Colossus (55 page)

Far-called, our navies melt away;
     
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
     
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
     
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

These are words the Colossus of our time needs to heed, even as it seems to bestride the globe, unrivaled. As Tony Blair put it succinctly in his address to Congress in July 2003, “All predominant power seems for a time invincible, but in fact, it is transient.”
³⁴
The question Americans must ask themselves is just how transient they wish their predominance 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.

Statistical Appendix

TABLE 1: MAJOR AMERICAN OCCUPATIONS OF FOREIGN TERRITORY, 1893–2003

*Gross national income per capita, Atlas method (current US$).

†Freedom House index of political freedom: 1 = wholly free, 7 = wholly unfree.

TABLE 2. AMERICAN CASUALTIES IN MAJOR WARS

NOTE:
“Combat deaths” refers to troops killed in action. “Other” includes deaths from disease, privation and accidents and includes and includes losses among prisoners of war. KIA = killed in action.

*Confederate nonbattle deaths and wounded estimated.

†Only one month of combat.

‡Only six weeks of sustained combat.

Source: Department of Defense.

Notes

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

1
. Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt,”
New York Times Magazine
, October 17, 2004.

2
. Woodward,
Plan of Attack
, p. 443.

3
. It is symptomatic that John Lewis Gaddis interprets the present predicament of the United States with reference to John Quincy Adams: Gaddis,
Surprise, Security, and the American Experience
(Cambridge, Mass., 2004).

4
. Ash,
Free World
, p. 102.

5
. Text of President Bush’s speech,
New York Times
, April 13, 2004.

6
. My emphasis; first presidential debate, September 30, 2004, text from FDCH E-Media. See also David M. Halbfinger and David E. Sanger, “Bush and Kerry Clash Over Iraq and a Timetable,”
New York Times
, September 7, 2004.

7
. On the significance of the frontier in imperial history, see Maier,
Among Empires
.

8
. Remarks by the President at the Twentieth Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, November 6, 2003;
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106–2.html
.

9
. President Bush’s speech to the Republican Party Convention,
New York Times
, September 2, 2004.

10
. “We’re pursuing a strategy of freedom around the world…”; first presidential debate, September 30, 2004.

11
. See Fukuyama,
State Building
.

12
. Roger Cohen, “ ‘Imperial America’ Retreats from Iraq,”
New York Times
, July 4, 2004.

13
. Daniel Drezner, “Bestriding the World, Sort Of,”
Wall Street Journal
, June 17, 2004.

14
. Michiko Kakutani, “Attention Deficit Disorder in a Most Peculiar Empire,”
New York Times
, May 21, 2004.

15
. See my
Empire
.

16
. By the end of August 2004, there had been around 300 allegations of mistreatment of detainees; 155 had so far been investigated, of which 66 had been substantiated;
Wall Street Journal
, August 26, 2004.

17
. Ibid.

18
. Woodward,
Plan of Attack
, p. 249.

19
. “The Best-laid Plans?,”
Financial Times
, August 3, 2003.

20
. Woodward,
Plan of Attack
, pp. 150, 270.

21
. See the remarks of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in an interview with the BBC in September 2004.

22
. Daniel Barnard, “The Great Iraqi Revolt: The 1919–20 Insurrections against the British in Mesopotamia” paper presented at the Harvard Graduate Student Conference in International History, April 23, 2004,
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~conih/abstracts/Barnard_article.doc.

23
. “White House Says Iraq Sovereignty Could Be Limited,”
New York Times
, April 22, 2004.

24
. My own calculations based on Budget of the United States Government, 2005 historical tables,
http:/frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/multidb.cgi.

25
. Budget of the United States Government, 2005, table 1.3,
http://www.gpoacess.gov/usbudget/fy05/sheets/hist01z2.xls

26
. “Kennedy, Reagan, and Bush Tax Cuts in Historical Perspective,”
http://www.taxfoundation.org/bushtaxplan-size.htm.

27
. Economic Report of the President, table B-81,
http://wais.access.gpo.gov
.

28
. Suskind,
The Price of Loyalty
, p. 291.

29
. Ibid.

30
. Source: Congressional Budget Office.

31
. See Michael P. Dooley, David Folkerts-Landau, and Peter Garber, “An Essay on the Revived Bretton Woods System,”
NBER Working Paper
, 9971 (September 2003) and “The Revived Bretton Woods System: The Effects of Periphery Intervention and Reserve Management on Interest Rates and Exchange Rates in Center Countries,”
NBER Working Paper
, 10332 (March 2004).

32
. Source: Treasury Bulletin, June 2004,
http://www.fms.treas.gov/bulletin/.Cf.
Pýivi Munter, “Most Treasuries in Foreign Hands,”
Financial Times
, June 14, 2004.

33
. See most recently Peterson,
Running on Empty
. According to the April 2004 report of the Medicare trustees, the system obligations to future retirees are unfunded by $62 trillion: see Joe Liebermann, “America Needs Honest Fiscal Accounting,”
Financial Times
, May 25, 2004.

34
. Niall Ferguson, “A Dollar Crash? Euro Trashing,”
The New Republic
, June 21, 2004.

35
. See Paul Krugman, “Questions of Interest,”
New York Times
, April 20, 2004. For a different view, see David Malpass, “Don’t Blame the Deficits for America’s Rate Hikes,”
Financial Times
, May 3, 2004.

36
. Niall Ferguson, “Who’s Buried by Higher Rates,”
Fortune
, June 14, 2004. On the macroeconomic implications of the decline of the American savings rate, see Lawrence H. Summers, “The United States and the Global Adjustment Process,” Third Annual Stavros S. Niarchos Lecture, Institute for International Economics, Washington, D.C., March 23, 2004.

37
. “Kerry’s Acceptance: There Is a Right Way and a Wrong Way to Be Strong,”
New York Times
, July 30, 2004.

38
. Robert Manchin and Gergely Hideg, “E.U. Survey: Are Transatlantic Ties Loosening?”
http://www.gallup.com/content/default.aspx?ci=12247&pg=1
.

39
. The phrase was originated by Charles Maier.

40
. Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat,
World Population Prospects: The 2002 Revision
,
http://esa.un.org/unpp.

41
. Edward C. Prescott, “Why Do Americans Work So Much More than Europeans?,”
NBER Working Paper
, 10316 (February 2004). For a different interpretation, see Olivier Blanchard, “The Economic Future of Europe,”
NBER Working Paper
, 10310 (February 2004).

42
. Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman, “Dreaming with the BRICs: The Path to 2050,”
Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper
, 99 (October 1, 2003).

43
. Nikola Spatafora, Yongzheng Yang, and Tarhan Feyzioglu, “China’s Emergence and Its Impact on the Global Economy,”
International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook
(March 2004), pp. 82–99.

44
. Niall Ferguson, “Eurabia?”
New York Times Magazine
, April 4, 2004. The neologism was coined by the Egyptian-born writer Bat Ye’or.

45
. For an optimistic view, see Held,
Global Covenant
. Rather more pessimistic—and more aware of medieval visions of a global “civil society”—is Linden,
A New Map of the World
.

INTRODUCTION

1
. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, interview with Al Jazeera TV, February 27, 2003, press release, Department of Defense.

2
. Bowden,
Black Hawk Down
, p. 228.

3
. For an archetypal rant from the French Left, see Julien,
America’s Empire
.

4
. See, e.g., Nearing,
American Empire
; Freeman and Nearing,
Dollar Diplomacy
.

5
. For an early example, see Williams,
Tragedy of American Diplomacy
. See also Lerner,
America as a Civilization
and Williams’s later
Empire as a Way of Life
.