“Our S.O.B.s”–America and the Autocrats
In one of history’s lucky accidents, the juxtaposition of two extraordinary events suddenly stripped the architecture of American global power bare for all to see. Between November 2010 and January 2011, WikiLeaks activists splashed snippets from 2,017 purloined US embassy cables, loaded with scurrilous comments about national leaders from Argentina to Zimbabwe, on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Then, just a few weeks later, the Middle East erupted in pro-democracy protests against the region’s autocratic leaders, many of whom were close US allies whose foibles had been detailed in those same cables.
Suddenly, it was possible to see the foundations of a world order that rested significantly on national leaders who served Washington as loyal subordinate elites that were, in reality, a motley collection of autocrats, aristocrats, and uniformed thugs. Then, in September 2011, the picture became clearer still when WikiLeaks accidentally released its entire cache of 251,287 confidential cables from 274 US embassies and consulates worldwide. At long last, we could grasp the larger logic of otherwise often inexplicable American foreign policy choices over the past half century.1
Why would the CIA risk controversy in 1965 at the height of the Cold War by overthrowing an accepted leader like Sukarno in Indonesia? Why would the US embassy encourage the assassination of the Catholic autocrat Ngô Đình Diệm at Saigon in 1963? The answer—and thanks to WikiLeaks and the “Arab spring” this is now so much clearer—is that each became insubordinate and so expendable.
Why, half a century later in 2011, would Washington betray its stated democratic principles by backing Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak against millions of demonstrators and then, when he faltered, use its leverage to encourage his replacement, at least initially, with his own intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, a man best known for running Cairo’s torture chambers (and lending them out to Washington)? The answer again: because both were agile political operatives skilled in serving Washington’s interests while simultaneously servicing the needs of their constituents in this key Arab state.2
Across the greater Middle East from Tunisia and Egypt to Bahrain and Yemen, the democratic protests of the Arab spring were suddenly threatening to sweep away figures crucial to the wielding of American power. Of course, all modern empires have relied on dependable surrogates to translate their global power into local control—and for most of them, the moment when those elites began to stir, talk back, and assert their own agendas was also the moment when you knew that imperial collapse was in the cards.
If the “velvet revolutions” that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 tolled the death knell for the Soviet Empire, then the “jasmine revolutions” that spread fitfully, painfully, violently across the Middle East after 2011 may well contribute, in the fullness of time, to the eclipse of American global power.
Putting the Military in Charge
To understand the importance of such subordinate elites, look back to the Cold War’s early days when a desperate White House was searching for something, anything that could halt the seemingly unstoppable spread of what Washington saw as anti-American and pro-communist sentiment.
In December 1954, the NSC met in the White House to stake out a strategy that could tame the powerful nationalist forces of change then sweeping the globe. Across Asia and Africa, a half-dozen European empires that had guaranteed global order for more than a century were giving way to new nations, many—as Washington saw it—susceptible to “communist subversion.” In Latin America, there were stirrings of leftist opposition to the region’s growing urban poverty and rural landlessness. To make it “absolutely clear we will not tolerate Communism anywhere in the Western Hemisphere,” influential Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey advised his NSC colleagues that they should “stop talking so much about democracy” and instead “support dictatorships of the right if their policies are pro-American.” At that moment, Dwight Eisenhower interrupted to observe, with a flash of strategic insight, that Humphrey was, in effect, saying: “They’re OK if they’re our s.o.b.’s.” The secretary agreed, adding: “Whatever we may choose to say in public about ideas and idealism, among ourselves we’ve got to be a great deal more practical and materialistic.”3
It was a moment to remember. The president had just articulated, with crystalline clarity, the system of global dominion that Washington would implement for the next fifty years—setting aside democratic principles for a tough realpolitik policy of backing any reliable leader who backed us, building a worldwide network of national (and often nationalist) leaders who would nonetheless put Washington’s needs above local ones. To consolidate its dominion, Washington would build a worldwide system of subordinate elites that became nothing less than an Archimedean lever to shift the globe in its direction.
In 1958, military coups in Iraq, Pakistan, and Thailand suddenly focused the NSC’s attention on the Third World’s militaries as forces to be reckoned with. At one meeting, NSC officials agreed that “it was desirable to encourage the military to stabilize a conservative system” by providing “at least a minimum of military assistance to these backward and undeveloped countries.” To maximize such leverage, Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, “stressed the need for our military attachés and for the personnel of our Military Assistance Advisory Groups to be carefully selected so that they could develop useful and appropriate relationships with the rising military leaders and factions in the underdeveloped countries.” Expressing “vigorous support” for this CIA suggestion, President Eisenhower added that “the trend towards military take-overs in the underdeveloped countries of Asia and Africa was almost certainly going to continue,” making it important “to orient the potential military leaders of these countries in a pro-Western rather than in a pro-Communist direction.” Bringing foreign military leaders to the United States for further “training” would, it was suggested, facilitate “management of the forces of change released by the development” of these emerging nations.4 In another moment of clarity, the administration now realized that military juntas could, if cultivated, serve as an important bulwark against communist takeovers.
