Posts from Cold War Era

While the U.S. had long since established itself as the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, the end of World War II marked the true beginning of America’s global military empire.  The United States had begun to stray from its original inclination towards nonintervention by becoming more involved in global military affairs, but still for the most part attempted to remain a limited constitutional republic and not an imperialist power.  When it did intervene in global conflicts, the Congress declared the wars constitutionally, as in the Spanish American War and both World Wars, and Presidents did not have the power to unilaterally launch military operations without the approval of Congress.  When the wars were over and the supposed threats had been vanquished, America brought its troops home and did not remain to oversee and police the regions in which it had fought indefinitely. America did not presume the right or the obligation to be present all around the globe in order to intervene in the affairs of other countries for U.S. “national interests” or conduct military missions for “humanitarian” purposes.

After World War II and the defeat of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, this all changed.  The U.S. was left as the overwhelming global power, while much of the world had been ravaged by the devastation of war.  Instead of accepting its victory and returning home to protect its borders and the liberties of its own people and to engage with the world peacefully, America decided to embark on a mission of global empire.  This struggle for world domination was driven by the cold war America fought against the Soviet Union, whose communist ideas had gained influence in the aftermath of the Soviet victory over the Nazis in World War II.  America’s conflict with the Soviets would direct the majority of U.S. foreign policy until the eventual Soviet collapse in 1991.

Americans were told that they must combat communism at every turn and without regard for the costs, otherwise the Soviets and their ideas would spread throughout the world.  Just five years after the end of World War II, the U.S. entered the Korean War in 1950 to fight the communist North Koreans, backed by the Soviets and communist China, to prevent the entire Korean peninsula from turning communist.  An estimated nearly 5 million people were killed, including nearly 40,000 U.S. servicemen.  The war resulted in a split Korea that did allow the south to remain free and eventually develop into a flourishing nation, but it also solidified the Kim dynasty in the north, which to this day rules over arguably the most totalitarian regime in the world and a people who live under unimaginably brutal conditions.

The U.S. entered the more widely-known Vietnam War in the 1960s in a similar effort to combat communism.  Foreign policy experts and government officials believed in the “domino theory,” which surmised that if Vietnam fell to communism, the rest of southeast Asia would subsequently fall to communism as well, like dominos.  Therefore, we were told, we must intervene militarily to prevent the north Vietnamese communists from marching south and imposing their communist rule on the entire country. This war resulted in another estimated nearly 2 million dead civilians, 1.5 million dead Vietnamese soldiers on both sides combined, and over 58,000 dead U.S. soldiers, and the country eventually fell to the communists anyway when America’s efforts had proven futile and they eventually withdrew in 1975.

The Cold War and the constant brinkmanship between America and the Soviet Union also involved the rise of a massive arms industry in the U.S. and the proliferation of nuclear weapons that threatened the existence of mankind.  The relationship between the weapons industry, the military, and the state, by which the state is constantly pushed in the direction of a more militaristic foreign policy by the desires of this profit-seeking arms industry that benefits from the demand for more weapons that war creates, was coined as the “military-industrial complex” and warned about by President Eisenhower in his farewell address.  This complex to this day remains one of the driving forces behind America’s imperial foreign policy, as the money and lobbying power of military industry provides ample incentive for politicians to promote never ending adventurism around the world.

The postwar period also gave way to the advance of a secretive war state in America, a collection of agencies and government operatives unaccountable to the traditional checks and balances of the American system, who not only serve the purpose of collecting intelligence and advising policy makers, but also carry out actual foreign policy operations, often in secret.  The primary example was the CIA, an agency purportedly designed to collect intelligence to help government officials make informed decisions, but instead became a weapon of covert regime change operations, secret coups to overthrow foreign governments or influence foreign elections, assassinations, and destabilization efforts to manipulate foreign political climates. The CIA helped stage a coup to overthrow the democratically elected leader of Iran in 1953, which eventually caused blowback in the form of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the taking of U.S. hostages, and an antagonistic relationship between the two countries ever since.  The CIA also made numerous efforts to destabilize the communist Cuban regime, which led to the Bay of Pigs disaster and the Cuban Missile Crisis, arguably the closest the world has ever come to experiencing utter nuclear devastation. Secret U.S. foreign operations, led by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies, have continued to engage in these types of destabilization efforts all over the world, often with disastrous results, and often completely unbeknownst to the American public.

The postwar period was highlighted by America’s cold war with the Soviet Union and fight against communism, with the major military event being the Vietnam War.  In the broader picture, this era represented America’s unabashed commitment to empire. The United States certainly had reason to fear the ideas of communism, a disastrous ideology that led to the deaths of hundreds of millions in the Soviet Union and China alone.  However, instead of using these fears to promote an alternatively free and liberty-based society at home, the U.S. government used them sinisterly to promote war propaganda and expand what was previously a limited constitutional republic that minded its own business, interacted peacefully with the world, and fought wars only when they were declared and for the sake of protecting our liberties, to an imperial power that patrolled the entire globe, meddled in the affairs of other nations, and fought illegal, undeclared, unconstitutional wars at the whims of its Presidents that had nothing to do with true national defense.