Colossus (54 page)

The
absence
of great power conflict is a concept that is unfamiliar in modern international history. In his classic 1833 essay “The Great Powers,” Ranke portrayed European history since the sixteenth century as a succession of bids for hegemony by one empire or another, each of which had been successfully resisted by the others: first the Habsburgs, then France in the seventeenth century and again France between 1793 and 1815. Had he lived for another ninety years, Ranke would have been able to add Germany between 1914 and 1945. For Ranke, Europe’s natural order was truly multipolar; power was shared by a pentarchy composed of France, Austria, England, Russia and Prussia, each in its different way an imperial power.
²⁶
From 1945 until 1989, of course, we lived in a bipolar world, which would have astonished Ranke (though not his contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville), a world divided between two continental empires, each accusing the other of being the imperialist. Then in the early 1990s it seemed as if the United States had established a unipolar order. Yet today’s transnational threats such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation and organized crime—to say nothing of disease pandemics, climate change and water shortages—put a premium on cooperation, not competition, between states. The attractions of unilateralism are undeniable, since demanding allies can be more irksome than invisible foes, but a solo strategy offers little prospect of victory against any of these challenges; the successful prosecution of the
“wars” against all of them depends as much on multilateral institutions as does the continuation of international free trade. There is, in any case, nothing more dangerous to a great empire than what the Victorian Conservatives called, with heavy irony, splendid isolation. Then as now, the great Anglophone empire needs perforce to work in concert with the lesser—but not negligible—powers in order to achieve its objectives. As G. John Ikenberry has argued, American success after both the Second World War and the cold war was closely linked to the creation and extension of international institutions that at once limited and yet legitimized American power.
²⁷

Consider again the question of peacekeeping. It has become abundantly clear that the United States 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 U.S. 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 U.S. Army, is to continue the now well-established practice of sharing the burdens of peacekeeping with other United Nations 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.

Those, like Robert Kagan, who dismiss the Europeans as Kant-reading Venusians—as opposed to America’s Hobbes- (and Clausewitz-) reading Martians—overlook the crucial significance of Pluto in the process of nation building. War and love are all very well, but all empires depend in some measure on money. Without hefty investment in enforcing the rule of law, countries like Afghanistan and Iraq will stagnate and perhaps disintegrate. Unless the United States is prepared radically to alter its attitudes toward low-intensity conflict, it will have little option but to cooperate with the more generous Europeans. Unilateralism, like isolation, is not so splendid after all. Indeed, it is seldom a realistic option for an empire.

The danger is that great power cooperation could simply break down, not because of rivalry between the United States and the European Union but because neither lacks the will to act beyond its own borders. The internal problems of these huge and complex entities may simply distract them from the problems of failed states and rogue regimes. Some would say that such a Spengleresque decline of the West might create a vacuum that only the rising powers of Asia could fill. Yet those who look at China as a future hegemon may discover that it too has enough to contend with in managing the social and political consequences of its second “Great Leap Forward,” this time to the capitalist free market. Likewise, those who see Islam as the West’s principal antagonist in a war of civilizations will find it difficult to imagine a political accompaniment to the indisputable demographic expansion of Muslim societies. The future, in short, might prove for a time to be apolar, a world without even
one
dominant imperial power.

THE TERMINATOR

The paradox of globalization is that as the world becomes more integrated, so power becomes more diffuse. Thanks to the dynamism of international capitalism, all but the poorest people in the world have significantly more purchasing power than their grandfathers dared dream of. The means of production were never more productive or—as China and India achieve their belated economic takeoffs—more widely shared. Thanks to the spread of democracy, a majority of people in the world now have markedly more political power than their grandfathers. The democratic means of election were never more widely accepted as the optimal form of government. The means of education too are accessible in most countries to much larger shares of the population than was the case two or three generations ago; more people than ever can harness their own brainpower. All these changes mean that the old monopolies on which power was traditionally based—monopolies on wealth, political office and knowledge—have in large measure been broken up. Unfortunately, thanks to the proliferation of modern means of destruction, the power to inflict violence has
also become more evenly distributed. Firepower has also been shared out as never before.

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 own 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.

And this brings us to the final respect in which the United States resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. In military confrontations, the United States has the capability to inflict amazing and appalling destruction, while sustaining only minimal damage to itself. There is no regime it could not terminate if it wanted to—including North Korea’s. Such a war might leave South Korea in ruins, of course, but the American Terminator would emerge from the rubble more or less unscathed. What the Terminator is
not
programmed to do, however, is to rebuild. In his wake he leaves only destruction.

