The list of countries targeted by the U.S. military includes the vast majority of the nations on Earth, including almost every single county in Latin America and the Caribbean and most of the African continent.
From the beginning of 1991 to the beginning of 2004, the U.S. military launched 100 interventions, according to CRS.
That number grew to 200 military interventions between 1991 and 2018.
The report shows that, since the end of the first cold war in 1991, at the moment of U.S. unipolar hegemony, the number of Washington’s military interventions abroad substantially increased.
Of the total 469 documented foreign military interventions, the Congressional Research Service noted that the U.S. government only formally declared war 11 times, in just five separate wars.
The data exclude the independence war been U.S. settlers and the British empire, any military deployments between 1776 and 1798, and the U.S. Civil War.
It is important to stress that all of these numbers are conservative estimates, because they do not include U.S. special operations, covert actions, or domestic deployments.
The CRS report clarified:
The list does not include covert actions or numerous occurrences in which U.S. forces have been stationed abroad since World War II in occupation forces or for participation in mutual security organizations, base agreements, or routine military assistance or training operations.
The report likewise excludes the deployment of the U.S. military forces against Indigenous peoples, when they were systematically ethnically cleansed in the violent process of westward settler-colonial expansion.
CRS acknowledged that it left out the “continual use of U.S. military units in the exploration, settlement, and pacification of the western part of the United States.”
“The U.S. has undertaken over 500 international military interventions since 1776, with nearly 60 percent undertaken between 1950 and 2017,” the project wrote. “What’s more, over one-third of these missions occurred after 1999.”
The Military Intervention Project added: “With the end of the Cold War era, we would expect the U.S. to decrease its military interventions abroad, assuming lower threats and interests at stake. But these patterns reveal the opposite—the U.S. has increased its military involvements abroad.”
Anti-government protest in Sri Lanka on April 13 in front of the Presidential Secretariat / credit: AntanO / Wikipedia
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Multipolarista.
Facing a deep economic crisis and bankruptcy, Sri Lanka was rocked by large protests this July, which led to the resignation of the government.
Numerous Western political leaders and media outlets blamed this uprising on a supposed Chinese “debt trap,” echoing a deceptive narrative that has been thoroughly debunked by mainstream academics.
In reality, the vast majority of the South Asian nation’s foreign debt is owed to the West.
These structural adjustment programs clearly have not worked, given Sri Lanka’s economy has been managed by the IMF for many of the decades since it achieved independence from British colonialism in 1948.
As of 2021, a staggering 81 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was owned by U.S. and European financial institutions, as well as Western allies Japan and India.
This pales in comparison to the mere 10 percent owed to Beijing.
According to official statistics from Sri Lanka’s Department of External Resources, as of the end of April 2021, the plurality of its foreign debt is owned by Western vulture funds and banks, which have nearly half, at 47 percent.
The top holders of the Sri Lankan government’s debt, in the form of international sovereign bonds (ISBs), are the following firms:
BlackRock (U.S.)
Ashmore Group (Britain)
Allianz (Germany)
UBS (Switzerland)
HSBC (Britain)
JPMorgan Chase (U.S.)
Prudential (U.S.)
The Asian Development Bank and World Bank, which are thoroughly dominated by the United States, own 13 percent and 9 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt, respectively.
Less known is that the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is, too, largely a vehicle of U.S. soft power. Neoconservative DC-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which is funded by Western governments, affectionately described the ADB as a “strategic asset for the United States,” and a crucial challenger to the much newer, Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
“The United States, through its membership in the ADB and with its Indo-Pacific Strategy, seeks to compete with China as a security and economic partner of choice in the region,” boasted CSIS.
Another country that has significant influence over the ADB is Japan, which similarly owns 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt.
An additional 2 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was owed to India as of April 2021, although that number has steadily increased since. In early 2022, India was in fact the top lender to Sri Lanka, with New Delhi disbursing 550 percent more credit than Beijing between January and April.
Together, these Western firms and their allies Japan and India own 81 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt – more than three-quarters of its international obligations.
By contrast, China owns just one-tenth of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt.
