Welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
It's Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And just like in the last interview, you hear me all the time invoke the writings of Chalmers Johnson, the author of the brilliant Blowback Trilogy.
That's Blowback, The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, Sorrows of Empire, I forget the subtitle of that one, and Nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic.
All three of them absolutely indispensable works.
And you can often read what Dr. Chalmers Johnson writes at truthdig.com.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
How are you doing?
Thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Well, one thing before we get into the details of what you've been writing here is something that I've always thought very interesting is your own personal story, your background as an intellectual, a professor, I believe, at USC, right?
No, at Berkeley.
I'm sorry?
At Berkeley.
Oh, at Berkeley.
Pardon me.
And you were at one time, I guess, like a contractor, analyst for the CIA.
Is that right?
A consultant.
A consultant, okay.
But not a covert operator, right?
You're an intellectual, an analyst.
Off the national estimate.
And I believe you've explained before that you were really an ardent Cold Warrior.
I think that's true, yes.
And so I guess it seems like, for the most part, the people who were ardent Cold Warriors during the days of the Soviet Union are ardent war on terrors now.
Why are you not still a proponent of American expansionism?
Oh, I think there's various reasons, but the most important one was the end of the Cold War, the elimination of the excuse for our huge global spread of military bases, empire, military forces, and seemingly endless wars, that when that ended and we had removed that problem, or it had removed itself, the thing that struck me most startlingly about it was how quickly the American establishment moved to find a replacement enemy.
That they couldn't live without the Soviet Union and the Cold War structure and the support for the military industrial complex and things of this sort.
They tried to find anything to replace the Soviet Union.
China, terrorism, instability even, one thing after another.
And they did not end the Cold War.
They continued it.
If anything, our military expenditures continued right through the 1990s and well into the Bush administration.
It was this development that led me to believe that we needed to rethink the entire Cold War and understand it rather more in terms of American imperialism than in terms of the menace of the Soviet Union.
And see, that's really important.
I think Pat Buchanan at the end of the Cold War said, alright, let's disband NATO and bring all our soldiers home and leave Iraq alone and not be an empire.
But he never seemed to be very likely to take up Cold War revisionism and whether they were doing the right thing all along.
But you went back and questioned the whole post-World War II era.
I believe that's true, yes.
And so what is it about the Cold War that you learned?
Or what is it that is so much different in your understanding now than during the Cold War itself?
During World War II, we decided, we determined that we would step into the shoes of the former British Empire for purposes of a theory of ours, the need for a hegemon to dominate the world, to regulate international commerce, to be the policemen of the world, things of this sort.
And that we began systematically to do that at the end of World War II, continued into the Cold War, and continued at the present time.
Part of the manifestation of that is our situation today of over 800 military bases spread around the globe on every continent except Antarctica.
They're lunatically expensive, have nothing to do with national security, and yet they're almost a taboo subject to even talk about getting rid of them.
Well, but what about the Red Menace?
I mean, the Soviet Union sure did control and have friendly relations with other communist nations in a very large part of the globe, right?
Wasn't it all a defensive move to contain communism?
We were forced to take up the British Empire.
I don't believe that's true.
I think that you could equally argue the other way around, that Soviet expansionism, militarism, was in some ways a response to our clear determination that once the British could no longer play the role of global hegemon, we were determined to step into their shoes, replace them, and to take over to maintain our hegemony over the globe.
So it depends upon the perspective you want to put on the data, but it's not at all clear that the United States was in any way ever truly threatened by the Soviet Union.
Well, you know, Murray Rothbard made the case back then that basically it was obvious that the Russian Communist Party basically wanted communism in one country or whatever.
They weren't trying to expand.
They were just trying to hold themselves together.
And you know, John Mueller pointed out in his great book, Overblown, that really what happened that destroyed the Soviet Union was that America stopped containing them.
After the disaster in Vietnam, they expanded into Afghanistan and they started propping up more regimes or putting more regimes on the dole in Africa and in Central America.
It was an overstretch.
So when we finally stopped containing them is when they fell apart.
Well, certainly the argument can be made that there's a lot to that.
I think that it's also true to say that Leninism had within it the seeds of its own destruction, that as an economic philosophy it didn't work the way it was intended to, and that this is one of the things today that one sees in Chinese reform.
