Aug 2, 2016
The New Rome: Neo-imperialism and the Decline of Unipolarity
Introduction
“But the liberality of the father had been restrained by prudence, and his indulgence to the troops was tempered by firmness and authority. The careless profusion of the son was the policy of one reign, and the inevitable ruin both of the army and of the empire. The vigor of the soldiers, instead of being confirmed by the severe discipline of camps, melted away in the luxury of cities. The excessive increase of their pay and donatives exhausted the state to enrich the military order, whose modesty in peace, and service in war, is best secured by an honorable poverty.[1]”
The above passage is taken from Edward Gibbon’s historical tome The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume 1, Chapter 6). This passage contrasts the prudent liberality of Emperor Septimius Severus (193 CE — 211 CE), the “father”, with the heedless avarice of Emperor Caracalla (211 CE — 217 CE), the “son”. Here Gibbon shows the effects of autocratic heedlessness on the decline of Rome. Indeed, many historians of Classical Civilization see Caracalla’s reign as a turning point in the peak of Rome’s eminence. The historical prominence of Rome offers both the historian and layperson an archetype of how “Mammon and power”, to use Emma Goldman’s words acontextually, simultaneously sustain and suffocate.
The question of whether multipolarity of any sort is still possible given our current circumstances is an open one. However, the question of whether radical geopolitical change is necessary to achieve it is not as it is very much the case that such change is currently underway. Although this piece will focus specifically on Western and US imperialism, my outlook towards it as outlined here can be universalized. In this piece I will be examining four cases of Western — particularly American — hegemony and imperialism and assess the legacy of that hegemony in countries affected by it and how that impacts us today. The comparisons and parallels to the decline Rome will simply function as a preemptive assessment of, to quote Bernard Lewis, “what went wrong”.
I. The Congo: Recolonized, and with a Chaotic Aftermath
If we fast-forward roughly 1700 years and look at the Republic of the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC) what we see is a newly formed country whose people have democratically elected a new leader, Patrice Lumumba. It is here where US and Belgian imperialism are implicated. To be clear, imperialism takes many forms: economic, theocratic, geopolitical, territorial, etc. The Congo has been a victim of the geopolitical imperialism of Belgium along with the help of the US through the CIA.
Lumumba, a staunch anti-colonialist, angered the Belgian authorities at his inauguration as he denounced the decade-long horrors and crimes of the colonizing nation. In setting his eyes on the genuine sovereignty of a previously subjugated land, Lumumba denounced the slavery, genocide, amputations, and forced rape previously inflicted upon the new nation and promised a way forward for the Congolese people. A few days into his leadership a rebellion in Katanga Province broke out. In an attempt to quell the rebellion, Lumumba sought the assistance of the Soviet Union, a deadly move given the current context of the Cold War. After Lumumba was deposed and subsequently assassinated, his appointed head of the armed forces, Joseph-Desiré Mobutu, a military dictator with sympathies to US interests, took over and renamed the country Zaïre. The country was steered into chaos and suffers from it to this day.
The US and Rome have both shared in the endeavor of protecting imperial interests, differing only in their modi operandi. For Rome, it was primarily territorial expansion, such as Caracalla’s invasions of Armenia and Parthia or Emperor Claudius’s conquest of Britannia. For the US, it has primarily been political, arming juntas to oust left-wing leaders and back authoritarian ones; it got expansionism out of its system in 1959 with the annexation and subsequent statehood of Hawaiʻi. Needless to say, the 12 million dollar project — 80 million dollars in today’s money — of turning the Congo into a geopolitical nightmare is now complete.[2] In a sense, what happened to Congo was a recolonization of sorts; that is to say that Congo is still suffering from the vicissitudes of European colonialism and American “regime change”. Autonomy and sovereignty are mere illusions under this analysis and more will be made about this point at the end.
II. Guatemala: The Fruits of Corporatism
The next turn will be toward the previous decade approximately 7,400 miles (12,000km) away from Kinshasa to Guatemala City, Guatemala. It was here where the people of Guatemala were served a cocktail of imperialism and corporatism from the American government. It is said that necessity is the mother of invention; well, in the context of vehement and subtly selfish anti-communism, the US had to invent a more elaborate pretext for ousting a democratically elected leader. The United Fruit Company, an American export corporation which traded fruit — primarily bananas — grown in Latin America, owned roughly 500,000 acres of Guatemala’s land, its port, and its telecommunications. A transnational corporate empire, United Fruit Company was nicknamed el pulpo, or “the octopus”.
