Imperialism 101

Other old, retired folks look forward to visiting places they have never been. My interest is in books I feel like I should already have read. I try to catch up, to no apparent purpose. The latest one that I drifted into by chance, because I was sick of Philip Roth, is Perry Anderson’s American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers. I’m very glad I did. I think now I will have to read more of his books. I suppose Lineages of the Absolute State is one of the top ones, since I have heard of it.

One surprising bit is Anderson’s enthusiasm for Gabriel Kolko, a name I of course remember from my student days. (I met his distant relative Jed online, which is very cool.) He was all the rage among radical history students, but I was an English major dedicated to doing as little work as possible. Other Anderson faves include Robert W. Tucker and Robert Brenner. Kolko and Brenner, the latter with whom I also traded a few emails, are next on my reading list. Who knows, they might turn me back into a raving Marxist.

The most surprising bit early on in the book is the demolition job Anderson performs on George Kennan, whom it turns out was one nasty mo’fo, very assiduous in garnishing his reputation as a humane, rational moderate. (In fact, a characteristic of the many thinkers in Anderson’s survey is the urge to keep their reputations sanitized.) An exegesis of Kennan’s own private papers, hidden from general public access for years, reveals a raving racist, antisemitic, anti-democratic swine.

Kennan and followers are at pains to uphold the notion of a balance of power, which sounds sober and reasonable, because that is how it is supposed to sound. The reality is a commitment to aggression, a dedication to ever-expanding U.S. power in the world, heavily motivated by commercial interests. As one author is quoted, no country is really interested in a balance of power, unless the balance favors them by a significant margin.

In other words, the entire “containment” jive at the heart of historic U.S. foreign policy declarations, from FDR to Obama, is just a veil for ceaseless, conniving aggression. It is no different in basic motivation from what used to be called “liberation rollback,” which was recognized as an explicitly aggressive, adventurist posture.  

Containment and rollback were two sides of the same coin. The rhetoric differed, but not the underlying policy. The good cop/bad cop analogy comes to mind. Another euphemism for containment enshrined in official U.S. documents was “a policy of gradual and calculated coercion.”

The two priorities of “containment” after World War II were solidifying U.S. control of once-and-future economic powerhouses Western Europe and Japan. The utility of both areas as forward emplacements of military bases, with respect to the USSR and the PRC, was another important consideration.

More contemporaneously we have the neo-con/realist/liberal trichotomy. But liberal internationalism or humanitarian interventionism are just nice ways of cloaking whatever insane U.S. policy is in motion. We should remember that under Bill Clinton, a resolution to overthrow Saddam Hussein passed the Senate unanimously, and in the House by a huge margin.

Are there really any differences between neo-cons and the so-called “realists”? I am less certain now. In a recent tweet I noted an interview with Henry Kissinger in the Wall Street Journal, wherein HK criticizes U.S. Cold War-style yammering about China. Kissinger is supposed to be of the realist persuasion. The realist school’s rhetoric is easier for an anti-imperialist to take because it tends to be free of self-righteous expressions of peace and love. The realists invite criticism on practical grounds, whereas for neo-con types, disagreement is tantamount to moral deficiency.

A bracing parallel to the demolition of Kennan is the continuity Anderson establishes, from FDR to Obama. It’s a clean sweep of any liberal pretentions to human rights in foreign policy. When you hear human rights from a USG representative or one of their legion of intellectual pimps, you can expect a defense of aggression of some kind. Now instead of the Cold War we have the Global War on Terror, merely the newest blank check for U.S. dominance exercises throughout the world.

The FDR bits reminded me of the diary of Henry Wallace that I read over 30 years ago. I still recall his discussion of post-war planning, for how the U.S. would run the world. Mind you, this was before D-Day, after the Nazis had devastated Russia, murdered millions of Jews, the Red Army was doing massive payback, while the U.S. was still dithering in opening a second front in Western Europe.

Then there is my other pet peeve, President Barack Hussein Obama, whom Anderson singles out for the avid use of killer drones, brutal treatment of whistleblowers like Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, deployment of the Stuxnet computer virus against Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the violent deposing of Libya’s autocratic ruler Muammar Gaddafi. Even the peace-and-love Occupy Wall Street movement came in for repression under the presidency of liberal stalwart Obama.

There is a prevailing notion that purports to distinguish Obama from the U.S. foreign policy establishment, said to be described by BHO as “the Blob.” Going by Anderson, the differences are tactical. Obama avoided the Syrian quagmire and cooled things down with Iran, but otherwise nourished the U.S. national security state and supported its objectives. Obama’s foreign policy terrier Ben Rhodes is a regular guest on MSNBC.

I feel obliged to mention a few lower-level, radical/liberal sell-outs. There is Samantha Power, author of a well-received book on mass murder who enthusiastically enlisted in “the Blob.” Another is Walter Russell Mead, who became a messianic promoter of U.S. imperialism after launching himself with a contrary take in his first big book.

I happened to debate Mead on a radio show out of Los Angeles on the wisdom of the Iraq invasion. He was all for it, exclaiming that if the U.S. failed to depose Saddam Hussein, Iraq would be taken over by Al Qaeda. Of course, this was close to the opposite of the truth.

In one respect, Obama’s bamboozlement of progressive expectations, his vindication of Adolph Reed, should not have been surprising. Hoping for something different would be like hoping the president of Exxon wouldn’t drill for oil.

In a previous post, I reviewed Robert Kagan’s book, Imperial Grunts, which provides a glowing account of the president’s secret army of assassins. I say ‘president’ because the operations of this apparatus have proven to be beyond the reach of the Congress, isolated from any sort of democratic accountability. A cute euphemism Anderson cites from a Thomas P.M. Barnett with respect to AFRICOM, one division of this army, is a “pistol-packing Peace Corps.”

One takeaway from the Deep State’s special bodies of armed men is the unlikely prospects for any sort of violent effort to “smash the state.” I’m not talking about the working-class people on food stamps who make up the conventional armed forces. The secret army is made up of well-paid specialists in counter-insurgency and violence, either in public service or in the employ of contractors. As such, they are the last bastion of power for the capitalist State. What could overcome them?

Anderson’s text winds up around 2016. He does fall into some major holes. One is his expectation that nothing much would jump off in Ukraine. He does credit NATO with pressuring Russia (but see the reference to Exxon above) and offers no apologies for Putin. He well anticipates the economic rise of China, but barely notices India. Nor is he at all prepared for Trump and other 21^st Century authoritarians. None of us were, as far as I can recall.

Then there is the vocabulary. Another phrase I recall reading many years ago by a critic I’ve forgotten about an author I’ve also forgotten (might have been James Gould Cozzens) was something like, “reading X, my vocabulary was enlarged, but not improved.” Anderson has been mocked for his use of words like alembrication, edulcoration, and eupeptic.

Most broadly, American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers is good preparation for an overview of imperialism, but ages less well in failing to anticipate the new, morbid symptoms epitomized by the likes of Trump and the inter-imperialist rivalries more recently jelling involving Russia and China. I’d say the high-level context badly needs supplementation with regard to these two factors.