Talk:War and Peace Studies

Grand Area planning

This article might benefit from something on the "Grand Area" planning -- if it shouldn't be an article itself. It seems awfully important. I'm struggling to find many sources, but Chomsky has mentioned the topic in numerous lectures and interviews:

Excerpt from Interview

A FEW years before Kennan’s document, the U.S. developed something called the "Grand Area Strategy." What was that about?

THIS IS quite interesting. There’s only one good book about this, by Laurence Shoup and William Minter, called Imperial Brain Trust. It’s not an official government policy. These were programs run by the Council on Foreign Relations with the participation of the State Department, from 1939 to 1945, planning the postwar world. It began when the Second World War began and went on. They’re quite interesting. One reason they’re interesting is because the policies that were actually carried out are very similar to those they discussed. Not surprisingly, it was many of the same people in charge and the same interests represented. It’s a book well worth reading. It’s been bitterly attacked, naturally, which is a pretty good sign that it’s worth reading. And no reviews and that sort of thing…it’s kept secret. There’s very little scholarship on this, but it’s really important material. It’s obvious from just taking a look at who was doing it. It actually reads rather like the National Security Strategy.

In some recent publications I’ve compared the statements, and this is kind of Roosevelt-style liberals, remember, at the opposite end of the planning spectrum. It says the United States will have to emerge from the war as the world dominant power, and will have to make sure there is no challenge to its dominance anywhere, ever. And it will have to do this by a program of complete rearmament, which will leave the United States in a position of overwhelming strength in the world. It goes on like that. In the early stages of the war the "Grand Area" was supposed to be the non-German world. They assumed in the early stages that Nazi Germany would partially win the war, at least it would control most of Europe. So there would be a German world, and then the question was, What about the non-German world? And they said: That has to be turned into what they called a "Grand Area" run by the United States. Then they went through a geopolitical and geostrategic analysis of whatever resources we’d need, and so on and so forth.

The Grand Area would include, at a minimum, the entire Western Hemisphere, the Far East and the former British Empire. That’s the early stage of the war. As it became clear by 1943 roughly, that Germany was going to be defeated, mainly by the Russians, they began extending the policies beyond, to try to hold on to as much of Eurasia as possible, assuming there wouldn’t be a German world. And those policies later extend into the policy planning carried out in the early postwar period, and in many respects right until today. These are pretty natural and sensible plans of analysts who are thinking in terms of world domination for the interests that they represent. Of course, they will say, and probably believe, that they’re just laboring for the benefit of the ordinary person, but the Romans that Schumpeter was talking about would have said the same thing and also believed it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Greg sg (talk • contribs) 10:39, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Excerpt from a 1985 talk by Noam Chomsky.

... U.S. global planning has always been sophisticated and careful, as you'd expect from a major superpower with a highly centralized and class conscious dominant social group. Their power, in turn, is rooted in their ownership and management of the economy, as is the norm in most societies. During World War II, American planners were well aware that the United States was going to emerge as a world-dominant power, in a position of hegemony that had few historical parallels, and they organized and met in order to deal with this situation.

From 1939 to 1945, extensive studies were conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department. One group was called the War-Peace Studies Group, which met for six years and produced extensive geopolitical analyses and plans. The Council on Foreign Relations is essentially the business input to foreign policy plainning. These groups also involved every top planner in the State Department, with the exception of the Secretary of State.

The conception that they developed is what they called "Grand Area" planning. The Grand Area was a region that was to be subordinated to the needs of the American economy. As one planner put it, it was to be the region that is "strategically necessary for world control." The geopolitical analysis held that the Grand Area had to include at least the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British Empire, which we were then in the process of dismantling and taking over ourselves. This is what is called "anti-imperialism" in American scholariship. The Grand Area was also to include western and southern Europe and the oil-producing regions of the Middle East; in fact, it was to include everything, if that were possible. Detailed plans were laid for particular regions of the Grand Area and also for international institutions that were to organize and police it, essentially in the interests of this subordination to U.S. domestic needs.

Of course, when we talk about the domestic economy, we don't necessarily mean the people of the United States; we mean whoever dominates and controls, owns and manages the American economy. In fact, the planners recognized that other arrangements, other forms of organization, involving much less extensive control over the world would indeed be possible, but only at what from their point of view was the "cost" of internal rearrangements toward a more egalitarian society in the United States, and obviously that is not contemplated.

