COMMITTEES OF CORRESPONDENCE FOR DEMOCRACY AND SOCIALISM

SOCIALIST EDUCATION PROJECT

MODULE 2

“Imperialism, Geopolitics, and United States Foreign Policy”

Table of Contents

Introduction

1.Michael Parenti, “Imperialism 101.”

2.Harry Targ, “The Open Door, Neoliberalism, and U.S. Foreign Policy.”

3.Michael Klare, “The New Geopolitics.”

4.Jim Lobe, “ ‘New American Century’ Project Ends With a Whimper.”

5.Noam Chomsky, “Latin America and Asia at Last Breaking Free of Washington’s Grip.”

6.Phyllis Bennis, “Thinking Strategically: Challenges Facing the Ant-War Movement”

Introduction

Mainstream analysts of United States foreign policy usually argue that the U.S. is motivated by humane motives in its international relations. Whether they say the United States is promoting freedom, or democracy, or economic development, or Christian values, they categorically reject any hint that the U.S. pursues empire. Many writers, and politicians, see the U.S. as special, agreeing with former President Reagan’s claim that it was “the city on the hill.” For some pundits the U.S. makes mistakes but the basic motives for policy are pure.

Progressives portray U.S. foreign policy as driven by economic and political institutions and interests, not high moral principles. Since the rise in protest against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s analysts revisited the theory of imperialism and reexamined the workings of the capitalist system to discover why the U.S. seemed always to be invading, undermining, subverting, or boycotting other countries. These theorists defended the unpopular proposition that the United States, not the former Soviet Union, was responsible for the Cold War.

More recently, some critics of U.S. foreign policy have diagnosed the ideology of the “free market”, neoliberalism, in conjunction with the drive for profit to better understand the U.S. pursuit of empire. In addition, others have emphasized the U.S. drive for geopolitical control, particularly of scarce resources such as oil, as a critical motivator for policy. And, finally, commentators have argued that recent U.S. foreign policy toward the Persian Gulf and East Asia has been shaped by the most militarist sector of the ruling class, the neoconservatives.

Whatever the combination of causes of U.S. foreign policy: the pursuit of empire has been fraught with impediments. Other countries, particularly in the Global South, have begun to resist U.S. global hegemony. And, there has emerged in the United States and Europe a large anti-war movement, which is beginning to impact on public opinion concerning the war on Iraq.

The literature in this module examines the theory of imperialism as it relates to U.S. foreign policy; the historic drive to create a global political economy amenable to capitalist expansion; the connections between imperialism and territorial and resource control; and finally the rise of international and domestic resistance to imperialism.

The following questions may be useful for discussion.

1.Does the theory of imperialism explain United States foreign policy? Why or why not?

2.Is the claim that the United States has pursued the policy of the “Open Door” since the 1890s correct? Why or why not?

3.Is the pursuit of geopolitical control a satisfying explanation for U.S. foreign policy?

4.What role has oil played in U.S. foreign policy?

5.Is the resistance of other nations to U.S. foreign policy significant or is U.S. hegemony just too great to be tamed or defeated?

6.Does the declining support for the war in Iraq, as measured by polling, represent a tangible shift in the thinking and politics of the American people?

Additional Readings:

William Blum, Killing Hope: United States Interventions in the Third World Since World War II.

David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy 1945-54.

Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire.

James Mann, The Vulcans.

William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.

Books by Arundhoti Roy, Phyllis Bennis, and Noam Chomsky,

This article is from: http://www.michaelparenti.org/Imperialism101.html

“Imperialism 101”

Against Empire

Chapter 1

Michael Parenti

Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries, carving up whole continents while oppressing indigenous peoples and obliterating entire civilizations. Yet, it is seldom accorded any serious attention by our academics, media commentators, and political leaders. When not ignored outright, the subject of imperialism has been sanitized, so that empires become "commonwealths," and colonies become "territories" or "dominions" (or, as in the case of Puerto Rico, "commonwealths" too). Imperialist military interventions become matters of "national defense," "national security," and maintaining "stability" in one or another region. In this book I want to look at imperialism for what it really is.

Across the Entire Globe

By "imperialism" I mean the process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land,labor, raw materials, and markets of another people.

The earliest victims of Western European imperialism were other Europeans. Some 800 years ago, Ireland became the first colony of what later became known as the British empire. A part of Ireland still remains under British occupation. Other early Caucasian victims included the Eastern Europeans. The people Charlemagne worked to death in his mines in the early part of the ninth century were Slavs. So frequent and prolonged was the enslavement of Eastern Europeans that "Slav" became synonymous with servitude. Indeed, the word "slave" derives from "Slav." Eastern Europe was an early source of capital accumulation, having become wholly dependent upon Western manufactures by the seventeenth century.

A particularly pernicious example of intra-European imperialism was the Nazi aggression during World War II, which gave the German business cartels and the Nazi state an opportunity to plunder the resources and exploit the labor of occupied Europe, including the slave labor of concentration camps.

The preponderant thrust of the European, North American, and Japanese imperial powers has been directed against Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By the nineteenth century, they saw the Third World as not only a source of raw materials and slaves but a market for manufactured goods. By the twentieth century, the industrial nations were exporting not only goods but capital, in the form of machinery, technology, investments, and loans.

To say that we have entered the stage of capital export and investment is not to imply that the plunder of natural resources has deceased. If anything, the despoliation has accelerated.

Of the various notions about imperialism circulating today in the United States, the dominant view is that it does not exist. Imperialism is not recognized as a legitimate concept, certainly not in regard to the United States. One may speak of "Soviet imperialism" or "nineteenth-century British imperialism" but not of U.S. imperialism. A graduate student in political science at most universities in this country would not be granted the opportunity to research U.S. imperialism, on the grounds that such an undertaking would not be scholarly. While many people throughout the world charge the United States with being an imperialist power, in this country persons who talk of U.S. imperialism are usually judged to be mouthing ideological blather.

The Dynamic of Capital Expansion

Imperialism is older than capitalism. The Persian, Macedonian, Roman, and Mongol empires all existed centuries before the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. Emperors and conquistadors were interested mostly in plunder and tribute, gold and glory. Capitalist imperialism differs from these earlier forms in the way it systematically accumulates capital through the organized exploitation of labor and the penetration of overseas markets.

Capitalist imperialism invests in other countries, transforming and dominating their economies, cultures, and political life, integrating their financial and productive structures into an international system of capital accumulation.

