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Weekend
Edition
November 4 / 5, 2006
Post-Cold War Decline
How
the US Lost Latin America
By JOSHUA SPERBER
The end of the Cold War can be seen
as both the best and worst thing to ever befall the United States.
On one hand, the USSR's precipitous collapse represented total
victory for the US. In one dramatic moment, the US's primary
military rival was defeated, while the putative threat of communism
appeared to suffer an irrevocable setback, if not absolute historical
refutation, with the demise of its oldest and largest nation-state
sponsor; US anti-Soviet policies were perceived as vindicated,
while the global conditions for US dominance pursued since the
Wilson Administration, as described by Neil Smith--namely, an
open world market--had finally arrived. US hubris was as sizable
as it was predictable. On the other hand, the disappearance
of the US's primary rival introduced enormous and potentially
insurmountable difficulties.
Massive military spending subsidizing
the US economy found itself without political justification for
the first time since FDR's Lend Lease Act rescued capitalism
from itself; an enormously effective propaganda device used to
suppress domestic labor and maintain social control had been
lost; the disappearance of an ostensibly alternative political-economic
ideology that had previously inspired the US into undergoing
domestic civil rights reforms threatens to create a newfound
and possibly terminal complacency; and the nominal raison d'etre
for an aggressive foreign policy "protecting" allies
from the alleged Soviet threat, while toppling and upholding
rebels and servants in interventions around the Third World,
has been eliminated. The ramifications of the end of the Cold
War can be seen domestically and internationally, and politically,
economically, militarily and ideologically. This paper will
examine the effects of those ramifications on the US relationship
with Latin America.
When we say that the US "lost"
Latin America we are of course adopting the language of US planners
who seek to "have" it, that is, who seek to keep it
from foreign competitors as stipulated in the Monroe Doctrine,
while maintaining internal rulers amenable to US corporate investment
and extraction. The US has lost on both counts, as imperial
rivals, specifically China, Noam Chomsky notes, are cultivating
financial, arms and energy agreements with Latin American states,
while growing numbers of those states are increasingly and flagrantly
ignoring US orders. The US's traditional response of forcible
removal has apparently been presently neutralized, at least in
Venezuela, where the 2002 attempted overthrow of Hugo Chavez
was a humiliating failure, resulting in the solidification of
the targeted regime. Likewise, the US's traditional day-to-day
method of dominance over Latin America, that of IMF/WTO economic
policies expediting the massive and regular transfer of Latin
American wealth to the US, is also being eschewed by emboldened
nationalist leaders.
With the collapse of the socialist
bloc, large areas hitherto quarantined from the West became exposed
to capitalist penetration, dialectically creating the conditions
for the US's ensuing overreach. The economic aspects of this
overreach, however, to a fair degree transcend the Cold War.
It was in 1973 that capitalism's postwar Golden Age finally
came tumbling to an end. The crisis in overproduction/ under-consumption
would prove intractable, triggering the US's shift from productive
to finance capitalism and the advent of a debt-based economy.
Though the US effectively employed economic means to thwart
rivals from the 1973 oil crisis through the Asian financial crisis
of the late 1990s, as David Harvey writes, the deindustrialization
associated with its greater shift to a consumption-driven economy
weakened the nation internally while its growing massive debt
significantly weakened its leverage vis-à-vis foreign
rivals. The international equilibrium that had been so totaled
by WWII, which had left much of the world in ruins and the US
vastly enriched, was irrepressibly reconfiguring. The Cold War's
end, depriving the US of its role as the chief defender of the
West against the USSR, introduced a greater political component
to the intensifying economic rivalry between the US and its allies,
specifically its Western European allies who were, in fits and
starts, moving toward economic, political and nascent military
unification driven by both longstanding US economic dominance
and the hastening decline of the rate of profit.
