[News] Donald Trump and the Coming Fall of American Empire

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://theintercept.com/2017/07/22/donald-trump-and-the-coming-fall-of-american-empire/ 



  Donald Trump and the Coming Fall of American Empire

Jeremy Scahill - July 22 2017
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_Even as President Donald_ Trump faces ever-intensifying investigations 
into the alleged connections between his top aides and family members 
and powerful Russian figures, he serves as commander in chief over a 
U.S. military that is killing an astonishing and growing number of 
civilians. Under Trump, the U.S. is re-escalating its war in 
Afghanistan, expanding its operations in Iraq and Syria, conducting 
covert raids in Somalia and Yemen, and openly facilitating the Saudi’s 
genocidal military destruction of Yemen.

Meanwhile, China has quietly and rapidly expanded its influence without 
deploying its military on foreign soil.

A new book by the famed historian Alfred McCoy predicts that China is 
set to surpass the influence of the U.S. globally, both militarily and 
economically, by the year 2030. At that point, McCoy asserts the United 
States empire as we know it will be no more. He sees the Trump 
presidency as one of the clearest byproducts of the erosion of U.S. 
global dominance, but not its root cause. At the same time, he also 
believes Trump may accelerate the empire’s decline.

McCoy argues that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the beginning of the 
end. McCoy is not some chicken little. He is a serious academic. And he 
has guts.

During the Vietnam War, McCoy was ambushed by CIA-backed paramilitaries 
as he investigated the swelling heroin trade. The CIA tried to stop the 
publication of his now classic book, “The Politics of Heroin.” His phone 
was tapped, he was audited by the IRS, and he was investigated and spied 
on by the FBI. McCoy also wrote one of the earliest and most prescient 
books on the post-9/11 CIA torture program and he is one of the world’s 
foremost experts on U.S. covert action. His new book, which will be 
released in September, is called “In the Shadows of the American 
Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power 
<https://www.amazon.com/Shadows-American-Century-Decline-Global/dp/1608467732>.”

“The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World 
War II, may already be tattered and fading by 2025 and, except for the 
finger pointing, could be over by 2030,” McCoy writes. Imagining the 
real-life impact on the U.S. economy, McCoy offers a dark prediction:

    For the majority of Americans, the 2020s will likely be remembered
    as a demoralizing decade of rising prices, stagnant wages, and
    fading international competitiveness. After years of swelling
    deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2030 the U.S.
    dollar eventually loses its special status as the world’s dominant
    reserve currency.

    Suddenly, there are punitive price increases for American imports
    ranging from clothing to computers. And the costs for all overseas
    activity surges as well, making travel for both tourists and troops
    prohibitive. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling
    now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to
    slash its bloated military budget. Under pressure at home and
    abroad, its forces begin to pull back from hundreds of overseas
    bases to a continental perimeter. Such a desperate move, however,
    comes too late.

    Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying its bills, China,
    India, Iran, Russia, and other powers provocatively challenge U.S.
    dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace.

Alfred McCoy is the Harrington professor of history at the University of 
Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the now-classic book “The 
Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade 
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/1556524838/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>.” 
His new book, out in September, is “In the Shadows of the American 
Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power 
<https://www.amazon.com/Shadows-American-Century-Decline-Global/dp/1608467732>.”

This week, I interviewed McCoy for the Intercepted podcast 
<https://theintercept.com/2017/07/19/intercepted-podcast-veni-vidi-tweeti/>. 
We broadcast an excerpt of the interview on the podcast. Below is an 
edited and slightly condensed version of the full interview. In this 
wide-ranging interview, we discuss Trump and Russia, the history of CIA 
interference in elections around the world, the Iran-Contra scandal, the 
CIA and the crack-cocaine epidemic, U.S. proxy wars, narcotrafficking in 
Afghanistan, and much more.

*Jeremy Scahill*: One of the things that you’re best known for is a book 
that continues to this day to be relevant when studying covert U.S. 
operations around the world, as well as the international narcotics 
trafficking industry, and of course you tie both of those together. 
We’re going to get into all of that in a moment but I wanted to begin by 
asking you to assess this current moment that we’re in with Donald 
Trump. How do you see him in a historical context, and what does his 
presidency represent about the American empire?

*Alfred McCoy*: What I think right now is that, through some kind of 
malign design, Donald Trump has divined, has figured out what are the 
essential pillars of U.S. global power that have sustained Washington’s 
hegemony for the past 70 years and he seems to be setting out to 
demolish each one of those pillars one by one. He’s weakened the NATO 
alliance; he’s weakened our alliances with Asian allies along the 
Pacific littoral. He’s proposing to cut back on the scientific research 
which has given the United States — its military industrial complex — a 
cutting edge, a leading edge in critical new weapons systems since the 
early years of the Cold War. And he’s withdrawing the United States, 
almost willfully, from its international leadership, most spectacularly 
with the Paris Climate Accord but also very importantly with the 
Trans-Pacific Partnership.

And he seems to be setting out to systematically demolish U.S. global 
hegemony. Now, it’s important to realize that the United States is no 
longer the pre-eminent global power we were, let’s say at the end of 
Eisenhower’s presidency, back in 1960. Our share of the global economy 
has declined substantially. We’re about to be eclipsed by 2030, by 
China, and become the world’s number two economic power. China’s making 
some breakthroughs in military technology. The world system is spreading 
its wealth and there are a number of second tier powers, the rise of the 
European Union, et cetera. It’s a more complex world, so the United 
States can no longer dictate to the world, or at least much of the 
world, like we could back in the 1950s.

Having said that, the presidency is a weaker office internationally than 
it used to be. Nonetheless, there are presidents, and I say Barack Obama 
was one of them, George H.W. Bush was another, these presidents through 
skillful diplomacy, their knowledge of the international system, their 
geopolitical skills, they could maximize U.S. influence on the world 
stage. They could use U.S. military power strategically, deftly, they 
could lead international coalitions, they could set the international 
agenda. Trump is turning his back on all of that and I think he’s 
accelerating perhaps markedly, even precipitously, the U.S. decline.

