Gunboat diplomacy had its origins in the Opium War, when the Chinese rebelled against the British importation of opium into China, and the British response was to send a gunboat up the Yangtze River. The resort to force in diplomatic initiatives has roots in antiquity, from the original disputes in the Fertile Crescent; but every generation has refined the use of coercion, to the point that today government's use of coercion is a well-oiled machine. There is almost an unwritten gentlemen's agreement that national governments will look the other way when any one of them abuses its own population; and when a strong national government attempts to overwhelm a weak nation's government, the world community feigns disapproval. All action is deliberately confused, however, because underlying all of the appearance of law and order, the world community still honors the law of conquest.

The one seeming divergence in this was the so-called "Gulf War," which was supposedly conducted to "liberate" Kuwait from Iraqi control. George Bush was the consummate CIA-man, and the whole Gulf War episode was purposely developed to result in a confrontation, on account of the fact that the Soviet Union was collapsing, and the United States needed a show of force to demonstrate to the world community that even though the Soviet Union might disappear, the United States was still a super-power that intended to push its weight around. The War was a perfect opportunity for the American military establishment to test all of its new high-tech weaponry under battlefield conditions, and it literally cut down the one-million-man Iraqi Army like butter. It is highly likely that the Pentagon knew that this would be the result, and allowed what amounted to a mass murder of Third World peasants to take place.

No one challenges the fact that Saddam Hussein is leading a fascist state, but when Allied forces could have proceeded to Baghdad to finish the work of the War, they backed off and made a DEAL with a man that President Bush had clearly labelled the equivalent of Adolf Hitler. No American would probably deny that the Gulf War was fought over oil; Kuwait is like the pesky Monaco to the annoyed neighbor of Iraq as France, which views the tiny state as a legal fiction. Yet the very show of force involved with the Gulf War, as well as the American invasion of Panama, demonstrated a double-standard at work, disallowing powerless states from projecting their authority outside of their own international boundaries, while sanctioning the role of American Armed Forces projecting American power anywhere politically expedient, under a flimsy appearance of enforcing international agreements.

The invasion of Panama to depose Manuel Noriega was the fruit of a tree planted with an American gunboat a century earlier. Before anyone thought up the great idea of building the Panama Canal, the area we now think of as the sovereign country of Panama was merely a northern province of Colombia. The Federal Government of the United States used the Monroe Doctrine to construct an imperial diplomacy, which initially staked out a sphere-of-influence that warned Old World powers not to attempt any further colonial adventures in the New World: the New World was to be dominated by the United States. The drive to build a canal as a short-cut between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans came about largely from the interests of the United States Navy, which recognized that the strategic control of the continent would devolve on anyone who had control of a canal at the narrowest point in the land; and there was the geo-political aspect of control of the Pacific Ocean. The British Navy had already proven the necessity of controlling the ocean as a supply line for colonial expansion.

Initially the Frenchman who built the Suez Canal, made an attempt to build a canal in northern Colombia. Little work was completed, when the financing turned into a massive scandal that had all the characteristics of the Tulip speculation in Holland. The speculation in the stocks and bonds of the canal contractor were traded heavily, making some insiders extremely wealthy, while the main asset of the company remained unfinished: the canal. So like all bubbles, it popped, and no canal was built.

The biggest obstacle to building the Panama Canal was the issue of who would control it. The next biggest obstacle was the fact that the area was covered with jungle, which was a breeding ground for diseases Western medicine had never encountered. When President Theodore Roosevelt got behind the Navy to push its interests, influenced by the British Naval tradition, and intending to launch an American Naval tradition to rival the British in colonial expansion, he immediately embraced the plan to build a canal through the Isthmus of Panama. The only problem was that it belonged to another country.

It is important to understand that technical issues of possession have never had a real hold over the bureaucrats of the Federal Government. Its double-dealing treatment of the American indians, (the reservation system being the model for South Africa's apartheid state), and its dismal record in the renumeration of the liberated slaves, speak volumes about the diplomatic corp's lack of enthusiasm over the territorial integrity of foreign states. The bureaucracy of the republic has a habit of successfully conquoring its enemies militarily, and then controlling the way its conquests are portrayed in "history." Thus the indians were not deprived of their human rights, they were "savages" who were "improved" by their contact with Western civilization.

The way the United States Government set up colonies was different from the classic European colonies, because the Federal Government had a tendency to set up full-fledged puppet states that it could control through confidential banking arrangements. This process was started through the evolution of the policy of new territories annexed by the United States being admitted as "states," and it was perfected through the efforts of the U.S. Government to undermine the native tribal governments of American indians. By forcing the tribes to abandon their hereditary lines of chiefs, through setting up "elected" tribal governments which were to be the sole recipients of funds from the Federal Government, the politicians in Washington, D.C. found that they could divide a traditional culture against itself, making it unable to defend itself. This became the working model, such as when a boatload of U.S. Marines landed in Hawaii, and effectively overthrew the native Hawaiian Kingdom.

