Fifty years ago, the American republic set forth to become the American Empire. In the name of saving the world from Communism, GORE VIDAL explains, its leaders created a National Security State, engaged in perhaps a hundred covert and overt wars, and ran up $5 trillion in debt. The winners were the arms merchants; the losers, the hoodwinked citizens of the United States. Without its Soviet enemy, the author asks, can the empire survive? It is wonderful indeed, ladies and gentlemen, to have all of you here between covers, as it were -- here being the place old John Bunyan called "Vanity Fair, because the town where 'tis kept, is lighter than vanity." But these days the town is not so much London or New York as the global village itself wherein you are this month's movers and shakers, as well as moved and shaken (I feel your pain Yasser). In a number of ways I find it highly fitting that we meet on the old fairground as 20th century and Second Christian Millennium are saying good-bye. Personally I thought they'd never go without taking us with them. There are, of course, 791 days still to go. I also note that the photographers have immortalized a number of smiles. Joy? Or are those anthropologists right who say that the human baring of teeth signals aggression? Let's hope not before 2001 C.E. Or course, centuries and millennia are just arbitrary markings, like bookkeeping at Paramount Pictures. But, symbolically, they mean a lot to those who are interested in why we are today what we are and doing what we are doing. This goes particularly for those movers and shakers who have spent a lot of this year in meetings, courtesy of the one indisposable -- or did President Clinton say indispensable? -- nation on earth and last self-styled global power, loaded down with nukes, bases, debts. Denver and Madrid were two fairgrounds. Nothing much is ever accomplished when the managing world director calls in his regional directors for fun and frolic But when Clinton chose a cowboy theme at Denver, with boots for all, some regional directors actually dared whine. But they are easily replaced and know it. Later the Seven Leading Economic Powers (plus Russia) decided, at Madrid, to extend the North American Atlantic Organization to include Poland, Czechland, Hungary. Jacques Chirac, the French director of the … well, let's be candid: American empire … wanted several more Eastern countries to join, while the Russian director wanted no Eastern extension of a military alliance that he still thinks, mistakenly, was formed to Eastern Europe from the power-mad Soviet Union. Actually, as we shall see, NATO was created so that the United States could dominate Western Europe militarily, politically, and economically: any current extension means that more nations and territories will come under American control while giving pleasure to such hyphenate American voters as Poles, Czechs, Hungarians. The French director was heard to use the word merde when the American emperor said that only three new countries are to be allowed in this time. The Frenchman was ignored, but then he had lost an election back home. In any case, the North Atlantic confederation of United States - Canada plus Western Europe can now be called the North Atlantic Baltic Danubian Organization, to which the Black Sea will no doubt soon be added. I see that some of you are stirring impatiently. The United States is an empire? The emperor's advisers chuckle at the notion. Are we not a freedom-loving perfect democracy eager to exhibit our state-of-the-art economy to old Europe as a model of what you can do in the way of making money for the few by eliminating labor unions and such decadent frills as public health and education? At Denver a French spear-carrier -- always those pesky French -- wondered just how reliable our unemployment figures were when one-tenth of the male workforce is not counted, as they are either in prison or on probation or parole. The Canadian prime minister -- even more tiresome than the French, was heard to say to his Belgian counterpart (over an open mike) that if the leaders of any other country took corporate money as openly as American leaders do, "we'd be in jail." Plainly, the natives are restive. But we are still in charge of the Vanity Fair. I bring up all this not to be unkind. Rather, I should like to point out that those who live too long with unquestioned contradictions are not apt be able to deal with reality when it eventually befalls them. I have lived through nearly three-quarters of this century. I enlisted in the army of the United States at 17; went to the Pacific; did nothing useful -- I was just there, as Nixon used to say, WHEN THE BOMBS WERE FALLING. But, actually, the bombs were not really falling on either of us: he was a naval officer making a fortune playing poker, while I was an army first mate writing a novel. Now, suddenly, it's 1997, and we are "celebrating" the 5Oth anniversary of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Also, more ominously, July 26 was the 5Oth anniversary of the National Security Act that, without national debate but very quiet bipartisan congressional support, replaced the old American Republic with a National Security State very much in the global-empire business, which explains … But, first. into the Time Machine. It is the Ides of August 1945. Germany and Japan have surrendered. and some 13 million Americans are headed home to enjoy -- well, being alive