https://prospect.org/features/roots-rage/

Blowback: The Cost and Consequences of the American Empire, by Chalmers Johnson. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 288 pages, $15.00 (paper).

His conclusions are sweeping: "I believe the profligate waste of our resources on irrelevant weapons systems and the Asia economic meltdown, as well as the continuous trail of military 'accidents' and of terrorist attacks on American installations and embassies, are all portents of a twenty-first-century crisis in America's informal empire, an empire based on the projection of military power to every corner of the world and on the use of American capital and markets to force global economic integration on our terms, at whatever costs to others."

In other words, "globalism" is just the newest euphemism, or ideological mask, for what others would call old-fashioned imperialism. Johnson asks us to view South Korea, Japan, and other Asian countries as American satellites, analogous to the Soviet Union's former client states in Eastern Europe. The United States not only exploits these countries economically, but, in his view, keeps an unnecessarily large military force in the region. The U.S. presence in South Korea consists of "37,000 combat troops occupying 65,500 acres of South Korean territory at 96 bases." Johnson devotes two chapters to explaining why South Korea has become a prime breeding ground for blowback.

He compares the 1980 uprising in Kwangju, South Korea, to the 1956 Hungarian uprising. South Korean protesters in Kwangju were put down with the help of the U.S. military, he says, in the "most notorious act of political violence in South Korea's history." The event is forever associated with the United States. What is worse, Johnson observes, everyone in Korea knows about the U.S. role, but the American people do not, since the Pentagon is still withholding information about its involvement.

For those who assume that American troops would come home if North and South Korea reunite, Johnson says, guess again. In 1998 Defense Secretary William Cohen told a Korean audience that the United States intends to keep troops in South Korea, even if North and South Korea become unified. Johnson asserts that both Japanese and Korean media viewed these remarks "as a barely veiled targeting of China as a future enemy and as a warning against the possibility that Japan might undertake a foreign policy independent of the United States."

Likewise, the U.S. military retains a significant presence in Japan. On Okinawa alone, the United States has 39 bases that occupy "20 percent of prime agricultural land." Johnson argues that the original rationale for these bases ended years, if not decades, ago. The new rationale is "stability," an amorphous concept that means little strategically.