US imperialism is at an impasse. The desperation of the system is evident in every aspect of its rule. From the state media to the corporate media, US imperialism has continuously worked hard to cover up the root causes of the crisis. Therefore, it is now urgent to explain to people what led to the collapse of US imperialism.

The non-stop nightmare called "election 2016" is the most visible expression of the stalemate of US imperialism. Trump's surprise victory has led to an intensification of the multilateral neo-McCarthy war. As in the first Cold War, Russia became the main target of the attack. The myth of Russian interference in the US electoral system has been propagated by the Obama administration, the corporate media, and even Jill Stein's recount campaign. So-called "secret revelations" (i.e., false statements) by the CIA were presented as evidence that Russia had arranged a secret plot to plant Trump in the White House. Some corporate media have gone so far as to claim that there are legitimate grounds for Trump's impeachment.

The neo-McCarthyist attack is directed at independent voices and non-standard elements of the ruling class. The corporate media labeled left-wing journalistic sources such as the Black Agenda as "fake news" and called for investigations into their ties to Russia under the 1919 Espionage Act. Much of the ruling class in the intelligence and US Department of War sees Trump as a problem because of his proposals to disarm the jihadists in Syria and defuse relations with Russia. But Trump only wants to enrich himself and his capitalist partners from the vast wealth of the growing Russian economy. And financial capital and the US military believe that destabilizing Russia is the best way to maintain hegemony. Therefore, they want to remove Trump, at least for the moment. Repression against the left is an added bonus.

Trump didn't win the election, Hillary Clinton lost it. She received huge help from US billionaires. She was considered the winner until the very moment the election results were published. Clinton's loss demonstrated a deep legitimacy crisis for the Democratic Party, as millions of voters hate its corporate sponsors. This fact has been obscured by lies about Russian interference in US elections and about "fake news" that undermines American democracy. In fact, Russia has little interest in undermining the US political process, which has long been completely corrupt. It was the Obama administration that staged military and political provocations against Russia. Russia is as interested in interfering in the internal affairs of the United States as the Syrian government is in killing its citizens. These two lies are fabricated for imperialist attacks on these countries.

But this policy is of little value given the lack of understanding of the crisis of US imperialism. The crisis of legitimacy of US imperialism is an expression of a serious crisis in the economic system. The numbers don't lie. The New York Times recently wrote about the death of the American Dream, as only 50% of those born in 1980 can earn as much as their parents did. And Market Watch reported that now more than 6 million auto loans in the US are 90 days late in payment. These economic indicators reflect the ongoing, global, economic crisis of US imperialism.

The economic crisis can be explained by the logic of imperialism as described in the book by Fred Goldstein. In this book, the global imperialist crisis is viewed in the context of the shift in the state of the productive forces under capitalism. For more than three decades, global capitalism has sought to expand through increased exploitation. This led to a frenzy of high-tech capital goods that replaced the bulk of US jobs. The result was an increase in the cost of production and a decrease in wages in the face of a slowdown in economic growth.

Technological development increased productivity and plunged the system into a permanent crisis of unemployment and overproduction. The system is falling apart because workers are so poor and overworked that only financial instruments can temporarily alleviate the burden of survival. However, the credit system exacerbates the crisis of overproduction. And the 2008 housing crisis was a direct result of financial speculation in credit cards, mortgages, and other loans. In other words, whenever the imperialist system attempts to expand economically, the sheer impoverishment of the exploited classes ensures that profits fall.

The traditional means of mitigating the economic crisis have been exhausted. The imperialist war saved American capitalism from collapse at one time, but it led to the growth of high-tech production, which creates few jobs. War is an expensive business, for which it is necessary to negotiate with various external forces: NATO countries, Arab monarchies, Israel, etc. And since a large-scale war does not bring economic benefits to the working masses in imperialist countries, it is very difficult to promote it. In other words, the military expansion of US imperialism does not lead to economic peace. War only leads to chaos and crisis.

Imperialist war has always served two main purposes: to expand the capitalist market and to maintain the political dominance of the capitalist country. However, the combination of an internal economic crisis and external popular resistance leads to stagnation. The imperialists offer nothing but destruction, and the stagnation has continued for more than 30 years despite many foreign wars. Their main task is to clear the way for capitalist expansion. However, wars no longer cope with this task. American wars in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Ukraine and other countries bring nothing but devastation and political chaos.

American imperialism is trapped in internal systemic contradictions. The main reaction of the ruling class to the systemic impasse is the intensification of state repression against the oppressed peoples. In the United States, these repressions are expressed in police terror against blacks - every day the police kill one African American. The US has spent billions of dollars developing the largest prison-police state in human history to quell the revolt of the most oppressed sections of the population. However, state repression quickly loses its effectiveness.

Some people will mourn the death of US imperialism, but not the revolutionaries. Revolutionaries move time. The Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements were nothing but beautiful protests. Another economic collapse is on the verge. Agitation and despair are growing among the masses, which must turn into revolutionary determination. The stalemate of US imperialism has already created the conditions for the emergence of a revolution. The task of the revolutionaries is to build a movement capable of turning popular unrest into a revolution.

If world industrial production from 1870 to 1913 increased five times, then industrial production in the United States - 8.6 times. The USA comes out on top in the world in industrial production. Structural changes are taking place in American industry at this time: before, light industry occupied the leading place, now heavy industry is coming to the fore. The decisive role in this was played by the electrical, oil, rubber, aluminum, and automotive industries. Their development was connected with the achievements of science and technology. American industry was still short of workers, so invention and new technology found particularly favorable ground.

As a result of a series of inventions by Thomas Edison (1847–1931) in the field of electrical engineering in the 1880s. famous is born Edison firm. In the future, it develops into the largest electrical corporation "General Electric". The electrical industry is becoming one of the leading industries in the US.

The invention of the internal combustion engine was used by entrepreneur Henry Ford to organize mass production of cars. The Ford company in a short time turns into a monopoly - the Ford Concern, and the US automobile industry immediately takes first place in the world. in England at the beginning of the 20th century. there was also a law according to which a person with a red flag had to walk in front of each car to protect pedestrians. In the US at this time there were already about 100,000 cars.

One of the first US monopolies was the Standard Oil Company, founded by J. D. Rockefeller., which already in 1880 processed over 90% of all American oil. Rockefeller managed to negotiate with the railroad companies for a reduced fee for the transportation of goods of his trust, which greatly helped him in the competition with his rivals. When competing companies started building pipelines to save their position, Rockefeller hired bandits and destroyed them. After some time, the Rockefeller Trust grew so much that it began to penetrate into other countries, organizing the extraction and processing of oil in Mexico, Venezuela, and Romania. According to family lore, members of the Morgan financial group were descended from a famous corsair. At the beginning of the XX century. they founded the "Steel Trust", which occupied a dominant position in the US steel industry. It controlled 75% of the US iron ore reserves and produced half of the iron and steel products. Trusts also appeared in other branches of industry; "kings" of wagons, canned meat, and so on arose. At the beginning of the XX century. they already provided 40% of the country's industrial output.

The monopolies jacked up the prices of their products, ruined the small industrialists, and all this set the country's public opinion against them.

Traditional for America was the doctrine of spontaneous development of the economy: economic development is a free struggle of forces, from which the state must stand aloof. Now, however, this traditional point of view met with strong opponents who believed that "an indispensable condition for human progress" are state laws that should restrict entrepreneurial activity and prevent monopolies.

Under pressure from public opinion, the Sherman "antitrust" law (1890) was adopted, which officially provided for the restriction of the activities of trusts and monopolies. However, the law was powerless precisely against trusts. It was directed against the collusion of several firms in the market, i.e. was against monopolies of a lower order - cartels and syndicates, and when these firms merged into one, i.e. a trust arose, the law did not see collusion here, and could not interfere in the internal affairs of firms.

After the Sherman Act, a new form of monopoly, the holding company, is gaining ground.

holding- a company that holds a portfolio of shares of different companies, receives dividends and distributes them among shareholders. Naturally, as an enterprise-shareholder, the holding company sends its directors to these firms and controls their activities. But in the face of the law, the holding is not a monopoly: the company owns only shares and, as a shareholder, certainly has the right to control those companies in which its capital is invested. The surprise was that the unions began to suffer from the Sherman Act. According to the formal meaning of the law, a trade union is an association of workers directed against competition in the labor market, the market for the sale of labor.

Parallel to the concentration of industry and the formation of monopolies is the concentration of banks and the formation of financial groups. By the beginning of the First World War, the two largest banks in the United States were headed by J.P. Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller. Their banks controlled a third of the country's national wealth, industrial monopolies and even entire industries were subordinate to them.

The Morgan financial group included the Steel Trust, the General Electric Company, the Pullman Carriage Company, 21 railroads, 3 insurance companies, etc. The Rockefeller financial group was narrower in composition - it included mainly oil corporations.

Agricultural production also continued to develop successfully during this period. The United States has moved into first place in the world in the production and export of grain, and has become the main supplier of agricultural products to Europe. But this economy developed differently in different parts of the country. The main industrial region of the USA - the industrial North - was at the same time the region of the most developed agriculture. 60% of US agricultural products were produced here. Cities and industrial centers showed an increased demand for food, so agriculture turned out to be very profitable, and there were no free lands, so production could only be increased through intensification, i.e. raising the technical level and increasing production from the same area.

In the former slave-owning South, the main part of the land area remained in the ownership of the former large landowners. They, as a rule, leased the land to small tenants, and often primitive forms of lease such as sharecropping were used, when the tenant had to give part of the crop to the owner of the land. Naturally, the technical level of agriculture here was much lower.

Colonization continued in the Far West. The region was relatively sparsely populated, and agriculture was predominantly extensive: since there was a lot of land, farmers did not try to get the maximum production from the area, but increased production by expanding the area. Thus, not all of the country's territory has yet been fully developed economically. The process of internal colonization of the country continued. Therefore, the export of capital from the United States was small, import prevailed. If American investment abroad by the beginning of the First World War amounted to about 3 billion dollars, then foreign investment in the United States was about 6 billion. This means that the United States still did not really need colonies. Nevertheless, in accordance with the general trend at the end of the XIX century. The US begins colonial expansion. However, the US colonial policy had features that distinguished it from the colonial expansion of European countries.

Firstly, underdeveloped countries - potential colonies were nearby, on their own continent, they did not have to go overseas. U.S. Adopts "America for Americans" Doctrine. At first, this doctrine was the slogan of the struggle of the peoples of Latin America against European colonialism. Under this slogan, the peoples were liberated from colonial dependence. When there were almost no European colonies left in America, the meaning of the doctrine changed. The United States, relying on it, did not allow the penetration of European capital into the countries of Latin America, reserving them for its colonial activities.

Secondly, The colonial expansion of the United States from the very beginning acquired the features of neo-colonialism. The United States does not declare the countries of Latin America as its colonies. Formally, they remain sovereign states. But, taking advantage of the economic weakness of these countries, the US capitalists import their capital there and exploit the national wealth. If the government of a goy or another country tries to get out of control, the United States, using its influence, will organize a coup d'état. This was the way, for example, the revolution in Panama for the sake of capturing the Panama Canal was arranged.

Thirdly, in the countries of the Old World, the United States promotes the principle of "open doors", i.e. equal opportunities for the capitalists of all countries. The USA is against colonialism, it is for the competition of capitals in underdeveloped states. And this allows them to penetrate into the underdeveloped countries of Asia.

• JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER "A NEW ERA OF IMPERIALISM"
• JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER "IMPERIAL AMERICA AND THE WAR"
• SAMIR AMIN "AMERICAN IMPERIALISM, EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST"
• JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER "OPEN IMPERIALISM"
• MICHAEL PARENTI "IMPERIALISM. INTRODUCTION"

John Bellamy Foster

New era of imperialism

Mansley Review, July 2003.

Numerous critics of the current expansion of the American empire - both among the American left and in Europe - now argue that the US under the presidency of George W. Bush is being captured by a cabal of neoconservatives, led by the likes of Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretary of Defense), Lewis Libby (Chief of Assistants Vice President) and Richard Pearl (of the Board of Defense Policy). This cabal is said to have the full support of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney, and through them President Bush. The rise to power of neo-conservative hegemonists is associated with the undemocratic elections of 2000, when Supreme Court appointed Bush as president, and with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when national security issues suddenly took priority. All this has contributed, we are told, to a unilateral and belligerent foreign policy, in defiance of the US's historical role in the world. As the Economist magazine asks on April 26, 2003: "Has a cabal of conspirators taken over the foreign policy of the world's most powerful power? Does a tiny group of ideologists have the undue power to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, create an empire, throw international law into the dustbin - and care about the consequences?"

The Economist himself answers "not really." Rightly dismissing the cabal theory, he argues instead that "the neocons are part of a larger movement" and that "there is (among the US political elite) a practical consensus that America must vigorously use its might to reorder the world." But the Economist, like other bourgeois participants in this dispute, omits the trifle that imperialism in this case, as always, is not just a political course, but a branched reality that grows out of the very nature of capitalist development. The historical changes of imperialism associated with the emergence of the so-called "unipolar world" make any attempt to reduce current events to the erroneous aspirations of a few powerful individuals absurd. Therefore, it is essential to consider historical foundations new era of US imperialism, including both the deeper causes and the personal actors who shape its current face.

The era of imperialism

The question: Is it possible that the US is conducting imperialist conquests because it fell victim to the personal needs of the people "above" - ​​is not new. Henry Magdoff poses it on the very first page of his 1969 book, The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of US Foreign Policy, a work that virtually revived the study of imperialism in the US. "Is this war (in Vietnam) part of a more general and consistent US foreign policy," he asks, "or is it a deviation of a certain group of people in power?" The answer, of course, was that although a certain group of people in power is leading this process, they express the deep tendencies of American foreign policy, generated by capitalism as such. In his book, the most important account of US imperialism in the 1960s, Magdoff uncovered the underlying political, economic, and military forces guiding US foreign policy.

The prevailing explanation during the Vietnam War was that the US was fighting a war to "contain" communism - and therefore the war had nothing to do with imperialism. But the scale and brutality of the war undermined any attempt at a simple containment explanation, since neither the USSR nor China showed any inclination towards global expansion and the revolutions in the third world were obviously of purely local origin. Magdoff dismissed as the mainstream the tendency to see US intervention in the Third World as a product of the Cold War, as well as the liberal inclination to see the war as a trick of the Texan president and his advisers. This required historical analysis.

The imperialism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was distinguished by two features: 1) the collapse of British hegemony and 2) the growth of monopoly capitalism - capitalism dominated by large companies formed as a result of the concentration and centralization of production. In addition to these features of what Lenin called the stage of imperialism (which, in his words, can be described "as briefly as possible" as the "monopoly stage of capitalism"), there are others. Capitalism as a system, of course, defined solely by the desire for accumulation that knows no boundaries.

Capitalism is, on the one hand, an expanding world economy characterized by what we call globalization, and, on the other hand, divided into numerous competing nation-states.

Moreover, the system is divided into opposite centers and peripheries. From its inception in the 16th and 17th century, and even more strongly at the stage of monopoly, the capital of each country in the center has been driven by the need to control access to raw materials and labor in the periphery. However, in the monopoly stage of capitalism, nation-states and their corporations seek to open up the largest possible share of the world economy to their investment, although not necessarily to their competitors. Such rivalry for areas of accumulation leads to battles for control of various areas on the periphery, the most famous of which is the fight for Africa at the end of the 19th century, in which all the then Western European powers took part.

However, imperialism continued to develop and passed its classical stage with the end of the Second World War and the subsequent anti-colonial movement, so that the 50s and 60s represent a later phase with its own specific historical characteristics. The most important of these is that the United States has replaced Great Britain as the hegemon of the world capitalist economy. The other is the existence of the USSR, the emergence of space for the revolutionary movements of the third world and the military alliance of the leading capitalist powers, based on the Cold War and asserting US hegemony. The US used its dominance to found the Bretton Woods institutions - GATT, IMF and WB - with the intention of concentrating the economic control of the core states, especially the US, over the periphery and thus over the entire world market.

