Colossus (5 page)

The best case for empire is always the case for order. Liberty is, of course, a loftier goal. But only those who have never known disorder fail to grasp that it is the necessary precondition for liberty. In that sense, the case for American empire is simultaneously a case against international anarchy— or, to be precise, of a proliferation of regional vacuums of power. None of this is to pretend that the United States is a perfect empire. Empires are by their very nature compromised by the power that they wield; they inexorably engender their own dissolution at home even as they impose order abroad. That is why our expectations should not be pitched too high. If it is hard enough to be an empire when you believe you have a mandate from heaven, how much harder is it for the United States, which believes that heaven intended it to free the world, not rule it.

Sadly, there are still a few places in the world that must be ruled before they can be freed. Sadly, the act of ruling them will sorely try Americans, who instinctively begrudge such places the blood, treasure, and time that they consume. Yet, saddest of all, there seems to be no better alternative for the United States and the world—and that is this book’s bottom line. Once, one hundred and sixty years ago, America’s imperial destiny seemed manifest. It has since become obscure. But it is America’s destiny just the
same. The only question that remains is: How much longer will this self-denying empire endure? The answer
Colossus
offers is: Not long, in the absence of fundamental reappraisal of America’s role in the world. If this book contributes anything to bring that reappraisal about, then it will have served its intended purpose.

Introduction

AL JAZEERA
: Would it worry you if you go by force into Iraq that this might create the impression that the United States is becoming an imperial, colonial power?

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 United States 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 United States behaves.
¹

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 that the other guys formed coalitions to knock him out first.

MARK BOWDEN, Black Hawk Down
²

AGE OF EMPIRES

One of the most popular of computer games in the world is called Age of Empires. For several months my own ten-year-old son was all but addicted to it. Its organizing premise is that the history of the world is the history of imperial conflict. Rival political entities vie with one another to control finite resources: people, fertile land, forests, gold mines and waterways. In their endless struggles the competing empires must strike a balance between the need for economic development and the exigencies of warfare. The player who is too aggressive soon runs out of resources if he has not taken the trouble to cultivate his existing territory, to expand its population and to accumulate gold. The player who focuses too much on
getting rich may find himself vulnerable to invasion if he meanwhile neglects his defenses.

Many Americans doubtless play Age of Empires, just as the Rangers in Mogadishu played its board game predecessor, Risk. But remarkably few Americans—or, for that matter, American soldiers—would be willing to admit that their own government is currently playing the game for real.

This book argues not merely that the United States is an empire but that it always has been an empire. Unlike most of the previous authors who have remarked on this, I have no objection in principle to an American empire. Indeed, a part of my argument is that many parts of the world would benefit from a period of American rule. But what the world needs today is not just any kind of empire. What is required is a
liberal
empire—that is to say, one that not only underwrites the free international exchange of commodities, labor and capital but also creates and upholds the conditions without which markets cannot function—peace and order, the rule of law, noncorrupt administration, stable fiscal and monetary policies—as well as provides public goods, such as transport infrastructure, hospitals and schools, which would not otherwise exist. One important question this book asks is whether or not the United States is capable of being a successful liberal empire. Although the United States seems in many ways ideally endowed economically, militarily and politically—to run such an “empire of liberty” (in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase), in practice it has been a surprisingly inept empire builder. I therefore attempt to explain why the United States finds being an empire so difficult; why, indeed, its imperial undertakings are so often short-lived and their results ephemeral.

Part of my intention is simply to interpret American history as in many ways unexceptional—as the history of just another empire, rather than (as many Americans still like to regard it) as something quite unique. However, I also want to delineate the peculiarities of American imperialism, both its awesome strengths and its debilitating weaknesses. The book sets recent events—in particular, the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq—in their long-run historical context, suggesting that they represent less of a break with the past than is commonly believed. Thus, although this is partly a work of contemporary political economy, inspired by my spending much of the past year in the United States, it is primarily a work of history. It is also, unavoidably, concerned
with the future—or rather, with possible futures. The later chapters of the book ask how enduring the American empire is likely to prove.

Is the American empire mightier than any other in history, bestriding the globe as the Colossus was said to tower over the harbor of Rhodes? Or is this giant a Goliath, vast but vulnerable to a single slingshot from a diminutive, elusive foe? Might the United States in fact be more like Samson, eyeless in Gaza, chained by irreconcilable commitments in the Middle East and ultimately capable only of blind destruction? Like all historical questions, these can only be answered by comparisons and counterfactuals, juxtaposing America’s empire with those that have gone before and considering other imaginable pasts, as well as possible futures.

