The Pacific Rim Review of Books

Issue Three 2006

In Democracy’s Shadow

Edited by Marcus G Raskin and A Carl LeVan

In Democracy’s Shadow shows why it would be an injustice for critics to make American President George W Bush and Vice-President Richard Cheney scapegoats for the problems of contemporary Americans. It could even be argued that their actions have done Americans a service in prompting a closer look, through books like In Democracy’s Shadow, at how the ‘National Security State’ has evolved over a century.  It has long shaped democratic processes into something very different from what is assumed by Americans and others who see democratic values as one of the great achievements of mankind’s progress.  At the same time it could be argued, from a perspective like that of Niall Ferguson in Colossos, that it is the very preoccupations of In Democracy’s Shadow that have inhibited America from fulfilling its role as the central imperial authority in the early 21^st Century global community.

This collection of essays suggests an American people who have been sleepwalking – although perhaps no more than their British predecessors, who founded the Anglo-American imperial order of the past two centuries.  Marcus G Raskin and A Carl Le Van, the compilers of this penetrating series of essays, say in their opening essay, The National Security State and the Tragedy of Empire:

As part of this system of invincibility the society cedes to the corporate economy the planning and regulatory function.  While the state can, if it so chooses, intervene directly, the decision-making system is a coordinated effort between the national security budget and the largest corporations.

They recall that:

By the time America entered World War I, it had occupied the Philippines and intervened in Central America and the Caribbean no less than forty-five times.

and that in 1933:

…..Walter Lippmann counselled the president, “The situation is critical, Franklin.  You may have to assume dictatorial power”.

In the first passage above some will hear echoes of the role of early British corporate interests that used the African slave trade, American riches and the Asian opium trade to establish the foundations of imperial wealth and power.  There are also echoes of the situation described by William Engdahl when he wrote in A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order:

British secret intelligence services at this time also evolved in an unusual manner.  Unlike the Empires of France or other nations, Britain modelled its post-Waterloo empire on an extremely sophisticated marriage between top bankers and financiers of the City of London, government cabinet ministers, heads of key industrial companies deemed strategic to the national interest, and the heads of the espionage services.

Of course, unlike Britain where democracy could be seen more readily as a political artifice, America was founded on the ideal of democracy.  It required skilled, subtle and resolute management to overshadow democracy and establish the ‘National Security State’ detailed in the essays collated by Raskin and Le Van. 

Indeed, one of the major questions posed by this work for further evaluation is that of how a modern democracy can prosper without the powerful and central driving influence of the corporation.  Even as the aberrations of giant corporations become increasingly pervasive in the contemporary world – whether in medicine, in food, in energy, in the environment, or in something else – it is not easy to see how Anglo-American communities can wean themselves from practices that have delivered them such imperial power, wealth and influence.  It would be folly to forget that corporate power has been fundamental to the creation and maintenance of Anglo-American Empire and all the rewards that have accompanied it.  After all, Anglo-American corporate entrepreneurship has proven itself with an unprecedented record of creative, innovative and successful imperial expansionism, at comparatively little cost or risk to government.

The first of four parts of the collection, entitled Cold War Beginnings, contains, apart from The National Security State and the Tragedy of Empire, essays titled The Centrality of the Atomic Bomb, The Cold War and the Fate of Democratic Culture and The Nuclear Crucible, which illustrate how the Bomb and the Cold War were used to cultivate both arrogance and fear amongst people awed by a previously unimaginable might.  Gar Alpervich and Kai Bird explore how the atomic bomb created a unique sense of American power, without which much would have evolved in other ways.  Norman Birnbaum relates how the Cold War “could have been ended decades before it actually ceased”.  He goes on to conclude:

Events like Watergate show how much of our public life it [the Cold War] corrupted.  Watergate was the invasion of domestic politics by the techniques of the Cold War, just as McCarthyism was the extension to foreign policy of the primitivism of much of American politics.  Whether the war on “terror” can be stopped from defining all of our politics depends on a reflective citizenry’s engaging in critical scrutiny of the past century.

Trerrence Edward Pope concludes this first part by explaining how the Nuclear Crucible creates a “serious moral, political and legal crisis” in an environment where:

…..the “dictates of public conscience”, in an age of propaganda and a media saturated monopoly plagued by censorship, are left without the means to attain the velocity of moral outrage, political comprehension, or legal sensibility. 

The second part, titled Finding Our Recent and Present Past, reviews The Nuclear Legacy of the Cold War, The Iraq War and the Future of International Law, Weapons of Mass Destruction and Human Rights, and Cold War Continium.  Initially, John Steinbrunner and Jeffrey Lewis argue that “the most insidious of the Cold War legacies – the apparent commitment of the United States to active military confrontation for decisive national advantage – will have to be adjusted to reality, not merely in words.  Richard Falk’s essay concludes darkly, however, that:

There exists ample flexibility within international law to deal with legitimate claims of self-defence, but with respect to illegitimate claims, such as Iraq, there is no occasion for innovative evasions of international law.

Peter Weiss and John Burroughs refocus attention on some hard and troubling questions:

When leaders speak of waging the war against terrorism to its final victory, one can only winch and wonder what they have in mind. What war? Against whom? Where fought?  With what weapons?  The final question is probably the crucial one.

