Much
of the impact of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s now-classic work Monopoly Capital
when it was published in 1966, at the very height of the Vietnam War, can be
attributed to its chapter on “Absorption of the Surplus: Militarism and
Imperialism.”
The chapter began with the question: “Why does the United States
oligarchy need and maintain such a huge military machine nowadays when it used
to get along with such a little one?” By 1959, they pointed out, the United
States had acquired a total of 275 major military base complexes in 31
countries, while it had more than 1,400 military bases altogether, including
all sites that the United States then occupied, plus base areas it had set
aside around the world for emergency occupation. Approximately a million troops
were stationed in these bases. (Later, other estimates utilizing different
methodologies put the number of U.S. military bases in 1957 at 883, and at
1,014 in 1967.) Although the United States had few colonial possessions outside
of Puerto Rico and some Pacific islands, its foreign military bases plus its
direct political-economic dominance over individual countries around the world
constituted, in Baran and Sweezy’s argument, an “American empire.” Since 1945,
the United States had already fought one major regional war in Asia—in
Korea—and was then engaged in another in Vietnam. According to Harry Magdoff a
few years later, U.S. military spending in 1968 on a per capita basis, adjusted
for price changes, dwarfed that of all the great powers combined in the buildup
to the Second World War and was more than twice that of Nazi Germany (Paul A.
Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital [New York: Monthly Review Press,
1966], 178–217 [all otherwise unspecified page citations that follow are to
this work]; Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present
[New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978], 205; John Bellamy Foster, Naked
Imperialism [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006], 57).
How,
then, could the massive U.S. military expansion in the post-Second World War
years be explained? The usual propagandistic answer at the time—that the
purpose of the U.S. war machine was primarily to counter military aggression by
the Soviet Union—could be dismissed out of hand. Even hardened Cold Warriors,
such as George Kennan, author of the “containment” strategy, together with such
influential U.S. figures as diplomat Chester Bowles, Senator J. William
Fulbright, and neoliberal journalist Walter Lippmann, all held to the general
consensus among those in power that the Soviet Union was not an aggressive
military power like Nazi Germany. Even William Schlamm, the former editor of
Fortune magazine, who proposed threatening the USSR with nuclear Armageddon in
order to force it to dissolve the Warsaw Pact, stated: “Communism thrives on
peace, wants peace, triumphs in peace” (186).
Hence,
“the American oligarchy’s need for a huge military machine must be sought
elsewhere than in a non-existent threat of Soviet aggression.” The beginning of
an answer was to be found in the 1947 Truman Doctrine, in which Washington
proclaimed that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free
peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside
pressure” everywhere in the world. So sweeping was this pronouncement that it
meant that the United States had established itself as the world gendarme
opposing not only the expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence, but all
revolutions, and, in effect, all substantive change in every corner of the
globe (186–88).
The
gargantuan U.S. military budget, Baran and Sweezy argued, was therefore not
simply a response to the rise of an alternative socialist bloc, but grew out of
the history of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Capitalism since its
inception has been an international system characterized by a hierarchy of
nation-states, divided into center and periphery with those at the very top of
the hierarchy having larger military capabilities. This went hand-in-hand with
colonial-imperial expansion and the wars between competing capitalist empires.
The United States itself had been conceived from the start by its so-called
founding fathers in imperialist terms, as demonstrated by historian Richard W.
Van Alstyne in The Rising American Empire (New York: Norton, 1960). In addition
to the wars against Indigenous populations and the seizure of large parts of
Mexico in the Mexican-American War, Washington at the brink of the twentieth
century forcibly annexed Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific in
the Spanish-American War, leading to a two-decades-long war in the Philippines
to suppress the population there. As early as the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, it had
asserted its hegemony over the entire Western Hemisphere, following this up
with incessant military interventions. Thus, “having already achieved the
status of a ‘have’ power [in imperial terms] by the time the Germans and
Japanese were ready to launch their leadership bids, the United States was
constrained to make common cause with the other ‘have’ powers [namely Britain
and France] in the First and Second World Wars.” In this respect, militarism
and imperialism characterized the entire history of U.S. capitalism (178–83).
U.S.
efforts to exercise its hegemonic control over the third world after the Second
World War were part of the same imperial expansionism. This took the form of
providing military backing for the expansion abroad of U.S. multinational
corporations, including the overthrow of any nationalist and socialist forces
that set limits on the power of the multinationals. In addition to serving the
needs of empire, military spending placed a floor under effective demand, often
pump-priming the economy, while directly supporting big business through the
guaranteed high profits provided by what U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower
labeled the “military-industrial complex.” As U.S. News and World Report
gleefully put it in 1954, “the H-bomb has blown depression-thinking out the
window” (191–202, 207–13).
