World domination (2)
October 5th, 2002
Last Saturday I said that the impending US war against Iraq is driven by the US aim to procure as many of the world’s oil resources as possible, in the course of which it would not balk at creating a global empire.
I owe readers of this column an apology. The empire does not need creating; it is already here. It was born over a hundred years ago during the US’s “splendid little war” (Theodore Roosevelt’s words) with Spain—in the course of which the United States conquered at the cost of a million native lives a country newly emerging from Spanish colonial rule, turned it into its own colony and forward military base and coaling station for nearly 50 years, and formally released it only after the Second World War, but kept it firmly within its orbit of influence.
That country is of course the Philippines, whose fortunes have been, to this very day, shaped by its relationship with the United States, first as its colony, and then as its first, last and always, client state in Asia.
The circumstances of the US conquest of the Philippines have receded from the memory of the colonized, or have never occupied a distinct place in the consciousness of most Filipinos. The reasons for this are legion, among them the tendency to recolor that brutal picture into the colors of the benevolence the United States itself said drove it to conquest. It is a tendency understandable enough among colonials, and by no means unique to Filipinos.
The US conquest of the Philippines is on the other hand a fact with which ordinary Americans are unfamiliar. What’s odd, however, is that at least one American historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., seemed either not to have known about it, or to have forgotten it altogether.
In a forum in Newsweek magazine a few weeks ago, Schlesinger, in the course of developing his thesis that the United States “would never be an empire,” said the US has never been a colonial power. Schlesinger obviously did not remember the Philippines, and also appears to have forgotten that Puerto Rico is still part of the US commonwealth, and that Guam and that part of the Virgin Islands are still formally US colonies.
In his view that the US will never be an empire, however, Schlesinger echoes the hopes of many American intellectuals that their country will hew to its declared commitments to democracy and self-rule—to the principles established in its own declaration of independence.
And yet the United States is already an empire. The French journalist Philip Golub quotes (in “Westward the Course of Empire,” Le Monde Diplomatique) Stephen Rosen of Harvard University as he describes the US:
“A political unit that has overwhelming military power, and uses that power to influence the internal behavior of other states, is called an empire.”
That view is echoed by Dinesh D’Souza of the conservative think tank the Hoover Institution, who argues that “Americans must finally recognize that the US has become an empire. . . .”
A number of American historians, politicians, researchers and policymakers have in fact openly affirmed—and argued the correctness—of US global dominance in the current world order. They are arguing that case today in the 21st century, a hundred years after the United States expanded westward into Asia, and 50 years after the European powers surrendered their colonies to native rule.
Besides the US’s 19th-century expansion’s resulting in the conquest of the Philippines, the United States also established itself in the Pacific as the dominant power. US historians have argued, however, that the drive for empire in the final days of the 19th century was an aberration, and that, as US foreign policy expert Charles W. Maynes argued only two years ago, the US “is a country with imperial capabilities but without an imperial mind.”
That is a thesis hardly worth defending today as the unilateralism of the Bush administration begins to more and more look and sound like imperial hubris—and as more and more spokesmen for US ruling circles argue the logic, correctness and alleged humaneness and benevolence of US imperial rule.
From Right to Left of the political spectrum, the argument that the United States must influence the political behavior of other states through force or the threat of the use of force is becoming as current today as it was at the turn of the century.
This argument is based on two assumptions. The first is that the United States is indubitably the world’s mightiest military and political power. The second is that it must preserve that status at all costs.
There have been other empires in history, but this is the first time in which one power has no rivals to speak of, and in which it has total global military supremacy.
Golub quotes the US historian Paul Kennedy:
“Nothing has ever existed like the disparity of power [today]. Pax Britannica was run on the cheap. Napoleon’s France and Philip II’s Spain had powerful foes and were part of a multipolar system. Charlemagne’s empire was merely Western European in stretch. The Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in Persia and a larger one in China. There is no comparison [to the American empire].”
The most striking thing about the global order today is that there is neither check nor balance on American power. The days when the United States will hesitate to act unilaterally ended with the passing of the Soviet Union, its only rival empire. The US war machine is also the mightiest in history, and armed with all the weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, biological and chemical—that George W. Bush has been declaring other states can’t possess without inviting US bombing.
The combination—the absence of any credible rival to US power, and the US’s possession of the mightiest war machine in all of human history—has led to the unilateralism of the present, in which the United States has made it clear that it is merely going through the motions of building an international consensus on Iraq.
With or without that consensus an attack on Iraq is certain, first because United States energy policy is focused on procuring new energy sources to maintain the profligate lifestyles of its citizens (whose happiness is the ultimate basis of the empire’s and its rulers’ existence) and incidentally assure its oil companies new sources of superprofits. The only question about a war on Iraq, as several US commentators have argued, is “when,” not “if.”
As the US campaign for war on Iraq accelerates, it is becoming clearer by the day that this determination will not be swayed either by considerations of its short-term impact on the Middle East and the rest of the world, or by any concern for its human costs.
Those concerns remain with the peoples of the planet, or at least with some of them, among whom there are at least stirrings of protest, no matter how faint, over the dominance of one power over the world and its fate. One such stirring was the 350,000-strong demonstration last Sunday in London against war in Iraq and Britain’s Tony Blair’s unique role in making it acceptable.
It seems safe to conclude that the US’s far too obvious display of imperial arrogance will not pass unprotested. The prospect of those protests’ ever really making a difference, however, is dim at best, given the vast power and the equally vast determination of the United States to preserve it at all costs—or, as the South African writer John Michael Coetzee (quoted by Golub) said, its being driven by one thought: “How not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.”
(ABS-CBNNEWS.COM/TODAY, October 1, 2002)