US: From Morning in America to Making America Great Again (1979 to present)
The next part of my chapter on the US
The election of Ronald Reagan, who had previously worked extensively in the post-war capitalism-promoting efforts of General Electric (and had also acted as an FBI informant during the post-WW2 red scare [Rosenfeld 2012]), provided a President that actively supported the corporate and political elite pushback. “Reagan received what he called his ‘post-graduate education in political science’ while serving as General Electric’s ‘travelling ambassador’ under its vice president, Lemuel Boulware, a union buster extraordinaire” (Marcetic 2020, p. 45). Labor-power had already been weakened by a less union supportive National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and anti-union decisions by both Republican and Democrat administrations during the 1970s (Domhoff 2013). The push for a government-financed universal healthcare system and a guaranteed minimum income for all had come to nothing with the defeat of Teddy Kennedy at the Democratic convention (Ward 2019). Labor-power was now greatly reduced by the firing of the striking air traffic controllers by the state (legitimizing the firing and replacement of striking workers), the high unemployment created by the Fed-induced Volcker Shock recession of the early 1980s (Greider 1987), and new employer-friendly interpretations of labor law. The Reagan (1980 – 1988) administrations also “ordered a scorched-earth policy through the Great Society from education, to housing, to employment [and] targeted very specifically those programs in which blacks were overrepresented even as he protected [programs such as] social security, where African Americans were but a small fraction of the recipients” (Anderson 2016, p. 119). Large-scale federal layoffs also disproportionately affected African Americans, and Reagan rendered the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) ineffective. The racialization of the War on Drugs (including the 100-1 difference in sentencing between crack cocaine and powdered cocaine in the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986), also led to a substantial undermining of the cohesion of African American neighbourhoods. In 1992, 91.4% of federal crack offenders were African American (Stolberg & Herndon 2019); a problem at least partially created by the administration’s facilitation of Contra drug running,
The following decade brought two Democratic presidential terms which resulted in the End of Welfare As We Know It (Law 1997; Brown 2013), three-strikes laws, and the biggest crime bill in US history that had an over-weighted impact upon the African American community through both the massive reductions in the social safety net and a doubling in the level of incarceration from 1994 to 2009; amid a “highly racialized world of welfare politics” (Brown 2013, p. 584) and a dog whistle discourse of “welfare queens”, “predators” and “super predators” (Dyck & Hussey 2008; Brown 2013; Lopez 2014; Stolberg & Herndon 2019). “Clinton’s policies proved that he was no friend to poor black women” (Baldwin 2010, p. 9), nor poor black men, nor black children who “Clinton used racially coded rhetoric to cast ... as animals” (Alexander quoted in Robinson 2016, p. 20). He, and the Corporate Democrats, were also no friend of labor as they passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), made the US a member of the new World Trade Organization (WTO), and provided China with Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR); facilitating extensive corporate offshoring. In addition, “By the end of the twentieth century, the once vaunted Wagner Act had become worse than null and void – it had become, as David Brody put it, a ‘tool of management’” (Cowie 2016, p. 25).
The Clinton administration was a friend of finance though, ignoring the US$500 billion government rescue for the extensive illegal looting of the Savings & Loan industry facilitated by the Reagan-era deregulation that was met with little or no punishment for the looters (Pizzo, Fricker & Muolo 2015) and the collapse of Long Term Capital Management, to further deregulate the financial industry. It also ignored the head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commissions (CFTC) in refusing to regulate over the counter (OTC) derivatives generally and to treat credit derivatives as insurance instruments (which they are). At the end of the decade it also ignored the lessons of the Great Depression, removing the separation between commercial and retail banking, with the Treasury Secretary responsible for this deregulation, previous co-chair of Goldman Sachs Robert Rubin, decamping to the biggest beneficiary Citigroup where he received over US$100 million in compensation.
