08/12/09 – Robert Higgs – The Scott Horton Show

Alright everybody, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
And our next guest on the show today is Robert Higgs, he's a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and is the editor of the Independent Review.
He's the author of Crisis and Leviathan and Against Leviathan and the Resurgence of the Warfare State, Depression War and Cold War and many other great books.
The website is independent.org.
Welcome back to the show Bob, how are you doing?
I'm fine Scott.
Well I appreciate you joining us on the show today and I want to ask you about the evolution of the American empire and the economics of it.
I was reading some Jeffrey Hummel and he was talking about how very shortly after Appomattox courthouse the Grand Army of the Republic was basically dismantled.
They kept 60,000 something troops for the occupation of the south, but the rest of the army was sent home, they sold off all their ships or sank them or I don't know what and basically the national government disarmed the military after the Civil War there.
And apparently that's basically more or less what happened after the Mexican War and even a bit in the so-called return to normalcy after World War I, but best I can tell since World War II we've had basically a permanent state of military expansion.
So I was wondering if you could explain how was it that got started and whether it was all just to protect us from the Reds or what's going on there and then maybe we can get into the situation as it exists today in terms of the American world empire and what it really costs this country.
The U.S. Armed Forces were built up enormously during World War II, Scott.
At their peak in 1945 they had more than 12 million men and women, some women, in uniform.
They had approximately that number of people working in the military supply industries and as civilian employees of the War Department and the Navy Department, so at that time we had about roughly 40% of the entire labor force of the United States occupied with making war directly or indirectly, which was just an astonishing thing.
The end of the war did bring about an enormous demobilization of those huge forces, but after that demobilization was completed, it took about two years to be fully completed, at that time the Armed Forces were much bigger, about three or four times bigger depending on which measure you look at, than they had been before World War II.
So there was a kind of ratchet effect in terms of the size of the Armed Forces.
There was also a ratchet effect in terms of the perceived responsibilities of those forces and that was ultimately the more important thing about World War II, because prior to the war the great, great majority of the American people, until 1941 probably 85 or 90% of the American people wanted nothing to do with foreign wars as they understood them, which was mostly an understanding of wars in Europe.
But the sentiment in this country before World War II was extremely hostile to war and militarism and the Armed Forces were practically starved in the 1920s and 30s, but that changed as a result of World War II.
The people adopted the idea during the war or were led to adopt it by their political leaders that the war changed the place of the United States in the global situation, that somehow now the United States had been thrust, as people like to say, into a position of world leadership of the democracies, the victorious powers in the war, oddly enough including the Soviet Union, above all in many ways the most victorious of all those allied powers, but put that aside and there we have people coming to believe in 1946 and later that there is now no going back to this thing that had been slandered as isolationism, that somehow this was obsolete, that it wouldn't work in the world as it existed after World War II.
So given that the United States had to take this position of world leadership, it had to maintain some kind of military forces that would be consistent with the exercise of that kind of leadership.
Now that doesn't mean that in 1947-48 the U.S. forces were anything to write home about.
They had been tremendously cut back and in some ways they were ill-supplied and ill-trained and so forth, and for a very short while there in 1947 the draft was discontinued.
So it almost looked as if we were going to go back to the old regime of complete demobilization, but we stopped short of it because of this new conception of American foreign policy in the post-war world, and going along with that and complementing it in a lot of ways was this perception that the Soviet Union had immediately come to pose the kind of threat to the free countries that Germany, Japan and their allies were supposed to have posed during the war.
So there was a seamless transition from the lineup of forces during the war to this realignment in which now the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, and before long China after it went communist, would all be put up as the enemy, and now the United States had to have forces capable of resisting or containing or otherwise coping with this new terrible menace that was said to threaten our country and the peace of the world, so that along with this kind of perception of the necessity for U.S. world leadership that was peddled by U.S. political leaders combined to give some support to maintaining bigger armed forces than the U.S. had maintained before the war.
Notwithstanding all of that, these weren't huge forces, even in 1948-49, and many people in the U.S. government wanted to enlarge them greatly in view of the situation I've been describing, which was their view of the world.
In fact, Bob, I think that's the way I learned it when I was a kid, was that the reason that World War II happened was because America didn't sign, the Senate didn't ratify the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations, and that was a lesson learned, that we've got to not only join the League of Nations, we have to own the thing and put it in New York and use that collective security model, Soviet Union or not, right?
I think that's true, Scott.
I think the war was represented to the public as a validation of what people had said before, the old Wilsonians with their support of the League of Nations and their resentment of its opponents.
You can see a lot of continuity from the Wilsonians of World War I right up to the post-war American foreign policy establishment, so that is part of it, but they're basically getting nowhere in the late 40s because Congress is just, strange to say, responding to the public, which wants to get rid of these giant armed forces and all the expenses that go with them and all the dangers that are perceived to go along with trying to be a world policeman.
So, I really oversimplified it at the beginning in saying that the militarization of World War II never really ended.
Of course, there was the ratchet effect, but it really was scaled back quite a bit from World War II.
It took, what, until the Korean War to really get the whole Cold Warrior machinery arms race going?
