Moving out of the superpower
orbit
By Tom Engelhardt
Of the two superpowers that faced each
other down in an almost half-century-long Cold
War, one - the United States - emerged victorious,
alone in the world, economically powerful,
militarily dominant; the other, never the stronger
of the two, limped off, its empire shattered and
scattered, its people impoverished and desperate,
its military a shell of its former self. This is a
story we all know, and more or less accept.
Winner/loser, victor/vanquished. It makes sense.
That's the way we expect matches, competitions,
struggles, wars to end.
But what if, as
has been suggested recently, the Cold War turned
out to be a loser/loser contest? That may seem
counterintuitive. In regards to the US, it would
have been considered laughable not so long ago,
except to a few scholars of imperial decline like
Immanuel Wallerstein, and yet it may be an
increasingly plausible thought.
Take,
however, the obvious loser of the Cold War, and
with the semi-secret - or at least not
particularly well covered - tale of how the
victorious US superpower attempted to finish off
its former rival, the Russian remnant of the USSR
and its last outlying regions of control, its
"near abroad".
By the 1980s, the USSR was
an overstretched empire - economically worse than
shaky, its military overblown, its money going
down an imperial rat hole - and then, of course,
there was Afghanistan. (Anything already sound a
little familiar here?) Afghanistan was Russia's
Vietnam, exactly as several American
administrations wanted it to be - the difference
being that Vietnam was a resounding regional
defeat for the US; while Afghanistan was a
politically and economically empire-shattering
defeat for the Soviet Union.
After the
Berlin Wall came down, US administrations,
especially the present one, poured money (direct
and indirect), effort and planning into the
penetration of, and stripping away of, Russia's
"near abroad". By now, the old Baltic republics of
the former Soviet Union have entered the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (and American
jets fly missions over them); Romania and Bulgaria
are readying themselves for possible future
American bases; Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan
have all had at least semi-democratic revolutions
(Orange, Rose, and Tulip), lead by oppositions at
least partly funded (in all sorts of complex ways)
and organized through the good offices of the US
government and allied foundations (using "methods
[that] have matured into a template for winning
other people's elections").
The US now has
military bases in the former Central Asian Soviet
republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and may
conceivably already have more military bases (and
missions) in the far-flung imperial regions of the
former USSR than do the Russians. (It's not even a
contest if you throw in Afghanistan.) US Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice, in her confirmation
hearings, tossed the last remaining western edge
of the old Soviet Union, the "democratic"
dictatorship of Belarus into her new list of
"outposts of tyranny".
When it comes to
Russia, the Bush administration has moved US
policy from the Cold War position of "containment"
to the Cold-Warrior dream-state of "roll back".
And despite the president's friendly invocations
of "Vladimir" in his press conferences and
elsewhere, administration officials undoubtedly
yearn for, or are even aiming for, "regime change"
in Putin's Russia. In the meantime, Russia's "near
abroad" has been largely stripped away under the
banner of the administration's latest crusader
slogan - distinctly it's most user-friendly one -
"democracy". Though it's certainly been a selling
slogan, the administration's enlistment of
"democracy" (as well as the genuine democratic
urges of peoples all around the rim of the old
Soviet Union) in its drive for global domination
has also been a corrupting one.
In all of
this, the Cold War's "winner" has been highly
successful in at least one aspect of its global
imperial mission: penetrating previously
off-limits regions of the former imperial foe,
setting up its own military outposts there, and
supporting whatever new Bush-friendly (or
NATO-friendly) regimes emerged. Unsurprisingly,
this has been especially true in regions capable
of contributing to nailing down control over the
Middle Eastern (and Caspian) oil heartlands of the
planet.
There are, however, limits to such
a strategy. Two of them are Russian in nature. The
first is that, at a time when (despite recent
dips) oil and natural gas prices are on the
long-term rise, the Russians sit on significant
reserves of both, which translate into power
reserves in every sense. But Putin's regime sits
on another kind of "power reserve" as well.
However unmentioned these days, this reserve - the
second limit - effectively constrains American
action in the world. Militarily, Russia may be
only a shadow of the former USSR, but it still has
a world-ending supply of nuclear weapons. While no
longer a global superpower, in this single arena
it remains just that - no small matter at a time
when, defying all odds, nuclear weapons have
become the global coin of the realm, more so
perhaps than in the old two-superpower universe.