According to Magdoff, US hegemony did not end the rivalry between capitalist countries. Realistic analysts have always viewed hegemony as historically transient, despite all the rhetoric of the "American century." The uneven development of capitalism means ongoing inter-imperialist rivalry, albeit sometimes hidden. "The contradictions between the unevenly developing industrial centers," he writes, "the axis of the imperialist wheel."

American militarism, which in his study is inseparable from the imperial role of the US, is not simply, or even primarily, the result of the Cold War with the USSR on which it was conditioned. The roots of militarism lie deeper in the need for the US, as the hegemon of the capitalist world economy, to keep the doors open for its overseas investment, by military force if necessary. At the same time, the US used its power to meet the needs of its own corporations, for example, in Latin America, where its dominance was not challenged by other great powers. And not only did the US play its military role repeatedly on the fringes in the post-war era, it could also justify it as part of the fight against communism at the time. Militarism, inseparable from the role of world hegemon and head of the allied forces, has permeated all forms of accumulation in the United States, so that the term "military-industrial complex", first used by President Eisenhower in his farewell speech, is an underestimation. Already at that time in the United States there was not a single significant center of accumulation that was not at the same time a major center of military production. War production supported the entire US economy and protected it from economic stagnation.

In a study of modern imperialism, Magdoff demonstrates how favorable imperialism was to capital at the center of the system (for example, the return on US foreign investment, relative to all net profits earned by non-financial companies, rose from 10% in 1950 to 22% in 1964). This siphoning off of funds from the periphery (and the use of what remains there in accordance with the class relations of the periphery, distorted by imperialist dependence) is the main reason for the ongoing underdevelopment of the periphery. However, two other statements specific to Magdoff were less noted: a warning about the growing catastrophic external debt of the third world and a deep analysis of the expanding global role of banks and financial capital in general. It wasn't until the early 1980s that the true extent of foreign debt came to attention when Brazil, Mexico, and other so-called "new industrial economies" suddenly found themselves unable to pay their debts. And the full significance of the financialization of the world economy remained hidden to most students of imperialism until the late 1980s.

Through a systematic historical study of imperialism, Magdoff and others have shown that US military intervention in Iran, Guatemala, Lebanon, Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic had nothing to do with "protecting American citizens" or fighting the expansion of the communist bloc. They were part of a wider phenomenon - imperialism in all its historical complexity and the role of the United States as the hegemon of the capitalist world. However, such an interpretation was strongly opposed by liberal critics of the Vietnam War, who sometimes admitted that the US was expanding its empire, but considered it, like other similar phenomena in US history, more an accident than a planned one (as did the defenders of the British Empire before them).

They insisted that American foreign policy was based primarily on ideals and not on material interests. The Vietnam War itself was attributed by many of these liberal critics to the "weak political thinking" of the ruling circles, which led the country astray. In 1971, Robert W. Tucker, Professor of American Foreign Policy in the Department of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, wrote The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy, in which he argued that US "absolution" in Vietnam resulted from "pure disinterest" with which they are at war. Tucker was a liberal opponent of the war, but he rejected a radical approach to the study of American militarism and imperialism.

Tucker attacked William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko and Harry Magdoff the most in his book. Magdoff especially for arguing that global control of raw materials is vital for US corporations and that the state serves them. Tucker went so far as to say that Magdoff's mistake was visible in the oil question. If the US were truly imperialistic about third world resources, they would try to control the oil in the Persian Gulf. Sweeping aside both logic and history, Tucker stated that this was not the case. As he put it:

“According to the radical point of view, it is to be expected that here (in the Middle East), if not elsewhere, American policy will reflect economic interests. Reality, as is well known, has nothing to do with this. Apart from the fact that, thanks to the growing and successful pressure, the oil countries were able to increase their share in the profits and taxes (the pressure did not cause any noticeable resistance), the US government contributed to the loss of advantages that the US oil companies had previously enjoyed in the Middle East. New York Times correspondent John M. Lee writes, "many observers note that the oil companies and the oil issue have so little influence on US policy toward Israel."

Thus, according to Tucker, the case of Persian Gulf oil refutes Magdoff's arguments about the importance of controlling the supply of raw materials in the operations of US imperialism. US political allegiance to Israel conflicted with their economic interests, but overcame all interests of American capitalism in relation to oil in the Middle East. Today it is hardly worth stressing how absurd this objection was. Not only has the US repeatedly used military force in the Middle East since Iran in 1953, it has also continuously imposed its control over oil and the interests of its oil corporations in the region. Israel, armed to the teeth by America and allowed to produce hundreds of atomic bombs, has long been part of this control strategy. From the beginning, the US role in the region has been openly imperialist, designed to maintain control over its oil. Only the kind of analysis that reduces economics to retail prices and profit margins, with no regard for the political and military shaping of economic relations—not to mention oil and cash flows—can lead to such patently erroneous conclusions.

New era of imperialism

In fact, nothing more clearly indicates the arrival of a new era of imperialism than the expansion of the American empire into the key oil regions of the Middle East and the Caspian Basin. The power of the United States in the Persian Gulf during the Cold War was limited by the USSR. The Iranian Revolution, which the United States apparently could not resist, was the biggest defeat of US imperialism (which looked to the Shah as a reliable foothold in the region) since the Vietnam War. Indeed, prior to 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, a major American war in the region would have been nearly unthinkable. Therefore, the power of the United States was significantly limited. The 1991 war, which the United States waged with the consent of the USSR, thus marked the advent of a new era of American imperialism and the global expansion of American power. It is not just a coincidence that the weakening of the USSR led almost immediately to a full-scale US war in a region key to controlling the world's oil, the most important commodity needed for world domination.

It is very important to understand that in 1991 the USSR was already extremely weakened and subject to US policy. But he was still not dead (this happened only at the end of the year) and there remained, albeit weak, but the possibility of a coup and change in the USSR, unfavorable to US interests. At the same time, the United States was economically inferior to some of its main competitors, and so it was widely believed that its economic hegemony was being significantly reduced, thereby narrowing the choice of possible actions. Although the government of George W. Bush proclaimed a "New World Order", no one knew what that meant. The collapse of the Soviet bloc was so sudden that the US ruling class and foreign policymakers were not sure what to do next.

During the first Gulf War, there was no unity among the American elite. Some felt that they should seize the moment and invade Iraq, as suggested by the Wall Street Journal. Others believed that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was then physically impossible. The next decade passed under the sign of continuous discussions in US foreign policy circles, as can be seen from the publication of the Council on Foreign Relations - Foreign Affeas, the question: how to use the fact that the US has become the only superpower. The debate about "unipolarity" (a term coined by the neo-conservative Charles Krauthammer in 1991) and unilateralism soon turned into an open discussion of American primacy, hegemony, empire, and even imperialism.

Moreover, by the end of the decade, the case for the US playing an imperial role had become increasingly insistent and elaborate. These topics have been debated since the beginning of the new era, not in terms of the goals pursued, but in terms of the effectiveness of achieving them. A particularly noteworthy call for a new imperialism is contained in the influential book The Imperial Seduction by the same Robert W. Tucker with David S. Hendrickson, published by the Council on External Relations. As Tucker and Hendrickson candidly explained, “The US is now the dominant military power.

In terms of territorial reach and the effectiveness of its military, the US has been compared in favor of some of the greatest empires of the past. Rome barely went beyond the borders of the Mediterranean, Napoleon could not enter the Atlantic Ocean and was defeated in the vastness of Russia. In the heyday of the so-called Pax Britannica, when the Royal Navy ruled the seas, Bismarck observed that if an English army landed on the coast of Prussia, he would send the local police to make arrests. The United States generally has more intimidating forces than all its predecessors. The US can reach anywhere in the world. They own the most modern and sophisticated weapons, which are used by experienced professionals in the art of war. They can transport powerful continental armies across the oceans. Their historical rivals are retreating, weakened by internal strife.

Under such circumstances, the age-old temptation – the imperial temptation – may become irresistible for the US... If the country does not find the image of empire that inspired the colonial forces of the past attractive, it may like to play an imperial role, without fulfilling the classic duties of imperial rule.”

This “imperial temptation,” the authors make clear, must be resisted not because it will lead to a revival of classical imperialism, but because the United States is only willing to do half the job: unleash military power, but neglect the more tedious responsibility of imperial power - building states (colonies - trans.).

Developing the theme from a position reminiscent of Kennedy-style Cold War liberalism, but also appealing to some neoconservatives, Tucker and Hendrickson argue that the United States, having won the Gulf War, should have immediately invaded Iraq, occupied and pacified Iraq, and overthrew the government. the Ba'ath Party, thereby fulfilling their imperial duties. "A stunning display of military power," they write, "would give the US enough time to form and recognize an interim Iraqi government composed of figures devoted to liberalism in the broadest sense...While such a government would no doubt be declared an American puppet, there is reason to believe that it could acquire considerable legitimacy. It would have access, under the supervision of the UN, to the proceeds of Iraqi oil, which would undoubtedly earn it considerable support from the Iraqi population.”

Tucker and Hendrickson—despite Tucker's earlier objections to Magdoff that the US's lack of control of Persian Gulf oil proves that the US is not an imperialist power—has no illusions about why occupying Iraq would be in US strategic interests, in a word: oil . “There is no other commodity,” they write, “that is as vital as oil; and there is nothing like the dependence of developed and developing economies on the energy resources of the Gulf; these resources are concentrated in a region that continues to be relatively inaccessible and highly unstable, and the possession of oil provides an incomparable financial foothold on which an expansionist developing country can base its aggressive claims. The need for the US to achieve dominance in the Middle East is thus not in doubt. If they are going to use force in such an exceptional case, they must do so responsibly - by establishing their authority.

Such advice comes from liberals, not conservatives (or neoconservatives) involved in US foreign policy, participants in a dispute within the ruling class. The debate is narrow-minded, with many liberal, state-building analysts much closer to neoconservatives and more hawkish in this regard than many conservatives. For Tucker and Hendrickson, imperialism is the choice of politicians, it is simply "imperial temptation." It can be resisted, but if it does not work out, then it is necessary to embody the liberal idea of ​​building a state - the restructuring of societies on liberal principles.

Indeed, the US ruling elite in the 1990s reached a remarkable consensus on key assessments and targets. As Richard N. Haass (member of the National Security Council under Bush Sr. and author of his most important statements on US military policy) noted in the 1994 edition of his book Intervention: superpower, the US is now more free to intervene." Regarding limits to US power, Haass proclaimed, "The US can do anything, but not all at once." He then discusses state building as a result of the intervention in Iraq and around the world. Another book by Haass, The Unenthusiastic Sheriff, published in 1997, describes the sheriff and his team, with the sheriff being the United States and the team being a "coalition of the willing." Both the sheriff and the crew shouldn't worry too much about the law, he said, but they should still try not to turn into a vigilante gang.

More important were Haass's arguments about hegemony, which expressed the main divisions among the establishment about US claims to world power. According to Haass, the US is clearly a "hegemon" in the sense of global dominance, but eternal hegemony as a foreign policy goal is a dangerous delusion. In March 1992, a draft of the Defense Planning Manual, also known as the Petnagon Papers, hit the media. The secret working paper was drafted in the elder Bush's Department of Defense under the direction of Paul Wolfowitz. It stated: "Our strategy (after the fall of the USSR) must now shift attention to preventing the emergence of any possible future rival." (New York Times, March 8, 1992). Criticizing this in The Unenthusiastic Sheriff, Haass argues that such a strategy is ill-conceived for the simple reason that the United States has no way of preventing the emergence of such a rival. Powers grow with the growth of their material resources; the great economic powers will inevitably become great powers in all respects, and the size of their military power "will depend largely on their own ideas of national interests, threats, political culture and economic power." The only possible strategy, since maintaining hegmony forever is impossible, is what Madeleine Albright dubbed the "demanding use of alliances" and what Haass himself called "the sheriff and his team", with the command being mainly other large states.

On November 11, 2000, Richard Haass - a member of the National Security Council and Special Assistant to the President under Bush Sr., shortly before his appointment by Bush Jr. as Chief of State Department Policy Planning - released a report in Atlanta entitled "Imperial America", about how the United States should formalize an "imperial foreign policy" using "excess power" to "spread its control" across the globe. Still denying the possibility of continued hegemony, Haass said the US should use the exceptional opportunity it now has to reshape the world to increase its global advantage. This means military intervention all over the world. "Imperial undervoltage, not overvoltage," he argues, "is the greater danger. By 2002, Haass, speaking for a government preparing to invade Iraq, proclaimed that a "failed state" unable to control terrorism in its own territory was thereby losing "the usual benefits of sovereignty, including the right to be left alone in its own territory. Other governments, including the US, are given the right to intervene. In the case of terrorism, it can even lead to the right to preventive or precautionary self-defence.”

In September 2000, two months before Imperial America, the neo-conservative group The New American Century Project released a report entitled: "Rebuilding America's Defense" commissioned by Dick Cheney, Donald Rasfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, younger brother of George W. Bush Jeb and Lewis Libby. It stated that “America has no world rival at this time. American strategy should aim to maintain and expand this favorable position as far into the future as possible." The main strategic task of the United States in the 21st century is to "preserve Pax Americana", for which it is necessary to expand the "borders of the American security zone", organizing new "overseas bases" and conducting operations around the world. On the issue of the Persian Gulf, there were no more equivocations: “For decades, the United States has tried to play a larger role in the regional security of the Persian Gulf. While the unfinished conflict with Iraq offers a justification for immediate action, the need for a significant US presence in the region goes beyond the question of Saddam Hussen's power.

So even before 9/11, the ruling class and its foreign policy specialists (including not only neo-conservatives) were committed to the open expansion of the American empire, taking full advantage of what they saw as a temporary advantage created by the fall of the USSR - until a new rival emerged. In the 1990s, the American economy, despite the slowdown in growth, still expanded faster than in Europe and Japan. This is especially true of the late 1990s, the years of the stock market bubble. At the same time, the Yugoslav civil wars showed that Europe was unable to wage war without the United States.

So in the late 1990s, discussions of American empire were held not so much in left-wing circles as in liberal and neo-conservative circles, which openly proclaimed imperial ambitions. After September 2001, the propensity to conduct large-scale military operations to expand American power, when the US again had to "put its boot on," as the neocon Max Booth put it in the book "Barbarian Wars for Peace" about the early US imperialist wars have become part of the dominant consensus of the ruling classes. The government's National Security Statement, delivered to the US Congress in September 2002, proclaimed the principle of a pre-emptive attack against potential enemies: "The US must and will be able to repel any attempt by the enemy ... to impose its will on the US, our allies, or our friends.. .Our forces will be strong enough to convince potential adversaries not to engage in an arms race in the hope of equaling or surpassing US power.”

In War on Itself: Why America Is Missing a Chance to Build a Better World (2003), Michael Hirsch (senior publisher of the Washington branch of Newsweek) presents the liberal view that while the US is authorized, as hegemon, to intervene in failed states, if is about vital strategic interests, this must be combined with state-building and agreement to act jointly with others. However, in reality it may be nothing more than "unipolarity ... well disguised as multipolarity." This is not a question of whether the US should expand its empire, but rather that the imperial temptation will be combined with the recognition of imperial responsibility, in the manner of Tucker and Hendrickson. On state-building interventions, Hirsch proclaimed: “We don't have a 'big shot' on failed states, like the ones we have on national security or the war on drugs. Perhaps you should have it."

What is called "state-building intervention," initially rejected by the Bush administration, is no longer questioned. This is evident from the report of the Council on Foreign Relations: "Iraq: The Next Day", published shortly before the US invasion and concerning state building in Iraq. One of the authors of this document is James F. Dobbins, director of the Rand Corporation Center for International Security and Defense Policy, who served as Clinton's special observer during the invasions of Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo and as Bush's special observer after the intervention in Afghanistan. Dobbins, an ardent advocate of "state-building interventions" - saber diplomacy - in both the Bush and Clinton governments, states explicitly in the report: "The partisan debate about state building is over. Both parties are clearly willing to use America's military to reform rogue states and repair broken societies."

