pa4

At the time, with the notable exception of Perón’s regime in Argentina, virtually all Latin American governments, a medley of conservative autocracies of one kind or another—traditional dictators, neo-feudal oligarchies, military juntas, single-party rule—with a sprinkling of narrowly based democracies, were more or less congenial helpmeets of us business and diplomacy. Living standards, however low for the majority of the population, were nevertheless on the whole somewhat higher than in South-East Asia or the Middle East. In the first years of the Cold War, the region offered fewer reasons for alarm than any other in the post-colonial world.

The election of a left-wing government in Guatemala, nationalizing land-holdings of the United Fruit Company and legalizing the local Communist Party, changed this. Mounting a land invasion by mercenaries, backed by a naval blockade and bombing from the air, the cia ousted the Arbenz regime in 1954, the New York Times exulting that this was ‘the first successful anti-Communist revolt since the war’. [104] In 1952, Truman had already approved a plan developed by Somoza after a visit to the President for a cia operation to overthrow Arbenz, countermanded at the last minute by Acheson, probably out of fear it would fail: Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States 1944–1955, Princeton 1992, pp. 228–31. Richard Helms, promoted to Chief of Operations at the cia the following year, explained to Gleijeses: ‘Truman okayed a good many decisions for covert operations that in later years he said he knew nothing about. It’s all presidential deniability’: p. 366. Six years later, when the victory of the Cuban Revolution brought expropriation of American capital to the doorstep of the us, [105] At which the overthrow of the regime in Havana rapidly became ‘the top priority of the us government’, in the younger Kennedy’s words: ‘All else is secondary. No time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.’ Kennan, consulted by the elder Kennedy before his inauguration, approved an invasion of Cuba, provided it was successful: Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, p. 172. the Kennedy Administration attempted without success a larger cia invasion to crush it, and then imposed a naval blockade to stop Soviet missiles arriving in the island, whose withdrawal had to be exchanged for abandonment of further military action against Cuba. With this, Latin America moved to the top of the Cold War agenda in Washington. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, guerrilla movements sprang up across the continent, while the us touted an Alliance for Progress as the liberal alternative to their radical goals, and armed counter-insurgency campaigns in one country after another—Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala—to root them out.

But the traditional forces of the Latin American right—the army, the church, latifundists, big business—were quite capable of taking the initiative to destroy any threat from the left, with or without it taking up arms, in the knowledge that they could count on the blessing, and where need be, material backing of the us. In 1964, the Brazilian military staged the first of the counter-revolutionary coups against an elected government that swept the major societies of the continent, while the aircraft carrier Forrestal and supporting destroyers hovered offshore in case help was required. [106] McGeorge Bundy to the nsc, 28 March 1964: ‘The shape of the problem in Brazil is such that we should not be worrying that the military will react; we should be worrying that the military will not react’: Westad, Global Cold War, p. 150. On April 1, Ambassador Lincoln Gordon could teletype Washington that it was ‘all over, with the democratic rebellion already 95 per cent successful’, and the next day celebrate ‘a great victory for the free world’, without which there could have been ‘a total loss to the West of all South American Republics’. For these and other particulars of ‘Operation Brother Sam’, see Phyllis Parker, Brazil and the Quiet Intervention, 1964, Austin 1979, pp. 72–87. A year later, us marines waded into the Dominican Republic to repel an imaginary communist danger, Brazilian troops returning the favour in their train. In Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, whether popular hopes for an alternative order took shape in urban guerrillas, populist labour movements, socialist or communist parties, all were crushed by ferocious military dictatorships, acting with the support of the us. By the mid-seventies, the Cuban Revolution had been isolated and the continent was armour-plated against any further challenge to capital.

As a theatre of the Cold War, Latin America saw the widest breadth of political forms and energies pitted against the American imperial order, and least connected—ideologically or materially—with the distant Soviet state. To Cuba, Moscow supplied an economic life-line without which it could scarcely have survived, but strategically it was at variance with Havana, deploring its revolutionary activism throughout. The letter of the Olney Corollary no longer held—the juntas in Brasília or Santiago were not mere subjects of the us, and Cuba could not be retaken. But its logic was still in place. To all appearances, in the first quarter of a century of the Cold War, nowhere was American victory so complete.

6. recalibration

In the history of the post-war American empire, the early seventies was a watershed. For twenty years after the onset of the Cold War, the alternation of incumbents in the White House scarcely affected the continuity of the strategy laid out in nsc–68. At the turn of the seventies, however, deep changes in the environment of us global power coincided with a presidency less committed to the pious fictions and policy fixations of its predecessors, capable of pursuing the same ultimate ends with notably more flexible—if also, where required, yet more ruthless—means. As no American ruler before or after him has been, Nixon was an innovator. But his departures from the handbook for running the Free World came from the opportunities and constraints of the conjuncture. On all three fronts of us grand strategy, the years 1971–73 saw dramatic changes.

The first came where everything had hitherto gone most smoothly. The reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan, the highest American priority after the war, had been a resounding success. But after two decades, the former Axis powers were now—thanks to us aid, access to us markets and borrowing of us technology, combined with reserve armies of low-wage labour and more advanced forms of industrial organization than the us possessed—out-competing American firms in one branch of manufacturing after another: steel, auto, machine tools, electronics. Under this German and Japanese pressure, the rate of profit of us producers fell sharply, and a us trade deficit opened up. [107] For this development, the indispensable account is Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, London and New York 2006, pp. 99–142. Compounding this relentless effect of the uneven development of capitalism during the long post-war boom were the costs of the domestic reforms with which Nixon, like Johnson, sought to consolidate his electorate and tamp down opposition to the war in Vietnam, itself a further drain on the us Treasury. The upshot was escalating inflation and a deteriorating balance of payments. To cap matters, France—under De Gaulle and Pompidou, the one Western state to regain, for a season, real political independence from Washington—had started to attack the dollar with increasing purchases of gold. The latitude of American power over American interests, the remit of the imperial state beyond the requirements of national capital, was for the first time under pressure.

Nixon’s response was draconian. The principles of free trade, the free market and the solidarity of the free world could not stand in the way of the national interest. Wasting no time on diplomatic consultation, in a four-minute television address to a domestic audience he jettisoned the Bretton Woods system, cutting the link of the dollar to gold, imposed a tariff surcharge on all imports, and decreed a wage and price freeze. In the short run, devaluation restored the competitive punch of us exporters, and in the long run, delinkage of the dollar from gold gave the us state greater freedom of economic manoeuvre than ever before. The real structure of the liberal international order projected in 1943–45 stood momentarily revealed. But this impressive success in the exercise of national egoism could only mask for a limited spell the irreversible alteration in the position of the United States in the world economy, of which Nixon was aware.

A month before delivering the American quietus to Bretton Woods, Nixon had startled the world with another, no less drastic reorientation of us policy, the announcement that he would shortly be travelling to Beijing. The victory of the Chinese revolution had been the worst blow Washington had ever suffered in the Cold War. Regarding the ccp as a more bitter enemy even than the cpsu, it had refused to recognize Mao’s regime, maintaining that the real China was its ward in Taiwan, and ignoring the split between Beijing and Moscow that became public in the early sixties and worsened steadily thereafter. Nixon now became determined to capitalize on it. Still mired in Vietnam, where the drv was receiving assistance from both Russia and China, his aim was to increase his leverage on both powers, playing them off against each other to secure a settlement that would preserve the South Vietnamese state and American military credibility in South-East Asia. In February 1972 his cordial reception by Mao in Beijing marked a diplomatic revolution. The two leaders agreed on the threat posed by the Soviet Union, laying the basis for a tacit alliance against it. Having obtained this understanding, Nixon proceeded to Moscow three months later, where—reminding Brezhnev of the potential dangers from China—he signed the first salt agreement, amid much celebration of détente. The treaty did not halt the arms race, and the atmospherics of détente were of less effect than intended in neutralizing domestic opposition to the war in Indochina. But the basic strategic gain of Nixon’s turn was enormous, and would last. The Communist world was no longer just divided. Henceforward China and Russia would compete for privileged relations with the United States.