After stabilizing at about 23% in the late 1970s, US union density declined to the point in the 2010s where it was below the level prior to the passing of the Wagner Act in 1935 (Cowie 2016, p. 11). Wealth and income inequality levels returned to those of the 1920s (Cowie 2016, p. 12) aided by an increasingly regressive tax structure (both technically and even more de facto), and the repeal of the New Deal financial regulatory environment. Reflecting and reinforcing the new power realities, the US Supreme Court issued rulings that equated money with protected free speech. After government spending fell somewhat during the 1990s, benefitting from the short-lived Peace Dividend and the Dot.com Bubble and restrictive fiscal policies, it rose back above 40% with the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (Mauro et al 2015). The Christian Right rose in power within the Republican party from the 1980s onward, with a hybrid mixture of religious fundamentalism, neoconservative foreign policy, and a gospel of wealth that supports free market fundamentalism;
Getting Christianity and elite economics together on the same page is useful in signaling that policies that serve the rich are simply articles of faith, the dispute of which is akin to arguing with a literal interpretation of the Bible (Parramore quoted in Maxwell & Shields 2019, p. 300-301).
One area not affected by reductions in state spending was that of the Hidden Development State (Block 2008) that benefitted corporate interests through providing the basic research that facilitated new product generation. The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program was put in place in 1982 to provide federal state funding to small business research initiatives. A near tripling of funding to the NIH, together with the Orphan Drugs Act of 1983, greatly aided the dominance of the US pharmaceutical industry. The National Nanotechnology Initiative, started in 2003, brought much greater coordination for federal nanotechnology research. This state directed development ran counter to the prevailing discourse of market-fundamentalism but reflected the reality of the need for federal funding for future-oriented basic research. The discourse of the entrepreneurial “risk taking” venture capital and high-tech industries had been built upon a substantial amount of myth. As Mazzucato notes, it is as much the risk taking of the entrepreneurial state that is responsible for successful technological development, “As has been the case in the development of other industries such as biotech and IT, private businesses have entered the game only after successful government initiatives absorb most of the uncertainty and not a little risk of developing new energy technologies in the first place” (Mazzucato 2015, p.127). The discourse of neoliberalism both “hides” this development state and endangers its future:
From the Internet to biotech and even shale gas, the US state has been the key driver of innovation-led growth – willing to invest in the most uncertain phase of the innovation and let business hop on for the easier ride down the way. If the rest of the world wants to emulate the US model they should do as the United States actually did, not as it says it did: more State not less … This is something that needs to be understood not just by the rest of the world, but in the United States itself, where the dominant political narrative is endangering funding for future innovation and economic growth. In 2013, US government spending for basic research fell below where it was a decade earlier. (Mazzucato 2015, p 1)
The discourse of “unleashing private entrepreneurial energies” was used to both greatly reduce state regulations and to greatly reduce levels of taxation – especially upon capital gains:
In the late 1970s capital gains taxes fell significantly following lobbying efforts on behalf of the US venture capital industry … The lobbyists argued before the government that venture capitalists had funded both the Internet and the early semiconductor industry, and that without venture capitalists, innovation would not happen. The same actors that rode the wave of expensive State investments in what would later become the dot.com revolution successfully lobbied government to reduce their taxes. (Mazzucato 2015, p. 25)
Repeated reductions in corporate taxes and those on rich individuals, together with extensive use of tax havens and transfer pricing, significantly reduced the level of state funding provided by the economic elite. In contrast those elites benefitted from many state policies, including repeated state bailouts for the financial sector. The removal of the New Deal financial regulatory framework, together with the legalization of share buy-backs and the failure to regulate the derivatives market, facilitated a vast expansion in the financial sector. This financialization of the economy precipitated both extractive and rentier forms of capitalism. Increasingly value was extracted from corporations and society by executive management and shareholders (including private equity), and through income sources based upon economic rents. With respect to private equity investment, which tends to greatly increase the debt level of corporations and extract value through large dividends and fees, “between 1985 and 2005, private equity funds experienced a compound annual growth rate of 18.5 per cent, and in the last few years, growth has been even more marked” (Froud & Williams 2007, p. 4). There has been a general tendency to see corporations as simply a set of cash flows that can be leveraged up (increased debt) to increase the returns to the equity holders. With respect to private equity, in many cases the initial investment is rapidly returned through large management fees and dividend payments, leaving only upside for the investors.
