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Foreign Policy Instructional

Understanding U.S Foreign Policy based on ZMI Lectures

by Stephen Shalom

Material in quotation marks are exact quotes (not from Shalom, but from the indicated sources), while material without quotation marks are loose -- sometimes very loose -- paraphrases.

Regrettably, the extensive discussions accompanying this material in class were not transcribed and therefore do not appear in this instructional.

The Course was given in two parts and the Instructional is divided similarly, with subdivisions in each.

Part One: The Driving Forces Of U.S. Foreign Policy

Introduction

What I'd like to do is take five different explanations of U.S. foreign policy and analyze them. Some of them I think are bogus, and some of them I think are real. I'm not going to tell you which I think is which -- but don't worry, you should be able to figure it out. The five I'm going to talk about are: First, morality,:is that's what's driving U.S. foreign policy? (Control your laughter, please.) Second, democracy: is a concern for democracy what's driving U.S. foreign policy? Third is capitalism: is that's what's driving U.S. foreign policy? Fourth is racism, and fifth is sexism and heterosexism. So let me go through each of these in order.

Morality as a driving force of U.S. Foreign Policy

There was a book by Charles Bohlen, a former U.S. ambassador and sometime academic, in which he said that when you're studying the foreign policy of most countries, you need to look at the material conditions, but that this doesn't apply when you're studying the United States because U.S. foreign policy is different from other countries' foreign policy in that it's not related to the material conditions of the country. This has been a constant argument among many political scientists and analysts, that somehow the U.S. is special, that the U.S. is different, that - to use the title of a book written in 1981 -- U.S. policymakers were "sentimental imperialists." Not the standard imperialism based on the usual greed and things like that, but this was a book about the U.S. experience in Asia. The United States was motivated by sentiment, by morality, by wanting to do good. Stanley Karnow wrote a book about the U.S. and the Philippines, and it talked about the colonial period, and he keeps on talking about U.S. "benign intentions," "high moral purpose," and -- one word he uses that I'd never heard of, and had to look up but couldn't find except in an unabridged dictionary -- U.S. "benison," which means the U.S. giving of benefits to Filipinos. This was why the United States was there: to help the Filipinos.
   
I was officially trained as a political scientist and one of the founders of American political science and the American study of international relations is a guy named Hans Morgenthau, and he has a criticism of U.S. foreign policy. Morgenthau says the thing wrong with U.S. foreign policy is that it's too moralistic and too legalistic. We're just too good. We shouldn't be this way, he says, and his decisive example to prove how good we are is a story from the turn of the century. We are, as you know, now in the hundredth anniversary of 1898, which is when the United States started on its era of global expansion. It, of course, had expanded across the American continent and expanded in Latin America, but in 1898 it went worldwide, and I'm going to try to make a number of references back to that 100-year-ago event.

The president at the time was William McKinley, and a group of Episcopal missionaries came to visit him, and as they were leaving the White House, he said, in rough paraphrase:

Wait, hold a minute. I want to tell you why I decided to annex the Philippines. I don't mind telling you, he said, that I paced the White House floor tormented by this question: should we annex the Philippines? And then it came to me. I heard a voice, and the voice said, "William, you should annex the Philippines. That's the thing to do because you need to civilize and Christianize the Filipinos."

Now the Filipinos were 90% Christian already, which might have given McKinley pause, but it didn't. Incredibly, this episode is what Morgenthau takes as proof that U.S. policy is moralistic. Moreover, if you read through McKinley's statement in more detail, he goes to say we could have given the Philippines to France and Germany, “our commercial rivals in the Orient”, but that would have been "bad business and discreditable." So evidently, McKinley's God who speaks to him and tells him what he ought to do is not oblivious to economic concerns, to profit and loss. (Now maybe it wasn't God. Maybe it was the voice of Theodore Roosevelt that McKinley heard instead -- but no matter.) The point is that McKinley's notion of morality included making money, and for Morgenthau to think that this shows the U.S. is to moralistic seems a very peculiar notion. But let me take other examples aside from that turn of the century one.

Democracy as a driving force of U.S. Foreign Policy

Okay, what about democracy? Is democracy a motive of U.S. foreign policy? Now you might say, well, gee, a lot of our leaders are talking about democracy all the time. It's interesting though that if you look at a lot of the accounts now, U.S. policy makers say things like we support democracy in Eastern Europe, and evidence of this is our support for free markets there. Basically the U.S. acts as though democracy and free markets, democracy and capitalism, are one in the same thing. I would in fact argue that they're contradictory, but you don't have to accept that view. What's clear is that they're not identical in any case, and so let's look at the U.S. attitude towards democracy, not capitalism, but democracy over the years.

Turn of the Century

Let's go back to the turn of the century again. Some Americans wanted to colonize the Philippines, and some people objected and said, we can't colonize the Philippines. That violates the principle of the consent of the governed, and one of the imperialists of the day, and in those days imperialists called themselves imperialists - Henry Cabot Lodge got up and said, if justice requires the consent of the governed, "then our whole past record of expansion is a crime" -- which obviously can't be true. So therefore, it's okay to take the Philippines. Senator Albert Beverage was challenged. One of the opponents of imperialism said, don't we believe in the Declaration of Independence? Doesn't that document say that all men are created equal and all that kind of stuff? How could we be colonizing the Philippines? And Senator Beverage replied, "you, who say the Declaration applies to all men, how dare you deny its application to the American Indian? And if you deny it to the Indian at home, how dare you grant it to the Malay abroad?" But let's take some more contemporary examples.

Iran

Now one of the problems in thinking about this question of democracy is that the U.S.'s main enemy during the Cold War years was the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union was indeed a dictatorship, and therefore when we oppose the Soviet Union, it wasn't clear. Was it that we we're opposing it because they were a dictatorship or we're only opposing them because they interfere in U.S. interests in some other way. So the best way to study it is let's look at examples of democracies, not cases like the Soviet Union. In 1953 in Iran, an elected Parliament called the Majlis had voted to nationalize the British oil company that dominated the Iranian economy. There was essentially one oil company owned by Britain that ran the whole Iranian economy, and the Majlis, the Iranian parliament, voted to nationalize it. (Let me make a quick aside here about international law. International law allows countries to nationalize property. U.S. law allows the U.S. government to nationalize property. What I mean is if you've got a house and the U.S. government wants to build a highway through your house, you can't say, sorry. They've got to pay you for it, but once they pay you a fair price, they can take it. It's in the Constitution: the government has the "right of eminent domain," the right to take property for the public good.) So Iran took this property, the British owned oil company, for the public good.

In 1953, the CIA went in and overthrew the government of Iran. A dictatorship was installed, which engaged in brutal torture, and which ruled until 1979 when the Shah was overthrown in the Iranian revolution. (The Iranian revolution ultimately led to rule by right-wing Ayatollahs, but this was not pre-ordained, nor does it negate the claim that the Shah's rule was an oppressive autocracy.) From the point of view of the United States, the Shah's dictatorship was most welcome. The first act put in place by the new Iranian government after the CIA overthrow in '53 was to essentially un-nationalize the oil company, giving 40% of it to the British oil company and most of the rest of it to U.S. oil companies.

