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

But how can peripheral societies, even when they achieve national independence, break out of their economic and political dependency? In the view of the prominent political scientist Andrew Janos, history offers examples of two grand strategies for dealing with this issue.³ The first was for dependent or “late-developing” countries to attempt through war and revolution to reconstruct their environments. This strategy required a militarization of society and the use of a mobilized people to attack and transform the environment. The execution of this strategy has taken the forms of aggression and conquest (Nazi Germany, Japan from 1931 to 1945), support for world revolution (Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia), fomenting “people’s wars” (China and Cuba), aggressive neutralism (India), and other projects aimed at altering an environment in which “advanced” countries exploit “developing” ones.

The second strategy has been, in Janos’s words, a “drive to imitate the technological innovations of the advanced countries.” This strategy has generally been internally oriented. It is best illustrated by Japan’s state-guided industrialization from 1868 to approximately the Great Depression and again from 1949 to the present. It may involve only the state’s use of tariffs to shelter its own economy from the penetrative power of stronger national economies. This was the strategy of the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in accordance with the ideas of Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich List. A version of this strategy also became policy in West Germany after its defeat in World War II. But such a strategy involving state guidance of the economy, cartelization, and the strategic allocation of industrial finance may so come to dominate a social system that development itself becomes the main legitimating and organizing principle of society, replacing or displacing democratic representation, tradition, or any other set of political or cultural principles. When that happens, the ensuing regime can be termed a “developmental state.”⁴

Needless to say, in comparing the ways each strategy has been used during the twentieth century, it seems clear that the developmental state has proven far more successful than any attempt to forcibly reconstruct the external world, although it is a tricky strategy to execute and has many hidden consequences. It is critically dependent on a permissive international environment, such as the one the United States enjoyed in the nineteenth century or Japan vis-à-vis the United States after 1952.

These two strategies also define the history of the People’s Republic of China since its birth in 1949. From the time Mao discovered that it would not be easy to duplicate a Stalinist program of development in China—that is, when he discovered that his Great Leap Forward campaign to move the country toward heavy industrialization through extreme levels of collectivization had by 1962 resulted in the deaths by starvation of some thirty million people—he experimented with altering the external environment on the cheap. He tried to militarize (he called it “revolutionize”) his own society and to reconstruct the external world by sponsoring or endorsing “people’s wars.” Even though in Vietnam this approach succeeded in tarnishing the image of the United States as a superpower, it did not really alter the balance of power, and the Vietnamese soon resented Mao’s claims of paternity to a strategy they had embarked on without Chinese help. Mao’s massive domestic upheaval, the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” which started in 1966 and lasted in one form or another almost a decade, was his revenge against the Communist Party after he lost control of it in the wake of the Great Leap Forward. It further discredited him, and communism, in the eyes of his main supporters; after his death in 1976 and the return to power of the purged Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the country devoted itself to reform and recovery from the Cultural Revolution. China began, in short, to experiment with the second strategy for breaking out of its backwardness.