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Citation: The Progressive May 1998, v62, n5, p18(4)
Author: Vidal, Gore
Title: The menopause of empire. (postwar American foreign policy)
by Gore Vidal
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COPYRIGHT 1998 Progressive Inc.
Before we get down to the really serious stuff about Monica and Kathleen, I
plan just a little foreplay here about the origins of the American empire and
the meaning of the Cold War, how it started, who started it, who benefited.
The twentieth century and the second Christian millennium are heading hand in
hand for the exit. Personally, I thought they'd never go without taking us
with them.
We all know that centuries and millennia are just arbitrary markings--a bit
like the bookkeeping at Paramount Pictures. But symbolically, they mean a lot.
This goes particularly for the one indisposable--or does the President say
indispensable?--nation on Earth, and the last self-styled global empire,
loaded down with nukes, bases, and debts.
I have now lived through nearly three-quarters of this century. I enlisted
in the Army of the United States at seventeen, went to the Pacific, did
nothing useful--I was just there, as Richard M. Nixon says, when the bombs
were falling. Actually, the bombs were not really falling on either one of us.
I was writing a novel, and he was making a fortune playing poker.
Now, suddenly, it's 1998. Last year, we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary
of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Also, more ominously, last July
26 was the fiftieth anniversary of the National Security Act that, without any
national debate or the people's consent, replaced the old American republic
with a national security state very much in the global empire business. Let us
get into the time machine.
It is the ides of August 1945. Germany and Japan have surrendered, and some
thirteen million Americans are headed home. Home turned out to be a sort of
fairground where fireworks go off, and the band plays "Don't Sit Under the
Apple Tree," and an endlessly enticing fun house flings open its doors, and we
file through. We enjoy halls and mirrors where everyone is comically
distorted, ride through all the various tunnels of love, and take scary tours
of horror chambers, where skeletons and cobwebs and bats push past us. And
suitably chilled and thrilled, we're ready for the exit and everyday life.
But, to the consternation of some and the apparent indifference of the
rest, we were never really allowed to leave the fun house. It has become a
permanent part of our world, as were those goblins sitting under the apple
tree.
Officially, the United States was at peace. Much of Europe and most of
Japan were in ruins, often literally, certainly economically. We alone had all
our cities and a sort of booming economy--sort of, because it depended on war
production and there was, as far as anyone could tell, no war in the offing.
Briefly, the arts flourished. It looked like it was going to be a golden age.
The Glass Menagerie was staged, Copland's Appalachian Spring was played, a
film called The Lost Weekend--not a bad title for what we'd gone through--won
an Academy Award. And the as-yet-unexiled Richard Wright published the
much-admired work Black Boy, while Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County
was banned for obscenity in parts of the country, though it would be allowed
out today in Washington.
Quaintly, each city had at least three or four daily newspapers, while New
York, as befitted the world's capital, had seventeen newspapers. But a
novelty, television, had begun to appear in household after household, its
cold, gray, distorting eye relentlessly projecting a fun house view of the
world.
Those who followed the ugly new minted word "media" began to note that
often while watching television we kept fading in and out of the chamber of
horrors. Our ally in the recent war, Uncle Joe Stalin, as the Accidental
President Harry S. Truman called him, was growing horns and fangs that dripped
blood. On Earth we were the only great unruined power with atomic weapons, and
we were somehow at terrible risk.
Why? How?
The trouble appeared to be over Germany, which on February 11, 1945, had
been split at the Yalta Summit meeting into four zones--American, Soviet,
British, and French. As the Russians had done the most fighting and suffered
the greatest losses, it was agreed that they should have an early crack at
reparations from Germany to the extent of $20 billion.
At a later meeting at Potsdam, the new President Truman, with Stalin and
Churchill, reconfirmed Yalta and opted for the unification of Germany under
the four victorious powers. But something had happened between the euphoria of
Yalta and the edginess of Potsdam.
As the meeting progressed, the atom bomb was tried out successfully in a
New Mexico desert. We were now able to incinerate Japan, or the Soviets for
that matter, and we no longer needed Russia's help to defeat Japan. We started
to renege on our agreements with Stalin, particularly reparations from
Germany. We also quietly shelved the notion agreed upon at Yalta of a united
Germany under four-power control. Our aim now was to unite the three western
zones of Germany and integrate them into our Western Europe, restoring in the
process Germany's economy, hence fewer reparations.
Then, as of May 1946, we began to rearm Germany. Stalin went up the wall at
this betrayal. The Cold War was on.