Guatemala

In 1954 the Guatemalan government nationalized the land owned by the U.S.-based corporation, the United Fruit Company. United Fruit had a lot of land that was not being used, but United Fruit figured we'll keep it out of circulation and that'll keep the prices high for agricultural products. But there were lots of landless peasants in Guatemala. So the government nationalized the land to give to the peasants. The Guatemalan government agreed to pay for the land, and they said to United Fruit, we'll pay you what it's worth. Let's look at your tax record. Let's see, according to the records you filed, last year you said the land was worth $.12 an acre (or some such ludicrous figure), so we'll pay you $.12. Now this was obviously outrageous to United Fruit, so the CIA went in and overthrew the government of Guatemala, and from 1954 through to the 80s, Guatemala was ruled by a brutal dictatorship, killing many tens of thousands of people.

Vietnam

In Vietnam in 1954, the war between the Vietnamese Independence Movement under Ho Chi Minh and the French colonialists came to an end, and the way the war was settled was that the French moved south and the Viet-Minh, the Vietnamese Independence Movement, moved north, and two years later there was supposed to be elections in which a government would be chosen for the whole country, for one Vietnam. President Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs that every single serious observer agrees that if elections were held at the time of the end of the fighting, Ho Chi Minh would have won 80% of the vote. So what's the solution from the point of view of Washington? Don't hold elections, because we're going to lose. So in 1956 when the elections were scheduled to be held, the United States and its puppet that they had installed in the south, Ngo Dinh Diem, essentially refused to allow the elections to take place, and the next two decades was a war over that issue.

Chile / Summary

In 1973 an democratically elected government in Chile was overthrown by the CIA. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was asked how he justified this, and he said, “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” Now, of course, the Chilean case had nothing to do with communism; what the Chilean people had voted for was a socialist government that maintained democratic structures throughout. Nevertheless, in Kissinger's view, such irresponsibility had to be smashed.

In 1981 George Bush - who was then Vice President -- traveled to the Philippines which was under the rule of dictator Ferdinand Marcos. And Bush picked up his glass and toasted Ferdinand Marcos and said, "We love your adherence to democratic principle," and I think that summarizes pretty well the United States' adherence to democratic principles.

Capitalism as a Motive for U..S. Foreign Policy

Okay, let me move now to the third potential motive for U.S. policy, and this is capitalism. Now let me clarify that I'm not talking about some kind of conspiracy here. I'm talking about the normal working of the U.S. political system. Everyone understands why it is that U.S. tax laws for example seem to give all these benefits to the rich. Why is that a middle class family might pay 29% of their marginal dollar in taxes on their wages or salaries while billionaires only pay 16% on their capital gains income, the money they make in the stock market? Why is that? Well, because the people who write the tax laws get campaign contributions from the rich, and the rich don't give campaign contributions to people who say, let's write tax laws that will tax the rich. No, they write them - they give their campaign contributions to people who say, let's benefit the rich, and this applies both to the Democrats and to the Republicans.

Now I don't want to suggest that there are no differences between Democrats and Republicans. In the early 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, chose as his Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson who was the President of General Motors, and Wilson said, don't worry, there's no conflict of interest here because what's good for General Motors is good for the United States and visa versa. In 1961 John Kennedy, a Democrat, became President, and the Democrats were different. Kennedy chose for his Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara, who was the head of the Ford Motor Company. So there are differences between the Democrats and the Republicans, but they're not all that substantive.

Turn of the Century

If you go back to the turn of the century, the imperialists spoke quite clearly. Albert Beverage, Senator from Indiana, said "Our largest trade henceforth must be with Asia. The Pacific is our ocean. ...The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East. ...And the Pacific is the ocean of the commerce of the future. Most future wars will be conflicts for commerce. The power that rules the Pacific, therefore, is the power that rules the world. And, with the Philippines, that power is and will forever be the American Republic."

That was the turn of the century. Throughout the 20s and 30s, the United States is intervening in Latin America, and whenever it does so, U.S. economic interests were being protected.

The cases of Iran, Guatemala and Chile mentioned previously -- all these are examples of interventions dominated by and motivated by economic considerations, but economics doesn't just drive interventions. It drives the entire orientation of U.S. policy.

Trade Relations

In the 19th century, the United States was protectionist. What I mean by that is the United States believed in having tariffs. Why, because in the 19th century - in the 1880s for example - American textile factories could not compete with British textile factories. The British had the most efficient textile industry in the world. They could undercut and outsell any country in the world, and therefore if there were no tariffs, no American consumer would buy an American textile because it would be too expensive. They would buy a British textile, and the American textile industry never would have been able to get off the ground. Now the U.S. could have done that. We could have said we don't need a textile industry. We're cotton exporters. We export (as Noam Chomsky has remarked) beaver skins and other things. This is what the American economy will depend on. We could have done that, but Americans wanted to have a higher standard of living, and we wanted to industrialize, and so we enacted tariffs that kept out British goods - thereby allowing American industries to grow.

By the 20th century and particularly after World War II, the United States had become the dominant economic power in the world, and so now the U.S. position became one of pushing for the elimination of tariffs. But every single country in the world, after Britain had industrialized, industrialized behind a tariff wall, and so U.S. pressure today on foreign countries - on third world countries - to eliminate their tariffs if essentially pressure to make sure that their standard of living doesn't increase while their population remains underdeveloped and poor.

Narco-Trafficking

This is the pattern of NAFTA and GATT and all these other international trade agreements, but it takes place even in terms of - it takes place even in a different realm, the realm of narco-trafficking. I'm not talking here about cocaine or heroin. I'm talking about cigarettes, nicotine.  The U.S. tobacco industry is having trouble selling cigarettes in the United States, and after all they're killing the American population. So they're running into some problems, and so the U.S. government's position is we're going to restrict you in the United States, but kill all you want abroad, and in fact, we will help you. There are a lot of countries, particularly in Asia, that had strict laws keeping out foreign cigarettes. They weren't necessarily doing this for good reasons. They were doing this because they had a small government monopoly on cigarettes, but the effect was that because there was just a small government monopoly, it wasn't advertised very much, and cigarette smoking was at relatively low levels. The United States went to Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and in each of these countries the United States said you are keeping out U.S. cigarettes. If you continue to keep them out, we will retaliate against your exports and cripple your economy. And every one of these countries gave in to U.S. pressure, allowing in U.S. cigarettes. The result was that advertising spread. In South Korea, for example, the most popular Asian rock star had a concert, and the way you got in was with ten empty packages of Marlboro cigarettes, that kind of thing. So modern marketing techniques were introduced, and as a consequence cigarette smoking has risen in all these countries. In Japan almost no women had smoked cigarettes in the past. Now there are big billboards outside women's colleges with advertisements proclaiming “you've come a long way baby”. As Asians die, U.S. companies profit.

Racism as a Motive for U.S. Foreign Policy

There's obviously lots more to say about each of these things, but I'm going to move on from capitalism now to talk about racism. Racism has been a fundamental aspect of U.S. society since the beginning. To George Washington, Indians and wolves were both “beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape.” General Sherman of Civil War fame said in 1866, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children” -- and these were not just words. Those were in fact the policies that were carried out. To Theodore Roosevelt, the “most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman,” but no matter, because it was “idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality which obtain between stable and cultured communities¼.” Not that Roosevelt went “so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but," he said, "I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

And this wasn't just the view of politicians. Consider the President of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, he explained that Jefferson's doctrine about people having basic rights of life, liberty, etc. etc. apply “only to our own race, and to those people whom we can assimilate rapidly.” Indians “are not men, within the meaning of the theory” that all men are created equal, he declared.

Of course U.S. racism was particularly notable with respect to those who were transplanted by force from Africa. Slavery needs no elaboration -- nor the century of Jim Crow that followed, nor the discrimination that continues even today -- but racism wasn't just a domestic policy.