Growing differences between
the US and its Cold War allies--not to mention its adversaries--descended
into total and acrimonious conflict over the US/UK 2003 war on
Iraq. Immanuel Wallerstein asserts that the US war against Iraq
constituted a war on France and Germany, noting that it was the
first time in the history of the UN that the US was unable to
win Security Council passage of a resolution it badly wanted.
France and Germany, among others, were indeed defying US attempts
to isolate and strangle Iraq, elevating its own energy, financial
and political interests above the US's attempt at disciplining
the recalcitrant oil producer. Hussein's threats to convert
oil sales from dollars to euros, which would have benefited the
EU at potentially great US expense, could further be seen as
likely to have raised the hackles of US leaders. Indeed, the
latter were particularly embittered as they recognized that the
military destruction of Iraq's ossified nationalized economy
would create massive investment opportunities benefiting the
global economy as a whole. Their erstwhile allies, for their
part, opposed the war as a means of, beyond protecting their
own positions, opposing the narrower US interests that attacking
Iraq did in fact also advance. Beyond the general domestic benefits
of warfare--expanding executive power, weakening civil liberties,
furthering nationalism and weakening labor, etc.--the US attacked
Iraq with the aim of controlling access to the Middle Eastern
oil "spigot" while encircling China with military bases,
securing US dominance for future decades as outlined in the Project
for a New American Century, as Harvey notes.
The war has, of course, not
gone as planned. As a result, the US has suffered incalculable
political damage--partially due to the incontrovertible exposure
of its prewar claims as fabrications. It is badly overextended
militarily, strengthening the hands of regional adversaries,
namely Iran, and its treasury is hemorrhaging. In short, as
Paul Kennedy presciently saw, it appears that the US's difficulties
in Iraq are hastening what was being fended off: US decline.
It is more this material weakening
of the US global position than the blow to its political credibility
that pertains to Latin America. Latin America, as opposed to
Western Europe, has long had good reason to view the US with
hostility and suspicion. The US has repeatedly undermined democratic
nationalist heads of state, overthrowing Arbenz in 1954 Guatemala
and supporting the military coup against Goulart ten years later
in Brazil. In 1973 Chile, the CIA orchestrated the overthrow
of the socialist democrat Allende, replacing him with Augusto
Pinochet who went on to establish a murderous police state.
After the US-supported dictator Somoza was overthrown in 1979
Nicaragua, the US created death squads who employed non-state
terrorism as a means to destroying the popular Sandinista Government.
The US established similar death squads in Guatemala and El
Salvador, murdering hundreds of thousands of people. Today the
US supports a government in Colombia engaged in some of the worst
human rights abuses in the hemisphere.
If US-supported repression,
however, is a means to an end, the end largely involves economic
domination. The US has more often than not been able to achieve
this more directly, if not less violently in its effects, through
the imposition of IMF/WTO economic mandates, often culminating
in brutal so-called austerity programs. For creditor nations,
these programs' success was their failure, as the dramatically
depreciated standards of living resulting from foreign-imposed
neo-liberalism in Argentina, for example, discredited that program
there once and for all. The political fallout of the Argentine
crisis--where the poor overtook highways and rebelled in food
protests, while the wealthier fought cops upon being deprived
of their capital--has contributed to the US's failure to impose
the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Latin America, an attempt
to expand NAFTA as a means of matching the EU's increasing economic
cohesion and the ascent of China.
The backlash against IMF/WTO
neo-liberalism and its US sponsor is increasingly articulated
through indigenous people's movements, which have obtained state
power in Bolivia. Indigenous movement's grievances, platforms
and rhetoric, buttressed by the strength of innumerable anti-capitalist
movements with their annual meetings at the World Social Forum
in Porto Alegre, arguably represent the greatest and most cogent
refutation of global US-led capitalism in the post-Cold War era.