I feel fascinated by the problems of dismantling a Leninist regime, which they certainly had at one time, without the known consequences that befell the former Soviet Union.
Well, I guess our problem is now we have nobody to contain us.
And even though we have mostly a private property rights-based capitalist system, we also have a lot of government intervention in that economy that seems, I guess from this point of view anyway, to be to our detriment, not least of which is the military spending, which Robert Higgs at the Independent Institute puts at a trillion dollars a year.
Right.
I accept his figures on that.
And he says the rule of thumb is whatever they say it is, double it, because you have to count the cost of the news and health care for veterans and all those things.
All of those things that have been systematically left out of the budget of what we spend on military affairs.
And so without anyone to contain us, we're basically on that path that the Soviet Union was on in the early and mid-'80s, I guess.
We're trying to contain ourselves, however.
We've gone too far.
We can't afford it any longer.
The Chinese are clearly catching up with us in terms of economic power.
It's impossible to be the global hegemon and be the world's largest debt-netter nation.
That's a contradiction that is now finally coming home to root.
Well, is anybody in Washington, D.C., finally getting the message about this, or we're just going to have to go the hard way all the way down?
I wish they were, but I don't see the signs that they are getting it, that I voted for Obama.
I basically support many of the things that he has done, particularly his emphasis on reducing global emissions of gases that cause global warming, his emphasis on providing health care for all Americans, and things of this sort.
But on the issues of the military, he's ducted.
He looks like a center-right government more every day.
One can't help but remember that his true predecessor is not Franklin Roosevelt.
His true predecessor is Lyndon Johnson, another liberal Democratic senator who came to power as the president via the vice presidency and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but who then, in a very idealistic manner, set out to undertake reforms that were long overdue in civil rights, in the war on poverty, things of this sort.
But he was totally blown out of the water and his presidency ruined by the Vietnam War that he inherited.
Unfortunately, it's beginning to look like Obama is doing the same thing with a war he has inherited in Afghanistan.
Well, what do you make of all the grand strategy about the arc of crisis and all this stuff, the oil pipeline directions and all this?
Does Central Asia belong to America?
I mean, is that basically the view of the people that run the American establishment and the American Pentagon, that we have to stay there forever?
This is Injun country, our manifest destiny, and all this?
Well, that's certainly the idea behind American imperialism, that we dominate the world, and among the various ways we do it, certainly are through military power, but also through the control of petroleum resources and the belief that the dependency on petroleum will continue virtually forever.
And this is an error.
It is the kind of thing that leads ultimately to the sort of thing that happened to the British Empire, a great imperial overstretch, a uniting of the rest of the world against you, and an impoverishment of your own society, in that one of the things that we never acknowledge are the opportunity costs in maintaining an empire.
That is to say, the opportunity cost that if you decide to be an imperialist power, that you can't do everything, and you can't do the things you should do, investing in education, in future technologies, things of this sort, which we clearly have fallen badly behind in.
Well, and on, I guess, the second point there, pushing the rest of the world together against you, this is something we've talked about in the past, and I guess maybe the idea would be now that that's less of a problem, that at least we're no longer pushing Europe straight into the arms of Russia and China, but at least we're pushing Russia and China together in Asia, and trying mightily to bribe the Indians, I guess, to tolerate us there.
Well, I think that also clearly in Latin America, that the time has run out on their toleration of America pushing them around, of imperialism.
The thing that fascinates me is when one looks back on the history of foreign activity in South America, over the last three or four centuries, is that it's the one area of the world in which Marx's analysis probably fits better than anybody else's.
And it's now beginning to show up that they don't want us anymore, and are freezing us out.
Well, in your latest piece at Truthdig, it's a review of a book about the cost of empire, and you mention the status of the American empire in Ecuador being kicked out, and it reminded me of a funny story where the President Correa, I guess is how you say it?
Yes.
He said, yeah, fine, you can keep your military base here, but we get to have a military base in Florida.
Right.
That was his quid pro quo.
Yes, once the base at Manta in Ecuador is finally closed in this coming November, then we'll have troops in Latin America, only in Colombia.
Yeah.
Well, that's real progress.
