The following is chapter six of Lance Selfa’s The Democrats: A Critical History. The footnote references have been removed.

    One of the enduring truisms of American politics since the 1960s is the notion that Republicans are “strong on national defense” while Democrats are “weak.” In 2004, largely on this basis, George W. Bush, who hid out in the Texas National Guard to avoid service in Vietnam, defeated Democratic senator John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran who emphasized his military service at every turn.

    Like many of the truisms about American politics, this one is largely a myth. One undeniable truth is that Democratic presidents led the United States into every major war of the twentieth century. The First World War (Wilson), the Second World War (Roosevelt), the Korean War (Truman), and the Vietnam War (Kennedy) were “Democratic” wars. Truman is the only government leader to have authorized the use of atomic weapons. Kennedy brought the world the closest it came to a global holocaust in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis between the United States and the USSR.

    The reason behind these facts is simple: the Democrats are as committed as the Republicans to upholding the United States’ right to police the world. Truman’s “Doctrine,” announced in 1947, asserted the U.S. government’s intention to intervene anywhere to uphold U.S. interests in the name of fighting “communism.” In 1960 Kennedy campaigned on a foreign policy platform more conservative than Nixon’s, chiding the Eisenhower administration for falling behind the Soviet Union in its development and deployment of missiles, satellites, and nuclear weapons. This “missile gap” was later discovered to be nonexistent. In 1984 Walter Mondale called for a quarantine of Nicaragua, a position farther to the right than Reagan’s support for the contras, the mercenary force fighting to overthrow the democratically elected Sandinista government. And in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Democrats and Republicans competed to show who was tougher in the “War on Terror.”

The Parties and Foreign Policy: A Case of Political Kabuki

    Given the fairly minimal differences between the Republicans and Democrats on U.S. foreign policy, it’s amazing that the image of sharp polarization between the parties exists. It’s particularly curious since this is the one main policy area in which the idea of “bipartisanship” extends the farthest. One of the oldest clichés in American politics holds that “politics stops at the water’s edge”—i.e., that partisan disputes aren’t supposed to interfere with the conduct of American foreign policy. On the biggest, guiding questions of American foreign policy, this is certainly the case. During the Cold War, for instance, no mainstream candidate ever ran a campaign challenging the United States’ anticommunist “containment” policy against the USSR. After September 11, 2001, nearly every Democrat or Republican running for office has claimed to have the best strategy for fighting “terrorism.” But within these wider agreements on goals and aims there is room for disagreement on the particulars. This is especially true during election season, when candidates and parties accentuate even miniscule differences in order to appeal to their respective voting bases. As foreign policy analyst Andrew Bacevich explained, “Through tacit agreement, the two major parties approach the contest for the presidency less as an opportunity for assessing U.S. policies abroad than for striking poses—a hallowed and inviolable bit of political kabuki.” During the 2000 election, Gore foreign policy adviser Richard Holbrooke maintained an agreement with Bush adviser Paul Wolfowitz—who gained notoriety soon thereafter as the intellectual author of the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war—to keep discussion of U.S. policy toward Indonesia and East Timor out of the presidential fray. As Holbrooke put it, “Paul and I have been in frequent touch to make sure we keep East Timor out of the presidential campaign, where it would do no good for American or Indonesian interests.”

    When he was a presidential candidate in 1992, Bill Clinton ridiculed George H. W. Bush for “coddling” dictators in his policy toward China. He said of Bush’s policy of forcibly returning refugees escaping from Haiti’s military dictatorship, “I am appalled by the decision of the Bush administration to pick up fleeing Haitians on the high seas and forcibly return them to Haiti before considering their claim to political asylum.” He slammed Bush for being too slow to intervene militarily in Bosnia. Once in office he reversed himself on both Haiti and China, adopting Bush’s policies on these questions. In the case of Haiti, Clinton didn’t even wait until his inauguration to announce that he would maintain Bush’s policy of locking up Haitian refugees in the Guantánamo Bay camp (that in 2001–2002 became a gulag for accused terrorists). Clinton lifted any human rights considerations regarding trade with China as part of his policy of adopting China as a “strategic partner” with the United States. By the end of his term, Clinton faced fire from right-wing Republicans who denounced his China policy in terms that resembled Clinton’s own criticism of Bush. In Bosnia, Clinton eventually made good on his plans for military intervention, but only after following George H. W. Bush’s policy for nearly three years.

    Likewise, during the 2000 election campaign, George W. Bush blasted Clinton for promoting “nation building” in places like the Balkans, for overextending the deployment of the armed forces, and for taking too soft a posture toward China, among other points. Future national security adviser Condoleezza Rice even hinted that the United States would pull its forces out of the Balkans, telling the New York Times in 2000, “We really don’t need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.” After Rice’s trial balloon caused outcry in Europe and in the U.S. media, Bush said he had no intention of pulling out of the Balkans. Despite its stated hostility to “nation building,” the Bush administration became bogged down in exactly such an endeavor in Afghanistan and Iraq. And with roughly half the combat power of the U.S. armed forces deployed around the world, the military under Bush was stretched thinner than it ever was under Clinton. Finally, even before Bush decided to count China as an ally in the “War on Terror,” he was backing away from his earlier bellicose rhetoric. When Chinese pilots shot down a U.S. spy plane in April 2001, Bush made a few saber-rattling noises. The administration then decided to trade U.S. crewmembers for an apology to China, leaving Bush’s cheerleaders in the conservative press to denounce him for producing “a national humiliation” in China.

    These examples show that when it comes to foreign policy, there is much more continuity between the administrations of both political parties than there is difference between them. As Bacevich noted, most disagreements between Democratic and Republican administrations emerge on the margins of the main questions of U.S. foreign policy. This reality makes it harder to explain the widely shared—almost automatic—perception that Democrats are “weak on defense” (or, put more positively from a liberal point of view, “committed to peace”) and that the Republicans are both “stronger” and “more professional” in their approach to foreign affairs. It omits the fact that Democratic administrations were the architects of the Cold War national security state and the policy of containment toward the USSR. FDR and his administration set up the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United Nations—ongoing tools of American imperialism. After Truman ordered atomic bombs dropped on Japan, he went on to create the National Security Council, the CIA, and the Defense Department. The Truman Doctrine authorized U.S. troops to intervene anywhere to “defend free enterprise” against “communism.” The mythmakers laud Kennedy for creating the Peace Corps, while ignoring that he also created the Green Berets.

The Birth of American Imperialism

    The Spanish-American War marked the entrance of the United States into the worldwide scramble for colonies among the advanced powers. In April 1898 the United States went to war with Cuba’s colonial overlord, Spain, under the pretext of retaliating for the sinking of the USS Maine, anchored in Havana, Cuba. By the end of December, the United States had routed Europe’s weakest colonial power and made off with all of Spain’s colonial possessions in Latin America and Asia, seizing control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.12 Novelist Mark Twain made no bones about the imperialist nature of this war:

How our hearts burned with indignation against the atrocious Spaniards. . . . But when the smoke was over, the dead buried and the cost of the war came back to the people in an increase in the price of commodities and rent—that is, when we sobered up from our patriotic spree—it suddenly dawned on us that the cause of the Spanish-American war was the price of sugar . . . that the lives, blood, and money of the American people were used to protect the interests of American capitalists.

    Ambassador John Hay wrote to congratulate assistant naval secretary Theodore Roosevelt on this “splendid little war,” engineered by the Republican administration of William McKinley. Theodore Roosevelt, who later assumed the presidency upon McKinley’s assassination, declared the United States’ right to intervene as “an international police power” throughout the Western Hemisphere in a speech before Congress in December 1904.

    No Democrat put a presidential stamp on U.S. empire until Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913. Wilson ordered military interventions in more countries and stationed troops for longer periods than either Roosevelt or Roosevelt’s Republican successor, William Howard Taft. In particular, Wilson turned the Caribbean Sea into a virtual American lake. In the years before U.S. intervention in the First World War, Wilson dispatched the Marines to Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, Honduras, and Guatemala. In 1914 U.S. troops landed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on a mission to collect from Haitian customhouses a debt owed to National City Bank. When the Haitians rose up against this attack on their sovereignty, the United States launched a full-scale occupation that lasted until 1934. When the United States finally withdrew from Haiti, it left behind a U.S.- trained military whose successors continued to terrorize the Haitian population for the rest of the century.

    Wilson’s actions in Haiti and the rest of the Americas followed logically from his understanding of the role U.S. foreign policy should play in the twentieth century. Writing as a Princeton political scientist more than a decade before he was elected president, he concluded that the “flag followed commerce”:

Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. [Emphasis added.] Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.

