All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Alfred McCoy.
He's got a piece in the viewpoint section of antiwar.com right now, his Tom Dispatch piece running under Tom Englehardt's name there, if you're hearing this later in our archives.
He's a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
He's a regular at Tom Dispatch and is author most recently of the award-winning book Policing America's Empire, the United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State.
He's also convened the Empires in Transition Project, a global working group of 140 historians from universities on four continents.
Of course, he also wrote The Politics of Heroin and A Question of Torture, I'm sure, among others as well.
Welcome to the show.
Alfred, how are you?
Fine, thank you.
I'm fine.
Well, good.
I appreciate you joining us on the show today, and it's a very important piece, I think, that you have here at TomDispatch.com.
Again, also in the viewpoint section today at antiwar.com.
An empire of failed states, Washington on the rocks.
You have a very compelling history of pretty much post-World War II American imperialism and hegemony.
I guess really can't be overstated the importance of having the Soviet Union as our opposite in the days of that bipolar world that's now a generation gone.
The Cold War coincided with a major change in global geopolitics.
For four centuries, half a dozen European empires had gradually spread around the globe to the point where by 1950 they ruled over about half of humanity.
And suddenly in a quarter century, really between 1947 and 1974, those six empires became 100 new nations, and the face of global geopolitics was changed.
That set off an intense competition between the Soviet Union and the United States, as well as Britain and France, for the loyalties of the leaders of those newly emerging nations.
To wind back historically, in the 19th century as European empires spread, they required the support of cooperating local elites, whether they were Fijian chiefs, Malay sultans, Indian maharajas, African emirs.
There's no way that the British empire, which arose from a nation of 40 million people and an army of only 99,000 men, there's no way an army of 99,000 men could have ruled over 400 million people in 1900, a full quarter of humanity, without the cooperation of those elites.
So really, all modern empires require the support of these cooperating or subordinate elites.
And so it was with the Soviet empire and the U.S. imperium after World War II.
Well, you know, I think that's very relevant to today, where many Americans really can't recognize the United States as an empire, because we have this network of lily pad bases, as Don Rumsfeld called them around the world.
And of course, we fight wars of liberation here and there, but they don't really see our guys as imperial redcoats, just openly, you know, for example, colonizing India, that kind of thing, the way the British did.
And yet, you're saying that the British empire certainly had their lily pads of bases and their bribes and their, you know, local satraps that helped them get away with it all in very much the same way the American empire is modeled today.
Yeah, there's a parallel actually between the British imperium and the U.S. global hegemony.
I think, let's say around 1900, there were two facets to the British empire.
The one was the classic formal empire that ruled over a quarter of humanity in colonies like British India, British Malaya, the Fiji Islands, and the rest.
But there was also developing throughout the 19th century, something that the British historians have called the British informal empire.
And after liberation from Spain in 1824, Latin America fell into the British control.
It wasn't direct colonial rule, but British consuls, British trade, British finance, British policy directed to a large extent the conduct of the foreign policy of the newly independent nations of Latin America.
And that informal empire spread to Egypt, spread to China, so that if you actually add up the population inside the informal empire, it's another quarter of humanity.
And that the British then ordered this imperium that effectively encompassed half of humanity.
First of all, with a global Navy, in 1900, the British Navy was 300 ships, and they had 30 bases worldwide that controlled global choke points from the Straits of Balter, the Suez Canal, Straits of Malacca.
And in cooperation actually with the United States Navy, they really dominated the seas, so that no other power could intervene overseas, could acquire a colony, ultimately without the permission, without the authority of the British.
So there was a complementation between the territorial control of colonies in specific localities, and this global array of naval power, and these 30 naval bastions worldwide.
So when the United States became the preeminent power after World War II, it was a change from the era of sea power to the era of air power.
And since, you know, diesel-driven ships could sail several oceans from a base, you needed fewer major bases, naval bases, for global naval power than you did for global air power.
So by the mid-1950s, by let's say 1955, the United States already had 300 bases, and we're now well up over 700 bases worldwide.
So we have an array that's rather similar to a large part of British Empire.
Global military dominion exercised by air power through 700 bases worldwide, and then subordinate elites, reliable local cooperating elites in countries around the globe.
And that system has begun to break down.
The bases are still in place, but those bases require the support, the cooperation of those local elites to be meaningful, and those elites are beginning to break away.