And, in fact, it hasn't been really war and revolution that did it.
It was lefties at the ballot box that accomplished it, huh?
No question.
And the realization that they had been systematically screwed for years on everything from coffee prices to payments for their resources flowing into American factories and American wealth.
Well, and I guess without the Soviet Union, it's harder for America to justify going down there and doing coup d'etats when they can't invoke a Soviet beachhead in our hemisphere and all that nonsense.
Well, that's quite true.
The Soviet Union was one of the most convenient things that's ever happened to us, particularly in our relations with Cuba.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
Well, and let's talk about that relations with Cuba.
I mean, I guess basically Castro.
I'm reading a great book about the Bay of Pigs right now by Howard Jones.
It talks about how Castro made the calculation that there's too much money at stake and the Americans will basically continue to allow trade.
And then he can have his cake and eat it, too, and be friends with the Soviets, but still trade with the Americans.
And so Ike Eisenhower and them decided, oh, no, you don't.
We'll just put an embargo on you to prove that your theory about how this was going to work is wrong.
And here we are in 2009 with this policy still strangling that island.
And Americans with a little bit of education or a little bit of income are also struggling to get visas to go visit Cuba.
Well, what do you think is going to happen now?
Do you think Obama is going to try to fix relations with Cuba at all?
I would hope so.
But I think he's not shown the decisiveness here that he has on the economic crisis, on other issues.
I'm utterly delighted to see that he is today putting on new restrictions on emissions of automobiles and demanding that we improve gas mileage up to 35.5 miles per gallon.
That's a good thing.
That's the sort of things he was supposed to do.
We don't understand why he has backtracked on commitments to close Guantanamo, to end the torture regime, and things of this sort.
It doesn't really make sense as far as I can see.
I also don't believe he can possibly hold back the tide of demands for information on these subjects.
I don't believe that his history works its way out anyway, and he ought to know that.
He's a very well-informed man.
His new stance on Israel, in talking with the Israeli prime minister yesterday, was quite gratifying.
Why hasn't he tumbled to the fact that our military empire, well over 800 bases spread around the world, is fantastically expensive, is worthless to us, that it's time to start cutting them down?
If he doesn't start doing it now, soon events are going to force him to anyway.
The problem for the United States is not bankruptcy, it's insolvency, that we simply run out of money to do the sorts of things that our military industrial complex demands.
That's now in the cards.
It doesn't take too long to get to that point.
We may get there regardless of what we do.
And that we need to lower our sights, get used to being an ordinary country, to start preparing the public for it, doing some real educational work of the sort that the president should do.
This is an area where I don't understand his blindness.
At first I thought it was simply he was, like many democratic politicians, scared of the American public and of the Republicans attacking him on grounds of national security.
But nobody really believes that there's a national security threat to the United States, that certainly the situation, from the point of view of, say, the Bush foreign policy in Pakistan, is deteriorating.
But the real question to ask is, why is this of vital interest to the United States?
In what sense does what happens there affect our interest?
Of course it's unstable, but if it doesn't affect us, it's not necessarily something we ought to try to do something about, particularly when we know that we're going to fail at it anyway.
There seems to be so much hype.
The New York Times put out this piece about how the Pakistanis are rapidly making more nuclear weapons and all this, which of course they deny.
So far they've outsourced to Zardari the job, and it seems like he's actually doing it, where Musharraf didn't, of invading the northwestern territories of Pakistan to some degree there.
But he's created a million and a half refugees and untold consequences that flow on down the line from there.
And I guess there's some reason to at least worry, from my point of view, that maybe the Obama team wants to have a little bit more crisis and disruption of society inside Pakistan, so they can justify, or pretend to justify, actually putting American troops there, perhaps seizing the Pakistanis' nukes and that kind of thing.
I hope that the public has become a little less gullible, that it can see through these things more effectively, to realize that it's nowhere written in international relations theory, in the stars, in any predictions or anything else, that it is our responsibility to deal with these matters.
Afghanistan has a simply unparalleled history of resisting foreign invaders and disrupting their lives, and it's not going to work.
We know how it will come out, the same way it's going to come out that it has for the British, the Russians, even going back to Alexander the Great.