    Despite his nakedly imperialist point of view, Wilson is remembered as a great humanitarian who pioneered the notion that U.S. foreign policy should serve loftier goals, promoting democracy and defending the self-determination of small nations. These hallmarks of what international relations specialists describe as a foreign policy of “idealism” are often interchangeably referred to as “Wilsonian.”Wilson’s idealistic reputation is a legacy based first on his decision to launch the United States into the First World War on the grounds of fighting to “make the world safe for democracy”; and second on his failed effort to win the U.S. Senate’s ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, the Wilson-spearheaded settlement of the First World War that included such planks as the creation of the League of Nations.

    In 1916 Wilson ran for reelection by tapping into mass antiwar sentiment, using the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” Only months after winning his second term, however, Wilson declared war on Germany in April 1917. Even during his first term, Wilson’s protestations of neutrality in the European conflict barely concealed his support for the side of allies Britain and France against Germany. American bankers and manufacturers, who were making millions from supplying the Allies with arms, foodstuffs, and money, pressed the government to move away from its stated neutrality. As the American economy became more entwined with the Allied side and therefore more committed to Allied victory, pressure built on Wilson to commit U.S. troops to assure victory over Germany. When in 1916 the U.S. government announced it would not act against U.S. banks that openly loaned money to the Allied belligerents, it was setting itself on the path to war. In fact, German submarine attacks on U.S. ships—the ostensible reason for U.S. entry into the war—increased in response to the U.S. decision to allow the House of Morgan banks to lend to the Allies. Forces inside the German general staff knew this action would likely draw the United States into the war, but they preferred to fight the United States as an open belligerent rather than as a supporter of the Allies. In 1919 testimony before the Senate, Wilson admitted that Germany’s actions were secondary to the U.S. decision to enter the war:

Senator McCumber: Do you think if Germany had committed no act of war or no act of injustice against our citizens that we would have gotten into this war? The President: I do think so. Senator McCumber: You do think we would have gotten in anyway? The President: I do.

    Once committed to entering the war on the Allied side, Wilson wanted to make sure that the United States would have a part in the conflict’s final settlement.

    With the Allied homelands devastated and their economies in shambles at the end of the First World War, the United States emerged globally as an ascending industrial and economic power. The United States might have depended solely on its economic might to assert its place at the top of world affairs. But the Russian Revolution of 1917 had introduced another variable into the equation. Not only were the Allies competing to defeat Germany, but they were also competing to maintain their own legitimacy in the eyes of war-weary populations, which looked with hope to the workers’ revolution that ended Russia’s participation in the war on the Allied side. Wilson’s “Fourteen Points,” his declared war aims, including lofty-sounding goals of a “just peace” and “self-determination of peoples,” were promulgated to keep the new Russian revolutionary government from pulling out of the war. While Wilson tried to combat the Bolshevik revolution ideologically, he also authorized open support to the counterrevolutionary White Armies in 1918–20. The United States dispatched an invasion force to Siberia in 1918.

    As the socialist historian Sidney Lens put it, the period of “peace” after the First World War “was to be a continuation of war by other means.” Not only did this mean the United States flexing its economic muscles, it also meant the attempt to put a “Wilsonian” stamp on the world through the League of Nations. Promoted as an international organization to preserve international peace through “collective security,” the league left socialists of the day skeptical. Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky explained its role this way:

Under the League of Nations flag, the United States made an attempt to extend to the other side of the ocean its experience with a federated unification of large, multinational masses—an attempt to chain to its chariot of gold the peoples of Europe and other parts of the world, and bring them under Washington’s rule. In essence the League of Nations was intended to be a world monopoly corporation, “Yankee and Co.”

    Wilson could not convince the U.S. Senate to ratify the treaty ending the First World War, largely because of opposition to the League of Nations. But isolationist senators opposed the treaty for very different reasons than Trotsky did. By the time the Democrats made their play as the architects of U.S. imperialism, the Republican Party had become dominated by “America First” isolationism. This position held that U.S. foreign policy should be concerned only with the military defense of U.S. territory and should eschew overseas intervention or other U.S. involvement in other regions’ affairs. Isolationist Republicans in the Senate successfully defeated President Wilson’s attempt to join the League of Nations.

    As the radical historian William Appleman Williams argued, it would be

misleading to employ the terms isolationist and internationalist when analyzing the refusal of the Senate to approve the League Treaty. The votes that defeated President Wilson’s “only possible program for peace” were cast by men of widely different purposes and motivations. Some were empire builders on a world scale; others were continentalists, who argued that the United States could control the balance of world power as soon as the Western Hemisphere was brought under more direct control and organization by Washington. Some were progressive, or even radical; while others were conservative or reactionary. But perhaps most significant of all was the manner in which they reacted to the movements of social and colonial revolution that seemed to be typified in the Bolshevik Revolution. For while President Wilson saw in the League Treaty an instrument which could prevent future upheavals of that character, his opponents thought his proposal either too liberal or too conservative, and so opposed it for those reasons.

    The United Nations, a global organization of nation-states modeled on the League of Nations, would emerge after the Second World War, this time with the United States’ blessing. And the man who served as Wilson’s assistant naval secretary, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would be its main sponsor.

Liberals and the “Good War”

    The First World War left the United States as the world’s leading economic power. The Second World War would leave the United States as the world’s leading military power. In the period between the wars, the United States concentrated on leveraging its economic power to enlarge its empire—to win with economic power what the European powers had won with the open imperialism of colonies and viceroys. Under the Republican administrations of the 1920s—and even more explicitly under the Democratic Roosevelt administration as of 1933— the United States pressed its advantages by means of the “open door,” forcing weaker economies into competition with the United States through “free trade” and “open commerce.” The Great Depression, which began in 1929, simultaneously made the U.S. strategy more difficult and more necessary. In a remarkably prescient statement written while in exile from Stalin’s Russia in 1934, Trotsky explained:

The gigantic economic superiority of the United States over Europe, and, consequently, over the world allowed the bourgeoisie of the United States to appear in the first postwar period as a dispassionate “conciliator,” defender of “freedom of the seas” and the “open door.” The industrial and business crisis revealed, however, with terrific force the disturbance of the old economic equilibrium, which had found sufficient support on the internal market. This road is completely exhausted.

       Of course, the economic superiority of the United States has not disappeared; on the contrary, it has even grown potentially, due to the further disintegration of Europe. . . . The superiority of the United States must find its expression in new forms, the way to which can be opened only by war.

       . . . U.S. capitalism is up against the same problems that pushed Germany in 1914 on the path of war. The world is divided? It must be redivided. For Germany it was a question of “organizing Europe.” The United States must “organize” the world. History is bringing humanity face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism.

    Trotsky identified the dynamics that would push the United States into the Second World War seven years later. In both major theaters where the United States ultimately fought, the Pacific and Europe, it faced economic rivals for whom the “open door” meant subordination to the United States. Rejecting that choice, Japan in the East and Germany in the West embarked on military campaigns to enlarge their economic spheres of influence. After Japan conquered Manchuria in 1937, the State Department worried that “Japanese superiority in the Far East would definitely mean the closing of the Open Door.”25 A German conquest of Europe would have created an economic super-state that would have blocked what Trotsky characterized as the United States’ own desire to organize the world. Defying his own campaign promises to stay out of “foreign wars,” FDR positioned the United States to join the conflict.

    The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor gave Roosevelt the license he needed to launch the United States into the Second World War. Only the time and place of the Japanese attack took the Roosevelt administration by surprise. For years beforehand it was clear that the president was preparing the nation, through a massive arms buildup, for its eventual entry into the war. In 1940, knowing that his actions would lead to Japanese expansionism in Asia, Roosevelt cut off supplies of oil, iron, and aircraft fuel to Japan. By late 1941 FDR’s advisers were meeting to discuss how they could maneuver Japan into “firing the first shot” for the war they planned to fight. In the West—throwing out all pretense of maintaining “neutrality” toward the belligerents—the United States used the 1941 Lend-Lease Act to arm Britain, France, and other allies in their war with Nazi Germany. With these tactics FDR cannily created an air of inevitability about the United States’ eventual entry into the war.

