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Abstract:
The mix between the old and the new in US’ role as world leader creates ambiguity and confusion. The US is looking for ways to regain its lost economic punch and to consolidte its world hegemony. The Soviet Union was the means to guarantee the legitimacy of these goals for almost 50 years. At present, however, with no true enemy in the horizon, the Soviet collapse is dragging the United States down. The twentieth century proved to be a period of transition, but not from capitalism to socialism. The nonmarket alternative or challenge represented by the Soviet Union gave capitalism the means to wipe away many obstacles in its reproduction process and lift profits to new levels. The United States occupied a privileged position in that process. However, the twenty-first century demands new solutions for capitalism’s inherent contradictions, and the United States is apparently still trying to invent a new Soviet Union.

Only 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its European allies, the United States seems to be on a self-destructive “fast-track.” For almost 50 years (1945–1990) the cold war gave it a strong hand in world affairs. U.S. foreign policy was based on containment, and it enabled the country to address its strategic goals in terms of a global crusade against the expanding “Soviet empire.” Since the Soviet menace disappeared, the United States has been unable to develop a solid policy capable of legitimizing its worldwide presence. Washington has tried unsuccessfully to develop different scenarios that could replace the communist challenge to “Western civilization.” Among the candidates examined, the drug lords stood out for some time in the 1990s. The Mexican migration tsunami was observed with growing interest. China and North Korea became candidates at some point and have not been taken off the list. Finally, it all boiled down to the Muslim threat. The Christian Crusades of the Middle Ages were a good starting point for an appropriate scenario. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict came in handy as well. The Afghan Taliban regime put in power by the United States in the mid-1990s became the terrrorist capable of mobilizing the Muslim masses and endangering every home.

The rest is history: the Twin Towers attack, the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, the ongoing destruction of Palestine, the warnings to Iran, the invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia, and so on. The link between all this and the United States’s need to have an enemy seems quite logical in historical terms. Since its Declaration of Independence it has been in a state of constant war--against the British, French, and Spanish empires, against the Native-American nations, against the Mexicans, against the Germans and the Japanese, against the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Cuba.

THE LOGIC OF CAPITALIST EXPANSION
All these wars had a driving logic behind them--the accumulation of capital, creating more jobs, incorporatiing more territory, making more profits.

In its wars against the European empires that had originally conquered and colonized America, the United States had to defend its internal markets, its small but growing trade in the Caribbean, the northeast (Canada), and the “Golden” West. In this more than a century long conflict, the best strategy was an offensive one that finally transformed the small colonies of the Atlantic coast into a country with a Pacific coast as well.

The war against the Native Americans was mainly one of attrition and eradication in an effort to monopolize the enormous natural resources of the Mississippi Basin and the Plains. This war can certainly be considered the greatest holocaust of all times. With the annexation of the Native American lands to the Union, profits were multiplied a hundredfold, allowing for more expansion, investment, and a massive migration of cheap labor across the Atlantic that lasted for 50 years. The defeat of the European empires in North America, the eradication of the Native American nations, and the defeat of the Mexicans gave the United States a platform for entering the twentieth century as a world power pursuing for its share of profits on a global scale.

At the turn of twentieth century the English and to a lesser extent the French and the Dutch held sway in world commerce and profits. The City of London was present in South America, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and China. It also controlled Central and Southern Europe, the Black Sea, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean. The growing German empire saw Central and Eastern (Russia) Europe as its natural areas for expansion, and Japan also saw Asia, especially history’s richest empire, China, as its backyard. The first half of the twentieth Century was devoted solely to the resolution of this worldwide imperialistic conflict. Two world wars, capitalism’s worst financial crisis to date (in 1929), the development of extremely destructive armaments, and the global expansion of the market economy were the final results of the long confontation. Politically, German and Japanese imperialistic designs were squashed, the British and French empires were dismantled, and the United States appeared on top of the heap, enjoying military, economic, and cultural hegemony never before seen. The two wars had made the United States the major player in the world market, reaping profits from what had been the British empire’s territories around the world. The United States became the world’s factory for all industrial products, its food provider, and its financial center. Its workforce was in high gear churning out profits that were immediately reinvested in what could be seen as the culmination of capitalist development.

