“American exceptionalism operates as a mythology of convenience that does a tremendous amount of work to simplify the contradiction between the apparent creed of US society and its much more complicated reality.”
—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor1
“In fact, empires are not innocent, absent-minded, accidental accretions. They are given purposive direction by rulers who consciously mobilize vast amounts of personnel and materials in order to plunder other lands and peoples.”
—Michael Parenti2
“We know that we, the Blacks, and not only we, the Blacks, have been, and are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is greed, whose only god is profit.”
—James Baldwin3
U.S. imperialism’s staggering military footprint abroad has already been emphasized in prior essays. A lengthy historical record exists of American-led wars of aggression conducted on nearly every continent since the end of the Second World War, especially in the darker nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The United States spends its annual $700 billion-plus war budget on weapons of mass destruction and military operations that have cost the lives of millions and left dozens of countries in near total ruin. It seems unlikely that the U.S. could possess such a record and simultaneously project itself not only as an innocent bystander to the evils of other countries, but also as the world’s humanitarian saving grace. In the next three chapters, we examine the various ideological tools that the U.S. employs to promote itself as an exceptional force for “good” in the world.
Beginning with the United States’ proclaimed desire to build an “Empire of Liberty” in the late 18th century and into the 19th century, western liberalism fundamentally shaped American efforts to develop an empire under the guise of spreading freedom around the world. Yet, as discussed in earlier chapters, liberal ideology has always possessed an inherent contradiction. Proclamations of individual liberty depend upon the oppression of those deemed incapable of realizing the fruits of this promise. As Lisa Lowe explains, liberalism’s contradiction only “resolves in ‘freedom’ within the modern Western political sphere through displacement and elision of the coeval conditions of settler dispossession, slavery, and indentureship in the Americas.”4 In other words, freedom—as defined by modern liberalism—is not only reserved for the civilized over the “savage” and the human over the nonhuman; it is acquired by and dependent upon the oppression of the other.5
When U.S. imperialism eclipsed the power of its European rivals in the mid-20th century, the world was sick and weary of war. Competition between Western imperial powers not only devastated European economies during two World Wars, but also kept nations under their colonial possession in a brutal state of subservience and starvation. Moreover, an American-led alignment emerged between the imperial powers after the Second World War. This meant that post-war prosperity for countries like the U.S. continued to rely on the super exploitation of formerly colonized nations that had just freed themselves from European bondage by using the division of the colonial powers to lay a path toward independence. The United States’ need to preserve its reputation as an exceptional “civilization” while dominating the former colonial possessions of its Western allies made “foreign aid” an important mechanism for securing American power abroad.
It is this backdrop that explains why the U.S. possesses a disproportionate influence over international institutions that distribute so-called “aid” abroad. Many Americans are unaware of the extensive mechanisms used by the U.S. to leverage “aid” as a means for dominance. Common misconceptions about American “aid” abroad came up during the 2016 presidential elections. Supporters of Donald Trump found his “America First” slogan enticing since it reflected their long-held belief that American political and economic activity abroad has privileged foreign nations at the expense of American national prosperity. The slogan positioned countries like China into enemy territory for benefiting from American economic power at the expense of white Americans. “Free Trade” agreements like NAFTA were rightly seen as anathema to the interests of the American worker, but only because they allowed non-white nations to steal American jobs. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton supporters opposed Trump’s “America First” position on the basis that the United States’ global influence provided economic and humanitarian benefits to both the American people and the world at large.
Neither position reflected the realities of American imperial power around the world. The impact of American foreign aid abroad is more damning than what Trump and Clinton suggested. Trump’s “America First” position reinforced the racial animus inherent in the exercise of American imperial power by suggesting that the U.S should not waste precious resources on those who use it at the expense of Americans. On the other hand, Clinton’s firm belief that U.S. influence abroad is a positive force for Americans and peoples around the world alike completely erased the devastating conditions that American foreign policy produces at home and abroad. Amid such confusion, it is imperative to deconstruct American influence abroad as neither beneficial for the majority of Americans nor for the nations around the world that have been on the receiving end of American “foreign aid.”
“Foreign aid” cannot be defined as one particular policy, but a multitude of policies meant to secure the interests of U.S. imperialism. “Foreign aid” takes the form of military and political “assistance.” Other types of “aid” include loans and financial assistance from international financial institutions dominated by the U.S. The United States is also home to a number of “civil society” groups or Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that receive public and private funds to create favorable political conditions for American domination. Few Americans, however, look at these policies critically because they are framed as “aid.” After all, how could poor, underdeveloped countries not benefit from assistance that comes from the most exceptional nation on the planet? This rhetorical question plays over and over in the discourse about American “aid” to remind the world that the U.S. can be counted on to attend to the needs of the global poor.
