Source: Intel HubAndrew Gavin Marshall
Chapter Excerpt: The Making of the American Empire
The process of establishing an American Empire during and after World
War II was not – as has been postulated (by those who even admit there
is such a thing as an ‘American Empire’) – an ‘accident’ of history,
something America seemingly stumbled into as a result of its unhindered
economic growth and military-political position as arbiter of world
peace and prosperity.
A vast literature has developed in the academic realm and policy
circles – particularly within Political Science and the think tank
community, respectively – which postulates a notion of ‘American empire’
or ‘American hegemony’ as accidental, incidental, benevolent,
reluctant, and desirable.
Robert Kagan is a prominent American neoconservative historian. He is
a Senior Fellow at the prestigious think tank, the Brookings
Institution, was a founder of the neoconservative think tank, the
Project for the New American Century (PNAC), formerly worked at the
State Department in the Reagan administration under Secretary of State,
George Shultz, and served for over a decade as a Senior Associate with
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and is, of course, a
member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Kagan has written a great deal on the notion of American hegemony. As he wrote in the journal, Foreign Policy,
in 1998, “the truth about America’s dominant role in the world is known
to most clear-eyed international observers.” This truth, according to
Kagan, “is that the benevolent hegemony exercised by the United States
is good for a vast portion of the world’s population.”
Samuel Huntington, another Council member and prominent American
strategist, wrote that, “A world without U.S. primacy will be a world
with more violence and disorder and less democracy and economic growth
than a world where the United States continues to have more influence
than any other country shaping global affairs.”[1] This “Benevolent
Empire” – as Kagan titles his article – rests on such fundamental ideas
as the notion “that American freedom depends on the survival and spread
of freedom elsewhere,” and that, “American prosperity cannot occur in
the absence of global prosperity.”
For half a century, Kagan wrote, Americans “have been guided by the
kind of enlightened self-interest that, in practice, comes dangerously
close to resembling generosity.”[2]
Sebastian Mallaby, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, former Editorial Board Member and columnist at the Washington Post as well as correspondent and bureau chief for The Economist, wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs, that “empire’s are not always planned,” referring to America as “The Reluctant Imperialist.”[3]
Lawrence Summers, another prominent economist, politician, and
policy-maker for the Clinton and Obama administrations, referred to
America as “history’s only nonimperialist superpower.”[4] Niall
Ferguson, a prominent British liberal economic historian, has written
extensively on the open acknowledgement of “American Empire,” but
stipulates, as he did in his book Colossus, “that the United States is an empire and that this might not be wholly bad.”
Referring to America as an “Unconscious Colossus,” Ferguson stressed
that, “a self-conscious American imperialism might well be preferable to
the available alternatives.”[5] Ferguson in fact stresses the need for
Americans to “recognize the imperial characteristics of their own power
today [writing in 2005] and, if possible, to learn from the achievements
and failures of past empires.” This, Ferguson felt, would reduce the
so-called “perils” of being an “empire in denial.”[6]
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., famed American liberal historian and adviser
to President Kennedy, wrote that the United States enjoys “an informal
empire – military bases, status-of-forces agreements, trade concessions,
multinational corporations, cultural penetrations, and other favors,”
yet, contends Schlesinger, “these are marginal to the subject of direct
control,” and instead, “far from ruling an empire in the old sense,”
America “has become the virtual prisoner of its client states.”[7] Some
other commentators referred to America as a “virtual” or even
“inadvertent” imperial power.[8]
The notion of America as a “reluctant imperialist” or a “benevolent
empire” is not a new one. This has been the mainstay within the academic
literature and policy-planning circles to both advocate for and justify
the existence of American domination of the world.
