Source of book: Borrowed from the Library
Where to start with this post? I suppose I could start by saying that this book is a good companion to two books I read previously, covering some of the same ground, but with its own additional information. Both A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin and Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer are about the problems created by intervention in foreign governments by the United States (and the United Kingdom in the first.)
While both of those books were well researched, thoroughly supported by evidence, and well written; Endless Enemies adds an additional layer of knowledge. Jonathan Kwitny was one of the most badass investigative journalists of the 20th Century, and this book is a clinic in how to do journalism.
Throughout the book, as Kwitny recounts events and documents and conversations, he explains exactly how he got the information. In a typical explanation, he will name the reporter who first published the information, then he will contact the actual people involved, and either get confirmation of the fact, or a refusal to answer questions. In an impressive number of cases, Kwitny himself was on the ground in the foreign country and has personal knowledge of things. There are also a lot of documents involved - and this was before email, so stuff on paper.
The pattern is clear: get the information, verify the information.
Also important is that Kwitny, unlike so much media these days, wasn’t content to just publish what officials told him. He is clear in this book that officials lie. It is what they are paid to do. You cannot take their word, but have to actually investigate and then report the truth. (Kwitny notes that even in his time, this was a problem for most of the mainstream media, all too willing to parrot the talking points from the US government.)
Another thing to understand about Kwitny is that he did a lot of his work for the Wall Street Journal, which he considered the most honest of the major media during the 1970s and 80s. He states in the book that he was not pressured to conform to a narrative in his reporting. I’m doubtful that is still the case.
As of the time this book was published, Kwitny would likely have been considered a right-leaning writer. He was definitely not in favor of Communism, or indeed in any planned economy. The book is unashamedly in favor of free enterprise, and indeed capitalism itself. Although with caveats. Kwitny, unlike today’s right wingers, understood that unregulated capitalism is just monopoly by another name. Much of this book describes the way that big business co-opts government (especially our own) to gain monopoly power over markets, thus suppressing free markets.
The free market is demonstrably the most bountiful economic system on earth. And it has become the odd role of the United States of America to deny that system to hundreds of millions of people the world wide.
These days, of course, because Kwitny was pro-democracy, believed capitalists needed regulation, opposed foreign meddling, and refuses in the book to blame poverty on brown skinned people, he would be considered a commie pinko by today’s American right wing. How times have changed.
The book’s subtitle gives a good indication of what the book is about.
How America’s worldwide interventions destroy democracy and free enterprise and defeat our own best interests.
Such a radical idea, right? The thing is, he makes a strong - indeed incontrovertible - case that our interventions have in fact been against democracy in the third world, have suppressed rather than encouraged free enterprise, and have ultimately gone against the best interests of our nation and its tax payers.
By installing and supporting dictators, forcing countries to accept dominance by our giant corporations, and doing this at incredible expense to taxpayers, our government has served the capitalist class at the expense of everyone else, here and abroad.
The book focuses on four specific parts of the world where we have meddled in different ways. In this, the book is a bit different than Overthrow, which specifically looks at instances where the US overthrew existing governments. There is overlap, of course, but we have also intervened in other ways, and those are also subjects of this book.
The book begins its tour with Africa, looks at the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia.
It starts, however, with a look at the common thread: the way loans to the third world intentionally keep countries impoverished while ensuring that Western corporations have access to natural resources.
I want to quote this bit about Lebanon, which the US has pretty well fucked since the 1950s.
The newspapers said the marines were put there to put an end to twenty-five years of bloody civil war, so that Lebanon could “get back on its feet” and start a democracy. Nobody seemed to remember that Lebanon’s twenty-five years of civil war began when the CIA sabotaged a democracy that was already in place.
Kwitny points out that the US has a lot of good things about it - freedom of speech, economic freedoms, a willingness to stand up to Hitler. But unfortunately, our government has failed us in foreign policy since the end of World War Two.
Americans have an interest in foreign affairs. They want and deserve security, peace, and prosperous trade. But these goals elude them. Their government’s foreign policy has left them in constant peril of war with a seemingly endless list of enemies.
We have fought a seemingly endless series of wars against countries that never wanted to fight us, all in the name of an ideological war against “Communism,” which, as Kwitny points out, isn’t even the right category for an undeveloped economy. In most of these cases, “communism” became the name for any opposition party to US corporate interests, even if the term wouldn’t actually apply.
This has led to negative consequences for the US, which we keep experiencing because we refuse to change our actions.
