Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>Some time long ago Angela rightly questioned my assertion that the US
would get Japan to pay for its organization of security forces in
Indonesia one way or another (holding on to US securities, further
expansionary policy, further trade or financial liberalization). Just
to make my seemingly wild assertion a bit more plausible, I forward here
a few examples of how the US has parlayed military hegemony into
financial power before.<
i think it's eminently plausible rakesh, always did. but i'd like to see some sense of this through illustration rather than extrapolation. really, it wouldn't bother me much one way or t'uther, if this were the case or not. but i do kind of object to the exptrapolation being used as a substitute for analysis, if you know what i mean. clearly there was a good deal of bankrolling going on during the gulf war, as strange shows. (which i'm assuming had much to do with japan's reliance on oil imports and the peculiar isolationism of the japanese constitution, now changing.) but i'm not sure this is happening now with the new-found policing role (or rather, the resurgence of the same) that australia will be playing in asia.
it does seem to me that the militarisation of europe (and i suspect over time, the EU) and australia might well be continuous with US dominance (if we were to read that as capitalist dominance), but in an important respect (even in the case of the gulf war), the US is no longer capable of or willing to sustain that kind of policing. that doesn't make any situation such any less onerous. it just might mean that we can no longer assume that anti-US imperialism is a direct substitute for anti-capitalism. i think it's a whole lot messier than that.
Angela _________
>From Susan Strange in her last book *mad money*:
"The implicit bargain--that the United States provided security and Japan paid for it--became more evident in the 1992 Gulf War. In the end, Japan paid some $13 billion of the costs of Desert Storm. Some calculations even suggested that the US showed a net profit out of the Gulf War. Every year, moreover, Japan was paying almost 3/4 of the onon salary costs of US bases in Japan, most of them in Okinawa, so that it was cheaper for the US Defense Department to keep soldiers in Japan than form them to stay at home. That the the Japanese govt raised no objection, even when the Okinawans did, could be explained by their continued reliance on the US forces, especially the US Navy, to act as a police force in the Pacific.
"Six years after the Cold War ended, there was rising tension between Taiwan and mainland China. In February 1996, the Japanese were understandably reassured by an American show of intermediating force in the shape of the aircraft carrier Nimitz steaming through the Taiwan staits. North Korea was another source of insecurity. Would its weak but repressive govt, facing a collapsing economy, be tempted to use nuclear weapons against the South? There were also unresolved conflicts between Japan and Russia over the Kurile Islands, and with China over the Spratlys." p. 45-6
And an example from almost 30 years ago:
"In Feb 1965 de Gaulle attacked the 'extraordinary priviliges' of the dollar in the international gold exchange standard, set up under the Bretton Woods Agreement back in the 1940s. He compared this system unfavourably with one traditionally based on gold. But his fond dream of a united European front agains the US and the almighty dollar soon faded away when the Germans failed to stand by the French in the debates on intl monetary reform. Germany owed its security fromt eh Red Army to the US nuclear umbrella; the price, as the US repeatedly made clear, of the implicit bargain was German membership and support for NATO and compliance with US interests in the management of money and finance. Gewrman leaders all understood this, so that, later, before Nixon unilaterlly devalued the dollar in 1971, Germany was the first western ally after Canada to agree not to embarrass Washington by asking for gold in return for the dollars it held in its growing monetary reserves." p. 64-5
rb