POSTWAR ALTERNATIVES
At this juncture, the United States had two alternatives for further growth and new profits: a global policy of development that wouLd incorporate both the former colonial territories and regions with a long capitalist history, with a massive transfer of capital to new and old markets, and a more traditional neocolonialism that would maintain the world in a condition of unequal and dependent capitalist development. It chose the latter. Michael Klare (2002) comments that the US wanted an even stronger military. This meant confronting three postwar challenges: (1) disciplining its workforce and some unhappy capitalists; (2) formalizing the end of the European empires and calling for rapid decolonization, giving its support to national liberation movements in Asia and Africa and then, once new nation-states had replaced the old colonial network, moving in quickly to control their resources and politics; and (3) dealing with the Soviet Union, which was determined to create a nonmarket economy (socialism) capable of challenging capitalism and giving the peoples of the world the opportunity to free themselves from exploitation and poverty.

Early postwar relations between Moscow and Washington had an immediate reference: in a strategic move to end the war, the United States decided that Moscow would take charge of driving the German troops out of Central Europe while it would take the responsibilty for cleaning up Western Europe. The Soviet Union came out of World War II devastated but victorious and equal to the United States in its ability to win over new allies. It was under the impression that the United States would help it to recover from the war, but its socialist discourse gave the United States the ideological ammunition it needed to legitimize its control over labor and the unhappy capitalists, establishing a permanent “wartime” regime at home (Wills, 2007),¹ and to set up conservative governments in Western Europe and outright authoritarian regimes in most of the rest of the world. The cold war was not about defeating the Soviet Union or destroying the United States. For the United States it was a problem of containment, while for the Soviet Union it was a matter of time. The United States had drawn a line and was aware that it was losing at its own game (China, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, etc.). The Soviet Union had decided on the tactic of “Socialism in one country” and was expecting the United States to come to terms with it in some way. “Socialism in one country” proved a self-defeating policy. The Soviet Union had developed a nonmarket economy linked formally to the world market (exporting goods in exchange for necessary inputs) capable of building up an enormous defensive arsenal but was unable to solve the difficult questions dealing with its population’s demands.

THE SOVIET COLLAPSE AND MILITARY SPENDING
Soviet participation in world markets had a stabilizing effect on capitalists around the world. On the one hand, the Soviet Unoin’s natural resources were an important reserve to balance capitalist deficits. On the other hand, the Soviet Union was a nonmarket competitor in the arms race, and this gave the United States a permanent edge vis-à-vis its “legitimate” possibility of developing the most advanced warfare technology. As early as 1960 the outgoing President DwightEisenhower warned his fellow citizens of the dangers that the military-industrial establishment entailed for their future.²The U.S. military budget, which reached US$299 billion in 1990, was believed by many to be a so-called “peace dividend” capable of being shared by the American people in the form of much-needed social services and investment. However, this was not what U.S. capitalists had in mind. Throughout the 1990s the military budget remained largely the same. Under G. H. W. Bush the United States invaded Panamá and bombed Baghdad in “Desert Storm”. Bill Clinton threw more troops and military hardware into the Balkans and Eastern Africa and developed new strategies for a world war against the drug lords and dangerous trends in migration. Between 1985 and 1995, the U.S. military budget, instead of shrinking, slowly grew.

With the administration of George W. Bush, however, the military budget went through the roof. By 2007 it had reached US$470 billion, not counting the cost of the wards in Iraq and Afghanistan (Table 1). TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE

With the global changes sparked by the Soviet Union’s collapse, the United States was practically left out in the cold, with no enemy to challenge. The reintroduction of Reagan’s “Star-Wars” space program in 2001 was not enough, nor were the wars against the drug lords and the nationalist regimes in the Balkans.The Chinese menace to the United States was watered down by the massive investments made by U.S. industry in the new market-hungry Beijing government. During the postwar years the United States built up a military strategy in the Middle East that until 1979 was focused on the Iran-Israel connection. After the shah’s overthrow, Iran was replaced by a new set of strategic allies, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In the 1980s the United States flirted with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, giving him outright military support in his ten-year war with Iran. It also committed its intelligence services and logistical support to Saudi Arabia’s Al Qaeda operative to destabilize the Afghan government backed by the Soviet Union.