was always the bottom line. Home turns out to be a sort of fairground where fireworks go off and the band plays "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," and an endlessly enticing fun house flings open its doors and we file through. We enjoy halls of mirrors where everyone Is comically distorted, ride through all the various tunnels of love, and take scary tours of horror chambers where skeletons and cobwebs and bats brush past us until, suitably chilled and thrilled, we are ready for the exit and everyday life, but, to the consternation of some -- and the apparent indifference of the rest -- we were never allowed to leave the fun house entirely: it had become a part of our world, as were the goblins sitting under that apple tree. Officially, the United States was at peace; much of Europe and most of Japan were in ruins, often literally, certainly economically. We alone had all our cities and a sort of booming economy -- "sort of" because it depended on war production, and there was, as far as anyone could tell, no war in the offing. But the arts briefly flourished. The Glass Menagerie was staged, Copland's Appalachian Spring was played. A film called The Lost Weekend -- not a bad title for what we had gone through -- won an Academy Award, and the as yet unexiled Richard Wright published a much-admired novel, Black Boy, while Edmund Wilson's novel Memoirs of Hecate County was banned for obscenity in parts of the country. Quaintly, each city had at least three or four daily newspapers in those days, while New York, as befitted the world city, had 17 newspapers. But a novelty, television, had begun to appear in household after household, its cold gray distorting eye relentlessly projecting a funhouse view of the world. Those who followed the -- ugly new-minted word -- media began to note that while watching even Milton Berle we kept fading in and out of the Chamber of Horrors. Subliminal skeletons would suddenly flash onto the TV screen; our ally in the recent war "Uncle Joe Stalin," as the accidental president Harry S. Truman had called him, was growing horns and fangs that dripped blood. On earth, we were the only great unruined power with atomic weapons; yet we were now -- somehow -- at terrible risk. Why? How? The trouble appeared to be over Germany, which, on February 11, 1945, had been split at the Yalta summit meeting into four zones: American, Soviet, British, French. As the Russians had done the most fighting and suffered the greatest losses, it was agreed that they should have an early crack at reparations from Germany -- to the extent of $20 billion. At a later meeting at Potsdam the new president Truman, with Stalin and Churchill, reconfirmed Yalta and opted for the unification of Germany under the four victorious powers. But something had happened between the euphoria of Yalta and the edginess of Potsdam. As the meeting progressed, the atom bomb was tried out successfully in a New Mexico desert. We were now able to incinerate Japan -- or the Soviet, for that matter -- and so we no longer needed Russian help to defeat Japan. We started to renege on our agreements with Stalin, particularly reparations from Germany. We also quietly shelved the notion, agreed upon at Yalta, of a united Germany under four-power control. Our aim now was to unite the three Western zones of Germany and integrate them into our Western Europe, restoring, in the process, the German economy -- hence, fewer reparations. Then, as of May 1946, we began to re-arm Germany. Stalin went ape at this betrayal. The Cold War was on. At home, the media was beginning to prepare the attentive few for Disappointment. Suddenly, we were faced with the highest personal income taxes in American history to pay for more and more weapons, among them the world-killer hydrogen bomb -- all because the Russians were coming. No one knew quite why they were coming or with what. Weren't they still burying 20 million dead? Official explanations for all this made little sense, but then, as Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, merrily observed, "In the State Department we used to discuss how much time that mythical 'average American citizen' put in each day listening, reading, and arguing about the world outside his own country.... It seemed to us that ten minutes a day would be a high average." So why bore the people? Secret "bipartisan" government is best for what, after all, is -- or should be -- a society of docile workers, enthusiastic consumers, obedient soldiers who will believe just about anything for at least 10 minutes. The National Security State, the NATO alliance, the 40-years Cold War were all created without the consent, much less advice, of the American people. Of course, there were elections during this crucial time, but Truman-Dewey, Eisenhower-Stevenson, Kennedy-Nixon were of a single mind as to the desirability of inventing, first, a many-tentacled enemy, Communism, the star of the Chamber of Horrors; then, to combat so much evil, install a permanent wartime state at home with loyalty oaths, a national "peacetime" draft, and secret police to keep watch over homegrown "traitors," as the few enemies of the National Security State were known. Then followed 40 years of mindless wars which created a debt of $5 trillion that hugely benefited aerospace and firms like General Electric, whose longtime TV pitchman was Ronald Reagan, eventually retired to the White House. Why go into all