    For Roosevelt and secretary of state Cordell Hull, U.S. war aims were simple and consistent for the four years of U.S. participation in the war. They envisioned a reinforcement of the U.S. “open door” policy. In Asia, this meant defeating Japan’s attempt to create an Asian “Co-Prosperity Sphere.” In Europe, this meant not only defeating Nazi Germany’s attempt to subjugate the continent, but also liquidating the British Empire. Toward this latter goal, Hull and Roosevelt insisted that Britain give up its “imperial preference” system in exchange for Lend-Lease aid. In other words, in order to receive U.S. aid in the war against Germany, Britain had to commit to eliminating the special trading preferences that it as the “mother country” maintained with its own colonies. For the United States to truly attain the “open door” policy it wanted, it had to be able to trade with the British Commonwealth on an even status with Britain—in effect breaking down the economic glue that held the British Empire together. To Hull, this “internationalism” anticipated the United States dominating the international system that would emerge from the war: “Leadership toward a new system of international relationships in trade and other economic affairs will devolve very largely upon the United States because of our great economic strength. We should assume this leadership, and the responsibility that goes with it, primarily for reasons of pure national self-interest.”

    While Hull consistently enunciated these war aims, Roosevelt couched U.S. goals in terms of the “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These cast U.S. and Allied goals in Wilsonian terms as a fight for democracy against dictatorship and militarism. But U.S domestic policies belied this high-minded rhetoric of freedom and democracy. These included FDR’s executive order interning Japanese Americans and continued segregation in the U.S. armed forces. His reluctant decision to ban racial discrimination in wartime hiring was forced only when Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union leader A. Philip Randolph threatened a massive march on Washington that promised to expose the United States’ racist hypocrisy in 1941.

    Even the ultimate justification of combating Hitler’s genocidal anti-Semitism was tainted by the administration’s refusal to lift immigration restrictions that prevented potentially millions of Jews from seeking refuge from the Holocaust in the United States. The most celebrated case was that of the USS St. Louis in 1939, when the U.S. Coast Guard turned away a ship carrying nearly one thousand Jewish refugees desperate to immigrate to the United States. The point here is not that FDR and the Democrats were merely hypocrites or that the administration did not believe in the high-minded principles it was pronouncing. It is that those high-minded principles always took a backseat to the imperial war aims of which Hull was the administration’s most consistent proponent.

    The radical historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out this contradiction in his discussion of wartime U.S. opposition to old-fashioned colonial imperialism:

Roosevelt’s opposition to the colonial empires was not simply altruistic; American commercial interests—for instance, the vast oil concessions that had been made to American companies in Saudi Arabia—were much in his mind. Although he believed that “imperialists”—he used the word as an epithet— had been short-sighted in taking a purely exploitative view of the colonies and that much greater potentialities lay in them if the welfare of the colonial peoples was taken into account, he was also aware of the possibilities for American trade in an economic revivification of the colonial areas under American encouragement.

    Humanitarian ideals, real or artificial, certainly did not carry over to the way the “good war” was fought. The “arsenal of democracy,” as the U.S. military-industrial complex came to be called during the Second World War, produced weapons that killed armies and civilian populations in the tens and hundreds of thousands. As many as thirty-five thousand perished in Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany—a horror immortalized in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five—and Tokyo and other major Japanese cities were reduced to cinders even before the United States planned an invasion. The war for the Pacific took on the character of what historian John W. Dower called a “race war” against the Japanese. Admiral William Halsey, commander of the South Pacific Force, described U.S. war plans in the East as “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill Japs.” Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s brother, advocated killing one-half of the Japanese population. In this climate it was understandable that Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, had no qualms about ordering the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—despite the fact that military leaders, including future Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, considered the bombings unnecessary to securing Japan’s surrender. Owing to what he characterized as “direct orders to commit ‘indiscriminate murder,’” an Indian judge at the postwar International Tribunal for the Far East argued that the Allies’ decision to use the atomic bombs was the greatest atrocity committed during the war in Asia.

Architects of the Cold War

    As U.S. troops swept across Europe and the Pacific, the highest officials in the Roosevelt and, after FDR’s death in April 1945, the Truman administrations drew up plans to establish a global U.S. empire after the Second World War. As the only major wartime belligerent that escaped large-scale destruction of its home territory and infrastructure, the United States accounted for nearly 60 percent of the total production of the seven largest capitalist countries. By the war’s end, the U.S. military literally covered the globe, with troops stationed in more than 1,100 bases in all regions of the world.36 For a brief period after the Second World War, the United States possessed a monopoly on the most destructive weapon ever produced—the atomic bomb. With its economic and military power at their height, the United States aimed to shape the world in its own interests.

    As its first task, the new U.S. empire constructed an international economic system designed to promote U.S. dominance in the world market. Official statements from government officials praised “free trade” as a means to break down barriers between nations. But behind the rhetoric lay the reality of U.S. economic dominance. To stabilize the world financial system after the war, the United States pushed for the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). To revive the economies of its European allies (and former enemies Germany and Japan), it sponsored the creation of the World Bank. “The United States could not passively sanction the employment of capital raised within the United States for ends contrary to our major policies or interests,” said the State Department’s Herbert Feis in 1944. “Capital is a form of power.” U.S. strategic interests were also at stake. As political scientist Diane B. Kunz explained,

American officials worried about the leftward turn in European politics, from the pervasive socialist influence throughout Europe to the heavy communist inroads in France and Italy. No one in Washington in May 1947 feared the imminent arrival of Soviet tanks in Paris or Rome. But, as George Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff had pointed out, “economic maladjustment . . . makes European society vulnerable to exploitation by any and all totalitarian movements.” In other words, a hungry, suffering electorate might vote communist governments into power.

    To back up economic clout with military muscle, the United States built military alliances spanning the globe. The most important of these alliances, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), founded in 1949, served to involve the United States permanently in European affairs. Ostensibly formed to present a common European defense against a Soviet invasion of the West, its real aim was, to paraphrase the first NATO General Secretary, Britain’s Lord Ismay, to keep the United States in Europe, to keep Russia out, and to keep Germany tied down. George Kennan, the U.S. State Department’s architect of anticommunist “containment,” nevertheless ridiculed NATO as a “military defense against an attack no one is planning.” He added that NATO “added depth and recalcitrance to the division of the continent and virtually forced individual countries to choose sides.” But forcing countries to choose sides between the United States–led Western bloc and the USSR–led Eastern bloc was what the Cold War was all about. Postwar institutions such as NATO, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the IMF, the World Bank, and the rest served more than simply anti-USSR aims. NSC 68, the 1950 State Department paper that outlined the pillars of the strategy of containment of the USSR, advocated U.S. military superiority as “a policy which the United States would probably pursue even if there were no Soviet threat.” Not only was the United States geared up to confront the Soviet Union, but it also aimed to ensure that Germany and Japan would not present a military threat to U.S. dominance again. To assure this, the United States greatly restricted Germany and Japan from rebuilding their militaries. To discourage the two countries from developing nuclear weapons, the United States offered them “protection” under its nuclear umbrella. Finally, the United States encouraged the revival of the Japanese and German economies and promoted a global “free trade” regime to preserve the Western alliance under U.S. economic domination.

    The United States maintained a monopoly on nuclear weapons until 1949, when the USSR exploded an atomic bomb. Russia’s acquisition of nuclear weapons touched off a superpower arms race. By 1980 the two superpowers possessed nearly twenty thousand warheads— each of them hundreds of times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945—aimed at each other’s major cities. With both superpowers armed with weapons that could destroy all life on the planet, the Cold War fostered a set of military doctrines that a reasonable person would consider insane. The policy of “mutually assured destruction” (known by the appropriate acronym “MAD”) guided the use of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The MAD policy assumed that neither the United States nor the USSR would launch a nuclear strike against the other because each knew a retaliatory strike would destroy it as well. Despite this deterrent, the United States provoked several nuclear confrontations with the Russians. The most serious of these, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, held the world hostage for nearly two weeks before Khrushchev agreed to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba.

    This nuclear stalemate imposed a certain amount of stability on the bipolar world created by the Cold War. Any direct confrontation between the superpowers threatened to spiral toward nuclear annihilation. So the main arena for “hot wars” that flowed out of the U.S.- USSR confrontation took place in the system’s periphery, the Third World. The Cold War’s unwritten rules allowed the United States and the USSR free rein within their respective “backyards.” So, despite issuing tirades against Soviet oppression, the United States never seriously considered aiding the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 or the Czechoslovakian Prague Spring of 1968. It acquiesced to the 1981 military coup that smashed Poland’s Solidarity movement. Meanwhile, Western communist parties devolved into tame reformist organizations that did more to sabotage movements such as the May 1968 French general strike than to help them. A successful revolution in either half of divided Europe was not in the interests of either Washington or Moscow.

