US: Current Strategic Culture & International Political Economy
Bibliography provided at the end of the next, and last, part of the chapter.
The US state/society complex has been dominated by elite business and financial interests since its independence, and prior to that within the predecessor British colonies; especially within the central and southern colonies. The period from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s, when there was somewhat of a compromise between the elites and the rest, was an exception to the general rule of US history. In the past four decades political power, together with wealth and income, has been re-concentrated to the level of the late nineteenth century Gilded Age. Exacerbating this is the high degree of corporate concentration, producing oligopolies that multiply the power of their owners and senior executives (the vast majority of which are de facto owners through stock option grants). The state/society complex is, once again dominated by large corporations and rich individuals, with domestic policies heavily skewed toward their benefit (extensive deregulation, little regulatory resistance to corporate concentration, tax cuts, privatization, little or no state support to labour unions, and a general resistance to social programs that are prevalent in many other Western nations). In the past four decades this domestic policy orientation has greatly exacerbated income and wealth inequality, reversing the significant reduction of these in the post-WW2 “miracle” years.
This has been underlined by the multi-trillion-dollar rescue packages for the financial system and large corporations in response to both the 2008 GFC and the most-recent COVID-19 crisis. In contrast, monies allocated to the rest of society, including small businesses, have been both small and grudgingly provided; for example, the lack of aid for defaulting homeowners after the 2008 GFC and the resistance to providing direct financial aid to individuals during the COVID-19 crisis. This “socialism for the rich, free markets for the rest” was also shown in previous state rescues of the financial system (1982 Mexican Peso Crisis, late 1980’s Savings & Loan Crisis), but the level of state favouritism to elite sectors has intensified over time.
Another confirmation is the resistance shown by both mainstream political parties to the provision of the type of socialized healthcare (“Medicare for All”) provided in other Western nations, something repeatedly shown to be supported by a majority of the population, in contrast to the ease with which increased military spending, business bailouts and subsidies, and repeated elite tax cuts have been passed. The nearly complete lack of state action against monopolistic and monopsonistic business practices both underlines elite dominance and serves to intensify that dominance; as does the repeated refusals of the Democratic Clinton and Obama administrations to support legislation that would improve the position of unions. This Democratic Party indifference is in contrast to an Economic Policy Institute article that points out a “huge unmet demand for collective bargaining”, as a result of workers having been “systematically disempowered as a result of corporate practices and economic policies that were adopted – or reforms that were blocked – at the behest of business and the wealthy” (Mishel 2020).
The case of the investment bank Goldman Sachs is illustrative of the elite domination and corruption of the Federal Government. Facing illiquidity and insolvency in 2008 it was provided with a commercial banking license so that it had direct access to Federal Reserve financing, and was made solvent through the state-approved full payment of US$12.9 billion on derivative contracts by the state-rescued American International Group that would have been nearly worthless otherwise (Rush 2011). Goldman Sachs was also allowed to hide its losses in a “missing month” by switching its fiscal years (Norris 2009), allowing for reported profits and large executive bonuses in the next fiscal quarter. No such largesse was shown to the many that lost their jobs and houses in the ensuing deep recession by the ex-Goldman Sachs CEO (a role that he had only relinquished in 2006) who served as the Treasury Secretary. At the same time, instead of the already highly concentrated banking industry that had facilitated the crisis being broken up into much smaller entities, further consolidation was facilitated with government funds and guarantees. There would be nothing like the Pecora Commission (Perino 2010) and fundamental industry re-regulation of the 1930s; nor any individual prosecutions for what appeared to be widespread control fraud (Marrs & Ferguson 2010; Pontell, Black & Geis 2014; Cohan 2015). The massive scale of the fiscal and monetary largesse to the financial and corporate sectors was not fully disclosed until a Freedom of Information lawsuit from the Bloomberg news organization forced disclosure by the Federal Reserve a few years later (Bloomberg 2011). Further financial concentration is provided by huge asset management firms such as Blackrock, which holds over US$9 trillion in financial assets. Blackrock’s role in managing the Federal Reserve’s large scale purchasing of bonds as part of the 2020 COVID financial support activities, some of which overlap with Blackrock’s own portfolios, underlines the extremely close and possibly conflict-ridden relationship between the state and economic and financial elites.