this now? Have we not done marvelously well as the United States of Amnesia? Our economy is the envy of the earth, the president proclaimed at Denver. No inflation. Jobs for all except the 2 percent of the population in prison and the 5 percent who no longer look for work and so are not counted, bringing our actual unemployment close to the glum European average of 11 percent. And all of this accomplished without ever once succumbing to the sick socialism of Europe. We have no health service or proper public education or, indeed, much of anything for the residents of the fun house. But there are lots of ill-paid work-hours for husband and wife with no care for the children while parents are away from home. Fortunately, Congress is now preparing legislation so that adult prisons can take in delinquent 14-year-olds. They, at least, will be taken care of, while, economically, it is only a matter of time before the great globe itself is green-spanned. Certainly European bankers envy us our powerless labor unions (only 14 percent of the lucky funsters are privileged to belong to a labor union) and our industries -- lean, mean, downsized, with no particular place for the redundant to go except into the hell of sizzle and fry and burn. Today we give orders to other countries. We tell them with whom to trade and to which of our courts they must show up for indictment should they disobey us. Meanwhile, F.B.I. agents range the world looking for drug fiends and peddlers while the unconstitutional C.I.A. (they don't submit their accounts to Congress as the Constitution requires) chases "terrorists" now that their onetime colleagues and sometime paymasters in the Russian K.G.B. have gone out of business. We have arrived at what Tennessee Williams once called A Moon of Pause. When I asked him what on earth the phrase meant, as spoken by an actress in one of his plays, "It is," he said loftily, "the actual Greek translation of menopause." I said that the word "moon" did not come from menses (Latin, not Greek, for "month"). "Then what," he asked suspiciously, "is the Latin for moon?" When I told him it was luna and what fun he might have with the word "lunatic," he sighed and cut. But at the time of the Madrid conference about the extension of NATO, a moon of pause seemed a nice dotty phrase for the change of life that our empire is now going through, with no enemy and no discernible function. While we were at our busiest in the fun house, no one ever told us what the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance was really about. March 17, 1948, the Treaty of Brussels called for a military alliance of Britain, France, Benelux to be joined by the U.S. and Canada on March 23. The impetus behind NATO was the United States, whose principal foreign policy, since the administration of George Washington, was to avoid what Alexander Hamilton called "entangling alliances." Now, as the Russians were supposed to be coming, we replaced the old republic with the newborn National Security State and set up shop as the major European power west of the Elbe. We were now hell-bent on the permanent division of Germany between our western zone (plus the French and British zones) and the Soviet zone to the east. Serenely, we broke every agreement that we had made with our former ally, now horrendous Communist enemy. For those interested in the details, Carolyn Eisenberg's Drawing the Line (The American Decision to Divide Germany 1944-49) is a masterful survey of an empire -- sometimes blindly, sometimes brilliantly -- assembling itself by turning first its allies and then its enemies like Germany, Italy, Japan into client states, permanently subject to our military and economic diktat. Although the Soviets still wanted to live by our original agreements at Yalta and even Potsdam, we had decided, unilaterally, to restore the German economy in order to enfold a re-armed Germany into Western Europe, thus isolating the Soviet, a nation which had not recovered from the Second World War and had no nuclear weapons. It was Acheson -- again -- who elegantly explained all the lies that he was obliged to tell Congress and the 10-minute-attention-spanned average American: "If we did make our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise.... Qualification must give way to simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness, almost brutality, in carrying home a point." Thus, were two generations of Americans treated by their overlords until, in the end, at the word "Communism," there is an orgasmic Pavlovian reflex just as the brain goes dead. In regard to the "enemy," Ambassador Waiter Bedell Smith -- a former general with powerful simple views -- wrote to his old boss General Eisenhower from Moscow in December 1947 apropos a conference to regularize European matters: "The difficulty under which we labor is that in spite of our announced position we really do not want nor intend to accept German unification in any terms the Russians might agree to, even though they seemed to meet most of our requirements." Hence, Stalin's frustration that led to the famous blockade of the Allied section of Berlin, overcome by General Lucius Clay's successful airlift. As Eisenberg writes, "With the inception of the Berlin blockade, President Truman articulated a simple story that featured the Russians, trampling the wartime agreements in their ruthless grab for the former German capital. The president did not explain that