The Untold History of the United States
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Chinese leaders accused the United States of trying to encircle them, insisting that it was the United States, not China, that was projecting military power in the region. China, they maintained, had tried to peacefully resolve its disputes with its neighbors. They expressed outrage over Obama’s approval of $5.8 billion in arms sales to Taiwan after having approved $6.4 billion the previous year. Congressional Republicans demanded even more, to which a senior administration official replied that compared to Bush, Obama had “provided twice the amount in half the time.” The People’s Daily, the official Chinese newspaper, informed the United States that it could forget about Chinese cooperation on other global issues: “American politicians are totally mistaken if they believe they can, on the one hand, demand that China behave as a responsible great power and cooperate with the United States on this and that issue, while on the other hand irresponsibly and wantonly harm China’s core interests.”193 The Chinese were also angry over other perceived slights, including Obama’s decision to meet with the Dalai Lama after choosing not to do so earlier in his administration when he was trying to improve relations with China.
The United States had also let slip that it was developing a new war strategy for Asia called the AirSea Battle Concept. Although highly classified, mention of it first appeared in the United States’ 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review. It was designed as a way to coordinate U.S. naval and air forces to counter China’s growing ability to disrupt the United States’ high-tech weapons and communications systems and thereby interfere with its ability to project its military power in a conflict. U.S. military leaders pointed to the threat from China’s “anti-access” strategy, which would limit U.S. ability to militarily aid allies. The fear, according to Andrew Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), was that such Chinese action would give it control of sea lanes in the Western Pacific.194 Speaking at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that such threats “appear designed to neutralize the advantages the US military has enjoyed since the end of the cold war—unfettered freedom of movement and the ability to project power to any region across the globe by surging aircraft ships, troops and supplies.”195
Chinese leaders understood that it was actually their shipping that was being threatened by tightened U.S. control over the South China Sea through which tankers carrying most of China’s oil imports passed. They pledged to resolve outstanding regional differences peacefully. But they also made clear that they would defend their interests. In a December address to China’s Central Military Commission, President Hu Jintao told the navy to “make extended preparations for warfare.”196
Also included in that calculation was war with the United States. When CSBA, one of the defense think tanks that had been gaming large-scale warfare with China for the Pentagon, issued a report on the topic in 2010, “the PLA (China’s People’s Liberation Army) went nuts,” according to a U.S. official who had just returned from Beijing. An internal report prepared for the Marine Corps commandant warned that “an Air-Sea Battle-focused Navy and Air Force would be preposterously expensive to build,” and, if used in war between the United States and China, would produce “incalculable human and economic destruction.”197
In pushing the confrontation with China, the United States and its Pacific allies were playing a very dangerous game. Their economic dependence on China made them particularly vulnerable to retaliation. As the holder of over $1 trillion in U.S. treasury bonds, China had the U.S. economy by the throat. Could the United States really afford to risk a hostile relationship with its biggest creditor? And, complicating matters further, China had replaced the United States as the biggest trading partner of all the Asian nations. In 2004, the United States had been the largest trading partner of the ten nations that comprised ASEAN. By 2011, China was first and the United States had fallen to fourth. In December, Japan and China announced that their currencies would convert directly into each other, obviating the need for each to buy dollars before converting them into the other’s currency. Such a move not only would expand trade between the two nations, it represented an important step toward making the yuan an alternate reserve currency to the dollar as China desired.
Undeterred, the United States persisted in the effort to bolster its economic position. In fall 2011, it formed a free trade group, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with allies in Asia, Latin America, and North America. It did not invite China to join, which made Fred Hu, the former chairman of Goldman Sachs in greater China who now chaired the Primavera Capital Group financial advisory firm, wonder, “How can you have a credible trade organization if you exclude the biggest trading nation?”