A central imperative of capitalism is expansion. Investors will not put their money into business ventures unless they can extract more than they invest. Increased earnings come only with a growth in the enterprise. The capitalist ceaselessly searches for ways of making more money in order to make still more money. One must always invest to realize profits, gathering as much strength as possible in the face of competing forces and unpredictable markets.

Given its expansionist nature, capitalism has little inclination to stay home. Almost 150 years ago, Marx and Engels described a bourgeoisie that "chases over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.. . . It creates a world after its own image." The expansionists destroy whole societies. Self-sufficient peoples are forcibly transformed into disfranchised wage workers. Indigenous communities and folk cultures are replaced by mass-market, mass-media, consumer societies. Cooperative lands are supplanted by agribusiness factory farms, villages by desolate shanty towns, autonomous regions by centralized autocracies.

Consider one of a thousand such instances. A few years ago the Los Angeles Times carried a special report on the rainforests of Borneo in the South Pacific. By their own testimony, the people there lived contented lives. They hunted, fished, and raised food in their jungle orchards and groves. But their entire way of life was ruthlessly wiped out by a few giant companies that destroyed the rainforest in order to harvest the hardwood for quick profits. Their lands were turned into ecological disaster areas and they themselves were transformed into disfranchised shantytown dwellers, forced to work for subsistence wages--when fortunate enough to find employment.

North American and European corporations have acquired control of more than three-fourths of the known mineral resources of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But the pursuit of natural resources is not the only reason for capitalist overseas expansion. There is the additional need to cut production costs and maximize profits by investing in countries with cheaper labor markets. U.S. corporate foreign investment grew 84 percent from 1985 to 1990, the most dramatic increase being in cheap-labor countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Spain, and Singapore.

Because of low wages, low taxes, nonexistent work benefits, weak labor unions, and nonexistent occupational and environmental protections, U.S. corporate profit rates in the Third World are 50 percent greater than in developed countries. Citibank, one of the largest U.S. firms, earns about 75 percent of its profits from overseas operations. While profit margins at home sometimes have had a sluggish growth, earnings abroad have continued to rise dramatically, fostering the development of what has become known as the multinational or transnational corporation. Today some four hundred transnational companies control about 80 percent of the capital assets of the global free market and are extending their grasp into the ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe.

Transnationals have developed a global production line. General Motors has factories that produce cars, trucks and a wide range of auto components in Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, Spain, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Nigeria, Singapore, Philippines, South Africa, South Korea and a dozen other countries. Such "multiple sourcing" enables GM to ride out strikes in one country by stepping up production in another, playing workers of various nations against each other in order to discourage wage and benefit demands and undermine labor union strategies.

Not Necessary, Just Compelling

Some writers question whether imperialism is a necessary condition for capitalism, pointing out that most Western capital is invested in Western nations, not in the Third World. If corporations lost all their Third World investments, they argue, many of them could still survive on their European and North American markets. In response, one should note that capitalism might be able to survive without imperialism--but it shows no inclination to do so. It manifests no desire to discard its enormously profitable Third World enterprises. Imperialism may not be a necessary condition for investor survival but it seems to be an inherent tendency and a natural outgrowth of advanced capitalism. Imperial relations may not be the only way to pursue profits, but they are the most lucrative way.

Whether imperialism is necessary for capitalism is really not the question. Many things that are not absolutely necessary are still highly desirable, therefore strongly preferred and vigorously pursued. Overseas investors find the Third World's cheap labor, vital natural resources, and various other highly profitable conditions to be compellingly attractive.

Superprofits may not be necessary for capitalism's survival but survival is not all that capitalists are interested in. Superprofits are strongly preferred to more modest earnings. That there may be no necessity between capitalism and imperialism does not mean there is no compelling linkage.

The same is true of other social dynamics. For instance, wealth does not necessarily have to lead to luxurious living. A higher portion of an owning class's riches could be used for investment rather personal consumption. The very wealthy could survive on more modest sums but that is not how most of them prefer to live. Throughout history, wealthy classes generally have shown a preference for getting the best of everything. After all, the whole purpose of getting rich off other people's labor is to live well, avoiding all forms of thankless toil and drudgery, enjoying superior opportunities for lavish life-styles, medical care, education, travel, recreation, security, leisure, and opportunities for power and prestige. While none of these things are really "necessary," they are fervently clung to by those who possess them--as witnessed by the violent measures endorsed by advantaged classes whenever they feel the threat of an equalizing or leveling democratic force.

Myths of Underdevelopment

The impoverished lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are known to us as the "Third World," to distinguish them from the "First World" of industrialized Europe and North America and the now largely defunct "Second World" of communist states. Third World poverty, called "underdevelopment," is treated by most Western observers as an original historic condition. We are asked to believe that it always existed, that poor countries are poor because their lands have always been infertile or their people unproductive. In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals and other natural resources. That is why the Europeans went through all the trouble to steal and plunder them.

One does not go to poor places for self-enrichment. The Third World is rich. Only its people are poor--and it is because of the pillage they have endured.

The process of expropriating the natural resources of the Third World began centuries ago and continues to this day. First, the colonizers extracted gold, silver, furs, silks, and spices, then flax, hemp, timber, molasses, sugar, rum, rubber, tobacco, calico, cocoa, coffee, cotton, copper, coal, palm oil, tin, iron, ivory, ebony, and later on, oil, zinc, manganese, mercury, platinum, cobalt, bauxite, aluminum, and uranium. Not to be overlooked is that most hellish of all expropriations: the abduction of millions of human beings into slave labor.

Through the centuries of colonization, many self-serving imperialist theories have been spun. I was taught in school that people in tropical lands are slothful and do not work as hard as we denizens of the temperate zone. In fact, the inhabitants of warm climates have performed remarkably productive feats, building magnificent civilizations well before Europe emerged from the Dark Ages. And today they often work long, hard hours for meager sums. Yet the early stereotype of the "lazy native" is still with us. In every capitalist society, the poor--both domestic and overseas--regularly are blamed for their own condition.

We hear that Third World peoples are culturally retarded in their attitudes, customs, and technical abilities. It is a convenient notion embraced by those who want to depict Western investments as a rescue operation designed to help backward peoples help themselves. This myth of "cultural backwardness" goes back to ancient times, when conquerors used it to justify enslaving indigenous peoples. It was used by European colonizers over the last five centuries for the same purpose.

