Grandmaster of the Great Game
Obama’s Geopolitical Strategy for Containing China
By Alfred W. McCoy
September 17, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "TomDispatch"
- In ways that have eluded Washington pundits and
policymakers, President Barack Obama is deploying a subtle geopolitical
strategy that, if successful, might give Washington a fighting chance to
extend its global hegemony deep into the twenty-first century. After six
years of silent, sometimes secret preparations, the Obama White House has
recently unveiled some bold diplomatic initiatives whose sum is nothing less
than a tri-continental strategy to check Beijing’s rise. As these moves
unfold, Obama is revealing himself as one of those rare grandmasters who
appear every generation or two with an ability to go beyond mere foreign
policy and play that ruthless global game called geopolitics.
Since he took office in 2009, Obama has faced an
unremitting chorus of criticism, left and right, domestic and foreign,
dismissing him as hapless, even hopeless. “He's a poor ignoramus; he should
read and study a little to understand reality,"
said Venezuela’s leftist president Hugo Chavez, just months after
Obama’s inauguration. “I think he has projected a position of weakness
and... a lack of leadership,”
claimed Republican Senator John McCain in 2012. “After six years,”
opined a commentator from the conservative Heritage Foundation last
April, “he still displays a troubling misunderstanding of power and the
leadership role the United States plays in the international system.” Even
former Democratic President Jimmy Carter recently
dismissed Obama’s foreign policy achievements as “minimal.” Voicing the
views of many Americans, Donald Trump
derided his global vision this way: “We have a president who doesn’t
have a clue.”
But let's give credit where it's due. Without proclaiming
a presumptuously labeled policy such as “triangulation,” “the Nixon
Doctrine,” or even a “freedom agenda,” Obama has moved step-by-step to
repair the damage caused by a plethora of Washington foreign policy
debacles, old and new, and then maneuvered deftly to rebuild America’s
fading global influence.
Viewed historically, Obama has set out to correct past
foreign policy excesses and disasters, largely the product of imperial
overreach, that can be traced to several generations of American leaders
bent on the exercise of unilateral power. Within the spectrum of American
state power, he has slowly shifted from the coercion of war, occupation,
torture, and other forms of unilateral military action toward the more
cooperative realm of trade, diplomacy, and mutual security -- all in search
of a new version of American supremacy.
Obama first had to deal with the disasters of the
post-9/11 years. Looking through history’s rearview mirror, Bush-Cheney
Republicans imagined the Middle East was the on-ramp to greater world power
and burned up at least two trillion dollars and much of U.S. prestige in a
misbegotten attempt to make that illusion a reality. Since the first day of
his presidency, Obama has been trying to pull back from or ameliorate the
resulting Bush-made miasmas in Afghanistan and Iraq (though with only modest
success), while resisting constant Republican pressures to reengage fully in
the permanent, pointless Middle Eastern war that they consider their own.
Instead of Bush's endless occupations with
170,000 troops in Iraq and
101,000 in Afghanistan, Obama's military has adopted a more mobile
Middle Eastern footprint of advisers, air strikes, drones, and special
operations squads. On other matters, however, Obama has acted far more
boldly.
Covert Cold War Disasters
Obama’s diplomats have, for instance, pursued
reconciliation with three “rogue” states -- Burma, Iran, and Cuba -- whose
seemingly implacable opposition to the U.S. sprang from some of the most
disastrous CIA covert interventions of the Cold War.
In 1951, as that “war” gripped the globe, Democratic
President Harry Truman ordered the CIA to arm some 12,000 Nationalist
Chinese soldiers who had been driven out of their country by communist
forces and had taken refuge in northern Burma. The result: three disastrous
attempts to invade their former homeland. After being slapped back across
the border by mere provincial militia, the Nationalist troops, again with
covert CIA support, occupied Burma’s northeast, prompting Rangoon to lodge a
formal complaint at the U.N. and the U.S. ambassador to Burma to resign in
protest.
Not only was this operation one of the great disasters in
a tangled history of such CIA interventions, forcing a major shake-up inside
the Agency, but it also produced a lasting breach in bilateral relations
with Burma, contributing to that country’s sense of isolation from the
international community. Even at the Cold War’s close 40 years later,
Burma’s military junta persisted in its international isolation while
retaining a close dependency relationship with China, thereby giving Beijing
a special claim to its rich resources and strategic access to the Indian
Ocean.
