The Perils of Sole Superpower Status

Humanist, Nov, 1998 by John M. Swomley

The United States is the world's self-proclaimed sole superpower, and both President Clinton and Congress are determined to maintain that superiority despite the cost in trillions of dollars and millions of lives. What makes it a superpower?

The first way the United States maintains its superpower status is by way of four major spheres of influence. Utilizing the Monroe Doctrine, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and various other agreements, it exercises its influence within the first sphere: the continents of North and South America. Since World War II, that influence has expanded to the second sphere: throughout the Pacific. U.S. military bases now extend from Australia to Japan, from South Korea to Hawaii and Alaska.

Through NATO and numerous investments and bases, the United States enjoys a third sphere of influence in Western Europe and, with the expansion of NATO upon U.S. insistence, in Eastern Europe to the borders of Russia. The United States further enjoys a fourth sphere encompassing the Middle East, where it has troops or military alliances stretching from Bosnia, Turkey, and Greece to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and some of the Gulf emirates--with Israel the pivotal ally. In addition, the United States exercises overwhelming financial influence abroad through American investments and in international policy-setting agencies, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.

The second way the United States maintains its number one status is domestically, through the vast military program of the Pentagon. There can hardly be a more arrogant proclamation of power than in the Pentagon's draft Defense Planning Guide for 1994-1999, which states:

   America must prevent other states from challenging our leadership or
   seeking to overturn the established political and economic order .... We
   must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even
   aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

To sustain this power, the United States maintains nearly one hundred major bases in sixteen countries and has stationed troops in seventy-five countries.

One of the ways the Pentagon influences the militaries of other countries is by training foreign officers at U.S. "war colleges." Another is by conducting training exercises with foreign armies. According to the August 1, 1998, New York Times, the Pentagon acknowledged that the purpose of these exercises, known as Joint Combined Exchange and Training, is "to train and engage and interact and gain influence with successive generations" of those nations' officers. According to Pentagon records, the U.S. military conducted training exercises with 102 foreign armies in 1997. In nations where the military is not completely controlled by civilian governments, this means the Pentagon has more influence than the State Department.

Another way the Pentagon influences other countries is through its arms sales staff of 6,400 employees. The Pentagon's foreign military finance program, with a budget of $3.5 billion, gives money to approved nations to buy arms. In fiscal year 1995-1996, the top U.S. armsmakers gave key members of Congress $10.8 million through political action committees and contributions, and Congress increased subsidies for arms exports from $7 billion to $7.6 billion. Since arms companies did a $15 billion export business in 1995, over half the cost for planes, tanks, and missiles came from U.S. taxpayers--not from other countries. Congress also passed a $15 billion loan guarantee program for domestic armsmakers if other countries default on their payments, and it gave armsmakers a tax break of $200 million a year by freeing them from their obligation to give the government 5 to 25 percent of their arms sales.

The U.S. government is not only the biggest supplier of weapons to other countries, it is helping to build arms industries in such countries as Israel, Turkey, Egypt, South Korea, and Taiwan. When it licenses these allies to develop U.S. weapons of mass destruction, it also exports the military technology to do so.

The third major facet of the United States' status as the world's leading superpower is its uncontested control of outer space through the U.S. Space Command and the two largest intelligence agencies: the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the National Security Agency (NSA). The United States is now the sole proprietor of a twenty-four-hour global reconnaissance network, with headquarters in Colorado: at the Aerospace Data Facility at Buckley Field in Aurora, at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, and at Falcon Air Force Base near Colorado Springs. Subsidiary bases exist in England, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere. Other known bases are in San Antonio, Texas, and Fort Gordon, Georgia.

Lockhead Martin, whose Titan IV plant is also in Colorado, launches highly secret technology into outer space aboard giant spy satellites that cost more than $1 billion each. Using this space network, the United States not only gathers an enormous amount of "intelligence" but commercial information of value to U.S. companies. In early 1995, France expelled all U.S. intelligence agencies, charging the NSA with giving information to Raytheon, a defense electronics powerhouse.