With respect to the Far East, the plans were roughly as follows: Japan, it was understood, would sooner or later be the industrial heartland of Asia once again. Since Japan is a resource-poor area, it would need Southeast Asia and South Asia for resources and markets. All of this, of course, would be incorporated within the global system dominated by the United States.

With regard to Latin America, the matter was put most plainly by Secretary of War Henry Stimson in May 1945 when he was explaining how we must eliminate and dismantle regional systems dominated by any other power, particularly the British, while maintaining and extending our own system. He explained with regard to Latin America as follows: "I think that it's not asking too much to have our little region over here which never has bothered anybody."

The basic thinking behind all of this has been explained quite lucidly on a number of occasions. (This is a very open society and if one wants to learn what's going on, you can do it; it takes a little work, but the documents are there and the history is also there.) One of the clearest and most lucid accounts of the planning behind this was by George Kennan, who was one of the most thoughtful, humane, and liberal of the planners, and in fact was eliminated from the State Depatment largely for that reason. Kennan was the head of the State Department policy planning staff in the late 1940s. In the following document, PPS23, February 1948, he outlined the basic thinking:

We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population... . In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity... . We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction... . We should cease to talk about vague and ..., unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

Now, recall that this is a Top Secret document. The idealistic slogans are, of course, to be constantly trumpeted by scholarship, the schools, the media, and the rest of the ideological system in order to pacify the domestic population, giving rise to accounts such as those of the "official view" that I've already described. Recall again that this is a view from the dovish, liberal, humane end of the spectrum. But it is lucid and clear.

There are some questions that one can raise about Kennan's formulation, a number of them, but I'll keep to one: whether he is right in suggesting that "human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization" should be dismissed as irrelevant to U.S. foreign policy. Actually, a review of the historical record suggests a different picture, namely that the United States has often opposed with tremendous ferocity, and even violence, these elements -- human rights, democratization, and the raising of living standards.

This is particularly the case in Latin America and there are very good reasons for it. The commitment to these doctrines is inconsistent with the use of harsh measures to maintain the disparity, to insure our control over 50 percent of the resources, and our exploitation of the world. In short, what we might call the "Fifth Freedom" (there were Four Freedoms, you remember, but there was one that was left out), the Freedom to Rob, and that's really the only one that counts; the others were mostly for show. And in order to maintain the freedom to rob and exploit, we do have to consistently oppose democratization, the raising of living standards, and human rights. And we do consistently oppose them; that, of course, is in the real world.

This Top Secret document referred to the Far East, but Kennan applied the same ideas to Latin America in a briefing for Latin American ambassadors in which he explained that one of the main concerns of U.S. policy is the "protection of our raw materials." Who must we protect our raw materials from? Well, primarily, the domestic populations, the indigenous population, which may have ideas of their own about raising the living standards, democratization, and human rights. And that's inconsistent with maintaining the disparity. How will we protect our raw materials from the indigenous population? Well, the answer is the following:

The final answer might be an unpleasant one, but ... we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government. This is not shameful, since the Communists are essentially traitors... . It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists.

Well, who are the Communists? "Communists" is a term regularly used in American political theology to refer to people who are committed to the belief that "the government has direct responsibility for the welfare of the people." I'm quoting the words of a 1949 State Department intelligence report which warned about the spread of this grim and evil doctrine, which does, of course, threaten "our raw materials" if we can't abort it somehow.

So it is small wonder, with this kind of background, that John F. Kennedy should say that "governments of the civilmilitary type of El Salvador are the most effective in containing Communist penetration in Latin America." Kennedy said this at the time when he was organizing the basic structure of the death squads that have massacred tens of thousands of people since (all of this, incidentally, within the framework of the Alliance for Progress, and, in fact, probably the only lasting effect of that program).

In the mid-1950s, these ideas were developed further. For example, one interesting case was an important study by a prestigious study group headed by William Yandell Eliot, who was Williams Professor of Government at Harvard. They were also concerned with what Communism is and how it spreads. They concluded accurately that the primary threat of Communism is the economic transformation of the Communist powers "in ways which reduce their willingness and ability to complement the industrial economies of the West." That is essentially correct and is a good operational definition of "Communism" in American political discourse. Our government is committed to that view.

If a government is so evil or unwise as to undertake a course of action of this sort, it immediately becomes an enemy. It becomes a part of the "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy" to take over the world, as John F. Kennedy put it. It is postulated that it has been taken over by the Russians if that's the policy that it appears to be committed to.

Greg sg (talk) 10:48, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

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