Such economic elite dominance of government is described by Wolin (2008) as Inverted Totalitarianism; a political sphere subservient to the economic. To all intents and purposes a single business party, masquerading as a duopoly (Democratic and Republican parties), dominates the US political system; the substantial policy differences between the two parties are minimal and focused within the area of culture (e.g. Roe vs. Wade, sexual and racial discrimination, “political correctness” etc.) rather than political economy. In 1964 Julius Nyerere, the President of Tanzania, captured this dynamic well when he stated, “The United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them” (quoted in Sharlet 2008, p. 384).
The extensive Democratic party machinations in both 2016 and 2020, aided by allied “liberal” media organizations, to defeat the economically progressive Bernie Saunders campaigns for the Party’s presidential nomination are evident of the political alignment of the Democratic party’s leadership. The two parties may represent slightly different combinations of economic elite factions (although many large political donors provide support to both parties), such as transnational and domestic groups, but this does not alter the overall ascendancy of economic elite interests. The lack of any real choice within the political system, and the prior destruction of the private sector unions, together with a highly concentrated and co-opted media, serves to demobilize the population (in contrast to the popular mobilization of a classical totalitarian state). The elite antagonism shown toward public sector unions (the last redoubt of concentrated labor power) and state support for the average citizen (e.g. Medicare and Social Security) is indicative of a continued drive to return US society to the realities of the late nineteenth century. Elite economic interests, to a level exceptional among Western nations, dominate the US state/society complex:
In modern America, concentrated wealth controls politics and government, leading even the extremely conservative Senator John McCain to remark that “both parties conspire to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder.” The American nation with its incredibly powerful chief executive, gargantuan military, repeated interventions in the affairs of foreign states, and political system in the thrall of great wealth, this is the very world that [Thomas] Jefferson abhorred. (Ferling 2013, p. 497)
Van Apeldoorn and de Graaff (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019) and Layne (2017) detail the continuity of US TNC domination of the strategic planning apparatus and foreign policy elite. The TNC leadership, their think-tank networks, foundations, and lobbyist organizations are significantly merged with the strategic planning process; to view them as separate entities is both ontologically and epistemologically misleading, “the foreign policy establishment is a subset of the corporate and financial elite (the ‘one percent’)” (Ibid., p. 264). The myriad of connections between the defence bureaucracies and the oligopolistic defence industries within the MIC (itself significantly expanded through increased defence spending and privatization) only adds to the level of merger. This leads to a strategic culture that has had a consistent worldview since at least the early 1940s, after the fall of France to Nazi Germany, when the possibility and the benefits of US global dominance became evident (Wertheim 2020).
This is based on: American primacy (“American leadership”), the imperative of national security. Liberal ideology – perhaps most importantly – the economic Open Door. From 1945 until today, the foreign policy establishment has aspired “quite simply to the moral and political leadership of the world” (Hodgson 1973, 10-11). (Layne 2017, p. 263).
This was a leadership gained through US economic, political, cultural and military (both overt and covert) dominance; a worldview seemingly triumphant with the fall of the Soviet bloc and the liberalization of China – only for triumph to be seemingly snatched away.
Up until the 1970s US elite interests and the raison d’etat were generally aligned, a strong nation as the underlying base for expansion and dominance; what was “good for GM” could be said to be “good for America”. In the post-WW2 period, the seemingly idyllic lifestyles of the American white population and the nation’s industrial and scientific leadership were important in the establishment of US hegemony over the neoLIO. With the move toward increased globalization at the turn of the century, together with the remaking of domestic political-economic relations from the 1970s, US elite interests and the raison d’etat started to become less aligned. The increasingly extractive relationship of the elite to the nation (Lazonick & Shin 2020), together with the profit-driven movement of economic activities to China and other nations, reduced relative national capabilities and increased those of geopolitical competitors. The increasing destruction and precarity of what used to be called the “US middle class” also reduced the strength of the US “brand” required for hegemonic leadership. The extreme state ineptitude and elite favouritism of the response to COVID-19, on both sides of the political aisle, has only added to the tarnishing of this brand image. A major conundrum for US elites, which has not found its way into mainstream discourse, is that its increasingly extractive relationship to the nation serves to reduce the geopolitical strength that the US transnational elites are reliant upon – a situation reminiscent of the British elite’s lack of interest in protecting and developing critical industrial sectors in the first half of the twentieth century (Barnett 1972, 2014).
