Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (4 page)

THE SHAPE OF EMPIRE

I
t was a better question than the businessman knew. I am sure Bush doesn’t think of himself as an emperor. Empires are something Europeans or Chinese or Japanese have, but not Americans. Nevertheless, if it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, chances are it’s a duck. Of course, America has few direct colonies or territorial possessions in the classic manner of the Britain and Japan of the past. But empires are also measured by their ability to project power, to compel or entice others to do their bidding, to set and enforce the rules, and to establish social norms. If we look at how the United States stacks up in that regard, the unmistakable visage of a duck begins to appear.

The aircraft carrier U.S.S.
Kitty Hawk
, which usually patrols the western Pacific from its home port in Yokosuka, Japan, is more like a nuclear-powered floating city than a mere ship. It is more than 1,100 feet long, as tall as a 20-story building, and carries a flight deck 250 feet across. This behemoth houses nearly 6,000 crew, pilots, and mechanics along with its 70 state-of-the-art aircraft. Wherever it goes it is accompanied by an Aegis cruiser outfitted to knock down incoming missiles, several frigates and destroyers, one or two hunter killer submarines, and supply vessels. The
Kitty Hawk
can steam at more than 30 miles per hour; to support the U.S. attack on Afghanistan, it covered the 6,000 miles from Yokosuka to the Indian Ocean in twelve days. This is a truly awesome concentration of military might.

The United States has thirteen of these carrier battle groups. No other country has even one.
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And whether it is bombers, working ballistic missiles, strategic submarines, laser-guided smart bombs, ground-hugging cruise missiles, pilotless drones, or gun ships, American dominance is more or less the same. Moreover, these forces are scattered at more than seven hundred U.S. installations around the globe,
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with 120,000 American troops in Europe; 92,000 in East Asia and the Pacific; 30,000 in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia; and 15,000 in the Western Hemisphere outside the United States.
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The United States’ share of the total defense spending of all countries in the world is at 40 percent and rising; it spends as much as the next nine countries combined.
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In terms of sheer military dominance the world has never seen anything like this.

Economically, the United States looms nearly as large. At $ 10 trillion, the U.S. GDP accounts for more than 30 percent of the combined GDP of all countries in the world and is twice that of the number-two country, Japan. While the GDP of the combined European Union is about $9 trillion, including the newly joining countries, the EU is not yet a state and acts as a peer of the United States only in limited areas. Even so, the United States is bigger economically than all of Europe and is four times as big as Germany, Europe’s largest economy. At market prices, China’s economy is only a tenth the size of the U.S. economy and Russia’s is less than half that. Even after the loss of $7 trillion of U.S. market value as a result of the collapse of the recent technology bubble, the capitalization of U.S. stock markets accounts for 36 percent of global market value.
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More significantly, U.S. productivity growth is 50 percent more rapid than that of other developed countries. Moreover, the numbers are all moving in the United States’ favor. As its share of global GDP, asset valuation, and productivity growth continues to rise, the United States economy will loom ever larger. One consequence is that it will be able to increase the already overwhelming size and power of its military forces while spending a smaller percentage of GDP on defense.

Nor can we ignore American leadership in key technologies or its intellectual and cultural dominance. U.S. research and development spending accounts for more than 40 percent of the global total, and in the area of medical and biotechnology research, the United States spends more than the rest of the world combined.
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More than 85 percent of the world’s computers run on Microsoft Windows or Unix and are powered by Intel or Motorola microprocessors. The software and systems integration businesses are dominated by U.S. companies like Microsoft, Oracle, EDS, and IBM, and the vast bulk of new drugs and medicines are developed in the United States. Close to 75 percent of all Internet communications globally pass through the United States at some point in their transmission. American films account for about 85 percent of box office revenue in Europe and more than 80 percent in the entire global market. In a recent survey of the top-ten movies in twenty-two countries, 191 of 220 possible slots were American.
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Dominance like this is unprecedented. At the peak of its empire, in the late nineteenth century, Great Britain’s GDP per capita was less than that of the United States, and its defense spending was less than that of both Russia and France.
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Nor did Britain dominate culturally in nearly the same proportion. The French did not dine on fish and chips or flock to British entertainment. Even the ancient Roman empire pales by comparison. Great as it was, it was strictly a regional operation. The Persian empire was a worthy competitor, and China’s GDP was probably larger and its technology arguably more advanced.

Being big, strong, and influential doesn’t necessarily equal imperialism, or if it does, perhaps the imperialism is a matter of seduction rather than coercion. In fact, Americas power makes itself felt in at least three distinct ways: coercion, seduction, and persuasion.

Coercion is, of course, the most direct, and we have recently seen a particularly striking example of the resentment it causes. On June 13, 2002, two U.S. Army officers were moving an armored mine-clearing vehicle from the American military base in downtown Seoul to training grounds outside the city. As they rounded a blind curve at high speed – on a narrow road that was also the least desirable route to their destination – they hit two teenage girls, who had been walking on the pedestrian shoulder of the road, and crushed them under their wheels. As prescribed by the Status of Forces Agreement with Korea, the soldiers were not investigated by Korean authorities but were tried by a U.S. military court. In late November, they were both found not guilty and transferred out of Korea.