    To maintain political, military, and economic dominance, the United States needed to establish its willingness to intervene anywhere to police its empire. The Truman Doctrine, announced in 1947, asserted the United States’ right “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities.” Announced as a justification for aiding the Greek government in its civil war against communist-led insurgents, it put the United States permanently on the side of all forces resisting change throughout the world. The United States became the chief underwriter of counterrevolution and backer of right-wing dictators and despots. Yet if governments showed inclinations to challenge the United States, Washington had no problem sponsoring “armed minorities” against them. The CIA, another 1947 creation of the Cold War, mounted numerous operations against regimes that refused to follow U.S. dictates.

    Intervention to prevent defections from the free-enterprise system seemed a crude rationale for policy. So U.S. officials simply harped on the alleged dangers of “communism.” As a Truman adviser told the president, “The only way we can sell the public on our new policy is by emphasizing . . . Communism vs. democracy” as the “major theme.” Any dictatorial regime was accepted as part of the “Free World” as long as it traded with the Western bloc, allowed Western investment, and supported the West in the Cold War. As a result, the Free World included such exemplars of democracy as the apartheid regime in South Africa, the shah’s Iran, and the medieval dictatorship of Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia. Under the pretext of defending the Free World, U.S. forces intervened dozens of times in countries around the world between 1947 and 1990. The longest and most costly of these took place in Asia, where the United States fought full-scale wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Camelot Goes to War

    The legacies of poverty and colonialism in Asia made the region ripe for nationalist unrest and superpower meddling. The fall of the corrupt pro-Western Chinese regime to Chinese communists in 1949 set off alarm bells in Washington. When North Korea, backed by Russia and China, overran the U.S.-backed puppet state in South Korea in 1950, the United States rushed thousands of troops to defend its interests in Korea. Presented as a UN “police action,” the 1950–53 Korean War cost the lives of thirty-three thousand Americans and two million Koreans, most of them civilians. Despite the carnage, the Korean War solved nothing. It simply redrew the partition line between the Stalinist state in the North and the pro-Western military regime in the South.

    The United States intervened in Korea because a shift in the balance of power on the Korean peninsula threatened to disrupt its post–Second World War designs in Asia. Strengthening a non-militarized Japan as a bulwark of capitalist stability in Asia formed the policy’s core. In order to rehabilitate and reintegrate Japan into an American-dominated world, the United States had to preserve Japan’s access to markets and trading partners in the region. U.S. Cold Warriors feared the collapse of one pro-Western regime after another—which they feared could isolate Japan and other U.S. allies and lead to their eventual collapse. U.S. leaders called this scenario the “domino theory.” After the Korea stalemate, the focus of U.S. efforts in Asia shifted to Vietnam:

The U.S. regarded Indochina as a firewall needed to prevent the more economically vital parts of the region—especially Malaya and Indonesia—from falling under communist control. Washington’s concern was that the economic repercussions of toppling dominoes would have geopolitical consequences: if Japan were cut off from Southeast Asia, the resulting economic hardship might cause domestic instability in Japan and result in Tokyo drifting out of the U.S. orbit.

    The communist-led Vietminh national independence movement drove France, Vietnam’s colonial overlord, out of the country in 1954. The United States sent military and economic aid to the corrupt South Vietnamese state, a creation of French colonialism, and propped up a series of hated South Vietnamese regimes to fight pro-independence forces from “communist” North Vietnam.

    Perhaps there is no greater myth in U.S. politics than the idea, promoted by popular films like Oliver Stone’s JFK, that the Kennedy administration had planned to wind down the Vietnam War at the time of Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. In this mythology the sainted JFK would have avoided the disaster into which his benighted successor, Lyndon Johnson, led the U.S. military and foreign policy establishment. But the record shows otherwise. In 1961 Kennedy’s top adviser, McGeorge Bundy, told the State Department that Kennedy “was really very eager indeed that [Vietnam] should have the highest priority for rapid and energetic action.” When Washington’s chosen puppet in South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem (whom Johnson once touted as “the Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia”), refused U.S. pressure to defuse anti-government demonstrations in 1963, Kennedy authorized a CIAled military coup that resulted in Diem’s assassination. Three weeks after Diem’s fall, Kennedy was assassinated. “We had a hand in killing [Diem],” Johnson told new vice president Hubert Humphrey. “Now it’s happening here.” Kennedy raised the number of U.S. military “advisers” in Vietnam from eight hundred when he took office to 16,700 in 1962. The effect—and indeed the intent—of Kennedy’s policy committed the United States to a wider role in Vietnam.

    In one of his first major statements on Vietnam as president, Johnson claimed, “We are not about to send American boys 9,000 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” Yet Johnson had been one of the administration’s Vietnam hawks. Only four days after assuming the presidency, he signed off on a secret memo, NSAM 273, that authorized U.S. attacks against North Vietnam. These covert operations were meant to goad North Vietnam into retaliations that would justify further and more open escalations of U.S. military force. Despite campaigning as a “peace” candidate in the 1964 election against Republican archconservative Barry Goldwater, LBJ followed through on his plans to escalate the conflict. To stave off the collapse of the new puppet regime in South Vietnam, the United States sent twenty-five thousand troops to Vietnam in 1965. It then escalated the conflict, stationing more than 540,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam by 1969. A key to winning this commitment of lives and treasure to Vietnam was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, passed through Congress in 1964 with only two dissenting votes. The resolution authorized the president to “take all necessary steps,” including using military force against North Vietnamese “aggression.” All serious studies and revelations from leaks of top-secret government documents proved that the “aggression” in the Gulf of Tonkin, to which the resolution was supposed to have responded, was largely a fabrication of the Pentagon and the Johnson administration.

    Despite a horrifying campaign of mass murder against the Vietnamese— carpet bombing, napalm, chemical warfare, assassination, and torture—the United States could not crush the movement for national liberation. The Vietnamese struggle, antiwar protest in the U.S. and other countries, and resistance to the war among U.S. troops in Vietnam forced Washington to give up. It withdrew troops and let the South Vietnamese state fend for itself. South Vietnam collapsed in the face of a two-month offensive by South Vietnamese guerrillas and North Vietnamese regulars in 1975. At the cost of two million Vietnamese lives and fifty-eight thousand American lives, U.S. imperialism suffered its greatest defeat.

    The Vietnam debacle left the U.S. military in disarray and its political leaders averse to another overseas adventure involving large numbers of U.S. troops. The defeat caused a “Vietnam syndrome,” a subsequent reluctance of American leaders to dispatch ground troops around the world. The sense of defeat and drift among the U.S. political elite, reinforced when a Republican favorite, Richard Nixon, was forced to resign the presidency in disgrace in 1974, opened the door to the Democratic “outsider” Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Mr. Carter and His Doctrine

    In 2002 the Nobel Prize Committee awarded Jimmy Carter the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of work by his foundation, the Carter Center, in observing elections and mediating conflicts around the world. That Carter would win the Peace Prize for work after he left the presidency conveniently overlooks the fact that he helped bring the world closer to war when he was president. Nobel laureate Carter reinstituted the military draft in 1979, requiring all males of draft age to register. But Carter’s care and feeding of the U.S. war machine went far beyond bringing back the draft, whose abolition represented a victory of the movement against the Vietnam War. Carter increased the U.S. military budget at a rate of 4 percent above inflation annually. In fact, he launched the Pentagon buildup that Ronald Reagan would take to then-unprecedented heights. Toward that end, in 1980, Carter signed Presidential Directive 59, establishing plans for fighting a “limited” nuclear war, including a first-strike policy.

    “Human rights” played a big role in Carter’s rhetoric about U.S. foreign policy, but not its practice. As historian Howard Zinn summarized: “Under Carter, the United States continued to support, all over the world, regimes that engaged in imprisonment of dissenters, torture, and mass murder: in the Philippines, in Iran, in Nicaragua, and in Indonesia, where the inhabitants of East Timor were being annihilated in a campaign bordering on genocide.”

    The biggest gap between word and deed came in Washington’s unconditional support for the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the brutal dictator who acted as a U.S. strongman in the Gulf. In 1977, during a state visit to Iran, Carter toasted the shah as an “enlightened monarch who enjoys his people’s total confidence.” Less than two years later, the Iranian people overthrew the shah. Another Carter favorite was Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu, who won praise and Western aid for abiding by Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. In 1989, Ceausescu and his hideous regime met the same fate that the shah’s did.

