The U.S. in the Post-War Order

The hegemonic stability theories seem to have been backed by evidence of the early phase of the post-World War 2 period in which the U.S. was able to push the former European imperial powers to accept a multilateral economic system, which existed beside the United Nations system, with the U.S. playing the leading role. This Bretton Woods system was predicated on the coincidence of three favorable political conditions. The first was the concentration of both political and economic power in the hands of a small number of (western) states; secondly, the existence of a cluster of important (economic and political) interests shared by those states; and thirdly, the presence of a dominant power "willing and able" to assume a leadership role in the new situation [Spero, 1977: 29].

It is the evolution of the contradictions of this combination that Spero spoke about that has created the predicament in which the present situation for the U.S. arises. The domination of the U.S. in global economic and strategic institutions such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and the Bretton Woods institutions characterized the Cold War period. These institutions expressed the interests of the western powers (at first hostile to Japanese emergence on the world economic scene) as the culmination of the western modern system based on liberal-monopolistic capitalism. The institutions also expressed political military power that the western countries wielded throughout the world. Western systems of economic, political, and military power in fact protected those economic interests that were threatened by "communism," and as time passed, by the emergent nationalism of what came to be called "Third World" or "developing" countries.

Indeed, as Paul Kennedy argued in his book: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers [1988], economic power is always needed to underpin military power, while the latter is also necessary in order to acquire and protect wealth that superpower status demands. The problem arises when a disproportionate share of a hegemon's economic resources is increasingly diverted from wealth-creation and allocated to military purposes. The result is the weakening of the economic backbone of the military power of the hegemon in the long run, which often leads to its eventual collapse.

This reality took some time to come through in the case of the U.S. The rise of U.S. transnational corporations in the world economy, for a time, reinforced U.S. economic, political, and strategic power, which many states in the world were obliged to comply with due to the imperatives of the situation. Having suffered from its isolationism of the interwar years and thereby contributing to the eventual collapse of the economic system and of the peace that had followed World War 1, the U.S. in the period following World War 2 was prepared for an outward push through the Bretton Woods multilateral system and the NATO alliance.

Having settled into the role of a superpower only challenged by the Soviet Union, the U.S. begun to pursue a series of policies in the international arena that tended to undermine its own political belief in the independence of states against European colonialism. To some extent, this was prompted by U.S. determination to resist "communism." But that consideration was only marginal. The real major consideration was the need to defend a western system of values built around Christianity, liberal democracy, and world capitalism. Now these values and interests appear to be threatened by the al Qaeda attack on the U.S.

Regarding its relations with Third World countries, many of these countries originally considered the U.S. to be a "progressive" and friendly power because of its opposition to the European colonial system, especially in the interwar years and the immediate post-war period. U.S. partial support for the right of self-determination for colonial countries, articulated in the Wilsonian "Fourteen Point" Speech after World War 1, symbolized this "progressive" image. But soon the U.S.'s own economic and strategic interests compelled it to structure the post-war multilateral system in such a manner that its hegemonic interests were taken care of globally. It was therefore not surprising that its role as a neo-colonial power emerged in the course of this historical process. This reality was revealed in its dealings with the former colonial powers, as both began to rely on NATO to suppress the struggles for self-determination against the former British and Portuguese colonies in Southern Africa and elsewhere.

The same happened in other parts of the Third World--in Asia and Latin America. The existence of the U.S.S.R. as an opposite hegemonic power implied the need to confront it not only on its own home ground, but also in the now politically independent countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. From confronting Cuba in the U.S.'s own back yard, the "anti-communist" crusade spread to all regions of the world. The United States came to increasingly rely on right-wing military rulers as "comrades in arms" in the fight "against communism" in Third World countries. They increasingly supported military dictators such as Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, General Suharto in Indonesia, General Mobutu in Congo, as well as General Pinochet in Chile.

These dictators represented the rear-guard of United States policy in the Cold War period in Third World countries. A stage was reached when the fight against the U.S.S.R. was equivalent to the fight for control of the world's natural and human resources for the benefit of the "Free World" against those of the East led by the U.S.S.R. Oil, strategic materials, and mineral wealth as well as trade and investment outlets became vital strategic areas to defend.

The Oil Crisis of the mid-1970s signaled the heightening of the United States political and strategic position in the Middle East, as we have seen, while the survival of Israel in the sea of Arab nationalism also determined the shape of U.S. foreign policy in that area. Arab nationalism and the Palestinian struggle against Israel appeared to contradict United States global policy and this set the environment for the September 11th events. Indeed, the U.S. has viewed the Middle East as an "arc of crisis" since the late 1970s.

It will be remembered that in 1979 President Carter signed Presidential Directive 18 to order the creation of the Rapid Deployment Force (RDF), composed of some 250,000 men and women, designed to meet contingencies after the Iranian revolution. The force was supposed to protect U.S. interests in 19 countries stretching all the way from Morocco through the Persian Gulf up to Pakistan, which the Pentagon regarded as the "cockpit of global crisis in the 1980s." In fact the real purpose was the protection of the oil fields in the area.

With the fall of the Shah of Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the RDF was expanded. By 1984, the force had been expanded to 400,000 men and women to be on the standby for action in the "worst case scenario" of possible Soviet invasion of Iran. This understanding was based on the calculation that by 1985, the Soviet Union would have become a net importer of oil and therefore constituted a serious competitor to the U.S. monopoly of Arab oil. This happened during the second oil crisis in 1979, a period heightened by the instability in Iran, which has never ended as far as the U.S. is concerned. All these developments are interlinked and therefore provide a necessary background to understanding pre- and post-September 11 developments.

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