The Last Empire

by Gore Vidal

  But nothing ever stays the same. During the last days of the waning moon, a haphazard Western European economic union was cobbled together; then, as the Soviet abruptly let go its empire, the two Germanys that we had so painstakingly kept apart reunited. Washington was suddenly adrift, and in the sky the moon of empire paused. Neither Reagan nor Bush had much knowledge of history or geography. Nevertheless, orders still kept coming from the White House. But they were less and less heeded because everyone knows that the Oval One has a bank overdraft of $5 trillion and he can no longer give presents to good clients or wage war without first passing the hat to the Germans and Japanese, as he was obliged to do when it came time to sponsor CNN’s light show in the Persian Gulf. Gradually, it is now becoming evident to even the most distracted funster that there is no longer any need for NATO, because there is no enemy. One might say there never really was one when NATO was started, but, over the years, we did succeed in creating a pretty dangerous Soviet, a fun-house-mirror version of ourselves. Although the United States may yet, in support of Israel, declare war on one billion Muslims, the Europeans will stay out. They recall 1529, when the Turks besieged Vienna not as obliging guest workers but as world conquerors. Never again.

  In the wake of the Madrid NATO summit, it is time for the United States to step away from Europe—gracefully. Certainly the Europeans think it is time for us to go, as their disdainful remarks at Denver betrayed, particularly when they were warned not to walk more than a block or two from their hotels for fear of being robbed, maimed, murdered. Yet why do we persist in holding on to empire? Cherchez la monnaie, as the clever French say. Ever since 1941, when Roosevelt got us out of the Depression by pumping federal money into rearming, war or the threat of war has been the principal engine to our society. Now the war is over. Or is it? Can we afford to give up our—well, cozy unremitting war? Why not—ah, the brilliance, the simplicity!—instead of shrinking, expand our phantom empire in Europe by popping everyone into NATO? No reason to have any particular enemy, though, who knows, if sufficiently goaded, Russia might again be persuaded to play Great Satan in our somewhat dusty chamber of horrors.

  With an expanded NATO, our armsmakers—if not workers—are in for a bonanza. As it is, our sales of weapons were up 23 percent last year, to $11.3 billion in orders; meanwhile, restrictions on sales to Latin America are now being lifted. Chile, ever menaced by Ecuador, may soon buy as many as twenty-four American-made F-16 jet fighters. But an expanded NATO is the beauty part. Upon joining NATO, the lucky new club member is obliged to buy expensive weapons from the likes of Lockheed Martin, recently merged with Northrop Grumman. Since the new members have precarious economies—and the old ones are not exactly booming—the American taxpayer, a wan goose that lays few eggs, will have to borrow ever more money to foot the bill, which the Congressional Budget Office says should come to $125 billion over fifteen years with the U.S. paying $19 billion. Yeltsin correctly sees this as a hostile move against Russia, not to mention an expensive renewal of the Cold War, while our very own Delphic oracle, the ancient Janus-like mandarin George Kennan, has said that such an expansion could “inflame nationalistic anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion.”

  Where once we were told it was better to be dead than Red, now we will be told that it is better to be broke than—what?—slaves of the Knights of Malta? Meanwhile, conservative think tanks (their salaries paid directly or indirectly by interested conglomerates) are issuing miles of boilerplate about the necessity of securing the Free World from enemies; and Lockheed Martin lobbies individual senators, having spent (officially) $2.3 million for congressional and presidential candidates in the 1996 election.

  For those interested in just how ruinous NATO membership will be for the new members, there is the special report NATO Expansion: Time to Reconsider, by the British American Security Information Council and the Centre for European Security and Disarmament. Jointly published 25 November 1996, the authors regard the remilitarization of the region between Berlin and Moscow as lunacy geopolitically and disastrous economically. Hungary is now aiming at a 22 percent increase in military spending this year. The Czechs and the Poles mean to double their defense spending. The world is again at risk as our “bipartisan” rulers continue loyally to serve those who actually elect them—Lockheed Martin Northrop Grumman, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, General Electric, Mickey Mouse, and on and on. Meanwhile, as I write, the U.S. is secretly building a new generation of nuclear weapons like the W-88 Trident missile. Cost: $4 billion a year.

