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CHAPTER 2 Cold War Empire Critics and supporters of America’s role in Indochina have widely agreed that the Vietnam War was not an aberration. The US commitment to war in Indochina was a natural and logical consequence—though perhaps not an inevitable one—of basic assumptions and strategies that had underpinned American foreign policy since at least the end of World War II. This is certainly Chomsky’s view, but his understanding of American foreign policy and its objectives departs radically from mainstream views. American Foreign Policy during the Cold War: A Chomskian Overview Most students of history see American foreign policy after World War II as dominated by the Cold War—the nearly half-century confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. To most Americans, the Cold War reflected an essentially defensive effort by the United States and its Western allies to contain the expansionist ambitions of a Soviet Union bent on imposing its Communist system throughout the world. This view of the Cold War was eventually challenged by some historians who saw the Cold War as a more interactive process in which the American side was hardly less aggressive than the Soviet. But even in this “revisionist” view the Cold War usually remained the central reality of international politics.1 Chomsky, instead, believes that the Cold War was something of a smokescreen . It served the needs of both superpowers for an excuse to consolidate their control over their respective empires. The American empire wasn’t characterized for the most part by direct ownership of foreign lands; it was, instead, an empire of influence and control, utilizing economic, political, and military power. Its core objective was to serve American business in the pursuit of profits. Chomsky recounts that the United States after World War II enjoyed a position of unprecedented international primacy; no other country remotely approached this country in economic or military power. Anticipating this fortunate position, US policy planners even before the war’s end had set to work planning the reconstruction of the international economic system, a system that would surely be dominated by American capitalism. A liberal internationalist system of open markets and unrestricted investment opportunities would naturally accrue to the advantage of firms of the dominant economic superpower. In this system, the countries of what came to be called the Third World were to play their tradi53 tional roles as suppliers of raw materials and outlets for exports and investment by international corporations based in the West.2 American leadership did largely succeed in reconstructing the world capitalist system, but the vision of a “balanced” international economy, with poorer countries playing their allotted subaltern roles, was to be threatened repeatedly by outbursts of revolutionary nationalism in the Third World. The most dramatic case, of course, was Vietnam. American policy planners in the early 1950s saw Indochina as a critical source of raw materials and market opportunities for the advanced capitalist economies—in particular, that of Japan, which was to serve as the pivot of the American-dominated world capitalist system in Asia. Should Vietnam withdraw from that system (to be followed, via the domino effect, by the rest of Southeast Asia), Japan could find itself compelled to turn to the Communist world for its economic lifelines. Thus, in Chomsky’s words, “the Vietnam War is simply a catastrophic episode, a grim and costly failure in this long-term effort to reduce Eastern Asia and much of the rest of the world to part of the Americandominated economic system.”3 Third World revolutionary movements were especially worrying to Washington because they could spread: the domino theory, derided by some critics of the Vietnam War, contained “an important kernel of plausibility, perhaps truth. National independence and revolutionary social change, if successful, may very well be contagious.”4 A successful revolutionary regime in a unified Vietnam, for example, might present an attractive model of development for other countries in Asia and even beyond. The first challenge to the reconstructed world capitalist system had come from the Soviet Union, whose expansion and consolidation of its own empire impeded the reintegration of the Eastern European countries into the economies of Western Europe. Chomsky explains that the Soviet Union’s “autarkic command economy interfered with US plans to construct a global system based on (relatively ) free trade and investment, which, under the conditions of mid century, was expected to be dominated by US corporations. . . . The Iron Curtain deprived the capitalist industrial powers of a region that was...

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