How the Last Superpower Was Unchained, American Wars and Self-Decline

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

14 June 18

 

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How the Last Superpower Was Unchained
American Wars and Self-Decline

hink of it as the all-American version of the human comedy: a great power that eternally knows what the world needs and offers copious advice with a tone deafness that would be humorous, if it weren’t so grim. If you look, you can find examples of this just about anywhere. Here, for instance, is a passage in the New York Times from a piece on the topsy-turvy Trumpian negotiations that preceded the Singapore summit. “The Americans and South Koreans,” wrote reporter Motoko Rich, “want to persuade the North that continuing to funnel most of the country’s resources into its military and nuclear programs shortchanges its citizens’ economic well-being. But the North does not see the two as mutually exclusive.”

Think about that for a moment. The U.S. has, of course, embarked on a trillion-dollar-plus upgrade of its already massive nuclear arsenal (and that’s before the cost overruns even begin). Its Congress and president have for years proven eager to sink at least a trillion dollars annually into the budget of the national security state (a figure that’s still rising and outpaces by far that of any other power on the planet), while its own infrastructure sags and crumbles. And yet it finds the impoverished North Koreans puzzling when they, too, follow such an extreme path.

Clueless is not a word Americans ordinarily apply to themselves as a country, a people, or a government. Yet how applicable it is.

And when it comes to cluelessness, there’s another, far stranger path the United States has been following since at least the George W. Bush moment that couldn’t be more consequential and yet somehow remains the least noticed of all. On this subject, Americans don’t have a clue. In fact, if you could put the United States on a psychiatrist’s couch, this might be the place to start.

America Contained

In a way, it's the oldest story on Earth: the rise and fall of empires. And note the plural there. It was never -- not until recently at least -- empire, always empires. Since the fifteenth century, when the fleets of the first European imperial powers broke into the larger world with subjugation in mind, it was invariably a contest of many. There were at least three or sometimes significantly more imperial powers rising and contesting for dominance or slowly falling from it. This was, by definition, the history of great powers on this planet: the challenging rise, the challenged decline. Think of it for so many centuries as the essential narrative of history, the story of how it all happened until at least 1945, when just two “superpowers,” the United States and the Soviet Union, found themselves facing off on a global scale.

Of the two, the U.S. was always stronger, more powerful, and far wealthier. It theoretically feared the Russian Bear, the Evil Empire, which it worked assiduously to “contain” behind that famed Iron Curtain and whose adherents in this country, always modest in number, were subjected to a mania of fear and suppression. However, the truth -- at least in retrospect -- was that, in the Cold War years, the Soviets were actually doing Washington a strange, if unnoted, favor. Across much of the Eurasian continent, and other places from Cuba to the Middle East, Soviet power and the never-ending contest for influence and dominance that went with it always reminded American leaders that their own power had its limits. This, as the twenty-first century should have (but hasn’t) made clear, was no small thing. It still seemed obvious then that American power could not be total. There were things it could not do, places it could not control, dreams its leaders simply couldn’t have. Though no one ever thought of it that way, from 1945 to 1991, the United States, like the Soviet Union, was, after a fashion, “contained.”

In those years, the Russians were, in essence, saving Washington from itself. Soviet power was a tangible reminder to American political and military leaders that certain areas of the planet remained no-go zones (except in what, in those years, were called “the shadows”). The Soviet Union, in short, rescued Washington from both the fantasy and the hell of going it alone, even if Americans only grasped that reality at the most subliminal of levels.

That was the situation until December 1991 when, at the end of a centuries-long imperial race for power (and the never-ending arms race that went with it), there was just one gigantic power left standing on Planet Earth. It told you something about the thinking then that, when the Soviet Union imploded, the initial reaction in Washington wasn’t triumphalism (though that came soon enough) but utter shock, a disbelieving sense that something no one had expected, predicted, or even imagined had nonetheless happened. To that very moment, Washington had continued to plan for a two-superpower world until the end of time.

America Uncontained

Soon enough, though, the Washington elite came to see what happened as, in the phrase of the moment, “the end of history.” Given the wreckage of the Soviet Union, it seemed that an ultimate victory had been won by the very country its politicians would soon come to call “the last superpower,” the “indispensable” nation, the “exceptional” state, a land great beyond imagining (until, at least, Donald Trump hit the campaign trail with a slogan that implied greatness wasn’t all-American anymore).

