Source: AlterNetNoam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky on how America "lost" the world.
Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated -- Japan’s
attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are
ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is
likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact.
At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of
President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and
murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the
invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead
and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the
long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most
lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food
crops.
The prime target was South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to
the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and
finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all
allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II,
including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In
this, Henry Kissinger’s orders were
being carried out -- “anything that flies on anything that moves” -- a
call for genocide that is rare in the historical record. Little of this
is remembered. Most was scarcely known beyond narrow circles of
activists.
When
the invasion was launched 50 years ago, concern was so slight that
there were few efforts at justification, hardly more than the
president’s impassioned plea that “we are opposed around the world by a
monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means
for expanding its sphere of influence” and if the conspiracy achieves
its ends in Laos and Vietnam, “the gates will be opened wide.”
Elsewhere, he warned further that “the complacent, the
self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the
debris of history [and] only the strong... can possibly survive,” in
this case reflecting on the failure of U.S. aggression and terror to
crush Cuban independence.
By the time protest began to mount half a dozen years later, the
respected Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall, no
dove, forecast that “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity… is
threatened with extinction...[as]...the countryside literally dies under
the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of
this size.” He was again referring to South Vietnam.
When the war ended eight horrendous years later, mainstream opinion
was divided between those who described the war as a “noble cause” that
could have been won with more dedication, and at the opposite extreme,
the critics, to whom it was “a mistake” that proved too costly. By
1977, President Carter aroused little notice when he explained that we
owe Vietnam “no debt” because “the destruction was mutual.”
There are important lessons in all this for today, even apart from
another reminder that only the weak and defeated are called to account
for their crimes. One lesson is that to understand what is happening we
should attend not only to critical events of the real world, often
dismissed from history, but also to what leaders and elite opinion
believe, however tinged with fantasy. Another lesson is that alongside
the flights of fancy concocted to terrify and mobilize the public (and
perhaps believed by some who are trapped in their own rhetoric), there
is also geostrategic planning based on principles that are rational and
stable over long periods because they are rooted in stable institutions
and their concerns. That is true in the case of Vietnam as well. I
will return to that, only stressing here that the persistent factors in
state action are generally well concealed.
The Iraq war is an instructive case. It was marketed to a terrified
public on the usual grounds of self-defense against an awesome threat to
survival: the “single question,” George W. Bush and Tony Blair
declared, was whether Saddam Hussein would end his programs of
developing weapons of mass destruction. When the single question
received the wrong answer, government rhetoric shifted effortlessly to
our “yearning for democracy,” and educated opinion duly followed course;
all routine.
Later, as the scale of the U.S. defeat in Iraq was becoming difficult
to suppress, the government quietly conceded what had been clear all
along. In 2007-2008, the administration officially announced that a
final settlement must grant the U.S. military bases and the right of
combat operations, and must privilege U.S. investors in the rich energy
system -- demands later reluctantly abandoned in the face of Iraqi
resistance. And all well kept from the general population.
Gauging American Decline
With such lessons in mind, it is useful to look at what is
highlighted in the major journals of policy and opinion today. Let us
keep to the most prestigious of the establishment journals, Foreign Affairs. The headline blaring on the cover of the December 2011 issue reads in bold face: “Is America Over?”
The title article calls for “retrenchment” in the “humanitarian
missions” abroad that are consuming the country’s wealth, so as to
arrest the American decline that is a major theme of international
affairs discourse, usually accompanied by the corollary that power is
shifting to the East, to China and (maybe) India.
The lead articles are on Israel-Palestine. The first, by two high Israeli officials, is entitled “The Problem is Palestinian Rejection”:
the conflict cannot be resolved because Palestinians refuse to
recognize Israel as a Jewish state -- thereby conforming to standard
diplomatic practice: states are recognized, but not privileged sectors
within them. The demand is hardly more than a new device to deter the
threat of political settlement that would undermine Israel’s
expansionist goals.
The opposing position, defended by an American professor, is entitled “The Problem Is the Occupation.”
