Brave New World Order

We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings...as future sewage workers or future... He was going on to say "future World controllers," but correcting himself, said "future Directors of Hatcheries." --A worker in Brave New World's Social Predestination Room

But someone is always going to have to lead the civilized world. --Michael Kramer, "Read My Ships," Time, August 20, 1990

The brave new world order being fashioned by the United States is based on clearly defined roles. U.S. leaders are "predestined" to be world controllers. Poor people in and outside of the United States are being "conditioned" to accept their place as the equivalent of "future sewage workers" in Aldous Huxley's novel. President Bush has suggested that in the new world order the weak must learn to trust the mercy of the strong. Unfortunately, as we will see, the weak can expect neither mercy nor justice in the new order.

The new world order is not fixed in time. It is an ongoing process of realignment among the powerful with profound implications for rich and poor both within the United States and the so-called Third World. The phrase itself, new world order, is misleading.

One important feature of the new world order is that it isn't really new. Joel Beinin, Professor of Middle Eastern History at Stanford University, notes:

The Bush Administration's response to this [Middle East] crisis is an indication of its strategy to maintain a leading American role in the post-Cold War world. Bush has spoken of this as a "new world order." But in fact it is the same old stuff...American intervention in the Third World to secure access to resources and markets and maintain the political status quo.

The new world order is a new phase in an ongoing history of U.S. control over third-world peoples and resources. The "same old stuff" is also evident in a "new" order in which U.S. policy emphasizes military solutions. "On the road to failure," Beinin says, this policy "will mark a very high economic cost on this country....The resources that will be expended on the military will be the resources that cannot be but should have been spent on our own people here at home."

The new order, like the old, is concerned with the relative distribution of wealth and power. The old order's most powerful players are struggling to adapt to changing circumstances. These circumstances include the decline of the Soviet Union, reduced East-West tensions, growing conflict between the developed nations of the North and the underdeveloped nations of the South, unrestrained U.S. military power, regional conflicts in the Third World, and economic realignment among Western nations, including the economic decline of the United States. In addition to the obvious shift in the balance of military power in the post-Cold War period there are three major economic trends that are shaking the foundations of the old order. Each involves a massive transfer of wealth:

• from poor nations to rich nations;
• from U.S. poor and working-class people, and from future generations, to U.S. elites; and
• from the United States to Japan and Western Europe.

Shifts in the balance of military and economic power, which confront U.S. leaders with numerous problems and contradictions, hold the key to unmasking the motivation of U.S. leaders during the Gulf War and to understanding the broader policy objectives of the United States within the new world order. Maintaining the skewed concentration of wealth within the United States while continuing to transfer wealth from the third-world poor to the developed-country rich are key objectives of the new world order.

However, these trends, deliberate and interrelated, are based on systematic exploitation. They are likely to foment considerable unrest both domestically and internationally. The economic decline of the United States relative to its Western allies poses other serious problems for a country that wants to exercise undisputed leadership in a new world order. U.S. economic problems are aggravated by the conflict between economic revitalization and a new world order in which the United States is assuming, in the words of the London Financial Times, a more "mercenary role."

President Bush and other U.S. leaders are adapting to and shaping a world order that suits particular interests. This section examines some of the mechanisms within the new order whereby the third-world poor continue to subsidize the first-world rich.

A Third-world Perspective on Who "Won" the Cold War

The nonviolent movements that swept through Eastern Europe and the rapid fall of the Soviet Union from superpower status surprised the world, but the process of disintegration had deep historical roots. Nonetheless, bureaucratic communist parties and the command economies they directed seemed to be discredited overnight.

Unfortunately, in the West the interpretation of these events was generally limited to self-congratulation rather than self-criticism. The Cold War was over, and we had won; we, of course, referred to the United States, the West, and capitalism. Democracy and the international market system had triumphed.

"Winning" the Cold War, for the United States, is an ideological triumph rooted in lies, distortions, and historical blindness. It is possible to proclaim victory because the failures of the Soviet-dominated order are real and obvious and because important facts are suppressed.

For example, one of four U.S. children is born into poverty. This statistic symbolically illustrates a deeper crisis: As the Cold War ended the United States was the lone global military superpower but the weakest economic partner in a tripolar world dominated by Japan and Western Europe. The dynamics of this crisis, and its relation to the new world order, are the subject of the following section.

