Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) Page 4
The United States has thirteen of these carrier battle groups. No other country has even one.12 And whether it is bombers, working ballistic missiles, strategic submarines, laser-guided smart bombs, ground-hugging cruise missiles, pilotless drones, or gun ships, American dominance is more or less the same. Moreover, these forces are scattered at more than seven hundred U.S. installations around the globe,13 with 120,000 American troops in Europe; 92,000 in East Asia and the Pacific; 30,000 in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia; and 15,000 in the Western Hemisphere outside the United States.14 The United States’ share of the total defense spending of all countries in the world is at 40 percent and rising; it spends as much as the next nine countries combined.15 In terms of sheer military dominance the world has never seen anything like this.
Economically, the United States looms nearly as large. At $ 10 trillion, the U.S. GDP accounts for more than 30 percent of the combined GDP of all countries in the world and is twice that of the number-two country, Japan. While the GDP of the combined European Union is about $9 trillion, including the newly joining countries, the EU is not yet a state and acts as a peer of the United States only in limited areas. Even so, the United States is bigger economically than all of Europe and is four times as big as Germany, Europe’s largest economy. At market prices, China’s economy is only a tenth the size of the U.S. economy and Russia’s is less than half that. Even after the loss of $7 trillion of U.S. market value as a result of the collapse of the recent technology bubble, the capitalization of U.S. stock markets accounts for 36 percent of global market value.16 More significantly, U.S. productivity growth is 50 percent more rapid than that of other developed countries. Moreover, the numbers are all moving in the United States’ favor. As its share of global GDP, asset valuation, and productivity growth continues to rise, the United States economy will loom ever larger. One consequence is that it will be able to increase the already overwhelming size and power of its military forces while spending a smaller percentage of GDP on defense.
Nor can we ignore American leadership in key technologies or its intellectual and cultural dominance. U.S. research and development spending accounts for more than 40 percent of the global total, and in the area of medical and biotechnology research, the United States spends more than the rest of the world combined.17 More than 85 percent of the world’s computers run on Microsoft Windows or Unix and are powered by Intel or Motorola microprocessors. The software and systems integration businesses are dominated by U.S. companies like Microsoft, Oracle, EDS, and IBM, and the vast bulk of new drugs and medicines are developed in the United States. Close to 75 percent of all Internet communications globally pass through the United States at some point in their transmission. American films account for about 85 percent of box office revenue in Europe and more than 80 percent in the entire global market. In a recent survey of the top-ten movies in twenty-two countries, 191 of 220 possible slots were American.18
Dominance like this is unprecedented. At the peak of its empire, in the late nineteenth century, Great Britain’s GDP per capita was less than that of the United States, and its defense spending was less than that of both Russia and France.19 Nor did Britain dominate culturally in nearly the same proportion. The French did not dine on fish and chips or flock to British entertainment. Even the ancient Roman empire pales by comparison. Great as it was, it was strictly a regional operation. The Persian empire was a worthy competitor, and China’s GDP was probably larger and its technology arguably more advanced.
Being big, strong, and influential doesn’t necessarily equal imperialism, or if it does, perhaps the imperialism is a matter of seduction rather than coercion. In fact, Americas power makes itself felt in at least three distinct ways: coercion, seduction, and persuasion.
Coercion is, of course, the most direct, and we have recently seen a particularly striking example of the resentment it causes. On June 13, 2002, two U.S. Army officers were moving an armored mine-clearing vehicle from the American military base in downtown Seoul to training grounds outside the city. As they rounded a blind curve at high speed – on a narrow road that was also the least desirable route to their destination – they hit two teenage girls, who had been walking on the pedestrian shoulder of the road, and crushed them under their wheels. As prescribed by the Status of Forces Agreement with Korea, the soldiers were not investigated by Korean authorities but were tried by a U.S. military court. In late November, they were both found not guilty and transferred out of Korea.
While hardly unique in the history of the American military presence in Korea, this incident was notable for its timing. The officers’ acquittal occurred two weeks before South Korea’s presidential election. Shortly after the decision was announced, fifty thousand protestors took to the streets in Seoul, and their anger galvanized the campaign of Roh Moo Hyun, a self-taught civil-rights lawyer who was running on a platform opposing U.S. policy toward the North and advocating revision of the unequal terms of alliance with the United States. Roh’s opponent, Lee Hoi Chang, ran as a firm advocate of the traditional alliance and of the U.S. line. Nearly 60 percent of Koreans in their twenties and thirties voted for Roh, giving him the margin of victory and raising concern in Washington about Korean anti-Americanism.20 Roh was elected in large part because Korean young people resent being a client state of the United States.
