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In the Shadows of the American Century

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The historian William Appleman Williams once identified such self-referential myopia as the country’s “grand illusion,” the “charming belief that the United States could reap the rewards of empire without paying the costs of empire and without admitting that it was an empire.” — location: 818 ^ref-43755

The most beloved writer of his generation, Mark Twain, charged that the conquest of the Philippines had “debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world,” — location: 827 ^ref-49189

eminent Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner warned that “the inevitable effect of imperialism on democracy” was to “lessen liberty and require discipline. It will … necessitate stronger and more elaborate governmental machinery” and increase “militarism.” — location: 830 ^ref-794

Congress restricted their range by limiting their coal capacity. — location: 1040 ^ref-6221

Adding a distinct, even novel dimension to US global power was a clandestine fourth tier that entailed global surveillance by the NSA and covert operations on five continents by the CIA, manipulating elections, promoting coups, and, when needed, mobilizing surrogate armies. — location: 1116 ^ref-48621

more than any other attribute, it is this clandestine dimension that distinguishes US global hegemony from earlier empires. — location: 1118 ^ref-29563

the “American Empire” had two features that distinguished it from Great Britain’s: military bases galore and its emphasis on offering generous economic aid to allies. — location: 1145 ^ref-52461

clandestine manipulation became Washington’s preferred mode of exercising old-fashioned imperial hegemony in a new world of nominally sovereign nations. — location: 1167 ^ref-62631

between 1946 and 2000 the rival superpowers intervened in 117 elections, or 11 percent of all the competitive national-level contests held worldwide, via campaign cash and media disinformation. Significantly, the United States was responsible for eighty-one of these attempts (70 percent of the total)— — location: 1179 ^ref-34023

eight instances in Italy, five in Japan, and several in Chile and Nicaragua stiffened by CIA paramilitary action. — location: 1182 ^ref-41305

a distinct global trend between 1958 and 1975—a “reverse wave” away from democracy, as military coups succeeded in more than three dozen nations, a full quarter of the world’s sovereign states. — location: 1190 ^ref-31342

the war on terror developed new technologies for the preservation of its global hegemony via space, cyberspace, and robotics, levitating its military force into an ether beyond the tyranny of terrestrial limits. — location: 1204 ^ref-13343

the foundations of a world order that rested significantly on national leaders who served Washington as loyal subordinate elites that were, in reality, a motley collection of autocrats, aristocrats, and uniformed thugs. — location: 1299 ^ref-36165

To make it “absolutely clear we will not tolerate Communism anywhere in the Western Hemisphere,” influential Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey advised his NSC colleagues that they should “stop talking so much about democracy” — location: 1325 ^ref-50363

“Whatever we may choose to say in public about ideas and idealism, among ourselves we’ve got to be a great deal more practical and materialistic.” — location: 1329 ^ref-47467

General Park Chung-hee, typically bartered troop deployments to Vietnam for billions of US development dollars, which helped spark the country’s economic “miracle.” — location: 1389 ^ref-27087

Invariably, the Americans backed down, sacrificing any hope of real change in order to maintain the ongoing war effort against the local Viet Cong rebels and their North Vietnamese backers. — location: 1425 ^ref-27573

Washington began to officially protest the ruthless repression. Instead of responding, Diệm worked through his brother to open negotiations with the communists in Hanoi, threatening Washington with willing betrayal of the US war effort via a coalition government with communist North Vietnam. — location: 1445 ^ref-50343

Washington required a Saigon government responsive to its demands yet popular enough with its own peasantry to wage the war in the villages. These proved to be impossibly contradictory political requirements. In the end, the Americans settled for authoritarian military rule, which, acceptable as it proved in Washington, was disdained by the Vietnamese peasantry. — location: 1474 ^ref-28870

Washington sacrificed democratic principles for determined leadership, and in end secured neither. — location: 1478 ^ref-4134

(American security forces guarded President Karzai for his first months in office because he had so little trust in his nominal Afghan allies.) — location: 1493 ^ref-25812

