Rumsfeld: Well I’m sure that some people would say that, but it can’t be true because we’re not a colonial power. We’ve never been a colonial power. We don’t take our force and go around the world and try to take other people’s real estate or other people’s resources, their oil. That’s just not what the US does. We never have and we never will. That’s not how democracies behave. That’s how an empire-building Soviet Union behaved but that’s not how the US behaves.
They played a lot of Risk, the board game where color-coded armies vied to conquer the world. It took hours, so it was great for killing time. Private First Class Jeff Young was so good at it the other guys formed coalitions to knock him out first.
Liberal interventionists. The imperialism of human rights. The majority of the new imperialists are neoconservatives.
Today there is only one empire — the global empire of the US. The US military are the true heirs of the legendary civil officials, and not just the dedicated military officers, of the British Empire.
We need to err on the side of being strong. And if people want to say we’re an imperial power, fine.
Julias Caesar called himself imperator but never king. His adopted heir Augustus preferred princeps. Emperors can call themselves what they like, and so can empires. The kingdom of England was proclaimed an empire — by Henry VIII — before it became one. The US by contrast has long been an empire, but eschews the appellation.
Define the term empire narrowly enough, of course, and the US can easily be excluded from the category. Here is a typical example: “Real imperial power … means a direct monopoly control over the organization and use of armed might. It means direct control over what is bought and sold, the terms of trade and the permission to trade… Let us stop talking of an American empire, for there is and there will be no such thing.”
Finally, the Pax Britannica depended mainly on the Royal Navy and was less “penetrative” than the “full-spectrum dominance” aimed for today by the American military. For a century, with the sole exception of the Crimean War, Britain felt unable to undertake military interventions in Europe, the theater most vital to its own survival, and when it was forced to do so in 1914 and 1939, it struggled to prevail. We arrive at the somewhat paradoxical conclusion that a hegemon can be more powerful than an empire.
On the other hand, the US posses a great many small areas of territory within notionally sovereign states that serve as bases for its armed forces. Before the deployment of troops in the invasion of Iraq, the US military had around 752 military installations in more than 130 countries. Significant numbers of American troops were stationed in 65 of these. Their locations significantly qualify President Bush’s assertion in his speech of Feb 26, 2003 that “after defeating enemies [in 1945], we did not leave behind occupying armies.” In the first year of his presidency, around 70,000 US troops were stationed in Germany, and 40,000 in Japan. American troops have been in those countries continuously since 1945. Almost as many (36,500) were in South Korea, where the American presence has been uninterrupted since 1950. Moreover, new wars have meant new bases, like camps in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.
Nor should it be forgotten what formidable military technology can be unleashed from these bases. Commentators like to point out that “the Pentagon’s budget is equal to the combined military budgets of the next 12 or 15 nations” and that “the US accounts for 40-45 percent of all the defense spending of the world’s 189 states.” Such fiscal measures, impressive though they sound, nevertheless understate the lead currently enjoyed by American armed forces. On land the US has 9,000 MI Abrams tanks. The rest of the world has nothing that can compete. At sea the US possesses nine “supercarrier” battle groups. The rest of the world has none. And in the air the US has three different kinds of undetectable stealth aircraft. The rest of the world has none. The US is also far ahead in the production of “smart” missiles and high-altitude “drones.” The British Empire never enjoyed this kind of military lead over the competition. Granted, there was a time when its network of naval and military bases bore a superficial resemblance to America’s today. The number of troops stationed abroad was also roughly the same. The British too relished their technological superiority, whether it took the form of the Maxim gun or the Dreadnought. But their empire never dominated the full spectrum of military capabilities the way the US does today. Though the Royal Navy ruled the waves, the French and later the Germans — to say nothing of the Americans — were able to build fleets that posed credible threats to that maritime dominance, while the British army was generally much smaller and more widely dispersed than the armies of the continental empires.
The British Empire too sought to make its values attractive to others, though initially the job had to be done by “men on the spot.” British missionaries, intent on spreading the islands’ various brand of Christianity, fanned out across the globe. British businessmen too introduced their styles of accounting and management. British administrators applied their notions of law and order. And British schoolmasters drummed reading, writing and arithmetic into colonial elites. Together all of them contrived to spread British leisure pursuits like cricket and afternoon tea. The aim was without question to “entice and attract” people toward British values.
39 of 81 largest telecommunications corporations are American, and around half of all the world’s countries rely principally on the US to supply their cinemas with films.
The British called it the “white man’s burden.” The French called it their “civilizing mission.” 19th-century Americans called it “manifest destiny.” It is now being called the “responsibilities of power.” The “promotion of freedom” or the “strategy of openness” is merely its latest incarnation. The fact is that liberal empires nearly always proclaim their own altruism.
Like the British Empire, in any case, the US reserves the right to use military forces, as and when it sees its interests threatened — not merely reactively but on occasion preemptively. Thus President Bush’s “National Security Strategy” asserts that the US reserves the right to “act preemptively to forestall or prevent hostile acts by our adversaries even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.” Soft power is merely the velvet glove concealing an iron hand.
In Cuba too business interests and strategic calculation pointed to recurrent intervention rather than annexation — dependence but not occupation. Cuban Constitution in 1902 gave the US the right to intervene if necessary “for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual property.” The amendment precluded any bilateral strategic arrangement between Cuba and a rival foreign power, thus giving the US an effective veto over the island’s foreign policy. It circumscribed the country’s future borrowing. And it entitled the US to establish naval bases on the Cuban coast.
