CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

How the United States Became a Warmonger

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

It seems an opportune time to scrutinize how it has come to pass that the U.S. has become a menace to others as well as to itself. Remembering its early vision of being a peaceful democracy that confined itself to the Western Hemisphere without entangling alliances and suspicious of a standing army that was institutionalized as part of governance and national security, other than in conditions of wartime.

This was not the whole truth, which blurs this mythified positive self-image of ‘greatness’  or ‘American exceptionalism’ by reminding dogmatic patriots of genocidal policies toward America’s native peoples and how imported slave labor sustained its agricultural productivity. In addition, geography helped sustain this peaceful image of a country welcoming to immigrants and skeptical of engagement in the European rivalries of its early experience as a sovereign state, a former colony until it broke away from the mighty British Empire in its War of Independence. Its earlier period as an exploited colony made the talented architects of the American public sensitive, above all, to the arbitrary rule and militarism of European rulers legitimized by the absolutist pretensions of royalism with special attention to the British instance as an influential negative model.

This early image of a guardian of hemispheric autonomy in relation to Europe was never an accurate portrayal of American foreign policy. The United States, once a sovereign state, flirted with the adoption of a foreign policy that included a colonial project of its own devising, focused on both the Caribbean and Pacific regions, seeking hegemonic controls, basing rights, and natural resources. Yet that did not challenge the core character of its foreign policy, which remained committed to isolationism with regard to European wars and general contentment with its successful emergence as an industrial giant.

The two world wars of the 20th Century began a transformative process that reached its climax at the end of the Cold War, when the U.S. emerged as a globally engaged superpower with no credible challengers possessing the requisite geopolitical muscle to back up strategic ambitions and fears. Yet its domestic identity remained rooted in the savior imagery of exceptionalism, which highlighted benign claims to be ‘a light unto the nations’ or, as all American politicians of right and left still affirm, ‘the greatest country ever,’ almost in the spirit of a loyalty oath. It is this transformation from a relatively peace-oriented republic to a globe-girdling militarist superpower that needs to be better understood if a demilitarized future identity is to become a realistic project of reform. Dwight Eisenhower recognized the domestic problems of this militarization in his 1961 Farewell Address as President, encapsulated in his memorable warnings to democracy of a peacetime ‘military-industrial-complex.’ This warning was a 20th-century echo of concerns about whether a free society could co-exist with what the Federalist Papers referred to as ‘a standing army.’ Such a sensitivity to the fragility of democratic governance has been lost in the long period of belligerency that stretched from World War II to the Cold War, and then was soon resuscitated as neoliberal globalization and increasing inter-civilizational tensions rationalized an expanding military budget and the global projection of American power, resulting in 750 foreign military bases in 85 countries.

From Engagement to Warmongering

The path........

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