That is the key point. While most Americans think of Korea as a spunky, hard-working, independent ally, it is actually in many ways a satellite, and it is not the only one. Ninety miles across the Korean Straits lies Japan. Several years ago, one of Japan’s leading politicians, Ichiro Ozawa, sparked a continuing debate with a call for Japan to become a ‘normal country.’21 Most Americans were surely not aware that Japan is an abnormal country. But Ozawa’s point was precisely that Japan, too, is a client of the United States. Like Korea, it hosts many U.S. bases, and as in Korea, there are continual incidents – people run over with vehicles, fights between residents and American soldiers, rapes of local women, and so forth. Yet, the ability of local authorities to investigate and try U.S. military personnel is restricted. The most concrete example for me of the nature of the relationship occurred when I accompanied then Vice President Bush on a trip to Tokyo in the mid-1980s. At one point the vice presidential airplane needed a part that had to be flown in from outside Japan. Someone asked whether we needed to obtain Japanese permission for the route of flight, and the officer in charge responded instantly that authorization was unnecessary because ‘that’s our airspace.’
Japan’s American-written constitution prohibits it from making war, and its ‘self-defense forces’ operate within a highly restricted framework. Both Japan’s and Korea’s security treaties with the United States are oneway arrangements. The United States undertakes to come to the defense of these two countries if they are attacked, but there is no reciprocal obligation to defend the United States. Just as Korea’s army is under U.S. command in the event of war, Japan’s is effectively in the same position.
But this issue of sovereignty goes beyond military matters. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Japan tried to mount an independent rescue operation for the nations of Southeast Asia, only to be stopped by the opposition of the U.S. Treasury. Korea was forced to restructure its economy under the tutelage of the International Monetary Fund, which is heavily influenced by the U.S. Treasury. What Ozawa brought to light is that when the nations of the world sit down to play, Japan comes without a full deck of cards.
The only comfort here is that Japan is not alone. As Irving Kristol has noted, ‘It is now a fact, still short of overt diplomatic recognition, that no European nation can have – or really wants to have – its own foreign policy. They are dependent nations, though they have a very large measure of local autonomy.’22
American power is also seductive – in two ways. The first has to do with excellence and entrepreneurial rewards. While there are many problems with the U.S. educational system, there is no doubt that it has the best universities in the world, and they are open to all comers regardless of country of origin. In fact, many of them recruit abroad. The result is that at any particular moment there are about 600,000 foreign students studying at U.S universities, and over the years literally millions of foreign students have graduated with American degrees.23 Many leading graduate programs in science and engineering at elite schools like Berkeley or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology draw a majority of their students from overseas.
America is also the world’s mecca for entrepreneurs. Silicon Valley is national-origin blind when it comes to funding and nurturing good ideas. In 2000, for example, more than 40 percent of the new companies established in the valley were started by Indian entrepreneurs, many of whom have subsequently started major operations in their home country.24 This arrangement is good for the entrepreneur, good for the United States, and good for India. If your thing is not starting companies but hitting baseballs or stuffing a basketball through a hoop, America is again the place for you.
The second manner of seduction is less about excellence and more about persuasion. Take that most successful of all international companies Coca-Cola. With sales of $20 billion and two-thirds of its revenue coming from international markets, it might seem to have little to worry about. But it does worry, a lot. To keep attracting investors and talent it has to keep growing. When you are as big as Coke, that means adding billions of dollars of sales every year, and when you have already penetrated much of the world market, you begin to wonder where your growth is going to come from. Fortunately there are a lot of people in places like India or Indonesia who still drink tea or water, and while ‘thirst cannot be manufactured, taste can be…’25 So Coke invests some of its enormous income in advertising (often using American success im
ages) to convince Indians and Indonesians that Coke is the cosmopolitan thing to drink. While tea is probably better for you, it doesn’t have that American image of success, so people around the globe keep switching to Coke, and Coke keeps growing.
Through military might, unequal treaties, intellectual excellence, entrepreneurial reward, and friendly persuasion, America has established an unprecedented condominium over the globe. The answer to my Mexican business friend is that whatever he thinks he is, Bush is the emperor.
THE MAKING OF AN EMPIRE
Although born in revolt against empire, America harbored the seeds of its own from the beginning. Two kinds of people ventured to the New World to establish colonies in the early seventeenth century, both in search of their destinies. To Virginia with Captain John Smith went the adventurers and artisans in search of fortune. To Massachusetts with Governor John Winthrop went the pilgrims and puritans in search of paradise. Those two searches have driven American expansion ever since.
