Yves here. Since the news and commentary flow is still a bit diminished due to the holiday break, we are serving up what would normally be a weekend item, an opinion piece that makes for a fine critical thinking exercise. I am sure you will have fun with the post proper, but let me start the ball rolling with the headline: the US is just fine with autocratic powers like Saudi Arabia provided they are not socialistic or worse in our eyes and follow our geopolitical directives.
By Thomas J. Barfield, professor of anthropology at Boston University. His new book, Shadow Empires, explores how distinctly different types of empires arose and sustained themselves as the dominant polities of Eurasia and North Africa for 2,500 years before disappearing in the 20th century. He is a renowned historian of Central Eurasia and the author of The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757, Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture, and Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (revised and expanded second edition 2022, Princeton University Press). Distributed by Human Bridges, first published in the Sentinel Post
Considering whether modern states are empires tells us almost nothing useful about either modern states or empires. A better question is what policies and structures pioneered by empires are still employed by states today, and how.
As the 20th century opened, long-established empires still governed the majority of Eurasia’s territory and population, but they all collapsed by the end of World War I. The European and Japanese colonial empires that escaped destruction then dissolved after World War II. After being the world’s dominant polities for two and a half millennia, empires were now extinct. The term empire itself turned pejorative; polemical rather than analytical. But while empires no longer existed, they left an enduring legacy: sets of distinctive templates for organizing very large polities with diverse populations. They also provided different strategic models for projecting power on the world stage.
Although the United States was the first nation designed on abstract principles of governance rather than inherited institutions, it drew on imperial models to realize them. America’s expansive concept of universal citizenship to unite its diverse population was distinctly Roman in origin, one that emerged in no other empire. American foreign policy, by contrast, employed a distinctly non-Roman maritime empire template that sought economic rather than territorial advantages. While the United States inherited its maritime tradition from Great Britain, in the post-1945 era its international policies bore a stronger resemblance to those of imperial Athens. Athens created the world’s first maritime empire (Arche) in the 5th century BC by building an alliance system to defend the Greeks against Persian aggression. It then used that base to establish an economic sphere in which it was the dominant player, becoming the region’s largest and richest city-state. In a remarkably similar way, the United States also created a postwar military alliance system designed to protect its members from aggression by the Soviet Union that served as a common multinational trading bloc with the American economy at its center.
Citizenship in the United States: E Pluribus Unum
The 18th-century founders of the U.S. were quite familiar with the classical Western history of ancient Greece and Rome. They embraced the principles of democratic governance developed by the Greeks but broke their city-state limitations with the adoption of the Roman imperial model of universal citizenship. As with Rome, American citizenship was designed to transcend existing parochial political identities (in this case America’s original 13 colonies), replacing them with an all-embracing national identity. And again, similar to the Roman Empire, American citizenship would not be restricted by national origin, race, or religion, although such invidious distinctions (particularly race) would play a negative role in the country’s domestic politics. Eager to attract settlers to a land short of labor, the U.S. made the naturalization of foreigners a regular practice and encouraged their immigration to its shores. It automatically conferred citizenship on children born in the country regardless of the status of their parents, precluding the emergence of permanent non-citizen minorities who were residents of a state but without rights in it. The anomaly of allowing a slave population to exist in its Southern states was resolved in a bloody civil war (1861-1865) and subsequent amendments to the Constitution that extended citizenship to all former slaves and their descendants. In 1924, Congress finally passed a law recognizing the country’s original Native American inhabitants as birthright citizens too.
Universal citizenship proved highly effective in uniting a population that had no common origin. The U.S. government was careful never to define “an American” as anything other than a legal category. This was reinforced by the Constitution’s prohibition of any religious tests for serving in public office and vesting rights in individuals rather than communities. It was an imperial way of thinking designed to avoid the religious and ethno-nationalist communal conflicts that plagued Europe. The potential for such conflicts was, and is, never absent in the United States. Existing communities invariably asserted that newer immigrants could never become “real Americans,” only to join with the two generations later to complain about more recent arrivals. In my own city of Boston, the influx of Catholic Irish immigrants provoked violent outrage by Yankee Protestants of English descent. Fifty years later, both English-speaking groups agreed that it was poor non-English speaking Italians and East European Jews who could never become real Americans like themselves. After the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed national-origin restrictions, an influx of Asian and Hispanic immigrants provoked renewed concerns that these people would never become real Americans either. Yet by 2018, 14 percentof the U.S. population was foreign-born, close to the record high set in the 1890s, and the once-alien foods they brought with them (from hot dogs to pizza to burritos) became American by popular consumption.
Sustaining America’s Arche
By 1853, the U.S. had taken possession of all the enormous territories between its Atlantic and Pacific coasts; the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 gave it control of around 10 million square kilometers. Yet despite being one of the largest countries on earth, the United States never viewed itself as a land power. (Even in the 21st century, its demographic and economic centers of gravity remained on the east and west coasts.) Instead, outside of North America, the United States adopted a maritime empire template for its international relations that gave sea power priority over land power, viewed economic hegemony as more desirable than territorial hegemony, and deemed indirect political domination more sustainable than direct political domination when wielding power abroad. By the end of the 19th century, the U.S. would become one of the world’s leading industrial and trading powers, although it had to contend with a domestic tradition of isolationism that was particularly strong after the end of World War I.
The maritime empire template first manifested itself in the 1823 Monroe Doctrine that declared the Americas an exclusive U.S. sphere of influence. This imposed a form of indirect domination by the U.S. over the newly independent states in Latin America and the Caribbean without touching these territories. The three-month Spanish-American War in 1898 was primarily a maritime conflict too. Here, the U.S. Navy fought simultaneously in both the Caribbean and the Pacific, sinking the Spanish fleets based in Cuba and the Philippines and delivering marine expeditionary forces ashore to expel the garrisons defending them.
