The New Age of Imperialism

Part II.
The New Age of Imperialism
Nothing in fact so reveals the new age of imperialism as the expansion of the U.S. Empire in the critical oil regions of the Middle East and the Caspian Sea Basin. U.S. power in the Persian Gulf was limited throughout the Cold War years as a result of the Soviet presence. The Iranian Revolution of 1979, to which the United States was seemingly helpless to respond, was the greatest defeat of U.S. imperialism (which had relied on Shah of Iran as a secure base in the region) since the Vietnam War. Indeed, prior to 1989 and the breakup of the Soviet bloc, a major U.S. war in the region would have been almost completely unthinkable. This left U.S. dominance in the region significantly constrained. The 1991 Gulf War, which was carried out by the United States with Soviet acquiescence, thus marked the beginning of a new age of U.S. imperialism and expansion of U.S . global power. It is no mere accident that the weakening of the Soviet Union led almost immediately to a full-scale U.S. military intervention in the region that was the key to controlling world oil, the most critical global resource, and thus crucial to any strategy of global domination.
It is essential to understand that in 1991 when the Gulf War occurred the Soviet Union was greatly weakened and subservient to U.S. policy. But it was not yet dead (that was to occur later on that year) and there was still the possibility, although dim, of a coup or upset and a turnaround in Soviet affairs unfavorable to U.S. interests. At the same time the United States was still in a position where it had lost economic ground to some of its main competitors and hence there was a widespread sense that its economic hegemony had seriously declined, limiting its course of action. Although the administration of George H. W. Bush declared a "New World Order" no one knew what this meant. The collapse of the Soviet bloc had been so sudden that the U.S. ruling class and the foreign policy elites were unsure of how to proceed.
During the first Gulf War the U.S. elites were split. Some believed that the U.S. should go on and invade Iraq, as the Wall Street Journal advised at the time. Others thought that an invasion and occupation of Iraq was not then feasible. Over the course of the next decade the dominant topic of discussion in U.S. foreign policy, as witnessed, for example, by the Council on Foreign Relations publication, Foreign Affairs, was how to exploit the fact that the United States was now the sole superpower. Discussions of unipolarity (a term introduced by the neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer in 1991) and unilateralism were soon coupled with open discussions on U.S. primacy, hegemony, empire, and even imperialism. Moreover, as the decade wore on, the arguments in favor of the United States exercising an imperial role became more and more pervasive and concrete. Such issues were discussed from the beginning of the new era not in terms of ends but in terms of efficacy. A particularly noteworthy example of the call for a new imperialism could be found in an influential book, entitled The Imperial Temptation, again by Robert W. Tucker, along with David C. Hendrickson, published by the Council on Foreign Relations in 1992. As Tucker and Hendrickson forthrightly explained,
The United States is today the dominant military power in the world. In the reach and effectiveness of its military forces, America compares favorably with some of the greatest empires known to history. Rome reached barely beyond the compass of the Mediterranean, whereas Napoleon could not break out into the Atlantic and went to defeat in the vast Russian spaces. During the height of the so-called Pax Britannica, when the Royal Navy ruled the seas, Bismarck remarked that if the British army landed on the Prussian coast he would have it arrested by the local police. The United States has an altogether more formidable collection of forces than its predecessors among the world's great powers. It has global reach. It possesses the most technologically advanced arms, commanded by professionals skilled in the art of war. It can transport powerful continental armies over oceanic distances. Its historic adversaries are in retreat, broken by internal discord.
Under these circumstances, an age-old temptation—the imperial temptation—may prove compelling for the United States....The nation is not likely to be attracted to the visions of empire that animated colonial powers of the past; it may well find attractive, however, a vision that enables the nation to assume an imperial role without fulfilling the classic duties of imperial rule (pp. 14–15).
The "imperial temptation," these authors made clear, was to be resisted less because of the fact that this would have constituted a renewal of classic imperialism, but because the United States was only willing to go half way, unleashing its military force while neglecting to take on the more burdensome responsibilities of imperial rule associated with nation building.