The Isthmus of Panama was a backwater, an inconsequential country province with no pretensions of independence. The entire project for independence was a proto-type for the kind of covert CIA operations Americans would be famous for in the Third World later in the century. An American "adventurer" intrigued with locals -- probably through bribes -- who declared their independence from Colombia, which was backed down from reclaiming the area by an American Gunboat. The new Government of Panama immediately signed special agreements with the United States that basically gave the U.S. Government rights to intervene in Panamanian affairs, but which gave the Panamanian Government the much needed credibility it needed by granting it diplomatic recognition. What proceeded to develop was a dictatorship, which became a key-feature of the client states the United States would prop up.

Under the principles of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States assumed a position of hegemony over the countries of Central and South America. It was for the purpose of sustaining this hegemony that American troops have been sent to Cuba, Haiti, Grenada, Guatamala, and Mexico. American intervention in Guatamala and Nicaragua is directly responsible for the civil war that has raged in those two countries for 75 years, in which hundreds of thousands of basically innocent people have perished. The way the CIA engineered the coup in Guatamala in the 1950s, to secure the property of United Fruit, was a classic example of psyche warfare. Through a disinformation campaign the democratically elected government panicked, and the CIA installed a puppet government that had been educated in the United States, and didn't have to wait to be told how to protect U.S. interests.

The hallmark of American control over a subject state is the fact that the rulers of the puppet state received their educations in the United States. Part of any effort to destabilize a target country was to offer Western educations to the children of its elite. This inevitably created a group in the country who only saw "progress" in the narrow industrial Western sense, who would cause controversies that effectively divided their own country from within. Using this turmoil, the international corporate interests would move in and set up a puppet republic, under a native with a Western education willing to give concessions to the corporations. This would effectively topple the traditional culture, which is generally muscled into the background by a republican state that is basically a police state.

The only real purpose for a client state is to do business with the Great Powers, so all the moral functions of government are stripped from it, which is why the republican system is employed by the international cartels that dominate the world community. The main function of the cartels is the control of natural resources, and therefore the supply and demand of those resources. By controlling the supply and demand the cartels control the value of money, but even more significantly, they control the value of wealth. It has been said that wars break out when the bottom drops out of the market for labor: In other words, when people become too plentiful and labor is too cheap, the correction mechanism of the market is a war. Wars always have a bottom line motivation, because above all, WARS ARE EXPENSIVE.

Wealth is not money, wealth is a tangible resource that is given a monetary value through the processes of the market economy. Natural resources are the core of wealth and they exist in finite quantities. It is this very finiteness that makes them valuable. Value is directly related to NEED, as it relates to supply. What this means is that someone in need may have to pay alot for something that is plentiful, because of the genuine urgency that might be involved. Market politics prey on need, which is the essence of the American medical establishment. Once the physician has the patient prone on the stretcher, in fear of death, he drills him for details of his financial condition to guarantee that the physician will be paid. All that mushy sentimental stuff about a Hypocratic Oath is only a cover for the real venality that comes out every time there is a buck to be made on the corpse of another American.

The United States Government has no moral mandate to uphold. It has a dismal record securing the human rights of its own nationals, who are busy blowing up government buildings in protest against the Federal state, or are training to blow up government buildings. In fact George Washington's republic actually operated on the revenues it collected on a tax on the trade in human slaves, which was one of the most typical markets of the early republic, and was an example of the genuine brutality inherent in the market system. The United States Government made the holding of slaves as property possible with its massive police infrastructure, so it was accustomed to serving as a fixture for business. The Federal Government also facilitated the evolution of the railroads as the first industrial big business of the modern era, through an unprecedented giveaway of public land to railroad corporations. The election of former- railroad attorney Abraham Lincoln to the presidency signified the kind of collegial system of control the corporations exercised over the Federal Government. One could say that when the slaves were freed, the bottom REALLY dropped out of the market for laborers, so it was convenient that one million were killed through the course of the Civil War. To the Federal Government, the American people are nothing more than numbers, which the Government feels free to use any way it chooses.

