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In Case
You Missed It
Naked Imperialism
The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance
17/11/06 "Monthly
Review." ---
An Interview with
John Bellamy Foster
Q: What do you mean by
"Naked Imperialism," the title you chose for your book?
A: There has been a lot of
discussion of what is called the "new imperialism" -- a phrase
used to refer to the phase of imperialism since 9/11. The term
Naked Imperialism in the title to my book was designed
to capture what is most obviously new in the current global
assault. Imperialism is inherent to capitalism and only varies
in form and intensity. What is new in the post-9/11 period is
the fact that U.S. empire and U.S. imperialism is more nakedly
promoted than at any time since the Spanish-American War at the
very end of the nineteenth century. In 2001, only a decade
after the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States, the
sole remaining superpower, responded to the terrorist attacks on
its homeland by launching a worldwide imperial expansion. The
vast U.S. war machine was put into ceaseless motion, ostensibly
justified by the so-called "war on terrorism," but in fact
without limits. U.S. global empire was presented as the
solution to all the world's problems. U.S. military
expenditures quickly rose to half of all world military
spending. The "forward deployment" of U.S. military bases was
occurring at strategic points (areas of vital geopolitical
interest to the United States) on every inhabited continent.
The United States was fighting major wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq. This worldwide expansionist thrust was bluntly justified
by the political, economic, military, media establishment --
what C. Wright Mills used to call the power elite -- in terms of
U.S. empire. This was a big change that needed to be explained.
The four most important factors
behind this turning point in world history were the demise of
the Soviet Union, the stagnation of the U.S. and world economy,
a perceived decline of U.S. hegemony, and concerns over control
of global resources, particularly oil. All of them set the
stage for the emergence of a naked imperialism -- one aimed at
global dominance.
Q: The antiwar
movement's most famous slogan in the war was "No Blood for Oil,"
and this view of the U.S. invasion of Iraq has been widely
accepted around the world. U.S. establishment media have been
at pains to deny that this is so, and even some progressive U.S.
commentators have ridiculed this view as
"simplistic" or worse. This is a question you address is in
Naked Imperialism. "War for oil" seems to have really
touched a nerve, but is this really so central an explanation?
Why do you think it has been so widely accepted, and so bitterly
attacked?
A: It is clear that the
geopolitics of oil have changed, and this is a point made in
Naked Imperialism. In the chapter "U.S. Imperial Ambitions
and Iraq" there is a bar graph superimposed on a map of the
world showing very visibly
the extent to which the oil reserves of the world are
concentrated in the Middle East. There is a lot of
discussion today about whether the world has reached or even
passed "peak oil" production. No one really knows the answer;
there are still too many unknowns, though the peak oil
hypothesis is a plausible one. What we do know for certain is
what the oil industry calls reserve/production ratios (or simply
r/p ratios), which give you the number of years before reserves
are likely to be exhausted for various oil-producing countries
in the world, based on current production levels. This tells us
that with each passing year a larger percentage of the world
reserves will be located in the Middle East, since the reserves
to production ratios there are far higher. It is obvious then
that control of the Middle East reserves becomes more critical
each year if world oil supplies are to be secured.
The United States has long
designated the security of world oil reserves as a vital
strategic interest, which translates ultimately into U.S.
leverage over the production and sale of these reserves, not to
mention the profits to be derived from this. A whole series of
foreign policy doctrines -- the Eisenhower doctrine of 50 years
ago, the Carter doctrine, the Bush doctrine -- have been
principally aimed at the Middle East, and amount to the
extension of the Monroe doctrine (which asserted U.S. hegemony
in the Americas) to the Middle East. One of the reasons
given by the administration for the Iraq war was to prevent
Saddam Hussein from having a
"stranglehold" on world oil. Perhaps this was the closest
to an honest reason they gave.
