The US Quest for Full-Spectrum Dominance

The war on Iraq may fly in the face of every tenet of rudimentary civilised conduct and international law, but the US has already developed a new doctrine to justify not just this one war but any future war of aggression and occupation that may follow. The Iraq war will be remembered as the first instance of application of America’s national security strategy which revolves around the doctrine of pre-emptive war. Noam Chomsky has rightly pointed out that even the phrase ‘pre-emptive strike’ is a deliberate understatement for the current American policy and that the term ‘preventive war’ would be a better description. The word pre-emption presupposes an imminent threat while the national security strategy adopted in September 2002 underscores the need to “adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries.” Indeed what the strategy advocates is not pre-emptive strikes against imminent threats, but decisive action – multilateral if possible, unilateral if necessary – against “emerging threats before they are fully formed.”

The strategy also openly declares that “to contend with uncertainty and to meet the many security challenges we face, the United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia, as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of US forces.” The basis of this national security strategy, which interprets external domination as internal security, is defined as “a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests,” an American ‘newspeak’ for total global hegemony in a unipolar world.

Like the war on Iraq, this doctrine of war masquerading as America’s official national security strategy had also been incubating for a long time. Way back in 1992, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and American victory in the Gulf War, Dick Cheney, the then Defence Secretary, had started articulating an aggressive and unilateral approach that would secure American dominance of world affairs by force. The US, Cheney insisted, must discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging its leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

The strategic planning continued through the Clinton years with funding from the military-industrial complex, energy companies, and right-wing foundations. Over time, those working on these new plans evolved into the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), established in 1997 with members Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz at the helm, a neo-conservative think-tank dedicated to the vision of US world domination through military conquest of what it calls “the new American frontier.” In September 2000, three months before Bush took office in January 2001, the PNAC updated and refined Cheney’s original version into a new report entitled: “Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategies, Forces, and Resources for a New Century” calling for developing America’s ability to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars.” The report advocated unprecedented hikes in military spending, American military domination of the Gulf region (Saddam or no Saddam!), toppling of non-complying regimes, abrogation of international treaties, control of the world’s energy sources, militarization of outer space, total control of cyberspace, and the willingness to use nuclear weapons to achieve “American” goals. In the language of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, this is America’s exciting total war to secure full-spectrum dominance!


Box

This Empire, too, Has a Name : Pax Americana

To the credit of Hardt and Negri, authors of the best-seller Empire, they had posited the right question – globalisation tending towards the rise of yet another empire. But they predicated the rise of history’s latest empire on the end of imperialism. In one sentence, their hypothesis was: Imperialism is out, empire is in. “The sovereignty of the nation-state was the cornerstone of the imperialisms that European powers constructed throughout the modern era.” But now, Hardt and Negri would have us believe that things have changed in that essential respect. In today’s world of transforming sovereignty, “Distinct colours of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow. … The United States does not, and indeed no nation state can today, form the centre of an imperialist project. Imperialism is over. … The history of imperialist, inter-imperialist, and anti-imperialist wars is over.”

It would be nice to hear from the authors of Empire now in the wake of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq. An empire connotes a certain scale and sweep and Hardt and Negri were certainly right in sensing and arguing that globalisation was hurtling towards that threshold. But they were wrong in treating capital as an abstract entity and imagining an abstract empire for this abstract capital. In real life capital is as concrete and as diverse as labour. And hence empires too have been and cannot but be concrete historical phenomena striding across concrete historical time and space and not not hanging in a timeless and fluid ahistorical vacuum.

The Communist Manifesto had rightly pointed out that both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the truly representative classes of modern capitalism are essentially international classes. But if in spite of that workers of the world find themselves a divided lot, divided by national and industrial or occupational boundaries, so do capitalists of the world. The general laws of motion of capital are always realised in specific blocks or branches of capital. There is nothing like universal boom or doom – the rate of growth or degree of crisis of capital always varies from one sector or one economy to another.

However much we may talk of global capital to refer to the expanding world market or domain in which dominant sections of capital move and operate, in terms of composition of capital we still talk about multinational or transnational capital which necessarily presupposes the nation as a unit. And all the TNCs and MNCs of the world have a definite original or national home! And when various blocks and branches of capital operate on a global level they also compete on a global level and the competition gets ever more intense and fierce. Competition, monopoly and then monopolistic competition or competition among monopolies – such is the growth spiral of capital.

Naturally, there can be nothing like all nation-states beating a universal and simultaneous retreat and allowing, voluntarily or under duress, some supra-national and super-sovereign empire of capital to dictate uniform terms to every nation-state. The retreat of some states and decline of some powers must mean the advance of some other states and rise of some other powers.

Empire is not a post-imperialist concept, it is very much an imperialist project. Not capital in general, but American capital in particular, more specifically some of the most powerful and influencial sections of American capital, are now pushing for an American Empire, for America’s ‘new and expanding national frontiers’.

Empires have always had names, and this latest one in the history of empires or would-be empires also has one. Pax Americana.

Back-to-previous-article
Top