Global Research
Peter Dale Scott
The most urgent political challenge to the world today is how to prevent the so-called “pax Americana” from progressively degenerating, like the 19th-century so-called “pax Britannica” before it, into major global warfare. I say “so-called,” because each “pax,” in its final stages, became less and less peaceful, less and less orderly, more and more a naked imposition of belligerent competitive power based on inequality.
To define this prevention of war as an achievable goal may sound pretentious. But the necessary steps to be taken are above all achievable here at home in America. And what is needed is not some radical and untested new policy, but a much-needed realistic reassessment and progressive scaling back of two discredited policies that are themselves new, and demonstrably counterproductive.
I am referring above all to America’s so-called War on Terror. American politics, both foreign and domestic, are being increasingly deformed by a war on terrorism that is counter-productive, producing more terrorists every year than eliminates. It is also profoundly dishonest, in that Washington’s policies actually contribute to the funding and arming of the jihadists that it nominally opposes.
Above all the War on Terror is a self-generating war, because, as many experts have warned, it produces more terrorists than it eliminates. And it has become inextricably combined with America’s earlier self-generating and hopelessly unwinnable war, the so-called War on Drugs.
The two self-generating wars have in effect become one. By launching a War on Drugs in Colombia and Mexico, America has contributed to a parastate of organized terror in Colombia (the so-called AUC, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) and an even bloodier reign of terror in Mexico (with 50,000 killed in the last six years).1 By launching a War on Terror in Afghanistan in 2001, America has contributed to a doubling of opium production there, making Afghanistan now the source of 90 percent of the world’s heroin and most of the world’s hashish.2
Americans should be aware of the overall pattern that drug production repeatedly rises where America intervenes militarily – Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 60s, Colombia and Afghanistan since then. (Opium cultivation also increased in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion.)3 And the opposite is also true: where America ceases to intervene militarily, notably in Southeast Asia since the 1970s, drug production declines.4
Both of America’s self-generating wars are lucrative to the private interests that lobby for their continuance.5 At the same time, both of these self-generating wars contribute to increasing insecurity and destabilization in America and in the world.
Thus, by a paradoxical dialectic, America’s New World Order degenerates progressively into a New World Disorder. And at home the seemingly indomitable national security state, beset by the problems of poverty, income disparity, and drugs, becomes, progressively, a national insecurity state and one gripped by political gridlock.
The purpose of this paper is to argue, using the analogy of British errors in the late 19th century, for a progressive return to a more stable and just international order, by a series of concrete steps, some of them incremental. Using the decline of Britain as an example, I hope to demonstrate that the solution cannot be expected from the current party political system, but must come from people outside that system.
The Follies of the Late 19th Century Pax Britannica
The final errors of British imperial leaders are particularly instructive for our predicament today. In both cases power in excess of defense needs led to more and more unjust, and frequently counter-productive, expansions of influence. My account in the following paragraphs is one-sidedly negative, ignoring positive achievements abroad in the areas of health and education. But the consolidation of British power led to the impoverishment abroad of previously wealthy countries like India, and also of British workers at home.6
A main reason for the latter was, as Kevin Phillips has demonstrated, the increasing outward flight of British investment capital and productive capacity:
Thus did Britain slip into circumstances akin to those of the United States in the 1980s and most of the 1990s – slumping nonsupervisory wage levels and declining basic industries on one hand, and at the other end of the scale a heyday for banks, financial services, and securities, a sharp rise in the portion of income coming from investment, and a stunning percentage of income and assets going to the top 1 percent.7
The dangers of increasing income and wealth disparity in Britain were easily recognized at the time, including by the young politician Winston Churchill.8 But only a few noticed the penetrating analysis by John A. Hobson in his book Imperialism (1902), that an untrammeled search for profit that directed capital abroad created a demand for an oversized defense establishment to protect it, leading in turn to wider and wilder use abroad of Britain’s armies. Hobson defined the imperialism of his time, which he dated from about 1870, as “a debasement ... of genuine nationalism, by attempts to overflow its natural banks and absorb the near or distant territory of reluctant and inassimilable peoples.”9
The earlier British empire could be said by a British historian in 1883 to have been “acquired in a fit of absence of mind," but this could not be said of Cecil Rhodes’s advances in Africa. Maldistribution of wealth was an initial cause of British expansion, and also an inevitable consequence of it. Much of Hobson’s book attacked western exploitation of the Third World, especially in Africa and Asia.10 He thus echoed Thucydides description of
how Athens was undone by the overreaching greed (pleonexia) of its unnecessary Sicilian expedition, a folly presaging America’s follies in Vietnam and Iraq [and Britain’s in Afghanistan and the Transvaal]. Thucydides attributed the rise of this folly to the rapid change in Athens after the death of Pericles, and in particular to the rise of a rapacious oligarchy.11
Both the apogee of the British empire and the start of its decline can be dated to the 1850s. In that decade London instituted direct control over India, displacing the nakedly exploitative East India Company.
The British empire during the Victorian Era
But in the same decade Britain sided with France’s nakedly expansionist Napoleon III (and the decadent Ottoman empire) in his ambitions against Russia’s status in the Holy Land. Although Britain was victorious in that war, historians have since judged that victory to be a chief cause of the breakdown in the balance of power that had prevailed in Europe since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Thus the legacy of the war for Britain was a more modernized and efficient army, together with a more insecure and unstable world. (Historians may in future come to judge that NATO’s Libyan venture of 2011 played a similar role in ending the era of U.S.-Russian détente.)
The Crimean War also saw the emergence of perhaps the world’s first significant antiwar movement in Britain, even though that movement is often remembered chiefly for its role in ending the active political roles of its main leaders, John Cobden and John Bright.12 In the short run, Britain’s governments and leaders moved to the right, leading (for example) to Gladstone’s bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 to recover the debts owed by the Egyptians to private British investors.
