because you need to civilize and Christianize the Filipinos." Now the Filipinos were
90% Christian already, which might have given McKinley pause, but it didn't.
Incredibly, this episode is what Morgenthau takes as proof that U.S. policy
is moralistic. Moreover, if you read through McKinley's statement in more
detail, he goes to say we could have given the Philippines to France and
Germany, “our commercial rivals in the Orient”, but that would have been
"bad business and discreditable." So evidently, McKinley's God who speaks
to him and tells him what he ought to do is not oblivious to economic concerns,
to profit and loss. (Now maybe it wasn't God. Maybe it was the voice of
Theodore Roosevelt that McKinley heard instead -- but no matter.) The point
is that McKinley's notion of morality included making money, and for Morgenthau
to think that this shows the U.S. is to moralistic seems a very peculiar
notion. But let me take other examples aside from that turn of the century
one.
World War Two and Saving Jews Let's think of some other cases where the opportunity to do good weighed heavily. Consider the case of World War II (additional reading). All these Jews were being killed, and the United States went and defeated Hitler. Wasn't that a moral act? Well, there were a couple things to consider. The first is that the United States didn't enter the war when Jews started getting killed. The United States entered the war when the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor and then Germany declared war on the United States, but more importantly before the United States entered the war, there was a crisis of Jewish refugees who wanted to get out of Europe because Hitler's policy at first was not extermination but expulsion, to expel as many Jews as he could from German controlled territory. The problem was while Hitler was willing to expel them, no country was willing to take them in. The United States called a conference to talk about this problem of Jewish refugees, and it was clear there was a tremendous need for countries to serve as safe havens for these refugees. The United States agreed to take in a grand total of zero refugees at this conference. In fact, the entire world agreed to take in a grand total of zero with the exception of Cuba that thought it would be good to have some whites coming in to Cuba to make sure the balance doesn't get too dark in Cuba, that kind of thing, and that was it. Everyone else said, we don't want these refugees. That would have been the main way that lives could have been saved, letting in refugees, and the U.S. policy throughout was not to let in refugees. Even once the United States got into war, it didn't change its policy. The United States had quotas on who could enter the country based on your country of origin, and these quotas were frankly racial quotas. That is if you take a map of Europe as you go from north to western Europe towards southeastern Europe, the quotas got smaller and smaller, because the northwestern Europeans were considered of the highest Anglo-Saxon stock, and as you got more and more southeastern, people were considered more and more inferior. Asia as a whole was given a quota of 50 for China and 50 for Japan, compared to 25,000 for Great Britain. Africa got zero because there were all colonized by the Europeans and anyway and so you would come in under the European quota if the Europeans let you. So Jewish refugees from eastern Europe were coming from countries with very low quotas, but what's remarkable is that they weren't even allowed in up to the quotas because as U.S. diplomats at the time said, these Jews are totally unassimilable and all they do is cause crime and other things. We don't want them in the country. Towards the end of the war, in 1944, the U.S. military got close enough that they could have bombed Auschwitz and the rail links leading to Auschwitz. Of course it could be rebuilt, but this would have slowed down the killing machine. U.S. officials chose not to do so. A specific proposal was made, asking the U.S. government to bomb Auschwitz, and the Undersecretary of War, John J. McCloy, said, we wouldn't want to do that because the Germans might take it out on the Jews. ("such an effort, even if practicable, might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans"). Now it's hard to imagine how the Germans could take it out on the Jews given that they're gassing them to death already, but basically the U.S. government refused to do it. Now there have been some writers recently who said, oh, it actually wasn't so easy to do. There were complications and so on and so forth. Yes, there were complications, but it doesn't seem like the same attention was given to this problem as you think the moral cause would warrant. Bangladesh Another example, is the case of Bangladesh.
After Britain left British India and gave it independence, the former colony
was partitioned between Hindus and Muslims into India and Pakistan. Pakistan
was actually composed of two unconnected pieces of territory, because that's
where the Muslim population had lived in British India, and so Pakistan
was a country in two parts separated by 1,000 miles. There was an East
Pakistan and a West Pakistan, and although they were both Muslim, they
were different ethnic groups, and the East Pakistanis were oppressed. West
Pakistan with the smaller population dominated East Pakistan, In 1970,
there was an election allowed by the ruling dictator, and in this election
a Bengali Party that favored autonomy for East Pakistan got more votes
than any other party. It would have been the majority party in the Parliament,
and so the dictator said, I am canceling the elections. I'm arresting the
East Pakistani politicians, and I'm sending in the army, and the army went
into East Pakistan and proceeded to commit horrendous massacres. Whole
areas of cities were blocked off surrounded by machine gunners, and then
burnt down, and if you tried to escape, they shot you because these were
places where there were a lot of radical Bengali university students and
so on. So hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, were killed in this
process. Massive rapes took place. The soldiers just went berserk raping
every Bengali woman they could find.
Now you might say, okay but that was during the Cold War, and so when the U.S. sent its Navy to the Bay of Bengal to warn India to keep hands off Pakistan, the Soviet Navy wasn't too far behind. So there were Cold War implications here. Rwanda Okay, well, let's look at a post-Cold War case, and this is from 1994. Not so long ago in Africa the case of Rwanda. (additional reading from Z or the longer, footnoted version.) In Rwanda in a period of 100 days, somewhere between half a million and a million members of the Tutsi minority were massacred, and I don't like to use the word genocide lightly, and not every time people are killed is it genocide, but this was a case of a systematic, planned attempt to kill every single man, woman, and child of the Tutsi minority that could be found. And this took place within a period of about 100 days, so it was a killing rate more intense than that of the Nazis in World War II. What was the U.S. response? Well, at first, there were some Americans and Europeans in Rwanda, so the French and the Belgian sent in planes and evacuated all these Westerners, and as Senator Bob Dole said, the Americans are out; that ought to be the end of it for us. And that in fact was the end of it for us. That is, the U.S. had no more interest in the matter. The Clinton administration told all U.S. diplomats, you are barred from using the word genocide in any of your comments. You cannot use the word genocide to describe what's going on. Why not? Because the U.S. had signed treaties saying that when genocide takes place, it would take action in various ways, and it didn't want to take action. So therefore, the word genocide couldn't be used. Now it so happens that there were 2,500 UN troops sitting in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, when the genocide began. The commander of the UN troops cabled back to New York saying, with some reinforcements and new instructions from the UN, I could save a lot of lives. So the Security Council met, and they said, you've got 2,500 now. Reduce them to 270. (The U.S. wanted to reduce them to zero but agreed reluctantly to allow 270 to remain but gave them no permission to intervene to save lives.) So here while perhaps the greatest genocide since World War II was taking place, under U.S. pressure, the UN withdrew its presence. The Secretary General a few weeks later called the Security Council back together and said, maybe we should reconsider this. The stories from Rwanda are pretty grisly, and the Security