US relies more on military as its hegemony declines

Published on Tuesday, July 27, 2010 by Foreign Policy in Focus
Imperial Overkill and the Death of US Empire
by Francis Shor

The main point of Shor’s article is that US foreign policy is a militarized foreign policy. This reflects a faltering US economy, the rising power of the Pentagon within the US, and a last ditch effort to avoid the decline of US hegemony around the world. You can go back to C. Wright Mills' book, The Power Elite (published 1956) to get an idea of the some of the roots of the military elites and US policy. Seymour Melman, now deceased, provided a monumental account in his books of how "the permanent war economy" was leading to a decline in "American capitalism. His books include: Out Depleted Society (1965), The Permanent War Economy (1974), Profits Without Production (1983), among others.

While the centrality of the Pentagon and military spending has long been prominent in US affairs, Shor argues that, unlike the past, it is not the cold war that spurs US militarism at home and abroad but the decline of and growing challenges to US imperialism.

Here are excerpts from the article.

“... beyond Afghanistan and the hydrocarbon-rich Caspian basin region, the imperial projects of the United States are, more and more, a commitment to Pentagon aggression and profligacy.”
[Imperial overkill] reflects: “The compulsion to rely even more heavily on the military to compensate for a waning hegemony in other domains - and to contend with shrinking resources (especially hydrocarbons), rising adversaries (especially China) and growing resistance (especially non-state Islamic militants and Latin American national-popular governments) - led to a record number of direct U. S. interventions. In turn, two of the most massive interventions, those in Iraq and Afghanistan, underscored the inability of Washington to realize all of its imperial goals.”

[....]

The Obama administration has expanded [2] the role of Special Operations forces from 60 to 75 countries, and given these forces the go-ahead to "get more aggressive much more quickly." In the process, the Obama administration has ramped up the extrajudicial assassinations first approved by the previous administration and added on a nearly 6 percent increase in the Special Operations budget.”

Shor adds:

...with special operations planting the seeds for eventually larger military engagements, the Pentagon has to plan for permanent war. This doctrine of "Long War" has bipartisan support in Washington, and is key to the forms of disaster capitalism that enrich the military-industrial complex and private contractors like Halliburton, Blackwater, and DynCorp, among many others.

Garrisoning the Globe [Shor’s section heading.]

The US efforts to maintain its military superiority is indicated by the fact that “the Pentagon still manages to receive the equivalent of what all of the other nations around the globe spend on their militaries,” continues to be “the overwhelming leader in military exports to the tune of 70 percent of the weapons market,” flouts “ international treaties, such as those on cluster bomb,” thus eroding “international legal standards,” and has over 700 military based positioned around the world.

[....]

“ This imperium is under attack not only by adversaries, but also by those who no longer accept U. S. economic and ideological models, especially in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007.” Shor gives the following examples. “Continuing resistance in Okinawa has roiled Japanese politics. In Latin America, leftist leaders from Rafael Correa in Ecuador to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela have challenged the United States....

“....Chavez has replaced U.S. military contracts with those of Russian and Chinese companies, and created a new military alliance with Russia that brought Russian naval vessels to Venezuela.”

The End of Indispensability

Shor quotes Emmanuel Todd, who maintains that the US "is pretending to remain the world's indispensable superpower by attacking insignificant adversaries," but[6] "this America... is hardly the indispensable nation it claims to be and is certainly not what the rest of the world really needs now."

Still it has the effect of creating “perpetual war.” “Such perpetual war is no longer about achieving victory, whatever that means, but perpetrating military imperialism. Although that imperialism is anchored in protecting economic prerogatives, it's also an obsession with a matrix of control and destruction, resulting in imperial overkill.”

[....]

Addicted to War

“.... Using a multiplier effect, the economist Joseph Stiglitz has estimated the long-term expenses for those wars to be in excess of three times the expended amount. This is all part of a growing debt [9] of $13 trillion dollars. Moreover, with U. S. casualties rising in Afghanistan and with a record number of closed head injuries among American soldiers, the costs in human terms are enormous. And still, the Pentagon is seeding future wars by the extensive operations of Special Forces.”

In Afghanistan, US contractors...contribute money [10] to Taliban warlords in order to guarantee safe delivery of U. S. supplies over Afghan routes. These payoffs also allow an unending cycle of violence that stokes the military machine and its imperial enablers.

[....]

“....Many voices on the left and the right are calling for Washington to admit it cannot "win" in Afghanistan. However, like other empires of the past, those in power remain convinced that they have a global mission to perform, even if it leads to self-destructive imperial overkill.”

© 2010 Foreign Policy in Focus

Francis Shor teaches history at Wayne State University. A contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, he is the author of Dying Empire: U. S. Imperialism and Global Resistance [11].

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