Since the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise to power of the Radical Right, I and others have often quoted Benjamin Franklin’s reply to those who asked him about the outcome of the Constitutional Convention: “A republic, if you can keep it.” We have meant to draw attention to several ominous developments: increasing economic inequality, the influence of money in electoral politics, the secrecy in which many governmental activities are shrouded; and the growth of a huge military establishment, out of all proportion to any conceivable threat against America’s territorial integrity. Such tendencies, as Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, and Madison all pointed out, inevitably erode self-government and popular sovereignty. If they are not checked and reversed, we doomsayers have warned, the United States will not indefinitely remain a republic, except in name.
At the end of World War II the United States was by far the richest and most powerful nation on earth. Nevertheless, although its leaders were hardly Marxists, they agreed with Marx that capitalism could only avoid stagnation by expanding – not territorially but into an integrated global economy presided over by America’s corporate and financial elite. The immediate obstacle to this was autarkic nationalism – for that, in effect, is what Communism was, whatever Communists (and most anti-Communists) may have thought. The Cold War was an all-out effort to contain and roll back the spread of independent, centrally-planned economies managed by non-capitalist bureaucratic elites. In the course of this struggle, the US constructed an arsenal of weapons and bases such as the world had never seen.
Most Americans assumed that when the “Communist” elites fell from power (in the USSR and its satellites) or changed course (in China), there would be no further need for such vast and expensive armed forces. We expected a “peace dividend,” not only in the form of a smaller military budget and footprint, but also in reduced international tensions and increased goodwill toward the United States. Instead, our armory and our foreign presence – what Chalmers Johnson calls our “empire of bases” – have grown steadily, while America is almost universally feared and mistrusted abroad.
What happened? Simply – and predictably – that other obstacles have arisen to the perennial goal of American foreign policy: an integrated global economy dominated by the United States. Arab nationalism is one, since the world’s largest oil reserves are located in Arab countries. Rival capitalist blocs – Western Europe and East Asia – who might form integrated regional economies that exclude the United States, are another. Still another is the “financialization” of the American economy: the hollowing out of our manufacturing industries, displaced by a bloated financial sector that exploits the privileged position of the dollar, which now depends entirely on the continued forbearance of European, Japanese, and Chinese central bankers. America’s fearsome military power has little to do with “national defense”; rather, it serves to insure that none of these potential threats to American economic preeminence ever materializes. This, as everyone in the world understands except the American press and public, is the meaning of the Bush administration’s (in)famous National Security Strategy document of September 2002.
A country that relies on its military to such an extent, and for such purposes, will come to grief and will gravely menace others. The harm the United States has incurred and inflicted in its pursuit of hegemony is the subject of these two trenchantly argued, comprehensively documented, grimly eloquent new books. Their importance cannot be overstated; like Paul Krugman’s “The Great Unraveling,” they describe a malign transformation as it is happening, one which most Americans don’t want but can’t seem to rouse themselves to prevent.
“The Sorrows of Empire” reveals the metastasis of American militarism. Currently the US has 725 acknowledged foreign bases in 38 countries, along with several secret ones – many times more, of course, than those of all other countries combined.