In reality, there were a variety of paths open to the “last superpower” at that moment. There was even, however briefly, talk of a “peace dividend” -- of the possibility that, in a world without contesting superpowers, taxpayer dollars might once again be invested not in the sinews of war-making but of peace-making (particularly in infrastructure and the well-being of the country’s citizens).

Such talk, however, lasted only a year or two and always in a minor key before being relegated to Washington’s attic. Instead, with only a few rickety “rogue” states left to deal with -- like... gulp... North Korea, Iraq, and Iran -- that money never actually headed home and neither did the thinking that went with it.

Consider it the good fortune of the geopolitical dreamers soon to take the reins in Washington that the first Gulf War of 1990-1991, which ended less than a year before the Soviet Union collapsed, prepared the way for quite a different style of thinking. That instant victory led to a new kind of militarized dreaming in which a highly tech-savvy military, like the one that had driven Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait in such short order, would be capable of doing anything on a planet without serious opposition.

And yet, from the beginning, there were signs suggesting a far grimmer future. To take but one infamous example, Americans still remember the Black Hawk Down moment of 1993 when the world’s greatest military fell victim to a Somali warlord and local militias and found itself incapable of imposing its will on one of the least impressive not-quite-states on the planet (a place still frustrating that military a quarter-century later).

In that post-1991 world, however, few in Washington even considered that the twentieth century had loosed another phenomenon on the world, that of insurgent national liberation movements, generally leftist rebellions, across what had been the colonial world -- the very world of competing empires now being tucked into the history books -- and it hadn’t gone away. In the twenty-first century, such insurgent movements, now largely religious, or terror-based, or both, would turn out to offer a grim new version of containment to the last superpower.

Unchaining the Indispensable Nation

On September 11, 2001, a canny global jihadist by the name of Osama bin Laden sent his air force (four hijacked U.S. passenger jets) and his precision weaponry (19 suicidal, mainly Saudi followers) against three iconic targets in the American pantheon: the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and undoubtedly the Capitol or the White House (neither of which was hit because one of those jets crashed in a field in Pennsylvania). In doing so, in a sense bin Laden not only loosed a literal hell on Earth, but unchained the last superpower.

Shakespeare would have had a word for what followed: hubris. But give the top officials of the Bush administration (and the neocons who supported them) a break. There had never been a moment like it: a moment of one. A single great power left alone, triumphant, on planet Earth. Just one superpower -- wealthy beyond compare, its increasingly high-tech military unmatched, its only true rival in a state of collapse -- had now been challenged by a small jihadist group.

To President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the rest of their crew, it seemed like nothing short of a heaven-sent opportunity. As they came out of the shock of 9/11, of that “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century,” it was as if they had found a magic formula in the ruins of those iconic buildings for the ultimate control of the planet. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would instruct an aide at the Pentagon that day, “Go massive. Sweep it up. Things related and not.”

Within days, things related and not were indeed being swept up. The country was almost instantly said to be “at war” and soon that conflict even had a name, the Global War on Terror. Nor was that war to be against just al-Qaeda, or even one country, an Afghanistan largely ruled by the Taliban. More than 60 countries said to have “terror networks” of various sorts found themselves almost instantly in the administration’s potential gun sights. And that was just to be the beginning of it all.

In October 2001, the invasion of Afghanistan was launched. In the spring of 2003, the invasion of Iraq followed, and those were only the initial steps in what was increasingly envisioned as the imposition of a Pax Americana on the Greater Middle East. There could be no doubt, for instance, that Iran and Syria, too, would soon go the way of Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush's top officials had been nursing just such dreams since, in 1997, many of them formed a think tank (the first ever to enter the White House) called the Project for a New American Century and began to write out what were then the fantasies of figures nowhere near power. By 2003, they were power itself and their dreams, if anything, had grown even more grandiose.

In addition to imagining a political Pax Republicana in the United States, they truly dreamed of a future planetary Pax Americana in which, for the first time in history, a single power would, in some fashion, control the whole works, the Earth itself. And this wasn’t to be a passing matter either. The Bush administration’s “unilateralism” rested on a conviction that it could actually create a future in which no country or even bloc of countries would ever come close to matching or challenging U.S. military power. The administration's National Security Strategy of 2002 put the matter bluntly: the U.S. was to “build and maintain” a military, in the phrase of the moment, “beyond challenge.”