What cultural supremacy could by claimed by the Europeans of yore? From the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries Europe was "ahead" in a variety of things, such as the number of hangings, murders, and other violent crimes; instances of venereal disease, smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis, plagues, and other bodily afflictions; social inequality and poverty (both urban and rural); mistreatment of women and children; and frequency of famines, slavery, prostitution, piracy, religious massacres, and inquisitional torture. Those who claim the West has been the most advanced civilization should keep such "achievements" in mind.

More seriously, we might note that Europe enjoyed a telling advantage in navigation and armaments. Muskets and cannon, Gatling guns and gunboats, and today missiles, helicopter gunships, and fighter bombers have been the deciding factors when West meets East and North meets South. Superior firepower, not superior culture, has brought the Europeans and Euro-North Americans to positions of supremacy that today are still maintained by force, though not by force alone.

It was said that colonized peoples were biologically backward and less evolved than their colonizers. Their "savagery" and "lower" level of cultural evolution were emblematic of their inferior genetic evolution. But were they culturally inferior? In many parts of what is now considered the Third World, people developed impressive skills in architecture, horticulture, crafts, hunting, fishing, midwifery, medicine, and other such things. Their social customs were often far more gracious and humane and less autocratic and repressive than anything found in Europe at that time. Of course we must not romanticize these indigenous societies, some of which had a number of cruel and unusual practices of their own. But generally, their peoples enjoyed healthier, happier lives, with more leisure time, than did most of Europe's inhabitants.

Other theories enjoy wide currency. We hear that Third World poverty is due to overpopulation, too many people having too many children to feed. Actually, over the last several centuries, many Third World lands have been less densely populated than certain parts of Europe. India has fewer people per acre--but more poverty--than Holland, Wales, England, Japan, Italy, and a few other industrial countries. Furthermore, it is the industrialized nations of the First World, not the poor ones of the Third, that devour some 80 percent of the world's resources and pose the greatest threat to the planet's ecology.

This is not to deny that overpopulation is a real problem for the planet's ecosphere. Limiting population growth in all nations would help the global environment but it would not solve the problems of the poor--because overpopulation in itself is not the cause of poverty but one of its effects. The poor tend to have large families because children are a source of family labor and income and a support during old age.

Frances Moore Lappe and Rachel Schurman found that of seventy Third World countries, there were six--China, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Chile, Burma, and Cuba--and the state of Kerala in India that had managed to lower their birth rates by one third. They enjoyed neither dramatic industrial expansion nor high per capita incomes nor extensive family planning programs. The factors they had in common were public education and health care, a reduction of economic inequality, improvements in women's rights, food subsidies, and in some cases land reform. In other words, fertility rates were lowered not by capitalist investments and economic growth as such but by socio-economic betterment, even of a modest scale, accompanied by the emergence of women's rights.

Artificially Converted to Poverty

What is called "underdevelopment" is a set of social relations that has been forcefully imposed on countries. With the advent of the Western colonizers, the peoples of the Third World were actually set back in their development sometimes for centuries. British imperialism in India provides an instructive example. In 1810, India was exporting more textiles to England than England was exporting to India. By 1830, the trade flow was reversed. The British had put up prohibitive tariff barriers to shut out indian finished goods and were dumping their commodities in India, a practice backed by British gunboats and military force. Within a matter of years, the great textile centers of Dacca and Madras were turned into ghost towns. The Indians were sent back to the land to raise the cotton used in British textile factories. In effect, India was reduced to being a cow milked by British financiers.

By 1850, India's debt had grown to 53 million pounds. From 1850 to 1900, its per capita income dropped by almost two-thirds. The value of the raw materials and commodities the Indians were obliged to send to Britain during most of the nineteenth century amounted yearly to more than the total income of the sixty million Indian agricultural and industrial workers. The massive poverty we associate with India was not that country's original historical condition. British imperialism did two things: first, it ended India's development, then it forcibly underdeveloped that country.

Similar bleeding processes occurred throughout the Third World. The enormous wealth extracted should remind us that there originally were few really poor nations. Countries like Brazil, Indonesia, Chile, Bolivia,Zaire, Mexico, Malaysia, and the Philippines were and sometimes still are rich in resources. Some lands have been so thoroughly plundered as to be desolate in all respects. However, most of the Third World is not "underdeveloped" but overexploited. Western colonization and investments have created a lower rather than a higher living standard.

Referring to what the English colonizers did to the Irish, Frederick Engels wrote in 1856: "How often have the Irish started out to achieve something, and every time they have been crushed politically and industrially. By consistent oppression they have been artificially converted into an utterly impoverished nation." So with most of the Third World. The Mayan Indians in Guatemala had a more nutritious and varied diet and better conditions of health in the early 16th century before the Europeans arrived than they have today. They had more craftspeople, architects, artisans, and horticulturists than today. What is called underdevelopment is not an original historical condition but a product of imperialism's superexploitation. Underdevelopment is itself a development.

Imperialism has created what I have termed "maldevelopment": modern office buildings and luxury hotels in the capital city instead of housing for the poor, cosmetic surgery clinics for the affluent instead of hospitals for workers, cash export crops for agribusiness instead of food for local markets, highways that go from the mines and latifundios to the refineries and ports instead of roads in the back country for those who might hope to see a doctor or a teacher.

Wealth is transferred from Third World peoples to the economic elites of Europe and North America (and more recently Japan) by direct plunder, by the expropriation of natural resources, the imposition of ruinous taxes and land rents, the payment of poverty wages, and the forced importation of finished goods at highly inflated prices. The colonized country is denied the freedom of trade and the opportunity to develop its own natural resources, markets, and industrial capacity. Self-sustenance and self-employment gives way to wage labor. From 1970 to 1980, the number of wage workers in the Third World grew from 72 million to 120 million, and the rate is accelerating.

Hundreds of millions of Third World peoples now live in destitution in remote villages and congested urban slums, suffering hunger, disease, and illiteracy, often because the land they once tilled is now controlled by agribusiness firms who use it for mining or for commercial export crops such as coffee, sugar, and beef, instead of growing beans, rice, and corn for home consumption. A study of twenty of the poorest countries, compiled from official statistics, found that the number of people living in what is called "absolute poverty" or rockbottom destitution, the poorest of the poor, is rising 70,000 a day and should reach 1.5 billion by the year 2000(San Francisco Examiner, June 8, 1994).

