The abiding rhetoric of US foreign policy is ‘freedom and democracy’:

But as David Sylvan, Professor of International Relations, and Former Head of the Political Science Department at Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, co-author of the book US Foreign Policy in Perspective: Clients, Enemies and Empire, explains to Craig Barfoot, it really isn’t quite like that.   Much of US foreign policy (as even the CIA would concede, says Professor Sylvan) revolves around acquiring clients, maintaining clients and engaging in hostile policies against enemies deemed to threaten them.  It is a peculiarly American form of imperialism.

Ranging over examples –  from US support for a monarchy in Saudi Arabia,           its support for coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile (when Henry Kissinger said, ‘I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people’),              its role in persuading Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to step down, and its support for the military in Egypt, Professor Sylvan paints a picture of a US  foreign policy based on maintaining the status quo in its client states. Change is almost always seen as threatening.

The book argues that having all these client states was not a grand planned strategy but one that emerged because of the policy instruments available to policymakers. That the US bureaucratic instruments themselves have created and maintained the situation of a client state empire.

Nevertheless although the US client empire differs from the European Empires of the 19th and 20th centuries in many respects (there is no direct government, for example), there are many similarities – US bases are sited in client countries, the US ambassador often has enhanced access to the client government and will often lecture it on such things as domestic spending or agricultural reform.

This book has a dedicated website featuring additional case studies and data sets,

Notes:

You might also be interested in Risa Arai’s podcast Empire: The features of American global power in which she talks to Dr Alex Colas of Birbeck, University of London.