Beyond the larger geopolitical
issue of securing the Middle East and its oil for the empire of
capital there is the question of who actually exploits the oil
and who profits from it. U.S. and British corporations are now
positioned to gain control over the production of, and to reap
huge profits from, the Iraqi oil reserves through so-called
"production sharing agreements," which will give them rights
to the exploitation and sale of the bulk of Iraq oil reserves
for decades to come -- even allowing them to book this oil as
"assets" in their accounts. In other words they will have the
material equivalent of the old imperial concessions system for
oil. This is apparently the main thrust of a new proposed oil
law in Iraq that was written by Washington and London with the
help of leading oil corporations, and that, in accordance with
an IMF deadline, is supposed to be approved by the Iraqi
government by the end of this year.
Defenders of U.S. imperialism in
Iraq naturally contend that "It is not all about oil" and try to
present the "NO BLOOD FOR OIL" slogan of the antiwar movement as
unpatriotic and the voice of irrationalism. They act
righteously indignant regarding any suggestion that the United
States is planning to loot Iraq's oil wealth. But it is
impossible to deny that much of this conflict is about
oil directly. And indirectly all questions regarding Iraq
return in the end to oil, which from a geostrategic standpoint
is what makes Iraq so important. In a recent poll of Iraqis
less than 2 percent thought that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was
to promote democracy in Iraq. More than three quarters of
Iraqis believed that the single most important reason for the
invasion was control of Iraqi oil.
Q: The first chapter of
Naked Imperialism was written shortly after 9/11 when
Washington was getting ready to invade Afghanistan. The
argument there suggested that this would be a war for a wider
empire not stopping in Afghanistan but leading to a
"global-imperial projection of U.S. power." What led you to
such a conclusion so quickly? Now, after five years, how would
you assess the balance between the view of a single
"U.S.-centric" imperialism and the view that focuses on
inter-imperialist tensions and rivalries?
A: 9/11 was unexpected. But the
response of Washington to it was no surprise. Viewed in
historical context, it was clear that the demise of the Soviet
Union, which left the United States as the sole military
superpower, coupled with the perceived decline of U.S. economic
hegemony, created strong pressure among the ruling interests to
push for an expansion of U.S. empire. Military interventionism
was underway throughout the 1990s. The first chapter of
Naked Imperialism lists 15 military interventions that the
United States had carried out in the Middle East/Islamic world
alone in the twenty years prior to 9/11. The U.S.-led NATO war
in Yugoslavia at the end of the 1990s was an indication of this
expansionist tendency -- in this case in Europe itself. It was
in the context of the struggle over the Balkans that the idea of
a "new imperialism" started to be celebrated by various
establishment figures. It was based on the logic of these
developments that István Mészáros argued in his book
Socialism or Barbarism (published by Monthly Review Press
early in 2001) that the U.S. goal of global
hegemonic-imperialism was pointing the world toward what was to
be "potentially the most dangerous phase of imperialism" -- a
position analyzed in Chapter 2 of Naked Imperialism.
There was no doubt therefore about the global-imperial
projection of U.S. power even before 9/11. And as if to drive
the point home, the Bush team issued numerous statements within
days of the terrorist attacks making it clear that they viewed
this as a new world war -- one without geographical limits and
by its nature perpetual.
Five years later nothing has
really changed except that the invasion and occupation of Iraq
has proven to be anything but a smooth conquest. The Democrats
criticized the Bush administration for its unilateralism,
arguing that a stronger coalition among the imperial states
should have been devised so that the United States would not
carry the whole burden and responsibility. The Democrats have
always preferred what Republican national security analyst
Richard Haass, who was the director of policy planning in Colin
Powell's state department under the administration of George W.
Bush, called the "sheriff and posse" approach, visualizing the
United States as the sheriff supported by a posse consisting of
the other imperial powers, primarily European states. Instead,
a go-it-alone "Lone Ranger" approach was adopted. This has to
do in part with inter-imperialist rivalry that remains in many
ways the hub of the imperialist wheel. The perceived decline of
U.S. hegemony is reflected in the fact that its economic power
relative to the world as a whole has diminished somewhat, but
this economic power shift has been widely diffused and no state
or unified group of states has yet emerged that is clearly
capable of challenging the United States economically, much less
militarily. At the same time the fall of the Soviet Union
created militarily a unipolar world. This meant that Washington
was in a position to use its seemingly unlimited means of
destruction to leverage greater economic and political power in
the world as a whole, and also to strengthen its geostrategic
position. Such a move would promote capitalism but also U.S.
interests with U.S. capital benefiting disproportionately.
