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Guy Spiro: Jim, can you give us a thumbnail of your work?

Jim Garrison: I’m the president of the State of the World Forum and the founder of the Gorbachev Foundation, both of which are based in the Presidio in San Francisco. I have been working for the past ten years with Mr. Gorbachev and a number of others to establish a global leadership network. We engage in dialogue about major global issues and develop action programs of global concern. We have worked to transform conversations that matter into actions that make a difference. It’s been an extraordinary ten years to be working not only with Mr. Gorbachev, but leaders from all over the world and across the range of the disciplines and domains to deal with global issues.

Part of what we’ve accomplished is simply the network itself. It’s been a real challenge to go around the world and find people committed to a constructive engagement about the future. What we’ve been seeking to put together is a global network that is committed to working on the establishment of the first global civilization. That’s what’s at stake for the international community as we begin the 21st century. It’s going to take a deep fathoming of the wisdom tradition of the human community and applying that to contemporary problems. We’ve held conferences all over the world, in India, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and certainly here in the United States and Canada, and have a fairly dimensionalized network of people that are committed to construct the future.

GS: It should be clear to any thinking person that it’s something like final exam time for us. We have so much scientific, military, technological, economic and cultural power, but we have to grow up and learn how to use it sanely.

JG: I was at a conference this June in Brussels that we convened in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion. It was a conference we did in partnership with the European Parliament and the European Commission. One of the speakers, a vice president of the World Bank, got up and said that no matter how important the invasion of Iraq seemed to be at that moment, and it certainly was galvanizing everyone’s attention, the real problems confronting the international community are an array ranging from ozone depletion, global warming, deforestation, over fishing, water scarcity, HIV-AIDS, SARS, organized crime, intellectual property issues, digital divide issues, e-commerce issues … and that all of these challenges were being left essentially unattended and were in fact metastasizing. That was putting us on a collision course with ourselves, because the international institutions are not capable of effective response. That gives rise to the reasons why I wrote the book America’s Empire.

GS: Do you find that the current administration with its Neo-Con ideology is an aberration?

JG: I think it’s both a fulfillment of the culmination of American history and an aberration of American history. It’s a fulfillment of American history in that not only is the United States the strongest nation in the world, it is the strongest nation in the history of the world. That did not come about by some immaculate conception. It came about because over the 225 years we have been a republic, we have actively sought global dominion, and our empire, like the Romans, was born out of a sense of manifest destiny. It’s important to remember that within a generation of the founding of the republic, president Monroe in 1823 had declared the Monroe Doctrine. This set forth the U.S. prerogative to basically exercise dominion over the entire western hemisphere. So global conquest and now global dominance has been very much a part of the American historical intentionality. In that sense, what the Bush administration has been doing is very consistent with the trajectory of American foreign policy.

Where it’s an aberration is that Bush and the Neo-Cons are deconstructing the very international system that has been building from every American president since Woodrow Wilson. After WWI, Wilson led the European Allies in establishing a League of Nations. That did not work. After the second World War, President Truman built all the institutions that created the stability after the war from the United Nations, the Bretton Woods Institutions, the NATO Alliance, the Marshall Plan, and all the major institutions that currently help regulate international affairs that were built by American presidents in times past. I think that the Bush administration has raised such an allergic reaction around the world because he is in fact using American power not to strengthen the existing and build additional institutions, but to erode these very institutions that people believe are essential for the regulation of the common good.

GS: It has seemed to me that Wolfowitz, Perle and the other Neo-Con ideologues dreamed up this idea of overtly using America’s might to effect regime change, that they are doing now, not really thinking that it was policy that might actually be used. Then the odd combination of GWB gaining the White House and 9/11 gave them the opportunity to put it into practice.

JG: The U.S. has been involved in regime change for a long time.

GS: Not quite so overtly.

JG: Oh, I would say to the contrary. Look at policies of the U.S. in Latin America, for example. On September 9, 1973, we engaged in a brutal regime change in Chile when we went in and assassinated Salvador Allende and empowered Pinochet.

The U.S. has a very long history of regime change. Look at what we did on this continent when we swept westward from sea to shining sea. The first regime change in Iraq was not President Bush’s. It was President Kennedy in 1963 when he overthrew the government of Kassem in a CIA coup that led to the establishment of the Baath party in Iraq.

GS: Manifest destiny and the Monroe Doctrine are very clear examples that no one can dispute. But if America was really bent on empire, why did it not use its military advantage at the end of WWII? It was globally deployed. It was the only country that had the bomb. It seems to me that America could have conquered the world militarily at that point and chose not to.

JG: I think we need to separate the two. First in terms of the specifics of your question, America did use its military power at the end of the war when it dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then again on Nagasaki as a signal to the rest of the world, particularly to the Soviet Union, that we had a military capacity that was unchallengeable. The fact that the Soviet Union did proceed to challenge American military power was what generated the cold war. It was, in fact, the reliance of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union on their military and nuclear arsenals that put the entire historical process basically on ice, as it were, because of the policy of mutual assured destruction.

