On the global hegemony of the American Empire

Fickle, Bitter, and Dangerous
An interview with Chalmers Johnson by David Ross

Chalmers Johnson served in the Navy during the Korean War. He earned his
Ph.D. in political science at UC Berkeley and taught there and at UC San
Diego until 1992. He served as chairman of the Center for Chinese
Studies and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. Chalmers Johnson is president and co-founder of the Japan
Policy Research Institute (www.jpri.org). He has written numerous
articles and reviews and twelve books on Asian subjects, including,
Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, MITI and the Japanese Miracle,
and Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. His latest
book is titled, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End
of the Republic.


David Ross (D.R.): Throughout the Internet after the September 11th
attacks, there was a lot of talk of blowback. When, in fact, a year
before the attacks, you wrote the book Blowback: The Costs and
Consequences of American Empire, where you predicted events such as
9-11. What is blowback and what are its causes?

Chalmers Johnson: "Blowback" is a CIA term. It was first invented after
the CIA intervention against the government of Iran in 1953 when we
overthrew an elected government there for the interests of the British
and American petroleum industries. Blowback refers to the unintended
consequences of clandestine policies that have been kept secret from the
American public. I think it's important to stress that any policy may
have unintended consequences, but here we're talking about unintended
consequences of policies that the public knows nothing about, therefore,
has no context within which to place them, and ends up with a daffy
president going around asking, "Why do they hate us?"

My analysis was that the things we had done during the cold war, and the
first decade after the cold war, were generating almost uncontrollable
blowback. I did not, obviously, specifically anticipate anything like
9-11, but I certainly did anticipate and predict terrorist acts against
Americans-military and civilian, abroad and at home-and therefore, was
not particularly surprised when the attacks came on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon in September of 2001. At the time, I did not
think that they were necessarily Islamic terrorists; I thought they
could have been from Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, Okinawa, Greece, or
any number of places on earth where we have carried out clandestine
activities that unquestionably generate hostility toward the United
States.

My book was written as an explicit warning to my fellow Americans of the
likely consequences of their policies over the previous decade and
earlier. The warning was unheeded in the United States. The book was
very well received abroad, particularly in Germany and Italy. But it was
more or less ignored here until after 9-11, when, as you say, it became
somewhat of an underground bestseller because of the surprise that the
world finally came home to the Americans.

 

DR: What are some instances of past blowback and possible future
blowback against the U.S?

Chalmers Johnson: First of all, I think the obvious thing right now is
our mistaken reaction to 9-11. It became almost taboo in this country
after 9-11 to even ask what the motives of the attackers were. The
public has now been so confused by lies from our government that they
believe Saddam Hussein was the one behind it. Of course, we know he
wasn't, and since there is no evidence that he could have been, the
people have gotten that idea only from listening to the disinformation
that comes from the White House and the Pentagon.

September 11th was not an attack on America's values or America's
democracy or America's wealth. It was an attack on American foreign
policy and there were some fairly obvious things that should have been
done at once which would have defused the situation. First, we should
have withdrawn the troops at once that we had based in Saudi Arabia.
Since the first war with Iraq in 1991, they were just exacerbating the
situation rather than serving any real function. Second, we should have
said that we do support the continuity of the state of Israel, but we do
not support Israeli Zionist imperialism. And that until the settlements
in the West Bank are closed-which are a cancer working on Israeli
society in a destructive manner-we're going to cease our continued
bankrolling of Israel, both financially and militarily. Last, we should
have instituted at once a crash program of fuel conservation that could
have easily eliminated our dependence on Persian Gulf petroleum imports.


We didn't do any of those things. Instead, we set out to use our massive
military power against two peculiarly puny and defenseless
targets-Afghanistan and Iraq-producing untold misery. This will without
question generate and recruit more people committed to the idea of
attacking the United States.

The Department of Defense has said for years that nobody can meet us
militarily except in one of two ways: one, with the use of nuclear
weapons, which would deter us; and the other is what they call, in
typical Pentagon jargon, "asymmetrical warfare," meaning the weak
attacking the super powerful via terrorism. There is every reason to
anticipate that we will have more terrorism as we increasingly sink into
the two quagmires that we have created in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

DR: You've done a lot of research on U.S./Asian relations. Can you give
us a historical thumbnail sketch of the U.S. involvement in South Korea?

Chalmers Johnson: It goes back to the Korean War in 1950-1953 and we've
been stationed there ever since. We have over one hundred military bases
in South Korea. Peace began to break out in Korea in the year 2000 when
the new South Korean president, Kim Dae-jung, on his own initiative,
without asking permission from the United States, went north and tried
to end the cold war on the Korean peninsula by opening direct
negotiations with North Korea-with Kim Jong Il's regime. He came back
after a triumph. It appeared as though, as he said in an op-ed in the
Los Angeles Times, the chances of war on the Korean peninsula had just
vanished.

This development was extremely threatening to the American military, the
military-industrial complex, and those who believe in some form of
American empire in that part of the world, they have done everything
since then to cause this situation to backtrack-to not allow peace to
break out on the Korean peninsula.

