[Editor's note: This article and all signed articles represent the views of the author and not necessarily the views of New Hampshire Peace Action]

If you want to understand US foreign policy, read the New York Times. The Times has traditionally echoed the State Department and Pentagon's views of world trends and world events. In recent years, Times columnist Thomas Friedman has been the de facto spokesman for Madeline Albright's State Department on the Times op-ed page. In a definitive article describing the evolution of a post-Cold War foreign policy under Madeline Albright, Friedman wrote:

"America does have a bipartisan national interest to pursue and it has an enormous role to play. But we won't begin to fully grasp that until we understand that we are in a new international system [ . . .] called globalization. Globalization is not just a trend, not just a phenomenon, not just an economic fad. It is the international system that has replaced the cold-war system. And like the cold-war system, globalization has its own rules, logic, structures, and characteristics [ . . . ]

"[ . . .] The deriving idea behind globalization id free-market capitalism. The more you open your economy to free trade and competition, the more efficient and flourishing your economy will be. Globalization means the spread of free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world."

This is, according to Friedman, achieved by the "integration of free markets, nation-states, and information technology to a degree never before witnessed." Under this system, the market rules, rewarding efficiency and entrepeneurship, and destroying corrupt systems by allowing them to go bankrupt. Those who play by the rules of the economic game, opening their markets to large corporations will benefit by seeing an increase in foreign investment in their countries and by being fully integrated into global political, economic, and cultural systems.

The trouble is that not everyone can or wants to "play by the rules." As the demonstrators who shut down the World Trade Organization talks in Seattle reminded us, many of the laws that corporations define as "trade barriers" are laws that serve legitimate purposes such as protecting the environment and the rights of workers. Many also tremendously resent the erosion of their own cultures, values, and autonomy in a globalized world. And some are simply too poor to buy their way into the game -- capitalism requires capital, and in a world where the gap between the rich and the poor is growing wider and wider, billions have no access to the capital they need to enter the global marked.

Activists protesting McDonalds in the UK.

Friedman acknowledges this to some extent, writing that "Because we are the biggest beneficiaries of globalization we are unwittingly putting enormous pressure on the rest of the world" and that globalization is "producing a powerful backlash from all those brutalized or left behind." He wants to see the United States exercise an enlightened reign over the global economy, providing a basic safety net for those at home and abroad who have trouble adjusting to the system. But, in the end he believes the rules of the new order have to be enforces, and threats to the order, be they nation states or "terrorists" need to be dealt with forcefully. He writes that:

"The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -- McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force Navy and Marine Corps."

Friedman describes the vision of globalization as "a world stabilizied by a benign superpower, with its capital in Washington, DC." Of course whether this superpower is "benign" or not depends on which end of the gun you are on, in a system in which "stabilization" means eliminating any threats to the expansion of capitalism and of the power of (primarily US-based) multinational corporations.

In many ways, this new philosophy of using military might to ensure the expansion of global markets and the security of large corporations is not new at all. In 1945, George Kennan, a liberal not unlike Thomas Friedman, wrote a study for the State Department which concluded that:

"We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population . . . In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity . . . To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives . . We should cease to talk about vague and . . . unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."

In the year's following the study, the US was largely guided by these principles, although "idealistic slogans" were widely used to justify US action against countries that rebelled against the economic order and insisted on controlling their own resources, by labeling any movement anywhere in the world that opposed capitalism as "Communist" and thus linking it with the brutal repression of the Stalinist Soviet Union. The fight against economic self determination was waged in the name of preserving freedom and extending democracy. In Iran, a democratically elected government that tried to nationalize the oil industry was overthrown by a CIA-engineered coup in the name of fighting Communism. Democratically elected left-of-center governments faced the same fate in Guatemala, Indonesia, and Chile when they threatened US investments or access to resources. But during this period the existence of a rival Superpower, the Soviet Union placed some limits on US power. The Soviet Union provided military and economic support to socialist states and guerilla insurgencies, giving those who defied the economic order the ability to mount a significant armed resistance to the military power of the US (in the case of Vietnam) and to US-backed right wing governments (in the cases of El Salvador and Guatemala) and right wing guerillas (in the cases of Nicaragua, Angola, and Mozambique.) In addition, the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union prevented the US from even trying to assert its military power as forcefully as it would like to in some areas (Cuba for example.) The official line was that the world was caught in a struggle between two ideologies and political/economic systems -- a philosophy and system that promoted individual freedom and capitalism, and a philosophy and a system that was marked by state control of the economic and private lives of its people. US support of totalitarian right wing regimes revealed that the struggle was really over whether US corporations would have access to foreign markets and foreign resources.