The Afghan socialist experiment fell apart in the early 1990s because of the Soviet Union’s internal troubles and the U.S.-backed Al Qaeda strategy of undercutting the Kabul regime. At the turn of the twentieth century the United States declared its former ally, Al Qaeda, a global threat to its national security. It invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban government and on the way decided to include Iraq in its military adventure. Between 2002 and 2006 the “war on terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the United States more than US$500 billion as it committed 150,000 troops, military hardware, and a global campaign to muster support for its “preemptive” attacks and “outlawed” war tactics (Cowan, 2007).³The “war on terror,” however, has not been able to stop the decline of U.S. accumulation. Its trade deficit vis-à-vis China and its lack of a competitive edge over Europe have weakened its ability to compete at a global level.

While the Soviet Union was a political competitor that challenged capitalist accumulation on a global scale, “terror” has been able to replace the old “communist” challenge only in a very limited way. Besides, the menace of “terror” has been ideologically and politically neutralized, boxed-in, and mitigated. This in no way reduces or minimizes the importance of Islam’s popular mobilization and future Arab nationalisms, completely independent of any “terror” factor. We are moving toward a world of commercial competition based on productivity. The United States is losing its advantage because of the lack of competiveness of its capitalist establishment. That establishment’s global domination has depended mainly on its service sector and a strong stock market. German and Japanese industrial growth and recent Chinese and Indian expansion in these sectors have practically displaced the United States as the world’s factory and will probably replace it as the world’s service provider.⁵

SUPERPOWER CONFLICTS AND NEOCOLONIAL WARS ON TERROR
How can the United States justify its abrogation of its antimissile agreements with Russia and its slamming the door on the Kyoto Protocol and the Rome Treaty when the only world powers that can challenge its military power or economic domination are its own allies? How can it continue backing Israel’s claims to Palestinian territories and policing every corner of the world from Kosovo to Haiti, not to mention Somalia and the Afghan highlands (Pozzi, 2006)? Can a “cyberspace war” against international electronic terrorist networks (see Elizalde, 2007) replace the more concrete fear of war against a superpower whose territory spans two continents?

In January 2007 a conference in London asserted a relation between climate change and terrorism. According to Reuters (Trevelyan, 2007), “global warming could exacerbate the world's rich-poor divide and help to radicalize populations and fan terrorism in the countries worst affected.” A former British ambassador to the UN is quoted as saying, "We have to reckon with the human propensity for violence." Crispin Tickell said that terrorists were likely to seek to exploit the tensions created. The scientist John Mitchell reported that the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had written a letter “to the American people” saying, "You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries."

The old cold-war tactics of containment, applied to the North Korean nuclear tests in 2006 and long-standing energy programs in Iran, have included space and sea deployments focused on both countries, although these are nothing like the global tactics developed to contain the Soviet Union in size or cost.

Japan has announced its intention to return, after an absence of 60 years, to the military playing field, investing in high-tech armaments. Its decision to abandon its long-time nonmilitarist position may be a response to its sluggish economy or to the prodding of the United States. Its new policy provoked immediate reactions from both neighboring Koreas as well as China.

These hot spots, in addition to the U.S. commitment in Iraq and Afghanistan, have given Washington’s war on terror its proper scenario, but they cannot compare to the Soviet challenge of the cold war. According to Levich (2006), “After five years of war in the Middle East, the most fantastic new devices purportedly in the US arsenal, reminiscent of Hollywood science fiction, have yet to appear on the battlefield. Some of these weapons may still be in development; some exist but have not been used for political or tactical reasons; some may never have existed except as journalistic fancies or black propaganda.” The Associated Press writer Elliot Minor reports on a new ray gun that the military calls an "active denial system. It's a ray gun that shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they are about to catch fire. The weapon is not expected to go into production until at least 2010.” According to Marine Col. Kirk Hymes, director of the nonlethal-weapons program at Quantico, VA, which helped develop the new weapon, "this is one of the key technologies for the future." None of these new technologies, however, can succeed in a ground war that is supported by the people. For every new gadget the U.S. military takes to the battlefield in Iraq, the resistance comes up with new improvised “booby-traps.” The war of containment between the United States and the Soviet Union has been replaced by wars of attrition in which no one knows for sure who has the upper hand. Can U.S. air power and troop deployment overcome people’s resistance and grassroots self-defense mobilization?