With the extremely belligerent remarks coming from the Bush
Administration, including Bush's statement in the State of the Union
address in 2002 that North Korea was part of something that he called an
"axis of evil," the North Koreans concluded that, indeed, they were
targeted by the United States for a regime change in the violent manner
they've already seen happen in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the threat
implicit in American policy became manifest with the massive attack on
Iraq, the North Koreans concluded that the only way they could defend
themselves was with the threat of nuclear weapons. The thing that was
wrong with Saddam Hussein in Iraq is he didn't actually have any weapons
of mass destruction and therefore, was vulnerable to the bullying of the
Donald Rumsfelds and the Condoleezza Rices of this world.

Therefore, we have a genuine crisis today. The North Koreans have
reopened their nuclear reactor, begun to reprocess old spent fuel rods
from their reactor and convert them into plutonium, and are well on
their way toward developing a nuclear arsenal. I believe the issue can
still be controlled because the surrounding nations-South Korea, Japan,
and China-all recognize that North Korea's activities are essentially
defensive. It is an isolated country that was ruined by the end of the
cold war, a failed communist country that has no real future and is
desperately trying to come in from the cold the way China did 20 years
ago.

But the chief issue is the volatility in Washington and whether or not
we can cause the president and his advisors to back down and assume a
more reasonable position in what is clearly a negotiable situation. The
North Koreans have said they would dismantle their nuclear weapons
capability in return for some guarantee that the Americans don't intend
to simply squash them the way they did Iraq. They want a non-aggression
treaty or at least some other very public statement by the United States
that it will not carry out aggression against North Korea. This has
struck our allies in South Korea as utterly reasonable, and it has
helped to fuel a very considerable anti-American movement in South Korea
at the present time.

 

DR: I've read in several different sources that near four million
Koreans were killed by U.S. military forces and U.S. client forces
before and during the Korean War. Would you agree with this figure?

Chalmers Johnson: I don't know if the number is accurate or not. But
certainly the revelations of the killing of unarmed civilians at Nogunri
during the Korean War, the almost relentless carpet bombing of North
Korea, and the general atrocities carried out by American troops that
seemed to have a basis in racism, have been suppressed for a long time
in South Korea but are coming to the fore again as they begin to see
American aggression in the field.

 

DR: In your book, Blowback, you also talk about how Japan is still a
client state of the U.S. government as is South Korea. Can you give us a
thumbnail sketch of the U.S. involvement in Japan?

Chalmers Johnson: We created satellites in East Asia after World War II
in the areas that we had conquered in exactly the same way and for more
or less the same reasons that the Soviet Union created satellites in
Eastern Europe-satellites that gained their independence from the Soviet
Union after the Berlin Wall was breached in 1989. Then, of course, the
Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. One of the reasons for my writing
Blowback was the end of the cold war in 1991 and the disappearance of
the menace of the Soviet Union. The United States, far from demobilizing
and trying to generate a peace dividend, was instead doing everything in
its power throughout the 1990s to shore up cold war structures in East
Asia and expand our empire of military bases into the Middle East, the
Persian Gulf, and Central Asia.

The problem is that this old structure is quite wobbly today, above all,
on economic grounds. Economics was the one thing that was really
different between our satellites and those of the Soviet Union. We said
to Japan and South Korea: In return for allowing us to station American
forces on your soil, indefinitely, without your having any control over
them despite all the nuisances that come with that, we would, in return,
give you free and open access to the American market, then and still
today, the world's largest market. And more importantly, we would
tolerate their protectionism, developing their own economies at our
expense. We said this in the early 1950's when we couldn't imagine that
they could ever become economic competitors

This has now come to the point where East Asia is quite industrialized.
It produces the largest trade surpluses in economic history that are
destined for the United States-trade surpluses in places like Japan,
South Korea, and Mainland China. This trade imbalance is something that
simply can't go on forever. At some point, the economic consequences of
our empire will bankrupt us, which is one of the sorrows of empire that
I talk about in my new book.

Meanwhile, the presence of American military bases in places like
Okinawa where we have 38 bases on an island smaller than Kauai in the
Hawaiian Islands, has produced a place that is almost volcanic in its
anti-Americanism. These military bases continue to generate
incidents-sexual violence, accidents, pollution, airplane crashes,
etc.-that build long-term distrust and dislike. What we're seeing is
almost a classic situation of subordinated peoples slowly developing the
attitudes and the alliances to resist American imperialism.

 

DR: In your book, Blowback, you also describe how the Asian financial
crisis, which infected Brazil and Russia also, was actually caused by
U.S. interests in order to weaken the Asian economic tigers and keep
them in their place.

Chalmers Johnson: One of the things that worried the United States
throughout the 1980s was that it became the world's largest net debtor
nation-we owed more money to other people than anybody else-whereas
Japan became the world's largest creditor nation. This should have been
a signal right then and there to alter this old relationship. We didn't.
Instead, the Japanese clung to us more tightly and we enjoyed having
them as our satellite in permanent orbit around our foreign policy.
Their foreign policy is essentially being dictated to them by Washington
D.C. Over time this situation becomes more and more unstable.