Proceeding from a nation-building perspective reminiscent of Kennedy-style Cold War liberalism, but also attractive to some neoconservatives, Tucker and Hendrickson presented the case that the United States, having fought the Gulf War, should have immediately proceeded to invade, occupy, and pacify Iraq, removing the Ba'ath Party from power, thus exercising its imperial responsibility. "The overwhelming display of military power," they wrote, "would have provided the United States with time to form and recognize a provisional Iraqi government consisting of individuals committed to a broadly liberal platform....Though such a government would undoubtedly have been accused of being an American puppet, there are good reasons for thinking that it might have acquired considerable legitimacy. It would have enjoyed access, under UN supervision, to Iraq's oil revenues, which surely would have won it considerable support from the Iraqi people" (p. 147).
Tucker and Hendrickson—in spite of Tucker's argument decades earlier against Magdoff, that the failure to seize control of Persian Gulf oil was evidence that the U.S. was not an imperialist power—were under no illusions about why an occupation of Iraq would be in U.S. strategic interest, in one word: "oil." "There is no other commodity," they wrote, "that has the crucial significance of oil; there is no parallel to the dependence of developed and developing economies on the energy resources of the Gulf; these resources are concentrated in an area that remains relatively inaccessible and highly unstable, and possession of oil affords an unparalleled financial base whereby an expansionist developing power may hope to realize its aggressive ambitions" (pp. 10–11). The need for the United States to achieve domination over the Middle East was therefore not in doubt. If it resorted to force under these exceptional conditions, it should do so responsibly—by extending its rule as well.
This argument comes out of the liberal rather than conservative (or neoconservative) side of the U.S. foreign policy establishment and ruling class discussions. The debate within the establishment is narrow, with many liberal foreign policy analysts, because of their penchant for nation building, much closer to neoconservatives and more hawkish in this respect than many conservatives. For Tucker and Hendrickson imperialism is a matter of choice made by policy makers; it is a mere "imperial temptation." It could be resisted, but if it is not, then it is necessary to take on the liberal dream of nation building—to re-engineer societies on liberal principles.
Indeed, a remarkable consensus on underlying assumptions and goals emerged within the U.S. power elite in the 1990s. As Richard N. Haass, a member of the National Security Council in the administration of President George H. W. Bush and the official who drafted the elder Bush's most important statement on U.S. military posture, observed in the 1994 edition of his book Intervention: "Liberated from the danger that military action will lead to confrontation with a rival superpower, the United States is now more free to intervene." In accounting for the limitations of U.S. power Haass declared, "the United States can do anything, just not everything" (p. 8). His analysis went on to discuss the possibility of nation-building interventions in Iraq and elsewhere. Another book by Haass, The Reluctant Sheriff, published in 1997, referred to the sheriff and his posse, with the sheriff defined as the United States and the posse as a "coalition of the willing" (p. 93). The sheriff and the posse need not worry too much about the law, he noted, but must nonetheless be wary of crossing over into vigilantism.
More important, was Haass' argument on hegemony, which pointed directly to the main differences within the establishment on the U.S. assertion of global power. According to Haass, the United States clearly was the "hegemon" in the sense of having global primacy, but permanent hegemony as an object of foreign policy was a dangerous illusion. In March 1992, a draft of the Defense Planning Guidance, also known as the "Pentagon Paper," was leaked to the press. This secret working document authored by the elder Bush's Defense Department under the supervision of Paul Wolfowitz (then undersecretary for policy) declared: "Our strategy [after the fall of the Soviet Union] must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor" ( New York Times, March 8, 1992). Questioning this in The Reluctant Sheriff, Haass claimed that this strategy was ill conceived for the simple reason that the United States did not have the capacity to prevent new global powers from emerging. Such powers emerge along with the growth of their material resources; great economic powers will inevitably have the capacity to become great powers generally (along a full spectrum), and the extent to which they emerge as full military powers "will depend mostly on their own perception of national interests, threats, political culture, and economic strength" (p. 54). The only rational long-term strategy, since the perpetuation of hegemony or primacy was impossible, was what Madeleine Albright termed "assertive multilateralism" or what Haass himself termed a "sheriff and posse" approachposse consisting mainly of the other major states. By November 2000, just before he was hired to be head of policy planning in Colin Powell's State Department in the administration of President George W. Bush, Haass delivered a paper in Atlanta called "Imperial America" on how the United States should fashion an "imperial foreign policy" that makes use of its "surplus of power" to "extend its control" across the face of the globe. While still denying that lasting hegemony was possible, Haass declared that the United States should use the exceptional opportunity that it now enjoyed to reshape the world in order to enhance its global strategic assets. This meant military interventions around the world. "Imperial understretch, not overstretch," he argued, "appears to be the greater danger of the two." * By 2002, Haass, speaking for an administration preparing to invade Iraq, was pronouncing that a failed state, unable to control terrorism within its own territory had lost "the normal advantages of sovereignty, including the right to be left alone inside [its] own territory. Other governments, including the U.S., gain the right to intervene. In the case of terrorism this can even lead to a right of preventative, or preemptory, self-defense" (quoted in Michael Hirsh, At War with Ourselves, p. 251).
