Decline and Fall
BOOT, MAX
Decline and Fall Chalmers Johnson resurrects an old theory of America's impending collapse. BY MAX BOOT There are only two professions in which being disastrously wrong is no bar to advancement....
...Maybe Chalmers Johnson is onto something after all, in predicting the decline of America...
...defense spending has declined from 6 percent to 3 percent of GDP—hardly an unsustainable level for such a dynamic economy...
...Like many leftists, Johnson blames the CIA and the Pentagon for the human rights abuses of allied mili-taries—as if banana republic armies need American instruction in how to torture or kill...
...What cause has he chosen to embrace this time...
...Among the examples of blow-back he cites is "the epidemic of cocaine and heroin use that has afflicted American cities during the past two decades"—which "was probably fueled in part by Central and South American military officers or corrupt politicians whom the CIA or the Pentagon once trained or supported and then installed in key government positions...
...we used it in Korea and Vietnam, where we "killed a great many more people in losing than the USSR did in its two successful interventions...
...He wants to bring U.S...
...Bad as Blowback is, it does serve at least one purpose: It reminds us that isolationism and protectionism are hardly confined to the Buchananite right...
...Johnson loves to blame America for propping up tyrants, but nearly all the examples he cites—Chiang Kai-shek, Ferdinand Marcos, Syngman Rhee, Augusto Pinochet—have since been replaced by liberal democracies...
...But what our allies really resent is what Johnson advocates: Washington demanding that they import a fixed amount of U.S...
...Unless we imitated Japan's industrial policy, Johnson counseled, America was doomed to become an economic serf to the Land of the Rising Sun...
...Their wing of the Democratic party has already slowed down Bill Clinton's efforts to expand free-trade treaties...
...Perhaps realizing that forecasting decline at some unspecified point in the future is insufficiently scary, Johnson tries to conjure up all sorts of problems the American "empire" has already caused...
...There are parallels between what happened in the former USSR after the end of the Cold War and the state of the American polity at the end of the century," he ventures hopefully...
...Along with James Fallows and Karel van Wolferen, he was a leader of the "revisionist" school, which argued that Japan had discovered a third way between capitalism and communism: state-directed growth, guided by the all-wise Ministry of International Trade and Industry...
...Can this be mere coincidence...
...The accusation, incidentally, Johnson credits to a series of stories in the San Jose Mercury News that were so thoroughly discredited that the newspaper itself repudiated them...
...Although a large portion of the Democratic party has reverted to Wilsonian internationalism, there is still a hardy band of zealots who cling to the old-time religion...
...Nowhere does the author acknowledge that since the end of the Cold War, U.S...
...Such rabid anti-Americanism pervades Blowback...
...Yet while giving the United States full blame for propping up these dictators, Johnson gives us no credit for nudging them (or their successors) out the door...
...And they might be in control of the House of Representatives...
...Johnson's favorite word is "genocidal," which he constantly applies to the actions of American allies such as Guatemala and Turkey...
...I suspect this confusion is due to Johnson's tendency—and he is hardly alone in this—to take a pacifist approach to defense policy and a militarist approach to trade...
...One suspects that if a Republican wins the White House, the isolationist, protectionist left will be in full cry once again...
...Alchemy...
...By this he apparently means that, like the Soviet Union, the United States today is burdened by excessive defense spending...
...The hedging—"probably" and "in part"— serves to give the suggestion, without quite saying it outright, that the CIA has been doping America's youngsters...
...instructors are precisely those qualities—professionalism, civilian control, restraint—that are in short supply among the Third World's armed forces...
...Even on his own terms Johnson's argument is incoherent...
...blows his worldview has taken...
...Luckily for me, I'm in one of them: journalism...
...He calls this "blow-back," borrowing a term beloved by spy novelists (who use it for the counterproductive consequences of covert actions...
...And he has now emerged with another book boldly championing another controversial theory...
...troops home because he thinks they cause resentment among our allies...
...If Dick Gephardt or David Bonior were to read Blowback, he would probably nod along in agreement...
...No, he has signed on to an even more discredited ideology: declinism...
...This is the theory, made famous by Paul Kennedy in his 1987 The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, that America is headed for a big fall...
...In the 1990s, of course, the Japanese "miracle" turned to dust, while America, with no industrial policy to speak of, has racked up the longest expansion in its history...
...He harshly criticizes the United States and the International Monetary Fund for trying to reform "Asian-style capitalism" and creating the Asian economic crisis of 1997...
...goods, whether their consumers want them or not...
...Johnson is seemingly oblivious to the documents coming out of East Bloc archives since the end of the Cold War, which have confirmed (as if it needed any confirming) that both the Vietnam and Korean wars were the result of deliberate Communist aggression...
...They used military force in Hungary and Czechoslovakia...
...But Johnson appears completely unabashed by the body Max Boot, the op-ed editor of the Wall Street Journal, is writing a history of America's small wars...
...Yet just a few pages earlier, he bemoans the failure of the United States to do more to reform Japan's crony capitalism...
...What foreign military officers learn from U.S...
...Astrology...
...No mention is made of the murderous tactics of the Marxist Kurdish and Guatemalan guerrillas trying to bring down their elected governments...
...The years since have not been kind to the worrywarts, but Johnson struggles gamely to resurrect the declinist myth in Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire...
...Johnson really pulls out all the stops by suggesting that the American "empire" is no better than the Soviet one: "There was, I believe, far more symmetry between the postwar policies of the Soviet Union and the United States than most Americans are willing to recognize...
...In the 1980s, Johnson, a political science professor retired from the University of California, San Diego, established himself as one of America's most famous Japanol-ogists...
...Luckily for Chalmers Johnson, he's in the other: academia...
Vol. 5 • March 2000 • No. 26