However, this maritime empire template did not assume global significance until after World War II when the U.S. abandoned its previous isolationism and replaced Great Britain as the West’s dominant power. Its only rival was the Soviet Union. The Soviets followed a typical imperial land power template by taking direct control of all the countries they occupied in Eastern and Central Europe and using proxy regimes to incorporate them into their command economy. By contrast, the U.S. employed an indirect maritime strategy that would have been familiar to the ancient Athenians: seek economic rather than territorial hegemony through an alliance system that protected its member states from aggression and allowed their economies to grow rapidly. Unlike the maritime Athenian Empire, however, the U.S. also possessed a large and self-sustaining domestic economy in North America that could bankroll its high defense spending without extorting payments from its allies, as Athens had unpopularly done.
The U.S. was not interested in recreating a closed trading system with subject colonies like that of the dissolving maritime British Empire. That required both considerable expense and local administrations to maintain. (It also generated anti-colonial political movements, of which the American Revolution had been one of the first.) Instead, the U.S. constructed a postwar international system from which it benefited militarily and economically. The system also benefited its allies enough to make it self-sustaining. The American arche consisted of overlapping networks of military and economic alliances that spanned the globe. The military alliances were designed to provide protection against possible Soviet aggression through mutual defense treaties, including the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Western Europe, and bilateral agreements with Japan (1951 and 1960) and Korea (1953) in northeast Asia. These were the linchpins of a system that allowed the stationing of American forces within these sovereign nations, and were part of a much vaster system of secondary alliances that even 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union included 800 military bases of various types in 70 countries. Connected by sea and air routes, this network allowed the U.S. to project its power worldwide without maintaining excessively large numbers of troops abroad. Its success in the aftermath of World War II was based on turning former enemies, Germany and Japan, into close allies and major economic powers after installing democratically run governments in these countries and financing their reconstruction.
Buttressed by new global multilateral institutions such as the World Bank (1944), the International Monetary Fund (1945), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1947), the U.S. supported the creation of the European Common Market (which eventually became the European Union). This was less a matter of altruism and had more to do with the employment of a maritime empire strategy that viewed the emergence of stronger allied partners as a net plus rather than potential rivals. In an improvement on ancient Athens’s approach, the U.S. relied as much on the self-interest of its members to keep the system functioning as it did on its own power. This dual military/economic network would see off the Soviet Union in 1991 and maintain itself afterward. Its success as a strategy was best appreciated by contrasting it with failed U.S. policies that veered from the maritime empire template and drew the country into counterproductive land wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
In one important area, the U.S. broke with the maritime empire template that had created cosmopolitan economies while retaining insular ruling elites in Athens, Venice, Holland, and Great Britain. Universal citizenship, immigration, and capitalist economic disruption combined to produce a political system in the U.S. where the elites who set the U.S. policy eventually reflected the diversity of the population, albeit with a considerable lag time. That diversity was also reflected in America’s soft power influence that was rivaled historically only by Athens in ancient Greece because, beginning in the mid-20th century, the U.S. became the place to be for those producing cultural and scientific innovations. Part of the attraction was its rich economy, secure private property rights, and freedom of expression, but the U.S. also benefited from the arrival of refugee artists, scholars, and scientists fleeing persecution or prejudice in their own homelands. This put the U.S. at the forefront of many fields that the country otherwise would have been unlikely to develop (or develop as quickly) without them. Whether in Hollywood, New York, or Silicon Valley, the ability to attract talented people who became American citizens by choice was an element that was missing in even the most economically cosmopolitan maritime empires of the past. The U.S. was certainly the first to make culture itself a profitable export.
Does understanding which tools a contemporary world power like the U.S. borrowed from extinct empires translate into understanding its global relations today? Yes, because these were grounded in a set of largely unarticulated economic and cultural principles that to them seemed natural and required no explanation and, hence, are often overlooked. For example, in a world where autocracy was the norm, maritime empires (except for Portugal, which was founded by a king) were distinguished by their representative governments. Athens was a democracy, Carthage, Venice, and Holland were republics, and Britain was governed by a parliament. This was a structure in which the state encouraged the accumulation of private wealth and protected it from arbitrary confiscation. Both elements were attractive to the 18th-century founders of the U.S., who combined the limited role of government and respect for private property espoused by John Locke along with an open economy championed by Adam Smith.
The hostility toward autocratic regimes like the former Soviet Union (or Russia today) and the People’s Republic of China displayed by the U.S. is thus better explained by its maritime empire heritage rather than any ideological differences. Autocratic regimes in today’s world seek to achieve stability by creating an equilibrium in which they are dominant—a conservative characteristic of the past empires on which they are modeled. Maritime empires, by contrast, thrived on change. They displayed a higher tolerance for risk and had a propensity to upset existing economic norms—attributes well adapted to modern capitalist economies where no steady-state equilibrium has yet emerged. That, combined with maritime empires’ preferences for alliance building and networks of influence, rather than direct domination, is the international framework in which the U.S. is most comfortable but is also one whose ancient origins have rarely been fully appreciated.
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As the Soviet diplomat said, “I wish we had your level of propaganda skill”
I know. Barfield is clearly flying the Jolly Roger on his flagpole. As if pirates were never fascists; they were only righteous privateers. Some things never change. I really do not think the need for good authoritarianism has changed but rather the need to tame private enterprise in a way that allows it to look more humanitarian, less red-handed. Lots of our political confusion, aka propaganda, could be alleviated if we just understood all the elusive uses of the word ‘fascist.’ Instead Barfield indulges in some whoppers, like asserting that maritime inclusive capitalism succeeded for the US because we had a large and thriving economy, not a dangerous military and some mind-boggling financial wizardry, along with profligate overconsumption and devastation of the environment in order to maintain power in order to manufacture profits in order to continue to maintain power. But I don’t need to rave about it today.
Yes, and it’s ongoing to this day. The Pilgrims arriving in America were less than Thankful to American Natives. They didn’t pay for the land, they took (stole) it. With the help of small pox and small bullets, and broken Treaties, they assumed they were being driven across the land by God. Americans were born into largesse and think it was all by their exceptionalism!
Mark Twain (Autobiography, Vol. 1, p.267)
[…] Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for – annually, not oftener – if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white’s man side, consequently on the Lord’s side, consequently it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments. The original reason for Thanksgiving Day has long ceased to exist – the Indians having long ago been comprehensively and satisfactorily exterminated and the account closed with Heaven, with the thanks due.
