[I am re-posting a diary I did back on July 6th, 2006. I want to re-open this discussion because it seems to me that there is a re-opening of a divide on the left between those that want to work within the system and those that want to scrap the system. We can see this division expressed in sjct’s diary today. I also think this diary has been one of my best, but most misunderstood essays. The reason for that seems to be that I attempted to redefine the term ‘American Exceptionalism’ and yet many people wanted to debate the issues using the traditional usage of the term. I’ll follow this up with an essay on ideological divides on the left.]
This is going to be an essay on post World War Two American Exceptionalism. But before I get started, I want to quote extensively from a history of Saudi Arabia’s economic development:
For thousands of years, the economy of the Arabian Peninsula was determined by autonomous clusters of people living near wells and oases. Most of the population was engaged in agriculture, including nomads who raised livestock by moving their animals to the limited forage produced by infrequent rains. However, the inability of pastoral nomads to provide for their communities solely on the basis of pastoral activities forced them to create multiple resource systems. Such systems took the form of protection services for merchant caravans and pilgrims, control over small oases, and, to a lesser extent, direct cultivation. In the settled areas, local craftsmen produced a few items needed by those living near or visiting the scattered sources of water. Production was limited to serve very small markets and existed essentially on a subsistence level. Trade was limited primarily to camel caravans and the annual influx of pilgrims visiting the holy places in the Hijaz. In the principal cities, such as Jiddah and Mecca, several large merchant families settled permanently and prospered, especially after the late nineteenth-century development of the Hejaz Railway. The growth in international trade associated with European colonial expansion also benefited these merchants and attracted numerous families from as far away as the Eastern Province of Arabia, Iran, the Levant, and Turkey.
The most profound agent of change for the economy of Saudi Arabia was the discovery of huge reserves of oil by a United States company in 1938. Initially, the newly established oil industry had only an indirect impact on this primitive economy. The establishment of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco, predecessor of Saudi Aramco) and the oil towns around the oil fields triggered major changes in the economy of the kingdom, especially in the Eastern Province. Development of the oil fields required ancillary construction of modern ports, roads, housing, power plants, and water systems. Saudi workers had to be trained in new skills. In addition, the concentration of oil field employees and the range of services the oil company and employees needed opened new economic opportunities on a scale previously unseen by local merchants, contractors, and others. Aramco provided technical, financial, and logistical support to local entrepreneurs to shed the many support activities it had initially assumed. The discovery of oil ended the kingdom’s isolation and introduced new ways to organize the production and distribution of goods and services.
This is a picture of Jeddah today:
Before a United States corporation discovered oil in Saudi Arabia in 1938 the country was economically undeveloped. It’s citizens subsisted through trade and crafts and tourism. Medical care was rudimentary. Today, according to the CIA World Fact Book Saudis enjoy a life expectancy of 75.67 years and an income of $12,800. Make of that what you will. The American decision to make a deal with the King of Saudi Arabia to develop his oil fields has clearly benefitted the people of Saudi Arabia. With a 2005 GDP of $338 billion, there is plenty of money to go around even after the princes get done whoring around Monaco and buying expensive aircraft from Boeing. So, from the outset, I’d like people to recognize that American “imperialism” in the Muslim world has been of great benefit to many of the people that live there. Any honest discussion of American Exceptionalism must take this into account. It is not decisive, it does not justify individual actions and policies, which may or may not have been ethical or have been beneficial to Muslims. It’s just one large fact among others. We should incorporate it into our overall view.
The United States relationship with Saudi Arabia began at a very important point in time.
The meeting between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz in 1945 was made possible by the use of two US Navy warships. FDR traveled to the Yalta conference and then to the Great Bitter Lake aboard the cruiser USS Quincy. The USS Murphy, a destroyer, escorted the Quincy on the voyage and was dispatched to Jeddah to transport King Abdulaziz to the meeting with FDR.
The Yalta Conference was a meeting between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. At the time, Russia was occupying most of Eastern Europe, including the Romanian oil fields. At Yalta, Stalin made clear that he had no intention of giving up all his territory, particularly parts of Poland. His forces outnumbered Eisenhower’s three to one. Moreover, Stalin had already killed, though famine, execution, and gulag, somewhere around 17 million of his own people. He had no respect for American principles of freedom of speech and religion. His regime used an expansionist Marxist-Leninist ideology. Roosevelt did not trust him. After the war, the United States stood alone (with support from Britain and her commonwealth) in having the wherewithal to protect Europe and East Asia from Soviet domination. We did not suffer over 400,000 dead and 670,846 wounded to see Europe overtaken by a different totalitarianism. What made post-war America exceptional? We were the only nation in a position to resist Stalin and protect what we had won in World War Two.
In the post war period it was common wisdom oil supplies had been critical to the outcome.
One of the major problems faced by the Nazi war machine in World War II was a shortage of oil. For this reason, Germany decided to give up on Moscow for the time being, and the summer offensive of 1942 decided to focus on the war in the south, with the target being the oil fields of the Caucasus. In a major blunder, Hitler split Army Group South into two subgroups, Army Group A which would attack the Caucasus and army group B which would advance towards the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd).
To gain a better understanding of how oil considerations affected the outcome of World War Two you can read this essay. You’ll note that outside of some 5 million barrels in Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France, all the oil was already, or fell into, the Soviets’ hands.
When the United States looked at the lessons of the war, it came to the conclusion that gaining access to energy supplies and denying them to the Soviets would be a key factor in any future war between us. In other words, it was vital to our national security. These thoughts were clearly in Roosevelt’s mind when he met with Saudi Arabia’s King.
We didn’t have the luxury of worrying about the types of dislocation we might do to a society of bedouin camel traders and small craftsmen. What is the line, in this context, between national security and exploitation? To what extent were American energy decisions made using religious, racist, or nationalist ideology? To what extent were those decisions made for the purpose of safeguarding ourselves and our allies against potential Soviet aggression?
America found itself in an exceptional position after World War Two. That position was not dreamt up by believers in Manifest Destiny, nor by racists, nor by jingoistic nationalists, nor by greedy capitalists (although those defects were present in the minds of many of the architects of our post war planning). Added to the threat of Soviet aggression was the new threat of nuclear weapons coupled with new advances in aviation and missile technology. We were facing not just military defeat but potential annihilation. In this context, it is unfair to criticize the United States for putting third world concerns about self-determination and control of their own resources on the second tier of considerations. The U.S. can and should be criticized for how we went about securing energy supplies, for what kind of deals we insisted on, for too often turning a blind eye to human rights. We should be heavily criticized for using our national security apparatus to aid our corporations in non-vital fields, like the United Fruit Company’s holdings in Guatemala, or other holdings in Chile. Vietnam did nothing for our national security and should not have been defended. We made lots and lots of mistakes and hurt and killed lots of people that we should not have hurt and killed. This is not a defense of American foreign policy in the post war era. This a defense of American Exceptionalism. It wasn’t based on some defect in the American psyche or some imagined double standard. It was based in reality. In many ways, it was our very success in rebuilding Europe, helping East Asia develop economically, setting up the United Nations, and helping to dismantle the old pre-war European empires, that has undermined the case for our exceptionalism. The world no longer needs us to play such an exceptional role. They are back on their feet, developed, and largely in agreement about the merits of representative government, free enterprise, collective security, and human rights.
Bush’s disrespect for collective security and human rights is undermining any further rationale for American Exceptionalism.