the United States had abandoned Yalta and Potsdam, that it was pushing the formation of a West German state against the misgivings of many Europeans, and that the Soviets had launched the blockade to prevent partition." This was fun-house politics at its most tragicomical. The president, like a distorting mirror, reversed the truth. But then he was never on top of the German situation as opposed to the coming election (November 1948), an election of compelling personal interest to him but, in the great scheme of things, to no one else. He did realize that the few Americans who could identify George Washington might object to our NATO alliance, and so his secretary of state, Acheson, was told to wait until February 1949, after the election; to present to Congress our changeover from a Western Hemisphere republic to an imperial European polity, symmetrically balanced by our Asian empire, centered on occupied Japan and, in due course, its tigerish pendant, the ASEAN alliance. The case for an American world empire was never properly argued since the debate -- what little there was -- centered on the alleged desire of the Soviet Union to conquer the whole world, just as Hitler and the Nazis were trying to do until stopped, in 1945, by the Soviet Union with (what Stalin regarded as suspiciously belated) aid from the U.S. On March 12, 1947, Truman addressed Congress to proclaim what would be known as the Truman Doctrine, in which he targeted our ally of two years earlier as the enemy. The subject at hand was a civil war in Greece, supposedly directed by the Soviet. We could not tolerate this as, suddenly, "the policy of the United States [is] to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure." Thus, Truman made the entire world the specific business of the United States. Although the Greek insurgents were getting some help from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, the Soviet stayed out. They still hoped that the British, whose business Greece had been, would keep order. But as Britain had neither the resources nor the will, she called on the U.S. to step in. Behind the usual closed doors, Acheson was stirring up Congress with Iago-like intensity: Russian pressure of some sort "had brought the Balkans to the point where a highly possible Soviet breakthrough might open three continents to Soviet penetration." Senators gasped; grew pale, wondered how to get more "defense" contracts into their states. Of the major politicians, only former vice president Henry Wallace dared answer Truman's "clearer than truth" version of history: "Yesterday March 12, 1947, marked a turning point in American history, [for] it is not a Greek crisis that we face, it is an American crisis. Yesterday, President Truman ... proposed, in effect, that America police Russia's every border. There is no regime too reactionary for us provided it stands in Russia's expansionist path. There is no country too remote to serve as the scene of a contest which may widen until it becomes a world war." Nine days after Truman declared war on Communism, he installed a federal loyalty-oath program. All government employees must now swear allegiance to the new order. Wallace struck again: "The President's executive order creates a master index of public servants. From the janitor in the village post office to the Cabinet members, they are to be sifted, and tested and watched and appraised." Truman was nervously aware that many regarded Wallace as true heir to Roosevelt's New Deal; Wallace was also likely to enter the presidential race of 1948. Truman now left truth behind in the dust. "The attempt of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, et al. to fool the world and the American Crackpots Association, represented by Jos. Davies, Henry Wallace, Claude Pepper and the actors and artists in immoral Greenwich Village, is just like Hitler's and Mussolini's so-called socialist states." Give 'em hell, Harry. In the wake of Truman's cuckoo-like emergence from the old-fashioned closet of the original American Republic, a new American state was being born in order to save the nation and the great globe itself from Communism. The nature of this militarized state was, from the beginning, beyond rational debate. Characteristically, Truman and Acheson insisted on closed hearings of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. These matters were too important to share with the people whose spare 10 minutes was now more and more filling up with television. The committee's Republican leader, Arthur H. Vandenberg, the great goose of Grand Rapids, Michigan, was thrilled to be taken into the confidence of the creators of the new empire, but he did suggest that, practically speaking, if hell wasn't scared out of the American people, Congress would have a hard time raising the revenues to pay for a military buildup in what was still thought to be, inside the ever more isolated fun house, peacetime. The media spoke with a single voice. Time Inc. publisher Henry Luce said it loudest: "God had founded America as a global beacon of freedom." Dissenters, like Wallace, were labeled Communists and ceased to engage meaningfully in public life or, by 1950. even in debate. Like the voice of a ghost, an ancestral voice, he spoke on May 21, 1947: "Today in blind fear of communism, we are turning aside from the United Nations. We are approaching a century of fear." Thus far, he is proved to be half right. On July 26, 