Year 501 Copyright © 1993 by Noam Chomsky. Published by South End Press.
Chapter 7: World Orders Old and New: Latin America Segment 2/17
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2. "The Welfare of the World Capitalist System"

The New World Order of 1945 is sometimes described with considerable candor in mainstream scholarship. A highly-regarded study of US-Brazilian relations by the senior historian of the CIA, Gerald Haines, opens frankly: "Following World War II the United States assumed, out of self-interest, responsibility for the welfare of the world capitalist system." He could have gone on to quote the 1948 CIA memorandum on "the colonial economic interests" of our Western European allies, or George Kennan's call for reopening Japan's "Empire toward the South," among other analyses reflecting real interests.4

"American leaders tried to reshape the world to fit U.S. needs and standards," Haines continues. It was to be an "open world" -- open to exploitation by the rich, but not completely open even to them. The US desired a "closed hemispheric system in an open world," Haines explains, following Latin Americanist David Green, who had described the system "formalized" after World War II as "A closed hemisphere in an open world." It was to be a world closed to others in regions already controlled by the US or held to be of critical importance (Latin America and the Middle East), and open where US dominance had not been established. Haines's phrase captures the vaunted principle of the Open Door in its doctrinally approved sense: What we have (if it is important enough), we keep; elsewhere, open access to all. The operative principle was articulated by the State Department in 1944 in a memorandum called "Petroleum Policy of the United States." The US then dominated Western Hemisphere production, which was to remain the largest in the world for another quarter century. That system must remain closed, the memorandum declared, while the rest of the world must be open. US policy "would involve the preservation of the absolute position presently obtaining, and therefore vigilant protection of existing concessions in United States hands coupled with insistence upon the Open Door principle of equal opportunity for United States companies in new areas."5

That Latin America would be ours is an expectation that goes back to the earliest days of the Republic, given an early form in the Monroe Doctrine. The intentions were articulated plainly and illustrated consistently in action. It is hard to improve upon the formulation by Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, which the President found "unanswerable" though "impolitic" to state openly:

In its advocacy of the Monroe Doctrine the United States considers its own interests. The integrity of other American nations is an incident, not an end. While this may seem based on selfishness alone, the author of the Doctrine had no higher or more generous motive in its declaration.
With some reason, Bismarck had described the Monroe Doctrine in 1898 as a "species of arrogance, peculiarly American and inexcusable."

Wilson's predecessor, President Taft, had foreseen that "the day is not far distant" when "the whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally." Given the awesome power that the US had achieved by the mid-1940s, Washington saw no reason to tolerate any interference in "our little region over here" (Stimson).6

In the global order of 1945, Haines continues, the goal was "to eliminate all foreign competition" from Latin America. The US undertook to displace its French, British, and Canadian rivals so as "to maintain the area as an important market for U.S. surplus industrial production and private investments, to exploit its vast reserves of raw materials, and to keep international communism out." Here the term "communist" is to be understood in its usual technical sense: those who appeal to "the poor people [who] have always wanted to plunder the rich," in John Foster Dulles's phrase. Plans were similar for the Middle East, to which the US extended the Monroe Doctrine after World War II, with enormous consequences for southern Europe, North Africa, and the region itself.

Though Haines happens to be concentrating on the richest and most important country of Latin America, the conclusions generalize. In Brazil, he writes, the US worked to prevent economic nationalism and what the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations called "excessive industrial development" -- that is, development that might compete with US corporations; competition with foreign capital was not "excessive," therefore allowed. That US demand had been imposed on the hemisphere generally by February 1945, as already discussed (chapter 2.1).

What was new in these priorities was the scale, not the character. The intent of the prewar Good Neighbor programs, David Green writes, was "to stimulate a certain diversification of Latin American production in the expectation that the Latin Americans would find ready markets in the hemisphere; [but] such diversification was to be limited to products not competitive with existing lines of production in already established Western Hemisphere markets," meaning in practice US lines of production. The proposals of the Inter-American Advisory Commission called for the US to absorb Latin American imports so as to enhance "the development of Latin America's capacity for purchasing more United States manufactures" (Green's emphasis). The earliest projects of the US-dominated inter-American agencies "were all of a consumer-goods rather than a producer goods variety." The purpose "was certainly not to cut into the United States' `share' of exports to Latin America," specifically "machinery and heavy industry exports."


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4 Haines, Americanization; Leffler, Preponderance, 258, 339. Ch. 2.2.

5 Cited by Kolko, Politics, 302f. Green, Containment, ch. 11. The situation is more complex; see ch. 2.2.

6 See TTT, ch. 2.3. Bismarck quoted by Nancy Mitchell, ms., SAIS, Johns Hopkins, 1991, forthcoming in Prologue. Stimson, p. 42, above.