“The United States today is, by its own reckoning, the overwhelmingly
dominant power of the globe in nearly all spheres,
with the determination to impose its will by one means or another.”
—Graham E. Fuller, former vice-chair of the US National Intelligence Council1
As he was leaving office in 2017 after eight years as US president, Barack Obama wrote a letter to his successor, Donald Trump. “American leadership in this world really is indispensable,” Obama told Trump. “It’s up to us, through action and example, to sustain the international order that’s expanded steadily since the end of the Cold War, and upon which our own wealth and safety depend.”2
There was nothing new in what Obama had to tell the incoming president. These themes had pervaded the utterances of US administrations, senators, scholars and editorial writers for decades. The themes were that US leadership is necessary; that it maintains an international order; and that the US-created international order is the basis of US prosperity. Senator John McCain, a principal figure in the Republican Party, echoed Obama. “We are the chief architect and defender of an international order governed by rules derived from our political and economic values,” McCain averred. “We have grown vastly wealthier and more powerful under those rules.”3 The dual statements, one by a Democrat, the other a Republican, represented the consensus position of the US foreign policy establishment. The United States has created an international order; that order has made the United States vastly wealthier and more powerful; and the US government intends to enforce the global economic order it created. Unspoken, but true nonetheless, is the reality that the global economic order the United States has created caters, not to US citizens en masse, but to a numerically tiny class of billionaire investors and shareholders who wield an influence in Washington that vastly exceeds their numbers. To construe McCain’s use of the plural pronoun “we” as denoting all Americans is to make what Jean-Paul Sartre called the error of confusing the elite with the genus.4 Anyone who doubts that billionaire investors and shareholders wield inordinate influence in Washington should consider the backgrounds and careers of appointees to the top positions in the US state—the secretaries of defense, treasury, state, and commerce; the national security advisers; ambassadors to the UN; World Bank presidents; and so on. If not immensely wealthy themselves, they are connected to the wealthy in important ways as political lieutenants and acolytes. When Obama and McCain say “our” and “we” they mean the top one percent of US citizens, the stratum of US society that matters in the political and economic life of the country—the United States’ very raison d’être.
One ought to consider too who US public policy favors. As political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page concluded in their 2014 analysis of over 1,700 US policy issues, “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial impacts on government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”5 In other words, the demos, ordinary people, have virtually no influence on US public policy, while wealthy business people and their lobbies, who constitute only a tiny fraction of the US population, have substantial impacts. The United States, then, is a plutocracy ruled by the wealthy, not a democracy ruled by the people. And the foreign policy of a plutocracy is one which addresses the concerns, interests, and aspirations of Wall Street, not Main Street.
The architects of the post-World War II, US-led international order were Wall Street bankers and lawyers, most of whom were members of the Wall Street foreign policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). McCain was a member of the CFR, as has been virtually every person who plays, or has played, a significant role in the US departments of state, defense, treasury, national security, US intelligence, the Pentagon, or as ambassador to the UN.6
The Wall Street politicos—to coin a term denoting people with strong Wall Street connections who take on leading roles in public policy—sought to build a post-war world in which US investors and shareholders would be able to exploit labor and resources over as much of the face of the globe as US power could make possible. Anathema to their vision of a post-war world were Germany’s and Japan’s closed economies, which, for roughly a decade beginning in the mid-1930s, had locked US businesspeople out of lucrative profit-making opportunities in Europe and East Asia. Equally repellent was the people-centered economy being built in the Soviet Union, which clashed strongly with the capital-centered economy on which Wall Street’s very prosperity depended. The last thing Wall Street politicos wanted was the advance of communism, which appeared poised to take off in war-torn Europe and East Asia. The international order the Wall Street politicos would seek to establish would be one of an open world economy; it would be capitalist, and all parts of the globe would be open to exploitation by US investors and shareholders.
The “containment of Communism and Soviet power,” noted historian Melvyn P. Leffler, “was essential to preserve an open world economy.”7 Hence, gradually, “between 1947 and 1950, the United States took on the role of hegemon in the international system.”8 Washington would assume a “leadership role around the world,”9 as Germany had assumed a “leadership role” in Europe, Japan had done in East Asia, Italy had tried to do in the Mediterranean, and Britain and France had done in Africa and parts of Asia; except that, with other imperialist powers defeated, or greatly weakened, the United States would capitalize on the opportunity to exercise primacy on a world scale, to construct what Brzezinski had called a global power—that is, an unsurpassed empire of unprecedented scope and reach.