A third limit on American power is only
now coming into sight: the beginning of the
formation of regional power blocs (not necessarily
military in nature) in opposition to the lone
superpower's various goals. While Greater Europe,
still in formation, represents one of these blocs;
and some greater Asian combination another (as was
indicated by the surprising, if tentative, recent
d'etente between China and India as well as the
shaky proto-military alliance between Russia and
China); perhaps the least expected and commented
upon of these blocs lies far closer to home,
consisting of a growing set of left-leaning
democracies in Latin America determined to pursue
their own collective interests regardless of
whatever the Bush administration has in mind.
Coup-making in our backyard
The
key to these developments lies in Iraq - or rather
in the Bush administration's 2001 decision that
ultimate global power and its own fate lay in the
Middle East. If Afghanistan was the USSR's Vietnam
(only worse in its effects), Iraq may prove to be
the American Afghanistan (even without an
oppositional superpower funding the insurgency in
that country). The greatest gamble of the Bush
administration - made up of the greatest gamblers
in our history since Jefferson Davis'
secessionists - was certainly its "regime change"
leap, under the guise of the global "war on
terror", via cruise missiles and tanks, into the
occupation of Iraq.
With no end in sight,
the draining Iraq war has already trumped much of
the rest of the Bush administration's aggressive
foreign policy (especially in Asia) and has left
the administration thoroughly distracted when it
comes to whole regions of the world. As Chris
Nelson of the Washington-insider Nelson Report put
matters this week:
All this by way of saying that we
can now see even more clearly than before the
import of Secretary of State Condi Rice's
extraordinary interview last week in the Wall
Street Journal. The former Soviet expert
repeatedly made clear that the entire focus of
Bush administration policy is and will continue
to be on the Middle East. All responsibility for
coming up with a solution to the North Korea
problem Rice cheerfully consigned to
China.
The war in Iraq has also left the Middle East
increasingly destabilized; oil prices on the rise;
the dollar undermined; and the US military
desperately overstretched, if not incapable of
dealing with other major global challenges. No
wonder the president clutched the hand of Saudi
Crown Prince Abdullah the other day down in
Crawford, Texas. He needs whatever help he can
get.
This, in turn, has opened a
remarkable space for experimentation and change
in, of all places, the little attended to "near
abroad" of the winning superpower - a space
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has recently been
playing with for all he's worth. A former military
man with his own shadowy past of coup d'etats,
Chavez, the twice elected and popular president of
Venezuela, is the sort of figure that American
administrations once dealt with
decisively.
But Chavez, who finds himself
in control of the third largest source of US
imported oil (to the tune of 15% of all our oil
imports, almost as much as Saudi Arabia), has in
the last months managed to: make energy deals with
super-competitor China and super-hated Iran (Hey,
that's our energy!); form a thumb-your-nose
informal economic alliance with super-hated Cuban
leader Fidel Castro, part of an attempt to create
an alternative to the US-backed Free Trade Area of
the Americas (from which Cuba is excluded); buy
arms from Russia and Spain; threaten to cut off
Venezuelan oil supplies to the US if his
government should be endangered or blockaded by
Washington; and last week - in the ultimate insult
to the Bush administration (for whom foreign
policy and military policy are almost the same
thing) - throw the US military out of Venezuela.
That this happened without evident
retaliation was a milestone of some sort; for
Chavez suddenly broke off military-to-military
relations, just about the only kind the Bush
administration ever promotes, and threw out "a
small group of US officers who were teaching and
studying in Venezuela", accusing them of
encouraging plots against his government. He also
ended joint military exercises, suspended all
military exchanges, and even threatened to try any
American military officer found spying in
Venezuelan courts.
As background to this
ongoing imbroglio: In April 2002, Venezuelan
military officials and business leaders launched a
coup d'etat against Chavez, forcing his government
out of power for 47 hours. During those hours, as
Marc Cooper of the Nation has written, "Although
the coup was denounced by 19 Latin American heads
of state as a violation of democratic principles,
the Bush administration publicly countenanced the
military takeover." (After the coup collapsed,
President George W Bush stated that he hoped
Chavez had "learned his lesson".) The US
government initially denied that it had had any
role in, or knew anything about, the coup before
it took place. Documents soon came to light,
however, showing that, at a minimum, the US
intelligence community was "getting a steady
stream of reports on planning for this coup" and
that these had been distributed at high levels in
the Bush administration.
Soon after the
coup collapsed, the reliable Ed Vulliamy of the
British Observer reported that the "failed coup in
Venezuela was closely tied to senior officials in
the US government, The Observer has established.
They have long histories in the [Central American]
'dirty wars' of the 1980s, and links to death
squads working in Central America at that time."
These figures included Otto Reich and Elliot
Abrams. Reich, once US ambassador to Venezuela and
a key Bush administration policy-maker on Latin
America, reportedly met with the coup plotters
over many months.
