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href="https://theintercept.com/2017/07/22/donald-trump-and-the-coming-fall-of-american-empire/">https://theintercept.com/2017/07/22/donald-trump-and-the-coming-fall-of-american-empire/</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">Donald Trump and the Coming Fall of
American Empire</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Jeremy Scahill - <span
class="PostByline-date"
data-reactid=".ti.1.0.0.2.0.1.0.1.1.4">July 22 2017</span></div>
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<p><u>Even as President Donald</u> 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.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, China has quietly and rapidly expanded its
influence without deploying its military on foreign
soil.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 “<a
href="https://www.amazon.com/Shadows-American-Century-Decline-Global/dp/1608467732">In
the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and
Decline of U.S. Global Power</a>.”</p>
<p>“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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Alfred McCoy is the Harrington professor of history
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the
author of the now-classic book “<a
href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1556524838/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">The
Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global
Drug Trade</a>.” His new book, out in September, is
“<a
href="https://www.amazon.com/Shadows-American-Century-Decline-Global/dp/1608467732">In
the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and
Decline of U.S. Global Power</a>.”</p>
<p>This week, I interviewed McCoy for the <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2017/07/19/intercepted-podcast-veni-vidi-tweeti/">Intercepted
podcast</a>. 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.</p>
<p><strong>Jeremy Scahill</strong>: 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?</p>
<p><strong>Alfred McCoy</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS</strong>: 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?</p>
<p><strong>AM</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS</strong>: 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?</p>
<p><strong>AM</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade</h3>
<p><strong>JS:</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>AM</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>AM</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>U.S. Interference in Elections</h3>
<p><strong>JS:</strong> 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?</p>
<p><strong>AM</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS</strong>: 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>AM</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Reagan, Iran-Contra, the CIA, and Crack Cocaine</h3>
<p><strong>JS: </strong>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p><strong>AM</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>AM</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Heroin and the Worsening War in Afghanistan</h3>
<p><strong>JS</strong>: 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?</p>
<p><strong>AM</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>The Pillars of Empire Are Starting to Crumble</h3>
<p><strong>JS</strong>: 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.”</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p><strong>AM</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS</strong>: 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?</p>
<p><strong>AM</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>JS</strong>: And is that, is that in your
opinion a bad thing?</p>
<p><strong>AM</strong>: 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em><br>
</em></p>
<p><br>
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