Worldwide, Washington would pour massive military aid into cultivating the armed forces across the planet by using “training missions” to create crucial ties between American advisers and the officer corps in country after country. If subordinate elites did not seem subordinate enough, then these American advisers could help identify alternative leaders who would skip the ballot box and seize power by coup d’état.
When civilian presidents proved insubordinate, the CIA went to work promoting such coups that would install reliable military successors. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, America’s trust in the militaries of its client states would only grow. Washington, for example, gave Egypt’s military a solid subsidy of $1.3 billion annually, but provided lesser amounts, ranging from $250 to $500 million, for the country’s economic development. As a result, in January 2011 when demonstrations in Cairo rocked the Mubarak regime, the New York Times reported that “a 30-year investment paid off as American generals … and intelligence officers quietly called … friends they had trained with,” successfully urging the army’s support for a “peaceful transition” to civilian rule that would soon fall to, yes, a military coup.5
Elsewhere in the Middle East, Washington has, since the 1950s, followed the British imperial preference for Arab aristocrats by cultivating allies that included a shah (Iran), sultans (Abu Dhabi, Oman), emirs (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai), and kings (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco). Across this vast, volatile region from Morocco to Iran, Washington courted these royalist regimes with military alliances, weapons systems, CIA support for local security, a safe American haven for their capital, and special treatment for those favored, including access to educational institutions in the United States or Department of Defense overseas schools for their children.6
America was, of course, by no means the first hegemon to build its global power on the gossamer threads of personal ties to local leaders. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain may have ruled the waves, but when it reached land, like empires past, it needed local allies who could serve as intermediaries in controlling complex, volatile societies. These relations were the only realistic way that a small island nation of just forty million could rule a global empire of some four hundred million, nearly a quarter of all humanity.
From 1850 to 1950, Britain governed its formal colonies through alliances with an extraordinary array of local elites—from Fiji Island chiefs and Malay sultans to Indian maharajas and African emirs. Simultaneously, Britain reigned over an even larger “informal empire” through subordinate elites that encompassed emperors (from Beijing to Istanbul), kings (from Bangkok to Cairo), and presidents (from Buenos Aires to Caracas). At the peak of its informal empire circa 1880, Britain’s domain in Latin America, the Middle East, and China was larger in population than its formal colonial empire in India and Africa. Its entire global empire, in other words, rested on the slender ties of cooperation from loyal local elites.7
Throughout Britain’s century of world dominion, 1815 to 1914, its self-confident agents of empire, from imperial viceroys in ostrich-plumed hats to district officers in khaki shorts, ruled much of Africa and Asia through protectorates and direct colonial rule. In the succeeding half century of American hegemony, Washington substituted its ambassadors, CIA station chiefs, and military advisers as envoys to the presidents and prime ministers of the new nations that had emerged from Europe’s faded empires.
When the Cold War coincided with an era of rapid decolonization, the world’s two superpowers turned to the same methods, regularly using their espionage agencies to manipulate the leaders of newly independent states. The Soviet Union’s KGB and its surrogates—like the Stasi in East Germany and the Securitate in Romania—enforced political conformity among the fourteen Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe and competed with the United States to win allies across the Third World. Simultaneously, the CIA monitored the loyalties of national leaders on four continents, employing coups, bribery, and covert operations to control and, when necessary, change nettlesome national leaders.
In an era of nationalist feeling, however, the loyalty of those elites proved a complex matter. Many of them were driven by their own deep feelings of nationalism, which meant that they had to be closely monitored. So critical were these subordinate elites, and so troublesome was their urge toward insubordination, that the CIA repeatedly launched risky covert operations to bring them to heel, sparking some of the great crises of the Cold War.
Since its global dominion emerged in a postcolonial era of national independence, Washington had little choice but to work not simply with surrogates or puppets but with allies who still sought to maximize what they saw as their nation’s interests (as well as their own). Even at the apex of its global power in the 1950s, when its domination was relatively unquestioned, Washington was forced into hard bargaining with prickly allies like South Korean autocrat Syngman Rhee and South Vietnam’s Ngô Đình Diệm. In South Korea during the 1960s, its president, General Park Chung-hee, typically bartered troop deployments to Vietnam for billions of US development dollars, which helped spark the country’s economic “miracle.” In the process, Washington paid up, but got what it wanted most of all: fifty thousand Korean troops as guns-for-hire helpers in its unpopular war in Vietnam.8
Our Man in Saigon and the “Mayor of Kabul”
A closer examination of Washington’s relations with two of those handpicked allies, Ngô Đình Diệm of Saigon and Hamid Karzai of Kabul, though separated by nearly half a century, illustrates the enormous difficulties the United States faced in managing these often insubordinate subordinate elites.