*JS*: Since Trump became president, everyone is sort of wrapped up in 
the palace intrigue, and what did Trump know about Russia and when did 
he know it, and did he know about Don Jr.’s meeting with this lawyer who 
is being described as “Kremlin-connected?” And I think all of that is a 
very important story because it could bring down his presidency, but at 
the same time my sense is that the CIA and the darkest elements of the 
U.S. military are actually in a pretty flexible position right now 
because Trump is so hands-off and, because as you say he’s not an 
effective manager of empire. What are your thoughts on that?

*AM*: That’s correct. Much of the military establishment and its links 
with the intelligence community is in place. Let’s say that some of the 
new initiatives — cyberwarfare — well the Trump administration 
understands the importance of that and indeed he has advisors that do, 
so the continued evolution of that, the development, that will continue, 
space warfare is in a long-term trajectory. Weapons systems take as long 
as 10 years to go from design, prototype, testing, and either rejection 
or acceptance. So that transcends any administration, even a two-term 
administration. So there’s a long-term trajectory.

President Eisenhower, that famous phrase that he warned us about in his 
last address, the military industrial complex — he built a complex in 
which he integrated scientific research, basic research in the 
universities and private corporations, and then dozens of defense 
contractors who have more or less permanent contracts to maintain their 
research and production establishment — he integrated that with the U.S. 
military and that will survive any American president.

Unfortunately what Trump doesn’t seem to understand is that there’s a 
close relationship between basic research, like research in artificial 
intelligence, and your capacity to come up with the next new thing that 
will give the United States a leading edge in military technology. And 
that’s what he doesn’t understand, that’s the one way he’s damaging the 
whole complex. But otherwise, you’re right, it’s on a longer-term 
trajectory about 10, 10-year cycles of research, procurement, and 
deployment of new weapon systems and that transcends any single 
administration.

*JS*: We’ve seen this kind of convergence of the agendas of some 
neoconservatives who formed part of the core of the “Never Trump” 
movement of Republicans and then the liberal elites that host shows on 
MSNBC or are identified as “Democratic strategists.” And this line that 
we’ve seen repeated over and over is that, what they deride as people 
calling the “deep state” — in other words, the elements within the CIA 
in the military — that they’re actually secretly protecting the country 
from Trump. Given your scholarship on what people loosely call the deep 
state right now, what do you make of those claims that the CIA and 
certain elements within the Pentagon are actually the protectors of the 
Democratic republic?

*AM*: A complex argument. One: the rapid growth of that state documented 
by the Washington Post, in a series about eight years ago, 2010, what 
they called the fourth branch of the U.S. government. That under the 
terms of the global war on terror, a massive infusion of nearly a 
trillion dollars into the Homeland Security. And all of the 17 agencies 
in the so-called intelligence community plus the considerable expansion 
of the Joint Special Operations Command, which is the military’s 
permanent integration with that security apparatus, that secret security 
apparatus, all of this has built a fourth branch of the U.S. government.

And I think that, just as Congress has proved independent from the Trump 
administration to a certain extent, and we’ll see about the Supreme 
Court, those are the classic three branches of executive, legislature, 
and judiciary — now we have this fourth branch. And, what you’re 
proposing is we need to take this very seriously when we look at the 
array of power in Washington, D.C. And I agree, we need to. And like all 
of the other branches it will coordinate with the executive because the 
executive has a great deal of power, of funding, you can set priorities, 
but it has a 10-year cycle — ultimately a much longer-term cycle of 
preparation and responsibility.

A president is in office for eight or maybe four years. A military 
career, if successful, an intelligence career, is 30 years. So those 
professionals, and the agencies they represent, have a much longer-term 
viewpoint. You can see this, for example, in the periodic reports of the 
National Intelligence Council, that every four years when there’s a new 
administration coming in, they’re the one agency of the U.S. government 
that looks ahead 20 years. Not just four or eight or 10. But they 
actually look ahead 20 years and they try and see the shape of the world 
and then, set, through the intelligence community and through the 
national security establishment, priorities for coping with this fast 
changing world.

So at the apex of the intelligence community, there is this formal 
procedure for establishing a long range, or medium range, 20-year 
perspective. So, yes, they look longer, they have their own policies, 
they have their contracts, their programs that are in many ways 
autonomous from the executive, and increasingly so. And depending on 
your point of view and how it plays out, that’s either a strength of the 
American system in the short term, when you have an executive that some 
people don’t like, like Donald Trump, over the longer term it could be 
seen as a threat to democracy, creating a bureaucratic apparatus that’s 
autonomous, even independent from both the executive and the legislative 
branch. So, it’s an open question but a good question.


      CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade

*JS:* You’ve written this excellent book that will come out from 
Haymarket books in September called “In the Shadows of the American 
Century: The Rise and the Decline of U.S. Global Power.” But I want to 
ask you about a much earlier book that you wrote, “The Politics of 
Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.” And that details your 
investigation — and it really was what introduced you to this world of 
covert CIA operations, client states, mercenaries, local proxies, and 
you also found yourself in conflict with very powerful individuals in 
the CIA and the national security state because of what you were 
researching. Talk about that book and the process that led to writing it 
and how it was eventually published.

*AM*: Sure. Now, almost 50 years ago, looking back it was an 
extraordinary experience. In the space of 18 months to two years, I 
acquired an amazing education. Up to that point I was a graduate student 
looking at the history of colonialism in Southeast Asia, writing 
articles that had lots of footnotes. I was a library rat.

And in 1970 and ’71, there were rumors that started coming back from 
Vietnam, particularly 1971, that heroin was spreading rapidly in the 
ranks of the U.S. forces fighting in South Vietnam. And in later 
research, done by the White House, [it was] determined that in 1971, 34 
percent, one-third of all the American combat troops fighting in South 
Vietnam were heavy heroin users. There were, if that statistic is 
accurate, more addicts in the ranks of the U.S. Army in South Vietnam 
than there were in the United States.