Cabal Theory and Imperial Reality

All of this has to do with a question raised by Magdoff a third of a century ago in The Age of Imperialism, which remains more than relevant today. "Is this war (in Vietnam) part of a more general and consistent US foreign policy," he asks, "or is it a deviation of a certain group of people in power?" The ruling class now generally agrees that objective forces and security demands are driving American expansionism; that it is in the general interest of American capitalism to extend its control over the entire world - as far and as long as possible. According to the New American Century Project: "Rebuilding America's defenses" is to capture the "unipolar moment."

There has been a widespread view on the left over the past two years of the new imperialist expansion as a neo-conservative venture involving a small group within the ruling class, nothing more than the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, based on the narrow expansionist interests of the military and oil companies. This is a dangerous delusion. At present there are no serious divisions within the American oligarchy or among foreign policymakers, although they will undoubtedly arise later as a result of failures. This is not a bunch of conspirators, but a consensus based on the interests of the ruling class and the development of imperialism.

However, there are discords between the US and other leading states - inter-imperialist rivalry remains the axis of the imperialist wheel. And how could it be otherwise if the US is trying to act as a world government in a world imperial order? Although the US is trying to strengthen its hegemonic position, it is economically weaker relative to the leading capitalist countries than at the beginning of the post-war period. “In the late 1940s, the US produced 50% of the world's GNP,” James Dobbins stated in Iraq: The Day After, and “could carry out these tasks (military intervention and state building) more or less on its own. In the 1990s, after the Cold War, America was able to lead a much broader coalition and thus share the burden of state building. The US cannot and should not afford to build a free Iraq alone. They will be able to attract wider participation from others, however, only if they learn the lessons of the 90s and 40s.” In other words, for the stagnant American economy, which, despite the relative gains of the late 1990s, is still significantly weaker in relation to its main rivals than it was after World War II, outright hegemony is a luxury that presupposes dependence on a “coalition of the willing.” .

At the same time, it is clear that the current period of US global imperialist hegemony is aimed primarily at expanding imperial power to the extent possible and subordinating the rest of the capitalist world to its interests. The Persian Gulf and the Caspian Basin contain not only the bulk of the world's oil reserves, but also a growing share of natural reserves as a whole, since high level productivity depletes the reserves of other regions. This was the reason for the US to seize full control over them - at the expense of current and potential rivals. But US imperial ambitions do not stop there, for they are based on economic goals that recognize no limits.

As Henry Magdoff noted at the end of the "Era of Imperialism" in 1969, the "recognized goal" of American TNCs is "to control the same percentage of the world market as the US market" and their thirst for overseas markets is far from quenched. Wackenhut Corrections, a Florida corporation, has obtained the rights to privatize prisons in England, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and the Dutch Antilles. Promoting the interests of American corporations abroad is one of the main responsibilities of the US government. Remember the stories of Monsanto and genetically modified foods, Microsoft and copyright, Bechtel and the war against Iraq.

It is impossible to exaggerate the danger of such double expansionism of corporations and the US state for the whole world. As Istvan Meszáros noted in Socialism or Barbarism (2001), US attempts to seize control of the entire world, originally inherent in capitalism and imperialism, now threaten humanity with “extremely violent rule over the entire world by one imperialist power on a permanent basis ... ridiculous and an impossible method of governing the world order"

The new era of American imperialism will give rise to its own contradictions, among them the attempts of other major powers to assert their influence using similar belligerent means, and all kinds of strategies of weaker countries and other groups engaging in "asymmetric" warfare. Given the unheard of destructive power of modern weapons that are spreading ever more widely, the consequences for humanity could be more devastating than ever before. Instead of creating a new Pax Americana, the US is paving the way for new worldwide genocides.

The greatest hope in these gloomy conditions remains rising protest from below, both in the US and elsewhere. The rise of the anti-globalization movement, which has flooded the world stage for almost 2 years since Seattle, was followed in February 2003 by the largest wave of global anti-war protests in human history. Never before has the population of the world risen so rapidly and on such a scale in an attempt to stop the imperialist war. The new era of imperialism is also a new era of resurrection. The Vietnam Syndrome, which has frightened imperial planners for years, not only left a serious legacy in the United States, but was also complemented by the Imperial Syndrome in a much wider expanse of the world - something that no one expected. This proves more than anything else that the strategy of the American ruling class to expand the American empire will not succeed in the long run, and will come to its - hopefully not the world's - inglorious end.

John Bellamy Foster

Imperial America and War

(Foreword to the collection of articles by Gerry Magdoff "Imperialism Without Colonies". Monsley Review Press, 2003)
On November 11, 2000, Richard Haass, a member of the National Security Council and Bush Sr.'s Special Assistant to the President, appointed shortly thereafter by Bush Jr. Chief of State Department Policy Planning, published a report in Atlanta entitled "Imperial America." He said that if the US is going to maintain its world dominance, the country will have to "rethink its role and become an imperial power from a traditional nation-state." Haass did not use the word "imperialist" in his description of the US, preferring "imperial" because the first word is associated with "exploitation, usually for commercial purposes" and "territorial control." But everything is so clear:

"To preach an imperial foreign policy is to call for a foreign policy that seeks to organize the world according to certain principles concerning relations between states and internal affairs. The United States will resemble Britain in the 19th century ... Coercion and force will, as a rule, only extreme measures As John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson wrote about England a century and a half ago: "English politics was based on the principle of informal control when possible and formal control if necessary. This can be applied to the United States at the beginning of the new century." (Richard N. Haass).

The existence of the American empire is no secret to anyone. This is widely recognized in the world, although traditionally denied by the ruling circles in the US itself. Haass, however, calls for a much more frank recognition by Washington of this imperial role, in front of the Americans and the world, for the greater success of imperial plans. "The main question facing US foreign policy," he explains, "is what to do with the surplus of power and the many and significant advantages that this surplus brings to the US." This surplus can only be exploited by recognizing that the US has imperial interests on the scale of 19th century England. The world should be made clear that Washington intends to "expand its reach," informally if possible and formally if not possible, to protect what it considers to be its legitimate interests around the world. The final chapter of the Haass report is titled: "Imperialism Begins at Home." Her conclusion: "The greatest risk the United States now faces...is the possibility of missing out on the opportunity to create a world that supports their vital interests through lack of effort. Imperial underextension, not overextension, is the gravest threat."

Of course, it is clear that the idea of ​​"imperial America", put forward by Haass, represents in general terms the new dominant moods of the American ruling class, as well as the state, whose main task is to serve this class. After many years of denying the existence of the US empire, now this very empire is being glorified, with its "imperial army" and "imperial protectorates." This change began as early as the late 1990s, when it became clear not only that the US was the only superpower left after the destruction of the USSR, but that Europe and the US, whose economic growth did not compare with the US, were less capable of being their serious economic rivals. sphere. And in the military sphere, Europe was unable to act without the help of the United States even in its own region in connection with the civil wars in Yugoslavia.

Since Washington launched the worldwide War on Terrorism in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the imperial features of US foreign policy have become increasingly apparent. Empire is now preached by political pundits and mainstream media as an inevitable "burden" of the US as it plays a unique role on the world stage. It is claimed that the US new type an empire free from national interests, economic exploitation, racism or colonialism, existing only to uphold freedom and human rights. As Michael Ignatieff (Professor of Human Rights Politics in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University) proclaimed in the New York Times Magazine: "American empire is not like the empires of yesteryear based on colonial possession, conquest and the white man's burden... 21st century imperialism is a new invention of political science, a dietary empire, world domination whose trills are free markets, human rights and democracy, all supported by the most terrifying military power the world has ever known" (January 5, 2003).

Leaving those bombastic phrases aside, this "21st century empire" is emerging as a major threat to humanity because Washington is increasingly willing to use its overwhelming military power to invade and occupy other countries if it decides it's necessary. However, as the Indian economist Prabhat Patnaik noted more than 10 years ago: "No Marxist has ever taken imperialism out of wars, on the contrary, wars have been explained by the existence of imperialism." Since the presence of imperialism has again become apparent as a result of these wars, it is worth considering their causes.

Classical imperialism

One of the most influential non-Marxist historical accounts of 19th century English imperialism is presented in the article "Free Trade Imperialism", written half a century ago by economic historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson. It was partly used by Haass to confirm his idea of ​​"imperial America". The main idea of ​​this article is simple: imperialism is the continuous reality of economic conquest in modern times. Those who associate imperialism mainly with colonies and colonialism and therefore considered the conquest of Africa and the expansion of colonial conquests at the end of the 19th century to be the basis of imperialism were mistaken. English imperialism throughout the 19th century remained basically the same in essence, despite the fact that at one time it focused on spreading free trade, and at another on the seizure of colonies. As Gallagher and Robinson explain (in the same paragraph quoted by Haass):

"English policy was based on the principle of informal control, when possible, and formal, if necessary. To call one method "anti-imperialist" and the other "imperialist" is to ignore the fact that, regardless of the methods used, the main goal was to protect and disseminate English The usual description of the policy of a free trade empire as "trade, not rule" should be understood as "trade with informal control if possible, trade with rule when necessary"... rivalry to British dominance in tropical Africa (late 19th century) and the comparative lack here of a broad and powerful local political system (state - trans.) that served successfully informal domination elsewhere, eventually led to formal rule.

Those who wish to grasp the essence of English imperialism in the 19th century, the authors would say, must focus on "free trade imperialism" and not on colonialism. Only when England's economic goals could not be achieved by informal control did she resort to formal imperialism or colonization—direct military and political control—to achieve them. And if it is commonly said that "trade follows the flag", it would be more accurate to say that "the main tendency of English trade is to follow the invisible flag of the informal empire". The "characteristic" of "19th-century English free-trade imperialism," these authors argue, was that the use of military force and power was generally limited to establishing secure conditions for economic domination and conquest.

The clearest example of such informal imperialism is the role of England in South America 19th century. England maintained control of the region through numerous trade treaties and financial agreements backed up by naval forces. As the English Foreign Secretary George Canning put it in 1824: "Spanish America is free, and, unless we make great mistakes in the management of our affairs, she belongs to England." Always, as Gallagher and Robinson argue, English influence has been used to turn such countries into "auxiliary economies supplying raw materials and food to Great Britain and markets for her industry." When there were no other ways to force submission, England was always ready to intervene - and repeatedly attacked the countries of Latin America in the 19th century.

As the famous German historian Wolfgang Mommsen remarked in his Theories of Imperialism, the significance of the principle of informal imperialism is that it can bridge Marxist and non-Marxist approaches by emphasizing the historical continuity of imperialism as an expression of economic expansion (without confusing it with more formal military and political manifestations):

"Recognition of the existence of numerous informal types of imperialist domination that precede and accompany the establishment of formal rule, or even make it superfluous, Western (non-Marxist) theories have come close to Marxism ... In general, most non-Marxists now recognize that imperialist dependence can stem from a huge variety of types informal influence, especially economic influence. As a rule, the imperialist forces in the colonial fringes did not have to constantly resort to the real use of political power: it was usually quite enough to know that they could count on the mother country in case of a crisis. Formal rule is thus most pronounced, but by no means a typical kind of imperialist dependence."

Oddly enough, Gallagher and Robinson saw their approach as different from the classic works of John Hobson (Imperialism: A Study, 1902) and Lenin (Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916) in the fact that Lenin and Hobson associated imperialism with a narrow circle of its manifestations, namely with the formal control of the imperialists, i.e. colonialism.
Viewing the last quarter of the 19th century, when the seizure of the colonies was in full swing, as a qualitatively new stage of capitalism - monopolistic or imperialistic - Lenin, they argue, thereby made formal rather than informal control the main feature of imperialism.

However, this criticism misses the mark, since Lenin himself emphasized that imperialism does not necessarily involve formal control, especially in the case of English imperialism in 19th century Latin America: "The division of the world into ... colonial powers and colonies," he observed, does not exhaust relations center-outskirts between states. In fact, Lenin pointed to "the variety of forms of dependent countries; countries that are officially politically independent, but which, in fact, are entangled in a web of financial and diplomatic dependence ... semi-colonies", including examples like Argentina, which was so financially dependent on London that was practically a British colony.

The reality of informal free-trade capitalism (or imperialism without colonies) has never been something of a mystery to Marxism, which sees imperialism as a historical process of capitalist expansion, with its forms of expression only of secondary importance. The reason for recognizing the last quarter of the 19th century as the imperialist stage in the work of Lenin and most of the subsequent Marxist writers had little to do with the transition from informal to formal imperialism, or the fact of a wide seizure of territories, but rather relied on the evolution of capitalism itself, which developed to a monopolistic stage, creating a qualitatively new type of imperialism. It was the historical analysis of imperialism as a manifestation of capitalist development in all its complexity (economy/politics/army - center and periphery) that gave the Marxist theory of capitalism the significance of a consistent way of understanding the deepening trends towards globalization within the system.

In this sense, imperialism was inherent in capitalism from the very beginning. Many features of modern capitalism, such as the creation of a world market, the division into center and outskirts, rivalry for the capture of colonies and semi-colonies, the capture of sources of raw materials for export to the mother country, etc. - have been inherent in capitalism as a world system since the end of the 15th century. Imperialism, in the broadest sense, comes from driving force the accumulation of the system itself (as fundamental to it as the pursuit of profit), which encourages the countries at the center of the capitalist world economy, and especially the rich in these countries, to line their pockets by appropriating surpluses and vital necessities from the border countries, what Pierre Jallet called "the looting of the third world." By various methods of coercion, the poor economies of dependent countries were organized (starting from the era of conquests of the late 15th and 16th centuries) so that their production and distribution served not so much their own needs as the mother countries. Nevertheless, the recognition of these common features of imperialism at different stages of capitalism is quite compatible with the observation that at the end of the 19th century there was a qualitative change in the nature and meaning of imperialism, sufficient for Lenin to associate it with a new stage of capitalism.

Therefore, Marxists often distinguished between the older imperialism and the so-called "new imperialism" that began in the last decades of the 19th century. The new imperialism had two main differences: 1) the collapse of British hegemony and the growing competition for control of the world among the leading capitalist powers, and 2) the rise of monopoly corporations - large, united industrial and financial firms - the leading actors in the economy of all advanced capitalist countries. The new colossal corporations, by their very nature, sought to transcend national boundaries and dominate global production and consumption. As Harry Magdoff observed: "The need to dominate is an essential feature of business." The monopoly firms involved in this imperialist struggle often enjoyed the support of their states. The Marxist theory of new imperialism, which focused on the emergence of giant companies, thus pointed to the changing conditions of the world economy, which in their development would give rise to what later became known as transnational corporations (TNCs). It is under such circumstances that old phenomena such as profit siphoning, the race for control of raw materials, the creation of economic dependence on the world's periphery, and the endless clash of world capitalist powers appear in new, changed forms.

It is precisely this understanding of imperialism as the historical reality of capitalist development, which acquired new features with the change in the system itself, that distinguishes the Marxist approach most sharply. Non-Marxists often view imperialism only as politics, associating it mainly with the political and military actions of the state. In the more widely held view (which has been opposed by economic historians like Gallagher and Robinson), imperialism existed only in cases of overt political and territorial domination as a result of outright conquest. On the contrary, from the point of view of Marxism, imperialism manifests itself not only in state policy, but also in the actions of corporations, through the mechanisms of trade, finance and investment. It weaves a vast web of class relations, including the promotion of local collaborators or compradors in dependent societies. Therefore, any description of how modern imperialism works necessarily includes a full analysis of the entire system of monopoly capitalism. The informal control of the countries on the outskirts of the capitalist world by the countries of the center is just as important, from this point of view, as the formal control. Struggles for hegemony and more general rivalries among the leading capitalist powers have always existed, but have taken various forms, depending on the economic, political, and military means at their disposal.

Imperial America after the Cold War

The main distinguishing feature of modern capitalism, from the point of view of Marxism, is associated with the creation of giant corporations, with the balance of power within this system, reflected in the position of various nation-states, which is constantly changing. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the main feature was the decline of British rule and the subsequent growth of rivalry among the advanced capitalist countries, which led to the First and Second World Wars. The creation of the USSR as a result of the First World War created an extremely dangerous challenge to the entire system, which led to the Cold War between the USA, the new dominant force in the capitalist world economy, and the USSR. The collapse of the USSR in 1991 left the US as the sole superpower. By the end of the 1990s, the US had defeated its main economic rivals. The result of all this at the beginning of the new century, as Henry Kissinger proclaimed in 2001 in "Does America Need a Foreign Policy at All?" , the United States has achieved "power beyond the reach of even the greatest empires of the past."

