The US Empire is no different than any other empire
Matthew Hoh is the Associate Director of the Eisenhower Media Network. A former Marine and State Department official who resigned in protest over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
Cross-posted from Matt’s Substack
I get asked a lot to explain who or what drives American foreign policy. In the last few years, this question has very often centered around the US-Israeli relationship. The following is adapted from an email to my friend, George, explaining my view that it is the imperial reality of the US that authors American foreign policy, particularly its wars, rather than corporations, political parties or foreign countries. Entire books have been written about this subject, Chalmers Johnson wrote 4, so please take my 1,000 words kindly:
…the impetus or driving force behind American foreign policy decisions is American. Specifically, when it comes to Israel, I believe the Israelis have an outsized voice in US Middle Eastern policies, and increasingly in US policies like censorship and social media ownership, but that is due to the American structure of legalized bribery that the Israelis, and every other moneyed interest, use to their advantage. The American government, dominated by oligarchs and corporations, is an empire, and so a nation like Israel, or realities such as the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), are manifestations of Empire. The US has a MIC because, as an empire, it requires a massive standing weapons industry to provide for its purposes. The US was an empire long before the MIC existed. American imperial wars across the continent, through the Caribbean and Latin America, and into Asia occurred before Dwight Eisenhower defined the MIC as we know it in 1961. That the MIC now exerts its own influence on the empire, because of the empire’s own political corruption, does not negate the ideology at the empire’s core, the empire’s reason for being, or an inertia of expansion and domination that began before the colonies became the United States and continues today. Imperial institutions and political corruption not only coexist but can be mutually reinforcing.
A similar imperial explanation exists for Israel’s relationship with the US. After WWII, with the demise of the British Empire, the US assumed the British role in the Levant. The British understood both pre-1948 Jewish control of Palestine and the subsequent Jewish state to be, in the words of Ronald Storrs, the second British Governor of Jerusalem, a “little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”. Five decades later, the Nixon Doctrine would identify Israel, as well as the Shah’s Iran, as the US’s “cops on the beat” in the Middle East, respective Jewish and Persian counterweights. Just as you had a containment strategy of the Soviet Union, you had an American policing strategy towards “Arabism”. This need for policing was reinforced by Nasser and the pan-Arab movement of the 50s and 60s and the alignment of the Soviet Union with Arab capitals (I wonder if it ever occurred to the Americans that the alignment of the Soviets and the Arabs had as much to do with US policies pushing them towards Moscow as it did with any ideological or shared interests). The US Empire created the circumstances in which Israel became indispensable as a sword and shield for US interests in the Middle East. There certainly was political pressure from the Israel lobby in the US from the 1940s to 1980s, including significant pressure in 1948, but I don’t see the modern pressure of the Israel lobby, and its current strength, coming into the power that we now know it as until after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and Ronald Reagan’s rebuke to Prime Minister Menachim Begin and Israel.
We live in an era where the US system of legalized bribery carries more weight than real national interests. This is the case for domestic and foreign policy. US healthcare policy demonstrates this domestically as the US maintains a unique healthcare system in the world, one that is the most expensive and provides the worst outcomes. This healthcare system benefits a single industry while weakening all others and impoverishing, sickening and killing the US population. US policy towards Israel is similar in that it fails to achieve US interests in the region by catering to a small, antagonistic nation in a region that no longer resembles the Cold War era in which the US-Israeli relationship began. Both Storrs’ and Nixon’s explanations for Israel’s purpose are no longer necessary, for example, the US has military bases in every country in the region besides Yemen and Iran. During Nasser’s time, the US had no permanent bases in the region.
The US is controlled more by political corruption than by national interest, but the post-WWII understanding of the necessity of Israel to American Middle Eastern policy still has a tremendous grip on the foreign policy establishment’s mindset and worldview.* The Israel lobby and the Imperial mindset in DC reinforce one another, one provides the narrative, reasoning and truth, articles of faith in DC, while the other provides the money that builds and sustains DC’ individuals and institutions, and disciplines those who go against them. However, the power of the Israeli lobby comes not from itself and it is not unique, but rather comes from the US’s own corruption, a corruption that any industry and interest can take advantage of to the detriment of the national interest.
That the Empire is no longer able to determine policies based on its interests is likely an attribute of imperial life cycles. As empires acquire wealth and become dominant, the greed that underwrites the base imperial motives turns on the empire itself. The American Empire’s agency has been eaten away by the selling of its organs to the highest bidder. A fitting loss of agency for an organism that itself profited from the violent theft of others. Likewise, the American Empire cannot understand itself or the world except through narratives and myths that are now expired or overcome. I imagine it was the same in London, Moscow, Madrid, and Rome as it is today in Washington, DC’s offices, corporate media’s newsrooms, Hollywood’s studios and school and university classrooms.
The same argument is true for all the other actors that are enjoying the benefits of the Iran War; many of these are the same industries and institutions that enjoy the benefits of any war: the military-industrial complex, the fossil fuel industry, the tech companies and other industries that will benefit from 92 million new consumers, the news and entertainment media, etc. oAll of those, in one way or another, are either manifestations of the US Empire, as is Israel, or understand that their particular dominance and privilege are maintained through the US imperial system, even if the American Empire in its current form will not survive long in the multipolar world.
All of these institutions, which we can rightly state are principles in explaining the war on Iran, do have a role, but they did not come into existence on their own or can survive without the US Empire. They are all manifestations of the US Empire. This war on Iran is occurring because the US is an empire, and nations like Iran, that stand against the hegemon, whether it be the US or Israel’s imperial subset of America, will always have such a war as their fate.
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