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In
his classic study of noninterventionist or "isolationist"
thought, Not
to the Swift, historian Justus
Doenecke takes note of a phenomenon that might be called
"Asialationism" – conservative politicians and publicists
of the postwar era who were opposed to meddling in the intrigues
of Europe but saw Asia as the equivalent of the long-vanished
American frontier, and the East as the natural arena of American
expansionism. In the postwar world, the old America
Firsters "became concentrated less and less upon withdrawal
from the world's passions and battles, and more and more upon
the most hazardous commitments on the Asian continent." The
Asialationists of today don't much like the US military occupation
of the Balkans, but the military occupation of Japan, South
Korea, and Okinawa are "vital" American interests. Putin is
a pussycat, but the "Chicoms," in these circles, are a looming
presence, a rising challenge to American hegemony that must
be "contained."
THE
ANTIDOTE
In
the 1950s, as the cold war delivered the conservative movement
to the tender mercies of various ex-communist and pseudo-Trotskyist
charlatans, still a minority within a minority retained the
old faith. Doenecke recounts that, even at the height of the
cold war hysteria, the "genuine outsiders" like Lawrence
Dennis, the seditiously acerbic mulatto intellectual,
historian Harry
Elmer Barnes, essayist Garet
Garrett and precious few others "called in vain for a
return to a more consistent and cautious ideology." Garrett,
the most lyrical and bitter of this Old Right band, wondered
aloud: "How could we lose China or Europe, since they never
belonged to us?" The question was drowned out by the strident
voices of the Cold War chorus, on the liberal "anti-Communist"
left as well as the right, and not asked again for half a
century. Now that the cold war is over, Chalmers
Johnson has raised this question with renewed urgency
in Blowback:
The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Metropolitan
Books, 268 pp., $26.00), a "must-read" book that is the perfect
antidote for present-day Asialationism
PRISONERS
OF HISTORY
In
1952, Garrett opined that by the time we discover our Republic
has become an Empire "it may be already too late to do anything
about it. That is to say, a time comes when Empire finds itself
a prisoner of history." There is the same sense of irony and
self-inflicted tragedy in Johnson's indictment of American
globalism. "Many may, as a start, find it hard to believe
that our place in the world even adds up to an empire," he
writes. "But only when we come to see our country as both
profiting from and trapped within the structures of an empire
of its own making will it be possible for us to explain a
great many elements of the world that otherwise perplex us."
"AS
YE SOW . . ."
Johnson,
president of the Japan Policy
Research Institute, presents his general theme by illustrating
it with examples in his area of expertise, the nations of
the Pacific Rim. The book opens by examining the ugly spectacle
of Imperial America in the miniature model of Okinawa. Johnson
paints a vivid portrait of the island's fate as an exploited
and thoroughly trashed outpost of empire, where rape, robbery,
and traffic accidents involving US military personnel surpass
the crime rates of our own inner cities. Chapters on Indonesia,
the two Koreas, China, and Japan illustrate the overarching
theme of "blowback," succinctly summed up in the old biblical
injunction that "as ye sow, so shall ye reap." "Blowback"
means not just terrorist attacks on the multitude of US military
bases and other targets abroad, but the not-so-long-range
economic and political consequences of imperial overstretch.
In this ambitious book, Johnson presents the outlines of an
alternative, non-Marxist theory of American imperialism: "Marx
and Lenin were mistaken about the nature of imperialism,"
he avers. "It is not the contradictions of capitalism that
lead to imperialism but imperialism that breeds some of the
more important contradictions of capitalism. When these contradictions
ripen, as they must, they create devastating economic crises."
JAPAN'S
'THIRD WAY'
Particularly
fascinating is Johnson's analysis of how the cold war distorted
the global economy, and hollowed out America's industrial
base, leading to malinvestment and subsequent overcapacity
in our East Asian satellites. Japan is a prime case in point.
