Gabriel Kolko

'The US Will Lose War Regardless What it Does'

Gabriel Kolko, John Goetz — 2007-09-17T11:05:00Z

In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, American military historian Gabriel Kolko argues that the situation in Iraq is worse than ever and that the artificial nation, created after World War I, is breaking up. The "surge," he says, is also failing.

Weapons of mass financial destruction

Gabriel Kolko — 2006-10-11T07:44:00Z

Last month a major US hedge fund, Amaranth Advisors, lost more

than half its assets in a week, speculating on natural gas

prices. The company proved correct the chief worry of such major

financial institutions as the World Bank and the International

Monetary Fund: that financial reality is now out of control.

[October 2006]

- / Le Monde diplomatique

The Great Equalizer. Lessons From Iraq and Lebanon

Gabriel Kolko — 2006-08-27T21:14:05Z

The United States had a monopoly of nuclear weaponry only a few years before other nations challenged it, but from 1949 until roughly the 1990s deterrence theory worked-nations knew that if they used the awesome bomb they were likely to be devastated in the riposte. Despite such examples of brinkmanship as the Cuban missile crisis and numerous threats of nuclear annihilation against non-nuclear powers, by and large the few nations that possessed the bomb concluded that nuclear war was not worth its horrendous risks. Today, by contrast, weapons of mass destruction or precision and power are within the capacity of dozens of nations either to produce or purchase. With the multiplicity of weapons now available, deterrence theory is increasingly irrelevant and the equations of military power that existed in the period after World War Two no longer hold. (...)

- / Japan Focus

The Decline of the American Empire

Gabriel Kolko — 2005-12-18T04:25:00Z

The dilemma the US has had for a half-century is that the priorities it must impose on its budget and its imperial plans have never guided its actual behavior and action. It has always believed, as well it should, that Europe and its control would determine the future of world power. But it has fought in Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq—the so-called "Third World" in general—where the stakes of power were much smaller.

The American priorities were specific, focused on individual nations, but they also set the United States the task of guiding or controlling the entire world—which is a very big place and has proven time and again to be far beyond American resources and imperial power. In most of those places in the Third World where the US massively employed its power directly it has lost, and its military might has been ineffective. The US's local proxies have been corrupt and venal in most nations where it has relied upon them. The cost, both in financial terms and in the eventual alienation of the American public, has been monumental. (...)

- / CounterPunch

The End of the Vietnam War, 30 Years Ago

Gabriel Kolko — 2005-05-01T01:35:00Z

Amsterdam.

The war in Vietnam that ended 30 years ago with a complete triumph for the Communists was the longest, most expensive and divisive American war in its history, involving over a half-million U.S. forces at one point-plus Australian, South Korean, and other troops.

If we use conventional military criteria, the Americans should have been victorious. They used 15 million tons of munitions (as much as they employed in World War Two), had a vast military superiority over their enemies by any standard one employs, and still they were defeated. (...)

- / CounterPunch

Wilsonian and Neoconservative Myths

Gabriel Kolko — 2005-01-30T04:22:00Z

Innumerable commentators have made comparisons between President Woodrow Wilson's internationalism and his alleged missionary zeal with the ideas of the neoconservatives now so influential in the Bush Administration. But any analogies are essentially inaccurate and they all ignore the crucial historical context.

Wilson developed his ideas, with the help of Colonel Edward House, wholly as a direct response to Lenin's lofty and spectacularly successful rhetoric for a new internationalism to replace the folly of the nations that had brought on the First World War. Prior to the bolshevik challenge Wilson's notions on the international order and America's goals were largely economic-based on British free trade doctrine—and quite banal. (...)

- / CounterPunch

Elections, Alliances and Empire

Gabriel Kolko — 2004-09-14T04:16:02Z

This essay by historian Gabriel Kolko is excerpted from CounterPunch's must-have new book, Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils, now available from CounterPunch/AK Press.

Alliances have been a major cause of wars throughout modern history, removing inhibitions that might otherwise have caused Germany, France and countless nations to reflect much more cautiously before embarking on death and destruction. The dissolution of all alliances is a crucial precondition of a world without wars. (...)

- / CounterPunch

The Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power

Gabriel Kolko — 2004-03-12T23:31:00Z

We are now experiencing fundamental changes in the international system whose implications and consequences may ultimately be as far-reaching as the dissolution of the Soviet bloc. (...)

Has the US Learned Anything?

Gabriel Kolko — 2003-11-29T04:37:00Z

There are great cultural, political, and physical differences between Vietnam and Iraq that cannot be minimized, and the geopolitical situation is entirely different. After all, the U.S. encouraged and materially supported Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran throughout the 1980s because it feared a militantly Shiite Iran would dominate the Gulf region. It still does, and if the Shia majority takes over the Iraqi government next June—the date Washington has promised to transfer nominal power to Iraqi authority—Iran is more likely than ever to attain its regional geopolitical ambitions. But putting this fundamental paradox in the American position aside, which makes the transfer of power to the Iraqi Shias and real democracy highly unlikely, the U.S. has ignored the lessons of the traumatic Vietnam experience and is today repeating many of the errors that produced defeat. (...)