Hence,
the whole basis of the argument on militarism and imperialism in Monopoly
Capital was that the sheer magnitude of U.S. wars and war preparation was not
primarily a product of the Cold War, but derived from the fundamental
imperatives of U.S. capitalism/imperialism of which the Cold War itself was a
mere manifestation. A logical corollary of this view was that if the Soviet
Union were to leave the world stage (a possibility inconceivable at the time),
the United States would nonetheless continue its militarism, since it derived
from its more fundamental imperialist impulse.
This,
in fact, is what actually happened beginning only months after the demise of
the Soviet Union in 1991. In what is known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine (after the
U.S. undersecretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz), Washington declared that, in
the geopolitical vacuum left open by the USSR’s disappearance from the world
stage, the United States would employ its military power to implement regime
change in strategic countries not under its control, particularly in areas
formerly within the Soviet sphere or in the oil-rich Middle East and North
Africa, creating a new unipolar world order while preventing the emergence of
another great power that could challenge U.S. global hegemony. As former U.S.
National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski put it, the United States, in its
eastward expansion of NATO as far as Ukraine—regarded as the “geopolitical
pivot” in confronting Russia—had as its object the consolidation of its position
as “the first and the only truly global power” (“Excerpts from Pentagon’s Plan:
Preventing the Re-emergence of a New Rival,” New York Times, March 8, 1992;
General Wesley K. Clark, Don’t Wait for the Next War [New York: Public Affairs,
2014], 37–40; Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard [New York; Basic Books,
1997], 10, 46).
A
new era of naked imperialism was thus unleashed beginning in 1991. According to
the Congressional Research Service, the United States has launched a total of
251 military interventions in foreign countries since the demise of the Soviet
Union in 1991, as compared to 469 over its entire history. In the words of
former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, the United States is “the most warlike
nation in the history of the world.” All of this has led in recent years to the
development of more all-encompassing analyses of the history of U.S. militarism
and imperialism (Congressional Research Service, Instances of Use of U.S. Armed
Services Abroad, March 8, 2022; Ben Norton, “U.S. Launched 251 Military
Interventions Since 1991, and 469 Since 1798,” Geopolitical Economy, September
13, 2022; Brett Wilkins, “Jimmy Carter: US ‘Most Warlike Nation in the History
of the World,’” Common Dreams, April 18, 2019).
One
such reassessment is provided by MR author David Vine in his 2020 book The
United States of War. Vine adopts a methodology of focusing on the history of
U.S. military bases as a means of mapping the development of U.S. military
power, beginning with the wars against Indigenous nations and peoples in the
early years of the republic and extending all the way to what he calls the
“hyperimperialism” of the years from 1991 to the present. An important part of
his analysis of the U.S. base empire is his discussion of the secretive
“lily-pad bases” that Washington has established around the world, which make
the actual numbers of U.S. military bases today difficult to calculate.
Nevertheless, the United States currently has at least eight hundred military
bases located in eighty-five countries/territories outside the fifty states and
Washington, D.C. Four hundred of these bases currently surround China (David
Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts
from Columbus to the Islamic State [Berkeley: University of California Press,
2020], 2, 279–97).
An
extensive commentary on the U.S. way of death is provided by David Michael
Smith in his 2023 book Endless Holocausts. Smith’s book consists of the
detailed documentation, based primarily on establishment sources, of mass
deaths due to war together with other forms of social murder, attributable to
the “U.S. Empire” over its history. Thus, he details how:
“Between 1945 and 1980, major U.S. wars
in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia killed twelve million people. Washington
also shared responsibility for the 1.7 million people who died during the rule
of the Khmer Rouge, and the U.S. proxy war in Afghanistan led to the deaths of
at least 1.5 million. U.S. support for the Guomindang in the second phase of
the Chinese civil war, for the French campaign to reconquer Vietnam, for the
anti-communist exterminations in Indonesia, for the Biafran war, and for the
Pakistani government during the Bangladesh War implicated Washington in the
deaths of almost 11 million people.”
Altogether,
including other millions of deaths, the United States was directly responsible
or shared responsibility for the deaths in that same period of some twenty-nine
million people. Similarly,
“Between 1980 and 2020, two U.S. wars and
sanctions in Iraq and the U.S. war in Afghanistan killed more than two million
people. Washington’s proxy wars in Angola, Mozambique, Rwanda, Democratic
Republic of Congo, and Syria resulted in roughly nine million deaths. U.S.
military interventions, support for client states and rebels, and related
famines in Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Nigeria cost the lives of
another five million people. The U.S. Empire’s role in the collapse of most
socialist regimes [including the imposition of economic shock therapy] made it
partly responsible for well over seven million deaths.”
Still
more millions died due to other U.S. hostile actions abroad in the period, with
Washington in these years having direct or shared responsibility for the deaths
altogether of more than twenty-five million people (David Smith, Endless
Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire [New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2023], 208–9, 256–57).
“Imperialism,”
Magdoff wrote in 1969, “necessarily involves militarism. Indeed, they are twins
that have fed on each other in the past, as they do now.” To combat the spread
of militarism and war throughout the globe today, it is necessary to confront
the imperialist world system centered in Washington (Magdoff, Imperialism,
205).
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