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

The United States will feel the blowback from this ill-advised and poorly prepared military adventure for decades. The war has already had the unintended consequences of seriously fracturing the Western democratic alliance; eliminating any potentiality for British leadership of the European Union; grievously weakening international law, including the charter of the United Nations; and destroying the credibility of the president, vice president, secretary of state, and other officials as a result of their lying to the international community and the American people. Most important, the unsanctioned military assault on Iraq communicated to the world that the United States was unwilling to seek a modus vivendi with Islamic nations and was therefore an appropriate, even necessary, target for further terrorist attacks.

History has shown that the most important virtue in the conduct of international relations is prudence—being cautious and discreet in actions, circumspect and sensible in what one says, suspicious of ideology, and slow to jump to conclusions. During the Cold War, the superpower confrontation imposed a high degree of caution on both sides. A mistake by one party was certain to be exploited by the other, and both the United States and the USSR knew how readily the other would take advantage of impetuous and poorly thought-out policies. After 1991 and the collapse of the USSR, the United States no longer felt this pressure and seemed to lose all sense of prudence. For example, President George H. W. Bush kept a tight leash on the same ideological and inexperienced neoconservatives who, in his son’s administration, have been given free rein. This loss of common sense guarantees an even more lethal era of blowback than America’s policies during the Cold War have already generated.

The United States and East Asia

The preoccupation of the United States after 9/11 has been primarily with the Islamic world. Yet East Asia remains an area of great, perhaps even greater, concern. The richest satellites of the United States are Japan and South Korea, but they are anything but firm within the American orbit. In December 2002, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of national attitudes in forty-two countries. A stunning 44 percent of South Koreans were found to hold unfavorable views of the United States, exceeding France’s 34 percent and Germany’s 35 percent. A Korean Gallup Poll conducted around the same time found that some 53.7 percent of South Koreans held “unfavorable” and “somewhat unfavorable” views of the United States. This group included upwards of 80 percent of the college students polled.¹¹

In Japan’s poorest prefecture, the tiny island of Okinawa, some thirty-eight American military bases are located under terms of the 1960 Japanese-American Security Treaty, and revolt against our military presence is endemic. As I discuss in this book, the situation in Okinawa is as volatile as that surrounding the Berlin Wall in 1989: when the inevitable anti-American explosion occurs, it is likely to unravel the entire U.S. presence in East Asia, just as the breaching of the Berlin Wall brought down the whole edifice of Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe.

Elsewhere in East Asia, the United States has repeatedly interfered in the domestic affairs of Indonesia, the world’s largest Islamic nation. The Pew survey cited above found that whereas in 2000, some 75 percent of Indonesians said that they had a favorable opinion of the United States, by 2003, 83 percent said that they had an unfavorable opinion. Despite Indonesia’s long tradition of a relaxed and heterodox approach to religion, outrage against America’s arrogant and racist attitudes toward Muslims has started to turn the country toward Islamic fundamentalism and militancy.¹² This is a potential disaster for the United States.

Despite the salience of Islamic terrorism against the United States, the two superpowers of East Asia, China and Japan, as well as the militarized standoff between the United States and North Korea, are likely to matter more in the early decades of the twenty-first century. China is the fastest growing economy on earth, capitalist in orientation but not a democracy (refuting a cherished tenet of American ideology that the two inevitably go together). China has a highly educated population four times larger than that of the United States and is the only nation on earth that has the potential to defend itself militarily against the United States. A Sino-American war would be an even more catastrophic rerun of the Vietnam War.