    To many, Carter’s greatest achievement for “peace” was brokering the 1978 Camp David Accords that resulted in Egypt’s recognition of Israel. In fact the United States designed the Camp David Accords to bolster Israel by removing Egypt as a military challenger. Israeli hawks openly admit that the peace treaty with Egypt allowed Israel to concentrate its forces for its 1978 and 1982 wars in Lebanon.56 No thought of justice for the Palestinians entered into Carter’s considerations. One year after Camp David, Carter fired UN ambassador Andrew Young for meeting with a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

    The 1979 Russian invasion of Afghanistan marked a turning point for Carter’s shift to a Cold War confrontation with the USSR. Years later, national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted the Carter administration had armed Afghan insurgents to provoke a Soviet invasion.58 In other words, the New Cold War whipped up in 1979–80 was based on a lie from someone who made a campaign pledge to a Watergate-weary electorate that “I will never lie to you.” In his 1980 State of the Union address, Carter asserted openly what all U.S. administrations since the 1940s had believed: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and any such assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

    The United States didn’t seriously believe the Soviet Union was using Afghanistan as a staging area for a thrust into the Persian Gulf. The “Soviet threat” justified a new policy of direct U.S. intervention in the Persian Gulf after the 1979 Iranian Revolution had eliminated the main U.S. ally in the region. To enforce this “Carter Doctrine,” the United States created the Rapid Deployment Force, later renamed the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). CENTCOM oversaw U.S. efforts to “pre-position” tons of U.S. military hardware and thousands of troops in friendly states around the Gulf. This deployment in the Gulf gave the United States the power to respond immediately to any crisis that threatened its access to oil and to “hold” the situation until a more substantial U.S. force could be assembled for war. Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-led war in Iraq in 1991, represented the culmination of the Carter Doctrine and CENTCOM’s mission.

    In the years since he left the White House, Carter has constructed a public persona calculated to airbrush his disastrous presidency from history. Winning the Nobel Prize is the ultimate recognition of just how successful he has been in making millions forget that he helped rekindle the Cold War and lay the groundwork for future U.S. wars in the Middle East.

Cold War Lite

    The Carter-Reagan military buildup helped to break the Russian economy. No longer able to sustain its European empire, Moscow moved to disengage from Eastern Europe. The Russian pullback set off a chain reaction in 1989, sparking political revolutions in one after another of its satellites. Within two years the entire postwar setup underlying the Cold War in Europe—a superpower USSR with pro-Moscow satellites and a Germany divided between East and West—collapsed. The Cold War ended, changing the structure of global politics fundamentally. There was no more “evil empire,” as Reagan once described the USSR and its Eastern Bloc satellites, to justify U.S. intervention around the world. In 1993 the Clinton administration inherited a favorable position for the United States as an imperial power. Two years after the disappearance of its chief military rival, the Soviet Union, the United States stood unchallenged as the world’s lone superpower. As the only military power with a global reach, it spent more on intelligence services alone than most countries spent on their entire military apparatuses.

    The United States and its allies accounted for 80 percent of world military spending. The time was ripe for a “peace dividend,” a major cut in military spending that would free up resources for spending on health care, education, and other social needs that had taken a backseat during the Cold War. Instead Clinton took the opposite course. Clinton’s plan for the post–Cold War military adopted most of the outgoing Bush administration’s assumptions. It preserved a Cold War–sized military after the Cold War was over. Under Clinton, the United States spent about 85 percent of what it had at the height of the Cold War to maintain a military with the power to intervene anywhere in the world. In 1998 Clinton announced a six-year boost to the military budget of $112 billion, including a go-ahead to the Pentagon’s biggest boondoggle, a “national missile defense” system. Ironically, the $112 billion figure corresponded almost exactly to a 1996 General Accounting Office estimate of the cost to make decrepit U.S. public school buildings functional for the nation’s schoolchildren.

    In 2000, when presidential candidate George W. Bush’s advisers attacked the Clinton-Gore administration for presiding over a decline in military “readiness,” Reagan-era Pentagon official Lawrence Korb rose to Clinton-Gore’s defense. Korb noted that military budgets under Clinton and Gore were larger than President George H. W. Bush had planned, had he won the 1992 election. The budget for training, readiness, and maintenance was actually 40 percent higher per person in uniform than it was under Bush, Korb pointed out. Six of Clinton’s eight budgets called for increases in military spending.

    Clinton and Gore dispatched troops around the world far more frequently than any other modern administration. Before launching the 1999 war against Yugoslavia, Clinton had sent U.S. forces into combat situations forty-six times. This compared to only twenty-six times for Presidents Ford (4), Carter (1), Reagan (14), and H. W. Bush (7) combined.65 Clinton, the one-time anti–Vietnam War protester, continued Bush’s 1992 invasion of Somalia, invaded Haiti in 1994, bombed Serbia in 1995 and 1999, Sudan and Afghanistan in 1997, and Iraq almost continuously throughout his administration. To force North Korea into negotiations, Clinton threatened a 1994 war that could have provoked a nuclear conflict. In 1995 the United States aided its Croatian ally in the ethnic cleansing of more than 170,000 Serbs. And it remained the main enforcer of genocidal sanctions on Iraq that killed more than a million Iraqis throughout the 1990s. In 1996, when CBS reporter Lesley Stahl asked then-UN ambassador (and later secretary of state) Madeleine Albright, “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And you know, is the price worth it?,” Albright replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.” In another case where the administration aided the violation of the human rights of millions, the administration won congressional approval for $1.3 billion in aid to the Colombian military in 2000.

    The administration’s support for sanctions in Iraq and for the death squads in Colombia belied all its talk about establishing a foreign policy based on human rights. But this had been clear from the start. After denouncing the Bush administration for ordering the forcible repatriation of Haitians fleeing persecution from their country, Clinton did an about-face. Bush’s policy became Clinton’s policy. Blasting Bush for “coddling dictators” in China, in 1994 Clinton removed any human rights considerations from U.S.-China trade. Clinton supported the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia to the bitter end in 1998. And his administration in 1997 lifted the ban on weapons sales to Latin American governments, including present and future military regimes. Given this record, it should come as no surprise that Clinton’s “humanitarian” war against Yugoslavia in 1999 produced a catastrophe for ordinary Serbs and Kosovar Albanians alike. “If there is a Clinton Doctrine—an innovation by the present administration in the conduct of foreign policy—it is this: punishing the innocent in order to express indignation at the guilty,” wrote one establishment critic of the NATO war.

    This critic was only partially correct, because Clinton—and especially his administration’s interventions in the Balkans—played a key role in helping to rehabilitate American imperialism ideologically. Down the line, the people who led the war over Kosovo represented the liberal or social democratic parties of their countries. The traditional right-wing “warmongers” like Bush, Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl were in retirement—with Clinton, Britain’s Tony Blair, Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder, and France’s Lionel Jospin filling their shoes. For them, leading NATO’s war represented a collective final step from the left side of the political spectrum to the “center” of capitalist politics. They had built their careers on playing to the aspirations of ordinary people while working hard to convince big business that they would be respectable custodians of the status quo. Blair and Clinton showed big business their willingness to cut social welfare programs. The Kosovo war gave them the opportunity to show the military establishment that they could win a major war and, at the same time, to sell it as a humanitarian gesture.

    In February 1999 Clinton announced plans for U.S. military power:

It’s easy . . . to say that we really have no interest in who lives in this or that valley in Bosnia, or who owns a strip of brushland in the Horn of Africa, or some pieces of parched earth by the Jordan River. But our true interests lie not in how small or distant these places are, or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names. The question we must ask is, what are the consequences to our security of letting conflicts fester and spread. We cannot, indeed, we should not, do everything or be everywhere. But where our values and our interests are at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so.

    Military analyst Michael T. Klare wrote, “No American president in recent times has articulated as ambitious a far-reaching policy.” No president, that is, until George W. Bush, who ran at full speed down a trail that Clinton had blazed for him.

The Bush Doctrine, the Democrats, and American Imperialism

 In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, American foreign policy took a sharp and dangerous turn to a more aggressive, militarist posture. The George W. Bush administration seized on the September 11 attacks to push what Bush defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld called a “forward-leaning” policy—using military intervention in every part of the world to advance U.S. political and economic interests. Neoconservative ideologues like Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and others took advantage of the post–September 11 climate to push through a program that had been considered untenable only a decade before. At its core was the “Bush Doctrine,” the unilateral declaration that the United States had the right to force “regime change” on enemy states—a policy implemented in full with the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. The administration pushed up the level of military spending from about $290 billion annually to more than four hundred billion dollars annually in three years, accomplishing in those three years the increase in military spending that Vice President Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign pledged to accomplish in ten years.