Racism and Foreign Policy

For example, when in 1804 Haiti became independent, the second independent country in this hemisphere, the United States refused to extend diplomatic recognition. Why? Well, because this was a country where slaves freed themselves. That's obviously a bad example, and so it wasn't until after the American Civil War that Washington extended diplomatic recognition to Haiti. And the pattern was still in place in the late twentieth century. You can find derogatory references to blacks as standard fair in the Nixon administration. Henry Kissinger, for example, chortled to Senator Fulbright who was going to have a dinner for some African diplomats, I wonder what your dining room is going to smell like.

Turn of the Century

Consider -- going back again to the turn of the century -- the annexation of the Philippines. Those who wanted to annex the Philippines, the imperialists, frankly said that Americans are “of the ruling race of the world”; “ours is the blood of government; ours the heart of dominion; ours the brain and genius of administration.” Anglo-Saxons said Teddy Roosevelt were the most advanced race and that inferior races are its "natural prey" and that when dealing with the "lower orders," it's okay to conquer these "lower orders" because to give self-government to the Philippines would be like granting self-government to an Apache reservation under some local chief. It's obviously preposterous. "The reasoning which justifies our having made war against Sitting Bull," said Roosevelt," also justifies our having checked the outbreaks of [Philippine leader Emilio] Aguinaldo and his followers."

As a result of the Spanish-American War, the United States had acquired the Philippines from Spain, but the Filipinos had said they wanted independence, and the U.S. then fought a war against them, killing tens of thousands. General Arthur MacArthur was in charge of U.S. forces during much of this war and he was asked by a Congressional Committee why it was that in this war we're killing 15 Filipinos for every one that we're wounding. That's usually the opposite of what happens in warfare. And Arthur MacArthur explained that inferior races succumb to their wounds more easily than Anglo-Saxons.

Interestingly, it was not just the imperialists, those who wanted to annex the Philippines, who were racist. Many of those who opposed annexation also were racists. So Senator Vardaman of Mississippi opposed annexing the Philippines because he said "the Filipino or any other mongrel race" could not learn self-government for a hundred thousand years because it's not in their blood to accomplish it, and therefore let's just leave them alone. Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina said he was against annexation because he had had experience with a "colored race." “It is to the injection into the body politic of the United States of that vitiated blood, that debased and ignorant people, that we object.”

World War II and beyond

Racism manifested itself in many other U.S. policies during World War II. People of Japanese descent, whether they were U.S. citizens or not, were placed in concentration camps, and this wasn't just war fever, war frenzy, because Italians and Germans with whom the United States was also at war did not generally get placed in those same kinds of camps. The United States dropped atom bombs on Japan. One wonders whether we would have used the same kinds of weapons on Germany. (For a broader consideration of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, see additional readings.) Twice since, the United States has waged war on Asian countries, laying waste their land and people, fighting those we called "gooks."

In 1965 when the United States sent in the Marines to the Dominican Republic, one of Lyndon Johnson's key advisors was Thomas C. Mann, and Mann said, “I know my Latinos. They understand only two things-a buck in the pocket and a kick in the ass.” And today, Arabs and Muslims are victims of the same kinds of virulent stereotypes. There was a popular postcard that declared "Fight High Oil Prices! Mug an Arab Today." Such stereotypes make it easier to ignore the human cost on civilians of such things as the economic blockade of Iraq that is currently decimating the population.

Sexism and Heterosexism as a Motive for U.S. Foreign Policy

Finally, I would like to turn to sexism and heterosexism. Sexism and heterosexism define appropriate role behavior for individuals. Women are devalued as are the traits that are typically identified with females such as nurturing and compassion. Men who do not adequately adhere to their approved version of masculinity are considered pariahs. If they are heterosexual but insufficiently masculine, they are treated as women, which is to say they are deprecated and excluded from power, and it's even worse if they're gay because then they're subject to job discrimination, arrest, assault, as well as ridicule.

These attitudes are widespread in American society, not just at the leadership level, but they're worse at the leadership level because the political system essentially selects for those with overdeveloped egos and underdeveloped compassion. That's how you get to be a leader. As Henry Kissinger put it, in contemporary America, power increasingly gravitates to those with an almost obsessive desire to win it. And so some people ask why it is that John Kennedy was having all these trysts in the White House with ten women at one time in his bath tub, you know, and why couldn't Bill Clinton just control himself for four years. The problem is you don't get to be in that position of power unless you've got a certain kind of character. So it's not a coincidence.

Masculinity and Toughness

At the turn of the century, Henry Stimson -- a Secretary of War under Taft and Franklin Roosevelt and a Secretary of State under Hoover - wrote that war would be a wonderfully good thing for this country, because this is the way you get to express your manhood. "Be a man -- that is the first and last rule of the greatest success in life," said Albert Beverage, the imperialist I quoted before. If the United States shunned colonies and was unwarlike, said Teddy Roosevelt, it would "go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities." The United States should enter World War I, said Teddy Roosevelt, because that way we could avoid "a flabby cosmopolitanism," a "flabby pacifism" which would be "not only silly but degrading" and represent "national emasculation."

Richard Barnett was a member of the Kennedy administration who later left and wrote about it, and he talks about how many members of that administration talked about the "hairy chest syndrome": "The man who was ready to recommend using violence against foreigners did not damage his reputation for prudence, soundness, or imagination, but the man who recommends putting an issue to the UN, seeking negotiations, or, horror of horrors, 'doing nothing' quickly becomes known as 'soft.'" For Robert Kennedy, one of the first things he wanted to know about anybody who was suggested for participation in the administration was whether he was tough enough. Being tough, Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent a cable to his ambassadors and said, stop using the word “feel” in your dispatches. Women feel, men do not feel. They act.

Robert MacNamara, the Secretary of Defense, came to Cambridge in 1965, and there were a bunch of anti-war demonstrators who greeted him there. I was in the crowd, and MacNamara got on top of a car and yelled at us and said, I was tougher than you in World War II and I'm tougher than you now. He thought that what we were criticizing him for was that he wasn't macho enough rather than that he was being inhumane.

More Toughness

Lyndon Johnson warned that “without superior air power, America is a bound and throttled giant, impotent and easy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife.” After Johnson got all the Kennedy advisors, he was afraid that they might think him less of a man if he didn't carry through on the Vietnam War. When he was weighing advice on the Vietnam War, he decided it was the "boys" who were most dovish and skeptical and the "men" who were sure and confident and hawkish. When he heard that one member of his administration was becoming a dove, Johnson said, "hell, he has to squat to piss." Doubt itself, Johnson thought, was a feminine quality, and when Lady Byrd expressed her doubts on some other issue, he said of course you're doubtful; that's like a woman. Women are always uncertain; men are certain. When Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam, he told a reporter, "I didn't just screw Ho Chi Minh, I cut off his pecker."

In the Nixon/Kissinger administration, you had the same kind of dynamics. As Kissinger said, no one could prosper around Nixon without affecting an air of toughness. Nixon hated most to be shown up in a group as being less tough than his advisors. Nixon was quoted as saying that he chose Spiro Agnew as his Vice President because he was a tough guy who had a strong looking chin, and when Charles Goodell, a senator, switched from being a hawk to being a dove on the Vietnam War, Agnew likened him to transsexual Christine Jorgensen. The U.S. objective, said Kissinger, was to purge our foreign policy of all sentimentality. For Kissinger, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and in his words, women are no more than a pass-time, a hobby. In crisis, boldness is the safest course, said Kissinger. During the first Nixon administration, when Kissinger was National Security Advisor he didn't get along with the Secretary of State. So what he did - because he thought this Secretary of State wasn't bold enough - was to spread stories that the Secretary of State was gay and had made it with Nixon.

