All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is John Glazer from the American Conservative Magazine.
He's got a great article here, Exporting Tyranny Through Foreign Aid.
Will upheaval in the Middle East force the U.S. to rethink its practice of subsidizing repressive regimes?
Welcome to the show, John.
How are you doing?
Good.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Now, what repressive regimes has the American government ever subsidized?
Come on.
Yeah, well, that's actually been one of the primary foreign policy legs of the U.S. towards that region, especially since World War II.
And it's interesting what's been happening with the advent of these uprisings across the region, is that it's been put into flux, or at least into the limelight, that the way that these regimes are trying to suppress these uprisings and revolts is with U.S. money and backing and weapons.
Well, but I saw on TV that America's on the side of the rebels in Libya.
Right.
Well, that's interesting, because just in 2009, we had given about $4.3 million to Qaddafi.
And now that we've intervened, we've sort of stopped that aid and decided to give some help to the rebels.
But in fact, the rebels have terrorist ties themselves.
And there's lots of evidence, according to Human Rights Watch reports, that the war has been elongated and continued longer than it would have been if we had not intervened at all.
Right.
And I think that's probably not necessarily to say that Qaddafi would have just won completely outright and killed everybody, either.
No, no.
There's evidence that, yeah, it would have ended, but it would have ended on more humanitarian grounds.
Yeah.
Because, of course, Qaddafi, and this is the way, you know, the land over there is.
It's all tribal.
And I forgot which was the expert on here.
Maybe it was Eric Margulies or whatever who said that ultimately he would have had to make a deal with the tribal chiefs over there that would be mutually agreeable to both sides.
But now that the West has intervened, of course, the headlines all read, Rebels Reject Qaddafi Peace Offer, over and over again.
Because why would they, you know, compromise in any way when they have NATO to do all they're fighting for?
Right.
In many ways, it's sort of allowed Qaddafi to dig in his heels and be sort of more hard line with the people in his country because he has this backdrop of U.S. support trying to infiltrate, as he might say, the country and his regime.
Right.
Yeah, of course, Hosni Mubarak tried to say, oh, this is all a CIA plot against me.
And the entire country laughed and said, you're a CIA plot against us.
Give us a break.
Indeed.
Yeah.
Egypt was a particularly egregious example of U.S. foreign aid.
They gave somewhere on the order of $1.5 to $2 billion every year for about 30 years.
That's about $60 billion from his entire tenure.
And it allowed, you know, vast, brutal campaigns of torture and jailing of political activists and restrictions on free speech and all other sorts of dictatorial policies that primarily came out of U.S. support.
Now, that's one of the primary reasons for this U.S. support that generalizes throughout the region in broad strokes is to keep corrupt yet controllable despots in power so that we can be the primary influence of policy in the region.
One of the primary reasons, quite explicitly, even if we look back at declassified documents, was to prevent the domestic populations from gaining any significant influence over policy.
Because as we've seen with these populations uprising recently, once the populations get some democratic autonomy, once policy starts to reflect the will of the people, it ends up being very contrary to what national security planners in Washington would prefer.
Yeah.
Well, and sometimes we just outright cancel the results of their elections if we don't like them, basically, or try to, like in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Indeed, indeed.
Well, and, you know, here's the thing, too.
I'd like to just say, well, you know, the average little D Democrat out there, but really, I think maybe just the average little A American out there thinks that foreign aid means helping people who are hungry, you know, like Hands Across America to save the poor starving Ethiopians and that kind of thing.
And so, you know, what kind of, you know, rich, greedy white guy must you be that you don't want to share and help out the poor people in the world?
Right.
Well, there's actually a number of different programs that fall under this broad-tent foreign aid.
And it's true that some portion of it, around $200 million in Egypt's case, was for what's called economic development and other terms that don't actually play out when you hand this money over to murky waters in these countries.
But the rest of that money, the rest of that $2 billion that was given to Mubarak was for military assistance, for weapons, for training his security forces, for supporting his regime directly.
So the military-slash-security assistance is really what makes up the bulk of all this aid going to the region.
And most people don't know it.
Most people do think of aid as some sort of charity to poor people in poor countries.
But this has been one of the primary aspects of U.S. foreign policy in the region.
And once people do know it, I don't think they're going to like it.
Just in February, a Rasmussen poll showed that a majority of Americans don't want that sort of aid going to Middle Eastern regimes.
And I think that given the fact that these uprisings have shown a line light on this kind of policy, I think there's some potential for it to change down the road.
Yeah, well, I hope that's true.
I think when the foreign aid discussion comes up, I think the most common refrain is, oh, but it's such a small part of the budget.
That's the only thing anybody could ever object to is the actual price tag.
And after all, we're only talking about, you know, millions here, tens of millions here, tens of millions there.
And that's not very much compared to the U.S. budget.