What this transformation of the dynamics of the Cold War could not deliver was Nixon’s immediate objective, a stalemate in Vietnam. Though Moscow and Beijing both urged another Geneva-style arrangement on Hanoi, they were not in a position to impose one. A further massive American bombing campaign failed to buckle the drv. In January 1973, accords had to be signed in Paris for a withdrawal of us troops from Vietnam in sixty days, sealing the fate of the southern regime. But the inglorious end of the long American intervention in Vietnam was rapidly recouped elsewhere. In September the Allende regime, the most advanced, freely elected socialist experience in South America, from whose example capital had most to fear, and whose fall Nixon had demanded from the start, was destroyed by the Chilean military. [108] The Director of the cia cabled its station chief in Santiago on 16 October 1970: ‘It is firm and continuous policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October, but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure towards this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that usg and American hand be well hidden.’ See Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, New York 2003, p. 64. In dealing with Chile, Kissinger was true to Kennan’s recommendations two decades earlier. In 1971, Kennan remarked: ‘Henry understands my views better than anyone at State ever has’, and eight days after the coup in Chile wrote to Kissinger, who had just become Secretary of State, ‘I could not be more pleased than I am by this appointment’: Gaddis, George F. Kennan, p. 621. A month later, the Egyptian army was routed by the Israeli offensive across the Canal, and the Arab nationalism embodied by Nasser’s regime was finished, leaving the United States diplomatic master of the Middle East.

II

Nixon’s departure was followed, after a brief interim, by a tonal and tactical reversion to more standard styles of American Weltpolitik. In a typical bout of domestic positioning, détente soon came under Democratic attack as an unprincipled sell-out to Moscow. In late 1974 the Jackson–Vanik amendment blocked the granting of mfn status to the ussr for obstructing Jewish emigration from Russia to Israel. A year later, salt ii was dead in the water. Nixon had not held high enough the banners of the Free World—in particular the cause of human rights, picked out by Jackson and blazoned by Carter in his campaign for the White House, which henceforward became an ideological staple of all regimes in Washington. The Cold War was not to be waged as a mere power-political contest. It was a moral-ideological battle for civilization, as Nitze had seen.

Strategically, little altered. Nixon’s legacy was not discarded, but substantively consolidated. There would be no return to benevolent American indifference—let alone assistance—to the economic rise of Japan or Germany. The First World had become a clear-cut arena of inter-capitalist competition in which us predominance was at stake, to be assured where necessary without compunction. Nixon had cut the dollar free from gold, and shown scant respect for laissez-faire totems at home or abroad, but the oil shock of 1973 had compounded the underlying economic downturn in the us with a steep burst of inflation, which the floating exchange rates instituted at the Smithsonian in 1971 did little to improve. By the end of the decade the temporary boost to American exports from the 1971 devaluation was exhausted, and the dollar dangerously low. With Volcker’s arrival at the Fed under Carter, there was an abrupt change of course. Interest rates were driven sky-high to stamp out inflation, attracting a flood of foreign capital, and putting massive pressure on dollar-denominated Third World debts. But once the dollar strengthened again—us manufacturers paying the price, the trade deficit widening—the Reagan Administration did not stand on ceremony. After ruthless arm-twisting, Japan and Germany were forced to accept enormous revaluations of the yen and the Mark to make American exports competitive once more. [109] Brenner, Economics of Global Turbulence, pp. 190, 206–7; The Boom and the Bubble, London and New York 2002, pp. 60–1, 106–7, 122–3, 127. The Plaza Accords of 1985, clinching the relative economic recovery of the us in the eighties, left no doubt who was master in the liberal international order, and intended to remain so.

Beyond the First World, Nixon’s two other great legacies each required completion. In the Far East, China had been wooed into an unspoken entente with America, but there were still no diplomatic relations between the two states, Washington maintaining formal recognition of the gmd regime in Taiwan as the government of China. In the Middle East, Israel had been handed victory, and Egypt saved from disaster, but a settlement between the two was needed for the us to capitalize fully on its command of the situation. Within a few months of each other, unfinished business in both theatres was wrapped up. In the autumn of 1978 Sadat and Begin signed a us-monitored agreement at Camp David returning Israeli-occupied Sinai to Egypt in exchange for the abandonment by Egypt of the allies who had fought with it, whose territories Israel continued to occupy, and of empty promises to the Palestinians, promptly discarded. A deluge of us military aid to both countries followed, as henceforward interconnected, if incommensurate ramparts of the American system in the Middle East: Israel an ally more than capable of independent action, Egypt a pensionary incapable of it.

In the Far East, China was easier game. Some tractations were needed to finesse the problem of Taiwan, but once Beijing made no case of continued American commercial and material support for the island, provided Washington withdrew recognition of the roc, the way was clear for the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the two powers on the first day of 1979. Two weeks later, Deng Xiaoping arrived in the us for a tour of the country and talks at the White House, aiming not only for a compact with America as a strategic counter-balance to Russia, as Mao had done, but integration into the global economic system headed by the us—an Open Door in reverse—which Mao had not. The entrance ticket he offered was a Chinese attack on Vietnam to punish it for having overthrown the Pol Pot regime, a protégé of Beijing, in Cambodia. The us, still smarting from its humiliation in Indochina, was happy to accept it. The Chinese invasion of Vietnam did not go well, and had to be called off with heavy casualties and little to show for it. But it served its political purpose, blooding China as a reliable us partner in South-East Asia, where the two powers joined forces to sustain the Khmer Rouge along the Thai border for another dozen years, and entitling the prc to the full benefit of American investors and American markets. Carter—human rights a better magic cloak for Pol Pot than Chicago economics for Pinochet—had proved an effective executor of Nixon.

III

Further strengthening of positions in the Middle and Far East was no guarantee of security elsewhere in the Third World. The late seventies and eighties saw not a contraction, but an expansion of danger-zones for the us into areas hitherto little touched by the Cold War. [110] Though, of course, never entirely out of sight in Washington. There is no better illustration of how imaginary is the belief that Kennan’s doctrine of containment was geographically limited, rather than uncompromisingly global, than pps 25 of March 1948 on North Africa, which—after remarking that ‘the people of Morocco can best advance under French tutelage’—concluded: ‘The development of the us into a major world power together with the wars that have been fought by this country to prevent the Atlantic littoral of Europe and Africa from falling into hostile hands, the increasing dependency of England upon the us and the situation brought about by the rise of air power and other technological advances, have made it necessary that a new concept should be applied to the entire group of territories bordering on the Eastern Atlantic at least down to the “Bulge” of Africa. The close interflexion of the French African territories bordering on the Mediterranean must also be considered an integral part of this concept. This would mean, in modern terms, that we could not tolerate from the standpoint of our national security the extension into this area of any system of power which is not a member of the Atlantic community, or a transfer of sovereignty to any power which does not have full consciousness of its obligations with respect to the peace of the Atlantic order’: Anna Kasten Nelson, ed., State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, vol. II, pp. 146–7. Africa had long been the continent least affected by it. The Algerian Revolution, the one mass armed struggle of the late fifties and early sixties, had caused some anxiety, but the rapid capture of power by an introverted military regime with few ideological ambitions allayed these. Elsewhere, there was no comparable scale of European settlement, with the exception of the white racist stronghold of South Africa, which could look after itself. In between, French and British colonies run by a handful of administrators, undisturbed by any war-time radicalization, covered most of the vast sub-Saharan spaces. There, decolonization could be handled without much difficulty, with a controlled transfer of power to generally moderate elites still highly dependent, materially and culturally, on the former metropoles.