Washington saw itself as having a continuing role in “shaping an emerging global economic order” that continued “to reflect [US] interests and values.” But there were impediments. “Despite its success, our rules-based system,” noted Obama, “is now competing against alternative, less-open models.” These include models based on “state-owned enterprises,”10 which are prevalent in China, Russia, Venezuela, the DPRK, Cuba, Iran, and Syria. Indeed, every country in the Pentagon’s cross-hairs since the dissolution of the USSR, from Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, to Saddam’s Iraq, Gaddafi’s Libya, Assad’s Syria, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, have embraced “alternative, less-open models” of economic organization based on “state-owned enterprises.” In his last address to the United Nations General Assembly, Obama referred to the economy of the DPRK as a “wasteland” and a “dead end.” It too, with its central planning and state control, was an alternative, less open model. In other words, the countries which have come to be the targets of US hostility are the very same ones which have built economies that are non-compliant with the US-led global economic order. The US president promised to address these “challenges.”11
When McCain said “we” are the chief architect and defender of an international order governed by rules derived from “our” political and economic values, what he really meant was that Wall Street is the system’s chief architect. When he said that “we” have grown vastly wealthier and more powerful under rules which reflect “our” political and economic values, what he really meant was that Wall Street had grown vastly wealthier and more powerful—and that the rules reflected Wall Street’s political and economic values.
Even a cursory survey of US society quickly reveals that vast wealth and power can hardly be claimed by Main Street, but is conspicuously evident on Wall Street. Therefore, the use of words such as “we” and “our” to attribute ownership of the global economic order to all Americans, misleadingly conflates the interests of Wall Street with those of all US citizens, the overwhelming majority of whom are not in any way a part of Wall Street and, on the contrary, stand in relation to Wall Street as Korean tenant famers stood in relation to absentee landlords—as the exploited, not beneficiaries. The purpose of conflating Wall Street and Main Street is to disguise the reality that the United States is class-divided, and that the global international order which US citizens are expected to salute and pay homage to as the guarantor of their prosperity is, in reality, the guarantor of the prosperity of a numerically miniscule economic uber-class, the one percent, whose vast wealth is as dependent on the exploitation of its American compatriots as it is on the exploitation of foreign populations.
“Ideology,” Joan Robinson is reputed to have once remarked, “is like your breath. You never smell your own.” The ideology inhered in the statements of US officials, like one’s own breath, may be difficult to detect. Ideology is a formal concept which denotes a set of ideas used to justify a socially-constructed order. It performs the following functions:
Washington presents the imposition of its will on the rest of the world, not as imperialism—the process of empire maintenance and building—or as the international dictatorship of the United States, or as despotism, but as “US leadership.” References to US leadership abound in the statements of US politicians, military leaders, and commentators. “We lead the world,” declared US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power.12 “The question is never whether America should lead, but how we lead,” asserted Obama’s National Security Strategy.13 Barbara Stephenson, president of the American Foreign Service Association, described the United States as having a “global leadership role.”14 After Trump was elected, Newt Gingrich said that the new president, a reality TV star, would have a new show to star in: “‘Leading the World.’”15 The political scientist and journalist David J. Rothkopf defines the White House and, more specifically, the National Security Council, as “the nerve center” from which the world is led.16 In his second inaugural address, Bill Clinton described the United States as “the world’s greatest democracy” imbued with a mission to spread its “bright flame … throughout all the world” and to “lead a whole world of democracies,” because “America stands alone as the world’s indispensable nation.”17
Other statements of US leadership refer explicitly to an international order. US Defense Secretary James Mattis issued a statement “to the Pentagon work force that cast the United States as a bulwark of the international order.”18 Sohrab Ahmari, who had spent years as an editor of the Wall Street Journal, defined US leadership as “essential to global order” and opined that the United States’ “combination of military supremacy and decent values makes our leadership essential.”19 John McCain referred to the United States as having “an obligation” to the lead the world and a “duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth.’”20
US military strategy defines US interests to include “an open international economic system” advanced by “US leadership.” US national security interests are equated with the “security of the global economic system”; and the “presence of US military forces in key locations around the world” is characterized as underpinning this system.21 US military leaders see US leadership as global and enforced by US military supremacy. “If you have a global economy, I think you need a global navy to look after that economy,” remarked the head of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Admiral Scott Swift.22 This resonates with Alexander Haig’s admission that tens of thousands of US troops occupy Europe to ensure that European markets remain open to US exports and investment. James Stavridis, who, as a US naval flag officer, had command of all NATO forces in Europe, said that the United States regards the world’s oceans as “a vast American lake” and that the role of its navy is to dominate “a defined sea space anywhere on the globe.”23 (Mussolini regarded the Mediterranean as a vast Italian lake, but then his imperial ambitions were a good deal more modest than Washington’s.) In 2017, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, declared that his country is “a nation that both thinks and acts globally.”24 He might have added that the United States both thinks and acts in terms of global markets, and its military functions to keep those markets open and free from challenges by alternative, less open models that rely on state-owned enterprises.
