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October 25 - November 3, 2023
By the war’s end, the United States had produced 84,000 tanks, 2.2 million trucks, 6.2 million rifles, and 41 billion rounds of small ammunition. The war against Hitler may have been a European fight, but it was very much made in the U.S.A.
Teddy Roosevelt, though obsessed with the “English-speaking peoples,” spoke French and German and could follow along in Italian. Woodrow Wilson, the era’s other scholar-president, read German scholarship and contemplated moving to Europe to better learn the language. Herbert Hoover ranged even further. He had tried to learn Osage as a boy, his first publication was a translation of a sixteenth-century Latin treatise on mining, and he and his wife, Lou, used Mandarin (learned while living in China) when they wished to speak privately.
In 1935 the State Department announced that it was annexing Baker, Howland, and Jarvis Islands in the central Pacific. Two days later, it hastily rescinded the announcement. The United States didn’t need to annex those islands, officials clarified with embarrassment. A consultation of the records had revealed that it already owned them.
Four days after it, the French fashion designer Louis Réard debuted a two-piece bathing suit. He dubbed it the “bikini,” on the grounds that the sight of a woman’s mostly unclothed body was as sensational as the bomb.
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated sixty-six more nuclear weapons on or near Bikini and the next-door atoll of Enewetak.
One such test at Bikini was of a hydrogen bomb, the “Bravo shot” in 1954. Its fifteen-megaton yield was twice as large as expected, and unusually strong winds carried the fallout well beyond the cordoned-off blast zone. Had it detonated over Washington, D.C., it could have killed 90 percent of the populations of Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York within three days.
Henry Kissinger, the country’s most esteemed civilian nuclear expert, voiced the prevailing attitude in blunter fashion. “There are only 90,000 people out there,” he said, referring to Micronesia. “Who gives a damn?”
The Japanese government conducted tests of the fallout (something the U.S. government declined to do). It found alarming levels of radioactivity in seawater as far as two thousand miles away from Bikini and strong radioactivity in the rain that fell on Japan.
The Japanese Gojira was a protest film, hammering away at the dangers of the U.S. testing in the Pacific. The English-language Godzilla, by contrast, was just another monster flick.
An artist named Gerald Holtom designed a symbol for the Aldermaston march. “I was in despair,” he remembered. He sketched himself “with hands palm out stretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle around it.” The lone individual standing helpless in the face of world-annihilating military might—it was “such a puny thing,” thought Holtom. But his creation, the peace symbol, resonated and quickly traveled around the world.
The Japanese had gone from being the masters of Asia to subjects in an occupied country. MacArthur ruled Japan unabashedly as a dictator.
Way ahead. Sony was the Apple of its day. In the 1960s it introduced the portable television, high-quality color television, and the first desktop calculator that didn’t require vacuum tubes. In the 1970s it was the VCR and the Walkman. In the 1980s Sony debuted compact discs, the Discman, the camcorder, the 3.5-inch floppy computer disk,
Resentment curdled, at least in some quarters. “They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs. They knock the hell out of our companies,” complained the real estate mogul Donald Trump on television. This issue marked Trump’s first foray into politics, and it struck a chord. The show’s host, Oprah Winfrey, noted that Trump’s message sounded like “presidential talk.” Would he ever consider running? “Probably not,” Trump replied, “but I do get tired of seeing the country ripped off.”
With Aramco’s blessing, he and his brother started their own construction firm: Mohamed and Abdullah, Sons of Awadh bin Laden.
These were choppy political waters, but Mohamed bin Laden surfed them adroitly. He became the Saudi government’s preferred builder. At the same time, he did so much business with the United States that he retained an agent in New York. He built classified projects for the U.S. military, including air bases and garrisons around Saudi Arabia’s western coast. He sent his oldest son, Salem, to England for a Western education. Four other sons would go on to study civil engineering in the United States.
Resistance fighters, known as the mujahidin, made protracted war on the Soviet-backed state. The Saudi government, eager to establish itself as the world defender of Islam, supported them. So did the United States, which enjoyed watching the other side expend its energies in a luckless war in Asia.
Osama bin Laden, keen to take on the godless superpower occupying Muslim lands, joined the mujahidin.
eventually he moved to Peshawar. He brought with him what he estimated to be a hundred tons of heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia: bulldozers, dump trucks, and trench-digging equipment. He dug tunnels and built roads. He put up air-raid shelters. He built a hospital.
Bin Laden was, in other words, an infrastructure guy. He was essentially running a mujahidin base in Pakistan. In 1988 he formed a small organization to direct the jihad. It was called, fittingly, al-Qaeda al-Askariya (“the Military Base”). Or just al-Qaeda (“the Base”), for short.
The House of Saud knew from faith, but it had little confidence in Bin Laden’s plan. Instead, King Fahd had agreed to meet with Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who’d flown to Jeddah a day after the invasion with General Norman Schwarzkopf and the Pentagon’s Paul Wolfowitz in tow. Cheney wanted to reopen Dhahran to the U.S. military. “After the danger is over, our forces will go home,” he promised. “I would hope so,” Crown Prince Abdullah responded under his breath, in Arabic.