Now this kind of attitude is not just at the top. It also pervades American society, and it pervades especially the military. Tailhook and other sexual harassment scandals in the military are just the tip of the iceberg, just as My Lai and those kinds of atrocities were the tip of the iceberg in Vietnam. U.S. soldiers are nourished on machismo. The 77th tactical fighter squadron had a song book including lyrics like "I Fucked a Dead Whore By the Side of the Road." In the movie Top Gun, one pilot speaks of the enemy to another and says, "They must be near; I've got a hard-on."

If you look at anthropological data, you'll find that one predictor of whether a society is warlike or not is whether the males have a tendency towards being ambitious and competitive. In psychology, a recent experiment using male college students found that subjects who endorse the use of nuclear weapons were significantly more likely to report being sexually aroused by forcing a female to do something she didn't want to do.

Conclusion

 So, as you can guess, of the five alleged motives for U.S. foreign policy that I've talked about, the first two, morality and democracy count for squat, while the other three - capitalism, racism, and sexism/ heterosexism - these are what drive U.S. foreign policy. A hundred years ago, there were people who called themselves imperialists, but there were also those who called themselves anti-imperialists. Many of those anti-imperialists as I've mentioned had very suspect motives. They were themselves racists and so on, but there were some in the anti-imperialist movement, particularly those based in New England, who came out of the abolitionist tradition who were anti-racist, anti-colonialist, and anti-imperialist - all the versions of imperialism, whether colonialism or neo-colonialism.

So there have been two themes in American history. There has been the theme of imperialism based on those motives of capitalism, racism, and sexism/heterosexism; but there has also been another tendency -- a weaker tendency, but one that's always been there -- and that's the theme of anti-imperialism, and our job is to keep that theme of anti-imperialism alive and strong.

Part II: Some Defining Incidents in U.S. Foreign Policy

What I'd like to do is to provide a quick survey of the history of U.S. foreign policy, looking at particular incidents that I think are illustrative of important themes that help us understand what U.S. foreign policy has been all about. The topics I want to cover are colonialism, the Good War, the Bad War, and Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, Indonesia, the Middle East, and the end of the Cold War. So that's a big agenda, and so obviously I'm going to give rather short shrift to many of these topics, but that's the time we've got. Here are the main sections...

Colonialism and Neocolonialism

Let me start with colonialism. In 1945 the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services - the United States agency that was the forerunner of the CIA - had an agent in Vietnam and this agent reported back to Washington that all the peasants wished that France would treat Vietnam like the United States had treated the Philippines because the United States had promised and did give the Philippines independence on July 4, 1946. The truth is that the United States had a reputation in much of the third world as an anti-colonial power, and so I'd like to talk about that a little bit.

The United States came to overseas colonialism late in the game. By 1898 Africa had already been carved up. Big chunks of Asia had already been carved up, and the United States then embarked on its colonial enterprise taking the Philippines and Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii. These were the territories that the U.S. formally colonized. Compared to a country like Britain which took all of India and big chunks of Africa and Asia, this was small pickings, and then in fact, the United States gave independence to its biggest colony, the Philippines, in 1946. So this is the basis for the claim that the U.S. has been anti-colonial, but it's important to look at what exactly happened at the turn of the century. At that time the U.S. fought a very bitter war in the Philippines leading to the deaths of perhaps as many as a quarter of a million Filipinos. The human toll among Filipinos was of no consequence to U.S. Policymakers, and the war was costly to the United States as well, in terms of lives and treasure and domestic dissent. So this was an approach that U.S. officials were not eager to repeat. They wanted instead an approach that offered the benefits of colonialism without its costs. This alternative approach -- neocolonialism -- the United States tried out in Cuba, forced to do so because of congressional legislation.

The Cuban Model

The U.S. gave Cuba independence, but it made the Cubans adopt a constitution that had various provisions - these are known as the Platt Amendment because the terms were incorporated in a piece of congressional legislation first. The Platt Amendment said that the Cubans had to agree that the United States could intervene in Cuba whenever it wanted, that the United States would get a military base on Cuban soil, that the Cuban government couldn't borrow monies without the permission of the U.S. government, and that the U.S. government has to approve the health standards in Havana. These kinds of clauses within the Cuban constitution made Cuban independence phony. Nevertheless, Cuba was formally independent, and this kind of arrangement where you have formal independence but in fact foreign domination is what we call neo-colonialism. It differs from old fashioned colonialism because there is no foreign flag flying over the territory.

The United States began in 1898 with its colonial venture in the Philippines, and some Americans approved that and wanted to pursue that, but others said -- and this was repeated year after year in the Democratic party platform -- that the U.S. should give the Philippines its independence so it could be like Cuba. And this was very much the debate that took place in the United States over the Philippines: That is, should the U.S. pursue standard colonialism or should it pursue neo-colonialism?

At no point was the real issue whether there should be genuine independence, genuine sovereignty, or genuine self-determination for Filipinos. Now the United States was not the only country to take this approach. Even a country like Britain did it in those cases where standard colonialism wasn't appropriate. So for example, after World War I, Britain gave independence to Iraq, but Iraq had to sign a treaty that left Britain as the dominant power with a military base controlling the Iraqi military and so on and so forth, and of course controlling the oil resources in the country. And Britain had a neo-colonial relationship with Egypt as well.

So in the world, there's been a lot of colonialism, and there's been neo-colonialism, depending on which circumstances seemed best for the dominant power. For the United States the conclusion after the experience of the Philippine American War was that colonialism generates a whole lot of hostility while neo-colonialism promised a much smoother operation that still maintained U.S. interests. And so, sure enough, on July 4, 1946, the U.S. flag was pulled down in Manila, and the Philippine flag went up, and the Philippines was independent. But the independence was phony. This can be seen by looking at the military and economic terms of independence

Independence with Strings

A military bases agreement between the United States and the Philippines provided that the United States would get huge military bases for 99 years rent free. These bases were so large that one year it was discovered that there were 10,000 Filipinos illegally growing sugar crops on the base unbeknownst to base officials. A U.S. official would fly to one of the bases and then take another plane to another part of the same base -- it was that big. This is the kind of base the U.S. had, and the U.S. had the absolute right to do what it wanted with this base in an independent Philippines, supporting, for example, military operations in Vietnam or the Persian Gulf.

The Philippine constitution had specified that after independence all investments in natural resources and in public utilities had to be at least 60% Philippine owned. The United States said to the Philippines upon independence that if they wanted the U.S. to fully pay war damage claims for the tremendous damage in the country, they would have to amend their constitution to give Americans equal investment rights with Filipinos (which is to say, privileged investment rights compared to anyone else in the world). The Philippines was not in a strong bargaining position. As a result of the World War II Japanese occupation and subsequent American reconquest there had been massive destruction, with Manila being the second most damaged capital city in the world after Warsaw. Washington had promised during the war that it would pay for all war damage in its Philippine colony. But now the U.S. would withhold full payment of these funds unless the Philippines gave Americans investment "parity" with Filipinos, and Filipinos had no choice but to accept the U.S. demand.

Trade relations were set up so that U.S. products had free access to the Philippines and that Philippine products that competed with U.S. products were kept out of the U.S. market.

