From "The American Empire, Pax Americana or Pox Americana?"
in the Monthly Review, September 2004, by John Bellamy
Foster and Robert W. McChesney. See
http://www.monthlyreview.org
On June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a commencement
address at American University in Washington, D.C., in which he declared
that the peace that the United States sought was "not a Pax Americana
enforced on the world by American weapons of war." His remarks were a
response to criticisms of the United States advanced in a recently
published Soviet text on military strategy. Kennedy dismissed the charge
that "American imperialist circles" were "preparing to unleash different
kinds of wars" including "preventative war." The Soviet text, he pointed
out, had stated, "The political aims of American imperialists were and
still are to enslave economically and politically the European and other
capitalist countries and, after the latter are transformed into obedient
tools, to unify them in various military-political blocs and groups
directed against the socialist countries. The main aim of all this is to
achieve world domination." In Kennedy's words, these were "wholly baseless
and incredible claims," the work of Marxist "propagandists." "The United
States, as the world knows, will never start a war."
Are the Bush wars an exception to the Kennedy picture of a benevolent
America?
Rather than breaking with earlier U.S. history these most recent
military actions represent the continuation and acceleration of an
old pattem-going back at least to the second half of the 1940s.
Major U.S. interventions, both overt and covert, include: China
(1945), Greece (1947-49), Korea (1950-53), Iran (1953), Guatemala
(1954), Indochina (1954-73), Lebanon (1958), the Congo (1960-64),
Cuba (1961), Indonesia (1965), the Dominican Republic (1965-66),
Chile (1973), Angola (1976-92), Lebanon (1982-84), Grenada
(1983-84), Afghanistan (1979-1989), El Salvador (1981-92),
Nicaragua (1981-90), Panama (1989-90), Iraq (1991), Somalia
(1992-94), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995), Yugoslavia (1999),
Afghanistan (2001-present), and Iraq (2003-present). The enormous
scale of U.S. military engagement is evident in the fact that its
military bases gird the globe.
Chalmers Johnson has written in his Sorrows of Empire, "As
distinct from other peoples on this earth, most Americans do not
recognize-or do not choose to recognize-that the United States
dominates the world through its military power. Due to government
secrecy, they are often ignorant of the fact that their government
garrisons the globe. They do not realize that a vast network of
American military bases on every continent but Antarctica actually
constitutes a new form of empire."
In the July-August 1991 Monthly Review, 43: 3, p 1-13, Harry
Magdoff and Paul Sweezy wrote in their article entitled "Pox
Americana":
The United States, it seems, has locked itself into a
course with the gravest implications for the whole world.
Change is the only certain law of the universe. It cannot
be stopped. If societies are prevented from trying to
solve their problems in their own ways, they will certainly
not solve them in ways dictated by others. And if they
cannot move forward, they will inevitably move backward.
This is what is happening in a large part of the world
today, and the United States, the most powerful nation with
unlimited means of coercion at its disposal, seems to be
telling the others that this is a fate that must be
accepted on pain of violent destruction.
After 26 major overt and covert
military interventions in other countries including the largest
U.S. military intervention in Europe since World War II,
Afghanistan, and two wars in the Gulf waged to secure the imperial
control of oil men and other war profiteering capitalists like
Haliburton that pull the strings of the President, what state are we
in? Consult pages from the Tao te Ching, and a
word or two from Anatole France for answers.
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