During his initial term in office, Obama made a concerted
effort to heal this strategic breach in Washington’s encirclement of the
Eurasian land mass. He sent Hillary Clinton on the first formal mission to
Burma by a secretary of state in more than 50 years; appointed the first
ambassador in 22 years; and, in November 2012, became the first president to
visit the country that, in an address to students at Rangoon University, he
called the “crossroads of East and South Asia” that borders on “the most
populated nations on the planet.”
Washington’s Cold War blunders were genuinely bipartisan.
Following Truman and drawing on his own experience as Allied commander for
Europe during World War II, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower proceeded
to wage the Cold War from the White House with the National Security Council
as his staff and the CIA as his secret army. Among the
170 CIA covert operations in 48 countries that Eisenhower authorized,
two must rank as major debacles, inflicting especially lasting damage on
America’s global standing.
In 1953, after Iran’s populist Prime Minister Mohammad
Mossadeq challenged Britain’s imperial monopoly over his country’s oil
industry, Eisenhower authorized a covert regime change operation to be
engineered by the CIA and British intelligence. Though the Agency came
perilously close to failure, it did finally succeed in installing the young,
untested Shah in power and then helped him consolidate his autocratic rule
by training a secret police, the notorious Savak, in torture and
surveillance. While Washingtonians toasted the delicious brilliance of this
secret-agent-style derring-do, Iranians seethed until 1979 when
demonstrators ousted the Shah and students stormed the U.S. embassy,
producing a 35-year breach in relations that weakened Washington’s position
in the Middle East.
In September 2013, spurning neoconservative calls for a
military solution to the “Iranian problem,” Obama dramatically
announced the first direct contact with that country’s leader since
1979. In this way, he launched two years of sustained diplomacy that
culminated in an historic agreement halting Iran’s nuclear program. From a
geopolitical perspective, this prospective entente, or at least truce,
avoided the sort of military action yearned for by Republicans that would
have mired Washington in yet another Middle Eastern war. It would also have
voided any chance for what, in 2011, Secretary of State Clinton first termed
“a pivot to new global realities.” She
spoke as well of “our strategic turn to the Asia-Pacific,” a policy
which, in a 2014 Beijing press conference, Obama would
tout as “our pivot to Asia.”
During his last months in office in 1960, President
Eisenhower also infamously authorized a CIA invasion of Cuba, confident that
1,000 ragtag Cuban exiles backed by U.S. airpower could somehow overthrow
Fidel Castro’s entrenched revolutionary regime. Inheriting this operation
and sensing disaster, President John F. Kennedy forced the CIA to scale back
its plans without stopping the Agency from proceeding. So it dumped those
exiles on a remote beach 50 impassable miles of trackless, tangled swamp
from their planned mountain refuge and sat back as Castro’s air force bombed
them into surrender.
For the next 40 years, the resulting rupture in diplomatic
relations and the U.S. embargo of Cuba weakened Washington’s position in the
Cold War, the Caribbean, and even southern Africa. After decades of
diplomatic isolation and economic embargo failed to change the communist
regime, President Obama initiated a thaw in relations, culminating in the
July 2015
reopening of the U.S. embassy in Havana, closed for nearly 55 years.
Obama’s Dollar Diplomacy
Moving from repair to revival, from past to future,
President Obama has been using America’s status as the planet’s number one
consumer nation to create a new version of dollar diplomacy. His strategy is
aimed at drawing China’s Eurasian trading partners back into Washington’s
orbit. While Beijing has been
moving
to bring parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe into a unified “world island”
with China at its epicenter, Obama has countered with a bold geopolitics
that would trisect that vast land mass by redirecting its trade towards the
United States.