    In the face of this challenge, the Democrats in Congress wilted. In the 2002 midterm elections, the Democrats insisted that they would run on a critique of Bush’s domestic agenda and avoid a battle with the president over the conduct of foreign policy. This was at a time when Bush deliberately pushed the congressional resolution authorizing war in Iraq in order to shape the midterm elections around “his” issue—the war on terrorism. The Democratic non-strategy, unsurprisingly, turned out to be a loser. As liberal foreign policy commentator William Hartung explained,

As for the Democrats, their leadership badly misplayed what admittedly was a difficult hand. The notion that granting the President his war resolution would somehow take the war issue off the table and clear the way for discussion of domestic issues, which were considered the Democratic party’s strong suit, was a colossal miscalculation. Not only did it give voters concerned about the war nowhere to turn on election day—depressing turnout in the process—but the national Democratic party never even bothered to craft an alternative domestic agenda. Not only was there no equivalent of the ten-point “Contract With America” that helped Republicans seize control of the house in the 1994 midterm elections, there was no plan at all.

    The Democrats ended up with the worst of both worlds. Those who supported Bush’s call to war—including 2004 presidential candidates Senator John Kerry, Senator Joe Lieberman, and Representative Richard Gephardt—found themselves lending legitimacy to a war policy that most rank-and-file Democrats opposed. Those who fell silent on the war in order to campaign on prescription drug benefits and the like had nothing to offer millions who were then besieging congressional offices with letters, emails, and phone calls opposing the war. As a result, discouraged Democratic voters stayed home and Bush claimed a major victory for his “war on terrorism” policy. Given their pathetic showings—on both foreign and domestic agendas—the Democrats were lucky to have confined their losses to only five House seats and two Senate seats.

    To truly understand what happened in this clash over the direction of U.S. foreign policy after September 11, it was essential to pay attention to the players’ records more than their election campaign rhetoric. From this point of view, a different understanding of the differences between Democrats and Republicans emerged. The Bush Doctrine indeed represented a departure in U.S. foreign policy. But it didn’t represent the sharp and radical break with the past that liberal Democrats imagined. If anything, the more aggressive U.S. imperial policy under Bush represented an amplification of trends in U.S. policy that the Clinton administration had set into motion.

    Many Democratic supporters willingly forgot this because the Clinton-Gore administration labeled its militarist policies as “humanitarian” efforts, while the post-9/11 Bush administration made no such claim. Contrasting the fear and loathing Bush inspired in Europe with the “mourning for Clinton” in European public opinion, Perry Anderson commented in 2002:

Where the rhetoric of the Clinton regime spoke of the cause of international justice and the construction of a democratic peace, the Bush administration has hoisted the banner of the war on terrorism. These are not incompatible motifs, but the order of emphasis assigned to each has altered. The result is a sharp contrast of atmospherics. The war on terrorism orchestrated by Cheney and Rumsfeld is a far more strident, if also brittle, rallying cry than the cloying pieties of the Clinton–Albright years. The immediate political yield of each has also differed. The new and sharper line from Washington has gone down badly in Europe, where human-rights discourse was and is especially prized. Here the earlier line was clearly superior as a hegemonic idiom.

     As Anderson noted, the Clinton administration was diplomatically adept at cloaking its agenda of American domination in idealistic claptrap about the “international community.” But it also spoke incessantly of the United States as the world’s “indispensable nation.” Its rhetoric may not have been as “unilateralist” as Bush’s, but its actions set many of the precedents that Bush ended up flaunting. To force a settlement in Bosnia, the United States launched NATO air strikes on Bosnian Serb positions in 1995. In using NATO in this way, the United States openly flouted the UN Security Council, which had been the forum for U.S. and European Balkans policy up to that point. The United States simply asserted NATO’s right to act as an arm of the UN Security Council. Four years later the United States junked even that pretext. Knowing it would face a Security Council veto from Russia and/or China, the United States didn’t even bother to seek a UN sanction for the 1999 NATO war in Kosovo. Economically, the United States exercised its might as well. When the 1997 economic crisis spread through Asia, the United States strong-armed Japan out of its offer to organize the bailout of major Southeast Asian countries. The United States insisted that only the IMF could organize the bailout. More than at any time in modern history, the United States used its influence in world organizations like the IMF and the World Bank to force free-market, U.S.-friendly policies on countries around the world.

    Although George W. Bush would never credit his predecessor, his administration took full advantage of policies Clinton had enacted years earlier. Rumsfeld would not have been in the position to play “New Europe” against “Old Europe” had Clinton not pushed through NATO expansion in 1996 or pursued an aggressive policy in the Balkans. The U.S. military would not have been able to topple the Taliban in a few months using air strikes and local militias had the Clinton administration not already tested this strategy in Kosovo in 1999.74 Bush would not have been poised to press free-trade pacts on Central and Latin American countries had Clinton not fought for NAFTA in 1993.

    The Clinton administration also pursued policies that presaged the world-dominating strategy of the Bush Doctrine. The watchword of the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the main statement of an administration’s military policies, was “shaping the international security environment in ways that promote and protect U.S. national interests.” In other words, using the military in “forward-leaning” ways to alter the political and economic configuration of the world to conform to U.S. interests. The QDR asserted that “preventing the emergence of a hostile regional coalition or hegemon” was a chief U.S. national security goal. And the Clinton administration did not shrink from even more expansive definitions of U.S. goals. The Pentagon under Clinton sponsored Joint Vision 2020, a task force promoting the idea that the United States should strive for “full-spectrum dominance” of all possible theaters of war, from the oceans to space. Clinton authorized the key weapon in this plan for global domination: the national missile defense system, a long-time goal of neoconservatives.

    Of all mainstream commentators, Andrew Bacevich was the most clear-sighted among those analyzing the continuity of Clinton and Bush policies. Writing a review of the national security strategy document that announced the Bush Doctrine, he explained:

Throughout the Clinton era, U.S. military forces marched hither and yon, intervening in a wider variety of places, for a wider variety of purposes than at any time in our history. More often than not, once the troops arrived, they stayed. As a result, by the time that Clinton left office in 2001, the defining fact of international politics—albeit one vigorously denied by the outgoing administration— had become not openness and not globalization but the emergence of a Pax Americana.

    The Bush administration didn’t share the Clinton administration’s “ambivalence” about using military force, he wrote. It wanted to lead with its mailed fist. Nevertheless,

the Bush administration’s grand strategy reeks of hubris. Yet one may also detect in its saber-rattling occasional notes of desperation. America today is, by any measure, the most powerful nation on earth, enjoying a level of mastery that may exceed that of any great power or any previous empire in all of history. Yet to judge by this extraordinary document, we cannot rest easy, we cannot guarantee our freedom or our prosperity until we have solved every problem everywhere, relying chiefly on armed force to do so. In the end, we have little real choice—as the similarities between this new strategy and the Clinton strategy that Republicans once denounced with such gusto attest. In truth, whatever their party affiliation or ideological disposition, members of the so-called foreign policy elite cannot conceive of an alternative to “global leadership”—the preferred euphemism for global empire.

The Neocons’ Democratic Origins

    In the years following the 9/11 attacks, it became fashionable in liberal circles to assert that a small “cabal” of Republican neoconservatives had hijacked an otherwise sound bipartisan American foreign policy. Yet a brief account of the origins of these neoconservatives shows that they—and their project—did not emerge from the netherworld. In fact, a large number of the neocons emerged from a wing of the Democratic Party. Their story begins in the late 1960s in the battle inside the foreign policy establishment over the fate of the Vietnam War. After the 1968 Tet Offensive made clear that the war was unwinnable, not only public opinion but also leading business executives and sectors of the military and intelligence establishments turned against it. This growing “antiwar camp” concealed differences between those who opposed the war in principle and those who thought cutting its losses in Vietnam would help the United States to advance its business and political interests elsewhere. In 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, backed by a segment of business executives including cosmetics boss Max Factor III and the CEOs of Xerox and Continental Grain, pursued a conscious strategy of “co-opting the left” by recruiting antiwar activists into his campaign.

    The bulk of U.S. business wasn’t willing to follow the McGovern backers. Neither were powerful forces inside the Democratic Party that had become accustomed to playing their assigned roles in the setup of Cold War liberalism. The State Department had long corrupted the AFL-CIO, funneling millions in government money to a cadre of trade union activists (many of them ex-leftists) who used it to build anticommunist unions and parties throughout the Third World. Because of its strong identification with Cold War anticommunists, the mainstream labor movement refused to back McGovern. Cold War liberal politicians, who combined liberal positions on social welfare issues with strong support for Cold War military spending, formed another piece of the Democratic establishment that rebelled against McGovern. The most prominent among these was U.S. senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, who mounted presidential runs in 1972 and 1976 based on his “strong on defense” positions. Having abandoned McGovern, these sections of the Democratic establishment contributed to his landslide defeat in 1972—a defeat that solidified the image of the Democrats as being “soft on defense.” All this history is important for understanding the peculiar character of the foreign policy architects of the George W. Bush administration. Nearly all the leading figures among twenty-first century neocons emerged from the “Scoop” Jackson wing of the Democratic Party. They found a home in the Reaganite Republican Party that made a huge military buildup against the USSR and Third World “communism” central to its project in the 1980s.