The overwhelming Western role in indebting Sri Lanka is made evident by a graph published by the country’s Department of External Resources, showing the foreign commitments by currency:
As of the end of 2019, less than 5 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was denominated in China’s currency the yuan (CNY). On the other hand, nearly two-thirds, 64.6 percent, was owed in U.S. dollars, along with an additional 14.4 percent in IMF special drawing rights (SDR) and more than 10 percent in the Japanese yen (JPY).
Western media reporting on the economic crisis in Sri Lanka, however, ignores these facts, giving the strong, and deeply misleading, impression that the chaos is in large part because of Beijing.
Sri Lankan Economic Crisis Driven by Neoliberal Policies, Inflation, Corruption, Covid-19 Pandemic
This July, Sri Lanka’s government was forced to resign, after hundreds of thousands of protesters stormed public buildings, setting some on fire, while also occupying the homes of the country’s leaders.
The protests were driven by skyrocketing rates of inflation, as well as rampant corruption and widespread shortages of fuel, food, and medicine – a product of the country’s inability to pay for imports.
In May, Sri Lanka defaulted on its debt. In June, it tried to negotiate another structural adjustment program with the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF). This would have been Sri Lanka’s 17th IMF bailout, but the talks ended without a deal.
By July, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe publicly admitted that his government was “bankrupt.”
Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who spent a significant part of his life working in the United States, entered office in 2019 and immediately imposed a series of neoliberal economic policies, which included cutting taxes on corporations.
These neoliberal policies decreased government revenue. And the precarious economic situation was only exacerbated by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Facing an out-of-control 39.1 percent inflation rate in May, the Sri Lankan government did a 180 and suddenly raised taxes again, further contributing to popular discontent, which broke out in a social explosion in July.
Media Falsely Blames China for Sri Lankan Debt Default
While 81 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt is owned by Western financial institutions, Japan, and India, major corporate media outlets sought to blame China for the country’s bankruptcy and subsequent protests.
The Wall Street Journal pointed the finger at Beijing in a deeply misleading article titled “China’s Lending Comes Under Fire as Sri Lankan Debt Crisis Deepens.” The newspaper noted that the crisis “opens a window for India to push back against Chinese influence in the Indian Ocean region.”
U.S. media giant the Associated Press also tried to scapegoat China, and its deceptive news wire was republished by outlets across the world, from ABC News to Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya.
VOA accused Beijing of “pursuing a kind of ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ meant to bring economically weak countries to their knees, dependent on China for support.”
On social media, the Western propaganda narrative surrounding the July protests in Sri Lanka was even more detached from reality.
A veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and National Security Agency (NSA), Derek J. Grossman, portrayed the unrest as an anti-China uprising.
“China’s window of opportunity to one day control Sri Lanka probably just closed,” he tweeted on July 9, as the government announced it was resigning.
After working for U.S. spy agencies, Grossman is today an analyst at the Pentagon’s main think tank, the RAND Corporation, where he has pushed a hawkish line against Beijing.
China’s window of opportunity to one day control Sri Lanka probably just closed. pic.twitter.com/WOLIb3SUTf
— Derek J. Grossman (@DerekJGrossman) July 9, 2022
BBC Reluctantly Admits the ‘Chinese Debt Trap’ Narrative in Sri Lanka Is False
China has funded several large infrastructure projects in Sri Lanka, building an international airport, hospitals, a convention center, a sports stadium, and most controversially a port in the southern coastal town of Hambantota.
The UK government’s BBC sent a reporter to Sri Lanka to investigate these accusations of supposed “Chinese debt traps.” But after speaking to locals, he reluctantly came to the conclusion that the narrative is false.
“The truth is that many independent experts say that we should be wary of the Chinese debt trap narrative, and we’ve found quite a lot of evidence here in Sri Lanka which contradicts it,” BBC host Ben Chu acknowledged.
He explained, “The Hambantota port, well, that was instigated by the Sri Lankans, not by the Chinese. And it can’t currently be used by Chinese military naval vessels, and actually there’s some pretty formidable barriers to that happening.”
“A lot of the projects we’ve been seeing, well, they feel more like white elephants than they do Chinese global strategic assets,” Chu added.