For many, “aid” is the same as “help” and the “distributor of aid”—in this case the U.S.—the same as the “helper”. But “aid” and empire cannot exist together in an abstract sense.6 Since it became the chief imperialist power after the Second World War, the United States has primarily been motivated by the interrelated desires to maximize the profit, scale, and influence of its multinational corporations, financial monopolies, and military industries. Imperial motivations are very clearly outlined in the actual operative frameworks of U.S. “foreign aid” institutions. When the American dollar became the global exchange rate in 1944 and then replaced gold as the reserve currency in the early 1970s, American financiers were given free reign over the Bretton Woods institutions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These institutions were originally advertised as agents of “assistance” and “development” in a post-World War planet, but became nothing more than agents of American empire.7
It is important to note that the U.S. has historically held disproportionate influence over the IMF and World Bank. The U.S. has by far the largest vote at nearly 18 percent in both institutions. U.S. influence is reflected in IMF and World Bank policy, especially in the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) that have ravaged nations in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. These programs began in 1980 as measures of assistance to relieve poor and formerly colonized countries from debts imposed on them from their colonizers during the post-war period. Instead of lending assistance, however, SAPs have only increased the economic burden imposed by U.S. imperialism by forcing indebted countries to privatize state industries, open up their economies for corporate investment, and restructure their political systems to benefit American and Western monopolies.
Nowhere is this burden more apparent than on the resource-rich African continent. The imposition of American “aid” in the form of SAPs was not embraced but rather imposed with the help of military “aid.” In the mid-20th century, Africa was ablaze with the spirit of independence and Pan-Africanism. Nations such as Algeria, Ghana, and Zaire (now Congo) waged heroic anti-colonial struggles, often with success. However, such success was consistently met with the force of U.S. imperialism and its interests in the resource-rich continent. Revolutionary leaders like Patrice Lumumba of Zaire and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana were assassinated in coups organized by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). What were their crimes? They had decided to organize the national economies of their respective countries around the needs of the African people and not those of European and American corporations. This, in the CIA’s estimation, made them potential breeding grounds for 20th-century socialist arrangements like those that existed in Russia and China. Thus, early military “aid” to independent African nations—a.k.a. violent overthrows of revolutionary leaders—created the political conditions necessary for “economic” aid in the form of SAPs.
SAPs have been disastrous for Africa ever since they became the continent’s dominant economic arrangement. According to Asad Ismi, SAPs have dramatically increased foreign investment and trade with Africa at the expense of a number of social indicators. Nearly 350 million Africans lived in extreme poverty as of 2003 and over a dozen countries possessed incomes in 1999 that were below 1975 figures.8 SAP mandates forced African countries to pay off debts with the receipt of more debt in exchange for austerity and privatization measures. These measures have led to a scarcity in clean drinking water and medical care in many African nations, which has ensured that life expectancy remains low while deaths from diseases such as HIV remain high. Meanwhile, African nations have paid over four times the amount of their original debt to World Bank and IMF lenders since 1980.
The IMF is the American-led face of what Ghanian revolutionary leader Kwame Nkrumah called “neocolonialism.”9 Neocolonialism accurately describes the continued foreign plunder of African nations despite formal recognition of their independence. American imperial dominance on the world stage has facilitated the conditions of neocolonialism. Because of SAPs, American and Western corporations have made enormous profits from the debt forced upon the African continent. New research from a coalition of UK and African development campaigners shows that in a given year, more wealth leaves Africa than enters it, by a figure of more than 40 billions dollars.10 The coalition found that $18 billion of the $32 billion in “aid” given to African countries in 2015 was used to pay outstanding interest to lenders. African countries have been deeply impoverished by American-led “foreign aid” arrangements despite the enormous wealth in their possession. The Democratic Republic of Congo alone possesses over $24 trillion worth of mineral wealth yet is one of the most underdeveloped nations worldwide.11 What the coalition does not mention is the role of the American-led IMF and World Bank in fostering these conditions.