The sorry history of the autocratic regime of Ngô Đình Diệm in Saigon from 1954 to 1963 offers a cautionary tale about Washington’s authoritarian allies. Even in the early years of the Cold War, American envoys found out how uncomfortable it could be to tolerate an ally’s corruption and election fraud. Washington’s support, however grudgingly given, soon came to seem like an endorsement of a loyal surrogate’s self-destructive policies that were greasing the slippery slide toward a foreign policy debacle.
From the very beginning of America’s intervention in South Vietnam in mid-1954, the limitations of its chosen leader were readily apparent. After years of exile in the United States and Europe, Diệm had a narrow political base among Vietnamese, but could count on powerful patrons in Washington, notably Democratic senators Mike Mansfield and John F. Kennedy, and an influential ally in Saigon, the legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale, Washington’s master of political manipulation in Southeast Asia. Landing at Saigon from France where he had been appointed Vietnam’s prime minister, Diệm was bundled into a black limousine escorted by “motorcycles in a police phalanx” that whizzed past a large crowd of “whole families … clustered together, children riding on backs” who had waited at the airport for hours under a tropical sun, leaving the people, as Lansdale noted, “disappointed” and “in a disgruntled mood.” The limousine swept toward the prime minister’s official residence downtown where a crowd of overseas Chinese and civil servants, released early from their desks, dutifully applauded his promises to “act decisively.”9 As narrow as that support might seem, Diệm would never succeed in expanding it significantly during his decade in power.
Amid the chaos accompanying France’s defeat in its long, bloody Indochina War (1946–54), Lansdale and the rest of the US mission would pull upon every lever of power, overt and covert, to secure Diệm’s tenuous hold on Saigon. In November 1954, US diplomats maneuvered to send his chief rival, the commander of the Vietnamese Army, packing for Paris. Meanwhile, Lansdale’s team provided Diệm with clandestine backing against residual French forces and well-armed regional militia, with tensions erupting into a bloody battle for Saigon in April 1955. Within a few months and with Lansdale’s assistance, Diệm won an incredible 98.2 percent of the vote over the emperor Bảo Đại in a rigged presidential election and promptly promulgated a new constitution that ended the Vietnamese monarchy after a millennium.10
Channeling all its aid payments through Diệm, Washington managed to destroy the last vestiges of French colonial support for his rivals, while winning the president a narrow political base within the army, among civil servants, and in the minority Catholic community. Backed by a seeming cornucopia of American aid, Diệm then dealt harshly with South Vietnam’s Buddhist sects and attacked former Viet Minh veterans of the war against the French. He also resisted the implementation of rural reforms that possibly could have won him a broader base among the country’s peasant population but certainly risked alienating the upper-class landowners who were a more reliable source of support. When the US embassy pressed for such changes, he simply stalled, convinced that Washington had already invested too much of its prestige in his regime and would be unable to withhold support. Like Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai decades later, Diệm’s ultimate weapon was his mixture of strength and weakness—the determination to pursue his own policies and the threat that his regime might simply collapse if American officials pushed him too hard in other directions.
Invariably, the Americans backed down, sacrificing any hope of real change in order to maintain the ongoing war effort against the local Viet Cong rebels and their North Vietnamese backers. As rebellion and dissent grew in South Vietnam, Washington only ratcheted up its military aid to battle the communists, giving Diệm yet more weapons to wield against his own people, communist and noncommunist alike. Working through his brother Ngô Đình Nhu—and this would have an eerie resonance in America’s future war in Afghanistan—Diệm’s regime took control of Saigon’s drug rackets, pocketing significant profits as it built up a nexus of secret police, prisons, and concentration camps to deal with suspected dissidents.11 By the time of Diệm’s downfall in 1963, there were some fifty thousand prisoners in his gulag.12
From 1960 to 1963, resistance sparked repression and repression redoubled resistance until South Vietnam was plagued by Buddhist riots in the cities and a spreading communist rebellion in the countryside. Maneuvering after dark, Viet Cong guerrillas slowly began to encircle Saigon, assassinating Diệm’s unpopular village headmen by the thousands.