One might say that all of this
is a product of inter-imperialist rivalry, but with this
difference: that it is acted out largely by the hegemonic power
and aimed at potential future rivals. The United
States is responding to its diminished economic power by using
its enormous military power to gain a permanent advantage over
all prospective challengers to its rule. The grand strategists
are trying to create a "Pax Americana" for a new century -- a
"new American century." The global imperial ambitions of the
United States and the sheer magnitude of U.S. power might lead
one to conclude that the reality is simply that of a
U.S.-centric world today and well into the future. But
Washington is all too aware (as the statements of numerous
national security analysts attest) that power configurations can
quickly change, particularly as a result of unequal economic
growth. It is therefore seeking to seize the day, grabbing
strategic assets and obtaining further advantages over what it
regards as its potential geopolitical rivals (individually and
in combination) at both the global and regional levels -- the
European Community, Russia, China, Japan, the Islamic world. If
history is any guide, such a grab for power is likely to lead to
forces countering it, and generate greater conflict. If this is
a unipolar world it is one that already exhibits serious cracks.
Q: The last chapter of
Naked Imperialism, originally published in June 2005,
is entitled "The Failure of Empire." You wrote it at a time
when Washington was making a show of having turned sovereignty
over to a transitional Iraqi government and was declaring that
the insurgency was defeated. It concludes: "Wider speculation
at this point would be foolhardy. But there is no doubt than in
invading Iraq the United States opened the doors of hell not
only for the Iraqis and the Middle East as a whole but also for
its own global imperialist order. The full repercussions of the
failure of the U.S. empire in Iraq have yet to be seen and will
only become evident in the months and years ahead." A year and
a half has passed, how much of this prediction do you see
fulfilled? What back then impelled you to a view not usual at
that time?
A: The idea that the gates of
hell were opening up in Iraq and that the likelihood was one of
civil war was the complete opposite of what the administration
and the press were saying at the time. Nevertheless, the
argument in Naked Imperialism was less one of
prediction than a realistic consideration of the forces in Iraq
and the historical tendencies that were unfolding. Behind the
public face given to the war, there have always been the
national security analysts who are trying to view it more
realistically, and it is on such assessments that my argument
was based. In particular, I relied on the research of Anthony
Cordesman, a leading national security analyst in the Ford
administration and Middle East expert, who was already pointing
out that the occupation was falling apart, and that the question
was how the United States could get its troops out before the
whole situation degenerated into a full-scale civil war.
When you add to this a
thoroughgoing critique of imperialism that suggests that
"staying the course" is more than a mere slogan and that the
high costs to the U.S. soldiers and military, even the
likelihood of being caught up in a long-term civil war, may be
considered "worth it" to a ruling elite playing a high-stakes
gamble for control of world oil and global hegemony -- then the
full abyss that the United States has opened up in Iraq suddenly
becomes apparent. The truth is that there was in Iraq no
political base, acceptable to the United States, on which to
build a new state in Iraq. The strong organized
collaborationist forces upon which a successful occupation (such
as Vichy for one or two years) might depend were not present: so
there was in fact no solution outside a continuing occupation
and perhaps a dismemberment of the entire country. The Shiites
no less than the Sunnis were to be prevented from effectively
controlling their own country, so any so-called "democracy"
could only be a sham. Washington's goal was eventually to make
the occupation less obvious by gradually reducing U.S. troops
and pulling them back into permanent bases in Iraq. Even that
hasn't been possible. Incidentally, what I did not know when I
wrote this chapter of Naked Imperialism was that the
United States was already providing support to
paramilitaries/militias in Iraq and was turning to the
"Salvadoran Option" of death squads to fight the insurgency.
