Let us recapitulate some of the key points previously presented. US rulers are committed to maintaining “overwhelming unilateral global military dominance.”1 While claiming to be motivated by a dedication to human rights and democracy, US rulers have armed, trained, and financed some of the most notorious right-wing autocracies in history.
The overall aim is to promote a global order dedicated to private ownership of the world’s financial and industrial wealth, expropriation of its natural resources, and advantageous control of its consumer and labor markets. This is a world where the gap between the wealthy few and the many poor grows ever greater, where the masses are experiencing a drastic decline in living standards.2 The goal is a world composed totally of exploitative, repressive, free market countries like Indonesia, Nigeria, and Haiti rather than prosperous social democracies like Finland, Sweden, or Denmark (whatever their respective flaws). Thus far the empire builders have been quite successful.
Even the relatively prosperous social democracies of Western Europe and Scandinavia, with their generous benefits and high wages, may find it increasingly difficult to compete in an international market ruled by laissez-faire free trade agreements and crowded with an additional 1.47 billion workers injected into the global low-wage labor market over the past two decades from China, India, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union.3
Some of the liberal cognoscenti are never happier than when they can patronizingly dilate on the malapropisms and “stupidity” of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, or other unlettered imperial policymakers. What I have tried to show is that US rulers have been neither retarded nor misdirected nor inept. To be sure, the 2003 invasion of Iraq sank into a quagmire not long after Bush announced “mission accomplished.” At the operational level his administration made gross miscalculations. This means the imperialists are fallible but not mindless, strong but not omnipotent.
As we have seen, nations that chart a self-defining course, seeking to use their land, labor, natural resources, and markets as they see fit, free from the smothering embrace of the free market global order, are designated as enemies of the United States or a threat to “US national interests.” Their leaders often have their moral sanity called into question, as has been the case at one time or another with Fidel Castro of Cuba, Manuel Noriega of Panama, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya, Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, Slo-bodan Milošević of Yugoslavia, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and others.
When US policymakers keep providing new and different explanations to justify a particular action, they most likely are lying. When people keep changing their story, you can be fairly sure it’s a story. This means that they are being not stupid but deceptive. So it is with most imperial policies.
As I have argued in this book, US global policy has been ruthlessly rational. Rather than deploring its failures, we should be deploring its successes because these “successes” do not represent the interests of the American people or the people of the world. We should spend less time talking about how “stupid” and “short-sighted” US foreign policy has been and more time exposing how successfully driven it is on behalf of the international plutocracy. Only then might we be able to change course.