He also conveniently leaves out the comprador elites around the world who enrich themselves at the expense of their fellow citizens while keeping US priorities firmly ahead of those of their own lands.
Groan, this is getting tiresome.
A “shining city on the kill” with barely functioning infrastructure, healthcare that is downright lethal, and rampant homelessness.
Yep, USA sure am special.
I live here and feel the same way. Over 1/2 of my ancestors are from the English colonial period and how I was raised is not how this country functions AND I come from a very traditional liberal stock. I am thankful every day my grandparents are already passed as they would be horrified at what we’ve turned this nation into.
The same attitude that calls Trump “a threat to ‘mah’ democracy (which ‘you’ don’t deserve).”
Not saying Trump is not a huckster, but he was never more than a minor nuisance, until the PTB started dismantling the real American democracy (assuming it was ever “real” to begin with) “in order to save it.” The fanatics who believe that they are so righteous that they are entitled to do every evil under the sun because of “the higher cause” are the most dangerous people out there, and the West is run by them.
One hates to dignify this piece by pointing out the huge logical and factual holes. I’m not even going to try. So if that response becomes typical, then the auteur can crow, “see, nobody has any opposition or comeback, so I must be RIGHT!”
Two yokels walking down a road, one suddenly stop and grabs the other one to make “them” stop, too.
“Hey, that pile there looks like dog shit!” says the stopper.
The stoppee says, “Yeah, it smells like dog shit!”
The stopper bends over, sticks his finger in the stuff, puts the sample in his mouth and says “Yeah, it tastes like dog shit!”
The other one says, “Wow, guess it is dog shit!”
They look at each other and both say “I’m sure glad we didn’t step in it!”
About those “principles of democratic governance developed by the Greeks” – maybe the author ought to check with the citizens of Melos about how they felt about being on the receiving end of Athens non-authoritarian democracy. Athens demanded that Melos join its alliance during the Peloponnesian war against Sparta (so not much to do with protecting Greece against the Persians at that point in time). Melos wanted to remain neutral and not join any alliance, but Athens wouldn’t take no for a answer. They invaded, killed the men, pillaged and plundered everything else, and enslaved anyone left alive. Thus Thucydides quip about the strong doing what they will, and the weak suffering what they must.
So yes, the US is modeled on Athenian practices, but not in the way this author thinks.
The thing about democracy, of any kind, is that it in no way ensures just or moral behaviour. It has other things going for it, but not that.
To be fair, reading only recently a biography of Demosthenes, , it does seem that the Athenians recognized the error of their ways and swore off this kind of imperialism, aggression and military adventurism after they bounced back from their defeat in the peleponnesian war and freed themselves from the oligarchy that the victorious Sparta had forced on them.
There was quite some soulsearching and hard work done to win back the trust of former vassals, taking care to really treat them like respected allies and equals this time and so on.
There was a huge turn against any sort of imperialism and militarism on part of the Athenians that I think would have been impossible in this form in a society that wasn’t genuinely democratic.
Big difference to modern, western pseudo democracies, when the Athenians collectively said no to such practices, it counted.
Unfortunately soon enough a genuinely aggressive, militaristic, expansionist and highly clever and manipulative autocrat, King Philip II of Macedon, would show up to crush independence and freedom in Athens amd Hellas once more.
You could perhaps say that aside from the intelligence and cleverness they definitely share King Philip really was all the things that Putin is only falsely accused of, including his skill at subverting democracy in covert and subtle ways and turning it against itself (though ultimately it should be said the Athenians successfully defended themselves against this subversion and were only crushed by brutal violence and overwelming hard power).
Some would argue, not without justification, that King Philip was one of the better authoritarians himself, but clearly Athen’s democracy also had a lot going for it, including a remarkable capacity to learn from mistakes and improve, so clearly the Athenians were indeed fighting a good fight struggling to preserve it, worthy of being remembered even if they ultimately failed.
But by comparing Putin and Philip of Macedonia I myself kinda fed into the idea that one could equate athenian democracy with our “democracy”, which is of course nonsense.
The american republic was if anything much more inspired by the Roman Republic after all, it was not created along athenian principles but in conscious and deliberate opposition to them.
It’s founders were almost to a man implacably hostile to the athenian model not because what it did wrong, but because of what from a genuinely pro democratic perspective it did right.
And the Athenians would immediately have recognized under the mockery of democracy the face of the oligarchy that was the deadly enemy of all they held sacred and that they opposed so bitterly.
Good points. A massive comeuppance does tend to help get people’s minds right. Athens never did much militarily after losing to Sparta, and Thebes was the big winner of the Peloponnesian war. They got to be the biggest Hellenic power for a few decades, until Alexander came with a grudge and razed Thebes to the ground.
That period between Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian war and Phillip’s takeover is one I never studied much. I’ve read some of Cicero’s phillipics, modeled after Demosthenes’ own, but never read him or any Aristotle for that matter. What was the biography you read? – I’m interested in reading it myself now!
Sorry it took me a while to get back to you.
I’ll have to say right away that it is a german biography, in German, by a german professor of ancient history at the university of Göttingen.
It’s also not brandnew but from 2004.
But as the author himself points out in his history of the reception of Demosthenes over the centuries, there aren’t and never really have been many biographies looking at his life in much real depth, certainly not as many as one might expect If there wasn’t such a long history of hostility against the man and probably more importantly still against the athenian democracy he dedicated his life too during the last two thousand years, so chances are good that there haven’t been that many major, newer publications since.
I find it incredibly interesting and I dare say it’s a period of history definitely deserving a lot more attention from amateur history buffs as well.
Unfortunately I have no idea if it was ever available in any other language but German but nonetheless so it goes:
The title is “Demosthenes von Athen – Ein Leben für die Freiheit” by Gustav Adolf Lehman, published by german publishing house C.H.Beck in Munich.
Thank you. Just checked and it doesn’t look like it’s been translated to English. Guess I’ll have to bone up on my German if I want to read that one…
Hear, hear:
“On the morning of May 29, 1787, in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, opened the meeting that would become known as the Constitutional Convention by identifying the underlying cause of various problems that the delegates of thirteen states had assembled to solve. “Our chief danger,” Randolph declared, “arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” None of the separate states’ constitutions, he said, had established “sufficient checks against the democracy.””