    Richard Perle, a member of the Bush-appointed Defense Policy Board who was the leading advocate of the 2003 Iraq War, began his Washington career on “Scoop” Jackson’s staff. The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, co-author of The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission, is the son of Irving Kristol, one-time Trotskyist and editor of the once-liberal Commentary, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, another former liberal turned “virtuecrat.” Defense Policy Board member R. James Woolsey III, a Washington lawyer who served in the Carter administration and spent two years as Bill Clinton’s first CIA director, was a fanatical supporter of a theory that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks. Former Iran-Contra criminal Elliott Abrams, the Bush administration’s director of Middle East policy, is a former staffer for Jackson and a former member of Social Democrats USA, the organization that supplied much of the cadre for the anticommunist trade-union activities in the Third World. Paul Wolfowitz received his introduction to Washington as a graduate assistant to defense intellectual (and former Trotskyist) Albert Wohlstetter, who served as an adviser to Jackson. The neocon hawks first roosted in the Committee for the Present Danger (CPD), a Washington lobby formed in the 1970s to urge an end to U.S. détente with the Soviet Union in favor of a huge increase in military spending. CPD founders Paul Nitze and Eugene V. Rostow were both Democrats who supported Reagan in 1980. Nitze, who later joined the Reagan administration, was hardly a fringe player. He was the chief author of NSC 68, the 1950 blueprint for U.S. Cold War policy produced for the Democratic Truman administration.

    Another letterhead organization emerging from the “Scoop” Jackson wing of the Democratic Party, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), included among its members major figures in the Clinton-Gore administration: Les Aspin, Clinton’s first defense secretary; Woolsey; former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Clinton’s energy secretary and UN ambassador; Henry Cisneros, Clinton’s housing secretary, and Lloyd Bentsen, Clinton’s first treasury secretary. The CDM joined these Clintonites with such Reaganites as former UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and Contra promoter Penn Kemble. The neocons found kindred spirits in longtime Republican hawks like vice president Dick Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. These labyrinthine, bipartisan interconnections indicate that there is nothing inherently “Republican” about the neoconservatives, who many argued had hijacked U.S. foreign policy after 2001. Building and expanding the U.S. empire is and has been a bipartisan project, with its ideological warriors accepted in both major parties.

The Iraq War: Neoconservatism’s Waterloo?

    For a short period of time—roughly between September 11, 2001, and May 1, 2003 (the day Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq from the deck of the USS Lincoln)—the neocons and the Bush administration appeared to have won the day. But quickly thereafter the war turned sour, as a resistance movement the administration hadn’t anticipated began launching attacks on U.S. forces.

    The Iraq debacle divided the U.S. ruling class over the strategy to move forward. On one side were those who wanted to join with Bush to push on to “victory” in Iraq. On the other were those who believed that salvaging the United States’ reputation or preventing a breakdown in the military required a change of course in Iraq. To be sure, these divisions were already appearing during the 2004 election campaign, when a slim majority of U.S. newspapers endorsed John Kerry and establishment organs like Foreign Affairs published critiques of the neocons’ Iraq strategy.

    But in 2005 and 2006, as the situation in Iraq steadily worsened, both public and elite opinion turned against the U.S. adventure. Leakers inside the Pentagon and intelligence agencies determined to undermine the administration’s “stay the course” rhetoric in Iraq found willing accomplices in a national media that had only recently served as a Bush administration palace guard. A turning point came in November 2005 when Representative John Murtha (D-PA), a member of Congress with close ties to the Pentagon, called for “redeployment” of U.S. forces from Iraq. The United States “cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily,” Murtha said. “It is time to bring them home.”

    Over the next year, as the news from Iraq became more dire, more establishment figures called for a change of course. A Bush-appointed committee of “wise men,” led by former secretary of state James Baker and former Representative Lee Hamilton, convened to devise a strategy to disengage from Iraq while preserving U.S. influence in the Middle East. Judging from 2006 donations, sections of big business and the rich appeared to conclude that a Democratic-led Congress was the only way to force a change on the Bush administration. Whether campaign donors were trying to push the GOP out or simply to assure themselves a “seat at the table” in a Democratic Congress, they were quite generous to the Democrats in 2006. With so many forces lining up to force a change in Washington, the only real question before Election Day was whether the Democrats would win both the House and the Senate.

    But were the Democrats prepared to deliver on a clear mandate to wind down the war? Within a few months in office they were already tamping down public expectations, for several reasons. First, although Democrats and much of the American establishment rejected the Bush administration’s head-in-the-sand, “stay the course” approach in Iraq, they were no more committed to pulling up stakes in Iraq than Bush. Democrats campaigned against Bush’s bungling of the war, not against the war itself. They looked to Baker and Hamilton’s Iraq Study Group to provide them with a strategy to change course in Iraq in order to salvage U.S. credibility and influence in the Middle East.

    If Democrats were dedicated to doing what their most committed supporters wanted them to do—that is, to ending the war in Iraq— they could have used their newfound power over financing the war to force Bush’s hand. However, through their first year in the congressional majority, they repeatedly refused to use their “power of the purse” to force a change in Iraq. The Democratic leadership faced a Waterloo of its own in May 2007, when it caved into Bush’s threats and voted for more than $120 billion in “supplemental” funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Democrats even agreed to spend more money than Bush had requested. As a “responsible” party that expected to win the White House and to inherit the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after the 2008 presidential election, they were already trying to position themselves. One indication of the shift in Democrats’ thinking was the decision by all the leading 2008 presidential contenders, including eventual nominee Senator Barack Obama, to refuse to pledge to pull all troops out of Iraq during their first presidential term (through 2013!).

Plus ça Change . . . Más de lo Mismo

    George W. Bush departed the White House as one of the most despised political figures in the world. Barack Obama, on the other hand, rode a wave of worldwide goodwill that was evident even in the summer before his election as president, when hundreds of thousands of Germans greeted him like a rock star at a Berlin rally. The Nobel Foundation confirmed the hopes for a shift in U.S. foreign policy when it awarded Obama, barely eight months into his term, a Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”.86 With the exception of the obvious fact that he was not George W. Bush, it was hard to see what Obama had accomplished to qualify him for a Peace Prize. Nevertheless, the American establishment had to have been pleased, because it realized that the United States needed a makeover on the international stage. As the socialist and Middle East expert Gilbert Achcar put it, “The interests of American imperialism obviously find their ultimate guarantee in military supremacy, but a politico-ideological facelift is a necessary and useful complement. Under Bush, the arrogance and right-wing shift went so far that it seems imperative for the ‘enlightened’ fraction of the American establishment to steer ‘to the left,’ at least in words. This is where someone like Barack Obama can be useful.”

    It soon became clear that the “change” Obama brought to foreign policy was one of style, rather than of substance. Obama signaled his commitment to continuity with the Bush administration early on when he reappointed Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates. Later, Obama promoted General David Petraeus, architect of Bush’s 2007–2008 “surge” strategy in Afghanistan, first to commander of the international force in Afghanistan, and later, in 2011, to Central Intelligence Agency director. And his choice of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state affirmed that the differences on the Iraq War they had aired during the 2008 Democratic presidential nominating campaign were forgotten.

    The continuity of personnel underscored the continuity of goals and policies between the Bush administration and the Obama administration. The lack of any “progressive” content in Obama’s foreign policy could be seen clearly in the administration’s relations with Latin America, a region that had experienced a “pink tide” of reformist governments throughout the Bush years. Rather than embrace this demand for change in the Americas, Obama—like Bush before him— stood apart from it, when not trying to undermine it. When the Honduran military overthrew reformist Honduran president Manuel Zelaya in 2009, the Obama administration made noises about the coup being “illegal,” but then did nothing to support Zelaya or to speak out on repression in the country. In the standard weasel words of diplomacy, it called for “a negotiated solution” and for “both sides” to agree. By failing to stand firmly against the coup, the Obama administration sided with the coup-makers. International negotiations ultimately secured the return of Zelaya in 2011, but in the meantime, the United States won international recognition for the coup regime and the demobilization of the grassroots resistance to the coup. If U.S. support for the Honduran military harkened back to the old days when the Pentagon trained repressive Central American militaries at the School of the Americas, Obama’s economic policies built on the “free trade” agreements of his predecessors. In 2011, Obama couldn’t muster congressional support for a jobs bill, but he had no trouble pushing through “free trade” agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea. Manuel Perez-Rocha drew this balance sheet of Obama’s policy in Latin America: “In spite of catchy new phrases for cooperation and engagement with Latin America and rhetoric about the importance of equal partnerships with the countries in the region, Obama’s trip to Latin America promised more of the same—más de lo mismo—for the countries of the region, which in the end tastes like the imperialism of the past.”