the extraction of value is pure financial engineering because the operating business acquires liabilities in the form of debt equal to the sum of cash taken out. But the cash goes into the hands of elite private equity providers and fund managers while the liabilities are passed onto the business … This serves to normalize the pursuit of value through financial re-engineering as businesses become bundles of assets that can be sold, unbundled, sold again through several cycles of refinancing for value extraction. (Ibid., p. 12)
All of the downside risk is placed upon the employees and debt holders (and the state with respect to possible increases in social welfare payments and employee pension bailouts), with the corporation being placed into bankruptcy if unable to service its large debts.
the private equity business model concentrates equity ownership and fee income in a few hands so that a managerial elite can gain what the Financial Times have described as ‘life changing amounts of money’. (Ibid., p. 10)
In many cases US corporate expenditures on stock buy-backs, which are tax advantageous to investors as the additional income comes in the form of lower-taxed capital gains and to executives who get to boost the value of their share options (which are not rebased to reflect the higher share prices created by the buy backs), exceed all R&D expenditures as well as increasing the corporation’s debt levels. The outcome of such value extraction may be a serious relative diminution in basic US technology innovation, “In the end, an increasingly timid (and sometimes austerity-driven) public sector and an increasingly financialized business sector will surely get us secular stagnation” (Mazzucato 2015, p. 15). With US economic power relying less and less on physical manufacturing, and more and more on the control of global value chains (GVCs) and intellectual property (Phillips 2017), this could be seriously detrimental in a geostrategic sense. At the international level, US corporations are relying more and more upon patent and copyright protections to both limit competition and to provide licensing revenue. This has been aided by the WTO Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) that became effective in 1995. This was the first time that intellectual property rights law was embedded in the international trading system, and it also changed the basis of patents from that of process (allowing other nations to “reverse engineer” patented products) to the product itself (Prashad 2014, p. 181). The US state has used extensive pressure to force other nations to integrate the WTO TRIPS into their laws and to accept the extended monopoly protection periods of US law. The rise of competitive patent-producing Chinese global corporations such as Huawei and the Made in China 2025 Chinese development plan, directly threaten the US dominance of GVCs.
Increases in corporate rents (and power) have been further aided from the late 1990s by an extensive level of US corporate consolidation driven by merger and acquisitions (M&A) facilitated by increasingly novel and flexible interpretations of anti-trust regulations; “one can make the case that merger reviews have become rather lax in the US” (Phillipon 2019, p. 90) with the number of US publicly listed companies per capita falling by more than half. An example of this lax regulation is that “the agency [US Federal Trade Commission] seems to have decided that five competitors are enough to ensure adequate competition in most markets” (Ibid., p. 91). In addition, there have been less new entries into concentrated markets, which may be significantly explained by hurdles erected by regulation and industry lobbying. Adding to the level of concentration has been the Pentagon’s move to a greatly reduced number of major military contractors, as well as the US Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) facilitation of extensive M&A that has resulted in six corporations that “Control 90% Of The Media In America … from 50 companies back in 1983” (Lutz 2012). The supposed democratizing nature of the Internet has been overcome, as with previous information revolutions, by the formation of “a highly centralized and integrated new industry” that has taken its place to “uphold the social structure that has been with us since the Industrial Revolution” (Wu 2010, intro. para. 11). The internet “doesn’t reverse the economic logic of concentration – it amplifies it” (Hindman 2009, p. 132) with the result that the “public sphere is already a de facto aristocracy” (Ibid., p. 139). Recent consolidations across Internet behemoths (e.g. Google buying Youtube, Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp) have added to the level of concentration. Within the financial industry, the removal of the Glass Steagall separation of investment and commercial banking, together with retraction of regulations against inter-state banking, has resulted in a multi-decadal merger wave. This was exacerbated by the consolidations carried out during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, with the resulting handful of “Too Big To Fail” financial institutions, such as Wells Fargo and Bank of America, dominating the industry; in severe contrast to the 1930s policies that enforced the division of retail and commercial banking and led to the prosecution of a number of banking executives.