And so what I did was I set out to investigate: Where was the opium 
coming from? Where was the heroin coming from? Who was trafficking it? 
How is it getting to the troops in their barracks and bunkers across the 
length and breadth of South Vietnam? Nobody was asking this question. 
Everyone was reporting on the high level of abuse, but nobody was 
figuring out where and who.

So I started interviewing. I went to Paris. I interviewed the head of 
the French equivalent of the CIA in Indochina, who was then head of a 
major French helicopter manufacturing company, and he explained to me 
how during the French Indochina war from 1946 to 1954, they were short 
of money for covert operations, so the hill tribes in Laos produced the 
opium, the aircraft picked it up, they turned it over to the 
netherworld, the gangsters that controlled Saigon and secured it for the 
French and that paid for their covert operations. And I said, “What 
about now?” And he said, “Well I don’t think the pattern’s changed. I 
think it’s still there. You should go and look.”

So I did. I went to Saigon. I got some top sources in the Vietnamese 
military. I went to Laos. I hiked into the mountains. I was ambushed by 
CIA mercenaries and what I discovered was that the CIA’s contract 
airline, Air America, was flying into the villages of the Hmong people 
in Northern Laos, whose main cash crop was opium and they were picking 
up the opium and flying it out of the hills and there were heroin labs — 
one of the heroin labs, the biggest heroin lab in the world, was run by 
the commander-in-chief of the Royal Laotian Army, a man whose military 
budget came entirely from the United States. And they were transforming, 
in those labs, the opium into heroin. It was being smuggled into South 
Vietnam by three cliques controlled by the president, the vice 
president, and the premier of South Vietnam, and their military allies 
and distributed to U.S. forces in South Vietnam.

And the CIA wasn’t directly involved, but they turned a blind eye to the 
role of their allies’ involvement in the traffic. And so this heroin 
epidemic swept the U.S. Army in Vietnam. The Defense Department invented 
mass urine analysis testing, so when those troops left they were tested 
and given treatment. And what I discovered was the complexities, the 
complicity, of the CIA in this traffic and that was a pattern that was 
repeated in Central America when the Contras became involved in the 
traffic. The CIA looked the other way as their aircraft and their allies 
were smuggling cocaine from Colombia through Central America to the 
United States. Same thing in the 1980s, during the secret war in 
Afghanistan, the Mujahideen turned to opium. The opium production in 
Afghanistan during that secret war increased from about 100 tons of 
opium per annum to 2000 tons, a massive increase. Afghanistan went from 
supplying zero percent of U.S. heroin supply — soared to 65 percent of 
the illicit heroin supply for the United States came out of Afghanistan. 
The CIA sent arms across the border through caravans to the Mujahideen 
fighters and those same caravans came out carrying opium. The CIA 
prevented the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, from 
investigating. Again, complicity in the traffic.

So a clear pattern. The other thing was when I began to do that 
investigation and write up the book, I faced enormous pressures. My 
phone was tapped by the FBI, the IRS investigated, I had an audit as a 
poverty-stricken graduate student. The Department of Education 
investigated my graduate fellowship. Friends of mine who had been 
serving in military intelligence were recruited to spy on me. In other 
words, what I found was the CIA penetrated every aspect of my life. The 
head of CIA covert operations, a very famous operative named Cord Meyer 
Jr., visited the offices of Harper and Row, my publisher, and tried to 
persuade the publisher to suppress the book, hold the contract, just 
don’t release the book, claiming that it was a threat to national security.

So what I discovered was not only CIA complicity, complex compromise 
relationships with covert allies far away in remote places like 
Southeast Asia, but also the incredible depth of the penetration of the 
CIA within U.S. society under the conditions of the Cold War. I found my 
phone, my fellowship, my friends, my publisher, every aspect of my life 
was manipulated by the CIA. It was a fascinating discovery.

*JS*: And you write in your forthcoming book, “In the Shadows of the 
American Century,” “I had crafted a historical method that would prove 
over the next 40 years of my career surprisingly useful in analyzing a 
diverse array of foreign policy controversies, CIA alliances with drug 
lords, the agency’s propagation of psychological torture, and our 
spreading state surveillance.” Part of the reason it seems that they 
were concerned about what you were investigating in Vietnam, Laos, and 
elsewhere was that you were tapping into something that was an emerging 
nexus that the CIA would rely on for decades to come.

*AM*: Indeed. All of those areas. The method I came up with was very 
simple. Start far back in the past, as far back as you can go, when the 
— let’s say the research on torture, although somewhat secret is not 
controversial because it hasn’t been applied. Go back to the U.S. 
colonial policy in the Philippines when we started surveillance circa 
1898 to pacify the Philippines, and then track it forward step by step 
all the way to the present, keeping in mind the patterns, the structure 
of the operation. And then when you get to the present where it becomes 
secret, highly classified, and very controversial, you understand the 
structure, so you know where to look, what assumptions are likely to be 
sound, what hypotheses might work, how you can conduct your analysis and 
that can lead you to an insight.

For example, let’s take the case of torture, OK? I work on the 
Philippines as my main area in Southeast Asia that I study, and I was 
very interested in the overthrow of the Marcos regime. I did some 
research that contributed to that overthrow. In the aftermath of the 
overthrow of the Marcos regime, there was this coterie of military 
colonels that had plotted an abortive coup, that had sparked a so-called 
People Power Revolution that put a million Filipinos on the streets of 
Manila calling for Marcos’ downfall, forcing Washington to provide him 
with aircraft that flew him out to exile in Hawaii and brought 
democracy. So I was very interested in who these colonels were.