    Obama’s continuation of U.S. domination in Latin America was a minor concession to conventional wisdom compared to his embrace of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.” In one of his first acts as president. Obama signed an executive order to close the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. At “Gitmo,” hundreds of “War on Terror” prisoners had spent years held without charges or trials—violating international law and drawing condemnation from the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet within a few months of signing the executive order—in the face of opposition from members of Congress, including most members of his own party—Obama began to back away from his pledge to close the camp. By mid-2009, the Obama administration announced its position on many of Bush’s most controversial “War on Terror” policies, accepting many of the Bush administration’s policies—military tribunals to try detainees and indefinite detention on presidential fiat among them—as its own. Coupled with his double-speak on torture—that he repudiated the Bush policies as illegal, but would not actually prosecute anyone who executed them—Obama served to legitimize many of the practices that he had criticized as a candidate for president. By the one-year anniversary of the executive order, when the closure of Guantámamo Bay was supposed to be completed, it was clear that Obama’s executive order was a dead letter. One could even ask if Obama ever had a real plan to close the prison in Cuba; at most he planned to move it to a prison in Illinois before Congress refused to fund the transfer. The administration gave up trying to find a way to shut the prison that had crystallized so much worldwide hatred of the Bush regime. In a separate executive order issued in March 2011, Obama codified the Bush policies of indefinite detention and military tribunals.

    The capitulation on Guantánamo put into relief the role in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy that the Obama administration adopted for itself. Rather than fundamentally changing course away from many of the Bush administration’s most repressive policies, the Obama administration helped to sanitize them. This was completely predictable, because the power of the U.S. presidency is cumulative. Once one chief executive seizes power for himself, his predecessors will not give it up willingly. What liberals and Democrats considered to be heinous and extreme policies when Bush enacted them became, with Obama’s help, part of the bipartisan consensus of American foreign policy.

    During the 2008 election campaign, Obama consistently contrasted Bush’s war in Iraq with the war in Afghanistan. The Iraq War, he often said, was the “wrong war at the wrong time” that diverted attention and resources from the real front in the fight against “terrorism”: Afghanistan. Obama pledged to refocus U.S. policy and to reinforce the war in Afghanistan. This was one campaign promise that Obama kept. In 2009, he announced the deployment of an additional thirty thousand troops to Afghanistan, bringing the total number of U.S. troops there to more than a hundred thousand by mid-2011, on the eve of the war’s tenth anniversary. At the same time, Obama stepped up the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (i.e., drones) to attack supposed “militant” targets in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. These moves escalated the war in Central Asia beyond even the Bush administration’s limits. In his first twenty-one months in office, Obama had already authorized 120 drone attacks on Islamist targets in Pakistan—an ostensible ally in the Afghan war. This amounted to twice as many attacks as Bush authorized in eight years.

    In fact, Obama expanded this use of remote-control warfare from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen, where, in 2011, a drone carried out Obama’s order to assassinate American-born Islamist cleric Anwar al- Awlaki. As constititutional lawyer and commentator Glenn Greenwald pointed out, not even Bush had ventured to assert the U.S. president’s right to order the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen without any semblance of due process.91 Obama had proven to be a more ruthless, and in some senses, more extreme conservator of his predecessor’s legacy, as two writers for the German newspaper Der Spiegel noted:

Today, Obama’s CIA no longer carries out kidnappings—it carries out killings. This means that the CIA can assume a military role and wage a war unconstrained by international law or the laws of war. It is waging that war in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan and Yemen, where officially there is no war.

       The advantage of the CIA’s new approach is simple. Prisoners have to be released at some point, or at least put on trial. Prisoners mean the possibility of facing investigations or having to address journalists’ questions.

       Killing is easier.

       Obama’s CIA decides who lives and who dies.

    As with all American presidents in the post–Second World War era, Obama’s overall policy goals hinged heavily on the United States’ relationship with the Middle East, the most strategically important region of the world. Having inherited an unpopular, disastrous, and costly (at more than a trillion dollars) war of choice in Iraq, Obama was expected to encourage a less belligerent posture than Bush. Obama won praise from across the political spectrum for his widely touted June 2009 speech in Cairo, Egypt, designed to signal a “new beginning” in relations between the United States and the Islamic world. But Obama’s rhetorical nods toward dialogue, democracy and openness carried little change in U.S. policy toward the region.

    One indication of this was the Obama administration’s continued devotion to supporting the most rejectionist policies of its main ally in the region, Israel. Unlike Bush and Cheney, Obama and Biden criticized Israel’s policy of continued settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But like Bush and Cheney, Obama and Biden did nothing about it. On multiple occasions when Israel’s actions brought worldwide condemnation, the Obama administration stood alone in Israel’s defense. In 2010, when Israeli commandoes attacked a flotilla bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza, killing nine unarmed civilians, the Obama administration worked overtime to water down the United Nations’ condemnation of the raid.94When the Palestinian Authority petitioned to the United Nations to be recognized as the government of an independent state in 2011, the United States and Israel, virtually alone, led the opposition to it.

    Perhaps even more indicative of the Obama administration’s commitment to the status quo in the Middle East was its reaction to popular movements for democracy in the region. In 2011, when movements for democracy erupted across the Middle East and North Africa, the administration stayed loyal to U.S.-allied dictators like Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak almost to the bitter end. Meanwhile, it supported Saudi Arabia’s invasion of Bahrain to suppress a popular movement for democracy there. It subsequently dispatched Secretary of State Clinton to Bahrain, the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, to offer an increase in arms sales to the kingdom.95

    Nevertheless, the Obama administration’s most audacious action during the Arab Spring was to support (and bankroll) a UN-sanctioned NATO intervention in the civil war in Libya. In so doing, Obama rehabilitated the concept of “humanitarian intervention,” last embraced during Clinton’s 1999 Kosovo adventure. Despite their rhetorical differences, the “liberal interventionists” in Obama’s administration behaved almost identically to the discredited neoconservatives of the Bush regime, foreign policy expert Stephen M. Walt argued. “So if you’re baffled by how Mr. ‘Change You Can Believe In’ morphed into Mr. ‘More of the Same,’ you shouldn’t really be surprised. . . . Most of the US foreign policy establishment has become addicted to empire, it seems, and it doesn’t really matter which party happens to be occupying Pennsylvania Avenue.” NATO intervention tipped the balance in favor of rebels who overthrew the Libyan dictator (and one-time U.S. ally) Moammar Qaddafi. But at the moment of triumph, it was unclear whether the Libyan opposition would be able to forge a truly independent country, or if NATO intervention had made the new Libya safe for Western oil companies, popular aspirations be damned.

    As the U.S./Western intervention in North Africa reached its goal of toppling Qaddafi, Obama dispatched a hundred U.S. Special Forces to Uganda on the premise that they would help the Ugandan government to defeat the Lord’s Resistance Army, a fanatical sect of a few hundred. But like the intervention in Libya, the intervention in Uganda was part of a longer campaign, accelerated under Obama, of militarizing U.S. foreign policy toward Africa with the aim of challenging China’s increasing influence in the region.

    What became of the Iraq War, opposition to which was one of the main launching points for Obama’s candidacy for president? In October 2011, Obama announced that all U.S. combat troops would be pulled out of Iraq. While this announcement appeared to fulfill liberals’ hopes, it was also coupled with a clear sense that the U.S. was merely refocusing its efforts in the region. The withdrawal still left the world’s largest U.S. embassy and tens of thousands of private mercenaries, who operated outside the boundaries of U.S. military law, in Iraq. Moreover, the Obama administration executed what amounted to a redeployment of U.S. forces to reactionary Gulf monarchies like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia that stood out as bulwarks of the status quo against the Arab Spring. While redeployed, U.S. troops would be kept at the ready for any future military action in the region, including against the new U.S. bogeyman, Iran. The U.S. envisioned a stronger and more formal military alliance with the Gulf Cooperation Council, developing further the alliance that Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush had initiated. “We are kind of thinking of going back to the way it was before we had a big ‘boots on the ground’ presence,” Major General Karl R. Horst, Central Command’s chief of staff, said. “I think it is healthy. I think it is efficient. I think it is practical.”99 Ironically, Obama won election in repudiation of George W. Bush, only to reestablish the foreign policy of George H.W. Bush.