Power, Profit and Prestige , livre ebook

Power, Profit and Prestige
POWER, PROFIT AND PRESTIGE
A History of American Imperial Expansion
Philip S. Golub
First published 2010 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © Philip S. Golub 2010
The right of Philip S. Golub to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN 978 0 7453 2872 0    Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 2871 3    Paperback ISBN 978 1 7837 1729 3    ePub ISBN 978 1 7837 1730 9    Mobi
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Contents

List of Tables
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations 1 . Introduction   Expansionist Behaviour   A Historical Sociological Approach   Theorising American Empire   An Indeterminate Future   Structure of the Book 2. The American Empire in its World Historical Setting   A Plural and Polycentric World Economy   The Distinctiveness of Western Global Expansion   Globalisation and War   The United States in the Transatlantic Imperial System 3. A Taste of Blood in the Jungle: The Late Nineteenth Century   The US: ‘An Active Unit’   Overseas Imperialism   Inter-Imperial Links and Rivalries   Wilson, Liberal Internationalism and Ultra-Imperialism 4. The Hierarchies of Pax Americana   Supplanting Britain   The Tripartite Imperial System   Europe: The Hegemonic Frontier   Authoritarian Mercantilism: The East Asian Frontier   Disciplining the Far Empire 5. Power and Plenty in the Post-Cold War   The Imperium Bellicum Americanum   Averting Decline   Actor Designs and Structural Constraints   Post-Cold War Options   The Liberal Interlude 6. Striving for Global Monopoly   A Broad Ideational Trend   Global Expansionism and Nationalism   Limitless Goals   Liberal Imperialism, Colonial Representations 7. Losing Control   War and Globalisation   The Crisis of American Power   Accentuating Centrifugal Trends   China’s Emerging Role   Challenge to US Dominance 8. Conclusion: Order, Hierarchy and Pluralism   Imperial Cosmologies   Logic of World Power   Pathways of Change   Long Exit from Empire   Pluralist Cooperation

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
List of Tables
2.1 World Population by Region, 1750–1900 2.2 Share of World Manufacturing, 1750–1900 2.3 Per Capita GNP, 1750–1995 3.1 Overseas Imperial Interventions, 1846–1868 3.2 Share of World Manufacturing: Industrial Countries 3.3 GNP per Capita, 1800–1913 5.1 US Defence Spending as a Share of World Spending 6.1 US National Defence Expenditures, 1940–2009 7.1 Major Foreign Holders of US Treasury Securities
List of Figures
3.1 Expansion of the British and American Empires from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries 5.1 US Military Personnel 5.2 Military Bases of the United States 7.1 Asia Share of World GDP (PPP)
Acknowledgements

This book, the expression of a lifelong ethical and intellectual concern over the inequities of power, was made possible by the many friends and intellectual companions who were kind enough to support the project from the start. My debts are many and I would like to particularly thank Kees Van der Pijl, Ronen Palan, Jean-Christophe Graz, Jean-Paul Maréchal, Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Christopher Newfield and Richard Falk for having in various ways offered their encouragement as well as always useful critical comments. Thanks are also due to Wendy Kristianasen for her friendship and constant support, to Philippe Rekacewicz for his cartographic talents, Danielle Brunon for her generosity and to Thomas Stevens and Claude Albert for their help on the manuscript. The many interviewees who over the years offered me their time, knowledge and insights also deserve thanks. Above all, though it be ‘too little payment for so great a debt’, my thanks to Noelle Kyriazi Burgi, my life companion and intellectual accomplice, without whom none of this would have been possible.
Abbreviations
ABF Asian Bond Fund ABM Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty ACU Asian Currency Unit AMF Asian Monetary Fund ASEAN Association of South East Asian Nations CBRC China Banking Regulatory Commission CFR Council on Foreign Relations CIA Central Intelligence Agency CRS Congressional Research Service DESTIN Development Studies Institute (London School of Economics) DOD Department of Defense DOL Department of Labor DPG Defense Planning Guideline EROA Economic Recovery in Occupied Areas ERP European Recovery Program FDI Foreign Direct Investment FIRE Finance, Insurance, Real Estate FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States GCC Gulf Cooperation Council HST Hegemonic Stability Theory IBSA India, Brazil and South Africa ILO International Labour Organization IMF International Monetary Fund JIC Joint Intelligence Committee JPY Japanese yen NACLA North American Congress on Latin America NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation NBER National Bureau of Economic Research NEC National Economic Council NIC National Intelligence Council NSA National Security Archive NSS National Security Strategy OECD Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development OPEC Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries PNAC Project for a New American Century PPP Purchasing Power Parity QDR Quadrennial Defense Review SIPRI Stockholm International Peace Research Institute UN United Nations UNASUR Union of South American Nations UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and Development UNSC United Nations Security Council WB World Bank WEF World Economic Forum WTO World Trade Organization
1
Introduction

This historical sociological study of American expansionism was begun a few years ago to account for the puzzling monopoly-seeking behaviour of the United States in the early years of the twenty-first century. It was completed in the midst of the breakdown of the US financial system and the most severe global economic crisis since the 1930s. While national and international regulatory authorities have managed, at least for the moment, to avert a cataclysmic collapse thanks to counter-cyclical interventions of unprecedented scope, the crisis has brought about a sharp decline of world output, of international trade and of transnational capital flows. The most developed economies have experienced severe economic contractions, leading to a compression of global demand affecting ‘emerging’ countries, many of which rely on the export of a narrow range of commodities and/or industrial goods to sustain growth. Locked into dependency relations with dominant markets, many smaller emerging countries and many countries in transition are hovering on the edge of bankruptcy. Worldwide unemployment and underemployment have risen sharply, generating what the International Labour Organization (ILO) has called a ‘global jobs crisis’. The situation is certainly not as dire as the early 1930s, at the economic, social or political levels. Nonetheless, in the absence of universally recognised sources of authority and empowered institutions of global governance, economic disintegration is accentuating fragmentation along national lines as rulers, sitting on top of simmering social volcanoes, respond to the increasingly urgent demands of society for protection from the destructive gales of the world market. It is too early to tell how far disintegration will go. What is quite clear, however, is that late twentieth-century American-centred globalisation, simply if summarily defined as the creation of a borderless, integrated and interdependent world capitalist economy, has begun to fray.
The crisis, which is universal in scope, marks a historical reversal of the process of economic internationalisation that occurred after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It coterminously represents a major setback for the United States. Coming on top of the Bush administration’s failed imperial wars and its methodical effort to deconstruct the international legal and political order established in 1944–1945, which eroded American political legitimacy, the worldwide disruption caused by the breakdown of the American financial system has deeply undermined the US’ historical claim to world economic leadership. It is no longer in a position, as it was in the 1990s, to define the norms and frameworks of economic behaviour, much less to assert the coincidence of national and universal interests. These dimensions of the present world crisis are inextricably linked. While the power political aims of the state and the deterritorialised logic of capital are not always congruent, intertwining as David Harvey puts it ‘in complex and sometimes contradictory ways’, 1 late twentieth-century globalisation was driven by the coincidence of visions and interests of transnational firms, the multilateral institutions and the American state. This was evidenced in a common agenda to tear down the last remaining barriers to free capital flows (the now defunct ‘Washington Consensus’) and establish a hegemonic model of economic and social behaviour. Seeking universal reach, transnational capital required the power and authority of the American state to lift residual