And what I found when I investigated them is that they weren’t line 
officers, say combat officers, they weren’t even intelligence officers. 
They were internal security officers who’ve been personally involved in 
torture. And what I begin to realize is that torture was a transactional 
experience, that these officers who’ve been trained by the CIA on how to 
interrogate and use torture, that, as they broke down their victims, 
they empowered themselves and inspired themselves to this coup to 
overthrow Marcos.

Well, that also introduced me to the idea that the CIA was training 
torturers around the globe. And I figured this out in the 1980s, before 
it was common knowledge. There was some research in the ’70s, people 
working on this, but we didn’t have the full picture. And what I began 
to figure out was also the nature of the methods that these colonels 
were using. Now, look, these are physical guys that were brutally, 
physically hazed at their military academy, as often happens in such 
organizations. And so instead of beating physically their victims, they 
use something counterintuitive. They didn’t touch their victims. They 
used psychological techniques. And so in 2004, when CBS television 
published those photographs from Abu Ghraib prison, and nobody knew what 
was going on. There was that famous photograph of the Iraqi detainee 
standing on a box with his arms outstretched with phony electrical wires 
attached to him, he’d been told that if he lowered his arms, he’d be 
shocked, and he had a bag on his head.

And I looked at that photo and I said, “Those are not bad apples. That 
is CIA doctrinal techniques. The bag is for sensory deprivation, the 
arms are for self-inflicted pain, those are the two fundamental 
techniques of CIA psychological torture.” I wrote a book, “A Question of 
Torture,” that made that argument. I participated in a documentary that 
won an Oscar, “Taxi to the Dark Side,” that interviewed me and also made 
that argument, and it would not be for another 10 years until 2014, when 
the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee spent $40 million and reviewed 
6 million CIA documents and came to a rather similar conclusions. So the 
method’s useful.


      U.S. Interference in Elections

*JS:* I want to ask you how we ended up with the national security state 
that we have today? What I mean is, the NSA with its vast powers, which 
of course you document in the book. The CIA employing tactics under what 
you’ve called “covert netherworld.” There is this sense, under someone 
like Barack Obama, that we’re not going to send massive troop 
deployments around the world, as much as we are going to depend on 
drones, discreet covert operations, escalated use of Special Operations 
Forces and CIA paramilitaries. But, talk about the post World War II 
growth of what now has come to be known as the national security state?

*AM*: Sure. I think the national security state is the instrument the 
United States used to build and exercise its global hegemony. Looking at 
the comparative history of empires in the modern age going back 500 
years, the thing that distinguishes the U.S. empire from almost any 
other, is the reliance upon covert methods and it’s a result of a 
historical moment.

The U.S. empire coincided with the decolonization, the dissolution of 
half a dozen European empires that produced 100 new nations, more than 
half the independent nations on the planet today. And so U.S. hegemony 
was being exercised, not over colonies, whose sovereignty was 
compromised, in fact had been transferred to the imperial power, but 
over independent nation states, who had sovereignty. So you had an 
empire under conditions that denied empire. So how do you exercise 
hegemony in a non-hegemonic world? You have to do it covertly.

And in 1947, President Harry Truman, right after World War II, and 
Congress passed the National Security Act that laid down the 
bureaucratic apparatus for the U.S. national security state. That 
National Security Act created the Defense Department, the U.S. Air 
Force, the CIA, and the National Security Council — the key instruments 
of the U.S. exercise of global power. And then when the next 
administration came in, under President Dwight Eisenhower, what he did 
is he realized that there were nations that were becoming independent 
across the world and that he had to be intervening in these independent 
nations and so the only way he could do it was through plausible 
deniability, you had to intervene in a way that could not be seen. You 
had to do it covertly. And so Eisenhower turned to the CIA, created by 
Harry Truman, and he transformed it from an organization that originally 
tried to penetrate the Iron Curtain, to send agents and operatives 
inside the Iron Curtain. It was a complete disaster. The operatives were 
captured, they were used to uncover the networks of opposition inside 
the Soviet Union, it was absolutely counterproductive. Eisenhower turned 
the CIA away from that misbegotten mission of penetrating the Iron 
Curtain and instead assigned them the mission of penetrating and 
controlling the three-quarters of the globe that was on the U.S. side of 
the Iron Curtain, the free world.

And Eisenhower relied upon the CIA, and then the National Security 
Agency, to monitor signals. And we began to exercise our global 
hegemony, covertly, through the CIA and allied intelligence agencies. 
And that’s been a distinctive aspect of U.S. hegemony since the dawn of 
American global power in 1945. And that continues today, ever deepening, 
layer upon layer, through those processes you described. The drones, the 
surveillance, the cyberwarfare — all of that is covert.

*JS*: It’s interesting because there’s a lot of talk now about foreign 
interference in the U.S. election with — exclusively the attention is 
being focused on: did Russia interfere in our election? And if so, were 
they successful in promoting Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton? And in 
your book, you cite this compilation from Carnegie Mellon University 
that says between 1946 and 2000, rival superpowers the United States and 
the Soviet Union, then Russia, intervened in 117 elections or 11 percent 
of all the competitive national level contests held worldwide via 
campaign cash and media disinformation. And then you write, 
“Significantly, the United States was responsible for 81 of those 
attempts, 70 percent of the total.”

This is not new, the idea that nations interfere in in the elections of 
others. Walk us through some of the greatest hits of the CIA and other 
intelligence agencies in election interference, since the 1940s.

*AM*: Sure — first of all, that was one of the central instruments of 
the U.S. exercise of global power covertly. We were promoting democracy 
worldwide, we stood very strongly for democracy over authoritarianism. 
On the other hand, we were exercising U.S. hegemony, which meant that 
somehow for those open free democratic contests to produce a leader who 
was our guy. And indeed, one of the key aspects of U.S. global power, as 
exercised by Eisenhower through, covertly, was the change. Look, under 
the colonial empires, Britain, France, Belgium all the rest, they had 
district officers and they worked with chiefs, maharajahs, emirs, local 
officials in colonial districts around the globe. And they controlled 
who was going to be the new emir, who was going to be the new sultan, 
who was going to be the new maharajah.

