U.S.: The power that loses wars
and gains strength

Carlos Alberto Montaner

(FIRMAS PRESS, Madrid) George Friedman, a renowned political analyst, affirms that the United States has lost, or failed to win, most of the political and military conflicts in which it has engaged in recent decades. He has just made that recount apropos of the Iraqi disaster.

In Korea in the early 1950s, the cost of reaching a truce and returning to the starting point was tens of thousands of lives. After the Missile Crisis in 1962, the Cuban dictatorship managed to consolidate and Moscow put a dagger to America's neck. With the USSR gone, Washington lost its will to eliminate a regime in whose uncomfortable presence it was accustomed to live.

Vietnam, as we all know, was an adventure that ended in the precipitate withdrawal of American troops and the absorption of South Vietnam by communist Vietnam. In Iran, it was impossible to prop up the Shah and the ayatollahs installed a religious madhouse intent on exterminating Israel and the United States, the great western Satan.

How can the United States be the only power on the planet if it has lost almost all the battles waged after World War II? One of the hypotheses examined by Friedman seems convincing: because the United States' strength  does not depend on its military might, which was utilized in all those episodes with many limitations, scant conviction, and generally amid a great many divided opinions.

The United States is the great engine of the planet because of its industrial power, its creativity, the drive of its economic system and the strength of its institutions. What has prevailed is General Motors and the Chase Manhattan Bank, not the Pentagon or the State Department.

To Friedman's reflections we might add a repertoire of Latin American examples. In 1898, the U.S. defeated Spain in a “splendid little war,” as Teddy Roosevelt phrased it, and the country seized Puerto Rico and the Philippines and converted Cuba into a protectorate for the duration of the Platt Amendment, which was abolished in 1934.

 What happened beginning in 1898? In the Philippines, there was ferocious resistence to the American occupation, quashed with the lives of 6,000 Americans and innumerable crimes committed by the new colonial power in an effort to “pacify” the country. Later, for half a century, the United States controlled the remote archipelago, which provided no benefit to the nation, until it granted Manila its independence after WWII.

For its part, Puerto Rico -- which in two referendums has refused to fully integrate into the United States and has managed to eliminate from its territory all U.S. military bases -- has been for decades the largest recipient of American aid in history ($17 billion last year) and one of the principal sources of Hispanic emigration to the mainland.

And Cuba? Cuba became the most tenacious enemy the U.S. ever had in Latin America, until the recent appear of the colorful Hugo Chávez. Honestly: Did the United States win the war of 1898?

This tale of frustration very much resembles the record of unexpected consequences created by U.S. military adventures in Central America and the Caribbean. Pershing's “punitive expedition” against Pancho Villa in Mexico, and the landings of Marines in Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic did not bring democratic stability or prosperity to those nations, as the State Department had intended.

That was probably because it is almost impossible to impose from abroad a type of behavior that does not adhere to the traditions, values and beliefs of the society being led along “the good path,” as the Americans are bitterly learning in Iraq today.

Are there any exceptions to this string of U.S. failures in Latin America? From Washington's perspective, only three and not very important: the coup against Jacobo Arbenz organized by the CIA in Guatemala in 1954, and the U.S. invasions of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Grenada in 1983.

In those three actions, launched with Cold War logic, the U.S. was able to avoid or contain the advance of communists and their sympathizers; but perhaps its wisest move was not to occupy those territories permanently and not to attempt to replicate in them the American institutions. That objective is simply beyond reach. It's pure wishful thinking. [©FIRMAS PRESS]

March 22, 2007

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