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/our-chief-danger
A Hogeland link! Thank you – one of my favorites.
Thanks for the link. Great read!
Also, this claim in the article is not true: “They embraced the principles of democratic governance developed by the Greek”
Democratic government in Athens was by sortition. I.e. committees elected by random lot from the electorate (which did not include women, foreigners or slaves).
What we call ‘democracy’ – i.e. ‘representative democracy’ – would be described by Athenians as a form of elitist (or ‘aristocratic’) governance which would probably lead to forms of dictatorship.
There is much to ponder in this excellent piece, if with caveats. Michael Hudson has made the point repeatedly that the US’s extensive military deployment is financed not by domestic capacity, but by dollar hegemony. Other coutries are compelled to invest their dollars in the US, else what to do with them?
The maritime model under which the US presumably does not seek land control seems compromised by the tendency to install suitable governments and patterns of economic development. Consider Central and South America. The current Peruvian president enjoys public support of but 5%. The US has troops and naval forces there, and in Ecuador. Economic models are essentially extractive–which requires effective land dominance.
Elsewhere, the US employs puppet governments in Ukraine, Israel, Jordan, Iraq and elsewhere in MENA.(Israel has squandered its future ability to say f*ck you to its patron.) Although it does seem to be losing its hold in west Africa.
The vassalage of Europe is complete. Germany is still occupied by US military forces.
Wait, you mean the US is not a puppet government of Israel’s?
“The hostility toward autocratic regimes like the former Soviet Union (or Russia today) and the People’s Republic of China displayed by the U.S. is thus better explained by its maritime empire heritage rather than any ideological differences. Autocratic regimes in today’s world seek to achieve stability by creating an equilibrium in which they are dominant—a conservative characteristic of the past empires on which they are modeled. Maritime empires, by contrast, thrived on change. They displayed a higher tolerance for risk and had a propensity to upset existing economic norms—attributes well adapted to modern capitalist economies where no steady-state equilibrium has yet emerged. That, combined with maritime empires’ preferences for alliance building and networks of influence, rather than direct domination, is the international framework in which the U.S. is most comfortable but is also one whose ancient origins have rarely been fully appreciated.”
This isn’t wrong, but let’s just say that it can be rephrased in a less positive way. For “change”, read “chaos”. For “alliance building and networks of influence”, read “use of proxies”. No direct domination, it is true, which means that Americans tend to break things and move on instead of imposing a lasting order on their victims (although, they did try direct domination at times, e.g. in the Philippines).
I do tend to think that maritime empires generally try to establish outposts surrounded by proxies rather than try to acquire territory: Opium War and Hong Kong provide prima facie example, as Britain went to war for legal, commercial, and diplomatic advantages and influence in China more than territory and Hong Kong just happened to be a convenient island to base their activities. Even the Raj becomes an exception that proves the rule: Britain would have happily maintained the facade with the East India Company and the network of vassal rulers had EIC not dropped the ball in 1850s. Not suggesting there’s any beneficence behind this: overseas territories require a lot of resources to maintain and a system of proxies and such is far cheaper.
What enables maritime empires, though, is that they are secure in their homeland: they have suppresses all their neighbors one way or another and potential peer powers are at least a sea away, without naval power to overcome them. So the only threat they can understand is the threat to their outposts and they need only to spend resources on navies and colonial armies.
I think a “land empire,” in practice, is nothing more than a powerful state with similarly powerful neighbors or near neighbors. They cannot be secure without both a powerful army and good diplomacy. Since their population are acutely aware of these threats, their populations are willing to tolerate a rather illiberal government in general–see France, for example. The kind of Kabuki like control that maritime empires are content with won’t work: see France’s persistent effort at taking over parts of Rhineland.
This also means, I think, the kind of enemies that maritime powers and land empires are different, in a fundamental way. Since, except in minds of some madmen, France cannot destroy Germany and Germany cannot destroy Russia, say, they can only be “rivals” or “frenemies”–sometimes adversaries, sometimes partners, always neighbors who needs to be treated with a degree of respect. Not so with the maritime empires: to them, the “enemies” are various “wogs” looking to subvert their imperial outposts, not potentially mortal threats to their nationhood.
But enough rambling for now…
This description of countries not under the thumb of the US as ‘autocracies’ is now just a meaningless smear, and is used as such. The majority of the populations of China and Russia are happy that they also live in ‘democratic’ societies. The accusation is made that these countries lock up or persecute ‘dissidents’ or mistreat prisoners. They may do sometimes, although not to the extent advertised in the west. So, how does this practice differ from the Assange, Snowden and Manning, and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo affairs.
I don’t mean to be mean but: I had a good laugh at the article.
The uncritical use of the term “autocratic” when referring to Russia or China is typical western hypocrisy. The author is clearly biased and selects facts arbitrarily. The loaded terms like “democracy” and “autocracy” need to be defined and critically analyzed.
Thanks for the opportunity to have a good sarcastic laugh. Augusto Pinochet, Papa Doc Duvalier, Reza Shah Pahlavi, Efrain Rios Montt, – the list of US (and British) supported dictators and autocrats is a long one. Even Wikipedia acknowledges it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._policy_toward_authoritarian_governments
Then we have three “democracies” who have committed some of the most heinous atrocities in world history and continue to support flagrant genocide. (the US/UK/Israel) . The rhetorical question is: “what difference does it make if the planes dropping bombs are from a “democracy” or a “dictatorship”? It was the good ol’ USA who tested out nuclear weapons on civilians and to deter the “autocratic” USSR.
Oh yes, the part about rejecting autocratic governments as such is obviously wrong. All maritime empires were just fine with autocracies that were relatively weak and subservient. They could also suck up to ones that were much more powerful. It is equals that they have trouble with, which is where varying preferences for order/chaos come into play.
The missing part is that they have issues with autocratic governments that are powerful enough to undermine their imperial outposts (not their homelands–the distinguishing characteristic of “maritime” empires seems to be that their rulers feel secure in their homeland with no powerful adversaries within reach). Of course, “autocratic” as they use is itself a peculiar term: like the “rules” in rules-based order, it lacks a precise definition–they know it when they see it, so to speak, and the definitions (or the attempts at defining them) follow the label, often deemed to be “self explanatory,” this leading to inconsistencies and hypocrisy.