There is now an acceptable formula for
describing what the US did in Venezuela, which can
be found regularly in press accounts, as in a
recent New York Times piece (US considers
toughening stance toward Venezuela) by reporter
Juan Forero: "... the United States tacitly
supported a coup that briefly ousted Mr Chavez in
April 2002." Here's another version from Ray
Suarez of PBS's Newshour: "Elements in the US
government, in the Bush administration, knew that
there was a coup under way in Venezuela, and did
not rise to support the current government."
Given the history of the US in Latin
America, when a coup occurs in a situation like
this, it should really be assumed that the US
government was involved in plotting it, not just
"tacitly supporting" it. (A decade or three from
now, when it no longer matters, we'll undoubtedly
have the documentation on this one.) In any case,
in the wake of the "botched coup" meant to
overthrow the elected government of Venezuela, the
US, according to a Newsday investigation, began
"pumping money into Venezuela immediately ...
creating a new 'Office of Transition Initiatives'
in Caracas" to distribute funds to those opposed
to Chavez. For instance, the "civic group" run by
Corina Machado, who signed the decree designed by
the coup plotters "that would fleetingly transform
the fragile democracy into a dictatorship ... was
awarded tens of thousands of American tax dollars
from two major US agencies - the National
Endowment for Democracy and the US Agency for
International Development. The funds were used
partly to encourage voter participation in a
subsequent effort to oust Chavez, this time
through a recall referendum."
In March,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, soon to be
on his way to Iraq, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan,
toured Latin America denouncing Chavez's
government - as did Rice last week. As Rice hopped
from country to country in our near abroad, she
called for a "free and completely democratic
Venezuela". In addition, Forero tells us:
While President Hugo Chevez of
Venezuela veers toward greater confrontation
with Washington, the Bush administration is
weighing a tougher approach, including funneling
more money to foundations and business and
political groups opposed to his leftist
government, American officials
say. It's the Ukrainian approach, but
against a democracy. What's at stake, as Forero's
article (egregiously anti-Chavez in tone) makes
clear, is oil. "The United States, said [a
high-ranking Republican aide on Capitol Hill who
works on Latin America policy], is particularly
concerned because Venezuela is one of four top
providers of foreign oil to the United States.
'You can't write him off', the aide said of Mr
Chavez. 'He's sitting on an energy source that's
critical to us'."
The American near
abroad peels away
Still, the escalating
tussle with Venezuela is but the tip of the
near-abroad iceberg. Just last week, for example,
with Rice in Latin America and lobbying hard, the
Organization of American States elected a Chilean
socialist, Interior Minister Jose Miguel Insulza -
the very candidate she had lobbied against (until
the last second) - to be its secretary general.
"It is the first time in the organization's
history," reports Larry Rohter of the New York
Times, "that a candidate initially opposed by the
United States will lead the 34-member regional
group." As a candidate, Insulza "not only favored
steps to bring Cuba back into the organization but
also had the support of Mr Chavez". Call it a sign
of changing times.
Perhaps a greater sign
of those changing times was the fact that, on
their separate trips across the continent, both
Rumsfeld and Rice made clear attempts to back up a
crescendo of warnings about and threats against
Chavez with some communal action - and failed
dismally. As Rohter put it:
Defense Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld
visited South America last month in what was
seen as an effort to stitch together an
anti-Chavez coalition, but got nowhere. Ms Rice
came to the region this week with much the same
mission and received the same chilly reception
from governments for whom the principles of
nonintervention and sovereignty are nearly
sacred. Or take the response of
Brazilian Defense Minister Jose Alencar in a press
conference with Rumsfeld in March. Just after
Rumsfeld questioned Chavez's motives in buying
100,000 AK-47's from Russia ("I can't imagine
what's going to happen to 100,000 AK-47s. I can't
imagine why Venezuela needs 100,000 AK-47s."),
Alencar was asked by a reporter if he was
"concerned about Chavez". His response was:
Brazil has always defended and will
continue defending the self-determination of the
different peoples and non-intervention in the
affairs of other countries. Obviously, here in
Brazil, which is a country historically pacific
[peaceful], obviously we would like to
increasingly deepen our diplomatic and trade
relations with our countries, with the objective
of achieving the common good. In
diplomatic-speak, that meant: Back off, Don.
Let's try to put this in context: Unlike
in areas bordering Russia and in the Middle East,
the United States has put no money into a "Latin
spring", and yet it's happened anyway. We may, in
fact, already be at the very start of something
like a Latin summer. Chile, Argentina, Venezuela,
Brazil, Mexico - the largest countries in the
region - are all now democracies; and all but
Mexico are led by socialists or independent-minded
leaders. This trend hasn't been restricted to the
more economically powerful countries in the region
either. It has taken hold from Uruguay to Ecuador.