Well, and right, that's really where we're at now is, and you make this comparison in your article, it seemed to me, I guess it took me a few days after the beginning of the Tunisian Revolution to catch on.
Once it really started in Egypt, the parallel came immediately to mind of when I was a kid watching the Berlin Wall fall and the disillusion of the Soviet Union.
And that really, I think you kind of say, this has really been happening since the fall of the Soviet Union to us too, just in real slow motion here up until this point.
First of all, the Middle East was the last place in the world where that block was firmly in place, and they were uniformly anti-democratic, if you will, kind of almost dying regimes that imposed the male fist of control over their populations, providing little in the way of education, social services, or economic development, whether they're oil or non-oil states.
And the U.S., through the Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain and then our air mantle, have really presided over the region, keeping these regimes as much as possible in place.
And when one of them falls, like the Shah did in Iran in the late 1970s, this of course is a major crisis for U.S. geopolitical power.
And our intervention in Iraq twice, in the Gulf War in 1991, the 2003 intervention in Iraq, that is in many ways an attempt geopolitically to compensate for the loss of Iran as a kind of the guardian of the Persian Gulf.
Now, that whole apparatus was a very smooth transition from British dominion.
With the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the Middle East became basically trustee territories for Britain and France, and the British took the greater share of those territories.
And they ran the Middle East through formal empire over places like Egypt, an informal empire as well.
And when the British Empire imploded, self-destructed in the Suez Crisis of 1956, Washington sat back, refused to bail out the British, and then provided, if you will, a financial bailout package afterwards of a billion pounds to tide them through the transition.
And then the United States took over the Middle Eastern region from the British.
Alright, we'll hold it right there, and we'll be right back everybody with Alfred McCoy, the author of a great many things, including one at TomDispatch.com right now.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm lucky enough to be talking with Alfred McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin, A Question of Torture, and the latest one, Policing America's Empire.
And he's got a piece running in the viewpoint section at Anti-War.com today from TomDispatch.com, An Empire of Failed States.
So now, I guess in the next segment, if we can tie up right where we left off was Eisenhower's outflanking basically of the British Empire and the taking over of it by America back after the Suez Crisis.
And then we need to make our way toward our current set of revolutions in the Middle East and what it all really means, of course, working in the fall of the Soviet Union, I guess, on the way.
Sure.
In the mid-1950s, it fell to the Eisenhower administration to bring two things together.
One, we were already launched on the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
But very quickly, this was a period in which there was a start of rapid decolonization.
And suddenly, the number of states in the United Nations doubled basically from 60 to over 100 under Eisenhower.
And that really changed the face of global geopolitics.
No longer could we rely on the British, the French, the Portuguese, etc. to maintain global order in much of the world.
And so the Eisenhower administration developed, if you will, a kind of system of subordinate elites.
And they very self-consciously held elaborate discussions in the National Security Council in the mid and late 1950s.
And basically, what they worked out was a system whereby the United States would set aside its democratic principles and adopt a tough rail policy of embracing any ally that served our interests.
In Latin America, this generally meant that the United States would favor military autocrats.
In the Middle East, as we picked up the remains of the British Empire, we followed their policy of backing local aristocrats.
And so by the 1960s, the United States was allied with a Shah in Iran, sultans in Abu Dhabi and Oman, emirs in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai, and kings in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, and for a time, Libya.
And then in Asia, we accepted a mixture of dictators and democrats.
And as regimes would shake or would move into opposition in the United States, the United States was always standing ready to let them come back into our fold.
For example, when Qaddafi agreed to give up his nuclear weapons and support the U.S. anti-terror campaign.
So U.S. policy was actually quite simple, quite sophisticated in this regard.
And throughout the Cold War, the United States battled increasingly in Africa against the KGB, the Soviet covert agency CIA versus KGB maneuvering to keep out Soviet weapons and to make sure that our guy got in power.
So for example, the United States worked to push Lumumba out of power in Congo and replace him ultimately with a reliable military ally, Joseph Mobutu, who plundered the nation for the next 30 years with our understanding, tolerance, and support.
Once the Cold War came to an end, however, not only did the Soviet Union very quickly lose its satellite nations, its control of 14 states on its borders, but also invisibly the world began to change.
