Page 107 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

96 Communication, Commerce and Power

American counter-offensive. Emerging out of the relative economic,
military and political decline of the United States, and fueled by
'sunbelt'-inspired neo-liberalism, the so-called New Cold War in the
1980s constituted an attempted reassertion of post-1945 US hege-
monic mighL 88 The assumed location in which America's eroding
power could most readily be redressed was the Third World. The
Soviet Union was represented as the force underlying LDC resistance
movements. The Reagan Doctrine - the strategy of arming right-wing
proxies and pro-Western insurgents to engage in the disruption or
overthrow of socialist LDC governments - sought not only to discip-
line the international left, it also sought to undermine the perceived
gains of the Soviet Union in international affairs. As Fred Halliday
89
summarizes, 'The Second Cold War was neither an accident, nor the
product of some neat conspiracy: it reflected ... decisions taken by
people in power with limited control over world events.' 90
The Reagan Doctrine was promoted as a struggle for 'freedom' - an
ideal that the White House religiously pursued in efforts to establish
secure capitalist market economies. In this effort, 'basic principles,
political as well as legal and moral, on which the international system
is based' were selectively repudiated. 91 Such an aggressive turn in US
foreign policy was justified during a brief period in which Reagan
administration officials vilified the Soviet Union as 'the evil empire.' 92
The US attack on the NWICO and virtually every international
organization supporting it were components of this New Cold War
offensive.

4.5 CONCLUSIONS

The claims made by some US officials, as early as 1969, that DBS was
impractical due to ongoing technological and economic barriers ring
hollow in light of the role played by the American state in directly
shaping the history of domestic and international telesatellites. If DBS
remained 'ten years away' in 1970, and again in 1975, and again in
1980, the policy preferences and subsequent regulations affecting
direct broadcasting developments were to blame, not the intellectual
abilities of engineers nor the dictates of a mythological free markeL
Despite established but limited US cultural-power applications,
despite the relative efficiency and probable effectiveness of DBS tech-
nologies, and despite the emergence of direct broadcasting as the
formative international issue of free flow versus prior consent/national