The subtitle reads “How the Occupation is Destroying the Nation.” Which
nation? Israel, of course. The paired articles appear under the
heading “Israel under Siege.”
The January 2012 issue features yet another call to bomb Iran now,
before it is too late. Warning of “the dangers of deterrence,” the
author suggests that “skeptics of military action fail to appreciate the
true danger that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to U.S. interests in
the Middle East and beyond. And their grim forecasts assume that the
cure would be worse than the disease -- that is, that the consequences
of a U.S. assault on Iran would be as bad as or worse than those of Iran
achieving its nuclear ambitions. But that is a faulty assumption. The
truth is that a military strike intended to destroy Iran’s nuclear
program, if managed carefully, could spare the region and the world a
very real threat and dramatically improve the long-term national
security of the United States.”
Others argue that the costs would be too high, and at the extremes
some even point out that an attack would violate international law -- as
does the stand of the moderates, who regularly deliver threats of
violence, in violation of the U.N. Charter.
Let us review these dominant concerns in turn.
American decline is real, though the apocalyptic vision reflects the
familiar ruling class perception that anything short of total control
amounts to total disaster. Despite the piteous laments, the U.S.
remains the world dominant power by a large margin, and no competitor is
in sight, not only in the military dimension, in which of course the
U.S. reigns supreme.
China and India have recorded rapid (though highly inegalitarian)
growth, but remain very poor countries, with enormous internal problems
not faced by the West. China is the world’s major manufacturing center,
but largely as an assembly plant for the advanced industrial powers on
its periphery and for western multinationals. That is likely to change
over time. Manufacturing regularly provides the basis for innovation,
often breakthroughs, as is now sometimes happening in China. One
example that has impressed western specialists is China’s takeover of
the growing global solar panel market, not on the basis of cheap labor
but by coordinated planning and, increasingly, innovation.
But the problems China faces are serious. Some are demographic, reviewed inScience, the
leading U.S. science weekly. The study shows that mortality sharply
decreased in China during the Maoist years, “mainly a result of economic
development and improvements in education and health services,
especially the public hygiene movement that resulted in a sharp drop in
mortality from infectious diseases.” This progress ended with the
initiation of the capitalist reforms 30 years ago, and the death rate
has since increased.
Furthermore, China’s recent economic growth has relied substantially
on a “demographic bonus,” a very large working-age population. “But the
window for harvesting this bonus may close soon,” with a “profound
impact on development”: “Excess cheap labor supply, which is one of the
major factors driving China's economic miracle, will no longer be
available.”
Demography is only one of many serious problems ahead. For India, the problems are far more severe.
Not all prominent voices foresee American decline.
Among international media, there is none more serious and responsible
than the London Financial Times. It recently devoted a full
page to the optimistic expectation that new technology for extracting
North American fossil fuels might allow the U.S. to become energy
independent, hence to retain its global hegemony for a century. There
is no mention of the kind of world the U.S. would rule in this happy
event, but not for lack of evidence.
At about the same time, the International Energy Agency reported that,
with rapidly increasing carbon emissions from fossil fuel use, the
limit of safety will be reached by 2017 if the world continues on its
present course. “The door is closing,” the IEA chief economist said, and
very soon it “will be closed forever.”
Shortly before the U.S. Department of Energy reported the
most recent carbon dioxide emissions figures, which “jumped by the
biggest amount on record” to a level higher than the worst-case scenario
anticipated by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
That
came as no surprise to many scientists, including the MIT program on
climate change, which for years has warned that the IPCC predictions are
too conservative.
Such critics of the IPCC predictions receive virtually
no public attention, unlike the fringe of denialists who are supported
by the corporate sector, along with huge propaganda campaigns that have
driven Americans off the international spectrum in dismissal of the
threats. Business support also translates directly to political power.
Denialism is part of the catechism that must be intoned by Republican
candidates in the farcical election campaign now in progress, and in
Congress they are powerful enough to abort even efforts to inquire into
the effects of global warming, let alone do anything serious about it.