The foreign policy establishment itself maintains the continuity of the strategic culture through the ways in which new entrants are recruited, the socialization process of those recruits at all elite educational levels, and the career limiting nature of dissent with respect to the consensus of “the cardinal points of US grand strategy [which] are pretty much set in concrete” (Layne 2017, p. 265). The instrumentality of these cardinal points with respect to the dominance and profits of US TNCs provide their material support.
The core components of the policy establishment’s world view are: the primacy of national security, the imperative of American leadership, the importance of the open international system, and the need to export America’s liberal political ideas. (Ibid., p. 267).
Parmar and Ledwidge capture the effectiveness of the integration of chosen racialized individuals into US elite beliefs and behaviors with respect to a President Obama who they propose represents a “’Wasp-ified’ black elite, assimilated into the extant structures of power that remain wedded to a more secular, non-biologically racial, version of Anglo-Saxonism or, more broadly, liberal internationalism” (2017, p. 374). They argue that Obama is “a part of that establishment and shares its elitist, secularized religio-racial-in-origin mindsets … the power of Establishment socialization and co-optational processes is fundamental” (Ibid., p. 377); other exceptional examples would be Susan Rice, Condoleeza Rice and Kamala Harris. The “establishment is open to the most talented minorities – exhibiting a formal commitment to a superficial but important visible ‘diversity’ – who share, or can learn to share, their mindsets” (Ibid., p. 377); a diversity of identities but not a diversity of worldviews. The very efficiency of the co-option of racialized and female individuals into elite policy circles, and the cultural disciplining of those circles, may produce a longer-term failure – a group cognitive inflexibility with respect to changing international realities, as noted by Layne (2017).
There is no strategic policy elite problematization of a continued framing of the US as both The Shining City On A Hill, munificently providing the benefits of its exceptionalism and leadership to the rest of the world and as The Indispensible Nation always faced with a new Frontier of external threats to be subjugated for the common good; “Even during the triumphalist interlude of the 1990s, the foreign policy establishment warned (in the words of President George H. Bush) that America’s security now was imperilled by amorphous forces of ‘uncertainty, instability, and danger’” (Ibid.). The GWOT provided a new Terror Dream inhabited by unknowable, unpredictable, amorphous forces that were “out there” in the “borderlands” while also “among us”. The threats of “non-liberal” and unsubordinated Russia and China have now created additional Others that threaten “our way of life”, and therefore need to be met with a reinvigorated US focus on global primacy. Their very existence in a form not acceptable to the US is seen as an existential threat. At the same time, US economic and financial elites do not accept that they must contribute toward this reinvigoration of the US as a nation – quite the contrary as they look for yet more tax cuts, less state support for the average citizen, continued maximization of short term profits, and even greater state subsidization; “In the United States, economically and politically, predatory value extraction has trumped sustainable prosperity” (Lazonick & Shin 2020, p. 239).
Widespread rentier capitalism removes the discipline of market and state oversight, as well as moving resources away from core activities that do not offer rentier returns and continuously undermines good governance. An important insight is that although a given nation may have huge resources it is dependent upon the capacity of the state to mobilize those resources for the national interest. The US state’s ability to effectively mobilize resources is open to considerable question given the lack of increases (and possible significant decreases if the pre-1990 inflation calculations were used) in welfare for the majority of the citizenry over the past decades. Why should citizens give their lives to a state that they see as not operating in their best interests? This inability was evident during the occupation of Iraq, with the military doing everything possible to stave off the need for a general military draft. In addition, the repeated failures in military procurement (Martynov 2019), such as the F35 aircraft (Broder 2015; Insinna 2019), the Littoral class ships (Axe 2019), and the inability to get the weapons elevators working on a recently built aircraft carrier (Mizokami 2019), together with the regulatory incompetence shown with respect to both the Boeing 737 crisis and the COVID response, and the recent fiasco of the Afghanistan withdrawal, put into question the basic competency of the US state. The rentier orientation of the elites may also place parts of it at direct odds to important US foreign policy objectives, such as the nurturing of soft power. Whilst China has been able to take significant advantage of “vaccine diplomacy”, the brazen rent-seeking behaviour of the US pharmaceutical companies that was seemingly backed up by the US State Department can only have reduced the positive image of the US to other nations.