At home, the media were beginning to prepare the attentive few for
disappointment. Suddenly we were faced with the highest personal income taxes
in American history to pay for more and more weapons, among them the world
killer hydrogen bomb. Why? Because the Russians were coming. No one knew quite
why they were coming or with what. Weren't they still burying twenty million
dead?
Official explanations for all this made very little sense. But then, as
Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson narrowly observed, "In the State
Department we used to discuss how much time that mythical average American
citizen put in each day listening, reading, and arguing about the world
outside his country. It seemed to us that ten minutes a day would be a high
average." So why bore the people? Secret bipartisan government is best for
what, after all, is or should be a society of docile workers, enthusiastic
consumers, obedient soldiers who will believe just about anything for at least
ten minutes.
The national security state, the NATO alliance, the forty years Cold War,
were all created without the consent, much less the advice, of the American
people. Of course, there were elections during the crucial time, but
Truman-Dewey, Eisenhower-Stevenson, Kennedy-Nixon were of a single mind as to
the desirability of inventing first a many-tentacled enemy--communism, the
star of the chamber of horrors--then, to combat so much evil, install a
permanent wartime state at home, with loyalty oaths, the national peacetime
draft, and secret police to keep watch over homegrown traitors, as the few
enemies of the national security state were known.
Then followed forty years of mindless wars, which created a debt of $5
trillion that hugely benefited aerospace companies and firms like General
Electric, whose longtime TV spokesman, Ronald Reagan, eventually retired to
the White House.
Why go into all of this now? Have we not done marvelously well? Certainly,
European bankers envy our powerless labor unions (only 14 percent of the lucky
funsters are privileged to belong to a union), and our industries (lean, mean,
down-sized). There is no particular place for the redundant to go, except into
the hell of sizzle and fry and burn.
Today, we give orders to every country on our globe--tell them with whom to
trade and to which of our courts they must show up for indictment should they
disobey. Yet we have come to what Tennessee Williams once called a "moon of
pause."
I asked him, "What on Earth does that mean, Tennessee?"
"It is," he said loftily, "the actual Greek translation of menopause."
I said that the word "moon" did not come from "menses"--Latin, not Greek,
for month.
"Then what," he asked suspiciously, "is the Latin for moon?"
And I told him it was "luna," and all the fun he might have with the word
"lunatic."
He sighed and cut.
But "a moon of pause" seems a nice dotty phrase for the change of life that
our empire is now going through with no enemy and no discernible function.
While we were at our busiest in the fun house, no one ever tot us what the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization was really about. On March 17, 1948, the
Treaty of Brussels called for a military alliance of Britain, France, and
Benelux to be joined by the U.S. and Canada. The impetus behind NATO was the
United States, whose principal foreign policy since the Administration of
George Washington was to avoid entangling alliances. Now, as the Russians were
supposed to be coming, we replaced the old republic with a newborn national
security state and set up shop as the major European power west of the Elbe.
We were now hell-bent on the permanent division of Germany between our Western
zone (plus the French and British zones) and the Soviet sector to the East.
Serenely, we broke every agreement that we had made with our former ally, the
now horrendous communist enemy. For those interested in the details, Carolyn
Eisenberg's Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany,
1944-1949, is a masterful survey of an empire, sometimes blindly, sometimes
brilliantly assembling itself.
Although the Soviets still wanted to live by our original arrangements at
Yalta, and even Potsdam, we had decided unilaterally to restore the German
economy in order to enfold a rearmed Germany into Western Europe, thus
isolating the Soviet Union, a nation which had not recovered from the Second
World War and had no nuclear weapons.
It was Dean Acheson again who elegantly explained all the lies that he was
obliged to tell Congress in the ten-minute attention span of the average
American. This is gorgeous stuff. "If we did make our points clearer than
truth," says Acheson, writing in his memoirs, "we did not differ from most
other educators and could hardly do otherwise."
Qualification must give way to simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance
to bluntness--almost brutality--in carrying home a point. Thus for two
generations, Americans have been conditioned by their overlords so that at the
word "communism" there is a Pavlovian reflex as the brain goes totally dead.
U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Walter Bedell Smith wrote in December 1947, "The
difficulty under which we labor is that in spite of our announced position we
really do not want, nor intend to accept, German unification in any terms the
Russians might agree to, even though they seem to meet most of our
requirements." This is higher diplomacy.
Stalin's frustration led to the famous blockade of the Allied section of
Berlin, overcome by General Lucius Clay's successful airlift. As Eisenberg
writes, with the inception of the Berlin blockade, President Truman
articulated a simple story that featured the Russians trampling the wartime
agreements in their ruthless grab of the former German capital. The President
did not explain that the United States had abandoned Yalta and Potsdam, that
it was pushing the formation of a West German state against the misgivings of
many Europeans, and that the Soviets had launched the blockade to prevent
partition. This was fun-house politics at its most tragical.