GS: But right at the end of the war, that wasn’t there.

JG: I think it actually was if you look at it. When the U.S. finished the war, it had over 1200 bases around the world. We dismantled some of them because Roosevelt and Truman understood a very important aspect of empire which, in fact, is what I deal with to a large extent in the book, and that is that empires can be amazingly long, like the Romans lasting over 1,000 years, or they can be amazingly short, like the Nazis, and last only twelve years. The Athenian empire lasted only forty years. The British Empire lasted 200. The Ottoman and the Babylonian empires lasted 400 years. So there’s a wide range of adaptabilities and intelligences that apply themselves to imperial power. Power is very volatile. The empires that have lasted the longest understood, like the Romans did, and as Roosevelt and Truman did, that you have to combine military strength with institutions that are perceived by the governed as fair. That’s what the Romans did. The application of Roman law, education, and Roman institutions really characterized and made cohesive the empire. Roosevelt and Truman did exactly the same thing. We had very strong military power. Make no mistake. We mounted a two-front war against imperial Japan and Nazi Germany and prevailed. Then we dropped the atomic bomb. In the process, we set up a network of bases around the world that consolidated American military supremacy. At the same time we built the U.N., the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, NATO, and a host of institutions that most people around the world by and large perceived as fair. For the last sixty years, people have accepted American dominance because it’s always been imbedded in institutions that people accepted as legitimate.

What Bush has done is that he’s not only deconstructed … he’s withdrawn or abrogated more treaties than any president in the history of the republic. He’s denigrated and marginalized the United Nations. His father used the United Nations to great effect in the first Gulf War and Bush Jr. has essentially dispensed with the U.N. as a necessary agency, and in the process violated international law and ended up with the United States isolated from the world community and paying hundreds of billions of dollars for an invasion that basically only he wanted. It’s worth remembering that when his father went into the first Gulf War, the cost totaled under 100 billion. But the U.S., because it went into that invasion with a real coalition, ended up paying less than 5% of the total price tag. Bush Jr. has such an uncomplicated mind that I don’t think he understands the presidency, history or the necessity of the institutions that he’s now destabilizing.

GS: I don’t want to create a big digression here, but it really makes me want to ask every Naderite I can find, “now do you think it doesn’t matter whether we have a Democrat or Republican in the White House?”

JG: The fact that he’s actively considering another run indicates to me that he’s completely disengaged from reality. I can’t think of a modern political figure that’s on such an ego trip as Ralph Nader.

GS: Only twenty years after 1980, people didn’t remember what Ted Kennedy did to Carter.

JG: These are some of the issues that we as Americans need to bear in mind. I believe this next election is the most critical in our lifetime. That’s one reason I wrote the book, to get Americans to understand that this is a moment when we have to understand that our nation has aggregated huge power in the world and we need to be very carefully attentive as to who we elect to wield that power.

GS: When people say that America is an empire, I think of the British Empire and I don’t see it being the same kind of thing at all. Isn’t it more of a corporatist empire? The corporations are multi-national and not beholden to any country, really.

JG: Well, yes and no, from my perspective. It’s true that if you take the 100 top economies in the world, 51 are corporations and 47 of those 51 are American corporations. So, it’s certainly the case that the corporate imperative is dominant around the world. The fact that the overwhelming majority of them are American corporations is consistent. One of the things that is unique about American imperial power is that it’s not just military. Many countries like the British, for example, had a strong naval and military presence, but its economy was very small when compared to the U.S. or Russia or Germany. The U.S. is the only empire to be simultaneously dominant in the military, political, economic, scientific, technological and cultural spheres. We dominate the world in every category of comparison. That pervasive dominance is interactive and staggering. Even in terms of space. The Chinese have just launched a little capsule into space and the guy went around for a few hours and touched down. President Bush has now announced a base on the moon and manned flights to Mars. That just gives you a measure of the dominance that the U.S. has over any other country in the world.

GS: And yet the British Empire ruled India and China.

JG: Yes, the British Empire had a quarter of the world’s territory and a quarter of the world’s population. They had formal rule in some areas and informal rule in others. One of the reasons why the U.S. has become so powerful is that it learned what the British and the French and the Spanish and the Russians did not, and that is that real empire is more economic than territorial. If you look at the Spanish and the Portuguese, they slugged it out in Latin America over territory. The Americans have almost no territory. We rule the world through mediating institutions, like the IMF and the World Bank where we have the veto powers, NATO, etc., and various trade protocols. But we don’t have land. We never made the mistake of equating empire with territory. We built our empire by opening markets, spreading democratic governance and applying a ruthless military force when necessary to keep markets open. And that’s why it’s not coincidental that 47 of the 51 major corporations in the world are American.

