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

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.