This, however, only generated extreme sectarian strife,
evolving into civil war-like conditions. The United States has
not been able to control any of this.
Hence, the title "The Failure of
Empire" was meant to convey the depth of the U.S. failure, which
was likely to become inescapable in the ensuing months and years
as it became apparent that there was no Iraqi state, the
resistance/insurgency could not be defeated, and the U.S.
occupation was pushing the whole country into civil war. Yet,
in one sense the invasion of Iraq has not (or has not yet) been
a complete failure for the U.S. empire. True, the country has
been effectively destroyed, the population is either in revolt
or in engaging in sectarian killings, death squads are
everywhere, the Iraqi government is a sham, U.S. soldiers are
dying and Iraqi civilians are being killed in enormous numbers.
But still from the standpoint of the empire based in Washington
it is not a total loss. The United States may yet end up
controlling Iraq's oil, and Iraq may prove to have the largest
oil reserves (including undiscovered reserves) in the entire
world. The U.S. now has major military bases in Iraq, bordering
Iran and dominating the Persian Gulf. But, to be able to gain
from these spoils, the empire will need to remain in Iraq and
will have to pay a very heavy price. And this will be constant
testimony to the brutal nature of U.S. imperialism. It could
prove in the end that the cost to the empire is too high and the
empire will retreat, but I do not expect it to relinquish its
hold on Iraq any time soon. It will remain for ostensibly
"humanitarian" reasons to counter the barbarism that is now
Iraq.
Q: There is an economic
argument that underlies your analysis in Naked Imperialism,
made explicit in Chapter 3 "Monopoly Capital and the New Age of
Imperialism." Not to recapitulate the whole argument, but what
do you see as the key linkages and causal chains between the
economic and the political/military in this current phase of
imperialism.
A: This could be a very long
answer, so I will try to keep it short. Since the 1970s the
dominant reality of the U.S. and world economy has been that of
stagnation and financial explosion. Although there continue to
be ups and downs in the business cycle, and although there are
exceptions (most notably China), the general condition of the
U.S. economy and the world economy as a whole has been slow
growth and rising unemployment/underemployment and excess
capacity. Although the economy is generating an enormous
surplus at the top (the more so because of stagnating wages and
redistribution of income and wealth toward the upper classes),
profitable investment opportunities within production have been
limited due to overcapacity in key industries worldwide. Under
these circumstances there has been a shift toward financial
speculation and the financialization of the global economy,
which has helped to keep the economy going but has not been able
to restart the engine of capital accumulation. Ultimately, the
analysis that best explains these developments, I argue, is
monopoly capital theory coming out of the work of Michal
Kalecki, Josef Steindl, Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, and Harry
Magdoff. These theorists were able early on to point to this
set of contradictions, which can be traced initially to the
nature of accumulation under the monopoly stage of capitalism,
i.e., a capitalist system dominated by a relatively small number
of giant corporations.
Today I think this analysis
needs to be developed further, which I try to do in the book, to
take into account the new globalization -- or what I would now
call the phase of global monopoly-finance capital. In order to
understand the forces driving today's economic imperialism
(commonly known as neoliberal globalization), as well as its
military imperialism, we have to see them in this larger context
of stagnation, financial explosion, world financial instability,
and declining U.S. hegemony. In a sense the current imperialist
phase is a product of growing instability at the economic base
of the system.
Q: One of the chapters of the
book is entitled "U.S. Military Bases and Empire" and goes over
the history of the U.S. empire in terms of the expansion and
contraction of its worldwide bases. An explanation we have seen
several times for the U.S. war on Iraq is that a primary goal is
the establishment of permanent U.S. military bases. How would
you address this?
A: With the beginning of the War
in Afghanistan and the expansion of U.S. imperialism in the form
of an overt war in this region, formerly part of the Soviet
Union, the whole question of the expanding sphere of U.S.
military bases, already evident in the Balkans, became an issue.
