Some people might complain that the analysis presented herein is simplistic and insufficiently nuanced because it ascribes everything to purely economic and class motives while ignoring other variables like geopolitics, culture, ethnicity, nationalism, ideology, morality, and leadership psychology. But I do not ascribe everything to purely economic interests. To focus on powerful corporate class interests that are usually ignored is not to claim that nothing else is to be considered as acting upon events. I do not argue that the struggle to maintain capitalist global hegemony explains everything about world politics or even everything about US foreign policy. However, it does explain quite a lot—so it is time we become aware of it and be willing to speak its name.
International capitalism is not the only consideration but it is the most crucial one. We do not have to stay transfixed upon it, but we ought to give some consideration to the role played by moneyed protagonists in international politics. If policymakers give such serious consideration to the global interests of their super rich financial class, might not we also?
It is a passion among certain academics to claim authorship to nuanced perceptions, that is, perceptions of many complexities. These complexities often turn out to be just so much polished evasion, whose primary function is to deny consideration of powerful economic factors. If such opinion makers really want to portray political life in all its manifold complexities, then we might expect that they be less studiously reticent about the immense realities of economic imperialism. They might consider how the process of global capitalist domination assumes many dimensions, including the economic realm as well as the political, military, and cultural.
The existence of other variables such as nationalism, militarism, the search for national security, and the pursuit of power and hegemonic dominance compels us neither to dismiss economic realities nor to treat these other variables as insulated from moneyed interests. Thus, to argue that US rulers intervene in one or another region not because of economic interests but for strategic reasons may sound to some like a more nuanced view, but in most cases, empirical examination shows that the desire to extend US strategic power is impelled at least in part by a desire to stabilize the area along lines that are favorable to political-economic elite interests—which is usually why the region becomes a focus of concern in the first place.
Various considerations are not mutually exclusive but work upon each other. The growth in overseas investments invites a need for military protection, just as military interventions open opportunities for overseas investment and the expansion of free market production in new parts of the world. All this, in turn, creates a need to secure bases and establish alliances with other nations. The alliances now expand the defense perimeter that must be maintained. So a particular country not only becomes an “essential” asset in the support of US defenses but must itself be defended, like any other asset.
To repeat, US leaders may have other concerns, such as advancing their nation’s prestige, maintaining national security against potentially competing (capitalist and noncapitalist) nations, developing strategic military superiority, distracting the American public from domestic problems and scandals, advancing the heroic macho image of the president, and the like. But these purposes almost always dovetail with dominant capitalist interests, or certainly do not challenge those interests in any serious way. No US president, for instance, would ever think of promoting his (or her) macho image by heroically supporting the cause of socialist revolution in this or any other country.
The point is not that nations act imperialistically for purely material motives but that the ideological and psychic motives, embraced with varying degrees of sincerity by individual policymakers, unfailingly serve the systemic interests of the dominant moneyed class. In short, US political-corporate elites have long struggled to make the world safe for transnational capital accumulation; to attain control of the markets, lands, natural resources, and cheap labor of all countries; and to prevent the emergence of revolutionary socialist, populist, or even nationalist régimes that refuse to submit to this arrangement.
To achieve global hegemony, a global military machine is essential. The goal is to create a world populated by vassals (known also as “client states”) and compliant populations completely open to transnational corporate penetration, on terms that are completely favorable to the transnationals. It is not too much to conclude that such a policy is produced not by dumb coincidence but by conscious effort and deliberate design.