Next year, if the leftist mayor of Mexico City,
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is elected president,
Mexico will put a stunning cap on the process.
Two-thirds of Latin America is now considered
left-leaning.
Latin America, of course,
has long been thought of as the imperial backyard
of the US. From the 1950s through the 1970s, from
Guatemala to Argentina, Brazil to Chile, we
encouraged, funded, organized, and sometimes (as
in Guatemala and Chile) led or all but led
military takeovers of democracies. As it happened,
the militaries of those countries, with their
carefully nurtured ties to the US military, proved
far easier to topple than the one-party,
one-leader system that has ruled Cuba through a
40-odd year American siege. In those decades,
throughout the region, our representatives
(ordinarily from the Central Intelligence Agency -
CIA) taught the local police and military torture
techniques of an Abu-Ghraib variety, backed
regimes renowned for disappearances, and generally
helped impose a blanket of draconian rule on the
continent in the name of anti-communism.
In the 1980s, with the help of a number of
people who are now household names, including new
intelligence "tsar" John Negroponte, the Reagan
administration repeated the process in Central
America, supporting death squads, military
killers, and right-wing thugs in
counter-revolutionary terror. The US poured
multi-millions into this process; later invaded
the Caribbean island of Grenada and then Panama;
and finally worked hard to impose an impoverishing
economic system ("neo-liberalism") on the
continent in the 1990s.
Leaving the
imperial orbit
Given all this, it's
remarkable what the Bush administration can't do
today in its own backyard. It can't fully isolate
Cuba; it can't create a regional "coalition of the
willing" against Venezuela; it can't simply impose
its version of economics on the continent; it
can't stop a number of countries in the region
from making energy deals of one sort or another
with China, Iran, India, and other potential
energy competitors. (And if, for a moment, you
were to glance north, rather than south, you might
notice that it was recently unable to impose its
pet boondoggle, the Star Wars anti-missile system,
on our recalcitrant northern neighbor Canada.
Another small sign of the times.)
There is
perhaps no area of the world where the Bush
administration has been less successful in
fostering the military-to-military relations that
are seen as crucial to its plans. Part of this has
been due to its tunnel-vision unilateralism. In an
attempt to prevent US soldiers or officials from
ever ending up in a foreign or international court
on any kind of war crimes charges, it sent the
American Service Members Protection Act (ASPA)
winging through Congress. This "prohibits US
security assistance funds and most military
cooperation unless a country rejects the UN-backed
ICC [International Criminal Court] or signs a
bilateral immunity agreement with the United
States". It then pursued such agreements with just
about every nation on the planet. As it happens,
11 of the nations that have ratified the ICC
agreement and refused to grant the United States
bilateral immunity are in Latin America. Another
sign of the times. As Pamela Hess, United Press
International's (UPI's) Pentagon correspondent,
put the matter:
Except for Colombia and Argentina,
all the major countries of South America are on
the ASPA black list: Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru,
Bolivia, Uruguay and Brazil. Prior to the
passage of the ASPA, the major South American
players had nearly 700 officers in training in
US military schools under the International
Military Education and Training program. That
number is essentially down to zero, say US
Southern Command sources. 'We have lost access
to a whole generation of military officers,' a
Southern Command source told UPI.
Extra-hemispheric actors are filling the void
left by restricted US military engagement with
partner nations. We now risk losing contact and
interoperability with a generation of military
classmates in many nations of the region,
including several leading countries,' [Southern
Command chief Gen Bantz Craddock told the Senate
Armed Services Committee in March]. The void
left by the United States after ASPA is
increasingly being filled by China, Craddock
warned. More striking yet has been the
rise of a new kind of "people power" - a term we
usually associate with Soviet-controlled Poland or
the Marcos-controlled Philippines - throughout
Latin America. It could most recently be observed
in Ecuador, where popular demonstrations drove the
Bush-administration-backed President, Lucio
Gutierrez, who had only recently illegally
dissolved the Supreme Court, out of the country;
and again, only a week ago, in Mexico City where
an estimated 1.2 million people turned out in a
"silent march" to support Andres Manuel Lopez
Obrador, that city's left-wing mayor and the
country's leading candidate for president in next
year's election, after President Vincente Fox's
ruling party had tried to railroad him out of the
race and into jail on a trumped-up charge. As
Danna Harman of the Christian Science Monitor
wrote of the march (People power rattling politics
of Latin America), while discussing "the weakening
of authoritarian regimes [in Latin America] and
the growing self-assurance of the people -
including, in the case in Bolivia, the
indigenous":
Chalk up another victory for Latin
American people power. In the 1990s, what
politicians feared most was apathy. But lately,
Latin Americans from Mexico City to Quito,
Ecuador - much like the citizens of Ukraine and
Lebanon - have been taking to the streets in
unprecedented numbers. Harold
Meyerson, writing in the Washington Post in April
on earlier Mexican protests over Obrador,
commented (Greetings from Mexistan):
Apparently, there are several kinds
of capital city rallies. There are those in
Kiev, where multitudes turned out to protest the
subversion of a national election and the
attempted murder of the opposition leader. There
are those in Beirut, where people gathered to
protest the murder of an opposition leader and
to demand self-determination. These were
outpourings that our government encouraged. And
there was the one last Thursday in Mexico City,
where 300,000 protesters filled the Zocalo ...