During the post-9/11 decade when Washington was spilling
its blood and treasure onto desert sands, Beijing was investing its
trillions of dollars of surplus from trade with the U.S. in plans for the
economic integration of the vast Eurasian land mass. In the process, it has
already built or is building an elaborate infrastructure of high-speed,
high-volume railroads and oil and natural gas pipelines across the vast
breadth of what Sir Halford Mackinder once dubbed the “world
island.” Speaking of pivots to Asia and elsewhere, in a 1904 scholarly
essay titled “The Geographical Pivot of History,” this renowned British
geographer, who started the study of geopolitics,
redrew the world map, reconceptualizing Africa, Asia, and Europe not as
three separate continents, but as a vast single land mass whose sheer size
could, if somehow integrated, make it the epicenter of global power.
In a bid to realize Mackinder’s vision a century later,
China has set out to unify Eurasia economically through massive construction
financed by loans, foreign aid, and a new Asian Infrastructure Investment
Bank that has already attracted
57 members, including some of Washington’s staunchest allies. With $4
trillion in hard-currency reserves, China has
invested $630 billion of it overseas in the last decade, mostly within
this tri-continental world island.
As an index of influence, China now
accounts for 79% of all foreign investment in Afghanistan, 70% in Sierra
Leone, and 83% in Zimbabwe. With a massive infusion of investment that will
reach a trillion dollars by 2025, China has managed to
double its annual trade with Africa over the past four years to $222
billion, three times America’s $73 billion. Beijing is also mobilizing
military forces potentially capable of surgically slicing through the arc of
bases, naval armadas, and military alliances with which Washington has
ringed the world island from England to Japan since 1945.
In recent months, however, Obama has unleashed a
countervailing strategy, seeking to split the world island economically
along its continental divide at the Ural Mountains through two trade
agreements that aim to
capture nothing less than “the central global pole position” for “almost
two-thirds of world GDP [gross domestic product] and nearly three-quarters
of world trade.” With the impending approval of the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP), Washington hopes to redirect much of the vast trade in
the Asian half of Eurasia toward North America.
Should another set of parallel negotiations prove
successful by their target date of 2016, Washington will reorient the
European Union’s portion of Eurasia, which still has the
world’s largest single economy and
another 16% of world trade, toward the U.S. through the Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
Finally, in a stroke of personal diplomacy that much of
the U.S. media misconstrued as a sentimental journey, Obama has been
courting African nations aggressively, convening a
White House summit for more than 50 of that continent’s leaders in 2014
and making a state visit to East Africa in July 2015. With its usual barbed
insight, Beijing’s Global Times has quite accurately
identified the real aim of Obama’s Africa diplomacy as “off-setting
China’s growing influence and recovering past U.S. leverage.”
Trade Treaties
When grandmasters play the great game of geopolitics,
there is, almost axiomatically, a certain sangfroid to their moves, an
indifference to any resulting collateral damage at home or abroad. These two
treaties, so central to Obama’s geopolitical strategy, will bring in their
wake both diplomatic gains and high social costs. Think of it in blunt terms
as the choice between maintaining the empire abroad and sustaining democracy
at home.
In his six years in office, Obama has invested diplomatic
and political capital in advancing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a
prospective treaty that carefully excludes China from membership in an
apparent bid to split its would-be world island right down its Pacific
littoral. Surpassing any other economic alliance except the European Union,
this treaty will bind the U.S. and 11 nations around the Pacific basin,
including Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, and Vietnam,
that represent $28 trillion in combined GDP or 40% of gross world product
and a third of all global trade. By sweeping up areas like agriculture, data
flows, and service industries, this treaty
aspires to a Pacific economic integration unparalleled in any existing
trade pact. In the process, it would draw these highly productive nations
away from China and into America’s orbit.
Not surprisingly, Obama has faced ferocious opposition
within his own party from Senator Elizabeth Warren and others who are
sharply
critical of the highly secretive nature of the negotiations for the pact
and the way it is likely to degrade labor and environmental laws in the
U.S. So scathing was this critique that, in June 2015, he
needed Republican votes to win Senate approval for “fast track”
authority to complete the final round of negotiations in coming months.
To pull at the western axis of China’s would-be world
island, Obama is also aggressively pursuing negotiations for the TTIP with
the
European Union and its $18 trillion economy. The treaty seeks fuller
economic integration between Europe and America by meshing government
regulations on matters such as auto safety in ways that might add some
$270 billion to their annual trade.