Council said, okay, we're going to send 5,000 troops, but we'll take volunteers. A number of African countries volunteered to send troops, but these African countries were poor countries, without the planes to get their troops there and without the armored personnel carriers they would need to protect the troops as entered riot situations to try to save people. The U.S. said we have armored personnel carriers, but we'll sell them to you, and the U.S. then spent the next five weeks bargaining over the price of the armored personnel carriers. Ultimately, what happened was France said it would send troops in. This was not good news, because France had been the major international supporter of the genocidal government. They had in fact been providing arms to the genocidalists during the killing. When the Security Council voted on the question of whether it should approve France's sending troops in, one of the members of the Security Council was Rwanda -- the genocidal government of Rwanda. They just by chance happened to be sitting on the Security Council that year, and the Security Council did not say, you're committing genocide, you don't belong here. The U.S. didn't say to the Rwandan government, we insist you close your embassy. They didn't say to the Rwandan leaders, we are warning you if you continue with that, you're going to get no aid. We're going to punish you afterwards. They said nothing. They said not a peep. No threats were made to their leaders, and when the Security Council voted should the French troops go in, Rwanda voted yes. Why, because Rwanda knew the French were its allies. They would not be there to interfere. The French arrived after the killing was basically over - because a Tutsi-led rebel army had defeated the Rwandan government. The best estimates are that the French probably saved some 14,000 Tutsi lives; however, that positive accomplishment needs to be counterbalanced against the fact that all the killers fled from other parts of Rwanda into the French zone, and the French then helped them escape into exile in Zaire where they were able to establish themselves in charge of refugee camps and plan additional raids into Rwanda which had now been taken over by the Tutsi rebels from neighboring countries. So it was a pretty horrendous behavior by the French, and the U.S. - which was not the worst villain there, they were probably the second worst villain - backed the French all the way. Summary A good summary of the U.S. attitude towards morality in foreign policy was given by Henry Kissinger. It turns out that in the early 1970s, the United States decided it wanted to destabilize the governments of Iraq. So the U.S. sent weapons to the Kurds in Iraq through Iran. Iran and Iraq border on each other and have often been feuding with one another. So the United States sent weapons to Iran to be passed on to the Kurds so that they could fight against the government of Iraq. And then in 1975 Iran and Iraq strike a deal. So Iran agrees to close the border so no more weapons will go across, and so the Kurds are now cut off from weapons and Iraq proceeds to massacre them. So they try to flee and some of these Kurds approach the United States and say, take us in under asylum. We're being butchered, and the United States turns them down, and Henry Kissinger was asked by a Congressional Committee in secret testimony why did we allow the Kurds to get massacred. We had armed them, we had supported them, we had encouraged them to fight against Iraq, and now they're getting massacred. We're letting them hang out to dry. And Henry Kissinger said, "covert action should not be confused with missionary work." That was his summary, and I think that's a good summary of the U.S. attitude towards morality. Morality is not what the United States does in foreign policy.
Democracy as a Motive for US Foreign Policy??? Okay, what about democracy? Is democracy a motive of U.S. foreign policy? Now you might say, well, gee, a lot of our leaders are talking about democracy all the time. It's interesting though that if you look at a lot of the accounts now, U.S. policy makers say things like we support democracy in Eastern Europe, and evidence of this is our support for free markets there. Basically the U.S. acts as though democracy and free markets, democracy and capitalism, are one in the same thing. I would in fact argue that they're contradictory, but you don't have to accept that view. What's clear is that they're not identical in any case, and so let's look at the U.S. attitude towards democracy, not capitalism, but democracy over the years. Let's go back to the turn of the century
again. Some Americans wanted to colonize the Philippines, and some people
objected and said, we can't colonize the Philippines. That violates the
principle of the consent of the governed, and one of the imperialists of
the day, and in those days imperialists called themselves imperialists
- Henry Cabot Lodge got up and said, if justice requires the consent of
the governed, "then our whole past record of expansion is a crime" -- which
obviously can't be true. So therefore, it's okay to take the Philippines.
Senator Albert Beverage was challenged. One of the opponents of imperialism
said, don't we believe in the Declaration of Independence? Doesn't that
document say that all men are created equal and all that kind of stuff?
How could we be colonizing the Philippines? And Senator Beverage replied,
"you, who say the Declaration applies to all men, how dare you deny its
application to the American Indian? And if you deny it to the Indian at
home, how dare you grant it to the Malay abroad?" But let's take some more
contemporary examples.
Iran Now one of the problems in thinking about
this question of democracy is that the U.S.'s main enemy during the Cold
War years was the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union was indeed a dictatorship,
and therefore when we oppose the Soviet Union, it wasn't clear. Was it
that we we're opposing it because they were a dictatorship or we're only
opposing them because they interfere in U.S. interests in some other way.
So the best way to study it is let's look at examples of democracies, not
cases like the Soviet Union. In 1953 in Iran, an elected Parliament called
the Majlis had voted to nationalize the British oil company that dominated
the Iranian economy. There was essentially one oil company owned by Britain
that ran the whole Iranian economy, and the Majlis, the Iranian parliament,
voted to nationalize it. (Let me make a quick aside here about international
law. International law allows countries to nationalize property. U.S. law
allows the U.S. government to nationalize property. What I mean is if you've
got a house and the U.S. government wants to build a highway through your
house, you can't say, sorry. They've got to pay you for it, but once they
pay you a fair price, they can take it. It's in the Constitution: the government
has the "right of eminent domain," the right to take property for the public
good.) So Iran took this property, the British owned oil company, for the
public good.
In 1953, the CIA went in and overthrew
the government of Iran. A dictatorship was installed, which engaged in
brutal torture, and which ruled until 1979 when the Shah was overthrown
in the Iranian revolution. (The Iranian revolution ultimately led to rule
by right-wing Ayatollahs, but this was not pre-ordained, nor does it negate
the claim that the Shah's rule was an oppressive autocracy.) From the point
of view of the United States, the Shah's dictatorship was most welcome.
The first act put in place by the new Iranian government after the CIA
overthrow in '53 was to essentially un-nationalize the oil company, giving
40% of it to the British oil company and most of the rest of it to U.S.
oil companies.
Guatemala In 1954 the Guatemalan government nationalized
the land owned by the U.S.-based corporation, the United Fruit Company.
United Fruit had a lot of land that was not being used, but United Fruit
figured we'll keep it out of circulation and that'll keep the prices high
for agricultural products. But there were lots of landless peasants in
Guatemala. So the government nationalized the land to give to the peasants.
The Guatemalan government agreed to pay for the land, and they said to
United Fruit, we'll pay you what it's worth. Let's look at your tax record.
Let's see, according to the records you filed, last year you said the land
was worth $.12 an acre (or some such ludicrous figure), so we'll pay you
$.12. Now this was obviously outrageous to United Fruit, so the CIA went
in and overthrew the government of Guatemala, and from 1954 through to
the 80s, Guatemala was ruled by a brutal dictatorship, killing many tens
of thousands of people.
