Colossus (9 page)

But what of America’s official, secular values and altruistic goals? Are these not fundamentally different from those of past empires, which were selfish and exploitative in their intentions? It is often argued that American policy makers since Woodrow Wilson have renounced imperialism, seeking instead to encourage the spread of Wilsonian principles: international law, democracy and the free market.
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Somehow—presumably because they are so self-evidently good—these ideas have “come to dominate international affairs.” The most that the United States therefore
needs to do is “act as the chief of the constabulary” to prevent any unenlightened forces from challenging this benign world order.
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There is certainly no shortage of vintage Wilsonian rhetoric in President Bush’s “National Security Strategy” published in September 2002, which explicitly states that it is a goal of American foreign policy “to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe.” “We will actively work,” the document declares, “to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world … America must stand firmly for the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity: the rule of law; limits on the absolute power of the state; free speech; freedom of worship; equal justice; respect for women; religious and ethnic tolerance; and respect for private property.”
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Yet this “strategy of openness” is not without its imperial precursors.
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From the second half of the nineteenth century until the Great Depression, the British Empire shared many of the same aspirations.
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The young Winston Churchill once defined the goals of British imperialism as being “[to reclaim] from barbarism fertile regions and large populations … to give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain….”
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Is this so very different from the language of American idealism? As Senator J. William Fulbright observed in 1968, “The British called it the ‘white man’s burden.’ The French called it their ‘civilizing mission.’ Nineteenth-century Americans called it ‘manifest destiny.’ It is now being called the ‘responsibilities of power.’ ”
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The “promotion of freedom” or the “strategy of openness” is merely its latest incarnation.
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The fact is that liberal empires nearly always proclaim their own altruism. When he spoke of the United States as an “empire of liberty,” Thomas Jefferson was merely purloining a hoary trope of British imperialism. Edmund Burke had identified “freedom” as a defining characteristic of the British Empire as early as 1766.
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Like the British Empire, in any case, the United States reserves the right to use military force, as and when it sees its interests threatened—not merely reactively but on occasion preemptively. Thus President Bush’s “National Security Strategy” asserts that the United States reserves the
right to “act preemptively… to forestall or prevent … hostile acts by our adversaries … even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.”
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Soft power is merely the velvet glove concealing an iron hand.

A BRITISH MODEL?

Unlike the majority of European writers who have written on this subject, I am fundamentally in favor of empire. Indeed, I believe that empire is more necessary in the twenty-first century than ever before. The threats we face are not in themselves new ones. But advances in technology make them more dangerous than ever before. Thanks to the speed and regularity of modern air travel, infectious diseases can be transmitted to us with terrifying swiftness. And thanks to the relative cheapness and destructiveness of modern weaponry, tyrants and terrorists can realistically think of devastating our cities. The old, post-1945 system of sovereign states, bound loosely together by an evolving system of international law, cannot easily deal with these threats because there are too many nation-states where the writ of the “international community” simply does not run. What is required is an agency capable of intervening in the affairs of such states to contain epidemics, depose tyrants, end local wars and eradicate terrorist organizations. This is the self-interested argument for empire. But there is also a complementary altruistic argument. Even if they did not pose a direct threat to the security of the United States, the economic and social conditions in a number of countries in the world would justify some kind of intervention. The poverty of a country like Liberia is explicable not in terms of resource endowment: otherwise (for example) Botswana would be just as poor.
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The problem in Liberia, as in so many sub–Saharan African states, is simply misgovernment: corrupt and lawless dictators whose conduct makes economic development impossible and encourages political opposition to take the form of civil war.
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Countries in this condition will not correct themselves. They require the imposition of some kind of external authority.
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There are those who would insist that an empire is by definition incapable of playing such a role; in their eyes, all empire are exploitative in
character. Yet there can be—and has been—such a thing as a liberal empire, one that enhances its own security and prosperity precisely by providing the rest of the world with generally beneficial public goods: not only economic freedom but also the institutions necessary for markets to flourish.
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In this regard, Americans have more to learn than they are prepared to admit from their more self-confident British predecessors, who, after the mid-nineteenth-century calamities of the Irish Famine and the Indian Mutiny, recast their empire as an economically liberal project, concerned as much with the integration of global markets as with the security of the British Isles, predicated on the idea that British rule was conferring genuine benefits in the form of free trade, the rule of law, the safeguarding of private property rights and noncorrupt administration, as well as government-guaranteed investments in infrastructure, public health and (some) education.
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Arnold Toynbee’s injunction to his Oxford tutorial pupils destined for the Indian Civil Service was clear: “If they went to India they were to go there for the good of her people on one of the noblest missions on which an Englishman could be engaged.”
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Let me emphasize that it is not my intention to suggest that Americans should somehow adopt the Victorians as role models. The British Empire was very far from an
ideal
liberal empire, and there is almost as much to be learned from its failures as from its successes. But the resemblances between what the British were attempting to do in 1904 and what the United States is trying to do in 2004 are nevertheless instructive. Like the United States today, Great Britain was very ready to use its naval and military superiority to fight numerous small wars against what we might now call failed states and rogue regimes. No one who has studied the history of the British campaign against the Sudanese dervishes, the followers of the charismatic Wahhabist leader known as the Mahdi, can fail to be struck by its intimations of present-day conflicts. Yet like the United States today, the Victorian imperialists did not act purely in the name of national or imperial security. Just as American presidents of recent decades have consistently propounded the benefits of economic globalization—even when they have deviated from free trade in practice—British statesmen a century ago regarded the spread of free trade and the liberalization of commodity, labor and capital markets as desirable for the general good. And just as most Americans today regard global democratization on the American model as
self-evidently good, so the British in those days aspired to export their own institutions—not just the common law but ultimately also parliamentary monarchy—to the rest of the world.