By transferring control over consumer safety, the
environment, and labor from democratic states to closed, pro-business
arbitration tribunals,
argues
a coalition of 170 European civil society groups, the TTIP, like its Pacific
counterpart, will exact a high social cost from participating countries.
While the European Union’s labyrinthine layers of bureaucracy and the
complexity of relations among its sovereign states make completion of
negotiations within the year unlikely, the TTIP treaty, propelled by Obama’s
singular determination, is moving at light speed compared to the laggard
Doha round of World Trade Organization negotiations, now in year 12 of
inconclusive talks with no end in sight.
Grandmasters of Geopolitics
In his determined pursuit of this grand strategy, Obama
has revealed himself as one of the few U.S. leaders since America’s rise to
world power in 1898 who can play this particular great game of imperial
domination with the requisite balance of vision and ruthlessness. Forget
everyone’s nominee for master diplomat, Henry Kissinger, who was as inept as
he was ruthless, extending the Vietnam War by seven bloody years to mask his
diplomatic failure, turning East Timor over to Indonesia for decades of
slaughter until its inevitable independence, cratering U.S. credibility in
Latin America by installing a murderous military dictatorship in Chile, and
mismanaging Moscow in ways that extended the Cold War by another 15 years.
Kissinger’s career, as international law specialist Richard Falk
wrote recently, has been marked by “his extraordinary capacity to be
repeatedly wrong about almost every major foreign policy decision made by
the U.S. government over the course of the last half-century.”
Once we subject other American leaders to a similar
calculus of costs and benefits, we are, surprisingly enough, left with just
three grandmasters of geopolitics: Elihu Root, the original architect of
America’s rise to global power; Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security
adviser to President Carter, who shattered the Soviet Empire, making the
U.S. the world’s sole superpower; and Barack Obama, who is defending that
status and offering a striking imperial blueprint for how to check China’s
rise. In each case, their maneuvers have been supple and subtle enough that
they have eluded both contemporary observers and later historians.
Many American presidents -- think Theodore Roosevelt,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton -- have been
capable diplomats, skilled at negotiating treaties or persuading allies to
do their bidding. But surprisingly few world leaders, American or otherwise,
have a capacity for mastering both the temporal and spatial dimensions of
global power -- that is, the connections between present actions and often
distant results as well as an intuitive ability to grasp the cultural,
economic, and military forces whose sum is geopolitics. Mastering both of
these skills involves seeing beneath the confusion of current events and
understanding the deeper currents of historical change. Root and Brzezinski
both had an ability to manipulate the present moment to advance long-term
American interests while altering, often fundamentally, the future balance
of global power. Though little noticed in the avalanche of criticism that
has all but buried his accomplishments in the Oval Office, Obama seems to be
following in their footsteps.
Elihu Root, Architect of American Power
All but forgotten today, Elihu Root was the true architect
of America’s transformation from an insular continental nation into a major
player on the world stage. About the time Sir Halford Mackinder was
imagining his new model for studying global power, Root was building an
institutional infrastructure at home and abroad for the actual exercise of
that power.
After a successful 30-year career as a corporate lawyer
representing the richest of robber barons, the most venal of trusts, and
even New York's outrageously corrupt William "Boss" Tweed, Root devoted
the rest of his long life to modernizing the American state as secretary
of war, secretary of state, a senator, and finally a plenipotentiary
extraordinaire. Not only did he shape the conduct of U.S. foreign policy for
the century to come, but he also played an outsized role, particularly for a
cabinet secretary of a then-peripheral power, in influencing the character
of an emerging international community.
As a prominent attorney, Root understood that the
Constitution’s protection of individual liberties and states’ rights had
created an inherently weak federal bureaucracy, ill suited for the concerted
projection of American imperial power beyond its borders. To transform this
“patchwork” state and its divided society -- still traumatized by the Civil
War -- into a world power, Root spent a quarter-century in the determined
pursuit of three intertwined objectives: fashioning the fragmentary federal
government into a potent apparatus for overseas expansion, building a
consensus among the country’s elites for such an activist foreign policy,
and creating new forms of global governance open to Washington’s influence.
As secretary of war (1899-1904), Root reformed the Army’s
antiquated structure, creating a centralized general staff, establishing a
modern war college, and expanding professional training for officers.
