With regard to Asia, the principles were first given a definitive form in an August 1949 draft of NSC 48, Bruce Cumings observes. The basic principle it enunciated was "reciprocal exchange and mutual advantage." A corollary, again, is opposition to independent development: "none of [the Asian countries] alone has adequate resources as a base for general industrialization." India, China, and Japan may "approximate that condition," but no more. Japan's prospects were regarded as quite limited: it might produce "knick-knacks" and other products for the underdeveloped world, a US survey mission concluded in 1950, but nothing more. Though doubtless infused by racism, such conclusions were not entirely unrealistic before the Korean war revived Japan's stagnating economy. "General industrialization in individual countries could be achieved only at a high cost as a result of sacrificing production in fields of comparative advantage," the draft continued. The US must find ways of "exerting economic pressures" on countries that do not accept their role as suppliers of "strategic commodities and other basic materials," the germ of later policies of economic warfare, Cumings observes.

Prospects for development in Africa were never taken seriously, White Africa aside. For the Middle East, the major concern was that the energy system be in US hands, operating in the manner designed by the British: local management would be delegated to an "Arab Façade," with "absorption" of the colonies "veiled by constitutional fictions as a protectorate, a sphere of influence, a buffer State, and so on," a device more cost-effective than direct rule (Lord Curzon and the Eastern Committee, 1917-1918). But we must never run the risk of "losing control," as John Foster Dulles warned. The Façade would therefore consist of family dictatorships that keep pretty much to what they are told, and ensure the flow of profits to the US, its British client, and their energy corporations. They are to be protected by regional enforcers, preferably non-Arab (Turkey, Israel, Iran under the Shah, Pakistan), with British and US muscle in reserve. The system has operated with reasonable efficiency over a considerable period, and has new prospects today with secular nationalist forces in the Arab world in utter disarray, and the Soviet deterrent removed.³

The basic themes of internal planning sometimes reach the public, as when the editors of the applauding the overthrow of the parliamentary Mossadegh regime in Iran, observed that "Underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism." The service areas must be protected from "Bolshevism" or "Communism," technical terms that refer to social transformation "in ways that reduce their willingness and ability to complement the industrial economies of the West," in the words of an important scholarly study of the 1950s. Most important, the historical record conforms very well to this commonly articulated understanding of the role of the South.⁴

"Radical and nationalistic regimes" are intolerable in themselves, even more so if they appear to be succeeding in terms that might be meaningful to oppressed and suffering people. In that case they become a "virus" that might "infect" others, a "rotten apple" that might "spoil the barrel." For the public, they are "dominoes" that will topple others by aggression and conquest; internally, the absurdity of this picture is often (not always) conceded, and the threat is recognized to be what Oxfam once called "the threat of a good example," referring to Nicaragua. When Henry Kissinger warned that the "contagious example" of Allende's Chile would "infect" not only Latin America but also southern Europe, sending to Italian voters the message that democratic social reform was a possible option, he did not anticipate that Allende's hordes would descend upon Rome. Although the Sandinista "Revolution without Borders" was a spectacularly successful government-media fraud, the propaganda images reflected an authentic concern: from the perspective of a hegemonic power and its intellectual servants, declaration of an intent to provide a model that will inspire others -- the actual source of the imagery -- amounts to aggression.⁵

When a virus is detected, it must be destroyed, and potential victims immunized. The Cuban virus called forth invasion, terror, and economic warfare, and a rash of National Security States to prevent the rot from spreading. The story was the same in Southeast Asia in the same years. The standard approach to the virus itself is a two-track policy, as in the case of Allende's Chile. The hard line called for a military coup, finally achieved. The soft line was explained by Ambassador Edward Korry, a Kennedy liberal: to "do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty, a policy designed for a long time to come to accelerate the hard features of a Communist society in Chile." Hence even if the hard line did not succeed in introducing fascist killers to exterminate the virus, the vision of "utmost deprivation" would suffice to keep the rot from spreading, and ultimately demoralize the patient itself. And crucially, it would provide ample grist for the mill of the cultural managers, who can produce cries of anguish at "the hard features of a Communist society," pouring scorn on those "apologists" who describe what is happening. The point was made clearly by Bertrand Russell in his bitterly critical account of Bolshevik Russia in its early days:

Every failure of industry, every tyrannous regulation brought about by the desperate situation, is used by the Entente as a justification of its policy. If a man is deprived of food and drink, he will grow weak, lose his reason, and finally die. This is not usually considered a good reason for inflicting death by starvation. But where nations are concerned, the weakness and struggles are regarded as morally culpable, and are held to justify further punishment.

There is, evidently, much satisfaction to be gained by careful inspection of those who are writhing under our boot, to see if they are behaving properly; when they are not, as is often the case, indignation is unconstrained. Far worse atrocities of our own, or of our "moderate" and "improving" clients, are merely an aberration, soon to be overcome.⁶

To introduce further technical terminology, "rotten apples" constitute a threat to "stability." As Washington prepared to overthrow the first democratic government in Guatemala in 1954, a State Department official warned that Guatemala "has become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbors where similar conditions prevail." "Stability" means security for "the upper classes and large foreign enterprises,"and it must naturally be preserved. It is understandable, then, that Eisenhower and Dulles should have felt that the "self-defense and self-preservation" of the United States might be at stake when they were advised that "a strike situation" in Honduras might "have had inspiration and support from the Guatemalan side of the border.⁷

³ Cumings, Origins, 172-3. On the contempt for Japan's prospects, see DD, 337-8. Ibid., ch. 6 and "Afterword," on the Middle East; and TNCW, ch. 8. British and Dulles, Stivers, Supremacy, 28, 34; America's Confrontation, 20f.

⁴ DD, 49-51, 27; and generally.

⁵ Ibid., 259; TTT, 270; COT, 219-221; NI, 71-2. Kissinger, TTT, 67-8.

⁶ DD, 395. Russell, Practice and Theory, 68.

⁷ Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, 365. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, Vol. IV, 1131ff.; no other evidence was cited. The Attorney-General invoked "self-defense and self-preservation" to justify the blockade imposed in violation of international law. Memorandum of NSC discussion, May 27, 1954.