On March 12, 1947, Truman addressed Congress to proclaim what would be
known as the Truman Doctrine, in which he targeted our ally of two years
earlier as the enemy. The subject at hand was a civil war in Greece,
supposedly directed by the Soviets. We could not tolerate this as
suddenly--this is his quotation--"the policy of the United States is to
support free people." Thus Truman made the entire world the specific business
of the United States. Although Greek insurgents were getting some help from
Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, the Soviets gave none. They still hoped that the
British, whose business Greece had been, would keep order. But as Britain had
neither the resources nor the will, they called on the U.S. to step it
Behind the usual closed doors, Acheson was stirring up Congress with
Iago-like intensity. "Russian pressure of some sort," he said, "has brought
the Balkans to the point where a highly possible Soviet breakthrough might
open three continents to Soviet penetration."
Senators gasped, grew pale, wondered how to get more defense contracts into
their states.
Of the major politicians, only former Vice President Henry Wallace dared
answer Truman's clearer-than-truth version of history. Wallace said,
"Yesterday, March 12, 1947, marked a turning point in American history. For it
is not a Greek crisis that we face; it is an American crisis. Yesterday,
President Truman proposed, in effect, that America police Russia's every
border. There is no regime too reactionary for us, provided it stands in
Russia's expansionist path. There is no country too remote to serve as a scene
of a contest which may widen until it becomes a world war."
Nine days after Truman declared war on communism, he installed a federal
loyalty oath program. All government employees had to now swear allegiance to
the new order. Henry Wallace struck again: "The President's Executive Order
creates a master index of public servants from the janitor in the village post
office to the Cabinet members. They are to be sifted and tested and watched
and appraised."
Truman was nervously aware that many regarded Wallace as the true heir to
Roosevelt's New Deal. Wallace was also likely to enter the Presidential race
of 1948. Truman now left truth behind in the dust. Here is his quote: "The
attempt of Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin et al. to fool the world--and the American
Crackpots Association, represented by Joe Davies, Henry Wallace, Claude
Pepper, and the actors and artists in immoral Greenwich Village--is just like
Hitler's and Mussolini's so-called socialist states." Give 'em hell, Harry.
In the wake of Truman's cuckoo-like emergence from the old-fashioned
closets of the republic, a new American state was being born in order to save
the nation and the great globe itself from communism. The nature of this
militarized state was from the beginning beyond rational debate.
Characteristically, Truman and Acheson insisted on closed hearings of the
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations--these matters were too important to
share with the people whose spare ten minutes was now more and more filling up
with television. The media spoke with a single voice. Time-Life publisher
Henry Luce said it loudest: "God has founded America as a global beacon of
freedom." (He once said to me the great task for the United States in the
American century is the Christianization of China. I remember thinking then we
were really in trouble.)
Dissenters like Wallace were labeled communists and ceased to engage
meaningfully in public life. An ancestral voice in his own time, Wallace spoke
again on May 21, 1947: "Today, in blind fear of communism, we are turning
aside from the United Nations. We are approaching a century of fear." And thus
far he has proved to be half right. On July 26, 1947, Congress enacted the
National Security Act, which created the National Security Council, still
going strong, and the Central Intelligence Agency, still apparently hung over
a cliff as the result of decades of bad intelligence, not to mention all those
cheery traitors for whom the country club at Langley, Virginia, was once an
impenetrable cover.
When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created, only Charles De
Gaulle got the point of what we were doing. He took France out of our Cosa
Nostra and developed his own atomic bomb. But France was still very much
linked to the empire, through the CIA and other secret forces.
Political control was exerted within the empire, not only driving the Labor
prime minister, Harold Wilson, around a bend too far, but preventing Italy
from ever having a cohesive government by not allowing the historic
compromise, a government of Christian Democrats and Communists.
The Soviets promptly cracked down on their client states--Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, East Germany--and the wall went up in Berlin.
From 1950 to 1990, Europe was dangerously divided and armed to the teeth.
But as American producers of weapons were never richer, all was well for their
world.
At Yalta, Roosevelt wanted to break up the European colonial empires,
particularly that of the French. Of Indochina, FDR said France has milked it
for 100 years. For the time being, he proposed a U.N. trusteeship. Then he
died.
Unlike Roosevelt, Truman was not a philatelist. Had he been a stamp
collector, he might have known where the various countries in the world were
and who lived in them. Like every good American, he knew he hated communism;
he also hated socialism, which may or may not have been the same thing--no one
was ever quite sure.