We forget that the original purpose of the Federal Government was the securing of land from the native Americans, so that it could be carved up and sold as "real estate." The real merciless way that this mandate was carried out is only now becoming common knowledge to the average American, who has suffered as much from a Western "education" as the Third World technocrats who become the pawns of Western power-plays. The total impact of the Federal Government on the native American culture has been genocidal, as whole tribes disappeared into planned extinction. Although the bureaucracy has "plausible deniability" in causing the deaths of generations of Native indians, who happen to possess legitimate legal claims, all one has to do to understand how the republic works just has to look at Leonard Peltier, who was obviously set up as a troublemaker for a crime he did not commit. At any time a genuine cultural hero has emerged, the bureaucracy of the Federal Government has been instrumental in murdering him.

Other puppet states set up by United States interests -- which are not the same as the national interests of Americans -- have included the Phillipines, South Vietnam, and even the post-World War II states of West Germany and Japan. While Japan retained a semblance of its old constitution with the retention of the Emperor, the new government was designed to answer to the United States as its suzerain. The Nuremburg Trial and the Nuremburg Principles created the new international "crimes against humanity," but the mechanism for charging those who commit such crimes has been safely in the hands of the greatest perpetrator of such crimes, the United States Government. It was not by accident that the United Nations -- the so-called World Body -- is dominated by a "permanent" group of five states, of which only one is accepted as a pre-eminent super-power. This was the same way the diplomats created the balance of power strategy of post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe, which was the most powerful reactionary influence in a world of emerging nationalism.

The only philosophy to actually have the support of the masses of the human community sufficient to enable it to actually compete with the cartels that dominate the world (and control the value of its wealth), has been nationalism. What defeated the American military juggernaut in Vietnam was not superior technology, but the love of the Vietnamese people for their nation. The real motivation for the Vietnamese "police action" was the possession of tin, rubber and phosphate, which the French had been exploiting before the United States, and which the United States intended to exploit as well. Initially, the French tire manufacturer Michellin had big rubber plantations in Vietnam, which the American corporation Firestone coveted. Vietnam also was the site of mining operations for 3M, or Minnesota Mining. Of course, such mainsprings of the American industrial core economy as Westinghouse, General Electric, Ford, GM, and Chrysler all had lucrative defense contracts, along with General Dynamics and Rocketdyne, which not only benefited them financially, but which gave them the cover of national security to enable them to embezzle to their heart's content.

There is a commercial that declares, "We make money the old-fashioned way..." Well, the old-fashioned way is to steal it. The American corporate ethic is a form of sanitized cannibalism. Politicians whimper when they have to prevent American nationals from starving to death by begrudgingly granting them "entitlements," but they vehemently defend billion-dollar hand-outs to American industry. Arcane arguments erupt over the difference between "private" versus "public" property, and the paper tiger of communism raises its ugly head, all in a display of manipulation that is nothing short of masterful. The fact that the communist states were always on the verge of collapse didn't stop the masters at deception from terrorizing the American society, as the so-called intelligence community used "threat inflation" to justify the construction of a national security state.

The corporate culture of the republic has felt free to interfere in the domestic affairs of any country on earth that has had the natural resources it needs to make continuing profits. The human race is literally raised like livestock, bred for the use of the corporations, and held in servitude to them. This is what the republic is used for. This is why nostalgia is raised for the founders of the republic, men who IN LIFE were mean-spirited slavemasters whose real motivation was the securing of their property, rather than any fickle sentiment of loyalty to the nation. Coercion is the root value of the corporate culture of the republic, because the corporate persona is a fraud, a deception, a legal fiction. A corporation is nothing other than a legal trick, a non-existent "being" created by the conventions of men, with all the rights of a genuine human being, but none of the liabilities.

Because the corporation is not real, force must be held in the immediate background in case someone doesn't want to go along with the "game." There has to be some form of punishment because traditional people are not given to complicated abstractions that result in acts of cruelty. The gunboat is the iron fist in the velvet glove; that rock-solid coercion the commerce driven republic is willing to resort to in order to promote its agenda. The subjugators expect the subjugated to accept their condition of subjugation, and act with deference to their captors. This is why there is such fury over the so-called War on Crime, because the "criminals" refuse to go by "The Rules." No one remembers that when George Washington was president, the rules made enslaved black people seeking freedom into felons for the simple act of seeking liberation!

The international climate is very dangerous for Americans, but this is because the Federal Government has felt free to mess with the affairs of foreign states, and those chickens will come home to roost. When the jet was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, the United States Government never admitted that it was done in retaliation for its bombing of Libya. It never admits any flaws, and any time it is the subject of attacks, it cries out like an innocent victim. The reality, however, is that the Federal Government has made lots of enemies around the world for the American people, and when the individuals responsible for the stupid policies travel abroad, they control the resources necessary to travel by a secured means; but the average American travels at the mercy of foreign states, and the terrorist movements that have risen up to match the terrorist methods that the United States Government introduced them to.