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| ISBN-13: | 9781783715756 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 04/20/1998 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Mark Curtis has published widely on British and US foreign policy and on international relations.
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CHAPTER 1
Postwar Foreign Policy and the Special Relationship
If we extricate ourselves from the view of foreign policy promoted in the mainstream and instead consider actual reality from the declassified documents and historical record, a fairly clear picture emerges as to the roots and effects of US and British foreign policy. In the US, there are a number of independent scholars – perhaps most prominently, Gabriel Kolko and Noam Chomsky – who have extensively analysed the historical and documentary record of US foreign policy. With British foreign policy, there is a paucity of independent sources and much of the secret record awaits documentation, which I tried to do in my previous book, The Ambiguities of Power. Below I try to outline, albeit very briefly, some main themes of postwar US and British foreign policy and the special relationship.
Key themes in postwar US foreign policy
Postwar US foreign policy has been based on securing control over what was called the 'Grand Area', which encompassed virtually the entire non-Soviet world. US leaders incessantly outlined their primary goal within this area of an 'open door' in international trade and investment whereby 'American enterprises in other countries should be assured the right of access to raw materials and markets and to labour supply of the host country on the same terms as business enterprises operated therein by its citizens or by citizens of third countries'. Given the predominant role of US business in the international economy after the Second World War, the overall US goal was nothing less than control of the international economy. Cordell Hull, the US Secretary of State and architect of US postwar planning, had noted during the war that:
Leadership towards a new system of international relationships in trade and other economic affairs will devolve very largely upon the United States because of our great economic strength. We should assume this leadership, and the responsibility that goes with it, primarily for reasons of pure national self-interest.
It also involved control over world order more generally. As a State Department memorandum of 1948 put it: the establishment of a 'truly stable world order can proceed ... only from the older, mellower and more advanced nations of the world'. This view echoed Winston Churchill, who had noted in 1940:
Power in the hands of these two great liberal nations, with the free nations of the British Commonwealth and the American Republics associated in some way with them so as to ensure that power is not abused, offers the only stable prospect of peace.
Noam Chomsky states that:
In the international system envisioned by US planners, the industrial powers were to reconstruct, essentially restoring the traditional order and barring any challenge to business dominance, but now taking their places within a world system regulated by the United States. This world system was to take the form of state-guided liberal internationalism, secured by US power to bar interfering forces and managed through military expenditures, which proved to be a critical factor stimulating industrial recovery. The global system was designed to guarantee the needs of US investors, who were expected to flourish under the prevailing circumstances.
Of particular importance to US planners were the raw material supplies, markets and investment opportunities of the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Leading historian Gabriel Kolko notes that 'by no later than 1960, America's ideals and assumptions regarding institutional issues, above all foreign investment and raw materials exports, had been repeated so often, both in its policy guidelines and its routine diplomacy, that one can fairly say that ... there remains no mystery whatsoever regarding American formal premises and aims'. Indeed, reviewing US foreign policy from 1945 until 1980, Kolko asserts that despite the risk of oversimplification, 'the economic component remains the single most important factor in its postwar conduct in the Third World'.
In the Middle East, US planners undertook to secure overall control of the region's oil supplies in alliance with US oil corporations and based on a close relationship principally with the Saudi royal family and regime that lasts until today. This involved US arms sales to the regime, which helped to 'keep the goodwill of the King and other important Saudi Arabs', as it was put in 1947, and which remains relevant today. US petroleum policy towards Britain – the other power with a controlling interest in Middle Eastern oil – was described in 1947 as predicated upon 'a very extensive joint interest and upon a control, at least for the moment, of the great bulk of the free petroleum resources of the world'.
The need to exert control over the international economy's most important commodity meant gradually displacing the British from the region, the first major act of which was the joint CIA–MI6 coup in 1953 against the Iranian government that had nationalised the British-controlled oil industry. The new regime under the Shah reduced the British concession and gave US oil corporations an increased share in the country's oil business. Throughout the postwar period overall strategic control of the region has remained an overriding priority of US foreign policy (referred to as 'defence' in the propaganda system in a region where the US has 'security interests'). The interventions in Lebanon in 1958 and in Iraq in 1991, the strategic alliance with the Shah of Iran from 1953–78, Turkey and Israel and constant support for the regimes of the oil-rich Gulf states have all been in order to secure this fundamental goal (see also Chapters 5 and 6).
