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<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175383/tomgram:_mccoy_and_reilly,_an_empire_of_failed_states/#more" eudora="autourl">
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<dd><font size=4>Washington on the Rocks</b> <br>
<dd>An Empire of Autocrats, Aristocrats, and Uniformed Thugs Begins to
Totter</b> <br>
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<dd><font size=3>By
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/alfredmccoy">Alfred W.
McCoy</a> and
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/brettreilly">Brett
Reilly</a><br><br>
<dd>In one of history’s lucky accidents, the juxtaposition of two
extraordinary events has stripped the architecture of American global
power bare for all to see. Last November, WikiLeaks splashed snippets
from U.S. embassy cables, loaded with scurrilous comments about national
leaders from Argentina to Zimbabwe, on the front pages of newspapers
worldwide. Then just a few weeks later, the Middle East erupted in
pro-democracy protests against the region’s autocratic leaders, many of
whom were close U.S. allies whose foibles had been so conveniently
detailed in those same diplomatic cables.<br><br>
<dd>Suddenly, it was possible to see the foundations of a U.S. world
order that rested significantly on national leaders who serve Washington
as loyal “subordinate elites” and who are, in reality, a motley
collection of autocrats, aristocrats, and uniformed thugs. Visible as
well was the larger logic of otherwise inexplicable U.S. foreign policy
choices over the past half-century.<br><br>
<dd><a name="more"></a>Why would the CIA risk controversy in 1965, at the
height of the Cold War, by overthrowing an accepted leader like Sukarno
in Indonesia or encouraging the assassination of the Catholic autocrat
Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon in 1963? The answer -- and
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/the-us-embassy-cables?INTCMP=SRCH">
thanks to WikiLeaks</a><a name="more"></a> and the “Arab spring,” this is
now so much clearer -- is that both were Washington’s chosen subordinates
until each became insubordinate and expendable.<br>
<br>
<dd>Why, half a century later, would Washington betray its stated
democratic principles by backing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak against
millions of demonstrators and then, when he faltered, use its leverage to
replace him, at least initially with his intelligence chief Omar
Suleiman, a man best known for
<a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/201127114827382865.html">
running Cairo’s torture chambers</a> (and lending them out to
Washington)? The answer again: because both were reliable subordinates
who had long served Washington’s interests well in this key Arab
state.<br><br>
<dd>Across the Greater Middle East from Tunisia and Egypt to Bahrain and
Yemen, democratic protests are threatening to sweep away subordinate
elites crucial to the wielding of American power. Of course, all modern
empires have relied on dependable surrogates to translate their global
power into local control -- and for most of them, the moment when those
elites began to stir, talk back, and set their own agendas was also the
moment when it became clear that imperial collapse was in the cards.
<br><br>
<dd>If the "velvet revolutions” that swept Eastern Europe in 1989
tolled the death knell for the Soviet empire, then the "jasmine
revolutions" now spreading across the Middle East may well mark the
beginning of the end for American global power.<br><br>
<dd>Putting the Military in Charge <br><br>
</b>
<dd>To understand the importance of local elites, look back to the Cold
War’s early days when a desperate White House was searching for
something, anything that could halt the seemingly unstoppable spread of
what Washington saw as anti-American and pro-communist sentiment. In
December 1954, the National Security Council (NSC) met in the White House
to stake out a strategy that could tame the powerful nationalist forces
of change then sweeping the globe.<br><br>
<dd>Across Asia and Africa, a half-dozen European empires that had
guaranteed global order for more than a century were giving way to 100
new nations, many -- as Washington saw it -- susceptible to “communist
subversion.” In Latin America, there were stirrings of leftist opposition
to the region’s growing urban poverty and rural landlessness.<br><br>
<dd>After a review of the “threats” facing the U.S. in Latin America,
influential Treasury Secretary George Humphrey informed his NSC
colleagues that they should “stop talking so much about democracy” and
instead “support dictatorships of the right if their policies are