Calling the election a “foreseeable train wreck,” deputy UN envoy Peter Galbraith said: “The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners.” — location: 1509 ^ref-51525

Whether at Saigon in the 1960s or at Kabul after 2002, Washington’s would-be subordinate elites had proved surprisingly insubordinate, creating not only weak, corrupt governance for their own countries but also a severe foreign policy crisis for the United States. — location: 1540 ^ref-2046

Selected and often installed in office by Washington, or at least backed by its massive military aid, these client regimes often became desperately dependent, even as their leaders failed to implement the sorts of reforms that might enable them to build independent political bases. — location: 1648 ^ref-39548

a fundamental structural flaw in any American entente with such autocrats. Inherent in these unequal alliances is a peculiar dynamic that makes the eventual collapse of American-anointed leaders an almost commonplace occurrence. At the outset, Washington selects clients who seem pliant enough to do its bidding. They, in turn, opt for Washington’s support not because they are strong, but precisely because they are weak and need foreign patronage to gain and hold office. — location: 1653 ^ref-42584

clients have little choice but to make Washington’s demands their top priority, investing their slender political resources in placating foreign envoys. — location: 1657 ^ref-25985

Caught between the demands of a powerful foreign patron and countervailing local needs and desires, both leaders let guerrillas capture the countryside, while struggling uncomfortably, even angrily, in Washington’s embrace. — location: 1660 ^ref-23727

Washington’s anointed autocrat in the former Soviet socialist republic of Kyrgyzstan, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, fled the palace after his riot police fired into the crowds and killed seventy-seven, but failed to stop opposition protesters from taking control of the capital Bishkek. — location: 1673 ^ref-30227

In the new world of sovereign states that emerged after World War II, Washington has had to pursue a contradictory policy—dealing with the leaders of nations as if they were fully independent while playing upon their deep dependence on US economic and military aid. — location: 1683 ^ref-20511

Absent a global war to sweep away an empire, the decline of a great power often proves to be a fitful, painful, drawn-out process. — location: 1687 ^ref-26317

it is necessary to look into a clandestine domain where secret services and criminal syndicates play a significant role in contemporary political life. — location: 1711 ^ref-26066

The recent history of this shadowy domain has been marked by millions of deaths, massive fiscal malfeasance, and epidemic drug addiction, which means understanding the covert netherworld couldn’t be more crucial. — location: 1719 ^ref-11410

this covert netherworld—in which criminal activities and Cold War skullduggery combined to produce a lethal form of surrogate warfare—engulfed entire countries and even continents in devastating violence. — location: 1725 ^ref-17706

twenty-two surrounding satellite states. — location: 1733 ^ref-6890

President Eisenhower avoided conventional combat yet authorized 170 CIA covert operations in forty-eight nations, while President Kennedy approved 163 more during his three years in office. — location: 1738 ^ref-30314

this recurring reliance on covert intervention transformed secret services from manipulators at the margins of state power into major players in international politics. — location: 1743 ^ref-42404

when these covert operations become entangled with the criminal underworld to form a covert netherworld, the possibility of failure only multiplied. — location: 1746 ^ref-35664

the rise of modern empires was the essential precondition for this covert domain’s transformation from sordid social margin into a significant political space. — location: 1751 ^ref-27624

As our knowledge of the Cold War grows, the list of drug traffickers who served the CIA lengthens to include Corsican syndicates, Chinese Nationalist Party irregulars, Lao generals, Haitian colonels, Honduran smugglers, and Afghan warlords. — location: 1768 ^ref-31839

Over the past two centuries, the major imperial powers have moved from an aggressive promotion of a free trade in opium to a rigorous prohibition of all narcotics production, sale, and use—a succession of contradictory policies whose collision has transformed opium as well as coca from folk medicines into major illicit commodities — location: 1777 ^ref-5145

After more than a century enmeshed in the imperial opium trade, China harvested 35,000 tons of opium in 1906 and imported 4,000 more to supply 13.5 million users, or 27 percent of its adult males, a level of mass addiction never equaled before or since. — location: 1779 ^ref-28421