  There comes a moment when empires cease to exert energy and become symbolic—or existential, as we used to say back in the Forties. The current wrangling over NATO demonstrates what a quandary a symbolic empire is in when it lacks the mind, much less the resources, to impose its hegemony upon former client states. At the end, entropy gets us all. Fun house falls down. Fairground’s a parking lot. “So I awoke, and behold it was a dream.” Pilgrim’s Progress again. But not quite yet.

  It is a truism that generals are always ready to fight the last war. The anachronistic rhetoric at Madrid in July, if ever acted upon, would certainly bring on the next—last?—big war, if only because, in Francis Bacon’s words, “Upon the breaking and shivering of a great state and empire, you may be sure to have wars.”

  Happily, in the absence of money and common will nothing much will probably happen. Meanwhile, there is a new better world ready to be born. The optimum economic unit in the world is now the city-state. Thanks to technology, everyone knows or can know something about everyone else on the planet. The message now pounding over the Internet is the irrelevancy, not to mention sheer danger, of the traditional nation-state, much less empire. Despite currency confusions, Southeast Asia leads the way while the warlords at Peking not only are tolerating vigorous industrial semi-autonomies like Shanghai but also may have an ongoing paradigm in Hong Kong. We do not like the way Singapore is run (hardly our business), but it is, relatively speaking, a greater commercial success than the United States, which might prosper, once the empire’s put out of its misery, in smaller units on the Swiss cantonal model: Spanish-speaking Catholic regions, Asian Confucian regions, consensually united mixed regions with, here and there, city-states like New York–Boston or Silicon Valley.

  In the next century, barring accident, the common market in Europe will evolve not so much into a union of ancient bloodstained states as a mosaic of homogenous regions and city-states like Milan, say, each loosely linked in trade with a clearinghouse information center at Brussels to orchestrate finance and trade and the policing of cartels. Basques, Bretons, Walloons, Scots who want to be rid of onerous nation-states should be let go in order to pursue and even—why not?—overtake happiness, the goal, or so we Americans have always pretended to believe, of the human enterprise.

  On that predictably sententious American note, O movers and shakers of the month, let us return to “the wilderness of this world,” recalling the Hippocratic oath, which enjoins doctors: “Above all do no harm.” Hippocrates also wrote, O moved and shaken, “Life is short, but the art is long, the opportunity fleeting, the experiment perilous, the judgment difficult.”

  Vanity Fair

  November 1997

  * IN THE LAIR OF THE OCTOPUS

  In “Murder as Policy” (April 24), Allan Nairn notes, accurately, that the “real role . . . of all U.S. ambassadors [to Guatemala] since 1954 [has been] to cover for and, in many ways, facilitate American support for a killer army.” Nairn’s report on the capers of one Thomas Stroock, a recent viceroy, is just another horror story in a long sequence which it was my . . . privilege? to see begin not in 1954 but even earlier, in 1946, when, at twenty, a first novel just published, I headed south of the border, ending up in Antigua, Guatemala, where I bought a ruined convent for $2,000 (the convent had been ruined, let me say in all fairness, by earthquake and not by the Guatemalan military or even by the U.S. embassy).

  Guatemala was beginning to flourish. The ol
d dictator, Ubico, an American client, had been driven out. A philosophy professor named Arévalo had been elected president in a free election. A democratic socialist or social democrat or whatever, he had brought young people into government, tamed the army, and behaved tactfully with the largest employer in the country, the American company United Fruit.

  Easily the most interesting person in—and out—of the town was Mario Monteforte Toledo. Under thirty, he was a thin, energetic intellectual who wrote poetry. He had a wife in the capital and an Indian girlfriend in Antigua, and when he came to visit, he and I would meet and talk, and talk.

  Mario was President of the Guatemalan Congress and was regarded by everyone as a future president of the republic. In politics he was vaguely socialist. I, of course, reflecting my family’s politics, was fiercely Tory. We had splendid rows.