pro-American.” At that moment with a flash of strategic insight, Dwight
Eisenhower interrupted to observe that Humphrey was, in effect, saying,
“They’re OK if they’re our</i> s.o.b.’s.”<br><br>
<dd>It was a moment to remember, for the President of the United States
had just articulated with crystalline clarity the system of global
dominion that Washington would implement for the next 50 years -- setting
aside democratic principles for a tough realpolitik</i> policy of backing
any reliable leader willing to support the U.S., thereby building a
worldwide network of national (and often nationalist) leaders who would,
in a pinch, put Washington’s needs above local ones.<br><br>
<dd>Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. would favor military autocrats in
Latin America, aristocrats across the Middle East, and a mixture of
democrats and dictators in Asia. In 1958, military coups in Thailand and
Iraq suddenly put the spotlight on Third World militaries as forces to be
reckoned with. It was then that the Eisenhower administration
decided to bring foreign military leaders to the U.S. for further
“training” to facilitate “the ‘management’ of the forces of change
released by the development” of these emerging nations. Henceforth,
Washington would pour military aid into the cultivation of the armed
forces of allies and potential allies worldwide, while “training
missions” would be used to create crucial ties between the U.S. military
and the officer corps in country after country -- or where subordinate
elites did not seem subordinate enough, help identify alternative
leaders.<br><br>
<dd>When civilian presidents proved insubordinate, the Central
Intelligence Agency went to work, promoting coups that would install
reliable military successors --replacing Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad
Mossadeq, who tried to nationalize his country's oil, with General
Fazlollah Zahedi (and then the young Shah) in 1953; President Sukarno
with General Suharto in Indonesia during the next decade; and of course
President Salvador Allende with General Augusto Pinochet in Chile in
1973, to name just three such moments. <br><br>
<dd>In the first years of the twenty-first century, Washington’s trust in
the militaries of its client states would only grow. The U.S. was,
for example, lavishing $1.3 billion in aid on Egypt’s military annually,
but investing only $250 million a year in the country’s economic
development. As a result, when demonstrations rocked the regime in Cairo
last January, as the New York Times</i>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/weekinreview/20military.html">
reported</a>, “a 30-year investment paid off as American generals... and
intelligence officers quietly called... friends they had trained with,”
successfully urging the army’s support for a “peaceful transition” to,
yes indeed, military rule.<br><br>
<dd>Elsewhere in the Middle East, Washington has, since the 1950s,
followed the British imperial preference for Arab aristocrats by
cultivating allies that included a shah (Iran), sultans (Abu Dhabi,
Oman), emirs (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai), and kings (Saudi Arabia,
Jordan, Morocco). Across this vast, volatile region from Morocco to Iran,
Washington courted these royalist regimes with military alliances,
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/21/us-congress-notified-arms-sale-saudi-arabia">
U.S. weapons systems</a>, CIA support for local security, a safe American
haven for their capital, and special favors for their elites, including
access to educational institutions in the U.S. or
<a href="http://www.bahr-ehs.eu.dodea.edu/">Department of Defense
overseas schools</a> for their children.<br><br>
<dd>In 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/weekinreview/30cooper.html">
summed up this record</a> thusly: “For 60 years, the United States
pursued stability at the expense of democracy… in the Middle East, and we
achieved neither.”<br><br>
<dd>How It Used to Work<br><br>
</b>
<dd>America is by no means the first hegemon to build its global power on
the gossamer threads of personal ties to local leaders. In the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, Britain may have ruled the waves (as America
would later rule the skies), but when it came to the ground, like empires
past it needed local allies who could serve as intermediaries in
controlling complex, volatile societies. Otherwise, how in 1900 could a
small island nation of just 40 million with an army of only 99,000 men
rule a global empire of some 400 million, nearly a quarter of all
humanity?<br><br>
<dd>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
<img src="http://www.tomdispatch.com/img/mccoy.gif" alt="[]"></a>From