In this critical three-year period, the US military mission in Saigon tried every conceivable counterinsurgency strategy to eradicate the Viet Cong—bringing in helicopters and armored vehicles for conventional mobility, deploying the Green Berets for unconventional combat, building up regional militias for localized security, and constructing “strategic hamlets” to isolate eight million peasants inside fortified compounds theoretically controlled by Diệm’s militia. Nothing worked. By 1963, the Viet Cong had grown from scattered bands of fighters into a guerrilla army that controlled more than half the countryside. Apart from impetus of Diệm’s repression, much of that rebel expansion was now sustained by support from North Vietnam, led by the newly ascendant southerner Lê Duần, who was determined to protect loyal cadres from elimination by Diệm and fulfill Hanoi’s dream of national reunification.13
When protesting Buddhist monk Quang Dúc assumed the lotus position on a Saigon street in June 1963 and held the posture while followers lit his gasoline-soaked robes that erupted in fatal flames, the Kennedy administration could no longer ignore the crisis. As Diệm’s batons cracked the heads of Buddhist demonstrators and Nhu’s wife applauded “monk barbecues,” Washington began to officially protest the ruthless repression. Instead of responding, Diệm worked through his brother to open negotiations with the communists in Hanoi, threatening Washington with willing betrayal of the US war effort via a coalition government with communist North Vietnam.14
In the midst of this crisis, the newly appointed ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge arrived in Saigon and, within days, approved a CIA coup to overthrow Diệm. For the next few months, Lansdale’s hard-bitten CIA understudy Lucien Conein met regularly with Saigon’s generals to hatch an elaborate plot that would be unleashed with devastating effect on November 1, 1963. As rebel troops backing the plotters stormed the palace, Diệm and Nhu fled to a safe house in Saigon’s Chinatown. Flushed from hiding by false promises of safe conduct into exile, Diệm climbed aboard a military convoy for what he thought was a ride to the airport. But CIA operative Conein told the Vietnamese generals that a US aircraft for his flight into exile was “not in the books,” making execution the only viable option. When the convoy stopped at a rail crossing, a military assassin riding along sprayed Diệm’s body with bullets and stabbed his bleeding corpse in a coup de grâce.15
Although Ambassador Lodge hosted an embassy celebration for the rebel officers and cabled President Kennedy that Diệm’s downfall would mean a “shorter war,” the country soon collapsed into further military coups and countercoups that crippled army operations. Over the next thirty-two months, Saigon had nine different governments and a change of cabinet every fifteen weeks—every one of them incompetent, corrupt, and ineffective. After spending a decade building up Diệm’s regime and a day destroying it, the United States had seemingly linked its power and prestige irrevocably to the survival of the Saigon government. The “best and brightest” in Washington were convinced that they could not just walk away. So as South Vietnam slid toward defeat in the two years after Diệm’s death, the first of what became 540,000 US combat troops arrived, ensuring that Vietnam would become not just an American-backed war but a full-scale American war.16
Washington then searched desperately for anyone who could provide sufficient stability to prosecute that war, eventually, with palpable relief, embracing a military junta headed by General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu. Sustained in power by American aid, Thiệu had a limited popular following at the outset, but squandered even that support over time by running virtually unopposed for reelection in 1971 and winning a risible 94.3 percent of the vote—repeating the same mistake that had weakened Diệm’s legitimacy from the start.17 But chastened by its experience in precipitating Diệm’s assassination, the American embassy decided to ignore Thiệu’s unpopularity and continue to build his army. When Washington finally began reducing its aid and withdrawing its troops after 1972, Thiệu found that his soldiers simply would not fight with sufficient determination to defend his unpopular government. With enemy forces encircling Saigon in April 1975, a CIA operative drove him to the airport for a flight into exile, noting the “reek of Scotch” on Thiệu’s breath and the sound of “gold bars clinking against each other” in his luggage. Within a week, his army collapsed with stunning speed, suffering one of the more devastating defeats in modern military history.18
In pursuit of its Vietnam War effort, Washington required a Saigon government responsive to its demands yet popular enough with its own peasantry to wage the war in the villages. These proved to be impossibly contradictory political requirements. In the end, the Americans settled for authoritarian military rule, which, acceptable as it proved in Washington, was disdained by the Vietnamese peasantry. Supporting democratic alternatives to Diệm and Thiệu—and there were several candidates—admittedly entailed risks in the face of a relentless communist insurgency. So Washington sacrificed democratic principles for determined leadership, and in end secured neither.