The terms of Philippine independence led some U.S. observers to remark that the U.S. is in a stronger position in the Philippines today - this was in 1946 - than during the colonial period. And this has been the neo-colonial model, one that the United States generally followed (with the exception of the Philippines from 1899-1946, and Puerto Rico and Guam to this day). And this neo-colonial model was pursued to the hilt by the United States in Latin America, in Southeast Asia, and in parts of the Middle East and Africa. So yes, the U.S. was different from Britain and France and Belgium. It didn't have a substantial overseas colonial empire, but that was not because the U.S. was any more devoted to the independence or self-determination or sovereignty of subject third world people.

The Good War

Okay, let me move on to the Good War, World War II. This is a war that has very good press in the United States. We fought the Good War. We did what we should have done there. The war in Europe is very complicated, but what I'd like to do is talk a little bit about the war in the Pacific.     

When the Depression hit, the response of all the colonial powers was to increase the tariffs around their colonies in order to keep out foreign competition and help their own domestic industries.

So Britain put a tariff wall around India so only their trade with India could be at the low prices, and everybody else who wanted to trade with India would have to pay higher prices. The U.S. put a high tariff wall around the Philippines. France did the same thing and so on, and therefore those countries with small colonial empires but which depended a lot on trade were especially hard hit, and one of these countries was Japan.

China

Japan more than most countries depended heavily on trade, and so Japan was eager to acquire a colonial empire of its own so it too could help its domestic industries by squeezing third world people to enrich itself. The Japanese went into Manchuria, in northern China, in the early 1930s. And that was one source of tension between the United States and Japan because the United States attitude towards China was an attitude established at the turn of the century when the United States announced the Open Door Policy, a policy which said that none of the great powers should colonize China. Britain was beginning to think about it, and Japan was beginning and Germany and Russia were thinking about it, and the United States announced that none of the powers should colonize China. China should be left independent. Translation: China should be open to the exploitation of all the great powers, not to just one or two of them. The proof that this is what the Open Door meant is that the United States and the other great powers got all kinds of special privileges in China, and these would be maintained until the middle of World War II.

Let's go back to the middle of the 19th century. The British were selling opium in China. Most Chinese officials are very corrupt, but in one port the Chinese official tried to interfere with the British sale of opium, and so naturally the British went to war against China. It was simply unacceptable that a Chinese official would try to interfere with British profits, so Britain went to war against China -- this is known as either the first Anglo-Chinese War or the First Opium War -- and when the smoke cleared, Britain got a bunch of privileges, and then a couple of years later, they did the same thing again in and there was a second round of this war, and as a result of this, Britain got Hong Kong; Britain got the right to sell what they wanted to sell in China; Britain got the right to have its merchants and traders go into any part of China they wanted without having to abide by Chinese laws, and they got the right that Britons, should they commit crimes, would not be tried by Chinese courts but rather would be tried by a Western court in Shanghai. And as soon as the British got these privileges, all the other Great Powers demanded the same privileges. The Chinese government thought -- and maybe it was right -- that it was better to give the rights to everyone because if just one country has these rights, they might try to colonize China; better to spread it out and let them keep each other in check.

So in Shanghai, there was actually an international settlement set up ruled by a western consortium, and if you were a westerner who committed a crime in China, you would be tried before this court. As part of these privileges, the United States and other countries had their gun boats sailing up and down Chinese rivers. This is not what you usually do in an independent country. If you'll notice there are no German military boats sailing up and down the Mississippi River. That's because we're an independent country, but China was essentially a neocolony of the Great Powers.

Well, when we get to the 1930s and Japan starts moving first into Manchuria and then after 1936 into China proper, Japan is coming into conflict with U.S. business interests and U.S. investment rights, the rights that we extorted from China. And sure enough, as the Japanese do their terror-bombing of the Chinese population, they occasionally hit some American property or some American gun boat, and this gets the United States very upset, but the key thing here is that the United States wasn't concerned about Chinese sovereignty. What the United States was concerned about was U.S. rights to exploit China on an equal basis. After 1936 Japan is in a full-scale war with China, and their rhetoric in this war is the same kind of rhetoric the U.S. used in Vietnam. That is we're here fighting communism because there are communists in China. We're here fighting communism. We're not doing this for any selfish reasons. We just want to get rid of these evil communists from Chinese soil.

A lot of trade still went on with China and came into China through the French colony of Vietnam and other places, and so eventually the Japanese moved into Vietnam in order to cut off trade with China that way, and the United States protested again that this was interfering with U.S. trade. The Japanese terror-bombed the Chinese population, and U.S. officials with great indignation explained that it is immoral and unacceptable to attack civilians during the course of a war, and bombing them from the air is something that offends the moral core of humanity.

Japan and the United Sates had negotiations. The United States - most of the negotiations were over U.S. business interests in China. Japan said to the United States, okay look, you've got a Monroe Doctrine for Latin America. You essentially said: rest of the world, keep out of Latin America. So we would like to have our Asian Monroe Doctrine in the same way. But the United States said, no, you can't do that. We, the United States, are entitled to a Monroe Doctrine in Latin America, but you're not entitled to one in Asia. And so what happened was that the United States started increasing its sanctions on Japan. They cut off oil trade with Japan.

U.S. allies, Britain and the Netherlands, also cut off oil trade with Japan. The Netherlands at that time was a government in exile living in London, but they still controlled what is today Indonesia, which was then called the Dutch East Indies, and they were a major oil producer, a major source of Japanese oil, and so the United States cut off Japanese oil, and now the question confronting Japanese policymakers was what do you do? Do you pack it all in, call all your troops home from Japan, or do you seize the oil that you need?

The Gentlemen's Agreement

Now let me just bring in one other theme here: that of racism. Early in the 20th century, Japanese immigrants came to the United States which led to various racial tensions on the West Coast, and the United States government wanted to exclude these Japanese immigrants and the United States started negotiations with Japan, and we signed something called the Gentlemen's Agreement. (In the world of diplomacy, whenever two thugs get together and make an agreement, they call it a Gentlemen's Agreement.) And this agreement stated said that the United States would allow Japanese immigrants into the United States if in turn Japan would make sure that the only people who applied for immigration were educated people.

So that was the compromise, and then in 1924 the U.S. unilaterally abrogated the Gentlemen's Agreement and said we've got a new immigration law. We consider Japanese and Chinese inferior. You're entitled to an immigration quota of fifty compared to 25,000 for Britain, and this greatly offended Japanese sentiment, and helped push things to war in 1941.

War

In late 1941, the Japanese decide they are going to seize the oil of the Dutch East Indies by force. The question, then, is can they seize that oil without bringing the United States into war. Well, if you look at a map, there's Japan, then the Philippines, then Indonesia. So if the Japanese were to attack Indonesia and there's a big U.S. military base in the Philippines in between, that's a pretty precarious position. So the Japanese decide we had better knock out the U.S. base in the Philippines. We'll knock out the U.S. base in Hawaii, and we'll start our conquest of the rich resources of South East Asia. This was as imperialist adventure on the part of the Japanese, but it's interesting to note that most of this imperialist adventure is directed not independent countries but at colonies. And when Japanese troops arrived in Indonesia, they said to the Indonesians "Asia for the Asians." Let's get rid of those European masters! And most Indonesians thought that was a pretty good idea, and so in most of these countries in Asia where the Japanese arrived, they found lots of politicians and others ready to support them. Some for all kinds of self-interested reasons, and some because they thought this was a way to get rid of the European yolk - the European and American yolk because there were collaborators with the Japanese in the U.S. colony of the Philippines too.