That is, you can't be that ignorant of history, as he appears to be, and as our military leaders continue to put out stale ideas that are reminiscent of nothing but Dick Cheney.
Well, you know, at least in those old empires, not that this is better, but economically on the balance sheet anyway, they were looting these places they would invade, and then take all the gold and slaves and whatever back to the central city, and that's basically how empire works.
And yet in our empire, and this is something that I think is so obviously true, it's something you clearly prove beyond dispute in your books, but it's something that pro- and anti-war forces both buy into, is this idea that the American people live this way, and only could because of all the violence that our government commits on people overseas.
When in fact, everything goes out and nothing comes back.
The people who get rich off of the empire are people who stick their hand in the stream of money as it goes out.
And it's just an equation for bankruptcy here.
All it takes is a look out the window to see.
It is at the same time also sapping our strength, in that we're not paying attention to the kind of research we ought to be doing.
It's simply astonishing the degree to which our research establishment has been diverted into military affairs, rather than to things that truly matter.
I mean, we compare the United States with any other advanced industrialized country in terms of rail transportation.
Ours is simply primitive compared with that of any other country.
This is not something that has to be, or does it have anything particularly to do with free enterprise.
It has to do with the preemption of our resources by something that will ultimately bring us down.
Well, and to your article at Truthdig here, I'm sorry that this somehow ranks lower on order of importance in the conversation.
It really shouldn't.
You talk about the American people's ignorance, especially because of mass media's refusal to discuss the effect of our empire on people around the world, not just in Iraq, but Okinawa.
And I know you're from the Japan Policy Research Institute.
This is a subject that you cover in at least two of the three books of the Blowback Trilogy.
What it's like to be a citizen of Okinawa, the Japanese, our best friends in the whole world.
How is it that our American military occupation treats them?
Well, it's by the same token we refuse to just acknowledge that the shame and the scandal of the American armed forces today is the treatment of women and girls within our own army, in the countries that we occupy as they surround our bases, that it's becoming epidemic and very serious, that Americans don't appreciate it because no Americans live next to a base made up of several thousand young Americans, heavily armed, deeply indoctrinated into their own alleged superiority, often racial superiority, and the kind of unbelievable tension that this generates.
We've been doing this for too long, and it's catching up with us.
Well, can you give us some examples?
Well, Okinawa is probably a good example where the rate of sexually violent crimes against the women of this small Japanese island is simply scandalous.
It's gone on for too long.
We have powerful organizations in Okinawa trying to get the officer corps, the Marine Corps, to exercise some minimal discipline over their troops.
They keep saying they're going to do it.
They don't do it.
We know that it's not impossible for the military to do that.
It just simply looks increasingly like the American Armed Forces are a misogynist organization and it's a disaster for a country to have them located in their territory.
Well, and here's the thing I don't understand either.
To what purpose?
I mean, it's not like China's about to invade Japan or something.
Of course not.
That's the point.
The only explanation that does make sense is pure imperialism, our feeling that we dominate the world, we must continue to do so, and that in some odd way, often defended by academic enthusiasts for militarism, that this is in our interest.
It's not at all clear that it's in our interest.
It's the opposite, that we are so clearly beginning to show signs of overstretch, of the weakness of our economy caused by the misallocation of our resources, by ineffective economic management, given the fact that we devote so much of our resources to the military, and that we need to change course.
That's what the British did after World War II, when they realized that they simply could not continue to claim a great victory in World War II over the Nazis, and then continue to rule India through essentially Nazi methods.
What about America's relationship with Russia as it is now?
Obama seems to me, you know, we all lamented George Bush's complete and total lack of ability to complete a sentence of any kind, but Obama seems to have that Clintonian gift of parsing his words so carefully, and saying one thing and meaning another, and that kind of thing, where the best example that I can think of, although there seems to be a new one every day, is the speech he gave in the Czech Republic, about how we're going to abolish nuclear weapons, but not in my lifetime, which he ought to live another 40 years or something.
And then in the second part of the speech, he announced that he was in fact going to go through with George Bush and Dick Cheney's plan to put anti-missile missiles in the Czech Republic and in Poland, to protect from Iran, when, as Scott Ritter points out, they're obviously for Russia, and yet they're completely useless for use against the Russians.
They're only served as a provocation.