In the more fluid, multipolar world that followed the Cold War’s end, US relations with some of its embattled allies once again had a Vietnam flavor to them. Take Afghan president Hamid Karzai. With his volatile mix of dependence and independence, he seemed like the archetype of all the autocrats Washington has backed in Asia, Africa, and Latin America since European empires began fading. When the CIA mobilized Afghan warlords to topple the fundamentalist Taliban government in October 2001, the country’s capital, Kabul, was Washington’s for the taking—and the giving. In the midst of the chaos that came with the Taliban regime’s headlong collapse, Karzai, an obscure exile living in Pakistan “with few contacts outside the CIA,” gathered a handful of followers and plunged into southern Afghanistan on a doomed agency mission to rally the Pashtun tribes for revolt. It proved a quixotic effort. With the Taliban in hot pursuit, his team was forced to flee from village to village where “not a single local stepped forward to join them.” Only extraction by navy SEALs saved him from certain death.19
Desperate for a reliable post-invasion ally, however, the Bush administration engaged in what one expert has called “bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting” to install Karzai in power as president. This process took place not through an election in Kabul, but by lobbying the foreign diplomats and Afghan leaders at a 2001 donors’ conference inside Bonn’s Hotel Petersberg where he was appointed interim president. When King Zahir Shah, a respected figure whose family had ruled Afghanistan for more than 150 years, offered his services as acting head of state, the US ambassador had a “showdown” with the monarch, quickly sending him back into exile. In this way, Karzai’s “authority,” which came directly and almost solely from the Bush administration, proved to be unchecked. (American security forces guarded President Karzai for his first months in office because he had so little trust in his nominal Afghan allies.)20
In the years that followed, his regime slid into an ever-deepening state of corruption and incompetence. As a flood of $114 billion in US development aid poured into Kabul between 2002 and 2015, a mere trickle escaped the capital’s bottomless bureaucracy to reach impoverished villages in the countryside.21 In 2009, Transparency International ranked Afghanistan as the world’s second most corrupt nation, just one notch above Somalia.22
The August 2009 presidential elections were an apt index of the country’s problematic “progress.” Karzai’s campaign team, dubbed “the warlord ticket,” included Abdul Dostum, an Uzbek warlord who had slaughtered “several thousand” prisoners in 2001; vice presidential candidate Muhammed Fahim, a former defense minister linked to drugs and human rights abuses; Akhundzada, the former governor of Helmand Province, who was caught with nine tons of drugs in his compound in 2005; and the president’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, reputedly the reigning drug lord of the southern city of Kandahar. “The Karzai family has opium and blood on their hands,” one Western intelligence official told the New York Times during the campaign.23
Desperate to capture an outright majority in the first round of balloting, Karzai’s coalition employed an extraordinary array of electoral chicanery. After two months of counting and checking, the UN’s Electoral Complaints Commission announced in October that more than a million of Karzai’s votes, 28 percent of his total, were fraudulent, pushing the president’s tally well below a winning margin.24 Calling the election a “foreseeable train wreck,” deputy UN envoy Peter Galbraith said: “The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners.”25
Galbraith was soon sacked, as US pressure extinguished the simmering flames of electoral protest. The runner-up withdrew from the runoff election that Washington had favored as a face-saving compromise, and Karzai was declared the outright winner by default. In the wake of the fraudulent election, he tried to stack the five-man Electoral Complaints Commission, replacing three foreign experts with his own Afghan appointees.26 When the parliament rejected his proposal, he lashed out with bizarre charges, accusing the UN of wanting a “puppet government” and blaming all the electoral fraud on “massive interference from foreigners.”27 In a meeting with members of parliament, Karzai reportedly told them: “If you and the international community pressure me more, I swear that I am going to join the Taliban.”28
Meanwhile, escalating pressure from Washington for reform only inflamed Karzai and led to public tantrums. As Air Force One headed for Kabul in March 2010, national security adviser General James Jones said bluntly that President Obama would try to persuade Karzai to prioritize “battling corruption, taking the fight to the narco-traffickers.”29 But after a week of inflammatory outbursts from Karzai, the White House was forced to retreat from this attempt at reform, with General Jones saying soothingly that during his visit to Kabul President Obama was “generally impressed with the quality of the [Afghan] ministers and the seriousness with which they’re approaching their job.”30
Despite the billions in aid lavished on Kabul, Washington found it impossible to control Karzai. He memorably summed up his fractious relationship with Washington this way: “I will speak for Afghanistan, and I will speak for the Afghan interest, but I will seek that Afghan interest … in partnership with America. In other words, if you’re looking for a stooge and calling a stooge a partner, no. If you’re looking for a partner, yes.”31
With Washington’s reform initiative effectively neutered, much like Diệm had done decades earlier, Karzai was free to spend the next four years presiding, as the sardonically dubbed “mayor of Kabul,” over the growth of the Taliban resistance movement. With its bloated bureaucracy in the capital and its coalition of warlords and drug lords in the countryside, the government failed to promote alternative crops or check the proliferation of opium cultivation, whose profits would come to sustain the spreading insurgency.
By the time Karzai left office in September 2014, after a fraud-ridden election that required American mediation to broker a viable coalition, the Taliban was poised for a sustained offensive that would shatter the Afghan army’s tenuous control of the countryside, taking over half of the rural districts.32 Instead of fading into quiet retirement, Karzai continued to hold court in his residence near the presidential palace, working, as the New York Times put it, “from the wings to destabilize the government and exploit a moment of national crisis to try to return to power.” As terrorist bombs erupted in the capital and Taliban guerrillas advanced in the countryside, Karzai encouraged protests in Kabul and warlord opposition in provinces like Kandahar, destabilizing the government of Washington’s favored new ally, President Ashraf Ghani.33 Whether at Saigon in the 1960s or at Kabul after 2002, Washington’s would-be subordinate elites had proved surprisingly insubordinate, creating not only weak, corrupt governance for their own countries but also a severe foreign policy crisis for the United States.