  Scene: patio of my house. Overhanging it the high wall of the adjacent church of El Carmen. Under a pepper tree, near an ugly square fountain like a horse trough, we would sit and drink beer. He told me the gossip. Then, after a ritual denunciation of the rich and the indifferent, Mario started to talk politics. “We may not last much longer.”

  “We . . . who?”

  “Our government. At some point we’re going to have to raise revenue. The only place where there is any money to be raised is el pulpo.” El pulpo meant the Octopus, also known as the United Fruit Company, whose annual revenues were twice that of the Guatemalan state. Recently workers had gone on strike; selfishly, they had wanted to be paid $1.50 a day for their interesting work.

  “What’s going to stop you from taxing them?” I was naive. This was long ago and the United States had just become the Leader of the Lucky Free World.

  “Your government. Who else? They kept Ubico in power all those years. Now they’re getting ready to replace us.”

  I was astonished. I had known vaguely about our numerous past interventions in Central America. But that was past. Why should we bother now? We controlled most of the world. “Why should we care what happens in a small country like this?”

  Mario gave me a compassionate look—compassion for my stupidity. “Businessmen. Like the owners of United Fruit. They care. They used to pay for our politicians. They still pay for yours. Why, one of your big senators is on the board of el pulpo.”

  I knew something about senators. Which one? Mario was vague. “He has three names. He’s from Boston, I think. . . .”

  “Henry Cabot Lodge? I don’t believe it.” Lodge was a family friend; as a boy I had discussed poetry with him—he was a poet’s son. Years later, as Kennedy’s Ambassador to Vietnam, he would preside over the murder of the Diem brothers.

  As we drank beer and the light faded, Mario described the trap that a small country like Guatemala was in. I can’t say that I took him very seriously. With all the world, except the satanic Soviet Union, under our control it was hardly in our national interest to overthrow a democratic neighbor, no matter how much its government irritated the board of directors of United Fruit. But in those days I was not aware to what extent big business controlled the government of our own rapidly expiring Republic. Now, of course, everyone knows to what extent our subsequent empire, with its militarized economy, controls business. The end result is much the same for the rest of the world, only the killing fields are more vast than before and we make mischief not just with weak neighbors but on every continent.

  Mario had given me the idea for a novel. A dictator (like Ubico) returns from an American exile as the Octopus’s candidate to regain power. I would tell the story through the eyes of a young American war veteran (like myself) who joins the general out of friendship for his son. The more I brooded on the story, the more complexities were revealed. Dark Green, Bright Red. The Greens, father and son, were the Company, and dark figures indeed, haunting the green jungles. Bright Red was not only blood but the possibility of a communist taking power.

  “No novel about—or from—Latin America has ever been a success in English.” As of 1950, my publisher was right.

  Four years after the book was published, Senator Lodge denounced Arévalo’s popularly elected successor, Arbenz, as a communist because, in June 1952, Arévalo had ordered the expropriation of some of United Fruit’s unused land, which he gave to 100,000 Guatemalan families. Arévalo paid the company what he thought was a fair price, their own evaluation of the land for tax purposes. The American Empire went into action, and through the CIA, it put together an army and bombed Guatemala City. U.S. Ambassador John Peurifoy behaved rather like Mr. Green in the novel. Arbenz resigned. Peurifoy wanted the Guatemalan Army’s chief of staff to become president, and gave him a list of “communists” to be shot. The chief of staff declined: “It would be better,” he said, “that you actually sit in the presidential chair and that the Stars and Stripes fly over the palace.”

  Puerifoy picked another military man to represent the interests of company and empire. Since then, Guatemala has been a slaughterground, very bright red indeed against the darkest imperial green. Later, it was discovered that Arbenz had no communist connections, but the “disinformation” had been so thorough that few Americans knew to what extent they had been lied to by a government that had now put itself above law and, rather worse, beyond reason.

  Incidentally, I note that the disinformation still goes on. In the April 9 New York Times (a “recovering” newspaper in recent years), one Clifford Krauss airily says that Guatemala’s Indians have been regularly screwed for 400 years, so what else is new? He gives a tendentious history of the country—purest Langley boilerplate, circa 1955—but omits the crucial 1931–44 dictatorship of Jorge Ubico.