First of all, in the last 20 years, we've seen the rise of the BRICS, so-called BRIC nations.
Brazil, Russia, India, and China, and now South Africa.
And these are dynamic states that have a great deal of capital for investment, are voraciously hungry in the case of India and China for raw materials.
And this provides a lot of alternatives.
Moreover, multinational corporations have detached themselves from their national base and they begin to operate almost as autonomous global forces.
So in this, the sum of these two trends, which we call globalization, has meant that we're not only, we're in a much more diffuse world than we once were.
Developing nations no longer have to attach themselves to a single state.
Moreover, as the world has gotten more complicated and multipolar, U.S. influence has begun to diminish.
States have alternatives.
Sources of arms, sources of capital, development, markets, all the rest.
And so basically, not only was the end of the Cold War the end of the Soviet Union, but it was also the beginning of the end of this U.S. system of global power.
And we've seen a really, a waning of U.S. capacity.
Look, during the Cold War, we had a systematic conscious policy of selecting, installing, maintaining, and when necessary, removing the heads of nation states in order to maintain our global system of subordinate elites.
Well, since 2001, look what's happened.
There was a coup in 2002, the U.S. backed to get rid of Hugo Chavez.
It lasted about a day, and he's still in power.
In 2008, the Bush administration tried to move Georgia out of the Soviet orbit.
That turned out to be a disaster.
In 2009, the United States backed the opposition in an attempt to overthrow Ahmadinejad and Iran.
Again, another disaster, another failure.
Hey, they did a regime change in Iraq and handed the whole place to the Ayatollah.
But think about that.
In a Cold War, that could have been done deathly with a military coup or a bit of CIA covert cash.
In order to change one dictator in Iraq, it required a massive U.S. military intervention.
And that was supposed to be step one in facilitating regime change in Syria and Iran.
Instead, those two states turned the tables on us, backed the insurgents, and mired us in a crippling insurgency, which is ultimately going to end with our probably, probably withdrawing from Iraq far more thoroughly than we originally planned.
So I think the signs are very clear.
There are capacities to control this system of subordinate elites breaking down.
And the real proof, the real sign that this system has began to fall apart is this tumultuous event that just erupted out of nowhere in January, starting in Tunisia, spreading to Egypt, and now spreading right across the region.
And, you know, for a nation that embraces and supposedly advocates democracy in the Middle East, Washington really wavered.
Our first attempt, first of all, was to back the Mubarak regime, stand firmly with an ally that, like many of these autocrats in the Middle East, had been the bastion of U.S. power in the region for 30 years.
Well, when that failed, we turned very quickly to his consigliere, the dark power behind this regime, a man named Omar Suleiman, who was the chief of state security and who ran the torture chambers for the Mubarak regime.
When we did rendering of suspects from, let's say, very controversially, Italy to Egypt, it was Omar Suleiman who was the CIA's interlocutor, their ally, in putting these suspects in through the Egyptian torture system.
And we backed him as a replacement for Mubarak.
Well, that failed.
But the U.S. did manage to, finally, in the end, use their ties to the Egyptian military, which we've carefully cultivated for the last 30 years.
There were all kinds of contacts between intelligence officials and officers that had trained together, emails, phone calls, faxes, to get the Egyptian military to back a non-violent transition to, as it turned out, military rule.
So the United States is still struggling to adapt and to maintain its position in the Middle East.
But ultimately, I think there are clear signs that this is breaking out of U.S. control.
Well, you know, Alfred, last week when I talked with Phil Giroldi, former CIA agent, about all this, one of the major themes was just the incoherence of all this policy.
And when you talk in the long view that you talk about, about the rise and fall of the American empire here, it reminds me of Carol Quigley's book, Tragedy and Hope, where he tracks the rise and fall of civilizations throughout human history.
And he says that world empire is the last stage before you kill yourself.
This is when your society is decaying.
And so you lash out in this sort of adolescent attempt to just get your hands on everything you can on the way down, you know, like doing everything you can to stop from dying, you know, no matter even if it's the chemo that's killing you or whatever, you know what I mean?
When you look at, let's say, the half-dozen European empires that faded and got wound down between 1947 and 1974, you can break their responses into two broad categories.
The British and, to a certain extent, the Portuguese accepted that the age of empire was over.