US leadership, moreover, is framed as an institution that other countries of the world consent to, and even ask for. Hence, US leaders present themselves as benevolently acceding to the world’s demand to be led. We “welcome our responsibility to lead,” declared Obama, as if the mantle had been thrust on Washington.25
Washington also presents itself as leading on behalf of universal welfare and universal values. For example, the US National Security Strategy of 2015 declares that American leadership is exercised “in the cause of universal values.”26 Washington tells us that “US leadership is a global force for good” and that there “is no substitute for American leadership … in the cause of universal values.”27 Obama, who left a trail of chaos and destruction across the Muslim world in his wake, could say, with apparent detachment from reality, that “I believe we [the US government] have been a force for good.”28 Delusion? Yes, but only if we assume that Obama was referring to a universal good. Since it is almost axiomatic that the United States has not acted as a force for universal good, unless Obama was detached from reality, the force for good to which he referred could only be specific to the interests of the Wall Street politicos who shaped the global economic order in whose interests Obama acted. Obama’s presidency was a force for good for a numerically small section of the US population that matters in US political life—billionaire investors and the immediate circle of professionals who attend to their profit-making needs, all of whom continue to enjoy rising wealth at the expense of everyone else.
Obama’s presidency was marked by true statements delivered with strategic omissions that made them into masterpieces of equivocation. If, through the brilliance of his equivocations, the bulk of the US population believed that the United States acts for the benefit of all, well, then, that was well and good, for the United States could hardly act as a force for the good of its wealthiest citizens without the consent and cooperation of the bottom 99 percent. And the menu peuple would hardly voluntarily cooperate if they believed that the movement of their government was along an arc defined by the interests of billionaire investors. The function of US presidents, as the principal face through which the Wall Street-dominated US government presents itself, is to manage the ideological environment. They must present Wall Street’s interests as Main Street’s interests and the United States’ interests as the world’s interests; US leadership must be presented as benevolent and universally beneficial, rather than exploitative and aimed at aggrandizing a hyper-wealthy Wall Street-centered minority. And US leadership must be presented, not as constructed and imposed by the United States, but as something everyone desires, except those deemed evil. In an instance of circular reasoning, the turpitude of the latter is defined by their rejection of US leadership. Forces which reject US leadership are evil. How do we know? Because they reject US leadership.
Over and over, US officials repeat a mantra—US leadership is “indispensable”—but they don’t say who it is indispensable to. The truth of the matter is that US leadership is indispensable to US billionaires as a class; it is a desideratum of their vast wealth and power. But the continual references to indispensability, made with the strategic omission of who US leadership is indispensable to, become invocations of “desirability.” We’re to believe that US leadership is universally desirable and good.
What qualities does the United States uniquely possess to make its leadership on a global scale desirable? The answer, apparently, is its “unique contributions and capabilities,” according to the 2015 National Security Strategy. But the strategy document fails to spell out what these contributions and capabilities are, leaving us to guess. One argument might be that the United States has constructed an international order that benefits all, and that the United States is the only country wealthy and powerful enough to enforce the universally beneficial international order; consequently, its leadership is desirable. Only an epistemology of ignorance can rescue this view from its utter disregard of reality.
US ideology has historical resonances. Claims to benevolent leadership have been used by other empires to beautify their projects of domination. Japanese empire-builders made clear their “intent to … lift Korea out of endemic poverty, eliminate governmental dysfunction, and bring prosperity to Korea in the process through expanded trade.” Japan “would open Korea to the global economy, a win-win solution for both countries.”29 We saw how that worked out. The journalist Hugh Byas condemned Japan in 1942 for sharing the same belief as Nazi Germany—the belief that Japan had “unique qualities that [made] it superior to its neighbors and [gave] it a special mission to perform.”30 Who can deny that the same imperial arrogance of superiority, accompanied by a special mission to lead, has not touched US leaders?