In the 1980s, as noted in chapter 2, the US led a stealth neoliberalization of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. These institutions were utilized during the Third World Debt Crisis of the 1980s to force nations to implement policies that would both open up their economies to foreign TNCs, and to move much of the public sector into the market economy. In this way both an extensive expansion of capital (the spatial fix [Harvey 2001; Arrighi 2004]) and an intensive one through the commodification of social services, utilities, health and education were facilitated. The blockage of the option of debt default that had been successfully utilized by many nations in the 1930s greatly benefitted US and other Western (and local elite) creditors, while creating a “Lost Decade” for much of Latin America and Africa. The commodification of government services has been brought home, with extensive privatization of US government services – including significant functions of the US military, privately-run charter schools and educational testing.
The Vietnam Syndrome (Summer Jr. 1992; Bagdikian 1993) was seen as limiting large-scale military operations, compounded by the mass casualties produced by the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut in 1983; in this context the highly secretive and illegal Contra operations against Nicaragua can be understood (Rubenberg 1988). When faced with a lack of public support, even in Congress, the executive branch utilized illegal and covert actions, rather than accept limitations upon its actions. Robinson proposes that the overthrow of Antonio Somoza in Nicaragua, together with other populist revolutions in a number of other US authoritarian allies, oriented US tactics toward “democracy promotion” [sic] as a way to “manage political change in order to preempt more fundamental social change” emphasizing “the penetration of civil society itself in order to secure social control and limit control from therein” (Robinson 2007, pp. 32-33). In 1983 the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was formed as a conduit for such efforts and “went on to provide aid to pro-US democratic forces in the Philippines in 1986 and in Chile from 1984–1990, contributing to nonrevolutionary regime transitions [and] broadened its mission beyond the non-Communist Third World to include aid to friendly democratic movements in Poland and Nicaragua” (Pee 2017, p. 707). This did not constitute a change in strategy, but rather a change in tactics within the same Open Door strategy; as noted by the man who helped draft the NED legislation “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA” (Allan Weinstein quoted by Engdahl 2015, chapter 2, sub-sect. US-Sponsored NGOs, para. 6).
After the rekindling of the Cold War in the 1980s, the collapse of the USSR removed the core Other (the “Evil Empire”) while enabling the inclusion of the ex-Soviet bloc (and a liberalizing China) within the neoLIO. The collapse of the ideological alternatives created a discoursal closure at home, while also providing a much greater freedom of action for the US. Perhaps even more than in the immediate post-WW2 period, the US (aided when possible by other parts of the West) found itself in a highly permissive position relative to the international system, allowing it to seemingly remake the world at will to its benefit; the natural conclusion to its multi-century efforts to defeat the recalcitrant Other. The escalating level of foreign oil dependence from this time onwards also created an increased need to maintain the stability of foreign oil providers. Instead of a peace dividend being provided through a reduction in defense spending, the MIC was reoriented toward a role of global dominance.
These drivers can be seen in the facilitation of the breakup of Yugoslavia, the support of shock therapy in the ex-Soviet bloc, funding and support for “color” revolutions, support for EU/NATO membership for the Eastern European and Baltic States (in contravention of explicit guarantees given to the USSR leadership [Majumdar 2017]), the removal of Iraq from Kuwait, the actions of the IMF and World Bank during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, and the inclusion of China within the WTO. The first US-Iraq war was also celebrated as removing the Vietnam Syndrome of domestic resistance to large-scale US foreign intervention (Summers Jr. 1992). A removal aided by US-Kuwaiti elite propaganda collaborations such as the infamous Baby Incubator Hoax congressional testimony by the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US Senate masquerading behind a hidden identity and aided by extensive coaching from the US public relations firm Hill & Knowlton (Stauber 1995; Knightley 2001; MacArthur 2004); an early example of the western interventionist human rights discourse (and reminiscent of British WW1 propaganda about German soldiers bayonetting babies).