But a refusal to see such events [hostages and political murders] in their context leaves the United States perpetually unprepared for crises abroad, when these crises are the natural consequence not only of events long visible, but often, in part, of the U.S.’s own actions.
I think Kwitny’s analysis of the mistakes we keep making in Africa is spot on. It also happens to match what African writers themselves have said. By clinging to our Cold War binary of “capitalism versus communism,” we fail to actually understand the real issues abroad. In speaking of the Congo (many of the names were different in the 1980s), he has this to say:
The first is provincialism. Accustomed to the context of big-power diplomacy, no one in the foreign policy-making chain of command could see the Congo for what it really was: a couple of hundred mini-nations, whose people were consumed with the daily chore of warding off hunger. These nations had long been occupied against their will by white people and occasionally forced to do slave labor for whites. Suddenly, under rules laid down by whites, they were proclaimed to be one “country,” with common leadership.
When governments changed, most of the country didn’t even know it, because it had no effect on their lives.
Back in the hinterland, where Americans didn’t go because the roads were too bad, millions of farmers hoed on, little concerned. Chaos in government is recognizable only to those who are used to getting some benefit from government. Very few Congolese fit that description.
The colonial powers had divided up Africa for their own convenience, drawing lines across ethnic lines, in ways that made sense for their exploitation of resources, but would never have become borders naturally. It should be no surprise that new countries that have no common language, religion, or ethnicity might be…unstable. Just saying.
In fact, the issue of “communism” has rarely ever even been a driving force in these conflicts. Economic ideology is just not the biggest factor in conflict, despite the claims by the US government.
But even more important historically was the shock to those who survived - the realization that tribal hatred was stronger than anyone’s philosophy. The real problems of Africa were being written in blood over the platitudes and ideological cant that people had come to believe.
The US made this worse, not better, by propping up brutal dictators, overthrowing governments, and fighting against democracy.
It is on the whole a pretty sorry record, though not exactly unpredictable, considering that native and colonial monarchies dominated previous African history. The democratic experiment had no example in Africa, and badly needed one. So perhaps the sorriest, and the most unnecessary, blight on the record of this new era, is that the precedent for it all, the very first coup in postcolonial African history, the very first political assassination, and the very first junking of a legally constituted democratic system, all took place in a major country, and were all instigated by the United States of America. It’s a sad situation when people are left to learn their “democracy” from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The CIA doesn’t come off well at all in this book, and it deserves all the censure it receives.
The obvious question raised by all of this is what the best interest of the United States really is: to perpetually try to corrupt as many overseas governments as we can so that when a military crisis arises we may have some crook on the scene in our pocket? Or to try to encourage, by example and reward, a world of clean governments that are strong through their own popularity - governments that allow their peoples’ free-market impulses to interact productively with our own peoples’ free-market impulses, and which for all these reasons are unlikely to become involved in a military crisis at all?
But corrupt governments allow giant corporations to extract profits. And also, everything is about the Cold War, and that war was built on lies.
There is also a dangerous hypocrisy at work. Unlike the great imperial powers of the past, today’s great powers mostly shun nationalistic rhetoric. They baldly deny that they are building empire. One hears little talk of the ethnic superiority claimed by other conquering peoples, like Rome’s, or Germany’s, or England’s. Usually, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. even deny that they are acting to protect themselves from each other. Almost in unison, they proclaim an ideological motivation - and justification - for what they do. They argue that by enabling the rule abroad of those who proclaim an ideology similar to theirs, they are performing a selfless favor for other countries.
But it really has always been about Empire.
In our handling of Zaire, great effort was made to suppress both democracy and free enterprise - in fact, to suppress almost everything we say we believe in.
And we haven’t even benefitted anyone economically. Even the corporations find their access to be in jeopardy due to political unrest.
So tenuous is our indirect line, through Mobutu Sese Seko, to Zaire’s mineral wealth that it could snap at any time. Similar situations confront us around the globe. We have sought to accomplish so much that is beyond our ability to accomplish, that we have threatened our ability to accomplish the one thing we need to accomplish. Peaceful commerce is so natural, so universally beneficial, that real effort is required to sabotage it. Inadvertently, we have applied that effort.
We also have ended up undermining ourselves in the Cold War. Interestingly, the U.S.S.R. also did so - both powers pretty well screwed themselves.