In our latest film from Sri Lanka, which faces financial collapse as the global Big Squeeze bites, Ben Chu examines the effect that Chinese loans and investment are having on the country:#Newsnighthttps://t.co/GBFZ1ItP0G
The British state media outlet interviewed the director of Port City Colombo’s economic commission, Saliya Wickramasuriya, who emphasized, “The Chinese government is not involved in setting the rules and regulations, so from that standpoint the government of Sri Lanka is in control, and it’s up to the government of Sri Lanka’s wish to flavor the city, the development of the city, in the way it wants to.”
“It is accurate to say that infrastructure development has boomed under Chinese investment, Chinese debt sometimes, but those are things that we’ve actually needed for a long, long time,” Wickramasuriya added.
Chu clarified that, “Importantly, it’s not debt but equity the Chinese own here.”
“So is the debt trap not all it seems?” he asked.
Mainstream U.S. Academics Debunk the ‘Chinese Debt Trap’ Myth
Mainstream Western academics have similarly investigated the claims of “Chinese debt traps,” and come to the conclusion that they do not exist.
Even a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, which is notorious for its revolving door with the U.S. government and close links to spy agencies, acknowledged that “the Chinese ‘debt trap’ is a myth.”
Writing in 2021 in the de facto mouthpiece of the DC political establishment, The Atlantic magazine, scholar Deborah Brautigam stated clearly that the debt-trap narrative is “a lie, and a powerful one.”
“Our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country, much less the port of Hambantota,” Brautigam said in the article, which was co-authored by Meg Rithmire, a professor at the stridently anti-socialist Harvard Business School.
The Chinese "debt-trap" narrative is a false one which wrongfully portrays both Beijing and the developing countries it deals with, Deborah Brautigam and Meg Rithmire write: https://t.co/FagExsdeNT
Brautigam published her findings in a 2020 article for Johns Hopkins’ China Africa Research Initiative, titled “Debt Relief with Chinese Characteristics,” along with fellow researchers Kevin Acker and Yufan Huang.
They investigated Chinese loans in Sri Lanka, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Angola, and the Republic of Congo, and “found no ‘asset seizures’ and, despite contract clauses requiring arbitration, no evidence of the use of courts to enforce payments, or application of penalty interest rates.”
They discovered that Beijing cancelled more than $3.4 billion and restructured or refinanced roughly $15 billion of debt in Africa between 2000 and 2019. At least 26 individual loans to African nations were renegotiated.
Western critics have attacked Beijing, claiming there is a lack of transparency surrounding its loans. Brautigam explained that “Chinese lenders prefer to address restructuring quietly, on a bilateral basis, tailoring programs to each situation.”
The researchers noted that China puts an “emphasis on ‘development sustainability’ (looking at the future contribution of the project) rather than ‘debt sustainability’ (looking at the current state of the economy) as the basis of project lending decisions.”
“Moreover, despite critics’ worries that China could seize its borrower’s assets, we do not see China attempting to take advantage of countries in debt distress,” they added.
“There were no ‘asset seizures’ in the 16 restructuring cases that we found,” the scholars continued. “We have not yet seen cases in Africa where Chinese banks or companies have sued sovereign governments or exercised the option for international arbitration standard in Chinese loan contracts.”
Benjamin Norton is founder and editor of Multipolarista.
On August 20, the government of Colombian President Gustavo Petro arrived in Caldono, Cauca, to hear community demands and concerns / credit: Alfonso Prada / Twitter
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by People’s Dispatch.
On August 20, the newly inaugurated left-wing government of President Gustavo Petro and Vice President Francia Márquez in Colombia launched the first Unified Command Post for Life (PMU) in the municipality of Caldono, in the Cauca department. The PMU is an initiative that aims to achieve total peace and protect the population affected by violence across the country, especially social leaders, human rights activists, environmentalists and former combatants of the demobilized FARC guerilla group.
The launch was led by Interior Minister Alfonso Prada, Environment Minister Susana Muhamad, Labor Minister Gloria Inés Ramírez, and around 30 legislators from across the political spectrum, including the president of the Senate, Roy Barreras, and the president of the Peace Commission of the Senate, Iván Cepeda.
“We have installed the PMU, which is a command post to achieve rapid security in a preventative approach, not in the approach of sadness when we receive the news of the death of social leaders,” Prada said.