They had little doubt that, in the face of the most technologically advanced, bulked-up, destructive force on Earth, hostile states would be “shocked and awed” by a simple demonstration of its power, while friendly ones would have little choice but to come to heel as well. After all, as President Bush said at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in 2007, the U.S. military was “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.”

Though there was much talk at the time about the “liberation” of Afghanistan and then Iraq, at least in their imaginations the true country being liberated was the planet’s lone superpower. Although the Bush administration was officially considered a “conservative” one, its key officials were geopolitical dreamers of the first order and their vision of the world was the very opposite of conservative. It harkened back to nothing and looked forward to everything. It was radical in ways that should have, but didn’t, take the American public’s breath away; radical in ways that had never been seen before.

Shock and Awe for the Last Superpower

Think of what those officials did in the post-9/11 moment as the ultimate act of greed. They tried to swallow a whole planet. They were determined to make it a planet of one in a way that had never before been seriously imagined.

It was, to say the least, a vision of madness. Even in a moment when it truly did seem -- to them at least -- that all constraints had been taken off, an administration of genuine conservatives might have hesitated. Its top officials might, at least, have approached the post-Soviet situation with a modicum of caution and modesty. But not George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and pals. In the face of what seemed like the ultimate in possibilities they proved clueless when it came to the possibility that anything on Earth might have a shot at containing them.

Even among their critics, who could have imagined then that, more than 16 years later, having faced only lightly armed enemies of various sorts, still wealthy beyond compare, still with a military funded in a way the next seven countries couldn’t cumulatively match, the United States would have won literally nothing? Who could have imagined that, unlike so many preceding imperial powers (including the U.S. of the earlier Cold War era), it would have been able to establish control over nothing at all; that, instead, from Afghanistan to Syria, Iraq deep into Africa, it would find itself in a state of “infinite war” and utter frustration on a planet filled with ever more failed states, destroyed cities, displaced people, and right-wing “populist” governments, including the one in Washington? Who could have imagined that, with a peace dividend no longer faintly conceivable, this country would have found itself not just in decline, but -- a new term is needed to catch the essence of this curious moment -- in what might be called self-decline?

Yes, a new power, China, is finally rising -- and doing so on a planet that seems itself to be going down. Here, then, is a conclusion that might be drawn from the quarter-century-plus in which America was both unchained and largely alone. The Earth is admittedly a small orb in a vast universe, but the history of this century so far suggests one reality about which America’s rulers proved utterly clueless: after so many hundreds of years of imperial struggle, this planet still remains too big, too disparate, too ornery to be controlled by a single power. What the Bush administration did was simply take one gulp too many and the result has been a kind of national (and planetary) indigestion.

Despite what it looked like in Washington once upon a time, the disappearance of the Soviet Union proved to be no gift at all, but a disaster of the first order. It removed all sense of limits from America’s political class and led to a tale of greed on a planetary scale. In the process, it also set the U.S. on a path to self-decline.

The history of greed in our time has yet to be written, but what a story it will someday make. In it, the greed of those geopolitical dreamers will intersect with the greed of an ever wealthier, ever more gilded 1%, of the billionaires who were preparing to swallow whole the political system of that last superpower and grab so much of the wealth of the planet, leaving so little for others.

Whether you’re talking about the urge to control the planet militarily or financially, what took place in these years could, in the end, result in ruin of a historic kind. To use a favored phrase from the Bush years, one of these days we may be facing little short of “regime change” on a planetary scale. And what a piece of shock and awe that’s likely to prove to be.

All of us, of course, now live on the planet Bush’s boys tried to swallow whole. They left us in a world of infinite war, infinite harm, and in Donald Trump’s America where cluelessness has been raised to a new power.

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Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His sixth and latest book, just published, is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).

[Note: Two deep bows of thanks are in order -- to Jim Peck and Nick Turse -- for helping me think this piece out.]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, and Nick Turse's Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead.

How Bernie Sanders Evolved on Criminal Justice Reform

By Shaun King, The Intercept

14 June 18

 

any years ago, an editor gave me some sage but surprising advice. He told me not to meet face-to-face with politicians. He said although I was a fierce critic, the moment I met most of them, everything would change. Up close, politicians can be captivating and charismatic, and after having a personal encounter with them, it would be harder to criticize them.