1947, Congress enacted the National Security Act, which created the National Security Council, still going strong, and the Central Intelligence Agency, still apparently going over a cliff as the result of decades of bad intelligence, not to mention all those cheery traitors for whom the country club at Langley, Virginia, was once an impenetrable cover. Years later, a sadder, if not wiser, Truman told his biographer, Merle Miller, that the C.I.A. had become a dangerous mess and ought not to have been set up as it was. But in 1947 the C.I.A.'s principal role in Europe was not to counter Soviet activities but to control the politics of NATO members. French and Italian trade unions and publications were subsidized, and a great deal of secret money was poured into Italy to ensure the victory of the Christian Democratic Party in the elections of April 1948. Acheson, in Present at the Creation, a memoir that compensates in elegance what it lacks in candor, alludes delicately to National Security Council document 68 (the 1950 blueprint for our war against Communism). But in 1969, when he was writing, he sadly notes that the memo is still classified. Only in 1975 was it to be declassified. There are seven points. First, never negotiate with the Soviet Union. No wonder the rebuffed Stalin, ever touchy, kept reacting brutally in Mitteleuropa. Second, develop the hydrogen bomb so that when the Russians go atomic we will still be ahead of them. Third? rapidly build up conventional forces. Fourth, to pay for this, levy huge personal income taxes -- as high as 90 percent. Fifth, mobilize everyone in the war against internal Communism through propaganda, loyalty oaths, and spy networks like the F.B.I., whose secret agent Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, had come into his splendid own, fingering better actors. Sixth, set up a strong alliance system, directed by the United States -- NATO. Seventh, make the people of Russia, through propaganda and C.I.A. derring-do, our allies against their government, thus legitimizing, with this highly vague task, our numerous unaccountable secret agents. So, after five years in the fun house, we partially emerged in January 1950, to find ourselves in a new sort of country. We were also, astonishingly, again at war: this time in Korea. But as Truman-Acheson were nervous about asking Congress for a declaration, the war was called a United Nations police action; and messily lost. Acheson did prepare a memo assuring Truman that, hitherto, 87 presidential military adventures had been undertaken without a congressional declaration of war as required by the old Constitution. Since 1950 the United States has fought perhaps a hundred overt and covert wars. None was declared by the nominal representatives of the American People in Congress Assembled; they had meekly turned over to the executive their principal great power, to wage war. That was the end of that Constitution. As it will take at least a decade for us to reinvent China as a new evil empire, the moon is in a state of pause over the old fairground. We are entering a phase undreamed of by those "present at the creation" of the empire. Although many still reflexively object to the word "empire," we have military bases in every continent, as well as 10 aboard the aircraft carrier called the United Kingdom. For 50 years we have supported too many tyrants, overthrown too many democratic governments, wasted too much of our own money in other people's civil wars to pretend that we're just helping out all those poor little folks all round the world who love freedom and democracy just like we do. When the Russians stabbed us in the back by folding their empire in 1991, we were left with many misconceptions about ourselves and, rather worse, about the rest of the world. The literature on what we did and why since 1945 is both copious and thin. There are some first-rate biographies of the various players. If one goes digging, there are interesting monographs like Waiter LaFeber's "NATO and the Korean War: A Context." But the link between universities and imperial Washington has always been a strong one as Kissingers dart back and forth between classroom to high office to even higher, lucrative eminence, as lobbyists for foreign powers, often hostile to our interests. Now, with Carolyn Eisenberg's Drawing the Line, there is a step-by-step description of the years 1944-49, when we restored, re-armed, and reintegrated our German province into our Western Europe. For those who feel that Eisenberg dwells too much on American confusions and mendacities, there is always the elegant Robert H. Ferrell on "The Formation of the Alliance, 1948-1949." A court historian, as apologists for empire are known, Ferrell does his best with Harry Truman, reminding us of all the maniacs around him who wanted atomic war at the time of Korea, among them the first secretary of defense, the paranoid James Forrestal, who, while reading Sophocles' Ajax in hospital, suddenly defenestrated himself, a form of resignation that has never really caught on as it should. At one point, Ferrell notes that Truman actually gave thought to the sufferings of women and children should we go nuclear in Korea. As for Truman's original decision to use two atomic bombs on Japan, most now agree that a single demonstration would have been quite enough to cause a Japanese surrender while making an attractive crater lake out of what had been Mount Fujiyama's