That September a new president was installed on condition that he accept a treaty similar to the Platt Amendment. In this case Haiti’s finances, police, press and public works were put under American supervision. The American navel commander in charge of the operation imposed de facto military rule in coastal towns.
I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903… Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.
This would always be the most damaging allegation against American imperialism: that for all its high-minded statements of intent, it boiled down to a Wall Street racket.
Yet Wilson could not be content with the traditional fruits of victory: imposing reparations, new borders and even a new regime on the losing side. Stung, perhaps, by the charges that the US had intervened only “at the command of gold” — to underwrite Wall Street’s loans to Britain and France — his overwrought mind craved nothing less than a reconstruction of the entire international system. As early as December 1914 he had proposed that any peace settlement “should be for the advantage of the European nations regarded as Peoples and not for any nation imposing its governmental will upon alien people.” The following May he informed the members of the League to Enforce Peace that “every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live.” “Every people,” he declared categorically in January 1917, “should be left free to determine its own polity,” spelling out a year later what that would mean in practice in points five to thirteen of his famous Fourteen Points. As envisaged by Wilson, the new “League of Nations” would not merely guarantee the territorial integrity of its member states but might consider making future territorial adjustments “pursuant to the principle of self-determination.” To Europeans this might seem revolutionary; to Americans, Wilson insisted, it was as self-evident as the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence: “These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no other. And they are also the principles and policies of forward looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.”
There were three difficulties with all this. The first was that it was richly hypocritical. In 1916 Wilson had drafted a speech that included the characteristically sententious line “It shall not lie with the American people to dictate to another what their government shall be…” His secretary of state, Robert Lansing, wrote succinctly in the margin: “Haiti, S Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama.” The second problem, which a better knowledge of Central Europe’s ethnic geography might have helped him avoid, was that the application of self-determination would produce a significantly enlarged German Reich, an outcome unlikely to be congenial to those powers that had fought Germany for three years without American military assistance. But the fatal flaw of the Wilsonian design was that it simply could not be sold to a skeptical Senate. There was a vast gulf between the bold assertion of the Roosevelt Corollary, which simply authorized the US to do what it liked in Latin America, and the airy commitments of the League Covenant, which would have obliged the US to “respect and preserve against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing independence of all Members of the League.”
No American who lived through that Sunday will ever forget it. It seared deeply into the national consciousness, shearing away illusions that had been fostered for generations. And with the first shock came a sort of panic. This struck at our deepest pride. It tore at the myth of our invulnerability. Striking at the precious legend of our might, it seemed to leave us naked and defenseless.
The colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of those countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements — all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war.
As supreme commander for the Allied powers, MacArthur was omnipotent. “I had,” he later recalled, “not only the normal executive authorities such as our own President has in this country, but I had legislative authority. I could by fiat issue directives.”
Yet barely 1 percent of senior Japanese civil servants lost their jobs, as it was through the civil service that the Americans governed. How, otherwise, could the American occupation have functioned? Japan’s postwar masters were almost completely ignorant of the language and culture of their new subjects. Colonel Charles Kades, who played a pivotal role in the drafting of the constitution of 1947, later admitted: “I had no knowledge whatsoever about Japan’s history or culture or myths… I was blank on Japan…” Moreover, the Americans generally confined themselves to their own “Little America” in Tokyo. As one of MacArthur’s senior staff put it, “For more than five years, with the rarest of exceptions, the only thing MacArthur saw of Japan physically was on the automobile route between the Daichi Building and his quarters at the American embassy, a distance of about a mile.”
For an empire in denial, there is really only one way to act imperially with a clear conscience, and that is to combat someone else’s imperialism. In the doctrine of containment, born in 1947, the US hit on the perfect ideology for its own peculiar kind of empire: the imperialism of anti-imperialism.
Two new international institutions were brought into being to manage the world’s financial system: the World Bank and the IMF. But the essence of American “hegemony” was the preferential treatment of American allies when it came to the allocation of loans and grants of aid (whether for development or military purposes). Given the size of the American economy relative to those of even its wealthiest allies, sums that were from an American viewpoint, relatively modest could appear very large to the recipients. Total economic aid for the period of 1946 to 1952 amounted to nearly 2 percent of US GNP, half of it accounted for by the Marshall Plan. Over the ensuring decade — including the heady years when JFK pledged to “pay any price, bear any burden and meet any hardship… to assure the survival and the success of liberty” — it dropped to below 1 percent.
Many another imperial power would have been unable to resist the window of opportunity afforded by America’s huge lead in the atomic arms race. Yet Truman drew back, and the general who defied him was thwarted. Why? The lesson Henry Kissinger and others drew from Korea was that America’s allies were as much a hindrance as a help. As Kissinger argued in 1956, “Either the alliances add little to our effective strength or they do not reflect a common purpose, or both… We have to face the fact that only the US is strong enough domestically and economically to assume worldwide responsibilities and that the attempt to obtain the prior approval by all our allies of our every step will lead not to common action but inaction… We must reserve the right to act alone, or with a regional grouping of power, if our strategic interest so dictates.” It was undeniable that the multilateral nature of the Korean intervention created some difficulties. MacArthur’s strategy was clearly not one that American’s European or Commonwealth allies wanted. Yet it seems clear that Truman would have opted for limited warfare even if the US had been acting alone. The irony was that in acting as he did — in upholding the authority of the president and the republican Constitution in the face of MacArthur’s challenge — Truman was acting against the popular will. The trouble with limited war turned out to be that the public patience with it was even more limited. It would take the US another long war to learn that lesson, and this war would end not in a tie but in a humiliating defeat. The paradox of the imperial Republic was that it was the civilian political elite — along with sections of the military — that favored limited war, much more than the wider electorate.