Right.
It's a brilliant example of what economists call concentrative benefits and dispersed costs.
So, yes, to the budget and to taxpayers generally, we don't really feel this, you know, five to six billion dollars a year going to the Middle East each year.
But they certainly feel it.
The regimes certainly feel that influx of money and the people, the hundreds of millions of people in these regions certainly feel when they when they try to demonstrate on the streets and get tortured and whatnot, they certainly feel all those concentrated benefits, not to them, but and so, yes, it's a classic example of that.
It might be a small drop in the bucket for the overall U.S. budget, but it's not a small drop in the bucket for peace and individual rights and democracy in the region.
Yeah, well put.
Well, and, you know, it seems to as though, you know, this is one of the things I really like about America and for that matter, Americans, is we're way over here in the middle of these two giant oceans separate from the rest of the world.
It's the new world over here.
And we really can live our whole lives over here without paying any attention to the rest of the world at all.
There are some people never leave their hometown and whatever.
We don't have to be, you know, that inward looking.
But basically, it's a good thing that most Americans figure what's going on in the rest of the world isn't really our business.
Problem with that is our government is constantly in everybody's business over there.
But the American people carry over that same attitude to just not paying attention to what their government is doing.
Even when our government is making the rest of the world our business, we still don't pay attention.
Right, right.
Well, I mean, it's interesting because it could be our business in terms of being able to trade with these people, being able to, you know, work out some perfectly peaceful market processes with these people.
But that's not how the government wants to do it.
The government wants to make it our business, but primarily because it contains the greatest petroleum resources in the world.
Well, we'll leave it right there and pick it up with oil on the other side of this break with John Glaser from the American Conservative Magazine, Exporting Tyranny Through Foreign Aid.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Talking with John Glaser from the American Conservative Magazine, Exporting Tyranny Through Foreign Aid is the new article.
And when we were so rudely interrupted by the hard break there, you were talking about oil and the centrality of that to American imperial policy in the Middle East.
You want to elaborate there, John?
Sure.
So, yeah, the petroleum interests in the region direct a lot of U.S. policy.
You can be sure if the main exports coming out of the region were pickles and onions, we would have a very different policy towards the region.
Additionally, though, there's some more ways to answer the question of why this foreign aid and why this policy towards the region.
And another one is the essential locations for strategic military bases in any world conflict.
So the fact that we can have readily available military bases in these various countries means that we can more easily conduct a war in any corner of the country whenever it's necessary.
For example, in Afghanistan, it was very helpful for us to have a military base in Uzbekistan to help the flow of arms and supply the troops that went in there.
Never mind the fact that the president of Uzbekistan is world-renowned for boiling people alive.
We still had to give him a bunch of money to let us keep our military bases there.
And it's a similar thing with Bahrain.
It hosts the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, which is one of the largest military forces in the region.
And without paying that brutal regime a bunch of money annually, we would have some trouble trying to keep that proxy military base there.
So that's another important part of imperial policy in the region.
Yeah.
Well, you know, this always bothered me because, well, I mean, really, as an economist, I'm a great anti-war guy, and I leave it to the Bob Murphys of the world to help me understand how this really works.
But I remember a Cato study, I think from, I don't know, 1997 or something like that, that said, look, you know, we spend twice as much securing the oil in the Middle East as we do on the oil in the Middle East.
This is totally unnecessary.
It doesn't matter who rules any of these countries as far as the ability of the average American, you know, citizen to pull up to the gas pump and be able to buy some.
The question is just which companies get to make the profits for, you know, make the cut for siphoning it out of the ground or doing the distribution, that kind of thing.
It's got to be our guys from Houston or a deal we make with BP over there in England instead of the Chinese.
We can't let them be the ones who are delivering this oil to market where everyone in the world can buy it for a price.
Right.
That's an important distinction to make because a lot of people get mixed up.
They say, okay, we're involved in the region for all this oil, but at the same time I'm still paying $4 a gallon at the pump.
And that, I think, misses the point.
The point is not about keeping prices low.
You say you're an economist, you know, we all know as economically-minded people that businesses try to cut costs for consumers.
That's not what governments try to do.
The government's interest in the oil in the region is based on control, not prices, not cutting costs, and not nothing businesslike.
It's about having control and influence over this lever of power in the region and in the world, and that dictates the policy there.
It doesn't have anything to do with prices of oil.
Well, you know, I think on both sides here it betrays that kind of central myth of the civic religion that any of these policies have anything to do with the people, whether we the people or they the people or anything else, right?
When our government is giving foreign aid to foreign governments, we just kind of take it for granted that it's being evenly distributed among all the people who really need it over there or something like that.
And we also assume if our government is over there, you know, putting a gun to people's heads in countries where, well, I'm using them, in countries where there's a bunch of oil, that this is about us, that ultimately it's about making sure that we have access to oil at the pump, something like that.