This naturally leads to the question: what will the US do with its huge "surplus power"? Washington's response, especially after 9/11, is to achieve imperial goals by resuming attacks on the world's fringe on a scale unheard of since the Vietnam War. In the imperialist war on "terrorism," the American state is an instrument for the expansionist goals of American business.

Abridged translation by Lydia Volgina
Original published at
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0503jbf.htm
http://left.ru/2003/15/foster91.html

Samir Amin

AMERICAN IMPERIALISM, EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST

Monthly Review, Volume 56, Number 6, November 2004
The analysis proposed here puts the role of Europe and the Middle East in the global imperialist strategy of the United States of America in the context of the historical vision of capitalist expansion that I have explored elsewhere 1 . Within the framework of this approach, capitalism has always been, since its inception, by virtue of its nature, a polarizing system, that is, an imperialist one. This polarization - and the accompanying emergence of dominating centers and oppressed peripheries, and their reproduction deepening at each stage - is integral to the process of capital accumulation carried out on a global scale.

In this theory of the global expansion of capitalism, the qualitative changes in accumulation systems, from one stage of their history to another, reflect successive forms of asymmetric center-periphery polarization, that is, concrete imperialism. Therefore, the current world system will remain imperialist (polarizing) for the foreseeable future, as its fundamental logic continues to be subject to capitalist production relations. This theory associates imperialism with the process of capital accumulation on a worldwide scale, which I see as creating a single reality, the various dimensions of which are virtually inseparable. Therefore, it differs greatly from both the vulgarized version of Lenin's theory of "imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism" (as if the previous stages of the global expansion of capitalism were not polarizing), and from modern postmodern theories that view the new globalization as "post-imperialist".

1. Constant conflict of imperialisms and collective imperialism

In its global expansion, imperialism has always appeared in the plural, from the time of its emergence (in the 16th century) until 1945. The eternal and often violent conflict of imperialisms has played as important a role in the transformation of the world as the class struggle, which expresses the fundamental contradictions of capitalism . Moreover, the social struggle and clashes between imperialisms are closely linked, and this connection determined the direction of real capitalism. The analysis I have proposed in this regard is very different from the idea of ​​"continuity of hegemonies" 2 .

The Second World War ended with an important transformation in the forms of imperialism, replacing many imperialisms in a state of constant conflict with collective imperialism. This collective imperialism is an ensemble of centers of the world capitalist system, or, more simply, a triad: the United States and its outer Canadian province, Western and Central Europe, and Japan. This new form of imperialist expansion has gone through various phases of its development, but has been uninterrupted since 1945. The role of the US as hegemon must be seen from this point of view, and every instance of this hegemony must be seen from the perspective of a new collective imperialism. It is the problems arising from these questions that I want to consider here.

The United States benefited economically from World War II, which crushed its principal rivals - Europe, the Soviet Union, China and Japan. This was an excellent position to consolidate their economic hegemony, since more than half of the world's industrial production was concentrated in the US, especially the technologies that would determine development in the second half of the century. In addition, they alone possessed nuclear weapons - a new total means of destruction.

This double advantage was, however, squandered in a relatively short period of time, two decades, by the economic rise of capitalist Europe and Japan, and the military rise of the Soviet Union. We must remember that this relative decline in American power has led to active speculation about America's decline, often supplemented by speculation about possible alternative hegemons (including Europe, Japan and, later, China).

At this time, Gaullism arose. Charles de Gaulle believed that the US goal since 1945 was control over the entire Old World (Eurasia). Washington strategically sought to divide Europe - which, in de Gaulle's view, stretched from the Atlantic to the Urals, including Soviet Russia - evoking the specter of aggression from Moscow, a specter that de Gaulle never believed in. His analysis was realistic, but he was practically alone. In opposition to the Atlanticism promoted by Washington, he envisioned a counter-strategy based on a Franco-German accord and the creation of an un-American Europe, gently rejecting Britain, which was rightly seen as the Trojan horse of Atlanticism. Europe had a path to cooperation with Soviet Russia. By cooperating and moving together, the three great European nations—the French, the Germans, and the Russians—could put an end to the American project of world domination. The internal conflict characteristic of the European project boils down to two alternatives: an Atlantic Europe, in which Europe is an appendage of the American project, and a non-Atlantic Europe, including Russia. This conflict has not yet been resolved. But the subsequent course of events - the end of Gaullism, the admission of Great Britain to the European Union, European expansion to the East, the collapse of the USSR, together led to the decline of the European project due to its dual dissolution in neoliberal economic globalization and political and military alignment with Washington. Moreover, these events revived the power of the collective character of the triad's imperialism.

2. The Project of the American Ruling Class: The Globalization of the Monroe Doctrine

The current American project, presumptuous, insane and criminal, did not originate in the mind of George W. Bush to be carried out by a far-right junta that came to power in a dubious election. It is a project that the American ruling class has nurtured since 1945, though it has had its ups and downs and has not always been able to carry it out with the persistence and brutality demonstrated since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This project has always given a decisive importance to the military dimension. Very quickly, the United States developed a global military strategy, dividing the planet into regions and transferring responsibility for control of each of them to the American Military Command. The goal was not only to encircle the USSR (and China), but also to secure Washington's position as the last resort for the whole world. In other words, the spread of the Monroe Doctrine to the entire planet has occurred, giving the United States the exclusive right to govern the entire world in accordance with what is defined as their national interests.

This project suggests that the primacy of US national interests should be placed above all other principles that control legitimate political behavior, which encourages a systematic distrust of all supranational rights. Of course, the imperialists of the past did not act differently, and those who seek to minimize and justify the opportunities - and criminal behavior - of the modern US establishment use this argument and find historical examples.

Because the horrors of World War II were the result of a conflict of imperialisms and fascism's contempt for international law, the United Nations was founded, proclaiming a new principle about the illegitimacy of the pre-existing right to independently start a war. The US not only identified itself with the new principle, but was one of the first forces to do so.

This positive initiative - supported by people all over the world - represented a qualitative shift and opened the way for the progress of civilization, but never had the respect of the US ruling class. Those in power in Washington have always disliked the very idea of ​​the UN, and today they are rudely proclaiming what they have sought to conceal until recently: that they do not accept the idea of ​​an international law superior to what they see as the defense of their own national interests. We cannot accept the justification for this rollback to the Nazi vision that led to the collapse of the League of Nations. The demand to adhere to international law, skillfully and elegantly made by French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin at the meeting of the Security Council, is not a nostalgic look into the past, but, on the contrary, a reminder of what the future should be like. In this case, the US was defending a past that, according to any reasonable opinion, is over.

The implementation of the American project naturally passed through a series of successive phases, which were determined by certain power relations.

Immediately after the Second World War, American superiority was not only accepted but also supported by the bourgeoisie of Europe and Japan. Since the threat of a Soviet invasion seemed convincing only to the feeble-minded, the constant incantations about it served the Right, as well as the Social Democrats, who were persecuted by their Communist rivals, in good stead. Then one might believe that the collective nature of the new imperialism was due to this political factor, and that once their subordination to the US was overcome, Europe and Japan would begin to look for opportunities to free themselves from Washington's clumsy and therefore useless oversight. But that was not the case. Why?

My explanation has to do with the rise of national liberation movements in Asia and Africa during the two decades that followed the 1955 Bandung conference that led to the emergence of the non-aligned movement, and the support they received from the Soviet Union and China. Imperialism was forced not only to accept peaceful coexistence with a huge territory that had gone out of its control (the socialist world), but also to negotiate the conditions for the participation of Asian and African countries in the imperialist world system. The unification of the triad under American supremacy seemed to be useful in managing North-South relations in this era. Therefore, the non-aligned states found themselves in a state of confrontation with the practically indivisible Western bloc.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the stifling of the populist nationalist regimes born of the national liberation movements led to a vigorous expansion of the US imperial project in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. In fact, the project seems to be carried out in the interests of collective imperialism, at least up to a certain point (which I will discuss later). It is expressed in the economic governance of the world based on the principles of neo-liberalism, implemented by the G7 and institutions subordinate to it (WTO, World Bank, IMF), and plans for structural adjustment that stifle the third world. Even at the political level, it is clear that initially the Europeans and the Japanese joined the American project. They accepted the marginalization of the UN in favor of the rise of NATO during the 1991 Gulf War and the 1999 war in Yugoslavia and Central Asia. This stage is still not over, even though the war in Iraq in 2003 showed some dissent.

The ruling class of the United States openly proclaims that it will not allow the restoration of any economic and military power capable of calling into question its monopoly of planetary domination, and because of this, has given itself the right to wage preventive wars. The goal can be three principal opponents.

First, it is Russia, whose dismemberment, after what happened with the USSR, has since become the main strategic goal of the United States. The Russian ruling class has not yet understood this. He seems convinced that after the defeat in the war, recovery is possible, as was the case with Germany and Japan. He forgets that Washington needed the resurrection of these two former adversaries to face the Soviet challenge. The new situation is completely different: the US no longer has a serious adversary. And their first desire is to destroy the devastated Russia completely and irrevocably. Will Putin understand this and begin the process of freeing the Russian ruling class from its illusions?

Secondly, it is China, whose growth and economic success worries the United States. The American strategic goal is the dismemberment of this great country.

Europe comes third in this global dream of the new rulers of the world. But here the American establishment doesn't seem concerned, at least not that much. The unconditional Atlanticism of the few (Great Britain as well as the new vassals in the east), the convergence of the interests of the dominant capital of the triad's collective imperialism, and the weakness of the European project (a problem to which I will return), together lead to the decline of this project. It seems that the European wing of the American project, like Washington's diplomacy, managed to keep Germany in line. Inclusion in the alliance and the conquest of Eastern Europe even strengthened this alliance. Germany was encouraged to renew the tradition of pushing the East, and the role that Berlin played in the breakup of Yugoslavia by quickly recognizing the independence of Slovenia and Croatia was a reflection of it. Otherwise, Germany was forced to stick to Washington's line. Are there any changes happening now? The German political class is indecisive and may be divided depending on the attitude towards strategic goals. An alternative to Atlanticism could be the rise of a nascent Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, which could then become the most important pillar of a European system independent of Washington.

The central question needs to be rethought, that is, the nature and potential strength of the triad's collective imperialism, and the contradictions and weaknesses of its US-led leadership.

3. The collective imperialism of the triad and the hegemony of the United States: their articulation and contradictions

Today's world is militarily unipolar. At the same time, some disagreements have emerged between the US and some European countries, demanding to take into account, at least in theory, the principles of liberalism in the political management of the global system. Are these disagreements only temporary, or are they heralding further changes? It is necessary to analyze in all their complexity the logic of the new phase of collective imperialism (North-South relations in today's language) and the specific goals of the American project. I will address five questions concisely and sequentially.

The evolution of a new collective imperialism

The formation of a new collective imperialism originates in the transformation of the conditions of competition. Just a few decades ago, large firms competed primarily in national markets, whether the American market (the largest national market in the world) or the European markets (despite their modest size, which made them inferior to the United States). Winners in national competition could enter the world market. Today, the size of the market required to win the first stage of competition is about 500-600 million potential consumers. The struggle must be waged directly for the global market. And those who dominate this market then assert their power in their respective national territories. Thus, internationalization becomes the main field of activity for large companies. Thus, in the national/global pair, the causal relationship changes: before, national strength ensured a global presence, now it is vice versa. Therefore, transnational companies, whatever their nationality, have a common interest in managing the world market. These interests are superimposed on various trade conflicts that define all forms of competition characteristic of capitalism, regardless of their nature.

The solidarity of the ruling groups of transnational capital members of the triad is real, and is expressed in their rallying around global neoliberalism. The United States, from this point of view, can be seen as the protector (military, if necessary) of these common interests. However, Washington does not at all seek an equal distribution of the profits from its dominance. The United States, on the contrary, seeks to turn its allies into vassals, and therefore only agrees to small concessions to its junior allies in the triad. Will this conflict of interests within the dominant capital lead to the collapse of the Atlantic alliance? Not impossible, but unlikely.

The place of the United States in the world economy

There is a widespread point of view that the US military strength is only the tip of the iceberg, reflecting its primacy in all areas, primarily economic, but also political and cultural. Therefore, it is impossible to avoid submission to the hegemony they claim.

On the contrary, I contend that in a system of collective imperialism, the US does not have decisive economic advantages. The American production system is far from being the most efficient in the world. In fact, few of its sectors could compete in the truly free market that liberal economists dream of. The trade deficit, which has been growing year after year, has grown from $100 billion in 1989 to $500 billion in 2002. Moreover, almost all spheres of production are involved in this deficit. Even the $35 billion in high-tech profits that once made in 1990 are now in short supply. The competition between Ariane and NASA rockets, between Airbus and Boeing, testifies to the vulnerability of the American advantage. The US is opposed by Europe and Japan in high-tech products, China, Korea, and other Asian and Latin American industrial nations in consumer goods, and Europe and southern Latin America in agriculture. The United States will probably not be able to achieve an advantage if it does not turn to non-economic measures, violating the principles of liberalism dictated by its competitors!

In fact, the US benefits only from a relative advantage in the military-industrial complex, precisely because this sector operates largely outside the rules of the market and enjoys government assistance. This advantage, of course, brings some benefits to the civilian sector (the Internet is the best example), but also leads to serious distortions, causing many sectors of production to fall behind.

Growth during the Clinton administration, flaunted as the result of liberal policies that Europe unfortunately resisted, was in fact largely far-fetched, and in any case non-spreadable, because it was based on the movement of capital, which meant the stagnation of the partner economies. In all sectors of real production, American growth did not exceed European growth. The American miracle was the result of a rise in consumption driven by widening social inequalities (financial and personal services, legions of lawyers and private police forces). In this sense, Clinton's liberalism undoubtedly set the stage for a reactionary wave and Bush's later victory.

The reasons for the weakening of the American manufacturing system are complex. Of course, they are not a mere coincidence, and cannot be remedied, for example, by setting the right exchange rate or a more favorable balance between payouts and productivity. They are structural. The mediocrity of the education system and deep-rooted misconceptions about preferring private property to the detriment of public services are among the main causes of the crisis that American society is experiencing.

It is surprising that the Europeans, without drawing any conclusions from the problems of the American economy, are actively imitating it. Everything cannot be explained here by the liberal virus, although it plays an important role for the system, paralyzing the left. Widespread privatization and the dismantling of public services will only negate the benefits of "old Europe" (as Bush calls it). However, whatever the damage these measures will cause in the long run, in the short run they will bring additional profits to the dominant capital.

Specific goals of the American project

The US hegemonic strategy is carried out within the framework of the new collective imperialism.

Conventional economists have no analytical means to understand these goals. They repeat adnauseam that in the new economy raw materials supplied from the third world are doomed to lose their value and therefore the third world is becoming more and more marginalized in the world system. In contrast to these naive and empty claims, we have the Bush administration's Mein Kampf 4 which makes it clear that the US is actively working to control the planet's natural resources to meet its consumer needs. The campaign for minerals (first of all, oil, but also other resources too) was expressed in all this fury. Moreover, the volumes of these resources are decreasing not only because of the cancer of Western consumerism, but also because of the new industrialization of the periphery.

Moreover, a significant number of countries in the South have to increase their industrial production both for the needs of their domestic markets and to maintain their role in the world market. As importers of technology, capital, as well as competitors in exports, they are doomed to upset the global economic balance. And this applies not only to East Asian countries like Korea, but also to huge China, and, tomorrow, India and the big countries of Latin America. However, far from being a factor of stabilization, the acceleration of capitalist expansion in the South can only lead to violent conflicts, internal and external. The reason why this expansion cannot be absorbed under existing conditions is the huge pool of labor force concentrated in the periphery. In fact, the periphery of the system remains a storm zone. The centers of the capitalist system are forced to increase their control over the peripheries and subject the world population to a ruthless discipline aimed primarily at satisfying their needs.

