“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” Chairman Mao famously stated in 1927.
Political power grows out of a barrel of oil – that’s an important theme in Daniel Yergin’s classic book The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power.
Political power, including the use of state violence, goes hand in hand with control of authorized currency – that’s one of the key lessons of David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
Guns, energy, money – each of these factors of power comes to mind in reading the recently released book by John Dower, The Violent American Century: War And Terror Since World War Two. (Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2017)
This brief book keeps a tight focus: cataloguing the extent of violence associated with the US role as the world’s dominant superpower. Dower avoids many closely related questions, such as Which persons or sectors in the US benefit most from military conflict? or, Was there justification for any of the violent overseas adventures by US forces in the past 75 years? or, Might the world have been more, or less, violent if the US had not been the dominant superpower?
It may be easy to forget, in Canada or western Europe or especially in the United States, that wars big and small have been raging somewhere in the world nearly every year through our lifetimes. Dower’s book is prompted in part by the recently popularized notion that on a world historical scale, violence is recently at an all-time low. Stephen Pinker, in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, marshaled both statistics and anecdotes to advance the view that “today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.”
Dower doesn’t try to definitively refute the idea of a “Long Peace”, but he does ask us to question widely held assumptions.
He begins with the important point that if you start with the unprecedented mass slaughter of World War II as a baseline, it’s easy to make a case that succeeding decades have been relatively peaceful.
Yet one of the key military strategies used by the US in World War II was retained in both practice and theory by subsequent US warlords – aerial bombardment of civilian populations.
By the time the United States began carpet-bombing Japan, ‘industrial war’ and psychological warfare were firmly wedded, and the destruction of enemy morale by deliberately targeting densely populated urban centers had become standard operating procedure. US air forces would later carry this most brutal of inheritances from World War Two to the populations of Korea and Indochina.” (The Violent American Century, pg 22)
The result of this policy carry-over was that
During the Korean War … the tonnage of bombs dropped by US forces was more than four times greater than had been dropped on Japan in 1945. … In the Vietnam War … an intensive US bombing campaign that eventually extended to Cambodia and Laos dropped more than forty times the tonnage of bombs used on Japan.” (The Violent American Century, pg 43)
The massive bombardments failed to produce unambiguous victories in Korea or in Indochina, but it’s hard to look at these wars and avoid the conclusion that the scope and scale of violence had remained terribly high.
Meanwhile US war planners were preparing for destruction on an even greater scale. Both US and Soviet nuclear forces held the capability of destroying all human life – and yet they continued to build more nuclear missiles and continued to discuss whether they would ever launch a first strike.
By the time of his retirement, former Strategic Air Command director General (George) Lee Butler had become an advocate of nuclear abolition. In his insider’s view, “mankind escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of diplomatic skill, blind luck and divine intervention, probably the latter in greatest proportion.”
Yet the danger remains. Even Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, who stirred hopes for peace in 2009 by calling for abolition of nuclear weapons, left office having approved a $1 trillion, 30-year program of upgrading US nuclear weapons.
Though the Cold War ended without conflagration between the world’s major powers, a CIA tabulation listed 331 “Major Episodes of Political Violence” between 1946 and 2013. The US armed, financed and/or coached at least one side in scores of these conflicts, and participated more directly in dozens. This history leads Dower to conclude
Branding the long postwar era as an epoch of relative peace is disingenuous …. It also obscures the degree to which the United States bears responsibility for contributing to, rather than impeding, militarization and mayhem after 1945.” (The Violent American Century, pg 3)
Dower also notes that violence doesn’t always end in death – sometimes it leads to flight. In this regard the recent, rapid increase in numbers of refugees calls into question the idea of a new era of peace. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees recently reported that the number of forcibly displaced individuals “had surpassed sixty million and was the highest level recorded since World War Two and its immediate aftermath.”
The wages of war
Since the US victory in World War II, the nation has responded by building an ever larger, ever more extensive military presence around the world. By the early 2000s, according to former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson, the US owned or rented more than 700 military bases in 130 countries.
Dower gives a brief tally of the financial costs to the US of this military occupation of the globe. In addition to the “base” defense department budget of about $600 billion per year, Dower says many extra expenses include “contingency” costs of engagements in the Middle East, care for veterans, the “black budget” for the CIA, and interest on the military component of the national debt, pushing the cost of the US military complex to around $1 trillion per year.
He concludes, “Creating a capacity for violence greater than the world has ever seen is costly – and remunerative.”
In coming installments of this essay we’ll consider especially those last three words: “costly and remunerative”. Who pays for and who benefits from the massive maintenance and exercise of military muscle, and over what time scale? In doing so, we’ll explore the interrelationships of three types of power: power from the barrel of a gun, power that comes from a barrel of oil, and power that comes from control of the monetary system.
Top photo: U.S. Air Force Republic F-105D Thunderchief fighters refuel from a Boeing KC-135A Stratotanker en route to North Vietnam in 1966. Photo in Wikimedia Commons is from US National Archives and Records Administration. A 2007 report for the Brookings Institution found that the Air Force alone used 52% of the fuel burned by the US government, and that all branches of the Department of Defense together burned 93% of US government fuel consumption. (“Department of Defense Energy Strategy: Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks”)