WHAT IF THE SOVIET UNION HAD NOT COLLAPSED?
Iraq is indeed a repeat of the Vietnam experience, with the difference that there is no Soviet Union behind the people’s guerrilla struggle in the Middle East. Several U.S. Presidents justified the Vietnam War in terms of the doctrine of containment. President Bush has had to argue that if Iraq falls an abstract “terror network” will become consolidated on a world scale, putting U.S. national security in danger. He has tried to build a containment strategy with his war on terror playing a central role. The logic of his discourse is flawed, however, because of the lack of anything to which“terror” can be attached and “contained.” The creation of the Soviet “menace” as the enemy that had to be contained (not necessarily destroyed) is very different from the war on terror. Immanuel Wallerstein interprets “the collapse of the Soviet Union . . . [as] a disaster for the United States…It removed the most important political weapon they had in relation to Western Europe and East Asia.”⁵

In his 2007 State of the Union Address, President Bush was quite open about his views relating to the war on terror. He began by saying that “terrorists” had no frontiers and the United States was a “nation at war.” He went on to say that the“terrorists” were trying to take over countries in order to attack the United States. “Our enemies are quite explicit about their intentions. They want to overthrow moderate governments, and establish safe havens from which to plan and carry out new attacks on our country.” Then he fell back on old cold-war rhetoric: “By killing and terrorizing Americans, they want to force our country to retreat from the world and abandon the cause of liberty. They would then be free to impose their will and spread their totalitarian ideology.”

The mix between the old and the new in world leadership creates ambiguity and confusion. It also leaves the United States with no clear goals vis-à-vis its true challenges. It is looking for ways to regain its lost economic punch and world hegemony. The Soviet Union was the means to guarantee the legitimacy of these goals for almost 50 years. At present, however, with no true enemy in the horizon, the Soviet collapse is dragging the United States down. The twentieth century has proved a period of transition, but not from capitalism to socialism. The nonmarket alternative or challenge represented by the Soviet Union gave capitalism the means to wipe away many obstacles in its reproduction process and lift profits to new levels. The United States occupied a privileged position in that process. However, the twenty-first century demands new solutions for capitalism’s inherent contradictions, and the United States is apparently still trying to invent a new Soviet Union. Meanwhile, it is going downhill along with what almost 100 years ago was a promising revolution.

NOTES

1. “We have not seen normal life in 66 years. The wartime discipline imposed in 1941 has never been lifted, and ‘the duration’ has become the norm. World War II melded into the cold war, with greater secrecy than ever—more classified information, tougher security clearances. And now the cold war has modulated into the war on terrorism.”

2. “The military-industrial complex will cause military spending to be driven not by national security needs but by a network of weapons makers, lobbyists, and elected officials” (quoted by Hossein-zadeh, 2007).

3. “Since fiscal 2001, Congress has approved $503 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other aspects of the U.S. ‘global war on terrorism,’ according to Congressional Budget Office testimony. Of that, $344 billion has gone for military, diplomatic, and other security costs in Iraq, the CBO said.”

4. John Updike (quoted by Azam, 2007) has suggested that U.S. “moral bankruptcy combined with China and India’s drive will transform the United States into tomorrow’s England.”

5. Wallerstein adds, “I think the left has underestimated historically the reality and the importance of the Yalta arrangements that made the Cold War a choreographed arrangement in which nothing ever really happened for forty years. . . . It kept the zones economically separate and allowed them to shout at each other loudly in order to keep their own side in order, but never to make any truly substantial changes in the arrangement. The US was therefore sitting on top of the world."