The GWOT then facilitated an escalation of Middle East interventionism with the invasion and occupation of firstly Afghanistan and then Iraq. The rapid rise in oil prices from 2000 onwards, together with rapidly increasing US oil imports and fears over Peak Oil raised the visibility of the control over global oil supplies within US strategic policy circles. This led to the alleged Seven Nations in Five Years plan of the Bush administration (Burke 2007), and has been seen as a major determinant of the US invasion of Iraq; a nation belligerent toward Al Qaeda (in contrast to US claims) and lacking the consciously fabricated Weapons of Mass Destruction (Leopold 2015). The GWOT, together with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, provided permanent US military bases across the Middle East, while aiding in the construction of the Muslim Other. It also, as with both WW1 and the Quasi-War with France, facilitated the passing of politically repressive legislation (e.g. the Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act) and extensive domestic spying (Angwin et al 2015), together with providing extensive profit-making opportunities (aided by the privatization of military and homeland security functions), and indirectly, furthering neoliberal ideological dominance.
The “war on terrorism” provided a seemingly endless military outlet for supplier capital, generated a colossal deficit that justified deeper dismantling of the Keynesian welfare state, locking neoliberal austerity in place, and legitimated the creation of a police state to repress political dissent in the name of security. (Robinson 2018, Ch. 5, para. 44).
From a purely realist perspective many of the US foreign policy actions would seem not to make sense, for example the aggressive march of NATO toward Russia’s borders, as they needlessly increased the risks of conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries. When a critical lens is added, including an understanding of the dominance of TNC capital within US foreign policy, rational motives become more evident. NATO and EU membership both fully integrate the ex-Soviet bloc states into the neoLIO and recreate the policy of Cold War containment with respect to an independent Russia. That nation may not be the ideological competitor that the USSR was, but after the turn of the century it has become much more nationalistic and resistant to Western dominance. China represented a colossal new profit-making opportunity for the TNCs; together with the ex-Soviet bloc it provided the spatial fix par excellence for TNC capital. This entailed:
a geographical restructuring of capitalist activity (deindustrialization here and reindustrialization there, for example) across the face of planet earth, the production of new forms of uneven geographical development, a recalibration and even re-centering of global power (with far greater emphasis upon the Pacific and newly industrializing countries) and a shift in the geographical scale at which capitalism is organized (symbolized by the growth of supra-state organizational forms such as the European Union and a more prominent role for institutions of global governance such as the WTO, the IMF, the G8, the UN and the like). Contemporary globalization has been, we can argue, the product of these specific geographically grounded processes. (Harvey 2001, p. 24).
These geographically grounded processes may have been facilitated by relatively inanimate factors such as new communications and transport technologies, but were also driven by the very animate and conscious actions of TNCs and the US foreign policy and military establishments (generally supported by their Western counterparts). For approximately two decades, the US elites had an unparalleled ability, and opportunity, to remake the world to their liking; as noted above possibly greater than during the immediate post-WW2 period. Without the need to build a positive buttress to an ideological competitor, and the legacy of the New Deal, the reaction was much more shock therapy and aggression than Marshall Plan. It was also one of hubris in much of the US policy-making and military establishments:
we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us. (US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright interviewed on the Today show [Albright 1998])
full spectrum dominance – the ability of US forces, operating unilaterally or in combination with multinational and interagency partners, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the full range of military operations. (US National Defense University, Institute for National Strategic Studies 2000, p. 61)
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
(a senior advisor to President G.W. Bush, which the article’s author identified as Karl Rove, quoted in Suskind 2004)
We came, we saw, he died. (US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, referring to the torture and murder of Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan head of state [CBS 2011])
As Cohen (2001; 2019) notes, the inability of the US to engage with Russia in a more supportive and respectful way may be seen as a major foreign policy blunder. The aggressive US reaction to Russia’s renewed nationalism has created a powerful coalition between Russia and China, on the basis of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. Instead of dividing and conquering, the US has united its opponents. Given the significant synergies that exist between China and Russia, together with the economic weakness of the latter, such strategic blindness can only be seen as a symptom of the hubris noted above and anger at the “loss” of Russia. The active US support for the coup against the elected President of the Ukraine in 2014, and then the resulting anti-Russian administration (including the NATO rebuilding and retraining of the Ukrainian military), has only served to drive Russia closer to China.