During the cold war era, Japan's strategic value outweighed
– in the eyes of US political leaders and economic planners
– its growing role as an economic competitor. Americans
provided open access to their markets without expecting or
demanding reciprocity, while the Japanese supinely accepted
their role as a eunuch state, disarmed but kept fat and happy
by their American overlords. As what Johnson calls a "developmental
state," along with the other Asian "tigers," Japan developed
its own variety of mercantilist capitalism, a "third way"
between the socialism of the Soviet bloc and what Johnson
deems American-style "laissez-faire."
IMPERIALIST
ECONOMICS
This
Nipponese "third way," however, was not an ideological alternative,
but the survival mechanism of a defeated people. Japanese
industrial policy, set by a permanent and unelected bureaucracy,
was geared to serve the interests of producers, not consumers.
Giant cartels, or zaibatsu, stood at the apex of an
export-driven economy, churning out inexpensive manufactured
goods for the US market and making their own people pay ten
times the world market price for their number one food staple,
rice. Other Asian nations, huddled under the US defense umbrella,
followed the Japanese example, South Korea and Taiwan being
the exemplars. Imperialism distorted the normal evolution
of these developing nations, and made them economically dependent
on their political and especially their military relationship
with the US. This peculiar form of imperial symbiosis had
a debilitating effect on both the Americans and the Japanese:
it led to the deindustrialization of America and a great deal
of Japanese malinvestment. In America, the deterioration of
the steel, auto, and other heavy industries created a "Rust
Belt" and decimated the ranks of working class families: in
Japan, MITI economic planners manipulated the controls of
their industrial policy machine, reducing interest rates to
zero percent, and creating a world-historic "bubble" that
burst around 1998, when the Japanese economy plunged into
recession.
BURDEN
OF EMPIRE
MITI's
economic planners, rather than undertake needed reforms –
which would have meant the wholesale restructuring of the
Japanese economy – fell back on what they knew: they
would export their way out of their predicament. Resisting
pressures to open their markets to American goods, the Japanese
continued to develop the fine art of economic warfare behind
a wall of protective tariffs, taxes, and other barriers to
free trade. In trade negotiations with the US government,
the Japanese held the trump card: would the Americans prefer
that suddenly impoverished Japanese holders of US government
securities converted their assets to cash? This would be the
ultimate – and, perhaps, the most destabilizing –
form of "blowback" possible: the bursting of the American
bubble and the beginning of a worldwide economic meltdown.
This is the true meaning of "globalization," the internationalist
buzzword of the moment: the US is being held hostage by its
own satellites, a prisoner of history and the hubris of its
leaders. Johnson's powerful thesis is that we are bound to
buckle under the burden of empire, it is only a matter of
time before the American Imperium goes the way of its Roman,
British, and Soviet predecessors.
THE
SOVIET PARADIGM
Johnson's
critique of America's global empire as comparable, in form
and function, to its Soviet counterpart is sure to enrage
those old cold warriors who rank the sin of "moral equivalence"
as a kind of blasphemy. Johnson is glad to cede to them the
moral high ground while making the vital point that this make
no difference whatsoever in analyzing how our system of client
states has actually functioned. The case of South Korea is
especially illuminating – and newsworthy, as we witness
the rise of a new Korean nationalism and the momentum of reunification
erasing borders, political structures, and inter-state alliances
born at the height of the cold war. In his chapter on South
Korea, Johnson likens the Kwangju
uprising of 1980 to the suppression of the Hungarian
revolution of 1956, with the only difference being that
the Soviets used their own troops while we depended on our
South Korean surrogates. When a South Korea general headed
off democratic elections with a coup, in 1980, and imposed
martial law; student protesters in Kwangju were bayoneted
by elite South Korean military forces who had been withdrawn
from the DMZ with much more than tacit US consent: as Johnson
shows, quoting recently-released cables to and from then-US
ambassador William J. Gleysteen, the
US coordinated the bloody crushing of the Kwangju rebellion
just as surely as the Kremlin planted its jackboot on the
neck of Imre
Nagy and the Hungarian revolutionaries. During the cold
war, South Korea had no more choice to opt out of its military
alliance with the US than the nations of the Warsaw Pact were
free to leave the Warsaw Pact.
