The list of US enemies, past and present, is long. According to American mythologies, most of them were evil incarnate. But only a global empire could have made such diverse enemies around the world. I have just chosen three for convenience and relevance.

Their initial friendly approaches to the United States could have helped avert the subsequent conflicts and slaughters, if reciprocated. But they were either rejected or ignored.

Ho Chi Minh

From the Versailles peace conference in 1919 to Ho’s declaration of independence from France in 1945, he made not one, not two but three open attempts to make friends with the United States, or at least presented himself as an admirer of the American republic and its governing principles. All of them failed.

Ho took Woodrow Wilson’s famous doctrine of self-determination seriously. When the US president arrived at Versailles, as recounted in Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History, Ho wrote him an appeal declaring: “[All] subject peoples are filled with hope by the prospect that an era of right and justice is opening to them … in the struggle of civilisation against barbarism.”

In place of French imperialist rule, he proposed a constitutional government with full democratic freedoms while sidestepping the question of independence for Vietnam. But, as Karnow wryly observed, though clothed in universal terms, “[Wilson’s] principles presumably applied only to Europe”, not non-white peoples.

When imperial Japan swept across Asia, kicking out the French in Vietnam, the Dutch from Indonesia, the British from Malaya and the Americans from the Philippines, many anti-imperialist Asian nationalists cheered, at least until the Japanese army unleashed its full horrors across the region. Ever clear-eyed, Ho sided with the Allies from the start. He bet that the Western allies would defeat the Axis powers. He also correctly gauged that the collaborationist Vichy government would be discredited.

When he declared Vietnam’s independence from France in 1945, he quoted the US Declaration of Independence. What he didn’t foresee was that the post-war French government wouldn’t give up without a fight and the US would support it, and then take up the fight in the name of anti-communism.

“It was patriotism and not communism that originally inspired me,” Ho once wrote. He didn’t start off as a hardcore communist; he became one thanks to French and American imperial policies.

The US was so blinded by its anti-communism that it thought North Vietnam was close to Mao’s China when its people had fought the Chinese for more than a millennium. And Ho was nothing if not a nationalist.

Fidel Castro

Like Ho, the Cuban leader was not born an anti-American communist, but made into one. Repeated attempts to depose or assassinate him by Uncle Sam would do that to anyone. When Castro first overthrew the corrupt Fulgencio Batista, who had turned the island nation into a haven for the US mafia and corporate interests, with full financial and military support from Washington, he was a nationalist and a socialist, but not a communist.

The new government in Havana was even composed of anti-communists. The many leftists in government were no more radical than Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, on which they initially modelled their economic reforms. It was the expropriation of American property undermining US corporate interests that first alarmed Washington. A visit by the Soviet deputy premier in 1960 to a trade fair was enough to trigger America’s unforgiving enmity. Instead of sending US marines, as Teddy Roosevelt once did, Dwight Eisenhower dispatched the CIA.

According to The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, Vol. 4: “The Cuban Communist Party was legalised and its members began to play a role, although relatively minor, in the implementation of Castro’s programmes … the CIA detected no evidence of a Soviet role, no evidence that Castro might himself be a communist.”

If you can’t overthrow a government, keep the country poor. Last year, 184 countries in the United Nations General Assembly – about 94 per cent of all nations on Earth – voted for a resolution to demand an end to the American economic blockade against Cuba, for the 29th year in a row, with only the US and Israel voting against.

Putin

While it’s highly contentious as to whether US president George H.W. Bush and secretary of state James Baker had ever made a security guarantee to Mikhail Gorbachev against Nato’s eastward expansions in central Europe, there is no doubt that Putin had initially toyed with joining the military alliance. His imperialist adventures only began after he was spurned while Nato took in more former Soviet satellite states as members.

By the time the Germans were ready to reunify, Soviet Russia was so weak that Gorbachev might well have not been able to secure any guarantee from the Americans beyond some verbal assurances which would be deniable later. But every nation’s first priority is survival, and the first condition of survival is to secure its borders. It would have been unimaginable that it wasn’t uppermost in Gorbachev’s mind.

It certainly was on Putin’s mind and he had openly voiced it in the past two decades. One way to address that was to join Nato. Last November, in an interview with the One Decision Podcast co-hosted by former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, George Robertson, a former British defence secretary and Nato chief between 1999 and 2003, acknowledged Putin told him about Russia’s interest but that he was told off. It was unlikely that Robertson didn’t explore the possibility further without informing Washington first.

… and finally China

In 1944, Mao Zedong passed on the following secret message to Washington via John Service, a deputy to the US ambassador to China.

It reads: “China must industrialise. This can be done … only by free enterprise and with the aid of foreign capital. Chinese and American interests are correlated and similar. They fit together, economically and politically … The United States would find us more cooperative than the Kuomintang. We will not be afraid of democratic American influence – we will welcome it.”

One of the first so-called old China hands, Service was purged from the US State Department in the McCarthy era.

And we all know how that turned out for China. Besides FDR, Mao also made friendly approaches to Harry Truman and Eisenhower. Again, he received no response. But he was fourth time lucky with that red baiter Richard Nixon. Who could have guessed?

Now, though, Chinese leaders are once again saying they don’t want to fight the US. But their wish will again be in vain. America has already made up its mind. And America always needs a big bad wolf to hunt and destroy to make sure the empire is still alive.

South China Morning Post