Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939

"Out just this year, Hochschild is a wonderful storyteller and first-rate journalist. He’s writing about the Spanish civil war and reminding us just how un-self-aware US foreign policy is. A lot of the narrative accounts of the civil war come from Hemingway and Orwell. What Adam is doing is stepping behind a lot of the familiar tones the US feels comfortable with and showing how divided America was. He tells a somewhat untold story of the involvement of US corporations. A lot of the current focus, and my work, has looked at how ostensibly commercial entities from Russia and China are being used as conduits for projecting state power and accomplishing political aims. In fact, during the Spanish civil war, the same was true for US corporations. He tells a great story of Texaco. At one point the CEO, Torkild Rieber, a Norwegian immigrant, was a great admirer of both Hitler and Franco in the 1930’s, eventually turned much of his attention onto the Spanish Civil War. Rieber wound up violating a lot of the neutrality laws in order to continue supplying oil to Franco’s troops – at a discount, no less. He also allowed Texaco vessels to convey espionage and actual intelligence that it seems was quite meaningful to the course of that war. “The US is schizophrenic in our relationship to geoeconomics” All of which is to say, with a long enough memory, our hands are not entirely clean: at many points in history, US economic might—even as expressed by private actors—has sought its fair share of geopolitical ends, taking to some fairly unsavory tactics and characters in the process. It’s also striking just how much corporate purpose was felt among America’s largest companies in those days. For better or worse—almost certainly better—it’s hard to imagine a company of the likes of Texaco getting religion on a geopolitical conflict to the degree they did not so long ago. The US is schizophrenic in our relationship to geoeconomics. We have a bit of collective amnesia on how comfortable we used to be in exercising geoeconomic power—right up until roughly Vietnam. The first two hundred years of our country’s history, it was something we did routinely and proudly. You do see a certain formalisation that comes about with World War I. With the US’s entry into World War I, Wilson signed on to a sanctions regime and began zealously enforcing it — quite a U-turn considering that, right up until joining World War I, we were avowedly asserting our neutral rights to trade. In fact, the US’s insistence on its neutral trading rights, even as it was clearly heading into the war itself, nearly ruptured the US-British alliance. Yet, as soon as we joined the war, Washington was not only enforcing these embargoes very enthusiastically, but pushing them further — and even threatening Scandinavian countries for asserting the same kind of neutral trading rights that we had been espousing right up until we joined the war. This does seem to be quite innovative when pressed on geoeconomics, but by and large, we see the US’s high watermark happen right after WWII, and — with the important exception of sanctions — it has been a fairly steady decline since."