In brief, American decline can perhaps be stemmed if we abandon hope
for decent survival, prospects that are all too real given the balance
of forces in the world.
“Losing” China and Vietnam
Putting such unpleasant thoughts aside, a close look at American
decline shows that China indeed plays a large role, as it has for 60
years. The decline that now elicits such concern is not a recent
phenomenon. It traces back to the end of World War II, when the U.S.
had half the world’s wealth and incomparable security and global reach.
Planners were naturally well aware of the enormous disparity of power,
and intended to keep it that way.
The basic viewpoint was outlined with admirable frankness in a major state paper of 1948 (PPS 23).
The author was one of the architects of the New World Order of the day,
the chair of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, the respected
statesman and scholar George Kennan, a moderate dove within the planning
spectrum. He observed that the central policy goal was to maintain the
“position of disparity” that separated our enormous wealth from the
poverty of others. To achieve that goal, he advised, “We should cease
to talk about vague and... unreal objectives such as human rights, the
raising of the living standards, and democratization,” and must “deal in
straight power concepts,” not “hampered by idealistic slogans” about
“altruism and world-benefaction.”
Kennan was referring specifically to Asia, but the observations
generalize, with exceptions, for participants in the U.S.-run global
system. It was well understood that the “idealistic slogans” were to be
displayed prominently when addressing others, including the
intellectual classes, who were expected to promulgate them.
The plans that Kennan helped formulate and implement took for granted
that the U.S. would control the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, the
former British empire (including the incomparable energy resources of
the Middle East), and as much of Eurasia as possible, crucially its
commercial and industrial centers. These were not unrealistic
objectives, given the distribution of power. But decline set in at
once.
In 1949, China declared independence, an event known in Western
discourse as “the loss of China” -- in the U.S., with bitter
recriminations and conflict over who was responsible for that loss. The
terminology is revealing. It is only possible to lose something that
one owns. The tacit assumption was that the U.S. owned China, by right,
along with most of the rest of the world, much as postwar planners
assumed.
The “loss of China” was the first major step in “America’s decline.”
It had major policy consequences. One was the immediate decision to
support France’s effort to reconquer its former colony of Indochina, so
that it, too, would not be “lost.”
Indochina itself was not a major concern, despite claims about its
rich resources by President Eisenhower and others. Rather, the concern
was the “domino theory,” which is often ridiculed when dominoes don’t
fall, but remains a leading principle of policy because it is quite
rational. To adopt Henry Kissinger’s version, a region that falls out
of control can become a “virus” that will “spread contagion,” inducing
others to follow the same path.
In the case of Vietnam, the concern was that the virus of independent
development might infect Indonesia, which really does have rich
resources. And that might lead Japan -- the “superdomino” as it was
called by the prominent Asia historian John Dower -- to “accommodate” to
an independent Asia as its technological and industrial center in a
system that would escape the reach of U.S. power. That would mean, in
effect, that the U.S. had lost the Pacific phase of World War II, fought
to prevent Japan’s attempt to establish such a New Order in Asia.
The way to deal with such a problem is clear: destroy the virus and
“inoculate” those who might be infected. In the Vietnam case, the
rational choice was to destroy any hope of successful independent
development and to impose brutal dictatorships in the surrounding
regions. Those tasks were successfully carried out -- though history
has its own cunning, and something similar to what was feared has since
been developing in East Asia, much to Washington’s dismay.
The most important victory of the Indochina wars was in 1965, when a
U.S.-backed military coup in Indonesia led by General Suharto carried
out massive crimes that were compared by the CIA to those of Hitler,
Stalin, and Mao. The “staggering mass slaughter,” as the New York Times described it, was reported accurately across the mainstream, and with unrestrained euphoria.
