The modern American empire was developed in the post World War Two era to combat the Soviet Union’s expanse in both land and in ideology. But even before the Truman Doctrine and the 1947 National Security Act we laid an important stone down that would play no small part in our successful showdown with totalitarian communism. On February 11, 1945 Franklin Roosevelt met with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman Al-Saud at Great Bitter Lake along the Suez Canal. The Sauds had granted oil concessions to America back in 1933, but this meeting of two major historical figures cemented a warm relationship between the two nations. And that relationship would be vitally important during the Cold War.
During the war, it became apparent that access to oil was critically important. Hitler’s anxiety about maintaining oil supplies led him to divert the march on Moscow at a critical time and attempt to conquer the Caucuses. It also led him to dilute the defense of the eastern front when the Russians began their historic counteroffensive, by keeping many divisions tied down defending the Romanian oilfields. So, when Roosevelt met with King Abdulaziz, safeguarding a steady supply of oil was considered a critical national security requirement.
Roosevelt probably never considered the nature of Saudi Arabia’s government or the legitimacy of the Saudi Kingdom. He just wanted good relations and oil concessions.
Yet, after the war the United States and Britain became concerned about Soviet influence in Eastern Europe, Greece, Turkey, and Iran. When Truman issued his doctrine he declared:
At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.
One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.
The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.
I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.
The immediate reason Truman made this speech was to ask for financial and military support for Greece and Turkey because the British were in the process of dissolving their empire and had no cash to continue their aid packages. The effect was that as Britain retreated America stepped back into the breach. One empire was effectively replaced by another.
Yet, our commitment to Truman’s ideals were imperfect from the outset. Truman wanted to promote freedom, democracy, and self-determination. But, we quickly found ourselves in a global ideological struggle where we found it expedient and prudent to support any regime, kingdom, or dictator that sided with us against communism.
The first shock came two years after Truman’s speech when China fell to Mao Tse-tung. This was followed by civil war in Korea. The Korean Peninsula had been split after the war by U.S.-Soviet agreement but in 1950, with Stalin’s approval, the North invaded the South. The combination of events solidified the impression that the communist ideology was intent on aggressive expansion and posed a threat every bit as menacing as fascism. When Truman decided to protect South Korea (and at the same time Taiwan), he launched us on a forty-year pattern of proxy wars against the Soviet Union.
The decision to resist communism on a global scale required a permanently mobilized military, basing rights throughout the world, and access to gobs of oil. The post-war economy also became increasingly dependent on cheap and reliable sources of energy. We quickly became less concerned with the freedom, democracy, and self-determination of our allies than with their reliability as allies and suppliers of energy. We set aside our noble ideals thinking that the greater goal of defeating communism would ultimately provide a greater good.
Before long the CIA was intervening in Guatemala in the interests of the United Fruit Company (a company CIA director Allan Dulles owned quite a bit of stock in). It was intervening in Iran in the interests of British oil interests. These interventions were only tangentially related to the threat communism. They were directly related to denying Guatemala and Iran self-determination.
As the Cold War ground on, we maintained alliances with some very repressive regimes in Indonesia, South Korea, Pakistan, Latin America, Africa, and throughout the Arab world. We occasionally intervened and undermined popularly elected governments when they leaned too far to the left or were too friendly with the Soviets.
Yet, in the last years of the Cold War, and especially after communism finally fell, democratic governments began sprouting up (especially in Latin America). In some sense, the compromises paid off in the end.
But in the detritus of the Cold War we had created some lasting enemies (Iran foremost among them). Moreover, without an expansive communist threat we no longer had any mission for our enormous armed forces and intelligence services beyond safeguarding our business interests and assuring a steady supply of energy. This led in the Bush I and Clinton era to a policy of actually suppressing democratic reforms in oil-rich countries with anti-American populations and in a policy of basing throughout central asia, including much of the former Soviet Union. The result is Islamic terrorism.
And my question is, do we need an empire now that the Soviet threat is gone? Do we need an empire to protect us from the blowback that maintaining our empire creates?
Is there any way to dismantle our empire without it resulting in chaos in the energy-rich areas of the world that we need for the proper functioning of the world economy?
And will our decision to invade Iraq result in a fundamentally more isolationist foreign policy?
I suspect that the arms manufacturers and all others who benefit from our military-industrial complex (including Boeing, and every community with a military base) will be able to easily demagogue any attempt to scale back our empire. They will continue to demonize the United Nations and any other organization that could conceivably replace us as the maintainer of world order.
In other words, when our empire ends it will be forced on us. Any attempt to question our empire will be a losing political argument until events dictate that we face our hubris.