IMPERIAL DENIAL

It used to be that only critics of American foreign policy referred to the “American Empire.” During the cold war, of course, both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China harped incessantly on the old Leninist theme of Yankee imperialism, as did many Western European, Middle Eastern and Asian writers, not all of them Marxists.
³
But their claim that overseas expansion was inspired by sinister corporate interests was not so very different from the indigenous American critiques of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century overseas expansion, whether populist, progressive or socialist.
⁴
In the 1960s these critiques fused to produce a new and influential historiography of American foreign policy usually referred to as revisionism.
⁵
Historians like Gabriel and Joyce Kolko argued that the cold war was the result not of Russian but of American aggression after 1945, an argument made all the more attractive to a generation of students by the contemporaneous war in Vietnam—proof, as it seemed, of the neocolonial thrust of American foreign policy.
⁶
The reassertion of American military power under Ronald Reagan prompted fresh warnings against the “imperial temptation.”
⁷

This tradition of radical criticism of American foreign policy shows no sign of fading away. Its distinctive, anguished tone continues to emanate from writers like Chalmers Johnson, William Blum and Michael Hudson,
⁸
echoing the strictures of an earlier generation of anti-imperialists (some of
whom are themselves still faintly audible).
⁹
Yet criticism of American empire was never the exclusive preserve of the political Left. In the eyes of Gore Vidal, the tragedy of the Roman Republic is repeating itself as farce, with the “national-security state” relentlessly encroaching on the prerogatives of the patrician elite to which Vidal himself belongs.
¹⁰
Meanwhile, far to the Right, Pat Buchanan continues to fulminate in the archaic isolationist idiom against East Coast internationalists intent on entangling the United States—against the express wishes of the Founding Fathers—in the quarrels and conflicts of the Old World. In Buchanan’s eyes, America is following not the example of Rome but that of Britain, whose empire it once repudiated but now imitates.
¹¹
Other, more mainstream conservatives—notably Clyde Prestowitz—have also heaped scorn on “the imperial project of the so-called neoconservatives.”
¹²

In the past three or four years, however, a growing number of commentators have begun to use the term
American empire
less pejoratively, if still ambivalently,
¹³
and in some cases with genuine enthusiasm. Speaking at a conference in Atlanta in November 2000, Richard Haass, who went on to serve in the Bush administration as director of policy planning in the State Department, argued that Americans needed to “re-conceive their global role from one of traditional nation-state to an imperial power,” calling openly for an “informal” American empire.
¹⁴
This was, at the time, bold language; it is easy to forget that during the 2000 presidential election campaign it was George W. Bush who accused the Clinton-Gore administration of undertaking too many “open-ended deployments and unclear military missions”.
¹⁵
As Thomas Donnelly, deputy executive director of the Project for the New American Century, told the
Washington Post
in August 2001, “There’s not all that many people who will talk about it [empire] openly. It’s discomforting to a lot of Americans. So they use code phrases like ‘America is the sole superpowe.’”
¹⁶

Such inhibitions seemed to fall away in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In a trenchant article for the
Weekly Standard
, published just a month after the destruction of the World Trade Center, Max Boot explicitly made “The Case for an American Empire.” “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today,” Boot declared, “cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”
¹⁷
When his history of
America’s “small wars” appeared the following year, its title was taken from Rudyard Kipling’s notorious poem “The White Man’s Burden,” written in 1899 as an exhortation to the United States to turn the Philippines into an American colony.
¹⁸
The journalist Robert Kaplan also took up the imperial theme in his book
Warrior Politics
, arguing that “future historians will look back on 21st-century United States as an empire as well as a republic.”
¹⁹
“There’s a positive side to empire,” Kaplan argued in an interview. “It’s in some ways the most benign form of order.”
²⁰
Charles Krauthammer, another conservative columnist, detected the change of mood. “People,” he told the
New York Times
, were “now coming out of the closet on the word ‘empire.’ ”
²¹
“America has become an empire,” agreed Dinesh D’Souza in the
Christian Science Monitor
, but happily it is “the most magnanimous imperial power ever.” His conclusion: “Let us have more of it”
²²
Writing in
Foreign Affairs
in 2002, the journalist Sebastian Mallaby proposed American “neo-imperialism” as the best remedy for the “chaos” engendered by “failed states” around the world.
²³
One reading of Michael Ignatieff’s recent critique of American “nation building” efforts in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan is that these have not been
sufficiently
imperialistic to be effective.
²⁴

While Mallaby and Ignatieff are perhaps best described as liberal interventionists—proponents of what Eric Hobsbawm has sneeringly dismissed as “the imperialism of human rights”—the majority of the new imperialists are neoconservatives, and it was their views that came to the fore during and after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. “Today there is only one empire,” wrote James Kurth in a special “Empire” issue of the
National Interest
, “the global empire of the United States. The U.S. military … are the true heirs of the legendary civil officials, and not just the dedicated military officers, of the British Empire.”
²⁵
Speaking on Fox News in April 2003, the editor of the
Weekly Standard
, William Kristol, declared: “We need to err on the side of being strong. And if people want to say we’re an imperial power, fine.”
²⁶
That same month the
Wall Street Journal
suggested that the British naval campaign against the slave trade in the mid-nineteenth century might provide a model for American policy against nuclear proliferation.
²⁷
Max Boot even called for the United States to establish a Colonial Office, the better to administer its new possessions in the Middle East and Asia.
²⁸