GS: Do you think that these 47 corporations really owe any allegiance to America?

JG: They may be off shore, but they are run by Americans, they spread American culture … let’s take for example Coca-Cola or General Motors or Microsoft. Those are huge corporations and the U.S. government in some ways kowtows to these guys. But they are American. They are part of brand America around the world.

GS: But they have no problem moving jobs out of America.

JG: No they have no allegiance to America, but they are part of the American imperial presence, let’s say footprint, around the world.

GS: So it’s not like they’re all in it together for America. They’re in it for themselves.

JG: They’re in it for themselves, but they’re an extension of America. At least that’s how I view it.

GS: You’re working with Carolyn Myss. How do you see the cooperation between the political and the spiritual?

JG: I asked the question, who was the first person in history in Europe to really understand the magnitude of what was going to happen in North America? There’ve been thousands of nations. There’ve been maybe 20 or 25 empires and there’s two that have emerged to the front rank of empire. That was Rome 2000 years ago and America today. The aggregation of power is so immense, that you’ve got to ask some deeper questions about how it happened here. Why did it happen here as opposed to Russia or China or Brazil? So I went back to the history books and asked the question, “Who was it? What was the original visionary imprint of what became the United States of America?” It came actually from Francis Bacon, who was one of the great mystics of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. He wrote a book right before he died that was unpublished because he died very soon thereafter, called New Atlantis. He believed and asserted that the North American Indians were the survivors and descendants of the original Atlantean civilization, and he called to mind that Atlantis had risen to global power and then been destroyed because of its hubris. So whatever was going to be built in North America would be Atlantean in its basic archetypal pattern and destiny path, and at some point it was going to rise to the level global dominion. Then it would, like ancient Atlantis, have to make a choice between power for the sake of service and power for the sake of more power, and as it decided, the fate of the world would be determined.

It’s also worth remembering that the founding fathers of the United States, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, etc., were all Masons and Rosicrucians. They were all students of Bacon. They believed that what they were creating was the new Atlantis, the new Israel, the new Rome, the new Athens, and they consciously set forth to build a nation around light and power. Look on the back of a dollar bill and see the pyramid and the all-seeing Eye of Horus. It’s important for Americans to understand that we were born out of a mystical vision of human perfection that was basically Atlantean in its impulse. So the challenge today is to reconnect with the Wisdom Tradition that gave rise to Atlantis, that gave rise to the United States of America, and that is ultimately an esoteric pursuit. In order for us to survive the politics of Bush and the Neo-Conservatives we have to bring to the fore the wisdom of the founding fathers. That’s the connection with someone like Carolyn. She’s writing a book which I think will come out in 2005 on the sacred contract of America. It will be a sort of mystical history of the United States. What I’ve done in my book is to trace this Atlantean vision of Francis Bacon and tell the story of how Bacon influenced our founding fathers, and how we have a mystical vision as the origin of the American experiment. Carolyn and I are not only good friends going back some twenty years, but we’re similarly convinced that we have in our generation come to the fullness of time.

GS: It all boils down to consciousness.

JG: Yes. One of the things I say at the beginning and the end of the book is that Americans have to become consciously aware of the power we now wield. Most people go along [living] ordinary lives and don’t even think about being American. We have our jobs or a bookstore, or we go to a gas station, we’re a mother, or we’re a lawyer. We don’t think about the fact that we are also Americans, and as Americans we have a sacred contract with ourselves as a community, and a nation. Now, since we’ve become such a huge empire and we control people either formally or informally, literally all over the world through mediating institutions, we have a responsibility to take that as seriously as we do our own personal decisions.

GS: It’s a matter of generating light. Light obliterates dark. The more consciousness, the more light can be generated, the more the things of darkness fall away. I’ve been saying to anyone that would listen to me that the cold war and the specter of nuclear annihilation didn’t go away because our system was better than the Soviets or because we could outspend them. Through the global peace and prayer meditations, mass consciousness rose up and struck it down. That’s the mechanism that we can use to solve all of our problems.

JG: Absolutely.

James Garrison is president of the State of the World Forum, a San Francisco-based non-profit institution created in 1995 to establish a global network of leaders dedicated to discerning and implementing those principles, values, and actions necessary to guide humanity toward a more sustainable global civilization. The Forum has convened a series of international conferences that have served to connect leaders and thinkers who may not traditionally interact. For more information on the World Forum, visit www.WorldForum.org.

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Jim Garrison is the author of The Plutonium Culture, The Darkness of God: Theology After Hiroshima, The Russian Threat: Myths and Realities, The New Diplomats, and Civilization and the Transformation of Power. His new book America as Empire: Global Leader or Rogue Power? tackles what is perhaps the most important question of our time: What kind of empire will America be? If American power is to survive for any great length of time, then America must exercise truly visionary leadership to reform the existing world order.

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