And then, when all of those nations decolonized and became independent, 
the fulcrum for the exercise of power shifted from the colonial district 
to the presidential palace. And so the United States paid a lot of 
attention in controlling who were the leaders in those presidential 
palaces. If you look at the 240,000 WikiLeaks cables from around the 
world that were leaked in 2011, you’ll find that much of what they’re 
concerned about is, who is in those presidential palaces around the 
country? So the U.S. did it through coups and, during the period of the 
1950s to the 1970s, about a quarter of the sovereign states in the world 
changed government by coups, and they also did it by electoral manipulation.

One of the most famous ones, the one that actually established the 
capacity of the CIA to do that, was the 1948 elections in Italy when it 
looked like the communist and socialist parties were slated for 
capturing a majority of the seats in parliament, and then forming a 
government. And you could have on our side of the Iron Curtain, in a 
very important world power, Italy, a legally elected, democratic elected 
communist government. And so the CIA spent, bargain basement, 
$1 million. Imagine: Buying Italy for a million dollars. Seems like a 
bargain.

They spent just a million dollars in very skillful, electoral 
manipulation, and they produced the electoral results of the Christian 
Democrats, a centrist government. And, throughout the Cold War, the U.S. 
deftly intervened in Italy at multiple levels overtly in bilateral aid 
and diplomacy, covertly, and electoral manipulation and something much 
deeper, Operation Gladio, where they had, if you will, an underground 
apparatus to seize power in Italy in the case of a communist takeover, 
by invasion. And the CIA would intervene, they pump money into the 
Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, they played electoral politics in the 
Philippines. They intervened in Korea politics, in South Korean 
politics, all around the globe. Any time that there was a serious 
electoral contest in which the outcome was critical to us, geopolitical 
interests, the U.S. was intervening.

Now, the difference between that and what we’ve seen with the 2016 
elections in the United States, if you’re the global hegemon, you are 
manipulating, influencing other people’s elections. If you’re a global 
power like the United States that stands for democracy, that’s the way 
we exercise that power. We did it sometimes crudely, sometimes deftly, 
but we didn’t invade countries, we didn’t bomb et cetera. We did it that 
way. And when we were manipulating other people’s elections, we’re the 
global power. And when we’re being manipulated, when other powers are 
penetrating our society and manipulating our elections, that’s a sign 
that we’re a declining power. And that’s very serious.

In order to maintain our position internationally, not only do we have 
to exercise our power skillfully, covertly through the operations we’ve 
been describing, surveillance and the rest, and overtly through 
diplomacy and international leadership, treaties and trade and all that, 
OK? But we also have to make sure that our electoral process is 
impenetrable, is secure, that other powers cannot manipulate us because 
they’re going to try.


      Reagan, Iran-Contra, the CIA, and Crack Cocaine

*JS: *I often find myself, when I’m watching the news, or in some cases 
even reading very serious powerful newspapers like the New York Times or 
the Washington Post, as they cover Donald Trump and this issue of 
Russia, it seems as though we are totally detached from history. And in 
reading your book I was reminded of the rise of Mobutu to power in 
Kinshasa, and also you went into great depth about the CIA crack cocaine 
story that ultimately was broken wide open by Gary Webb in the San Jose 
Mercury News, and then attacked and major news organizations trying to 
discredit him. Walk us through the Contra War and the connection to the 
selling of embargoed weapons to Iran and the fact that you had eleven 
senior officials in Ronald Reagan’s administration actually convicted of 
selling Iran embargoed arms.

I mean we talk about scandals and then you look at Reagan, and it’s like 
11 senior officials convicted of selling embargoed arms to finance the 
CIA’s death squad the Contras in Nicaragua?

*AM*: You know, in the Reagan administration the United States was at a 
low ebb in its global power. The Reagan administration launched the 
invasion of Grenada. It was the first time in nearly a decade that the 
U.S. has been able to exercise its global power anywhere beyond the 
United States successfully, its military power. And then in Central 
America, the Reagan administration felt very threatened by the collapse 
of the Somoza regime, one of the U.S. client regimes in Central America, 
and the Sandinista guerrilla movement capturing the capital Managua in 1979.

And that occurred at the same time as the Soviet Red Army basically 
occupied Kabul, the capture of the capital of Afghanistan, so the Reagan 
administration felt threatened, on a kind of far periphery of U.S. power 
in Afghanistan, and close at home, kind of a gateway to America — in 
Central America. So the Reagan administration reacted by mounting two 
major covert operations: one, to push the Red Army out of Afghanistan 
and two, to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. And both 
of these operations involved tolerating trafficking in opium in 
Afghanistan by the Mujahideen Muslim guerrilla fighters, and tolerating 
the trafficking in cocaine in Central America by our Contra allies.

And there were basically two forms of support for the Contras. The one 
was the arms-for-money deal to provide black money to sustain the Contra 
revolt for the decade that it dragged on. And the other thing was a kind 
of hands-off approach. There was a DEA operative, a Drug Enforcement 
Administration operative, in Honduras that was reporting on the Honduran 
military complicity in the transit traffic of cocaine moving from 
Colombia through Central America to the United States. He was removed 
from the country. And then the CIA, because of Congress cutting off the 
arms shipments periodically for the CIA, the so-called Boland amendment 
that imposed a kind of embargo upon U.S. support for the Contras, they 
needed to periodically warehouse their arms. And what they found was 
that the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras, particularly Roatan 
Island, was an ideal logistics point right off the coast — it was a 
major transshipment point for cocaine moving from Colombia across the 
Caribbean to the United States but it’s also an ideal place for the U.S. 
to warehouse and then ship its arms to the Contras on the border with 
Nicaragua and Honduras.