I’ve been to India, Pyle, and I know the harm liberals do. We go and invade the country: the local tribes support us: we are victorious: but … [in Burma] we made peace … and left our allies to be crucified and sawn in two. They were innocent. They thought we’d stay. But we were liberals and we didn’t want a bad conscience.
The South Vietnamese who acted on the assumption that the Americans would stay — would at least defend a partition on the Korean model — underestimated the growing power of liberalism and a bad conscience within the American elite.
“See, lady, we’re not like the French. We’re all-American good-guy GI Joe. You should learn to like us. We’re Yanks, and Yanks like to be liked. We’ll tear this place apart if we have to, but we’ll put everything back in its place.” The effect of such imperial denial were ultimately crippling to American strategy. Within a short time, the reality — that imperialists are seldom loved — began to sink in, as one disillusioned veteran put it: “We’re supposed to be saving these people and obviously we are not looked upon as the saviors here. They can’t like us a whole lot. If we came into a village, there was no flag waving, nobody running out to throw flowers at us, no pretty young girls coming out to give us kisses as we march through victorious. ‘Oh, here come the fucking Americans again. Jesus, when are they going to learn?’”
Could the Vietnam War have been won if it had been fought more ruthlessly? In the eyes of many American military analysts, Vietnam exposed the flaws in the concept of limited war. General William Westmoreland, who commanded US combat forces until 1968, blamed the “ill-considered” policy of “graduated response,” which he believed had prevented a swift and decisive resolution of the conflict. General Bruce Palmer argued that “the graduated, piecemeal employment of airpower against North Vietnam violated many principles of war.”
Failure in Vietnam did more than redefine American attitudes to the world, driving many Americans toward a repudiation of postwar globalism. It also changed the attitudes of the world toward the US, unleashing a wave of anti-American feeling (not least within the West European intelligentsia) that was to endure for the rest of the Cold War, no matter how egregious the repressiveness of Communist regimes around the world. The imperialism of anti-imperialism had come fatally unstuck if it was the US that was cast in the role of the evil empire. Small wonder the most successful post-Vietnam movie of them all was in fact a science-fiction fable in which the audience was invited to identify with a ragtag collection of freedom fighters battling for an underdog Rebel Alliance against a sinister Galactic Empire. In Star Wars George Lucas perfectly expressed the American yearning not to be on the dark side of imperialism. It was not without significance that as his cinematic epic unfolded backward a generation later, the archvillain Darth Vader was revealed to have been an all-American Jedi Knight in his youth.
What the Cuban missile crisis revealed was that when the two superpowers confronted each another “eyeball to eyeball,” they discovered that they had grown to resemble each other. We now know that both parties blinked in the confrontation; perhaps it was the surprise of recognition. For in truth neither of the two anti-imperialists empires cared enough about Cuba to risk a thermonuclear duel. Not for the first or the last time, the principal beneficiary of this standoff was a petty dictator. So long as the superpowers could compete only through proxies, it was the little countries that got the Caesars — and, all too often, the Caligulas too.
It is often assumed that the greatest failure of American policy during the Cold War was defeat in Vietnam. Yet the loss of much of Indochina to Communist regimes proved to be as strategically unimportant as it was politically embarrassing. The US lost face. That was about all it lost. It was the people of Vietnam and Cambodia who paid the horrifically high price of American failure; Americans themselves were able to walk away from the wreckage of “containment.” The reality, which dawned only slowly on policy makers in Washington, was that Vietnam did not really matter. Nor, on mature reflection, did Cuba, which was why the US quietly abandoned the idea of toppling the Castro regime. Whether they were in Hanoi or Havana, Communists in developing countries proved to be relatively harmless from the point of view of American national security.
First, America’s relationship with Israel has long been characterized by friction and ambivalence. It is anything but a marriage made in heaven. Secondly, the oil-rich US is much less dependent on Middle Eastern oil than is Western Europe or Japan. “Control” of Arabian oil reserves is a goal the US long ago renounced; if such control were really necessary to ensure the flow of oil to the Western world, it would be the oiless Germans and the Japanese who would be pressing for it with the greatest zeal. Thirdly, the phenomenon of terrorism in the Middle East — and indeed elsewhere — has until recently had relatively little to do with the US. What was remarkable about 9/11 was simply that it had taken so long for a major terrorist outrage to happen on American soil. And what appears to have motivated the attackers could hardly be described as a misdeed, since American troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia primarily in order to defend that country and its neighbors from the aggression of another Arab state, Iraq.
So important has the Middle East been in American foreign policy during the past three decades that it is easy to forget how much less attention it used to be given.