Imperialism forces millions of children around the world to live nightmarish lives, their mental and physical health severely damaged by endless exploitation. A documentary film on the Discovery Channel (April 24, 1994) reported that in countries like Russia, Thailand, and the Philippines, large numbers of minors are sold into prostitution to help their desperate families survive. In countries like Mexico, India, Colombia, and Egypt, children are dragooned into health-shattering, dawn-to-dusk labor on farms and in factories and mines for pennies an hour, with no opportunity for play, schooling, or medical care.

In India, 55 million children are pressed into the work force. Tens of Thousands labor in glass factories in temperatures as high as 100 degrees. In one plant, four-year-olds toil from 5 o'clock in the morning until the dead of night, inhaling fumes and contracting emphysema, tuberculosis, and other respiratory diseases. In the Philippines and Malaysia corporations have lobbied to drop age restrictions for labor recruitment. The pursuit of profit becomes a pursuit of evil.

Development Theory

When we say a country is "underdeveloped," we are implying that it is backward and retarded in some way, that its people have shown little capacity to achieve and evolve. The negative connotations of "underdeveloped" has caused the United Nations, the Wall Street Journal, and parties of various political persuasion to refer to Third World countries as "developing" nations, a term somewhat less insulting than "underdeveloped" but equally misleading. I prefer to use "Third World" because "developing" seems to be just a euphemistic way of saying "underdeveloped but belatedly starting to do something about it." It still implies that poverty was an original historic condition and not something imposed by the imperialists. It also falsely suggests that these countries are developing when actually their economic conditions are usually worsening.

The dominant theory of the last half century, enunciated repeatedly by writers like Barbara Ward and W. W. Rostow and afforded wide currency in the United States and other parts of the Western world, maintains that it is up to the rich nations of the North to help uplift the "backward" nations of the South, bringing them technology and teaching them proper work habits. This is an updated version of "the White man's burden," a favorite imperialist fantasy.

According to the development scenario, with the introduction of Western investments, the backward economic sectors of the poor nations will release their workers, who then will find more productive employment in the modern sector at higher wages. As capital accumulates, business will reinvest its profits, thus creating still more products, jobs, buying power, and markets. Eventually a more prosperous economy evolves.

This "development theory" or "modernization theory," as it is sometimes called, bears little relation to reality. What has emerged in the Third World is an intensely exploitive form of dependent capitalism. Economic Conditions have worsened drastically with the growth of transnational corporate investment. The problem is not poor lands or unproductive populations but foreign exploitation and class inequality. Investors go into a country not to uplift it but to enrich themselves.

People in these countries do not need to be taught how to farm. They need the land and the implements to farm. They do not need to be taught how to fish. They need the boats and the nets and access to shore frontage, bays, and oceans. They need industrial plants to cease dumping toxic effusions into the waters. They do not need to be convinced that they should use hygienic standards. They do not need a Peace Corps Volunteer to tell them to boil their water, especially when they cannot afford fuel or have no access to firewood. They need the conditions that will allow them to have clean drinking water and clean clothes and homes. They do not need advice about balanced diets from North Americans. They usually know what foods best serve their nutritional requirements. They need to be given back their land and labor so that they might work for themselves and grow food for their own consumption.

The legacy of imperial domination is not only misery and strife, but an economic structure dominated by a network of international corporations which themselves are beholden to parent companies based in North America, Europe and Japan. If there is any harmonization or integration, it occurs among the global investor classes, not among the indigenous economies of these countries. Third World economies remain fragmented and unintegrated both between each other and within themselves, both in the flow of capital And goods and in technology and organization. In sum, what we have is a world economy that has little to do with the economic needs of the world's people.

Neoimperialism: Skimming the Cream

Sometimes imperial domination is explained as arising from an innate desire for domination and expansion, a "territorial imperative." In fact, territorial imperialism is no longer the prevailing mode. Compared to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the European powers carved up the world among themselves, today there is almost no colonial dominion left. Colonel Blimp is dead and buried, replaced by men in business suits.

Rather than being directly colonized by the imperial power, the weaker countries have been granted the trappings of sovereignty--while Western finance capital retains control of the lion's share of their profitable resources. This relationship has gone under various names: "informal empire," "colonialism without colonies," "neocolonialism," and "neoimperialism."

U.S. political and business leaders were among the earliest practitioners of this new kind of empire, most notably in Cuba at the beginning of the twentieth century. Having forcibly wrested the island from Spain in the war of 1898, they eventually gave Cuba its formal independence. The Cubans now had their own government, constitution, flag, currency, and security force. But major foreign policy decisions remained in U.S. hands as did the island's wealth, including its sugar, tobacco, and tourist industries, and major imports and exports.

Historically U.S. capitalist interests have been less interested in acquiring more colonies than in acquiring more wealth, preferring to make off with the treasure of other nations without bothering to own and administer the nations themselves. Under neoimperialism, the flag stays home, while the dollar goes everywhere--frequently assisted by the sword.

After World War II, European powers like Britain and France adopted a strategy of neoimperialism. Left financially depleted by years of warfare, and facing intensified popular resistance from within the Third World itself, they reluctantly decided that indirect economic hegemony was less costly and politically more expedient than outright colonial rule. They discovered that the removal of a conspicuously intrusive colonial rule made it more difficult for nationalist elements within the previously colonized countries to mobilize anti-imperialist sentiments.

Though the newly established government might be far from completely independent, it usually enjoyed more legitimacy in the eyes of its populace than a colonial administration controlled by the imperial power. Furthermore, under neoimperialism the native government takes up the costs of administering the country while the imperialist interests are free to concentrate on accumulating capital--which is all they really want to do.

After years of colonialism, the Third World country finds it extremely difficult to extricate itself from the unequal relationship with its former colonizer and impossible to depart from the global capitalist sphere. Those countries that try to make a break are subjected to punishing economic and military treatment by one or another major power, nowadays usually the United States.

The leaders of the new nations may voice revolutionary slogans, yet they find themselves locked into the global capitalist orbit, cooperating perforce with the First World nations for investment, trade, and aid. So we witnessed the curious phenomenon of leaders of newly independent Third World nations denouncing imperialism as the source of their countries' ills, while dissidents in these countries denounced these same leaders as collaborators of imperialism.

