Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

by Chalmers Johnson

  The indispensable instrument for maintaining the American empire is its huge military establishment. Despite the money lavished on it, the endless praise for it in the media, and the overstretch and blowback it generates, the military always demands more. In the decade following the end of the Cold War, military budgets consistently gave priority to an arms race that had no other participants. For example, the Pentagon’s budget for the fiscal year 2000 called for replacing the F-15, “the world’s most advanced aircraft,” with the F-22, also “the world’s most advanced aircraft.” The air force wanted 339 F-22s at $188 million each, three times the cost of the airplane it is replacing. The United States already has 1,094 F-15s, against which there is no equal or more capable aircraft on earth. The last Clinton defense budget included funds for yet more nuclear-attack submarines, for which there is no conceivable use or contingency. They merely provide work for local defense contractors and will join the fleet of America’s “floating Chernobyls,” along with its nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, cruising the seas waiting for an accident to occur.

  The American military at the end of the century is becoming an autonomous system. We no longer have a draft army based on the obligation of citizens to serve their nation. When the Vietnam War exposed the inequities of the draft—for example, the ease with which college students could gain deferments—Congress decided to abolish conscription rather than enforce it in an equitable manner. Today, the military is an entirely mercenary force, made up of volunteers paid salaries by the Pentagon. Although the military still tries to invoke the public’s support for a force made up of fellow citizens, this force is increasingly separated from civilian interests and devoted to military ones.

  Equipped with the most advanced precision-guided munitions, high-performance aircraft, and intercontinental-range missiles, the American armed forces can unquestionably deliver death and destruction to any target on earth and expect little in the way of retaliation. Even so, these forces voraciously demand more and newer equipment, while the Pentagon now more or less sets its own agenda. Accustomed to life in a half-century-old, well-established empire, the corporate interests of the armed forces have begun to take precedence over the older idea that the military is only one of several means that a democratic government might employ to implement its policies. As their size and prominence grow over time, the armed forces of an empire tend to displace other instruments of foreign policy implementation. What also grows is militarism, “a vast array of customs, interests, prestige, actions, and thought associated with armies and wars and yet transcending true military purpose”—and certainly a reasonable description of the American military ethos today.7

  “Blowback” is shorthand for saying that a nation reaps what it sows, even if it does not fully know or understand what it has sown. Given its wealth and power, the United States will be a prime recipient in the foreseeable future of all of the more expectable forms of blowback, particularly terrorist attacks against Americans in and out of the armed forces anywhere on earth, including within the United States. But it is blowback in its larger aspect—the tangible costs of empire—that truly threatens it. Empires are costly operations, and they become more costly by the year. The hollowing out of American industry, for instance, is a form of blowback—an unintended negative consequence of American policy—even though it is seldom recognized as such. The growth of militarism in a once democratic society is another example of blowback. Empire is the problem. Even though the United States has a strong sense of invulnerability and substantial military and economic tools to make such a feeling credible, the fact of its imperial pretensions means that a crisis is inevitable. More imperialist projects simply generate more blowback. If we do not begin to solve problems in more prudent and modest ways, blowback will only become more intense.

  David Calleo, a professor of international politics, has observed, “The international system breaks down not only because unbalanced and aggressive new powers seek to dominate their neighbors, but also because declining powers, rather than adjusting and accommodating, try to cement their slipping preeminence into an exploitative hegemony.”8 I believe that the United States at the end of the twentieth century fits this description. The signs of such an exploitative hegemony are already with us: increasing estrangement between populations and their governments; a determination of elites to hang on to power despite a loss of moral authority; the appearance of militarism and the separation of the military from the society it is supposed to serve; fierce repression (the huge and still growing American prison population and rising enthusiasm for the death penalty may be symptomatic of this); and an economic crisis that is global in nature. History offers few examples of declining hegemons reversing their decline or giving up power peacefully, although Gorbachev’s policies at the end of the Cold War may constitute one. Given that it is close to inconceivable that any American leader could have the authority and vision to act with similar restraint in dealing with our client states (for example, by withdrawing our military from the Korean peninsula), one must conclude that blowback will ultimately produce a crisis that suddenly, wrenchingly impairs or ends America’s hegemonic influence. Given the almost sacred position empire bestows on the American military, it seems unlikely that the crisis will occur in that area. Thus, barring an unforeseen reform movement, it seems most probable that economic contradictions will force the unraveling of the American empire.

  Marx and Lenin were mistaken about the nature of imperialism. It is not the contradictions of capitalism that lead to imperialism but imperialism that breeds some of the most important contradictions of capitalism. When these contradictions ripen, as they must, they create devastating economic crises.