There was – to begin with – a certain duality in the minds of the country’s founders. On the one hand, Washington and Jefferson warned against entangling alliances, and John Quincy Adams famously noted that ‘America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy… She might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.’ Yet it was Jefferson who dreamed of an ‘empire of liberty,’ who boldly doubled the country’s size with his purchase of the Louisiana Territory and who imagined a time when ‘our multiplication will cover the whole northern if not southern continent.’ Adams echoed him, saying, ‘North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation.’ Actually, the unilateralist attitude toward foreign countries and the expansionist spirit were two edges of the sword called American Exceptionalism.26
From the start, Americans saw themselves as an exception to the normal run of nations. Having formed the first republic since classical times, they saw it as the start of a whole new human history. As such, it was not to be contaminated by reliance on or adoption of the ways of peoples of the old history. At the same time, Americans were convinced that they were a beacon to mankind, and came to think of themselves as, in the words of the chapter epigraph, ‘the Peculiar Chosen People – the Israel of our time.’ If Americans were the chosen people, then America was the Promised Land. ‘Manifest Destiny’ was the term for the doctrine that Americans must create one nation spanning the continent from sea to sea. By 1885, that had become a reality. Of course, it was a reality that came at the expense of Mexico, which lost half its territory in an American-instigated war, and of Native Americans who were nearly exterminated. That reality somehow went unnoticed at the time, garbed as it was in the rhetoric of what President Andrew Jackson called ‘extending the area of freedom.’
This area was about to take a quantum leap by the end of the nineteenth century. With the materialization of its manifest destiny, America’s expansionist spirit turned toward foreign shores. In fact, the United States was no stranger abroad, having already fought overseas on more than one hundred occasions. Indeed, the U.S. Navy had been patrolling China’s Yangtze River since the 1840s. But in 1898, President McKinley asked Congress to authorize use of force to protect American interests and halt Spanish oppression of Cuba. Said McKinley, ‘We intervene not for conquest. We intervene for humanity’s sake’ and to ‘earn the praises of every lover of freedom the world over.’ But when the end of the war left the formerly Spanish Philippines in American hands McKinley, after much ‘prayerful agonizing’ (and despite a declaration of independence by the Filipinos) concluded, ‘There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift, and civilize, and Christianize them.’27 Thus the Philippines became an American colony after four hundred years as a Spanish one.
Woodrow Wilson, who presided over no major expansion of American controlled territory, nonetheless articulated McKinley’s sense of mission in a new way with profound implications that would reverberate down to our own time. First, he waited until German submarine attacks ‘pushed’ America into World War I, and when he led the country into the war, it was for the purpose of making the world ‘safe for democracy.’ His League of Nations failed because, it was said, of isolationists in the U.S. Senate. Actually, however, the opposing senators had been enthusiastic supporters of U.S. colonial expansion; they weren’t isolationists. Rather they rejected the League because they were unilateralists. In a way, this was American exceptionalism, versus American exceptionalism, and if Wilson lost the first round, he nevertheless established the tone and framework of American foreign policy for the rest of the century.
American policy and objectives in World War II were almost totally Wilsonian. Said President Roosevelt upon declaring war: ‘We fight not for conquest, but for a world in which this nation and all that this nation represents will be safe for our children.’28 America, of course, emerged from the war as the overwhelmingly dominant power. Yet, it did something no such power had done before. Rejecting its old tradition of unilateralism, it laid the foundation for a new world of multilateralism. It is fascinating to speculate on how the world might look had there been no Cold War. But there was, and President Truman chose to respond in the now familiar way, saying, ‘If we falter in our leadership we may endanger the peace of the world and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this nation.’29
The policy of containment, by which America and its allies outlasted communism in the Cold War, was built on several supports. First, the United States defined its national interest in terms of entangling itself in alliances and multinational institutions aimed at preventing the spread of communism and, where possible, at preserving and promoting democracy, the global rule of law, non-aggression, and due process. Second was the maintenance, apparently permanent, of a very large standing military force, which entailed the expenditure of 3 to 10 percent of GDP on defense and the creation of an enormous and powerful military-industrial complex.30 Third was a habit of expediency. With full knowledge that such actions undermined its credibility as an advocate of freedom, the United States frequently backed dictators and authoritarian rulers as long as they professed anticommunism. (The Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and a succession of military dictators in Latin America, South Korea, Pakistan, and Taiwan come readily to mind.) Finally, free trade and open markets became inextricably entwined with the promotion of democracy, the view being that free-market economic policies would lead to political liberalization. These policies were also, of course, good for U.S. commercial interests. The Cold War was thus won through the classic American quest for both fortune and paradise that I mentioned earlier.
In the sudden absence of any threat to U.S. security and with most of the world rushing to adopt democratic politics and market capitalism along with free trade, it almost seemed there was nothing left to debate. In his The End of History, Francis Fukuyama heralded a new era in which the adoption of the universal U.S. or, more broadly, ‘western’ values and systems would establish global prosperity and peace. Now that American values had apparently triumphed, here was the moment when the nation could step back, dramatically reduce its military establishment, close many of its far-flung bases, revise American commitments abroad, and lead the world by example. The U.S. could stand fast as the ‘Citty upon a Hill,’ glad to have ‘the eies of all people upon us,’ as the Governor John Winthrop had envisioned centuries ago.