There were two other colonial powers, however, of lesser size and self-confidence, who in opposite ways flubbed this process, putting Washington on the alert. Belgium, having for years made no effort to prepare a suitable post-colonial landing in the Congo, granted it independence overnight in 1960. When amid chaotic conditions following a mutiny of the ex-colonial gendarmerie against its white officers, Lumumba—elected leader of the country—appealed for Soviet aid, the cia was instructed to poison him. After this came to nothing, the us—in effective control of the un operation ostensibly sent to stabilize the situation—orchestrated a seizure of power by troops under Mobutu, a cia asset, ensuring Lumumba’s death par pouvoir interposé, and the dictatorship in the Congo of their parachutist commander for thirty years. [111] The un bureaucracy and the us secret state were in full agreement, Hammarskjöld opining that ‘Lumumba must be broken’, his American deputy Cordier that Lumumba was Africa’s ‘Little Hitler’, and Allen Dulles cabling the cia station chief in Leopoldville: ‘In high quarters here it is held that if [Lumumba] continues to hold office, the inevitable result will at best be chaos and at worst pave the way to Communist takeover of the Congo with disastrous consequences for the prestige of the un and for the interests of the free world generally. Consequently we conclude that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective.’ In Washington, Eisenhower gave a green light to the disposal of Lumumba, and an emissary was dispatched to poison him. The best documentation of his fate is Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba, London and New York 2001, pp. 17–20 ff and passim. The Congo operation was much more important in setting a benchmark for subsequent use of the un as an instrument of American will than its function as an international fig-leaf for the war in Korea.

Portugal, itself a dictatorship dating back to fascist times, whose identity as a European power was inseparable from its African empire, had no intention of relinquishing its colonies, and by outlasting France and Britain on the continent for over a decade, created the conditions for a radicalized anti-imperialism looking for aid and inspiration to the ussr, otherwise present elsewhere only in South Africa. When, after a dozen years of armed struggle, a metropolitan revolution finally brought decolonization, the richest Portuguese possession of Angola was divided between three movements for independence, two of the right, backed by the Congo and the prc, and one of the left, backed by Russia. Alarmed at the prospect of this last winning the contest between them, in 1975 Washington supplied its opponents with funds, weapons and officers in a covert cia operation from the north, while inciting South Africa to invade the colony from the south. Before Luanda could fall, Cuban troops ferried from the Caribbean in Soviet transports arrived in strength, clearing the north and obliging the South African column to withdraw. For the us, defeat in Angola was consignment of the country to communism, and in the eighties it stepped up support for the rival force remaining in the field, led by Pretoria’s ally Savimbi. A second South African invasion, assisted by Savimbi, was halted thirteen years later by another Cuban expedition, larger than the first. In Angola, by the time Reagan left office, America had been worsted. [112] See the fine account in Westad, The Global Cold War, pp. 218–46, 390–2.

The only African arena to have escaped European colonization prior to the First World War, and then been only briefly conquered after it, predictably became the other proving ground of the last phases of the Cold War, as a feudal kingdom overdue for explosion. The Ethiopian revolution that toppled the archaic local dynasty in 1974 became steadily more radical as the group of junior officers who took power underwent a series of convulsive purges, ending in a regime that not only called for Soviet military assistance, but—rather than talking vaguely of African socialism, as many others had done—proclaimed the goal of creating a society based on scientific socialism, Soviet-style. Imperial Ethiopia had, traditionally, been a plaque tournante of American strategic dispositions in the Horn. When it appeared to have capsized into communism, the us instigated an invasion by Somalia in 1977 to reclaim the Ogaden region. As in Angola, the incursion was beaten back by a combination of Cuban troops and much more Soviet armour and oversight, a bitter pill for Washington to swallow. At the helm of the nsc, Brzezinski declared the death of détente in the sands of the Ogaden. Success in the Congo had confirmed the value of the un as a cover for us operations in the Third World. Setbacks in Angola and Ethiopia offered lessons in how better to run proxy wars.

Across the Atlantic, South America had been so scoured of threats to capital by the late seventies that the military regimes which had stamped them out could withdraw, their historical task accomplished, leaving democratic governments in place, safe from any temptation of radical change. Central America, however, lay in a different political time-zone. Long a political backwater, home to some of the most benighted tyrants on the continent, its brief episodes of insurgency quickly snuffed out, most of the region had remained quiet during the period of high revolutionary activism to the south. The overthrow by Sandinista rebels in 1979 of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, whose rule under American patronage dated from the time of Roosevelt, brought the country into the full glare of us counter-insurgency. [113] Somoza, to whom Stimson had taken a liking on a visit during the second us occupation of Nicaragua in 1927, became the first head of the National Guard created by the Marines as Roosevelt took office. After murdering Sandino in 1934, he was in due course welcomed to Washington in unprecedented style by the President: ‘Plans called for Roosevelt, for the first time since entering office in 1933, to leave the White House to greet a chief of state. The vice-president, the full cabinet, and the principal leaders of Congress and the judiciary were all scheduled to be present for the arrival of Somoza’s train. A large military honour guard, a twenty-one gun salute, a presidential motorcade down Pennsylvania Avenue, a state dinner, and an overnight stay at the White House were all part of the official itinerary’, with ‘over five thousand soldiers, sailors and Marines lining the streets and fifty aircraft flying overhead. Government employees released from work for the occasion swelled the crowds along the procession’: Paul Coe Clark, The United States and Somoza: A Revisionist Look, Westport 1992, pp. 63–4. The Nicaraguan revolutionaries were closely linked to Cuba, and in 1981 their victory set off an insurrection in El Salvador that developed into a civil war lasting a decade, and a briefer uprising in Guatemala—where guerrillas were an older phenomenon—broken by all-out repression. Local oligarchs and officers reacted to the wave of regional radicalization with death-squads, disappearances, torture, massacres. In these two countries, the Carter Administration supplied American training and assistance. Reagan, no less determined to hold the line in El Salvador and Guatemala, decided to tackle the root of the problem in Nicaragua itself.

From 1982 onwards, the us assembled an army of counter-revolutionaries, well funded and equipped, in Honduras and Costa Rica to destroy the Sandinista regime. Cross-border raids and attacks multiplied, with widespread sabotage of communications, destruction of crops and economic installations, and assassination of civilians, in a campaign under direct American control and design. Without being able to hold large swathes of territory, the Contras put the country under siege. Privation and fatigue gradually weakened popular support for the Sandinista government, until at the end of the decade it agreed to elections if the Contras were stood down, and was defeated by the candidate of the State Department, who alone could deliver an end to the American embargo impoverishing the country. Central America was not Africa. The us could fight a proxy war against a small opponent to complete success—rounding off its grip on the region with an invasion of Panama straight out of the twenties, before Nicaraguans even went to the polls, to get rid of an unsatisfactory strongman. [114] ‘Between the onset of the global Cold War in 1948 and its conclusion in 1990, the us government secured the overthrow of at least twenty-four governments in Latin America, four by direct use of us military forces, three by means of cia-managed revolts or assassination, and seventeen by encouraging local military and political forces to intervene without direct us participation, usually through military coups d’état . . . The human cost of this effort was immense. Between 1960, by which time the Soviets had dismantled Stalin’s gulags, and the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. In other words, from 1960 to 1990, the Soviet bloc as a whole was less repressive, measured in terms of human victims, than many individual Latin American countries. The hot Cold War in Central America produced an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe. Between 1975 and 1991, the death toll alone stood at nearly 300,000 in a population of less than 30 million. More than 1 million refugees fled from the region—most to the United States. The economic costs have never been calculated, but were huge. In the 1980s, these costs did not affect us policy because the burden on the United States was negligible’: John Coatsworth, ‘The Cold War in Central America, 1975–1991’, in Leffler and Westad, eds, Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, pp. 220–1.

IV

Much more was at stake in the other zone to open up as a front in the last decade of the Cold War. Between the Arab world and the Subcontinent lay two states that had never been subject to European mandate or conquest, though each had been the object of repeated intrusion and manipulation by imperial powers. Since its installation by us and British intelligence in the fifties, the royal dictatorship in Iran had become the linchpin of American strategy in the region surrounding the Gulf, recipient of every kind of favour and assistance from Washington. In Afghanistan, the monarchy had been terminated by a dynastic cousin seeking to update the country with Soviet aid. In January 1978, massive demonstrations broke out against the Pahlavi regime, long a byword for tyranny and corruption, and within a year it was finished, the Shah fleeing into exile and the Shi’a cleric Khomeini returning from it to head a revolutionary regime of unexpected Islamist stamp, equally hostile to the Iranian left and to the American superpower. [115] On the last day of 1977, Carter had toasted the Shah in Teheran—‘there is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship’—as a fellow-spirit in the cause of ‘human rights’, and a pillar of stability in the region, upheld by ‘the admiration and love your people give to you’: see Lloyd Gardner, The Long Road to Baghdad, New York 2008, p. 51. When the us embassy in Teheran was seized by students two years later, Kennan urged an American declaration of war on Iran: Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, p. 278. In April 1978, Afghan communists targeted for a purge hit back with a coup that put them in power overnight. Though not equivalent, both upheavals were blows. Afghanistan might have semi-lain within Moscow’s diplomatic sphere of influence, but the establishment of a Communist regime there was another matter, a threat to Pakistan and unacceptable in principle. But the country was poor and isolated. Iran, double in size and population, and one of the world’s largest oil producers, was neither. In itself, no doubt, an Islamic regime was less dangerous than a Communist one, but its anti-imperialist fervour could prove the more destabilizing, if unchecked, in the Middle East. The us embassy was seized and its staff held hostage in Teheran, not Kabul.

