The Great Deception

Anglo-American Power and World Order

Mark Curtis

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781783715756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

An original and radically revised view of British and US foreign policy, exposing the extent to which Anglo-American interests have shaped and damaged the current world order.

Part I

Foreign Policy

1

Postwar Foreign Policy and the Special Relationship

If we extricate ourselves from the view of foreign policy promoted in the mainstream and instead consider actual reality from the declassified documents and historical record, a fairly clear picture emerges as to the roots and effects of US and British foreign policy. In the US, there are a number of independent scholars – perhaps most prominently, Gabriel Kolko and Noam Chomsky – who have extensively analysed the historical and documentary record of US foreign policy. With British foreign policy, there is a paucity of independent sources and much of the secret record awaits documentation, which I tried to do in my previous book, The Ambiguities of Power. Below I try to outline, albeit very briefly, some main themes of postwar US and British foreign policy and the special relationship.

Key themes in postwar US foreign policy

Postwar US foreign policy has been based on securing control over what was called the ‘Grand Area’, which encompassed virtually the entire non-Soviet world. US leaders incessantly outlined their primary goal within this area of an ‘open door’ in international trade and investment whereby ‘American enterprises in other countries should be assured the right of access to raw materials and markets and to labour supply of the host country on the same terms as business enterprises operated therein by its citizens or by citizens of third countries’.¹ Given the predominant role of US business in the international economy after the Second World War, the overall US goal was nothing less than control of the international economy.² Cordell Hull, the US Secretary of State and architect of US postwar planning, had noted during the war that:

Leadership towards a new system of international relationships in trade and other economic affairs will devolve very largely upon the United States because of our great economic strength. We should assume this leadership, and the responsibility that goes with it, primarily for reasons of pure national self-interest.³

It also involved control over world order more generally. As a State Department memorandum of 1948 put it: the establishment of a ‘truly stable world order can proceed ... only from the older, mellower and more advanced nations of the world’.⁴ This view echoed Winston Churchill, who had noted in 1940:

Power in the hands of these two great liberal nations, with the free nations of the British Commonwealth and the American Republics associated in some way with them so as to ensure that power is not abused, offers the only stable prospect of peace.⁵

Noam Chomsky states that:

In the international system envisioned by US planners, the industrial powers were to reconstruct, essentially restoring the traditional order and barring any challenge to business dominance, but now taking their places within a world system regulated by the United States. This world system was to take the form of state-guided liberal internationalism, secured by US power to bar interfering forces and managed through military expenditures, which proved to be a critical factor stimulating industrial recovery. The global system was designed to guarantee the needs of US investors, who were expected to flourish under the prevailing circumstances.⁶

Of particular importance to US planners were the raw material supplies, markets and investment opportunities of the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Leading historian Gabriel Kolko notes that ‘by no later than 1960, America’s ideals and assumptions regarding institutional issues, above all foreign investment and raw materials exports, had been repeated so often, both in its policy guidelines and its routine diplomacy, that one can fairly say that ... there remains no mystery whatsoever regarding American formal premises and aims’.⁷ Indeed, reviewing US foreign policy from 1945 until 1980, Kolko asserts that despite the risk of oversimplification, ‘the economic component remains the single most important factor in its postwar conduct in the Third World’.⁸

In the Middle East, US planners undertook to secure overall control of the region’s oil supplies in alliance with US oil corporations and based on a close relationship principally with the Saudi royal family and regime that lasts until today. This involved US arms sales to the regime, which helped to ‘keep the goodwill of the King and other important Saudi Arabs’, as it was put in 1947, and which remains relevant today.⁹ US petroleum policy towards Britain – the other power with a controlling interest in Middle Eastern oil – was described in 1947 as predicated upon ‘a very extensive joint interest and upon a control, at least for the moment, of the great bulk of the free petroleum resources of the world’.¹⁰

The need to exert control over the international economy’s most important commodity meant gradually displacing the British from the region, the first major act of which was the joint CIA–MI6 coup in 1953 against the Iranian government that had nationalised the British-controlled oil industry. The new regime under the Shah reduced the British concession and gave US oil corporations an increased share in the country’s oil business. Throughout the postwar period overall strategic control of the region has remained an overriding priority of US foreign policy (referred to as ‘defence’ in the propaganda system in a region where the US has ‘security interests’). The interventions in Lebanon in 1958 and in Iraq in 1991, the strategic alliance with the Shah of Iran from 1953–78, Turkey and Israel and constant support for the regimes of the oil-rich Gulf states have all been in order to secure this fundamental goal (see also Chapters 5 and 6).