The Cold War also provided the US with a rationale and a mechanism for preventing Japan and Western Europe from emerging as rival powers that could threaten US military and economic dominance. The Soviet Union and China were painted as military threats to Western Europe and Japan, and the Europeans and the Japanese were led to believe that they needed military protection from the US, and in order to gain that military protection they were willing to sacrifice a degree of political and economic control. Recent assessments have led historians to question not only whether the Soviet Union and China ever had any real plans to attempt to expand beyond the borders of the spheres of influence they controlled in 1950 (with the exception of Chinese desires to reclaim Taiwan and to reunify Korea,) but whether US intelligence agencies ever really believed that wither country had these plans. As Benjamin Schwartz and Christopher Layne wrote in The Nation last spring:

"In the early cold war years, the United States, through its dominant role in NATO, assumed responsibility for defending Western Europe from the Soviet Union because immediately after World War II that area was clearly incapable of protecting itself. Yet, by the mid-sixties, the Western Europeans had staged a vigorous economic recovery, and the Soviet Union's objective in Europe was obviously to maintain, rather than overthrow, the post-1945 status quo. Indeed, even the hawkish former Reagan Administration Pentagon official Fred Ikle has suggested that any serious likelihood of Soviet aggression against Western Europe had already vanished by the end of the fifties. So why then did the United States persist in its strategy long after it was apparent that, if indeed really threatened at all, Western Europe was capable of providing for its own security? And why did the United States continue to insist--as it still does--that a US-led NATO was the indispensable foundation of any European security architecture, thus consistently blocking proposals that would have given Western Europe the responsibility for its own defense?

"Although the continuity and fundamental goals of America's role in Europe are in many ways obscured by focusing on the containment of its cold war enemy, they are illuminated by examining the containment of its allies. By providing for Germany's security and by enmeshing its military and foreign policies into an alliance that it dominated, the United States contained its erstwhile enemy, preventing its "partner" from embarking upon independent foreign and military policies. This stabilized relations among the states of Western Europe, for by controlling Germany, the United States--to use a current term in policy-making circles--"reassured" Germany's neighbors that they would not be threatened by the resurgence of German power (a resurgence that was necessary both to contain the Soviet Union and to insure a prosperous Western European and world economy). The leash of America's security leadership thereby reined in the dogs of war. By, in effect, banishing power politics, NATO protected the states of Western Europe from themselves."

The Cold War provided a perfect framework for advancing US military, economic and political dominance.

The end of the Cold War meant two major changes. When the Soviet Union and its military dissolved, there was no longer any power that was capable of mounting any meaningful challenge to US military dominance. The second major change was that the rhetoric of political, economic, and military struggle was replaced by a triumphalist rhetoric that proclaimed that capitalism and liberal democracy had triumphed over socialism and totalitarianism as the perfect and inevitable social and economic models and that we had effectively reached "the end of history," a time when there were no longer any real struggles left for humanity. The US proclaimed a policy of "constructive engagement" for totalitarian capitalist countries like Indonesia, and totalitarian quasi-capitalist countries like China, making the dubious argument that open markets brought new cultural influences and new ideas into closed societies, eventually bringing political democracy. In the Third World "neoliberalism" replaced dictators who presides iron-fisted regimes that used brute force to prevent people from organizing in ways that would threaten the large corporations that invested in the Third World, with articulate, Western-educated social engineers who favored using economic policies to exercise social control (although in places like Mexico it became clear that neoliberal governments were quite willing to use military force to put down uprisings when subtler, more socially acceptable tactics failed.)

