The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II by John W. Dower

Author:John W. Dower [Dower, John W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, ebook
ISBN: 9781608467266
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2017-03-19T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

ARCS OF INSTABILITY

The most popular Cold War catchphrase conveying the distorted picture of monolithic communism that Robert McNamara later repudiated was the “domino theory.” This traced back to the mid-1950s, when the United States replaced the military forces of colonial France in Vietnam. If indigenous communist forces fighting to unite that divided country succeeded, it was declared, this would set off a chain reaction throughout Asia in which country after country fell under Moscow-led communist domination, up to and including Japan.1

The worldwide proxy wars both Cold War superpowers had engaged in reflected the ubiquity of this sort of chain-reaction alarmism; and this mindset on the part of American strategic analysts did not disappear with the demise of the Soviet Union. It was redirected and reformulated in response to new perceived threats—a process already articulated in the Carter Doctrine of 1980, with its warning about the menace posed by the sudden emergence of the revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran.

The domino metaphor did not survive the Cold War. In the 1990s, catchphrases of the chaos-in-the-littorals sort drew attention in US military circles, and by the turn of the century it had become common to speak of a world imperiled by an “arc of instability.” A top-level intelligence report in 2004 captured the panoramic sweep of this, calling attention to “a great arc of instability from Sub-Saharan Africa, through North Africa, into the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus and South and Central Asia and through parts of Southeast Asia.”2

In this and other government reports, the arc of instability was associated with contradictions in the megatrend of globalization. On the one hand, globalization promised a world in which technological advances created a more integrated and prosperous international system. On the other hand, these high-tech, high-speed developments were exacerbating inequalities and heightening tensions between “haves” and “have-nots,” both among and within nations. The disruptive side of globalization was the fertile ground in which protest and agitation, including radical Islamist-led terrorism, could take root. Even while propagating a strident gospel of antiglobalization coupled with anti-Westernization, such protest flourished by exploiting the new information technology to propagandize its cause while maintaining a decentralized mode of operation.3

The highly visible US wars, occupations, and interventions that followed September 11 were responses to this perception of ever-widening arcs of instability. Less visible were the extensive operations undertaken by covert US military units specializing in “unconventional warfare.” When the Bush administration ended in January 2009, these elite special forces were deployed in around sixty nations. This was twenty countries less than the secret “worldwide attack matrix” the CIA produced following the September 11 attacks but exactly what Rumsfeld had predicted publicly. A little over a year later, the press put the number of countries involved at seventy-five. In 2011, a spokesman for US Special Operations Command disclosed that, on any given day, American military personnel were indeed engaged in a range of missions in around seventy nations, but by year’s end the total number of countries would be around 120.

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