Well, the United States went to war and in fighting this war against Japan, the United States resorted to terror-bombing that made Japanese bombing in China look like kid's play. Even before the atom bombs, the U.S. wiped out most of the major cities of Japan with fire bombing -- essentially turning the whole cities into rubble, and the targets were generally the working class homes, because those burnt better than upper class homes. To burn a factory is a little difficult. Factories are often made out of more permanent material, but if you kill all the workers, you don't have to worry about the factories, and that was essentially U.S. strategy.

Victory in Asia

When the war came to an end, Japan was defeated, but it wasn't a victory for the independence of the people of Asia. In Indonesia, in Vietnam, and in China - in each of these cases, the United States was determined to either turn the territory back over to its colonial master or in the case of China, turn it over to a pro-American government rather than the Chinese communist movement which was contesting for power there. In Vietnam, what happened was this. British troops arrive with the job of disarming the Japanese in Vietnam. And what the British do is use the Japanese soldiers to help them put down those Vietnamese who are troublesome. They let the French out of prison, and then essentially turn the territory back over to the French. In Indonesia, the British troops and Dutch troops use the Japanese troops help to crush Indonesian independence movements. In China, the United States use its air force to fly Chiang Kai-shek's troops to various spots around the country to help defeat the communists in their civil war. So in each one of these cases, the defeat of Japan didn't mean the end of colonialism. It didn't mean the end of foreign domination. It meant that Japan wouldn't be the dominant force, but that Japan would now be replaced by the new super power in Asia, and that was the United States.

Now in each one of the places, things went in different directions. In the case of Vietnam, the French eventually couldn't hold on and had to get out, and the United States then continued that war for two more decades.

In the case of Indonesia, the United States noted that the Indonesia independence movement crushed a communist rebellion in Indonesia, and the United States said, aha, now this is a good kind of independence movement. They kill communists! And so the United States told the Dutch, okay, you've got to give them independence. You can take all their money from them and so on and so forth, but you need to give them independence, and the U.S. supported Indonesia's independence, though subsidizing the Dutch in various ways. (As we shall see</a>, the U.S. would soon try to subvert the independent Indonesian government, leading in 1965 to one of the greatest mass murders of the century, with U.S. complicity.)

In Vietnam, the U.S. didn't support Vietnamese independence because there the left was in control of the independence movement, and in China despite the U.S. best efforts, the forces of Chiang Kai-shek disintegrated, and instead the communists came to power. So the U.S. didn't get what it wanted, but there were large numbers of corpses throughout Asia as a result of the U.S. victory in the Pacific War, corpses that were created after 1945.

Korea too - Korea had been a Japanese colony. The United States went in and worked with the Japanese army in Korea to maintain a pro-American government in the south. In the north, the Soviet Union tried to create a regime in its own image. It didn't use the Japanese though because it had a different social base than the Americans did, but that was to lead in a few years to the Korean War which the United States got involved in a big way, and another several million corpses were the result there.

Vietnam and Imperialism

World War II was the Good War, Vietnam is the Bad War, and there are very few Americans today who will say the Vietnam War was not a mistake. Even the gung-ho military types will agree that something went wrong. There was a mistake there, but it seems to me it's important to look at Vietnam and to see the ways in which it wasn't a mistake, that in fact Vietnam was a quite logical outgrowth of U.S. foreign policy.

Now some people say how could the U.S.'s war in Vietnam have been an imperial venture, much less an imperialist venture. Yes, it could have been stupid or whatever, a blunder, but how could it have been imperialist? And the argument against imperialism in Vietnam goes as follows: Look, we spent more in Vietnam than any possible estimates of the total value of any investments then or in the future in Vietnam. So how could that have been the motivation? But there is a problem with this argument that tries to refute the role of imperialism in explaining the Vietnam war.

Let me give you an example. There's a bank down the street. Let's say the bank is robbed and the robbers take $5,000. The police will chase these robbers. They will chase them across state borders. They will spend great amounts of money to catch them, put them on trial, and put them in prison. And if you add up that total cost - of the police work, the courts, and the prison -- it's far more than $5,000, and so you might say, well what's the logic of that? Well, the logic of it is -- as any public official will readily tell you -- that if you don't stop this bank robber - if you let this bank robber get away with it - if you let bank robbers know they can get away with this kind of thing, there will be bank robberies all over the place. And so the purpose of catching and punishing this bank robber, whatever the cost, is not just to punish this one but to deter others, and that's the way one needs to look at U.S. foreign policy.

The U.S. position was that the entire world except for China and the Soviet Union was part of the American capitalist system. Against China and the Soviet Union Washington would try various subversive methods, but it wasn't going to go to an all-out war. The rest of the world, however, was going to be subordinated to the United States, and so Washington had to deliver a message to third world revolutionaries everywhere: If you try to break out, we will smash you. Therefore, the benefits that U.S. policy makers expected to get from defeating the Vietnamese revolution was not that this one piece of territory will now be added to the U.S. empire, but rather that everyone would understand that you don't leave the U.S. empire when the U.S. doesn't want you to. U.S. officials talked about the domino theory and said, you know if Vietnam falls, then Laos will fall, then Cambodia will fall, then Thailand will fall like a stack of dominos. That's why we're in Vietnam, said Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson. Now that was obviously a foolish theory, but there's a sensible version of this theory which is that if revolutionists succeed in Vietnam, revolutionaries in other countries will say, hey, we could have better lives for our people too. We don't have to accept that kind of domination! Therefore, it was crucial to the United States to make sure that the Vietnamese revolution did not succeed.

Winners and Losers

 Now usually when people talk about Vietnam, they talk about this as the war that the United States lost and that the Vietnamese won. Noam Chomsky has an interesting approach to this, however. He says no, the U.S. won the Vietnam War. It's a little quirky of an interpretation, but here's his point. He says, the U.S. preferred solution in Vietnam would have been an outright military victory. The U.S.'s second choice solution in Vietnam was to so devastate that country so that no sensible revolutionary anywhere in the third world would want to do it again - would want to undertake a revolution. You know, if I were sitting in some jungle in a random third world country and I looked at Vietnam, I would say well, let's see what happened. The Vietnamese people fought for decades. They suffered about four million deaths, and what do they have today to show for it: a country that's at the same standard of living it was at perhaps in 1950, and a country with almost nothing remaining of the egalitarian impulses of that earlier period. That hardly seems like a cause for which you would want to give your life. And from the U.S. point of view, that's precisely the idea -- to make such sacrifices seem pointless. And that's why when the war was over in 1975, the U.S. was determined that it was not going to trade with Vietnam, and it was not going to let anyone else trade with Vietnam.

    One of the consequences of the war was that the water buffalo that are so crucial to the Vietnamese economy were devastated in the course of the war. India offered to provide Vietnam as aid some water buffalo, and the United States said to India, if you provide that aid to Vietnam, we cut off all foreign aid from you. And the United States made sure that international bodies provided no aid to Vietnam. What's the purpose of this? The purpose was to make sure that Vietnam would be a hell-hole again so that any potential revolutionaries anywhere in the world would look at this and say, this is not something I'm going to give my life for.

The Cold War

At the end of World War II the Cold War came into full swing. Of course you can trace the Cold War back to 1917, and one of the interesting things is that U.S. officials were talking about communist-Bolshevik aggression even in the 1920s when there wasn't a Soviet soldier capable of leaving Soviet territory. So, for example, U.S. officials talked about a Soviet Bolshevik plot in Mexico. There was nothing of the sort. There were Mexicans who were challenging the status quo, and the U.S. was sending troops into Mexico to crush them, but it doesn't play as well to say to the American people, we're going to intervene in Mexico against Mexican self-determination. It's always a little nicer to be able to say we're intervening against a Bolshevik plot, and to a large extent, much of what passed for the Cold War was a U.S. effort to try to portray the U.S. policy of crushing third world independence movements and describing them as part of a Soviet plot, and so if you look at specific cases, you'll find that the U.S. often encouraged countries to become dependent on the Soviet Union.

