WORLD WAR II AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
Student:
I think it’s crazy that the U.S. supports the mass murder of millions of people through its arms
sales and its support for dictatorships. I cannot understand how the government that entered
World War II in order to defend democracy and prevent Germany from murdering millions
of people now allows – no, enables – it to happen in other countries. It doesn’t make sense.
Response:
There are several things to understand about why the U.S. entered World War II and why it
now carries out a policy of arming dictators and engaging in “pre-emptive wars.”
(1) The U.S. did not enter World War II in order to prevent Germany from murdering
people. The United States neither rushed its military forces to liberate the death camps nor
opened its borders to Jews and other threatened peoples. It entered the war to prevent
Germany and Japan from establishing European and Asian empires, respectively, which would
have isolated the U.S. economically.
(2) The point here is that the U.S. did not enter WW II in order to “defend democracy” or for
any other humanitarian cause. Rather, the purpose was to assure that U.S. corporations could
continue their lucrative trade with Europe. (It had very little trade with Japan and the rest of
Asia at the time.) A German victory would have curtailed that trade substantially, or at least
changed the terms of trade in ways that put U.S. corporations at a significant disadvantage.
(3) But aside from the purposes for which the U.S. entered World War II, the position of the
U.S. has changed dramatically since World War II. The U.S. was only a minor imperial power
before the war, but it emerged as the only functioning capitalist nation after the war. That
meant that the U.S. became the only significant imperial power in the world, a position that
every president since then has sought to improve upon. (The British Empire had been
severely damaged by World War I, and it collapsed entirely shortly after WW II.) So U.S.
foreign policy objectives changed after the war. After WW II, it wasn’t the same
“government.”
(4) In that context, U.S. arms dealing and military intervention do make sense. While a mild
semblance of “democracy” remains in U.S. domestic affairs (although Domhoff and Parenti
both show how scant U.S. democracy is even in domestic affairs), democracy has never been a
guiding principle for U.S. involvement in foreign affairs. The highest priority has always been
the defense of U.S.-based corporations’ right to operate as profitably as possible everywhere in
the world. That has been especially true since WW II, when the U.S. role as the world’s chief
imperial power became unassailable.
I need to point out that, despite the enormous military advantage the U.S. currently has,
the U.S. imperial dominance is no longer “unassailable.” The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
are last-ditch efforts to shore up an empire that seems to be disintegrating. U.S. policymakers
are stuck in a Cold War rut that insists that empires are made with military might. Everyone
else in the world knows that modern empires are based on economic hegemony. The Bush
administration has sacrificed the U.S. economy on the twin pyres of enriching the rich and
feeding the dogs of war.