Contrary to popular myth, another key US postwar policy was general support for continuing control of colonial territories by the European powers, especially in Africa. ‘In general’, the State Department noted in 1950, ‘we believe that our economic goals in Africa should be achieved through coordination and cooperation with the colonial powers.’¹¹ European colonial powers’ plans to ‘undertake jointly the economic development and exploitation’ of the colonial areas ‘has much to recommend it’, the State Department noted in 1948.¹² In 1950, the State Department supported the European policy of the ‘development of Africa as a means of strengthening their overall economic and strategic position in the world’.¹³ By 1960, a National Security Council (NSC) report on Africa confirmed that the policy continued, and US interests involved ‘the development of the dependent territories, in an orderly manner and in cooperation with the European metropoles, toward ultimate self-determination’. This transition should take place ‘in a way which preserves the essential ties which bind Western Europe and Africa’. It also stated:

As areas achieve independence [US policy is to] encourage them (1) to make the maximum contribution to their own economic development, (2) to eliminate barriers to trade and investment, (3) to take measures capable of attracting maximum amounts of external private capital, and (4) to look essentially to Western Europe, to the Free World international financial institutions and to private investment to meet their needs for external capital so long as this is consistent with US security interests.¹⁴

The US Joint Chiefs of Staff noted in 1947 that ‘the United States is, by reason of its strength and political enlightenment, the natural leader of this hemisphere’, referring to Latin America.¹⁵ Similarly, then CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence, Robert Gates, noted in 1984 that ‘the fact is that the Western hemisphere is the sphere of influence of the United States’.¹⁶ In Latin America, Kolko notes, the US confronted ‘an alternative concept of national capitalist economic development that rejected fundamentally its historic objective of an integrated world economy based not simply on capitalism but also on unrestricted access to whatever wealth it desired’. ‘Nowhere else’, Kolko states, ‘were the underlying bases and objectives of US foreign policy revealed so starkly’ in which the ‘open door’ was a myth and ‘power and gain for the United States’ the real foundation of its policies.¹⁷

The US intervention in Guatemala in 1954 was the first major postwar example of a familiar pattern of intervention, especially in Latin America. The pattern is that an essentially nationalist government (in this case under Jacobo Arbenz, democratically elected) threatens established US business interests in the country and/or region (in this case specifically the United Fruit Company, a major landowner) and the traditional economic and political order by pursuing a reform programme of benefit to the majority impoverished population. The political programme is then publicly labelled by US leaders as ‘communist’, usually backed by the Soviet Union, providing a pretext for intervention. The overt or covert US intervention occurs (in the Guatemala case with the CIA organising an invasion of the country, and conducting bombing raids) in an attempt to return to the traditional order under the pretext of restoring ‘democracy’. This pattern was repeated in covert or overt US operations in Cuba from 1959, the Dominican Republic in 1965, Vietnam from the 1950s and in US-aided coups such as in Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973.

Another element in the basic pattern was sympathetic ideological framing of the issues by the US and British media and academia. Thirty years after the intervention in Guatemala, the US-organised contra war in Nicaragua showed the pattern was alive and well. The latter has been extensively documented by independent analysts, and involved the systematic pursuit of acts of terrorism by the US-backed forces and the undermining of possible diplomatic solutions to the conflict. The overall US goal in Nicaragua – and in the wider Central America region – was most reasonably understood as the destruction of the prospects for independent development. As in many other US interventions, the official assertions about the primacy of the Soviet or communist threat as an explanation for US policy were too ludicrous to be taken seriously on the evidence. However, as I documented in a study of British press reporting of the war in Nicaragua, this was indeed the lens through which the war was consistently reported in Britain, as well as in the US.¹⁸

A further element in the pattern was support for US policy from Britain, which has usually been the primary (and sometimes only major) supporter of US acts of aggression throughout the postwar period. For example, the Thatcher government strongly backed the US war against Nicaragua, adopting supportive positions in international fora and publicly declaring strong diplomatic backing. ‘We support the United States’ aim to promote peaceful change, democracy and economic development’ in Central America, Thatcher stated in January 1984, by which time the US aim of destroying the prospects for these was quite clear to any rational observer (which thus excluded 99 per cent of the British press).¹⁹ British mercenaries took part in the war, one British private ‘security’ company was involved in the sabotage of installations in Nicaragua, and British aircrew made ‘flights into Nicaragua so that American nationals could not be captured if anything happened’, John Prados notes in a study of CIA operations.²⁰ Security services expert Stephen Dorril notes that ‘it is almost inevitable’ that these deals between the US and British mercenaries were made with the agreement of Britain’s MI6 ‘since there is agreement between the American and British intelligence services about recruiting each other’s citizens’.²¹ Arms for the Contras were contracted and forwarded from British companies, and attempts were made to supply surface-to-air missiles, though British government involvement is unclear.²²

The principal threat to US foreign policy was always upheld by US officials as being the Soviet Union. The interventions from Guatemala in 1954 to Grenada in 1983 – as well as other policies, such as human rights and arms control – were invariably described in this light. Mainstream academia and the media, including many left-leaning commentators, promoted this line, in Britain as well as in the US, with as much frequency. Although ‘containment’ of the Soviet Union explains much about US postwar strategy, and the Cold War was a key issue in many policies, postwar US foreign policy was never in reality based mainly on containment. As I have shown elsewhere,²³ with reference to the planning documents of the US and Britain, much of postwar foreign policy is explicable more in terms of dividing up the world by reaching a tacit understanding with the Soviet Union. A British Foreign Office memorandum of 1951 noted that the current Western policy of ‘containment’ must ‘give way as soon as possible’ to ‘the positive purpose of reaching an accommodation, or rather a modus vivendi ... with the Communist half of the world’.²⁴ This largely occurred in Eastern Europe – to be controlled by the Soviet Union – and virtually the whole of the Third World – to be controlled by the US and its allies and in which, in reality, there was very l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Introduction
• Part I Foreign Policy
• Part II Development
• Part III The Middle East
• Part IV The United Nations
• Notes
• Index