After the mass domestic resistance to the Vietnam War, the freedom of action of US foreign policy with respect to domestic opinion was greatly increased by a number of factors. The US military have relied upon a voluntary membership, rather than one based upon a conscription army that would spread the experiences of the nation’s wars across the citizenry, “The Nixon Administration was very clear on that point: to give yourself a chance of fighting a lengthy limited war, you must get away from conscripts” (Hoffman et al 1981, p. 8). In more recent years the large-scale use of private armed mercenaries and the extensive outsourcing of administration and support tasks previously performed by military personnel has served to reduce the “official” casualties, as the outsourced personnel tend to die much less publicly.
Too many soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines dying … would draw unnecessary attention … Mercenaries die in warzones. They absorb deaths that would otherwise bloody the military ranks. This allows the War Department [sic] and Capitol Hill to cite low casualty figures … Additionally, using mercenaries keeps conscription off the table. Conscription would expand the burden of war into the upper-middle and upper classes of society, dragging in the sons and daughters of the ruling elite. (Sorensen 2020, p. 20)
In addition, media access to war zones has been greatly restricted, with “embedded” journalists becoming the norm, and independent (of the US state) journalists treated as an opposition rather than as part of the free press (MacArthur 2004), and extensive cooptation of media organizations has taken place (Taylor 1992; Bagdikian 1993; Isikoff & Corn 2006; Brewer 2009). Instead of having to “keep transmission equipment out” (Hoffman et al 1981, p. 8), the US state and a compliant media have become proficient at managing the media messages emanating from conflict zones.
Kreps (2018) also notes the move away from war taxes and war bonds, that produce a directly identifiable financial impact to the citizenry, to war funding through a general increase in state indebtedness. As with the lack of a military draft, this helps remove the impact of wars away from the consciousness of the general citizenry; the $6.4 trillion costs of the post-911 wars (The Watson Institute 2019) have been added to the US state debt with no immediate financial impact upon the general populace. Foreign interventions have also been restructured in ways that reduce US casualties and increase secrecy, though the extensive use of air power, drones, covert special operations, proxy armies, covertly supported “color revolutions”, and economic and financial sanctions. The reaction of the majority of US citizens to the 2018 deaths of US troops in Niger was one of surprise that US troops were even in Niger; a measure of the ability of the US state to successfully utilize such covert operations with limited or no external oversight (Cooper, Gibbens-Neff & Schmitt 2018).
In 2010, Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported that the U.S. Special Operations Forces were deployed in 75 countries … By the end of 2011, U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Nye told me, that number would reach 120. (Turse 2012, p. 12)
As of 2020, there are only 195 countries in the world. A lesson initially learnt from Nicaragua at the turn of the century, then relearnt from Vietnam that had to be painfully relearnt again from Iraq and Afghanistan was that:
Nothing is more destructive of army morale than being in a situation in which it is nearly impossible to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys; in which one does not know whether the terrain on which one fights is yours or theirs. (Hoffman et al 1981, p. 10)
Sorenson (2020) proposes that the balance of power within the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) has become corporatized, that the profit-maximizing private defense industry corporations – a “war industry” - have become the predominant power within it. He identifies a highly effective five-step strategy to capture government:
1. Pull retiring military officers into war corporations.
2. Stack the deck by placing ex-industry officials in the Pentagon leadership.
3. Finance congressional campaigns.
4. Lobby creatively.
5. Fund think tanks and corporate media. (Ibid., p. 68)
U.S. foreign policy then becomes heavily affected by the profitability requirements of the defense industry corporations – peace is very bad for profits. This extensive capture of government by private interests greatly restricts the set of foreign policy alternatives deemed to be “politically acceptable”; especially with many corporations and industry bodies funding both Democratic and Republican politicians. Hillary Clinton may call for a redirection of defense spending to rebuild the industrial policy hidden within the MIC (Clinton 2020), but the willingness of the major defense corporations to give up their massively profitable military contracts may severely limit the ability to significantly implement such a change. No-bid service contracts and overly complex “cost plus” military hardware specified by captured buyers are just so much more profitable than producing batteries, wind turbines and smart electricity grids in a competitive marketplace.