Who is running this show that they think it's the right idea to pick a fight with Russia right now?
We just don't understand this opaqueness, this inability, this myopia, inability to see that Russia is certainly not the former Soviet Union.
It is a much, much smaller place than the Soviet Union was.
It is slowly recovering from the trauma of the end of Leninist communism, and we violated one understanding they had after another, including the thought that we would not provoke them by pushing the limits of our military alliances, like NATO, right up to the Russian border, but we've been, in fact, creating military alliances with the Baltic nations, of all things.
This is as threatening, well, certainly as the Soviet Union putting missiles in Cuba ever thought it would be, and we are doing it to right and left around the world.
Why?
I don't understand.
It's part of the continued, I guess, the hangover of the Cold War, of the years of propaganda drumbeat on the American public, but it's tragic, it's gone too far.
The whole Georgian effort was just ludicrous.
I mean, it was so clearly, obviously, that we have provoked Georgia into behaving in a belligerent manner because we caused them to believe that we would back them up on any stupid thing they did, sort of the same mistake we've made with the Israelis for so long.
And, of course, they went too far, that it was perfectly natural that Russia would react to the use of force against South Ossetia and places like that.
And it backfired on us badly.
We don't acknowledge we made errors, we are not sensible about it, and we don't understand how, having elected a new reform government, and certainly we understood it to be a reform government, and that the country was desperately in need of reform, we don't understand why one area of reform, namely our foreign military policies, should be offered.
Well, and you've really dedicated these last few years of your life to this subject, of waking up the American people to even just the fact that we have an empire, right?
I mean, hell, everybody still calls it defense spending, as though we don't have these hundreds of bases you talk about.
And as we know, the defense has nothing to do with national defense.
They certainly were not defending us on September 11, 2001.
We had to create a new department concerned with national security, national defense, namely the department of what we now call Homeland Security.
The contradictions here are endless, and we desperately need to wake up.
It is very close to being too late right now.
I would have thought that the economic meltdown and the fact that it was much more serious than anybody was saying or predicting or any of our economic geniuses were commenting on when it first started, turned out to be much more serious than they appreciated that the imperial overstretch has gone so far now that clearly the dollar soon will lose its status as the international main currency of trade and settlement of debt, and that the replacement is almost surely the Chinese currency.
Well, and that's the real breaking point.
I mean, if that doesn't do it, then I don't know what could, right?
Well, you'd think it was already started.
I mean, one of the most conservative and interesting economists at work in America today, Nouriel Roubini at New York University, just wrote in the op-ed of the New York Times this past couple of weeks, I can't remember the exact date now, on how it's now inevitable that we no longer have the position of economic hegemon, we can't regain it, there's no historical precedent of a hegemon retaining his imperial power only through military force, particularly since we can't afford the military any longer.
Yeah, it really is strange to me.
It's exactly out of Carol Quigley's study of the rise and fall of empires, that last stage of world empire where they just lash out like a wounded dog or something, and just completely make matters worse all the way around.
Oh, you think you're going to start denominating your oil in anything but dollars?
Well, we'll show you.
We'll spend $4 trillion that we have to create out of nothing in order to invade you and not let you out of the dollar.
Well, what does that do to the dollar?
And now look at us.
It's a disaster.
And the real point there is, the dollar hasn't broken yet.
We're at the point.
We're at the point.
Bernanke is doing everything he can, I guess, to break it by creating trillions and trillions of new dollars out of thin air.
But that will have to be the end of the empire then when the dollar is worthless, right?
No question.
I mean, to attempt to reconstitute the old system, there are some vaguely encouraging signs as the auto industry is being reformed or is going out of business, which it should have done some time ago, or various other such things.
But the policies aren't lined up yet, and the president is not really offering reformist leadership where it's needed in that area.
Well, when the whole thing falls apart, are you optimistic at all that the American people will be able to at least kind of get our act together enough to want to go back to following the Constitution rather than throwing it away and replacing it with a much worse system?
I wish that were true, but I'm a professional political scientist, and political scientists are virtually, by training, personality, historical knowledge, and everything else, anything but optimistic.
Yeah.
Well, that's kind of how I feel about it.
It seems like it's so obvious, though, that we've gone off our track.