And so, the kingpin, the drug kingpin of the Bay Islands was a notorious 
international trafficker named Alan Hyde who had 35 ships on the high 
seas smuggling cocaine from Colombia into the United States. Every U.S. 
security agency involved, the Coast Guard, the CIA itself, the Drug 
Enforcement Administration, they all had reports about Alan Hyde being a 
Class A trafficker, arguably the biggest smuggler in the Caribbean. And 
to get access to his warehouses what the CIA did was they basically 
blocked any investigation of Alan Hyde from 1987 to 1992, during the 
peak of the crack-cocaine epidemic, and so the CIA got to ship their 
guns to his warehouses and then onward to the border post for the 
Contras. And Alan Hyde was given an immunity to investigation or 
prosecution for five years.

That’s — any criminal, that’s all they need, is an immunity to 
investigation. And this coincided with the flood of cocaine through 
Central America into the United States. This CIA inspector general in 
response to protests in South Central, Los Angeles, conducted an 
investigation also in response to Gary Webb’s inquiries and they 
released Report 1, they called “The California Connection.” They said 
that Gary Webb’s allegations that the CIA had protected the 
distributors, the deal of the Nicaraguan dealers who were brokering the 
sale of the import cocaine to the Crips and Bloods gangs in South 
Central, L.A., that that all that was false.

Then they issued, the inspector general in 1998, issued part two of that 
report, the executive summary said similarly: no case to answer, CIA 
relations with the Contras in Central America complex, but nothing about 
drugs. But if you actually read the report, all the way through, which 
is something historians tend to do, you get to paragraph 913 of that 
report and there are subsequently 40 of the most amazing revelations, 
40 paragraphs of the most amazing revelations stating explicitly in 
cables and verbatim quotes from interviews with CIA operatives about 
their compromised relationship with the biggest drug smuggler in the 
Caribbean, Alan Hyde.

And if you go on the CIA website and you look for that 1998 Inspector 
General Report, you’ll find a little black line that says paragraphs 
913-960 have been excised. Those are those paragraphs. But you can find 
them on the internet.

*JS*: One of the fascinating aspects of this — it’s a short part of your 
book, but I think it’s always important to point this out, the name 
Robert Gates pops up at the time that the CIA had this relationship with 
Hyde. Gates was the deputy director of the CIA, and of course now is one 
of the beloved figures in the bipartisan foreign policy consensus. He 
was defense secretary under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And 
Gates, his hands are all over this thing as well.

*AM*: Yeah, there’s, how am I going to put it? That illustrates the 
disparity between the formal rhetoric of politics and the geopolitics of 
the exercise of global power. And the difficulties, the demands, the 
moral and political compromises required to run, well let’s call it an 
empire. A global empire. And, from a pure realpolitik imperial 
perspective, that Contra operation, by seeking an effective 
complementation between the flow of drugs north, very powerful illicit 
economic force, and the Contra guerrilla operations, accomplish their 
objective. You know? After 10 years of supporting the Contras, the 
Sandinistas lost power for a time in a democratic election. They were 
finally pushed out of office. The CIA accomplished its mission.

Now, if you compare that with where we are with drugs and covert 
operations and military operations in Afghanistan, it was very 
successful in the 1980s, as a result of the CIA’s alliance of the 
Mujahideen, provisioning of arms and tolerance for their trafficking and 
drugs, which provided the bulk of their finance. You know, in 1989, the 
Soviet Red Army left Kabul, they left Afghanistan, the CIA won. Well 
today, of course, that drug traffic has been taken over by the Taliban 
and it funds the bulk of the Taliban’s guerrilla operations, pays for a 
new crop of teenage boys to become fighters every spring, and we’ve lost 
control of that. So from a realpolitik perspective, we can see a 
weakening of U.S. controls over these covert operations that are another 
manifestation of our, of the decline of the U.S. hegemony.


      Heroin and the Worsening War in Afghanistan

*JS*: I want to ask you about Afghanistan given all of the work you’ve 
done on the intersection of covert operations on behalf of an empire and 
transnational narcotics trafficking. I think a lot of people who have 
followed the history of Afghanistan and U.S. involvement there find it 
hard to believe that the United States is not aware that its actions are 
fueling the heroin trade and fueling the insurgency there by having a 
Taliban that relies on it, as you just laid out. Given your historical, 
analytical work on past crises, what should we be looking for to see 
whether or not there is a direct U.S. role in facilitating narcotics 
flow out of Afghanistan?

*AM*: Sure. Good question. Look, during the 1980s, when that operation 
was successful, the CIA knew and in fact a man named Charles Cogan who 
was the head of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, and when he retired he 
gave an interview to Australian television, and he said, “Look, there 
was fallout from that operation. OK, yes there was fallout in terms of 
drugs.” But he said, “Let’s remember the Soviets left Afghanistan.” So 
the CIA was, and if Charles Cogan was any sign and I think he is, and he 
was the head of the operation for a while, they very well knew that the 
mujahideen fighters, the Muslim guerrillas they were arming and 
equipping, were getting the bulk of their finance and were sustaining 
their mass base among the farmers of southern Afghanistan through 
trafficking in opium and heroin. And that provided — I mean it provided 
65 percent, the bulk of U.S. heroin supply, the bulk of the world’s supply.

Now, when the United States pulled out of Afghanistan in 1992, we turned 
our backs on it and the Taliban backed by Pakistan took power, and under 
the Taliban by 2000, by 1999-2000, the opium harvest more than doubled 
to 4500 tons. But then the Taliban became concerned about their pariah 
status and they decided that if they abolished opium they would no 
longer be a pariah state, they could get international recognition, they 
could strengthen their hold on power. And so they actually, in 
2000-2001, completely wiped out opium, and it went down from 4600 tons 
to 180 tons, I mean like an incredible — the most, one of the most 
successful opium eradication programs anywhere on the planet.