William Blum, former State Department analyst and author of Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire, highlights the way America’s handling of Serbia and Milosevic demonstrated “the kind of power that any Emperor of the past would have deeply envied’ but not “the kind of post-Cold War world that critics and victims of American foreign policy had hoped for.”

The third part, titled National Security Substructures, contains three essays: A Report on NAFTA and the State of the Maquilas, Courts and Universities as Institutions in the National Security State and The Pentagon’s Welfare Budget.  Saul Landau illuminates the manner in which the contradiction between the relentless corporate search for reserves of cheap labour, facilitated by the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement, and the resurgent demands of the security establishment, inspired by the war on terror, has left both land and people devastated in the northern parts of Mexico.  Anabel L Dwyer and David J Dwyer, lawyer and anthropologist, reveal in a penetrating, but not necessarily politically hard-headed, way the success of the ‘National Security State’ in mobilizing educational and legal institutions to ensure citizens accommodate its needs.  They note its dangerous character due to its “flimsy ‘foundation in nuclear weapons” but do not progress far in highlighting politically practical remedies.  Seymore Melman details the cost of the American military budget with over $4 trillion spent by 1996 on nuclear weapons alone, with only 8 percent of the nuclear stockpile capable of obliterating the populations of both Russia and China.  He notes that military expenditure “is encouraged by the myth that the economic capability of the United States is, for all practical purposes, without limit”.  He then goes on to outline the neglect of spending on road, bridge, transit, aviation, school, water, waste, energy and other infrastructure.

The fourth and final part of In Democracy’s Shadow is titled Accountability and Democracy and includes papers on Security’s Conquest of Federal Law Enforcement, The Seeds of Secrecy, Then and Now, The National Security State, War and Congress and Myth Verses Hypothesis.  Peter Raven-Hansen boldly states his central thesis in his opening sentence:

Since 1986, presidents have taken international terrorism, drug trafficking and international organized crime out of the law enforcement closet of ordinary crimes and relabelled them as “national security threats”.

Anna K Nelson’s final paragraph captures a similar lament:

Once again we are at war, and once again it is war without end….Regrettably, Americans have simply grown accustomed to the national security state and its partner, secrecy.  After fifty years, the seeds of secrecy are still bearing fruit.

Marcus G Raskin and A Carl LeVan then come to the crux of the whole book with the words:

Something has to give. Either the imperial system is dropped, or the Constitution is dismantled.

The novelist Norman Mailer rounds up the essays by writing of Myth Verses Hypothesis and captures the essence of much of the drama concerning the ‘National Security State’.  He suggests the careful and artful construction of a mythology that has disguised the imperial character of American government and preserved the perceived and comforting illusions of democracy.   Moreover, in this he goes to the heart of the failure of the elite guiding the imperial state with the words:

…..the nation’s future , and its technological skills, seemed to be in distress.  American students at STEM studies – STEM, science, technology, engineering and mathematics – no longer appeared to be equal to those Asian and European students who also were studying advanced courses at our universities.

Raskin’s final essay, Conclusions, delivers a type of coup de grace with the question:

In the twenty-first century, can the United States wean itself from being the dominant warrior nation, which balances itself on the steep ledge of fear, omnipotent fantasy, decline and destruction?

In Democracy’s Shadow leaves little doubt that previous warnings about the perils of American Empire, delivered by writers like Paul Kennedy and Chalmers Johnson, were well conceived.  It is worth remarking, however, that perhaps more important than the painful post 9/11 initiatives in Afghanistan and Iraq in signalling the failure of empire was the 1997 Asian financial crisis.  Much evidence, including that of Nobel Laureate and former World Bank Chief Economist, Joseph Stiglitz, in Globalization and Its Discontents, now indicates that it was the product of decisions made by financial authorities in America who felt threatened by Asian economic growth and were concerned to re-establish American economic authority.  On the contrary, it gave Americans the illusion of triumph over ‘Asian values’, exacerbated an already excessive and perilous boom and catapulted China over America’s ally Japan into an Asian, and perhaps global, leadership role

In Democracy’s Shadow is a product of the failure of the ‘National Security State’ and if it has a weakness it is the omission of any consideration of the international implications of the reassertion of democratic preoccupations over the global concerns of empire.  America cannot escape easily the legacy of more than a hundred years of global assertiveness and expanding authority.  The tragedy is that the United States, like the United Kingdom before it, knew how to build an empire but has not demonstrated the capacity to govern one.  The world may have to look to a resurgent China, with its long history of far-reaching imperial government and recurring revival after decline, for lessons on how to meet this challenge.

In the meantime, are there ways for America to return to a more representative and viable form of democracy without relinquishing both the rewards of Empire and the capacity to prosper in an increasingly competitive global economy”?  Or does the restoration of democratic ideals, and the surrender of the American ‘National Security State’, carry with it a necessary acceptance of a humbler, much reduced form of Anglo-American corporate wealth and activity?

To date, President George W Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney have succeeded mostly in highlighting the seriousness of the dilemmas that now confront America’s leadership class.  In Democracy’s Shadow sketches vividly the trail of decisions that have led them to their present range of choices.