The prior weakening of US national strengths, together with the lack of the readiness of the elites to commit to a domestic regeneration, produces reliance upon external actions designed to retard the development of Russia, and especially China. The actions taken to damage some of the leading Chinese TNCs and limit the ability of Russia to monetize its fossil fuel deposits, represent such actions. With an inability to move away from a policy of global primacy, an escalating use of such external actions would be expected; with the possibility of military conflict increasing. A move away from the policy of primacy, and perhaps a move to the offshore balancing proposed by Layne (1997 and 2017) and other realist scholars would represent a fundamental turn in the 400-year history of the US and its colonial precursors. It would also bring an end to the Western European global dominance, of which the US represents the pinnacle. Such a change also has a significant racialized element if the ascendancy of China within the geopolitical system, and that of the “East” in general, is to be accepted. It would represent the rejection of the universalist Western “civilizing” mission based upon Greco-Roman concepts, and the acceptance of the validity of other civilizational philosophies and foundational histories. Japan had represented a smaller-scale challenge that had led to a “Yellow Peril” anti-Japanese racist response due to its own ascendancy in the 1970s until its financial crisis in 1993 (Heale 2009), echoing the earlier anti-Asian scares nearly a century earlier; even though Japan had already integrated significant liberal institutions during the US occupation and accepted US geopolitical primacy. Such considerations represent some of the unstated reasons for resistance to the end of US primacy.
The current dynamic of the international system places the US as the dominant power undergoing a possible challenge from China; the incumbent with a rational focus on limiting the rise of its challenger through increases in its own relative power and/or that of its coalition with respect to China and its coalition. In neorealist terms, the rise of China as a Great Power threatens US hegemony and requires a strategy of containment (as practiced with the Soviet bloc during the Cold War) and perhaps even inevitable military conflict.
The strategic culture tends more toward the raison d'élite than the raison d'état, with the larger and internationalized concentrations of capital highly advantaged; with an Open-Door foreign policy that serves to open up other nations to the profit making of large US corporations and rich investors. The neoliberal “Washington Consensus” of the US Treasury and US and Western dominated international financial institutions (IMF, World Bank, WTO) utilizes financial and economic levers to pressure other nations to remove capital controls and state support for domestic industries, deregulate, cut social spending and privatize significant segments of the state. A common sense that sees the US as an “exceptional” nation with a mission to bring liberal capitalist democracy to the world also supports overt and covert interference in the internal dynamics of other nations that require help to become truly “modern”. The view of the US as the “global policeman” (the sovereign that can act above the law to protect the “rules based international system”) also legitimizes such intervention.
even though … the Bush administration was widely unpopular … its policies regarding NATO expansion, free trade, and a host of other programs aimed at maintaining clients were for the most part continuations of what the Clinton administration had done. (Sylvan & Majeski 2009, p. 245)
Within such a worldview, US actions that veer from liberal ideals are seen as either “mistakes” or unfortunate ones required with respect to “uncivilized” (as defined by the US strategic culture) nations which tend to be branded as dictatorships, authoritarian or lacking respect for universal human rights. Only with such a worldview can humanitarian interventions that violate other nation’s sovereignty be rationalized, and examples such as Libya be seen as unfortunate “failures” rather than instrumentally driven regime change operations. The obfuscation of underlying economic and financial motives by this ideology leads some foreign policy analysts to bemoan the “human rights” focus of the US, rather than seeing the interests of the US elites that underly its foreign policy orientation.