And with the exception of the Suez disaster, the British were actually quite rational, quite sophisticated in the way that they withdrew themselves from colony after colony.
They gave up control over a quarter of humanity very, very quickly in generally rather peaceable transfers of power.
There were two exceptions to us, of course, Kenya.
But then there were the French that hung and clung desperately and refused to recognize the transition.
The same with the Dutch.
And the result was they had wrenching, very difficult economic, cultural, political transitions.
We seem to be following the French and the Dutch clinging to power, refusing to make a transition to a multipolar world in which our influence is going to be less than it's been in the past.
Well, you know, it's funny, though, because on some levels, you know, you read something like Thomas Barnett, the Pentagon's new map that came out, I think, pretty much right after September 11th.
And he was already talking about what he called the Seam States, which is the brick that you talked about.
You know, there's the core, which is America and its Western allies.
And then there's these kind of middle states.
And then there's the so-called third world, you know, to be exploited and whatever.
And it seems like there really was a lot of thought put into that maybe the world is becoming more multipolar, that maybe Kruthammer had it wrong when the Soviet empire fell about our unipolar moment and all that.
And that, you know, so at the same time, it seems in a way, is it just the kind of ignorance and arrogance of the Dick Cheney's of the world that would just attempt to defy gravity this this strongly and push this hard against the natural order of things in the world?
I mean, as you say, without the Soviet empire, why would anybody want to be under our thumb?
It seems like an impossible task.
Well, that's where the system of subordinate elites has worked effectively.
You know, we've all been able to offer states intelligence cooperation, military aid, economic aid, access to markets, etc, in order to cultivate these regimes.
And moreover, you know, until recently, we've been very efficient through the CIA, and during the Cold War, British intelligence as well, in changing in subordinate elites.
Well, that is now over.
The world is changing yet, this is the system of power that we have, and we're watching it unravel.
And it's yet to be clear whether Washington is going to come up with another kind of global system.
You're right, under the Bush administration, there was an absolute denial of a changing multipolar world.
The idea under the Bush administration is the United States would exercise its power unilaterally, and then build something like the coalition of the willing work out of outside established alliance networks, particularly with the Europeans, who because the EU are far more assertive than they've been in previous decades, and cobbled together a kind of made up coalition, but basically a unilateral exercise of power, also a massive expansion of the US military to maintain the course of force behind that.
And, you know, it ran in defiance, it ran against the grain of history, a grain that is subtly, invisibly, you know, ripping the system apart.
You know, you can't really put it as historical processes change, they change subtly and visibly until there's suddenly some kind of major eruption in which you can suddenly see the way the past is bearing on the present and shaping the future.
And the Middle East is one of those circumstances right now, where the end of the American Imperium is now clearly visible, in which a system of global power the United States built up 60 years ago, is finally coming to an end.
And it's yet unclear how the United States is going to adapt and what kind of global geopolitical order is going to replace the American unipolar power that's been exercised for the past 20 years.
Well, the only shame of it to me is that we didn't just decide to undo our empire, because it's wrong.
And we're having to accept this fate, it's outside of the control of the best and the brightest at the Department of State.
And so I guess we have to just settle for that.
Well, because we're not planning it.
I mean, for one thing, we see that we've we're still maintaining this vast defense budget, whose precise purpose is still really unclear.
I mean, we're maintaining this formidable array of naval and air power, designed to basically fight the Cold War against the Soviet Union, without really a clear purpose.
We've been and moreover, we've diverted literally trillions of dollars into these two interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, at the same time, when global competitiveness is shifting increasingly into economic and technological realms.
So we've been starving basic scientific research, alternative energy, education, infrastructure, in order to wage these wars.
And yet the real arena of global competitiveness is the realm of science, technology and economic innovation.
And so we're falling behind very dramatically our competitors in these critical areas, while we're clinging to the old array of power.
All right, well, we'll have to leave it there.
But that's very well said the whole thing, and especially that last part.
I'm so happy I finally got you on the show, sir.
Thank you, Scott.
You're welcome.
Everybody, that is Alfred McCoy is the author of The Politics of Heroin, a question of torture, and now policing America's empire, the United States, the Philippines and the rise of the surveillance state.
The new one at tomdispatch.com is called an empire of failed states, Washington on the rocks.
It's also available at antiwar.com in the Tom Englehart archive, and we'll be right back.