The US is an autocratic regime. In fact, it is so autocratic that the security services executed a sitting president and his brother. There are no restrictions on state power. Citizens have no privacy. No aspect of life is unmolested by the state.
US is hostile to autocrats: Profit and projection.
War is profitable, it is a political tool as well. It permits propaganda and openly attacking dissidents!
As an aside being Vietnam era: how does US get away [again] with its unelected puppet in Kiev as its musical chairs “leaders” in Saigon!
Oh jeez. The rape of Melos is one of those anomalous details — like carpet bombing Vietnam, or the siege of Falluja — that confuse a structural analysis done from 50,000 feet.
So the question is, how valuable is this, when it omits routine mass human catastrophes from the model? I read Thucydides the year after the Vietnam War, and the parallel was obvious then and now.
But his idea of a maritime empire template is worth something, if read against a factual knowledge of things like the Bengal Famine, the Century of Humiliation, or an intelligence agency superintending cocaine shipments to fund a proxy insurgency within an unruly province with it’s sphere. Within the confines of intelligent liberalism, stuff like bombing wedding parties is taken as read, so it is not mentioned.
He does let the cat out of the bag a little when he characterizes US relations with the Americas consistent with the template as “indirect domination,” aka US hegemony. As an academic, he can’t use that word because he’d be off his anthropologist turf, but he does nod at it. When you get military critics of our Ukraine policy making the point that the US has an expeditionary force model unready to conduct a land war against Russia, they are making a related point about being a maritime empire. So this article has some value when it characterizes US global hegemony as a historical formation.
He gets some facts wrong. As far as I can tell, Adam Smith had no influence on the founders –did it influence Hamilton’s plan for manufactures? It was clear at the time that at least some motivation behind granting civil rights was that not to do so would make the US look bad in the ideological competition with the USSR. But he’s right about US affinity for representative governments — it just isn’t within his writ to say who they are representing.
The Rape of Melos was not as typical of Athens as american attrocities are of the US Empire.
We aren’t doing justice to Athens this way when there are much better precedents for America like Carthage or later Venice.
Please clap!
This IS basically Alexander Dugin’s argument about the struggle between Eternal Rome and Eternal Carthage, just arguing from and for the perspective of Carthage.
Well, as I see it it is clear enough who the bigger pox on mankind is and we also know who in the end won the first round even if it took a couple decades (and of course the US and modern West could be said to have inherited plenty of the worst traits of both Carthage and Rome).
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
(The “Carthago delenda est!” comes later, in the hopefully not too distant future.)
“In a remarkably similar way, the United States also created a postwar military alliance system designed to protect its members from aggression by the Soviet Union”
“The Soviets followed a typical imperial land power template by taking direct control of all the countries they occupied in Eastern and Central Europe and using proxy regimes to incorporate them into their command economy.”
The US alliance was designed to be prepared for any opportunity of getting away with USSR. The Soviets only wanted to lick their wounds and maybe enjoy the peace. The two nukes on Japan were more of a warning signal to the Soviets than anything else. What made Japan surrender was the imminent Soviet invasion, with their troops obliterated in Manchuria.
And no, the Soviets never took direct control of the eastern European countries under their influence. This is evident in the different approaches taken by these countries with respect to land ownership. The guy is soo high on his own perfume that it boggles the mind.
Stalin wanted Germany permanently sundered to 4 agrarian states with no heavy industry and never again a military.
FDR died and Churchill took to going after Russia.
Russia has wanted distance from western enemies since early wars with Sweden.
You are talking about the Morgentau Plan for Germany here, which was American, not Russian.
And USSR, wanting a security buffer after the collosal losses in WWII is understandable – even so the Warsaw Pact came 6 years after NATO. And that didn’t involve economic take over, or integration or anything like that.
The funny thing is how many states were actually under “direct control” of a “land empire,” communist or otherwise. That characterization reminded me of the false premise of the domino theory: that Hanoi was under “direct control” of “Beijing,” which was under “direct control” of Moscow, the nexus of all international commie conspiracy. The truth, obviously, was, eh, a bit different.
I know an easy way to identify inconsequential historians. They like to position the Vietnam and Iraq wars as unwarranted exceptions in U.S. history.
This, of course, makes no sense and is the inaccurate kernel at the center of the piece: “Yet despite being one of the largest countries on earth, the United States never viewed itself as a land power.”
If so, the U S of A wouldn’t have bothered with the Louisiana Purchase. Nor would Manifest Destiny have led to the Mexican-American War and annexation of Texas. And remind me about Fifty-Four Forty or Fight.
And I’m recalling a couple of incursions into Canada.
Further, the U S of A has managed to keep Canada and Mexico on fairly short leashes, no matter the occasional burst of nationalist fervor from them.
Ulysses Grant had a few ideas about war and about U.S. politics in Mexico: “For myself,” Grant wrote later about the United States war against Mexico, “I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”
Thanks, and to all the other commenters who are taking shots. Of course the view of America as the new Athens is straight out of the Atlantic Council and how they justify their every move. It’s lonely at the top but somebody has to do it.
Balderdash.
You’re correct. It’s incredible stuff, really.
The whole business about the non-exclusionary nature of US citizenship is also baloney – it essentially backdates the temporary Reconstruction era dispensation to the time of the Revolution 90 years earlier.
The author would have us believe that Russian citizenship is somehow “exclusionary.”. What do people like Alexei Kim and Viktor Tsoi have in common?
The US steals their land and plunders it and then ” In 1924, Congress finally passed a law recognizing the country’s original Native American inhabitants as birthright citizens too.”
Such a deal!
Does this person know what the U.S. of A. did to the Native Americans? Or to the Us-Japanese during WWII?
Supposedly, democracies are not capable of such wicked deeds, right?
Thanks to Yves for the critical thinking piece and to my fellow commenters for shredding it.
“The U.S. also possessed a large and self-sustaining domestic economy in North America that could bankroll its high defense spending without extorting payments from its allies, as Athens had unpopularly done.”