The first and most basic [American interest] is the geopolitical importance of the Middle East to the defense of Europe. Our alliance with western Europe is absolutely essential to the balance of world power on which the primordial safety of the US depends… Hegemonial control of the oil, the space and the mass of the region of the region by the Soviet Union would carry with it dominion over Western Europe as well. NATO would be dismantled.
Yet terrorism in the real world is about more than symbolism. It is the continuation of war by other means — by those who are too weak to wage proper war in pursuit of their political goals. The characteristic feature of terrorism is that its violence is sporadic. Its technology is primitive. Its operatives are, contrary to popular belief, highly vulnerable to countermeasures — especially when the terrorists have no bases on foreign soil from which to operate. The terrorist’s resource are far inferior to those of the states against which he fights, so that most terrorist organizations depend on a combination of thieving and begging for their funds. It is possible for a terrorist organization to operate in a country without external sources of support, but it requires a secure locality where its members can prepare their attack without fear of interdiction. When this is not available, the terrorists are bound to seek assistance from abroad. Countries that offer them support — or even mere sympathy — are unlikely to be targets for their violence. Conversely, foreign countries that assist the other side — the government against which the terrorists are fighting — may well find themselves drawn into the conflict.
The US economy weathered this blow more easily than many feared at the time. Viewed in strictly economic terms, the attacks of September 11 were comparable with a very severe natural disaster: expensive but affordable, and of much less significance than the deflation of stock market bubble that had begun a year and a half earlier. Compared with the damage that might have been inflicted by the Soviet Union in the event that the cold war had turned hot, they were indeed trivial. Simply because WW3 did not happen should not lead us to draw the wrong conclusion that al Qa’eda is more dangerous to the US than was Soviet communism.
The problem with al Qa’eda is not that it is a big threat; it is that such a small and organizationally diffuse threat is exceedingly difficult to locate, whether to annihilate or to negotiate with.
Just as it was a myth in the 1930s to believe that “the bomber will always get through,” so it is a myth today that the terrorist will always get through. Domestic terrorism can be reduced, if not wholly eliminated, by a combination of policing and parleying. The problem of terrorism was a severe one in Western Europe during the 1970s as nationalist minorities (in Ireland and Spain) and extreme Marxists (in Italy, Germany and Greece) waged campaigns of assassination and destruction. Today, with the exception of the Basque separatist group, the perpetrators of these crimes have been jailed, marginalized or induced to renounce violence. No terrorist movement is immune from schism when confronted by both duress and dialogue.
“It’s nice to say we can do it unilaterally, except you can’t” - Colin Powell to Bush.
The point about the UN is not that it is an alternative to the US. It is a creature of the US. And its resources are so much smaller than those of the US government that its functions can never be more than complementary to American power. To be precise, the annual budget of the UN is equivalent to around 0.07 percent of the US federal budget, 0.4 percent of the US defense budget and 17.6 percent of the US international development and humanitarian assistance budget. In the words of the former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright, who from 1993 to 1996 was the American permanent representative to the UN, the annual budget of the UN is “roughly what the Pentagon spends every 32 hours.” The UN could thus never hope to run counter to the US and win; whenever there have been differences, as over the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, the US has simply gone its own way. Though America has done more of this kind of thing under President Bush, it is not a novelty. The US needs the UN, but it does not need to sign every international agreement the latter produces. The UN needs the US even more, so it must be tolerant to its principal patron. Were an outright breach to occur between the US and the UN, the latter would for all practical purposes be defunct.
Such checks on the power of the US as exist today must therefore be sought behind the veil of “multilateralism.” They will be found in the permanent representation on the UN Security Council of the three former empires and one still existent empire: Britain, France, Russia and China. It is they, not the UN per se, that have the power to deny the foreign policy of the US the sanction of the “international community” in the form of UNSC resolutions, and they can exercise this power singly as well as collectively. Thus, ironically, the seal of multilateral approval can be withheld by the unilateral action of just one other permanent member of the Security Council. That the US tolerates this when it happens, as it did over Iraq last year, is a mark of its own self-restraint, but also of its own self-interest. The UNSC — rather like the regular conferences of the foreign ministers of the great powers during the 19th century — is a convenience, a clearinghouse for the interests of some (though not all) of the great powers today. When it does legitimize American policy, it is positively useful. When it does not, on the other hand, it is no more than an irritant. And perhaps by providing a stage on which the former empires can indulge their own sense of self-importance, it renders them even less powerful than they might otherwise be — precisely because their presence is a subtle irritant to the ascendant economic powers of the present that are, for purely historical reasons, not permanent council members. Today the other four permanent members of the UNSC have economies with a combined GDP of $4.5T. This is slightly less than half the GDP of the US. It is also less than three-quarters of the combined GDP of the three largest nonmembers of the council: Japan, Germany and India.
Desert Storm worked because we managed to go up against the only jerk on the planet who actually was stupid enough to confront us symmetrically, with less of everything, including the moral right to do what he did to Kuwait.
Every enemy advertises his weakness in the way he fights. To Aideed’s fighters, the Ranger’s weakness was apparent. They were not willing to die… To kill Rangers, you had to make them stand and fight. The answer was to bring down a helicopter.
Jimmy Carter in 1979: “We must forge an unshakable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world fail to act in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide.”
Ronald Reagan in 1984: “Like you, I say in a forthright voice, ‘Never again!’”
Bill Clinton in 1993, opening the Holocaust Museum in Washington: “We must not permit that to happen again.”