We became deeply concerned, however, about the fact that Japan was
becoming such a rich and powerful manufacturing country. All you have to
do is look at any American parking lot to see what I'm talking about:
The kind of enormous competition that Japan offered to the American
automobile industry, and the fact that virtually all consumer
electronics are made in Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan today.

Therefore, there's no question that we used organizations that are our
surrogates, our proxies-the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World
Bank, and the World Trade Organization-to destabilize various nations in
East Asia and to make them subordinate to us.

It was a shocking development for the Asian economic tigers. They've
slowly begun to recover from it. South Korea has recovered very nicely.
But the legacy it has left is that the United States is considered
fickle, bitter, and dangerous, and that an alliance with the United
States is probably more costly than it's worth. These attitudes now
carry over into places like Argentina, which was formerly the fine pupil
of American economic theories; the election of Lula da Silva in Brazil;
and the anti-American attitudes caused by the great poverty imposed by
the IMF in places like Ecuador and Venezuela.

These attitudes are now hardening. If we look forward and ask when will
the American empire start to unravel, I would predict that our military
is so strong, I don't really expect it to occur on military grounds, but
I think we can expect an economic crisis in the not too distant future.
The attempt to dominate the entire globe militarily is an extremely
expensive proposition, and we are not in a very good position to do that
compared to other empires. The British Empire, on the eve of the First
World War, had trade surpluses in the neighborhood of 7 percent of Gross
Domestic Product (GDP). They were a rich country and could afford to do
what they wanted to do, even make mistakes, like the Boer War in South
Africa.

The United States for the last 15 years has had trade deficits that are
the largest ever recorded in economic history and today are running at
around 5 percent of GDP. The buoyancy of our financial markets-since we
save almost nothing in this country-depends almost entirely on capital
imports from savings-oriented countries, particularly those in East
Asia. Anytime these countries start concluding that the United States is
not a safe place to invest or that there are alternatives, such as the
emerging European Union, then the United States will find itself in
extremely serious trouble with a howling deflation.

 

DR: In June 2003, Paul Wolfowitz was in Japan advocating that Japanese
troops be sent to Iraq. Could you comment on that?

Chalmers Johnson: The odd thing in East Asia, which is, except for
places like North Korea, one of the richest parts of the world today is
that peace is breaking out. China has turned decisively in a commercial
direction and is today one of the major manufacturing centers on earth.
Except for the United States and Britain, it absorbs more direct foreign
investment than any other country on earth. It is quite integrated into
the world's manufacturing system at the present time and has a huge
trade surplus with the United States.

There is no enemy that requires our military presence in East Asia,
except in so far as we are worried that China, 50 years from now, with
the world's largest population and an economy that's growing faster than
any other economy on earth, may well rival us in terms of our power to
push people around. I don't believe there is any real sense of a
military threat.

Nonetheless, we have now become so committed to military
means-militarism is so far advanced in our country and we have such
massive forces deployed in East Asia-that Wolfowitz and the like are
doing their best to insure that peace does not break out. They do
everything in their power to push Japan into further rearmament, to
exacerbate the situation on the Korean peninsula, and to continue to
talk to the Taiwanese about the possibility of war with China. In fact,
the Taiwanese situation is largely being resolved by economic
integration between the mainland and Taiwan.

Wolfowitz was touring the area from Singapore up through Korea and
Japan, making belligerent statements everywhere he went. What does it
sound like? It sounds like the Roman Empire. They are concerned about
the potential growth-not any genuine, serious threat-of China over the
long term.

 

D.R.: What solid evidence is there that the Bush Administration is lying
to the general public about the recent invasion of Iraq; and secondly,
do you think they're going to attack other nations in the Middle East?

Chalmers Johnson: The evidence is now overwhelming that the so-called
main reason for the attack on Iraq-the threat that Saddam Hussein had
weapons of mass destruction, meaning nuclear, biological and chemical
weapons-has evaporated. And there's ample evidence that the
administration lied to the public, and knew they were lying in the sense
that the documents alleging, for example, that Iraq was importing
uranium from Niger were forged. They relied on intelligence from the
British government that was plagiarized from other open and public
sources. The credibility of Colin Powell simply is gone after his
performance at the United Nations on February 5th, 2003. No one in their
right mind would ever believe a thing he said again.

As for further war in the Middle East, the people who have been making
policy, concentrated above all in the Pentagon around people like Paul
Wolfowitz and under the influence of Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, have
certainly proclaimed their desire to carry the war further. They are
also deeply influenced by the right wing in Israel, by the Likud Party,
the party of Ariel Sharon.

Therefore, the only thing that apparently might stop them from further
wars in, for example, Syria or Iran-which there's already evidence
they're trying to destabilize-is the growing quagmire in Iraq itself.
The American public, whether they're informed about the war or not, will
not tolerate many further casualties of the sort that have been
occurring after the president so flamboyantly declared the war was over.

 

David Ross hosts a talk show on KMUD radio in Redway, CA. He is a
grassroots activist who has worked on the Nader campaign, corporate
malfeasance, U.S. foreign policy, and environmental issues. He can be
reached at daveross27@hotmail.com.