Jacobo Árbenz, the newly elected leader of Guatemala, promised agrarian donatives to Guatemala’s socioeconomically marginalized. However, some of these donatives included land owned by the United Fruit Company, in which many high-level US officials had interests of one kind or another. The obvious solution was that Árbenz had to go. As is historically apparent, “_____ must go”[3, 4, 5] has become a working shibboleth for Western geopolitical depositions, euphemistically termed “regime change” or “intervention”. Here, a pretext of fighting Marxism and communism was invented to, in Chomskian parlance, “manufacture the consent” of the populace, which was not hard to do given the jingoistic hangover from the end of WWII.
Propaganda is simply power and information, so with the help of an informant, Árbenz got word of the coup the US was planning and made the information public. However, it was to little avail as the US simply denounced it as a trick and in turn accused Árbenz of being a Soviet puppet; this charge was echoed by the media and it stuck. Moreover, many other countries were threatened on pain of losing US support if they dissented from its anti-Communist actions. Guatemala’s airwaves were soon flooded with anti-Communist rhetoric; a psychopolitical war had begun, bringing the narrative to the populace of the America’s imperial proxy. Árbenz soon resigned but it was not over yet; the very man who was to succeed him and continue his policies, Carlos Enrique Díaz, only lasted a day until he was deposed by Elfego Monzón, who was ultimately replaced by Carlos Castillo. As was the case in DRC, these authoritarians brought chaos and strife to their people. However, the most important variable in this historical analysis is the main beneficiary of the whole operation, the United Fruit Company whose success came at the cost of over 100,000 Guatemalans — mostly Mayan natives — murdered by a succession of ruthless autocrats backed by the US.
The case of the Guatemalan coup of 1954 evinces the power of a narrative on the psychology of a populace both domestic and international. However, the case most importantly shows the clear marriage of state and corporation and the greed that impels its protection.
III. Cuba, Castro, and Crisis
Corporatism is not the sole driver of imperialism; sometimes it is just pure haughtiness. However, haughtiness, as we shall see, more often than not leaves one ill-prepared for failure. The third case study in American hegemony is in Havana, Cuba, only 900 miles away from Guatemala City. Here, will be an analysis of popular resistance to imperialism, the failure to oust an elected leader, our response to ideological push-back, and how that response affects us now.
Seven years after the ousting of Árbenz, souring relations with Cuba ensued after US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista was overthrown during the Cuban Revolution and replaced with Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, commonly known as Fidel Castro.
There is much to be said about the belittling of popular resistance by imperial powers generally. Imposing ideologies and narratives on a nation’s disaffected denizens is an easy way to do one’s dirty work. As we saw in the previous case study, propaganda has a way of denuding certain people of their psychological autonomy and it can go a long way.
The interests of the imperial power always tend to trump the interests of the people in its proxy countries affected. However, the US has ironically — and rather hypocritically — used the very denizens of the proxy nation to create the illusion of popular sympathy to US interests. Historically, this tactic has played itself out in Afghanistan and Vietnam and is now playing itself out in Syria.
The incident follows the typical Cold War story of a CIA-backed group of disloyal separatists — Brigade 2506 in this case—trying to oust a leader with Communist leanings, Fidel Castro. However, this case of America’s attempted hegemony in Cuba is special for one simple reason. It failed. The incident is known as, Invasión de Bahía de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs Invasion.[6]
The haughtiness that followed the successful ousting of Árbenz seven years earlier carried over from Eisenhower to Kennedy but it led to a few, namely four, fatal assumptions:
- The CIA assumed that the troops of Brigade 2506 would trigger an uprising among the populace.
- Upon the landing of Brigade 2506, Cuban military officials were alerted of the invasion and fought back.
- In an effort to quell any suspicion of US support, Kennedy did not supply the air power needed for the invasion to be successful.
- The CIA ultimately decided on the Bay of Pigs, Castro’s favorite fishing spot, to be the landing site for the invasion.
The failure of the invasion only strengthened the political fervor of Castro and the popular support he received from the Cuban people. Castro subsequently quelled uprisings and allied himself and Cuba with the Soviets. Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev shipped missiles to Cuba to deter any possible subsequent invasion. Here, Cuba became a Cold War proxy in a conflict known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. An embargo was already placed on Cuba and up until recently, US-Cuba relations have been tense.