That's what's wrong is we've abandoned what we're supposed to be doing here.
Well, we've abandoned what we know what we ought to be doing, too.
That's what's so disastrous about it.
I mean, I fear that we're starting to replay again the idealism of a Lyndon Johnson, of a liberal Democratic senator who did not really expect to be president, but when he became president he surprised everyone with the Civil Rights Act, with the most innovative policies we had seen on race relations since the Civil War, on the war on poverty, on one thing after another, and then he is simply ruined by the Vietnam War.
Right, and set us up for the economic disaster of the 1970s.
Absolutely.
Where there was a bubble burst, and then they kept trying to stimulate and stimulate and stimulate, and it didn't work for a whole decade, and it forced us off the gold standard.
It doesn't take much insight to say it's extremely unlikely that Barack Obama wants to go down as a second Lyndon Johnson.
That's why you don't understand what he's up to.
What is his strategy?
In the case of Bush-Cheney, you had the feeling they were really old-fashioned reactionaries that had Kipling-esque dreams of empire, many of them inspired by Israeli strategists.
But in the case of Obama, it doesn't make sense.
Well, let me ask you about this.
I'm sorry for keeping you so long, but you're so interesting.
I love these questions, or I love these answers.
The questions aren't that good.
But the American establishment, and all your Cold War revisionism, did you find that they were as deluded as you were during the Cold War, or they knew that this was all a hoax all along anyway?
I mean, it wasn't the Israeli establishment that came up with the plan for empire.
It was the Council on Foreign Relations in the 40s.
We were all deluded.
There's no question about that.
We convinced ourselves that a very poor country that had been maldeveloped under communism, namely Stalinist Russia, was stepping into the shoes of Adolf Hitler.
The Russian victory over Hitler during World War II is one of the great and unusual stories of modern times.
It's still, to me, astonishing the degree to which things like the History Channel run off of the idea that we won World War II.
That is, had it not been for Zhukov and the Russian army, we might very well all be speaking German.
And this is the tragedy of it all, that we let it go too far, we lost our critical facilities, and that's what goes wrong with imperialism and its handmaiden, militarism.
Well, you know, I used to, when I was younger, think that when the Bushes talked about the New World Order, that that didn't mean the American empire.
It wasn't whatever came after it.
It's some kind of larger world federal system that America becomes sort of subsumed under, and there have been a lot of intellectuals who lean that way over the years.
I never thought it was as alarming a concept as you gathered it was in the minds of some American right-wingers.
Right, well, my thing was, it seemed like, if I've known since I was a little kid that all empires fall, then this has got to be on purpose.
This Kissinger guy's a genius.
How could he make this giant murder-suicide pact?
This isn't right, you know?
It must be part of the plan.
But now I realize why all empires fall.
It's because they get people that really are that narrow-sighted, and they have so much power, it's just a free-for-all.
Whether we didn't notice that our leading ally in the world, the country that seemingly forever we can't get away from, Britain, finally, between 1945 and 1947, realized that the game was up, that they couldn't do it any longer, that if they were going to remain a viable democracy, they had to get rid of the empire.
And they started doing it.
They didn't do a very good job.
They weren't very clever about it.
There were many setbacks, everything from attempts to suppress the people of Kenya in an anti-colonial revolt, the whole fiasco of the Suez Canal and their relations with Egypt.
But nonetheless, they did get out.
They didn't get out as they should have, but the current Indian election is rather gratifying.
It's taken a long time to get to this point, and India remains still a very poor country, but it's not a disaster by any manner, and rather impressive development most recently.
And it's astonishing to see the recovery of public opinion in India of the Congress Party.
That's what we learn from these countries.
That is, Britain is not a bad country to emulate, to have figured out that it was on a path that led to disaster.
We're on a path that will lead to disaster, and we're not figuring it out.
We're not yet putting it on our agenda to start making the changes that will be necessary.
Well, Dr. Johnson, I sure appreciate your efforts along these lines to get people to recognize Well, I appreciate your efforts.
We have antiwar.com, too.
It's an extremely useful compendium.
Every one of us consults it daily.
Well, thank you very much for that.
Everybody, that's Dr. Chalmers Johnson.
The book is Nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic.
Thanks again.
Thank you very much.