The U.S. avoids explicit mention of the role it plays in the plunder of African wealth. It instead has deployed NGOs to resolve the problems that result from it. SAPs, for example, create the poverty necessary for American NGOs to operate as the philanthropic arm of U.S. imperialism. NGOs are “nonprofit” institutions, meaning that donors receive generous tax benefits for their contributions. NGOs, however, do not operate outside of the imperial exploitation of African wealth. Their philanthropic mission statements which purport to alleviate poverty and suffering in Africa are nothing but smokescreens that mask the underlying motivations of NGO donors and directors who, more often than not, are the very executives of the monopolies plundering the continent.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is one of the most prominent American NGOs on the African continent. Bill Gates is the owner of the Microsoft corporation and the second richest person in the world. The Gates family possesses lucrative investments in Africa, including in the volatile mining of minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo spurred a U.S.-backed genocide led by Rwanda and Uganda which has killed over 6 million Congolese people since 1996. The fortunes of Microsoft and other tech monopolies are aided by the philanthropic influence of the BMGF. It is the second largest funder of the World Health Organization (WHO) behind the U.S. itself.
According to a 2016 study by Global Justice Now, the BMGF has an extensive record of promoting corporate interests in Africa.12 The foundation has lucrative shares in corporations such as Coca-Cola and Monsanto. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Gates Foundation used its influence to lobby for Public-Private Partnerships (P3s) in Mozambique that effectively imploded the nation’s public health system and placed it in the control of private operators, some of which were overseen by the Gates Foundation.13 Many of its board members and directors in the foundation’s agricultural and medical programs are current or former advisors for these monopolies. Sam Dryden, the Director of Agricultural Development at the foundation, previously worked for Monsanto, and the Director of HIV was a former senior researcher at the pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer. Global Justice Now links the corporate governance of the foundation to the policies it promotes on the African continent. For example, the Gates Foundation has long pushed for exclusive corporate ownership of seed and land titles throughout Africa. According to a summary of the study:
. . . the foundation is working with US trader Cargill in an $8 million project to “develop the soya value chain” in southern Africa. Cargill is the biggest global player in the production of and trade in soya with heavy investments in South America where GM soya mono-crops have displaced rural populations and caused great environmental damage. According to Global Justice Now, the BMGF-funded project will likely enable Cargill to capture a hitherto untapped African soya market and eventually introduce GM soya onto the continent.14
NGOs are thus many things, including tax-havens for the rich and humanitarian proxies for corporate profit. But they also provide a valuable ideological tool that U.S. imperialism could not do without. Endless poverty in Africa requires justification, especially to an American population largely cut out from the super profits that derive from it. NGOs promote subjection with a human face and reinforce the white supremacist logics of the American nation-state. U.S.-based NGOs promote a philanthropic image that effectively strips Africans of agency and places it firmly in the hands of American profiteers and their mainly white supporters. NGOs depict Africans as poor, helpless nonhumans compared to Americans who supposedly live in a prosperous and generous nation. NGOs regularly enlist the talents of celebrities such as Bono to advertise the “private sector” as a solution to “Africa’s problems.”
NGOs give a human face to U.S. imperialism’s plunder of Africa. However, in the last few decades, American economic influence in Africa has eroded despite the presence of American NGOs and American-led IMF financial arrangements. African nations indebted to the IMF and plundered by corporations with the support of NGOs have looked to China for an alternative model of development. Chinese trade with Africa currently dwarfs the United States by more than double at $220 billion dollars.15 Western leaders like Hillary Clinton accuse China of practicing a “new colonialism,” “as if China was an invader in a zone that ‘naturally’ belongs to Europeans and Americans.”16 Yet while American and Western nations have focused on repatriating profitable raw materials from Africa to feed the production cycles of monopoly corporations, leaving African countries in debt, China has focused on providing technical support and infrastructure development to African countries in exchange for access to their natural resources. As Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo points out, it also helps that China treats Africans not as charity cases but business partners.17