US military planners no longer felt quite the same need to disguise their true goals and motives. In a public planning document, "Vision for 2020," the Pentagon's space command asserted that the US military needed to maintain "full spectrum dominance," the ability to meet any threat to "US interests and investments" with devastating and overwhelming force. The document also predicted that the greatest threats to US power would come from poor nations left behind by the global economy, as the gap between "haves and have-nots" grew.

The Gulf War represented the first real challenge to the new political, economic, and military order the US and its allies sought to impose in the post-Cold War world. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait provided both a real and a symbolic threat to the global economy by limiting the Western powers' control over Middle Eastern oil. As Jerry Mander wrote in In the Absence of the Sacred:

" [ . . . ] the Persian Gulf crisis revealed [a] critical, hidden truth about the new economic order: It is extremely vulnerable. The mere threat to slow the flow of just one key resource, such as oil, set the entire technological system reeling like a creature whose air supply is choked off. In its present structure, our society is utterly dependent on this one natural resource. We will do anything for it, including killing hundreds of thousands of people and irreparably ravaging the landscape. And yet, did we not criticize and scorn stone-age peoples and their economies -- those poor hunter-gatherers who did not create surplus or storage --for being so vulnerable to disaster? Wasn't this whole technological pathway created to resolve that ancient vulnerability to nature? Wasn't that the fundamental rationale, the essential promise of the machine?"

By threatening Western access to Middle Eastern oil, Iraq not only threatened to destabilize oil-dependent industrial economies, it also threatened to reveal the weakness of the new order. The problem with a globalized economy is that as it evolves and grows it requires total access to resources and markets to survive. George Bush said that the United States was fighting to defend "our way of life," and by that he meant a way of life that was possible only when a small fraction of the world's population controls most or all of the world's resources. If the goal of the war had simply been to expel Iraq from Kuwait or to restore the "free" flow of oil in the Persian Gulf, a simple military defeat of Iraq would have been sufficient. But it was necessary also to make an example of Iraq, to make it clear that any nation that steps out of line and threatens the economic order will be severely punished. And so Iraq had to be completely devastated. Just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sacrificed to demonstrate the power of nuclear weapons in an effort to deter any challenges to US power in the post-World War II era, Iraq has been subjected to nine years of bombing and economic sanctions in order to deter threats to US power. This message was lost on the American public but was understood clearly by the Third World leaders for whom it was intended.

The Gulf War also provided an opportunity for the US to demonstrate its military might and make it clear to Japan and Western Europe that the US military was willing, able, and needed to protect their economic interests. To quote Schwartz and Layne again:

"To US policy-makers, America's OEleadership, through NATO in ameliorating the security concerns of the Europeans continues to be vital despite the Soviet Union's demise. After all, the now-infamous draft of the Pentagon's 1992,post-cold war, Defense Planning Guidance argued that the United States should still do this by "discouraging the advanced industrialized nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger global or regional role,, thereby dominating the international system.

"To accomplish this, Washington must keep the former great OEpowers of Western Europe, as well as Japan, firmly within the constraints of the US-created postwar system by providing what one of the guidance's authors terms OEadult supervision., It must protect the interests of virtually all potential great powers for them so that they need not acquire the capabilities to protect themselves--that is, so that they need not act like great powers. (No wonder the United States must spend more on its OEnational security, than the rest of the world's countries combined.) The very existence of truly independent actors would be intolerable, for it would challenge US hegemony, which Washington says is the key to a prosperous and stable international order."

