Imperialism, Intervention Capacity, and Foreign Policy Making

Abstract

This article summarizes central theoretical and methodological notions developed in an empirical analysis of US foreign policy decisionmaking, of the economic effects of war expenditures and of the evolution of public opinion in the Indochina intervention, from Kennedy to Nixon. In the first part, the economic and political base for the US intervention policy in the Third World in general and in Indochina in particular is analyzed. In this framework the functions of military spend ing and war industry for the militarization of US intervention policy and for internal economic sta bilization in the interest of the US power elite are discussed. The link between the escalation of the Vietnam war in 1964/65 and the prevention of an impending economic recession in the US serves as an illustrating example. In order to analyze the impact of economic and political factors determining US foreign policy towards the Third World in concrete historical situations, the concept of 'intervention capacity' is introduced. Intervention capacity does not only mean the available and applied resources and means for military actions or threats: it also sub sumes the level of economic, social, and political stability required in the imperialistic nation itself for performing and continuing interventions in the Third World. The international and national weakening of US imperialism as a consequence of its failure to achieve its military goal in Southeast Asia is analyzed in this perspective. Besides the analysis of the strategic context and the delineated problem area of intervention ca pacity, studies of imperialist interventions should deal also with the process of foreign policy ma king. Criteria for a better understanding of this process in which political and economic goals are converted into political action consensus are dis cussed in connection with the Indochina policy decisions. In the final section, the developed analytical framework is used for a critical review of liberal and radical analyses of the US Indochina inter vention. The main argument here is that critical social science, in bringing in the needed system perspective, should not neglect to apply more re fined methods of data analysis and concept re finement.