The US Still Thinks It Owns The World
The United States has long assumed the right to use violence to achieve its
aims, but it is now less able to implement its policies
By Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian
This piece is adapted from Uprisings, a chapter in Power Systems:
Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to US
Empire ,
Noam Chomsky’s new book of interviews with David Barsamian (with thanks to
the publisher, Metropolitan Books). The questions are Barsamian’s, the
answers Chomsky’s.
December 01, 2014 “ICH ” – “The
Guardian
”
– Does the United States still have the same level of control over the
energy resources of the Middle East as it once had?
The major energy-producing countries are still firmly under the control of
the western-backed dictatorships. So, actually, the progress made by the
Arab spring is limited, but it’s not insignificant. The western-controlled
dictatorial system is being eroded. In fact, it’s been being eroded for
some time. So, for example, if you go back 50 years, the energy resources –
the main concern of US planners – have been mostly nationalised. There are
constantly attempts to reverse that, but they have not succeeded.
Take the US invasion of Iraq, for example. To everyone except a dedicated
ideologue, it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq
not because of our love of
democracy but because it’s maybe the second- or third-largest source of oil
in the world, and is right in the middle of the major energy-producing
region. You’re not supposed to say this. It’s considered a conspiracy
theory.
The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism –
mostly by nonviolent resistance. The United States could kill the
insurgents, but they couldn’t deal with half a million people demonstrating
in the streets. Step by step, Iraq was able to dismantle the controls put
in place by the occupying forces. By November 2007, it was becoming pretty
clear that it was going to be very hard to reach US goals. And at that
point, interestingly, those goals were explicitly stated. So in November
2007 the Bush II administration came out with an official declaration about
what any future arrangement with Iraq would have to be. It had two major
requirements: one, that the United States must be free to carry out combat
operations from its military bases, which it will retain; and, two,
“encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American
investments”. In January 2008, Bush made this clear in one of his signing
statements. A couple of months later, in the face of Iraqi resistance, the
United States had to give that up. Control of Iraq is now disappearing
before their eyes.
Iraq was an attempt to reinstitute by force something like the old system
of control, but it was beaten back. In general, I think, US policies remain
constant, going back to the second world war. But the capacity to implement
them is declining.
Declining because of economic weakness?
Partly because the world is just becoming more diverse. It has more diverse
power centres. At the end of the second world war, the United States was
absolutely at the peak of its power. It had half the world’s wealth, and
every one of its competitors was seriously damaged or destroyed. It had a
position of unimaginable security and developed plans to essentially run
the world – not unrealistically at the time.
This was called “grand area” planning?
Yes. Right after the second world war, George Kennan, head of the US state
department policy planning staff, and others sketched out the details, and
then they were implemented. What’s happening now in the Middle East and
north Africa, to an extent, and in South America substantially goes all the
way back to the late 1940s. The first major successful resistance to US
hegemony was in 1949. That’s when an event took place that, interestingly,
is called “the loss of China”. It’s a very interesting phrase, never
challenged. There was a lot of discussion about who is responsible for the
loss of China. It became a huge domestic issue. But it’s a very interesting
phrase. You can only lose something if you own it. It was just taken for
granted: we possess China – and, if they move toward independence, we’ve
lost China. Later came concerns about “the loss of Latin America”, “the
loss of the Middle East”, “the loss of” certain countries, all based on the
premise that we own the world and anything that weakens our control is a
loss to us and we wonder how to recover it.
Today, if you read, say, foreign policy journals or, in a farcical form,
listen to the Republican debates, they’re asking, “How do we prevent
further losses?”
On the other hand, the capacity to preserve control has sharply declined.
By 1970, the world was already what was called tripolar economically, with
a US-based North American industrial centre, a German-based European
centre, roughly comparable in size, and a Japan-based east Asian centre,
which was then the most dynamic growth region in the world. Since then, the
global economic order has become much more diverse. So it’s harder to carry
out our policies, but the underlying principles have not changed much.
Take the Clinton doctrine. The Clinton doctrine was that the United States
was entitled to resort to unilateral force to ensure “uninhibited access to
key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources”. That goes beyond
anything that George W Bush said. But it was quiet and it wasn’t arrogant
and abrasive, so it didn’t cause much of an uproar. The belief in that
entitlement continues right to the present. It’s also part of the
intellectual culture.
Right after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, amid all the cheers and
applause, there were a few critical comments questioning the legality of
the act. Centuries ago, there used to be something called presumption of
innocence. If you apprehend a suspect, he’s a suspect until proven guilty.
He should be brought to trial. It’s a core part of American law. You can
trace it back to Magna Carta. So there were a couple of voices saying maybe
we shouldn’t throw out the whole basis of Anglo-American law. That led to a
lot of very angry and infuriated reactions, but the most interesting ones
were, as usual, on the left-liberal end of the spectrum. Matthew Yglesias
, a well-known and highly respected
left-liberal commentator, wrote an article in which he ridiculed these
views. He said they were “amazingly naive” and silly. Then he explained the
reason. He said: “One of the main functions of the international
institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military
force by western powers.” Of course, he didn’t mean Norway. He meant the
United States. So the principle on which the international system is based
is that the US is entitled to use force at will. To talk about the US
violating international law or something like that is amazingly naive,
completely silly. Incidentally, I was the target of those remarks, and I’m
happy to confess my guilt. I do think that Magna Carta and international
law are worth paying some attention to.