Unfortunately, “never again” turned out in the 1990s to mean “no more than once or twice a decade.”
In fact, the Bush administration had contemplated “a sort of mini-Iraq thing” as early as the winter of 1991, drawing up contingency plans for a military strike against the Serbs. It was decided instead to take the European at their word. “They will screw it up,” argued Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, “and this will teach them a lesson.” Eagleburger’s successor, Warren Christopher, was also inclined to keep out of what he called “a problem from hell.” And during the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton himself had argued that American troops should not be sent “into a quagmire that is essentially a civil war.”
The Serbs rejected this. The US knew how to change their minds. Yet 3 things were different about the decision to unleash the full might of the US Air Force against not just the Serbian forces in Kosovo but Serbia as a whole. First, the Clinton administration did not seek the approval of the UNSC; it was NATO, not the UN, that went to war. Secondly, this was an intervention that very clearly violated the sovereignty of Serbia, precisely why approval from the UNSC was not sought. Thirdly, the air strikes had the unanticipated effect of worsening the situation of those on whose behalf they were launched.
But the discovery that the US could shoot first and seek UNSC resolutions afterward was a revelation. Almost equally important was the realization on the part of the American commander General Wesley Clark that decision making within the structure of NATO was only slightly less cumbersome than decision making within the UN. The American appetite for untrammeled command over its military ventures had already been whetted, more than two years before September 2001.
Those who are sentimentally attached to the UN as an institution should be forced to study its abject failure to respond to the ghastly events that unfolded in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, which claimed at least half a million lives. It is the well known that the Clinton administration’s attitude was determined, as usual, by the fear of American casualties. The decision to send a laughably small force of 200 US troops to Kigali airport in 1994 was based on the repulsive calculation that “one American casualty is worth about 85,000 Rwanda dead.” The American insistence that any UN force be kept as small as possible; the American delaying tactics over proposals to send reinforcements; the American insistence that any US troops be paid for by the UN in advance.
In the words of the “National Security Strategy” published in 2002, the enemy in this new war consisted of “shadowy networks of individuals who can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than its costs to purchase a single tank.” The campaign against such a foe could only be unspectacular: an arrest at Frankfurt Airport or in a seedy Pakistani flophouse, an assassination in a Baghdad villa or a Palestinian back street.
Thus, impelled forward by a combination of European exhaustion, non-European nationalism and American idealism, the world embarked on an epochal experiment, and experiment to test the hypothesis that it was imperialism that caused both poverty and wars and that self-determination would ultimately pave the way to prosperity and peace.
This hypothesis has been largely proved false. The coming of political independence has brought prosperity only to a small minority of former colonies. And although the former imperial powers no longer fight one another, decolonization has in many cases been followed by recurrent conflict between newly independent states and, even more often, within them. Self-determination was supposed to go hand in hand with democracy. But decolonization has often led not to democracy but , after the briefest of interludes, to indigenous dictatorship. Many of these dictatorships have been worse for the people living under them than the old colonial structures of government: more corrupt, more lawless, more violent.
There are those who claim that the big divergence in per capita incomes between rich and poor countries since the 1960s has been a direct consequence of globalization. But this is a flawed argument. In theory, globalization, meaning simply the international integration of international markets for commodities, services and capital and labor, should tend to maximize economic efficiency, yielding gains for all concerned. The real problem of the early 21st century is not globalization but its absence or inhibition. Indeed, the sad truth about globalization is that it is not truly global at all.
Part of the problem is that world trade is still far from being truly free. At least some of the blame for this can be laid at the door of the world’s richest countries, which continue to pay subsidies to their farmers equivalent to the entire GDP of Africa. But it is not just rich countries that are at fault. Many poor countries have hedged their economies around with a bewildering variety of restrictions that tend to hamper commerce.
A similar point can be made with respect to flows of labor.
Above all, consider the evidence on the international capital flow. Most of today’s overseas investment goes on within the developed world. Most cross-border capital flows are among the US, the EU and Japan.
Most of the loans and aid poured into poor countries has simply leaked back out — often to bank accounts in Switzerland — as corrupt rulers have stashed their ill-gotten gains abroad.
Most poor countries stay poor because they lack the right institutions — not least the right institutions to encourage investment.
Moreover, poor countries are more likely to succumb to civil war than rich ones.
Two conclusions follow from all this. The first is simply that in many cases of economic “backwardness,” a liberal empire can do better than a nation-state. The second, however, is that even a very capable liberal empire may not succeed in conferring prosperity evenly on all the territories it administers. With that caveat, we may therefore make what might be called an altruistic argument for the US to engage in something resembling liberal imperialism in our time. A country like — to take just one example — Liberia would benefit immeasurably from something like American colonial administration.
The British, however, were always wary about giving the military too much power in their imperial administration. Parliamentarians at Westminster had read enough Roman history to want to keep generals subordinate to civilian governors. The “brass hats” were there to inflict the Victorian equivalent of “shock and awe” whenever the natives grew restive; otherwise, colonial government was a matter for Oxbridge-educated mandarins. It would be interesting to know, by way of comparison, how many members of Havard’s or Yale’s class of 2004 are seriously considering careers in the postwar administration of Iraq.