If claims of victory in the Cold War are dubious in light of childhood poverty and U.S. economic decline, then they are also questionable from the perspective of third-world peoples whose countries are allied with the "victorious" Western powers. Pablo Richard, a liberation theologian working in Costa Rica, writes:

The world changed abruptly in the last months of 1989....But has the life and death situation of the poor and oppressed masses of the Third World really changed? The Berlin Wall fell, and the rich world trembled with joy. In reality, the fall of the wall was very positive. But we are aware that another gigantic wall is being constructed in the Third World, to hide the reality of the poor majorities. A wall between the rich and the poor is being built, so that poverty does not annoy the powerful and the poor are obliged to die in the silence of history. A wall of silence is being built so that the rich world forgets the Third World. A wall of disinformation...is being built to casually pervert the reality of the Third World.

In addition to the reality of childhood poverty within the "victorious" United States is the fact that the majority of the approximately 40 million people who die each year from hunger live in third-world nations dominated by the United States and its Western allies. The victims of hunger and poverty are not primarily casualties of the Soviet Empire. They are victims of the international market economy which is being heralded as the savior of Eastern Europe and all of humanity.

The uncritical patriotism that swept through the United States following the war against Iraq was built on the earlier sense of triumph in the Cold War. U.S. claims of victory in the Cold War, of moral legitimacy in the Gulf War, and of moral purpose in the new world order are rooted in national self-deception.

Such deception, including the use of the collective "we" in the proclamations of victory, is highly misleading and dangerous: It hides the ongoing oppression of the poor, within and outside the United States; it conceals the economic decline of the United States relative to Western Europe and Japan; and it obscures fundamental contradictions and conflicts within U.S. domestic and foreign policies that benefit certain groups at the expense of others.

JON SOBRINO, A JESUIT priest from El Salvador, speaks of the self-deception of the First World or Western countries as a scandalous coverup. Shortly after the murder of two women and six priests at the hands of U.S.-trained soldiers in El Salvador he wrote:

Wealth and power cannot exist if other people do not die, if people do not suffer in powerlessness and poverty and without dignity....We say that the First World, the wealthy countries, cover up the greatest scandal in this world, which is the world itself. The existence of two-thirds of humankind dying in poverty is covered up.

The poor majorities living in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Philippines, and many other third-world countries find little comfort in hearing that the Cold War is over and "we" won. Their countries have been integrated into the international market economy for generations, and they are living in nations with close political, economic, and military ties to the United States. Presumably, they are on the winning side of the Cold War conflict. However, their lives are condemned to poverty, inequality, and oppression.

The contradiction should be obvious. We rightly equate food shortages and long lines in the Soviet Union with the failures of communism, but we fail to see domestic and international hunger in light of the failure of capitalism and the international market economy. The United States celebrates democratic movements and social changes in Eastern Europe. However, it blocks the possibility of similar changes within the U.S. sphere of influence.

The poor desperately need a new world order. However, an authentically new order would require a fundamental break with the old. Not only was victory in the Cold War an empty claim for underdeveloped countries but the new world order that is taking shape in the post-Cold War period is solidifying an alliance of Northern industrialized countries against the nations of the South.

The forces of the late twentieth century have required double-entry bookkeeping: new wealth in profusion for the bright, the bold, the educated and the politically favored; economic carnage among the less fortunate. In short, the United States of the 1980s.

- Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor

Poor people living in third-world countries are not the only victims of the so-called new world order. At the heart of this "new" order is a troubling paradox: Poor people within the United States, and the country as a whole, are getting poorer at the same time as the rich within the United States are getting richer.

The massive wealth drain from third-world countries to first-world elites has not prevented the economic decline of the United States. Its pressing national problems mirror those of many third-world countries.

The infant mortality rate in inner cities like Detroit and Washington, D.C., exceeds that of impoverished Honduras. The United States, in less than two decades, went from being the world's largest creditor nation to being the world's largest debtor. It is also a country of stark contrasts including billionaires and homeless people, measles epidemics and military bands, crack babies and Wall Street speculators.

