Law, good faith and security were not arbitrary to the entrepreneur Charles Gould in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. They were quite contingent: “Anyone can declaim about these things, but I pin my hopes to material interests. Only let the material interests once get a firm footing, and they are bound to impose the conditions on which alone they can continue to exist… A better justice will come afterwards.” This fundamental principle accounts, rather more convincingly than any claptrap about spreading civilisation, for the missionary zeal of the pioneers of the classic age of imperialism; as the era of inter-imperialist rivalries came to an end, the same deterministic logic has underpinned the efforts of the United States to shape the world since 1945.
The world was to become one great US-led co-prosperity sphere and if this meant dictatorships and police states, so be it. This was, we were told, a matter of expediency, because we were at war with global communism. In America’s Other War, his book about Colombia, Doug Stokes advanced the thesis that the aims of US foreign policy have remained essentially the same in recent years as they were before the end of the Cold War – to prevent independent economic development and support only that order and security which accorded with its own ideological and strategic vision.
Global Energy Security and American Hegemony examines how the wthe US has set about dealing with a devastatingly simple problem, summarised by Stokes and co-author Sam Raphael as a “mismatch between the geographical distribution of global energy stocks and the location of the largest energy consumers”. It is the same dilemma that faced US policymakers after the Second World War, but in a world of rapidly declining resources. Once the debate has been couched in the right terms, the reasonable claims of China or Russia can become a question of national security, perhaps even national defence, to US policymakers. The Soviet threat may be gone, but it has never been more important for Washington to cultivate friendly, governments in the oil-rich south, and today’s State Department strategies for dealing with internal subversion are familiar to anyone with a knowledge of the Cold War era; under the rubric of psychological operations, the doctrine of counter-insurgency warfare provides governments in the global south with what the authors describe as “a blueprint for a campaign against civil society”.
Their analysis does not cast the US as a lone crusader acting solely in its own interests; where the narrow interests of the US oil sector come into conflict with the interests of the capitalist world order as a whole, the latter trumps the former. It’s an important distinction that goes to the heart of the nature of imperialism in the contemporary world.