Fortuitously, the problem of how to deal with the Iranian Revolution found a happy solution within less than a year of the overthrow of the Shah, with the all-out attack on Iran launched by Iraq in September 1980, in the belief Teheran was much weakened by a Khomeinist regime still preoccupied by repression of a range of internal oppositions. Saddam Hussein’s bid to seize the oil-rich, predominantly Arab, province of Khuzestan unleashed the second-longest conventional war of the twentieth century, with undercover us encouragement and assistance. [116] See Bruce Jentleson, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982–1990, New York 1994, pp. 42–8. Calling on every reserve of Iranian patriotism, the Khomeinist system survived the assault. But for American purposes, the war was cost-effective. Without the commitment of any us troops, or even cia operatives, disabled within the country, the Iranian Revolution was pinned down within its own borders for nearly a decade, and its external impetus largely exhausted by the struggle for defensive survival. When the war finally came to an end in 1988, the clerical regime was still in place, but it had been contained, and with the proclamation of the Carter Doctrine and its implementation by Reagan, the Gulf converted into a military walkway for us power in the region.

Afghanistan could be tackled more ambitiously than Iran, along Central American rather than Southern African lines. If Baghdad was an arm’s length Pretoria, Islamabad would be a close-range Tegucigalpa, from which the us could mount a proxy war against Communism with an army of Contras who, however, would become more than mercenaries. As early as July 1979, before the monarchy had collapsed in Iran or Soviet tanks were anywhere near Kabul, the us was bankrolling religious and tribal resistance to the Saur Revolution. When Moscow reacted to fratricide in Afghan communism with a full-scale military intervention in December, Washington saw the chance to pay the ussr back in its own coin: this would be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. Under the benevolent awning of the Zia dictatorship in Pakistan, massive transfers of money and advanced weaponry were funnelled to mujahedin fighters against atheism. Divided from the start, Afghan communism had tried to compensate for the weakness of its basis in a still overwhelmingly rural and tribal society with the ferocity of its repression of opposition to it, now superimposed with the ponderous weight of an alien army. In these conditions, the us had little difficulty sustaining hi-tech guerrilla attacks on it for over a decade, irrigated with cia and Saudi funding, but grounded in passionate religious-popular sentiment. Dependent for military survival on Soviet air and land power, the regime in Kabul was politically doomed by it.

V

In their long contest with the United States, the rulers of the Soviet Union believed by the mid-seventies that they had achieved strategic nuclear parity, and therewith recognition by Washington of political parity as a superpower of equal standing at large. Détente, in their eyes, signalled its acceptance of these realities. So they saw no reason why the ussr should act with less freedom than the us where the frontiers between the two blocs were not, as in Europe, fixed fast by mutual agreement. Central America was within the hemispheric domain of the us and they would not interfere. But Africa was a terrain vague, and Afghanistan a borderland of the ussr in which the us had never been greatly involved. Military power-projection in such regions was not a provocation, but within the rules of the game as understood by Moscow.

These were illusions. What Brezhnev and his colleagues believed was a strategic turning-point was for Nixon and Kissinger a tactical construction. No American administration had any intention of permitting Moscow to act in the Third World as Washington might do, and all had the means to see that it would come to grief if it tried to do so. The apparent Soviet gains of the seventies were built on sands, brittle regimes that lacked either disciplined communist cadres or nation-wide mass movements behind them, and would fall or invert in short order once support from Moscow was gone. The ultimate disparity between the two antagonists remained as great as it had ever been at the dawn of the Cold War, before Mao’s victory in China altered the extent of the imbalance for a time. Even with lines of communication as short as those to Afghanistan, Moscow was trapped as Brzezinski had intended. The Red Army had no remedy against Stinger missiles. To demoralization beyond the perimeters of Stalin’s rule was added fraying within them. Eastern Europe had long been off-limits to the us, which had stood by when East German workers rose in 1953, Hungary revolted in 1956 and Czechoslovakia was invaded in 1968. But détente, which had deluded Soviet leaders into thinking they could act with less inhibition in the Horn or the Hindu Kush, where it had no bearing for Washington, allowed the us to act with less inhibition in Europe. There the Helsinki Accords, where Moscow paid for formal recognition of territorial borders that were never in real dispute with formal recognition of human rights that eminently were, had changed the coordinates of the Cold War. This time, when Solidarity erupted in Poland, there could be no Iron Curtain. American subventions, sluiced through the Vatican, could not be stopped, nor a rolling Polish insurgency broken.

Along with military wounds and political troubles came economic pressures. In the seventies, rising oil prices had compounded recession in the West. In the eighties, falling oil prices hit Soviet trade balances that depended on hard currency earnings from the country’s energy sector to pay for medium-tech imports. If the origins of the long downturn in the oecd lay in the dynamics of uneven development and over-competition, its consequences could be checked and deferred by a systemic expansion of credit, to ward off any traumatic devalorization of capital. In the ussr, a long economic downturn began earlier—growth rates were already falling in the sixties, if much more sharply from the second half of the seventies; and its dynamics lay in plan-driven lack of competition and over-extension of the life-span of capital. [117] Vladimir Popov, ‘Life Cycle of the Centrally Planned Economy: Why Soviet Growth Rates Peaked in the 1950s’, cefir/nes Working Paper no. 152, November 2010, pp. 5–11—a fundamental diagnosis, showing that in effect the Soviet economy suffered from its own, much more drastic, version of the same problem that would slow American growth rates from the seventies onwards, in Robert Brenner’s analysis. In the thirties, Trotsky had already observed that the fate of Soviet socialism would be determined by whether or not its productivity of labour surpassed that of advanced capitalism. By the eighties, the answer was clear. The gnp and per capita income of the ussr were half those of the us, and labour productivity perhaps 40 per cent. Central to that difference was a still larger one, in reverse. In the much richer American economy, military expenditures accounted for an average of some 6–7 per cent of gdp from the sixties onwards; in the Soviet economy, the figure was over double that—15–16 per cent.

Since the fifties, American grand strategy had classically aimed to ‘put the maximum strain’, as nsc–68 had enjoined, on the Soviet system. The Reagan Administration, mauling its flanks in Central Asia and infiltrating its defences in Eastern Europe, also piled on economic pressure, with a technological embargo striking at Russian oil production, and a quadrupling of Saudi output that lowered oil prices by 60 per cent. But its decisive move was the announcement of a Strategic Defense Initiative to render the us invulnerable to icbm attack. Originating in an evaluation of the Soviet threat by Team B within the cia that rang the alarm at a ‘window of vulnerability’—yet another avatar of the bomber and missile gaps of the fifties and sixties—which Moscow could use to obliterate or blackmail the West, sdi was a technological scarecrow whose putative costs were enormous. That it could not actually be built was of little importance. What mattered was that it intimidate a cornered Soviet leadership, now flailing about in bungled attempts to revive the economy at home, and increasingly desperate for Western approval abroad.