1850 to 1950, Britain controlled its formal colonies through an
extraordinary array of local allies -- from Fiji island chiefs and Malay
sultans to Indian maharajas and African emirs. Simultaneously, through
subordinate elites Britain reigned over an even larger “informal empire”
that encompassed emperors (from Beijing to Istanbul), kings (from Bangkok
to Cairo), and presidents (from Buenos Aires to Caracas). At its peak in
1880, Britain's informal empire in Latin America, the Middle East, and
China was larger, in population, than its formal colonial holdings in
India and Africa. Its entire global empire, encompassing nearly half of
humanity, rested on these slender ties of cooperation to loyal local
elites.<br><br>
<dd>Following four centuries of relentless imperial expansion, however,
Europe’s five major overseas empires were suddenly erased from the globe
in a quarter-century of decolonization. Between 1947 and 1974, the
Belgian, British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese empires faded fast from
Asia and Africa, giving way to a hundred new nations, more than half of
today’s sovereign states. In searching for an explanation for this
sudden, sweeping change, most scholars agree with British imperial
historian Ronald Robinson who famously argued that “when colonial rulers
had run out of indigenous collaborators,” their power began to
fade.<br><br>
<dd>During the Cold War that coincided with this era of rapid
decolonization, the world’s two superpowers turned to the same methods
regularly using their espionage agencies to manipulate the leaders of
newly independent states. The Soviet Union’s KGB and its surrogates
like the Stasi in East Germany and the Securitate in Romania enforced
political conformity among the 14 Soviet satellite states in Eastern
Europe and challenged the U.S. for loyal allies across the Third
World. Simultaneously, the CIA monitored the loyalties of
presidents, autocrats, and dictators on four continents,
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/post/174824/chalmers_johnson_agency_of_rogues">
employing</a> coups, bribery, and covert penetration to control and, when
necessary, remove nettlesome leaders.<br><br>
<dd>In an era of nationalist feeling, however, the loyalty of local
elites proved a complex matter indeed. Many of them were driven by
conflicting loyalties and often deep feelings of nationalism, which meant
that they had to be monitored closely. So critical were these
subordinate elites, and so troublesome were their insubordinate
iterations, that the CIA repeatedly launched risky covert operations to
bring them to heel, sparking some of the great crises of the Cold
War.<br><br>
<dd>Given the rise of its system of global control in a post-World War II
age of independence, Washington had little choice but to work not simply
with surrogates or puppets, but with allies who -- admittedly from weaker
positions -- still sought to maximize what they saw as their nations’
interests (as well as their own). Even at the height of American global
power in the 1950s, when its dominance was relatively unquestioned,
Washington was forced into hard bargaining with the likes of the
Philippines’ Raymond Magsaysay, South Korean autocrat Syngman Rhee, and
South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem.<br><br>
<dd>In South Korea during the 1960s, for instance, General Park Chung
Hee, then president, bartered troop deployments to Vietnam for billions
of U.S. development dollars, which helped spark the country's economic
"miracle." In the process, Washington paid up, but got what it
most wanted: 50,000 of those tough Korean troops as guns-for-hire helpers
in its unpopular war in Vietnam.<br><br>
<dd>Post-Cold War World<br><br>
</b>
<dd>After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, ending the Cold War, Moscow
quickly lost its satellite states from Estonia to Azerbaijan, as
once-loyal Soviet surrogates were ousted or leapt off the sinking ship of
empire. For Washington, the “victor” and soon to be the “sole superpower”
on planet Earth, the same process would begin to happen, but at a far
slower pace.<br><br>
<dd>Over the next two decades, globalization fostered a multipolar system
of rising powers in Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow, Ankara, and Brasilia,
even as a denationalized system of corporate power reduced the dependency
of developing economies on any single state, however imperial. With
its capacity for controlling elites receding, Washington has faced
ideological competition from Islamic fundamentalism, European regulatory
regimes, Chinese state capitalism, and a rising tide of economic
nationalism in Latin America.<br><br>