SOUTH
KOREA – AN AMERICAN PROVINCE
This
inability to get out from under the "protection" of the US
hegemon is even more pronounced in the post-cold war era,
when there is nothing to protect South Korea against except
the accelerating implosion of North Korean communism. As President
Kim
Dae Jung, a former dissident who served time in jail for
proposing direct talks with North Korea, holds up the promise
of reunification
as an achievable goal, in the imperial city of Washington
the lords of the New World Order are getting nervous. In April
of 1997, Johnson reminds us, defense secretary William Cohen
declared in a visit to Seoul that American troops would stay
stationed on the peninsula even if North and South Korea were
reunified – a statement that was met with widespread
shock, at the time, not only by the Chinese but by the South
Koreans, who increasingly view the GIs in their midst as more
of a threat than North Korea's million-man army.
SEOUL'S
SEARCH FOR NUKES
Johnson's
account of the origins and development of South Korea as a
US client state emphasizes the underlying current of Korean
nationalism that is just now breaking through to the surface.
General
Park Chung-hee's coup d'etat of 1961 ushered in a decade
of what appeared, on the surface, to be an era of seamless
coordination between Washington and Seoul, with the dominance
of the former and the latter's dependence completely beyond
question. But Johnson reveals another side to the history
of this relationship which is little-known in the West yet
instrumental in understanding what is happening in Korea today.
Johnson tells the story of how Gen. Park, seeing the fate
of America's South Vietnamese clients, was determined that
South Korea could go it alone – by acquiring nuclear
weapons. South Korea launched a nuclear weapons program that
was supposed to bear radioactive fruit in 1985 – but
Park was assassinated before the project really got off the
ground.
ANOTHER
"LONE GUNMAN"?
It
was, of course, just a coincidence that his assassin was South
Korea's chief of intelligence, Kim
Jae-kyu, who just happened to be Park's main liasion with
Washington. The two were having dinner, and sometime between
the appetizers and the drinks the KCIA
chief pulled out a pistol shot Park in the head, and wounded
a bodyguard. The official story is that he did it to protest
the "repression against the people" – a repression implemented
by none other than the assassin himself, the commander of
Park's political police. While Americans have long since explained
away virtually all political assassinations by means of the
"lone gunmen" story, Koreans are understandably more skeptical.
THE
GERMAN ROAD
The
"isolationism" and "xenophobia" said to permeate the North
is in reality a national characteristic, a stubborn willfulness
that resents foreign intrusion and is the legacy of a whole
series of Japanese invasions beginning in the 1500s. Park
was an anti-Communist, but he was a Korean first. The same
nationalism underlies the ostensibly Marxist ideology of the
North: Kim
Jong Il may be the hereditary "communist" monarch of the
North Korean workers paradise, but it turns out he is also
a Korean patriot. Starvation is said to induce clarity of
mind, at least in the first stages, and perhaps the effects
of the famine are being personally felt by North Korea's "Great
Leader." In such circumstances, a square meal comes before
ideology. Although widely characterized as being not ready
for prime time, he is proving his mettle as a world leader
by outflanking the US and China – neither of which are
all that eager to see a united Korea. The wily Kim Jong Il,
by endorsing reunification and entering into serious negotiations,
is betting on making as "soft" a landing as his German counterparts.
When the Berlin
Wall fell, the ruling Socialist
Unity Party (SED), once a bastion of orthodox Stalinism,
quickly mutated into the Party
of Democratic Socialism (PDS), which in practice serves
as the far left wing of the German
Social Democracy. As the artificial wall separating the
two Koreas begins to crack, the Korean Communists could easily
take the same road.