In a parallel military move, the United States Pacific Command invited Russia and India to participate in a major naval exercise off Hawaii in June 2012. China was not invited to join.198
U.S. hegemonic pretensions remained lofty, but U.S. ability to police Asia and the rest of the globe was constrained by the dimensions of its budget crisis. By 2010, the U.S. was spending $1.6 trillion over revenues in its $3.8 trillion budget. The shortfall was borrowed largely from China and Japan. Debt service alone cost $250 billion. The military budget, including black operations, intelligence, foreign military aid, private contractors, and veterans’ benefits, totaled over $1 trillion. Christopher Hellman of the National Priorities Project calculated that the U.S. actually spends over $1.2 trillion out of its $3 trillion annual budget on “defense,” when all military- and security-related expenses are factored in.199
That figure approximately equaled what the rest of the world spent. Even during the height of the Cold War, the United States spent only 26 percent of the world total. As Congressman Barney Frank observed, “We have fewer enemies and we’re spending more money.” U.S. military spending consumed approximately 44 percent of all U.S. tax revenues. Maintaining bases cost approximately $250 billion. Hiring the Pentagon’s vast army of private contractors, which, according to the Washington Post, totaled 1.2 million people, cost almost as much. New and costly high-tech weapons systems added to the burden. Did all this spending make Americans safer? Frank commented, “I don’t think any terrorist has ever been shot by a nuclear submarine.”200
In 2011, the Obama administration announced plans to reduce the Pentagon budget by at least $450 billion over the coming decade with additional cuts of $500 billion looming if Congress failed to meet other revenue goals. But Obama and Leon Panetta, who had moved from CIA to Defense, made clear that the restructuring would not impinge upon the U.S. shift toward Asia. They rejected proposals to cut the number of aircraft carriers from eleven to ten and planned to increase investment in the long-range stealth bombers and antimissile systems considered essential in combating China as well as armed drones, cyberspace systems, and rapid-deployment aircraft. In June 2012, Panetta notified a conference of defense officials from twenty-eight Asia-Pacific nations that the United States would “rebalance” its forces. By 2020, 60 percent of U.S. naval forces would be in the Pacific and only 40 percent in the Atlantic, a substantial shift from its 50-50 split in 2012. U.S. forces will include, Panetta explained, “six aircraft carriers in this region, a majority of our cruisers, destroyers, Littoral Combat Ships, and submarines.” In case anyone missed the point, Panetta outlined some of the United States’ spending priorities: “We are investing specifically in . . . an advanced fifth-generation fighter, an enhanced Virginia-class submarine, new electronic warfare and communications capabilities, and improved precision weapons—that will provide our forces with freedom of maneuver in areas in which our access and freedom of action may be threatened. We recognize the challenges of operating over the Pacific’s vast distances. That is why we are investing in new aerial-refueling tankers, a new bomber, and advanced maritime patrol and anti-submarine warfare aircraft.” And if that weren’t sufficient, Panetta had the gall to remind listeners, including officials from China, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, that �
�over the course of history, the United States has fought wars, we have spilled blood, we have deployed our forces time and time again to defend our vital interests in the Asia-Pacific region.”201 He insisted, with a straight face, that stepped-up U.S. efforts in the region were not aimed at containing China. Even the New York Times noted that “few in the audience said they believed that.” Indonesia’s foreign minister voiced the views of many who resented U.S. pressure to choose sides, a seeming throwback to John Foster Dulles’s 1950s attacks on nations that refused to choose sides in the Cold War, commenting, “What worries us is having to choose—we don’t want to be put in that position.”202
U.S. plans to militarize the region were coming up against other obstacles as well. Some of America’s Asian allies were confronting the same budgetary constraints that were impeding U.S. efforts. In May 2012, Australia, where Obama had kicked off his Asian tour a few months earlier, announced cuts in defense spending of 10.5 percent or $5.5 billion over the next four years, which, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, would represent the lowest percentage of gross domestic product since 1938. The Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald warned that “Events in Canberra and Washington raise serious questions about the ability of the alliance partners to give effect to their grand pledges to each other. On the Australian side, it is stunningly clear what’s happened. The Gillard government has chosen to reduce Australia’s defence effort to its feeblest in 74 years. . . . The government weighed its priorities, and defence came in at the bottom.”203
For the United States, with the Pacific off the table, defense savings would come, in part, from cutting the size of the army from 570,000 to 490,000 and lowering force levels in Europe. Joining Panetta at the Pentagon in early January 2012, Obama declared, “We’re turning the page on a decade of war. . . . We’ll be able to ensure our security with smaller conventional ground forces. We’ll continue to get rid of outdated Cold War–era systems so that we can invest in the capabilities we need for the future.”204
While cutting defense spending, pulling combat forces out of Iraq, and beginning the drawdown in Afghanistan represented a welcome retreat from the hypermilitarism of the Bush-Cheney years, they did not represent the sharp and definitive break with empire that the world needed to see from the United States and that Obama had been encouraged to pursue by the man who had engineered the end of the Soviet Empire: Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev had pressed Obama to pursue the kind of bold initiatives that had allowed Gorbachev to change the course of history. “America needs perestroika right now . . . ,” he said in 2009, “because the problems he has to deal with are not easy ones.” Gorbachev called for ending the kind of unregulated free market policies that caused the global economic downturn and perpetuated the gap between the world’s rich and poor. The United States, he warned, can no longer dictate to the rest of the world. “Everyone is used to America as the shepherd that tells everyone what to do. But this period has already ended.” He condemned the Clinton and Bush administrations’ dangerous militarization of international politics and urged the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan as Russia had done over twenty years ago when Gorbachev inherited a similarly disastrous and unpopular war.205