For pretty much my entire career as a journalist, I’ve stayed true to this counsel, going to outrageous lengths to avoid meeting politicians face-to-face. I’ve never met New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. I’ve never met New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. And I felt fully at peace when I criticized them both for failing to deliver essential criminal justice reforms they promised.

Despite my personal endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary and campaigning for him, I’ve never met him. I’ve had several opportunities to do so and have found ways to wiggle out of each of the encounters. Consequently, when I’ve felt the need to publicly criticize him for a political blind spot or mistake, I haven’t felt like I was violating a personal relationship.

A couple of weeks ago, I broke my own rule.

As you may know, I help lead a political organization called Real Justice PAC that is fighting to elect reform-minded district attorneys across the country. We recently co-hosted a huge event in Los Angeles with Sanders and the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter to promote local justice reforms. (My work for Real Justice PAC is independent from The Intercept.)

Sanders’s office reached out to me months ago to begin a dialogue about how he could better support our work. He had read my piece on The Intercept about the radical changes newly elected Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner was making, and it truly seemed to be a revelatory moment for the senator. Within weeks of reading my piece, Sanders was planning on co-hosting an event in Philadelphia with Krasner. Meeting Krasner, I believe, was a transformative moment for Sanders.

In many ways, Krasner is Sanders in district attorney form. Beyond the fact that they are both plain-spoken, gray-haired, bespectacled white men, neither comes from the political establishment. They both see themselves as countercultural leaders determined to challenge the status quo — even if it pisses off every single person around them. Depending on where you are on the political spectrum, you either love them or hate them. Their views, though, are clear. You know where they stand.

In meeting Krasner, Sanders found someone who approaches problems in a manner very similar to his own — but is actually getting stuff done. I don’t mean that as a slight to Sanders, but as a progressive U.S. senator in a Republican-controlled Congress with Donald Trump as president, it’s almost impossible to pass progressive reforms. Krasner has only been in office for six months and is radically changing everything about the inner processes of justice in Philadelphia.

It was a light bulb moment. Real Justice helped elect Krasner, as well as other reform candidates across the country, and Sanders now wanted to know how he could help. His team let me know that between a rally he was hosting to bring attention to low wages of Disneyland employees and an event he had in Los Angeles later that evening, Sanders had a narrow window of time to talk about local justice reforms. He would do whatever we asked, the staff told me, meet with whoever we asked, and speak forcefully for essential local and national criminal justice reforms.

This was a risk for Sanders.

In July 2015, Black Lives Matter activists bravely interrupted a town hall with Sanders at a liberal political event, demanding that he center structural racism in his message. The following month, Black Lives Matter activists in Seattle again interrupted a speech from Sanders — demanding that he center the struggle for black lives in his campaign. In both instances, much of Sanders’s white liberal base struggled to understand why such interruptions were necessary.

A few weeks later, in the wake of those two moments, Sanders met privately with another group of black activists to discuss criminal justice reforms. I spoke directly with many of the attendees that day, including DeRay Mckesson, and was told that the meeting didn’t go well – that attendees sensed very little emotional connection from Sanders and that some wondered if he truly even wanted to be there.

So, three years later, to be willing to co-host a public event in front of over 4,000 people, alongside six radical women of color, without ever asking what they would be talking about or knowing if they would plan on calling him out publicly yet again, was a pretty big deal.

Backstage, I met privately with Sanders, and was immediately struck by his vastly improved mastery of core issues around criminal justice reform. But it wasn’t just his newfound fluency on these issues that surprised me — it was his emotion.

“It’s disgusting, Shaun, that our country is basically criminalizing poverty. I’ll be honest with you. I really didn’t know this was happening. I had no idea hundreds of thousands of Americans, particularly African-Americans, were being held in jail, for months or years, even though they’ve never been convicted of a crime, simply because they can’t afford bail,” Sanders told me in a tiny dressing room backstage before the event.

“I’ve learned a lot,” he continued. “I see the racial disparities clearer than ever. I want to help – just tell me how I can best help and we’ll do it.” I was touched. He wasn’t reading from a script. He was admitting to me, as he soon would from the stage, in front of thousands of people, that he hasn’t always gotten this quite right.