European empires, along with the Empire of Japan, invoked the concept of racial superiority to justify their exploitation of subject peoples. Relationships of domination were presented as relationships of benevolence. The superior race was taking inferior people in hand, and guiding them for their own benefit until they were able to govern themselves. Consider that Washington today refuses to yield op-con to South Korea because it deems Seoul not yet ready to handle its own self-defense. Today, concepts of white (or Japanese) supremacy are no longer formally tolerable, and qualities said (against the evidence) to be unique to, or more fully developed in, the United States (industriousness, inventiveness, equality of opportunity) assume the role previously played by racial superiority.
The French imperial theorist, Jules Harmand, justified European domination by reference to its “superiority” which provided it with the moral legitimacy to lead in order to bestow its blessings on lesser people. The frequently offered justifications of US leadership come remarkably close to Harmand’s justification of European empire. For example, US ideology constructs an international hierarchy, not of races, but of nations. It declares that the United States is the superior nation, or, if we like, the superior civilization. Its superiority is to be understood as based not merely on mechanical, economic, and military superiority, but on moral superiority, which US presidents and other ideologues define as commitment to “human rights and democracy” (conspicuously absent in US support for every dictator, king, emir, or sultan who facilitates Wall Street’s wealth accumulation). The United States’ right to direct the rest of humanity is presented as springing from its ostensible commitment to universal values which make it a shining beacon on a hill—the last best hope on earth, as John McCain emetically put it.
Additionally, US ideology presents US leadership as enforcing order on the world, and of bringing security to other countries, on whose soil US military personnel are implanted, for reasons we’re to believe are due to the host countries lacking the aptitude or means to defend themselves. Like European civilization, which flattered itself that it was conferring its blessings on inferior people, the United States establishes missions in the name of spreading democracy, human rights, economic aid, and military assistance on lesser countries implied to be incapable of self-governance, self-defense, or economic policy-making. With these mental and material instruments which “lesser” countries lack and now receive, the inferior countries of the globe, owing to the largesse bestowed upon them by a selfless America, now gain the idea and ambition for a better existence, and the means of achieving it.
Cutting through the dense, all-surrounding fog of US imperialist ideology, the grand strategy of the US state is revealed to be one in which Washington imposes an economic order on the world, at the center of which lurks Wall Street’s interests, and which is hostile to alternative economic orders that do not prioritize the interests of US capital—namely, those in which the state has a role to play in the economy, through planning or enterprise-ownership or tilting the playing field in favor of local business interests or imposing conditions to protect labor or the environment to a degree corporate America deems to be onerous. If we take “America” to represent the numerically insignificant class of billionaires at the apex of US political and economic life, then US grand strategy is to “corporate Americanize” the world economy—that is, to order it in the interests of Wall Street.
If that is the United States’ grand global strategy, what then is its Korea strategy? When John Bolton, then US undersecretary of state for arms control, was asked this question in 2003 by New York Times’ reporter Christopher Marquis, Marquis said that Bolton “strode over to a bookshelf, pulled off a volume and slapped it on the table. It was called ‘The End of North Korea.’” That, Bolton said, “‘is our policy.’”31 Richard N. Haas, who was director of policy planning at the US State Department before becoming president of the Council on Foreign Relations, described the goal of US Korea policy as “ending North Korea’s existence as an independent entity and reunifying the Korean Peninsula.”32 In other words, Washington’s goal vis-à-vis Korea is to eliminate the DPRK, and bring the peninsula under the proximal control of the ROK, and therefore, under the distal control of Washington.
The reason Washington seeks this outcome has more to do with China, and secondarily Russia, than the DPRK itself. China and Russia are strong enough that they cannot be easily coerced by Washington into accepting subordinate roles in the Wall Street-defined global economic order. And both countries, China perhaps more strongly than Russia, have adopted “alternative economic models” which feature a strong role for state-owned enterprises, that vile apparatus of state-directed development so loathed by the owners of private capital. Washington would like to make both countries more open to exploitation by private US economic interests than they already are—that is, the goal is to order US-Chinese and US-Russian economic relationships so that they preponderantly benefit private US enterprises. To that end, Washington aspires to successfully pressure Moscow and Beijing to abandon dirigiste economic policies which favor local businesses and publicly-owned enterprises.
