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

World politics in the twenty-first century will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century—that is, from the unintended consequences of the Cold War and the crucial American decision to maintain a Cold War posture in a post–Cold War world. U.S. administrations did what they thought they had to do in the Cold War years. History will record that in some places they did exemplary things; in other places, particularly in East Asia but also in Central America, they behaved no better than the Communist bureaucrats of their superpower competitor. The United States likes to think of itself as the winner of the Cold War. In all probability, to those looking back a century hence, neither side will appear to have won, particularly if the United States maintains its present imperial course.

FURTHER READING

After a lifetime spent writing academic books, I have tried to keep the notes in this one to a minimum in the hope of offering the nonexpert a provocative rather than a pedantic experience. Quotations are cited in the notes, but I believe it might be more useful with regard to general references to offer an annotated list of books, articles, and Internet sites that strike me as particularly helpful and relevant for further reading. These I have grouped under subject headings.

Arms Sales

Greider, William. Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace. New York: Public Affairs, 1998.

A short but powerful introduction to the economic implications of America’s massive military apparatus and the interests of the arms industry.

Shear, Jeff. The Keys to the Kingdom: The FS-X Deal and the Selling of America’s Future to Japan. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

A brilliant exposé of “the little state department in the Pentagon” and how and why it transferred the technology of America’s best fighter aircraft to Japan and got nothing in return.

Tirman, John. Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America’s Arms Trade. New York: Free Press, 1997.

If you read no other book on America’s arms trade, read this one. Tirman’s treatment of the U.S. stake in Turkey’s “white genocide” against the Kurds is the best available.

Aspects of American Imperialism

Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1994. Paperbound.

A masterful treatment of the transfer of hegemony from Britain to the United States. Brilliant on the “dialectic of market and plan” as the leitmotif of the twentieth century.

Aron, Raymond. The Imperial Republic: The United States and the World, 1945–1973. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

A classic defense of American Cold War policy in Europe by an independent French intellectual. Aron gets it right about Europe but has not a clue to American behavior in postwar East Asia.

Cumings, Bruce. Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American–East Asian Relations at the End of the Century. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999.

Important essays by the country’s leading historian of modern Korea. Cumings’s chapters on North Korea’s nuclear program, “area studies” during and after the Cold War, and American hegemony in East Asia are indispensable.

Engelhardt, Tom. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Paperbound.

The best guide to the ideology of American “good intentions” in the world, regardless of costs, and what happened to this ideology after the Vietnam War.

Greene, Graham. The Quiet American. New York: Bantam Books, 1957. Paperbound.

Greene is unsurpassed on Americans as imperialists, “impregnably armoured by . . . good intentions and . . . ignorance.”

Hatcher, Patrick Lloyd. The Suicide of an Elite: American Internationalists and Vietnam. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

An insider discusses how the loss of the war in Vietnam was not an accident or the result of a conspiracy but the normal workings of the Cold War national security apparatus.

Lowen, Rebecca S. Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Why President Eisenhower’s epithet “the military-industrial complex” must be amended to “the military-industrial-university” complex and the blowback from lost intellectual integrity that awaits American institutions of higher learning.

China