President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” expanding prohibition efforts beyond American borders to the Mediterranean basin and Southeast Asia—an ill-fated effort that would ultimately serve to stimulate an increase in trafficking. — location: 1796 ^ref-32505

Such enforcement doubled the US prison population, which rose from 370,000 in 1981 to 713,000 in 1989. — location: 1898 ^ref-798

In four states—Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia—more than 20 percent of all African Americans were disenfranchised for felony convictions. — location: 1903 ^ref-39818

the national press entered the debate on the side of the CIA, with the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times each publishing front-page investigations, attacking the Mercury’s story and accusing that paper of fanning the flames of racial discord. — location: 1922 ^ref-44914

The first intervention in 1979 succeeded in part because the surrogate war the CIA launched to expel the Soviet Red Army coincided with the way its Afghan allies used the country’s swelling drug traffic to sustain their decade-long struggle. — location: 1948 ^ref-4266

trade. I don’t think that we need to apologize for this.… There was fallout in term of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.” — location: 2006 ^ref-2507

In July 2000, however, as a devastating drought entered its second year and hunger spread across Afghanistan, the Taliban government suddenly ordered a ban on all opium cultivation in an apparent appeal for international acceptance. — location: 2035 ^ref-2442

this prohibition had reduced the harvest by 94 percent to a mere 185 tons. The area of poppy cultivation fell sharply from 82,000 hectares in 2000 to only 8,000 a year later. — location: 2039 ^ref-13417

it seems likely that its opium prohibition had economically eviscerated the Taliban, leaving its theocracy a hollow shell that shattered with the first American bombs. — location: 2055 ^ref-35000

when the Taliban collapsed, the groundwork had already been laid for the resumption of opium cultivation and the drug trade on a major scale. — location: 2087 ^ref-19436

the annual harvest was up 24 percent to a record 8,200 tons, or 53 percent of the country’s GDP and 93 percent of the world’s illicit heroin supply. — location: 2111 ^ref-28695

this unintended outcome for what had once seemed a sophisticated counterinsurgency tactic was but one of many signs that these operations, instead of supporting American goals, were headed for a disastrous outcome. — location: 2134 ^ref-4977

“We can continue to fertilize this deadly soil with yet more blood in a brutal war with an uncertain outcome … or we can help renew this ancient, arid land by replanting the orchards, replenishing the flocks, and rebuilding the farming destroyed in decades of war … until food crops become a viable alternative to opium. To put it simply, so simply that even Washington might understand, we can only pacify a narco-state when it is no longer a narco-state.” — location: 2151 ^ref-21701

For most people worldwide, economic activity, the production and exchange of goods, is the prime point of contact with their government. — location: 2255 ^ref-7343

When, however, a country’s most significant commodity is illegal, then political loyalties naturally shift to the economic networks that move that product safely and secretly from fields to foreign markets, providing protection, finance, and employment at every stage. “The narcotics trade poisons the Afghan financial sector and fuels a growing illicit economy,” — location: 2256 ^ref-21030

Investing even a small portion of all that misspent military funding in the country’s agriculture can produce economic alternatives for the millions of farmers who depend upon the opium crop for employment. Ruined orchards could be rebuilt, ravaged flocks repopulated, wasted seed stocks regrown, and wrecked snow-melt irrigation systems that once sustained a diverse agriculture before these decades of war repaired. — location: 2266 ^ref-17821

At the peak of its global power back in the 1980s, Washington was master of the covert netherworld, as it was for so much of the world, manipulating a fusion of Islamic fundamentalism and illicit opium to drive the Soviet Army from Afghanistan and riding a convergence of Contra resistance and cocaine trafficking to force regime change in Nicaragua. — location: 2275 ^ref-12804

The Cold War proved to be a historic high tide for covert action, fostering secretive agencies of unprecedented power and extending their netherworlds to whole countries and continents. This clandestine domain will likely remain a central component of future US involvement in geopolitical conflict, whether against Russia, China, or lesser powers worldwide. — location: 2280 ^ref-56236