From this point of view, the American establishment perfectly understood that, in pursuing the goals of strengthening its hegemony, it has three decisive advantages over Europe and Japan in this struggle: control over the natural resources of the world, military monopoly and the importance of the Anglo-Saxon culture, which best expresses the ideological dominance of capitalism. The systematic use of these three advantages exposes many aspects of American policy: Washington's constant attempts to establish military control over the oil-rich Middle East; their aggressive strategy towards China and Korea - taking advantage of the "financial crisis" that hit the latter; their skillful game of widening the divide in Europe - mobilizing an unconditionally allied Britain and preventing closer ties between the European Union and Russia. At the level of global control over the planet's resources, the US has a decisive advantage over Europe and Japan. The point is not only that the United States is the only military force on an international scale, and therefore no serious intervention in the Third World can do without it, but also that Europe (with the exception of the former USSR) and Japan do not have significant resources for of its economy. For example, their dependence in the energy sector, in particular their dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf, will persist for a long time, even if it decreases to some extent. By exercising military control over the region through the Iraq war, the US has shown that it is well aware of the usefulness of this mode of pressure to influence (allied) competitors. Not so long ago, the Soviet Union also understood the vulnerability of Europe and Japan, and Soviet interventions in the Third World were intended to remind them of this, as well as to call for negotiations on other terms. It was clear that the problems of Europe and Japan could become a reason for a serious rapprochement between Europe and Russia (Gorbachev's "common home"). For this reason, the formation of Eurasia remains Washington's nightmare.

Conflict between the United States and partners in the triad

Although the partners in the triad share common interests in the global governance of collective imperialism, expressed in their interaction with the South, they are nonetheless in a state of potential conflict.

Europe, and the world in general, will be forced to choose one of two strategic alternatives: invest their capital (i.e., savings) to continue financing the American deficit (consumption, investment, and military spending), or mothball and invest the surplus within their own limits.

Conventional economists ignore this problem by making the nonsensical assumption that, given that globalization has supposedly abolished the nation-state, it is no longer possible to manage the primary economic factors (saving and investment) at the national level. But as silly as it sounds, the very idea of ​​the need to save and invest at the global level is actually useful in justifying and supporting other countries' financing of US deficits. This nonsense is a good example of tautological reasoning, when the conclusions that are expected in the end are laid down from the very beginning.

Why is this nonsense accepted? There is no doubt that the teams of economists surrounding the European (as well as Russian and Chinese) political class on the right, just like the electoral left, are themselves victims of the economic alienation that I call the liberal virus. In addition, this point of view reflects the political decision of large transnational capital. The essence of this decision is that the benefits of US governance of the globalized system in the interests of collective imperialism outweigh its disadvantages - a tribute that must be paid to Washington for stability. In fact, this is precisely a tribute, and not an investment on the terms of a return. There are countries regarded as poor debtors who always force their foreign debt to be serviced at any cost. But there is also a rich debtor country that can devalue its debt if it sees fit.

The other alternative for Europe (and the rest of the world) would be to stop these transfers in favor of the US. The surplus product can be used locally (in Europe) and the economy will revive. The flight of capital is forcing Europeans to adopt policies that, in the misleading language of conventional economic theory, are called "deflationary" and which I call stagnation - aimed at exporting the profits generated by exports. This makes the recovery of Europe dependent on artificial support from the US. Mobilizing this surplus product to provide employment in Europe would mean a revival of consumption (due to the restoration of the social dimension of liberal virus-hit economic management), investment (primarily in new technologies and research), and even military spending (this would reduce the US advantage in this area). ). The choice of this alternative would mean a shift in the balance of social relations towards the working classes. In Europe, this is a possible alternative for capital. The contrast between the US and Europe does not lie in the plane of interests of the dominant segments of their capital. First of all, it comes from differences in their political cultures.

Questions of theory raised by previous reflections

The cooperation and competition of partners in collective imperialism in the control of the South - the taking of natural resources and the subjugation of people - can be analyzed from different points of view. I will make three remarks which seem to me particularly important.

First, the modern world system, which I consider to be a system of collective imperialism, is no less imperialist than the previous ones. This is not an "Empire" having a "post-capitalist" nature 5 .

Secondly, I propose to consider the history of capitalism as a global one from the very beginning, focusing on the differences between different stages of imperialism (or center-periphery relations).

Third, internationalization is not synonymous with the unification of the economic system through deregulatory opening of markets. The latter - in their changing historical forms(freedom of trade yesterday, freedom for companies today) - is always only a project of the then dominant capital. In fact, this project was almost always imposed on terms that had nothing to do with a specific internal logic. It can never be embodied except for short periods of history. The "free exchange" promoted by the greatest industrial power of that time, Great Britain, was effective only for twenty years (1860-1880) and was replaced by a century (1880-1980) characterized by inter-imperialist conflict, a serious separation from the world system of socialist countries and a more modest secession of countries with populist nationalist regimes (during the Bandung era from 1955 to 1975). The current period of a new unification of the world market, carried out by neoliberalism since the 1980s, and expanded to the entire planet with the collapse of the USSR, is unlikely to have a good fate. The chaos it generates shows that it represents the “eternal utopia of capital”, as I have been describing this system since 1990.

4. Middle East in the imperialist system

US regional dominance after the fall of the USSR

The Middle East, considered together with the border areas of the Caucasus and post-Soviet Central Asia, occupies a very important position in the geostrategy and geopolitics of imperialism and, in particular, the hegemonic project of the United States. It owes this position to three factors: the wealth of its oil fields, its geographic location in the heart of the Old World, and its position as a vulnerable spot in the world system.

Access to relatively cheap oil is vital to the ruling triad, and the best remedy ensuring this access is confident political control over the territory.

But the region is no less important due to its geographical position, being the center of the Old World, and located at an equal distance from Paris, Beijing, Singapore and Johannesburg. In the old days, control of this crossroads gave the Caliphate an advantage in gaining the benefit of long-distance trade. After the Second World War, the region, located south of the Soviet Union, was necessary for the military strategy of encircling the USSR. And the region has not lost its significance with the fall of the enemy. American dominance in the region weakens Europe, dependent on energy supplies from the Middle East, to the position of a vassal. With Russia repressed, China and India are also becoming vulnerable to constant energy blackmail. Control of the Middle East allows the expansion of the Monroe Doctrine to the Old World, fulfilling the objectives of the US hegemonic project. But Washington's long and constant attempts, beginning in 1945, to secure control over the region without involving Great Britain and England were unsuccessful. We can recall the failure of the attempt to join the region to NATO through the Baghdad Pact, and the fall of one of the most loyal allies, the Shah of Iran.

The reason is very simple, and is that Arab (and Iranian) nationalist populism has rapidly come into conflict with the aspirations of American hegemonism. The Arab project sought to force the superpowers to recognize the independence of the Arab world. The Non-Aligned Movement, formed in 1955 in Bandung at the congress of the national liberation movements of the countries of Asia and Africa, was the strongest current of that time. The USSR quickly realized that by supporting this project, it was possible to counteract the aggressive plans of Washington.

This era has come to an end, primarily because the populist nationalist project of the Arab world quickly lost its potential for transformation, and nationalist regimes turned into dictatorships, devoid of plans and hope for change. The vacuum created by this shift has opened the way for political Islam and backward Gulf autocracies, beloved friends of Washington. The region has become one of the weak points of the global system, vulnerable to external interference (including military), which local regimes, due to lack of legitimacy, are unable to contain or repel. The region represented, and continues to represent, the zone of greatest importance (like the Caribbean) in the US military division of the entire planet - the zone in which the US has given itself the "right" to intervene militarily. Since 1990, they have not denied themselves anything!

The United States operates in the Middle East in close cooperation with its two unconditional allies - Turkey and Israel. Europe is removed from the region and forced to accept that the US is protecting the global vital interests of the triad there, that is, the supply of oil. Despite clear signs of irritation after the Iraq war, Europeans in the region as a whole continue to follow Washington's lead.

The role of Israel and the Palestinian resistance

Israeli colonial expansion is a real challenge. Israel is the only country in the world that refuses to recognize its borders as they have been defined (and should therefore be denied the right to be a member of the UN). Like the United States in the 19th century, Israel claims the right to conquer new territories for the expansion of its colonization, and to persecute the people who lived there for thousands of years as "redskins". Israel is the only country openly declaring non-compliance with UN resolutions.

The 1967 war, planned in 1965 in agreement with Washington, pursued several goals: to begin the destruction of populist nationalist regimes, break their alliance with the Soviet Union, force them to shift to pro-American positions, open up new territories for Zionist colonization. In the territories conquered in 1967, Israel established an apartheid system inspired by the South African model.

Here the interests of ruling capital meet those of Zionism. A rich, strong and modernized Arab world would call into question the West's right to seize its oil resources, which is so necessary to continue the wastefulness associated with capital accumulation. Therefore, the political forces in the countries of the triad - faithful servants of transnational capital - do not need a modernized and strong Arab world.

Thus, the alliance between Western countries and Israel is based on their common interests. This alliance is in no way the result of the European sense of guilt for anti-Semitism and the crimes of Nazism, nor the ability of the "Jewish lobby" to exploit this feeling. If the West decided that its interests were threatened by Zionist colonial expansionism, they would quickly find ways to overcome the guilt complex and neutralize the lobby. There is no doubt that public opinion in democratic countries does not determine the behavior of the authorities. We know that this opinion is also fabricated. Israel could not have resisted for more than a few days even under the moderate blockade imposed by the Western countries on Yugoslavia, Iraq and Cuba. Therefore, it would not be difficult to bring Israel to its senses and create conditions for real peace, if there was a real desire to do this, but there is not.

Shortly after the defeat in the 1967 war, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat proclaimed that since the US held "90% of all the cards" (his expression), it was necessary to break with the Soviet Union and enter the Western camp. He thought that by doing so, it would be possible to influence Washington to put pressure on Israel, to reason with it. Apart from the strategic ideas shared with Sadat, the wrongness of which was proven by subsequent events, Arab public opinion was not aware of the dynamics of the global expansion of capitalism, and even less was able to understand its real contradictions and weaknesses. It is still convinced that "someday the West will understand that it is in its own long-term interests to maintain good relations with the two hundred million Arab world and not sacrifice these relations for senseless support of Israel." That is, it is implicitly assumed that the "West", which is the imperial center of capital, seeks to modernize and develop the Arab world, and not to keep it in a state of helplessness, for which Israel's support is very useful.

The choice made by the Arab governments, with the exception of Syria and Lebanon, which led them to accept, through the negotiations in Madrid and Oslo (1993), the American plan for the so-called final peace, of course, could not bring the results they hoped for, that is, containment expansionist project of Israel. Today, by openly denying the terms of the Oslo agreement, Ariel Sharon clearly demonstrates what was clear from the beginning - that this was not a project of final peace, but the opening of a new phase of Zionist colonial expansion.

Israel and the Western countries that support his project have plunged the region into a state of constant war. In turn, this state of constant warfare was reinforced by the autocratic Arab regimes. Blocking any possibility of democratic evolution weakens the chances of an Arab revival, and thus strengthens the alliance of dominant capital with US hegemonic strategy. The circle is complete: the American-Israeli alliance serves the interests of both partners perfectly.

At first, the apartheid system that had been unfolding since 1967 gave the impression of being able to accomplish its task of managing the daily life of the occupied territories by frightened elites and merchant bourgeoisie, with the outward approval of the Palestinian people. Since its exile in Tunisia, the PLO, which left the region after the Israeli army invaded Lebanon (1982), seemed unable to question the Zionist annexation.

The first Intifada broke out in 1987. It reflected the emergence on the stage of popular classes, primarily the poorest segments imprisoned in refugee camps. The intifada weakened Israeli power by organizing systematic civil disobedience. Israel responded with brutality, but could neither restore effective policing nor force the cowardly Palestinian middle class to seize power again. On the contrary, the Intifada called for the return of the exiled political forces, the creation of new local forms of organization and the involvement of the middle classes in the struggle for liberation. The intifada was started by a youth, the chebabalIntifada, not organized in the formal networks of the PLO, but in no way hostile to them. The four components of the PLO (Fatah, subordinate to Yasser Arafat, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Communist Party) joined the Intifada and thus earned the sympathy of the chebab. The Muslim Brotherhood, relegated to the background due to lack of activity in previous years, except for some Islamic Jihad actions in 1980, formed Hamas in 1988.

As the first Intifada began to fizzle out two years later, and Israeli repression became increasingly violent (including the use of firearms against children and the closure of the border to cut off the Palestinian workers' only source of income), "negotiations" were launched. The United States took the initiative with the Madrid meeting (1991) and the so-called Oslo Peace Accords (1993). These agreements allowed the PLO to return to the occupied territories, which were to become the Palestinian Authority.

The Oslo Accords envisaged the transformation of the occupied territories into one or more Bantustans fully integrated into Israel 6 . The Palestinian Authority was supposed to be just a pseudo-state - like Bantustan - and in fact be subordinate to the Zionist order.

Returning to Palestine, the PLO - now the Palestinian Authority - sought to establish this order, but not without some ambiguity. The administration included in its structures a significant part of the chebabs that coordinated the Intifada. It gained legitimacy after a referendum in 1996, in which 80% of the Palestinians took part; the vast majority elected Arafat president of the autonomy. The administration found itself in an ambiguous position: agree to perform the functions entrusted to it by Israel, the United States and Europe, that is, the functions of the government of Bantustan, or be equal to the Palestinian people who refused to obey?

Since the Palestinian people rejected the Bantustan project, Israel decided to denounce the Oslo agreement, but continued to dictate its terms, turning exclusively to military force. The provocation in the holy places of Jerusalem, planned by the war criminal Sharon in 1998 (however carried out with the help of the Labor government, which allowed the use of tanks), the complete victory of this criminal in the elections and his rise to power (and the cooperation with him in this government of doves like Shimon Peres ), led to the second Intifada, which continues to this day.

Will it bring the Palestinian people freedom from subjection to Zionist apartheid? It's still too early to say for sure. In any case, the Palestinian people now have a real national liberation movement. It has its own specifics. It does not follow the style of one-party homogeneity (even though the reality of one-party states is always more complex). Its components have their own characteristics, their own vision of the future, including ideologies, their warriors and adherents, but at the same time they know how to cooperate in the conduct of the struggle.

American Project for the Middle East

The decline of populist nationalist regimes and the disappearance of Soviet support gave the US the opportunity to expand its project into the territory.

Control of the Middle East is the cornerstone of Washington's project of global hegemony. Is the US also planning to ensure this control? For a decade now, Washington has taken the initiative to promote a curious project called " Common Market Middle East,” in which some Gulf countries will invest, other Arab countries will provide cheap labor, and Israel will establish technological control and retain the functions of a privileged intermediary. This project was accepted by the Gulf countries and Egypt, but was rejected by Syria, Iraq and Iran. Therefore, it was necessary to overthrow these three regimes. This has now been done with Iraq.

The question is what type of political regime must be established for this project to be sustainable. Washington propaganda speaks of "democracies." In fact, the renewal of the alliance with so-called "moderate political Islam" (which is supposedly the only force capable of controlling the situation and preventing the drift towards terrorism - and "terrorism" is defined as a threat to the United States alone) now represents Washington's axis of political choice. . Within this perspective, peacekeeping will be associated with the obsolete Middle Eastern social system.

Faced with the spread of the American project, Europe proposed its own project, which was given the name "Euro-Mediterranean Partnership". It is a decidedly craven project, weighed down with empty talk that, of course, also proposes to reconcile the Arab countries with Israel. And by excluding the Gulf countries from the European-Mediterranean dialogue, it became clear that the management and control of these countries is the sole responsibility of Washington.

The sharp contrast between the audacity of the American project and the weakness of the European one is a good indication that real Atlanticism does not imply equality between the US and Europe in responsibility and participation in decision-making. Tony Blair, an advocate for the creation of a unipolar world, believes that this provision can be justified, since Atlanticism will be based on a more even distribution of powers. Washington's self-confidence makes this hope more and more illusory every day, if it was not originally an attempt to deceive European public opinion. The realism of Stalin's claim that the Nazis "didn't know where to stop" fits perfectly with those who rule the US. Blair appeals to hopes that are similar to the belief that Mussolini can appease Hitler.