Vietnam In Vietnam in 1954, the war between the Vietnamese Independence Movement under Ho Chi Minh and the French colonialists came to an end, and the way the war was settled was that the French moved south and the Viet-Minh, the Vietnamese Independence Movement, moved north, and two years later there was supposed to be elections in which a government would be chosen for the whole country, for one Vietnam. President Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs that every single serious observer agrees that if elections were held at the time of the end of the fighting, Ho Chi Minh would have won 80% of the vote. So what's the solution from the point of view of Washington? Don't hold elections, because we're going to lose. So in 1956 when the elections were scheduled to be held, the United States and its puppet that they had installed in the south, Ngo Dinh Diem, essentially refused to allow the elections to take place, and the next two decades was a war over that issue. Chile In 1973 an democratically elected government
in Chile was overthrown by the CIA. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
was asked how he justified this, and he said, “I don't see why we need
to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility
of its own people.” Now, of course, the Chilean case had nothing to do
with communism; what the Chilean people had voted for was a socialist government
that maintained democratic structures throughout. Nevertheless, in Kissinger's
view, such irresponsibility had to be smashed.
Capitalism as a Motive for U..S. Foreign Policy??? Okay, let me move now to the third potential
motive for U.S. policy, and this is capitalism. Now let me clarify that
I'm not talking about some kind of conspiracy here. I'm talking about the
normal working of the U.S. political system. Everyone understands why it
is that U.S. tax laws for example seem to give all these benefits to the
rich. Why is that a middle class family might pay 29% of their marginal
dollar in taxes on their wages or salaries while billionaires only pay
16% on their capital gains income, the money they make in the stock market?
Why is that? Well, because the people who write the tax laws get campaign
contributions from the rich, and the rich don't give campaign contributions
to people who say, let's write tax laws that will tax the rich. No, they
write them - they give their campaign contributions to people who say,
let's benefit the rich, and this applies both to the Democrats and to the
Republicans.
Turn of the Century If you go back to the turn of the century,
the imperialists spoke quite clearly. Albert Beverage, Senator from Indiana,
said "Our largest trade henceforth must be with Asia. The Pacific is our
ocean. ...The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East. ...And
the Pacific is the ocean of the commerce of the future. Most future wars
will be conflicts for commerce. The power that rules the Pacific, therefore,
is the power that rules the world. And, with the Philippines, that power
is and will forever be the American Republic."
The cases of iran, Guatemala, and Chile mentioned previously -- all these are examples of interventions dominated by and motivated by economic considerations, but economics doesn't just drive interventions. It drives the entire orientation of U.S. policy. Trade Relations In the 19th century, the United States
was protectionist. What I mean by that is the United States believed in
having tariffs. Why, because in the 19th century - in the 1880s for example
- American textile factories could not compete with British textile factories.
The British had the most efficient textile industry in the world. They
could undercut and outsell any country in the world, and therefore if there
were no tariffs, no American consumer would buy an American textile because
it would be too expensive. They would buy a British textile, and the American
textile industry never would have been able to get off the ground. Now
the U.S. could have done that. We could have said we don't need a textile
industry. We're cotton exporters. We export (as Noam Chomsky has remarked)
beaver skins and other things. This is what the American economy will depend
on. We could have done that, but Americans wanted to have a higher standard
of living, and we wanted to industrialize, and so we enacted tariffs that
kept out British goods - thereby allowing American industries to grow.
Narco-Trafficking This is the pattern of NAFTA and GATT and
all these other international trade agreements, but it takes place even
in terms of - it takes place even in a different realm, the realm of narco-trafficking.
I'm not talking here about cocaine or heroin. I'm talking about cigarettes,
nicotine. (additional reading). The U.S. tobacco industry is having trouble
selling cigarettes in the United States, and after all they're killing
the American population. So they're running into some problems, and so
the U.S. government's position is we're going to restrict you in the United
States, but kill all you want abroad, and in fact, we will help you. There
are a lot of countries, particularly in Asia, that had strict laws keeping
out foreign cigarettes. They weren't necessarily doing this for good reasons.
They were doing this because they had a small government monopoly on cigarettes,
but the effect was that because there was just a small government monopoly,
it wasn't advertised very much, and cigarette smoking was at relatively
low levels. The United States went to Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan,
South Korea, and in each of these countries the United States said you
are keeping out U.S. cigarettes. If you continue to keep them out, we will
retaliate against your exports and cripple your economy. And every one
of these countries gave in to U.S. pressure, allowing in U.S. cigarettes.
The result was that advertising spread. In South Korea, for example, the
most popular Asian rock star had a concert, and the way you got in was
with ten empty packages of Marlboro cigarettes, that kind of thing. So
modern marketing techniques were introduced, and as a consequence cigarette
smoking has risen in all these countries. In Japan almost no women had
smoked cigarettes in the past. Now there are big billboards outside women's
colleges with advertisements proclaiming “you've come a long way baby”.
As Asians die, U.S. companies profit.
Racism and US Foreign Policy There's obviously lots more to say about
each of these things, but I'm going to move on from capitalism now to talk
about racism. Racism has been a fundamental aspect of U.S. society since
the beginning. To George Washington, Indians and wolves were both “beasts
of prey, tho' they differ in shape.” General Sherman of Civil War fame
said in 1866, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux,
even to their extermination, men, women and children” -- and these were
not just words. Those were in fact the policies that were carried out.
To Theodore Roosevelt, the “most ultimately righteous of all wars is a
war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman,”
but no matter, because it was “idle to apply to savages the rules of international
morality which obtain between stable and cultured communities¼.”
Not that Roosevelt went “so far as to think that the only good Indians
are dead Indians, but," he said, "I believe nine out of ten are, and I
shouldn't inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
For example, when in 1804 Haiti became independent, the second independent country in this hemisphere, the United States refused to extend diplomatic recognition. Why? Well, because this was a country where slaves freed themselves. That's obviously a bad example, and so it wasn't until after the American Civil War that Washington extended diplomatic recognition to Haiti. And the pattern was still in place in the late twentieth century. You can find derogatory references to blacks as standard fair in the Nixon administration. Henry Kissinger, for example, chortled to Senator Fulbright who was going to have a dinner for some African diplomats, I wonder what your dining room is going to smell like. Turn of The Century Consider -- going back again to the turn of the century -- the annexation of the Philippines. Those who wanted to annex the Philippines, the imperialists, frankly said that Americans are “of the ruling race of the world”; “ours is the blood of government; ours the heart of dominion; ours the brain and genius of administration.” Anglo-Saxons said Teddy Roosevelt were the most advanced race and that inferior races are its "natural prey" and that when dealing with the "lower orders," it's okay to conquer these "lower orders" because to give self-government to the Philippines would be like granting self-government to an Apache reservation under some local chief. It's obviously preposterous. "The reasoning which justifies our having made war against Sitting Bull," said Roosevelt," also justifies our having checked the outbreaks of [Philippine leader Emilio] Aguinaldo and his followers." As a result of the Spanish-American War, the United States had acquired the Philippines from Spain, but the Filipinos had said they wanted independence, and the U.S. then fought a war against them, killing tens of thousands. General Arthur MacArthur was in charge of U.S. forces during much of this war and he was asked by a Congressional Committee why it was that in this war we're killing 15 Filipinos for every one that we're wounding. That's usually the opposite of what happens in warfare. And Arthur MacArthur explained that inferior races succumb to their wounds more easily than Anglo-Saxons. Interestingly, it was not just the imperialists, those who wanted to annex the Philippines, who were racist. Many of those who opposed annexation also were racists. So Senator Vardaman of Mississippi opposed annexing the Philippines because he said "the Filipino or any other mongrel race" could not learn self-government for a hundred thousand years because it's not in their blood to accomplish it, and therefore let's just leave them alone. Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina said he was against annexation because he had had experience with a "colored race." “It is to the injection into the body politic of the United States of that vitiated blood, that debased and ignorant people, that we object.” World War Two and Beyond Racism manifested itself in many other
U.S. policies during World War II. People of Japanese descent, whether
they were U.S. citizens or not, were placed in concentration camps, and
this wasn't just war fever, war frenzy, because Italians and Germans with
whom the United States was also at war did not generally get placed in
those same kinds of camps. The United States dropped atom bombs on Japan.
