By Superna Aggarwal
When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, it marked the end of a Cold War which began with the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. The age of certainty had passed. The Soviet threat was gone and with it much of the justification for US intervention in the Third World.
Cut loose from the rhetorical moorings of the Cold War, US military strategists could no longer use the communist pretext to target popular uprisings as a part of a counter-insurgency which officially began under the Kennedy administration and reached its height in the '80s, when the "Reagan Doctrine" had the CIA running a total of 50 covert operations to overthrow or destabilise governments viewed as Soviet surrogates.
It was time to take stock and acknowledge how little 70 years of shadow boxing with the Soviets had meant for the aspirations of most of the world. But the US continues to police the Third World, as evidenced by its involvement in three major post-Cold War conflicts in Panama, Iraq and Somalia.
Barely had the Wall come down when President George Bush invaded Panama in a brutal operation which killed up to 10,000 civilians. Enter a new enemy and a new pretext for US intervention, the Hispanic narcotics trafficker. For the people of Central America, the war on drugs proved to be as brutal as the war on communism.
There was more to come. Islamic fundamentalism was sweeping across the Middle East, highlighted by the election of the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, which was subsequently ousted in a military coup. Bolstered by the economic failures of the secular Arab state, this emerging phenomenon provided the perfect rationale for the US's increased military presence in the Middle East at a time when it was withdrawing troops elsewhere.
It also legitimised the high-tech offensive against Iraq during the Gulf conflict, fought and won with media images of mad Arab bombers, oppressed Arab women and a demonised Saddam Hussein. Unlike the Vietnam War, Desert Storm proved to be politically popular and militarily decisive, and victory meant that failure in Vietnam, and the aimlessness of US foreign policy since 1975 could be attributed to a state of mind ("the Vietnam syndrome") rather than to the limits of US power.
Sometimes it was more convenient to ignore the past altogether, in Somalia for example, where the US helped to arm the warlords of Mogadishu, a fact overlooked by the mass media which, in typical fashion, have reduced the complex nature of the anarchy and starvation in the country to the evil of one man, General Aideed.
History repeats
A cynical analysis of these post-Cold War events echoes Marx's insight: history does repeat itself, the second time as farce. Indeed, Noam Chomsky argues that the US used the logic of the Cold War to justify its traditional interventionist policies in the Third World, which began long before the Cold War and which will continue long after.
"Before the Bolshevik Revolution and the beginning of the Cold War, Woodrow Wilson sent the Marines to the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Then in 1989 George Bush celebrated the end of the Cold War by invading Panama and restoring the rule of a 10% white minority."
He says that the target of this aggression was not just the communist fighters in the jungles, but the people who supported them. The peoples of the Third World and the pressures their growing numbers imposed on the world's limited resources were the real enemy.
"The European conquest 500 years ago was based on the assumption that the Third World, or the colonies, were to play a service role. They were to provide the cheap labour, raw materials and, more recently, opportunities for the export of pollution and markets for the advanced industrial societies.
"Any nationalist regime that was responsive to the needs of its people did not serve that complementary role and was therefore considered dangerous. As Eisenhower said, 'The threat of communism is its appeal to the general population — something which we have no capacity to duplicate'. In that sense we have always been against the communists, whether they have been Jesuit priests in Central America or Filipino peasants calling for land reform. That's what it's always been about, prior to, during and since the Cold War."
Nevertheless, much has changed in US foreign policy since the so-called "end of history". Cold war dictators have fallen in Somalia and Ethiopia with the loss of superpower patronage, the 12-year-old civil war in El Salvador which the US funded to the tune of $1.5 billion dollars a year is over, the Clinton administration is on the verge of removing an 18-year-old trade embargo against Vietnam, a UN-brokered peace is holding in Cambodia, the US is trying to return ousted Haitian President Aristide to power, and the undreamable has happened in the Middle East, where Israel and the PLO, the century's most bitter enemies, signed a historic peace deal.
That the Middle East treaty was signed at all is proof that human beings are sometimes capable of transforming what seems to be their destiny.
Economic motives
According to Joe Stork, the editor of Middle East Report, the US pushed for the agreement because growing Arab hostility to an uncompromising Israeli state was threatening US economic power in the Persian Gulf at a time when the old superpower conflicts were being replaced by economic rivalries.
"The US sees the Persian Gulf region as an area that it must continue to control and have access to economically and militarily in terms of constituting a world power and its ability to compete with Japan and Europe."
Other economic pressures came from the domestic front, with the Clinton administration facing growing opposition to its annual $7 billion military aid package to Israel at a time of chronic economic problems at home.
Faced with the emerging reality that the world's richest country is also the world's biggest debtor, the US must now reassess its role. In the coming months, President Clinton will unveil new plans that will seek to shed many of the US's political and economic burdens of global leadership.
The administration is looking for new ways to use international institutions like the United Nations and its regional organisations like NATO and the emerging Pacific security system to defray the costs of the global role the US shouldered during the Cold War.
The new policy will cover issues like arms control, the future of US strategic forces, and a new Pentagon training program to prepare for peacekeeping and low-intensity and guerilla wars in the Third World. The focus will be on Asia, reflecting the dominant trading links of the Pacific Rim.
But despite these changes, the US increasingly sees its military might as a substitute for economic power — the key to holding onto Third World outposts and maintaining leverage over key trading partners.
According to Chomsky, the weapons being developed now are far more technologically advanced and reflect recent changes to US military strategy:
"No longer is it necessary to maintain a highly intimidating military posture to fend off retaliation from the Soviet Union. Now military developments are justified on the basis of 'the increasingly technological sophistication of Third World powers'. For the first time we've openly conceded that the real enemy is the Third World, and the need to keep it under control in a cost effective way using high-tech weapons."
The other worrying trend is the increase in US arms sales to the Third World. US armament firms are actively pursuing contracts in developing countries. The US has become the biggest arms exporter to the Third World, with arms sales reaching $13.6 billion last year, or 57% of the world market.
Such economic considerations are likely to dominate US foreign policy well into the 21st century. NAFTA, the globalisation of the world economy, GATT, business opportunities in Indochina, the commercial benefits of developmental assistance: this is the language of the New World Order.
Is this just another phase of an endless Cold War?