Is another choice of Europe possible? Has it started to take shape? Doesn't Chirac's speech, in which he opposes the "unipolar Atlantic" world (which for him is in fact a synonym for unilateral US hegemony), not a harbinger of the creation of a multipolar world and the end of Atlanticism? For this to become a reality, Europe must first free itself from the quicksand in which it is now bogged down.

5. European project in the liberal swamp

All European governments swore allegiance to the basic tenets of liberalism. This monotony of European countries means the complete destruction of the European project due to the double weakening, economic (the advantages of the EU economy are dissolved in economic globalization) and political (European political and military autonomy disappears). There is currently no European project. It is being replaced by the North Atlantic (and eventually the Triads) project under US leadership.

After the Second World War, Western Europe was able to catch up with the United States in economics and technology. After 1989, the Soviet threat disappeared, as did the contradictions that marked the European history of the last century and a half - France, Germany and Russia reconciled. The potential for these changes is still untapped. Of course, they take place on an economic basis, transformed in accordance with the principles of liberalism. But this liberalism until the 1980s. was quite moderate thanks to the social democratic historical compromise that forced capital to adapt to the demands of social justice put forward by the working people. However, then the creation of a new social structure inspired by American, anti-social liberalism began.

This turn plunged European societies into a multidimensional crisis. First of all, it is the economic crisis that inevitably accompanies the liberal choice. The crisis was aggravated by the fact that European countries provided the economic conditions for American dominance: Europe, until recently, agreed to finance the US deficit, neglecting its own interests. This was followed by a social crisis in which it is necessary to highlight the growth of resistance and the struggle of the masses against the fatal consequences of the liberal choice. Finally, one can see the beginning of the political crisis in the refusal to submit, at least unconditionally, to the American aspirations for an endless war against the South.

The "made in USA" wars have stirred up public opinion (the latest case with Iraq had a global effect) and even some governments, including France, Germany, Russia and China. But these same countries have not questioned their commitment to liberal politics. This major contradiction will be resolved either by further compliance with Washington's demands, or by a real rupture, signifying the end of Atlanticism.

The main political conclusion I draw from this analysis is that Europe cannot transcend Atlanticism as long as political power is in the hands of dominant transnational capital. Only if social and political struggles can lead to a new historic compromise between capital and labor can Europe move away from Washington, making the European project possible. Under these conditions, Europe could also – and should – be involved at the international level in relations with the East and the South, under conditions other than the current conditions of collective imperialism. This course should start a long march beyond capitalism. In other words, Europe will be on the left or not at all.

Translation by Yuri Dergunov

Notes

1 Samir Amin, Class and Nation (New York: NYU Press, 1981); Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989); Samir Amin, Obsolescent Capitalism (London: Zed Books, 2003); Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus (New York, Monthly Review Press, 2004).

2 The literature on "hegemonic succession" is "West-centric" in the sense that it views the transformations taking place at the heart of the system as guiding the system's global evolution and of decisive and almost exclusive significance. The reactions of the populations of the peripheries to the spread of imperialism should not be underestimated. The independence of the Americas, the great revolutions made in the name of socialism in Russia and China, the restoration of the independence of the Asian and African countries were challenges to the system coming from the peripheries. And I do not believe that one can evaluate the history of world capitalism without taking into account the changes in which center capitalism itself has been drawn. Therefore, it seems to me that the history of imperialism is more appropriately viewed in terms of the conflict of imperialisms than in terms of the type of order that succession of hegemonies leads to. The apparent periods of hegemony have always been very short, and the hegemonies themselves very relative.

3 Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

4 Office of the White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States, September 2002. http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html .

5 Amin alludes to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book "Empire", which substantiates the assertion of the end of imperialism and the transition to a "new global form of sovereignty" from a pseudo-Marxist position. - Approx. per.

6 Amin draws parallels with the apartheid system in South Africa. - Approx. per.

John Bellamy Foster

OPEN IMPERIALISM

Monthly Review, Volume 57, Number 4, September 2005
The global actions of the United States after September 11, 2001 are often seen as the beginning of a "new militarism" or "new imperialism." But neither militarism nor imperialism is anything new to the US. They have been expansionist—continental, hemispheric, global—from the very beginning. What has changed is the frankness of this expansion and the boundless, planetary scope of US ambitions.

Max Booth, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, insists on the "terrible danger" that threatens the United States in Iraq and in the world "if we do not use all our strength because of the fear of the word" imperialism "... Taking into account history, the US government should not use this term in its rhetoric. But it certainly must use it in practice.” The US, he says, must be "prepared for imperial rule without apologetics." Washington may not count on “permanent bases in Iraq… but they should be… If that gives rise to talk of American imperialism, well, so be it” (“American Imperialism?: No Need to Run from the Label,” USA Today, 6 May 2003). Similarly, Deepak Lal, Coleman Professor of International Development Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues: “Pax Americana’s main task should be to find ways to create a new order in the Middle East… Many people make accusations that such actions will be acts of imperialism. and will largely be based on the desire to control Middle Eastern oil. But surely imperialism is just what is needed to restore order in the Middle East” (“In Defense of Empires,” in Andrew Bacevich, ed., The Imperial Tense, 2003).

These views, although proclaimed by neoconservatives, are entirely in line with American foreign policy. Undoubtedly, there are only minor differences in the US ruling circles on the topic of attempts to expand the American empire. For Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, “the real controversy … is not about whether or not there will be an empire, but about what it will be” (New York Times, May 10, 2003). Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Politics at Harvard University, states unequivocally: “This new imperialism… is humanitarian in theory but imperial in practice; it creates "sub-sovereignty" in which states remain independent in theory but not in reality. The reason the Americans are in Afghanistan or the Balkans is to establish imperial order in areas that are important to US interests. They are there to protect order from the menace of the barbarians." As "the last military state of the West" and the last "of the existing empires", the US is responsible for "imperial structuring and order". “Similar to Rome… we are now experiencing an awakening of the barbarians… They have already received their reward, but punishment will still fall on their heads” (“The Challenges of American Imperial Power,” Naval War College Review, Spring 2003).

All of this reflects the realities of American imperial power. In his preamble to the National Security Strategy of the United States, released in the fall of 2002, President George W. Bush proclaimed that with the fall of the Soviet Union, there was now "one enduring model of national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise," embodied in the American capitalism. Any society that rejects this rule is doomed to fall and will, as it was implied, be declared a threat to US security. The main text of the document was accompanied by an open declaration of Washington's goals for strategic dominance in the indefinite future. He proclaimed the US desire to wage preventive wars against states that directly threaten or may threaten future US dominance, or may be seen as an indirect threat because of the danger they pose to US allies anywhere in the world. As the new National Security Strategy notes, preventive action will be taken to ensure that no country can be a military rival to the US in the future. On April 13, 2004, President Bush declared that the US needed to "keep on the offensive" in a ruthless war waged against anyone seen as an enemy.

Since September 11, 2001, the US has started the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, expanded the global distribution of the military base system, and increased military spending so that it now spends almost as much on the military as all other states combined. In praise of the American blitzkrieg in Iraq, journalist Greg Easterbrook proclaimed in the New York Times (April 27, 2003) that the US military is “the strongest this world has ever known… stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the zenith of Rome's power."

Many left-wing critics reacted in the spirit of: "Let's drop these bastards!". The American government during Bush, this view argues, was taken over by a neo-conservative cabal that began to pursue a new policy of militarism and imperialism. For example, UCLA sociologist Michael Mann argues in his Incoherent Empire (2003) that "a neoconservative chicken-hawk coup ... led to the takeover of the White House and the Department of Defense" with the victory of George W. Bush in the presidential election. For Mann, the solution to this problem is to "throw the militarists out of their offices."

My point of view leads me to other conclusions. American militarism and imperialism have taken deep roots in US history and the politico-economic logic of capitalism. As US imperialists fail to admit even now, the US has been an empire since its founding. "The United States," Booth writes in "American Imperialism?" have been an empire since at least 1803, when Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory. In the 19th century, what Jefferson called "the empire of freedom" spread to the entire continent. Later, the US conquered and colonized foreign territories through the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the brutal Philippine-American War that immediately followed, which was justified as an attempt to "bear the burden of the white man." After World War II, the US and other major imperialist states abandoned formal political empires but retained informal economic empires, accompanied by the threat and often reality of military intervention. The Cold War masked this neo-colonial reality, but it could never completely hide it.

Empire growth is not a feature of the United States and not only the result of the policies of certain states. It is the systematic result of the entire history and logic of capitalism. Since its birth in the 15th and 16th centuries, capitalism has been a global expansionist system, hierarchically divided between metropolises and satellites, center and periphery. The goal of the modern imperialist system, as in the past, is to open the peripheral economies to investment from the capitalist core, thus guaranteeing permanent access to natural resources at low prices and a net flow of economic surplus from the periphery to the center of the world system. In addition, the Third World is seen as a source of cheap labor, representing a global reserve army of labor. The economies of the periphery are focused on meeting the external needs of the United States and other countries in the core of the capitalist system, and not their own internal needs. This has led (with some important exceptions) to conditions of perpetual dependency and debt bondage in the world's poorest regions.

If the "new militarism" and "new imperialism" are not so new, and lie in the mainstream of the entire history of the United States and world capitalism, an important question arises: why did American imperialism become more overt in recent years, so that it was unexpectedly discovered by itself and its supporters and opponents? Just a few years ago, some leftist globalization theorists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their book Empire (2000) argued that the era of imperialism was over, that the Vietnam War was the last imperialist war. But today, imperialism is far more in demand by the US power structure than at any time since the 1890s. This shift can only be understood by considering the historical changes that have taken place in the last three decades since the end of the Vietnam War.

When the Vietnam War finally ended in 1975, the US suffered a heavy defeat in what the Cold War ideology denied, an imperialist war. The defeat coincided with an unexpected drop in the growth of the American and world capitalist economies in the early 1970s, when the nemesis of stagnation again reminded itself of itself. The extensive dollar exports associated with war and the rise of empire created a huge Eurodollar market that played a central role in President Richard Nixon's August 1971 decision to de-back the dollar in gold, ending the gold standard. It was a sign of the decline of American economic hegemony. The energy crisis that hit the US and other major industrial nations, when the Gulf states cut oil exports in response to Western support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War, exposed the US's vulnerability to dependence on foreign oil.

The unwillingness of the American population to support US military interventions in the Third World, which conservatives branded the "Vietnam Syndrome", during this period deterred the US from using the colossal military machine as a response to the global crisis. American interventions were consistently curtailed and the retreat of the imperialist system began: Ethiopia in 1974, Portuguese colonies in Africa (Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau) in 1974-1975, Grenada in 1979, Nicaragua in 1979, Iran in 1979 and Zimbabwe in 1980.

The most serious defeat of American imperialism in the late 1970s. was the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which overthrew the Shah of Iran, the former arm of US military dominance over the Persian Gulf and its oil.

In the wake of the energy crisis, the Middle East has become a top priority for US global strategy. President Jimmy Carter stated in January 1980 what became known as the Carter Doctrine: “Attempts by any outside force to take control of the Middle East region will be regarded as a threat to the vital interests of the United States of America, and the threat will be answered by any necessary methods, including military strength." This was expressed as a kind of parallel to the Monroe Doctrine, which proclaimed US claims to dominance over the Americas, and became an imaginary "legal principle" that justified American military incursions in other states of the hemisphere. The Carter Doctrine effectively asserted that the US was claiming military dominance over the Persian Gulf, administered by the American empire, "by any means necessary". The US assertion in the Middle East was accompanied by the onslaught of a CIA-sponsored war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan (it was the largest covert war in history), in which the US enlisted fundamentalist Islamic forces, including Osama bin Laden, who waged jihad against Soviet forces. . The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were the response to this war and the ensuing Gulf War.

During the Reagan era in the 1980s. The US expanded its offensive, resuming the arms race and looking for ways to overthrow the revolutions of the 1970s. In addition to contributing to the war against the USSR in Afghanistan, they provided military and economic assistance to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, assisting him in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988; increased direct military involvement in the Middle East with an unsuccessful intervention in Lebanon in the early 1980s. (troops were withdrawn only after the bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983); sponsored covert operations against unfriendly countries and revolutionary movements throughout the world. The biggest secret wars were waged against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and against the revolutionary forces in Guatemala and El Salvador. In 1983, the US invaded Grenada and, under the next president, George H. W. Bush, occupied Panama in December 1989 as part of a campaign to regain control of Central America.

But the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 brought about a real change in US imperialism. As Andrew Batzewicz wrote in The American Empire (2002), “just as victory in 1898 [in the Spanish-American War] turned the Caribbean into an American lake, so victory [in the Cold War] in 1989 made the entire world the domain of the United States; since that time, American interests have lost borders. Unexpectedly, with the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from the world stage (and its imminent collapse in the summer of 1991), the possibility of widespread military intervention in the Middle East was opened. Immediately, in the spring of 1991, the Gulf War broke out. The US, although aware of the impending Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, did not object until it began (Saddam Hussein's statement and US Ambassador April Glaspie's response can be read in the New York Times International, September 23, 1990). The Iraqi invasion gave the US a pretext for a full-scale war in the Middle East. Between 100,000 and 200,000 Iraqi soldiers died during the hostilities, and at least 15,000 civilians died directly from American and British bombing raids on Iraq (Research Unit for Political Economy, Behind the Invasion of Iraq, 2003). Commenting on the major results of the war, President Bush proclaimed in April 1991, "With God's help, we have eradicated the Vietnamese syndrome."

However, the US at that time decided not to develop its advantage and not to occupy Iraq. While there were certainly many reasons for this decision, among which was the likely lack of support from the Arab members of the coalition, the main one was the geopolitical changes that occurred after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The position of the Soviet Union itself was unstable. With no clear vision of the fate of the Soviet Union and the geopolitical sphere it controlled, Washington could not afford to occupy Iraq. The end of the Soviet Union did not come until the next month.

In the 1990s The US (led by Democrat Bill Clinton) has been involved in major military interventions in the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe. The war in Yugoslavia culminated in the US-led NATO bombing campaign for eleven weeks, followed by the deployment of NATO ground forces. Under the pretext of ending "ethnic cleansing," the war in the Balkans had as its geopolitical goal the expansion of US imperial power into the former Soviet sphere of influence.

Towards the end of the 20th century, the US power elite began a transition to a policy of outright imperialism not seen since the turn of the century, with the American empire now seen as planetary in scope. Even with the emergence of a massive anti-globalization movement, especially after the Seattle protests of November 1999, the US establishment has moved vigorously towards 21st century imperialism promoting neoliberal globalization based on American world domination. "The invisible hand of the market," as Thomas Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times foreign policy columnist, observed. – will never work without an invisible fist. McDonald's can't thrive without McDonnell Douglas, the maker of the F-15. And the invisible fist that keeps Silicon Valley technology secure is the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps” (New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1999). However, the “invisible fist” was only partially invisible, and in recent years it has become increasingly visible.

One can be convinced that the transition to openly militaristic imperialism took place gradually, in several stages. During much of the 1990s the US ruling class and the military establishment were debating behind the scenes about what to do now that the disappearance of the Soviet Union had left the United States as the sole superpower. To be sure, there was no doubt that it would become the economic arm of the global empire led by the United States. 1990s demonstrated the strengthening of neoliberal globalization, that is, the destruction of barriers to capital, which led to the strengthening of the rich capitalist countries of the center of the world economy relative to the poor countries of the periphery. The key instrument was the founding of the World Trade Organization, in addition to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as organizations that set the monopoly capitalist rules of the game. From the perspective of most of the world, a more exploitative economic imperialism has reared its ugly head. But for the countries at the center of the world economy, neoliberal globalization was seen as a resounding success, despite the signs of global financial instability, which was announced by the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998.

However, the US establishment continued to discuss the way and limits to which the US should develop its advantage by using its colossal military power to advance US global primacy in the new "unipolar" world. If neoliberalism arose as a response to economic stagnation, shifting the brunt of the economic crisis onto the planet's poor, the problem of the decline of American economic hegemony seems to have received a completely different solution: the establishment of the United States as the military colossus of the world system.

Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Department of Defense, at the suggestion of George W. Bush, initiated a review of national security policy in light of the changing global situation. The report, completed in March 1992 and known as the Defense Planning Guide, was written under the direction of Paul Wolfowitz, then Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Defense. He pointed out that the primary goal of US national security should be "preventing the emergence of potential global rivals" (New York Times, March 8, 1992). The subsequent debate within the American establishment was not about whether the US should seek to establish global leadership, but whether it would happen unilaterally or multilaterally. Some of the key people in the administration of future President George W. Bush, including Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, organized the Project for a New American Century, which, in anticipation of the victory of George W. Bush in the White House, at the request of the then vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney, issued a foreign policy document entitled "Redesigning American Defense" (September 2000), which reproduces the one-sided and overtly aggressive "Defense Planning Manual" of 1992. After September 11, 2001, this approach became official US policy in the "National Defense of the United States, 2002. The drumming of the war before the invasion of Iraq coincided with the issuance of a new declaration of national security, a declaration of a new world war.

As I have noted, a common view among critics is to attribute these dramatic changes to the takeover of the political and military command centers of the American state by a neo-conservative cabal that gained power in the 2000 elections and then used the opportunities provided by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to global imperial offensive and new militarism. But the expansion of the American empire, in light of the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the foregoing discussion has shown, has continued all this time and was originally a bipartisan project. During the Clinton administration, the US waged war in the Balkans, which was part of the Soviet sphere in Eastern Europe, and began the process of establishing military bases in Central Asia, which was part of the Soviet Union itself. In the late 1990s, the US was dropping bombs on Iraq every day. When John Kerry, as the Democratic presidential nominee in the 2004 election, argued that he would fight the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism with equal resolve and military resources, and his course would be less one-sided, he was only postulating the views Democrats on the nature of empire in the 1990s. and upon their completion.

From the point of view of the holistic approach offered by the critique of capitalism in historical materialism, there could be no doubt about the direction of the evolution of American imperialism after the fall of the Soviet Union. Capitalism, by its very logic, is a global expansionist system. The tension between transnational economic aspirations and the fact that it remains politically divided into nation-states is insurmountable within the system. However, the ill-fated attempts of individual states to overcome this contradiction is also part of the fundamental logic of capitalism. In the current world situation, when one capitalist state has a virtual monopoly on the means of destruction, it cannot resist the temptation to establish complete dominance and turn itself into a global state that controls the world economy. As the eminent Marxist philosopher Istvan Meszáros noted in his book Socialism or Barbarism (2001), which was written—importantly—before George W. Bush came to power: “What is at stake today is not control over any part of planets - no matter how big - that would tolerate the existence of weaker but independent rivals. No, we are talking about total control over the entire planet by one hegemonic economic and military superpower. About control by any means at its disposal, even the most authoritarian and, if necessary, military.

The unprecedented threats of this new global disorder are embodied in the two cataclysms the world is heading towards today: the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the increasing likelihood of an outbreak of nuclear war and planetary ecological destruction. This is symbolized by the Bush administration's refusal to sign the Total Test Ban Treaty, which was supposed to limit the development of nuclear weapons, and the Kyoto Protocol as the first step towards controlling global warming. As former Secretary of Defense (in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) Robert McNamara argues in his Foreign Policy May-June 2005 article "The Apocalypse Is Coming": but never at all. We have been, and remain, ready to use nuclear weapons, by the decision of one man, the President, against any enemy, whether they have nuclear weapons or not, if we believe it is in our interest.” The country with the largest regular military and the willingness to use them unilaterally to increase its global power is also the country with the largest nuclear forces and the willingness to use them in its fit of rage, bringing the world to the brink of survival. The country that produces the most global warming carbon dioxide (about a quarter of the world's production) has become the biggest obstacle to preventing global warming and the cause of rising global environmental issues, creating the possibility of a collapse of civilization if these trends continue.

The US is trying to establish its sovereign global rule over the entire planet at a time of deepening global crisis: economic stagnation, growing polarization between wealth and poverty on a global scale, the decline of American economic hegemony, the growth of nuclear threats and environmental degradation. The result is an increase in international instability. Other potential powers are emerging in the world, such as the European Union or China, that could challenge the US on a regional or even global level. In the Third World, revolutions are starting to gain momentum again, which is symbolized by the Bolivarian Revolution under the leadership of Hugo Chavez. US attempts to squeeze the Middle East and its oil with an imperial noose have run into fierce and seemingly invincible Iraqi resistance, creating the conditions for imperial tension. As long as the US brandishes its nuclear arsenal and refuses to promote international agreements to control this type of arms, the proliferation of nuclear weapons continues. New countries such as North Korea are preparing to join the "nuclear club". Terrorist retaliation for imperialist wars in the Third World is a widely accepted reality that creates fear of future terrorist attacks in New York, London and elsewhere. These vast and overlapping historical contradictions, rooted in the combined and uneven development of the global capitalist economy, together with the US drive for world domination, herald potentially the most dangerous period in the history of imperialism.

The course the US and world capitalism are following is leading to global barbarism, or even worse. But it is important to remember that there is nothing insurmountable in human history. There is still an alternative path - a global struggle for a humane, egalitarian, democratic and sustainable society. The classical name for this society is "socialism". This renewed struggle for a world of human equality must begin by identifying the weak link in the system and, at the same time, the most urgent task in the world - organizing a global resistance movement against the new overt imperialism.

John Bellamy Foster is professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, head of the Marxist section of the American Sociological Association, and author of Marx's Ecology, A Vulnerable Planet, and Ecology Against Capitalism. The published article is a preface to his book "Frank Imperialism", which will be published in early 2006.

Michael Parenti

IMPERIALISM. INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1

Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history for the past four or five centuries, dividing entire continents while oppressing indigenous peoples and destroying entire civilizations. At the same time, the empire in the form in which it currently exists rarely becomes the object of serious attention of our scientists, media commentators and political leaders. Although the subject of imperialism was not completely ignored, it was subjected to a fair amount of refinement, softening, so that empires began to be called "commonwealths", and colonies turned into "territories" and "dominions". Imperialist military interventions became a matter of "national defense", "national security" and the maintenance of "stability" in a particular region. In this book, I want to look at what imperialism really is.

Through the whole world

By "imperialism" I mean the process by which the dominant political-economic interests of one nation expropriate the land, labor, natural resources and markets of other peoples for their own enrichment. The first victims of Western European imperialism were other Europeans. About 800 years ago, Ireland became the first colony of what was later called the British Empire. Today part of Ireland is still under British occupation. Other early white victims of imperialism include the peoples of Eastern Europe. At the beginning of the ninth century, the Slavs worked to their death in the mines of the Carolingians. This enslavement of Eastern Europeans was so intense and prolonged that the word "Slav" became synonymous with slavery. Indeed, the word "slave" (slave in Western languages ​​- trans.) comes from the root "glory". Eastern Europe was an early source of capital accumulation, becoming completely dependent on Western industrialists by the seventeenth century.

A particularly devastating example of intra-European imperialism was the Nazi aggression during World War II, which enabled the German industrial cartels and the Nazi state to plunder the resources and exploit the labor of occupied Europe, including slave labor in concentration camps.

The main blow of the European, North American and Japanese imperial powers was directed against Africa, Asia and Latin America. By the 19th century, they saw the Third World not only as a source of natural resources and slaves, but also as a market for their manufactured goods. By the 20th century, industrialized nations had moved to export not only goods but also capital, in the form of equipment, technology, investments, and loans. But this does not mean that the plundering of natural resources has stopped. On the contrary, the robbery only intensified.

Among the many views of imperialism circulating in the United States today is the idea that imperialism no longer exists. Imperialism is not recognized as a legitimate concept, and certainly not in relation to the United States. You can talk about "Soviet imperialism" or "British imperialism of the 19th century", but not about American. A political science graduate at most universities in this country will not get the opportunity to research American imperialism on the grounds that such research will not be academic. 1 While many people around the globe accuse the US of being an imperialist power, in this country people who talk about US imperialism are usually considered empty ideological talkers.

Capital expansion dynamics

Imperialism is older than capitalism. The Persian, Macedonian, Roman and Mongol empires existed centuries before the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. Emperors and conquerors were mainly interested in robbery and tribute collection, gold and glory. Capitalist imperialism differs from these earlier forms in that it systematically accumulates capital through the organized exploitation of labor and penetration into overseas markets. Capitalist imperialism invests in other countries, dominates their economy, culture and political life, and integrates their production structure into the international system of capital accumulation.

The central imperative of capitalism is expansion, expansion. Investors will not invest in a venture unless they can get more out of it than they put in. An increase in profits is possible only with the growth of the enterprise. The capitalist is constantly looking for ways to make more money in order to make even more money. It is necessary to constantly invest for profit, to accumulate as much strength as possible in the face of competing forces and unpredictable markets.

Given its expansionist nature, capitalism has little incentive to stay at home. Nearly 150 years ago, Marx and Engels described the bourgeoisie as “preying over the entire surface of the globe. She must nest everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere ... She creates the world in her own image. The expansionists destroy entire societies. Self-sufficient peoples are transformed by force into disenfranchised hired workers. Indigenous communities and popular cultures are being replaced by mass market, mass media and consumer societies. Cooperative lands are being occupied by agribusiness, villages are being replaced by urban-type barrack settlements, and autonomous regions are turning into centralized autocracies.

Here is one of thousands of such examples. A few years ago, the Los Angeles Times published a special report on the rainforests of Borneo, in the South Pacific region. According to their own stories, people there lived self-sufficient lives. They hunted, fished, grew food in their gardens and groves. But their whole way of life was ruthlessly destroyed by several giant companies that destroyed the rainforests in order to sell the timber and make a profit. Their lands have turned into areas of ecological disaster, and they themselves have become disenfranchised inhabitants of shanty towns, forced to work for the minimum wage - when they are lucky enough to find at least some work.

North American and European corporations have acquired control of more than three-quarters of the mineral resources of Asia, Africa and Latin America. But the pursuit of natural resources is not the only reason for the overseas expansion of capitalism. There is an additional need to reduce production costs and maximize profits by investing in countries with an abundance of cheap labor. Foreign investment by US corporations rose 84% from 1985 to 1990, with the most dramatic increases in countries with cheap labor such as South Korea, Taiwan, Spain, and Singapore.

Due to low wages, taxes, lack of social benefits, weak unions, non-existent professional and environmental protections, corporate profits for American businesses in the Third World are 50% higher than in developed countries. Citibank, one of the largest American firms, receives about 75% of its profits from foreign operations. While profit growth at home was rather modest, profits abroad increased dramatically, boosting the development of what became known as multinational corporations (MNCs). Today, about 400 TNCs control approximately 80% of capital assets in the global market and extend their influence to the former communist countries of Eastern Europe.

TNCs have developed a global pipeline. General Motors has factories producing cars, trucks and a wide range of parts in Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, Spain, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Nigeria, Singapore, the Philippines, South Africa, South Korea and a dozen similar countries. This “distribution of power” allows a company to mitigate the damage of strikes in one country by shifting production to another, pit workers from different countries against each other in order to reduce demands for higher wages and better working conditions, and undermine labor unions.

Not necessary, but simply irresistible

Some authors question whether imperialism is a necessary condition for capitalism, pointing out that most Western capital is invested in the West and not in the Third World. If corporations lose all their investments in the Third World, these researchers argue, many of them could survive off the European and North American markets. In response, one can say that capitalism is able to live without imperialism - but it does not show an inclination to do so. He shows no desire to give up his extraordinarily profitable Third World ventures. Imperialism may not be a necessary condition for the investor's survival, but it appears to be an inherent trend and a natural outgrowth of advanced capitalism. Imperialist relations may not be the only way to make profits, but they are the most cost-effective way.

The necessity of imperialism for capitalism is not really a question. Many things that are not absolutely necessary are at the same time strongly desired, and therefore they are preferred and zealously pursued. Across the seas, investors find cheap Third World labor, vital natural resources, and many other highly lucrative terms that are irresistibly attractive. Superprofits may not be necessary for the survival of capitalism, but survival is not all that the capitalist is interested in. There is a strong preference for super-profits over moderate earnings. Just because capitalism doesn't need imperialism doesn't mean there's no irresistible connection.

The same is true for other kinds of social dynamics. For example, wealth does not necessarily lead to a luxurious life. Much of the wealth of the ruling class can be used for investment rather than personal consumption. The very rich can live on more modest amounts, but most of them prefer to live differently. Throughout history, the propertied classes have preferred to have the best of everything. After all, the purpose of profiting from other people's labor is a good life, the ability to avoid any form of thankless hard and monotonous work, to enjoy privileged access to a luxurious life, medical care, travel, education, recreation, security, leisure, and of course power and prestige. And while none of these things are really "necessary," those who possess them cling to them tightly, as evidenced by the brutal measures taken by the possessing classes as soon as they feel threatened by the egalitarian democratic force.

Myths of underdevelopment

The poor lands of Asia, Africa and Latin America are known to us under the name "Third World" to distinguish them from the "First World" of industrialized Europe and North America and the now largely collapsed "Second World" of communist countries. The poverty of the Third World, called "underdevelopment", is regarded by most Western observers as the original historical condition. We are being asked to believe that this has always been the case, that poor countries are poor because their lands have always been infertile or their people have always been unproductive.

In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced vast amounts of food, minerals, and other natural resources. That is why the Europeans were so eager to rob them. No one goes to poor places to get rich. The third world is rich. Only his people are poor - and this is because of the robbery they suffered.

The process of expropriation of the natural resources of the Third World began many centuries ago and continues today. First, the colonialists took gold, silver, furs, silk, spices, then flax, hemp, timber, molasses, sugar, rum, rubber, tobacco, cocoa, coffee, cotton, copper, coal, iron, tin, palm oil, ivory, and later oil, zinc, manganese, platinum, cobalt, bauxite, aluminum and uranium. And not to miss the most monstrous expropriation: the forced labor of millions of people.

During the centuries of colonization, many theories arose to serve colonization. I was taught in school that people in tropical lands are passive, lazy and cannot work as intensively as we inhabitants of temperate latitudes. In fact, the inhabitants of the warm lands performed great labor feats, creating magnificent civilizations, long before Europe emerged from the Dark Ages. And today they often work hard, long and hard hours for meager sums. And yet the early stereotype of the "lazy native" is still with us. In any capitalist society, the poor, whether local or overseas, are regularly blamed for their own poverty.

We hear that the peoples of the Third World are culturally backward in their manners, customs, and technical abilities. This is a convenient idea for those who want to present Western investment as a rescue operation aimed at helping backward peoples become more efficient. The myth of "cultural backwardness" goes back to ancient times, when it was used by conquerors to enslave indigenous peoples. For the same purposes, he served for European cottonizers over the past five centuries.

What kind of cultural superiority could the Europeans of past times claim? From the 15th century to the 19th century, Europeans were "ahead" in terms of executions, murders and other atrocities; they were also leaders in the prevalence of venereal diseases, smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis, plague and other bodily ailments, as well as in social inequality and poverty (both urban and rural), abuse of women and children and the prevalence of hunger, slavery, prostitution, piracy , religious murders and torture by the Inquisition. Anyone who believes that the West was the most advanced civilization must keep all these "achievements" in mind.

Speaking more seriously, it should be noted that Europe had a serious advantage in terms of navigation and weapons. Muskets and cannons, machine guns and destroyers, today's rockets, helicopters and bombers have become a decisive factor in the meeting of West and East, North and South. Superior firepower, not superior culture, allowed Europeans and North Americans to dominate positions that are still held largely by force, though not by force alone.

It has also been claimed that the peoples being colonized were biologically backward and evolved more slowly than their colonizers. Their "savagery" and "low" level of cultural development were presented as an expression of their inferior genetic evolution. But were they culturally backward? In many parts of what is now considered the Third World, the peoples were highly skilled in architecture, gardening, crafts, hunting, fishing, midwifery, medicine, and other things. Their social customs and mores were often more noble and humane and less autocratic and repressive than anything similar in Europe at that time. Of course, we shouldn't romanticize these indigenous societies, some of which had their own violent customs. But in general, these peoples had a healthier, happier life, with more free time than most Europeans.

