ABSTRACT
The U.S. client state empire is large, expanding, and long-lived. As we saw in Chapter 2, it stretches around the globe, accounting for over 40 percent of the world’s countries, over a third of its population, and over 80 percent of its economic output. As we saw in Chapter 3, the empire began over a century ago and is still growing, with the latest acquisition as recent as 2004. And aswe saw in Chapters 4 and 5, the empire is remarkably robust, with most clients being routinely maintained in that status and those with problems being maintained through U.S. intervention. At first blush, this track record would seem to be one of great success, leading U.S. policy makers to no small measure of satisfaction. However, to be a client is to have the U.S. continually concerned with the regime’s maintenance and hence highly attentive to any problems which it deems potentially or actually threatening to that condition. A significant number of these problems involve real or imagined activities by those identified as opponents of the clients’ regimes. Some problems, though, are attributed to other states, with the majority of such problems coming from states considered to be enemies of the United States. In Chapter 3, we briefly discussed enemy states, which we defined as nonclients
whose regimes are seen as choosing systematically to differ with the U.S. on key issues of foreign and domestic economic and political policy. These enemies, we pointed out, come in various ideological hues and have nothing in common except the U.S. perception that they have opted deliberately for across-the-board disagreements with Washington. Those disagreements are seen as extending to U.S. clients: enemy states are pictured as at the very least attempting to impede or disrupt U.S. policy regarding certain client states, and quite possibly as attempting to subvert the regimes of those clients. Enemies may also be perceived as posing a physical or ideological threat to the United States itself, but this danger is usually seen as accompanying threats to clients instead of substituting for those threats. Indeed, few of the enemies listed in Figure 3.1 were viewed by U.S. officials as a military danger to the U.S. itself; and the level of those officials’ concern with specific enemies was unrelated to that danger. In using words such as “perceive,” “see,” “view,” “picture,” and “imagine,” we do not
mean to imply that states categorized as enemies by U.S. policy makers in fact do nothing to undermine U.S. policy or aid domestic opponents of U.S. client regimes. Certainly such acts do occur, as they have in the past against both imperial powers and other states. Our point, rather, is to suggest that there is an important ideological and, as we will see, cybernetic connection between the categorization of a state as having chosen to differ systematically with the U.S., on the one hand, and its categorization as a danger to the U.S., on the other. In a world of theoretically separate and independent political units, a state that is seen as rejecting the norms proclaimed by existing or
rising imperial powers will tend to be seen by the latter as endangering other units, so much so that there can be no genuine peace with that state unless and until it has changed not only its foreign policy but above all its internal power arrangements. Which of these – the nature of a regime or its foreign policy – comes first is a chickenand-egg question; but imperial powers assuredly perceive some sort of connection. Thus, Philip II of Spain saw Elizabeth’s England as impelled to its anti-Spanish naval raids and its support of Dutch rebels by the Protestantism it espoused, a faith that had already led to Elizabeth’s condemnation by the Pope. Two centuries later, the British prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, proclaimed revolutionary France “a system which was in itself a declaration of war against all nations,” with security impossible until “either the principle [of the system] has extinguished or its strength is exhausted.” This rhetoric was repeated yet again after World War II, when one of the leading thinkers of the State Department informed Truman that:
our free society finds itself morally challenged by the Soviet system. No other value system is so wholly irreconcilable with ours, so implacable in its purpose to destroy ours … and no other has the support of a great and growing center of military power.1
