excerpts from
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
by Chalmers Johnson

Holt, 2000
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blowback_CJohnson/Blowback_CJohnson.html

Even though the United States at century's end appears to have the necessary firepower and economic resources to neutralize all challengers, I believe our very hubris ensures our undoing. A classic mistake of empire managers is to come to believe that there is nowhere within their domain--in our case, nowhere on earth--in which their presence is not crucial.

Sooner or later, it becomes psychologically impossible not to insist on involvement everywhere, which is, of course, a definition of imperial overstretch.

In the long run, the people of the United States are neither militaristic enough nor rich enough to engage in the perpetual police actions, wars, and bailouts their government's hegemonic policies will require.

The indispensable instrument for maintaining the American empire is its military establishment. Despite the money lavished on it, the endless praise for it in the media, and the overstretch and blowback it generates, the military always demands more.

For example, the Pentagon's budget for the fiscal year 2000 called for replacing the F-15, "the world's most advanced aircraft" with the F-22, also "the world's most advanced aircraft." The air force wanted 339 F-22s at $188 million each, three times the cost of the airplane it's replacing. The United States already has 1,094 F-15s, against which there is no equal or more capable aircraft on earth.

The last Clinton defense budget included funds for yet more nuclear-attack submarines, for which there is no conceivable use or contingency. They merely provide work for local defense contractors and will join the fleet of America's "floating Chernobyls", along with its nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, cruising the seas waiting for an accident to occur.

"Blowback" is shorthand for saying that a nation reaps what it sows, even if it does not fully know or understand what it has sown. Given its wealth and power, the United States will be a prime recipient in the foreseeable future for all of the more expectable forms of blowback, particularly terrorist attacks against Americans in and out of the armed forces anywhere on earth, including within the United States.

But it is blowback in its larger aspect-the tangible costs of empire-that truly threaten it. Empires are costly operations, and they become more costly by the year. The hollowing out of American industry, for instance, is a form of blowback-an unintended negative consequence of American policy-even though it is seldom recognized as such.

The growth of militarism in a once democratic society is another example of blowback. Empire is the problem. More imperialist projects simply generate more blowback. If we do not begin to solve problems in more prudent and modest ways, blowback will only become more intense.

What's to be done? Were awareness of an impending crisis of empire to rise among American citizens and their leaders, then it would be fairly obvious what first steps at least should be taken:

  • adjust to and support the emergence of China on the global stage;
  • establish diplomatic relations with North Korea and withdraw ground forces from the Korean peninsula;
  • pay the United States' dues to the United Nations;
  • support global economic diversity rather than globalization;
  • extricate ourselves from our trade-for-military-bases deals with rich East Asian countries, even if they do not want to end them;
  • reemphasize the "defense" in the Department of Defense and make its name fit its mission;
  • unilaterally reduce our stockpile of nuclear weapons to a deterrent level and declare a no-first-use policy;
  • sign and ratify the treaty banning land mines;
  • sign and ratify the treaty establishing an international criminal court.

More generally, the United States should seek to lead through diplomacy and example rather than through military force and economic bullying. Such an agenda is neither unrealistic nor revolutionary. It is appropriate for a post-Cold War world and for a United States that puts the welfare of its citizens ahead of the pretensions of its imperialists.