In September 2000, two months before Haass had presented his "Imperial America" paper, the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century had issued a report entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses, drawn up at the request of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, George W. Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby. The report declared that "at present the United States faces no global rival. America's grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible." The main strategic goal of the United States in the twenty-first century was to "preserve Pax Americana." To achieve this it was necessary to expand the "American security perimeter" by establishing new "overseas bases" and forward operations throughout the world. On the question of the Persian Gulf, Rebuilding America's Defenses was no less explicit: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
Even before September 11, therefore, the ruling class and its foreign policy elites (including those outside neoconservative circles) had moved towards an explicit policy of expanding the American empire, taking full advantage of what was regarded as the limited window brought on by the demise of the Soviet Union—and before new rivals of scale could arise. The 1990s saw the U.S. economy, despite the slow-down in the secular growth trend, advance more rapidly than that of Europe and Japan. This was particularly the case in the bubble years of the latter half of the 1990s. The Yugoslavian civil wars meanwhile demonstrated that Europe was unable to act militarily without the United States.
Hence, by the end of the 1990s, discussions of U.S. empire and imperialism cropped up not so much on the left as in liberal and neoconservative circles, where imperial ambitions were openly proclaimed. * Following September 2001, the disposition to carry out massive military interventions to promote the expansion of U.S. power, in which the United States would once again put its "boots on the ground," as neoconservative pundit Max Boot expressed it in his book on The Savage Wars of Peace on early U.S. imperialist wars, became part of the dominant ruling class consensus. The administration's National Security Strategy statement, transmitted to Congress in September 2002, promoted the principle of preemptive attacks against potential enemies and declared: "The United States must and will maintain the capability to defeat any attempt by an enemy...to impose its will on the United States, our allies, or our friends....Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in the hope of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States."
In At War with Ourselves: Why America is Squandering its Chance to Build a Better World (2003), Michael Hirsh, senior editor for Newsweek's Washington bureau, presents the argument of political liberals that while it is proper for the United States as the hegemonic power to intervene where failed states are concerned, and where its vital strategic interests are at stake, this has to be coupled with nation building and a commitment to broader multilateralism. However, in reality this may only be a "unipolarity...well disguised as multipolarity" (p. 245). This is not a debate about whether the United States should extend its empire, but rather whether the imperial temptation will be accompanied by the assertion of imperial responsibility, in the manner raised by Tucker and Hendrickson. Commenting on nation-building interventions, Hirsh declares "There is no 'czar' for failed states as there is for homeland security or the war on drugs. Perhaps there should be"
What have been called "nation-building interventions," originally rejected by the Bush administration, are no longer in question. This can be seen in the Council on Foreign Relations report, Iraq: The Day After , published shortly before the U.S. invasion, and addressing nation building in Iraq. One of the task force members in the development of that report was James F. Dobbins, Director of the Rand Corporation Center for International Security and Defense Policy, who served as the Clinton administration's special envoy during the interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo and also as special envoy for the Bush II administration following the invasion of Afghanistan. Dobbins, an advocate for "nation-building interventions"—the diplomacy of the sword—in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, declared definitively in the Council on Foreign Relations report: "The partisan debate over nation-building is over. Administrations of both parties are clearly prepared to use American military forces to reform rogue states and repair broken societies"
The Cabal Theory and Imperial Realities
All of this relates to the question that Magdoff raised more than a third of a century ago in The Age of Imperialism and that is more than ever with us today. "Is the [Vietnam] war," he asked, "part of a more general and consistent scheme of United States external policies or is it an aberration of a particular group of men in power?" There is now a general agreement within the establishment itself that objective forces and security requirements are driving U.S. expansionism; that it is in the general interest of the high command of U.S. capitalism to extend its control over the world—as far and for as long as possible. According to the Project for the New American Century report, Rebuilding America's Defenses, it is necessary to seize the "unipolar moment."