  I must say I find it disconcerting to read in 1995 that “by surrounding himself with Communist Party advisers, accepting arms from Czechoslovakia and building a port to compete with United Fruit’s facilities, Arbenz challenged the United States at the height of the cold war.” God, to think that such evil ever walked the Central American night! “President Eisenhower’s CIA organized a Guatemalan [sic] invasion force and bombed Guatemala City in 1954.”

  Dark Green, Bright Red was just reissued in England. Reviewing it in the Evening Standard, the journalist Patrick Skene Catling writes, “I wish I had read this prophetic work of fiction before my first visit to Guatemala in 1954. Gore Vidal would have helped me to understand how John Peurifoy . . . was able to take me up to the roof of his embassy to watch . . . the air raids without anxiety, because he and the CIA knew exactly where the bombs were going to fall.”

  A final note—of bemusement, I suppose. I was at school with Nathaniel Davis, who was our Ambassador in Chile at the time of Allende’s overthrow. A couple of years later Davis was Ambassador to Switzerland and we had lunch at the Berne embassy. I expressed outrage at our country’s role in the matter of Chile. Davis “explained” his role. Then he asked, “Do you take the line that the United States should never intervene in the affairs of another country?” I said that unless an invasion was being mounted against us in Mexico, no, we should never intervene. Davis, a thoughtful man, thought; then he said, “Well, it would be nice in diplomacy, or in life, if one could ever start from a point of innocence.” To which I suppose the only answer is to say—Go! Plunge ever deeper, com-mit more crimes to erase those already committed, and repeat with Macbeth, “I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

  The Nation

  5 June 1995

  * WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE

  Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution requires government agencies to submit their budgets at regular intervals to Congress for review. Neither the CIA nor the DIA does this.* Occasionally, at the dark of the moon, they will send someone up to the Hill to disinform Congress, and that’s that. After all, to explain what they actually do with the money that they get would be a breach of national security, the overall rubric that protects so many of them from criminal indictments. Although most Americans now think that the CIA was c
reated at Valley Forge by General Washington, this unaccountable spy service was invented less than half a century ago, and since that time we have been systematically misinformed about the rest of the world for domestic policy reasons (remember Russia’s outstanding economic surge in 1980?). Intelligence is an empty concept unless directly related to action. In a war, knowledge of the enemy’s troop movements is all-important. In peacetime, random intelligence-gathering is meaningless, when not sinister.

  Since our rulers have figured that one out, they have done their best to make sure that we shall never be at peace; hence, the necessity of tracking enemies—mostly imaginary ones, as the Pentagon recently revealed in its wonderfully wild scenarios for future wars. Since Communism’s ultimate crime against humanity was to go out of business, we now have no universal war to conduct except the one against drugs (more than $20 billion was wasted last year on this crusade). As there is now no longer sufficient money for any of these “wars,” there is no longer a rationale for so many secret services unless the Feds really come out of the closet and declare war on the American people, the ultimate solution: after all, one contingency plan in Ollie North’s notebook suggested that in a time of crisis, dusky-hued Americans should be sequestered.

  I would suggest that the State Department return to its once-useful if dull task of supplying us with information about other countries so that we might know more about what they’d like to buy from us. The hysterical tracking down of nuclear weapons is useless. After all, we, or our treasured allies, have armed all the world to the teeth. We have neither the money nor the brains to monitor every country on earth, which means, alas, that if some evil dictator in Madagascar wants to nuke or biologically degrade Washington, D.C., there’s not much we can do about it. Certainly, the CIA, as now constituted, would be the last to know of his intention, though perhaps the first to get the good of his foul plot. I would abandon all the military-related secret services and I would keep the FBI on a tight leash—no more dirty tricks against those who dislike the way that we are governed, and no more dossiers on those of us who might be able to find a way out of the mess we are in, best personified by the late J. Edgar Hoover and best memorialized by that Pennsylvania Avenue Babylonian fortress that still bears his infamous name.