Prada explained that the protection plan will cover the 65 municipalities hardest hit by violence in the country, adding that initial emphasis will be placed on “5 to 10 of them, which are in a very delicate situation and are systematically assassinating their leaders.” He said that the state would provide accompaniment and maintain a permanent presence in those 10 municipalities.
The Interior Minister said that the government is particularly committed to the Cauca department. “For us, Cauca is a huge priority… If we achieve integral and total peace in Cauca, I have no doubt that we can dream of having total peace in Colombia,” said Prada.
Prada explained that instructions had been given to the institutions that have powers related to the protection of the lives of social leaders, land defenders, environmentalists, community leaders, peace signatories, land restitution managers, and those who work in crop substitution.
Prada added that the government had already ordered the local authorities to comply with the early warnings issued by the Ombudsman’s Office, especially for the municipalities of Caldono, Buenos Aires and Santander de Quilichao, in Cauca. He also said that the government would strengthen the National Protection Unit (UNP).
For her part, Environment Minister Muhamad stressed that this plan recognizes land defenders as people who make a positive, important and legitimate contribution to the protection of nature and promotion of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment. Muhamad assured that with the beginning of the plan, the implementation of the Escazú Agreement also begins, pending its ratification by the House of Representatives.
With regard to illegal paramilitary groups, Senator Barreras said that dialogues are the only way that allows peace. “The government and the congress have every desire to allow them to reintegrate into society and these command posts for life are spaces for dialogue and listening, the message that we are sending them is that they take advantage of the opportunity to lay down their arms so that they can join the life of Colombia,” said Barreras.
Iniciamos el Plan de Choque para salvaguardar la vida de las y los Líderes Sociales en Colombia, así como de quienes firmaron la paz .
Comisión del Gobierno Nacional, 20 congresistas y la Comunidad Internacional en defensa de la vida y la paz en los Territorio, rumbo al Cauca pic.twitter.com/sTQgD8i0rD
On August 19, the Ombudsman’s Office released a report in which it reported that between January 1 and July 31, 122 social leaders and human rights defenders had been assassinated in different departments of the country. It also reported that Cauca with 19 assassinations, Nariño with 17, Antioquia with 12, and Putumayo with 11, are the departments with the highest number of cases.
According to the Colombian human rights organization Institute of Development and Peace Studies (INDEPAZ), between January 1 and August 20, 119 environmentalists, land defenders, human rights defenders, Afro-descendent, Indigenous, peasant and social leaders had been killed by illegal armed and drug-trafficking groups operating in the country. Additionally, during this period, 32 ex-combatants of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who were in the reincorporation process, had also been murdered.
Petro and Márquez, during their election campaign, vowed to fight drug trafficking and paramilitarism, and consolidate peace in the country. The day following their inauguration, on August 8, in the first press conference to local media, Petro confirmed the resumption of negotiations with the National Liberation Army (ELN), the largest leftist guerrilla group active in Colombia. On August 11, a delegation of the Colombian government, headed by Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva Durán, visited Cuba to establish contact with the leadership of the ELN in order to advance towards peace negotiations. On August 20, President Petro announced that in order to further advance in the dialogue with the ELN, the arrest and extradition orders against the members of the insurgency group were suspended. At the same time, he confirmed the restitution of the negotiation protocols with the ELN that had been signed with the government of former president Juan Manuel Santos.
A U.S. Air Force Douglas Skyraider drops a white phosphorus bomb on a Viet Cong position in South Vietnam in 1966 / credit: U.S. Air Force
Editor’s Note: The following is the writer’s opinion.
“More of us took our own lives after returning home than died in the battle.” -statement of U.S. armed forces veterans on U.S. war on Vietnam
In the analysis of all exploitative systems, it is obvious to see how the exploited are harmed. This is where most attention has been focused, and understandably so.
Nevertheless, it is also important to examine and understand what happens to the exploiters at the other end of the process of exploitation.
The reason is, invariably, in any process of exploitation, exploiters are also harmed in ways that are serious and significant, even though they may be less visible and obvious immediately. This is partly the reason why this aspect of exploitation is less recognized. If there is a better understanding and a wider recognition of how exploiters suffer in the process of exploitation, new openings can emerge to convince the more powerful regarding the futility of prolonging exploitative relations and systems.
