Jensen: Which, in itself, is a war crime.

Clark: Sure, but since when does international law stop the U.S. government — except when it comes to laws made by the World Trade Organization, where it's to the advantage of the owners of capital for the government to obey them?

The U.S. figured that if the Vietnamese couldn't control their water supply, then they couldn't grow rice, and they wouldn't be able to feed themselves. At that time, they were producing about five tons of rice to the hectare, which is extremely productive. The economy was based on the women. The men were living in tunnels to the south with a bag of rice, a bag of ammunition, and a rifle; some had been there for years. And we were still bombing them mercilessly, inflicting heavy casualties. Yet they survived.

The sanctions, on the other hand, brought their economy down below that of Mozambique — then the poorest country in the world, with a per capita income of about eighty dollars per year.

All of this reflects a U.S. foreign policy that is completely materialistic and enforced by violence, or the threat of violence, and economic coercion.

Jensen: Do you think most Americans would agree that U.S. foreign policy has been "a disaster"?

Clark: Sadly, I think most Americans don't have an opinion about our foreign policy. Worse than that, when they do think about it, it's in terms of the demonization of enemies and the exaltation of our capacity for violence.

When the Gulf War started in 1991, you could almost feel a reverence come over the country. We had a forty-two-day running commercial for militarism. Nearly everybody was glued to CNN, and whenever they saw a Tomahawk cruise missile taking off from a navy vessel somewhere in the Persian Gulf, they practically stood up and shouted, "Hooray for America!" But that missile was going to hit a market in Basra or someplace, destroy three hundred food stalls, and kill forty-two very poor people. And we considered that a good thing.

It's very difficult to debate military spending in this country today — which is unbelievable, because our military spending is absolutely, certifiably insane. Just to provide one example: We still have twenty-two commissioned Trident nuclear submarines, which are first-strike weapons. Any one of those submarines can launch twenty-four missiles simultaneously. Each of those missiles can contain as many as seventeen independently targeted, maneuverable nuclear warheads. And each of those warheads can travel seven thousand nautical miles and supposedly hit within three hundred feet of its predetermined target. If we fire them in opposite directions, we can span fourteen thousand nautical miles: halfway around the world at the equator. This means we can take out 408 centers of human population, hitting each with a nuclear warhead ten times as powerful as the bomb that incinerated Nagasaki.

Jensen: This is all from one submarine?

Clark: One submarine. And we have twenty-two of them. It's an unthinkable machine. Why would you have it? What kind of mind would conceive of such a machine? What justification could there be for its existence? What would be the meaning of daring to use it?

Yet the debate about military spending in this country never raises these questions. Think back to 1980, when President Carter and Governor Reagan were arguing about the military budget. At that time, you could see the end of the Cold War approaching; the risk of superpower conflict was waning rapidly. Carter came in with a 7 percent increase in the budget, when it should have been reduced. And Reagan, of course, topped him with a proposal for an 11 percent increase. Carter's response was that he could spend 7 percent more effectively than Reagan could spend 11 percent, so we'd be stronger on Carter's program. Nowhere in this debate did we — or do we now — hear anything about the morality or the sanity (even the fiscal sanity) of such huge military budgets.

Our foreign policy is based on the use of our military might as an enforcer, exactly as Teddy Roosevelt implied when he said that we should "speak softly and carry a big stick." What does that mean? It means: "Do what I say, or I'll smash your head in. I won't make a lot of noise about it; I'll just do it."

Jensen: How many times has the United States invaded Latin America in the last two hundred years?

Clark: It depends on who's doing the counting, but in the twentieth century alone, it was undoubtedly almost once per year. Off the top of my head, I could count probably seventy instances.

Jensen: And, of course, it was the same in the nineteenth century.

Clark: We sent the word out pretty early. We had to worry about the British and the Spanish for a long time, but we were determined to make this "our" hemisphere — while, at the same time, certainly not confining ourselves to just this side of the world.

We hear a lot of rhetoric about how the United States exports democracy all over the world, but if you really want to understand U.S. influence on other peoples, probably the best places to start are Liberia and the Philippines, which are our two preeminent colonies — I think it's fair to call them that — in Africa and Asia.

We started in Liberia well before 1843, planning to send freed slaves there as one of the "solutions," so to speak, to our slavery problem. Liberia became a U.S. colony in every sense of the word: "Liberia" is the name we gave the country; the capital, Monrovia, and the great port city, Buchanan, are both named after U.S. presidents; the government was organized and put in place directly by the United States; the national currency is the U.S. dollar. Given these close connections, you'd expect Liberia to be relatively well-off. But it would be difficult, even in Africa, to find a people more tormented and endangered and impoverished than Liberia's.

It's the same story in the Philippines, which we conquered during the Philippine-American War — commonly (and inaccurately) called the Spanish-American War. More than a million Filipinos died during that war from violence and dengue fever, a byproduct of the fighting. We had government testimony of widespread use of torture by U.S. troops and of a general giving orders to kill all of the males on Negros Island. Once, that island could feed more than the population of the entire Philippine archipelago. And what's the condition of that island now, after a hundred years of American benevolence? It's owned by twelve families and produces 60 percent of the sugar exported from the Philippines. The children of those who chop the cane starve because their families don't even have enough land to grow their own vegetables. Per capita income in the Philippines ten years ago was less than six hundred dollars. Per capita income in Japan, by contrast, was more than twenty-four thousand dollars. Even the poorest countries in the region have per capita incomes double or triple that of the Philippines.

So what have Liberia and the Philippines gotten out of being de facto colonies of the United States? Poverty, division, confusion, and tyrannical governments: Ferdinand Marcos was our man in Manila. We installed one dictator after another in Liberia.

These two countries represent a small part of our foreign policy, but it's a part where you would expect us to be the most attentive to the well-being of the people. Yet few have suffered more in other parts of the world.

Jensen: So how do we maintain our national self-image as God's gift to the world, the great bastion of democracy?

Clark: But we're not a democracy. It's a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we're a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy. Wealth has its way. The concentration of wealth and the division between rich and poor in the U.S. are unequaled anywhere. And think of whom we admire most: the Rockefellers and Morgans, the Bill Gateses and Donald Trumps. Would any moral person accumulate a billion dollars when there are 10 million infants dying of starvation every year? Is that the best thing you can find to do with your time?

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