Aware that the ussr could no longer hope to match so costly a programme, Gorbachev travelled to Reykjavik to try to deliver his country from the crippling weight of the arms race altogether. [118] Gorbachev to the Politburo in October 1986: ‘We will be pulled into an arms race that is beyond our capabilities, and we will lose it, because we are at the limit of our capabilities. Moreover, we can expect that Japan and the frg could very soon add their economic potential to the American one. If the new round begins, the pressure on our economy will be unbelievable’: Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev, Chapel Hill 2007, p. 292. As Reagan candidly recalled: ‘The great dynamic success of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism—money. The Russians could never win the arms race; we could outspend them forever’: An American Life, New York 1990, p. 267. There us officials were stunned as he made one unilateral concession after another. ‘We came with nothing to offer, and offered nothing’, one negotiator remembered. ‘We sat there while they unwrapped their gifts’. [119] ‘Secretary Schultz, not then deep in nuclear matters, nevertheless caught the drift. We had triumphed’: Kenneth Adelman, The Great Universal Embrace, New York 1989, p. 55. Adelman was Arms Control Director under Reagan. But it was no dice. sdi would not be abandoned: Gorbachev came away empty-handed. Two years later, a ban on intermediate-range missiles was small consolation. It had taken thirty years for the Soviet Union to achieve formal nuclear parity with the United States. But the goal was over-valued and the price ruinous. American encirclement of the ussr had never been primarily conceived as a conventional Niederwerfungskrieg. From the start, it was a long-term Ermattungskrieg, and victory was now at hand.

Amid a continually worsening crisis of material provision at home, as the old economic system was disrupted by addled reforms incapable of giving birth to a new one, withdrawal from Afghanistan was followed by retreat from Eastern Europe. There the regimes of the Warsaw Pact had never enjoyed much native support, their peoples rebelling whenever they had a chance of doing so. In 1989, emboldened by the new conjuncture, one political break-out followed another: within six months, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania. The signal for the upheaval came in the spring, when the Hungarian government was secretly paid a billion Deutschmarks by Kohl to open its border with Austria, and young East Germans started to pour across it. [120] Harper, The Cold War, p. 238. In Moscow, Gorbachev let matters take their course. Making no attempt to negotiate Soviet exit from the region, he placed his trust in Western gratitude for a unilateral withdrawal of the 500,000 Red Army troops stationed in it. In exchange, Bush Sr offered a verbal promise that nato would not be extended to the borders of Russia, and declined to supply any economic aid until the country was a free market economy. [121] ‘Disappointed by the failure of his personal relations with Western leaders to yield returns, Gorbachev tried to make a more pragmatic case for major aid. As he told Bush in July 1991, if the United States was prepared to spend $100 billion on regional problems (the Gulf), why was it not ready to expend similar sums to help sustain perestroika, which had yielded enormous foreign-policy dividends, including unprecedented Soviet support in the Middle East? But such appeals fell on deaf ears. Not even the relatively modest $30 billion package suggested by American and Soviet specialists—comparable to the scale of Western aid commitments to Eastern Europe—found political favour’: Alex Pravda, ‘The Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1990–1991’, in Leffler and Westad, eds, Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, p. 376. His call for Europe to be whole and free was met. For the ussr itself to become free, it would have to be divided. Gorbachev survived his unrequited pursuit of an entente with America by little more than a year. What remained of the Soviet establishment could see where his conception of peace with honour was leading, and in trying to depose him, precipitated it. In December 1991, the ussr disappeared from the map.

7. liberalism militant

The end of the Cold War closed an epoch. The United States now stood alone as a super-power, the first in world history. That did not mean it could rest on its laurels. The agenda of 1950 might be complete. But the grand strategy of the American state had always been broader. The original vision of 1943 had been put on hold for an emergency half-century, but never relinquished: the construction of a liberal international order with America at its head. Communism was dead, but capitalism had not yet found its accomplished form, as a planetary universal under a singular hegemon. The free market was not yet world-wide. Democracy was not invariably safe. In the hierarchy of states, nations did not always know their place. There was also the detritus of the Cold War to be cleared away, where it had left relics of a discredited past.

In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse, the last were details that took care of themselves. By 1992, the regimes in South Yemen, Ethiopia and Afghanistan had all fallen, Angola had come to its senses, and Nicaragua was back in good hands. In the Third World, scarcely a government was left that any longer cared to call itself socialist. There had always, however, been states which without making that misstep were unacceptable in other ways, some failing to respect liberal economic principles, others the will of what could now be called, without fear of contradiction, the ‘international community’. Few had consistently defied Washington, but nationalist posturing of one kind or another might still lead them in directions that would need to be stopped. The Panamanian dictator Noriega had long been on the cia payroll, and supplied valuable help in the undeclared war against the Sandinistas. But when he resisted pressure to drop his take of the drug trade, and started to edge away from Washington, he was summarily removed with a us invasion in late 1989.

A much larger offence was committed by the Iraqi dictatorship in seizing Kuwait the following year. The Baath regime headed by Saddam Hussein had also enjoyed cia assistance in coming to power, and played a useful role in pinning down the Iranian revolution in protracted trench warfare. But though merciless to communists, as to all other opponents, the regime was truculently nationalist, permitting no foreign oil companies to operate on its soil and, unlike the Egyptian dictatorship, no American control of its decisions. Whatever the historic rights and wrongs of Baghdad’s claims to the sheikhdom to the south, a British creation, there could be no question of allowing it to acquire the Kuwaiti oilfields in addition to its own, which could put Iraq in a position to threaten Saudi Arabia itself. Mobilizing half a million troops, topped up with contingents from thirty-odd other countries, after five weeks of aerial bombardment Operation Desert Storm routed the Iraqi army in five days, restoring the Sabah dynasty to its throne. The cost to the us was nugatory: ninety per cent of the bill was picked up by Germany, Japan and the Gulf states.

The Gulf War, the first Bush proclaimed, marked the arrival of a New World Order. Where only a year earlier the invasion of Panama had been condemned by majorities in both the General Assembly and the Security Council of the un (Russia and China joining every Third World country to vote for the resolution, the uk and France joining the us to veto it), the expedition to Iraq sailed through the Security Council, Russia approving, China abstaining, America tipping Third World states for their service. The end of the Cold War had changed everything. It was as if Roosevelt’s vision of the world’s posse had arrived. [122] Bush: ‘A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and preeminent superpower: the United States of America. And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with power—and the world is right. They trust us to be fair and restrained; they trust us to be on the side of decency. They trust us to do what’s right’: State of the Union Address, January 1992. To cap the us triumph, within a few months of these victories, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, hitherto an ineffectual residue of the late sixties, was transformed into a powerful instrument of American hegemony with the submission of France and China to it, sealing a nuclear oligarchy in the Security Council, under which signature of the Treaty would henceforward become a condition of international respectability for lesser states, save where Washington wished to waive it—Israel was naturally exempted. [123] Susan Watkins, ‘The Nuclear Non-Protestation Treaty’, nlr 54, Nov–Dec 2008—the only serious historical, let alone critical, reconstruction of the background and history of the Treaty. In four short years, the colourless elder Bush could be accounted the most successful foreign policy President since the war.

II

Clinton, profiting from a third-party candidate, was elected on a dip in the domestic economy, the recession of 1991. But like every contender for the White House since the fifties, he assailed the incumbent for weakness in fighting America’s enemies abroad, calling for tougher policies on Cuba and China, in a stance backed by Nitze, Brzezinski and fellow-spirits, for whom Bush had been too soft on dictators and insufficiently resolute in pursuing violators of human rights. [124] Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11, New York 2008, pp. 35–7. Robert Kagan was another supporter of Clinton in 1992. In office, however, Clinton’s first priority was to build out the liberal order of free trade into an encompassing global system under us command. Bush had not neglected this front, but lost power before he could finalize either the creation of a regional economic bloc welding Mexico and Canada to the United States, or the protracted negotiations to wrap up the Uruguay Round at gatt. Clinton, over-riding opposition in his own party, pushed through nafta and the transformation of gatt into the wto as the formal framework of a universal market for capital to come. Within that framework, the us could now play a more decisive role than ever in shaping an emergent pan-capitalist world to its own requirements.