Also in understanding the extent of the U.S. empire the range
of its bases was clearly the key. I therefore undertook a study
of the history of U.S. military bases in other countries since
the Second World War. One result of this was a
map, reproduced in the book, showing the 60 countries and
separate territories in which U.S. military bases were located
as of January 2002.
Click on the map for a larger view.
The map was quite influential
and was reproduced frequently on the Internet. Chalmers Johnson
relied on some of this research on bases in his useful book
The Sorrows of Empire. The base map that I developed
together with my colleagues at Monthly Review was
conservative in that it only included countries with bases that
were listed in the Department of Defense's Base Structure
Report (which includes only those with permanent
structures) or newly created bases reported in the press.
Actual base/troop deployment is more extensive and fluid than
that conservative analysis suggests. The United States at any
one time has troops in more than 100 countries, often carrying
out joint exercises. Since the map was devised, the United
States has expanded its bases in every continent of the global
South. One thing this tells us, in addition to the size of the
U.S. empire and its strategic points of concern, is how thinly
spread out U.S. forces are -- so that relatively few are
available for a major war/occupation as in Iraq.
Bases are of course staging
grounds for U.S. imperialism and not themselves the reality of
that imperialism. They allow for what is called the "forward
projection" of U.S. power. Viewed in this way, it is a misnomer
to think of bases in Iraq or elsewhere as a primary goal. The
bases in Iraq are important because they allow the U.S. to exert
control over Iraq and the Persian Gulf as a whole. This is a
region considered of enormous strategic value and it is no
secret why: oil. What is at issue is the control of oil and the
blocking of the emergence of powerful oil states that could
threaten the interests of U.S. capital -- and not the bases
themselves which are mere tools of empire.
Q: In Naked
Imperialism there are frequent references to "barbarism"
as an alternative outcome to the events of these first years of
the 21st Century, yet you do not spell out what you mean. It's
not a pleasant line of thought, but what is this alternative, as
you see it?
A: You are right that the issue
of barbarism is frequently referred to in the book. One of the
chapters in Naked Imperialism is actually entitled "The
Empire of Barbarism." This reflects the view that capitalism,
as witnessed particularly by its naked imperialism abroad, is
increasingly degenerating into a kind of barbarism, where war,
brutality, torture, misery, superexploitation, all sorts of
draconian measures against the poor, border security,
anti-immigration, gated homes, racism, extreme environmental
devastation threatening whole populations and even the globe,
nuclear proliferation (and hence the danger of more terrible
wars), etc. are all on the rise. In Marxism this has always
been seen as a possibility: that, instead of revolutions taking
the world forward, there will be what Marx once called "the
common ruin of the contending classes," a decline into
barbarism. Rosa Luxemburg famously raised the question of
"socialism or barbarism," which has been repeated in our own
time by thinkers such as Daniel Singer and István Mészáros.
Of course, given the history of
Western capitalism, the notion of barbarism in modern times
carries the implication of fascism. But there is more at issue
here: the brutality of the imperialist colonization of the
periphery in the early centuries of capitalism, world war, the
science of torture, racism, the devastation of the natural world
and all beings that depend on it. We are seeing a dangerous
resurgence of all of these tendencies in our time. In the view
presented in Naked Imperialism, this is a product of
the current phase of capitalism, the end of any possibility for
a "rational capitalism." The only answer is the struggle for
socialism, a society controlled by the associated producers and
the wider sets of needs and values that they represent instead
of the invisible hand (now an iron fist) of
capitalism/imperialism.
Q: In your book you
frequently argue that the notion of a "Bush cabal" or a "Bush
junta" as an explanation of the war in Iraq is wrong. Now the
Democrats have majorities in both houses of Congress and are
insisting on a "phased redeployment of the troops." Any time
soon should we expect a fundamental change in Washington's
military posture in Iraq and its approach to empire in the world
at large?