When in fact, whether we're talking about the foreign country or whether we're talking about here, it's all just, you know, your basic public choice theory that, nope, the people who run these policies in the individual countries are individuals themselves, and they're doing these things for their own interests and the interests of their associates that they make deals with.
There is no public interest that any of these people are serving.
Right, right.
It's important to remember what you just said about the people, because the people are very much more aware of this in the region than the American people.
They know full well that the U.S. government is funding the governments that are denying them their rights, and it doesn't bode well for the perception of America that this is going on and that they're fully aware of it.
It's a direct contradiction from what Obama said in his speech in Cairo in 2009, that no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by another.
They know very well the hypocritical nature of U.S. policy in the region, and we should always consider what, how U.S. policy in the region manifests itself when people get really angry and decide to conduct terrorist operations against us, whether it's domestically or abroad.
All too often, that's forgotten about.
It's not religion, and it's not the culture.
It's a direct result of U.S. policy in the region.
Well, and you know, we talk about Eastern Europe, too, and how after the fall of the wall, they gave out all this foreign aid, and in order to basically loot a lot of those countries, the so-called shock therapy wasn't about turning them into real free market economies.
It was all crony capitalism, and that's kind of the economic hitman thing, is we're here to help you out by giving you a nice IMF or World Bank loan for your development or whatever, but it's always rigged so that the politician who makes the deal makes a bunch of money for himself or a Swiss bank account or whatever.
That's his bribe to sign the deal.
And then it's always some terribly uneconomical thing that they're trying to do in the first place.
And then the debt gets rolled over onto the masses of the country who can't afford to pay it back, and then they just come in like gangsters and go, oh, well, you can't pay our usury, then we get to take all your resources away.
And this is how Hugo Chavez won all the support that he did in the rest of South America, not just in Venezuela.
It wasn't because everybody just, you know, believed in his brand of socialism or whatever.
It was because he was actually giving them a decent deal on loans, and, you know, not using loans as a trick to bribe people and steal a bunch of property, but really he kind of made himself the honest IMF of South America.
And that was what earned him the enmity of the American empire so bad, was he was cutting out our scam.
We call it foreign aid.
We go in there and bribe your politicians to turn over all your resources to our corporate friends.
That's right.
I mean, the disintegration of Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union, it took a lot longer for sort of peaceful democratic societies to build up.
And one of the reasons was because, you know, they were under the U.S. boot with all this foreign aid that was being divvied up.
And that generalizes throughout the region, you're correct, and throughout the world.
These policies have no correlation with, you know, going towards democracy and development.
These societies never end up becoming richer or more peaceful or more respecting of human rights.
And it's supposed to be that way.
I mean, we wouldn't know it from listening to politicians, but what they say is that they're interested in these things.
And what they do is continue with policies that intentionally repress these societies and regress them back to, you know, Stone Age policies.
Yeah.
And I guess, you know, the American people, we all look at each individual program or issue by itself.
And so we, oh, yeah, foreign aid, as though it's not part of the entire imperial package.
Whereas if this was some sort of limited constitutional republic that minded its own business, but every once in a while went to help people if there was a famine or a hurricane or something like that, then, you know, it would be plausible that actually, no, they're really just trying to help people for a change or whatever.
But the thing is, none of this does take place in a vacuum, does it?
No, no.
I mean, and that can be seen from just the amount of the number of countries that we actually give taxpayer money to.
There's 192, roughly, countries in the world, and 150 of them get U.S. money directly from the U.S. government.
So that should tell us that it is a broader policy and it's not these sort of concentrated aims to help different things come up with some development and democracy and human rights.
Yeah.
If only the people had voted for Ron Paul back in 1988, it wouldn't be like this at all, you know?
I know, I know.
Well, that, I mean, in some sense, in terms of the politics that you mentioned, it is, we have some encouraging signs.
I mean, I'm a pessimist most of the time, but there are at least some encouraging signs.
The Tea Party, despite the problems I have with it, has been slightly more scrutinizing of foreign aid policies.
Rand Paul himself got a lot of attention a few months ago when he said his preference would be to end foreign aid to all governments, including Israel.
And so there are a few of those sort of pushes, but we'll have to see what it comes to.
Yeah.
Well, and a lot of that depends on having a Democrat in the White House, because we know how Republicans are when a Republican is in office.
Indeed.
In executive power.
Right.
Boy, they love big government, sometimes.
All right.
Well, listen, we're a little bit over time here, but I really appreciate your time.
It's been a great interview and it's a very good article.
Exporting Tyranny Through Foreign Aid at the American Conservative Magazine, the website is amconmag.com.
Thanks very much, John.
Thank you.
John Glazer, everybody.
We'll be right back.
