09.12.2004
US decline and the drive to war
Nick Rogers examines a number of theoretical questions arising from the Iraq war. In the first part of his article he looks at the role of inter-imperialist rivalries and the securing of oil in US neo-conservative strategic thinking
One hundred thousand dead Iraqi civilians, according to the most recent estimate. Fallujah pulverised. Generalised chaos and instability. Deep fissures in the 60-year-old, US-led western alliance. Iraq is a horror show that is not only of concern to the worldwide left and liberal intelligentsia, but has dominated mainstream politics.
Inevitably, significant events force socialists to reassess theory in the light of a changing reality. In this article and a subsequent piece I will touch on a number of the debates. The extent to which rivalries between major powers are re-emerging. The relationship between rich and poor states. What we can say about the concept of the decline of capitalism at the moment of capital’s apparent triumph. The future prospects for the contours of the global political economy and for the robustness of capitalist economic performance.
The articles are not intended as a comprehensive survey of the discussion among socialists on the Iraq war, its causes and consequences. I will, however, look at two perspectives that have been aired in the pages of the Weekly Worker. Hillel Ticktin wrote on the causes of the war last year (August 28 2003), an argument he develops more fully in the current issue of Critique (No35, April 2004). Jack Conrad has discussed many of the same issues in chapter four of Remaking Europe (October 2004). An earlier version of his analysis appeared last year (Weekly Worker April 10 2003).
Inter-imperialist rivalry
What does the invasion of Iraq tell us about the nature of imperialism at the beginning of 21st century? How far has the global political economy moved on since the world of fierce contests between rival capitalisms described by Lenin and Bukharin?
The position of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty was discussed in the Weekly Worker in the summer, extensively by Mike Macnair and in one article by me. Martin Thomas of the AWL has articulated a line of reasoning that is similar in many ways to that of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, the authors of Empire. According to comrade Thomas, although the United States is the major power, the world is not a US empire in any meaningful sense. When the US pursues what it perceives as its own national interests on the larger scale, it inevitably acts to defend the interest of all big capital - US or otherwise.
The US seeks to “police the social fabric of the world - to maintain a smooth network of capitalist states covering the earth’s surface”. The US intervention in Iraq is an attack on national sovereignty to be condemned and opposed. But ultimately the US is seeking to restore capitalist norms to Iraq and the capitalists of all nations will benefit.
Hillel Ticktin takes a similar position in his Weekly Worker article (August 28 2003): “There is a huge degree of financial integration, as well as a fair degree of industrial integration, between the imperialists. It is not clear what competition between these powers means any longer. The kind of inter-imperialist rivalry that there was in 1914 or later is now much more muted.”
In fact, Ticktin argues that since World War II the US has not only been the predominant capitalist power, but in that period did not face a serious challenge from the Soviet Union and its allies. A distinctive aspect of Ticktin’s thinking is his thesis that Stalinism and western capitalism existed in a symbiotic relationship that served the interests of both ruling elites. Stalinist rule not only suppressed and atomised independent working class activity in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and China, but placed an almost insurmountable block on the progress of working class politics in the west.
There is a large degree of truth in the argument that the role of the Soviet Union distorted working class and socialist politics in the capitalist world. Also anti-communism was a key feature of the ruling class’s ideological defence of capitalism. However, one factor Ticktin underplays is the fact that the existence of the Soviet Union and the expansion of the Stalinist system after World War II dramatically reduced the sphere within which capital could operate.
Furthermore, third world ruling elites were able to play off one superpower against another. This was the world in which Saddam Hussein learnt his trade. In the 1980s he received military support from both the Soviet Union and US in his war against Iran. It is surely Saddam Hussein’s failure to appreciate the new global environment taking shape at the beginning of the 1990s that led him into his catastrophically mistaken invasion of Kuwait.
And in those countries where capital did have free rein the US was hardly indifferent to the prospect of Communist Party electoral advance. In Italy the possibility of PCI participation in coalition with the Christian Democrats led to off-stage intimations that the US would back a coup. And the 20th century saw scores of actual US interventions to depose even vaguely progressive governments.
The contest between the Soviet Union and US was real enough and goes a long way to explain the ramping up of military expenditure in the US and the genesis of its military-industrial complex.
Fear of the Soviet Union, combined with US economic and military domination of the most advanced capitalist countries, after the cessation of hostilities in 1945 did play a pivotal role in welding together a cohesive western alliance in which the old inter-imperialist rivalries were indeed much more muted.
However, over the last 30 years perhaps, and certainly since 1990, sharper differences of interest have began to emerge. The run-up to the invasion of Iraq exposed many of these: divisions which, quite apart from pitting France and Germany against the US, split the countries of the European Union itself.