President Obama broke this bipartisan pattern for the first time in a century. Instead of retrenching the domestic surveillance built by his Republican predecessor, he seemed determined to maintain American dominion through a strategic edge in information control—and so continued to support construction of a powerful global panopticon capable of surveilling domestic dissidents, tracking terrorists, manipulating allied nations, monitoring rival powers, countering hostile cyber strikes, protecting domestic communications, and crippling essential electronic systems in enemy nations. — location: 2303 ^ref-33221

the military’s information infrastructure has advanced through three distinct technological phases: manual intelligence collection during the Philippine War; computerized data management in the war in Vietnam; and, most recently, integrated robotic systems in Afghanistan and Iraq. — location: 2323 ^ref-33082

The British Empire expanded steadily for two hundred years through alliances with such subordinate elites and then unraveled suddenly in just twenty years when, as historian Ronald Robinson has written, “colonial rulers had run out of indigenous collaborators.” — location: 2379 ^ref-57897

from an earlier assignment as military attaché at the czar’s court in St. Petersburg, had come to understand the importance of intelligence and a secret police. — location: 2408 ^ref-21188

While the pacification of the Philippines was under way, Mark Twain wrote an imagined history of a future twentieth-century America, arguing that its “lust for conquest” had destroyed “the Great Republic … [because] trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people’s liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake.” — location: 2427 ^ref-18201

Sixteen men died in the five-day Battle of Blair Mountain, but none was shot by army troops. — location: 2455 ^ref-28547

With war’s end in 1918, Military Intelligence revived the Protective League and organized the American Legion to engage in two years of repression against the socialist left, marked by mob action across the Midwest, the notorious Lusk raids in New York City, J. Edgar Hoover’s “Palmer raids” across the Northeast, and the suppression of strikes from New York to Seattle. — location: 2456 ^ref-25316

During World War II, the FBI would use warrantless wiretaps, “black bag” break-ins, and surreptitious mail opening to track suspects, while mobilizing over three hundred thousand informers to secure defense plants against wartime threats that ultimately proved, said a Senate report, “negligible.” — location: 2471 ^ref-28128

President Harry Truman soon discovered the extraordinary extent of FBI surveillance. “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police,” Truman wrote in his diary that May. “FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail.” — location: 2495 ^ref-65233

Even though all this computerized data contributed to a soul-searing defeat in Vietnam, in retrospect it served as an important experimental step, creating innovations that would start Washington, decades later, on the path toward a third, robotic information regime. — location: 2522 ^ref-37874

In effect, media exposé and legislative reform put limits on Cold War excesses, much as Republican conservatives had done in the aftermath of World War I. — location: 2547 ^ref-7093

Unlike Republicans in the 1920s or Democrats in the 1970s who curtailed wartime surveillance, President Obama instead expanded the NSA’s digital project as a permanent weapon for the exercise of global power. — location: 2583 ^ref-30127

the marriage of the NSA’s decryption technology to the Internet’s data hubs now allows the agency’s 37,000 employees to monitor the entire globe with a highly efficient ratio of just one official for every 200,000 people on the planet. — location: 2617 ^ref-50826

So deeply classified was this operation that in March 2013 intelligence chief James Clapper could assure Congress, under oath, that the NSA did not collect “any type of data at all on millions of Americans.” — location: 2646 ^ref-12650

“They even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target’s reputation.… These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.” — location: 2732 ^ref-4859

some 321,000 tons, twice the conventional bombardment of Japan during World War II, were dropped on the Plain of Jars region, a highland valley with some 200,000 people and ancient Buddhist temples, a royal palace, market towns, and rice-growing villages. — location: 3443 ^ref-15764

Since the war in Vietnam ended in 1975, approximately twenty thousand Laotian civilians have been killed or maimed by these unexploded bombs, and the number continues to mount. — location: 3462 ^ref-33968

by funding its own fleet of thirty-five attack drones and borrowing others from the air force, the CIA moved from passive intelligence collection to a permanent capacity for extrajudicial executions on three continents. — location: 3620 ^ref-22334