And what was the response of our government? ...
Did we tell the crowds gathered in the Zocalo
that America walks at their side?
Not
quite. While Rice waxes eloquent about our
concern for democratic rights in Central Asia
and the Middle East, the most the Bush
administration has managed to say about
democracy in the unimaginably faraway land of
Mexico has been the comment of a State
Department spokesman that this is an internal
Mexican affair. Democracy may be all well and
good, but Lopez Obrador is just not Bush's kind
of guy. As mayor of Mexico City, he's increased
public pensions to the elderly and spent heavily
on public works and the accompanying job
creation. He's criticized the North American
Free Trade Agreement as a boon for the corporate
sector and a bust for Mexican workers ...
As it turned out, the Mexican people
didn't need Bush's funding or organizational
support; nor, it seems, did any other
manifestation of "people power" to our south. For
what we have been seeing throughout Latin America
- as along Russia's border - has been a serial
revolt in country after country against the Cold
War world and the imperial orders it imposed on
its near abroads. Once upon a time, an American
administration would have put such revolts down
serially, using the CIA, military to military
relations, economic power, and aid of various
sorts; but, though events in Latin America are
finally making the Bush administration sit up and
take note, its ability to act is more limited than
usual. After all, Iraq is proving a black hole for
American power and something of a graveyard for
the administration's global ambitions and energies
- giving new meaning to that old Vietnam-era word
"quagmire".
There can be little question
that, in the superpower-funded revolt of the
Russian near-abroad and the unsupported revolt of
the American near-abroad, you find similar
impulses. When imperial power anywhere begins to
crumble, it naturally creates space for local and
regional experiments in new kinds of power
relations. Unfortunately, all our covert (and less
than covert) help in "organizing" democracy
movements from Ukraine and Georgia to Kyrgyzstan
and Belarus gives our leaders the feeling, I fear,
that they are actually creating democracies by
manipulation in someone else's near abroad.
It might be safe to assume that, given
crumbling Russian power and the space it's left
open, democracy movements would have developed
apace (as in Latin America), even had our help
never been offered. Of course when our leaders
come across "people power" that has developed
without their imprimatur (not always a pretty
sight) - whether in the form of brutal struggles
for national sovereignty (as in Iraq) or in their
democratic form in Latin America - they are
invariably caught off guard and generally
appalled. But it's only in looking at these forms
of popular power - whether violent or peaceful -
that you can see the genuine strangeness of what
may turn out to be our loser/loser superpower
world.
No one should, of course,
underestimate the power of an empire to, as George
Lucas might say, "strike back". And yet, let's
hold out hope of a sort against empire and its
plans for domination. Despite our recent emphasis
in "the homeland" on security and borders, what
are borders really? What are they actually capable
of keeping out? It's strange sometimes how
permeable walls and borders prove. As Paul
Woodward, the canny editor of the War in Context
website wrote recently:
People power's a fine thing for
shaking up Eastern Europe and the Middle East,
but as it spreads to the Americas, it could be
coming uncomfortably close to home. What if
people power caught on in the United States?
What if accountability was being demanded not
just from governments in Kiev and Beirut but
also those in London and Washington? The bread
and circuses approach to democracy has so far
been an effective guarantor of political apathy
across America, but what if Americans in large
numbers were to one day wake up from their
political slumber and demand that they too
deserve a truly representative
government? What if, indeed. What if
we all began slipping out of the imperial orbit?
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the
Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular
antidote to the mainstream media"), is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project and the
author of The End of Victory Culture, a
history of American triumphalism in the Cold
War.
(Special thanks go to Nick Turse
for his invaluable research assistance.)
Published with permission of Tomdispatch.com
(Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt) |
