The
State of the American Empire – How the USA Shapes the World
By Jim Miles
28 September, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The State of the American
Empire – How the USA Shapes the World. Stephen Burman. University
of California Press, Myriad Editions. 2007.
On first perusal my perceptions
told me this was my kind of book: lots of graphs, charts, and maps for
my visual learning strengths, more akin to the National Geographic where
I can glean most of the significant information from the photos and
captions as much as I can from the text. But then as I delved into the
text that introduces and accompanies the visuals, I realized that this
was a bit more than just an atlas – it also made political statements
through choice of words and topics.
Unfortunately, that position
wavered in front of me, at one time apparently saying this, at another
time apparently saying that. The State of the American Empire has a
slippery and elusive perspective, but one that finally settles down
into a relatively clear theme, perhaps the slippery metaphor being appropriate
for American ‘idealism’ as it stands today. Ultimately,
the underlying theme to the book, even though it brings forth some very
strong criticisms of American actions, is that we, the royal ‘we’,
the global ‘we’, need the empire for stability that will
bring about the security we need for our energy demands, for our currency
markets, for our trade relations.
In the fifth chapter, “Military,”
another related theme, much more clearly stated, not nearly as slippery,
more like a grasping hawk, much more clearly defined, arises, giving
the truth to the type of empire the world is dealing with, and the type
of security and stability America is quite literally gunning for. Burman
states, “…the USA has its own agenda and national interests
to pursue, and it is its capacity to mobilize its armed forces, rather
than economic strength, that is the bedrock of its imperial power.”
Initially arguing for security through the idealistic goodness of empire
and its economic idealism of free trade and global mobility of capital
and labour and resources – mainly oil - that has been lost during
the Bush ‘regime’ (I’ll come back to that word), the
concept of stability falls upon the stability of a military ‘regime’
not unlike that promoted by the likes of Friedman, Ferguson, Ledeen
and other hot war promoters: we are morally superior, might is right,
and we are going to use it to protect our interests.
Domestically, Burman also
recognizes the nature of this militaristic view, as the “…military
expenditures make it difficult to cut spending, and this is one of the
drivers behind the US creation and exaggeration of threats to its security.”
It is not further defined as such, but following the artificially inflated
fear of communism to the artificially inflated fear of ‘terror’,
the US military keeps corporate as well as domestic America rolling
along financially.
Returning to the “Military
Abroad”, Burman says that all the overseas deployments “symbolize
the power that defines American imperialism,” a rather clear and
bold statement of the intent and purpose of the military, acknowledged
to include “threats…to oil supplies from the Middle East
or the Caspian region.” It is oil where the atlas begins its tour.
Topics on nuclear energy,
climate change, energy security, oil consumption, dependency, and policy
are covered in the first chapter. It is here that the repetitive idea
of the need for security and stability are introduced, and Burman can
only see a dominant US hegemony as being capable of providing world
security and stability. A distinction is made between a benign hegemony
of leadership and the more malignant kind of imperialism that has been
created under the Bush ‘regime’, the first of many arguable
points. It is also here that certain biases are introduced.
One of those biases is Burman’s
curious view that the US has only been empirically aggressive under
Bush, even with maps of American interventions abroad showing interventions
“to prevent the spread of communism.” This is one of those
slippery sections. Did he not say that the US created its own threat
to security, in this case the exaggerated fear of communism that dominated
US foreign policy for decades? A sidebar on the intervention map indicates
that in Indonesia US covert support “…led to a purge of
hundreds of thousand of communists.” Most accurate accounts indicate
that anyone in opposition to the government was labelled communist and
executed, regardless of their actual political persuasion.
Another bias is the word
regime itself. I have used it to label the Bush government a regime,
as it fits with Burman’s use of it in relation to other countries.
Iran had a “nationalist regime”, Chile had a “socialist
regime”, Venezuela has a “left wing regime” –
all three of them democratically elected governments, the first two
terminated by American CIA intervention, and the latter still waiting
its ultimate intervention after an initial failure. The commonality
was that they simply wanted to use their own resources for their own
people and not let foreign nationals control the native wealth. The
US cannot accept a democratically successful socialist government to
exist within its sphere, as it works contrary to its own corporate interests.