peak. But Truman was in a bit of a daze at the time, as were the 13 million of us under arms who loudly applauded his abrupt ending of the first out-and-out race war, where the Japanese had taken to castrating Marines, alive as well as dead, while Marines, good brand-name-conscious Americans, would stick Coca-Cola bottles up living Japanese soldiers and then break them off. Welcome to some pre-fun-house memories still vivid to ancient survivors. The story that Lieutenant R. M. Nixon tried to persuade the Marines to use Pepsi-Cola bottles has never been verified. The climate of intimidation that began with the loyalty oath of 1947 remains with us even though two American generations have been born with no particular knowledge of what the weather was like before the great freeze and the dramatic change in our form of government. No thorough history of what actually happened to us and to the world 1945-97 has yet appeared. There are interesting glances at this or that detail. There are also far too many silly hagiographies of gallant little guy Truman and superstatesman George Marshall, who did admit to Acheson that he had no idea what on earth the plan in his name was really about. But aside from all the American and foreign dead from Korea to Vietnam, from Guatemala to the Persian Gulf, the destruction of our old republic's institutions has been the great hurt. Congress has surrendered to the executive not only the first of its great powers, but the second, the power of the purse, looks to be up for grabs as Congress is forcing more money on the Pentagon than even that black hole has asked for, obliging the executive to spend many hot hours in the vast kitchen where the books are forever cooking in bright-red ink. As for our Ouija-board Supreme Court, it would be nice if they would take time off from holding seances with the long-dead founders, whose original intent so puzzles them, and actually examine what the founders wrought, the Constitution itself and the Bill of Rights. Did anyone speak out during the half-century that got us $5 trillion into debt while reducing the median household income by 7 percent when ... No. Sorry. Too boring. Or, as Edward S. Herman writes, "Paul Krugman admits, in Age of Diminished Expectations, that the worsening of the income distribution was 'the central fact about economic life in America in the 1980s,' but as an issue 'it has basically exhausted the patience of the American public'" -- the l0-minute attention span, unlike the green-span, has snapped on that one -- "and 'no policy change now under discussion seems likely to narrow the gap significantly.'" It was The New Yorker's literary and social critic Edmund Wilson who first sounded the alarm. In 1963 he published The Cold War and the Income Tax. Stupidly, he admits, he filed no income-tax returns between 1946 and 1955. As I've noted, one of the great events of our first year in the fun house was the publication in 1946 of Wilson's novel Memoirs of Hecate County. Wilson's income -- never much -- doubled. Then a system of justice, forever alert to sexual indecency, suppressed his book by court order. He was now broke with an expensively tangled marital life. Wilson describes being hounded by agents of the I.R.S.; he also goes into the background of the federal income tax, which dates, as we know it, from 1913. Wilson also notes that, as of the 1960s, we were paying more taxes than we did during the Second World War. Since N.S.C.-68 would remain a secret for another 12 years, he had no way of knowing that punitive income taxes must be borne by the American people in order to build up both nuclear and conventional forces to "protect" ourselves from a Second World country of, as yet, no danger to anyone except weak neighbors along its borders. In my review of Wilson's polemic (Book Week, November 3, 1963) I wrote: "In public services, we lag behind all the industrialized nations of the West, preferring that the public money go not to the people but to big business. The result is a unique society in which we have free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich." It should be noted -- but seldom is -- that the Depression did not end with the New Deal of 1933-40. In fact, it flared up again, worse than ever, in 1939 and 1940. Then, when F.D.R. spent some $20 billion on defense (1941), the Depression was over and Lord Keynes was a hero. This relatively small injection of public money into the system reduced unemployment to 8 percent and, not unnaturally, impressed the country's postwar managers: if you want to avoid depression, spend money on war. No one told them that the same money spent on the country's infrastructure would have saved us debt, grief blood. What now seems to us as Wilson's rather dizzy otherworldly approach to paying taxes is, in the context of his lifetime, reasonable. In 1939, only four million tax returns were filed: less than 10 percent of the workforce. According to Richard Polenberg, "By the summer of 1943, nearly all Americans paid taxes out of their weekly earnings, and most were current in their payments.... [And thus] a foundation for the modern tax structure had been erected." Then some unsung genius thought up the withholding tax, and all the folks were well and truly locked in. Wilson knew none of this. But he had figured out the causal link between income tax and cold war. The truth is that the people of the United States are at the present time dominated