These insights provide for a very different view of US foreign policy from that of the neorealist school, a foreign policy directed at the protection and advancement of US corporate and investor interests in foreign nations – even if those interests may undermine the welfare of significant segments of the US population or even national security (e.g. the offshoring of significant segments of US manufacturing, facilitating of the rise of China). The US policy of global pre-eminence serves to remove the threat of competitor economic elites, backs up pressure on individual nations to “open up” with overwhelming military (both overt and covert) force and physically protects the sprawling activities of US-dominated global supply chains. The extreme aggression shown toward states with governments that do not support economic opening, or the “free” market in general, reflects the raison d'élite. The greatest challenge of nations such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Iran, Russia, and China to this elite is that they block attempts to open themselves up to the exploitation of US capital, as well as representing an example of a different path for both other nations and the US general populace.
Six decades of economic and financial sanctions, and repeated attempts at regime change and leader assassinations, is the result for a Cuba that in no way can be conceived of as a threat to the US in neorealist terms after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. A strategy of pre-eminence also directly benefits a heavily privatized US Military Industrial Complex that gains financially from both covert and overt aggression, with the oligopolistic military contractors being some of the most profitable US corporations. Of the over US$2 trillion spent on the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan (and the US$8 trillion spent on the post-2001 wars) much went to boost the profits of military contractors, as well as the pre and post retirement careers of the military leadership; many of which retire into very lucrative positions in defence contractor and related organizations. The GWOT provided the means with which to reverse any possibility of a “peace dividend” after the fall of the Soviet bloc, and the US has increased its number of foreign bases rather than reduce them since that fall. The continued stationing of 35,000 US military personnel in Germany, 12,000 in Italy and 10,000 in the UK when the threat of a Soviet bloc invasion evaporated decades ago is evidential of these dynamics. The expansion of NATO (against explicit promises made to the USSR President, Gorbachev, at the time of the reunification of Germany) to the borders of Russia, a major nuclear power second only to the US, tends to increase the possibility of conflict rather than reduce it. When viewed through a neorealist lens, such actions could be seen as actively reducing the security of the US given the lack of any real threat from a much diminished and defensive Russia. An understanding of the internal dynamics of the US, and its resultant strategies of the Open Door and global pre-eminence, provide some answers to this conundrum.
This foreign policy orientation may significantly account for what may go down as one of the greatest errors of US foreign policy – the derogatory and aggressive stance toward post-Soviet Russia that has resulted in the increasing alignment of Russia with China. A Russia in the Western camp would have placed the West across the northern border of China, brought Central Asia under Western influence, removed Russian military support and technology from the Chinese, and greatly strengthened any Chinese energy embargo; what could be considered a “no brainer” perhaps in neorealist balancing terms. Instead, China is significantly strengthened by its symbiotic alliance with Russia; an alliance protected from the early efforts of President Trump for a rapprochement with Russia by the dominant elites, strategic decision-making institutions and a mainstream US media through the “Russia, Russia, Russia” propaganda blitz. In the 1990s it seemed as if Russia would become subservient to US and Western interests, with no need to treat it with diplomatic respect. This assumed inevitability was reversed by Putin and the nationalist elements of the Russian capitalist and state classes. The US strategic culture seemed unable to accept this “loss” of Russia (with parallels with the “loss” of China in 1949), responding with an unprecedented vilification of a leader of a major foreign power and the obviation of any possibility of reconciliation between the two powers. Any relationship with Russia other than a completely subservient one, with a Russian economy open to US profit making and exploitation, seems to be unacceptable to the US strategic culture.
The Western-supported coup against the democratically elected Ukrainian president in 2014, bringing to power a vehemently anti-Russian regime that terrorized citizens that disagreed with it in the south and east of the country, only served to further alienate Russia and precipitated the Russian annexation of Crimea (which contains Russia’s premier naval base in the Black Sea). The ongoing attempts of the Ukrainian army at the subjugation and ethnic cleansing of the predominantly ethnic Russian Donbass, including the widespread shelling of civilians, only deepened this alienation. In addition, the recent revelations by the ex German chancellor Angela Merkel and others that the Minsk I & II agreements of 2014 and 2015, designed to peacefully end the Donbass civil war through political decentralization, were only agreed to by the West to allow for the rebuilding and rearming of the Ukrainian army after defeats shows a deep level of Western mendacity toward the Russian leadership.