The word itself, according to the dictionary, is quite neutral, simply
meaning “method or system of government; prevailing system of
things.” Okay, we all live with regimes. Interesting how it takes
on a hostile tenor when used in opposition to US interests.
There are other small biases
that enter the text, a small but important one being the word “hijack”,
as in “The trade dispute…over bananas reveals how wealthy
corporations can hijack US foreign policy.” To the contrary, US
foreign policy has mainly been about supporting corporate endeavours
in other countries (witness the statements on the military, above),
the ‘banana’ republics of Central America being prime examples,
with intertwined interests going back to the late 1800s and the establishment
of the Boston based United Fruit Company. There is nothing to “hijack”
in foreign policy – it has always been thus, corporations working
within US foreign policy, as currently evident with Bechtel, Raytheon,
Halliburton, Exxon, Boeing et al and the war on terror now centred in
the Middle East.
Another curiosity is the
description of the US as an “honest broker” in areas of
conflict such as the Middle East, and in Asia.” This is a futuristic
view, but it is preceded by the word “resume”. There is
nothing to resume, the US has never been an honest broker but Burman
sees it doing this after “making tactical withdrawals from hotspots
while continuing to manipulate the balance of power in regions of potential
conflict.” I’m not sure how to respond to this, it just
seems so ludicrous. Later on Burman indicates “The USA aspires
to play the role of honest broker in conflict resolution,” in
the Middle East, adding another layer of ridiculousness to the ludicrous.
The two simply do not go together, not historically, nor will it in
the future, not with the label USA attached.
Two of these ‘hotspots’
are Iraq and Iran but that they are labelled as such is disingenuous.
Burman’s definition of a ‘hotspot’ is, above all,
being an oil rich area. Further, “they are unstable due to internal
unrest, anti-Americanism, or threatened by terrorist disruption.”
As a result of all this, “the need to secure supplies in a potentially
hostile world will continue to drive US foreign policy.” Oh goody,
more invasions, more covert actions against democratic governments,
more false flag interventions. There is no definition within the idea
of hotspots that perhaps the US is a major part of the problem itself,
having destroyed democratic governments, or having invaded on illegal
and false pretences, or that ongoing occupation is what drives resistance
and the resort to terrorism (which it really is not, if it is a local
insurgency trying to drive an occupying force out – wholly sustainable
under the UN Charter and international law).
Democracy and free markets
receive a boost within the text as Burman believes that free markets
lead to democracy in spite of the evidence provided by many other academics
to the contrary (Stiglitz, Chua, Chomsky, Johnson) that show his belief
in “supporting democracy through trade” to be a lie. He
then works himself into a contradiction, as do all freemarketeers, by
saying that “an unregulated world market poses as serious a threat”
as other antagonisms, yet a ‘regulated free’ market is quite
simply a contradiction. It is either free or it is regulated. Free marketeers
do not truly want ‘free’ markets, they want ‘regulated’
markets that serve their purposes, as corporations and “other
countries collude with American imperialism…as providers of stability
and security.” Collude? Fraudulent secret understanding as per
the dictionary? Burman keeps making these slippery twists and thus loses
himself in his own arguments.
Many other slippery interpretations
enter Burman’s text. His general factual information is good,
but his interpretation and analysis of it is weak, with a creeping (perhaps
slithering would work better with slippery) bias that provides a pro-empirical
slant. The State of the American Empire is still something I would recommend,
strangely enough, as an addition to an academic library, not for the
‘atlas’ quality that it could have been, but for the curious
mixture of strong anti-empire criticisms superficially imposed over
an overall positive view of the benefits of a capitalist free market
system supported primarily not by the goodwill of the markets, but by
the world’s dominant military.
Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist
of opinion pieces and book reviews to Palestine Chronicles. His interest
in this topic stems originally from an environmental perspective, which
encompasses the militarization and economic subjugation of the global
community and its commodification by corporate governance and by the
American government.
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