<dd>As U.S. power and influence declined, Washington’s attempts to
control its subordinate elites began to fail, often spectacularly --
including its efforts to topple bête noire</i> Hugo Chavez of Venezuela
in a badly bungled 2002 coup, to detach ally Mikheil Saakashvili of
Georgia from Russia’s orbit in 2008, and to oust nemesis Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad in the 2009 Iranian elections. Where a CIA coup or covert
cash once sufficed to defeat an antagonist, the Bush administration
needed a massive invasion to topple just one troublesome dictator, Saddam
Hussein. Even then, it found its plans for subsequent regime change
in Syria and Iran blocked when these states instead aided a devastating
insurgency against U.S. forces inside Iraq.<br><br>
<dd>Similarly, despite the infusions of billions of dollars in foreign
aid, Washington has found it nearly impossible to control the Afghan
president it installed in power, Hamid Karzai, who memorably
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/12/AR2010121203747.html">
summed up</a> his fractious relationship with Washington to American
envoys this way: “If you're looking for a stooge and calling a stooge a
partner, no. If you're looking for a partner, yes.”<br><br>
<dd>Then, late in 2010, WikiLeaks began distributing those thousands of
U.S. diplomatic cables that offer uncensored insights into Washington’s
weakening control over the system of surrogate power that it had built up
for 50 years. In reading these documents, Israeli journalist Aluf Benn of
Haaretz
<a href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/wikileaks-cables-tell-the-story-of-an-empire-in-decline-1.328145">
could see</a> “the fall of the American empire, the decline of a
superpower that ruled the world by the dint of its military and economic
supremacy.” No longer, he added, are “American ambassadors… received in
world capitals as ‘high commissioners'... [instead they are] tired
bureaucrats [who] spend their days listening wearily to their hosts'
talking points, never reminding them who is the superpower and who the
client state.”<br><br>
<dd>Indeed, what the WikiLeaks documents show is a State Department
struggling to manage an unruly global system of increasingly
insubordinate elites by any means possible -- via intrigue to collect
needed information and intelligence, friendly acts meant to coax
compliance, threats to coerce cooperation, and billions of dollars in
misspent aid to court influence. In early 2009, for instance, the State
Department
<a href="http://www.wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/04/09STATE37561.html">
instructed</a> its embassies worldwide to play imperial police by
collecting comprehensive data on local leaders, including “email
addresses, telephone and fax numbers, fingerprints, facial images, DNA,
and iris scans.” Showing its need, like some colonial governor, for
incriminating information on the locals, the State Department also
<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wikileaks-files/8331622/SNF-BAHRAIN-EMERGENT-PRINCES-NASIR-AND-KHALID.html">
pressed</a> its Bahrain embassy for sordid details, damaging in an
Islamic society, about the kingdom’s crown princes, asking: “Is there any
derogatory information on either prince? Does either prince drink
alcohol? Does either one use drugs?"<br><br>
<dd>With the hauteur of latter-day imperial envoys, U.S. diplomats seemed
to empower themselves for dominance by
<a href="http://www.wikileaks.ch/cable/2010/01/10ANKARA87.html">
dismissing</a> “the Turks neo-Ottoman posturing around the Middle East
and Balkans,” or by knowing the weaknesses of their subordinate elites,
notably Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s
<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1336783/WikiLeaks-Colonel-Gaddafis-phobias-flamenco-dancing-voluptuous-blonde-nurse.html">
“voluptuous blonde” nurse</a>, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari’s
morbid fear of military coups, or Afghan Vice President Ahmad Zia
Massoud’s
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29cables.html">$52
million</a> in stolen funds.<br><br>
<dd>As its influence declines, however, Washington is finding many of its
chosen local allies either increasingly insubordinate or irrelevant,
particularly in the strategic Middle East. In mid-2009, for instance, the
U.S. ambassador to Tunisia
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/217138">
reported</a> that “President Ben Ali… and his regime have lost touch with
the Tunisian people,” relying “on the police for control,” while
“corruption in the inner circle is growing” and “the risks to the
regime's long-term stability are increasing.” Even so, the U.S. envoy
