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

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 demonstrators 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.