As 2012 dawned, the world was in extraordinary flux. U.S. global power had eroded, opening the door to an exciting array of possibilities, some fraught with dangers of their own. Recognizing the extraordinary upheaval that rattled ruling elites across the globe in 2011, Time magazine had just named “The Protester” its person of the year. The spark had actually been ignited in December 2010 when Mohamed Bouazizi, a twenty-six-year-old Tunisian street vendor, having been humiliated by police one too many times, set himself on fire. That simple and desperate act sparked a massive popular rebellion in Tunisia that overthrew the twenty-three-year rule of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The sight of ordinary Tunisians standing up fearlessly to their police state rulers struck a chord with millions who had suffered their own indignities at the hands of corrupt, dictatorial regimes that, more often than not, had been backed and armed by the United States. The movement spread quickly to Algeria, Egypt, and across the Arab world. The WikiLeaks release, beginning in February 2011, of a quarter million U.S. diplomatic cables poured fuel on an already burning fire. Protests in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain were soon spiraling out of government control. Opposition to government- and banker-imposed austerity swept across Europe, most prominently in Spain, Greece, Italy, France, and Britain. Chinese citizens defied their government officials in protests against corruption and inequality. Russians rose up against vote fraud and Vladimir Putin’s autocratic rule. Japanese expressed outrage over government and power company deception in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
And in the United States, the Occupy Wall Street movement brought desperately needed attention to the tremendous and ever growing gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the population—the 99 percent. The Pew Research Center reported in January 2012 that two-thirds of Americans believed that “strong” conflicts existed between rich and poor, a 19 percent increase since Pew’s July 2009 survey. Thirty percent felt there were “very strong conflicts,” a 50 percent jump in two and a half years.206 This was no surprise given the fact that the net worth of the median American family had dropped 39 percent in three years from $126,400 in 2007 to just $77,300 in 2010, according to the Survey of Financial Resources issued every three years by the Federal Reserve. Those without high school diplomas saw their net worth plummet by 54 percent. In 2012, Joseph Stiglitz calculated that the combined $90 billion wealth of the six Walmart heirs equaled that of the bottom 30 percent of Americans.207 The movement also raised profound and troubling questions about U.S. priorities in the aftermath of the financial meltdown. Budget cuts, though often ill-conceived, had forced Americans to reconsider the wisdom of the imperial project itself. At a time when unemployment soared, infrastructure decayed, and social services were decimated, could the United States really afford to maintain its vast global empire? Was it really in the U.S. interest to police the planet? Should the United States ever again invade countries that posed no threat to the American people?
The prospect for reform at home also brightened. The movement, harkening back to the workers’ rights, social justice, and antiwar struggles of the 1930s and 1960s, ignited the imagination of millions across the country, especially America’s youth. Suffused with a sense of utopian possibilities for the first time in decades, Americans began to ponder what a fair, equitable, and just society might look like. No longer would they tolerate the inordinate power and influence the wealthy exercised in dominating all spheres of public and private life. And the impact of the Occupy movement was felt far beyond its own ranks as its egalitarian and redistributionist sentiments reshaped political discourse in the United States. The broadening link between renewed U.S. activism and democratic strivings on a global scale augured well for the future.
But monumental problems exist that demand attention. Global warming threatens the future of life on the planet in ways that only nuclear war had done previously. It is already melting the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps, raising ocean levels, causing floods and droughts, expanding the reach of deadly diseases, and ruining global food and water supplies. The United States itself reels from the effects of record temperatures, disastrous hurricanes, floods, forest fires, and droughts rivaling the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Nor has the nuclear threat by any means abated. The danger of nuclear proliferation, even nuclear anarchy, continues. Nuclear arsenals remain far in excess of the megatonnage that experts believe necessary to trigger a life-extinguishing nuclear winter. And despite Obama’s professed commitment, the prospects for substantial reductions, let alone complete abolition, seem bleak.
In what would presage a remarkable turnaround if it continues, even Barack Obama began showing faint signs of returning to the transformational figure he had appeared to be during the 2008 campaign. Spurred by the Occupy Wall Street movement’s succe
ss in getting out its message, continued Republican intransigence, economic stagnation, budgetary constraints, and tumbling approval ratings, by late 2011 Obama appeared to be regaining some of his old dynamism. Traces of populism crept into his speeches. He openly embraced ending the Iraq War and cutting defense spending, even though both developments had been forced upon him. Was there a chance that he might be undergoing a Kennedyesque road-to-Damascus conversion and realizing how poorly American militarism and imperialism had served the American people and the rest of the world? The prospects looked dim, and his Fort Bragg speech and willingness to sign the extremely dangerous 2012 Defense Authorization bill were not encouraging. What had become apparent was that the real hope for changing the United States—for helping it regain its democratic, egalitarian, and revolutionary soul—lay in U.S. citizens joining with the rebellious masses everywhere to deploy the lessons of history, their history, the people’s history, which is no longer untold, and demand creation of a world that represents the interests of the overwhelming majority, not that of the wealthiest, greediest, and most powerful. Building such a movement is also the only hope to save American democracy from the clutches of an ever-expanding, ever-encroaching national security state. Such tyranny was a threat that America’s revolutionary leaders understood very well. When a woman asked Benjamin Franklin in 1787, after the Constitutional Convention, “Well, Doctor, what have we got—a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin responded with words as timely today as when he uttered them, “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”208