  Once the Cold War had ended and the United States had decided to try to convert its “slipping preeminence into an exploitative hegemony,” it set out to compel every significant economy on earth to remodel itself along American lines. This ignorant project has not only failed but has brought discredit to the very idea of free trade and raised serious questions in the minds of economists in East Asia and throughout the Third World about the motives of the United States in the global economy. The world remains poised on the edge of a possible, United States–induced recession, although the United States itself has thus far been the least affected by the economic crisis. Even if a collapse of global demand is avoided, misguided American economic policies have set back thirty years of economic progress in Southeast Asia and laid the foundation for unpredictable forms of economic, political, and military retaliation by the devastated nations.

  Ashok Nath, executive director of the Asialink Advertising Corporation and a strong voice in Asian business affairs, asks about the United States’ push for globalization: “Is there no way to go but a generic world order in which every country is forced to have the same interpretation of democracy as the U.S.?” “Will speculators, the non-value-adding but crisis-providing segment of ‘modern society,’ continue their activities unbridled?” “Is the U.S., boosted by consumer spending but lacking strong savings, the next bubble economy?”9 Such questions have become ubiquitous in East Asia in the wake of the near economic meltdown. They constitute an antiglobalization time bomb that, if it explodes, could lead to mutually destructive protectionism and a huge contraction of global economic activity.

  The world economy needs leadership to re-create something comparable to the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 to 1971, with fixed exchange rates and controls over the movement of capital. Instead of attempting to homogenize the global economy, we should be championing results-oriented trade of mutual benefit to nations that do not have identical economic systems. Foreign countries with entirely different legal, economic, and political systems do not need the International Monetary Fund to forcibly impose on them what is a dubious form of capitalism even in the United States. The IMF has already shelled out about $200 billion in a futile attempt to repair the damage that the United States’ globalization schemes caused, even as its own meddlin
g in these sick economies has often ended up making them sicker.

  The need to raise incomes in the developing world in order to maintain adequate levels of global demand must also be recognized. Since this almost surely cannot (and probably should not) be done by attempting to institutionalize some version of labor rights on a global scale, the United States should establish minimum-wage levels for the manufacture of goods that are to be exported to our market. As an illustration of the need, the athletic shoe manufacturer Nike proudly announced that effective April 1, 1999, it was increasing entry-level cash wages for its workers in Indonesia by 6 percent.10 Unfortunately, Indonesia had an 80 percent inflation rate for the years 1998 and 1999, and the World Bank projected an inflation rate of 20 percent for the year 2000.

  In February 1999, at the twenty-ninth annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin defended finance capitalism while acknowledging that the world was in “the most serious financial crisis of the last fifty years.”11 Yet he stonewalled pleas for change from world leaders. Later that month, at a meeting of the finance ministers of the G-7 group of advanced industrial democracies in Bonn, Germany, the United States blocked all proposals for reform: it would not countenance capital controls, a “super IMF” that would act as a central bank for all nations, or anything like minimum-wage levels in poor countries. The most it would condone was cuts in interest rates by the central banks of various individual nations in order to stimulate economic activity. The United States instead advocated yet more deregulation of trade and investment.

  Meanwhile, resentment is growing over American exploitation of the global economic crisis. Big American companies are buying up factories and businesses in East Asia and elsewhere at ludicrously low prices. Procter & Gamble, for instance, has picked up several state-of-the-art Korean factories for next to nothing.12 Morgan Stanley, Bankers Trust, Salomon Brothers, and CS First Boston expect returns of around 20 percent on their purchases of real estate loans in Tokyo.13 In Thailand, any number of American investment companies have been buying up service, steel, and energy companies at concessionary prices. In June 1998, a Washington-based merchant bank, the Carlyle Group, sent a group of its executives, led by its adviser, former president George Bush, to Bangkok to “evaluate opportunities.” It plans to invest $500 million in Thailand. Asia Properties, a San Diego firm founded in April 1998, was created specifically “to take advantage of the fire-sale real estate prices along Bangkok’s main thoroughfares.” According to its vice president, “Asia is going through the largest transference of assets in the history of the world.”14 Many East Asians call this “vulture capitalism” and suspect that it was the true purpose of the economic advice given to them in the first place.

  The Americans buying these foreclosed properties in East Asia may believe they are merely responding to the signals of normal market forces, but they would be fools to believe that the sellers agree with them. Countries like Thailand and Indonesia have long been on the receiving end of U.S. pressures to deregulate and open their countries to international investors. As a result of doing so they now find themselves destitute, selling off what they built with their own labor in the years since the Vietnam War ended. It is only a matter of time until the small nations of East Asia get tired of this American bullying and find a suitable leader to create an anti-American coalition.