In the first decades of the Cold War, American policies had been permissive: other industrial states could be allowed, even assisted in the face of Communist danger, to develop as they judged best, without undue regard for liberal orthodoxy. From the seventies onwards, American policies became defensive: us interests had to be asserted against competitors within the oecd, if necessary with brutal coups d’arrêt, but without undue intervention in the rival economies themselves. By the nineties, Washington could move to the offensive. The neo-liberal turn had deregulated international financial markets, prising open hitherto semi-enclosed national economies, and the United States was strategically master of a unipolar world. In these conditions, the us could for the first time apply systematic pressure on surrounding states to bring their practices into line with American standards. The free market was no longer to be trifled with. Its principles had to be observed. Where protection, either social or national, infringed on them, it should now be phased out. The Washington Consensus—imperatives shared by the imf, the World Bank and the us Treasury—laid down the appropriate rules for the Third World. But it was the Mexican and Asian financial crises, each a direct result of the new regime of footloose global finance, that gave the Clinton Administration the real opportunity to drive American norms of market-friendly conduct home. [125] For the latter, see Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble, London and New York 1999, pp. 76–9, 84–92, 103–15. With far the deepest capital markets of any major economy, and the global reserve currency, the United States stood for the moment controller of the very turbulence its model of accumulation was unleashing. The triumvirate of Greenspan, Rubin and Summers could be billed by the local press as the ‘Committee to Save the World’.

Mexico, Korea, Indonesia: these were important targets for imf medication. But the leading object of us concern was naturally Russia, where the collapse of communism did not ipso facto ensure a smooth passage to capitalism, essential for the consolidation of victory in the Cold War. For the Clinton Administration, the maintenance of a political regime in Moscow willing to make a complete break with the past was a priority. Yeltsin might be drunk, corrupt and incompetent, but he was a convert to the cause of anti-communism, who had no qualms about shock therapy—overnight freeing of prices and cutting of subsidies—or the handing-over of the country’s principal assets for nominal sums to a small number of crooked projectors, advisers seconded from Harvard taking a cut. When he bombarded the Russian parliament with tanks and faked victory in a constitutional referendum to stay in power, Clinton’s team warmly congratulated him. His reelection in danger, a timely American loan arrived, with political consultants from California to help his campaign. His obliteration of Grozny accomplished, Clinton celebrated its liberation. Russian finances melting down in 1998, the imf stepped into the breach without conditionality. In exchange, Yeltsin’s diplomatic alignment with Washington was so complete that Gorbachev, no enemy of the us, could describe his Foreign Minister as the American consul in Moscow.

The world-wide extension of neo-liberal rules of trade and investment, and the integration of the former Soviet Union into its system, could be seen as fulfilments of the long-range vision of the last years of Roosevelt’s Presidency. But much had changed since then, in the reflexes and ambitions of us elites. The Cold War had ended in the economic and political settlement of an American peace. But that did not mean a return to arcadia. American power rested not simply on force of example—the wealth and freedom that made the us a model for emulation and natural leader in the civilization of capital—but also, inseparably, force of arms. To the expansion of its economic and political influence could not correspond a contraction of its military reach. The one, its strategists had long insisted, was a condition of the other. For the Clinton regime, the disappearance of the Soviet threat was thus no reason for withdrawal of forward us positions in Europe. On the contrary: the weakness of Russia made it possible to extend them. nato, far from being dismantled now that the Cold War was over, could be enlarged to the doorstep of Russia.

To do so would put a safety-catch on any attempt to revive Muscovite aspirations of old, and reassure newly liberated East European states that they were now behind a Western shield. Not only this. The expansion of nato to the East represented an assertion of American hegemony over Europe, at a time when the end of the Soviet Union risked tempting traditional us partners in the region to act more independently than in the past. [126] ‘A final reason for enlargement was the Clinton Administration’s belief that nato needed a new lease of life to remain viable. nato’s viability, in turn, was important because the alliance not only helped maintain America’s position as a European power, it also preserved America’s hegemony in Europe’: Robert Art, America’s Grand Strategy and World Politics, p. 222. Art is the most straightforward and lucidly authoritative theorist of us power-projection today. See ‘Consilium’, pp. 150–5 below. To make the continental point clear, nato was extended to Eastern Europe before the eu got there. At home, nato enlargement enjoyed bipartisan support at Congressional level—Republicans were as ardent for it as Democrats. But at elite level, where grand strategy was debated, it caused the sharpest ex ante split since the Second World War, many hardened Cold Warriors—Nitze, even Clinton’s own Defence Secretary—judging it a dangerous provocation of Russia, liable to weaken its new-found friendship with the West and foster a resentful revanchism. To help Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996, Clinton postponed it for a year. [127] Chollet and Goldgeier, America Between the Wars, pp. 124, 134. But he knew his partner: only token protests were forthcoming. In due course, nato enlargement was then doubled, as ‘out of area’ military operations without even a façade of defence—Balkans, Central Asia, North Africa—expanded the geopolitical projection of the ‘Atlantic’ Alliance yet further.

Meanwhile, the new unipolar order had brought a third innovation. Federal Yugoslavia, communist but not part of the Soviet bloc, disintegrated in the last period of the Bush Administration, its constituent republics breaking away along ethnic lines. In Bosnia, where no group was a majority, the European Community brokered a power-sharing arrangement between Muslims, Serbs and Croats in the spring of 1992, promptly repudiated at us instigation by the first, who declared Bosnian independence, triggering a three-way civil war. When a un force dispatched to protect lives and bring the parties peace failed to stop the killings, the worst committed by Serbs, the Clinton Administration trained and armed a Croat counter-attack in 1995 that cleansed the Krajina of its Serb population and with a nato bombing campaign against Serb forces brought the war to an end, dividing Bosnia into three sub-statelets under a Euro-American proconsul. us actions marked two milestones. It was the first time the Security Council subcontracted a military operation to nato, and the first time an aerial blitz was declared a humanitarian intervention.

Four years later, a far more massive nato assault—36,000 combat missions and 23,000 bombs and missiles—was launched against what was still formally the remnant of Yugoslavia, in the name of stopping Serb genocide of the Albanian population in Kosovo. This was too much for the Yeltsin regime, facing widespread indignation at home, to countenance formally in the Security Council, so un cover was lacking. But informally Moscow played its part by inducing Milošević to surrender without putting up resistance on the ground, which was feared by Clinton. The war on Yugoslavia set three further benchmarks for the exercise of American power. nato, a supposedly defensive alliance, had—newly enlarged—been employed for what was patently an attack on another state. The attack was a first demonstration of the ‘revolution in military affairs’ delivered by electronic advances in precision targeting and bombing from high altitudes: not a single casualty was incurred in combat by the us. Above all, it was legitimated in the name of a new doctrine. The cause of human rights, Clinton and Blair explained, over-rode the principle of national sovereignty.

The final innovation of the Clinton Presidency came in the Middle East. There, the survival of Saddam’s dictatorship was a standing defiance of the us, which had to be brought to an end. When the rout of the Iraqi Army in the Gulf War was not followed, as expected, by the overthrow of the Baath regime from within, Washington pushed the most far-reaching sanctions on record through the Security Council, a blockade that Clinton’s National Security adviser Sandy Berger boasted was ‘unprecedented for its severity in the whole of world history’, banning all trade or financial transfers of any kind with the country, save in medicine and—in dire circumstances—foodstuffs. The levels of infant mortality, malnutrition, and excess mortality that this blockade inflicted on the population of Iraq remain contested, [128] For a critical review of the evidence, see Michael Spagat, ‘Truth and death in Iraq under sanctions’, Significance, September 2010, pp. 116–20. but confronted with an estimate of half a million, Clinton’s Secretary of State declared that if that was the toll, it was worth it. When economic strangulation could not be achieved, Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act into law in 1998, making the political removal of Saddam’s regime explicit us policy, and when stepped-up secret funding of operations to topple it were of no more avail, unloaded wave after wave of high explosives on the country. By the end of 1999, the same year as the war in Yugoslavia, in six thousand Anglo-American sorties some four hundred tons of ordnance had been dropped on Iraq. [129] See Tariq Ali, ‘Our Herods’, nlr 5, Sept–Oct 2000, pp. 5–7. Nothing quite like this had ever happened before. A new weapon had been added to the imperial arsenal: undeclared conventional war.