China’s economic partnership with Africa has caused the American ruling class to panic and shift their focus in the continent. Rather than presenting Africans as poor and helpless, the U.S. has casted the continent as a “security” threat that requires American military “aid” to eradicate. “Africa as a zone of risk, cast as a source of looming threats,” writes Maximilian Forte, “has been one of the central tenets of U.S. policy statements, refurbishing the colonial ‘Dark Continent’ narrative.”18 Many observers, including the U.S. armed forces establishment itself, have openly admitted that the explosive growth of the American military is a direct response to Chinese economic growth. The Council on Foreign Relations, an influential U.S. foreign policy think-tank, warned about China’s rise in Africa as far back as 2006: “U.S. policy has not responded to the implications of intensifying activity in Africa by China along with other Asian countries. This activity may have consequences not only for access to resources but perhaps more importantly for the pursuit of important U.S. objectives of good governance, protection of human rights, and sound economic policies.”19 Lest we forget, however, by “good governance” they mean “regimes that are supportive of U.S. policy and that model their political systems in some fashion on the American one.” And by “human rights” they mean a particular notion of “freedom,” one tied directly to “free” markets, “free” trade, and “the relatively unrestrained ability of wealthy private interests to operate and act to maximize their gains.”20
Concerns over restricted access to Africa’s wealth prompted an increase in American military “aid” to Africa, which was institutionalized in 2008 with the formation of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM).21 According to Khaled Al-Kassimi, AFRICOM placed American military operations in Africa under one institutional umbrella for the first time in history as a response to the post-9/11 narrative that posited the continent as an emerging threat to American national security.22 American military expansion is therefore framed as a humanitarian mission in Africa. As Al-Kassimi observes, drawing from the work of Maximilian Forte, “humanitarianism is always brought about by the West, the ‘self-appointed messiah that has the right to determine which is the right side of history [using] the American military as savior.’” “These myths,” he continues, “create further opposing binaries such as the US being the helper because it is independent while Africans are helpless because they are dependent.”23 AFRICOM’s role as the rightful savior of African problems, without permission or consultation from African nations themselves, has been assumed from the outset of the institution’s development. American foreign policy advisors, however, have claimed that AFRICOM is a collaborative institution that “partners” with African militaries to resolve their own problems.24
Yet it isn’t too difficult to see that AFRICOM has reinforced American hegemony in Africa by recolonizing the militaries of “partner” African countries. Under the Obama Administration, AFRICOM grew exponentially. It currently has a presence in nearly every African country. In 2015 alone, the American military carried out 674 operations, a nearly 300 percent increase from the period of AFRICOM’s formation in 2008. AFRICOM’s security experts do not hesitate to justify its expanding presence as a necessary response to a number of so-called “security” threats. The largest threat often cited is that posed by transnational terror groups. Describing Africa as a “battlefield” for the defense of American “national security” interests has given cover to the real motivations that underlie American military presence in Africa.
These motivations were exposed by AFRICOM’s first full-scale military invasion of Libya in 2011.25 Prior to the invasion, AFRICOM maintained a relatively light footprint in Africa. The Libyan Jamahiriya led by Muammar Gaddafi strongly opposed AFRICOM’s presence and presented to the African Union (AU) a plan for a continental military and gold currency independent of the American dollar. In fact, the WikiLeaks dump of Hillary Clinton’s emails revealed that such plans formed the basis for the U.S.-NATO invasion.26 Moreover, writes Maximilian Forte, “Gaddafi’s power and influence on the continent had also been increasing, through aid, investment, and a range of projects designed to lessen African dependency on the West and to challenge Western multilateral institutions by building African unity.”27 Beginning in March of 2011—after positioning himself as a significant rival to U.S. economic and strategic interests—the U.S.-NATO alliance led by AFRICOM dropped over 30,000 bombs in six months, killing at least 60,000 Libyans.28 AFRICOM played a central role in the implementation of the “no-fly zone” established by the UN Security Council enactment of Article 1973. This article declared that the U.S.-NATO alliance had the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) Libyan citizens from what they declared was an oppressive regime that was murdering “its own people.”29
By October 2011, AFRICOM-NATO backed “rebels,” many of whom shared affiliations with terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and openly called for the genocide of Black Libyans, had successfully overthrown the Libyan government. As Forte observes:
. . . while “genocide” was quickly proffered by some as the way to characterize the suppression of the revolt by the government, a term especially popular within the small circle of Western liberal imperialists whose banner is the “responsibility to protect,” the term “genocide” was never used by the same people, nor by the UN or Western leaders, to describe actual facts on the ground that involved “ignited public anger” in a “battle against black people.” If this was “humanitarianism,” it could only be so by disqualifying Africans as members of humanity. The actual practice of intervention did just that.30