and driven by two kinds of officially propagated fear: fear of the Soviet Union and fear of the income tax. These two terrors have been adjusted so as to complement one another and thus to keep the citizen of our free society under the strain of a double pressure from which he finds himself unable to escape -- like the man in the old Western story, who, chased into a narrow ravine by a buffalo, is confronted with a grizzly bear. If we fail to accept the tax the Russian buffalo will butt and trample us, and if we try to defy the tax, the federal bear will crush us. At the time the original North American Treaty Organization was created, only the Augustus manqe de Gaulle got the point to what we were doing; he took France out of our Cosa Nostra and developed his own atomic bomb. But France was still very much linked to the imperium. Through the C.I.A. and other secret forces, political control was exerted within the empire, not only driving the British Labour prime minister Harold Wilson around a bend too far but preventing Italy from ever having a cohesive government by not allowing the "historic compromise" -- a government of Christian Democrats and Communists -- to take place. The Soviet, always reactive, promptly cracked down on their client states Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany; and a wall went up in Berlin, to spite their face. From 1950 to 1990, Europe was dangerously divided; and armed to the teeth. But as American producers of weapons were never richer, all was well with their world. At Yalta, Roosevelt wanted to break up the European colonial empires, particularly that of the French. Of Indochina he said, "France has milked it for a hundred years." For the time being, he proposed a U.N. trusteeship. Then he died. Unlike Roosevelt. Truman was not a philatelist. Had he been a stamp collector, he might have known where the various countries in the world were and who lived in them. But like every good American, Truman knew he hated Communism. He also hated socialism, which may or may not have been the same thing. No one seemed quite sure. Yet as early as the American election of 1848, socialism -- imported by comical German immigrants with noses always in books -- was an ominous specter, calculated to derange a raw capitalist society with labor unions, health care, and other Devil's work still being fiercely resisted a century and a half later. In 1946, when Ho Chi Minh asked the United States to take Indochina under its wing, Truman said, No way. You're some kind of Fu Manchu Communist -- the worst. In August 1945, Truman told de Gaulle that the French could return to Indochina: we were no longer F.D.R. anti-imperialists. As Ho had his northern republic, the French installed Bao Dai in the South. February 1, 1950, the State Department reported, "The choice confronting the United States is to support the French in Indochina or face the extension of Communism over the remainder of the continental area of Southeast Asia and, possibly, further westward." Thus, without shepherds or even a napalm star, the domino theory was born in a humble State Department manger. On May 8, 1950, Acheson recommended economic and military aid to the French in Vietnam. By 1955, the U.S. was paying 40 percent of the French cost of war. For a quarter-century, the United States was to fight in Vietnam because our ignorant leaders and their sharp-eyed financiers never realized that the game, at best, is always chess and never dominoes. But nothing ever stays the same. During the last days of the waning moon, a haphazard Western European economic union was cobbled together, then, as the Soviet abruptly let go Its empire, the two Germanys that we had so painstakingly kept apart reunited. Washington was suddenly adrift, and in the sky the moon of empire paused. Neither Reagan nor Bush had much knowledge of history or geography. Nevertheless, orders still kept coming from the White House. But they were less and less heeded because everyone knows that the Oval One has a bank overdraft of $5 trillion and he can no longer give presents to good clients or wage war without first passing the hat to the Germans and Japanese, as he was obliged to do when it came time to sponsor CNN's light show in the Persian Gulf. Gradually, it is now becoming evident to even the most distracted funster that there is no longer any need for NATO, because there is no enemy. One might say there never really was one when NATO was started, but, over the years, we did succeed in creating a pretty dangerous Soviet, a fun-house-mirror version of ourselves. Although the United States may yet, in support of Israel, declare war on one billion Muslims, the Europeans will stay out. They recall 1529, when the Turks besieged Vienna not as obliging guest workers but as world conquerors. Never again. In the wake of the Madrid NATO summit, it is time for the United States to step away from Europe -- gracefully. Certainly the Europeans think it is time for us to go, as their disdainful remarks at Denver betrayed, particularly when they were warned not to walk more than a block or two from their hotels for fear of being robbed, maimed, murdered. Yet why do we persist in holding on to empire? Cherchez la monnaie, as the clever French say. Ever since 1941, when Roosevelt got us out of the Depression by pumping federal money into re-arming, war or the threat of war has been the principal engine to our society. Now the war is