Justified Tyranny



History shows the strong ties between politics and economy and these ties become much stronger when comes to certain policies like the national security that aims to protect both of them. Especially when comes to a government like the united states that because of its political and economic nature national security has no meaning but keeping safe the political and economic powers. Thomas J. McCormick in his essay, “the world-System, Hegemony, and Decline,” divides the entire world economy system, through a short history of political economy, to three: “the capitalist world-system (or world economy), the external world (empires), and the mini systems of subsistence communities1.” Melvyn P. Leffler in his article “National Security, Core Values, and Power” describes the national security as “the decisions and actions deemed imperative to protect domestic core values from external threats.”2
McCormick has focused more on the capitalist system and describes it as hegemony and the core value of the free world3 system. McCormick forgets to talk about the fact that Political-economy systems changed after the 1930s, at least, to four systems. He totally leaves out the Mixed Economic System that has brought up after the First World War. The main idea, which began in England, came from a combination of the values of the market, and various planned economies, and mixes their essentials to achieve an ideology of the idealized sense of a political-economic system. The author spends most of the pages to describe capitalism as the most powerful system. He justifies all the ideologies of capitalism and believes most countries have started or will start to change to capitalism, “As the world’s dominant economic power, a hegemonic power has the most to gain from such a free world and the most to lose from nationalistic efforts to limit the free movement of capital, goods, and currencies.”4 this sounds like what Lenin was promising during the Soviet Revolution: “The fulfilment of this task, the destruction of the most powerful bulwark, not only of European, but (it may now be said) of Asiatic reaction, would make the Russian proletariat the vanguard of the international revolutionary proletariat.”5 Maybe someone can argue that these two quotes are not the same word by word, which is true but behind these words are too much confident of the systems that were/are doomed to fail. The full control of the economy by the government was a bad idea as much as the full competitive market is. McCormick doesn’t want to see that both ideas result to economic dictatorship, first one by the government, and the second one by corporations. On the other hand, McCormick sounds like one of those pro-globalization people who call their Opponents anti-trade. They close their eyes to the fact that the globalization just has made rich People richer and poor people poorer. It has given the giant corporations access to more natural and economical sources of the third world countries while those small countries cannot compete with the economical monsters. Finally, the author forgets the fact that “China is on track to become the No. 1 economy by sheer size by the early 2020s.”6 He can falsely describe Chinese political economy system a shape of capitalism, but this can be true if we don’t know what the capitalism truly means. Seems in reality, McCormick’s hope for his favorite political-economic system will crash in less than 5 years. although just some conservative like him are still believing the power of capitalism. The world is going to have a new chapter that capitalism can be just a name as much as Communism started to become a long time ago.
Leffler justifies the use of any domestic or international acts by the American government. He believes the duty of the government is to protect the core values. Leffler does not look much different than his colleague. He misses the effect of “the protecting core value”7 on citizens and other nations. By Leffler’s definition sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, and wiretapping citizens all are the strategies that government has to choose to defend “the state’s organizing ideology.7” Leffler simply forgets that corporate benefit the United States concern of National Security leads to create war in other countries although we cannot forget that the core value that the author describes has cost Americans billions of dollars  and has cost for other countries hundreds of thousands of dead bodies.  Seems all the policies that Leffler defending in his article didn’t have anything but failure for the United States, but the born of government organizations like TSA and NSA that has wasted billions of dollars of t6he taxpayers money with the result that has been everything but security and comfort for the citizens of the United States. It’s funny that Leffler tries to not to mention any of these, especially if we think that all these organizations’ failures happened exactly after 9/11 while the United States government was busy to protect the core value of the nation by sending hundreds of thousands troops to Iraq and Afghanistan and spending $4 trillion to $6 trillion8 and killing more 300,000 of civilians in those countries. This is the question that Leffler never answers; if the national security policy of the United States has been valuable idea to protect the country why instead of stopping terrorism has caused more terrorist attacks and why made the government trust lesser and lesser its own allies that finally resulted wiretapping German Chancellor or Australian prime minister? 
Bottom line both articles are just a way of justifying a systematic political economic terrorism that has been nothing but deliberately conveying false information and using the tools of propaganda and systematic governmental plans to justify the failure of a system. Unfortunately, history shows all the efforts like this never works as much as didn’t work in communism era and also in feudalism era. Future will be a new chapter of politics in the world where the capitalism will be just as forgotten name.
Footnotes
1.      Dennis Merrill and Thomas G. Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, Volume II: Since 1914 (Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010), 3.
2.      Ibid., 7.
3.      Ibid., 4.
4.      Ibid., 5.
5.      Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 5 (Moscow: Foreign Languages House, 1961), 347-348.
6.      McDonald, Joe. “Report: China to Overtake U.S. Economy This Year." USA Today. Last revised 30 Apr. 2014. Accessed September14, 2014. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/04/30/china-us-top-          economy/8538689/
7.      Dennis Merrill and Thomas G. Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, Volume II: Since 1914 (Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010), 8.
8.   Londoño, Ernesto. “Study: Iraq, Afghan War Costs to Top $4 Trillion.” WashingtonPost. The Washington Post. Last revised 28 Mar. 2013. Accessed September14, 2014.   http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/study-iraq-afghan-war-costs-to- top-4-trillion/2013/03/28/b82a5dce-97ed-11e2-814b-063623d80a60_story.html.

Bibliography
Leffler, Melvyn P. “National Security, Core Values, and Power.” In Major Problems in
        American Foreign Relations Volume II: Since 1914, edited by Thomas G. Paterson and
        Dennis Merrill, 7-10. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010.Lenin,
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. Vladimir Ilyich. Lenin’s Collected Works. Translated by Joe Fineberg    
        and George Hanna. Moscow: Foreign Languages House, 1961.
Londoño, Ernesto. “Study: Iraq, Afghan War Costs to Top $4 Trillion.” Washington Post. The   
        Washington Post. Last revised 28 Mar. 2013. Accessed September14, 2014.   
         http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/study-iraq-afghan-war-costs-to-
         top-4-trillion/2013/03/28/b82a5dce-97ed-11e2-814b-063623d80a60_story.html.
McCormick, Thomas J. “The World-System, Hegemony, and Decline." In Major Problems in
        American Foreign Relations Volume II: Since 1914, edited by Thomas G. Paterson and  
        Dennis Merrill, 3-7. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010.       
McDonald, Joe. “Report: China to Overtake U.S. Economy This Year.” USA Today. Last   
        revised 30 Apr. 2014. Accessed September14, 2014.
        http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/04/30/china-us-top-           
        economy/8538689/

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