The most prosperous nation on the African continent was turned to rubble. Muammar Gaddafi was brutally assassinated without trial. The socialist-oriented system in Libya that provided free health care, affordable housing, and free education was dismantled and replaced by the corrupt rule of competing “rebel” militias. These “rebels,” in turn, took their arms across Africa and even into nations such as Syria to wreak similar destruction, giving AFRICOM more opportunities to justify the 5,000 to 8,000 military personnel it had deployed to Africa by 2014.31
AFRICOM achieved its mission in Libya, which was to secure the conditions necessary for American corporate penetration of the continent. Indeed, David Hamod, CEO of the US-Arab Chamber of Commerce, declared a “gold rush” for American and Western corporations in the wake of Libya’s demise.32 Hamod’s remarks confirmed the true intentions of the American war in Libya. AFRICOM was created to serve as military arm of American “aid’ to the African continent. Yet military “aid” has helped American economic interests while providing Africa with nothing in return. This, of course, should come as no surprise to those privy to AFRICOM’s initial design. As Forte shows:
Opportunities for U.S. expansion have been at the forefront of planning for AFRICOM, which as an idea began to be articulated for a decade prior to its establishment. The plan to establish such a program came as a result “of a 1-year thought process within the U.S. government” that saw the “growing strategic importance of Africa” [. . .] In fact, the idea first took shape in the plans of lobbyists for the oil industry, joined by a select group of members of Congress, and military officers who issued a white paper titled, “African Oil: A Priority for U.S. National Security and African Development” in 2002.33
Even Vice Admiral Robert Moeller admitted that AFRICOM’s true purpose is to maintain “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market.”34 Of course, by “free” flowing he meant that U.S. policy “aims to ensure that African resources flow in the ‘right’ direction.”35 We need not guess where this “right” direction points.
By examining American “aid” to Africa, it becomes increasingly clear that the concept further justifies imperialist policy at the expense of the sovereignty and self-determination of African nations. American “aid,” whether in the economic form of IMF and World Bank loans, the political form of NGOs, or the military form of AFRICOM, serves to reinforce the ideology of American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism takes after the Western capitalist world’s toxic, anti-African racism that justified colonial plunder and enslavement as early as the 17th century. American exceptionalism has relegated Africa to an inferior status to the American nation-state and its Western allies. Africa’s presumed inferiority to the “white” imperialist countries is precisely why the imposition of poverty and war can be framed as “aid” with little criticism emanating from the majority of Americans. “Western liberalism’s multiple myths of humanitarianism, which include the benevolent spread of democracy, the protection of innocent civilians, the benign building of nations, and the liberation of peoples suffering under dictators,” Maximilian Forte writes, “are myths that fabricate a world where there are rightful actors and those acted upon.”36 AFRICOM thus reinforces the Eurocentric nature of American foreign policy by justifying expansion with “the belief that the world should be engineered in its image and that the destiny of the US is to civilize and democratize the world over.”37 African countries never asked for AFRICOM’s presence in Libya or elsewhere.
To ask African countries permission to intervene in their affairs would be to affirm the humanity of African people. However, American innocence and American exceptionalism have worked together in Africa to erase African existence. When Africa does exist, it is viewed through the prism of inhumanity where uncivilized Africans require American “humanitarianism” to advance their societies. American “aid” is dependent on the legitimation of “humanitarianism,” which occurs in all channels of American society. White billionaires such as Bill Gates are promoted as stalwarts of humanitarianism in Africa for their generous charity in the form of NGOs with little mention of their negative impact on the continent. IMF and World Bank loans are disguised as “development” aid to provide economic “opportunity” to poor Africans. And AFRICOM’s main operation in Libya was described as a “humanitarian intervention” to save Africans from their allegedly brutal government. Indeed, these institutions have mastered what Deborah Elizabeth Whaley calls “the language of imperialism”: “moralistic crusaders” with “a divine right to conquer, civilize, and tame the wild.”38
The very notion of American “aid” implies that the U.S. empire is capable of providing assistance to other nations on a benevolent and mutual basis. However, each and every form of American “aid” has merely reproduced conditions of inequality, instability, and oppression for recipient nations in Africa. “Aid” has been used as an instrument to reinforce the social relations of American superiority and African inferiority. Africa proves that there is no exceptionalism under the dictates of American empire. The conditions of empire are mirrored throughout the world, whether in the American-led war on Syria where “aid” takes the form of weapons to “rebels” and “coalition” airstrike, or in the hostile sanctions on Latin American countries such as Venezuela and Cuba. American foreign policy is much larger than its “aid” structures, of which only a small number have been covered in this essay. In the following essays, we explore further the relationship between U.S. foreign policy and the ideology of “humanitarianism” so critical in the promotion of American exceptionalism and, by extension, American expansion.