The Hidden Agenda: Pax Americana and Postwar Corporate
Rule
By Richard K. Moore
World War II resulted in overwhelming U.S. military supremacy. A regime of
American-backed "peace" -- a Pax Americana -- was established early in
the postwar world. European businesses could get the benefit of foreign
trade and investment without the assistance of their own fleets and armies.
Under this new regime, it no longer made much sense for European powers to fight
with one another or to compete militarily for economic spheres. After
1945, the old empires were gradually dismantled and Western Europe entered an
unprecedented era of collaboration.
The fundamental structure of the international economy had rapidly shifted from
partitioned to integrated. For the first time in many centuries a lasting
peace in Western Europe was achieved. Both of these developments followed
naturally from a single revolutionary shift - the establishment of the Pax
Americana regime. Before that regime, globalization was impossible and
European peace had been unachievable; with the regime, the peace followed
naturally and the integration of the global economy, in one form or another,
became inevitable.
The outcome of World War II had given America military supremacy, but the U.S.
had other options available to it besides establishing the Pax Americana regime.
There was considerable domestic pressure for the U.S. to return to isolationism
and minimize foreign entanglements. Why did the U.S. instead pursue a role
of active leadership, guiding the creation of the UN, the IMF and the other
postwar international institutions? And why didn't America follow standard
Western tradition, and use its overwhelming power to carve out its own private
sphere of influence, leaving the European powers to stake out their own?
It turns out there are very clear answers to these questions. In fact, the
strategic considerations that went into these momentous policy choices are a
matter of public record.
In 1939, important parts of the world were coming under the control of Japan and
Germany, and the U.S. government was trying to figure out what response would
best serve U.S. interests. The U.S. government turned to the Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR) and empowered it to convene a series of planning
sessions to come up with a sensible U.S. strategy. The CFR was a prominent
voice for sentiment that was widespread among U.S. policy makers and elites.
The planning sessions were highly secret at the time, but notes and bulletins
produced by the sessions have since become publicly available. The
development of the strategic thinking can be clearly traced.
The CFR sessions immediately focused on economic considerations. They
systematically assessed market sizes and resource availability, in different
parts of the world. They were seeking to identify what sphere of influence
the U.S. would require in order to fulfill the trade requirements of the
imperialist American economy. Out of these deliberations came the
fundamental framework for U.S. war strategy. In their initial thinking,
the Council planning teams were inclined to write off Hitler's gains as
irreversible. They painstakingly calculated that they needed the Western
Hemisphere, the British Commonwealth, and Asia - as "friendly" zones -
in order to remain viable as a world power. They decided that Japan's
expansion must be stopped, that Japan must be ultimately incorporated into the
American fold, and that Great Britain was central to U.S. strategy.
But by 1941, the grand planners expanded their objectives to include the defeat
of Germany and the establishment of a world-wide "friendly" zone -
what was to later become known as the free world, the underdeveloped world, or
the Third World. The Council also outlined, during 1941-1942, the basic
structures of the Bretton Woods arrangements - the IMF, the World Bank and the
UN. The fundamental objectives behind this blueprint were stated clearly
and candidly by the participants themselves in publicly available documents.
For instance:
"Recommendation P-B23 (July 1941) stated that worldwide financial
institutions were necessary for the purpose of "stabilizing currencies and
facilitating programs of capital investment for constructive undertakings in
backward and underdeveloped regions." In the last half of 1941 and
the first months of 1942, the CFR developed this idea for the integration of the
world."
"Isaiah Bowman first suggested a way to solve the problem of maintaining
effective control over weaker territories while avoiding overt imperial
conquest. At a CFR meeting in May 1942, he stated that the U.S. had to
exercise the strength needed to assure "security," and at the same
time "avoid conventional forms of imperialism." The way to do
this, he argued, was to make the exercise of that power international in
character through a United Nations body." (Trilaterialism: The
Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, p.148,149.