could only recommend that Washington “dial back the public criticism” and
instead rely only on “frequent high-level private candor” -- a policy
that failed to produce any reforms before demonstrations toppled the
regime just 18 months later.<br><br>
<dd>Similarly, in late 2008 the American Embassy in Cairo
<a href="http://www.wikileaks.ch/cable/2008/12/08CAIRO2543.html">
feared</a> that “Egyptian democracy and human rights efforts... are being
suffocated.” However, as the embassy admitted, “we would not like to
contemplate complications for U.S. regional interests should the
U.S.-Egyptian bond be seriously weakened.” When Mubarak visited
Washington a few months later, the Embassy
<a href="http://www.wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/05/09CAIRO874.html">urged</a>
the White House “to restore the sense of warmth that has traditionally
characterized the U.S.-Egyptian partnership.” And so in June 2009, just
18 months before the Egyptian president’s downfall, President Obama
<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2009/06/090602_obama_transcript.shtml">
hailed</a> this useful dictator as “a stalwart ally... a force for
stability and good in the region."<br><br>
<dd>As the crisis in Cairo’s Tahrir Square unfolded, respected opposition
leader Mohamed ElBaradei
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/world/middleeast/27opposition.html">
complained bitterly</a> that Washington was pushing “the whole Arab world
into radicalization with this inept policy of supporting repression.”
After 40 years of U.S. dominion, the Middle East was, he
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/opinion/09friedman.html">
said</a>, “a collection of failed states that add nothing to humanity or
science” because “people were taught not to think or to act, and were
consistently given an inferior education.”<br><br>
<dd>Absent a global war capable of simply sweeping away an empire, the
decline of a great power is often a fitful, painful, drawn-out affair. In
addition to the two American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down to
something not so far short of defeat, the nation’s capital is now
writhing in fiscal crisis, the coin of the realm is losing its
creditworthiness, and longtime allies are forging economic and even
military ties to rival China. To all of this, we must now add the
possible loss of loyal surrogates across the Middle East.<br><br>
<dd>For more than 50 years, Washington has been served well by a system
of global power based on subordinate elites. That system once facilitated
the extension of American influence worldwide with a surprising
efficiency and (relatively speaking) an economy of force. Now, however,
those loyal allies increasingly look like an empire of failed or
insubordinate states. Make no mistake: the degradation of, or ending of,
half a century of such ties is likely to leave Washington on the
rocks.<br><br>
<dd>Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, a
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175327/alfred_mccoy_taking_down_america">
TomDispatch regular</a>, and author most recently of the award-winning
book,
</i>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the
Rise of the Surveillance State</a>. He has also convened the
<a href="http://history.wisc.edu/goldberg/us_empire_project.htm">“Empires
in Transition” project</a>, a global working group of 140 historians from
universities on four continents. The results of their first meetings were
published as
</i>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299231046/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State</a>,
and the findings from their latest conference, at Barcelona last June,
will appear next year as </i>Endless Empires: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s
Eclipse, and America’s Decline. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest
TomCast audio interview in which McCoy discusses why Washington is likely
to cling disastrously to empire in the midst of decline, click
<a href="http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/2011/04/suborninations.html">
here</a>, or download it to your iPod
<a href="http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=j0SS4Al/iVI&subid=&offerid=146261.1&type=10&tmpid=5573&RD_PARM1=http%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2Fus%2Fpodcast%2Ftomcast-from-tomdispatch-com%2Fid357095817">
here</a>.<br><br>
<dd>Brett Reilly is a graduate student in History at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, where he is studying U.S. foreign policy in Asia.
<br><br>
</i>
<dd>Copyright 2011 Alfred W. McCoy and Brett Reilly<br><br>
<br><br>
<br>
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