Colossus (10 page)

Chapter 7
compares American and European versions of empire and asks if today’s European leaders, and some American scholars, are correct to foresee a time when the European Union will act as an effective counterweight to American power. At times during 2003 this already appeared to be happening. Yet in reality the European Union is almost the antithesis of an empire; its institutions are designed not to harness and wield power but to disperse it between the member states and the regions within its borders.

Finally,
chapter 8
challenges the thesis that growing overseas military commitments may drag the United States toward economic overstretch. There is no question that the United States is an unusual empire in its dependence on foreign capital to finance both private consumption and government borrowing. Yet its twin deficits are not the result of too many foreign military interventions. In fact, it is the domestic fiscal commitments of the federal government that seem likely to overstretch it in the years ahead. The true feet of clay of the American Colossus are the impending fiscal crises of the systems of Medicare and Social Security.

My conclusion (for those readers who like an indication of their ultimate destination) is that the global power of the United States today—impressive though it is to behold—rests on much weaker foundations than
is, commonly supposed. The United States has acquired an empire, but Americans themselves lack the imperial cast of mind. They would rather consume than conquer. They would rather build shopping malls than nations. They crave for themselves protracted old age and dread, even for other Americans who have volunteered for military service, untimely death in battle. It is not just that, like their British predecessors, they gained their empire in “a fit of absence of mind.” The problem is that despite occasional flashes of self-knowledge, they have remained absentminded—or rather, in denial—about their imperial power all along. Consequently, and very regrettably, it is quite conceivable that their empire could unravel as swiftly as the equally “anti-imperial” empire that was the Soviet Union.

Those who wish to perpetuate American primacy by achieving and maintaining full-spectrum dominance are, in short, facing the wrong way. For the threat to America’s empire does not come from embryonic rival empires to the west or to the east. I regret to say that it may come from the vacuum of power–the absence of a will to power–within.

PART 1

RISE

Chapter 1

The Limits of the American Empire

What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law?

But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable.

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? … What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? … What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.

HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick, chapter 89

INTIMATIONS OF EMPIRE

It is commonplace to assume that having been forged in a war of independence against imperial rule, the United States could never become an empire in its own right. Many Americans today would accept the verdict of the historian Rupert Emerson, writing in 1942: “With the exception of the brief period of imperialist activity at the time of the Spanish-American war, the American people have shown a deep repugnance to both the conquest of distant lands and the assumption of rule over alien peoples.”
¹
The irony is that there were no more self-confident imperialists than the Founding Fathers themselves.

The empire they envisaged was, to be sure, very different in character from the empire from which they had seceded. It was not intended to resemble the maritime empires of Western Europe. But it did have much in common with the great land empires of the past. Like Rome, it began with a relatively small core—the founding states’ combined area today is just 8 percent of the total extent of the United States—which expanded to dominate half a continent. Like Rome, it was an inclusive empire, relatively (though not wholly) promiscuous in the way that it conferred citizenship.
²
Like Rome, it had, at least for a time, its disenfranchised slaves.
³
But unlike Rome, its republican constitution has withstood the ambitions of any would-be Caesars—so far. (It is of course early days. The United States is 228 years old. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49
B.C.
, the Roman Republic was 460 years old.)

That the United States would expand was decided almost from its very inception. When, in the draft Articles of Confederation of July 1776, John Dickinson proposed setting western boundaries of the states, the idea was thrown out at the committee stage. To George Washington the United States was a “nascent empire,” later an “infant empire.”
⁴
Thomas Jefferson told James Madison he was “persuaded no constitution was ever before as well calculated as ours for extending extensive empire and self-government.” The initial “confederacy” of thirteen would be “the nest from which all America, North and South [would] be peopled.”
⁵
Indeed, Jefferson observed in a letter of 1801 that the short history of the United States had already furnished “a new proof for the falsehood of Montesquieu’s doctrine, that a republic can be preserved only in a small territory. The reverse is the truth.”
⁶
Madison agreed; in the tenth of the
Federalist Papers
, he forcefully argued for “extend[ing] the sphere” to create a larger republic.
⁷
Alexander Hamilton too referred to the United States—in the opening paragraph of the first of the
Federalist Papers
—as “in many respects the most interesting … empire … in the world.”
⁸
He looked forward eagerly to the emergence of a “great American system, superior to the control of all trans-Atlantic force of influence, and able to dictate the terms of connection between the Old and the New World.”
⁹

Such intimations of grandeur were widespread. William Henry Drayton, chief justice of South Carolina, declared in 1776: “Empires have their zenith—and their descension [
sic
] to a dissolution…. The British Period
is from the Year 1758, when they victoriously pursued their Enemies into every Quarter of the Globe…. The Almighty … has made choice of the present generation to erect the American Empire…. And thus has suddenly arisen in the World, a new Empire, stiled [
sic
] the United States of America. An Empire that as soon as started into Existence, attracts the Attention of the Rest of the Universe; and bids fair, by the blessing of God, to be the most glorious of any upon Record.”
¹⁰
Thirteen years later a Congregational minister named Jedidiah Morse published his
American Geography
, predicting that the “last and broadest seat” of empire would be in America, “the largest empire that ever existed”: “We cannot but anticipate the period, as not far distant, when the American Empire will comprehend millions of souls, west of the Mississippi…. Europe begins to look forward with anxiety to her West Indian Islands, which are the natural legacy of this continent, and will doubtless be claimed as such when America shall have arrived at an age which will enable her to maintain her right.”
¹¹

In the space of less than a century the vision of a continental empire was largely realized. Yet Morse’s prediction that America’s expansion would go beyond the continent’s two ocean shores was only very feebly fulfilled. Why?