THE
"SOFT" OPTION
The
same military and political establishment that insists on
indefinitely maintaining our cold war "forward" stance on
the Korea peninsula, as a permanent obstacle to Korean reunification,
also sees China as an emerging threat to American hegemony
that must be either "engaged" or "contained" – but never
adjusted to. The irony, Johnson points out, is that a united
Korea could well provide a regional counter-balance to this
alleged Chinese threat. The author's view of China reflects
his view of Asia's capitalist developmental states –
Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and even Japan – that
they are "soft" authoritarian states. These states, while
nominally democratic, are really ruled over by unelected bureaucrats,
with varying degrees of popular participation and consent.
China is an example of "soft totalitarianism," where the media
is openly controlled by the state; Johnson contrasts this
with the Japanese model of speech control, where "such freedoms
exist on paper but are attenuated in part by cartelization
of the news media – press clubs in Japan can impose collective
or individual penalties on journalists who report news that
irritates the state." Elections are formally held under both
systems, with China's soft totalitarians using police methods
to ensure the outcome and Japan's soft authoritarian regime
employing more subtle but no less effective means to guarantee
a similar result, achieving its ends "through peer pressure,
bullying, fear of ostracism, giving priority to group norms,
and eliciting conformity through social sanctions of various
kinds."
CULTURE
TRUMPS IDEOLOGY
Under
both types of regimes, elections are mere formalities, and
the economic reforms in China have further blurred the differences
between the "socialist" and "capitalist" wings of developing
Asia. Beneath the thin veneer of ideology, the underlying
character of the various national cultures shapes the social
and political evolution of the Asian tigers, including that
giant mastadon,
China. Johnson points out that "the real economic model for
mainland China, although never mentioned for all the obvious
reasons, is undoubtedly neither Japan nor South Korea but
Taiwan" under the Nationalists,
where thriving state-party enterprises comprise half the nation's
wealth. Left to themselves, Johnson suggests, China and Taiwan
could come to some peaceful conclusion to their long-drawn
out family feud – a possibility that once seemed more
likely than the prospect of Korean reunification.
THE
WALL STREET – TREASURY COMPLEX
The
cold war ended, but Americans did not go home: instead they
stayed to guard the frontiers of empire against an enemy that
has long since vanished. More than that: they launched a new
holy war, this time a whole series of "humanitarian" interventions
in tandem with an ideological campaign to impose "free market
democracy" on the rest of the world. Johnson dismisses the
overrated Francis
Fukuyama, the "right"-Hegelian
Deep Thinker of "The
End of History" fame, as "the apologist for America."
Fukuyama's thesis that history ended with the invention of
McDonald's and the
advent of MTV – and
that this, along with the apparent death of communism, would
have to mean that there was no alternative to Western democratic
capitalism – or, at least, no legitimate one that deserved
to be let alone to develop in its own way. But the universalism
of Western elites would never permit such a strategy of benign
neglect. Johnson, citing Jagdish
Bhagwati, a fervent free trader and former GATT official,
points to the existence of the "Wall Street-Treasury Complex"
(WTC) that is "comparable to the military-industrial complex,
which contributes little to the global economy but profits
enormously from pretending that it does."
THE
NEW UTOPIANS
With
US hegemony in the military realm assured, and the public
largely unaware of its government's machinations, "government
officials, economic theorists, and members of the Wall Street-Treasury
Complex launched an astonishingly ambitious, even megalomaniacal
attempt to make the rest of the world adopt American economic
institutions and norms. One could argue that the project reflected
the last great expression of eighteenth-century Enlightenment
rationalism, as idealistic and utopian as the paradise of
pure communism that Marx envisioned." This megalomania is
reflected not just in Fukuyama's
hubristic thesis, but in the Clinton
Doctrine that commits the US to the forcible eradication
of "racism" and "ethnic intolerance" even if we have to invade
the every country on earth to do it – invading not only
militarily, as in Kosovo, but also launching economic attacks
on the currency of targeted nations, such as Indonesia, Thailand,
and Malaysia, with oddly coordinated strikes at the value
of local currencies. "Although there is no evidence that Washington
hatched a conspiracy to extend the scope of its global hegemony,"
writes Johnson, "a sense of moral superiority on the part
of some and of opportunism on the part of others more than
sufficed to create a similar effect." It wouldn't be the first
time government worked in tandem with finance capital to achieve
common political and financial objectives.