Take in recent years the example of Nicaragua. Throughout the 1980s, the United States launched a war against Nicaragua, the Contra War. The U.S. pressured all of its allies not to provide any weapons to the Nicaraguan government. So what does Nicaragua do, they go to the one place - the one country that will still provide them with weapons with which they can defend themselves against this U.S. orchestrated war, and that's the Soviet Union. And then the U.S. says, ah-ha, you see, that's why we need to overthrow the government of Nicaragua because they're Soviet puppets! And so many times during the 80s, the U.S. government would announce that there were Soviet MIGs being sent to Nicaragua. Well, it would have been good if there were Soviet MIGs being sent to Nicaragua, but generally there weren't, and the reason was that the United States simply concocted many of these stories as a way to justify its intervention.

In Guatemala when the U.S. intervened, it didn't say we're intervening because we want to protect the United Fruit, though that in fact was what was going on. What they did say was that we're intervening because the Guatemalan government has gotten arms from the Soviet Union. Now there was an arms shipment from the Soviet Union, but the shipment followed rather than preceded U.S. planning to overthrow the government, and the Guatemalan government quite naturally wanted to protect itself.

In 1960, U.S. policy makers are sitting around, and the CIA suggests assassinating Castro, his brother Raul, and Che Guevara and one of the policy makers says, well, no that wouldn't be a good idea because the only well organized group in Cuba who would benefit from the lack of those leaders would be the Cuban communist party, which might then take control. To which CIA director Allen Dulles replied, well that wouldn't be so bad. That would give us a better justification for intervention in Cuba.

In short, communism was not the reason for the U.S. intervention, but the convenient rationale. This has been the case in Cuba and has pretty much been the pattern throughout. This is not to say, for example, that Ho Chi Minh was not a communist, but the United States had lots of evidence that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist before he was a pawn of the Soviet Union, and therefore good reason to think he might behave very much as Tito was behaving in Yugoslavia. Tito had broken with Stalin in 1948; he was a communist, a communist dictator - not my hero -- but he was clearly opposed to Stalin, and he was clearly following an independent foreign policy, and there's no reason to think that Ho Chi Minh committed as he was to Vietnamese nationalism and independence wouldn't have followed a similar course, but the U.S. was unwilling to consider that. By definition, communism was what mattered because that was the way to justify U.S. interventionism.

The Cuban Missile Crisis- 1

In the Cold War, there is one incident that is referred to as Kennedy's finest hour, and this is the Cuban missile crisis. This is an incident in which we came closer than we ever had before and probably than we ever have since to nuclear war, and the risks of nuclear war during this crisis were substantial. U.S. officials throughout the crisis slept in bomb shelters. The rest of us were - if you were around then - out in the open subject to incineration but U.S. officials were in bomb shelters because they thought this was serious. The CIA told Kennedy they estimated there's a one-third to one-half chance of all out nuclear war, and Kennedy went ahead anyway.

   Let me just review quickly what the facts of this situation were. The United States and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons, and the United States and the Soviet Union had long range missiles that could deliver these nuclear weapons from one country to the other. In the 1960 presidential election campaign between Nixon and Kennedy, the hawk in that campaign - the more militaristic candidate - was John Kennedy, the Democrat, and what Kennedy said is there is a missile gap under these do-nothing Republicans. We haven't built enough missiles, and so the Soviet Union has got more missiles than us. Kennedy gets elected and becomes President.

    The U.S. has spy satellites. The spy satellites show that there is a missile gap indeed, and it's about 100 to one in the U.S. favor, and U.S. officials decide we're going to tell the Soviet Union that we know that gap is in our favor. You see Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, was a bit of a cheapskate. He thought that although the Soviet Union knew how to build these missiles, they cost a lot of money. So what I'll do is I'll talk a big game and make a lot of threats and pretend I've got a lot of missiles, but I won't build them. And on May Day, he would have military parades in Red Square, and he would have the Soviet Air Force fly over Red Square, and they would go around behind some clouds and come back and fly over again, and so you would see more and more waves of planes and you would say, wow, look at that! It's all very impressive, but Khrushchev in fact didn't build any significant number of ICBMs. So the U.S. said to Khrushchev essentially, we know you're bluffing. So what that means is don't think you're going to push us around. We're going to push you around now because we're the ones who've got the advantage. In addition to its ICBMs, the intercontinental range ballistic missiles, the U.S. also had shorter range missiles - nuclear missiles, in Turkey right on the Soviet border.

The Cuban Missile Crisis-2

The Soviet Union decides to respond to this nuclear imbalance by putting Soviet missiles in Cuba 90 miles from the United States, and they did so secretly, but U.S. spy planes saw them, saw the missile sites being constructed, and Kennedy had to decide how to respond to this, and there were a number of options. One option is do nothing. After all, the Soviet Union can deploy missiles in the Soviet Union. (Whether you're hit by a missile from Cuba or from Russia doesn't matter much, admitted Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.) The U.S. too has missiles. Neither side is planning to launch a sneak attack on the other, and so what's the big deal. A second option is to use this opportunity to do some disarming, and say to the Soviet Union, hey, we'll trade our missiles in Turkey for your missiles in Cuba, and while we're at it, let's get rid of some more missiles too - some intercontinental range missiles.

   Those two approaches were both ruled out by the Kennedy administration as unacceptable. Instead the big debate within the administration was between three other options: (1) invade Cuba, (2) launch air strikes to take out the Soviet missile sites, and (3) put a blockade around Cuba because not all of the missiles were in Cuba yet. The Air Force thought the air strike was the best strategy, and Kennedy said to them, well, what happens when we knock out those missile sites, are we going to kill any Russians? Yes, the Air Force replied, we'll probably kill a few thousand Russians. Well, what happens if the Soviets respond by attacking - I mean, we are militarily strong in the Western hemisphere, and what if the Soviet Union attacks West Berlin? Well, that will start a nuclear war, remarked the Air Force.

   Well, Kennedy was not that rash and he said I'll go with the blockade option, but of course the problem with the blockade option is there is still enough equipment in Cuba that they can build what they've got there, and how is the blockade going to stop that, and he doesn't have an answer to this yet. We'll see what we do next. Kennedy goes on television and says I am putting a blockade around Cuba. That means any Soviet ship heading to Cuba will be stopped and searched, and if it's got military equipment, we will not let it in.

   Now this is an act of war. Countries are allowed to trade with whom they want. The United States didn't ask Soviet permission before sending its missiles to Turkey. Countries send weapons as their sovereign right to other countries.

   Anyway, Kennedy announces this blockade. Khrushchev says I am not backing down. I am sending our ships through and they will not stop for you. The U.S. navy says we will sink you if you try to get through. The Soviet Union says we've got our submarines in the areas and we'll sink you back, and the U.S. builds up its force, and a Soviet ship gets closer and closer to the U.S. blockade line and this is a very scary 24 hours.