Middle East Crisis
During this diplomatic standoff in Kabul, WikiLeaks activists began releasing those 251,000 diplomatic cables making it clear that Washington’s relationship with Karzai in all its complexities and contradictions was by no means exceptional. Indeed, the most revealing of those cables offered uncensored insights into Washington’s weakening controls over the global system of surrogate power that it had built over the past half century.
In reading these documents, the Israeli journalist Aluf Benn of the newspaper Haaretz could see “the fall of the American empire, the decline of a superpower that ruled the world by the dint of its military and economic supremacy.” No longer, he added, are “American ambassadors … received in world capitals as ‘high commissioners’ … [instead they are] tired bureaucrats [who] spend their days listening wearily to their hosts’ talking points, never reminding them who is the superpower and who the client state.”34 As its influence declined, Washington was finding many of its chosen local allies either increasingly insubordinate or irrelevant, particularly in the strategic Middle East.
After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Moscow quickly lost its satellite states from the Baltic Sea to Central Asia, as once loyal surrogates were ousted or leapt off the sinking ship of Soviet Empire. For the “victor” in the Cold War, soon to be the planet’s “sole superpower,” a similar erosion of loyalties also began but at a much slower pace.
In the two decades that followed, globalization fostered a multipolar system of rising powers in Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow, Ankara, and Brasilia, even as a denationalized system of corporate power reduced the dependency of developing economies on any single state, however imperial. With its capacity to control elites receding, Washington faced ideological competition from Islamic fundamentalism, European regulatory regimes, Chinese state capitalism, and Latin American economic nationalism.
Amid this ongoing decline in its influence, Washington’s attempts to control its subordinate elites or create new ones began to fail, often spectacularly—including, its efforts to topple bête noire Hugo Chávez of Venezuela in a badly bungled 2002 coup, to detach ally Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia from Russia’s orbit in 2008, or to oust nemesis Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2009 Iranian elections.
Indicative of such declining influence, in early 2011 Washington faced an eruption of protests against pro-American autocrats from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. According to the WikiLeaks cables, President Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali of Tunisia had long kept Islamic radicals at bay. Colonel Muammar Gadhafi of Libya had been “a strong partner in the war against terrorism.” Hosni Mubarak had repressed the radical Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen had allowed the United States an “open door on terrorism.” King Abdullah II of Jordan was a key defender of Israel. King Hamad of Bahrain provided port facilities for the US Fifth Fleet in the oil-rich Persian Gulf and favored “his relations with the U.S. intelligence community above all others.”35
While these leaders served Washington well, they also subjected their own peoples to decades of corruption and repression, a policy whose ultimate failure prompted a frank admission from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2005. “For 60 years,” she told an audience in Cairo, “the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy … in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.”36
In this region, perhaps more than any other, stability was indeed a serious problem. As European empires carved up the Ottoman domains in the decades surrounding World War I, they drew colonial boundaries for geopolitical convenience, ignoring what the New York Times called the “extraordinarily complex tapestries of tribes and subtribes and clans, ancient social orders that remained the population’s principal source of identification and allegiance.” After that Great War, the British fused the Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish populations of three Ottoman provinces into a protectorate called Iraq, and papered over the divisions by placing a made-up monarchy at its head. Just to the west, the French expropriated two more Ottoman provinces, and ruled Syria and Lebanon through a mosaic of sectarian minorities such as the Alawites, the Druze, and Maronite Christians. Between 1911 and 1920, the Italians seized half a dozen cities along the coast of North Africa from the Ottoman Empire and, after a protracted pacification, merged them into a colony called Libya. Through this tangled imperial history, many if not most of the twenty-two nations in the modern Arab world took form as fragile states, prone to fighting, fragmentation, or both. As the region’s great-power patron during the Cold War decades that followed, Washington eschewed major social change and simply tried to maintain the imperial structure it had inherited—intervening twice in Lebanon (1958, 1982) to stabilize the ethnic coalition France had left behind, strengthening the many monarchies fostered by the British, and taking over the Bahrain naval base from Britain in 1971 to protect the Persian Gulf and its small sheikhdoms.37
Whatever the merits or demerits of earlier US policy might have been, Washington’s occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011 proved a catalyst for chaos, first for the country itself and then for the wider Middle East where the political balance was tenuous at best. After the US invasion of March 2003 captured Baghdad in just three weeks, Washington’s empowered envoy L. Paul Bremer made a series of decisions for his occupation government that ranged, in the words of the New York Times, from the “deleterious” to the “calamitous.” First, he fired eighty-five thousand members of the ruling Baath Party, producing “the instant impoverishment of entire clans and tribes.” Then, he abolished the Iraqi military, largely controlled by the Sunni minority, dismissing “hundreds of thousands of men … with both military training and access to weapons.” Finally, the US military under his command gave “little thought to the arsenals and munitions depots … scattered about the country” that were soon “systematically looted, sometimes under the gaze of coalition soldiers who did not intervene.”38
Under what the New York Times called the collective “weight of these blunders” the US occupation erupted in a violent insurgency within a year. After auditioning a succession of diffident allies, the United States finally settled on the Shia sectarian leader Nouri al-Maliki, whose eight years of corrupt, repressive maladministration (2006–14) were crowned by the disastrous ISIS offensive of June 2014. For nearly a decade, the United States had spent $25 billion building a modern Iraqi army with the full panoply of armor, artillery, infantry, and special forces. Within a week, however, just five thousand Sunni guerrillas routed a hundred thousand of these Iraqi (largely Shia) troops, capturing billions of dollars of advanced weaponry, cities with five million people, and a full third of Iraq’s sovereign territory. It would take two full years to rebuild this army sufficiently to retake many of these captured cities, and even then sectarian troops—Shia militia and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters—did much of the fighting.39
In retrospect, the critical variable for this imperial misadventure in Iraq was Washington’s inability to find an effective ally as surrogate for its exercise of power. In its last years, the shockwaves from this bungled American occupation and the sustained jihadist resistance were soon felt across this volatile region.
