The imperial nation conceives of only two kinds of nations beyond its boundaries: satellites (or vassal states) and enemies (potential and actual). Among the satellites can be included “allies,” those lesser powers that remain friendly by staying more or less in line with the imperial transnational investment policies of large-scale capital accumulation. The satellite is a vassal state bonded to the imperium. Among the enemies (or “potential” enemies) is any country that seeks to chart an independent and self-defining course, to use its land, natural resources, capital, labor, and markets for its own development and possibly for regional hegemony.
Each new imperial acquisition creates a broadened perimeter, yet another area to defend against some real or imagined adversary. The empire builders know no rest. They require ever larger budgets and ever more elaborate weaponry. The corporate investors batten on defense contracts, leaving the taxpayer to bear the crushing costs.
In 2009, the Obama administration proposed a “stimulus package” to counteract the deep recession that afflicted the corporate economy. The package consisted of $787 billion in spending programs presumably designed to create jobs and stimulate growth. (Although one critic noted that the stimulus plan was “overloaded with business-friendly tax cuts and too short on labor-intensive projects to put people to work right away.”1) Left unmentioned in the debate over the package is that the US corporate economy has been living off annual stimulus packages ever since World War II. They are called “defense expenditures.” Every year the military spending package is by far the largest item in the discretionary federal budget.
As to be expected, these colossal allocations are encouraged by corporate America, first, because such expenditures create a military might that boosts corporate global hegemony; and second, because military contracts are risk-free, set without competitive bidding or adequate oversight. They come with guaranteed cost overruns and bring in superlative profits. Defense spending does not have to struggle with sluggish consumer demand; there are always more advanced weapons to develop, obsolete weaponry to replace, soldiers to feed and shelter, and new wars to be fought.
These, then, comprise the two basic reasons why the US assiduously remains an armed superpower even in the absence of a comparable opponent. First, keeping the world safe for global capital accumulation requires a massive military establishment. Second, a massive military itself constitutes a source of immense capital accumulation.
The centrists and liberals dare not challenge these military appropriations for fear of being seen as faltering in their devotion to “keep America strong.” Obama’s 2009 stimulus package was heavily contested because it was for civilian economic purposes rather than for empire and war—in contrast to the huge 2010 defense spending bills that Congress passed with relatively little debate.
The enormous national debt the United States carries, and the heavy tax burden the public bears in servicing that debt, is largely an outgrowth of the gargantuan sums expended on wars and military budgets, the cumulative multi-trillion-dollar expense of maintaining a growing global empire for the past sixty years or more.
Some reactionaries argue that the debt is caused mostly by Social Security payments and other entitlements, all of which threaten to go broke in some years ahead. In fact, over the past half century or more the Social Security Trust Fund has been self-sufficient, taking in more money than it spends. By 2010 it contained an accumulated $2.6 trillion surplus.2
Numbering among the victims of imperialism are the common people of the imperial nation itself, those who pay the costs of empire with their blood and taxes. The empire feeds off the republic. The populace does without essentials so that the patricians can pursue their far-off plunder. The center is bled so that the perimeter can continue to expand.
By 2011 the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had cost over 5,000 American lives, along with tens of thousands more wounded or disabled, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani deaths. Suicide rates among US veterans from these two wars remained dramatically higher than in the rest of the US population. Mental health breakdowns were now the leading cause of hospital admissions for the military, higher than physical injuries. On any given night, tens of thousands of homeless veterans were living on our nation’s streets.3
As we moved deeper into the “Great Recession,” almost every state and municipality in the United States was facing a budget crisis with serious shortfalls in revenues, record debts, and harsh cutbacks in human services. But one component of government, the Defense Department, suffered no shortage of funding. In 2010, the Pentagon and related agencies expended somewhere between $850 billion to $1 trillion, if we count the indirect costs of war and empire, such as veterans benefits and medical costs, annual debt payments due to military spending, covert military and intelligence operations, the 70 percent of federal research and development funds that goes to the military, “supplementary appropriations” for specific wars as in Iraq and Afghanistan, and defense expenses picked up by nonmilitary agencies including “defense-related activities” of the General Services Administration, along with the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons programs, which consumes more than half of that department’s budget.4 This was a vastly larger sum than what all fifty states of the union together spent on education, housing, police, fire fighting, roads, hospitals, human services, occupational safety, and the like.
With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States now accounts for almost 50 percent of the world’s military spending. In second place is China, with 6.6 percent of the world’s expenditure on arms. In the past decade the US allocated over $6 trillion on war and preparation for war.5 Forty percent of the US military budget goes for overhead. One critic notes that the Pentagon cannot account for much of its funds, property, and supplies. “[I]t cooks its own books to make them appear in balance, and it makes new spending decisions based on the phony data.” Many years of reports by the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon’s own inspector general testify to this.6
Along with immensely profitable war contracts comes increased income inequality and the defunding of public services. The impoverishment of public services is not only one of the costs of empire; it is one of the goals. The imperial rulers wage war not only against people in foreign lands but against their own populace as well, diminishing their demands, expectations, and sense of entitlement.
There are those who say that empires are “economically irrational” affairs because they cost more than they bring in. The British spent more in India than they were able to extract, and they extracted quite a bit. So too with the Americans in the Philippines and in Central America. But the people who pay the costs of empire are not the same as those who reap its rewards. As Thorstein Veblen pointed out in 1904, the gains of empire flow into the hands of the privileged business class, the large overseas investors, while the costs are extracted from the general treasury, that is, from “the industry of the rest of the people.”7 The same has been true in regard to Iraq: US taxpayers have carried the costs and are paying the debt that the war brought, while Halliburton, Blackwater, and a hundred other corporations reap the fat no-bid contracts and corrupt dealings, almost all of it not audited.8