They also completely weakened their state, so that when the U.S. began 
bombing in October 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban quickly 
collapsed and then what happened was, of course, when the U.S. came back 
in, what we did was we worked through the CIA. And we put pallets of 
hundred dollar bills, we sent in $70 million in cash, we mobilized the 
old warlord coalition in the far north, the warlords there were heavily 
involved in opium traffic. We mobilize the Pashtun warlords who were all 
opium traffickers, and when they swept across Afghanistan and captured 
the countryside in the provincial capitals, they began supervising over 
the replanting of opium. And, very quickly, the opium harvest began 
blooming and by 2006 it was up to 8000 tons of opium — the highest in a 
century providing well over 90 percent of the world’s opium and heroin 
supply, and a majority of the gross domestic product of Afghanistan.

And, at the local level, the Taliban took control of the cultivation, 
the processing and the smuggling and they used the profits to rebuild 
their apparatus. They were completely wiped out in October 2001, they 
steadily rebuilt and have launched this succession of offensives that 
now control over half the countryside, so there’s a very clear 
relationship between the opium crop, which is now beyond our control, we 
ignored it up to 2004, as it was booming and spreading again. So it’s 
one of those interesting exercises or instances in which the U.S. loses 
control over this complementation between the illicit traffic and the 
surrogate warfare, that complementation that worked so well in Central 
America. When you’ve lost control of it in Afghanistan, and it’s one 
more index of our waning control over the world, an ever more complex world.


      The Pillars of Empire Are Starting to Crumble

*JS*: One of the things that struck me as I read your book “In the 
Shadows of the American Century” was how often you predict, based on 
data, on historical example, that the United States as an empire is 
headed down a path of demise and you write about that with a nuance and 
you don’t pretend to know the exact scenario. One of the things you 
write in the book is, “Future historians are likely to identify George 
W. Bush’s rash invasion of Iraq, in 2003, as the start of America’s 
downfall. But instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many 
past empires with cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this 
21st-century imperial collapse could come relatively quietly through the 
invisible tendrils of economic contraction or cyberwarfare.”

Why do you seem so convinced that this is inevitable, and how do you 
foresee the scenarios, potential scenarios for the demise of what we now 
understand as the American empire?

*AM*: There are, I think, multiple factors that lead to an imperial 
decline. If you look at the key aspects of the U.S. global power, you 
can see a waning of strength in every one of those. One of the key 
things that I think very few people understand, after World War II, the 
United States became the first world power, the first empire in 1,000 
years to control both ends of the vast Eurasian continent. Now Eurasia, 
that enormous landmass, is the epicenter of world power. It’s got the 
resources, the people, the civilizations that — you’ve got to control 
that to control the world. And the United States, through the NATO 
alliance in Western Europe and a string of alliances along the Pacific 
littoral with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia, 
controlled the axial ends of the Eurasian landmass.

And then we link that with layers of power, treaties multilateral 
defense treaties, starting with NATO in Europe, all the way to SETO and 
ANZUS with Australia, the Japan Mutual Security Treaty, the South Korea 
U.S. Mutual Security Treaty, the Philippine U.S. Mutual Security Treaty. 
And then we had fleets, we had the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, the 
Seventh Fleet at Subic Bay Philippines, later the Fifth Fleet in the 
Persian Gulf. We had hundreds of military bases. By the end of the Cold 
War we have about 800 overseas military bases.

Most of those were arrayed around the Eurasian landmass. In the last 
10 years as drone technology has developed, we’ve laid the latest layer 
upon that, which are the drone bases. There are 60 U.S. drone bases that 
stretch from Sicily all the way to Andersen air base on Guam, and that, 
given the range of the most powerful drones, the Global Hawk, it gives 
us surveillance and then with Predator and Reaper, strike capacity, all 
the way along that rim, and that has been, if you will, the key pillars 
in the global architecture of U.S. power.

And those pillars are starting to crumble. The NATO alliance is 
weakening under Trump, with the rise of Russian pressure on that 
alliance, but more particularly, our capacity to control those critical 
allies along the Pacific littoral is beginning to weaken. Jeremy, your 
organization The Intercept had, last April, a very important document 
that leaked out, the transcript of that phone conversation between 
President Trump and President Duterte of the Philippines, that should 
have had front page coverage all across the world, and every serious 
American newspaper. It got good coverage, but not the coverage it deserved.

If you read that transcript closely, you can see the waning of U.S. 
power along the Pacific littoral. Donald Trump is calling up, he’s got a 
fellow demagogue in the person of Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the 
Philippines, who has killed about 8000 people in his so-called drug war 
— people blown away, bodies dumped in the streets of Manila and Cebu and 
elsewhere in the country, and he’s calling up and congratulating him and 
trying to bond with him, you know, autocrat to autocrat. And then Trump 
shifts the conversation and says, “Well, we got this problem in Korea. 
Kim Jong-un is unreliable.” And Duterte says, “I’m going to call China, 
I’ll talk to Xi Jinping about that.” And Trump says, “We’ve got some 
very powerful submarines, which we’re going to have in the area.” And 
Duterte says, “Yeah, I’m going to call,” he says, “Yeah, I’m gonna call 
Xi Jinping about that. I’ll be talking to China.”

And it’s clear that Trump is trying to court the man, trying to impress 
him with U.S. strength, and every time Trump tries to do it, Duterte 
responds, “I will call China.” It’s a clear indication of China’s rising 
power along that Pacific littoral. Also, China has been conducting a 
very skillful geopolitical strategy, so-called “One belt, One road” or 
“Silk Road” strategy and what China has been doing since about 2007 is 
they’ve spent a trillion dollars and they’re going to spend another 
trillion dollars in laying down a massive infrastructure of rails and 
gas and oil pipelines that will integrate the entire Eurasian landmass. 
Look, Europe and Asia, which we think of as — we’re learning in 
geography in elementary school that they’re two separate continents — 
they’re not. They were only separated by the vast distances, the steps 
in the desert that seem to divide them. Well China’s laid down, through 
a trillion dollars investment, a series of pipelines that are bringing 
energy from Central Asia across thousands of miles into China, from 
Siberia into China.