The 2014 Minsk Agreement was an attempt to buy time for Ukraine. Ukraine used this time to become stronger, as you can see today. Ukraine in 2014-2015 and Ukraine today are not the same (Merkel, quoted in Modern Diplomacy 2022)
The assumption of the US elite, as stated by the US President, was that the sanctions imposed on Russia after its recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics as independent entities, would destroy the Russian economy and its currency. These sanctions included the unprecedented steps of freezing Russian foreign reserves and the confiscation of the personal properties of selected Russian citizens. The unwillingness of the world outside the West (North America, Europe, Japan and Oceania) to join the West-imposed sanctions and its readiness to continue trading with Russia showed a serious miscalculation by US policy makers. When combined with the actions that Russia had taken in previous years to protect itself against the impact of Western sanctions, non-West nation’s implicit and explicit support of Russia, greatly nullified the impact of the sanctions. The Russian economy contracted only 2% in 2022 and set for growth in 2023, and the Russian currency has stabilized at the prior level after some volatility. The Russo-Ukrainian conflict has shown Russia to be both economically and militarily stronger than assumed, and more determined to continue the conflict (as shown by the very strong domestic approval ratings for both Putin and the conflict), than may have been assumed in US elite circles. Russia has also been forming a deepening alliance with an Iran disillusioned with President Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA) and President Biden’s unwillingness to reenter it without extensive new restrictions upon Iran, together with the illegal assassination of the Iranian #2 Qasem Soleimani and additional illegal US sanctions against Iran. Together with US illegal sanctions (e.g. to destroy the competitiveness of Chinese technology firms such as Huawei) and import tariffs implemented against China and the US exacerbation of tensions over Taiwan, US actions have resulted in a tightening alliance between Russia, China and Iran; an outcome that does not improve US national security, or advance US power within the international system.
Here the level of permissiveness within the international system for US foreign policy actions, and perhaps an unwillingness to accept or inability to understand a reduction of that permissiveness, may help one understand US actions. In an international system with an extremely low level of threat, as with the US immediately the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the 1990s, domestic political and economic dynamics may play a greater role in foreign policy as the international system is less constraining. This can be seen in the aggressive regime change actions taken by the US to force open the economies of other nations from the 1990s onwards; with military actions against Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and “colour revolutions” fomented and/or supported in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and the Ukraine, and sanctions and outright support for opposition groups with respect to North Korea, Syria, Iran, Venezuela and Russia. With the resurgence of Russia, and the arrival of China as a great power, this level of permissiveness has already been significantly reduced, and may be completely removed in many areas of the world as the combination of Russia and China (as well as Iran) becomes more assertive in the international realm. It could be said that the US strategic culture mistook a temporary period of permissiveness for a final liberal capitalist victory; leading to hubris and possibly an unwillingness/inability to accept the new emerging pluralistic reality that may have led to significant foreign policy errors.
Such an analytical picture does provide a relatively nuanced view of the present, and provides significant insights into future state policy making, but does not provide an understanding of the historical processes that created the current US and may support the unwillingness to accept a less permissive international environment. It takes the present as a given, without problematizing its elements; how and why the present came into being may have significant exculpatory value with respect to how the future may progress. This is where the benefit of a historical materialist analysis comes into play. The US started as a series of British (and Dutch in the case of New Amsterdam) white settler colonies on the western seaboard of North America, both as business and religious extremist ventures, reflecting the hierarchical structures of the home country. The settlers considered it their God-given right to take the lands inhabited by the indigenous nations; including the extermination of those inhabitants if required. The first two centuries of conflict with these “heathen” Others helped create the conditions for the intensification of the indigenous genocide and the creation of a new “living space” (a genocidal project that Hitler drew many parallels with in his own quest for lebensraum) for white settler capitalism free of the constraints of the mother country. The mass utilization of African racialized slaves removed the threat of a combination of lower-class whites and others against the ruling elites while creating great concentrated wealth in the South and a huge market for the industries of the North. Independence replaced the authority of the British elite with that of the US elite, one that created a central state and a constitution designed to protect US elite interests within a nation created through “indigenous genocide, racialized slavery and hyper-capitalism” as Sjursen succinctly puts it (2021); allied with a belief in a civilizational exceptionalism buttressed with religious extremism and chauvinism. The modern-day sense of terror of the not yet subjugated Others (Russia, China, Iran etc.), which practice “aggression” against the US through their very existence, carries over from the centuries of genocidal clearance of the continental US of the uncivilized (i.e. non-white, non-liberal and non-Christian) Other. The terror of such others as “Muslim terrorists”, “Godless communists”, “Reds under the bed”, and “authoritarian leaders” has been invoked from the Philippine Moro War (“Indian country”) to Vietnam (“gooks”) to the “yellow peril” of Japan (both in WW2 and in the 1990s), the invasion of Iraq (“hajis”), and now the demonization of first Putin and now Xi (and the CCP). This is not just conscious propaganda but reflects a widely held worldview within the strategic culture – as evidenced by the statements of officials covered previously.