The concept of the reluctant, yet benevolent great power presents an
image of a dutiful personage coming to the aid of those in need,
following the responsibility which is derived from great power; that
America’s rise to economic prominence – also seen as the product of free
and democratic initiative and ideals (thus negating America’s long
history of being a slave state and subsequently a brutal industrial
society) – was the precursor to America being thrown the title of
‘global power,’ and with that title bestowed upon it – like a child-king
still unsure of his own abilities to rule – took up the activities of a
global power with a desire to bring the rest of the world the same
altruistic truths and enlightened ideals which made America flourish so;
that America’s gift to the world was to spread freedom and democracy,
in the economic, political, and social spheres. This myth has been a
constant foundation for the advocacy and justification of empire. Its
importance rests most especially on the ideals and global public opinion
which prevailed as the great European empires waned and ultimately
collapsed through two World Wars.
The colonized peoples of the world had had enough of empire, had
suffered so immeasurably and consistently under its tutelage, that the
concept of empire was so discredited in the eyes of the world’s majority
as to be incapable of justifying in the formal imperial-colonial sense.
At home, America’s domestic political situation and public opinion
had been largely isolationist, seeking to refrain from an expansive
foreign policy, leading many American presidents and strategists to
bemoan the struggle for empire beyond the continent on the reluctance of
the American people and Congress to pursue aggressive expansionism
(save for the expansion across the continent, wiping out Native American
populations for American Lebensraum and the slow, increasing expression of trans-sovereign rights in Latin America, long considered “America’s backyard”).
World War II, then, presented a new opportunity, and a new challenge
for America in the world. The opportunity was to become the worlds most
powerful empire history had ever witnessed; the challenge, then, was to
justify it in explicitly anti-imperial rhetoric.
America, thus, was not a
reluctant or accidental empire, nor, for that matter, a benevolent one.
America was chosen to be an empire; it was strategised, discussed, debated, planned and implemented.
The key architects of this empire were the bankers and corporations which arose out of America’s Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century, the philanthropic foundations they established in the early 20th century, the prominent think tanks created throughout the first half of the 20th
century, and the major academics, strategists and policy-makers who
emerged from the foundation-funded universities, institutes, think
tanks, and the business community, and who dominated the corridors of power in the planning circles that made policy.
No sooner had World War II begun than American strategists began
calling for a new global American empire. Henry R. Luce, a Yale graduate
and founder of Time Magazine, Life, and Fortune, was among America’s most influential publishers in the first half of the 20th
century. A strong supporter of the Republican Party and virulent
anti-Communist, Luce was also a staunch advocate of fascism in Europe –
notably Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany – as a means of preventing
the spread of Communism.
In 1941, Luce wrote a famous article in Life entitled, “The American Century,” in which he stated that, “the 20th
Century must be to a significant degree an American Century.” Luce
wrote that America has “that indefinable, unmistakable sign of
leadership: prestige.” As such, unlike past empires like Rome, Genghis
Khan, or Imperial Britain, “American prestige throughout the world is
faith in the good intentions as well as the ultimate intelligence and
ultimate strength of the whole American people.”[9] Luce felt that the
“abundant life” of America should be made available “for all mankind,”
as soon as mankind embraces “America’s vision.” Luce wrote:
It must be a sharing with all peoples of our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills. It must be an internationalism of the people, by the people and for the people… We must undertake now to be the Good Samaritan of the entire world.[10]
While Luce was perhaps the first theorist to posit the specific
concept of “the American Century,” the actual work done to create this
century (or at least the latter half of it) for America was chiefly
initiated by the Council on Foreign Relations, and the prominent
strategist Dean Acheson, among others.
As Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Dean Acheson delivered a speech at
Yale entitled, “An American Attitude Toward Foreign Affairs,” in which
he articulated a vision of America in the near future, and as he later
recalled, it was at the time of delivering this speech that Acheson
began “work on a new postwar world system.” Acheson declared in his
speech that, “Our vital interests… do not permit us to be indifferent to
the outcome” of the wars erupting in Europe and Asia. The causes of the
war, according to Acheson, were in “the failure of some mechanisms of
the Nineteenth Century world economy,” which resulted in “this break-up
of the world into exclusive areas for armed exploitation administered
along oriental lines.”