Reply by Christopher I. Clement

Gandásegui claims that U.S. foreign policy during the cold war was a “problem of containment” rather than “defeating the Soviet Union.” The term “containment” suggests that the central purpose of the U.S. cold-war policy was to deter the Soviet Union from attempting expansion outside of its Eastern European bloc, but strong historical evidence indicates that this was neither its principal nor its sole objective. U.S. officials considered international communism an obstacle to their grand strategy, ¹ the creation of a new international system modeled on the U.S. economy, political system, and society. Therefore, almost from the start, their goal was the annihilation of the Soviet Union.

U.S. grand strategy was partly a product of a steady expansion of the United States, which had accelerated since the mid-nineteenth century. Gandásegui is not incorrect when he says that U.S. foreign policy is driven by the logic of capitalist expansion and the need to protect the country’s commercial interests vis-à-vis the European imperial powers. Such a structural explanation can, however, be applied to any imperial power anywhere and lacks a detailed appreciation of the specific historical factors, choices, and decisions that contributed to the rise of U.S. global power. From about the 1840s on, increasing segments of U.S. businesses, the public, and the political leadership believed that economic, social, and political well-being at home depended on the shaping of an international environment conducive to U.S. global power (Williams, 1988; Hunt, 1988; Lafeber, 1994). The decades that followed were marked by U.S. annexations and direct military interventions and occupations throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Those favoring an aggressive and proactive U.S. foreign policy realized that it was not enough to rid the Western Hemisphere of European influence. The United States would have to displace the preeminent positions of the European imperial powers and take the lead in shaping a new international order. However, various public forces opposed to further U.S. expansionism (Ninkovich, 2001) and geopolitical deterrents (Mearsheimer, 2001) worked against direct entanglements in Europe. An opportunity to have a direct, overpowering presence in Europe would eventually come at the end of World War II with the decimation of the European imperial powers’ military capabilities (Layne, 2006: 40-46).

Even before the war ended, U.S. officials planned a reconstructed international order in which the world would be dependent on U.S. preeminence. The architects of the post-1945 international order imagined a world in which U.S. economic and political strength would shape markets and governments everywhere and U.S. military power could respond to challenges anywhere. The international system would be secured through three core institutions that hinged on U.S. preeminence: the Bretton Woods agreements (economic), the United Nations and other international organizations (political), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other security pacts (military). A preponderance of U.S. power and influence in Europe was critical for building these institutions. U.S. planners therefore desired the continued presence of the U.S. troops and a strong, steady flow of U.S. dollars and political meddling in Europe after the war. Events between 1946 and 1949 (e.g., Winston Churchill’s claim of an “iron curtain” descending on Europe, Harry Truman’s response to communist advances in Greece, Turkey, Italy, and France, the Berlin blockade and airlift, and the communist victory in China) indicated that the Truman administration regarded the Soviet Union and international communism as major rivals to U.S. ambitions.

In April 1950, the National Security Council issued a report that would structure the foreign policy of almost every U.S. presidential administration until the end of the cold war. The report known as NSC-68 made clear that the Soviet Union could not coexist with the world that U.S. planners wanted to create. Contrary to Gandásegui’s thesis, dissolution rather than containment of the Soviet Union was to be the principal objective of U.S. policy (Layne, 2006: 63-64). NSC-68 insisted that the Soviet Union could not be compared to previous great powers in Europe. Soviet expansion was supposedly guided by a fanatical belief in an intractable battle between communism and imperialism and Russia’s imperial legacy. Neither deterrence nor appeasement would check it, since the Soviet leadership held an unwavering belief in world communist revolution. The downfall of the Soviet Union would be necessary to secure the new international order backed by the United States. As Thomas McCormick (1995: 93-95) explains, the Truman administration opted for massive military spending and a direct face-off with Soviet “proxies” in Latin America, Africa, and Asia over negotiation with the Soviet Union. Some national security advisors apparently warned that NSC-68 estimates of Soviet intentions and capabilities were overblown and ignored evidence suggesting that Soviet expansion was rendered nearly impossible by geopolitical and economic obstacles (McCormick, 1995: 97; but see Layne, 2006: 62-63). These warnings were ignored, and NSC-68 became the paradigm of U.S. cold-war policy.