over. Or is it? Can we afford to give up our -- well, cozy unremitting war? Why not -- ah, the brilliance, the simplicity! -- instead of shrinking, expand our phantom empire in Europe by popping everyone into NATO? No reason to have any particular enemy, though, who knows, if sufficiently goaded, Russia might again be persuaded to play Great Satan in our somewhat dusty chamber of horrors. With an expanded NATO, our arms-makers -- if not workers -- are in for a bonanza. As it is, our sales of weapons were up 23 percent last year, to $11.3 billion in orders; meanwhile, restrictions on sales to Latin America are now being lifted. Chile, ever menaced by Ecuador, may soon buy as many as 24 American-made F-16 jet fighters. But an expanded NATO is the beauty part. Upon joining NATO, the lucky new club member is obliged to buy expensive weapons from the likes of Lockheed Martin, recently merged with Northrop Grumman. Since the new members have precarious economies -- and the old ones are not exactly booming -- the American taxpayer, a wan goose that lays few eggs, will have to borrow ever more money to foot the bill, which the Congressional Budget Office says should come to $125 billion over 15 years with the U.S. paying $19 billion. Yeltsin correctly sees this as a hostile move against Russia, not to mention an expensive renewal of the Cold War, while our very own Delphic oracle, the ancient Janus-like mandarin George Kennan, has said that such an expansion could "inflame nationalistic anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion." Where once we were told it was better to be dead than Red, now we will be told that it is better to be broke than -- what? -- slaves of the Knights of Malta? Meanwhile, conservative think tanks (their salaries paid directly or indirectly by interested conglomerates) are issuing miles of boilerplate about the necessity of securing the Free World from enemies; and Lockheed Martin lobbies individual senators, having spent (officially) $2.3 million for congressional and presidential candidates in the 1996 election. For those interested in just how ruinous NATO membership will be for the new members, there is the special report NATO Expansion: Time to Reconsider, by the British American Security Information Council and the Centre for European Security and Disarmament. Jointly published 25 November 1996, the authors regard the remilitarization of the region between Berlin and Moscow as lunacy geopolitically and disastrous economically. Hungary is now aiming at a 22 percent increase in military spending this year. The Czechs and the Poles mean to double their defense spending. The world is again at risk as our "bipartisan" rulers continue loyally to serve those who actually elect them -- Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, General Electric, Mickey Mouse, and on and on. Meanwhile, as I write, the U.S. is secretly building a new generation of nuclear weapons like the W-88 Trident missile. Cost: $4 billion a year. There comes a moment when empires cease to exert energy and become symbolic -- or existential, as we used to say back in the 40s. The current wrangling over NATO demonstrates what a quandary a symbolic empire is in when it lacks the mind, much less the resources, to impose its hegemony upon former client states. At the end, entropy gets us all. Fun house falls down. Fairground's a parking lot. "So I awoke, and behold it was a dream." Pilgrim's Progress again. But not quite yet. It is a truism that generals are always ready to fight the last war. The anachronistic rhetoric at Madrid in July, if ever acted upon, would certainly bring on the next -- last? -- big war, if only because, in Francis Bacon's words, "Upon the breaking and shivering of a great state and empire, you may be sure to have wars." Happily, in the absence of money and common will nothing much will probably happen. Meanwhile, there is a new better world ready to be born. The optimum economic unit in the world is now the city-state. Thanks to technology, everyone knows or can know something about everyone else on the planet. The message now pounding over the Internet is the irrelevancy, not to mention sheer danger, of the traditional nation-state, much less empire. Despite currency confusions, Southeast Asia leads the way while the warlords at Peking not only are tolerating vigorous industrial semi-autonomies like Shanghai but also may have an ongoing paradigm in Hong Kong. We do not like the way Singapore is run (hardly our business), but it is, relatively speaking, a greater commercial success than the United States, which might prosper, once the empire's put out of its misery, in smaller units on the Swiss cantonal model: Spanish-speaking Catholic regions, Asian Confucian regions, consensually united mixed regions with, here and there, city-states like New York-Boston or Silicon Valley. In the next century, barring accident, the common market in Europe will evolve not so much into a union of ancient bloodstained states as a mosaic of homogenous regions and city-states like Milan, say, each loosely linked in trade with a clearinghouse information canter at Brussels to orchestrate finance and trade and the policing of cartels. Basques, Bretons, Walloons, Scots who want to be rid of onerous nation-states should be let go in order to pursue and even -- why not? -- overtake happiness, the goal, or so we Americans have always pretended to believe, of the human enterprise. |