Alfred W. McCoy’s latest book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, provides an autopsy on a dying empire, which has squandered its moral capital by promoting wide-scale torture and mass surveillance.
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According to McCoy, the decline of the American empire was set in motion by the Bush Administration’s over-reaction to 9/11 and disastrous invasion of Iraq. This led to the wasting of trillions of taxpayer dollars, underinvestment in public education and clean energy technologies, and political dysfunction in an era of corporate-dominance.
In the Shadows of the American Century weaves details about McCoy’s life and his experience chronicling the dark side of American power over the course of the last half century. Born in 1945 at the start of America’s untrammeled global domination, McCoy attended elite schools where he would “observe firsthand the ethos that shaped those at the apex of American power, their character and worldview.” His father helped liberate a Nazi death camp and fought in the Korean War, showing young Al a photo he had taken of the remnants of a destroyed Korean woman’s home, which would remain for him an indelible image.
McCoy grew up living the American dream in Boston and Los Angeles. But even then, the perspicacious boy who would go on to expose the CIA’s machination in the narcotics trade, sensed that something rotten lurked beneath the surface. His father remained troubled by his experiences at war and work in the military-industrial complex as an electronics engineer, and developed an alcohol and gambling addiction that hastened his death at age 45.
In 1972, McCoy published The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which traced through firsthand interviews and dangerous field work the CIA’s alliance with opium-growing warlords in the Golden Triangle and corrupt generals in the South Vietnamese military. The CIA tried to suppress publication of the book and McCoy managed to avoid being expelled from Yale University (a school with deep CIA ties) only because his graduate school adviser was visiting from Germany.
After completing his doctorate and publishing several books on Philippines history, McCoy undertook further path-breaking investigations into the CIA’s worldwide interrogation practices, clandestine police training, and mass surveillance. He became a student of William Appleman Williams and the Wisconsin school which pioneered critical study of American foreign policy. His expertise on the Philippines further enabled him to see the exercise of American power from the viewpoint of the colonized.
McCoy’s 2009 book, Policing America’s Empire: The U.S., the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (University of Wisconsin, 2009), delved into the history of the Philippines constabulary, which provided a prototype for paramilitary policing organizations created by the United States. Ralph Van Deman, “the father of American military intelligence,” appropriated techniques of mass surveillance used in the Philippines against messianic peasant leaders towards leftist and radical groups in the United States.
By 2013, the surveillance state first created by Van Deman and close associates like J. Edgar Hoover reached truly Orwellian levels. The National Security Agency had more than 100,000 active surveillance targets within the United States, and was collecting forty one billion new records per month.
McCoy quotes Mark Twain to the effect that empire and democracy are never compatible. He also stresses that U.S. imperial power has been marked by an incredible appetite for superficial data accumulation which comes at the expense of broader cultural and political awareness. The consequence is a series of foreign policy disasters which have sown the seeds of imperial decline.
The Vietnam War first laid bare the hubris of American policymakers, while serving as a laboratory for the development of new military technologies such as computerized bombing, communications satellites, laser guided bombs, and unmanned aircraft.
Under the Operation Igloo White, the Air Force ringed the Ho Chi Minh Trail with ground sensors that triggered signals picked up by hovering drones. These were in turn used for bomb targeting by IBM computers located inside a U.S. Air Base at Nakhon Phanom, Thailand. The $6 billion operation proved a dismal failure, however, as farmers living under constant bombing gravitated to the communists.
Igloo White nevertheless provided a template for waging war by machine. Today, the U.S. military relies heavily on weaponized drones along with biometric identification, satellite surveillance, and incredible firepower that could vaporize enemies and unfortunate civilians. It also continues to embrace torture methods first developed through CIA behavioral science research programs that “metastasized like an undetected cancer” during the Cold War.
The use of criminal proxies to carry out covert operations is another unrecognized feature of American global power reminiscent of past empires. During the Cold War, the U.S. government allied with Chinese Guomindang warlords, Laotian and South Vietnamese generals, and Corsican gangsters who were central players in the world drug traffic.
In the 1980s Contra War, the CIA forged an alliance with Alan Hyde, a notorious cocaine trafficker who controlled 35 ships crisscrossing the Caribbean and gave the CIA access to his strategic port facility in the Bay Islands off Honduras. More recently, the United States has allied with warlord traffickers in Afghanistan, where the opium flower blooms widely in a war-ravaged economy and been used to finance the Taliban’s resurgence.
McCoy is not entirely negative about U.S. power, believing that for all its dark aspects, it did introduce stable global institutions like the United Nations, economic integration, international law and commitment to human rights and liberal principles, even if they were not always upheld. He expresses a faint hope at the end that even at this late hour, the American people may still come together, as they did in World War II, to “build a more just society at home and more equitable world abroad.”
But given how violent the American Century has been, the decline of American power could actually be a good thing for most of humanity. After all, as Latin America has become more independent over the last decade, it has seen a decline in torture and human rights abuses. China is less of a militaristic power than America. It seems more concerned with building roads and infrastructure in the developing world than in backing coups. Thus a new China Century may actually be less violent and destructive than the American and European ones.
An aspect of empire McCoy does not delve into is the economic costs for Americans. The late economist Seymour Melman wrote about the parasitic nature of military industry and its diversion of productive resources. He saw American imperialism at the root of extensive inequality and the emergence of Third World conditions in areas like infrastructure and health.
The decline of the military-industrial complex could encourage more humane economic development and result in America’s technological ingenuity being applied in more constructive ways. The end of empire scenarios relayed by McCoy in dark terms could in turn provide positive opportunities for societal change as the necessity for constant war is removed.
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