One wonders whether we would have used the same kinds of weapons on Germany.
(For a broader consideration of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, see additional
readings.) Twice since, the United States has waged war on Asian countries,
laying waste their land and people, fighting those we called "gooks."
In 1965 when the United States sent in the Marines to the Dominican Republic, one of Lyndon Johnson's key advisors was Thomas C. Mann, and Mann said, “I know my Latinos. They understand only two things-a buck in the pocket and a kick in the ass.” And today, Arabs and Muslims are victims of the same kinds of virulent stereotypes. There was a popular postcard that declared "Fight High Oil Prices! Mug an Arab Today." Such stereotypes make it easier to ignore the human cost on civilians of such things as the economic blockade of Iraq that is currently decimating the population.
Sexism and Heterosexism as a Motive for U.S. Foreign Policy Finally, I would like to turn to sexism and heterosexism. Sexism and heterosexism define appropriate role behavior for individuals. Women are devalued as are the traits that are typically identified with females such as nurturing and compassion. Men who do not adequately adhere to their approved version of masculinity are considered pariahs. If they are heterosexual but insufficiently masculine, they are treated as women, which is to say they are deprecated and excluded from power, and it's even worse if they're gay because then they're subject to job discrimination, arrest, assault, as well as ridicule. These attitudes are widespread in American society, not just at the leadership level, but they're worse at the leadership level because the political system essentially selects for those with overdeveloped egos and underdeveloped compassion. That's how you get to be a leader. As Henry Kissinger put it, in contemporary America, power increasingly gravitates to those with an almost obsessive desire to win it. And so some people ask why it is that John Kennedy was having all these trysts in the White House with ten women at one time in his bath tub, you know, and why couldn't Bill Clinton just control himself for four years. The problem is you don't get to be in that position of power unless you've got a certain kind of character. So it's not a coincidence. Masculinity and Toughness At the turn of the century, Henry Stimson -- a Secretary of War under Taft and Franklin Roosevelt and a Secretary of State under Hoover - wrote that war would be a wonderfully good thing for this country, because this is the way you get to express your manhood. "Be a man -- that is the first and last rule of the greatest success in life," said Albert Beverage, the imperialist I quoted before. If the United States shunned colonies and was unwarlike, said Teddy Roosevelt, it would "go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities." The United States should enter World War I, said Teddy Roosevelt, because that way we could avoid "a flabby cosmopolitanism," a "flabby pacifism" which would be "not only silly but degrading" and represent "national emasculation." Richard Barnett was a member
of the Kennedy administration who later left and wrote about it, and he
talks about how many members of that administration talked about the "hairy
chest syndrome": "The man who was ready to recommend using violence against
foreigners did not damage his reputation for prudence, soundness, or imagination,
but the man who recommends putting an issue to the UN, seeking negotiations,
or, horror of horrors, 'doing nothing' quickly becomes known as 'soft.'"
For Robert Kennedy, one of the first things he wanted to know about anybody
who was suggested for participation in the administration was whether he
was tough enough. Being tough, Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent a cable
to his ambassadors and said, stop using the word “feel” in your dispatches.
Women feel, men do not feel. They act.
Robert MacNamara, the Secretary of Defense, came to Cambridge in 1965, and there were a bunch of anti-war demonstrators who greeted him there. I was in the crowd, and MacNamara got on top of a car and yelled at us and said, I was tougher than you in World War II and I'm tougher than you now. He thought that what we were criticizing him for was that he wasn't macho enough rather than that he was being inhumane. More Toughness Lyndon Johnson warned that “without superior air power, America is a bound and throttled giant, impotent and easy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife.” After Johnson got all the Kennedy advisors, he was afraid that they might think him less of a man if he didn't carry through on the Vietnam War. When he was weighing advice on the Vietnam War, he decided it was the "boys" who were most dovish and skeptical and the "men" who were sure and confident and hawkish. When he heard that one member of his administration was becoming a dove, Johnson said, "hell, he has to squat to piss." Doubt itself, Johnson thought, was a feminine quality, and when Lady Byrd expressed her doubts on some other issue, he said of course you're doubtful; that's like a woman. Women are always uncertain; men are certain. When Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam, he told a reporter, "I didn't just screw Ho Chi Minh, I cut off his pecker." In the Nixon/Kissinger administration, you had the same kind of dynamics. As Kissinger said, no one could prosper around Nixon without affecting an air of toughness. Nixon hated most to be shown up in a group as being less tough than his advisors. Nixon was quoted as saying that he chose Spiro Agnew as his Vice President because he was a tough guy who had a strong looking chin, and when Charles Goodell, a senator, switched from being a hawk to being a dove on the Vietnam War, Agnew likened him to transsexual Christine Jorgensen. The U.S. objective, said Kissinger, was to purge our foreign policy of all sentimentality. For Kissinger, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and in his words, women are no more than a pass-time, a hobby. In crisis, boldness is the safest course, said Kissinger. During the first Nixon administration, when Kissinger was National Security Advisor he didn't get along with the Secretary of State. So what he did - because he thought this Secretary of State wasn't bold enough - was to spread stories that the Secretary of State was gay and had made it with Nixon. Now this kind of attitude is not just at the top. It also pervades American society, and it pervades especially the military. Tailhook and other sexual harassment scandals in the military are just the tip of the iceberg, just as My Lai and those kinds of atrocities were the tip of the iceberg in Vietnam. U.S. soldiers are nourished on machismo. The 77th tactical fighter squadron had a song book including lyrics like "I Fucked a Dead Whore By the Side of the Road." In the movie Top Gun, one pilot speaks of the enemy to another and says, "They must be near; I've got a hard-on." If you look at anthropological
data, you'll find that one predictor of whether a society is warlike or
not is whether the males have a tendency towards being ambitious and competitive.
In psychology, a recent experiment using male college students found that
subjects who endorse the use of nuclear weapons were significantly more
likely to report being sexually aroused by forcing a female to do something
she didn't want to do.
Conclusion So, as you can guess, of the five alleged
motives for U.S. foreign policy that I've talked about, the first two,
morality and democracy count for squat, while the other three - capitalism,
racism, and sexism/ heterosexism - these are what drive U.S. foreign policy.
A hundred years ago, there were people who called themselves imperialists,
but there were also those who called themselves anti-imperialists. Many
of those anti-imperialists as I've mentioned had very suspect motives.
