McNamara’s Double Guilt

Robert McNamara, U.S. Defense Secretary, then president of the World Bank, active supporter of the intervention in Vietnam and fierce anticommunist, recently died at the age of 93. His work between 1961 and 1981 contributed to the shaping of today’s world economy. In their assessment, Eric Toussaint and Damien Millet reveal the extent of the disasters caused during his career, supported by a triptych of trade, war and debt.

The first president of the automobile multinational Ford company who was not a member of the Ford family, McNamara only remained in this position for five weeks before becoming the Defense Secretary of the United States, under the presidency of John F. Kennedy (1961-1963), a position he would continue to hold under President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1968). McNamara was one of the main architects of the U.S.’ military aggression in Vietnam, a war often called “McNamara’s war.”

He exerted continual pressure to send more troops there, totaling more than 500,000 soldiers. Around one million communist combatants and Vietnamese patriots and four million civilians were killed between 1961 and 1975. Years later, McNamara would acknowledge his errors: “We, the members of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, direct participants in decisions on Vietnam (…) were wrong, we were terribly wrong.” He would add further: “I had never visited Indochina, and I did not understand anything about its history, its language, its culture, its values. I was totally insensitive to it all. (…) When we’re talking about Vietnam, we were in a position to decide a policy for a land unknown to us.”

In 1968, when the situation became very difficult for the U.S., McNamara was named president of the World Bank, where he would behave like a missionary, continuing the anticommunist campaign. His arrival marked a significant turn in the World Bank that gave a leap forward to debt after using it as a true geopolitical weapon. From 1968 to 1973, the World Bank arranged more loans than during the entire period of 1945 to 1968. Countries of the South were urged to borrow massively in order to finance the modernization of their export apparatus and to tie them more tightly to the world market. In fact, McNamara pushed the countries of the South to submit to the conditions attached to these loans, to accept useless infrastructure, inadequate social budgets, and to build large, disastrous dams in pillaged surroundings, all at the cost of colossal debts.

The bait used: liquidity placed in the reach of local governments with no mechanism to fight corruption and the misappropriation of public funds. In exchange for this liquidity, the governments would accept most of the World Bank’s recommendations.

Who were these loans granted to? In the middle of the Cold War, the World Bank intervened to fight Soviet influence and different nationalist and anti-imperialist attempts. The strategy was dual. On one hand, the World Bank supported the strategic allies of the United States in different regions of the planet (Mobutu in Zaire, Suharto in Indonesia, Pinochet in Chile, the Brazilian and Argentinean dictators…) in order to reinforce the American area of influence. On the other hand, the World Bank lent conditionally to countries that tried to apply policies that broke with the dominant capitalist model, in order to be able to exert control over their economic policies (Nasser in Egypt, N’Krumah in Ghana, Manley in Jamaica, Sukarno in Indonesia…).

At the beginning of 1980, the countries of the South, excessively indebted, suffered directly from the brutal rise of interest rates and the drop in prices of raw materials, whose production kept increasing in order to pay the debt, which increased competition among the countries at the same time that demand fell in the North. The consequences would be terrible for the nations of the South, which are obligated by the IMF and the World Bank to bleed themselves dry in order to pay the rich creditors.

McNamara is guilty of having led a colonial war in Vietnam. He is also guilty, as president of the World Bank between 1968 and 1981, of having led the countries of the South to their tragic over-indebtedness. For 20 years, McNamara’s management brought two goals to fruition: he recovered the advantage over countries that had affirmed their will to be independent, and increased domination of the people of the South. Today, it is sad that McNamara has not been forced to account for this.