In the US the political victory of the neo-conservatives, reconfirmed on November 2 2004, has brought into the open arguments that have raged within the US elite over the last decade about the future geo-political strategy of the US and its capitalism. Maybe because they had to fight their way into the political establishment, the collection of rightwing politicians and thinkers George Bush has placed at the centre of his administration are refreshingly - if terrifyingly - honest and forthright in expressing themselves.
Jack Conrad in Remaking Europe quotes from the documents of the Project for the New American Century, a key neo-conservative think-tank. Rebuilding America’s defenses, the September 2000 defence blueprint of the PNAC, is highly significant because it was published before the attacks of September 11 2001 (and indeed before the election of George Bush) and so predates current, more ephemeral concerns with al Qa’eda and international terrorism.
The document sets out an audacious perspective: “Today the [US military’s] task is to secure and expand the ‘zones of democratic peace’; to deter the rise of a new great power competitor; to defend key regions of Europe, east Asia and the Middle East; and to preserve American pre-eminence through the coming transformation of war made possible by new technologies.”
So for those running the US government the key objective is to preserve for the next several decades the status of the US as the world’s sole superpower. Such an ambition will not be easily achieved.
The current military predominance of the US is not in doubt. Last year, the US spent $396.1 billion (without taking account of extra allocations specifically to cover the Iraq conflict) on ‘defence’ - out of a global military expenditure of $950 billion (ie, over 40% of world spending on arms). The US and its closest allies control between two-thirds and three-quarters (depending on who you categorise as a close ally) of the world’s military budget.
But, not to put too fine a point on it, military dominance costs money. The US is the world’s largest economy, but its economic weight is by no means secure. The US is responsible for 22% of global production. Striking enough for a nation boasting less than five percent of the world’s population, but down from half of global production in the period after 1945.
And the US economy struggles under massive twin trade and government budget deficits. These are only sustainable for as long as the rest of the world’s capitalists and governments are prepared to hold an ever-increasing fund of dollar assets.
In large part the strategic dilemma for US policy-makers is how to utilise the current military pre-eminence to maintain a commensurate economic lead. This will be the source of many a conflict in the decades to come. Wherever they look around the world, the neo-cons see potential challengers to US interests. The danger of Germany or Japan “aspiring to a larger regional role” was cited by Paul Wolfowitz at the beginning of the 1990s.
The European Union’s tentative moves to build more cohesive military forces, partly independent of Nato, and the deployment of a European global positioning satellite system engender anxiety in Washington corridors. So does the EU’s growing economic clout - with an economy now larger, if less integrated and less productive, than that of the US.
Russia is much reduced in stature: Nato presses against its western borders; US military bases are established in the former Soviet republics of central Asia; a US-sponsored pipeline transports oil from the former Soviet complexes of Azerbaijan to the Mediterranean coast of long-term US ally, Turkey.
But Russia remains a major nuclear power. It possesses immense natural resources, a highly literate workforce and abundant reserves of nationalism with which to launch a challenge to its old adversary. US intervention in the politics of Ukraine is testament to a continued commitment to containing the Russian bear.
Above all, however, the fears of the neo-cons are focussed on the world’s fastest-growing economy and most populous country, China. In the words of Rebuilding America’s defenses, “… the new strategic centre of concern appears to be shifting to east Asia”.
China presents a multitude of potential threats to US supremacy. Vertiginous economic growth rates challenge the global economic pecking order. On some projections China will overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy in the next 20 or 30 years - although wealth per head will remain much lower. In many ways reading the economic runes is a fool’s game. In the 1980s much ink was wasted predicting that the Japanese economy would eclipse the US. As it transpired, the 1990s witnessed a decade of Japanese economic stagnation, not to mention sluggish growth in the EU, and the US entered the new millennium having retained its share of global production and stronger than ever in key high technology sectors.
Yet the Chinese economy has demonstrated the robustness of its growth strategy over a period of more than two decades and survived the east Asian financial crash of 1997 relatively unscathed. Chinese manufacturers increasingly dominate world trade. China’s surging demand for raw materials has seen global prices rise. Increasingly, China is the main driver of Asian economic growth - and the key to Japan’s economic recovery.
If China succumbs to US pressures to revalue the renminbi - so as to staunch the tidal wave of Chinese export flooding the US market - dollar measurements of the Chinese economy might see it emerge as the second largest in the world.
Furthermore, the neo-cons are well aware that economic prowess can all too easily be translated into military muscle. The size of the Chinese population means that Chinese ground forces (at two million) outnumber by four times US army personnel (at approximately half a million).