In many instances a comprador class emerged or was installed as a first condition for independence. A comprador class is one that cooperates in turning its own country into a client state for foreign interests. A client state is one that is open to investments on terms that are decidedly favorable to the foreign investors. In a client state, corporate investors enjoy direct subsidies and land grants, access to raw materials and cheap labor, light or nonexistent taxes, few effective labor unions, no minimum wage or child labor or occupational safety laws, and no consumer or environmental protections to speak of. The protective laws that do exist go largely unenforced.

In all, the Third World is something of a capitalist paradise, offering Life as it was in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century, with a rate of profit vastly higher than what might be earned today in a country with strong economic regulations. The comprador class is well recompensed for its cooperation. Its leaders enjoy opportunities to line their pockets with the foreign aid sent by the U.S. government.

Stability is assured with the establishment of security forces, armed and trained by the United States in the latest technologies of terror and repression. Still, neoimperialism carries risks. The achievement of de jure independence eventually fosters expectations of de facto Independence. The forms of self rule incite a desire for the fruits of self rule. Sometimes a national leader emerges who is a patriot and reformer rather than a comprador collaborator. Therefore, the changeover from colonialism to neocolonialism is not without risks for the imperialists and represents a net gain for popular forces in the world.

THE OPEN DOOR, NEO-LIBERALISM, AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

(appeared in Northwestern Journal of International Affairs, Autumn, 1999).

Harry R. Targ

Introduction

Social convention and the quest for a new beginning lead analysts to reflect on the century drawing to a close and the prospects for something better happening in the new age. There is no reason why such a project should not address United States foreign policy as well. Revisiting twentieth century U.S. foreign policy is also called for because of the radical changes that occurred just a decade ago in world affairs: the collapse of the socialist bloc and most importantly the Soviet Union.

The comments below therefore address the issue of United States foreign policy in the past, the twentieth century, and the prospects for U.S. policy in the years ahead. Of necessity, such an exercise must come to grips with how to best characterize the underlying features of United States policy over a long time (if that is possible) and the root causes of that policy. In the process, the analysis must estimate the relative similarities or differences in such policy over time.Of particular interest is the assessment of differences and/or similarities in United States foreign policy since the end of the Cold War with prior periods.

Competing Interpretations of United States Foreign Policy

During the height of the Cold War, scholars and political activists intensely debated about the character and justice of United States foreign policy. Three primary frameworks or "schools of thought" evolved to understand, explain, and assess that policy, the fortunes of which have risen and fallen as historical contexts change.

The most popular view of U.S. foreign policy, the "traditional" perspective, was that articulated by policymakers and their friends and supporters over the last fifty years. The United States is understood as a reluctant player on the world stage as it emerged from World War II. As the reality of Soviet and Communist aggression became clear, the U.S. was forced by 1947 to assume the mantle of leadership of the "free world" in the defense against Communism. Whether the threat was the expansionist Soviet state with global conquest in mind or a state driven by a messianic ideology, Marxism, the need for a defender of the free world was clear. From the Truman Doctrine's declaration that the U.S. "must" come to the defense of free peoples against "totalitarianism" to the Reagan Doctrine's call for a worldwide crusade to overturn Communism, that "evil empire," U.S. foreign policy is seen as altruistic, defensive, supportive of freedom and democracy, and morally right.

Most Americans found this explanation compelling and because of the stultifying atmosphere of a post-war American political culture of anti-Communism, alternative perspectives were not often voiced. The so-called "realist" theorists, however, did raise a modest challenge to Cold War orthodoxy. These theorists conceptualized the United States and the Soviet Union as big powers in a nation-state system that breeds hostility, misperception, competing interests, and paranoia. For many of the realists, powerful states will always act to maximize their power and position in the world. When two such big powers faced off against each other, it was inevitable that conflict would result. For Hans Morgenthau the only factor that kept the two powers from direct military confrontation was the existence of powerful new weapons of destruction that guaranteed that no winners would survive a battle.

As the war in Vietnam escalated, a new body of writing gained currency. Inspired by the ground-breaking book by William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, a new school of "revisionist" scholarship emerged. Williams introduced the idea that there was continuity to American foreign policy and that the fundamental policy goal of each administration since the industrial revolution, however it would be applied to particular historical circumstances, was the pursuit of the "Open Door." The "Open Door" policy constituted a fundamental commitment to maximize the capacity of U.S. capitalism to penetrate other countries for immediate economic gain or the prospects of long-term economic gain. Others, inspired by this "Wisconsin School" refined the basic idea and used it to revisit a variety of U.S. policies over a variety of time frames.

The revisionist thesis was sometimes advanced by those who looked with greater specificity at the dynamics and core features of capitalism as an economic, indeed a world, system. Looking back to the dawn of global capitalism, and its founding theoretician, Adam Smith, theorists began to examine the principles of a market economy and a market driven society articulated by its supporters. Human affairs, from the standpoint of what is called "classical liberalism," were governed by the market. The state should play a modest role in society, providing police protection and national defense, while the market generates social welfare for all those who participate in it. The outcome of the competitive struggle in the market place to maximize personal gain was social stability and economic progress. Only when states interfere in the marketplace do societies experience economic decay and political decadence. Most fundamentally for political theory, democracy was equated with the freedom of marketplace transactions.

Therefore, revisionist claims are illuminated by this understanding of the capitalist vision of a market economy. The idea of the "Open Door" is infused with the understanding that capitalist states, such as the United States, seek to create the potential for "market economies" virtually everywhere around the globe and it is this vision that undergirds the Cold War (and post-Cold War) rhetoric about protecting the free world and spreading democracy. Analyzing the rhetoric of the Clinton Administration when it articulates its fundamental premise that U.S. foreign policy must promote "market democracies" around the world, one can see the continuity of such policy with the past, only modified by forces that have resisted the full realization of the goal. What Appleman Williams referred to as the policy of the "Open Door" a long time ago is precisely what analysts outside the United States refer to today as the "neoliberal" policy agenda.

Twentieth Century Contexts and Challenges to the Pursuit of the Open Door

Eric Hobsbawm has argued that the fundamental dimension of conflict shaping the "short twentieth century", 1917 to 1991, was the struggle between socialism and capitalism. He and others date the "Cold War" from 1917 when the Bolsheviks seized state power in Russia and set out to fashion a political and economic order challenging capitalism. The U.S. and other capitalist nations sent troops to Russia to support the counterrevolutionaries in their attempt to overthrow Socialism. This failed but it served as a warning to the new Soviet leaders, and their descendants, that the capitalist countries would forever seek to overthrow their regime.

