Colossus (6 page)

Within the Pentagon the figure most frequently associated with the “new imperialism” is Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who first won notoriety, as undersecretary of defense under the current president’s father, by arguing that the aim of U.S. policy should be to “convince potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.”
²⁹
That line, so controversial when it was written back in 1992, now seems remarkably tame. Nine years later the Office of the Secretary of Defense organized a Summer Study at the Naval War College, Newport, to “explore strategic approaches to sustain [U.S. predominance] for the long term (~50 years),” which explicitly drew comparisons between the U.S. and the Roman, Chinese, Ottoman and British empires.
³⁰
Such parallels clearly do not seem outlandish to senior American military personnel. In 2000 General Anthony Zinni, then commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command, told the journalist Dana Priest that he “had become a modern-day proconsul, descendant of the warrior-statesman who ruled the Roman Empire’s outlying territory, bringing order and ideals from a legalistic Rome.”
³¹
It is hard to be certain that this was irony.

Officially, to be sure, the United States remains an empire in denial.
³²
Most politicians would agree with the distinction drawn by the historian Charles Beard back in 1939: “America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America.”
³³
Richard Nixon insisted in his memoirs that the United States is “the only great power without a history of imperialistic claims on neighboring countries,”
³⁴
a view echoed by policy makers throughout the past decade. In the words of Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, President Clinton’s national security adviser, “We are the first global power in history that is not an imperial power.”
³⁵
A year later, while campaigning to succeed Clinton, George W. Bush echoed both Nixon and Berger: “America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused—preferring greatness to power, and justice to glory.”
³⁶
He has reverted to this theme on several occasions since entering the White House. In a speech he made at the American Enterprise Institute shortly before the invasion of Iraq, Bush stated: “The US has no intention of determining the precise form of Iraq’s new government. That choice belongs to the Iraqi people…. We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary and not a day more. America has made and kept this kind of commitment before in
the peace that followed a world war. After defeating enemies, we did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and parliaments.”
³⁷
He reiterated this lack of imperial intent in a television address to the Iraqi people on April 10, when he declared: “We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave. Iraq will go forward as a unified, independent and sovereign nation.”
³⁸
Speaking on board the
Abraham Lincoln
aircraft carrier on May 1, the president rammed the point home: “Other nations in history have fought in foreign lands and remained to occupy and exploit. Americans, following a battle, want nothing more than to return home.”
³⁹
The same line is taken by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as the epigraph to this introduction makes clear. Indeed, it appears to be one of the few issues about which all the principal figures in the Bush administration are agreed. Speaking at the George Washington University in September last year, Secretary of State Colin Powell insisted: “The United States does not seek a territorial empire. We have never been imperialists. We seek a world in which liberty, prosperity and peace can become the heritage of all peoples, and not just the exclusive privilege of a few.”
⁴⁰

Few Americans would dissent from this. Revealingly, four out of five Americans polled by the Pew Global Attitudes survey last year agreed that it was “good that American ideas and customs were spreading around the world.”
⁴¹
But were the same people to be asked if they considered this a consequence of American imperialism, hardly any would concur.

Freud defined
denial
as a primitive psychological defense mechanism against trauma. Perhaps it was therefore inevitable that in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Americans would deny their country’s imperial character more vehemently than ever. Yet as U.S. foreign policy has moved from the defense to the offense, the need for denial would seem to have diminished. It may thus be therapeutic to determine the precise nature of this empire—since empire it is, in all but name.

HEGEMONY AND EMPIRE

Julius 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.
⁴²
The United States by contrast has long been an empire, but eschews the appellation.

Define the term
empire
narrowly enough, of course, and the United States 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 the administration of justice and the definition thereof. It means 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.”
⁴³
For a generation of “realist” writers, eager to rebut Soviet charges of American imperialism, it became conventional to argue that the United States had only briefly flirted with this kind of formal empire, beginning with the annexation of the Philippines in 1898 and ending by the 1930s.
⁴⁴
What the United States did after the end of the Second World War was, however, fundamentally different in character. According to one recent formulation, it was “not an imperial state with a predatory intent”; it was “more concerned with enhancing regional stability and security and protecting international trade than enlarging its power at the expense of others.”
⁴⁵

If the United States was not an empire, then what was it? And what is it now that the empire it was avowedly striving to “contain” is no more? “The only superpower”—existing in a “unipolar” world—is one way of describing it.
Hyperpuissance
was the (certainly ironical) coinage of the former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine. Some writers favor more anemic terms like global
leadership
,
⁴⁶
while Philip Bobbitt simply regards the United States as a particularly successful form of nation-state.
⁴⁷
A recent series of seminars at Harvard’s Kennedy School opted for the inoffensive term
primacy
.
⁴⁸
But by far the most popular term among writers on international relations remains
hegemon
.
⁴⁹

What is this thing called hegemony? Is it merely a euphemism for
empire
, or does it describe the role of the
primus inter pares
, the leader of an alliance, rather than a ruler over subject peoples? And what are the hegemon’s motives? Does it exert power beyond its borders for its own self-interested purposes? Or is it engaged altruistically in the provision of international public goods?