   Ultimately Khrushchev turns his ships around and Dean Rusk, the U.S. Secretary of State says it was a nuclear "game of chicken." "We were eyeball to eyeball, and they blinked first." This is the way our leaders treat the survival of the human race -- as a game of chicken. Khrushchev says to Kennedy I will trade the missiles in Cuba for the missiles in Turkey. Kennedy says that is unacceptable. You must grovel. You must surrender. Now there are some analysts who now say that privately Kennedy had decided that before he started a nuclear war he would have been willing to trade the missiles, but what's interesting is that for many, many years, this wasn't known, and all the members of the Kennedy administration and all the writers writing about the Cuban missile crisis who said this was Kennedy's greatest hour think that one of the great things about it is that he was unwilling to compromise - that he was willing to risk nuclear war in order to achieve the principle that the U.S. is allowed to do what it wants, put missiles in Turkey, and the Soviet Union is not allowed to do so.

    Moreover, what is important to know about this is that those U.S. missiles in Turkey were obsolete. The U.S. had already decided to remove the missiles in Turkey, not because the Soviet Union wanted them out but for other reasons. The United States had just recently developed submarine-launched missiles, and it thought better to put submarines in the Mediterranean that could hit the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. There was no need to put land-based missiles in Turkey. Those missiles in Turkey were precarious. They're above ground and a terrorist driving by could shoot a bullet through one of them. So they were the kinds of things you wanted to remove. Thus, the U.S. was willing to risk nuclear war rather than trade off obsolete missiles for Soviet missiles. This was what has become known as the greatest moment - the greatest victory of the Cold War.

Indonesia

There was another great victory in the Cold War, and that took place in 1965 in Indonesia. I mentioned <a href="#indo1">before</a> that the Indonesian government seemed reliably anti-communist when they got their independence in 1948, but over the next decade or so, the Indonesian ruler, Sukarno, became increasingly nationalistic, and the United States grew increasingly hostile. The United States tried various covert operations to overthrow Sukarno.

In 1958 there was a serious effort to support a successionist movement on some of the Indonesian islands, and the CIA was flying bombing raids from the Philippines. These operations all failed, but in 1965 the Indonesian military launched a coup in which they proceeded to kill somewhere between half a million and a million Indonesians, killing members of the largest communist party in the world outside of a communist country as well as lots of peasant activists and workers. The United States cheered these events, supplied military aid to the Indonesian military during the process. Time Magazine said this is a gleam of light in Asia that all these people were killed, and we've now discovered that there was in fact an additional U.S. role here which is that U.S. officials in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta were preparing lists of names of communists to be killed and giving them to the Indonesian military and checking off the names of those who were butchered - heads cut off, check, and here's your next list, and so on. This murderous government, headed by General Suharto has just been forced to step down in 1998 by popular pressure, but the U.S. backed his regime from 1965 until the bitter end. That story though of course it still to be played out.

Mopping Up: The Mideast and the End of the Cold War

There's a whole lot to say about the Middle East, and somehow I'm going to confine my remarks to just a brief point. In 1967 Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip along with pieces of Syria and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. These territories, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, contained large numbers of Palestinians. The U.S. and Israeli attitude was no compromise was necessary because Israel was the dominant military power in the region and therefore the U.S. could just sit back and leave the status quo. Anwar Sadat, the leader of Egypt, says to the United States we are willing to negotiate with Israel. We will even throw out our Soviet military advisors if you will help bring Israel to the negotiating table. The United States was not interested. Sadat eventually went to war, and the U.S. backed Israel in that war. Eventually Israel and Egypt did reach a settlement on the Sinai but that allowed Israel to in fact hold onto the occupied Palestinian territory without having to face Egypt any longer.

So while on the one hand that made the prospect of war on the Egyptian/Israeli border less likely, on the other hand it also meant that the prospects for Palestinians were grimmer than ever. In the late 80s the Palestinians took matters into their own hands and launched their Intifada, their unarmed uprising against the Israelis which the Israelis responded to with brutal repression. In 1992, the Oslo Agreements went into effect which was a plan to try to placate Palestinian nationalism without offering real Palestinian independence. Right now the United States continues to try to bargain and negotiate to press Israel to give up 13% instead of 9% of this territory, but the fundamental fact about what's going on in the Middle East is that neither Israel - neither party in Israel nor the United States support the fundamental notion that Palestinians just like Israeli Jews are entitled to self-determination, and it's that failure to treat Palestinians as people entitled to the same rights as everyone else - that is going to be the smoldering cause of blowups for a long time to come.

Some U.S. politicians claim the United States is pressing Israel too hard. Others say, no, no, Clinton, you should press Israel this hard, but whether they press them for 13% or 9%, that's a far cry from real self-determination and therefore none of this has any prospect of ending the crisis in the Middle East until that notion of self-determination is recognized.

The End of the Cold War

Okay, my final two minutes are on the end of the Cold War. Reagan and Bush say they won the Cold War, and it was their tough policies - their refusal to placate the Soviet Union or to let the Soviet Union win cheap victories that won the Cold War. What really ended the Cold War was the rise of Michael Gorbachev to the leadership of the Soviet Union. He was the one leader in this Cold War contest who realized that you need to break out of these patterns of actions and reactions by one side taking unilateral steps and he took unilateral steps. He broke negotiating log jabs. He said I'm reducing my forces. I'm not waiting for he United States to reduce their forces. I'm reducing my forces, and what's remarkable is that as the Soviet Union kept on reducing its forces, the Bush administration said we cannot let our guard down. This is a plot. In fact, at one point the Soviet navy which had grown from 1945 to the 1980s from a small little navy to one that was beginning to try to do what the U.S. did -- the U.S. has a navy that sails around the whole world; we don't just sail in the Mississippi River -- the Soviet navy was trying to do that, but was so far behind it was pitiful. But under Gorbachev suddenly Soviet ships that had been trying to hang out in Asia or hang out in the Indian Ocean were being called back and were sitting in ports, and so how did the U.S. navy respond to this? They said this is the most dangerous situation of all. Obviously the Soviet Union is planning a sneak attack, and therefore we cannot reduce our military spending. We have to in fact spend more because the situation is getting even more precarious.

Reagan and Bush had nothing to do with Gorbachev coming to power, and Reagan and Bush had nothing to do with Gorbachev's breaking out of the Cold War mold. They in fact didn't make it easy for him. They might have made an easier transition if when he moved to make unilateral reductions, they said we will match that unilateral reduction, but in fact the U.S. generally didn't do so. The Soviet Union then imploded because of its own internal contradictions which is basically that you can't have a modern economy at the same time that you have that kind of, top down dictatorial setup, and Gorbachev tried to do a transition from that, but unleashed forces that he couldn't control. But there's no reason for Reagan or Bush to take any credit for any of the things that occurred in the Cold War.

They did at various points heighten the prospect of real conflict and heighten the prospect of perhaps a military coup against Gorbachev. Keep in mind that things looked the same in both countries. The right wingers -- the militarists in both countries -- if they fear that the other side is getting too much of an edge, they feel their government is getting weak and may be provoked to rash actions. So rather than helping Gorbachev along, Reagan and Bush probably made things more difficult for him.

Conclusion

The United States has behaved differently from other Great Powers in that it - for its own selfish reasons - emphasized neo-colonial domination of the Third World rather than colonial rule. Global domination was a concern even in the "Good War" and certainly in Vietnam, Indonesia, and many other places, where Third World corpses were plentiful. This quest for dominance has put the very survival of the human race at risk, particularly during the Cuban Missile crisis. The Cold War is now over - no thanks to U.S. policy makers, but just as it was right to oppose U.S. imperialism before the Cold War and during the Cold War, so too it is right to oppose it today.

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