The excuse for intervention, of course, is the notion that if we don’t fight, Moscow will win by default. Yet as one travels the globe, from Indochina to Cuba to Angola, one finds that the Third World countries where the Soviets are alleged to hold the strongest influence are precisely those countries where we have fought. Meanwhile, in countries that weren’t militarily threatened by the United States, where Soviet influence had a chance to flunk on its own merits, it has.
One of the most depressing things in this book was the well-documented interconnection of business and government. It was (and probably still is, even more so in the Trump Era) an incestuous circle jerk of lawyers, diplomats, and politicians. Two of the big players were Allen and John Foster Dulles, who worked for the big oil companies through their law firm, then went into politics, where, predictably, they used their influence to have the CIA and the military do the work of Big Oil.
In other words, the CIA director and the secretary of state at the time of the Mossadegh coup were, in private life, well-paid lawyers for the major oil companies.
Yes, it was that bad. And that is why we ended democracy in Iran.
We are left with no explanation for the coup except for one that might at first glance be rejected as a piece of Socialist Workers’ party campaign rhetoric: a retrieval of the rights of two Rockefeller-controlled oil companies, whose lawyers were running the CIA and the State Department, to monopolize Iranian oil in U.S. markets and thereby fix gasoline prices for the American consumer. Can it be? If so, adding insult to injury, the same consumer was also being dunned for tax money to hire and outfit the U.S. agents who were carrying out the coup.
These wars - culminating in Vietnam, another war based on lies and morally indefensible - have led us to the distrust of the American government we see today.
The loss of a U.S. citizen’s ability to believe his own government officials on such matters is one of the saddest results of the whole anti-communist crusade. In some ways, it is sadder than the loss of life the crusade has cost, because officials who constantly lie for what they see as the greater good create more loss of life, through every war and covert action the country is sucked into.
There are multiple chapters on Cuba, which has to be one of America’s greatest own goals of all time. And we still refuse to change policy, even though Castro is long dead.
Starting with our United Fruit wars, we made it clear that we didn’t give a rat’s ass about the people of Latin America - we just wanted to exploit their land for profit. The rise of Castro was enabled by this.
The U.S. had delivered Castro a power he never could have bought - a legitimacy he could have won no other way.
For that matter, why haven’t we normalized diplomacy with Cuba? Why do we not trade with them? We do with China, after all. And brutal places like Saudi Arabia as well.
The answer is something I discovered over a decade ago. The people and companies who were rich in pre-revolutionary Cuba expect to be reimbursed for their losses. This expectation is fuelled by companies like United Fruit, who dream of returning to the good old days, when they owned most of Cuba’s land.
To this day, United Brands is part of a business lobby opposing improved relations with Cuba until Cuba pays the claims of 979 U.S. companies whose property was seized by the Cuban government.
Kwitny spent a good bit of time in Cuba, and not in the tourist areas. He recounts the interviews he did there (and a number are in the book) and his observations of the country.
The fact is that Cuba is among the most functional countries in Latin America. Its infant mortality rate is like the first world - and better than it is in the US. Ditto for life expectancy, education, medical care, and so on. Cubans live better than other third world citizens - Kwitny describes this through his interviews with a wide range of people, from those in menial jobs to students to business owners.
And all this despite the US embargo.
One of the interesting questions raised by this chapter is what constitutes happiness? By some measures, Cubans are happier than Americans. They have less money, but they have more security - guaranteed jobs, food, healthcare, and education. Even the issue of money is tricky - many wealthy nations, the US included, concentrate that wealth at the top, and the poorest of the poor here are left to live on the streets. Perhaps overall well-being is, as one Cuban interviewed said, “more important than money.”
While Kwitny is no fan of communism, and does note the authoritarian aspects, he also notes that this is actually far less invasive than the thugs of the dictators running many countries - dictators the US put there and maintains. He also notes that the Soviets subsidized the Cuban economy, but the amount in play very likely was less than tourism and trade would have brought in.
The sad thing is, Cuba’s most natural trade partner would be the US, and yet we refuse to take the action that would lead to closer relations (and a reduction in the Soviet/Russian threat.) Why will we not do this?
For the past quarter century, the United States has fretted and fumed, and applied great resources trying to change conditions in Latin America. Yet the condition the US has concentrated on changing has not been bloodshed, poverty, illiteracy, or disease. The US effort has been directed toward changing the government of Cuba, where all these evils exist less than almost anywhere else in Latin America. And the US has punished any nation that tried, even slightly, to emulate Cuba.
In discussing countries like Nicaragua, Kwitny notes that their long-term interests don’t lie on the other side of the world. The problem is that America continues to stifle popular government, democracy, and free markets in these countries, driving them to seek help elsewhere.