Yet as early as the American election of 1848, socialism--imported by
comical German immigrants with noses always in books--was an ominous spectre
calculated to enrage a raw capitalist society with labor unions, health care,
and other devil's work. It is still being fiercely resisted a century and a
half later.
In 1946, when Ho Chi Minh asked the United States to take Indochina under
its wing, Truman said, No way, you are some kind of Fu Manchu Communist--the
worst. In August 1945, Truman told De Gaulle that the French could return to
Indochina--we were no longer FDR anti-imperialists. As Ho had his northern
republic, the French installed Bao Dai in the South. On February 1, 1950, the
State Department came to this extraordinary conclusion: "The choice
confronting the United States is to support the French in Indochina or face
the extension of communism over the remainder of the continental area of
Southeast Asia, and possibly further westward." Thus without shepherds or even
a napalm star, the domino theory was born in a humble State Department manger.
On May 8, 1950, Acheson recommended economic and military aid to the French
in Vietnam. By 1955, the U.S. was paying 40 percent of the French costs for
that war. For a quarter century, the United States was to fight in Vietnam
because our ignorant leaders and their sharp-eyed financiers never realized
that the game is not dominoes but chess.
Happily, nothing ever stays the same. During the last days of the waning
moon, a haphazard Western European Union was being cobbled together. Then the
Soviet Union, demonstrating its pure viciousness, abruptly folded. The two
Germanys that we had so painstakingly kept apart reunited. Washington was
suddenly adrift, and in the sky, the moon of empire paused.
Neither Reagan nor Bush had much knowledge of history or geography;
nevertheless, orders still kept coming from the White House, but they were
less and less heeded because everyone knew that the oval one had a bank
overdraft of $5 trillion, and he could no longer give presents to good clients
or wage war without first passing the hat to the Germans and the Japanese, as
he was obliged to do when Ted Turner had his light show for CNN in the Persian
Gulf.
Gradually, it is now becoming evident to even the most distracted funster
that there is no longer any need for NATO because there is no enemy. One might
say there never really was one, even when NATO was started. But over the
years, we did succeed in creating a pretty dangerous Soviet funhouse-mirror
version of ourselves. Although the United States may yet, in support of
Israel, declare war on one billion Muslims, the Europeans will stay out of
that one. They recall 1529, when the Turks besieged Vienna, not as obliging
guest workers, but as world conquerors. The time has now come for the
Europeans to free themselves of their American masters.
Our motive for hanging on to empire is obvious. With an expanded NATO, our
arms makers, if not workers, are in for a bonanza. As it is, American sales of
weapons went up 23 percent last year while restrictions on sales to Latin
America are being lifted. Chile, ever menaced by Ecuador, plans to buy
twenty-four F-16 jet fighters.
But it is an expanded NATO that causes true joy in the boardrooms. Upon
joining NATO, the lucky new club member is obliged to buy expensive weapons
from the likes of Lockheed Martin. Since the new members have precarious
economies and the old ones are not exactly booming, the American taxpayer--a
wan goose that lays few eggs--will have to borrow even more money to foot the
bill, which the Congressional Budget Office says should come to $125 billion
over fifteen years, with the U.S. paying most of it. Yeltsin correctly sees
this as a hostile move against Russia, not to mention an expensive renewal of
the Cold War.
There comes a moment when empires cease to exert energy and become symbolic
or existential, as we used to say back in the 1940s. The current wrangling
over NATO demonstrates what a quandary a symbolic empire is in when it wants
to maintain its view of itself at home and abroad and yet lacks the mind, much
less the resources, to impose its hegemony upon its former client states.
In the absence of money and common will, nothing much will probably happen.
Meanwhile, there's a new and better world ready to be born. The optimum
economic unit in the world is now the city-state. Thanks to technology,
everyone knows or can know something about everyone else on the planet. The
message now pounding in over the Internet is the irrelevancy, not to mention
the sheer danger, of the traditional nation-state, much less empire.
The common Euro Market will evolve not so much into a union of ancient
bloodstained states as a mosaic of homogeneous regions like the Spanish-French
Basques or city-states like Milan, each loosely linked in trade with a
clearinghouse information center at Brussels. People who want to be rid of
onerous nation-states should be left to go in order to pursue (and even--why
not?--overtake) happiness, the goal, or so we Americans have always pretended
to believe, of the human enterprise.
So, on that predictably sententious American note, I am tempted to enjoin
the movers and shakers of this world to recall the Greek doctor's oath: "Above
all, do no harm." Hippocrates also wrote--and this goes for the moved and the
shaken of the world--"Life is short, but the art is long, the opportunity
fleeting, the experiment perilous, the judgment difficult."
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