Er, doesn’t the US demand that NATO members spend 2% of GDP on US defence materiel? And in a sane and rational world, why are NATO countries spending billions on buying F35 aircraft, proven to be an absolute turkey with absurd maintenance and other ongoing costs, unless being extorted by the US to do so. Not to mention all sorts of other US materiel that the conflict in Ukraine is showing to be inferior to Russian equivalents.
One of my Japanese friends told me that the US bills Japan for the US Bases stationed there.
They also are made to buy the f-35’s and other armaments for their “defense”.
The F35 is more of an adornment than armament. In reality it is effectively neither use nor ornament.
The theoretical framework of the USA and then the American empire as described is generally accurate. Surely Republican Rome was a idea worked into the original constitution. Acquiring the trans-Mississippi: a purchase that was contingent on the ability of the then great powers to reverse it, a compromise rather than war in the back of beyond for the Oregon country, a straight up conquest of Mexico’s north and the US had a continental empire with weak states to the north and south, thousands of miles of ocean to east and west. It was a continental empire but one threatened by no one for any foreseeable future. It is not threatened militarily today. The US acquired territory overseas as a late comer in the imperial land rush of the late 19th century. Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy was his way of saying commercial ties not direct rule. In the 1940s Japan and Germany were threats to US freedom of action. Taking part in their destruction restored that freedom and at a relatively small cost. The commercial empire developed from mid-century on.
Fear of the purported aims of the USSR gave us the Cold War … mistakenly seen only in military terms by the US. Neither Russia nor China is a direct military threat to the US today. Their resistance to US insistence on retaining the arrangements and the privileged position that grew out of World War II and the US seeing that resistance only in military terms is the root of the tension in the world today. I do not believe the US actually cares a fig about the governments of other nations so long as it can be #1 now and in the future.
Seems to me that most of the comments are focused on particulars not the framework. Nothing wrong with that. I have chosen to focus elsewhere.
The comments are remarkable and thoroughly question the framework and premise after premise of Barfield’s essay, making for a fine argument in which I would surely side with the commenters.
I know I’m violating house rules by commenting without reading the article but, yes, the comments here deserve kudos. I read the title this morning and spent a minute thinking of counter examples on both sides and decided to not read it and come back later to read the comments. NC FTW.
One wonders, if the same critical thinking is applied to his anthropology profession, what kind of research is accomplished.
Glad he is not a medical doctor!
Barfield is systematically wrong. People were sailing to acquire goods and trade them, acquisition could have a form of purchase or piracy, hence thalassocracies were typically ruled by rich merchants, hence oligarchies. More democratic form were short-lived aberrations until early 19th century, England was abandoning the system of rotten boroughs, USA was abandoning property requirements for franchise, and the rich had to develop skills in manipulating public opinion, buying politicians etc. A democratic ideology developed, but with no proselytizing.
Pasting from Wikipedia: The Kirkpatrick Doctrine was the doctrine expounded by United States Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick in the early 1980s based on her 1979 essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards”.[1] The doctrine was used to justify the U.S. foreign policy of supporting Third World anti-communist dictatorships during the Cold War.[2]
Doctrine
Kirkpatrick claimed that states in the Soviet bloc and other Communist states were totalitarian regimes, while pro-Western dictatorships were merely “authoritarian” ones. According to Kirkpatrick, totalitarian regimes were more stable and self-perpetuating than authoritarian regimes, and thus had a greater propensity to influence neighboring states.
—–
Kirkpatrick was revolted by (feeble) attempts of Carter to dissuade pro-American dictators from bloody repressions, hence she switched to being a Republican and formulating the theory why autocracy is OK. And she was not an effete theoretician, like Victoria Nuland today, she we thick in action or close to it. Thus as late as 1980-ties we could see an aversion to aversion to autocracy. And till these days, there is no impulse in the “collective West” to “reform” autocratic governments that have sufficiently nice attitude to Western domination. And there was no need to raise the issue of democratic deficiencies against disobedient strongmen as they could be accused either of Communist or pro-Soviet tendency or some particular sins, like drug trafficking or throwing babies out of incubators.
I did not watch the political scene with sufficient regularity to offer dates, but concepts like “rule based international order” and “autocracy as enemy of freedom” are quite novel and folks in their 60-ties may recall time where they were not used. BTW, rbio is a successor of “liberal international order”, but too many people in charge hated the word “liberal” so here we are. My guess is that both novelties got wider circulation after 2000, with a rather slow crescendo.
When Yves says “critical thinking exercise”, I often expect that to be a euphemism for (deserved) “tomato-throwing exercise”.
But while I don’t agree with it overall, I think it’s a good piece because the author keeps things grounded in a valid hypothesis (the old naval vs land empire dichotomy) and acknowledges the exceptions (the US is not exactly like most naval empires, both for better and worse).
A few counter-points though:
1. I think I’ve mentioned it before, and Spengler pretty much all but says it out loud, but if you want to compare the US to a Classical Mediterranean society, there’s a solid argument it should actually be Syracuse: Lots of open land, mass immigration, celebrity & technology obsessed, really into mechanized & expeditionary warfare, a paradoxical mix of democratic culture with shameless oligarchy, etc.
2. India. Even if you accept the author’s identity of “land empire” = “autocracy”, where does India fit into that? AFAIK India’s imperial history is definitely more decentralized than China’s, and their governments are nothing alike. In terms of a land vs. naval orientation though, China and India both strike me as more alike than anything. Not stereotypical “seafaring peoples” but with a naval tradition & some colonies in the past, imperial but not very expansionist outside their civilizational sphere.
3. Whether it’s “democracy” vs. “autocracy”, or “globalism” vs. “sovereignty”, I feel a lot of these foreign-policy discussions in the West will always have a lacuna until they can at least consider the “civilization state” concept. Westernized liberals in particular seem to practically see red and flip out at merely hearing the phrase. But I think it’s a great concept that clarifies a lot about the world & many societies, especially particularly large or ancient ones. Instead of a billion variations of comparing the US to ancient Athens or Rome, I wonder how much would naturally fall out of 3 questions: “How is the US effectively still a settler colony? How is it a nation? And how is it a civilization?”