The Soviet Union’s possession of a nuclear arsenal only modified U.S. strategy. Instead of direct military combat with the Soviet Union, one component of the strategy centered on stopping presumed Soviet advances in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The U.S.-sponsored overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 were the precursors of four decades of covert operations, counterinsurgency warfare, and direct military interventions in the three regions. A second component, which developed from the Eisenhower to the Nixon administrations, aimed at drawing the Soviet Union into a conventional and nuclear arms race that it could not win. This two-pronged strategy would supposedly cut the Soviet Union off from the rest of the world, hasten its internal disorder, and lead to its eventual collapse.

Gandásegui’s point that the United States wanted to replace the old colonial networks in Asia and Africa with direct U.S. control over resources and politics fits well with these historical details, but U.S. domination in the three regions in question was based on the idea that international communism (i.e., the Soviet Union) could be completely uprooted instead of contained.

The decision to increase military spending and deracinate the presumed Soviet “menace” in every corner of the world set U.S. global power back far earlier than Gandásegui claims. The NSC-68 report established a policy that eventually led to deficit spending, trade imbalances, and a deterioration of the gold standard of the U.S. currency. Defeat in Vietnam and the Nixon administration’s decision to stop the direct convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold rattled U.S. global economic and political prestige. Negotiations with the Soviet Union now seemed a reasonable option. The Nixon administration initiated a series of talks over reduction of nuclear arsenals, mutual trade, and scientific and cultural exchanges that continued into the Ford and Carter presidencies. In the 1970s, a resigned belief in co-existence (officially called “détente”) replaced the objective of dissolution, but this moment would not last long.

Detractors of détente openly worked to get U.S. strategy back into line with the goal of obliterating the Soviet Union. As the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), George HW Bush approved a parallel intelligence review group (Team B) that argued the CIA underestimated the military capabilities of the Soviet Union and ignored signs that the Soviets had offensive plans. Among the members of Team B were Paul Nitze (a key author of NSC-68) and Paul Wolfowitz (a key architect of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq). Backers of Team B included Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Richard Perle. Team B’s claims were later found to be highly exaggerated (Barry, 2004), but presidential candidate Ronald Reagan used them and events in Afghanistan, Iran, and Central America to win the 1980 election.

The Reagan administration’s policy of “rollback” was actually nothing new. It represented the restoration and rejuvenation of NSC-68 as the central directive of U.S. cold war policy. During the 1980s, the United States returned to its two-pronged strategy of confrontation with Soviet “proxies” in Latin America and Africa and an arms race. Military spending rebounded alongside U.S. covert operations and arms transfers to Central America, Angola, and Mozambique. The United States also targeted new challenges emerging in Libya and Iran. The logic was the same as it had been before détente: destroy present rivals to U.S. global power and prevent new ones from emerging.

The decision to sustain and/or increase the U.S. military budget was largely a product of the exuberance which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unlike the 1960s, the U.S. had come out ahead with a relatively healthy economy and without. The clarion call issued by ideologues writing in Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy was to seize the moment and complete the international system begun in 1945. They differed only on tactics. Some suggested that the U.S. ease its burdens by relying on multilateral cooperation with European and other allies (e.g., Nye, 1992; 1995; Schlesinger, 1991) while others emphasized unilateralism and preemption (e.g., Krauthammer, 1990-91). In either case, full-spectrum dominance and intolerance for any and all rivals remain the guiding principles of the U.S. grand strategy after the cold war. In good part, this ideology explains why U.S. officials insist that forward troop deployment in Europe and East Asia must continue (Layne, 2006: 108-110, 164-165) and that military spending must be maintained or increased to respond to challenges anywhere in the world (Johnson, 2004).