Unfortunately, there is a fatal flaw to the project of short-term nation building, and that is the extreme difficulty of securing local support when an American pledge to depart imminently has been announced and — more importantly — believed by the inhabitants of the occupied country in question. Perhaps more than anything else, the British Empire was an empire based on local collaboration; how else could fewer than 1000 ICS men have governed a population of 400 million Indians?
As early as August 1883 Gladstone himself had already made no fewer than five public pledges to leave Egypt. However, all attempts to agree a departure date with the other powers foundered. With the outbreak of WW1, the British felt emboldened to convert their “veiled Protectorate” into a real one. But in 1992 they formally declared Egypt independent, and in 1936 they pronounced their military occupation at an end. The only caveat was that the British troops did not actually leave. As late as October 1954, 18 years after the occupation had supposedly ended, there were still 80,000 British troops in the canal zone, a huge military base covering an area the size of Massachusetts. It was not until June 1956 that they were finally compelled — 74 years after the original invasion and largely as a result of economic weakness at home — to honor their multiple pledges to go. Even then, as we have seen, they made a desperate last-ditch attempt to return after Nasser nationalized the canal. In short, from 1882 until the Suez crisis — as Lord Salisbury had said almost from the occupation’s outset — the independence of Egypt had been a “screaming farce.”
Jacques Chirac had to distance himself from Le Pen’s stance on immigration, and that in turn may help explain why he was so reluctant to be associated with military action against Iraq in 2003.
Such domestic political considerations — or, to be precise, the diversity of domestic political constellations — are the principal reason why it has proved so difficult to coordinate the diplomacy of the EU member states.
Europe’s, in short, is a curious kind of union, a confederation that fantasizes about being a confederation without ever quite becoming one. It has an executive, a legislature, an upper house, a supreme court, a central bank, a common currency, a flag and an anthem. But it has only a tiny common budget and the barest bones of a common army. Many more decisions than its architects intended are still taken by the national governments at meetings of the Council of Europe or at intergovernmental conferences. The EU lacks a common language, a common postal system, a common soccer team, even a standardized electric socket. To some critics, it threatens to become a “Fourth Reich,” not only dominated by Germany, but German in its institutional structure. To others, it is the French who really run the union in the style of their own less than accountable bureaucracy, preventing its evolution into an American-style US.
Talk of a federal Europe’s emerging as a counterweight to the US is based on a complete misreading of developments. The EU is populous but senescent. Its economy is large but sluggish. Its productivity is not bad but vitiated by excessive leisure. It is a successful but still insufficiently liberal customs union. It contains a monetary union that has depressed rather than enhanced its members’ economic growth. It is certainly a legal union, but too much of its law emanates from an unelected and unaccountable commission for it to enjoy legitimacy. And as a political entity it seems to likely to remain confederal for the foreseeable future. What de Gaulle said in 1962 remains fundamentally true today: “At the present time there cannot be any other Europe than a Europe of States, apart, of course, from myths, stories, and parades.” An even these myths do not command much respect. Although there are traces of a common European culture that is distinct from the amorphous, American notion of “the West,” national identities still predominate, and immigration is doing little to diminish them. For all these reasons, a common foreign and security policy seems a remote and perhaps unattainable ambition.
At substantially less than the requested $79B — probably closer to $48B — the war itself was relatively cheap. Moreover, as economists pointed out, the US might even have made a saving by getting rid of Saddam since it was costing around $13B a year just to contain the military threat that he posed.
$20B has been earmarked for reconstruction, a quarter of which will go on modernizing the Iraqi security forces. Repairs to the dilapidated oil wells, pipelines and refineries alone would cost over $5B; overhauling the electricity system, more than twice that. Still, $20B is still a large sum in relation to Iraq’s miserably low GDP; it is proportionately a far bigger stimulus than Marshall Plan aid was to West Germany in the late 1940s, since the German economy never collapsed as completely under Hitler as Iraq’s has under Saddam. Moreover, international donors have already offered around $13B toward the cost of postwar reconstruction.
It is not, then, the cost of regime change and nation building that threatens the American empire with overstretch. It is expenditure much closer to home. For the American economy has come to rely to a greater extent than at any time in history on consumption and credit — both public and private. Since America’s external power is predicated on the strength of the economy, there is therefore a paradox. Traditionally, empires faced a choice between guns and butter — between military expenditures and consumption — and were constrained by excessive indebtedness. But the American empire needs consumption to fuel its economic growth, out of which its military expenditures can so easily be afforded. And it seems to be able to borrow unprecedented sums in order to maintain the growth of consumption. It is a gun and butter empire.
Americans like security. But they like Social Security more than national security. It is their preoccupation with the hazards of old age and ill health that will prove to be the real cause of their country’s fiscal overstretch, not their preoccupation with the hazards of terrorism and the “axis of evil.”
By the time all baby boomers are retired, the US will have doubled the size of its elderly population but increased by barely 15 percent the number of taxpaying workers able to pay for their benefits.
Another way of expressing the problem is to compare our own lifetime tax burden with the lifetime tax burden the next generation will have to shoulder if the government does not do one of the above — hence the term often used to describe calculations like these: generational accounting. What such accounts imply is that anyone who has the bad luck to be born in America today, as opposed to back in the 1940s or 1950s, is going to be saddled throughout his working life with very high taxes, potentially twice as high as those his parents or grandparents faced. Notwithstanding the Bush administration’s tax cuts, Americans today are scarcely undertaxed. So the idea of taxing the next generation at twice the current rate seems, to say the least, fanciful.