III

In a departure from the normal pattern, the second Bush campaigned for the White House calling for a less, not more, preceptorial American role in the world at large. In office, the initial priority of his Defense Secretary was a leaner rather than larger military establishment. The bolt from the blue of September 2001 transformed such postures into their opposite, the Republican Administration becoming a byword for aggressive American self-assertion and armed force to impose American will. For the first time since Pearl Harbour, us soil had been violated. Retribution would leave the world in no doubt of the extent of American power. The enemy was terrorism, and war on it would be waged till it was rooted out, everywhere.

This was a nation-wide reaction, from which there was virtually no dissent within the country, and little at first outside it. Apocalyptic commentary abounded on the deadly new epoch into which humanity was entering. The reality, of course, was that the attentats of 9/11 were an unrepeatable historical fluke, capable of catching the American state off-guard only because their agents were so minimal a speck on the radar-screen of its strategic interests. In the larger scheme of things, Al Qaeda was a tiny organization of marginal consequence, magnified only by the wealth at the disposal of its leader. But though the outcome of its plan to attack symbolic buildings in New York and Washington was a matter of chance, its motivation was not. The episode was rooted in the geopolitical region where us policies had long been calculated to maximize popular hostility. In the Middle East, American support for dynastic Arab tyrannies of one stripe or another, so long as they accommodated us interests, was habitual. There was nothing exceptional in this, however—the pattern had historically been much the same in Latin America or South-East Asia. What set the Middle East apart was the American bond with Israel. Everywhere else in the post-war world, the us had taken care never to be too closely identified with European colonial rule, even where it might for a spell have to be accepted as a dike against communism, aware that to be so would compromise its own prospects of control in the battle-grounds of the Cold War. The Free World could harbour dictators; it could not afford colonies. In the Middle East alone, this rule was broken. Israel was not a colony, but something still more incendiary—an expansionist settler state established, not in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, when European colonization was at its height across the world, but in the middle of the twentieth century, when decolonization was in full swing. Not only that: it was a state explicitly founded on religion, the Promised Land for the Chosen People—in a region where a far more populous rival religion, with memories of a much earlier confessional intrusion into the same territory and its successful expulsion, still held virtually untouched sway. A more combustible combination would be difficult to imagine.

American grand strategy, however construed, could have no rational place for an organic—as distinct from occasional—connection with a state offering such a provocation to an environment so important to the us, as the world’s major source of petroleum. [130] See ‘Jottings on the Conjuncture’, nlr 48, Nov–Dec 2007, pp. 15–18. Israeli military prowess could indeed be of use to Washington. Counter-productive when allied to Anglo-French colonialism in 1956, it had inflicted a welcome humiliation on Soviet-leaning Arab nationalism in 1967, helped to deliver Egypt to the United States in 1973, and crippled the plo in driving it from the Lebanon in 1982. But there were limits to this functionality: the idf had to be restrained from occupying Beirut, and told to sit tight during the Gulf War. Israeli fire-power alone, of whose potential political costs in the Arab world all American rulers were aware, offered no basis for the extent of the us commitment to Israel over half a century. Nor were the virtues of Israeli democracy amidst the deserts of despotism, or the frontier spirit uniting the two nations, more than ideological top dressing for the nature of the relationship between Tel Aviv and Washington. That stemmed from the strength of the Jewish community within the American political system, whose power was on display as early as 1947—when Baruch and Frankfurter were to the fore in the bribes and threats needed to lock down a majority at the un for the partition of Palestine—and became decisive in the formation of regional policy after 1967, installing a supervening interest at odds with the calculus of national interest at large, warping the rationality of its normal adjustments of means to ends. [131] See ‘Scurrying towards Bethlehem’, nlr 10, July–Aug 2001, pp. 10–15 ff.

If the American connection with Israel was one factor setting the Middle East apart from any other zone of us power-projection abroad, there was another. Iraq remained unfinished business. The Baath state was not just any regime unsatisfactory to Washington, of which at one time or another there had been—indeed still were—many in the Third World. It was unique in post-war history as the first state whose overthrow was the object of a public law passed by Congress, counter-signed by the White House, and prosecuted by years of unconcealed, if undeclared, conventional hostilities. During the Cold War, no Communist regime had ever been comparably outlawed. For Saddam’s government to survive this legislation and the campaign of destruction it authorized would be a political-military defeat putting in question the credibility of American power. The second Bush had come to office promising a lower us profile at large, but never peace with Baghdad. From the start, his Administration was filled with enthusiasts for the Iraq Liberation Act.

Finally, there was a third feature of the Middle Eastern scene that had no counterpart elsewhere. Over the course of the Cold War, the us had used a wide range of proxies to fight assorted enemies at a remove. French mercenaries, gmd drug lords, Cuban gusanos, Hmong tribesmen, South African regulars, Nicaraguan Contras, Vatican bankers—all in their time acted as vehicles of American will. None, however, received such massive support and to such spectacular effect as the mujahedin in Afghanistan. In the largest operation in its history, the cia funnelled some $3 billion in arms and assistance, and orchestrated another $3 billion from Saudi Arabia, to the guerrillas who eventually drove the Russians out of the country. But beyond anti-communism, in this case unlike any other comparable operation, there was virtually no common ideological denominator between metropolitan principal and local agent. The Afghan resistance was not just tribal—Washington knew how to handle that—but religious, fired by a faith as hostile to the West as to the Soviet Union, and attracting volunteers from all over the Muslim world. To the cultural barrier of Islam, impenetrable to American oversight, was added the political thicket of Pakistan, through which aid had to pass, whose isi enjoyed far more direct control over the different mujahedin groups and their camps in the North-West Frontier than the cia could ever do. The result was to set loose forces that delivered the United States its greatest single triumph in the Cold War, yet of which it had least political understanding or mastery. When out of the post-communist dispute for power in Kabul, the most rigorist of all Islamist groups emerged the Afghan winner, flanked by the most radical of Arab volunteers, the confidence and energy released by a victorious jihad against one set of infidels turned, logically enough, against the other, whose support had been tactically accepted in the battle against the first, without any belief that it was otherwise preferable.

Al Qaeda, formed in Afghanistan, but composed essentially of Arabs, had its eyes fixed on the Middle East rather than Central Asia. The first public manifesto of its leader explained his cause. The fate of Palestine held pride of place. The outrages of Israel in the region, and of its protector the United States, called the devout to action: to the shelling of Beirut should answer that of its perpetrators. Nor was this all. Since the Gulf War against Iraq, American troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia, violating the sanctity of the Holy Places. The Prophet had expressly demanded jihad against any such intrusion. The faithful had triumphed over one super-power in Afghanistan. Their duty was now to expel the other and its offshoot, by carrying the war to the enemy. Behind 9/11 thus lay, in theological garb, a typical anti-imperialist backlash against the power that had long been an alien overlord in the region, from an organization resorting to terror—as nearly always—out of weakness rather than strength, in the absence of any mass basis of popular resistance to the occupier. [132] For a level-headed discussion: Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire, London and New York 2003, pp. 113–5.

The Bush Administration’s counterblow was rapid and sweeping. A combination of high-altitude bombing, small numbers of special forces, and purchase of Tajik warlords brought down the Taliban regime in a few weeks. There were seven American casualties. The us-led occupation acquired un auspices, later transferred to nato, and a pliant regime, headed by a former contractor for the cia, in Kabul. Diplomatically, Operation Enduring Freedom was a complete success, blessed by all major powers and neighbouring states; if Pakistan at gun-point, Russia not only of its own accord, but opening its air-space for Pentagon logistics, with the ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia competing with each other to offer bases to the us. Militarily, Taliban and Al Qaeda commanders might have escaped their pursuers, but high-technology war from the skies had done all that could be asked of it: the rma was irresistible.