Moments later, Sanders met with Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter and a brilliant organizer around justice reform in Los Angeles. When she told him that the city was planning on spending $2.5 billion on constructing a new jail, Sanders was instantly appalled. “What a waste. Imagine if that was spent on education and job training,” he quipped.
Cullors then welcomed to the room the most amazing, fierce, experienced group of activists in Los Angeles – all black and Latina women – who immediately communicated to Sanders how essential it was to have him firmly speak out against the construction of the jail and the horrible use of cash bail as a tool of oppression throughout the city. When Sanders asked about the impact of cash bail on families in Los Angeles, organizer Ivette Ale immediately interjected, “Not only are people losing their jobs because they can’t afford the bail for a crime they haven’t even been convicted of, they are often losing their homes, and even their children. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. If a single mom is arrested — she could be completely innocent — but if she can’t afford bail, her kids are going to be home on their own and sometimes become wards of the state.”

Sanders was clearly listening to Cullors and Ale. In his speech just a few moments later, he skillfully integrated their very thoughts on the outrageous cost of the proposed jail and the horrible consequences of cash bail right into his message.

Sanders is primarily known for speaking about how unfair and unequal the nation’s economy is, but his critics have frequently said that he has communicated this message at the expense of race and racism in America. I’d tend to agree with them and have said so publicly. This was not the case at our event in Los Angeles. Backstage and before the audience, Sanders openly identified race and bigotry as essential primary factors in why two very different justice systems exist in this country.

He clearly and definitively spoke on how essential it was to hold the worst cops in our country accountable for their abuse and brutality. He railed at how outrageous it is for Wall Street bankers who’ve stolen millions of dollars to never spend a day in jail, while black children across the country are sent to prison for stealing a pair of shoes or possessing weed.

Sanders’s speech was good. It wasn’t perfect, but it was really, really good. When Sanders communicated to the crowd how hard the jobs of cops are, and how essential their role is in keeping communities safe, I winced. I was standing next to Melina Abdullah, the director of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, and heard her sigh as well. I assured her that I would communicate to Sanders why such a point probably made perfect sense to him, but stung the crowd.

In our communities, police are often agents of brutality and oppression. Instead of keeping us safe, they arrest and punish people at will. In New York, after the city did away with the policy of stop and frisk and pledged to do away with arresting people for marijuana possession — policies that had seen countless people locked up for doing little or nothing wrong — it would seem like fewer police would now be needed. But police are still an ever-present occupying force. In some communities, police may be seen as welcome guests during emergencies. But in parts of Los Angeles and in many other communities of color across the country, that just isn’t the case.

What Sanders showed in that comment was a man who is still very much evolving. His speech was one of the best I’ve ever heard on criminal justice reform from a mainstream American politician. I wouldn’t give it an A, but I would give it a solid B+. Most politicians don’t even have the courage to show up. Sanders did — and he did so with a very graceful humility.

As he had backstage, Sanders told the audience that he had to admit he was just now catching up with everybody else who had spoken before him about justice reform. Knowing that many in the crowd were there to see him, he told them that the organizers and activists sharing the stage with him were the real heroes.

There was something else I suspected about Sanders that I’d wanted to confirm during our event — and I did manage to confirm it: Sanders had been deeply moved by the death of Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a New York police officer 4 years ago. Erica, who was my friend and perhaps my fiercest defender in the country, had been forced into activism and advocacy. Our last conversation before she passed away happened to be about Sanders. She loved him — and she was stingy with who she loved and supported. So many politicians had lied to her about what they’d do and how’d they’d help her family get justice that she had grown sour on pretty much everyone — except Sanders. He had welcomed her on the campaign trail and even co-hosted events with her. I thought her campaign ad about why she supported him was the best of the whole policial season. Having spent time with her, Sanders saw how badly she wanted justice for her family.

In some ways, I think Sanders feels obligated to carry Erica Garner’s baton on criminal justice reform. She gave so much of her energy campaigning for Sanders that he seems to see his fight for justice as a real way of paying her back.

I think he’s made a good start.

So I violated my basic rule of not engaging politicians face-to-face, but in this case, I’m glad I did. I saw the sincerity and growth in a man that I’ve heard others say was too stubborn to change. With those sorts of changes, with people like Sanders taking up the mantle of criminal justice reform, hopefully our struggle can grow so that this country can change, too.