Yes, that's exactly what happened, Scott.
What was going on was that the foreign policy establishment and the Truman administration were very keen to build up the armed forces and their focus of attention was heavily on Europe and resisting any further Soviet expansion in Europe and trying to keep Western European countries from going communist internally through Soviet subversion or assistance.
So, they keenly wanted this build up mainly for that purpose, but the public just didn't want to spend all this money to maintain a big peacetime armed force.
As you noted, they had never done this in our history.
What tipped the balance was Korea.
Acheson has this famous statement in his book, President of the Creation, in which he says, �Korea saved us,� by which he meant that once the Korean War broke out and the government responded by going to war against the North Koreans and, soon afterward, the Chinese, these big new military expenses looked like expenses of fighting the war.
But, in the most part, they were not that.
They were actually expenses aimed at building up the armed forces for operations elsewhere in the world, primarily in Western Europe.
What year was it that the Russians first tested an atomic bomb?
1949.
So, a lot of things are happening around the same time there, at the end of the 40s.
I mentioned that the communists took over China in 1949.
The Soviets exploded their first atom bomb.
The next year, the North Korean invasion.
So, hell is breaking loose on the foreign policy front, and all of these things are being leveraged by the Truman administration to do what it wanted to do before any of these events took place, which is build up the armed forces for the purpose of effectively resisting or containing Soviet expansionism, primarily in Europe.
Now, when I talk to Chalmers Johnson, he's the author of, as I'm sure you know, the great blowback trilogy, Blowback, Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, the last days of the American Republic.
And, he was a Cold Warrior, and I think it wasn't until after the Cold War ended, he saw that NATO did not disband in response to the Warsaw Pact disbanding.
And, he saw the American Empire reach for its unipolar moment, as Charles Krauthammer the neocon called it.
And, that's what made him go back and question the entire Cold War, and revise his understanding of the entire Cold War, that really, he'd been wrong.
He was a spear carrier for Empire, he said, and the whole thing was basically a ruse.
There was no point in, you know, they might as well have just said, okay, well, we recognize the Soviet Union as a country on Earth, just like any other, and whatever, and gone on from there.
But, instead, they chose to make a big bogus arms race out of it, and contain communism on its borders all around the world, defend from it on its own borders, you know, everywhere on Earth, and now here we are, as Johnson, probably more than anyone else has documented, with hundreds and hundreds, more than 700, 800, some say 1,000 bases, all over the face of the Earth, and the Soviet Union now is long gone.
Well, there's no doubt that once you build up a big apparatus, like a lot of bases all over the world, and a lot of industries reliant on selling arms and related materials and services to the Defense Department, and so forth, the whole machinery takes on a life of its own, Scott.
And so, it certainly did that in the so-called military-industrial complex of the United States, which, by the way, was also a product of this post-World War II situation.
We never had a genuine military-industrial complex in peacetime before.
We had little elements that you can try to blow up out of proportion, but they don't cut it.
It's a post-World War II phenomenon.
And, of course, these industrialists, these congressmen that want to keep bases in their districts, and these local people who want to keep employment going, all these things feed into the politics of wanting defense to be a kind of welfare program for a variety of interests.
And many of them, by the way, this isn't welfare for the poor, this is more like welfare for the middle class and even the rich.
So, defense is the one thing that always seems to trump everything else in American politics, particularly if people are led to perceive some great bogeyman out there who's out to get them.
Now, having said that, I want to go back and distance myself a little bit from the idea that the arms race was invented in Washington, D.C., because I don't entirely subscribe to that idea.
I think the Soviet Union was a very dangerous bunch of criminals, and I think their intentions were bad.
I think we can certainly debate whether their foreign policy was especially aggressive or whether they were simply reacting in various ways to what they took to be threats posed to them by the U.S. and its allies.
But at the same time, I don't want to put myself in a position of seeming to represent a Stalinist company as a bunch of Boy Scouts, because they were nothing of the sort.
That does not mean that they were necessarily intending to, in some way, conquer the world.
I think they would have been pleased if they could have done that, but they didn't really have the resources to do that.
They did have the resources, as it turned out, to ultimately pose a credible threat of destroying the world with the nuclear weapons they built.
They, of course, sent money, advisors, forces, and military equipment to various points in the Third World where they tried to stir up trouble.
As long as we're straightening out the record here, I didn't intend to sound like a Stalinist either.
I'm just picking on my own government more since they're mine.
The reason I pick up on that, Scott, is that I think there are a lot of people, actually even libertarians, who more than take that view, and I'm simply not one of them.
I'm perfectly willing and, in fact, eager to reveal and describe the ways in which the United States' foreign policy contributed to this arms race that went on for 40 years or so during the Cold War.
I think that was a terrifying thing for humanity and still is, by the way.
A lot of people think the Cold War is over, so all this threat of nuclear destruction has been averted, but it hasn't, because both the Russians and the Americans continue to maintain thousands of nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles to send these horrible weapons anywhere on Earth.
So that threat still exists, and that is the main danger that the Cold War posed.