They were themselves racists and so on, but there were some in the anti-imperialist
movement, particularly those based in New England, who came out of the
abolitionist tradition who were anti-racist, anti-colonialist, and anti-imperialist
- all the versions of imperialism, whether colonialism or neo-colonialism.
So there have been two themes in American history. There has been the theme of imperialism based on those motives of capitalism, racism, and sexism/heterosexism; but there has also been another tendency -- a weaker tendency, but one that's always been there -- and that's the theme of anti-imperialism, and our job is to keep that theme of anti-imperialism alive and strong.
Part II: Some Defining Incidents in U.S. Foreign Policy What I'd like to do is to provide a quick survey of the history of U.S. foreign policy, looking at particular incidents that I think are illustrative of important themes that help us understand what U.S. foreign policy has been all about. The topics I want to cover are colonialism, the Good War, the Bad War, and Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, Indonesia, the Middle East, and the end of the Cold War. So that's a big agenda, and so obviously I'm going to give rather short shrift to many of these topics, but that's the time we've got. Here are the main sections...
Colonialism and Neocolonialism Let me start with colonialism. In 1945
the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services - the United States agency that
was the forerunner of the CIA - had an agent in Vietnam and this agent
reported back to Washington that all the peasants wished that France would
treat Vietnam like the United States had treated the Philippines because
the United States had promised and did give the Philippines independence
on July 4, 1946. The truth is that the United States had a reputation in
much of the third world as an anti-colonial power, and so I'd like to talk
about that a little bit.
The United States came to overseas colonialism late in the game. By 1898 Africa had already been carved up. Big chunks of Asia had already been carved up, and the United States then embarked on its colonial enterprise taking the Philippines and Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii. These were the territories that the U.S. formally colonized. Compared to a country like Britain which took all of India and big chunks of Africa and Asia, this was small pickings, and then in fact, the United States gave independence to its biggest colony, the Philippines, in 1946. So this is the basis for the claim that the U.S. has been anti-colonial, but it's important to look at what exactly happened at the turn of the century. At that time the U.S. fought a very bitter war in the Philippines leading to the deaths of perhaps as many as a quarter of a million Filipinos. The human toll among Filipinos was of no consequence to U.S. Policymakers, and the war was costly to the United States as well, in terms of lives and treasure and domestic dissent. So this was an approach that U.S. officials were not eager to repeat. They wanted instead an approach that offered the benefits of colonialism without its costs. This alternative approach -- neocolonialism -- the United States tried out in Cuba, forced to do so because of congressional legislation. The Cuban Model The U.S. gave Cuba independence, but it made the Cubans adopt a constitution that had various provisions - these are known as the Platt Amendment because the terms were incorporated in a piece of congressional legislation first. The Platt Amendment said that the Cubans had to agree that the United States could intervene in Cuba whenever it wanted, that the United States would get a military base on Cuban soil, that the Cuban government couldn't borrow monies without the permission of the U.S. government, and that the U.S. government has to approve the health standards in Havana. These kinds of clauses within the Cuban constitution made Cuban independence phony. Nevertheless, Cuba was formally independent, and this kind of arrangement where you have formal independence but in fact foreign domination is what we call neo-colonialism. It differs from old fashioned colonialism because there is no foreign flag flying over the territory. The United States began in 1898 with its colonial venture in the Philippines, and some Americans approved that and wanted to pursue that, but others said -- and this was repeated year after year in the Democratic party platform -- that the U.S. should give the Philippines its independence so it could be like Cuba. And this was very much the debate that took place in the United States over the Philippines: That is, should the U.S. pursue standard colonialism or should it pursue neo-colonialism? At no point was the real issue whether there should be genuine independence, genuine sovereignty, or genuine self-determination for Filipinos. Now the United States was not the only country to take this approach. Even a country like Britain did it in those cases where standard colonialism wasn't appropriate. So for example, after World War I, Britain gave independence to Iraq, but Iraq had to sign a treaty that left Britain as the dominant power with a military base controlling the Iraqi military and so on and so forth, and of course controlling the oil resources in the country. And Britain had a neo-colonial relationship with Egypt as well. So in the world, there's been a lot of colonialism, and there's been neo-colonialism, depending on which circumstances seemed best for the dominant power. For the United States the conclusion after the experience of the Philippine American War was that colonialism generates a whole lot of hostility while neo-colonialism promised a much smoother operation that still maintained U.S. interests. And so, sure enough, on July 4, 1946, the U.S. flag was pulled down in Manila, and the Philippine flag went up, and the Philippines was independent. But the independence was phony. This can be seen by looking at the military and economic terms of independence Independence with Strings A military bases agreement between the United States and the Philippines provided that the United States would get huge military bases for 99 years rent free. These bases were so large that one year it was discovered that there were 10,000 Filipinos illegally growing sugar crops on the base unbeknownst to base officials. A U.S. official would fly to one of the bases and then take another plane to another part of the same base -- it was that big. This is the kind of base the U.S. had, and the U.S. had the absolute right to do what it wanted with this base in an independent Philippines, supporting, for example, military operations in Vietnam or the Persian Gulf. The Philippine constitution had specified that after independence all investments in natural resources and in public utilities had to be at least 60% Philippine owned. The United States said to the Philippines upon independence that if they wanted the U.S. to fully pay war damage claims for the tremendous damage in the country, they would have to amend their constitution to give Americans equal investment rights with Filipinos (which is to say, privileged investment rights compared to anyone else in the world). The Philippines was not in a strong bargaining position. As a result of the World War II Japanese occupation and subsequent American reconquest there had been massive destruction, with Manila being the second most damaged capital city in the world after Warsaw. Washington had promised during the war that it would pay for all war damage in its Philippine colony. But now the U.S. would withhold full payment of these funds unless the Philippines gave Americans investment "parity" with Filipinos, and Filipinos had no choice but to accept the U.S. demand. Trade relations were set up so that U.S. products had free access to the Philippines and that Philippine products that competed with U.S. products were kept out of the U.S. market.
The Good War Okay, let me move on to the Good War, World
War II. This is a war that has very good press in the United States. We
fought the Good War. We did what we should have done there. The war in
Europe is very complicated, but what I'd like to do is talk a little bit
about the war in the Pacific. (For more details, see additional readings
from Z or the longer footnoted version.)
So Britain put a tariff wall
around India so only their trade with India could be at the low prices,
and everybody else who wanted to trade with India would have to pay higher
prices. The U.S. put a high tariff wall around the Philippines. France
did the same thing and so on, and therefore those countries with small
colonial empires but which depended a lot on trade were especially hard
hit, and one of these countries was Japan.
