“Despite being funded in a fashion beyond compare and spreading its peculiar brand of destruction around the globe, its system of war hasn’t triumphed in a significant conflict since World War II (with the war in Korea remaining, almost three-quarters of a century later, in a painful and festering stalemate).”
This is a liberal nationalist view of a former American military professor and Air Force officer.
All his emphasis on ‘lies’ by the military and the propaganda of war without mentioning what he calls the ‘truth’ is keeps the reader wondering, bewildered perhaps.
Not a single mention of the political economy of war, especially of the nature and functioning of American capital. You just get the impression that a few liars at the top cause wars as if politicians, strategists of empire, ruling classes, advisors, etc think and work outside a socio-political frame work of power structure and power relations domestically and internationally.
There is a mention of ‘honour’ and the huge sums of money spent on wars, but not a single mention of the number of people the American wars killed and the lives destroyed.
And why do the ‘lies’ begin with Vietnam? Were previous American wars dripping of honour and truth?
There is no single mention of the current war between Russia and the American-led alliance. There are no lies in this war. We all know that the Russian invasion is a criminal invasion that is not based on lies. We know that NATO expansion/encroachment is not a lie, either. I wonder how Astore, a military professor, views a war that is based on truth.
Related
Here is another former military officer turned a historian: Andrew Bacevich –mentioned in the article above. Bacevich is far more superior than William Astore.
Peter Gowan reviewed Bacevich’s American Empire. The book, Gowan wrote, is “a tonic to read: crisp, vivid, pungent, with a dry sense of humour and sharp sense of hypocrisies. Bacevich is a conservative, who explains that he believed in the justice of America’s war against Communism, and continues to do so, but once it was over came to the conclusion that us expansionism both preceded and exceeded the logic of the Cold War, and needed to be understood in a longer, more continuous historical durée.
The search for an intellectual perspective that could grasp the dynamics of imperial power led this Army colonel to cross political tracks and find answers in two bodies of work associated, in different contexts, with the American Left—the writings of Charles Beard, in the inter-war years, and William Appleman Williams, from the 1950s to the 1970s. Both these historians had insisted that the United States, contrary to official liberal mythology, was an expansionist power—not drawn to generous actions abroad by lofty internationalist ideals, but driven towards ceaseless diplomatic and military interventions across the world by forces deeply rooted within American society at home. In the 1920s Beard, already famous for his economic interpretations of the Constitution and the Civil War, turned his attention to us foreign policy, and concluded—consistently with the general focus of his work—that ‘as the domestic market was saturated and capital heaped up for investment, the pressure for the expansion of the American commercial empire rose with corresponding speed’.
Fearing the consequences of this dynamic, Beard advocated an alternative route of development, much in the spirit of Hobson in England: the better way forward was to deepen the domestic market by raising the living standards of American workers and investing in social programmes at home.
The great obstacle to such a path lay in the fear of the American business class that such deepening might unleash political forces that would undermine the entrenched privileges of the propertied classes within the United States itself. For this bloc, if domestic prosperity was to be maintained without sacrifice of economic hierarchy, capital accumulation would have to be re-wired to external expansion. War and conquest had to be accepted as the price of social peace at home. ‘Nations’, said Beard, ‘are governed by their interests as their statesmen conceive those interests’. In the United States, the principal business of the state was business. Banks and corporations were the real motors of the foreign policy that had pushed America into the First World War, and were driving it towards a Second, against which Beard passionately warned.
American Empire does not dwell much on the nexus between internal social interests and external power-projection. Nor does it explore the mechanics of grand strategy, in the style of Gabriel Kolko.
At all events, it could be argued that the selection of legacies Bacevich has made among his forebears limits the way he stages his analytic narrative. In particular, what is not covered here are what could be called the Achesonian foundations of post-war us imperial strategy. For, as Bruce Cumings and others have shown, the turn to a huge power-projection outwards, fuelled by a very large, permanent defence industry and massive military budget, and codified doctrinally in NSC-68, occurred against the background of a serious recession in the American economy in 1949, and still high levels of union militancy. It was then, as Acheson put it, that ‘Korea saved us’. The Cold War delivered a range of key domestic benefits: warfare Keynesianism as a strong alternative to and barrier against welfare Keynesianism; a powerful anti-Communist ideology for use against any form of radical dissent; a means of providing a range of R and D [Research and Development] and other supports to a wide spectrum of us industries; and very powerful, cross-class social constituencies in the us with a direct stake in imperial expansion.
The American economic expansionism that used to be expressed as ‘interdependence’ has been rebaptized: ‘globalization’ is essentially a radicalized synonym for this older term…
The world’s products are being exchanged as never before . . . Isolation is no longer possible or desirable’. Anthony Giddens? No, McKinley in September 1901. Or, as Thomas Friedman put it a century later: ‘Globalization-is-Us’.
Bacevich is right to stress that, in fact, the most complete and fulsome versions of America’s imperial mission in the world were the work of the Clinton regime, which wove its necessary internal and external, economic and military-political dimensions into a smooth whole after the rather lame efforts of its predecessor.
In chapter after chapter Bacevich documents the twin tracks of expansionism in the 1990s: on one side, the opening of overseas economies and refashioning of financial institutions to us advantage, with the requisite cultural trappings; on the other, the projection of military force to keep or restore order abroad, accompanied by diplomatic strategies to discipline the other main power centres of the world. But in laying out this overall design, Bacevich devotes special attention to the area of his own professional exper- tise. His most original and valuable contribution to our understanding of the modus operandi of the Empire lies in his analysis of its military apparatus and the purposes to which this is now put.
The Department of Defence has developed 21st century equivalents of both ‘gunboats and Gurkhas’—that is, a combination of overwhelming air power with surrogate or mercenary forces on the ground: missiles, drones and B-1s above, and the KLA, Northern Alliance and Kurds below. Designed to minimize American casualties, which might unsettle domestic opinion …
The commanders-in-chief of these theatres typically wield, Bacevich shows, far more political and diplomatic power than any corresponding civilian functionaries of the American state..
American Empire sets itself a carefully limited brief: to show the practical and ideological continuities of American imperial power, and the novel military dispositions it has developed since the Cold War.”
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