Recreating a world peace, posited Acheson, would require “a broader
market for goods made under decent standards,” as well as “a stable
international monetary system” and the removal of “exclusive
preferential trade agreements.” Essentially, it was an advocacy for a
global liberal economic order as the means to world peace, and without a
hint of irony, Acheson then called for the immediate establishment of
“a navy and air force adequate to secure us in both oceans
simultaneously and with striking power sufficient to reach to the other
side of each of them.”[11] Dean Acheson was also closely involved in the
Council on Foreign Relations’ plans for the shaping of the post-War
world order.
The Council on Foreign Relations and the ‘Grand Area’
Before America had even entered the war in late 1941, the Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR) was planning for America’s assumed entry into
the war. The CFR effectively undertook a policy coup d’état over
American foreign policy with the Second World War.
When war broke out, the Council began a “strictly confidential”
project called the War and Peace Studies, in which top CFR members
collaborated with the US State Department in determining US policy, and
the project was entirely financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.[12]
The War and Peace Studies project had come up with a number of
initiatives for the post-War world. One of the most important objectives
it laid out was the identification of what areas of the world America
would need to control in order to facilitate strong economic growth.
This came to be known as the “Grand Area,” and it included:
Latin America, Europe, the colonies of the British Empire, and all of Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia was necessary as a source of raw materials for Great Britain and Japan and as a consumer of Japanese products. The American national interest was then defined in terms of the integration and defense of the Grand Area, which led to plans for the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank and eventually to the decision to defend Vietnam from a Communist takeover at all costs.[13]
In 1940, the Council on Foreign Relations also began a wide-ranging
study of the war-time economic needs of the United States (prior to U.S.
entry into the war), called the Financial and Economic Experts, which
divided the world into four main blocs: continental Europe (which was
dominated by Germany at the time), the U.S. –Western hemisphere, the
United Kingdom and its colonial and commonwealth nations, and the
Far-East-Pacific Area, including Japan, China, and the Dutch East
Indies.
The study compiled a list of each region’s main imports and exports.
Upon completion of the study in the fall of 1940, the Council sent its
conclusions and policy recommendations to President Roosevelt and the
State Department. The conclusions stated that the United States needed
larger export markets for its products, and specifically that the U.S.
needed “living space” (or as the Nazi German state referred to it, Lebensraum)
throughout the Western hemisphere and beyond, as well as trade and
“economic integration” with the Far East and the British
Empire/Commonwealth blocs.
The report stated bluntly, “as a minimum, the American ‘national
interests’ involved the free access to markets and raw materials in the
British Empire, the Far East, and the entire Western hemisphere.”[14]
This was the foundation for the Grand Area designs of the Council in
the post-War world. The Grand Area project emphasized that for America
to manage the “Grand Areas” of the world, multilateral organizations
would be needed to help facilitate “appropriate measures in the fields
of trade, investment, and monetary arrangements.” The study further
emphasized the need to maintain “military supremacy” in order to help
facilitate control of these areas.
As the Council’s 1940 report to the U.S. State Department stated: “The
foremost requirement of the United States in a world in which it
proposes to hold unquestioned power is the rapid fulfillment of a
program of complete re-armament,” which would “involve increased
military expenditures and other risks.”[15]
While the Grand Area project was made and designed for the United
States during World War II, it included plans for the post-War world,
and included continental Europe in its designs following the assumed
defeat of Germany. Thus, as economist Ismael Hossein-Zadeh wrote,
“making the Grand Area global.”
The idea behind the “Grand Area” was “even more grandiose – one world
economy dominated by the United States,” and the study itself suggested
that the Grand Area “would then be an organized nucleus for building an
integrated world economy after the war.”[16] As Shoup and Minter wrote
in their study of the Council, Imperial Brain Trust, “the
United States had to enter the war and organize a new world order
satisfactory to the United States.”[17] Benevolent, indeed.
Following Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into the War, the Council
concluded as early as 1941 that the defeat of the Axis powers was simply
a matter of time. As such, they were advancing their plans for the
post-War world, expanding the Grand Area to:
include the entire globe. A new world order with international political and economic institutions was projected, which would join and integrate all of the earth’s nations under the leadership of the United States. The Unification of the whole world was now the aim of the Council [on Foreign Relations] and government planners.[18]
As a part of this planning process, the U.S. Department of State
formed the Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy in late December
of 1941, of which the first document that was produced, “stressed the
danger of another world depression and the need to provide confidence in
world economic stability.” Thus, “the United States had to be involved
with the internal affairs of the key industrial and raw
materials-producing countries.”