By 2009, political tensions were rising across the Middle East, threatening Washington’s subordinate elites. The US ambassador to Tunisia reported that “President Ben Ali … and his regime have lost touch with the Tunisian people,” relying “on the police for control,” while “corruption in the inner circle is growing” and “the risks to the regime’s long-term stability are increasing.” Even so, the envoy could only recommend that Washington “dial back the public criticism” and instead rely on “frequent high-level private candor”—a policy that failed to produce any reforms before demonstrations toppled the government eighteen months later.40
Similarly, in late 2008 the American embassy in Cairo feared that “Egyptian democracy and human rights efforts … are being suffocated,” but still insisted that “we would not like to contemplate complications for U.S. regional interests should the U.S.-Egyptian bond be seriously weakened.”41 When President Hosni Mubarak visited Washington a few months later, the Cairo embassy urged the administration “to restore the sense of warmth that has traditionally characterized the U.S.-Egyptian partnership.”42 Consequently, President Obama hailed this dictator as “a stalwart ally” and “a force for stability and good in the region.”43 When massive demonstrations demanded Mubarak’s ouster just eighteen months later, Washington discouraged democratic reforms and backed General Omar Suleiman, the president’s “consigliere” and intelligence chief who, according to embassy cables, had a “strong and growing relationship” with the CIA.44
As mass protests filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square for eighteen days in early 2011, Mubarak’s stunning downfall and the sudden ouster of his chosen successor Suleiman represented, wrote a New York Times commentator, “an historic eclipse of U.S. power.” Indeed, in the year that followed what came to be called “the Arab spring,” Islamist leaders whom Washington had long disdained rode to power in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Middle East on a wave of anti-American rhetoric.45 The all-powerful Egyptian military tolerated the fundamentalist rule of the Muslim Brotherhood under Mohamed Morsi for a little more than a year until July 2013 when a junta led by General Abdel al-Sisi seized power in a successful coup. After consolidating his control by taking 96 percent of the vote a year later, President Sisi was determined that he “never be viewed as the West’s lap dog”—a loss of influence compounded as American aid slid from over $2 billion annually during two decades under Mubarak to just $1.4 billion by late 2016.46
Taking a broader view of this failure, Egypt’s respected opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei complained bitterly that, after forty years of US dominion, the Middle East was “a collection of failed states that add nothing to humanity or science” because “people were taught not to think or to act, and were consistently given an inferior education.”47
Reflecting the pathology of imperial dominion that has complicated Washington’s ability to maintain its vast informal empire, the WikiLeaks cables also revealed a condescending attitude among American diplomats toward their subordinate elites. With the hauteur of latter-day imperial envoys, those diplomats derided “Canada’s habitual inferiority complex vis-à-vis the U.S.”;48 dismissed “the Turks’ neo-Ottoman posturing around the Middle East and Balkans”;49 and indulged in snide smugness at the failings of would-be allies: Colonel Muammar Gadhafi’s yen for a “voluptuous blonde” nurse, Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari’s morbid fear of military coups, or Afghan vice president Ahmad Zia Massoud’s reported $52 million in stolen funds.50
In addition, the State Department instructed its embassies worldwide to play imperial policemen by collecting comprehensive data on local leaders like “biographic and biometric data, including health, opinions toward the US, training history, ethnicity (tribal and/or clan), and … email addresses, telephone and fax numbers, fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans.”51 Emphasizing the importance of incriminating information, the department pressed its Bahrain embassy for details—damaging in an Islamic society—on the kingdom’s crown princes, asking: “Is there any derogatory information on either prince? Does either prince drink alcohol? Does either one use drugs?”52
The Age of American Decline
In Washington’s relations with both Diệm and Karzai there lurked a self-defeating pattern in its alliances with autocrats and dictators throughout the Third World, then and now. Selected and often installed in office by Washington, or at least backed by its massive military aid, these client regimes often became desperately dependent, even as their leaders failed to implement the sorts of reforms that might enable them to build independent political bases. Torn between pleasing foreign patrons or their own people, these leaders wound up pleasing neither. As opposition to their rule grew, a downward spiral of repression and corruption often ended in collapse. At the same time, despite all its power, Washington descended into frustration and despair, unable to force its allies to adopt reforms that might allow them to survive.