FRONTIER FOR SALE

The overland expansion was easy; this is often forgotten. For one thing, the Native American populations were too small and technologically backward to offer more than sporadic and ineffectual resistance to the hordes of white settlers swarming westward, enticed by the prospect of virgin land. Around 6 million immigrants came to the United States between 1820 and 1869, and nearly 16 million in the years to 1913. Already in 1820 the indigenous population had numbered just 325,000 (a mere 3 percent of population), their numbers having been roughly halved in the previous century by disease and small wars.
¹²
The new Republic simply continued the old British practice of treating traditional native hunting grounds as
terra nullius
, free, ownerless land. Jefferson talked of an expansion based “not on conquest, but [on] principles of compact and equality.”
¹³
Like so much that he wrote on the subject of equality, however, this
was an implicitly qualified statement. Just as the “rights of man” did not apply to his or any other plantation owner’s slaves, so territorial expansion would not be based on the consent of the indigenous peoples of North America. As early as 1817 the secretary of war, John C. Calhoun, inaugurated the policy of removing “Indians” beyond the ninety-fifth line of longitude, a policy that became law in 1825.
¹⁴
President Andrew Jackson’s professions of humanitarian intent scarcely disguised the ruthlessness of what was being done: “[This] just and humane policy recommended… [the Indians] to quit their possessions … and go to a country to the west where there is every probability that they will always be free from the mercenary influence of white men…. Under such circumstances the General Government can exercise a paternal control over their interests and possibly perpetuate their race.”
¹⁵
In sum, the Native American tribes were to be coerced into exchanging “their possessions” for the “possibility” of perpetuating their race under their expropriators’ “paternal control.” In his seminal study,
The Significance of the Frontier in American History
(1893), Frederick Jackson Turner later sought to portray continental expansion as the source of America’s alleged democratic vigor. In reality, expansion was achieved by a combination of land hunger, religious zeal and military force—in that order.
¹⁶
The number of settlers and sectarians was always vastly greater than the number of soldiers concerned. Between 1816 and 1860 the American army numbered on average less than 20,000 men, little more than one-tenth of 1 percent of the population—a tiny ratio of military participation by European standards.
¹⁷
The Indian Wars were doubtless cruel, but they were small wars. The Shawnees and the Seminoles needed a European ally to stand any chance of victory. After 1815 the prospect of such support disappeared, and the Indians were on their own.

Matters were also made easy for the growing Republic by the fact that none of the other European (or Europeanized) powers with territorial claims in North America posed a potentially fatal threat to the United States after 1783. In one respect, Jefferson was right. When it came to securing territory from them, this would not be an empire based on conquest. Rather, it would be an empire purchased for cash—or, to be precise, for government bonds. When the United States offered these in exchange for territory, the owners seldom hesitated to sell. The territory acquired in 1803 roughly doubled the size of the United States, including as it did all
or at least a part of thirteen future states. “Louisiana,” as this vast area was then known, was bought, not fought for, because neither of its previous owners, the French and the Spanish, saw any strategic benefit in retaining it. Ironically, it was in part the British navy that made the Louisiana Purchase possible; had it not been for its dominance of the Atlantic sea-lanes, which had effectively confined Napoleon’s power to the European continent, Jefferson’s offer might not have been so readily accepted. To exchange real estate covering roughly eight hundred thousand square miles for $11.2 million in freshly printed U.S. federal government bonds was, for the French, a financial expedient. For the United States the deal was, in effect, the mother of all mortgages—and, it should be added, one brokered by the London bank Barings.
¹⁸
By contrast, when the United States went to war against Britain between 1812 and 1815, it only succeeded in gaining a trifling amount of additional territory to the south; after Spanish authority in Florida disintegrated and residents around Baton Rouge proclaimed the Republic of West Florida, Madison ordered its annexa-tion.
¹⁹
Dreams of annexing Canada were dispelled—despite a fleeting occupation of Toronto—by effective British resistance. The treaties of 1818 and 1819, with Britain and Spain respectively, were successes more for diplomacy than for arms. Britain agreed to a northern boundary along the forty-ninth parallel, giving up any claim to much of what became North Dakota, while Spain relinquished Florida and recognized a new western boundary along the border of what was to become Oklahoma.

Even the acquisition of Texas owed as much to cash and peaceful colonization as to conquest. From 1821 until 1834 Stephen Austin established and ran his colony with the consent of the Mexican authorities, which were in fact more generous than the United States toward would-be settlers. In 1829 Austin wrote enthusiastically to his sister and brother-in-law, urging them to come to Texas and describing the Mexican government as “the most liberal and munificent Govt. on earth to emigra[n]ts.” “After being here one year,” he added, “you will oppose a change even to Uncle Sam.” As late as 1832 his “standing motto” was still “Fidelity to Mexico.”
²⁰
Two years before, a decree had prohibited Americans from settling in Texas. But although this prompted the settlers to summon their own convention, they resolved merely to send Austin to petition the government in Mexico City.
²¹
Only in 1835, after Austin had spent the better part of a
year in jail, and after repeated harassment by Mexican troops, did the settlers take up arms.
²²