But to some extent, the "idealistic slogans" that Kennan disdained were still necessary to sell the "new" political, economic, and military order to the public. The response was the development of "humanitarian" military intervention. The US sought to replace the UN as the global enforcer of human rights and armed "peacekeeper." The war against Yugoslavia provided the US with an ostensibly moral justification for maintaining and using a tremendous military force -- to protect ethnic minorities from brutal governments, in this case to protect the Kosovar Albanians from the Serbs (no matter that the same protection was never extend to the Tibetans or the East Timorese or to our own ethnic minorities). No matter that the bombing actually provoked the Serbs to expand their war against the Kosovar Albanians, or that in the aftermath of the war the Albanians subjected the Serbs to the same ethnic cleansing the Serbs had inflicted on the Albanians before the war. The point was that the US was able to portray itself as a benign superpower by apparently coming to the aid of people who were clearly suffering horribly, thus enabling it to claim that US dominance was in the interest of humanity. As Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos wrote in an insightful commentary on the war:

"In this war, the great Power has set itself to making all of us take part: either we support Milosevic's OEethnic cleansing, war or we support NATO's OEhumanitarian, war.

"This is the great alchemy of money, to offer us the option of choosing between two wars, not between peace and war.

" On the shelves of the globalized market, the Powers are offering humanity only different versions of the same war: they come in all colors, flavors, sizes and shapes. They are for all tastes and all pocket books. There is only one thing that makes them the same, the results. Always destruction, always anguish, always death. And death, anguish and destruction are always for the other, for the different, for that which is unnecessary, for that which is in the way, for that which is below."

Schwartz and Layne point out that this intervention set a dangerous precedent, and was in many ways a Trojan horse for continued US control of Europe through NATO:

"Military involvement in Kosovo--or someplace like it--was foreshadowed by NATO expansion. As Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott stated in arguing the case for an enlarged NATO, OEThe lesson of the tragedy in the former Yugoslavia is not to retire NATO in disgrace but to develop its ability to counter precisely those forces that have exploded in the Balkans.,

"And as NATO's war against Serbia demonstrates, there is no logical stopping point for US commitments in Europe according to the calculus driving America's European strategy. For example, now that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have been admitted to NATO, instability arising in the regions to the east of the expanded alliance will threaten those states and ultimately Western Europe, or so it will inevitably be argued. The need to defend already extant security interests will be invoked to support subsequent enlargement, thus incurring new strategic responsibilities for the alliance and entangling it even more deeply in a geopolitically volatile region. After all, [Se. Richard] Lugar argues that the US-led NATO must OEgo out of area, because OEthere can be no lasting security at the center without security at the periphery., Of course, to follow this logic means that the ostensible threats to US security will be nearly endless."

The US is clearly bent on maintaining its position as the sole military superpower, and to use that power to promote the continued- expansion of capitalism and to destroy any threats to US "interests and investments." US "national security" policy is no longer about defending the borders of the United States, it is now about defending the interests and enforcing the rules of a global economic system driven largely by US-based multinational corporations.

Since there is no longer any real external check on US military power, if we want to end the massive violence that the US military is conducting and threatening to conduct in defense of capital, we need to develop a movement within the US that is capable off challenging and resisting the Pentagon's plans and of articulating an alternative vision of a world with room for diversity, dissent, and self determination. And we need to work to build solidarity with resistance movements in other countries that are fighting for the survival of their cultures and their people in the face of tremendous odds. In order to fight globalized capital we need to develop globablized grassroots resistance.

Subcomondante Marcos, fighting to protect his homeland in Chiapas from the paper companies that want to destroy it, presented an eloquent description of an alternative vision for the world in the new millennium:

"Another, different world is possible than this violent supermarket that neo-liberalism is selling us. Another world is possible, where the option is between war and peace, between memory and forgetting, between hope and resignation, between the gray and the rainbow. A world where many worlds fit is possible. It is possible for an imperfect OEYes!,, unfinished and incomplete, to be born from a OENO!,, a OEYes!, that gives humanity back the hope of rebuilding, every day, the complex bridge that joins thought and feeling."

It is up to us to choose with our actions which world we want to live in.