Contrary to popular myth, another key US postwar policy was general support for continuing control of colonial territories by the European powers, especially in Africa. 'In general', the State Department noted in 1950, 'we believe that our economic goals in Africa should be achieved through coordination and cooperation with the colonial powers.' European colonial powers' plans to 'undertake jointly the economic development and exploitation' of the colonial areas 'has much to recommend it', the State Department noted in 1948. In 1950, the State Department supported the European policy of the 'development of Africa as a means of strengthening their overall economic and strategic position in the world'. By 1960, a National Security Council (NSC) report on Africa confirmed that the policy continued, and US interests involved 'the development of the dependent territories, in an orderly manner and in cooperation with the European metropoles, toward ultimate self-determination'. This transition should take place 'in a way which preserves the essential ties which bind Western Europe and Africa'. It also stated:
As areas achieve independence [US policy is to] encourage them (1) to make the maximum contribution to their own economic development, (2) to eliminate barriers to trade and investment, (3) to take measures capable of attracting maximum amounts of external private capital, and (4) to look essentially to Western Europe, to the Free World international financial institutions and to private investment to meet their needs for external capital so long as this is consistent with US security interests.
The US Joint Chiefs of Staff noted in 1947 that The United States is, by reason of its strength and political enlightenment, the natural leader of this hemisphere', referring to Latin America. Similarly, then CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence, Robert Gates, noted in 1984 that The fact is that the Western hemisphere is the sphere of influence of the United States'. In Latin America, Kolko notes, the US confronted 'an alternative concept of national capitalist economic development that rejected fundamentally its historic objective of an integrated world economy based not simply on capitalism but also on unrestricted access to whatever wealth it desired'. 'Nowhere else', Kolko states, 'were the underlying bases and objectives of US foreign policy revealed so starkly' in which the 'open door' was a myth and 'power and gain for the United States' the real foundation of its policies.
The US intervention in Guatemala in 1954 was the first major postwar example of a familiar pattern of intervention, especially in Latin America. The pattern is that an essentially nationalist government (in this case under Jacobo Arbenz, democratically elected) threatens established US business interests in the country and/or region (in this case specifically the United Fruit Company, a major landowner) and the traditional economic and political order by pursuing a reform programme of benefit to the majority impoverished population. The political programme is then publicly labelled by US leaders as 'communist', usually backed by the Soviet Union, providing a pretext for intervention. The overt or covert US intervention occurs (in the Guatemala case with the CIA organising an invasion of the country, and conducting bombing raids) in an attempt to return to the traditional order under the pretext of restoring 'democracy'. This pattern was repeated in covert or overt US operations in Cuba from 1959, the Dominican Republic in 1965, Vietnam from the 1950s and in US-aided coups such as in Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973.
Another element in the basic pattern was sympathetic ideological framing of the issues by the US and British media and academia. Thirty years after the intervention in Guatemala, the US-organised contra war in Nicaragua showed the pattern was alive and well. The latter has been extensively documented by independent analysts, and involved the systematic pursuit of acts of terrorism by the US-backed forces and the undermining of possible diplomatic solutions to the conflict. The overall US goal in Nicaragua – and in the wider Central America region – was most reasonably understood as the destruction of the prospects for independent development. As in many other US interventions, the official assertions about the primacy of the Soviet or communist threat as an explanation for US policy were too ludicrous to be taken seriously on the evidence. However, as I documented in a study of British press reporting of the war in Nicaragua, this was indeed the lens through which the war was consistently reported in Britain, as well as in the US.
A further element in the pattern was support for US policy from Britain, which has usually been the primary (and sometimes only major) supporter of US acts of aggression throughout the postwar period. For example, the Thatcher government strongly backed the US war against Nicaragua, adopting supportive positions in international fora and publicly declaring strong diplomatic backing. 'We support the United States' aim to promote peaceful change, democracy and economic development' in Central America, Thatcher stated in January 1984, by which time the US aim of destroying the prospects for these was quite clear to any rational observer (which thus excluded 99 per cent of the British press). British mercenaries took part in the war, one British private 'security' company was involved in the sabotage of installations in Nicaragua, and British aircrew made 'flights into Nicaragua so that American nationals could not be captured if anything happened', John Prados notes in a study of CIA operations. Security services expert Stephen Dorril notes that 'it is almost inevitable' that these deals between the US and British mercenaries were made with the agreement of Britain's MI6 'since there is agreement between the American and British intelligence services about recruiting each other's citizens'. Arms for the Contras were contracted and forwarded from British companies, and attempts were made to supply surface-to-air missiles, though British government involvement is unclear.