Americans easily forget that after the blunders of the late eighteenth century, British governments learned that it was perfectly easy to grant “responsible government” to colonies that were clearly well advanced along the road to economic modernity and social stability. Canada, New Zealand, Australia and (albeit with a restricted franchise) South Africa all had executives accountable to elected parliaments by the early 1900s. Nor was this benefit intended to be the exclusive preserve of the colonies of white settlement. On the question of whether India should ultimately be capable of British-style parliamentary government, Thomas Babington Macaulay was quite explicit, if characteristically condescending: “Never will I attempt to avert or to retard it [Indian self-government]. Whenever it comes it will be the proudest day in English history. To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own.”
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Not dissimilar aspirations were being expressed in some quarters last year on the subject of democratizing the Arab world. Speaking at the United Nations in September of last year, President Bush himself made it clear that this was one of his objectives in invading Iraq.
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As we shall see, however, the Americans were not the first Anglophone invaders to arrive in Baghdad proclaiming themselves to be “liberators” rather than conquerors.
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The structure of this book is straightforward.
Chapter 1
considers the imperial origins of the United States and seeks to characterize the extent and limits of its empire up to the First World War.
Chapter 2
asks why, despite its vast economic and military capabilities, the United States had such difficulties in imposing its will on so many of the countries where it intervened during the twentieth century. It also offers some explanations for the exceptional successes of American “nation building” in West Germany, Japan and South Korea.

Chapter 3
argues that the events of September 11, 2001, though they struck Americans like a bolt from the blue, represented the culmination of
well-established historical trends: the contradictions of American policy in the Middle East, the growing dependence of Western economies on oil from the Persian Gulf and the adoption and development of terrorism as a tactic by Arabs hostile to the United States and its allies. Perhaps the biggest change the terrorists wrought was in American attitudes; this was not the kind of change that they intended. It was 9/11 that converted an instinctively introverted, if not isolationist, administration and electorate to the idea of waging a war against real, suspected or even potential sponsors of terrorism. Yet here too there were important continuities. The real historical turning point—the moment when the twenty-first century may be said to have begun—was not 9/11 but 11/9. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, changed the context of American power far more profoundly than the fall of the World Trade Center. Malignant though it is, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism remains a far less potent threat to the United States than the Soviet Union once was.

Chapter 4
asks if American policy in Iraq since 1990 can be understood as a descent from “multilateralism” to “unilateralism.” I suggest that, on the contrary, it has been the United Nations that has performed a shifting role in the last decade and a half, and American policy has been in large measure improvised in response to the failures of the UN and, in particular, to the failures of the European powers represented on the UN Security Council. It was during the 1990s that the United States learned, through bitter experience, the value of credible military interventions in countries where state terror was being used against ethnic minorities. It also learned that these did not require explicit authorization in the form of UNSC resolutions. “Coalitions of the willing” could suffice.

Chapter 5
makes the case for contemporary empire in the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by considering the costs and benefits of the last great Anglophone empire. The suggestion here is that liberal empire makes sense today in terms of both American self-interest and altruism. For many former colonies, the experiment with political independence has been a failure in economic and in political terms. Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, has been impoverished not by the oft-denounced legacies of colonialism but by decades of misrule since independence. By contrast, a liberal imperial model offers the best prospects for economic growth by guaranteeing not just economic openness but, more important, the institutional
foundations for successful development.
Chapter 6
attempts a provisional cost-benefit analysis of the American occupation of Iraq, asking if the liberal imperial model can work in that unfortunate country. The chapter suggests that American objectives in 2003—to ensure the disarmament of Iraq, to overthrow a vicious tyrant and to transform fundamentally the politics of the Middle East—were both laudable and attainable. However, it is far from clear as I write that the United States is capable of committing either the manpower or the time needed to make a success of its “nation building” in Iraq, much less in Afghanistan. This is primarily because the American electorate is averse to the kind of long-term commitment that history strongly suggests is necessary to achieve a successful transition to a market economy and representative government. Though I fervently hope to be proved wrong, I therefore question whether America has the capacity to build effective civilian institutions in Iraq, given its historic preference for short-term, primarily military interventions and its reluctance to learn that these seldom, if ever, work.