After World War II, Communist revolutions or transformations of state power occurred in China, Vietnam, and Cuba. Each revolution generated hostility from the United States. Similarly, as Socialist regimes were created out of indigenous political forces or by Soviet occupiers in Eastern Europe, the United States responded with hostility.

Opposition to Communist regimes was matched by opposition to radical nationalist regimes as well. These are regimes that profess their commitment to develop indigenously based economic and political institutions unhindered by foreign interventions. In the post-war period, the United States engineered the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran in 1953 because the Iranian government had seized control of foreign owned oil companies. Jacob Arbenz, president of Guatemala, was ousted from power in a U.S. planned military invasion because his government had nationalized vast landholdings of the powerful United Fruit Company. The United States reacted to what was perceived as radical nationalism (or Communist sympathies) in the Dominican Republic (1965), Jamaica (1972-80), Nicaragua (1979-90), Chile (1970-73), Cuba (since 1959), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Ghana (1966), and Angola, Ethiopia, and the Congo (1960). In short, as with Socialist states, radical nationalist regimes were correctly seen as seeking to establish limits to the economic penetration envisioned by the policy of the Open Door.

The threat to the Open Door was also reflected in the reaction to left political movements at home and abroad. At home, this meant repressing political forces that articulated visions of workers participation in state policymaking. Anti-Communist political culture, so pervasive in the 1940s and 1950s in the U.S., targeted persons and groups who were advocates of policies opposed to the Cold War against the Soviet Union and those who supported militant trade unionism at home. Similarly the U.S. aided allies who were threatened by vibrant leftwing forces at home. Directly after World War II, U.S.policymakers feared the election of Communists to power in Italy and France. Marshall Plan assistance was designed, among other things, to reduce the appeal of Communism in Western Europe.

Finally, the Open Door, from time to time, has been challenged by capitalist competitors of the United States. Directly after World War II, the Commonwealth under British hegemony limited U.S. economic penetration. By the 1970s, Japan played a dominant role in the Asian trade system as did Western Europe in relations with the East and in parts of Africa. By the 1990s, even in the midst of "globalization," U.S, European, and Japanese capital had a presence in their own spheres of influence (Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa, and Asia respectively) thus opening the prospects of regional capitalist hegemons that might restrict U.S. capital penetration.

In sum, the historic context in which U.S. capitalism evolved, grew, flowered, and for a time dominated the world system, was a context of resistance and challenge. Socialist states emerged. Colonized nations achieved their political independence. Some former colonies pursued nationalist economic policies. Leftist movements at home and abroad emerged challenging U.S. capitalist hegemony. Finally, capitalist competitors rose to challenge the economic hegemon. The pursuit of the Open Door, therefore, was constrained and constricted, sometimes challenged, sometimes welcomed, and enforced through economic penetration and military power. This dialectic of expanding penetration around the world and resistance to it explains the history of the United States relationship to the world in the twentieth century.

United States Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Period

President Clinton has argued recently that the United States must be prepared to act anywhere to preserve political stability. In a February, 1999 speech quoted by Michael Klare in The Nation Clinton is supposed to have said:

"It's easy... to say that we really have no interests in who lives in this or that valley in Bosnia, or who owns a strip of brushland in the Horn of Africa, or some piece of patched earth by the Jordan River. But the true measure of our interests lies not in how small or distant these places are, or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names. The question we must ask is, what are the consequences to our security of letting conflicts fester and spread. We cannot, indeed, we should not, do everything or be everywhere. But where our values and our interests are at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so."

Of course, policymakers have recognized for a long time that what the U.S. can choose to do is limited by citizen resistance to another Vietnam-style war which would yield battle casualties. Therefore, they have shifted to high technology push button air wars such as the bombings of Afghanistan, the Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslovia, all within a year's time. The bombing of Iraq has become a permanent, and almost invisible, feature of U.S. foreign policy.

To rationalize defense spending of near Cold War proportions (the 1999 defense budget was $276 billion), defense intellectuals argue that the world is even more scary a place now that the Cold War is over than before. What makes the need for defense spending vital today, they say, is that we do not even know who our enemies are nor the threats that they represent. After all, terrorists could strike the United States with biological weapons, or North Korean missiles could be sent to hit U.S. targets, or Colombian guerrillas could destabilize Latin America and spread drugs throughout North America.

In the current lexicon of the defense intellectuals and policy makers there exist so-called "rogue states". These are the states that refuse to accept norms of international conduct conforming to U.S. values. By coincidence, the designated rogue states, such as Iran or Cuba, or North Korea, seek to control their own political and/or economic institutions.

Contrary to the mystification of arguments about a threatening, unpredictable world or rogue states, policymakers do, from time-to-time, articulate the real goals of policy-the creation and support of so-called "market democracies" around the world.

"Market democracies" is the concept commonly used in the United States to describe what those elsewhere refer to as the "neoliberal" policy agenda. Neoliberalism, is being imposed on virtually every country, by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the G-7 countries (wealthy capitalist states), the World Trade Organization, multinational corporations, and international financial institutions, with money and guns. Neoliberalism consists of a set of policies that require countries to adopt economic policies that radically reduce government programs for people, that privatize public institutions, that eliminate regulations on economic activity (including workplace rules and environmental regulations), and that prioritize agricultural and industrial production for export not domestic consumption. The bottom line requirement of neoliberalism is that countries open up their national economies to free and unfettered penetration by multinational corporations and banks.

Therefore, the neoliberal policy agenda supported by post-Cold War presidents Bush and Clinton constitute an extension, given the current historical context, of the Open Door vision enshrined in U.S. foreign policy at the dawn of the twentieth century. With the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the disintegration of many Socialist states, the collapse of the solidarity of the Non-Aligned Movement of Third World countries, resistance to the Open Door (now neoliberalism) has declined. Thus, President Clinton can confidently proclaim that the U.S. role in the world will be an activist, global, and interventionist one.

Consequences of the Open Door/Neoliberal Policy

Contrary to expectations, the spread of neoliberal economic policies have not stimulated economic development across the face of the globe. The old slogan, "the rising tide lifts all boats," has not occurred. United Nations Development Program data indicates that gaps between rich and poor people and rich and poor nations have grown dramatically from the 1960s to the 1990s. Further, data suggests that one-quarter to one-third of humankind lives in poverty, lacking adequate provisions as to food, health care, water, land, and housing. Many of the former Socialist states that deconstructed from 1989 to 1991 have experienced substantial declines in their gross domestic products and the basic safety nets that characterized living conditions within them. In many countries around the world, unemployment rates run as high as 70 percent and some have estimated that up to forty percent of the working age population in Latin America survives in the informal sector-hustling chiclets, selling basic consumer goods on the street, selling drugs, engaging in prostitution etc.