Kwitny talks a lot about the central mistake of the Cold War: deciding that Communism was somehow something new and uniquely evil, totally different from other dictatorships. Thus, a civil war wasn’t just a civil war, it was an invasion of this new evil. Rather than having faith that the US system was superior and that people would therefore choose it, we decided to devote our resources to stamping out this idea, as if one could even do that. (And also, isn’t stamping out ideas the sort of thing authoritarian systems like…Communism are known for? Just saying.
When communism became a scapegoat, however, it was no longer an evil among evils. It was a unique evil - so insidious that it could override all cross-cultural barriers and all known norms of human behavior. Thus the Chinese revolution could never be seen as an ordinary civil war, the coming of yet another dynasty to China. One side called itself communist. That side must, by our perception, consist of brainwashed hordes, manipulated by a handful of satanic agents. It was inconceivable that they were rational human beings pursuing what looked to them, rightly or wrongly, to be the most advantageous course.
Related to this is the fact that the colonial powers didn’t actually export free markets. They exported a system where they got to exploit the native peoples and their resources. This next passage is from a discussion of Indonesia.
But, like so many postcolonial leaders, Sukarno had fallen into the trap of judging the capitalist economic system by the way the system worked in the colonies. Just as the U.S. today defends monopolistic, non-free market economies, the European colonial countries generally did not export a free market system as an example to their foreign wards. Rather, they sent abroad a form of feudalism.
Thus, to Sukarno, capitalism was an economic system under which the Dutch owned everything. This system worked fine in Holland, where everybody was Dutch, but in Indonesia it seemed grossly unfair. So Sukarno adopted socialism.
The chapter on China is fascinating. It is very out of date - a LOT has changed there in 40 years to put it mildly. What is interesting is that some of what Kwitny expected did in fact happen.
In many ways, China’s history is a cycle of openings and closings to the outside. There is always the lure of material advances, followed by the threat of internal disruption, and then the clampdown. How do you let in things and keep out thoughts? The emperors never learned. The current government is searching for a way to admit technological ideas while filtering out other ideas.
With the opening of China to trade, a lot of Western ideas did in fact enter. China hasn’t embraced an open society, though - it remains authoritarian. But, interestingly, it has become far more capitalist than it was.
In fact, the best description of China’s economy these days is “authoritarian capitalism.” There is still government involvement, and single party rule. But there is sure a lot of free enterprise taking place - and China is experiencing many of the nasty side effects of capitalism: billionaires, soaring inequality, unaffordable housing, urbanization.
As China becomes the world’s premier power, a process being accelerated by the Trump administration’s dismantling of American power, it will be interesting to see if it follows the US and USSR in blundering in foreign policy.
Kwitny is no fan of the international arms trade. He assigns equal responsibility to the US and USSR for making the world a more unsafe place through the selling of weapons, usually with little if any accountability for how they are used. (See: Israel right now. But there are a myriad of examples past and present.) This trade is a significant factor in keeping brutal dictators in power, and spreading suffering across the globe.
The book also describes the sordid history of using mobsters at home and abroad in foreign policy. Like that time “Lucky” Luciano was freed from prison as a reward for using the mob to invade Sicily during World War Two. This hasn’t been a good long term strategy for the US, as it has associated us with the worst sorts of people and organizations.
I also want to note another line, where Kwitny really nails it.
Considering the low wages that Gulf & Western gets by with, the food aid could be seen as a U.S. taxpayer subsidy to the company, not to the people of the Dominican Republic.
This applies at home as well. All those social programs right wingers keep winging about - Medicaid, food stamps, other subsidies - aren’t really about subsidizing the poor. They are about subsidizing the corporations that refuse to pay a living wage. We can have the discussion about whether those subsidies are beneficial to society, but we need to stop blaming the working poor for them.
The last chapter is Kwitny’s argument that the US is, through its foreign policy, not only betraying the values we claim to hold, but also denying the benefits of a good society to the third world. In his view, history itself since World War Two has amply demonstrated which ideas lead to good results.
In the decades since then, the Third World itself has offered many equally stunning examples of similar countries that chose different roads. In every case, the more market-oriented and the more pluralistic the road chosen, the more successful the country has been in meeting the needs of its people.
Kwitny isn’t wrong. Free markets outperform planned economies. Pluralism brings opportunities to everyone and attracts the best from everywhere.