For the sake of brevity, here we speak mostly in terms of only two ends of exploitation systems—the exploiters and the exploited. But we also can speak of two ends of systems of dominance—the dominators and the dominated. Or the two ends of systems of conquest—the conqueror and the conquered.
One indication of what happens to the exploiter or the conqueror is available in some statements of the veterans of U.S. armed forces. One of these statements, which described the immense cruelties and killings, said, “We know what Post Traumatic Stress Disorder looks like, feels like and tastes like because the ghosts of over 2 million men, women and children still haunt our dreams. More of us took our own lives after returning home than died in battle.”
A detailed account followed the life of a pilot whose napalm bombing had led to the burning of a Vietnamese girl, Kim Phuc. After returning home, this pilot kept looking at the picture of Kim in flames. This girl was roughly the same age as his son. “He could almost smell the child’s burning flesh.” The veteran had nightmares of screaming children pointing accusing fingers toward him. There was a breakdown in his family. He turned to alcohol. “He drank to put the bombing out of his mind, and the drinking made him more obsessed.”(Reader’s Digest, November 1997).
This is by no means an isolated case. Breakdowns in close relationships, substance abuse, domestic violence, self-violence and suicide attempts have been found to be very high among soldiers who return home after fighting highly unjust wars. More commonly, anyone who performs unjust and exploitative actions over a period of time is likely to be able to continue this only by giving up on the sensitivity needed for care, compassion and love. Hence, this person’s ability to fulfill close relationships based on this declines steadily, as also his ability to experience those forms of happiness associated with real love, caring relationships and compassion.
At a wider level, a group or society which seeks to enrich itself by plundering and exploiting others has to spread value systems that make their members insensitive to the sufferings of others. But in the process of making them insensitive, the foundation also is prepared for breakdown of internal social relations (including with the closest people), internal violence, self-violence and falsehoods. This can be seen in exploiter and conqueror societies as well as at individual levels, in the hollow lives of those who lead aggressions.
To give one example of such impacts, the example of Christopher Columbus may be cited. The extreme cruelties driven by the endless greed of this explorer are well-known. What kind of personality this turned him into is best revealed by a reputed doctor, Sigmundo Feliz, who attended to him in his final years:
“To be without roots, without a sense of home and place is one of the most serious, though one of the least emphasized, psychological disorders. This patient suffered from this to an unusual degree… This patient appears from all evidence to be someone who found it difficult, even in non-threatening circumstances, to tell the truth, a habit of delusion that at times turned into self-delusion.”
At the level of entire societies, those which lead by aggression toward others, culminating in wars, are often engaged in spreading falsehoods and self-delusions, media and education systems being two commonly used channels. The big lies cooked up to justify aggression for plunder or domination get transferred also to almost equally big lies cooked up to justify internal exploitation by big business interests. Hence, people are exposed to serious health hazards by big business interests; in some cases the toll in the longer term may be higher than that of even destructive wars. Therefore, not just at the level of individuals but also at the level of entire societies, exploiters also suffer in serious ways.
The aggression and weaponization abroad is also reflected in internal violence. The United States, for example, experienced:
1.2 million recorded violent incidents in 2019 (366 per 100,000 people), according to FBI data;
Over 10 million arrests this year (not counting traffic violations), which comes out to 3,011 arrests for every 100,000 people;
The highest number of prisoners per capita in the world;
Seven people dying a violent death every hour; and
19,100 homicides and 47,500 suicides in 2019.
According to official U.S. data, this year 12 million people seriously thought about suicide, while 3.5 million planned a suicide attempt and 1.4 million attempted suicide.
Among U.S. youth, suicide is the second highest cause of death. Plus, an unprecedented increasing trend of suicide attempts have been reported among U.S. youth during the last decade, and more pronounced among girls.
Some of this data points to a deep internal social crisis that can arise within an exploiter-and-conqueror society known for its invasion and aggression. Careful research is likely to reveal more links of aggression and internal distress. Such research should be used to convince more people about the futility of paths based on exploitation, dominance and conquest.
Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril and Earth Beyond Boundaries.