The speed and ease of the conquest of Afghanistan made delivery of a quietus to Iraq the obvious next step, premeditated in Washington as soon as 9/11 struck. Two difficulties lay in the way. Iraq was a much more developed society, whose regime possessed a substantial modern army that could not be dispersed with a few irregulars. A ground war, avoided in Yugoslavia, would be necessary to overthrow it. That meant a risk of casualties unpopular with the American public, requiring a casus belli more specific than general loss of us credibility if the Baath regime lingered on. Casting about for what would be of most effect, the Administration hit upon Iraqi possession of—nuclear or biological—weapons of mass destruction, presented as a threat to national security, as the most colourable pretext, though Saddam Hussein’s trampling of human rights and the prospect of bringing democracy to Iraq were prominently invoked alongside it. That there were no more weapons of mass destruction in Iraq than there had been genocide in Kosovo hardly mattered. This was a portfolio of reasons sufficient to create a broad national consensus—Democrats and Republicans, print and electronic media, alike—behind an attack on Iraq. [133] As at every stage of American imperial expansion, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, there was a scattering of eloquent voices of domestic opposition, without echo in the political system. Strikingly, virtually every one of the most powerful critiques of the new course of empire came from writers of a conservative, not a radical, background. This pattern goes back to the Gulf War itself, of which Robert Tucker co-authored with David Hendrickson a firm rejection: the United States had taken on ‘an imperial role without discharging the classic duties of imperial rule’, one in which ‘fear of American casualties accounts for the extraordinarily destructive character of the conflict’, giving ‘military force a position in our statecraft that is excessive and disproportionate’, with ‘the consent and even enthusiasm of the nation’: The Imperial Temptation: The New World Order and America’s Purpose, New York 1992, pp. 15–16, 162, 185, 195. Within a few weeks of the attentats of 11 September 2001, when such a reaction was unheard-of, the great historian Paul Schroeder published a prophetic warning of the likely consequences of a successful lunge into Afghanistan: ‘The Risks of Victory’, The National Interest, Winter 2001–2002, pp. 22–36. The three outstanding bodies of critical analysis of American foreign policy in the new century, each distinctive in its own way, share similar features. Chalmers Johnson, in his day an adviser to the cia, published Blowback (2000), predicting that America would not enjoy impunity for its imperial intrusions around the world, followed by The Sorrows of Empire (2004) and Nemesis (2006), a trilogy packed with pungent detail, delivering an unsparing diagnosis of the contemporary Pax Americana. Andrew Bacevich, once a colonel in the us Army, brought out American Empire in 2002, followed by The New American Militarism (2005), and The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008), in a series of works that recover the tradition of William Appleman Williams—to some extent also Beard—in lucid contemporary form, without being confined to it. Christopher Layne, holder of the Robert Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas a&m, has developed the most trenchant realist critique of the overall arc of American action from the Second World War into and after the Cold War, in the more theoretically conceived The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (2006)—a fundamental work. European publics were more apprehensive, but most of their governments rallied to the cause.

The conquest of Iraq was as lightning as of Afghanistan: Baghdad fell in three weeks, where Kabul had required five. But the Baath regime, more long-standing than the Taliban, had a capillary structure that proved capable of ferocious resistance within days of the occupation of the country, detonating a Sunni maquis compounded by a rising among Shi’a radicals. The danger of a common front of opposition to occupiers was short-lived. Sectarian bombing of Shi’a mosques and processions by Salafi fanatics, and sectarian collaboration with the us by the top clerical authorities in Najaf as a stepping-stone to Shi’a domination, precipitated a civil war within Iraqi society that kept American forces in control, precariously at first, but eventually allowing them to split the Sunni community itself, and bring the insurgency to an end.

The third major ground war of the country since 1945 was, for the us, a relatively painless affair. Though its absolute cost in constant dollars was greater than the war in Korea or Vietnam—hi-tech weaponry was more expensive—as a percentage of gdp it was lower, and its impact on the domestic economy much less. Over seven years, American casualties totalled 4,500—fewer than two months of car accidents in the us. Unpopular at home, after initial euphoria, the war in Iraq never aroused the extent of domestic opposition that met the war in Vietnam, or had the electoral impact of the war in Korea. Flurries of disquiet over torture or massacre by us forces soon passed. As in those earlier conflicts, the cost was borne by the country for whose freedom America ostensibly fought. It is possible that fewer Iraqis were killed by the invasion and occupation of their country than by the sanctions whose work they completed. But the number—at a conservative count, over 160,000—was still proportionately higher than total American casualties in World War Two. [134] For this figure, see the Iraq Body Count, which relies essentially on media-documented fatalities, for March 2013: civilian deaths 120–130,000. To death was added flight—some two million refugees in neighbouring countries—ethnic cleansing, and breakdown of essential services. Ten years later, over 60 per cent of the adult population is jobless, a quarter of families are below the poverty line, and Baghdad has no regular electricity. [135] ‘Iraq Ten Years On’, Economist, 2 March 2013, p. 19.

Militarily and politically, however, us objectives were achieved. There was no winter rout on the Yalu or helicopter scramble from Saigon. The Baath regime was destroyed, and American troops departed in good order, leaving behind a constitution crafted within the largest us embassy in the world, a leader picked on its premises by the us, and security forces totalling 1,200,000—nearly twice the size of Saddam’s army—equipped with us weaponry. What made that legacy possible was the support the American invasion received from the leaderships of the Shi’a and Kurdish communities that made up two-thirds of the population, each with longer histories of hostility to Saddam Hussein than Washington, and aims of replacing his rule. After the occupation was gone, the Iraq they divided between them, each with its own machinery of repression, remains a religious and ethnic mine-field, racked by Sunni anger and traversed in opposite directions by manoeuvres from Turkey and Iran. But it has ceased to be an affront to the dignity of empire. [136] The underlying spirit of the American invasion was captured by Kennan when the pla drove back MacArthur’s troops from the Yalu in December 1950: ‘The Chinese have now committed an affront of the greatest magnitude to the United States. They have done us something we cannot forget for years and the Chinese will have to worry about righting themselves with us not us with them. We owe China nothing but a lesson’: Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. vii, pp. 1345–6. In his final years, Kennan had broken with this outlook and vigorously opposed the attack on Iraq.

Elsewhere too the Bush Administration, distinct in rhetoric, was continuous in substance with its predecessor. Clinton had bonded with Yeltsin, a soft touch for the us. Bush did as well or better with Putin, a hard case, who yet granted Russian permission for American military overflights to Afghanistan, and put up with the extension of nato to the Baltic states. China was no less supportive of the descent on Kabul, both powers fearing Islamic militancy within their own borders. The eu was cajoled into opening negotiations with Turkey for entry into the Union. If further deregulation of world trade with the Doha Round came to grief on India’s refusal to expose its peasants to subsidized Euro-American grain exports, of much greater strategic significance was the lifting by Bush of the us embargo on nuclear technology to India, paving the way for closer relations with Delhi. Liberals wringing their hands over the reputational damage to America done by Iraq need not have worried. Among the powers that counted, the invasion was a Panama in the sands, leaving no discernible trace.

8. the incumbent

Democratic take-over of the White House in 2009 brought little alteration in American imperial policy. Continuity was signalled from the start by the retention or promotion of key personnel in the Republican war on terror: Gates, Brennan, Petraeus, McChrystal. Before entering the Senate, Obama had opposed the war in Iraq; in the Senate, he voted $360 billion for it. Campaigning for the Presidency, he criticized the war in the name of another one. Not Iraq, but Afghanistan was where us fire-power should be concentrated. Within a year of taking office, us troops had been doubled to 100,000 and Special Forces operations increased six-fold, in a bid to repeat the military success in Iraq, where Obama had merely to stick to his predecessor’s schedule for a subsequent withdrawal. But Afghanistan was not Iraq, and no such laurels were in reach. The country was not only half as large again in size, but much of it mountainous, ideal guerrilla terrain. It abutted onto a still larger neighbour, forced to permit American operations across its soil, but more than willing to provide sub rosa cover and aid to resistance against the occupying forces across the border. Last but not least, American support in the country was confined to minority groups—Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek—while the Afghan resistance was based on the Pathan plurality, extending deep into the North-West Frontier. Added to all these obstacles was the impact of the war in Iraq itself. In the Hindu Kush it mattered, as in Brussels, Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, it did not. The Iraqi resistance, divided and self-destructive, had been crushed. But it had taken five years and a quarter of a million troops to quell it, and by giving the Taliban breathing-space to become fighters for something closer to a national war of liberation, allowed the Afghan guerrilla to regroup and strike back with increasing effect at the occupation.

Desperate to break this resistance, the Democratic Administration escalated the war in Pakistan, where its predecessor had already been launching covert attacks with the latest missile-delivery system. The rma had flourished since Kosovo, now producing unmanned