China Japan more than most countries depended heavily on trade, and so Japan was eager to acquire a colonial empire of its own so it too could help its domestic industries by squeezing third world people to enrich itself. The Japanese went into Manchuria, in northern China, in the early 1930s. And that was one source of tension between the United States and Japan because the United States attitude towards China was an attitude established at the turn of the century when the United States announced the Open Door Policy, a policy which said that none of the great powers should colonize China. Britain was beginning to think about it, and Japan was beginning and Germany and Russia were thinking about it, and the United States announced that none of the powers should colonize China. China should be left independent. Translation: China should be open to the exploitation of all the great powers, not to just one or two of them. The proof that this is what the Open Door meant is that the United States and the other great powers got all kinds of special privileges in China, and these would be maintained until the middle of World War II. Let's go back to the middle
of the 19th century. The British were selling opium in China. Most Chinese
officials are very corrupt, but in one port the Chinese official tried
to interfere with the British sale of opium, and so naturally the British
went to war against China. It was simply unacceptable that a Chinese official
would try to interfere with British profits, so Britain went to war against
China -- this is known as either the first Anglo-Chinese War or the First
Opium War -- and when the smoke cleared, Britain got a bunch of privileges,
and then a couple of years later, they did the same thing again in and
there was a second round of this war, and as a result of this, Britain
got Hong Kong; Britain got the right to sell what they wanted to sell in
China; Britain got the right to have its merchants and traders go into
any part of China they wanted without having to abide by Chinese laws,
and they got the right that Britons, should they commit crimes, would not
be tried by Chinese courts but rather would be tried by a Western court
in Shanghai. And as soon as the British got these privileges, all the other
Great Powers demanded the same privileges. The Chinese government thought
-- and maybe it was right -- that it was better to give the rights to everyone
because if just one country has these rights, they might try to colonize
China; better to spread it out and let them keep each other in check.
Well, when we get to the 1930s
and Japan starts moving first into Manchuria and then after 1936 into China
proper, Japan is coming into conflict with U.S. business interests and
U.S. investment rights, the rights that we extorted from China. And sure
enough, as the Japanese do their terror-bombing of the Chinese population,
they occasionally hit some American property or some American gun boat,
and this gets the United States very upset, but the key thing here is that
the United States wasn't concerned about Chinese sovereignty. What the
United States was concerned about was U.S. rights to exploit China on an
equal basis. After 1936 Japan is in a full-scale war with China, and their
rhetoric in this war is the same kind of rhetoric the U.S. used in Vietnam.
That is we're here fighting communism because there are communists in China.
We're here fighting communism. We're not doing this for any selfish reasons.
We just want to get rid of these evil communists from Chinese soil.
The Gentlemans Agreement Now let me just bring in one other theme here: that of racism. Early in the 20th century, Japanese immigrants came to the United States which led to various racial tensions on the West Coast, and the United States government wanted to exclude these Japanese immigrants and the United States started negotiations with Japan, and we signed something called the Gentlemen's Agreement. (In the world of diplomacy, whenever two thugs get together and make an agreement, they call it a Gentlemen's Agreement.) And this agreement stated said that the United States would allow Japanese immigrants into the United States if in turn Japan would make sure that the only people who applied for immigration were educated people.
War In late 1941, the Japanese decide they are going to seize the oil of the Dutch East Indies by force. The question, then, is can they seize that oil without bringing the United States into war. Well, if you look at a map, there's Japan, then the Philippines, then Indonesia. So if the Japanese were to attack Indonesia and there's a big U.S. military base in the Philippines in between, that's a pretty precarious position. So the Japanese decide we had better knock out the U.S. base in the Philippines. We'll knock out the U.S. base in Hawaii, and we'll start our conquest of the rich resources of South East Asia. This was as imperialist adventure on the part of the Japanese, but it's interesting to note that most of this imperialist adventure is directed not independent countries but at colonies. And when Japanese troops arrived in Indonesia, they said to the Indonesians "Asia for the Asians." Let's get rid of those European masters! And most Indonesians thought that was a pretty good idea, and so in most of these countries in Asia where the Japanese arrived, they found lots of politicians and others ready to support them. Some for all kinds of self-interested reasons, and some because they thought this was a way to get rid of the European yolk - the European and American yolk because there were collaborators with the Japanese in the U.S. colony of the Philippines too.
Victory in Asia When the war came to an end, Japan was defeated, but it wasn't a victory for the independence of the people of Asia. In Indonesia, in Vietnam, and in China - in each of these cases, the United States was determined to either turn the territory back over to its colonial master or in the case of China, turn it over to a pro-American government rather than the Chinese communist movement which was contesting for power there. In Vietnam, what happened was this. British troops arrive with the job of disarming the Japanese in Vietnam. And what the British do is use the Japanese soldiers to help them put down those Vietnamese who are troublesome. They let the French out of prison, and then essentially turn the territory back over to the French. In Indonesia, the British troops and Dutch troops use the Japanese troops help to crush Indonesian independence movements. In China, the United States use its air force to fly Chiang Kai-shek's troops to various spots around the country to help defeat the communists in their civil war. So in each one of these cases, the defeat of Japan didn't mean the end of colonialism. It didn't mean the end of foreign domination. It meant that Japan wouldn't be the dominant force, but that Japan would now be replaced by the new super power in Asia, and that was the United States. Now in each one of the places, things went in different directions. In the case of Vietnam, the French eventually couldn't hold on and had to get out, and the United States then continued that war for two more decades. In the case of Indonesia, the United States noted that the Indonesia independence movement crushed a communist rebellion in Indonesia, and the United States said, aha, now this is a good kind of independence movement. They kill communists! And so the United States told the Dutch, okay, you've got to give them independence. You can take all their money from them and so on and so forth, but you need to give them independence, and the U.S. supported Indonesia's independence, though subsidizing the Dutch in various ways. (As we shall see</a>, the U.S. would soon try to subvert the independent Indonesian government, leading in 1965 to one of the greatest mass murders of the century, with U.S. complicity.) In Vietnam, the U.S. didn't support Vietnamese independence because there the left was in control of the independence movement, and in China despite the U.S. best efforts, the forces of Chiang Kai-shek disintegrated, and instead the communists came to power. So the U.S. didn't get what it wanted, but there were large numbers of corpses throughout Asia as a result of the U.S. victory in the Pacific War, corpses that were created after 1945.
Vietnam and Imperialism World War II was the Good War, Vietnam is the Bad War, and there are very few Americans today who will say the Vietnam War was not a mistake. Even the gung-ho military types will agree that something went wrong. There was a mistake there, but it seems to me it's important to look at Vietnam and to see the ways in which it wasn't a mistake, that in fact Vietnam was a quite logical outgrowth of U.S. foreign policy. Now some people say how could the U.S.'s war in Vietnam have been an imperial venture, much less an imperialist venture. Yes, it could have been stupid or whatever, a blunder, but how could it have been imperialist? And the argument against imperialism in Vietnam goes as follows: Look, we spent more in Vietnam than any possible estimates of the total value of any investments then or in the future in Vietnam. So how could that have been the motivation? But there is a problem with this argument that tries to refute the role of imperialism in explaining the Vietnam war. Let me give you an example. There's a bank down the street. Let's say the bank is robbed and the robbers take $5,000. The police will chase these robbers. They will chase them across state borders. They will spend great amounts of money to catch them, put them on trial, and put them in prison. And if you add up that total cost - of the police work, the courts, and the prison -- it's far more than $5,000, and so you might say, well what's the logic of that? Well, the logic of it is -- as any public official will readily tell you -- that if you don't stop this bank robber - if you let this bank robber get away with it - if you let bank robbers know they can get away with this kind of thing, there will be bank robberies all over the place. And so the purpose of catching and punishing this bank robber, whatever the cost, is not just to punish this one but to deter others, and that's the way one needs to look at U.S. foreign policy.