There was—and is—a fundamental structural flaw in any American entente with such autocrats. Inherent in these unequal alliances is a peculiar dynamic that makes the eventual collapse of American-anointed leaders an almost commonplace occurrence. At the outset, Washington selects clients who seem pliant enough to do its bidding. They, in turn, opt for Washington’s support not because they are strong, but precisely because they are weak and need foreign patronage to gain and hold office.
Once installed, clients have little choice but to make Washington’s demands their top priority, investing their slender political resources in placating foreign envoys. Responding to an American political agenda on civil and military matters, these autocrats often fail to devote sufficient energy, attention, and resources to cultivating a popular following—with Diệm isolated in his Saigon palace, just as Karzai became “the mayor of Kabul.” Caught between the demands of a powerful foreign patron and countervailing local needs and desires, both leaders let guerrillas capture the countryside, while struggling uncomfortably, even angrily, in Washington’s embrace.
Since the end of World War II, many of the sharpest crises in US foreign policy have arisen from such problematic relationships with authoritarian client regimes. It was the similarly close alliance with General Fulgencio Bautista of Cuba in the 1950s that inspired the Cuban Revolution and culminated in Fidel Castro’s rebels capturing the Cuban capital, Havana, in 1959. That, in turn, led the Kennedy administration into the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion of the island and then the Cuban missile crisis with Russia.
For a full quarter century, the United States played international patron to Mohammad Reza Shah of Iran, massively arming his police and military while making him Washington’s proxy power in the Persian Gulf. His fall in the Islamic revolution of 1979 not only removed the cornerstone of American power in this strategic region but also plunged Washington into a succession of foreign policy confrontations with Iran and other entanglements in the Greater Middle East that have yet to end.
The regime of Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza, a similarly loyal client in Central America, fell to the Sandinista revolution in 1979, creating a foreign policy problem that led to the CIA’s controversial Contra operation against the new left-wing regime and the seamy Iran-Contra scandal that would roil President Ronald Reagan’s second term.
More recently in April 2010, Washington’s anointed autocrat in the former Soviet socialist republic of Kyrgyzstan, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, fled the palace after his riot police fired into the crowds and killed seventy-seven, but failed to stop opposition protesters from taking control of the capital Bishkek. Just five years before, Bakiyev rode into power “flanked by the robber barons on horseback from the south,” and then proceeded to plunder the country to enrich his family and his cronies, even manipulating the Pentagon into giving his son’s company a $315 million contract to fuel US military aircraft. Although his rule was brutal and corrupt, the Obama administration courted Bakiyev sedulously to preserve American use of the old Soviet air base at Manas, critical for supply flights into Afghanistan. Even as riot police were beating the opposition into submission to prepare for Bakiyev’s “landslide victory” in the July 2009 elections, President Obama sent him a personal letter praising his support for the Afghan war. With Washington’s imprimatur, there was nothing to stop Bakiyev’s political slide into murderous repression and his ultimate fall from power.53
Why have so many American alliances with autocrats and dictators collapsed in such spectacular fashion, producing divisive recriminations at home and policy disasters abroad? In the new world of sovereign states that emerged after World War II, Washington has had to pursue a contradictory policy—dealing with the leaders of nations as if they were fully independent while playing upon their deep dependence on US economic and military aid. After identifying its own prestige with these fragile regimes, Washington usually tries to coax or chide them into embracing needed reforms. When this counsel fails and prudence might dictate the start of a staged withdrawal of support, as it once did in Saigon and does now in Kabul, American envoys usually cling to even the most unrepentant ally for the long slide into disaster.
Absent a global war to sweep away an empire, the decline of a great power often proves to be a fitful, painful, drawn-out process. To Washington’s never-ending wars in the Middle East, its crippling partisan deadlock, the economy’s slow slide toward second place globally, and some of its longtime allies, including the Philippines, now forging economic ties with rival hegemon China, must now be added the loss of loyal surrogates across the Middle East. Egypt’s transition from President Mubarak to General al-Sisi, for instance, might seem a small move from one military autocrat to another, but it also was accompanied by a decline in US influence as the new regime, like others in the Middle East, distanced itself from Washington.
For more than fifty years, this system of global power has served Washington well, allowing it to extend its influence worldwide with surprising efficiency and economy of force. So there can be little question that the weakening of this network of subordinate elites and the ending of ties to a range of loyal allies—and they are indeed ending—is a major blow to American global power.