There is, however, one serious problem with these figures, not with the calculations that underlie them but with their acceptance. To put it bluntly, this news is so bad that scarcely anyone believes it.
No sane presidential candidate would campaign with the slogan “Hike taxes by two-thirds.” Nor is any rational incumbent likely to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits by more than half. It is therefore safe to assume that in the short run almost nothing will be done to address the problem of generational imbalance. Unfortunately, this means the problem will get still worse.
Will either of these policies be implemented? The answer is that it seems unlikely in view of the growing political organization and self-consciousness of the American elderly. Social Security is sometimes referred to as the third rail by American politicians, because politicians who touch it by suggesting any cut in benefits tend to receive a violent political shock from the American Association of Retired Persons.
What might panic the mammals who buy and sell long-term US bonds for a living? Here the sand pile is composed of the expectations of millions of individuals. Like grains of sand, little bits of bad news are dropped on us, day after day, week after week,. Like sand pile, we can hold steady for some time before the cumulative weight of these grains of bad news causes us to alter our fundamental expectations. But one day something happens — maybe just one extra grain of bad news — that triggers the shift from equilibrium into self-sustaining criticality. Everything therefore depends on what traders and investors expect the government to do about the $45T black hole and what might happen to change the expectations they currently hold. Here, then, is one scenario. Bondholders will start to sell off as soon as a critical mass of them recognize that the government’s implicit and explicit liabilities are too much for it to handle with conventional fiscal policy and conclude that the only way the government will be able to pay its bills is by printing money, reading to higher inflation. What commonly triggers such shifts in expectations is an item of bad financial news.
The crux of the matter is that the Asian-American economic relationship is not symmetrical. 20th-century history handed the US a privileged position in the world economy; its currency became and has remained the world’s favorite. Since 1945 it has been used more than any other for denominating international transactions, and that has made it the preferred currency for central bank reserves. A century ago sterling enjoyed something of the same status. But sterling was strictly pegged to gold, just as the dollar was by somewhat different means during the years of the years of the Bretton Woods system. De Gaulle complained in the 1960s that the US was abusing its position as printer of the world’s reserver currency, but as long as the dollar retained the link to gold, there were limit to how far such abuse could be taken. Only from the 1970s onward, when the dollar became a pure fiat currency with its supply dictated by the Feds regardless of gold convertibility, was the US really able to exploit the dollar’s unique appeal to foreigners. Ever since, the US has periodically collected from foreigners the special tax known as seigniorage, the transfer from the holders of a currency to its issuers that automatically happens when the value of that currency is diminished. Dollar devaluations have been the device Americans have periodically used to reduce the real value of their external liabilities, most spectacularly in the mid-1980s. No other economy in the world reaps such benefits from devaluation as the US. The cost in terms of more expensive imports is offset not just by the textbook stimulus to export but, more important, by the real reduction in the value of America’s external liabilities.
Low long-term interest rates are the key to the postponement of America’s fiscal reckoning. So long as the debt can be financed abroad at rates of little more than 4 percent, there will be no incentive to grasp the political nettles that surround Medicare and Social Security. The price of these low rates, however, is that the US cannot expect to devalue the dollar; it must live with a static or even rising real exchange rate because its trading partners in Asia are buying dollar-denominated securities precisely to maintain nominal exchange rates as they are. Put like that, the world sounds as if it has arrived at a more or less happy state of equilibrium. In history, however, no equilibrium goes unpunctuated. In the decade before 1914, it seemed to many observers as if economic interdependence between Britain and Germany were making a war between the two great empires unlikely, if not impossible. Still war came. In the months after the Wall Street stock market bubble burst in October 1929, it seemed as if the US would experience nothing more than a conventional recession. The Smoot-Hawley tariff bill, enacted in June 1930, triggered a global depression.
None of us can know what will trigger a shift from last year’s equilibrium to something quite different. It could be domestic anxieties about a default on welfare entitlements; it could be a strategic change of heart in East Asia. Nor can any of us know when the shift will happen or how big it will be. As with an earthquake, its timing and magnitude are simply impossible to forecast. We cannot even be sure where the effects will be most severe. The possibility cannot be discounted that, as in the 1980s, a dollar devaluation might be more costly to East Asia’s banks than to the US economy. If that is the case — if China suffers the fate of Japan and is tipped into deflation by the vagaries of American economic policy — the future of the dollar as the world’s favorite currency will surely cease to be assured. Today’s open door between America and Asia could close with a surprisingly loud bang.
In three distinct ways the Terminator is a perfect, if unwitting, metaphor of American power. Though he has the body of a man half his age, Schwarzenegger himself is in fact just a few years short of his 60th birthday. His determination to remain forever Mr. Universe typifies the determination of an entire generation never to grow old, though grow old they must — with significant economic consequences. The Terminator is also a very American hero for the simple reason that there is only one of him. In this he personifies the chronic manpower shortage that currently constrains American nation building. Above all, the Terminator exemplifies the limits of American power because the word ABORT starts flashing in his head before he has completed his mission. Outwardly, Arnold Schwarzenegger is without a question a colossus; it is hard to imagine the male body looking any bigger and stronger. He is to the human frame what the US is to the capitalist economy. Yet his character embodies the three key deficits that explain why America only looks immensely strong without actually being immensely strong.