Through this transformation, the military moved far beyond its traditional
mission of coastal defense and became an increasingly agile force for
overseas expansion -- in China, the Philippines, the Caribbean, Latin
America, and, ultimately, Europe itself. With his eye firmly fixed on
America’s ascent, Root also covered up atrocities that accompanied the
army’s extraordinarily brutal pacification of the Philippines.
As secretary of state (1907-1909), senator (1909-1915),
and special envoy to Russia (1917), Root then led a sustained diplomatic
effort to make the country, for the first time, a real presence in the
community of nations. To insert Washington -- until then at the periphery of
a world politics still centered on Europe -- in the game of global power
projection, Secretary of State Root launched an unprecedented tour of Latin
America in 1906, winning the continent’s support.
With the backing of 17 Latin republics among the 44
nations present, Washington gained sufficient geopolitical clout at the
Second Hague Peace Conference in 1907 to conclude the first broad
international legal agreement on the laws of war. To house the Permanent
Court of Arbitration, the world’s first ongoing institution for global
governance, which emerged from the Hague peace conferences, Root’s friend
Andrew Carnegie spent $1.5 million, a vast sum at the time, to build the
lavish Peace Palace at The Hague in 1913. A year later, as chair of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1910-1925), Root helped
establish The Hague Academy of International Law housed within that Peace
Palace.
Simultaneously, he cemented a close alliance with Britain
by promoting treaties to resolve territorial disputes that had roiled
relations with the world’s preeminent power for the better part of a
century. That effort won him the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1912. Even in retirement at age 75, Root served on
a League of Nations committee that established the Permanent Court of
International Justice, realizing his long-held vision of the international
community as an assembly of sovereign states governed by the rule of law.
Throughout these decades, Root was careful to cultivate
support for an assertive foreign policy among the country’s ruling East
Coast elites. As the culmination of this effort, in 1918 he led a group of
financiers, industrialists, and corporate lawyers in establishing the
Council on Foreign Relations in New York, which soon became the country’s
most influential forum for shaping public consensus for an expansive foreign
policy. He also cultivated academic specialists at leading universities
nationwide, using their expertise to shape and support his foreign policy
ideas. In sum, Root recast American society to forge a nexus of money,
influence, and intellect that would sustain U.S. foreign policy for the next
century.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Destroyer of Empires
After a long period of indifferent international
leadership, during Jimmy Carter’s presidency foreign policy came under the
charge of an underestimated figure, National Security
Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Émigré Polish aristocrat, professor of
international relations, and an autodidact when it came to geopolitics, he
was above all an intellectual acolyte of Sir Halford Mackinder. Through both
action and analysis, Brzezinski made Mackinder’s concept of Eurasia as the
world island and its vast interior heartland as the “pivot” of global power
his own. He would prove particularly adept at applying Sir Halford’s famous
dictum: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the
Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the
world.”
Wielding a $100 million CIA covert operation like a
sharpened wedge, Brzezinski drove radical Islam from Afghanistan into the
“heartland” of Soviet Central Asia, drawing Moscow into a debilitating
decade-long Afghan war that weakened Russia sufficiently for Eastern Europe
to finally break free from the Soviet empire. With a calculus that couldn’t
have been more coldblooded, he understood and
rationalized the untold misery and unimaginable human suffering his
strategy inflicted through ravaged landscapes, the millions his policy
uprooted from ancestral villages and turned into refugees, and the countless
Afghan dead and wounded. Dismissing the long-term damage as "some stirred-up
Moslems," as he saw it, none of it added up to a hill of beans compared to
the importance of striking directly into the Eurasian heartland to free
Eastern Europe, half a continent away, and shatter the Soviet empire. And
these results did indeed mark Brzezinski as a grandmaster of geopolitics in
all its ruthless realpolitik. (Mind you, the future suffering from those
"stirred-up Moslems" now includes the rise of al-Qaeda, 9/11, and America’s
second Afghan War, as well as the unsettling of the Greater Middle East
thanks to the growth of the Islamic extremism he first nurtured.)