A: It has always amazed me how
quick left pundits both in this country and the world as a whole
jumped on to the notion of a Bush cabal, or the "Bush-Cheney
junta" as Gore Vidal put it, as the explanation for the War on
Iraq and the entire War on Terrorism. In this view. the
Republicans effectively carried out a coup in the 2000 election
bringing the neoconservatives to power, and it is the
neoconservatives that are then to blame for today's naked
imperialism. Not just Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice, of
course, but also including Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Richard
Pearle, and various others. In this view, the opponents of the
Bush cabal within the Republican Party are the "wise men" like
James Baker, Robert Gates, and Brent Scowcroft associated with
the administration of W's father, Bush I. The Democrats
meanwhile are seen as strongly opposing the neoconservative Bush
II cabal.
The fact that neoconservatives
have dominated the present administration is of course true and
significant up to a point. But, as I argue at length in
Naked Imperialism, to suggest that a cabal is somehow
behind the sorrows of empire and that we have only to kick them
out of office to solve the problem is to ignore all the lessons
of history. The present empire strategy has been in the works
for a long time -- since the fall of the Soviet Union at the
outset of the '90s, or even further back -- since the resurgence
of stagnation and the first major signs of declining U.S.
hegemony in the early and mid-'70s. The war in Yugoslavia took
place under Clinton, who also bombed Iraq on a daily basis, and
initiated U.S. military bases in Central Asia. The Democrats
mostly supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and their
criticisms of the Iraq war have been more of a tactical rather
than a strategic nature. Thus they fault the Bush
administration for unilateralism as opposed to multilateralism
in the invading force, the disbanding of the Baathist military,
too many military resources directed at Iraq as opposed to
Afghanistan, too few U.S. troops in the initial invading and
occupying force, corruption in the handling of military
contracts, too little armor for the troops, etc. These are not
fundamental attacks on today's naked imperialism. What this
reflects is the fact that the U.S. ruling class as a whole (to
which the Democrats as well as the Republicans are beholden) has
remained strongly behind the larger war.
What is happening now since the
election, with the Democrats controlling both houses in
Congress, Rumsfeld gone, and the Iraq strategy clearly in
shambles, is that James Baker, Robert Gates, and other "wise
men" of Bush I are being brought in to save Bush II. But we
shouldn't have illusions about a turn toward peace as a result.
Gates, the new Secretary of Defense, is a former director of
the CIA involved in Iran-Contra. Meanwhile, the Democrats
themselves are calling for a "phased redeployment,"
which may simply take the form of a redeployment of troops
within the global war -- more to Afghanistan, more to bases in
Iraq -- rather than a withdrawal from Iraq or a pulling back
from the imperial War on Terrorism in any way. Given the
changes in Washington, we will soon get a reasonable test of the
cabal thesis, which will doubtless demonstrate that the grand
imperial strategy will continue to be pursued, however much
things may change at a tactical level. Where the Democrats are
most likely to resist is not in regard to the imperialist
strategy but in relation to the homeland security measures
adopted domestically, which are an internal counterpart of this
overall strategy. But it is unlikely that the Democrats will,
for example, take a strong stand against the Patriot Act. Here
too they will most likely play a game of changing things on the
margins, while accepting the larger erosion of democracy and
human rights.
In fact the value of Naked
Imperialism in comparison with such cabal theories is that
it is rooted in an unrelenting critique of capitalism and
imperialism. The emphasis then is on the real forces associated
with the imperial juggernaut. This is not to say that things
are inevitably determined by such powerful structural forces
that there is no escape from these imperial relations, no basis
for hope. But it does tell us that if there is going to be any
fundamental change in the course of history it will not occur
among the elites. Rather it will have to be carried out
radically from below, and not simply by throwing out a cabal or
through the election of the other wing of the ruling two-party
system. What we need is change on a much more revolutionary
scale, which means that the people must take history into their
own hands once again.
John Bellamy
Foster is professor of sociology at the University of Oregon,
author of Marx's Ecology and Ecology Against Capitalism, and
editor of Monthly Review.
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