This doesn’t mean that Kwitny was a libertarian, though. Free markets, like any public good, need to be protected from those who would prey on them.
The issue is not simply public versus private. The productive economies of Malaysia, Taiwan, and Singapore have benefitted from considerable government participation. On Taiwan, especially, the government intervened to make sure that much of the economy’s profit was spread to the poorest parts of the countryside via large public works - hydroelectric projects and good schools, for example. This intervention helped keep production high, by maintaining morale among farmers who might not otherwise have participated in the industrial boom.
If that sounds a lot like the New Deal, or what President Biden was attempting to do during his term, you would be right. Kwitny goes on:
Government under Marxist socialism is obviously very different. The problem with these radical governments is that instead of attacking poverty, they invariably end up attacking only wealth. Some government intervention is generally necessary in order to attack poverty, especially after decades or centuries of feudal accumulations of wealth. Monopolies must be restrained and competition encouraged. Industrious individuals need access to land or other means of production to show what they can turn out. Marxism, though, has almost invariably brought about the vengeful destruction of productive power, not the thoughtful redistribution of it.
I thoroughly agree with Kwitny here. The goal has to be giving everyone access to the resources - the means of production - rather than letting it accumulate with a few wealthy individuals or families. But simply destroying in vengeance impoverishes everyone. Thoughtful redistribution.
Of course, these days, Kwitny would be considered a flaming pinko for saying so. Which is ironic considering how strongly anti-Marxist he was.
There is only one reason why a country would want to adopt Marxist-socialism today. Unfortunately, it is often a valid reason. Marxism-socialism is often the only way a country can avoid American imperialism. Joining the Soviet arms network is often the only way to have a national government that is independent from CIA manipulation, and that stands a chance of bargaining at arm’s length with multinational corporations.
And therein lies so many of our problems. Ditto for the Middle East, where radical Islam is perceived as the only option to push back against CIA manipulation and corporate plundering.
I also loved Kwitny’s analysis of what really made America great. (Which are the very things Trump and his goons and ghouls are working to destroy.)
We misunderstand our own message to the world. We misunderstand the source of our strength, our prosperity, and our freedom. The distinction between private and state enterprises is not what is fundamental to American achievement. Our achievement is based on a division of power.
We divide power throughout our society. The powers of government are divided among federal, state, and local units. At each level, power is divided among the executive, the legislature, and courts. Even so, government doesn’t play nearly so great a role in the U.S. as we encourage it to play overseas. Most decisions are barred to government. Many decisions are reserved to each individual to make for himself. Others are relegated to professionally competent authorities: within broad social guidelines that are politically ordained, doctors guide the day-to-day functioning of their own profession, as do accountants, plumbers, English literature professors, and (there’s a hair in every pudding) lawyers.
I’ll forgive the slur against my profession due to the general truth of the claim about professionals.
In the business field, what has distinguished American society has been not only its Rockefellers, but its ability to restrain its Rockefellers, and to preserve open competition. What has distinguished us is not only our Standard Oils, but our ability to break up our Standard Oils. Monopolistic controls have been allowed to persist mostly in foreign dealings, through influence over the State Department, not the Justice Department.
The open chance for small businesses to grow, for the eccentric with a gift to become an entrepreneur, for the individual farmer to figure out a better way of planting or marketing, has been a lifeblood of our system. Equally so has been the power of consumers, individually or banded voluntarily together, to contain the excesses of large and small businesses.
I might recommend a couple of excellent books for more in this line: American Amnesia by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson for the role government has played in creating American greatness; and American Capitalism by John Kenneth Galbraith for the concept of "countervailing power” as a restraint on capitalist exploitation.
I’ll end with what I think is a great summary of how Cold War thinking has poisoned our foreign policy and even far too much of our domestic politics.
By viewing the world as a chessboard, on which all the pieces are either black or white, either our friend or the Soviets’, our leaders are ignoring the principles of which genuine friendships, and partnerships, are made. Only out of such principles can come true national security.
I must admit that this book did make me a bit nostalgic for the days of my youth, when the American right, for all its flaws, still contained thoughtful and nuanced ideas and thinkers. As I noted at the beginning, Kwitny wasn’t considered a leftist when this book was written. His central commitment was to the truth, however, not partisan politics. His commitment was to human thriving and human decency, not political loyalty. And these days, that makes one a leftist.
This book was not “enjoyable” - it was depressing and infuriating in so many ways. But it also stands as a monument to true investigative journalism, and an inspiration to those of us who truly believe in a better world.
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