Page 2 of
2 AMERICAN DECLINE IN
PERSPECTIVE, Part 1 'Losing' the world By
Noam Chomsky
Such critics of the IPCC
predictions receive virtually no public attention,
unlike the fringe of denialists who are supported
by the corporate sector, along with huge
propaganda campaigns that have driven Americans
off the international spectrum in dismissal of the
threats.
Business support also
translates directly to political power. Denialism
is part of the catechism that must be intoned by
Republican candidates in the farcical election
campaign now in progress, and in congress they are
powerful enough to abort even efforts to inquire
into the effects of global warming, let alone
do
anything serious about it.
In brief, American decline
can perhaps be stemmed if we abandon hope for
decent survival, prospects that are all too real
given the balance of forces in the world.
'Losing' China and
Vietnam Putting such
unpleasant thoughts aside, a close look at
American decline shows that China indeed plays a
large role, as it has for 60 years.
The
decline that now elicits such concern is not a
recent phenomenon. It traces back to the end of
World War II, when the US had half the world's
wealth and incomparable security and global reach.
Planners were naturally well aware of the enormous
disparity of power and intended to keep it that
way.
The basic viewpoint was
outlined with admirable frankness in a major state
paper of 1948 (PPS 23). The author was one of the
architects of the New World Order of the day, the
chair of the State Department Policy Planning
Staff, the respected statesman and scholar George
Kennan, a moderate dove within the planning
spectrum.
He observed that the central
policy goal was to maintain the "position of
disparity" that separated our enormous wealth from
the poverty of others. To achieve that goal, he
advised, "We should cease to talk about vague and
... unreal objectives such as human rights, the
raising of the living standards, and
democratization," and must "deal in straight power
concepts", not "hampered by idealistic slogans"
about "altruism and world-benefaction".
Kennan was referring
specifically to Asia, but the observations
generalize, with exceptions, for participants in
the US-run global system. It was well understood
that the "idealistic slogans" were to be displayed
prominently when addressing others, including the
intellectual classes, who were expected to
promulgate them.
The plans that Kennan helped
formulate and implement took for granted that the
US would control the Western hemisphere, the Far
East, the former British empire (including the
incomparable energy resources of the Middle East),
and as much of Eurasia as possible, crucially its
commercial and industrial centers. These were not
unrealistic objectives, given the distribution of
power. But decline set in at once.
In
1949, China declared independence, an event known
in Western discourse as "the loss of China" - in
the US, with bitter recriminations and conflict
over who was responsible for that loss. The
terminology is revealing. It is only possible to
lose something that one owns. The tacit assumption
was that the US owned China by right, along with
most of the rest of the world, much as postwar
planners assumed.
The "loss of China" was the
first major step in "America's decline". It had
major policy consequences. One was the immediate
decision to support France's effort to reconquer
its former colony of Indochina, so that it, too,
would not be "lost".
Indochina itself was not a
major concern, despite claims about its rich
resources by president Dwight Eisenhower and
others. Rather, the concern was the "domino
theory", which is often ridiculed when dominoes
don't fall, but remains a leading principle of
policy because it is quite rational. To adopt
Henry Kissinger's version, a region that falls out
of control can become a "virus" that will "spread
contagion", inducing others to follow the same
path.
In the case of Vietnam, the
concern was that the virus of independent
development might infect Indonesia, which really
does have rich resources. And that might lead
Japan - the "superdomino" as it was called by the
prominent Asia historian John Dower - to
"accommodate" to an independent Asia as its
technological and industrial center in a system
that would escape the reach of US power. That
would mean, in effect, that the US had lost the
Pacific phase of World War II, fought to prevent
Japan's attempt to establish such a New Order in
Asia.
The way to deal with such a
problem is clear: destroy the virus and
"inoculate" those who might be infected. In the
Vietnam case, the rational choice was to destroy
any hope of successful independent development and
to impose brutal dictatorships in the surrounding
regions. Those tasks were successfully carried out
- though history has its own cunning, and
something similar to what was feared has since
been developing in East Asia, much to Washington's
dismay.
The most important victory of
the Indochina wars was in 1965, when a US-backed
military coup in Indonesia led by General Suharto
carried out massive crimes that were compared by
the Central Intelligence Agency to those of Adolf
Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. The
"staggering mass slaughter", as the New York Times
described it, was reported accurately across the
mainstream, and with unrestrained euphoria.
