Hawkish economist who experienced a dramatic conversion and became a darling of American liberals
An academic voice crying in the wilderness, Chalmers Johnson was the latter-day Cassandra of contemporary statecraft. He fought in the Korean War and went on to become a passionate advocate of the Vietnam War and the Cold War until, after a dizzying turnaround, he ended his days as the pathologist, both practical and ideological, of the American Empire.
No one ever doubted his patriotism. He always wished the best for his country. But Johnson’s Damascene conversion to the cause of live-and-let-live, predicated on the belief that the US, through its serial engagement in war and occupation, was sowing the seeds of its own destruction, was rare and wholly remarkable.
His trenchant 1970s analysis of the Japanese and Chinese postwar experience, in which he rejected the assumption that free-market principles were the sole means of achieving global power and prosperity, was revolutionary enough. Simultaneously — some might say incongruously — came his support for America’s doomed effort to defeat communism in East Asia and his work for the CIA aimed at subverting the Soviet Union. But it was his Empire trilogy, beginning at the turn of the present century with Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, that had the deepest and perhaps most lasting impact on the psyche of his country’s ruling class.
The Sorrows of Empire followed in 2004, and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, in 2007. Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, a summation of his views, came out as recently as August this year.
Ronald Asmus, a former leading adviser to Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration, wrote that Johnson’s work was “a cry from the heart of an intelligent person who fears that the basic values of our republic are in danger”. It conveyed, he said, “a sense of impending doom rooted in a belief that the US has entered a perpetual state of war that will drain our economy and destroy our constitutional freedoms”.
Some would argue that he was a classic case of buyer’s remorse, or of the regret of a man in old age ruefully reflecting on a lifetime of lost causes, Whatever the truth, he remained sharp as a tack even in his final days.
Chalmers Ashby Johnson was born in August 1931 in Phoenix, Arizona, then a windswept desert town. His father, David, had fought in the US Navy in the Pacific in the war; his mother, Katherine, made homes for Chalmers and his younger sister, Barbara, first in the Phoenix suburbs, then in Alemada, California, where both children went to high school and from which Chalmers went on to study economics at the University of California in Berkeley.
After graduating with honours in 1953 he was drafted into the Navy, serving on a patrol boat that spent much of its time being repaired in the port of Yokohama. This was where he learnt Japanese and became fascinated by the resurgent Japanese economy, as well as by the triumph of Maoism in China.
Returning to the US at the end of his service, he took a master’s in economics at Berkeley in 1957 and his PhD four years later, afterwards joining the political science faculty and embarking on what he thought would be his life’s work, the study of economic development in East Asia and, in particular, the phenomenon of state-sponsored capitalism.
Johnson was an economist, but like all the best of his profession did not neglect the political and social circumstances in which growth occurred. In Japan he had noticed the prevalence of anti-American feeling, which he concluded was a function not of defeat in the war but of the ill effects of occupation. This was a theme to which he would return. A series of books followed, including Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, Ideology and Politics in Contemporary China and An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring. Johnson was by now acknowledged as one of America’s foremost authorities on the politics of the Pacific Ring, which he feared could go communist if America and the West did not take a stand. It came as no surprise when he was recruited as a consultant to the CIA in the 1960s, during which time he championed the cause of the Vietnam War while advising on the likely impact of the Cultural Revolution in China.
In 1982, as a leading member of the so-called Japanese Revisionists, he published his landmark book, MITI and the Japanese Miracle, a study of Tokyo’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry which posited the view — then thought heretical — that capitalism could successfully be led by government and did not have to arise out of the unfettered competition of a free market.
By now, Johnson was well into his stride. But it was not until 2000, when he was already 69, that he truly found his voice. As he reflected on the growing hegemony of the United States in a post-Soviet world, he began to wonder if Washington was not wandering down a dangerous path. He had witnessed the implosion of the British Empire after the Second World War — a process that, in the sense that it was both ordered and deliberate, he rather admired. He had also read deeply on the Chinese and Japanese empires, as well as on the decline and fall of Rome. Now he feared that America was, however unwittingly, becoming a New Roman Empire, establishing military bases across the globe and requiring the “free world” to acknowledge its suzerainty in support of a selfproclaimed Pax Americana.
The Blowback trilogy was the logical consequence of this train of thought. The books, outlining a nightmare scenario in which his country wastes blood and treasure in support of an impossible construct while incurring the hatred or resentment of most of the world’s people, struck a nerve with liberals across the world.
In Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Great Hope, Johnson sought to show how his country could turn the situation around and perhaps re-establish itself as a democratic society at peace with itself and the world. But he was not optimistic.
Writing in August in the online Huffington Post, he observed: “I foresee the US drifting along, much as the Obama Administration seems to be drifting along in the war in Afghanistan. The common talk among economists today is that high unemployment may linger for another decade. Add in low investment and depressed spending (except perhaps by the government) and I fear T. S. Eliot had it right when he wrote: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper’.”
A long-standing member of the US Council on Foreign Relations, he decided late in life that the extent of his differences with the body’s overall ethos were such that he could no longer remain. His resignation was rejected. The only way in which a member of the council could resign, he was informed, was to die. “In that case,” he reportedly replied, “consider me dead.”
Johnson is survived by his wife, the anthropologist Sheila Knipschee, whom he had met at Berkeley. They had no children.
Chalmers Johnson, economist and political commentator, was born on August 6, 1931. He died on November 20, 2010, aged 79
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