The end of the American empire (1)

Americans like to forget they ever had an empire or to claim that, if they did, the Americans never really wanted one. But the momentum of Manifest Destiny made them an imperial power.

American diplomat, author, and writer, Charles W. Freeman, Jr, who served in the US Foreign Service, and the State and Defense Departments in various capacities for thirty years, before falling victim to a campaign against him by the Israel lobby, because of his outspoken statements against the state terrorism of the illegal Zionist entity and Washington’s blanket American support for its crimes, has written an investigative article titled "End of the American Empire".

I’m here to talk about the end of the American empire. But before I do, I want to note that one of our most charming characteristics as Americans is amnesia. I mean, we are so good at forgetting what we’ve done and where we did it that we can hide our own Easter eggs. Americans like to forget we ever had an empire or to claim that, if we did, we never really wanted one. But the momentum of Manifest Destiny made us an imperial power. It carried us well beyond the shores of the continent we seized from its original aboriginal and Mexican owners. The Monroe Doctrine proclaimed an American sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. But the American empire was never limited to that sphere. In 1854, the US deployed marines to China and Japan, where they imposed our first treaty ports. Somewhat like Guantánamo of today, these were places in foreign countries where our law, not theirs, prevailed, whether they liked it or not. Also in 1854, US gunboats began to sail up and down the Yangtze River – the jugular vein of China – a practice that ended only in 1941, when Japan as well as the Chinese went after us. In 1893, the US engineered regime change in Hawaii. In 1898, it annexed the islands outright. In that same year, we helped Cuba win independence from Spain, while confiscating the Spanish Empire’s remaining holdings in Asia and the Americas, such as Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Beginning in 1897, the US Navy contested Samoa with Germany. In 1899, it took Samoa’s eastern islands, establishing a naval base at Pago Pago.

From 1899 to 1902, Americans killed an estimated 200,000 or more Filipinos who tried to gain independence from us. In 1903, we forced Cuba to cede a base at Guantánamo and detached Panamá from Colombia. In later years, we occupied Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, parts of Mexico, and Haiti. Blatant American empire-building of this sort ended with World War II, when it was replaced by a duel with the Soviet Union. But the antipathies our earlier empire-building created remain potent. They played a significant role in Cuba’s decision to seek Soviet protection after its revolution in 1959. They inspired the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua. (Augusto César Sandino, whose name the movement took, was the charismatic leader of the resistance to the 12-year long US occupation of Nicaragua that ended in 1943.) In 1991, as soon as the Cold War ended, the Philippines evicted US bases and forces on its territory.

In the Cold War, we ruled the roost in a sphere of influence called “the free world”—free only in the sense that it included every country outside the competing Soviet sphere of influence, whether democratic or aligned with the US or not. With the end of the Cold War, we incorporated most of the former Soviet sphere into our own, pushing our self-proclaimed responsibility to manage everything within it right up to the borders of Russia and China. Russia’s unwillingness to accept that everything beyond its territory is ours to regulate is the root cause of the crises in Georgia and Ukraine. China’s unwillingness to acquiesce in perpetual US dominance of its waters is the origin of the current tensions in the South China Sea.
The notion of a sphere of influence that is global except for a few no-go zones in Russia and China is now so deeply ingrained in the US psyche that politicians think it entirely natural to make a number of far-reaching assertions, such as:

(1) The world is desperate for Americans to lead it by making the rules, regulating global public goods, policing the global commons, and doing in “bad guys” everywhere by whatever means our president considers most expedient.

(2) The US is losing influence by not putting boots on the ground in more places.

(3) The United States is the indispensable arbiter of what the world’s international financial institutions should do and how they should do it.

(4) Even if they change, American values always represent universal norms, from which other cultures deviate at their peril. Thus, profanity, sacrilege, and blasphemy—all of which were not so long ago anathema to Americans—are now basic human rights to be insisted upon internationally. So are indulgence in homosexuality, climate change denial, the sale of GM foodstuffs, and the consumption of alcohol. And so forth.

These American conceits are, of course, delusional. They are all the more unpersuasive to foreigners because everyone can see that the US is now in a schizophrenic muddle—able to open fire at perceived enemies but delusional, distracted, and internally divided to the point of political paralysis. The Congress has walked off the job, leaving decisions about war and peace to the president and turning economic policy over to the Fed, which has now run out of options. Almost half of our senators had time to write to America’s adversaries in Tehran to disavow the authority of the president to represent us internationally. Politicians who long asserted that “Washington is broken” appear to take pride in themselves for finally having broken it. The run-up to the 2016 presidential election is providing ongoing evidence that the US is currently suffering from the political equivalent of a nervous breakdown. Congress may be on strike against the rest of the government, but our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines remain hard at work. Since the turn of the century, they have been kept busy fighting a series of ill-conceived wars—all of which they have lost or are losing. The major achievement of multiple interventions in the Muslim world has been to demonstrate that the use of force is not the answer to many problems but that there are few problems it cannot aggravate. The US repeated inability to win and end our wars has damaged American prestige with its allies and adversaries alike. Still, with the Congress engaged in a walkout from its legislative responsibilities and the public in revolt against the mess in Washington, American global leadership is not much in evidence except on the battlefield, where its results are not impressive.

Diplomacy-free foreign policy blows up enough things to liven up the TV news but it generates terrorist blowback and it’s expensive. There is a direct line of causation between European and American interventions in the Middle East and the bombings in Boston, Paris, and Brussels as well as the flood of refugees now inundating Europe. And so far this century, we’ve racked up over $6 trillion in outlays and future financial obligations in wars that fail to achieve much, if anything, other than breeding terrorists with global reach. We borrowed the money to conduct these military activities abroad at the expense of investing in our homeland. What we have to show for staggering additions to our national debt is falling living standards for all but the “one percent,” a shrinking middle class, a rising fear of terrorism, rotting infrastructure, unattended forest fires, and eroding civil liberties. No wonder, both allies and adversaries now consider the US the most erratic and unpredictable element in the current world disorder.

You won’t have the respect of allies and they won’t follow you if, as in the case of Iraq, you insist that they join you in entering an obvious ambush on the basis of falsified intelligence. You can’t continue to control the global monetary system when, as in the case of the IMF and World Bank, you renege on promises to reform and fund them. You can’t accomplish much by launching wars and then asking your military commanders to figure out what their objectives should be.

But that’s what we’ve been doing. Our generals and admirals have long been taught that they are to implement, not make policy. But what if the civilian leadership is clueless or deluded? What if there is no feasible policy objective attached to military campaigns?

We went into Afghanistan to take out the alleged perpetrators of 9/11 and punish the Taliban regime. We did that, but we’re still there. Why? Because, perhaps to protect the world’s heroin supply! We went into Iraq to ensure that weapons of mass destruction that did not exist did not fall into the hands of terrorists who did not exist until our arrival created them. We’re still there. Why? Is it divide Iraq between Kurds and Sunni and Sh`ia Arabs? Is it to protect China’s access to Iraqi oil? Is it to combat terrorists that our presence creates?

Amidst this inexcusable confusion, our Congress now routinely asks combatant commanders to make policy recommendations independent of those proposed by their civilian commander-in-chief or the secretary of state. Our generals not only provide such advice; they openly advocate actions in places like Ukraine and the South China Sea that undercut White House guidance while appeasing hawkish congressional opinion. We must add the erosion of civilian control of the military to the lengthening list of constitutional crises our imperial adventurism is brewing up. In a land of bewildered civilians, US militarism now has a well-attested record of failure to deliver anything but escalating violence and debt.