Edited by Holly Sklar.)
From these quoatations it becomes clear that the primary objective behind this
planning was to facilitate the growth of the global capitalist economy
("facilitate programs of capital investment"). No other primary
concerns seemed to play any role in the planning process - least of all any
related to human rights, world peace or democratic sovereignty. Economic
growth, and economic growth alone, was the prize upon which these planners
always kept their eyes. The rest of the agenda was about how to accomplish
this single objective.
The Third World ("backward and underdeveloped regions") was targeted
as the place where growth can be generated - through corporate-funded
development projects ("capital investment for constructive undertakings
"). The planners anticipated that Third World nations would need to
be coerced into this agenda ("the problem of maintaining effective control
over weaker territories"). They also anticipated that overt
imperialism would be politically unacceptable in the postwar world ("avoid
conventional forms of imperialism"). A solution was identified to
solve these anticipated problems. That was to deploy American power
("United States had to exercise the strength"), but to disguise it as
an international mission ("make the exercise of that power international in
character through a United Nations body"). Ironically, the covert
objective for the UN - coercion through intervention - was nearly the opposite
of the public objective - peace through cooperation. These policy
recommendations were adopted and the postwar "free world" developed
accordingly.
In public reality, the U.S. would be providing benign leadership and policing on
behalf of the international community in pursuit of democracy and peace.
In hidden reality, the U.S. would be intervening on behalf of international
capital while explaining its actions in public-reality terms. That's what
was explicitly anticipated in the CFR planning documents, and that's precisely
how things have developed ever since. William Blum's book, Killing Hope,
chronicles in detail the postwar history of this dual-agenda system, contrasting
rhetoric with reality in 55 separate intervention incidents. Some of these
interventions were overt and some covert - but the motivating agendas were in
all cases covert.
In order to carry out the hidden agenda - maximizing capital growth through
exploitive Third World development - it was necessary that the socialist
ideology be contained. "Mother Russia," which had been heralded
as the West's staunch ally against fascism, suddenly became the "Red
Menace." In 1946, Churchill articulated the doctrine of the
"Iron Curtain" and the Cold War was on. There followed a
decades-long propaganda campaign in Western media that demonized the Soviet
Union. The Nazi intelligence network which had operated throughout Eastern
Europe was kept intact and was incorporated into the new U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency. Covert destabilization operations against the Soviets
were an ongoing part of the Cold War.
It was the ideology of socialism that needed to be contained much more than the
USSR itself. Any ideology which sought to organize a Third World economy
around its own local self interests, rather than external investor interests,
was labeled "Marxist," and the Soviet expansionist Bogeyman was
offered as an excuse for whatever "order restoring" military
intervention might be required. In fact, Soviet forces, and later Chinese,
preferred for the most part to stay home and keep order within what was called
the Communist Bloc. It was American bases that were strung around the
globe, not Soviet or Chinese ones.
The leadership of this global regime remains to this day centered in the top
echelons of the U.S. government. And the tradition of ongoing elite
strategic planning has been institutionalized in the form of the National
Security Council, the CIA, the National Security Agency and miscellaneous other
agencies - all working closely with a network of corporate-linked think tanks
and consulting firms. As the U.S. continues to impose its leadership,
using unilateral force when considered necessary, it follows the policy
guidelines defined by this highly secret, ongoing, corporate-dominated, elite
planning process.
Thus it is a corporate elite that is guiding the direction of global events -
for its own benefit. Western populations benefited economically from this
system in the immediate postwar years - but the price they paid was the loss of
democratic control over their destinies. In the final analysis, people of
the West are just as much victims of this elite global regime as is the rest of
the world. This fact became apparent with the unfolding of the neoliberal
revolution.
Source: "Globalization and the Revolutionary Imperative from Global Tyranny
to Democratic Renaissance," CyberJournal, Jan. 14, 2000. Web site:
<cyberjournal.org/cj/rkm/gri.shtml>