Sat Mag
From the eagle’s backyard:
A brief account of US foreign policy
By Uditha Devapriya
Jenny Pearce titled her book on US intervention in Central America and the Caribbean “Under the Eagle.” Though there had been a vast literature on US intervention in the region, Pearce’s study would be one of the first to document its crippling impact on Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama in Central America, as well as Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Guyana, St Lucia, Grenada, St Vincent, Dominica, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba in the Caribbean.
US foreign policy has generally been a softened down version of its policy towards its neighbours. The realities of the Cold War made it imperative for the richest country in the world to stabilise its backyard, even if it meant rigging elections, supporting coups, installing dictators, and funding counterinsurgents. And yet such interventions predate the Cold War: they began with the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which laid down in diplomatic argot the need to project US dominance over its immediate surroundings.
Between 1870 and 1916 the value of goods manufactured by US industry increased almost tenfold. By 1880 the US economy had become twice the size of Britain’s. Fareed Zakaria (“The Future of American Power”, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008) sums up the reasons for this concomitant rise and decline on each side of the Atlantic, including the antiquated nature of British capitalism, bad labour relations, low investments in new equipment, and the feudalisation of British schools and universities; “the wonder,” writes Zakaria, “is not that it declined but that its dominance lasted as long as it did.” The reasons for this need not detain us here. What is relevant is that with these spurts in industry, the US government recognised that it had to match its economic superiority with military clout.
It went about the task slowly, cautiously. In 1892 it built its first battleship. The timing was right: two years earlier, Alfred Mahan’s book The Influence of Sea Power upon History, which contended that maritime power was the key to global supremacy, had come out.
Six years later the US defeated the Spanish and took control of Cuba. Following that it invaded the Puerto Rico and purchased the Philippines for $20 million. In 1902, after its annexation of the Philippines, it recognised Cuba as an independent republic, yet made a sham of it by inserting the Platt Amendment, which reserved to the Americans the right to intervene in the internal affairs of the country. It invoked this several times and went on to dominate Cuba’s political and economic life until 1959.
Gunboat diplomacy began with Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize at around the same time he inserted a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine which justified “the intervention by some civilized nation” and “the exercise of an international police power” for the US. He was followed by William Howard Taft, who in 1912 argued that “the whole hemisphere will be ours… by virtue of our superiority of race.”
Taft and Woodrow Wilson substituted dollars for gunboats. The sugar plantations of the Caribbean and the banana plantations of Central America lured financiers and government officials alike. The US quickly moved in: it occupied Nicaragua in 1912 and stayed there until 1925. It returned two years later and withdrew in 1933, creating a rightwing National Guard headed by one of the first US allied military dictators, Anastasio Somoza. Somoza would be followed by Jorge Ubico in Guatemala, Tiburcio Andino in Honduras, Maximiliano Martinez in El Salvador, and Gerardo Machado (and Fulgencio Batista) in Cuba.
Gunboats and dollars gave way to Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbour Policy.” As with all previous policies, it was a convenient cover for the pursuit of national self-interest. The US made it clear to the British that their time in the region was over, and to this end penetrated the Commonwealth Caribbean. Soon it got to dominate these economies: between 1930 and 1944, its share of coffee exports from Central America rose from 20% to 87%. In such a state of affairs the colonial powers had to leave, making way for the new superpower. This was true of other regions as well; thus after nationalists took up arms against the Dutch in Indonesia in 1945, US diplomats chose to side against the colonial overlords.
When the D. S. Senanayake government chose to side with the nationalists, it was arguably affirming the fading away of Dutch and the rise of American power in South-East Asia. The distinction the government made between communists and non-communists involved in the uprising and its cautious emphasis on support for the former indicate where exactly its ideological preferences lay: certainly not in Moscow.
Interestingly enough, through all this, while US interventionism didn’t explicitly emulate European colonialism, the latter shaped it. The Europeans never pretended to be motivated by anything other than the lure of trade and theft. The British did establish an efficient bureaucracy extending into the fields of health, education, the legal system, and so on, yet it was the last, and arguably the first, European superpower to do so.
Scholars have observed that of all historical transitions between superpowers, the transition to the US from Britain proved to be the most peaceful. The reason, they conjecture, is that economic ties between these two countries were great, certainly greater than had been the case between previous contending powers. Against that backdrop the US absorbed British imperialism, and rather than abandoning it, it fine-tuned it.
The language it used differed little, initially, from the language the British had employed. As seen in its conquest of Cuba, the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary were put into effect to justify foreign interventions in terms of what it saw as the inability of “natives” to govern themselves. This was what the British had done in their colonies as well, having consistently denied them self-government. Thus Woodrow Wilson wrote of “our peculiar duty, as it is also England’s”, to teach the natives “order and self-control.”