The US is fighting for liberalism and the immortal right of a country to become a western vassal and invite US’ nuclear forces within 300 miles of Moscow!
Whatever liberalism might be! Maybe insisting on Taiwan do what it won’t allow in the Donbas!
WW III coming in both approaches.
Odd that he picks Athens rather than Carthage as his typical maritime empire of the classical era. Equally odd that he passes over the considerable appetite for direct rule on the part of the Dutch and British maritime empires. And where does land AND maritime power Spain fit into this egregiously simplistic model during it’s golden age?
Chomsky on Adam Smith, 1995:
“(…)
He’s pre-capitalist, a figure of the Enlightenment. What we would call capitalism he despised. People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.
He did give an argument for markets, but the argument was that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets will lead to perfect equality. That’s the argument for them, because he thought that equality of condition (not just opportunity) is what you should be aiming at. It goes on and on. He gave a devastating critique of what we would call North-South policies. He was talking about England and India. He bitterly condemned the British experiments they were carrying out which were devastating India.
He also made remarks which ought to be truisms about the way states work. He pointed out that its totally senseless to talk about a nation and what we would nowadays call “national interests.” He simply observed in passing, because it’s so obvious, that in England, which is what he’s discussing — and it was the most democratic society of the day — the principal architects of policy are the “merchants and manufacturers,” and they make certain that their own interests are, in his words, “most peculiarly attended to,” no matter what the effect on others, including the people of England who, he argued, suffered from their policies. He didn’t have the data to prove it at the time, but he was probably right.
This truism was, a century later, called class analysis, but you don’t have to go to Marx to find it. It’s very explicit in Adam Smith. It’s so obvious that any ten-year-old can see it. So he didn’t make a big point of it. He just mentioned it. But that’s correct. If you read through his work, he’s intelligent. He’s a person who was from the Enlightenment. His driving motives were the assumption that people were guided by sympathy and feelings of solidarity and the need for control of their own work, much like other Enlightenment and early Romantic thinkers. He’s part of that period, the Scottish Enlightenment.
The version of him that’s given today is just ridiculous. But I didn’t have to any research to find this out. All you have to do is read. If you’re literate, you’ll find it out. I did do a little research in the way it’s treated, and that’s interesting. For example, the University of Chicago, the great bastion of free market economics, etc., etc., published a bicentennial edition of the hero, a scholarly edition with all the footnotes and the introduction by a Nobel Prize winner, George Stigler, a huge index, a real scholarly edition. That’s the one I used. It’s the best edition. The scholarly framework was very interesting, including Stigler’s introduction. It’s likely he never opened The Wealth of Nations. Just about everything he said about the book was completely false. I went through a bunch of examples in writing about it, in Year 501 and elsewhere.
But even more interesting in some ways was the index. Adam Smith is very well known for his advocacy of division of labor. Take a look at “division of labor” in the index and there are lots and lots of things listed. But there’s one missing, namely his denunciation of division of labor, the one I just cited. That’s somehow missing from the index. It goes on like this. I wouldn’t call this research because it’s ten minutes’ work, but if you look at the scholarship, then it’s interesting.
(…)”
“This was a structure in which the state encouraged the accumulation of private wealth and protected it from arbitrary confiscation. Both elements were attractive to the 18th-century founders of the U.S., who combined the limited role of government and respect for private property espoused by John Locke along with an open economy championed by Adam Smith.”
No doubt Adam Smith and John Locke would have nodded approvingly as the US stole Venezuela’s FX reserves. They would also approve of America’s encouragement of the EU to steal Russia’s FX reserves, just like they did to Libya’s, too.
But, it’s not just stealing from states. They stole Roman Abramovich’s football Club, Chelsea, which he rightfully bought with funds stolen from the Russian state!
“The maritime empire template first manifested itself in the 1823 Monroe Doctrine that declared the Americas an exclusive U.S. sphere of influence. This imposed a form of indirect domination by the U.S. over the newly independent states in Latin America and the Caribbean without touching these territories.”
United Fruit would like a word or two…
They would humbly suggest you peasants in Central America stop growing crops to feed yourselves like rice and beans. Focus on cash crops like bananas and coffee. If you don’t show the requisite wisdom to listen to these recommendations…well, you might get a visit from the death squads.
I’ll take a slightly different tack and say that it begins by equating Aristotle and his teacher Plato in philosophical terms. I’ve been puzzled by how longlived was the Academy which Plato, himself a follower of Socrates, founded. Five hundred years or so it lasted, well into the first and second centuries AD I make that, amateurishly speaking.
My( again amateurish) thesis is that Aristotle accomplished this by deliberately (he was indeed a brilliant mind) subverting Plato’s democratic principles and proclaiming his understanding to be what Plato himself was saying. Aristotle taught Philip’s son Alexander to be what he became, an empire builder. And, in the acceptance of Aristotelian thought, the Academy continued to exist long after its founder had left the scene. Instead of remaining a thinking/instruction place for all citizens, it reverted (not without resistance, I imagine) to becoming a training place for the elites only, in how they could manage to rule a subservient population, which the Athenian empire was becoming.
Yves is very correct to take issue in the first instance with the misnomer ‘autocratic’ in the title. That is where the rot begins for this article. And it DOES begin with ideology. The fish rots from the head. Slowly but inevitably, it rots.
The idea that the US is not an empire is absurd. Chalmers Johnson wrote at least 4 books about how the US is an empire of bases. And the idea that the US was not designed on institutions is also absurd. What about slavery, banking, military — the institutions enabling settler-colonialism — not to mention more recent institutions like the IMF, WB, WTO. This revisionist history is a perfect example of Herman’s and Chomsky’s white-washing narratives which are employed to manufacture consent – to create a mythology that supports manifest destiny and exceptionalism – but most of all creates a complacent and ignorant American public who go along with US wars, coups and genocide.
It is very simple. If you are a head of some state and an opponent of US and the western pirates you must become an autocrat if you want to survive.
US can always print money and pay insurgents, terrorists to use against you and your country. US can use money to bribe your officials and buy secrets from your scientists. So, the only thing you can do, as you can never have so much money is to rule with the iron fist. Let your population be afraid for their lives so they won’t take money from Uncle Sam and betray you.