A common trait of empires, suzerains, and colonizing powers is to make resistance synonymous with antagonism and aggression, hence the inherent normativity of the word “terrorism”. This phenomenon is endemic to many conflicts past and present: Roman Empire-Britannia, Japan-China, Israel-Palestine, US-Iran, and Israel-Lebanon. Even calling them conflicts is misleading; the “conflict” is created by resistance. Terming them conflicts obscures an apparent reality of political domination and resistance to it.
It is worth noting how deadly hegemonic arrogance can be if it is met with resistance. The Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion of Shanghai was met with the Rape of Nanking. The Soweto uprising, a response by Black South Africans to the imposition of Afrikaans in school lessons, was met by a massacre of over 100 schoolchildren. Cuba has been financially decimated by the embargo and more so in the years following the dissolution of the USSR. Cubans, who are now receiving less than 20 dollars a month, are seeking other forms of work and face hunger. After more than fifty-five years, the legacy of US-Cuban tension is only starting to fade with the lifting of the embargo. However, much work is still need for a geopolitical realignment to occur.
The failure to “Americanize” Cuba is a clear case of pride coming before a great fall. However, it also highlights the importance of perspective in its analysis. The framing of Castro as a dictator, the phenomenon of Cuban-American conservatism in Florida, and the seemingly timeless embargo on Cuba inevitably force one to appropriate the American perspective in this whole issue. The reality of the situation is more nuanced; the failed attempt to oust Castro was punished with an embargo. The Cuban exiles in Florida are those who were either apart of or loyal to the attempt to oust — and even assassinate — a leader. The case of Cuba evinces the punishment of a nation’s autonomy and the decade-long legacy of political disaffection, or clear treason from the Cuban perspective.
IV. Somalia 2006: Ignorance Replaces Arrogance
Our final destination in this piece is Mogadishu, approximately 8400 miles (13,500 km) from Havana. This case study shows that not even the end of the Cold War is enough to quell neo-imperialist ambitions. However, our context here is not a nuclear arms race mollified only by the threat of mutually assured destruction. It is instead the War on Terror, an ongoing, ambiguously worded, and rather quixotic attempt to quell militant Salafism in response to 9/11. Here, both neo-Orientalism and Africanism rear their ugly heads to engineer instability under the guise of political change.
Somalia, having been wrecked by sixteen years of anocracy and warlord rivalry following the ousting of Siad Barre, was seeing rising stability come by way of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) which gradually took on greater societal responsibilities in the midst of the ensuing social and political chaos. This kritarchy that followed the chaos, however palliative, was welcomed by many Somalians. Where does America fit into this? The US government with its ambiguous War on Terror was convinced by the Ethiopian government, which funded the movements to oust Barre in 1991 and with which the Bush administration subsequently partnered, that the ICU fell under America’s umbrella definition of what constituted terrorism. Neo-Orientalism presents itself here in the conflation of militant Salafism and kritarchal Islamism; Africanism, in the assumption of African intracontinental solidarity and ignorance of regional power struggles.
As was the case in Iraq, a scant knowledge of the political, cultural, and religious nuances of the region led to the US arming of warlords supported by Ethiopia.[7] Somalia’s Islamist judges naturally fought the warlords supported by the US and Ethiopia, but it was a fight against the instability and separatism that they surely knew the warlords would bring. However, US-Ethiopian intervention was not only constituted by the arming of warlords to defeat presumed jihadist terrorists, but also by bringing “regime change” to Somalia in the form of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG).
The TFG took power in early 2007 and the dissolution of the ICU followed. However, dissolution, as is apparent in many cases, breeds disaffection: Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Ba’athists, the US-backed Free Syrian Army, and the Afghani Mujahideen are all examples of this phenomenon. Here, the same phenomenon took place, leading to the rise of Ḥarakat ash-Shabāb al-Mujāhidīn, or “Movement of the Jihadist Youth”, better known as Al-Shabaab (“The Youth”). Al-Shabaab is comprised of the younger disaffected members of the ICU, support for whom heavily solidified after the ousting of Barre. In this case, ignorance, simplistic thinking, and a fundamental lack of coordination was the fault here. Swallowing a foreign narrative about the condition of a group of people and an imprecise understanding of an enemy has sown the seeds of chaos in Somalia. Ironically, the very venture to quell militant Salafism has, through its disorganization and imprecision, served to strengthen it. Al-Shabaab pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda in 2012, and has been implicated over 400 deaths from terrorism since, most notably in Kenya at the Westgate Shopping Mall in 2013 and Garissa University in 2015.