Most US forces … are so focused on mission accomplishment they often lack the patience to let the host nation operate in accordance with its own capabilities as well as customs and traditions. — location: 3830 ^ref-23554

as can often happen in an imperial relationship, the asymmetry of power between nominal allies accentuated American arrogance and contributed to these damaging debacles. — location: 3836 ^ref-48466

After six years of operations restricted by this drone’s inability to fly above the weather as a human pilot would, the air force in 2012 recommended ending the program. But its builders, powerful defense contractors Northrop and Raytheon, fought back and saved it. — location: 3899 ^ref-58353

China is using its cash reserves to reach deep within the world island to the heart of Eurasia in an attempt to thoroughly reshape the geopolitical fundamentals of global power, using a subtle strategy that has so far eluded Washington’s power elites. — location: 4057 ^ref-52236

Obama set out to correct past foreign policy excesses and disasters, largely the product of imperial overreach, that could be traced to several generations of American leaders bent on the exercise of unilateral power. — location: 4249 ^ref-37599

Truman ordered the CIA to arm some twelve thousand Nationalist Chinese soldiers who had been driven out of their country by communist forces and taken refuge in northern Burma. — location: 4272 ^ref-63727

The agency then helped him consolidate his autocratic rule by training a secret police, the notorious Savak, in torture and surveillance techniques. — location: 4290 ^ref-9852

As Obama himself put it, the Middle East has “countries that have very few civic traditions” roiled by all “the malicious, nihilistic, violent parts of humanity,” while Southeast Asia “is filled with striving, ambitious people who are every single day scratching and clawing to build businesses.… The contrast is pretty stark.” — location: 4319 ^ref-18156

Elihu Root, the original architect of America’s rise to global power; Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Carter who shattered the Soviet Empire and made Washington the world’s sole superpower; and Barack Obama, who tried to defend that status — location: 4383 ^ref-54184

To resolve the knotty contradiction of a republic running an empire, he quickly established colonial regimes for Puerto Rico and the Philippines, while dictating the constitution for a nominally independent Cuba that conceded the United States a navy base on the island and the right to intervene whenever it chose. With his eye firmly fixed on America’s ascent, he also covered up atrocities that accompanied the army’s extraordinarily brutal pacification of the Philippines. — location: 4427 ^ref-5926

Secretary Root made a “triumphal visit” to Rio for the Inter-American Conference and then circled the continent, stopping at half a dozen capitals, greeted by wildly cheering crowds at every port. — location: 4435 ^ref-47338

group of financiers, industrialists, and corporate lawyers in establishing the Council on Foreign Relations — location: 4451 ^ref-32489

Colonial pacification during the Philippine-American War ravaged the countryside and killed at least two hundred thousand in a population of just seven million, leaving a “postmemory”—that is, a “trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge”— — location: 4637 ^ref-61255

Washington has been building a triple-tier architecture for continued global hegemony with a strength, scope, and sophistication unprecedented in the history of world empires. Beneath the earth and seas, the NSA has penetrated the fiber-optic networks of global telecommunications to monitor both national leaders and their restive millions, creating a surveillance apparatus unequaled in both breadth of geographical reach and depth of social penetration. — location: 4734 ^ref-53519

Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the decline will be. — location: 4814 ^ref-39583

climate change. Indeed, this troubling trend is on such an undeniable trajectory that we need to treat it less like a fifth scenario and more as a likely array of facts that will be the background to whatever happens to American power. — location: 4827 ^ref-9437

The American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works. There is little suggestion that any issues of any real significance—including endless wars, a bloated national security state, the starved education system, a decaying infrastructure, and climate change—will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize the country’s chances in a changing world. Yet the possibility also remains that, even at this late hour, the American people could come together—as they did during World War II or the Cold War—to build a more just society at home and a more equitable world abroad. — location: 5406 ^ref-36790

With the ticking of history’s clock, time is growing short for the United States to have anything akin to Britain’s success in shaping a succeeding world order that protects its interests, preserves its prosperity, and bears the imprint of its best values. — location: 5416 ^ref-9956

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