Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

The Soviet Union started setting up its satellites largely because it could not compete with the largesse of the United States’ Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of war-torn Europe. (This, of course, reflected a major outcome of World War II: much of the Soviet Union had been reduced to rubble, while the United States emerged unscathed.) The USSR quickly recognized that in the conflict between democracy and totalitarianism developing in postwar Europe, it was on the less popular side. In Eastern Europe it could not bring its supporters to power through the ballot box, and so it ruthlessly ousted local democrats. In a Czech coup in February 1948 and elsewhere it imported Stalinism, claiming it was merely a version of socialism.

The Soviet Union had a defensive need to secure its Western approaches. By contrast, after Japan’s defeat no regime in East Asia was capable of threatening the United States itself, least of all a China devastated by war and revolution. We therefore built our system of satellites for more genuinely imperialist reasons, although the government argued that our efforts were necessary due to the natural aggression of Sino-Soviet communism and the possibility that the fall of any country, however minor, to communism would lead other countries to topple like a set of “dominoes,” until the chain reaction might reach the heartland of capitalism itself.

The American decision to create satellites in East Asia followed in part from the Communist revolution in China, which meant that American plans for a new postwar international order in East Asia based on an alliance with China, its wartime ally, were no longer viable. Although unwilling to go to war against the popular forces of Chinese communism to prop up the failing Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, we reversed our policies for occupied Japan, giving up on further efforts to democratize the country and committing ourselves instead to its swift economic rehabilitation. Japan, the former implacable enemy, replaced China as America’s primary East Asian ally. The U.S. government now devoted its energies to defending Japan and building it up as an East Asian alternative to the Chinese revolution. Even though we did not try to “roll back” that revolution, President Truman’s decision in 1950 to order the Seventh Fleet to defend Taiwan and police the Taiwan Strait, and General Douglas MacArthur’s decision to march north to the Chinese border during the Korean War, nonetheless ensured Chinese hostility for at least two decades.

Needless to say, the United States did not consult the defeated Japanese people about these decisions or about the decision to cultivate the remnants of that country’s unquestionably anti-Communist wartime establishment. Our reliance in some cases on literal war criminals—for example, Nobusuke Kishi, former minister of munitions in Tojo’s wartime cabinet, who became the country’s prime minister in 1957—and on a CIA-financed single-party regime were the mirror image of Soviet policies in the former German Democratic Republic. Such policies actually led to an anti-American revolt in 1960. In the largest mass demonstrations in postwar Japanese history, protesters surrounded the parliament building and demanded that lawmakers not ratify a renewal of the Japanese-American Security Treaty. The situation became so tense that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was forced to cancel a proposed visit. (The first sitting American president ever to visit Tokyo would be Gerald Ford.) Using its rigged majority, the conservative party forced through ratification, keeping American troops in Japan, and the political system never again fully regained the trust of the public. For thirty years, the Liberal Democratic Party successfully prevented any alteration in political power and dutifully legitimated Japan’s status as a satellite of the United States. Unfortunately, it did little else, leaving the actual governance of the country to the state bureaucracy, ensuring that any impulses the citizenry might have had toward self-government would atrophy. By the 1990s Japan was the world’s second-richest country, but with a government remarkably similar to that of the former East Germany.

In order to support Britain, France, and Holland in the face of fears that the rest of Europe might “go Communist,” the United States abandoned its wartime promises to help liberate those nations’ colonies. Instead, the United States came to support or replace the former imperialists in wars intended to secure their prewar possessions. This meant that in East Asia, except in our own colony, the Philippines, we wound up on the wrong side of history. (Even in the Philippines, which we granted formal independence on July 4, 1946, we kept enormous military base complexes until the Filipinos expelled us in 1992.)