How does U.S. imperialism itself confront its own official image in the mirror? Does it pretend not to be imperialist as such? Quite some time back, John Bellamy Foster called attention to a relatively unknown event and a document. Given the importance of the document, Id do well to quote Foster at some length here: On November 11, 2000, Richard Haas--a member of the National Security Council and special assistant to the president under the elder Bush, soon to be appointed director of policy planning in the state department of newly elected President George W. Bush--delivered a paper in Atlanta entitled Imperial America. For the United States to succeed at its objective of global preeminence, he declared, it would be necessary for Americans to re-conceive their role from a traditional nation-state to an imperial power. Haas eschewed the term imperialist in describing America’s role, preferring imperial, since the former connoted exploitation, normally for commercial ends, and territorial control. Foster then quotes the Hass document directly thus:To advocate an imperial foreign policy is to call for a foreign policy that attempts to organize the world along certain principles affecting relations between states and conditions within them. The U.S. role would resemble 19th century Great Britain. . . . Coercion and the use of force would normally be a last resort; what was written by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson about Britain a century and a half ago, that The British policy followed the principle of extending control informally if possible and formally if necessary,” could be applied to the American role at the start of the new century. The mission of global pax Americana emerges in this document with brutal clarity: the U.S.--whether it calls itself imperialist or imperial--would continue to resort to any means necessary to ensure and consolidate--and extend without limits--its dominance on a world scale. Even--if needs arise--the U.S. will go back in history to resurrect without remorse the nineteenth-century form of blatant colonialism! But meanwhile, the U.S. continues to have in its possession Puerto Rico as a direct colony, while the occupation of Iraq by the U.S. attested to nothing short of colonialism even in territorial terms. And, of course, the U.S. has already established the world’s matchless track-record of military interventions and other subjugating or sabotaging ventures in the service of imperialism itself. The leading American military historian William Blum points to a particular segment of this track-record thus: From 1945 to the end of the century, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments and to crush more than 30 populist movements fighting against insufferable regimes. In the process, the US bombed about 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair. It is against this background, then, that the slogan it’s not just imperialism, but U.S. imperialism, stupid! not only makes sense but also becomes an undeniable material force with serious consequences for the wretched of the earth inhabiting particularly what Che Guevara calls the tricontinental sphere--a sphere from which theories of imperialism and strategies of anti-imperialist struggle have both already emerged with full force, although the West still continues to dictate the production, exchange, and consumption of theories of imperialism around the world.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 02:32:22 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015