It
was "a gleam of light in Asia", as the noted
liberal commentator James Reston wrote in the
Times. The coup ended the threat of democracy by
demolishing the mass-based political party of the
poor, established a dictatorship that went on to
compile one of the worst human rights records in
the world, and threw the riches of the country
open to Western investors. Small wonder that,
after many other horrors, including the
near-genocidal invasion of East Timor, Suharto was
welcomed by the Bill Clinton administration in
1995 as "our kind of guy".
Years after the great events
of 1965, Kennedy-Johnson National Security Adviser
McGeorge Bundy reflected that it would have been
wise to end the Vietnam war at that time, with the
"virus" virtually destroyed and the primary domino
solidly in place, buttressed by other US-backed
dictatorships throughout the region.
Similar procedures have been
routinely followed elsewhere. Kissinger was
referring specifically to the threat of socialist
democracy in Chile. That threat was ended on
another forgotten date, what Latin Americans call
"the first 9/11", which in violence and bitter
effects far exceeded the 9/11 commemorated in the
West.
A vicious dictatorship was
imposed in Chile, one part of a plague of brutal
repression that spread through Latin America,
reaching Central America under Reagan. Viruses
have aroused deep concern elsewhere as well,
including the Middle East, where the threat of
secular nationalism has often concerned British
and US planners, inducing them to support radical
Islamic fundamentalism to counter it.
The concentration of wealth
and American decline Despite such victories,
American decline continued. By 1970, the US share
of world wealth had dropped to about 25%, roughly
where it remains, still colossal but far below the
end of World War II. By then, the industrial world
was "tripolar": US-based North America,
German-based Europe and East Asia, already the
most dynamic industrial region, at the time
Japan-based, but by now including the former
Japanese colonies Taiwan and South Korea, and more
recently China.
At about that time, American decline
entered a new phase: conscious self-inflicted
decline. From the 1970s, there has been a
significant change in the US economy, as planners,
private and state, shifted it toward
financialization and the offshoring of production,
driven in part by the declining rate of profit in
domestic manufacturing.
These
decisions initiated a vicious cycle in which
wealth became highly concentrated (dramatically so
in the top 0.1% of the population), yielding
concentration of political power, hence
legislation to carry the cycle further: taxation
and other fiscal policies, deregulation, changes
in the rules of corporate governance allowing huge
gains for executives, and so on.
Meanwhile, for the majority,
real wages largely stagnated, and people were able
to get by only by sharply increased workloads (far
beyond Europe), unsustainable debt, and repeated
bubbles since the Reagan years, creating paper
wealth that inevitably disappeared when they burst
(and the perpetrators were bailed out by the
taxpayer).
In parallel, the political
system has been increasingly shredded as both
parties are driven deeper into corporate pockets
with the escalating cost of elections, the
Republicans to the level of farce, the Democrats
(now largely the former "moderate Republicans")
not far behind.
A recent study by the
Economic Policy Institute, which has been the
major source of reputable data on these
developments for years, is entitled "Failure by
Design". The phrase "by design" is accurate. Other
choices were certainly possible. And as the study
points out, the "failure" is class-based.
There is no failure for the
designers. Far from it. Rather, the policies are a
failure for the large majority, the 99% in the
imagery of the Occupy movements - and for the
country, which has declined and will continue to
do so under these policies.
One
factor is the offshoring of manufacturing. As the
solar panel example mentioned earlier illustrates,
manufacturing capacity provides the basis and
stimulus for innovation leading to higher stages
of sophistication in production, design, and
invention.
That, too, is being outsourced,
not a problem for the "money mandarins" who
increasingly design policy, but a serious problem
for working people and the middle classes, and a
real disaster for the most oppressed, African
Americans, who have never escaped the legacy of
slavery and its ugly aftermath, and whose meager
wealth virtually disappeared after the collapse of
the housing bubble in 2008, setting off the most
recent financial crisis, the worst so far.
Part
2: The imperial way
Noam
Chomsky is Institute
Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of
Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of
numerous best-selling political works. His latest
books areMaking the Future:
Occupations, Intervention, Empire and Resistance
andThe Essential Chomsky(edited by Anthony Arnove), a
collection of his writings on politics and on
language from the 1950s to the present, Gaza in
Crisis, with Ilan Pappe, and Hopes and
Prospects, also available
as an audiobook. To listen to Timothy MacBain's
latest Tomcast audio interview in which Chomsky
offers an anatomy of American defeats in the
Greater Middle East, click here, or download it to
your iPod here.
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