Winners and Losers Now usually when people talk about Vietnam, they talk about this as the war that the United States lost and that the Vietnamese won. Noam Chomsky has an interesting approach to this, however. He says no, the U.S. won the Vietnam War. It's a little quirky of an interpretation, but here's his point. He says, the U.S. preferred solution in Vietnam would have been an outright military victory. The U.S.'s second choice solution in Vietnam was to so devastate that country so that no sensible revolutionary anywhere in the third world would want to do it again - would want to undertake a revolution. You know, if I were sitting in some jungle in a random third world country and I looked at Vietnam, I would say well, let's see what happened. The Vietnamese people fought for decades. They suffered about four million deaths, and what do they have today to show for it: a country that's at the same standard of living it was at perhaps in 1950, and a country with almost nothing remaining of the egalitarian impulses of that earlier period. That hardly seems like a cause for which you would want to give your life. And from the U.S. point of view, that's precisely the idea -- to make such sacrifices seem pointless. And that's why when the war was over in 1975, the U.S. was determined that it was not going to trade with Vietnam, and it was not going to let anyone else trade with Vietnam.
The Cold War At the end of World War II the Cold War came into full swing. Of course you can trace the Cold War back to 1917, and one of the interesting things is that U.S. officials were talking about communist-Bolshevik aggression even in the 1920s when there wasn't a Soviet soldier capable of leaving Soviet territory. So, for example, U.S. officials talked about a Soviet Bolshevik plot in Mexico. There was nothing of the sort. There were Mexicans who were challenging the status quo, and the U.S. was sending troops into Mexico to crush them, but it doesn't play as well to say to the American people, we're going to intervene in Mexico against Mexican self-determination. It's always a little nicer to be able to say we're intervening against a Bolshevik plot, and to a large extent, much of what passed for the Cold War was a U.S. effort to try to portray the U.S. policy of crushing third world independence movements and describing them as part of a Soviet plot, and so if you look at specific cases, you'll find that the U.S. often encouraged countries to become dependent on the Soviet Union. Take in recent years the example of Nicaragua. Throughout the 1980s, the United States launched a war against Nicaragua, the Contra War. The U.S. pressured all of its allies not to provide any weapons to the Nicaraguan government. So what does Nicaragua do, they go to the one place - the one country that will still provide them with weapons with which they can defend themselves against this U.S. orchestrated war, and that's the Soviet Union. And then the U.S. says, ah-ha, you see, that's why we need to overthrow the government of Nicaragua because they're Soviet puppets! And so many times during the 80s, the U.S. government would announce that there were Soviet MIGs being sent to Nicaragua. Well, it would have been good if there were Soviet MIGs being sent to Nicaragua, but generally there weren't, and the reason was that the United States simply concocted many of these stories as a way to justify its intervention. In Guatemala when the U.S. intervened, it didn't say we're intervening because we want to protect the United Fruit, though that in fact was what was going on. What they did say was that we're intervening because the Guatemalan government has gotten arms from the Soviet Union. Now there was an arms shipment from the Soviet Union, but the shipment followed rather than preceded U.S. planning to overthrow the government, and the Guatemalan government quite naturally wanted to protect itself. In 1960, U.S. policy makers are sitting around, and the CIA suggests assassinating Castro, his brother Raul, and Che Guevara and one of the policy makers says, well, no that wouldn't be a good idea because the only well organized group in Cuba who would benefit from the lack of those leaders would be the Cuban communist party, which might then take control. To which CIA director Allen Dulles replied, well that wouldn't be so bad. That would give us a better justification for intervention in Cuba. In short, communism was not the reason for the U.S. intervention, but the convenient rationale. This has been the case in Cuba and has pretty much been the pattern throughout. This is not to say, for example, that Ho Chi Minh was not a communist, but the United States had lots of evidence that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist before he was a pawn of the Soviet Union, and therefore good reason to think he might behave very much as Tito was behaving in Yugoslavia. Tito had broken with Stalin in 1948; he was a communist, a communist dictator - not my hero -- but he was clearly opposed to Stalin, and he was clearly following an independent foreign policy, and there's no reason to think that Ho Chi Minh committed as he was to Vietnamese nationalism and independence wouldn't have followed a similar course, but the U.S. was unwilling to consider that. By definition, communism was what mattered because that was the way to justify U.S. interventionism. The Cuban Missile Crisis I In the Cold War, there is one incident that is referred to as Kennedy's finest hour, and this is the Cuban missile crisis. This is an incident in which we came closer than we ever had before and probably than we ever have since to nuclear war, and the risks of nuclear war during this crisis were substantial. U.S. officials throughout the crisis slept in bomb shelters. The rest of us were - if you were around then - out in the open subject to incineration but U.S. officials were in bomb shelters because they thought this was serious. The CIA told Kennedy they estimated there's a one-third to one-half chance of all out nuclear war, and Kennedy went ahead anyway. Let me just review quickly what the facts of this situation were. The United States and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons, and the United States and the Soviet Union had long range missiles that could deliver these nuclear weapons from one country to the other. In the 1960 presidential election campaign between Nixon and Kennedy, the hawk in that campaign - the more militaristic candidate - was John Kennedy, the Democrat, and what Kennedy said is there is a missile gap under these do-nothing Republicans. We haven't built enough missiles, and so the Soviet Union has got more missiles than us. Kennedy gets elected and becomes President.