The case study of Somalia and the rise of Al-Shabaab is important primarily because it is a non-Western power that struck first. If one looks with fresh eyes, the Ethiopian-backed ousting of Siad Barre serves as a mirror to ourselves and all who wish to emulate our imperialist ventures. Somalia is a case study in the dangers of melding power with simple-mindedness and disorganization.
Our Legacy Abroad
An analysis of post-WWII history implicates the US in a number of geopolitical and military conflicts. The analysis above shows the drivers and effects of neo-imperialism. In the DRC, an anti-colonialist was ousted because of his strong views and replaced with a line of dictators who bind the country to a legacy of social and political stagnancy. Shakespeare is noted as saying through Jaques in As You Like It,
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts…”As You Like It, (II.VII.139–141)
While we are all players on the world stage, not everyone gets to play in equal part. Some have bigger parts than others and others have the role they wish to play taken away from them. Some are used to ensure the play goes one way rather than another. In this analysis sovereignty and autonomy are both illusions. The DRC, is not an independent state; it has been hampered by imperialism and recolonized by its own externally enforced chaos.
Guatemala has seen the genocide of its native population under authoritarian regime after authoritarian regime. It appears that the more than 100,000 lives lost were worth less than the profits of the United Fruit Company in which many high-ranking American officials, such as John Foster Dulles and Henry Cabot Lodge, had stock. The melding of corporatism and neo-imperialism is indicative of another illusion, an American illusion, the illusion of democracy. Rather, it is plutocracy masquerading as democracy and using neoliberalism to do so.
Cuba’s rightful resistance to American meddling was only met with punishment. The grudge America holds with Cuba is in its lack of conciliation to American demands. Castro, love him or not (and I don’t), did not deserve the economic sanctions imposed on him, at least not at the expense of the Cuban people. However, what is more interesting is the way rightful resistance is punished with extreme severity. Be it in Ancient Rome, Modern Israel, 20th century Imperial Japan, or Apartheid South Africa, the severity with which resistance is punished elucidates the greed that drives domineering powers, especially when their attempts fail. We see this in Syria where the attempt to oust Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Russia, has been dwarfed in importance by the battle against Islamic State in which Russia is cooperating. We apparently have not learned our lesson from Iraq and Libya and the maintenance of Cold War revivalism in this proxy war only clarifies that reality.
Somalia is what happens when one power’s imperialism mixes with that of another power. Ethiopia essentially used the power of the United States to do its bidding in Somalia. Such was also the case with Britain and Iran in 1953 and Belgium and the Republic of the Congo in 1961. Here, an ongoing, disorganized, and vague attempt to address the global issue of Salafi terrorism led to the dissolution of the very force that stabilized a country formerly in chaos. The case of Somalia also shows how easy it is to leach off a superpower that has both money and power to burn.
How Will We Fall?
What will be our downfall? Will it be an event? A Waterloo? An enemy? An Odoacer? Or a political reformer? An Atatürk? The Chilcot Report, an inquiry into the role of the UK in the Iraq War, was released on July 6 of this year. A document of more than 2 million words, the report pulled no punches in its transparency about total non-threat that Saddam Hussein was, the unmerited fear of weapons of mass destruction, and the rashness of such a war given alternative measures [8]. The comprehensive report comes just short of recommending that Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair be tried in The Hague as a war criminal.
In March of this same year Radovan Karadžić, the former leader of the Bosnian Serbs, was sentenced to forty years in prison for genocide, persecution, and other war crimes he ordered in Srebrenica in 1995. In April of last year, Palestine joined the International Criminal Court (ICC) to implicate Israel in war crimes following Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014. Israel, an ICC signatory, has not ratified its signature and is thus not bound by any legal obligations. The significance of this move is that more pressure will be gradually put on Israel to join the ICC so that the playing field can be even. It is only a matter of time before the US will succumb to this sort of pressure, although it will not do so easily.