A key question in this was, as one postwar planner articulated, “how
to create purchasing power outside of our country which would be
converted into domestic purchasing power through exportation.” The idea
was about “devising appropriate institutions” which would fulfill this
role, ultimately resting with the formation of the IMF and the
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (later known as
the World Bank). The postwar planners had to continually construct an
idea of an international order, directed by the United States, which
would not so easily resemble the formal colonial period or its methods
of exerting hegemony.[19]
Recommendations of the Council suggested that such new international
financial institutions were necessary in terms of “stabilizing
currencies and facilitating programs of capital investment for
constructive undertakings in backward and underdeveloped regions.”
These plans included for the establishment of an International
Reconstruction Finance Corporations and an “international investment
agency which would stimulate world trade and prosperity by facilitating
investment in development programs the world over.” These plans were
drafted in recommendations and given to President Roosevelt and the
Department of State.[20]
One Council member suggested that, “It might be wise to set up two
financial institutions: one an international exchange stabilization
board and one an international bank to handle short-term transactions
not directly concerned with stabilization.” Thus, the Council drafted in
1941 and 1942 plans that would result in the formation of the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which formally emerged
from the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, an event that is commonly
acknowledged as the “birthplace” of the World Bank and IMF, thus
ignoring their ideological origins at the Council on Foreign Relations
two-to-three years prior.
The internal department committees established in the Department of
State and Treasury were well represented by Council members who drew up
the final plans for the creation of these two major institutions.[21]
Whereas the League of Nations had been a major objective of the
Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Corporation-funded Council on
Foreign Relations following World War I, so too was the United Nations
near the end of World War II. A steering committee consisting of U.S.
Secretary of State Cordell Hull and five Council on Foreign Relations
members was formed in 1943. One of the Council members, Isaiah Bowman,
suggested a way to solve the problem of maintaining effective control over weaker territories while avoiding overt imperial conquest. At a Council [on Foreign Relations] meeting in May 1942, he stated that the United States had to exercise the strength needed to assure “security,” and at the same time “avoid conventional forms of imperialism.” The way to do this, he argued, was to make the exercise of that power international in character through a United Nations body.[22]
The “secret steering committee,” later called the Informal Agenda
Group, undertook a series of consultations and meetings with foreign
governments which would be essential in creating the new institution,
including the Soviet Union, Canada, and Britain, and the Charter of the
United Nations was subsequently decided upon with the consent of
President Roosevelt in June 1944.[23]
The Informal Agenda Group was made up of six individuals, including
Secretary of State Cordell Hull. All of them, with the exception of
Hull, were Council members. President Roosevelt had referred to them as
“my postwar advisers,” and aside from formal policy recommendations,
they “served as advisers to the Secretary of State and the President on
the final decisions.” By December 1943, a new member was added to the
Group, Under Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., who was not
only a Council member, but was also a former top executive at United
States Steel and was the son of a partner in the J.P. Morgan Bank.
After the Group had drafted the recommendations for a United Nations
body, Secretary Hull had asked three lawyers to rule on its
constitutionality. The three lawyers he chose were Charles Evan Hughes,
John W. Davis, and Nathan L. Miller. Both Hughes and Davis were Council
members, and John Davis was even a former President of the Council and
remained as a Director.[24] John D. Rockefeller Jr. subsequently gifted
the United Nations with $8.5 million in order to buy the land for its
headquarters in New York City.[25]
Andrew Gavin Marshall is
an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal,
Canada, writing
on a number of social, political, economic, and historical issues. He
is also Project Manager of The People’s Book Project.
NOTE: This was but a small sample from the chapter on the origins
of the American Empire in the post-World War II world. The very same
chapter includes the internal policy discussions relating to the
formation of the Cold War, the establishment of the National Security
State, and the advancement of policy programs aimed at securing the
“Grand Areas” for American dominance around the world. The chapter also
studies the emergence of the Marshall Plan, NATO, European integration,
the Bilderberg Group, and a number of other institutions and ideas
related to establishing and expanding a ‘New World Order.’
