Blowback
Chalmers Johnson
268 pages, including index and notes
published in 2000

"Blowback" is a political term first coined by the Central Intelligence Agency to describe unintended consequences of American polices and actions abroad, usually kept secret from the American audience. Here Chalmers Johnson uses it to describe the unintended consequences of American imperialism, both abroad and at home. According to Chalmers, who describes himself as a "spear-carrier for empire", the US has attempted to transform its "slipping preeminence into an exploitative hegemony" in the half-century after World War II, accelerated by the end of the Cold War in 1990. The US, through a combination of ideology and greed, set out to acquire itself an empire after World War II and it succeeded. Chalmers believes that the consequences of this will come back to haunt the US in the 21st century: nations reap what they sow.

Chalmers Johnson's background is as an expert on East Asia in general, China and Japan in particular, which explains Blowback's focus on that region. In his view, the United States behaved simularly in this region to the way the USSR managed Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philipines, Indonesia and Vietnam were and are treated like semi-colonies, with their economies (re)orientated towards the US and their territories used to house large parts of the US military machine. In essence, Johnson maintains, the US treated its Asian allies the same as the USSR used to treat its Warsawpact partners.

The most immediate aspect of the American empire and the aspect that creates the most local resentment, is its worldwide military presence:

The one subject beyond discussion... is the fact that, a decade after the end of the Cold War, hundreds of thousands of American troops, supplied with the world's most advanced weaponry, sometimes including nuclear arms, are stationed on over sixty-one base complexes in nineteen countries worldwide, using the Department of Defense's narrowest definition of a "major installation"; if one included every kind of installation that houses representatives of the American military, the number would rise to over eight hundred.

He illustrates how this causes resentment by looking at how the US behaved in Okinawa, where US soldiers are litterally above the law, able even to rape twelve year old girls with little or no consequences, as well as incidents elsewhere. For example, there is the way in which the US frustrated Italian justice in its attempts to prosecute the pilots of an US Navy jet which collided with an Italian cablecar in 1998, where it turned out US pilots where routinely flying at unsafe heights.

The second aspect causing blowback, is the way in which the US interferes in other countries' economy and politics. Johnson's Asian expertise is on show here again, as he describes the ways in which the US has been closely involved with the succesive dictatorships running South Korea. This went so far as tacit approval and support for the 1980 Gwanju massacre, in which at least several hundred and possibly several thousand people were killed in protests against the military coup of General Chun Doo-hwan.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this kind of support does not help the US in the long run; countries run by US supported dictators tend to become somewhat anti-american after their liberation... It is typical of an empire though to believe that it will forever be strong enough to escape the consequences of its actions. Of course, for most countries, even with genuine grieves against the US, there is no alternative but to submit to its hegemony, as the alternative is to be frozen out of the world economy.

On a larger scale, the US operates as if its hegemony is unlimited and will last forever. This attitude was always present, but according to Johnson, and I would agree with him, has been getting worse since the end of the Cold War, which the Washington elite percieved as a US win rather than a USSR loss. It results in an arrogant and highhanded approach towards foreign policy in which, as Johnson puts it, "cruise missiles are substituted for diplomacy".

The most interesting thing about Blowback is that it was published in 2000, a year before the September 11 attacks, so far the ultimate in blowback. After the attacks, everything Chambers Johnson was complaining about in his book was turned up to 11, with predictable results. The US is now paying the bill with a hollowed out economy and an increasing list of casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars that might take decades to resolve.