So, US urge to dominate create autocratics opponents to this domination.
“the United States was the first nation designed on abstract principles of governance” – Do those include slavery, protecting the banks, settler-colonialism, racism, protecting property?
“America’s expansive concept of universal citizenship” – Citizenship which only extended to white male property-owners is universal?
“that sought economic rather than territorial advantages” – What about the Monroe Doctrine and land theft from indigenous peoples, Mexico, Philippines, Hawaii?
“United States inherited its maritime tradition … a stronger resemblance to those of imperial Athens …to defend the Greeks against Persian aggression” – When has the US ever faced outside aggression on its shores?
“a postwar military alliance system designed to protect its members from aggression by the Soviet Union” – It was the US that has continuously been the global aggressor – Latin America, Iran, Indochina, Indonesia, Africa, Middle East.
“They embraced the principles of democratic governance … universal citizenship” – Where only 10% (white male property-owners) could vote.
“American citizenship would not be restricted by national origin, race, or religion” – What fantasy history has this guy been reading?
“a land short of labor” – The typical settler-colonial myth of a country without a people.
“precluding the emergence of permanent non-citizen minorities … without rights in it.” – However with only limited rights because no rights at all would have been unstable.
“In 1924, Congress finally passed a law recognizing the country’s original Native American inhabitants as birthright citizens” – As part of a process of further land theft and removal of their nation status
“It was an imperial way of thinking” – And yet he claims the US is not an empire.
“By 1853, the U.S. had taken possession of all the enormous territories” – Why the passive “taken possession of” rather than the actual “used violent genocide to steal”?
“the United States never viewed itself as a land power” – What about Manifest Destiny? Why does the US have over 800 bases globally?
“Monroe Doctrine … indirect domination by the U.S. … without touching these territories” – I guess Barfield never read “Open Veins of Latin America”.
“until after World War II when the U.S. abandoned its previous isolationism” – What about what Smedley Butler said about “being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers”
“using proxy regimes to incorporate them into their command economy” – Isn’t that what the US did in Western Europe, Latin America, Indochina, Indonesia…
“seek economic rather than territorial hegemony through an alliance system that protected its member states from aggression”
“allowed their economies to grow rapidly” – I guess Barfield never read Walter Rodney, Eduardo Galeano, Juan Jose Arevalo, Robin Phillpot, …
“could bankroll its high defense spending without extorting payments from its allies” – As Michael Hudson explains, forcing global trading to be in US$ effectively extorted payments that funded the twin deficits.
“U.S. was not interested in recreating a closed trading system” – Because the US wanted to exploit all countries globally.
“that required both considerable expense” – As if the >$1 trillion military budget is not a considerable expense.
“the U.S. constructed a postwar international system from which it benefited” – IMF, WB allowed the US hegemon to dictate conditions to the world – not a very democratic system.
“networks of military and economic alliances that spanned the globe” – Enabled and enforced by coups, bribery, military threats and wars.
“The military alliances were designed to provide protection” – “To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” Henry Kissinger
“bilateral agreements … that allowed the stationing of American forces within these sovereign nations” – Treaties forced on states by the occupying power to allow them to remain occupied.
“U.S. to project its power worldwide without maintaining excessively large numbers of troops abroad” – What is Barfield’s definition of “excessive”?
“after installing democratically run governments” – oxymoron
“U.S. supported the creation of the European Common Market” – So neoliberalism could be imposed on all of Europe.
“was less a matter of altruism” – Because corporate US has never acted out of altruism.
“self-interest of its members to keep the system functioning” – The self-interest of its elites.
“counterproductive land wars in Vietnam and Iraq” – What basis does Barfield use to define “counterproductive”? What about all the global oppression and genocide imposed by the US outside these two examples?
“where the elites who set the U.S. policy eventually reflected the diversity of the population” – Has Barfield ever looked at the diversity of Corporate Boards, CEOs and Congress?
“Part of the attraction was its rich economy, secure private property rights, and freedom of expression” – US mythology. Most people were fleeing oppression, often under US puppet governments.
“The U.S. was certainly the first to make culture itself a profitable export.” – McCulture
“unarticulated economic and cultural principles” – i.e. the making of American myths
“maritime empires … were distinguished by their representative governments” – They only “represented” the merchant class, not the working masses.
“the state encouraged the accumulation of private wealth and protected it from arbitrary confiscation.” – This has always been the role of all states.
“The hostility toward autocratic regimes” – As Yves said, unless they are US puppet autocrats.
“Autocratic regimes in today’s world seek to achieve stability by creating an equilibrium in which they are dominant” – How does this not apply to the US oligarchs too?
“Maritime empires, by contrast, thrived on change … a higher tolerance for risk and had a propensity to upset existing economic norms” – By “propensity to upset existing economic norms” is Barfield referring to US coups and genocides?
“modern capitalist economies where no steady-state equilibrium has yet emerged” – A rather amusing comment since neoclassical economics is based on equilibrium.
“alliance building and networks of influence, rather than direct domination” – So soft domination via extortion, bribery, and military threats.
Thx for this. Really neat. Attention: Not your usual c&p job (!) + read carefully to get it all
I would recommend Barfield read Hudson’s Super Imperialism if I thought he would understand it.
A rewriting of history or the preservation of the old history of the conqueror with
By 1853, the U.S. had taken possession of all the enormous territories between its Atlantic and Pacific coasts
The territories occupation came with the extermination of the inhabitants (1700 native population over 20 million, population in 1900 250K)
The US was a sea based nation because all nations with a viable coastline were sea based, land travel was difficult (horse), sea was often faster.
The Monroe doctrine replaced European empires with US hegemony, it installed military and right wing dictatorships compliant with US policy and economic needs (see Cuba, where the US invaded and repressed local independence movements on many occasions)
The US advancement to a global power came with technological inventions, giving its ships and planes the necessary range and the US used the end of European empires and the end of WW2 as a lever to create over 1000 bases and torture sites worldwide.
Far from not supporting autocratic regimes, it installed them in Greece, Vietnam, Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia, numerous African states and S American states and the Middle East (including the assassination of democratically elected governments)