America and the Cold War Mentality

American Policing on the World Stage The American “policing” role developed because of the Cold War, but it was primarily a means for protecting and assisting economic interests for itself and its allies as illustrated by recent events as well as earlier ones. When George H. Bush called for the Gulf War in order to push Iraq out of Kuwait, he cast Hussein in the role of “villain” and Kuwait as the “victim” in his address to Congress (Bush, 1991).

Colin Powell (2003) would do a similar stunt a decade later in the events leading up to the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq, which was accused of harboring WMDs and using mobile weapons labs to hide them (labs that would in fact never be found). In both cases, the pretext for war was based on phony intelligence—but the point was never about sticking up for the little guy or defending the world from evil.

It was always about America being the world’s policeman as a means of protecting its own and its allies’ interests. In the Middle East, those allies are clearly Israel and Saudi Arabia, and toppling regimes (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran) is what they desire. Since the start of the Cold War, regime change has been America’s bread and butter all over the world.

From Italy to Iran to Guatemala to Laos to Cuba to Vietnam and so on, the U.S.’s track record speaks for itself. Recent events in the Middle East show as much, as do earlier incidents like the Bay of Pigs and Gulf of Tonkin just to name a few of the more egregious examples (Paul, 2008). America had become the world’s superpower in the aftermath of WWII. The U.S.

had helped to turn the tide against the Axis, and its technological superiority (in terms of true WMDs) was demonstrated not once but twice over Japan. Dulles (1954) explained it sufficiently well when he (under)stated the policy of the U.S. in the face of Soviet “aggression”—a term Bush I would apply to the heinous act of Hussein in the early 1990s of daring to oppose Western machinations and annex Kuwait for himself.

For Dulles (1954) the policy was simple: “The way to deter aggression is for the free community to be willing and able to respond vigorously at places and with means of its own choosing.” Those words of “of its own choosing” would be especially important—as Dulles himself would demonstrate in the Bay of Pigs incident—an attempt at regime change in Cuba that certainly qualified as America choosing its own method of dealing with upstarts who dared challenge the empire’s police stick.

Dulles himself was a product of the Cold War’s Marshall Plan, ostensibly developed to help rebuild Europe’s economic infrastructure, but which actually provided the CIA with a bottomless pocket book from which the intelligence agency could engage in covert operations all around the world (Schultz, 2014). Operating behind entities like Radio Free Europe, the U.S. became the new empire. It would attempt to muscle in wherever it could, exercising its influence in myriad ways.

In Vietnam, for instance, it attempted to replace French rule with its own puppet on a string and then resorted to military force when that failed. In the Middle East, as George H. Bush pointed out, America was to be the protector of the helpless against the evil aggressions of larger bullying states—like Iraq—at least, that is what he told the public. Domestically, there was a struggle for power behind the scenes.

The assassination of Kennedy marked the watershed moment; fear of Communism had been building in American society, and the alleged assassin being painted as a Communist supporter did not help to alleviate those fears. Johnson jumped on the fear and used it to really get the war under way in Asia. As the body bags mounted, support for the anti-Communist crusade deteriorated.

Nixon failed to deliver, and his replacement, Ford, gave the government over heart and soul to the neoconservatives—instead of to the people who wanted an end to the wars. Bush I (former CIA Director) would serve as Reagan’s Dick Cheney just as Dick Cheney would serve as his Bush II’s man behind the man.

And all along the neoconservative foreign policy would build steam, culminating in a volcanic blast of “policing” in the post-9/11 Bush Doctrine that would usher in an era of warfare of tremendous scope and terrible destruction (Tarzi, 2014). After all, as Tarzi (2014) notes, the famous Bush Doctrine was really just “a synonym for neoconservative foreign policy”—and that policy had been in the works all throughout the Cold War.

In conclusion, America’s policy has not been a policy of humanitarian intervention, and though disguised as a policy of “policing” thanks to stories of babies being tossed out of incubators and vials of yellow cake it has really been nothing more than the policy of the neoconservatives—i.e., the policy of the Cold Warriors and their allies in the Middle East, namely Israel and Saudi Arabia, the only two states in the Middle East routinely ignored by the U.S. bully stick.

Their special relationship is really.