Of course, it did all kinds of other damage along the way with all these regional wars and so forth that cropped up, but nonetheless, this Cold War, responsibility for it, must be placed, to some extent, on the United States.
It's not solely the wicked Russians that are driving this thing.
Well, and as we discussed with Jess Raimondo in the last interview, you have, and as you mentioned, you have almost this new, or perhaps not almost, you have a new American establishment that is made up of the leaders of the arms manufacturing firms.
This new phenomenon post-World War II, as you called it, where, for one example, you have Bruce Jackson, who's a high-level executive at Lockheed, who set up the Committee for Coming Up With Excuses to Expand NATO and the Committee for Coming Up With Excuses to Invade Iraq, and for him, obviously, it's the bottom line is selling airplanes.
Oh, yeah.
I remember a student of mine who went to work for Boeing back around 1970, and I used to see this man from time to time, and he was working in a very odd department at Boeing.
It was a kind of group of geniuses, former admirals and generals and computer geniuses and physicists and so forth, kind of the usual suspects for a military industry.
This organization was interested not in making airplanes or missiles or anything like that.
Their subject was geopolitics.
That is to say, the Boeing company was maintaining all of these highly paid experts and technical geniuses for the purpose of making U.S. foreign policy.
That's what it boiled down to.
Of course, Boeing was not the only big arms company that was operating along the lines of that model.
You also have this phenomenon where you have a Burger King at every military base all over the world, and you have Colgate or Crest or whatever have the toothpaste contract, and you have massive, it's not just the diner that's next to the military base that goes out of business when it closes.
Almost all big business American corporations are working some kind of Pentagon contract to supply the soldiers with something or another.
Yeah, and nobody ever wants these bases to close.
Once you get them, which we did during World War II in order to support 12 million people in the uniformed armed forces, that took in a huge number of bases and other facilities.
But once you get them, every time you close one in the United States, you've got all kinds of flack from those local businesses and congressmen and labor unions and so forth that just want to keep that business coming in.
But we also have, as you noted earlier, hundreds, at least 700 plus, and we can talk about whether it's 800, 900 or 1,000 worldwide bases.
The beauty of that for the flag officers of the Army and the Air Force and the Marines especially, is every one of those bases has a commanding officer.
That's a lot of high-ranking officers being maintained on welfare so that they can be base commanders somewhere on Earth.
You add up the weight, the clout of 700 plus mostly generals and admirals, and you've got a tremendous amount of influence with Congress, for example.
We know one of my favorite political analysts is Gareth Porter, and he's a bit of a leftist, but he says that forget about Lockheed and Raytheon and Boeing and forget about Exxon and BP and all the oil companies, that the Pentagon itself is the major driving force of the empire, like you're saying.
All these base commanders who never give up what they have.
I agree entirely with him, because these base commanders are just one element of what gives the Pentagon so much clout in U.S. politics.
The Pentagon is an octopus with tentacles that spread in all kinds of directions, and it also has this kind of sacred aura in American politics.
It can get away with things such as consistently violating the law.
I wrote a column just yesterday in which I pointed out that since 1994, the law has required every federal department to conduct an annual financial audit.
But the Department of Defense has never conducted this audit, and every year they send an inspector general or one of his subordinates to Congress to testify that the reason why they're not complying with the law is that the Defense Department's records are such a mess that they're not suitable even for the conduct of an audit.
It's not that they've jittered the audit somehow.
They can't even do an audit.
This kind of thumbing their nose at the very laws under which they're supposed to be living causes no big reaction at all.
Most people aren't even aware of this.
Congress doesn't go ballistic, but if you had an Enron that was not presenting an audit to the SEC every year, they'd be closed down overnight.
Yeah, their stock price would drop.
But the sort of thing that will not be tolerated by private organizations is routinely swallowed if it's the Pentagon as the perpetrator.
Well, now let me ask you this as the final question.
You've shown over and over, and Mother Jones agrees with you, that the Pentagon and the World Empire basically cost us about a trillion dollars a year.
I know that you've explained before that it's your view that virtually everything goes out and nothing comes back.
So my question is, with all our current economic crisis and everything, how close to the edge of the cliff have they driven us, the imperialists in America?
I mean, is America really bankrupt?
And how much danger is it spending a trillion dollars a year for the life of the average American here, Bob?
Well, every trillion, whatever it's for, endangers the economic well-being of the American people.
But I think that the trillion, give or take, that is consumed by the U.S. military every year, by now it's more.
That trillion has more ill effects than the mere amount of money suggests, because it's not simply wasting money, as many government activities do, it's creating positive harm and danger for the American people, and harm and danger for many other people in the world as well.
So this is a really nefarious influence in world politics today, in my judgment.
Now again, when I say that, I'm not intending to suggest that there are no evil people out there in other parts of the world, that there are no threats of any kind to U.S. national security.
I believe there are some threats.
But having said that, it's still the case, in my view, that all things considered, the U.S. armed forces and the way that U.S. foreign policy employs them add up to an influence for evil in the world, on balance.
And that is, to me, a more menacing situation than the mere fact that they might be throwing a trillion dollars down a hole every year.
You're welcome for that.