Peter Dale Scott
To define this prevention of war as an achievable goal may sound pretentious. But the necessary steps to be taken are above all achievable here at home in America. And what is needed is not some radical and untested new policy, but a much-needed realistic reassessment and progressive scaling back of two discredited policies that are themselves new, and demonstrably counterproductive.
I am referring above all to America’s so-called War on Terror. American politics, both foreign and domestic, are being increasingly deformed by a war on terrorism that is counter-productive, producing more terrorists every year than eliminates. It is also profoundly dishonest, in that Washington’s policies actually contribute to the funding and arming of the jihadists that it nominally opposes.
Above all the War on Terror is a self-generating war, because, as many experts have warned, it produces more terrorists than it eliminates. And it has become inextricably combined with America’s earlier self-generating and hopelessly unwinnable war, the so-called War on Drugs.
The two self-generating wars have in effect become one. By launching a War on Drugs in Colombia and Mexico, America has contributed to a parastate of organized terror in Colombia (the so-called AUC, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) and an even bloodier reign of terror in Mexico (with 50,000 killed in the last six years).1 By launching a War on Terror in Afghanistan in 2001, America has contributed to a doubling of opium production there, making Afghanistan now the source of 90 percent of the world’s heroin and most of the world’s hashish.2
Americans should be aware of the overall pattern that drug production repeatedly rises where America intervenes militarily – Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 60s, Colombia and Afghanistan since then. (Opium cultivation also increased in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion.)3 And the opposite is also true: where America ceases to intervene militarily, notably in Southeast Asia since the 1970s, drug production declines.4
Both of America’s self-generating wars are lucrative to the private interests that lobby for their continuance.5 At the same time, both of these self-generating wars contribute to increasing insecurity and destabilization in America and in the world.
Thus, by a paradoxical dialectic, America’s New World Order degenerates progressively into a New World Disorder. And at home the seemingly indomitable national security state, beset by the problems of poverty, income disparity, and drugs, becomes, progressively, a national insecurity state and one gripped by political gridlock.
The purpose of this paper is to argue, using the analogy of British errors in the late 19th century, for a progressive return to a more stable and just international order, by a series of concrete steps, some of them incremental. Using the decline of Britain as an example, I hope to demonstrate that the solution cannot be expected from the current party political system, but must come from people outside that system.
The Follies of the Late 19th Century Pax Britannica
The final errors of British imperial leaders are particularly instructive for our predicament today. In both cases power in excess of defense needs led to more and more unjust, and frequently counter-productive, expansions of influence. My account in the following paragraphs is one-sidedly negative, ignoring positive achievements abroad in the areas of health and education. But the consolidation of British power led to the impoverishment abroad of previously wealthy countries like India, and also of British workers at home.6
A main reason for the latter was, as Kevin Phillips has demonstrated, the increasing outward flight of British investment capital and productive capacity:
Thus did Britain slip into circumstances akin to those of the United States in the 1980s and most of the 1990s – slumping nonsupervisory wage levels and declining basic industries on one hand, and at the other end of the scale a heyday for banks, financial services, and securities, a sharp rise in the portion of income coming from investment, and a stunning percentage of income and assets going to the top 1 percent.7
The dangers of increasing income and wealth disparity in Britain were easily recognized at the time, including by the young politician Winston Churchill.8 But only a few noticed the penetrating analysis by John A. Hobson in his book Imperialism (1902), that an untrammeled search for profit that directed capital abroad created a demand for an oversized defense establishment to protect it, leading in turn to wider and wilder use abroad of Britain’s armies. Hobson defined the imperialism of his time, which he dated from about 1870, as “a debasement ... of genuine nationalism, by attempts to overflow its natural banks and absorb the near or distant territory of reluctant and inassimilable peoples.”9
The earlier British empire could be said by a British historian in 1883 to have been “acquired in a fit of absence of mind," but this could not be said of Cecil Rhodes’s advances in Africa. Maldistribution of wealth was an initial cause of British expansion, and also an inevitable consequence of it. Much of Hobson’s book attacked western exploitation of the Third World, especially in Africa and Asia.10 He thus echoed Thucydides description of
how Athens was undone by the overreaching greed (pleonexia) of its unnecessary Sicilian expedition, a folly presaging America’s follies in Vietnam and Iraq [and Britain’s in Afghanistan and the Transvaal]. Thucydides attributed the rise of this folly to the rapid change in Athens after the death of Pericles, and in particular to the rise of a rapacious oligarchy.11
Both the apogee of the British empire and the start of its decline can be dated to the 1850s. In that decade London instituted direct control over India, displacing the nakedly exploitative East India Company.
The British empire during the Victorian Era
But in the same decade Britain sided with France’s nakedly expansionist Napoleon III (and the decadent Ottoman empire) in his ambitions against Russia’s status in the Holy Land. Although Britain was victorious in that war, historians have since judged that victory to be a chief cause of the breakdown in the balance of power that had prevailed in Europe since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Thus the legacy of the war for Britain was a more modernized and efficient army, together with a more insecure and unstable world. (Historians may in future come to judge that NATO’s Libyan venture of 2011 played a similar role in ending the era of U.S.-Russian détente.)
The Crimean War also saw the emergence of perhaps the world’s first significant antiwar movement in Britain, even though that movement is often remembered chiefly for its role in ending the active political roles of its main leaders, John Cobden and John Bright.12 In the short run, Britain’s governments and leaders moved to the right, leading (for example) to Gladstone’s bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 to recover the debts owed by the Egyptians to private British investors.
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