It was “a gleam of light in Asia,” as the noted liberal commentator James Reston wrote in the Times. The
coup ended the threat of democracy by demolishing the mass-based
political party of the poor, established a dictatorship that went on to
compile one of the worst human rights records in the world, and threw
the riches of the country open to western investors. Small wonder that,
after many other horrors, including the near-genocidal invasion of East Timor, Suharto was welcomed by the Clinton administration in 1995 as “our kind of guy.”
Years after the great events of 1965, Kennedy-Johnson National
Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy reflected that it would have been wise
to end the Vietnam war at that time, with the “virus” virtually
destroyed and the primary domino solidly in place, buttressed by other
U.S.-backed dictatorships throughout the region.
Similar procedures have been routinely followed elsewhere. Kissinger
was referring specifically to the threat of socialist democracy in
Chile. That threat was ended on another forgotten date, what Latin
Americans call “the first 9/11,”
which in violence and bitter effects far exceeded the 9/11 commemorated
in the West. A vicious dictatorship was imposed in Chile, one part of a
plague of brutal repression that spread through Latin America, reaching
Central America under Reagan. Viruses have aroused deep concern
elsewhere as well, including the Middle East, where the threat of
secular nationalism has often concerned British and U.S. planners,
inducing them to support radical Islamic fundamentalism to counter it.
The Concentration of Wealth and American Decline
Despite such victories, American decline continued. By 1970, U.S.
share of world wealth had dropped to about 25%, roughly where it
remains, still colossal but far below the end of World War II. By then,
the industrial world was “tripolar”: US-based North America,
German-based Europe, and East Asia, already the most dynamic industrial
region, at the time Japan-based, but by now including the former
Japanese colonies Taiwan and South Korea, and more recently China.
At about that time, American decline entered a new phase: conscious
self-inflicted decline. From the 1970s, there has been a significant
change in the U.S. economy, as planners, private and state, shifted it
toward financialization and the offshoring of production, driven in part
by the declining rate of profit in domestic manufacturing. These
decisions initiated a vicious cycle in which wealth became highly
concentrated (dramatically so in the top 0.1% of the population),
yielding concentration of political power, hence legislation to carry
the cycle further: taxation and other fiscal policies, deregulation,
changes in the rules of corporate governance allowing huge gains for
executives, and so on.
Meanwhile, for the majority, real wages largely stagnated, and people
were able to get by only by sharply increased workloads (far beyond
Europe), unsustainable debt, and repeated bubbles since the Reagan
years, creating paper wealth that inevitably disappeared when they burst
(and the perpetrators were bailed out by the taxpayer). In parallel,
the political system has been increasingly shredded as both parties are
driven deeper into corporate pockets with the escalating cost of
elections, the Republicans to the level of farce, the Democrats (now
largely the former “moderate Republicans”) not far behind.
A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, which has been the
major source of reputable data on these developments for years, is
entitled Failure by Design.
The phrase “by design” is accurate. Other choices were certainly
possible. And as the study points out, the “failure” is class-based.
There is no failure for the designers. Far from it. Rather, the
policies are a failure for the large majority, the 99% in the imagery of
the Occupy movements -- and for the country, which has declined and
will continue to do so under these policies.
One factor is the offshoring of manufacturing. As the solar panel
example mentioned earlier illustrates, manufacturing capacity provides
the basis and stimulus for innovation leading to higher stages of
sophistication in production, design, and invention. That, too, is
being outsourced, not a problem for the “money mandarins” who
increasingly design policy, but a serious problem for working people and
the middle classes, and a real disaster for the most oppressed, African
Americans, who have never escaped the legacy of slavery and its ugly
aftermath, and whose meager wealth virtually disappeared after the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008, setting off the most recent financial crisis, the worst so far.
Noam
Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of
Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous best-selling
political works. His latest books are Making the Future: Occupations, Intervention, Empire, and Resistance, The Essential Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his writings on politics and on language from the 1950s to the present, Gaza in Crisis, with Ilan Pappé, and Hopes and Prospects, also available as an audiobook.
To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which
Chomsky offers an anatomy of American defeats in the Greater Middle
East, click here, or download it to your iPod here.