The principal threat to US foreign policy was always upheld by US officials as being the Soviet Union. The interventions from Guatemala in 1954 to Grenada in 1983 – as well as other policies, such as human rights and arms control – were invariably described in this light. Mainstream academia and the media, including many left-leaning commentators, promoted this line, in Britain as well as in the US, with as much frequency. Although 'containment' of the Soviet Union explains much about US postwar strategy, and the Cold War was a key issue in many policies, postwar US foreign policy was never in reality based mainly on containment. As I have shown elsewhere, with reference to the planning documents of the US and Britain, much of postwar foreign policy is explicable more in terms of dividing up the world by reaching a tacit understanding with the Soviet Union. A British Foreign Office memorandum of 1951 noted that the current Western policy of 'containment' must 'give way as soon as possible' to 'the positive purpose of reaching an accommodation, or rather a modus vivendi ... with the Communist half of the world'. This largely occurred in Eastern Europe – to be controlled by the Soviet Union – and virtually the whole of the Third World – to be controlled by the US and its allies and in which, in reality, there was very little direct interference by the Soviet Union.
The declassified documents and historical record show that the main threat in the Third World was from internal nationalist forces, sometimes popular and democratic, that threatened US and foreign control over the country's resources. Such threats were sometimes labelled 'internal aggression' in the planning records. Noam Chomsky has unearthed much evidence to this effect: the major threat to US interests is posed by 'nationalistic regimes' that are responsive to popular pressures for 'immediate improvements in the low living standard of the masses' and diversification of the economies. This tendency conflicts with the need to 'protect our resources' and to encourage 'a climate conducive to foreign investment' and 'in the case of foreign capital to repatriate a reasonable return'. This threat remains essentially the same today, although the forces that oppose US policy are as likely to be independent civil society groups as political, liberation movements as such.
The overturning of nationalist regimes and the undermining of nationalist movements were therefore standard features of US (and British) postwar foreign policy. Control over key states and regions was to be effected by maintaining the established order ('internal security') in these areas, through an alliance with often repressive and military-dominated elites. Arms exports and military training played (and continue to play) an important role in cementing such alliances; military intervention is an option when things get really out of control. Former Reagan administration official Thomas Carothers has noted that in Central America (and elsewhere, one might add), the US 'inevitably sought only limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been allied'. Thus US policy was to support 'the basic order of ... quite undemocratic societies' and to avoid 'populist-based change' that might upset 'established economic and political orders' and open 'a leftist direction'.
A major reason why nationalist forces presented such a threat to US policy was the fear that success would be repeated elsewhere – the 'threat of a good example', to use the title of a book by Oxfam, explaining US fears that the success of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua might be repeated elsewhere in Central America. The Castro revolution in Cuba was feared partly 'because it could encourage expropriations of American property in other Latin American countries'. CIA Director John McCone said that 'Cuba is the key to all Latin America; if Cuba succeeds, we can expect all of Latin America to fall'. Similarly, during the US preparations to overthrow the Guatemalan government in 1954, a State Department official noted that Guatemala:
has become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social programme of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbours where similar conditions prevail.
Nationalist grievances should have been well understood by US planners, since they are revealed in many of the declassified US documents. The US Department of Agriculture noted in 1950 that 'the central agricultural and, indeed, economic and social problem throughout Asia is the abject poverty of the large masses of the peasants'. One of the basic reasons for this 'has been the landlord-tenant system in many parts of Asia, under which large groups of peasants are cultivating somebody else's land and paying exorbitant rents for it'. A danger was that 'the success of the communists in China, where they largely won the support of the peasants by promising land in drastic revision of landlord-tenant relationships, maybe repeated in other parts of Asia'. Such inequities in land ownership were the principal cause of many revolutionary or reformist movements the US sought to crush, such as in the Philippines in the 1950s, in Vietnam from the 1950s and El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Great Deception"
by .
Copyright © 1998 Mark Curtis.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Table of Contents
IntroductionPart One: Foreign Policy
1. Postwar Foreign Policy and the Special Relationship
2. Foreign Policy Under the Democrats and Labour
Part Two: Development
3. The 'Development' System
4. The Prevention of Development
Part Three: the Middle East
5. Controlling the Modern Middle East
6. The Gulf
Part Four: the United Nations
7. The Us, Britain and the Un in History
8. Current Policy, Intervention and the Case of Rwanda
Notes
Index