The victories over Mexico and then Spain (adding militarist imperialism to US practices) reinforced these beliefs, and the fratricidal self-destruction of two world wars emanating from Europe further strengthened the view of the US as the saviour of Western civilization from a decadent and decaying Europe. The result was a global dominance gained with no military attacks upon the continental US, the homeland; the US Civil War (1861-1865) being the only major US military action to occur on what is now US soil since the Mexican American war of 1846-1848. The relative ease of the US rise, without the invasions and widespread destruction suffered by both China and Russia, also serves to reinforce the common sense of US exceptionalism. During the Cold War the US remained mostly unchallenged outside the cordon sanitaire that had been erected around the “godless” Communist bloc. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the market opening of both China and India could be seen as the culmination of the multi-hundred year expansion of the “New Jerusalem” (Richman 2020) of the United States into the indispensable nation that can finally civilize, dominate or remove the Other; the “End of History”. Strategies such as offshore balancing were rejected in favour of the globalization of the hybrid capabilities of interference in other nation’s affairs that had been perfected in South America in the twentieth century, with the whole world now seen as the US hemisphere. Such a view has been given military representation by US military commands that encompass the globe – Africa Command, European Command, Central Command, Indo-Pacific Command, Northern Command, Southern Command and Strategic Command; with new commands recently added for the internet “Cyber Command” and even space “Space Command”. Added to these are the US covert operations taking place within the majority of the nations upon the Earth.
The US state/society complex is dominated by a capitalist elite class that has set itself the task of rendering all other state/society complexes into an idealized version of itself that opens up those complexes to US (as well as that of its Western junior allies) domination and exploitation. Over a number of centuries, capitalist class dominance and a limited role for the state (i.e. without roles that do not benefit the capitalist class) have been integrated into the societal common sense as has also been the innate superiority of the US with respect to other nations and its right to interfere with the internal dynamics of those nations; liberal imperialism. The dialectical processes that have challenged this common sense have been repeatedly crushed with few exceptions, whether they be those provided by the indigenous population, labour unions, communists, small farmer organizations, the former slave population, anti-war protestors, or the Occupy Wall Street movement. The US elites and their co-opted state and judiciary have utilized widespread authoritarian and cooption measures many times in US history to restrain and defeat challenges to this common sense. These measures being the norm rather than the exception; the Red Scares after both world wars, COINTELPRO, the Espionage Act, the Homeland Security Act, the illegal domestic surveillance programs of the NSA, and mass incarceration being some examples. Ironically, the reversal of much of the New Deal by the capitalist elites, their even greater domination of state functions in the past four decades, together the removal of the competing state/society complex of the Soviet bloc may have paradoxically led to an overemphasis on rentier activities and a level of arrogant self-deception that has degraded important capabilities; as noted above. The Amsterdam School, focusing on the nature and impact of the elites, captures the elite dominance of the US state/society complex well:
In the case of the United States, its liberal capitalist political economy is characterized by a structure at the apex of which we find the oligarchic top segment of an autonomous capitalist class. The US political system is consequently structurally biased towards the interests of the corporate community, secured through persistently revolving door and through the so-called policy planning process. That process takes place primarily within think-tanks and foundations which are in turn closely interlocked with the corporate elite, generating a particular (pro-business) elite consensus and world-view that then feed into public policy-making. It is our argument that the close nexus of this corporate elite, and its predominantly globalist outlook, with the foreign policy-making establishment helps to account for America’s overall foreign policy of the past decades, and will remain an important variable in determining future US strategy vis-à-vis China. (de Graaff & van Apeldoorn 2018, p. 116)
The Amsterdam School also captures the ways in which the US elite has integrated other Western elites into their global project, and subordinated other comprador elites to serve its (and their own) interests rather than those of their own nations. These elite connections are fostered across business, educational, state and military realms – providing extremely flexible and powerful ways with which to undermine and overthrow governments that take actions against US interests; backed up by US-allied NGOs and agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). South America offers a great number of examples of the US utilization of such elites, through coups, the delegitimization of opposing governments, and general social, political and economic destabilization.