The frequency of wars, external and internal, have increased on average in the years since the Cold War than before. In 1992 alone there were 34 wars in progress. In 1995, some 15.3 million people were displaced mostly as a result of war and the number of refugees needing shelter, medical care, food, and water has increased by 50 percent in the 1990s over the 1980s.

It is contended here that the United States, as the world's leading economic and military power, bears significant responsibility for these post-Cold War developments, and even if it did not it could use its resources to help reverse the economic devastation and violence. Further, it is claimed that the general foreign policy that underlies the poverty and violence in question is neo-liberalism, the contemporary descendent of the old Open Door vision.

Critics and activists for a new U.S. foreign policy must begin to articulate a convincing alternative: an alternative that respects, encourages and supports economic and political autonomy of countries around the world; that rejects interventionism and militarism; and that relies for policy direction on fully representative international institutions for economic and political leadership.

Ironically, it was just about thirty years ago that the United Nations system provided a public platform for spokespersons from many countries to talk about a New International Economic Order. The NIEO, not revolutionary but reformist, called for the development of rules, regulations, laws, and norms governing the conduct of powerful nations, huge corporations and banks, and international financial institutions. Among these rules would be a set of standards that the international capitalist system would accept to maximize the opportunity of humane economic development and minimize the pain caused by unbridled global capitalism.

The NIEO program made foreign investors and bankers and the international system of trade and investment accountable to the needs of poorer nations and people. Today representatives of powerful nations negotiate the establishment of a Mutual Agreement on Investment (MAI) to radically reduce any limits on the activities of corporations, banks, and rich capitalist countries. The neo-liberal vision is hegemonic and U.S. foreign policy is based upon it. For the long term benefit of its own citizens and citizens of the world that policy and vision has to change.

Bibliography

Michael T. Klare, "The Clinton Doctrine," The Nation, April 19, 1999.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1994.

William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 1961.

This article is available from: http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=9132

POLITICS-US:
"New American Century" Project Ends With A Whimper

Analysis by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jun 12 (IPS) - Is the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which did so much to promote the invasion of Iraq and an Israel-centred "global war on terror", closing down?

In the absence of an official announcement and the failure since late last year of a live person to answer its telephone number, a Washington Post obituary would seem to be definitive. And, sure enough, the Post quoted one unidentified source presumably linked to PNAC that the group was "heading toward closing" with the feeling of "goal accomplished".

In fact, the nine-year-old group, whose 27 founders included Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, among at least half a dozen of the most powerful hawks in the George W. Bush administration's first term, has been inactive since January 2005, when it issued the last of its "statements", an appeal to significantly increase the size of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to cope with the growing demands of the kind of "Pax Americana" it had done so much to promote.

As a platform for the three-part coalition that was most enthusiastic about war in Iraq -- aggressive nationalists like Cheney, Christian Zionists of the religious Right, and Israel-centred neo-conservatives -- PNAC actually began breaking down shortly after the Iraq invasion.

It was then that the group's predominantly neo-conservative leadership -- Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, PNAC director Gary Schmitt, and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace analyst Robert Kagan -- began attacking Rumsfeld, in particular, for failing to deploy enough troops to pacify the country and launch a true nation-building exercise, as in post-World War II Germany and Japan.

It was the first of a number of policy splits that, along with the deepening quagmire in Iraq itself, have debilitated the hawks, forcing neo-conservatives in the group to reach out to liberal interventionists with whom they sponsored a series of joint statements extolling the virtues of nation-building and a larger army, or calling for a tougher U.S. stance toward Russia and China.

PNAC was launched by Kristol and Kagan in 1997, shortly after their publication of an article in Foreign Affairs magazine entitled "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy", in which they called for Washington to exercise "benevolent global hegemony" to be sustained "as far into the future as possible".

While critical of then President Bill Clinton, the article was directed more against a Republican Congress which, in their view, had grown increasingly isolationist, particularly after the precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Somalia in 1994 and strong Republican opposition to intervention in the Balkans against Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

It was in this spirit that the two co-founded PNAC, whose charter was signed by leading neo-conservatives, including Cheney's future chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby; Rumsfeld's future deputy, Paul Wolfowitz; Bush's future top Middle East aide, Elliott Abrams; his future ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad; Rumsfeld's future top international security official, Peter Rodman; American Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow and neo-cons impresario Richard Perle, and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush; as well as Cheney and Rumsfeld themselves.

The charter's few specifics, as well as follow-up reports published by PNAC -- "Rebuilding America's Defenses" and "Present Dangers", both published in 2000 to influence the foreign policy debate during the presidential campaign that year -- were based to a great extent on an infamous "Defense Planning Guidance" (DPG) draft produced under Cheney when he served as secretary of defence under President George H.W. Bush in 1992.

That paper, which was developed by then-Undersecretary of Defence Wolfowitz, Libby, Khalilzad, and the current deputy national security adviser, J.D. Crouch, with assistance from Perle and other like-minded defence specialists, called for the "benevolent domination by one power" (the U.S.) to replace "collective internationalism" and for Washington to ensure that domination, particularly in Eurasia, in order to prevent the emergence, by confrontation if necessary, of any possible regional or global rival.

It was PNAC's role to sustain and propagate these ideas through its reports, its periodic letters and statements signed by right-wing notables, and a steady flow of opinion-pieces and essays, that acted as part of a larger neo-conservative "echo chamber" that included Kristol's Weekly Standard, Fox News, the Washington Times, and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, to frame debates in official Washington and the mainstream media.

In this sense, PNAC was more of a "letter-head organisation" that acted more as a mechanism for developing consensus on issues among different political forces -- in its case, Republican hawks -- and then pushing them in public, than as a think tank.

Indeed, the fact that several of its half-a-dozen staff members -- most recently, PNAC director Schmitt -- have taken posts at the much-larger AEI located just five floors above PNAC's offices helps illustrate the incestuous nature of the larger network. Nonetheless, PNAC was the first to call publicly (in 1998) for Washington to pursue "regime change" in Iraq by military means in conjunction with the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi, who would later play a key role in the propaganda campaign against Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.

