Forum Post: On American Hegemony

—This is a partial transcript taken from Chalmers Johnson on American Hegemony, 2008 (22.47-33.03min).

One of the complex issues in the analysis of American imperialism is the attempt always to reduce it to something else, particularly to economic interests, corporate interests—seemingly illegitimate power in our society, the power of money. It has the smell of a sort of ersatz or vulgar Marxism about it, but in the minds of many people an easy satisfactory explanation that this is really corporate greed that accounts for all of this. I dislike this view because I think it denigrates what Imperialism actually is. That imperialism is the impulse toward hegemony over other nations.
The attempt to dominate the rest of the world in which one form of domination is the use of economic power under your control, but you should bear in mind that when one looks at the United States today, it loves to keep talking about how it is the lone superpower, I guarantee you that a superpower losing its manufacturing basis as rapidly as this country is, that is the world’s largest debtor nation by orders of magnitude that is dependent on the good will of bankers in China and Japan in order to continue to enjoy its lifestyle. There are serious anomalies in this kind of explanation, though there is no question that over the years the government has used its imperial apparatus for economic purposes for the advantage of American firms.
So there are numerous examples and perhaps the single best example is the influence of petroleum on governmental policy making. After all, this also goes back to the Iranian case. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company which is today British Petroleum was very much a British government cartel that was directly connected to the Royal Navy because it supplied fuel for British battleships and things of this sort. We have had a very deep interest in this since the 1930’s when The Standard Oil Company discovered oil in the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia and we began to create as friendly a relationship with Saudi Arabia as we possibly could—leading to the creation of The Arabian-American Oil Company. The very foundations, the pillars of our policy in the Middle East for much of the post-war world were the relationship with Saudi Arabia created back in the late 1930’s and the relationship with Iran created as a result of the coup of 1953 and the bringing to power in that country our puppet the Shah of Iran and his extremely repressive police state organized around the police apparatus called Savak. When that was overthrown in 1979 in an important revolution against us in which we were totally unprepared, we lost one of our pillars and clearly we are not likely to ever have friendly relations with Iran again as far as one can see ahead. In the case of Saudi Arabia, we lost that after the first Gulf War when stupidly, thoughtlessly, typical I’m sorry to say of the George H.W. Bush Administration—that after expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, we put American ground forces in Saudi Arabia allegedly to defend the House of Fahd—that is the ruling house of Saudi Arabia. Many pious young Saudi’s, not least of which was the pious young millionaire Osama Bin-laden objected to the use of infidel troops to defend the regime that is charged with defending the two most sacred sites in Islam—Mecca and Medina. They claimed that we could defend ourselves against Saddam Hussein. It was a stupid thing to do, even to imagine putting our often racially biased, arrogant, and remarkably stupid troops into a country like Saudi Arabia where they would not have possibly understood what they were getting into or the cultural norms that they were trampling on almost daily being there. It was also unnecessary even from a military point of view. Saudi Arabia is surrounded by water. We have 12 carrier task forces that are among the most expensive military apparatuses on earth. Saudi Arabia was always easily protected from at sea on our own ships rather than putting troops in Saudi Arabia. The fact that we did put troops there in part maddened Osama Bin-laden as we know in some detail, but it caused the Saudi’s to become less and less interested in their alliance with us. They progressively restricted our use of the huge military base at Riyadh Prince Sultan Air Base so that by the time of the assault on Iraq in 2003 our use of Prince Sultan had stopped. We moved our forces to Qatar and in fact this is one of the main motivations for the attack on Iraq was to find a new central territory that would replace Iran and Saudi Arabia as our previous main basis of operation in the Middle East. Not of least importance was the fact that Iraq is an oil rich country but it wasn’t that. Primarily the oil was of greater interest to us as a means of leverage over other countries such as China and Japan that are dependent upon imported petroleum from this part of the world. Saudi Arabia is the largest single exporter of oil. As one looks back on it, petroleum has dominated our policies in many ways.