China is not just a rising power threatening the interests of the United States, but also a nationalist Party-state dominated state/society complex that both resists domination by a capitalist class and serves as a competing state/society model to that of the US for other nations to follow; and perhaps the domestic US population itself. The Chinese challenge is not to the US nation as a whole but to the capitalist class that dominates the US. A class which is somewhat “trapped” by its own highly profitable labour-arbitrage and consumer market activities in China and Asia in general; “a loss of economic openness in Asia and the ability to maintain and control that openness on US terms—is what constitutes the greatest threat to US interests” (de Graaff & van Apeldoorn 2018, p. 124). At the same time, the Otherness of the Chinese civilizational project is reinforced in the US strategic culture through the latter’s somewhat unconscious beliefs in racial and civilizational superiority that are couched in cultural terms and Orientalist language. As Siu and Chun (2020) note, racialized tropes such as the “Yellow Peril”, accusations of Oriental economic and technological “cheating” and even assertions of the Chinese creation of COVID, have surfaced as China becomes a greater challenge to US dominance.
The challenge is not just to the elite’s power and status, but also to its sense of self; its ontological security. This latter challenge has been shown in the US responses to the new assertiveness of both Russia and China, “the United States finds it extraordinarily difficult to accept [being on the receiving end of the type of lectures that it is used to being the one to deliver]” (Mercouris 2021). The understanding that ideas can significantly outlive the material and institutional realities that supported them may provide insight into a significant complication of US foreign policy, as its elites struggle to comprehend a world in which they need to accept the Other as their legitimate equal or even perhaps as their better.
[They] cannot yet comprehend an order that encompasses on the basis of something approaching equality the broad mass of people – citizens – at home, let alone the non-western peoples of the global South, or even their elites. (Parmar 2018)
The resulting cognitive dissonance may lead to dangerous policy errors, as US elites seek to reject facts that threaten their sense of self and attack the perceived purveyors of those facts. The Amsterdam School allows for a heterogeneous capitalist elite that may come together when overall class interests are involved but may also have conflicting interests. Within the US, the fossil fuel and related interests form a significant capitalist class fraction that greatly constrains US climate change policies within a bound of outright denial of the existential threat (under Presidents Bush and Trump) and a soft acceptance (under Presidents Clinton and Obama) that does not significantly hinder fossil fuel interests. Within such a constraint, no significant climate change-oriented policies should be expected outside the circumstances of a climate change emergency; even then policies would tend toward technology solutions such as Solar Radiation Management that could facilitate a slow move away from fossil fuels. The fossil fuel related grouping, together with domestic interests that are dependent upon the health of the US domestic economy – such as real estate development and resource extraction in general – were evident in coalition of elite forces that supported Trump. This was a very different coalition to the Open Door one that dominated foreign policy up to Trump’s election and strove mightily to nullify parts of his agenda that they did not agree with; “the kind of firms to which Trump’s foreign-policy makers connect are on average smaller and include fewer large transnational corporations than the other administrations” (van Apeldoorn & de Graaff 2019, p. 13), and the financial sector representatives include a significant number of domestic real estate interests. This produced an inner policy circle with few linkages to the usual network of thinks tanks that have been “so central to top foreign-policy makers over the past decades across both Democratic and Republican administrations” (Ibid., p. 18). With the election of President Biden, the Open Door fraction has fully reasserted its dominance, the push for global dominance reignited, and outright climate denial has been replaced with policies of soft acceptance.