The word was used originally to describe the relationship of Athens to
the other Greek city-states when they leagued together to defend themselves against the Persian Empire; Athens led but did not rule over the others.
⁵⁰
In so-called world-system theory, by contrast, hegemony means more than mere leadership, but less than outright empire.
⁵¹
In yet another, narrower definition, the hegemon’s principal function in the twentieth century was to underwrite a liberal international commercial and financial system.
⁵²
In what became known, somewhat inelegantly, as hegemonic stability theory, the fundamental question of the postwar period was how far and for how long the United States would remain committed to free trade once other economies, benefiting from precisely the liberal economic order made possible by U.S. hegemony, began to catch up. Would Americans revert to protectionist policies in an effort to perpetuate their hegemony or stick with free trade at the risk of experiencing relative decline? This has been called the hegemon’s dilemma, and it appeared to many writers to be essentially the same dilemma that Britain had faced before 1914.
⁵³

Yet if the British Empire was America’s precursor as the global hegemon, might not the United States equally well be Britain’s successor as an Anglophone empire? Most historians would agree that, if anything, American economic power after 1945 exceeded that of Britain after 1815, a comparable watershed of power following the final defeat of Napoleonic France. First, the extraordinary growth in productivity achieved between around 1890 and 1950 eclipsed anything previously achieved by Britain, even in the first flush of the Industrial Revolution. Secondly, the United States very deliberately used its power to advance multilateral and mutually balanced tariff reductions under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (later the World Trade Organization). Thus the reductions of tariffs achieved in the Kennedy Round (1967) and in subsequent “rounds” of negotiation owed much to American pressures such as the “conditionality” attached to loans from the Washington-based International Monetary Fund. By contrast, the nineteenth-century spread of free trade and free navigation—the “public goods” most commonly attributed to the British Empire—were as much spontaneous phenomena as they were direct consequences of British power. Thirdly, successive U.S. governments allegedly took advantage of the dollar’s role as a key currency before and after the breakdown of Bretton Woods. The U.S. government had access to a “gold mine of paper”
and could therefore collect a subsidy from foreigners in the form of seigniorage (by selling foreigners dollars and dollar-denominated assets that then depreciated in value).
⁵⁴
The gold standard offered Britain no such advantages, and perhaps even some disadvantages. 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 in 1939, it struggled to prevail.
⁵⁵
We arrive at the somewhat paradoxical conclusion that a hegemon can be more powerful than an empire.

The distinction between hegemony and empire would be legitimate if the term
empire
did simply mean, as so many American commentators seem to assume, direct rule over foreign territories without any political representation of their inhabitants. But students of imperial history have a more sophisticated conceptual framework than that. At the time, British colonial administrators like Frederick Lugard clearly understood the distinction between “direct” and “indirect” rule; large parts of the British Empire in Asia and Africa were ruled indirectly—that is, through the agency of local potentates rather than British governors. A further distinction was introduced by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in their seminal 1953 article on “the imperialism of free trade.” This encapsulated the way the Victorians used their naval and financial power to open the markets of countries outside their colonial ambit.
⁵⁶
Equally illuminating is the now widely accepted distinction between “formal” and “informal empire.” The British did not formally govern Argentina, for example, but the merchant banks of the City of London exerted such a powerful influence on its fiscal and monetary policy that Argentina’s independence was heavily qualified.
⁵⁷
In the words of one of the few modern historians to attempt a genuinely comparative study of the subject, an empire is “first and foremost, a very great power that has left its mark on the international relations of an era … a polity that rules over wide territories and many peoples, since the management of space and multi-ethnicity is one of the great perennial dilemmas of empire…. An empire is by definition … not a polity ruled with the explicit consent of its peoples. [But] by a process of assimilation of peoples of democratization of institutions empires
can transform themselves into multinational federations or even nation states.”
⁵⁸
It is possible to be still more precise than this. In table 1 below I have attempted a simple typology intended to capture the diversity of forms that can be subsumed under the category “empires.” Note that the table should be read as a menu rather than as a grid. For example, an empire could be an oligarchy at home, aiming to acquire raw materials from abroad, thereby increasing international trade, using mainly military methods, imposing a market economy, in the interests of its ruling elite, with a hierarchical social character. Another empire might be a democracy at home, mainly interested in security, providing peace as a public good, ruling mainly through firms and NGOs, promoting a mixed economy, in the interests of all inhabitants, with an assimilative social character.