During the fall of 2003 President Bush sought to stiffen American morale by declaring that he was “not leaving” Iraq; that America “doesn’t run”; that the Middle East “must be a focus of American policy for decades to come.” If, nevertheless, the United States finally submits to political pressure at home and abroad by withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan before their economic reconstruction has been achieved, the scene will not be wholly unfamiliar. The limits of American power will be laid bare when the global Terminator finally admits: “I won’t be back.”

In my book
The Cash Nexus
, written in 2000 and published in the spring of 2001, I tried to make the argument that the United States not only could afford to play a more assertive global role but
could
not afford
not
to. Any historian who ventures to make prognostications has a duty to review them with the benefit of hindsight. The key points I made were as follows:

1. “The means of destruction have never been cheaper…. The main beneficiaries [of cheap weaponry] 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.”
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2. “Plainly, it is highly unlikely that any state would contemplate a direct attack on the United States in the foreseeable future; though a terrorist campaign against American cities is quite easy to imagine.”
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3. “Nearly all of the increase in the number of wars in the world since 1945 is due to the spread of civil war…. [But] the United Nations [has a] very patchy record as a global policeman…. Between 1992 and 1999 the Security Council authorized a series of humanitarian interventions…. The majority were at best ineffective, and at worst disastrous.”
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4. “The question has frequently been asked, and deserves repetition: would it not be desirable for the United States to depose these tyrants and impose democratic government on their countries? The idea of invading a country, deposing its dictators and imposing free elections at gunpoint is generally dismissed as incompatible with American ‘values’ A common argument is that the United States could never engage in the kind of overt imperial rule practiced by Britain in the nineteenth century—though this was precisely what was done in Germany and in Japan at the end of the Second World War, and with great and lasting success.”
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5. “Far from retreating like some giant snail behind an electronic shell, the United States should be devoting a larger percentage of its vast resources to making the world safe for capitalism and democracy. Contrary to the naïve triumphalism of the ‘end of history,’ these are not naturally occurring, but require strong institutional foundations of law and order. The proper role of an imperial America is to establish these institutions where they are lacking, if necessary … by military force. There is no economic argument against such a policy, since it would not be prohibitively costly. Imposing democracy on all the world’s ‘rogue states’ would not push the U.S. defense budget much above 5 per cent of GDP. There is also an economic argument for doing so, as establishing the rule of law in such countries would pay a long-run dividend as their trade revived and expanded.”
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Writing in the dying days of the Clinton administration, I concluded— somewhat heatedly—that “the greatest disappointment facing the world in “the twenty-first century [is] that the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it.” Little did I imagine that within a matter of nine months, a new president, confronted by the calamity of September 11, would embark on a policy so similar to the one I had advocated. Since the declaration of the war against terrorism, the question has ceased to be about guts. It is now about grit, the tenacity to finish what has been started.

Unlike most European critics of the United States, then, I believe the world needs an effective liberal empire and that the United States is the best candidate for the job. Economic globalization is working. The rapid growth of
per capita
incomes in the world’s two most populous countries, China and India, means that international inequality is finally narrowing.
³³
But there are parts of the world where legal and political institutions are in a condition of such collapse or corruption that their inhabitants are effectively cut off from any hope of prosperity. And there are states that, through either weakness or malice, encourage terrorist organizations committed to wrecking a liberal world order. For that reason, economic globalization needs to be underwritten politically, as it was a century ago.

The United States has good reasons to play the role of liberal empire, both from the point of view of its own security and out of straightforward altruism. In many ways too it is uniquely well equipped to play it. Yet for all its colossal economic, military and cultural power, the United States still looks unlikely to be an
effective
liberal empire without some profound changes in its economic structure, its social makeup and its political culture.

American neoimperialists like to quote Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” written in 1899 to encourage President McKinley’s empire-building efforts in the Philippines. But its language—indeed the entire nineteenth-century lexicon of imperialism—is irrevocably the language of a bygone age. Though I have warned against the dangers of imperial denial, I do not mean to say that the existence of an American empire should instead be proclaimed from the rooftop of the Capitol. All I mean is that whatever they choose to call their position in the world—hegemony, primacy, predominance or leadership—Americans should recognize the
functional
resemblance between Anglophone power present and past and should try to
do a better rather than a worse job of policing an unruly world than their British predecessors. In learning from the history of other empires, Americans will learn not arrogance but precisely that humility which, as a candidate for the presidency, George W. Bush once recommended to his countrymen.

There is another poem by Kipling, written two years before “The White Man’s Burden,” which perhaps strikes a more apposite chord. Entitled simply “Recessional,” it is a somber intimation of imperial mortality, perfectly crafted to temper late Victorian delusions of grandeur: