Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

In February 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, defending the use of cruise missiles against Iraq, declared, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see farther into the future.”⁴ In this book I have tried to lay out some important aspects of America’s role in the world that suggest precisely the opposite. I have also tried to explain how the nature and shape of this role grew out of the structural characteristics of the Cold War itself and the strategies the United States pursued, particularly in East Asia, to achieve what it considered its interests during that period and after. I have argued that the United States created satellites in East Asia for the same reasons that the former Soviet Union created satellites in Eastern Europe. For over forty years, the policies needed to maintain these client states economically, while protecting and controlling them militarily, produced serious unintended consequences, most of which Americans have yet to fully grasp. They hollowed out our domestic manufacturing and bred a military establishment that is today close to being beyond civilian control. Given that the government only attempts to shore up, not change, these anachronistic arrangements, one must ask when, not whether, our accidental empire will start to unravel.

According to a Brookings Institution study, it has cost the United States $5.5 trillion to build and maintain our nuclear arsenal.⁵ It is now common knowledge that comparable costs in the former USSR led to its collapse. In 1988, just before the Berlin Wall fell, that elegant historian of imperial overextension Paul Kennedy detailed the numerous weaknesses of the Soviet economy but nonetheless concluded, “This does not mean that the USSR is close to collapse, any more than it should be viewed as a country of almost supernatural strength. It does mean that it is facing awkward choices.”⁶ This understandable misassessment by one of the world’s authorities on imperial collapse contains an important warning for the United States. Fifteen years ago no one in Russia or elsewhere imagined that the USSR could possibly be in danger of internal disintegration. There are parallels between what happened in the former USSR after the end of the Cold War and the state of the American polity at the end of the century, even acknowledging that economically the Soviet Union had long been a shell held together by a huge underground (and technically illegal) economy, while it displayed to the external world a vast imperial army and nuclear forces.

In March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was no more opposed to Soviet-style socialism than his counterparts in the United States were opposed to “democracy and free markets.” He was, however, keenly aware of the strains that an endless, unwinnable war in Afghanistan and the arms race with the United States were placing on an already shaky economy. A month after he came to power, Gorbachev launched a campaign of economic reform controlled from above that he called perestroika, or “restructuring.” Gorbachev’s relatively limited goal was to try to accelerate national economic performance by relaxing the Soviet system’s centralized planning. He did not fully appreciate that weakening the vertical structure of the Soviet system without first creating horizontal (even if ideologically unacceptable) institutions, such as markets, prices, and private property, would only lead to chaos. Communist colleagues with vested interests in the old system rebelled against even his modest domestic reforms and sabotaged them. In order to counter these attacks, in 1987 Gorbachev introduced something really new—glasnost, or freedom of speech. His intent was still only to achieve a more efficient system of production and improved living standards under the established Soviet political order.

But far more than perestroika, glasnost would prove a critical miscalculation for a leader hoping to reform Soviet-style communism. Glasnost not only opened up the full horrors of the Stalinist past but also revealed the extent to which totalitarian controls had damaged all aspects of life in the USSR. Glasnost—the open discussion of the past—ended up discrediting the very institutions within which the Soviet people had worked since at least 1929, clearing the way for the abandonment of Communist ideology itself, and the subsequent loss of any form of political authority in Russia. A decade later the country was bankrupt, more or less leaderless, and riven with corruption. Russia has also become one of the world’s most important breeding grounds for resentment against the Western powers. Even as the United States gloats over its “victory” in the Cold War, future Russian revanchism becomes more and more likely.