The most disturbing parallel between the United States and the Third World is that massive wealth transfers from the third-world poor to the first-world rich have a domestic counterpart. During the 1980s there was a dramatic shift in wealth from poor and working-class Americans to U.S. elites. This upward redistribution of wealth was accompanied by a radical shift in relative wealth and economic power from the United States to Japan and Western Europe. There is one other paradox that is central to understanding U.S. goals within the new world order: The nation's declining economic power is accompanied by and linked to United States ascendancy as the world's undisputed leader in military power.

Domestic Hunger and Poverty

The Reagan and Bush years produced, according to Kevin Phillips, a Republican party strategist, "one of U.S. history's most striking concentrations of wealth." This wealth concentration occurred "as the American dream was beginning to crumble not just in inner-city ghettos and farm townships but in blue collar centers and even middle-class suburbs."

The gap between the richest and poorest U.S. citizens is now greater than at any time since the Census Bureau began collecting such data in 1947. The poorest 20 percent of the U.S. population receive 3.8 percent of national income; the richest 20 percent get 46.1 percent.

If talk of victory in the Cold War sounded bitterly ironic to poor people living in third-world countries allied with the United States, it is doubly so for people living in third-world conditions within the United States. The following litany of ills provides ample evidence of a nation in crisis:

• One in four children in the United States is born into poverty;
• More than 35 million U.S. citizens lack any type of health insurance. Millions more have only limited coverage.
• The United States ranks 22nd in infant mortality, behind most of our industrial allies.
• Most of the poor in the United States are full-time workers or their dependents. This reflects a serious deterioration in the wages and benefits of significant sectors of the U.S. work force.
• In 1985, 20.4 percent of all infants below age 1 were not fully vaccinated against polio, 41.5 percent of infants of color. One-fourth of the poorest low-income households spend more than 75 percent of their incomes for rent.
• The United States has the world's largest per capita prison population. 426 of every 100,000 people are in jail. By way of comparison, the incarceration rates per 100,000 people are 333 in South Africa, 268 in the Soviet Union, 97 in Great Britain, 76 in Spain, and 40 in the Netherlands.
• The United States, according to a United Nations' Development Program report, also has the highest murder rate and highest incidence of reported rape among industrialized countries.

These acute social problems are a consequence of national policies and priorities that enrich certain sectors at the expense of others. These policies include enormous tax cuts for the richest Americans, major cuts in social services, huge trade and budget deficits, and massive infusions of foreign capital. They reward speculative rather than productive investment and emphasize military production and power over socially useful production.

U.S. policies border on economic apartheid as U.S. elites, like their third-world counterparts, impose austerity measures on the poor. Most graphically, as economic opportunities and federally funded housing units are severely limited by budget cuts the poor find "alternative housing" in prisons.

The United States not only has the highest rate of imprisonment of any nation in the world, it has the most racially biased prison system. One of four black males is in the criminal justice system--in jail, on trial, awaiting trial or on parole. South Africa's incarceration rate for blacks is 729 per 100,000. The U.S. rate is 3,109.

THE END OF THE Cold War should have been greeted with a chorus of alleluias. Songs of praise were warranted because the Cold War thaw offered hope that something new was possible, not only for people in Eastern Europe but for U.S. and third-world peoples shackled by poverty and economic inequality. The end of superpower rivalry offered hope to third-world countries long held hostage by the dominant powers, who refused to allow non-alignment.

The end of the Cold War also offered hope for the United States, where economic problems were well advanced but not terminal. Judicious use of hundreds of billions of dollars of savings from the long-awaited "peace dividend" coupled with major tax, economic, and social reforms, offered possibilities for hope and revitalization. The world was standing at the threshold of a new world order.

Unfortunately, the possibility of an authentically new order threatened entrenched interests and was quickly dashed. The possibility of meaningful reforms lay dead in the sand, a premeditated casualty of the Gulf War. It was replaced with a "brave new world order" that suited elite U.S. interests.

This article is excerpted from the first and second chapters of the book Brave New World Order: Must We Pledge Allegiance? by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, published by Orbis Books in January 1992. Nelson-Pallmeyer lived and worked in Central America for several years and was also the author of War Against the Poor: Low-Intensity Conflict and Christian Faith (Orbis Books, 1989) when this article appeared.