In many cases, for instance, the United States has been busily arming opponents in ongoing conflicts—Iran and Iraq, Greece and Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel, and China and Taiwan. Saddam Hussein of Iraq, the number-one “rogue” leader of the 1990s, was during the 1980s simply an outstanding customer with an almost limitless line of credit because of his country’s oil reserves. Often the purchasing country makes its purchases conditional on the transfer of technology and patents, so that it can ultimately manufacture the items for itself and others. The result is the proliferation around the world not just of weapons but of new weapons industries. On January 10, 1995, former CIA director James Woolsey told Congress that weapons sales “have the potential to significantly alter military balances, and disrupt U.S. military operations and cause significant U.S. casualties.”32 Yet on August 27, 1998, in a typical example of the Pentagon shaping—or misshaping—foreign policy through arms sales, the Department of Defense announced the sale of several hundred missiles and antisubmarine torpedoes to Taiwan for $350 million. China naturally denounced the sale as a violation of agreements it had with the United States. The Defense Department’s response was, “The proposed sale of this military equipment will not affect the basic military balance in the region.”33 If that is true, why sell the equipment in the first place? Was it merely to enhance the balance sheets of several defense corporations to which the Pentagon is closely tied? If it is not true, why even bother to suggest that the balance of power is of any interest to the Pentagon?
In August 1996, then Secretary of Defense Perry called for an end to a decades-old ban on arms sales to Latin America on the grounds that most countries in the region were now democracies, so it is inconceivable that they would use newly purchased arms against one another. A year later, on August 1, 1997, the White House announced, “In the past decade, Latin America has changed dramatically from a region dominated by coups and military governments to one of democracy and civilian control. . . . Some Latin American countries are now addressing the need to modernize their militaries.” The Clinton administration thereupon authorized the sale of advanced American weapons to any and all buyers south of the border (except, of course, Cuba).
A staple of American thinking about foreign policy is that democracies pose no threat to other democracies. But if the countries of Latin America are now democracies, logically that should mean that they do not need to “modernize their militaries.” They might instead follow the example of Costa Rica, which since 1948 has had no military, only a civilian constabulary, and which is one of the most stable, peaceful countries in the area. Its former president, Oscar Arias, who won the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an end to multiple civil wars in Central America, is a strong opponent of the renewed American arms shipments. In 1999, he observed, “Americans have shown great concern about the reported loss of classified nuclear secrets to the Chinese. But they should be just as outraged that their country gives away many other military secrets voluntarily, in the form of high-tech arms exports. By selling advanced weaponry throughout the world, wealthy military contractors not only weaken national security and squeeze taxpayers at home but also strengthen dictators and worsen human misery abroad.”34
When such contradictions are exposed, the Pentagon falls back on the argument that if it does not sell the arms to Latin America, some other country will. By analogy, Colombia might say to the United States that if it does not grow and sell cocaine to Americans, some other country will. When considered together, the extensive JCET training programs in the region and the new arms sales policy are undoubtedly undermining democracy in Latin America and moving several long-standing conflicts toward war. For example, for some time JCET missions have been training the army of Ecuador while the Pentagon has sold Ecuador military Black Hawk helicopters and A-37 combat jets. Only after the training and the sales were completed did the United States discover that Ecuador was planning to use these forces not against drug dealers and “terrorists” but for a war with Peru.35
The United States has justified its contacts with the Ecuadorian military as a means to get to know its leaders personally and to develop long-term relationships of trust. But as Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory has observed, many in the Reagan administration and the Pentagon knew practically every crucial figure in the Salvadoran death squads, most of whom were graduates of the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. This did not stop the Salvadorans from killing seventy thousand of their fellow countrymen, not to mention raping and killing four American churchwomen in 1980, acts the American ambassador to El Salvador and the secretary of state then covered up. One Salvadoran colonel whom the U.S. ambassador suspected of ordering the murders of the three nuns and a Catholic lay worker was, in 1998, living comfortably with his wife and children in Florida.
The economic benefits of arms sales have been vastly overstated. The world’s second-largest capitalist economy, Japan, does very well without them. In the late 1990s, the economy of Southern California started to thrive once it finally got beyond its Cold War dependence on aerospace sales. Many of the most outspoken congressional champions of reducing the federal budget are profligate when it comes to funding arms industries in their localities, often with the expectation of what future export sales will do for their constituents. In January 1998, then House Speaker Newt Gingrich added $2.5 billion to the defense budget for more F-22s and C-130s, which even the air force did not want (or need), only because they were partly manufactured in Georgia. In June 1998, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott added the construction of another helicopter aircraft carrier (that the navy insisted it did not need) to that year’s $270 billion defense appropriations bill because the ship was to be built at Pascagoula, Mississippi.
The American empire has become skilled at developing self-fulfilling—and self-serving—prophecies in order to justify its policies. It expands the NATO alliance eastward in part in order to sell arms to the former Soviet bloc countries, whose armies are being integrated into the NATO command structure, with the certain knowledge that doing so will threaten Russia and elicit a hostile Russian reaction. This Russian reaction then becomes the excuse for the expansion. Similarly, the United States sells advanced weaponry to a country without enemies, like Thailand, which in January 1997 bought $600 million worth of F-18 fighters plus the previously not-for-sale Amraam air-to-air missile. (Purchase of the aircraft was put on hold after the economic crisis erupted.) It then contends that more must be invested in arms development at home for a new generation of American fighter planes and missiles, given the necessity of keeping ahead of the rest of the world.
A classic model of the way this type of circular reasoning can lead to disaster is a U.S. decision to “help” an ally faced with domestic dissidence or even insurrection. First, the “threatened” country is declared part of America’s vital interests; next, American military personnel and commercial camp followers are sent in to “assist” the government. The foreignness of this effort as well as its indifference to democracy and local conditions only accelerate the insurrectionary movement. In the end an American protectorate is replaced by a virulently anti-American regime. This scenario played itself out in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iran in our time. Now it appears it might do so in Saudi Arabia.
Since the Gulf War the United States has maintained around thirty-five thousand troops in Saudi Arabia. Devoutly Muslim citizens of that kingdom see their presence as a humiliation to the country and an affront to their religion. Dissident Saudis have launched attacks against Americans and against the Saudi regime itself. After the June 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartments near Dhahran killed nineteen American airmen, the international relations commentator William Pfaff offered the reasonable prediction, “Within 15 years at most, if present American and Saudi Arabian policies are pursued, the Saudi monarchy will be overturned and a radical and anti-American government will take power in Riyadh.”36 Yet American foreign policy remains on autopilot, instead of withdrawing fr
om a place where a U.S. presence is only making a dangerous situation worse.
Ten years after the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon monopolizes the formulation and conduct of American foreign policy. Increasingly, the United States has only one, commonly inappropriate means of achieving its external objectives—military force. It no longer has a full repertoire of skills, including a seasoned, culturally and linguistically expert diplomatic corps; truly viable international institutions that the American public supports both politically and financially and that can give legitimacy to American efforts abroad; economic policies that effectively leverage the tremendous power of the American market into desired foreign responses; or even an ability to express American values without being charged, accurately, with hopeless hypocrisy. The use of cruise missiles and B-2 bombers to achieve humanitarian objectives is a sign of how unbalanced our foreign policy apparatus has become. The American-inspired and -led NATO intervention in Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 to protect the Albanian majority in Kosovo was a tragic example of what is wrong.
It may or may not be prudent policy to put humanitarian objectives above respect for the sovereignty of nations; it is, in any case, a precedent-setting position that could come back to haunt the United States, which is, like Yugoslavia, a multiethnic country. But betraying no doubts whatsoever, the U.S. government disdained to seek U.N. Security Council sanction for its objectives and then chose to commit a defensive military alliance, NATO, to a totally unprecedented offensive role, in violation of the treaty that created it. Its rationale was that its end—humanitarian relief of defenseless civilians under attack by a political leader with an odious record of similar attacks in the past—justified its means: targeting high-flying bombers and cruise missiles on undefended civilian buildings (including the embassy of China) and public infrastructure, such as roads and bridges. It is not surprising that not a single American serviceman was killed. It is also not surprising that the policy produced precisely the humanitarian disaster for the Albanians in Kosovo that its ostensible purpose was to prevent. As former president Jimmy Carter put it, “Even for the world’s only superpower, the ends don’t always justify the means.”37 The United States’s objectives in Kosovo, which were arguably justifiable on their own terms, were compromised by reliance on a technologically phenomenal but utterly inappropriate military machine because it was the only means still available.
Military might does not equate with “leadership of the free world.” It is also no substitute for an informed public that understands and has approved the policies being carried out in its name. An excessive reliance on a militarized foreign policy and an indifference to the distinction between national interests and national values in deciding where the United States should intervene abroad have actually made the country less secure in ways that will become only more apparent in the years to come.
What would make the United States more secure is not more money spent on JCET teams or espionage satellites to find and retaliate against terrorists. Instead, the United States should bring most of its overseas land-based forces home and reorient its foreign policy to stress leadership through example and diplomacy. Nowhere is this more true than on the Korean peninsula. American military intervention in Korea dates back to 1945. Most of our commitments in Korea were made before current government leaders were even born. The passage of time, economic development, and the collapse of communism have rendered most of them utterly anachronistic. Yet they remain unchanged, constituting one of our greatest breeding grounds for blowback.