In this book I have tried to show that there are three fundamental deficits that together explain why the US has been a less effective empire than its British predecessor. They are its economic deficit, its manpower deficit and — the most serious of the three — its attention deficit.
There is a fundamental question that goes beyond the military. It’s, “What is our obligation to the world?” We preach about values, democracy, human rights, but we haven’t convinced the American people to pony up… There’s no leadership that steps up and says, “This is the right thing to do.” That’s the basic problem. There’s got to be the political will and support for these things. We should believe that a stable world is a better place for us. If you had a policy and a forward-leaning engagement strategy, the US would make a much greater difference to the world. It would intervene earlier and pick fights better.
But a “forward-leaning engagement strategy” is much easier for a solider to imagine than for an elected politician. It is not just that first-term American presidents have only two and a half years in office before the issue of securing the reelection begins to loom. It is the fact that even sooner, midterm congressional elections can have the effect of emasculating their legislative program. It is the fact that American politics operates on three tiers simultaneously: the national, the state and the local. How could Californians be expected to pay full attention to the problems of nation building in Baghdad in the summer of 2003, when a self-selected mob of amateur politicians was noisily bidding to recall their incumbent governor? It is the fact that the federal executive itself is anything but a homogeneous entity. Interdepartmental rivalry is of course the norm in most human institutions of any size. But there were times in 2003 then the complete absence of coordination among the Defense Department, the State Department and the Treasury — to say nothing of the Commerce Department, the trade representative, the US Agency for International Development and the host of institutions now notionally concerned with “homeland security” — recalled the worst of “polycracy” of Wilhemine Germany. Imperial Germany too practiced imperialism in a hurry. It too was “impatient for quick results.”
Does imperial denial matter? The answer is that it does. Successful empire is seldom solely based on coercion; there must be some economic dividends for the ruled as well as the rulers, if only to buy the loyalty of indigenous elites, and these dividends need to be sustained for a significant length of time. The trouble with an empire in denial is that it tends to make two mistakes when it chooses to intervene in the affairs of lesser states. The first may be to allocate insufficient resources to the nonmilitary aspects of the project. The second, and the more serious, is to attempt economic and political transformation in an unrealistically short time frame.
Consuming on credit, reluctant to go to the front line, inclined to lose interest in protracted undertakings: if all this conjures up an image of America as a sedentary colossus — to put it bluntly, a kind of strategic couch potato — then the image may be worth pondering.
Yet this should not be taken to vindicate those pessimists who predict imminent decline for the US, whether relative to Europe or to China. The trouble with “realist” fear of a coming shift from “unipolarity” to “multipolarity” is that they overlook the possibility of generalized impotence — or, if you like, apolarity. Those fixated on a Bismarkcian model of the balance of power tend to assume that international relations resemble the interplay of magnets, with the larger powers attracting satellites as if they were iron filings, sometimes joining together, but more often repelling each another. But what if the great powers of today ceased to be magnetic, losing their powers both to attract and to repel? What if even the US, ever more preoccupied with its own internal problems, became the strategic equivalent of an inert lump of old iron? In many ways, this is already the fate that has overtaken Japan and the EU; once economic titans, they are not senescent societies and strategic dwarfs. Nor will China be exempt from demographic “graying.” One legacy of one-child policy will be a rising dependency ratio in the coming decades.
Consider again the question of peacekeeping. It has become abundantly clear that the US is not capable of effective peacekeeping — that is to say, constabulary duties — in countries as far apart as Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq without some foreign assistance. Peacekeeping is not what American soldiers are trained to do, nor do they appear to have much appetite for it. It also seems reasonable to assume that the American electorate will not tolerate a prolonged exposure of US troops to the unglamorous hazards of “low-intensity conflict”: suicide bombers at checkpoints, snipers down back streets, rocket-propelled grenades fired at patrols and convoys. The obvious solution, short of a substantial expansion of the US Army, is to continue the now well-established practice of sharing the burdens of peacekeeping with other UN members — in particular, America’s European allies, with their relatively generous aid budgets and their large conscript armies. If they are not used for peacekeeping, it is hard to see what these soldiers are for, in a Europe that has declared perpetual peace within its own borders and is no longer menaced by Russia.
Power, let us not forget, is not just about being able to buy whatever you want; that is mere wealth. Power is about being able to get whatever you want at below the market price. It is about being able to get people to perform services or part with goods that they would not ordinarily offer to sell at any price. For empires, those ambitious states that seek to exert power beyond their borders, power depends on both the resolve of the masters and the consent of the subjects. Yet power diminishes as it is shared. One country with one nuclear bomb is more powerful, if the rest of the world has none, than a country with a thousand nuclear bombs, if everyone else has one.
I tried to make the argument that the US not only could afford to play a more assertive global role but could not afford not to.
The means of destruction have never been cheaper. The main beneficiaries have been and remain the guerrilla armies of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, the terrorist groups of Western Europe and the drug gangs of the Americas.
“All predominant power seems for a time invincible, but in fact, it is transient.” The question Americans must ask themselves is just how transient they wish their dominance to be. Though the barbarians have already knocked at the gates — once, spectacularly — imperial decline in this case seems more likely to come, as it came to Gibbon’s Rome, from within.