King Fahd agreed. “Come with all you can bring,” he told Cheney. “Come as fast as you can.”
Iraq had seized Kuwait with some three hundred thousand seasoned troops, four thousand tanks, and hundreds of combat aircraft.
The Iraqi army was the fourth largest in the world (ranking just below the U.S. Army),
Ten minutes into the attack, much of Iraq’s infrastructural network, including the Baghdad power grid, had been disabled. Within hours, Hussein’s communications were knocked out.
The barrage continued for forty-three days. Fighting an air war over a desert was much easier than fighting one over a jungle, it turned out.
At the urging of the nervous Saudi government, Bin Laden left the country, making his way eventually to Afghanistan. But he did not drop the issue. That the U.S. troops stayed in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War, in breach of Cheney’s promise, only added fuel to Bin Laden’s fire.
The United States had thus expended nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars’ worth of missiles to kill a dozen or two low-level al-Qaeda members and destroy the factory that made more than half of Sudan’s medicine, including vital antimalarials.
Since sanctions against Sudan made importing medicine difficult, this caused an uncounted number of needless deaths—Germany’s ambassador to Sudan guessed “several tens of thousands”—in one of the world’s poorest countries.
Nineteen hijackers, fifteen from Saudi Arabia, commandeered four commercial aircraft. One hit the Pentagon (“a military base,” Bin Laden explained). Two more struck the World Trade Center. (“It wasn’t a children’s school!”) The fourth, en route to the U.S. Capitol, crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Bin Laden had found a way to make air strikes without an air force.
This is worth emphasizing. After the 9/11 attacks, “Why do they hate us?” was the constant question. Yet Bin Laden’s motives were neither unknowable nor obscure. September 11 was, in large part, retaliation against the United States for its empire of bases.
In a way, Bin Laden got lucky with George W. Bush, who had recently succeeded Bill Clinton. Bush could have treated the 9/11 attacks as a crime, arrested the perpetrators, and brought them to justice. Instead, he declared a “war on terror” of global expanse and promised to “rid the world of evil-doers.”
In fact, the Bush administration had first taken an interest in them when, shortly before September 11, counterterrorism officials had tested an unarmed Predator drone over Kandahar and spotted a tall man in white, flowing robes surrounded by a security detail—quite likely Bin Laden himself. Arming the drones would ensure that the United States could act should it sight him again.
Foreign prisons, walled compounds, hidden bases, island colonies, GPS antenna stations, pinpoint strikes, networks, planes, and drones—these are the locales and instruments of the ongoing war on terror. This is the shape of power today. This is the world the United States made.
The combination was potent: a legal environment where foreign workers could toil for paltry wages with little oversight to stitch garments labeled MADE IN THE USA.
So, for the purposes of labor law, the Northern Marianas wasn’t part of the United States. For the purposes of trade, it was. And for the purposes of lobbying regulations, it was a foreign government.
Had this been litigated, it would have made for fascinating case law. McCain was, per the 1937 statute, a citizen by virtue of his birth. But he wasn’t born a citizen, as no law made him a citizen at the time of his birth. Arguably, then, he was not a “natural born citizen” and thus not eligible for the presidency. As Gabriel Chin, the law professor who unearthed this, put it, McCain was born “eleven months and a hundred yards short of citizenship.”
McCain’s Senate colleagues were nervous enough to pass a nonbinding resolution declaring him to be a natural born citizen.
In the end, McCain and Palin weren’t much impeded by their colonial entanglements. They were white, and they projected an image of being “American”—McCain a war hero from a military family, Palin a fierce defender of what she called “the real America.”
The same immunity was not enjoyed by their opponent in the 2008 election, Barack Obama. On paper, Obama had fewer colonial liabilities than his opponents. He’d been born in Hawai‘i two years after it became a state, so there was no question as to his eligibility for the presidency—he didn’t have the McCain problem. And though Hawai‘i, like Alaska, has a formidable sovereignty movement, Obama had never engaged with it—he didn’t have the Palin problem, either. He spoke little of Hawai‘i while campaigning. Instead, he stressed his Kansan mother and his political education as a community organizer
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Without the public doubts concerning Obama’s “Americanness,” Trump would quite likely not have been elected.
There are about four million people living in the territories today, in Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas. They’re subject to the whims of Congress and the president, but they can’t vote for either. More than fifty years after the Voting Rights Act, they remain disenfranchised.
Britain and France have some thirteen overseas bases between them, Russia has nine, and various other countries have one—in all, there are probably thirty overseas bases owned by non-U.S. countries. The United States, by contrast, has roughly eight hundred, plus agreements granting it access to still other foreign sites.
Yet empire is not only a pejorative. It’s also a way of describing a country that, for good or bad, has outposts and colonies. In this sense, empire is not about a country’s character, but its shape. And by this definition, the United States has indisputably been an empire and remains one today.
Territory still matters today. Colonialism hovers in the background of politics at the highest level. McCain, Palin, Obama, and Trump have all been touched by it. That may seem like an odd and surprising fact. But we should get over our surprise. The history of the United States is the history of empire.