Of course, US military technology is vastly superior to that of the Chinese. Rebuilding America’s defenses goes as far as to propose a space corps. But in the decades to come growing wealth will provide China with the ability to begin to close the technological gap. And, even now, the number of troops China can place on the ground begins to shift the balance of power in its immediate neighbourhood. Taiwan is a dangerous flashpoint and an object of many a neo-con demand for even closer ties and even greater levels of support from the US government.
The neo-cons’ Manichean vision of a world threatening to overwhelm US capitalism provides the context for the drive to war with Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction and links with al Qa’eda were never serious considerations.
In part Iraq was a question of unfinished business with a stubborn miscreant and an opportunity to serve warning on other rebels who might seek to prick US pretensions - Colonel Gaddafi’s bid to come in from the cold is a striking affirmation of instant success for this strategy. Rebuilding America’s defenses is concerned that a failure to meet the challenges will “call America’s status as the world’s leading power into question. As we have seen, even a small failure like that in Somalia or a halting and incomplete triumph, as in the Balkans, can cast doubt on America’s credibility.”
Iraq also serves as a justification for Bush’s hikes in the military budget and makes a contribution to tutoring the US population in the clarity of the neo-conservative world vision.
Oil
Jack Conrad argues that US objectives in Iraq are not “directly connected with and subordinate to an unquenchable US thirst for oil. A crude leftwing obsession and oversimplification ...”
Hillel Ticktin agrees. He rehearses a series of arguments against the most common theses in socialist journals and meetings. The US could easily have done a deal with Saddam Hussein, as it was prepared to do so in the 1980s. US companies already control the oil supply, so they do not need to own it outright. Even non-US oil companies, such as BP and Shell and the French Total, have a substantial proportion of shares owned by Americans (30% in the case of Total). There is no immediate need for the US to secure Iraqi oil supplies - investment of resources and political and military leverage could just as easily go into the development of supplies of Russian and African oil. Some sectors of US capitalism benefit from high oil prices; others from a low prices. There is no evidence that US oil companies were pushing for the invasion.
Jack Conrad and Ticktin are correct to caution against an explanation of US motivations that is excessively reductionist with regard to immediate economic benefit. But economics does matter to the US even when its leaders are thinking most strategically.
The US is increasingly dependent on imported oil. In the last 30 years US oil output from domestic oilfields has fallen by 40%, while consumption has increased by 40%. Over the same period the share of oil imports in US oil consumption has risen from 36% to 56%.
The Cheney report of May 2001 (more formally known as the National Energy Plan) estimated that by 2020 the US “will import nearly two out of every three barrels of oil - a condition of increased dependency on foreign powers that do not always have America’s interests at heart”.
For US capitalism, secure oil supplies are a strategic imperative that is key to defending its global geopolitical position. An imperative that influences the deployment of many units of the US military. Take, for instance, the role of the US navy in defending oil supply lines - whether it be the Bosporus, Suez and Panama canals, Hormuz straits in the gulf (the US navy’s fifth fleet is based in Bahrain) or the Malacca straits in south-east Asia, linking the Persian Gulf and US allies in east Asia.
What is more, the key strategic rivals, real and potential, of the US - especially Japan and China - are increasingly dependent on Middle Eastern oil. In crises in the decades to come, he who physically controls the oil may very well get to call the tune.
Saddam Hussein committed two major crimes against US oil interests. One, his political survival and the continuation of sanctions meant that Iraqi oil - reserves of which are possibly second only to those of Saudi Arabia - was not being pumped in substantial quantities. Any relaxation of the restrictions would have won Saddam Hussein increased stature in the region and given him the wherewithal to begin to restore the influence of his regime.
Two, he was signing oil contracts to develop Iraqi oil production with French (Total) Russian (Lukoil and Zarubezhneft), Chinese (the China National Petroleum Corporation), and Indian (Oil and Natural Gas Corporation) companies. US companies were being deliberately excluded from the potential bonanza.
And Saddam Hussein committed a third crime against the United States that is surprisingly rarely mentioned, but was potentially devastating to US interests. Iraq was selling its oil for euros rather than dollars. Iran was threatening to do the same. A broad switch from petro-dollars to petro-euros would make it impossible for the US to cover its deficits and would precipitate a major economic crisis. Needless to say, Iraqi oil sales are today denominated in dollars.
But US interests in the Middle East are wider than restoring and controlling the flow of Iraqi oil. The neo-conservatives have articulated an agenda for transforming the whole region. Couched in terms of ‘bringing democracy’, the neo-cons have a vision of restoring stability to the Middle East and installing regimes that are even more easily manipulated than the current crop of sheikdoms and dictatorships. Hence the identification of both Iran and Syria as potential targets for regime change.
A major prize for the US would be the dissolution of Opec or the transformation of the cartel into a tame puppet. At a stroke, Hugo Chavez’s vision of a more robust Opec bringing greater equality to world affairs would evaporate.