In 1998, in retirement, Brzezinski again applied Sir
Halford’s theory, this time in a book titled
The Grand Chessboard, a geopolitical treatise on America’s
capacity for extending its global hegemony. Although Washington was still
basking in the pre-9/11 glow of its newly won grandeur as the world’s sole
superpower, he could already imagine the geopolitical constraints that might
come into play and undermine that status. If the U.S. then seemed a colossus
standing astride the world, Eurasia still remained “the globe’s most
important playing field... with preponderance over the entire Eurasian
continent serving as the central basis for global primacy.”
That Eurasian “megacontinent,” Brzezinski observed, “is
just too large, too populous, culturally too varied, and composed of too
many historically ambitious and politically energetic states to be compliant
toward even the most economically successful and politically preeminent
global power.” Washington, he predicted, could continue its half-century
dominion over the “oddly shaped Eurasian chessboard -- extending from Lisbon
to Vladivostok” only as long as it could preserve its unchallenged “perch on
the Western periphery,” while the vast “middle space” does not become “an
assertive single entity," and the Eastern end of the world continent did not
unify itself in a way that might lead to “the expulsion of America from its
offshore bases.” Should any of these critical conditions change, Brzezinski
warned prophetically, “a potential rival to America might at some point
arise.”
Barack Obama, Defender of U.S. Global Hegemony
Less than a decade later, China emerged to challenge
America’s control of Eurasia and so threaten Washington’s standing as the
globe’s great hegemon. While the U.S. military was mired in the Middle East,
Beijing quietly began working to unify that vast “middle space” of Eurasia,
while preparing to neutralize America’s “offshore bases.”
By the time Barack Obama entered the Oval Office in 2009,
there were already the first signs of a serious geopolitical challenge that
only the president and his closest advisers seemed to recognize. In a speech
to the Australian parliament in November 2011, Obama
said: “Let there be no doubt: in the Asia-Pacific in the twenty-first
century, the United States of America is all in.” After two long wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan “that cost us dearly, in blood and treasure, “ he
explained, “the United States is turning our attention to the vast potential
of the Asia Pacific region,” which is “the world’s fastest-growing region --
and home to more than half the global economy.” His initial deployment of
just 2,500
U.S. troops to Australia seemed a slender down payment on his
“deliberate and strategic decision” to become America’s first “Pacific
president,” producing a great deal of premature criticism and derision.
Four years later, one CNN commentator would still be
calling this “Obama’s pivot to nowhere.” Even seasoned foreign policy
commentator Fareed Zakaria would
ask, in early 2015, “Whatever happened to the pivot to Asia?” Answering
his own question, Zakaria argued that the president was still mired in the
Middle East and the centerpiece of that pivot, the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, seemed to be facing certain defeat in Congress.
To the consternation of his critics, in the waning months
of his presidency, from Iran to Cuba, from Burma to the Pacific Ocean, Obama
has revealed himself as an American strategist potentially capable of laying
the groundwork for the continued planetary dominion of the United States
deep into the twenty-first century. In the last 16 months of his presidency,
with a bit of grit and luck and a final diplomatic surge --
concluding the nuclear treaty with Iran to prevent another debilitating
Middle Eastern conflict, winning congressional approval of the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, and completing negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership -- Obama just might secure the U.S. a significant
extension of its waning global hegemony.
Specifics aside, the world’s two most powerful nations,
China and the United States, seem to have developed conflicting geopolitical
strategies to guide their struggle for global power. Whether Beijing will
succeed in moving ever further toward unifying Asia, Africa, and Europe into
that world island or Washington will persist with Obama’s strategy of
splitting that land mass along its axial divisions via trans-oceanic trade
won’t become clear for another decade or two.
We still cannot say whether the outcome of this great game
will be decided through an almost invisible commercial competition or a more
violent drama akin to history’s last comparable imperial transition, the
protracted
rivalry between Napoleon’s “continental system” and Britain’s maritime
strategy at the start of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, we are
starting to see the broad parameters of an epochal geopolitical contest
likely to shape the world’s destiny in the coming decades of this still
young twenty-first century.
Alfred W. McCoy, a
TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington Professor of History
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author, most recently, of
Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation,
and co-editor of
Endless Empire: Europe’s Eclipse, Spain’s Retreat, America’s Decline.
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Copyright 2015 Alfred W. McCoy