SOUTH KOREA:
LEGACY OF THE COLD WAR
There were many differences between the Soviet Union’s satellites in Eastern Europe and the United States’ satellites in East Asia, most importantly in the area of economic organization. In Europe, Stalin imposed on all seven of his “people’s democracies” (Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Romania but not Yugoslavia, which was not created by the Red Army) a uniform pattern involving the collectivization of agriculture and an extreme centralization of economic decision making. The USSR demanded that all of these countries industrialize at the fastest possible pace, with absolute priority given to heavy industry. In the period from 1947 to 1952, the Soviet Union imposed its own economic methods uncritically and without taking any cultural or other differences into account. It was a process in some ways similar to the one the International Monetary Fund imposed on the smaller, more open economies of East Asia during and after the financial crisis of 1997—and with similar results.
In contrast with the Soviet Union, the United States was much less doctrinaire about economic arrangements in its satellites during the Cold War. In Japan and South Korea, its two main dependencies in East Asia, it insisted on the institution of private property and opposed any steps toward the nationalization of industry, but it tolerated land reform, state guidance of the economy, protectionism, mercantilism, and the cartelization of industry as long as these methods produced economic growth and blunted the appeal of communism. The United States used aid and preferred access to its vast market to bring these countries into its political orbit and keep them there. It disguised what it was doing—ultimately fooling only its own people—with euphemisms like “exportled growth” and “the separation of politics and economics.” The result was that over the years places like South Korea were able to export their way to personal incomes averaging over $10,000 per capita, a process that the Western business press invariably characterized as “miraculous.” It was not a process made available to the Latin American dependencies of the United States, because they were not of equal strategic importance in the Cold War.
When it came to the political and military dimensions of satellite creation and maintenance, the Soviet Union and the United States pursued similar policies and for similar reasons. They controlled their dependencies through single-party dictatorships (in Japan’s case a one-party “democracy”) that either the Red Army or the U.S. Army installed in power and then supported throughout the Cold War against any and all popular efforts to introduce truly democratic regimes. Although rebellions against our military presence in Japan were endemic from 1952 until after the end of the Vietnam War, we helped maintain (often through CIA funds channeled to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party) a single-party regime from 1949 to 1993, a record for stable satellite government (although identical in length to that of the government of East Germany from 1945 to 1989). During this period Japan was led by the same types of “shameless mediocrities” that the French international relations theorist Raymond Aron once said the Soviet Union relied on to govern Eastern Europe.1
Democracy finally began to appear in South Korea only in 1987, over four decades after the country came into being, largely because the military dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, had attracted the Olympic Games for the following year and so had trapped himself into behaving in a civilized manner before a global audience when Koreans began to protest his rule. Much as in 1989, when the Russians did not intervene militarily to stop the East Germans from tearing down the Berlin Wall, the United States in 1987 did not encourage its Korean military allies to use force, as it had done in the past. One reason was that American officials still had in mind the traumatic outcome of the Iranian revolution—when their down-the-line support of the Shah’s repressive rule had only accelerated the coming to power of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and an implacably anti-American regime. Just the previous year, in February 1986, they thought they saw similar events unfolding in the Philippines as a popular movement swept away another U.S.-supported but corrupt and incompetent dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. In that case, the United States did not support the repression of the rebels, and the results proved relatively satisfying when Corazon Aquino, the widow of an assassinated Marcos opponent, and a group of middle-class reformers came to power, backed by military men with strong ties to the United States. Thus, the American government again showed restraint in the Korean situation, and the student d
emonstrators with their middle-class backers, seizing the chance, brought into being what is today the only democracy in East Asia, other than the Philippines, that rests on popular political action from below.
The end of World War II had proved no more a “liberation day” for Korea than for Czechoslovakia or other nations of Eastern Europe. The Japanese had occupied, colonized, and exploited Korea since 1905, just as the Nazis, following the 1938 Munich Agreement, had divided, occupied, and ravished Czechoslovakia. Both countries now underwent transformations into colonies of the victors of World War II. At about the same time in February 1948 when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was carrying out a coup d’état in Prague, right-wing forces in the southern half of divided Korea, then under the control of the United States, were slaughtering at least thirty thousand dissident peasants on the island of Cheju. Although the Czech events are much better known (and led to the creation of NATO the following year), the killings in Korea were of essentially the same character as those in Czechoslovakia. The Cheju massacre was part of a process by which our puppet regime in South Korea, a government every bit as unpopular as Klement Gottwald’s Stalinist government in Czechoslovakia, consolidated power. Gottwald, president of Czechoslovakia from 1948 until his death in 1953, and Syngman Rhee, president of South Korea from 1948 to 1960, were, in fact, similar figures: neither could have come to power without the aid of his superpower patron and both were prototypes of the faceless bureaucrats the Soviets and the Americans would use for the next forty years to govern their “captive nations” (a term the Eisenhower administration came to apply to the Soviet Union’s satellites).
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