The consolidation of the media into large TNC enterprises has also greatly reduced the scope for a diversity of domestic discourses. The lack of impact of revelations of executive branch misrepresentations with respect to the war in Afghanistan (Chotiner 2019), extensive torture programs (US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence 2014) and large-scale domestic surveillance (McCoy 2013) highlight this discoursal closure. The partnership between Facebook and the TNC-dominated Atlantic Council (Vanian 2018), and changes to Google algorithms that downgraded respected non-mainstream media sources (Pop 2017), all point to reductions in non-elite entities’ ability to engage in the national political discourse. The concept of Humanitarian Intervention has also been used as a domestic legitimizer of intervention (e.g. Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya), together with extensive media manipulation (MacArthur 2004; Rampton & Stauber 2006), and a jingoistic nationalism added after 9/11. Taken together, and with a bipartisan political party consensus for foreign interventions, the result is little if any domestic constraint upon US foreign policy – short of a long-lasting major war requiring conscription.
The recent case of the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) whistleblowers that have exposed serious concerns of political bias and malpractice with respect to the investigation of the Douma, Syria “gas attack” is highly instructive. The numerous whistleblowers call into question the OPCW’s official findings that a gas attack even happened; findings that were used as a casus belli by the US, resulting in a cruise missile attack upon Syria (Hitchens 2019). The very limited and generally dismissive coverage of the mainstream media with respect to these whistleblower testimonies given what would appear to be their high “newsworthiness” is instructive of the level of discoursal discipline followed by the media (Mate 2020); a discipline that led to the resignation of a Newsweek journalist due to the refusal to print his story on the OPCW whistle-blower revelations (Haddad 2019; MacLeod 2019). The only coverage dealing fully with the details exposed by the whistleblowers has been through alternative media sites such as the Gray Zone (Mate 2019 & 2019a). Another case is that of the incredibly effective suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop revelations just prior to the 2020 US presidential election; with the legitimacy and ownership of the laptop only being noted in the mainstream media in early 2023.
The subjectivist acceptance of foreign policy miscalculations through cognitive misinterpretations may have a high utility with respect to the present-day US state. At the very zenith of its global power, the US made fundamental foreign policy errors. The assumption that the fall of the Soviet Union produced an “end of history”, in which the global acceptance of American-style democratic-capitalism was inevitable, fulfilled the creation myth of the Shining City On A Hill bringing civilization to the whole world and acting as the Global Policeman. Such a belief led firstly to the provision of US permanent normal trade relations and then WTO membership, to a highly non-liberal China. The massive profit-making opportunities available to US TNCs through the US-China wage-arbitrage may also have been a significant factor in these decisions. This allowed the Chinese CCP dominated economy to enter a period of rapid exponential growth during the next decade. At the same time, as Cohen notes, the plundering and arrogant treatment of Russia created a nationalist backlash led by Putin. The inability of the US to accept Russia as an independent power, with its own sphere of influence, then turned it into an opponent and natural ally of China.
Instead of leveraging the huge amount of global goodwill that stemmed from the 9/11 attacks, the hubristic and aggressive way in which the US responded alienated many. The invasion and occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq went against the lessons taken to heart in the inter-war period and learnt again in Vietnam. The extensive focus on the GWOT, together with the problems created by the two occupations, allowed for little geopolitical focus on Russia and China. The growth of the latter not only strengthened a possible opponent, but also weakened the US through extensive deindustrialization. The perceived (by Russia and China) misuse of a UN mandate in Libya, together with the US support for the Ukrainian coup, then helped solidify the budding alliance between Russia and China (solidified even more during the Russo-Ukrainian war). The destruction of the Middle East power-balance through the invasion of Iraq has also increased the local position of Iran, including with the majority-Shia Iraq. The at least tacitly sponsored by the US destabilization of Syria has also provided much greater influence for both Iran and Russia within that country.
With respect to South America, the United States has recognized and actively supported highly questionable changes in government in countries such as Brazil (with the removal of the serving President and a leading candidate jailed under highly questionable circumstances) and Bolivia (with the unsupported assertion of “electoral irregularities” by the OAS [Chang et al 2019]) as part of a general reversal of the South American Pink Tide (Encarnacion 2018). This may at least partly be seen as a reassertion of US dominance over the Western Hemisphere in the face of the Chinese challenge.