Democracy promotion, regime change and nation building have also emerged as part of the vernacular of U.S. post-cold-war global power. A central theme of the Clinton administration’s foreign policy doctrine was democracy enlargement. The assumptions behind the doctrine are articulated in the White House National Security Strategy Report (1998): “Democratic governments are more likely to cooperate with each other against common threats, promote free trade, and encourage sustainable economic development. Hence, the trend toward democracy and free markets throughout the world advances American interests. The United States will support this trend by remaining actively engaged in the world.” The report makes it clear that adversaries of U.S. global power can best be prevented from emerging by radically transforming the nations of the world into “democracies.”

In practice, democracy enlargement under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush has meant the U.S. seeking to consolidate gains where candidates compatible with U.S. economic and geopolitical interests have won elections (e.g., Chile in 1989, Nicaragua in 1990), preventing presumed adversaries from winning elections (e.g., Nicaragua in 1996 and 2006; Bolivia in 2002, El Salvador in 2004, Mexico in 2006) and eliminating worrisome regimes - derided as “rogue states,” “outposts of tyranny,” or “semiauthoritarian” - by funding their opponents, toppling them, and imposing transplanted governments that will presumably fall into line with Washington’s dictates (e.g., Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and Yugoslavia). As with the Soviet Union, the objective is not to contain challengers but to eliminate them.

The Iraq War reveals the extent to which the United States will pursue this mission. An invasion and occupation that, according to Richard Perle and Dick Cheney, was to be quick, easy, and greeted favorably by Iraqis has instead plunged Iraq into civil war and cost the United States over $320 billion. During the cold war, the decision to pursue the annihilation of the Soviet Union pushed the United States to near disaster. What is dragging it down today is not the collapse of the Soviet Union but the insatiable quest for global preeminence and the quixotic notion that people who “hate” the United States can be vanquished forever.

NOTES

1. I borrow the notion of “grand strategy” from Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions (2006: 46-47)): “The United States aspired to be the preponderant power in the international system, and to make sure that there no rivals that could challenge it.” As Layne explains the U.S. strategy of eliminating rivals was based on the idea that rivalry itself can be rendered obsolete in the international system. U.S. leaders assumed that U.S. global power was best maintained in a world where it had no present or potential rivals.

Rejoinder by Marco A. Gandásegui Jr.

Clement’s commentary deserves to be taken into account, but his summary of the history of U.S. conflicts in the twentieth century misses my point: Imperialism is a characteristic of the growth and expansion of capitalism. How can the United States continue being the hegemonic power in the twenty-first century? Has the collapse of the Soviet Union set U.S. hegemony on a downward course that is irreversible?

Imperialism in the twentieth century was the product of capitalist development, its contradictions, and its efforts to keep the rate of profit at an acceptable level. As capitalism has grown and expanded, the specificities of imperialism have changed significantly, but the bottom line remains the same as it was for the early Marxists. Karl Marx not only revealed the role of class struggle in shaping modern society but also took the first steps toward showing that capitalism had to expand the world market and compete with other capitalist regimes for a bigger share of it. Later on a host of theorists developed these ideas and put them in context. Thus imperialism was seen as a higher stage of capitalist development in which global control over markets, territories, and raw materials was paramount.

World wars and regional conflict have long been part of the imperialists’ agenda. The first half of the twentieth century was marked by world wars. The second half was characterized by U.S. hegemony, regional conflict, and the containment of the Soviet Union. We can hypothesize that the existence of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc allowed the United States the possibility of legitimately expanding to the rest of the world market—Western Europe, Africa, most of Asia, and Latin America—and provided it the wherewithal for disciplining its working class.

The collapse of the Soviet Union created a new scenario for U.S. hegemony to deal with. The marketplace is capitalism’s battleground, and in it commercial and political negotiations among states are constantly taking place, all for the sake of profit. When expansion by way of negotiations is not an alternative, war is the only option. How can the “hegemon” legitimize violence and warfare?

Which “enemy” is more useful: the Soviet Union or the Muslim world?

Year	United States$ (Billions)	% of GNP
1980	134	4
1990	299	4
2000	294	3
2001	348	5
2007	470	6

Year	US$ (Billions)	% of GNP	Troop Levels (000)
1987	257	16.6	2,350
1997	24	3.8	1,195^a