I merely mention that to illustrate that, in the intellectual culture, even
at what’s called the left-liberal end of the political spectrum, the core
principles haven’t changed very much. But the capacity to implement them
has been sharply reduced. That’s why you get all this talk about American
decline. Take a look at the year-end issue of Foreign Affairs, the main
establishment journal. Its big front-page cover asks, in bold face, “Is
America Over?” It’s a standard complaint of those who believe they should
have everything. If you believe you should have everything and anything
gets away from you, it’s a tragedy, and the world is collapsing. So is
America over? A long time ago we “lost” China, we’ve lost southeast Asia,
we’ve lost South America. Maybe we’ll lose the Middle East and north
African countries. Is America over? It’s a kind of paranoia, but it’s the
paranoia of the super-rich and the super-powerful. If you don’t have
everything, it’s a disaster.
The New York Times describes the “defining policy quandary of the Arab
spring as how to square contradictory US impulses, including support for
democratic change, a desire for stability, and wariness of Islamists who
have become a potent political force”. The Times identifies three US goals.
What do you make of them?
Two of them are accurate. The United States is in favour of stability. But
you have to remember what stability means. Stability means conformity to US
orders. So, for example, one of the charges against Iran, the big foreign
policy threat, is that it is destabilising Iraq and Afghanistan. How? By
trying to expand its influence into neighbouring countries. On the other
hand, we “stabilise” countries when we invade them and destroy them.
I’ve occasionally quoted one of my favourite illustrations of this, which
is from a well-known, very good liberal foreign policy analyst, James
Chace, a former editor of Foreign Affairs. Writing about the overthrow of
the Salvador Allende regime and the imposition of the dictatorship of
Augusto Pinochet in 1973, he said that we had to “destabilise” Chile in the
interests of “stability”. That’s not perceived to be a contradiction – and
it isn’t. We had to destroy the parliamentary system in order to gain
stability, meaning that they do what we say. So yes, we are in favour of
stability in this technical sense.
Concern about political Islam is just like concern about any independent
development. Anything that’s independent you have to have concern about,
because it may undermine you. In fact, it’s a little paradoxical, because
traditionally the United States and Britain have by and large strongly
supported radical Islamic fundamentalism, not political Islam, as a force
to block secular nationalism, the real concern. So, for example, Saudi
Arabia is the most extreme fundamentalist state in the world, a radical
Islamic state. It has missionary zeal, is spreading radical Islam to
Pakistan and funding terror. But it’s the bastion of US and British policy.
They’ve consistently supported it against the threat of secular nationalism
from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and Abd al-Karim Qasim
‘s Iraq, among many
others. But they don’t like political Islam because it may become
independent.
The first of the three points, our yearning for democracy, that’s about on
the level of Joseph Stalin talking about the Russian commitment to freedom,
democracy and liberty for the world. It’s the kind of statement you laugh
about when you hear it from commissars or Iranian clerics, but you nod
politely, and maybe even with awe, when you hear it from their western
counterparts.
If you look at the record, the yearning for democracy is a bad joke. That’s
even recognised by leading scholars, though they don’t put it this way. One
of the major scholars on so-called democracy promotion is Thomas Carothers,
who is pretty conservative and highly regarded – a neo-Reaganite, not a
flaming liberal. He worked in Reagan’s state department and has several
books reviewing the course of democracy promotion, which he takes very
seriously. He says, yes, this is a deep-seated American ideal, but it has a
funny history. The history is that every US administration is
“schizophrenic”. They support democracy only if it conforms to certain
strategic and economic interests. He describes this as a strange pathology,
as if the United States needed psychiatric treatment or something. Of
course, there’s another interpretation, but one that can’t come to mind if
you’re a well-educated, properly behaved intellectual.
Within several months of the toppling of [President Hosni] Mubarak in
Egypt, he was in the dock facing criminal charges and prosecution. It’s
inconceivable that US leaders will ever be held to account for their crimes
in Iraq or beyond. Is that going to change anytime soon?
That’s basically the Yglesias principle: the very foundation of the
international order is that the United States has the right to use violence
at will. So how can you charge anybody?
And no one else has that right?
Of course not. Well, maybe our clients do. If Israel invades Lebanon and
kills 1,000 people and destroys half the country, OK, that’s all right.
It’s interesting. Barack Obama was a senator before he was president. He
didn’t do much as a senator, but he did a couple of things, including one
he was particularly proud of. In fact, if you looked at his website before
the primaries, he highlighted the fact that, during the Israeli invasion of
Lebanon in 2006, he co-sponsored a Senate resolution demanding that the
United States do nothing to impede Israel’s military actions until they had
achieved their objectives, and censuring Iran and Syria because they were
supporting resistance to Israel’s destruction of southern Lebanon,
incidentally, for the fifth time in 25 years. So they inherit the right.
Other clients do, too.
But the rights really reside in Washington. That’s what it means to own the
world. It’s like the air you breathe. You can’t question it. The main
founder of contemporary IR [international relations] theory, Hans Morgenthau
, was really quite a decent
person, one of the very few political scientists and international affairs
specialists to criticise the Vietnam war on moral, not tactical, grounds.
Very rare. He wrote a book called The Purpose of American Politics. You
already know what’s coming. Other countries don’t have purposes. The
purpose of America, on the other hand, is “transcendent” – to bring freedom
and justice to the rest of the world. But he’s a good scholar, like
Carothers. So he went through the records. He said that, when you studied
the record, it looked as if the United States hadn’t lived up to its
transcendent purpose. But then he says that to criticise our transcendent
purpose “is to fall into the error of atheism, which denies the validity of
religion on similar grounds” – which is a good comparison. It’s a deeply
entrenched religious belief. It’s so deep that it’s going to be hard to
disentangle it. And if anyone questions that, it leads to near-hysteria and
often to charges of anti-Americanism or “hating America” – interesting
concepts that don’t exist in democratic societies, only in totalitarian
societies and here, where they’re just taken for granted.
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