The Cuban Missile Crisis II The Soviet Union decides to respond to this nuclear imbalance by putting Soviet missiles in Cuba 90 miles from the United States, and they did so secretly, but U.S. spy planes saw them, saw the missile sites being constructed, and Kennedy had to decide how to respond to this, and there were a number of options. One option is do nothing. After all, the Soviet Union can deploy missiles in the Soviet Union. (Whether you're hit by a missile from Cuba or from Russia doesn't matter much, admitted Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.) The U.S. too has missiles. Neither side is planning to launch a sneak attack on the other, and so what's the big deal. A second option is to use this opportunity to do some disarming, and say to the Soviet Union, hey, we'll trade our missiles in Turkey for your missiles in Cuba, and while we're at it, let's get rid of some more missiles too - some intercontinental range missiles. Those two approaches were both ruled out by the Kennedy administration as unacceptable. Instead the big debate within the administration was between three other options: (1) invade Cuba, (2) launch air strikes to take out the Soviet missile sites, and (3) put a blockade around Cuba because not all of the missiles were in Cuba yet. The Air Force thought the air strike was the best strategy, and Kennedy said to them, well, what happens when we knock out those missile sites, are we going to kill any Russians? Yes, the Air Force replied, we'll probably kill a few thousand Russians. Well, what happens if the Soviets respond by attacking - I mean, we are militarily strong in the Western hemisphere, and what if the Soviet Union attacks West Berlin? Well, that will start a nuclear war, remarked the Air Force. Well, Kennedy was not that rash and he said I'll go with the blockade option, but of course the problem with the blockade option is there is still enough equipment in Cuba that they can build what they've got there, and how is the blockade going to stop that, and he doesn't have an answer to this yet. We'll see what we do next. Kennedy goes on television and says I am putting a blockade around Cuba. That means any Soviet ship heading to Cuba will be stopped and searched, and if it's got military equipment, we will not let it in. Now this is an act of war. Countries are allowed to trade with whom they want. The United States didn't ask Soviet permission before sending its missiles to Turkey. Countries send weapons as their sovereign right to other countries. Anyway, Kennedy announces this blockade. Khrushchev says I am not backing down. I am sending our ships through and they will not stop for you. The U.S. navy says we will sink you if you try to get through. The Soviet Union says we've got our submarines in the areas and we'll sink you back, and the U.S. builds up its force, and a Soviet ship gets closer and closer to the U.S. blockade line and this is a very scary 24 hours. Ultimately Khrushchev turns his ships around and Dean Rusk, the U.S. Secretary of State says it was a nuclear "game of chicken." "We were eyeball to eyeball, and they blinked first." This is the way our leaders treat the survival of the human race -- as a game of chicken. Khrushchev says to Kennedy I will trade the missiles in Cuba for the missiles in Turkey. Kennedy says that is unacceptable. You must grovel. You must surrender. Now there are some analysts who now say that privately Kennedy had decided that before he started a nuclear war he would have been willing to trade the missiles, but what's interesting is that for many, many years, this wasn't known, and all the members of the Kennedy administration and all the writers writing about the Cuban missile crisis who said this was Kennedy's greatest hour think that one of the great things about it is that he was unwilling to compromise - that he was willing to risk nuclear war in order to achieve the principle that the U.S. is allowed to do what it wants, put missiles in Turkey, and the Soviet Union is not allowed to do so.
Indonesia There was another great victory in the Cold War, and that took place in 1965 in Indonesia. I mentioned before that the Indonesian government seemed reliably anti-communist when they got their independence in 1948, but over the next decade or so, the Indonesian ruler, Sukarno, became increasingly nationalistic, and the United States grew increasingly hostile. The United States tried various covert operations to overthrow Sukarno.
Mopping Up: The Mideast and the End of the Cold War There's a whole lot to say about the Middle East, and somehow I'm going to confine my remarks to just a brief point. In 1967 Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip along with pieces of Syria and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. These territories, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, contained large numbers of Palestinians. The U.S. and Israeli attitude was no compromise was necessary because Israel was the dominant military power in the region and therefore the U.S. could just sit back and leave the status quo. Anwar Sadat, the leader of Egypt, says to the United States we are willing to negotiate with Israel. We will even throw out our Soviet military advisors if you will help bring Israel to the negotiating table. The United States was not interested. Sadat eventually went to war, and the U.S. backed Israel in that war. Eventually Israel and Egypt did reach a settlement on the Sinai but that allowed Israel to in fact hold onto the occupied Palestinian territory without having to face Egypt any longer. So while on the one hand that made the prospect of war on the Egyptian/Israeli border less likely, on the other hand it also meant that the prospects for Palestinians were grimmer than ever. In the late 80s the Palestinians took matters into their own hands and launched their Intifada, their unarmed uprising against the Israelis which the Israelis responded to with brutal repression. In 1992, the Oslo Agreements went into effect which was a plan to try to placate Palestinian nationalism without offering real Palestinian independence. Right now the United States continues to try to bargain and negotiate to press Israel to give up 13% instead of 9% of this territory, but the fundamental fact about what's going on in the Middle East is that neither Israel - neither party in Israel nor the United States support the fundamental notion that Palestinians just like Israeli Jews are entitled to self-determination, and it's that failure to treat Palestinians as people entitled to the same rights as everyone else - that is going to be the smoldering cause of blowups for a long time to come. Some U.S. politicians claim the United States is pressing Israel too hard. Others say, no, no, Clinton, you should press Israel this hard, but whether they press them for 13% or 9%, that's a far cry from real self-determination and therefore none of this has any prospect of ending the crisis in the Middle East until that notion of self-determination is recognized. The End of the Cold War Okay, my final two minutes are on the end of the Cold War. Reagan and Bush say they won the Cold War, and it was their tough policies - their refusal to placate the Soviet Union or to let the Soviet Union win cheap victories that won the Cold War. What really ended the Cold War was the rise of Michael Gorbachev to the leadership of the Soviet Union. He was the one leader in this Cold War contest who realized that you need to break out of these patterns of actions and reactions by one side taking unilateral steps and he took unilateral steps. He broke negotiating log jabs. He said I'm reducing my forces. I'm not waiting for he United States to reduce their forces. I'm reducing my forces, and what's remarkable is that as the Soviet Union kept on reducing its forces, the Bush administration said we cannot let our guard down. This is a plot. In fact, at one point the Soviet navy which had grown from 1945 to the 1980s from a small little navy to one that was beginning to try to do what the U.S. did -- the U.S. has a navy that sails around the whole world; we don't just sail in the Mississippi River -- the Soviet navy was trying to do that, but was so far behind it was pitiful. But under Gorbachev suddenly Soviet ships that had been trying to hang out in Asia or hang out in the Indian Ocean were being called back and were sitting in ports, and so how did the U.S. navy respond to this? They said this is the most dangerous situation of all. Obviously the Soviet Union is planning a sneak attack, and therefore we cannot reduce our military spending. We have to in fact spend more because the situation is getting even more precarious. Reagan and Bush had nothing to do with Gorbachev coming to power, and Reagan and Bush had nothing to do with Gorbachev's breaking out of the Cold War mold. They in fact didn't make it easy for him. They might have made an easier transition if when he moved to make unilateral reductions, they said we will match that unilateral reduction, but in fact the U.S. generally didn't do so. The Soviet Union then imploded because of its own internal contradictions which is basically that you can't have a modern economy at the same time that you have that kind of, top down dictatorial setup, and Gorbachev tried to do a transition from that, but unleashed forces that he couldn't control. But there's no reason for Reagan or Bush to take any credit for any of the things that occurred in the Cold War. They did at various points heighten the prospect of real conflict and heighten the prospect of perhaps a military coup against Gorbachev. Keep in mind that things looked the same in both countries. The right wingers -- the militarists in both countries -- if they fear that the other side is getting too much of an edge, they feel their government is getting weak and may be provoked to rash actions. So rather than helping Gorbachev along, Reagan and Bush probably made things more difficult for him. Conclusion The United States has behaved differently
from other Great Powers in that it - for its own selfish reasons - emphasized
neo-colonial domination of the Third World rather than colonial rule. Global
domination was a concern even in the "Good War" and certainly in Vietnam,
Indonesia, and many other places, where Third World corpses were plentiful.
This quest for dominance has put the very survival of the human race at
risk, particularly during the Cuban Missile crisis. The Cold War is now
over - no thanks to U.S. policy makers, but just as it was right to oppose
U.S. imperialism before the Cold War and during the Cold War, so too it
is right to oppose it today.
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