Washington also has concerns about the rise of China as an economic power. China’s growing economic dominance threatens to supplant US capital from the Asia-Pacific region. For this reason, the Obama administration began to shift US military forces more heavily toward East Asia and the Pacific to accomplish the goal of what was called “balancing China’s rise,” where “balancing” was used as a euphemism for “eclipsing.” This was the so-called “pivot” to the Far East. In addition, an investor agreement was championed, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to thwart the establishment in Asia and Oceania of a Chinese-centered economic area. The impetus for the agreement was to prevent “countries like China” writing “the rules of the global economy,” announced Obama. “We should write those rules,” he declared.33 Indeed, that is the whole point of US imperialism—to write the rules of the global economic order to favor US free enterprise. By “we” Obama meant Wall Street. Wall Street should write the rules of trade, commerce, and investment, to suit Wall Street’s interests.
A US military presence in Korea, a country which shares a border with China and Russia, helps Washington pursue its goal of containing these two potential challengers to Wall Street’s hegemony. Washington would like to block Beijing and Moscow from drawing other countries into the Chinese and Russian economic orbits. It also aspires to dislodge countries already strongly economically linked to China and Russia in order to absorb them into the Wall Street-centric global order. To this end, Washington spent $5 billion on regime change to draw Ukraine out of Russia’s economic orbit, and into that of the US-superintended Western European economy.34 While this has no direct relevance to Korea, it does illustrate the lengths to which Washington will go to capture markets and investment opportunities for corporate America.
Employing Korea as a fixed aircraft carrier, located menacingly on the peripheries of China and Russia, helps Washington create a “security architecture” for Japan. By playing the lead role in guaranteeing Japan’s security against threats from China and Russia, the United States partly relieves Japan of the burden of funding its own self-defense. This in turn makes Japan militarily dependent on the United States, unable to use arms to challenge the US-defined global economic order in favor of one that is more directly congruent with the aspirations of Japanese investors and businesses.
Of course, a US troop presence in Korea is greatly facilitated by a subservient Korean state. The security needs of the state in the face of the hostility of the DPRK provide a public justification for the presence of tens of thousands of US military personnel. In reality, the ROK is militarily stronger than the DPRK and capable of defending itself. What’s more, the ROK is sheltered beneath a US nuclear umbrella. Washington has declared on several occasions that an attack by North Korea on the ROK will be met by overwhelming force. In short, South Korea does not face a significant security threat from its northern neighbor. Pyongyang has no desire to commit suicide by crossing the armistice line, nor is it unaware of its limited military capabilities vis-à-vis its southern rival.
Pyongyang long ago abandoned any hope of unifying Korea by military means, recognizing that the imbalance in military strength in the ROK’s favor makes the project quixotic. As an alternative, on many occasions North Korean leaders have proposed a peaceful reunification. Under the plan first sketched out by Kim Il-sung, the South Korean economy would continue to be capitalist, but US troops would quit the country. A united Korea, under one flag and one government, would strongly foster intra-Korean security. And yet, just as often as Pyongyang has proposed this arrangement, Seoul has rejected it. A US military presence, from the point of view of the ROK government, is non-negotiable. US troops must remain on the peninsula for US geostrategic reasons, to stifle China and Russia.
A related goal of Washington’s Korea strategy is to use the ROK military as an Asian army in reserve. From Washington’s point of view, the 600,000 active-duty personnel of the ROK military, and its 3.5 million reservists, all under US wartime command, are of far greater significance than the comparatively tiny US military garrison in Korea, numbering less than 30,000. From the very beginning, South Korean soldiers trained for, operated on behalf of, and fought for, US goals, under the direction of US advisers and US commanders. The model that journalist Marguerite Higgins observed in the late 1940s, of a comparatively small number of US soldiers training a much larger force of South Koreans to do the shooting for them, is still in place. The significant South Korean military is a chess piece to be moved about on a grand chess board by planners in Washington seeking domination of Eurasia.