[2] Ibid, page 28.
[3] Sebastian Mallaby, “The Reluctant Imperialist: Terrorism, Failed States, and the Case for American Empire,” Foreign Affairs (Vol. 81, No. 2, March-April 2002), page 6.
[4] Ibid, page 2.
[5] Niall Ferguson, “The Unconscious Colossus: Limits of (& Alternatives to) American Empire,” Daedalus (Vol. 134, No. 2, On Imperialism, Spring 2005), page 21.
[6] Ibid, pages 21-22.
[7] Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The American Empire? Not so Fast,” World Policy Journal (Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring 2005), page 45.
[8] Michael Cox, “Empire by Denial: The Strange Case of the United States,” International Affairs (Vol. 81, No. 1, January 2005), page 18.
[9] Geir Lundestad, “‘Empire by Invitation’ in the American Century,” Diplomatic History (Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring 1999), page 189.
[10] Bruce Cumings, “The American Century and the Third World,” Diplomatic History (Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring 1999), page 356.
[11] Ibid, pages 358-359.
[12] CFR, War and Peace. CFR History: http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/war_peace.html
[13] Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), page 74.
[14] Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pages 43-45.
[15] Ibid, page 45.
[16] Ibid, page 46.
[17] Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (Authors Choice Press, New York: 2004), page 118.
[18] Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), page 48.
[19] Ibid, pages 49-51.
[20] Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (Authors Choice Press, New York: 2004), pages 166-167.
[21] Ibid, pages 168-169.
[22] Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), page 159.
[23] Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), page 51.
[24] Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (Authors Choice Press, New York: 2004), pages 169-171.
[25] Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), page 160.
NOTE: The following is a brief six-page excerpt from a 60 page
chapter on the origins of the American Empire at the end of World War
II. The chapter, nearly complete, is one of several chapters in a book
being funded and facilitated through The People’s Book Project,
which is aimed at producing a multi-volume book on a modern history of
institutions and ideas of power and resistance. Included within the
volumes are: the emergence of nation-states, capitalism, and central
banking; the rise of the European empires and colonization; the
emergence of new dynastic powers, namely the banking and industrial
families of the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Morgans, et. al.; the
development of the mass education system as a means of social control;
the emergence and evolution of university education, the social
sciences, and the formation of new concepts of social control and
methods of social engineering; the development, purpose, and effects of
philanthropic foundations on society; the emergence and evolution of the
consumer culture, advertising, public relations, and advanced systems
of propaganda; the development of the ‘modern institutional society’,
with an examination of the different brands in Communist, Fascist, and
Liberal Democratic states; the development and intent of the Welfare
State, social services, and management of the poor; the effect of two
world wars, and the formation of the American Empire with its political,
military, intelligence, economic, financial, and cultural apparatus and
institutions of expansion, including the American foundations, think
tanks, World Bank, IMF, UN, NATO, CIA, Pentagon, etc.; the role of
international think tanks like the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral
Commission in shaping and re-shaping world order and expanding dominance
and control of the world; the formation of an apparatus of global
governance and the ideology of globalism; population control and the
environmental movement; and finally the emergence, evolution, and role
of science, technology, psychology, and psychiatry on the development of
a global scientific dictatorship… and what we can do to change all of
this!
The above is not even an exhaustive list of the scope of this
multi-volume book. Over 500 pages has been written thus far, and there
is a great deal more to go, at which point the end result will be broken
up into relevant sections as a complete volume on the modern history of
ideas and institutions of power in our world, asking and answering the
questions:
What is the nature of our global society? How did we get here?
Who brought us here? When did this begin? Where are we going? Why? … and
what can we do to change it.
The People’s Book Project is currently in need of support, as it has run out of funds.
Please donate to help ensure that this project can move forward and
help support an effort to provide a new examination of our world, and a
new understanding in how we can go about changing it! Thank you.