That the US is unable to condemn these movements as Soviet proxies,
but must either attack them through the baldly oppressive and
ideologically prostrate "War on Terror," itself a rhetorical
substitute for the equally impotent "War on Drugs,"
badly weakens its hand. No matter how hollow and hypocritical
the US's Cold War rhetoric had been it at least had the retrogressive
Soviet police state to reference. With the collapse of the Soviet
Union, US imperialism is growingly naked--revealing its indubitable
oppressiveness among masses whose revolutionary sentiment "another
world is possible" is a direct challenge to the US nationalism
that is an internal precondition for its rule. At the same time,
even removed gloves can do little when their fists are being
swallowed in the Middle East.
While the growing brazenness
of US extra-legal violence reveals and exacerbates its weakening
position, the US is simultaneously suffering as a result of the
internal contradictions of its official, and unavoidable, economic
policies. NAFTA was designed to both alleviate capitalism's
invariable overproduction crises by opening up the Mexican market
to US-subsidized agribusiness, while also creating investment
outlets freed from environmental, labor and other regulations
impeding foreign trade and profit. While reactionaries such
as Ross Perot were correct in predicting that NAFTA would accelerate
US de-industrialization and lead to massive job losses, its defenders
were equally correct to condemn nationalist capitalists like
Perot as naïve isolationists ignoring that capitalism's
quintessence is perpetual expansion. NAFTA's adoption less reflected
a political decision than a bilateral response to increased
economic competition within post-1973 capitalism, that is, falling
rates of profit combined with decreasing areas of investment.
One irony of present-day capitalism
is that the deleterious effects of its insatiable rapaciousness
are, via one manner or another, increasingly boomeranging on
the imperial powers. NAFTA assuredly devastated Mexico, condemning
myriad peasant farmers to poverty. Unable to compete in a market
flooded with US-subsidized cheap grains, rural farmers overwhelmed
the cities. In the north, the brutal anti-union maquiladoras
resulted in heavily polluted, crime-ridden towns left for dead
by the ravages of capital departed for yet cheaper markets across
the Pacific. This declining standard of living led increased
numbers of Mexican workers, combined with refugees of the earlier
Central American killing fields, to migrate to the US.
In Working the Boundaries,
Nicholas De Genova describes the manner in which the inflow of
Latino/a migrant workers benefits the US economy, as it is able
to assault labor as a whole through making vulnerable an underpaid
racialized subclass by, rather than deporting it, legally designating
it perpetually "deportable." Though benefiting the
economy, the stable political basis required for capitalism is
being undermined by job loss amid the persistent decline in the
standard of living. US fascist movements like the so-called
Minutemen have astutely diverted growing hostility associated
with worsening labor and living conditions through obfuscating
economic realities while decrying the effects of a degraded "culture."
Composed of and aided by neo-Nazi organizations, they, like
liberals, accept borders, states and capitalism as natural givens,
while seeking to "defend" white supremacy against the
Latino/a "aliens." Notably, the Minutemen and other
fascist organizations are increasingly disdainful of George W.
Bush, himself the helpless captive of corporate and state exigencies.
The negative effects of furthering capitalism within an ideological
context that precludes mass dissemination of the radical critique
of capitalism has resulted in tendencies so potentially powerful
they threaten to subordinate material state economic interests
to ideological ones.
That this fascist threat is
occurring after the end of the Cold War indicates that if the
US's pro-freedom language of the Cold War-years was rhetoric
and bluff, sometimes called, the loss of an apparent ideological
foe within the context of advancing capitalist crises relegates
present-day declarations of "freedom" an anachronistic
folly. Apart from the present and future domestic victims of
an increasingly racist and aggressive US, the collapse of an
"American" ideology premised on perpetually expanding
borders and "freedom" harms the long-term health of
a state needing though doggedly avoiding reform, as Eric Hobsbawm
foresaw in his Age of Extremes. The US appears to have played
its last hand, and brute force is a prescription for, if not
total collapse a la the USSR, precipitous and inevitable decline.
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