Imperialist US foreign policy to continue under Obama

By Alejandro Lichauco

ANALYSIS

02/12/2009

Imperialism has been the defining signature of American foreign policy and that imperialism is at the root of America’s domestic and international crisis. For at the core of that imperialism, and in fact its driving force, has been America’s obsession to impose the doctrine of free trade and free enterprise capitalism on the entire world.

But what the global meltdown, which started in America, has demonstrated, is that free trade and free enterprise capitalism can only result in the destruction of domestic industries and the unrestrained greed of a miniscule but all-powerful community of international bankers. America today, because of its embrace of free trade and free enterprise, has destroyed its once all-powerful industrial base and without that base, its financial system has had to go, along with the rest of the economy,

But back to the subject of imperialism. The obsessive desire to impose its ideology on the rest of the world — on the mistaken assumption that this ideology is good for America — led to a foreign policy of global interventionism and territorial expansionism. For more than a hundred years, the US government subverted the electoral process and democratic rights of peoples to choose their own leaders and government in order to ensure that free trade and free enterprise capitalism prevail in foreign countries.

The distinguished historian, Sidney Lens, in his monumental book The Forging of the American Empire, summed it all up in these words: “The United States has pilfered large territories from helpless or near-helpless peoples; it has forced its will on scores of nations, against their wishes and against their interests; it has violated hundreds of treaties and understandings; it has committed war crimes as shocking as most; it has wielded a military stick and a dollar carrot to forge an imperialist empire such as man has never known before; it has intervened ruthlessly in the internal affairs of dozens of nations to prevent them from choosing the leaders they did want or from overthrowing, by revolution, the ones they didn’t.”

The imperialism of US foreign policy explains the rise of radicalism in the Third World. That radicalism, exemplified by the such as of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Mao, Sukarno, Nasser and Khadaffy, were by and large a reaction to the imperial aggressiveness of America’s foreign policy and the widespread poverty which that imperialism has brought about.

One would imagine that the new US President Barack Obama, campaigning on the theme of change and of giving America’s foreign policy a new face, would by his choice of key appointees, give unmistakable proof that he would repudiate the imperialism of his country’s foreign policy. The very imperialism that brought about Vietnam and Iraq.

But far from it. Obama’s appointees, as pointed out in a preceding article, are evidence enough that his mindset and ideology follow exactly that of his predecessors. One example would suffice, and in fact is most disturbing. That appointment is Lawrence Summers who will head the National Economic Research Council of the Obama administration.

Summers was among the principal architects of Gatt and WTO under the Clinton administration. In brief, a confirmed globalist. Considering the havoc which globalization has wrought on the world economy, including the United States, one would imagine that Obama would have left Summers completely out in the cold. Instead, however, he has given Summers a crucial position in his administration, one that would likely determine the nature and direction of America’s economic foreign policy.

To give you an idea of what Summers is about, in the years that he served the Clinton administration as Treasury Secretary, he enunciated the sinister doctrine that nations opposed to the expansion of free trade are to be seen as “the greatest threat to US economic security.”

That remark prompted this writer, then writing for Today, issue of Feb. 5, 2000, to write a piece titled “A new — and sinister — US security doctrine.”

In sum, Obama’s appointment of Lawrence Summers to the key post as head of the National Economic Council, can only mean that Obama intends to continue with the imperialism that has been the defining signature of his country’s foreign policy over the last hundred years. The same imperialism that led to the annexation of the Philippines, the colonization of Cuba, the war in Vietnam and now the war in Iraq. And, on the side, the assassination of populist leaders like Salvador Allende, the overthrow of democratically elected Mossadegh of Iran, and the plot to assassinate our own Claro M. Recto. And dozens of other such examples.

US imperialism continues under a black President. That’s what the appointment of Lawrence Summers means. It means more poverty for America, more hatred abroad for America, and, now spoken of frequently, the possible attack on Iran to provoke a war which it is mistakenly assumed would save the economy of America.

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