5. After the Cold War

There is little reason to expect that "the great work of subjugation and conquest" will change in any fundamental way with the passing of the Cold War phase of the North-South conflict. But as always, stable policies must be adapted to changing contingencies, as they were when a New World Order was established in 1945, and again when Richard Nixon announced his "New Economic Policy" in 1971, in both cases, reflecting real changes in the distribution of power. The Soviet decline that accelerated from the late 1970s yields a situation that is also new in a number of respects, though major tendencies persist, including the internationalization of production and finance, the disorders of the affluent alliance, the relative weakening of the still-dominant US economy, and the marginalization of much of the domestic public of the world-dominant societies.

One consequence of the Soviet collapse is the project of imposing the neoliberal mode of subordination on large parts of the region. A second is that new pretexts are needed for intervention. Despite much bombast, the problem of the vanishing pretext was recognized through the 1980s. The population was therefore regaled with international terrorists, Hispanic narcotraffickers, Islamic fundamentalists, crazed Arabs, and other useful constructions, as attempts were made to adapt the standard formula for diverting and subduing the public: fear of some Great Satan, followed by awe as our Grand Leaders heroically overcome him and march on to new triumphs. Regular confrontations were manufactured with the convenient Libyan punching bag; Grenada was about to cut off sea lines and bomb us from a Cuban-built airbase; Sandinistas were spreading their "revolution without borders" and advancing on Texas; Noriega (after he was fired) was leading the Colombian cartel to poison our children; Saddam Hussein stepped out of line and became the Beast of Baghdad, etc. But in general, as the variety of targets illustrates, the formula is not available as routinely as before. President Bush has been criticized for his failure to formulate grand designs in the manner of his predecessors, but that is unfair, given the disappearance of the "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy" to which JFK could appeal, and its variants. The standard formula may lose its effectiveness for other reasons too, as conditions of life decline for the superfluous population.

Other consequences were pointed out forthrightly by rational analysts. In a 1988 end-of-year analysis of the Cold War in the New York Times, Dimitri Simes wrote that the impending disappearance of the Soviet enemy offers the US three advantages: first, we can shift NATO costs to European competitors; second, we can end "the manipulation of America by third world nations," "resist unwarranted third world demands for assistance," and strike a harder bargain with "defiant third world debtors"; and third, military power can be used more freely "as a United States foreign policy instrument...against those who contemplate challenging important American interests," with no fear of "triggering counterintervention," the deterrent having been removed. In brief, the US can regain some power within the rich men's club, tighten the screws on the Third World, and resort more freely to violence against defenseless victims. The senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was right on target.³⁰

The fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 can be taken as the symbolic end of the Cold War. After that, it took real dedication to conjure up the Soviet threat, though habits die slowly. Thus, in early 1990, much excitement was generated by a document published anonymously by University of California Sovietologist Martin Malia, railing about how Brezhnev had "intervened at will throughout the Third World" and "Russia bestrode the world" while "the liberal-to-radical mainstream of Anglo-American Sovietology" regarded Stalinism as having "a democratic cast," indulging in "blatant fantasies...about democratic Stalinism" and "puerile fetishization of Lenin," along with a host of similar insights apparently picked up in some Paris café. But in the 1990s, only the most disciplined minds can handle this kind of fare with appropriate gravity.³¹

Much can be learned about the Cold War era by observing what happened after the Berlin wall fell. The case of Cuba is instructive. For 170 years, the US has sought to prevent Cuban independence. From 1959, the pretext for invasion, terror, and economic warfare was the security threat posed by this outpost of the Kremlin. With the threat gone, the reaction was uniform: we must step up the attack. The banner is now democracy and human rights, upheld by political leaders and moralists who have demonstrated their commitment to these values with such integrity over the years, for example, during the murderous US crusade against the Church and others who dared organize the undeserving public in Central America through the 1980s. It would not be easy to invent a clearer demonstration of the fraudulence of the Cold War pretext; being doctrinally unacceptable, the conclusions remain invisible (see chapter 6).

US opposition to Haitian independence for two centuries also continued, quite independently of the Cold War. Events of the 1980s, notably after the fall of the Berlin wall, also illustrate with much clarity traditional US distaste for democracy and indifference to human rights. We return to details (chapter 8).

Another instructive example is Saddam Hussein, a favored friend and trading partner of the West right through his worst atrocities. As the Berlin wall was tottering in October 1989, the White House intervened directly, in a highly secret meeting, to ensure that Iraq would receive another $1 billion in loan guarantees, overcoming Treasury and Commerce department objections that Iraq was not creditworthy. The reason, the State Department explained, was that Iraq was "very important to US interests in the Middle East"; it was "influential in the peace process" and was "a key to maintaining stability in the region, offering great trade opportunities for US companies." As is the norm, Saddam Hussein's crimes were of no account until he committed the crime of disobedience. And the West soon returned to tacit support for him against an even greater enemy, freedom and democracy in the Third World, as already discussed.³²

Again the lesson is clear: the priorities are profits and power; democracy in more than form is a threat to be overcome; human rights are of instrumental value for propaganda purposes, nothing more.

³⁰ Simes, NYT, Dec. 27, 1988. For further detail, see DD, 97f.

³¹ See Daedalus, Winter 1990; NYT, Jan. 4, Aug. 31, 1990. DD, 61, for more.

³² Lionel Barber and Alan Friedman, FT (London), May 3, 1991. Serious mainstream coverage of the topic in the US began with the Los Angeles Times, Feb. 23, 25, 26, 1992. On information available before the invasion of Kuwait, often ignored in the mainstream, see DD, 152, 194f.