They’ve also built seven bases in the South China Sea and they’re taking 
control over these — spent over $200 million in transforming a fishing 
village on the Arabian Sea named Gwadar, in Pakistan, into a major 
modern port. They’ve also got port facilities in Africa. And through 
these port facilities they’re cutting those circles of steel that the 
United States laid down to kind of link and hold those two axial ends of 
Eurasia. So we are slowly, because of China’s investment, its 
development, some of our mismanagement of our relationships and 
long-term trends, those axial ends of Eurasia they’re crumbling. Our 
power, our control over that critical continent is weakening, and 
China’s control is slowly inexorably increasing and that is going to be 
a major geopolitical shift. One that is going to weaken the United 
States and strengthen China.

*JS*: You write, “All available economic, educational, technological 
data indicate that when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends 
are likely to aggregate rapidly by 2020, and could reach a critical mass 
no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at 
the start of World War II, may already be tattered and fading by 2025, 
and, except for the finger pointing could be over by 2030.” How do you 
see that happening and what does that mean for the United States in the 
world, but also for ordinary Americans?

*AM*: Sure. How do I see it happening? There are the geopolitical shifts 
that I just described. The other thing of the long-term trends, the 
issues of economic waning, U.S. economic strength. China is slowly, is 
steadily surpassing the United States as the number one economic power. 
That’s one long-term trend. And China will therefore have the resources 
to invest in military technology.

The second thing is, we speak of crumbling U.S. infrastructure, one 
thing that nobody talks about very seriously in a sustained way is the 
intellectual infrastructure of the country. The OECD, the Organization 
for Economic Cooperation and Development, the rich countries club, 
conducts these tests every couple years, the PISA tests, and they test 
15-year-olds. In the latest rounds of tests, Shanghai students have come 
number one in math, science, and literacy.

U.S. students have been somewhere, in math and science, somewhere 
between 20 and 30. And so you might say, “Who cares about a bunch of 
15-year-olds with braces, backpacks, and attitudes?” Well, by 2030, 
those 15-year-olds are going to be in their 20s and 30s. They’re going 
to be the super smart scientists and engineers that are coming up with 
the cutting edge technology. Technology, for example, like photon 
communications. China is evidently going to lead in this, that means 
that China can communicate with its satellites and its entire cyber and 
space and military apparatus without fear of being compromised. We have 
not developed the same level of photon communications as China. We’re 
much more subject to being hijacked and manipulated.

So, those kinds of trends in raw military power. The sort of the erosion 
of U.S. educational standards within 10 or 15 years can have some very 
serious implications for our military technology. It means you just 
don’t have the scientists, the technology, the innovation that has been 
so central to U.S. global power for so many years. And so that waning, 
the geopolitical shifts, you know, those invisible movements of a power 
arrayed across the landscape. And then the technological and educational 
shifts coming together means that there are all kinds of ways for the 
U.S. to lose power. Either with a bang or a whimper. But by 2030, it’s 
pretty much over for our global dominion.

*JS*: And is that, is that in your opinion a bad thing?

*AM*: Well, yes it is, and I here, you know I speak, you could call me, 
you know a narrow American. But, OK, every empire — if you think we’ve 
had empires in the world for about 4,000 years. Some have been more 
benign and beneficent, others have been absolutely brutal. If you want 
to go to the most brutal empire, I think in human history, the Nazi 
empire in Europe. It was an empire. It plundered. Much of that 
mobilization of labor was just raw exploitation. It was the most brutal 
empire in human history and it collapsed. The Japanese empire in Asia, 
which was arguably the biggest empire in history, was a second runner-up 
for raw brutality, they collapsed. The British empire was relatively 
benign. Yes, it was a global power, there were many excesses, many 
incidents, one can go on, but when it was all over, they left the 
Westminster system of parliament, they left the global language, they 
left a global economy, they left a culture of sports, they created 
artifacts like the BBC.

So the U.S. empire has been, and we’ve had our excesses, Vietnam, we 
could go on. Afghanistan. There are many problems with the U.S. exercise 
of its power but we have stood for human rights, the world has had 70 
years of relative peace and lots of medium size wars but nothing like 
World War I and World War II. There has been an increase in global 
development, the growth of a global economy, with many inequities, but 
nonetheless, transnationally, a new middle class is appearing around the 
globe. We’ve stood for labor rights and environmental protection. Our 
successor powers, China and Russia, are authoritarian regimes. Russia’s 
autocratic, China’s a former communist regime. They stand for none of 
these liberal principles.

So you’ll have the realpolitik exercise of power, all the downsides with 
none of the upsides, with none of the positive development. I mean we’ve 
stood for women’s rights, for gay rights, for human progress, for 
democracy. You know we’ve been flawed in efficacy, but we’ve stood for 
those principles and we have advanced them. So we have been, on the 
scale of empires, comparatively benign and beneficent. And I don’t think 
the succeeding powers are going to be that way.

Moreover, there are going to be implications for the United States. Most 
visibly, I think that when the dollar is no longer the world’s 
unchallenged, pre-eminent, global reserve currency, the grand imperial 
game will be over. Look, what we’ve been able to do for the last 
20 years is we send the world our brightly colored, our nicely printed 
paper, T-notes, and they give us oil and automobiles and computers and 
technology. We get real goods and they get brightly colored paper. 
Because of the position of the dollar. When the dollar is no longer the 
global reserve currency, the cost of goods in the United States is going 
to skyrocket.

We will not be able to travel the world as we do now. We won’t be able 
to enjoy the standard of living we do now. There will be lots of 
tensions that are going to occur in the society from what will be a 
major rewriting of the American social contract. This will not be 
pleasant. And arguably, I think it’s possible if we look back, we could 
see Trump’s election and all the problems of the Trump administration as 
one manifestation of this imperial decline.

/
/


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