Graphic source: Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.)
Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, Henry Holt, 2000.
The term "blowback," which officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented for their own internal use, is starting to circulate among students of international relations. It refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of "terrorists" or "drug lords" or "rogue states" or "illegal arms merchants" often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations (p. 8).
The term is useful and should be retained, even if Professor Johnson over reaches in his attempts to portray every world situation involving the U.S., where he has no expertise, as blowback.
I can agree with him on certain points, even outside of his expertise though, the Chilean coup of 1973 is a clear example. The U.S. had no right to intervene in a Chilean internal situation.
The crucial question, now that the U.S. has wrongfully expanded into an empire that intervenes in the domestic policies of other nations, is how it will retract into a defensible position.
Historian Paul Kennedy, in his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, wrote that the U.S.:
cannot avoid confronting the two great tests which challenge the longevity of every major power that occupies the "number one" position in world affairs: whether, in the military/strategic realm, it can preserve a reasonable balance between the nation's perceived defense requirements and the means it possesses to maintain these commitments; and whether, as an intimately related point, it can preserve the technological and economic bases of its power from relative erosion in the face of the ever-shifting patterns of global production. This test of American abilities will be the greater because it, like Imperial Spain around 1600 or the British Empire around 1900, is the inheritor of a vast array of strategical commitments which had been made decades earlier, when the nation's political, economic, and military capacity to influence world affairs seemed so much more assured (p. 31).
The U.S. is in a similar situation that challenged Imperial Spain around 1600 and the British Empire around 1900. In neither case, did unfolding events work out well for their Empires.
One of our over-stretching areas is the Persian Gulf region, as Johnson notes:
maintaining access to Persian Gulf oil requires about $50 billion of the annual U.S. defense budget, including maintenance of one or more carrier task forces there, protecting sea lanes, and keeping large air forces in readiness in the area. But the oil we import from the Persian Gulf costs only a fifth that amount, about $11 billion per annum (p. 87).
It is more expensive for the U.S. to be fighting in the Persian Gulf than it is to simply import the relatively small amount of oil we receive from the region.
There is a dearth of fresh thinking or preparation in the region and the U.S. seems stuck in military solutions. Johnson opines:
Ten years after the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon monopolizes the formulation and conduct of American foreign policy. Increasingly, the United States has only one, commonly inappropriate means of achieving its external objectives-military force. It no longer has a full repertoire of skills, including a seasoned, culturally and linguistically expert diplomatic corps; truly viable international institutions that the American public supports both politically and financially and that can give legitimacy to American efforts abroad; economic policies that effectively leverage the tremendous power of the American market into desired foreign responses; or even an ability to express American values without being charged, accurately, with hopeless hypocrisy. The use of cruise missiles and B-2 bombers to achieve humanitarian objectives is a sign of how unbalanced our foreign policy apparatus has become (p. 93).
The U.S. has only military actions to offer while long-range solutions are to be found in cultural and educational knowledge.
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