The wider left's tendency over the last two years to focus on this new imperialist expansion as a neoconservative project involving a small sector of the ruling class not reaching beyond the right wing of the Republican Party—resting on particular expansive interests in the military and oil sectors—is a dangerous illusion. At present there is no serious split within the U.S. oligarchy or the foreign policy establishment, though these will undoubtedly develop in the future as a result of failures down the road. There is no cabal, but a consensus rooted in ruling class needs and the dynamics of imperialism.
There are, however, divisions between the United States and other leading states—intercapitalist rivalry remains the hub of the imperialist wheel. How could it be otherwise when the United States is trying to establish itself as the surrogate world government in a global imperial order? Although the United States is attempting to reassert its hegemonic position in the world it remains far weaker economically, relative to other leading capitalist states, than it was at the beginning of the post–Second World War period. "In the late 1940s, when the United States produced 50 percent of the world's gross national product (GNP)," James Dobbins stated in Iraq: The Day After, "it was able to perform those tasks [of military intervention and nation-building] more or less on its own. In the 1990s, in the aftermath of the Cold War, America was able to lead much broader coalitions and thereby share the burden of nation building much more widely. The United States cannot afford and does not need to go it alone in building a free Iraq. It will secure broader participation, however, only if it pays attention to the lessons of the 1990s as well as those of the 1940s" (pp. 48–49). In other words, for a stagnating U.S. economy that, despite its relative economic gains in the late 1990s, is in a much weaker economic position vis-á-vis its main competitors than in the years following the Second World War, outright hegemonism is beyond its means, and it remains dependent on "coalitions of the willing."
At the same time, it is clear that in the present period of global hegemonic imperialism the United States is geared above all to expanding its imperial power to whatever extent possible and subordinating the rest of the capitalist world to its interests. The Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea Basin represent not only the bulk of world petroleum reserves, but also a rapidly increasing proportion of total reserves, as high production rates diminish reserves elsewhere. This has provided much of the stimulus for the United States to gain greater control of these resources—at the expense of its present and potential rivals. But U.S. imperial ambitions do not end there, since they are driven by economic ambitions that know no bounds. As Harry Magdoff noted in the closing pages of The Age of Imperialism in 1969, "it is the professed goal" of U.S. multinational corporations "to control as large a share of the world market as they do of the United States market," and this hunger for foreign markets persists today. Florida-based Wackenhut Corrections Corporation has won prison privatization contracts in Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand, and the Netherlands Antilles ("Prison Industry Goes Global," fall 2000). Promotion of U.S. corporate interests abroad is one of the primary responsibilities of the U.S. state. Consider the cases of Monsanto and genetically modified food, Microsoft and intellectual property, Bechtel and the war on Iraq. It would be impossible to exaggerate how dangerous this dual expansionism of U.S. corporations and the U.S. state is to the world at large. As IstvE1n ME9szE1ros observed in 2001 in Socialism or Barbarism, the U.S. attempt to seize global control, which is inherent in the workings of capitalism and imperialism, is now threatening humanity with the "extreme violent rule of the whole world by one hegemonic imperialist country on a permanent basis...an absurd and unsustainable way of running the world order." *
This new age of U.S. imperialism will generate its own contradictions, amongst them attempts by other major powers to assert their influence, resorting to similar belligerent means, and all sorts of strategies by weaker states and non-state actors to engage in "asymmetric" forms of warfare. Given the unprecedented destructiveness of contemporary weapons, which are diffused ever more widely, the consequences for the population of the world could well be devastating beyond anything ever before witnessed. Rather than generating a new "Pax Americana" the United States may be paving the way to new global holocausts.
The greatest hope in these dire circumstances lies in a rising tide of revolt from below, both in the United States and globally. The growth of the antiglobalization movement, which dominated the world stage for nearly two years following the events in Seattle in November 1999, was succeeded in February 2003 by the largest global wave of antiwar protests in human history. Never before has the world's population risen up so quickly and in such massive numbers in the attempt to stop an imperialist war. The new age of imperialism is also a new age of revolt. The Vietnam Syndrome, which has so worried the strategic planners of the imperial order for decades, now seems not only to have left a deep legacy within the United States but also to have been coupled this time around with an Empire Syndrome on a much more global scale—something that no one really expected. This more than anything else makes it clear that the strategy of the American ruling class to expand the American Empire cannot possibly succeed in the long run, and will prove to be its own—we hope not the world's—undoing flows of both oil and profits—could result in such obvious errors