But perhaps its most notable letter was sent to Bush Sep. 20, 2001, just nine days after the 9/11 attacks. In addition to calling for the ouster of the Taliban and war on al Qaeda, the letter called for waging a broader and more ambitious "war on terrorism" that would include cutting off the Palestinian Authority under Yassir Arafat, taking on Hezbollah, threatening Syria and Iran and, most importantly, ousting Hussein regardless of his relationship to the attacks or al Qaeda.

"It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States," it said. "But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."

The letter was signed by 38 members of the predominantly neo-conservative Washington echo chamber, many of whom -- especially Kristol, Kagan, Defence Policy Board members Perle, Woolsey, Eliot Cohen, Centre for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney, former Education Secretary William Bennett, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, and Foundation for the Defence of Democracies director Clifford May --would emerge, along with Woolsey, as the most ubiquitous champions of war with Iraq outside the administration.

Seven months later, PNAC issued another letter signed by many of the same people urging Bush to step up preparations for war with Iraq, sever all ties to the Palestinian Authority under Arafat and give full backing to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's efforts to crush the Palestinian intifada.

"Israel's fight against terrorism is our fight. Israel's victory is an important part of our victory," the letter noted. "For reasons both moral and strategic, we need to stand with Israel in its fight against terrorism." Bush complied two months later.

That period -- Sep. 20, 2001, to the run-up to the Iraq war in early 2003 -- marked the high-water mark of PNAC's existence. Since then, things have generally gone downhill, as the hawks they represented, including the group's dominant neo-conservatives, have fallen prey to internal disagreements: over Rumsfeld's stewardship of Iraq and the Pentagon; over the wisdom of democratic "transformation" in the Arab Middle East; over Sharon's Gaza disengagement plan; over China; and even over the latest administration moves on Iran.

All of which has made it far more difficult to forge consensus -- and compose letters -- in these areas. (FIN/2006)

Latin America and Asia Are at Last Breaking Free of Washington's Grip

Noam Chomsky

The Guardian, March 15, 2006

The prospect that Europe and Asia might move towards greater independence has troubled US planners since the second world war. The concerns have only risen as the "tripolar order" - Europe, North America and Asia - has continued to evolve.

Every day Latin America, too, is becoming more independent. Now Asia and the Americas are strengthening their ties while the reigning superpower, the odd man out, consumes itself in misadventures in the Middle East. Regional integration in Asia and Latin America is a crucial and increasingly important issue that, from Washington's perspective, betokens a defiant world gone out of control. Energy, of course, remains a defining factor - the object of contention - everywhere.

China, unlike Europe, refuses to be intimidated by Washington, a primary reason for the fear of China by US planners, which presents a dilemma: steps toward confrontation are inhibited by US corporate reliance on China as an export platform and growing market, as well as by China's financial reserves - reported to be approaching Japan's in scale.

In January, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah visited Beijing, which is expected to lead to a Sino-Saudi memorandum of understanding calling for "increased cooperation and investment between the two countries in oil, natural gas and investment", the Wall Street Journal reports.

Already much of Iran's oil goes to China, and China is providing Iran with weapons that both states presumably regard as deterrent to US designs. India also has options. India may choose to be a US client, or it may prefer to join the more independent Asian bloc that is taking shape, with ever more ties to Middle East oil producers. Siddharth Varadarjan, the deputy editor of the Hindu, observes that "if the 21st century is to be an 'Asian century,' Asia's passivity in the energy sector has to end".

The key is India-China cooperation. In January, an agreement signed in Beijing "cleared the way for India and China to collaborate not only in technology but also in hydrocarbon exploration and production, a partnership that could eventually alter fundamental equations in the world's oil and natural gas sector", Varadarjan points out.

An additional step, already being contemplated, is an Asian oil market trading in euros. The impact on the international financial system and the balance of global power could be significant. It should be no surprise that President Bush paid a recent visit to try to keep India in the fold, offering nuclear cooperation and other inducements as a lure.

Meanwhile, in Latin America left-centre governments prevail from Venezuela to Argentina. The indigenous populations have become much more active and influential, particularly in Bolivia and Ecuador, where they either want oil and gas to be domestically controlled or, in some cases, oppose production altogether.

Many indigenous people apparently do not see any reason why their lives, societies and cultures should be disrupted or destroyed so that New Yorkers can sit in their SUVs in traffic gridlock.

Venezuela, the leading oil exporter in the hemisphere, has forged probably the closest relations with China of any Latin American country, and is planning to sell increasing amounts of oil to China as part of its effort to reduce dependence on the openly hostile US government.

Venezuela has joined Mercosur, the South American customs union - a move described by Nestor Kirchner, the Argentinian president, as "a milestone" in the development of this trading bloc, and welcomed as a "new chapter in our integration" by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president.

Venezuela, apart from supplying Argentina with fuel oil, bought almost a third of Argentinian debt issued in 2005, one element of a region-wide effort to free the countries from the controls of the IMF after two decades of disastrous conformity to the rules imposed by the US-dominated international financial institutions.

Steps toward Southern Cone [the southern states of South America] integration advanced further in December with the election in Bolivia of Evo Morales, the country's first indigenous president. Morales moved quickly to reach a series of energy accords with Venezuela. The Financial Times reported that these "are expected to underpin forthcoming radical reforms to Bolivia's economy and energy sector" with its huge gas reserves, second only to Venezuela's in South America.

Cuba-Venezuela relations are becoming ever closer, each relying on its comparative advantage. Venezuela is providing low-cost oil, while in return Cuba organises literacy and health programmes, sending thousands of highly skilled professionals, teachers and doctors, who work in the poorest and most neglected areas, as they do elsewhere in the third world. Cuban medical assistance is also being welcomed elsewhere. One of the most horrendous tragedies of recent years was the earthquake in Pakistan last October. Besides the huge death toll, unknown numbers of survivors have to face brutal winter weather with little shelter, food or medical assistance.

"Cuba has provided the largest contingent of doctors and paramedics to Pakistan," paying all the costs (perhaps with Venezuelan funding), writes John Cherian in India's Frontline magazine, citing Dawn, a leading Pakistan daily. President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan expressed his "deep gratitude" to Fidel Castro for the "spirit and compassion" of the Cuban medical teams - reported to comprise more than 1,000 trained personnel, 4