For contrast, former vice president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Jean-Pierre Bemba, was sentenced to eighteen years for rapes and pillages committed by his troops in the Central African Republic. The absurdity of present circumstances is all too apparent: the rightful indictment of a leader whose country — through its own chaos — has essentially been ‘recolonized’ as a result of its bout with Western meddling versus the lack of indictment of one whose country is responsible for roughly a million deaths in Iraq alone. Is it fair to hold the US to a lower standard than the Congo? Djibouti? Uganda? Do we really think that social equity and political stability can be used to mask war crimes and the deadly consequences of American hegemony?
It should be noted as well the US attitude towards the ICC has been more than casually dismissive; it has been outright antagonistic. Since 2002 the US under the Bush administration has been on an ideological war to discourage countries such as Nicaragua, Azerbaijan, Kuwait, and Israel — among others — from joining the ICC.
However, the creeping influence of the ICC is not the only harbinger of the demise of unipolarity. Leaks by prominent whistle-blowers like Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange serve to show corruption in the US political system both domestically and internationally. Like Rome, the US has turned its back on its citizens and now caters to patricians and other elites. In fact, a famous Princeton study found that it is these people who are the greatest force for political change in the US at this moment. We have forgotten our original principles, similar to how Rome forgot SPQR*. As a result, we have become like the same empire from which we extricated ourselves to form this country.
Why is all of this relevant? Because my thesis is that our decline, like that of the Roman Empire, will be multifaceted, a thesis which speaks volumes about our behavior on the world stage and the various consequences that such behavior has brought about. For example, given the corporatist aspect our political system, our whole War on Terror is largely a cycle of facilitating the continued profiteering of defense and petroleum contractors in order to fight the enemies we have both deliberately and inadvertently created, much in the same way Rome tried to fight off the barbarians — Goths, Vandals, and Germanic tribes — to its east. Around the turn of the fourth century Emperor Diocletian (284 CE — 305 CE) militarized the Roman government by changing its taxation laws to fund military expenditures, much similar to what the US did during WWII with total war. Diocletian, unwilling to expend Rome’s own military power, trained and absorbed Germanic tribes — barbarians to the Romans — for mercenary assistance; these were called foederati. Sound familiar?
One should bear in mind that the decline in Amerocentric unipolarity need not be catastrophic or chaotic; a decline in influence is not tantamount to the termination of an entire civilization as some more paranoid Huntingtonian thinkers would have you believe. At the level of the populace, many are becoming fed up with an oligarchic system that caters to the highest corporate bidder and it appears that a significant portion of the European and American populaces are suffering some sort of identity crisis. In the American context, this identity crisis is signified by the rise of Donald Trump, which will be the subject of another piece. What’s important, however, is that multiculturalism, the dissolution of a common American ‘white’ identity, and an ongoing war with jihadists, who are seen as today’s Barbarians along with Muslims in general, have sown the seeds for discomfort among disaffected whites who see their country as being taken away from them. At the level of geopolitics, our decline could be understood as a decline in influence and a decline in international micromanagement as Iran and China are becoming forces for transnational political influence in their own right. However, if we are to learn from history and truly live up to our original principles a little bit less of America might not be such a bad thing.
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
— Marcus Aurelius
- Gibbon, Edward. Fall in the West. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Vol 1. Everyman’s Library, 2010. Print.
- Robarge, David. CIA’s Covert Operations in the Congo, 1960–1968: Insights from Newly Declassified Documents. FRUS. Vol XXIII. Studies in Intelligence Vol 58, No. 3 (September 2014). Print.
- Wilson, Scott, and Joby Warrick. “Assad Must Go, Obama Says.” Washington Post. Washington Post, 18 Aug. 2011. Web. 12 July 2016.
- Johnson, Boris. “Saddam Must Go, but Don’t Lie to Me about the Reasons.” The Telegraph. The Telegraph, 26 Dec. 2002. Web. 12 July 2016.
- Adams, Paul. “Libya: Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy Vow Gaddafi Must Go.” BBC News. BBC, 15 Apr. 2011. Web. 12 July 2016.
- Voss, Michael. “Bay of Pigs: The ‘perfect failure’ of Cuba invasion.” BBC News. BBC, 14 Apr. 2011. Web. 20 July 2016.
- Lacey, Marc. “Somali Islamists Declare Victory; Warlords on Run.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 05 June 2006. Web. 27 July 2016.
- Harding, Luke. “Tony Blair Unrepentant as Chilcot Gives Crushing Iraq War Verdict.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 06 July 2016. Web. 27 July 2016.
*SPQR — Senātus PopulusQue Rōmānus (The Senate and the People of Rome)