There are other theories that are widely circulated. We are told that the poverty of the Third World is due to overcrowding, as many people have too many children to feed. In fact, over the past few centuries, many Third World countries have been less densely populated than some countries in Europe. India has fewer people per unit area - but more poverty - than Holland, Wales, Italy, England, Japan and a number of other industrial countries. Moreover, it is the industrialized nations of the First World, and not the poor peoples of the Third, that consume 80% of the world's resources and pose the greatest threat to the ecology of the globe.

All this does not call into question the real threat of overpopulation of the planet for the ecosphere. Reducing population growth in all countries of the world will help improve the global habitat, but it will not solve the problems of the poor - for overpopulation in itself is not a cause of poverty, but only one of its consequences. The poor tend to have large families, as children are a source of labor, family income and support for the elderly.

Franz Moore Lappe and Rachel Schurman found that out of seventy Third World countries, six—China, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Chile, Burma, and Cuba, and the state of Kerala in India—were able to reduce their birth rate by one-third. They did not experience dramatic increases in production or rapid growth in per capita income, nor did they run extensive family planning programs 2 . Factors that researchers say played a decisive role in the decline in fertility were education and health measures, reduction of economic inequality, improvement in women's rights, food subsidies and, in some cases, land reform. In other words, the birth rate was reduced not through capitalist investment and economic growth per se, but through socio-economic improvements, even modest ones, accompanied by the strengthening of women's rights.

Artificially turned into the poor

What is called "underdevelopment" is actually a complex public relations imposed by force on a number of countries. With the advance of Western colonizers, the peoples of the Third World suffered a setback in their development, sometimes for centuries. British imperialism in India is a good example. In 1810, India exported more textiles to England than England exported to India. By 1830 the picture had reversed. The British set up a protective tariff to block Indian manufactured goods and dumped their goods on the Indian market, a practice supported by military force. Within a few years, the huge textile centers in Dhaka and Madras turned into ghost towns. The Indians were sent back to the countryside to grow cotton for the British textile mills. India, as a result, has become a cow milked by British financiers.

By 1850 India's debt had grown to £53 million. Between 1850 and 1900 its GNP per capita fell by nearly two-thirds. The price of raw materials and commodities that India was forced to sell to Britain during most of the 19th century amounted to the annual income of 60 million Indian agricultural and industrial workers. The mass poverty that we associate with India was not the original historical condition of that country. British imperialism did two things: firstly, it stopped Indian development; secondly, it imposed underdevelopment on the country by force.

Notes

1 In Chapter 10, the topic of relations between imperialism and the academy is disclosed in more detail.

2 Data for China are before 1979 - the beginning of modernization, industrial growth and the introduction of the one-child program: see Food First Development Report no.4 1988

From Empires to Imperialism [The State and the Emergence of Bourgeois Civilization] Kagarlitsky Boris Yulievich

AMERICAN IMPERIALISM

AMERICAN IMPERIALISM

In February 1898, the administration of President William McKinley used the explosion of the American battleship USS Maine in Havana as a pretext to intervene in the Spanish colonies, where the war of independence had been raging for several years - in Cuba, in Insurgents in Puerto Rico and the Philippines waged a successful struggle against the weakening empire. The explosion of the American battleship remained unexplained, marking the beginning of a peculiar tradition of strange incidents that provoked American military actions abroad (from the sinking of the Louisitania in 1915 and the Tonkin incident in 1964 to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001) .

The US government has declared itself the protector of Cuba, insisting that it "renounces all intention of taking this island under its control, jurisdiction or sovereignty, limiting all its efforts to the establishment of peace there." This obligation was formally observed - in relation to Cuba, but not to the Philippines and Puerto Rico, also occupied by the Americans during the war. Based on such statements, future US President Woodrow Wilson, in A History of the American People, even retroactively concluded that, in relation to Cuba, “the intervention was not caused by a desire to expand the borders of the United States, but solely by a desire to protect those who were victims of oppression. to enable them to form their own government, restore peace and order to the island, and establish the principle of free trade there.”

Even before the hostilities of the Spanish-American War began, there was a discussion in the United States itself about the prospects opening up for the country. The victory over a weak and bankrupt Spain was not in doubt, but the question remained about the fate of the Spanish colonies, which were inevitably to be under American control, and how the new status of a colonial power was compatible with the republican traditions of America.

In fact, of course, the United States has been an aggressive imperial power from the very moment of its inception, and it was precisely the need of the American elites for independent expansion that predetermined not only their determination to separate from Britain, but also the ability of the ruling circles of the North and South to unite and work out a common project of independence. Robert Kagan reasonably notes that the turn of US policy towards imperialism in 1898 was not at all a break with national traditions, as opponents (and even some supporters) of the current course believed. On the contrary, “it grew out of old and potent American ambitions” demonstrated by the Founding Fathers.

However, for American public opinion, it was the war with Spain that turned out to be the moment of truth, when the masses of citizens, who sincerely believed in republican values, suddenly realized the imperialist nature of their own state.

However, while defending the need for colonial expansion, the American ruling circles simultaneously emphasized that, firstly, their actions were largely forced, and secondly, American colonialism would be completely different from Spanish, British or French. The annexation of the Hawaiian Islands, for example, was justified by saying that "if we do not take Hawaii for ourselves, England will." On the other hand, assessing the prospects of the future American colonial empire, the liberal-progressive newspaper The Nation wrote: “British rule in India was associated at first with the despotism of a completely irresponsible private trading company. There is nothing like this in our political system. We will not be able to rule a dependent territory except by means of elections” (by the ballot). Such colonialism can only benefit the conquered, just as the victory of the North over the South in the Civil War and the subsequent policy of Reconstruction benefited the vanquished. “We have to do in Cuba what we did in the South thirty years ago. It will be the same reconstruction, although this time it will be more difficult, since we will have to draw our line among a people who do not know our language, do not share our ideas and are undoubtedly ready to hate us if we resort to coercion.

Having declared war on Spain, the United States easily captured Cuba and Puerto Rico, and then the Philippines, where, however, they had to face active resistance from the very rebels whom, according to the official version, they came to support. By signing the Peace of Paris, Spain renounced the rights to its colonies occupied by the Americans. While Cuba was formally granted independence, a colonial administration was established in the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Guam, the southern island of the Marianas archipelago, which was subordinate to the Governor-General of the Philippines, was transferred to the United States under the Treaty of Paris, and in February 1899, Spain sold the rest of the Marianas to the German Empire.

Explaining the capture of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, Woodrow Wilson complained that the transition to a new colonial policy happened somehow by itself, forcedly, since the old Spanish administration collapsed, a political vacuum formed - it was impossible to leave the islands to their fate! In reality, there was no vacuum - the Philippine rebels were a real political and military force, with which the United States had to fight for several more years.

The colonial war launched by American forces in the Philippines, according to various estimates, cost the local population from 200 thousand to a million lives. As the Russian historian V.V. Sumsky, “the technique of counterinsurgency operations, applied in the second half of the 20th century. in Vietnam, America tried it for the first time - and with frightening cruelty - in its Asian colony. However, the success of the colonial policy was predetermined not only by punitive operations, but primarily by the cooperation of the local bourgeoisie, which readily supported the new masters. As early as 1900, the colonial authorities began organizing a system of representation that ensured the participation of local elites in the management of the colony. For the bourgeoisie of Manila and other economic centers of the archipelago, participation in the Asian expansion of the United States and the transformation of the islands into an outpost of this expansion promised much greater benefits than independence.

Wilson's story gives a quite frank explanation of what happened. America, becoming a world trading power, inevitably turned out to be a colonial power as well. “The country had to move from developing its own resources to conquering world markets. A vast market was opening up in the East, and politicians, as well as merchants, must take this into account, playing by the rules of competition - the way to this market must be opened with the help of diplomacy, and if necessary, then force. And the United States simply could not pass up the opportunity to establish an outpost in the East, the opportunity that the possession of the Philippines opened up for them. For the sake of this, the Americans even had to sacrifice some ideals, retreat from the principles that "professed by every generation of their statesmen from the first".

As American colonial expansion unfolded, so did the tone of the press, and at the same time the illusions about the specific democracy of the American empire dissipated. On the pages of The Nation, idealism is replaced by pragmatism: “If we decide to annex countries and govern a people that differ from us in race, religion, language, history, and much more than others, a people who will most likely hate us and consider our power“ yoke,” we need to train administrators, just like guns and ships. We must do what all the other conquerors and colonizers do, what England is doing, what Germany and Russia are doing.

These words turned out to be prophetic. The new American administrators ruled the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the same way that the European colonial officials did, only harder, actively introducing English language and effectively controlling all decision-making even at the local level.

Of course, the question of how to reconcile republican values ​​and imperial ambitions could not be completely ignored by the liberal part of public opinion. However, the answer given by the publicists of those years was cynically simple - no way. If the British parliamentary system and the French Republic were able to ignore this contradiction by suppressing local resistance in Madagascar and the Sudan, then why can't American democracy do the same in the Philippines and Puerto Rico? “Indeed, it is difficult to reconcile the beautiful democratic principles of human rights with the brutal suppression of the discontent of the Malagasy, Sudanese or Filipinos, depriving them of the rights that we ourselves recognize and respect. But why do we think that a democracy should be more consistent in its actions than any other form of government?

In the name of commercial interests, democracy has had to show some inconsistency...

Of course, not all citizens of the American Republic shared such a pragmatic view of things. On November 19, 1898, the Anti-Imperialist League was founded in Boston, after which similar organizations began to spring up in all states. A year later, they already had a total of about a million members. In October of the following year, the nationwide American Anti-Imperialist League was established. The leading role in the league was played by the liberal intelligentsia and representatives of the petty-bourgeois “populist” opposition. The League opposed the Paris Peace Treaty, according to which the Philippines and Puerto Rico passed into the possession of the United States, and after the approval of the treaty in February 1899, it called for an end to American intervention in the Philippines, speaking in favor of granting independence to the archipelago.

One of the ideologists of the League was the famous writer Mark Twain, who resolutely spoke out "against the attempts of the imperial eagle to launch its claws into another country." The anti-imperialists declared themselves defenders of America's traditional democratic values, declaring their intention to unite all those "who disagree with the attempts of the Republic to govern an empire scattered in remote parts of the world."

By 1901, however, the activities of the League began to decline. Failing to achieve a change in political course, the movement was forced to accept its consequences. During the First World War, the American Anti-Imperialist League did not oppose the participation of the United States, although some of its members expressed disagreement with government policy. In 1921 the League was dissolved. Having had a certain influence on the ideology of the American left, it left almost no traces in the American mass consciousness, for which the contradiction between democratic norms of domestic policy and anti-democratic foreign policy practice did not receive serious reflection until the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.

The conquered Philippines became a base for American expansion in East Asia. The international situation favored this. In 1884, the Chinese government was defeated by France, and in 1895 by Japan. The conservative and incompetent government of Empress Cixi frustrated all attempts at reform, creating the conditions for a powerful social explosion. He did not keep himself waiting long. The 1898 flood was followed by a Yihetuan (Boxer) popular uprising that quickly turned against the foreign presence in the country. In 1900, the German envoy in Beijing, a large number of other Europeans and Chinese Christians were killed by Boxers. This gave rise to another intervention, in which, along with the Germans and the British, the French, Austrians and Italians took part. Russia occupied Manchuria. Supported the intervention and the United States.

In the spring of 1898, The Nation coolly stated that the Chinese empire was falling apart: "Nothing can save it and the only question is who will take over parts of it." The American public is ripe enough to support participation in the division.

The acquisition of their own colonies during the Spanish-American War forced bourgeois public opinion in the United States to reassess the role of other colonial powers as well. At the height of the conflict with Spain, The Nation wrote that "an alliance between England and the United States is now, after a century of mutual dislike and mistrust, becoming a matter of practical politics." English colonial practice now appeared before the readers of the newspaper in an exclusively positive light, and the need for cooperation between the two powers was justified not by pragmatic, but by the highest considerations. While the Americans are concerned about the development of democracy in the former Spanish colonies, the mission of the British Empire is to spread enlightenment in Asia. Therefore, any weakening of its position in the East "will mean the defeat of civilization, which will be thrown back at least a century."

However, compared with the European powers, the United States still remained in China on the sidelines. The greatest activity in the new onslaught on China was shown by Russia and Germany, which previously did not have strong positions in the Celestial Empire. In 1900, an American newspaper stated with envy and admiration that by conquering Manchuria, Russia "annexed one of the richest provinces in the world." Like other colonial conquests, Russian expansion will only benefit the conquered people, and under the rule of the Romanovs, Chinese barbarism will give way to Russian civilization: “Russia will certainly introduce an advanced civilization in this region, order will reign there under its rule, and prosperity will certainly follow. ".

These hopes, however, were not destined to come true. The division of booty in northern China turned into a sharp conflict, and then a war between Russia and Japan. Having defeated the Russian troops on land, the Japanese ended the war of 1904-1905 by sinking the Russian fleet in the Tsushima Strait and occupying the desperately resisting Port Arthur. For Russia, the outcome of the war meant the beginning of an era of revolutionary upheaval; for Japan, it marked its rise as a new imperialist power claiming equal rights and influence with its European partners and rivals.

And for America, Japan's success meant the emergence of a new and unexpected rival that was yet to be faced in a bloody conflict.

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Imperialism: 1900–1945

"Empire at the heart of American foreign policy"

The term imperialism was coined in the middle of the 19th century. It was first widely applied to the US by the "American Anti-Imperialist League" founded in 1898 against the Spanish–American War and the subsequent occupation and brutality perpetrated by US forces in the Philippines after the Philippine–American War.

Cultural imperialism

The debate about supposedly American cultural imperialism differs in many ways from military imperialism, however, some critics argue that cultural imperialism is not independent of military imperialism. Edward Said, one of the original scholars of post-colonial theory, argues that

So influential has been the discourse insisting on American specialness, altruism and opportunity, that imperialism in the United States as a word or ideology has turned up only rarely and recently in accounts of the United States culture, politics and history. But the connection between imperial politics and culture in North America, and in particular in the United States, is astonishingly direct.

US military bases abroad as a form of empire

US military presence in 2007.
More than 1000 employees.
Over 100 employees.
Use military installations.

see also

Notes

Links

• "America and Empire: Manifest Destiny Warmed Up?". The Economist. Argues that the U.S. is going through an imperial phase, but like previous phases, this will be temporary, since (they argue) empire is incompatible with traditional U.S. policies and beliefs.
• 9/11 and the American Empire. Retrieved May 5, 2006. A website that looks at the events of 9/11 which point towards government orchestration with the intention of using mass public fear as a catalyst for creating a stronger American Empire.
• The American Empire Project. Retrieved 16 August 2008. A series of related books by the authors Chalmers Johnson, Michael T. Klare, Alfred W. McCoy, Walden Bello, Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler, Brendan Smith, James P. Carroll, Noam Chomsky , Robert Dreyfuss, El Fisgn, Greg Grandin, and Peter H. Irons.
• An American Question. "" tygerland.net by AS Heath. Retrieved June 10, 2006. July 25, 2005
• Boot, Max (May 5 2003). "American imperialism? No need to run away from label". USA today. Argues that "U.S. imperialism has been the greatest force for good in the world during the past century."
• Hitchens, Christopher, Imperialism: Superpower dominance, malignant and benign. Slate.com. Retrieved June 10, 2006. , warns that the U.S.-whether or not you call it an empire-should be careful to use its power wisely.
• Johnson, Paul, America's New Empire for Liberty. Article from conservative writer and historian, argues that the U.S. has always been an empire-and a good one at that.
• Motyl, Alexander J. (July/August 2006). "Empire Falls Alexander J. Motyl". foreign affairs. Two new books attempt to explain U.S. power and policy in imperial terms.
• Empire? . Global Policy Forum. Retrieved August 7, 2006.
• Niall Ferguson Empire Falls. Vanity fair. Retrieved October 1, 2006.
• The American Empire:Pax Americana or Pox Americana? . Monthly Review. Retrieved March 20, 2007.
• Is President Bush Destroying the American Empire? An Update on America's Inadvertent Empire Transcript of presentation by Robert Dujarric on April 14, 2004
• On the Coming Decline and Fall of the US Empire. transnational.org. Retrieved July 30, 2006.

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