systemicdisorder | Is there some sort of altruism in the U.S. setting itself up as the
gendarme of the world? Well, that’s a rhetorical question, obviously,
but such self-deception is widespread, and not just among the
foreign-policy establishment.
One line of critique sometimes heard, especially during this year’s
presidential campaign, is that the U.S. should demand its allies “pay
their fair share.” It’s not only from Right-wing quarters that phrase is
heard, but even from Left populist Bernie Sanders, who insisted during
this month’s Brooklyn debate with Hillary Clinton that other members of
Nato ought to pay more so the Pentagon budget can be cut. Senator
Sanders said this in the context of pointing out the superior social
benefits across Europe as compared to the U.S., but what it really
implies is that militarism is justified.
Setting aside that Senator Sanders’ record on imperialism
is not nearly as distant from Secretary Clinton’s as his supporters
believe, it is a reflection of how deeply imperialism is in the bones of
United Statesians when even the candidate positioning himself as a Left
insurgent doesn’t seriously question the scale of military operations
or their purpose.
So why is U.S. military spending so high? It’s because the repeated
use of force is what is necessary to maintain the capitalist system. As
top dog in the world capitalist system, it’s up the to the U.S. to do
what is necessary to keep itself, and its multi-national corporations,
in the driver’s seat. That has been a successful project. U.S.-based
multi-nationals hold the world’s highest share in 18 of 25 broad industrial sectors, according to an analysis in New Left Review, and often by commanding margins — U.S. multi-nationals hold at least a 40 percent global share in 10 of those sectors.
A partial list of U.S. interventions
from 1890, as compiled by Zoltán Grossman, a professor at Evergreen
State College in Olympia, Washington state, lists more than 130 foreign
military interventions (not including the use of troops to put down
strikes within U.S.). Consistently, these were used to impose U.S.
dictates on smaller countries.
At the beginning of the 20th century, U.S. President William Howard Taft declared that his foreign policy
was “to include active intervention to secure our merchandise and our
capitalists opportunity for profitable investment” abroad. Taft
overthrew the government of Nicaragua to punish it for taking a loan
from a British bank rather than a U.S. bank, and then put Nicaragua’s
customs collections under U.S. control and handed two U.S. banks control of Nicaragua’s national bank and railroad.
Little has changed since, including the overthrows of the governments
of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973), and
more recently the invasion of Iraq and the attempted overthrow of the Venezuelan government.