  In the meantime, the hollowing out of American industry continues unabated. In 1998, the primary case was steel, but the machine tools, chemical, semiconductor, and apparel industries were in the same boat. During 1998, cheap Japanese steel exports to the United States surged some sixteen times above their 1997 level. Even the most efficient American steelmakers, like Nucor of Charlotte, North Carolina, were unable to compete with Japanese cut-rate prices. In the first decade after the Cold War, the U.S. steel industry closed down thirty million tons of productive capacity. Over the past three decades, it has cut its workforce by 400,000 people. Today, it employs only 163,000 workers but pays each of them an average salary of $65,000 a year. As a result of this restructuring and major investments in the most advanced technology, the American steel industry is today competitive with anyone in the world, yet it continues to be overwhelmed by global overcapacity.15

  Perhaps the American policies that are burying American steel made strategic sense during the period from 1950 to 1970, when they also brought real competition to such complacent industries as automobile manufacturing. By December 1998, however, when the Japanese government decided to reinforce protection of its hopelessly inefficient farmers by imposing tariffs of 1,000 percent on imported California rice, American toleration had become purely self-destructive. In 1997, the United States supplied almost half of the 640,000 tons of rice Japan imported, virtually all of it from California’s 2,500 rice farms. The new tariff was the Japanese government’s way of getting around a commitment it made in 1993, in the so-called Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, to import increasing amounts of rice. There is no question that American rice farming is more efficient than Japan’s and that American farmers have matched the varieties of rice favored by Japanese consumers. But the Japanese government makes its consumers pay ten times the world’s price for their main food staple in order to protect the gerrymandered rural voting base of the Liberal Democratic Party.16 Japan can get away with such policies because the United States wants to keep it as a secure staging area for the projection of military power in Asia.

  What is to be done? Were awareness of an impending crisis of empire to rise among American citizens and their leaders, then it would be fairly obvious what first steps at least should be taken: adjust to and support the emergence of China on the global stage; establish diplomatic relations with North Korea and withdraw ground forces from the Korean peninsula; pay the United States’ dues to the United Nations; support global economic diversity rather than globalization; extricate ourselves from our trade-for-military-bases deals with rich East Asian countries, even if they do not want to end them; reemphasize the “defense” in the Department of Defense and make its name fit its mission; unilaterally reduce our stockpile of nuclear warheads to a deterrent level and declare a no-first-use policy; sign and ratify the treaty banning land mines; and sign and ratify the treaty establishing an international criminal court.

  More generally, the United States should seek to lead through diplomacy and example rather than through military force and economic bullying. Such an agenda is neither unrealistic nor revolutionary. It is appropriate for a post–Cold War world and for a United States that puts the welfare of its citizens ahead of the pretensions of its imperialists. Many U.S. leaders seem to have convinced themselves that if so much as one overseas American base is closed or one small country is allowed to manage its own economy, the world will collapse. They might better ponder the creativity and growth that would be unleashed if only the United States would relax its suffocating embrace. They should also understand that their efforts to maintain imperial hegemony inevitably generate multiple forms of blowback. Although it is impossible to say when this game will end, there is little doubt about how it will end.

  World politics in the twenty-first century will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century—that is, from the unintended consequences of the Cold War and the crucial American decision to maintain a Cold War posture in a post–Cold War world. U.S. administrations did what they thought they had to do in the Cold War years. History will record that in some places they did exemplary things; in other places, particularly in East Asia but also in Central America, they behaved no better than the Communist bureaucrats of their superpower competitor. The United States likes to think of itself as the winner of the Cold War. In all probability, to those looking back a century hence, neither side will appear to have won, particularly if the United States maintains its present imperial course.

  FURTHER READING

  After a lifetime spent writing academic books
, I have tried to keep the notes in this one to a minimum in the hope of offering the nonexpert a provocative rather than a pedantic experience. Quotations are cited in the notes, but I believe it might be more useful with regard to general references to offer an annotated list of books, articles, and Internet sites that strike me as particularly helpful and relevant for further reading. These I have grouped under subject headings.

  Arms Sales

  Greider, William. Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace. New York: Public Affairs, 1998.

  A short but powerful introduction to the economic implications of America’s massive military apparatus and the interests of the arms industry.

  Shear, Jeff. The Keys to the Kingdom: The FS-X Deal and the Selling of America’s Future to Japan. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

  A brilliant exposé of “the little state department in the Pentagon” and how and why it transferred the technology of America’s best fighter aircraft to Japan and got nothing in return.