This is in keeping with European colonial tradition. European powers sought colonies, not only as markets, sources of raw material, and soil on which to settle surplus populations, but also as sources of manpower for wars. The British, for example, drew heavily on India to supply their fighting forces in the Great War. Mohandas Gandhi, known today as a great advocate of non-violence, engaged in recruiting 500,000 of his compatriots “for the British army and did it with such zeal as to write to the Viceroy’s personal secretary: ‘I have an idea that if I became your recruiting agent in chief I might rain men on you.’”35 The French, similarly, relied heavily on colonial troops. Canada contributed 600,000 of its citizens to the war, which was declared on its behalf by Britain, with not a single Canadian consulted. David Olusoga’s book, The World’s War, makes the point that World War I was truly a world war, largely because the European powers at the center of it called on their vast colonial possessions for manpower36. Hence, Washington’s goal in Korea of maintaining a puppet state capable of disgorging trained military personnel to fight in US wars continues a hoary imperial tradition.
Washington seeks the end of the DPRK, to use John Bolton’s description of US aims, because Pyongyang is against the aforementioned US goals. The DPRK has a people- and Korean-centered economy, rejects US leadership and the idea that countries can be arranged in a hierarchy with the United States at the top, and demands the exit of US troops from the peninsula. North Koreans also repudiate the idea of a US puppet state of Korea. While they’re willing to tolerate a capitalist economy in the south under their proposed plan for reunification, they insist that Korea be a truly sovereign, independent state. No state can be truly independent if it hosts foreign troops on its soil and places its military under foreign command. No country can be truly sovereign if it submits to US leadership. Leadership, as Washington means it, is the negation of sovereignty; it is the process of yielding decision-making authority to Washington and, indirectly, to Wall Street.
1 Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam. (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2010), 252-253.
2 Letter of outgoing US President Barack Obama to incoming President Donald Trump. http://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/03/politics/obama-trump-letter-inauguration-day/index.html
3 John McCain, “John McCain: Why We Must Support Human Rights,” The New York Times, May 8, 2017.
4 Sartre, 26.
5 Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014).
6 See: Laurence H. Shoup, Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015) and Laurence H. Shoup & William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & United States Foreign Policy. Authors’ Choice Press, 2004.
7 Leffler, 96.
8 Ibid., 64.
9 Ibid., 69.
10 US National Security Strategy, 2015.
12 Ibid.
12 “U.S. envoy urges no cut in U.N. funding,” The Associated Press, January 13, 2017.
13 US National Security Strategy, 2015.
14 Felicia Schwartz, “U.S. to reduce staffing at embassy in Cuba in response to mysterious attacks,” The Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2017.
15 Michael M. Grynbaum, “An ’apprentice’ role for Trump opens door wide for questions,” The New York Times, December 9, 2016.
16 Mark Landler, “Trump National Security team gets a slow start,” The New York Times, January 18, 2017.
17 William J. Clinton, Inaugural Address. January 20, 1997.
18 Michael R. Gordon, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, “Trump will call for a Pentagon plan to hit ISIS harder, official say,” The New York Times, January 26, 2017.
19 Sohrab Ahmari, “A noble responsibility,” The Wall Street Journal, May 6, 2013.
20 Solomon Hughes, “Trump warns McCain: ‘I fight back’,” The Wall Street Journal, October 17, 2017.
21 National Military Strategy of the United States, 2015.
22 Maxwell Watts, “U.S. allies in Asia are anxious, Pacific Fleet commander says,” The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2017.
23 James Stavridis, “Growing threat to the U.S. at sea,” The Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2017.
24 Posture statement of 19th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before the 115th Congress Senate Armed Services Budget Hearing, June 13, 2017.
25 Transcript: President Obama’s speed outlining strategy to defeat Islamic state, The Washington Post, September 10, 2014.
26 US National Security Strategy, 2015.
27 Ibid.
28 Obama address to the United Nations General Assembly, 2016.
29 Paine, The Japanese Empire, 22.
30 Ibid., 103.
31 Christopher Marquis, “Absent From the Korea Talks: Bush’s Hard-Liner,” The New York Times, September 3, 2003.
32 Richard N. Haass, “Time to end the North Korean threat,” The Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2014.
33 Statement by the President on the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, October 5, 2015.
34 See Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland’s December 13, 2013 address to the US-Ukraine Foundation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2fYcHLouXY)
35 Losurdo, Non-Violence: A History Beyond the Myth. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015. 2015, 28.
36 David Olusoga, The World’s War. (London: Head of Zeus, 2014).