Later with the onset of the Cold War, it changed its rhetoric: as James Peck argues in Ideal Illusions, “Washington predicated its war of ideas on a set of deep divisions.” Accordingly the world split into two for US political theorists: “between freedom and equality, reform and revolution, self-interest and collective interests, the free market and state planning, and pluralistic democracy and mass mobilization.” To legitimise that new rhetoric, theorists cloaked it under the cover of a commitment to a rights-based world order: what Mangala Samaraweera in a tweet on the foreign policy of the current government calls “the three pillars of democracy, freedom and the rule of law.”
Despite its emphasis on agrarian reform, the Alliance did little to combat the dependence of the plantation sector on the export market. Between 1960 and 1965, per capita agricultural production in Central America grew by an inconsequential 2.2%. Between 1965 and 1970 it grew by a dismal 1.6%. Meanwhile, multinational companies gained ground, reversing any progress the Alliance might have made: rather than supporting agriculture, they processed junk food, promoting low nutrition among locals. Instead of preventing revolution, in other words, the Alliance succeeded in fermenting it.
Soon enough the backyard began to unravel: 20 years after Castro overthrew Batista, Daniel Ortega overthrew Somoza in Nicaragua. Then civil war broke out in El Salvador: the US gave the government there more than three billion dollars in aid to quell the rebellion. But as in Cuba, support from Washington couldn’t make up for popular hatred of the regime. After a decade of insurgency and counterinsurgency, El Salvador fell apart.
The lesson to be learnt here is that the US failed to pursue its foreign policy objectives to their logical conclusion because it couldn’t match intervention with aid. This proved to be true of its policies in the world beyond the Americas as well.
To give just one example, though every pro-Western government here distanced itself from Moscow and Beijing, the US failed to fill the gap. The Rubber-Rice Pact, for instance, was signed after Washington refused the D. S. Senanayake government’s request to buy rubber at premium prices, while not even a visit to Lyndon Johnson by Dudley Senanayake could persuade the US, then caught up in Vietnam, to resume aid years after it had invoked the Hickenlooper Amendment in response to the Sirimavo Bandaranaike government taking over several multinationals. J. R. Jayewardene expected the US to come to its support when India began to interfere two decades later, yet it explicitly refused to do so. The yahapalana government came to power on a tidal wave of Sinophobia (Humphrey Hawksley called Maithripala Sirisena “Sino-skeptical”), but when it turned to the US, it received neither aid nor investment. Barely two years later, it was crawling back to Beijing.
This rift between the reality of intervention, the promises of aid, and the failure to make good on those promises led to the defeat of successive West-friendly regimes in Sri Lanka. John Kotelawala’s government fell despite its McCarthyist tactics against the Left; Dudley Senanayake’s third government fell despite, or rather because of, its ambivalent attitude to Vietnam; and J. R. Jayewardene’s government gave way to Ranasinghe Premadasa, who proved himself to be far less deferential to Washington. As for the yahapalana regime, the results of the 2019 presidential and the 2020 parliamentary election should put to rest any notion that its pro-US tilt ever received the support of the local population.
Today foreign aid has largely replaced military intervention in the race for superpower status. China vies with the US to prop up development in the Global South, and since 2017 Beijing has outpaced Washington. Xi Jinping’s coming to power has accelerated this trend, while Donald Trump’s isolationism has pushed China to almost every corner of the Third World. The election of nationalists and populists, meanwhile, has both supplemented and contradicted China’s rise: hence the Philippines under Duterte allied with China, while Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan continues to play on anti-China sentiment.
The difference between these two superpowers lies in how they seek to shape the world. The US projects its version of European-style intervention, imposing sanctions on unfriendly states while failing to reward friendly states with aid and investments. China, on the other hand, prioritises development over outright intervention. Its actions in the South China Sea notwithstanding, its record as a driver of growth in South Asia and Africa has bolstered its image among countries like ours that have listened to the rhetoric of rules and rights from the capitals of the West without receiving any money.
Here we see an almost primeval difference in how each views the needs of the Third World: while the US emphasises fidelity to norms such as democracy, freedom, and the rule of law, which in its interactions with the world have been more honoured in the breach than the observance, China delivers development without questioning whether the governments it supports are committed to such norms. The latter is viewed, justifiably, as sign of respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a country; the former is viewed, and resented, as an infringement of these values. Hence China’s rising influence in the Indo-Pacific, and the US’s waning popularity. Things may change with a Joe Biden presidency or remain as they are with a second Trump presidency, but as of now, that’s only conjecture.
The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com