THE
REAL 'THIRD WAY'
I
can't say I agree with all of the author's policy prescriptions
– he calls for "managed trade," which is what we have
now – but what is important is the broad sweep
of his analysis of militarized state capitalism as the inevitable
outcome of an imperial foreign policy. His critique of Western
capitalism as no less cartelized than the zaibatsu
of Japan is sharp, at times: he notes disdainfully the
"crony capitalism" that enabled the government
bailout of Long-Term Capital Management, a huge hedge
fund gone broke headed by former Federal Reserve vice chairman
David
W. Mullins. As the International Monetary Fund goes on
the rampage in the Far East, decimating national economies
and turning crisis into catastrophe, Johnson acerbically notes
that "globalization seems to boil down to the spread of poverty
to every country except the United States."
ROGUE
SUPERPOWER
There
is much
talk of "rogue
states" these days, and what to do about them: but the
real problem, as Johnson points out, is that the world is
afflicted by a "rogue
superpower" – the US. Lecturing, threatening, and
overtly seeking to overthrow any and all regimes that fail
to bow low enough before the American hegemon, Madam secretary
Albright travels the world braying about the virtues of "democracy"
and "free markets": in February 1998, explaining why it was
necessary to launch cruise missiles against Iraq, Mad Madeleine
launched into one of her trademark tirades: "If we have to
use force, it is because we are America," she bawled. "We
are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see farther
into the future."
PYRRHIC
"VICTORY"
These
people see no further than the next election, the next indictment,
or the next big campaign contribution from a weapons contractor.
Like such Old Right critics of the Warfare State as John
T. Flynn, Johnson sees the role of the arms lobby and
an ever-growing military establishment as "the indispensable
instrument for maintaining the American empire." We have won
a post-cold war arms race, he avers, "that had no other participants,"
all to feed the voracious appetite of an American military
machine that has become autonomous, an imperial Praetorian
Guard armed with thermonuclear weapons – and ready for
a Caesar.
CRISIS
OF EMPIRE
The
unintended consequences of the cold war, predicts Johnson,
will linger well into the 21st century, the history
of which will in large part be an account of the blowback
from the twentieth. Only an awareness of the crisis of empire
among American citizens can hope to avert or at least ameliorate
it: Our leaders believe 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," but "they might better
ponder the creativity and growth that would be unleashed in
only the United States would relax its suffocating embrace."
The publication of Johnson's eloquent plea for a foreign policy
more like the Founding Fathers' and less like that of, say,Caligula,
or Charlemagne,
is really a case of good timing, for the crisis of empire
predicted in these pages seems almost upon us. "Although it
is impossible to say when this game will end," he writes,
"there is little doubt about how it will end." That it could
end differently, that we could pull back from the abyss of
empire before it's too late, is a growing possibility as more
Americans wake up to the dangers of a rapacious American globalism.
Certainly our chances are improved by the addition of Johnson's
voice to the growing chorus calling for restraint.
A
NOTE TO OUR READERS
From
time to time, we get letters of protest from angry readers
who object to links that bring them to material of which they
do not approve. In linking to an article on a liberal or left-wing
site, for example, we may expose our conservative readers
to views they find objectionable – because alongside
an article opposing, say, military aid to Colombia they find
an article promoting "gay rights," or support for Al Gore,
or whatever. On the other hand, we also get letters from lefties
and libertarians who have a fit whenever we link to an article
on a right-wing site that may contain material they find reprehensible.
They want to know: "Why are you promoting attacks on gays,
minorities, and women?" etc. etc. ad nauseum. These
whiners really need to get a life. If mere exposure to dissenting
opinions is enough to unnerve them, then the First Amendment
is doomed in any case and we might as well close up shop.
Aside from that rather depressing observation, however, let
it be known that we cannot take responsibility for all the
material that appears on the sites we link to. While there
are indeed some sites that I will not, on principle,
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