'Blowback': Another Evil Empire, This One in the Mirrors
By Richard Bernstein
Chalmers Johnson starts his new book with an account of how he came to change his view of the American role in the world. A onetime supporter of the Vietnam War who now wishes he had "stood with the antiwar protest movement," Mr. Johnson, professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, spent a decade studying Japanese industrial policy. His research, which inevitably covered the American relationship with Japan, led him, he writes, "to see clearly for the first time the shape of the empire that I had so long uncritically supported."
The empire in question is the American empire, the term itself indicating the extent to which Mr. Johnson has now come to see things very critically indeed. His new book, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire," is a take-no-prisoners tirade against what he portrays as classic imperial overextension worthy of Rome or the Ottoman Empire. His main contention is that the United States, by resorting to "bluster, military force and financial manipulation," all harnessed to its goal of global hegemony, is subjecting itself to acts of retribution around the world -- that retribution being the "blowback" of his title. In other words, the World Trade Center bombings and other anti-American terrorist acts may be just the beginning.
In this sense Mr. Johnson's book is a useful and timely alert by a man with robustly contrarian views. But Mr. Johnson's turn from uncritical to critical about the American empire is a vastly more radical project than just a warning. Underlying his book is a strong but unsubstantiated conviction that the United States has all along been little better than any other imperial power, including the Soviet Union, seeking amoral advantage wherever and however it could -- and reaping blowback as a consequence. Extending blowback to just about every area of American action in the world gives the book a boldly provocative edge; unfortunately, it also makes Mr. Johnson sound like some of the more rigidly ideological protesters he used to disdain.
This is not to say that Mr. Johnson fails to raise important questions or to make persuasive arguments about the deleterious consequences of the global American presence. Among the questions is whether it is really necessary for the United States to maintain some 65 major military installations outside its borders. Mr. Johnson describes the most important of those installations, in Okinawa, as a place where the impact of so many soldiers on such a small island has been ruinous for the permanent inhabitants. One of his major villains is the International Monetary Fund, whose narrow America-centered view of developement is, in Mr. Johnson's jaundiced view, responsible for economic hardship around the world, and this view, though sketchily presented, merits a hearing.
Mr. Johnson also mounts a thought-provoking critique of American behavior during the Korean crisis of 1994 and 1995, when North Korea seemed about to embark on a nuclear weapons program. He demonstrates that the threat was grossly exaggerated to begin with and then deceitfully managed, with the result that the Korean peninsula is more potentially dangerous than it was before. His two chapters on China, which he portrays as a likely superpower of the 21st century, are incisive, informed and common-sensical.
But these sections of Mr. Johnson's book are marred by an overriding, sweeping and cranky one-sidedness. The basic problem is that Mr. Johnson is a good deal readier to see hidden similarities -- between, say, the nature of the former Soviet satellite East Germany and the American "satellite" Japan -- than to admit obvious distinctions. His account of the American relationship with South Korea is a case in point.
He begins with the highly debatable assertion that for much of their history North and South Korea were "nearly indistinguishable in terms of human rights abuses and Stalinist-style development policies." Mr. Johnson then focuses largely on the suppression of a democratic uprising in 1980 in the city of Kwangju against South Korea's military dictator of the moment, Gen. Chun Doo Hwan. To Mr. Johnson, General Chun's crackdown, more violent than China's Tiananmen Square crackdown a decade later, was of a piece with Soviet repression in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 and illustrates the basic similarity between Soviet and American imperialisms.
It is a deceptive, even cynical argument. Nobody that I know of has much love for General Chun or approves of his handling of the Kwangju crisis, but Mr. Johnson's eagerness to draw Soviet-American parallels leads him to pass lightly over crucial facts and arguments. Most generally, he does not consider that the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary were Soviet totalitarianism expressing its nature, whereas the slaughter in Kwangju represented neither American values nor American goals. He dismisses as almost irrelevant the signal fact that no American troops were in Kwangju but Soviet forces were in Eastern Europe.
Equally troubling, Mr. Johnson relies on a few snippets of very inconclusive evidence to accuse American officials in Korea and Washington of authorizing General Chun's Kwangju actions in advance, but he ignores a substantial evidence and published testimony that point to a contrary conclusion. Mr. Johnson even muses that when General Chun later was tried for the Kwangju massacre, these American officials "might well have belonged in the dock alongside their Korean colleagues."
Most important perhaps, Mr. Johnson fails to offer alternatives to American policy in Korea or the likely consequences of those alternatives. In Hungary and Czechoslovakia the alternative to the Soviet invasion was the survival of less repressive new governments. In Korea the alternative to continued backing for General Chun would probably have been a collapse of order in South Korea, which might have induced North Korea to attact.
Mr. Johnson is even unwilling to give the United States any moral credit for the overall outcome of its engagement in Asia: namely, conditions of relative peace and stability in which a core of fairly prosperous democracies has emerged. Mr. Johnson may label these democracies -- among them Japan, South Korea and now possibly even Indonesia -- as mere "satellites" of the American empire, but that characterization probably says more about Mr. Johnson than it does about the realities of world politics.
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Carl
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