While hardly unique in the history of the American military presence in Korea, this incident was notable for its timing. The officers’ acquittal occurred two weeks before South Korea’s presidential election. Shortly after the decision was announced, fifty thousand protestors took to the streets in Seoul, and their anger galvanized the campaign of Roh Moo Hyun, a self-taught civil-rights lawyer who was running on a platform opposing U.S. policy toward the North and advocating revision of the unequal terms of alliance with the United States. Roh’s opponent, Lee Hoi Chang, ran as a firm advocate of the traditional alliance and of the U.S. line. Nearly 60 percent of Koreans in their twenties and thirties voted for Roh, giving him the margin of victory and raising concern in Washington about Korean anti-Americanism.
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Roh was elected in large part because Korean young people resent being a client state of the United States.

That is the key point. While most Americans think of Korea as a spunky, hard-working, independent ally, it is actually in many ways a satellite, and it is not the only one. Ninety miles across the Korean Straits lies Japan. Several years ago, one of Japan’s leading politicians, Ichiro Ozawa, sparked a continuing debate with a call for Japan to become a ‘normal country.’
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Most Americans were surely not aware that Japan is an abnormal country. But Ozawa’s point was precisely that Japan, too, is a client of the United States. Like Korea, it hosts many U.S. bases, and as in Korea, there are continual incidents – people run over with vehicles, fights between residents and American soldiers, rapes of local women, and so forth. Yet, the ability of local authorities to investigate and try U.S. military personnel is restricted. The most concrete example for me of the nature of the relationship occurred when I accompanied then Vice President Bush on a trip to Tokyo in the mid-1980
s
. At one point the vice presidential airplane needed a part that had to be flown in from outside Japan. Someone asked whether we needed to obtain Japanese permission for the route of flight, and the officer in charge responded instantly that authorization was unnecessary because ‘that’s our airspace.’

Japan’s American-written constitution prohibits it from making war, and its ‘self-defense forces’ operate within a highly restricted framework. Both Japan’s and Korea’s security treaties with the United States are oneway arrangements. The United States undertakes to come to the defense of these two countries if they are attacked, but there is no reciprocal obligation to defend the United States. Just as Korea’s army is under U.S. command in the event of war, Japan’s is effectively in the same position.

But this issue of sovereignty goes beyond military matters. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Japan tried to mount an independent rescue operation for the nations of Southeast Asia, only to be stopped by the opposition of the U.S. Treasury. Korea was forced to restructure its economy under the tutelage of the International Monetary Fund, which is heavily influenced by the U.S. Treasury. What Ozawa brought to light is that when the nations of the world sit down to play, Japan comes without a full deck of cards.

The only comfort here is that Japan is not alone. As Irving Kristol has noted, ‘It is now a fact, still short of overt diplomatic recognition, that no European nation can have – or really wants to have – its own foreign policy. They are dependent nations, though they have a very large measure of local autonomy.’
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American power is also seductive – in two ways. The first has to do with excellence and entrepreneurial rewards. While there are many problems with the U.S. educational system, there is no doubt that it has the best universities in the world, and they are open to all comers regardless of country of origin. In fact, many of them recruit abroad. The result is that at any particular moment there are about 600,000 foreign students studying at U.S universities, and over the years literally millions of foreign students have graduated with American degrees.
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Many leading graduate programs in science and engineering at elite schools like Berkeley or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology draw a majority of their students from overseas.

America is also the world’s mecca for entrepreneurs. Silicon Valley is national-origin blind when it comes to funding and nurturing good ideas. In 2000, for example, more than 40 percent of the new companies established in the valley were started by Indian entrepreneurs, many of whom have subsequently started major operations in their home country.
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This arrangement is good for the entrepreneur, good for the United States, and good for India. If your thing is not starting companies but hitting baseballs or stuffing a basketball through a hoop, America is again the place for you.

The second manner of seduction is less about excellence and more about persuasion. Take that most successful of all international companies Coca-Cola. With sales of $20 billion and two-thirds of its revenue coming from international markets, it might seem to have little to worry about. But it does worry, a lot. To keep attracting investors and talent it has to keep growing. When you are as big as Coke, that means adding billions of dollars of sales every year, and when you have already penetrated much of the world market, you begin to wonder where your growth is going to come from. Fortunately there are a lot of people in places like India or Indonesia who still drink tea or water, and while ‘thirst cannot be manufactured, taste can be…’
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So Coke invests some of its enormous income in advertising (often using American success images) to convince Indians and Indonesians that Coke is the cosmopolitan thing to drink. While tea is probably better for you, it doesn’t have that American image of success, so people around the globe keep switching to Coke, and Coke keeps growing.

Through military might, unequal treaties, intellectual excellence, entrepreneurial reward, and friendly persuasion, America has established an unprecedented condominium over the globe. The answer to my Mexican business friend is that whatever he thinks he is, Bush is the emperor.

THE MAKING OF AN EMPIRE

A
lthough born in revolt against empire, America harbored the seeds of its own from the beginning. Two kinds of people ventured to the New World to establish colonies in the early seventeenth century, both in search of their destinies. To Virginia with Captain John Smith went the adventurers and artisans in search of fortune. To Massachusetts with Governor John Winthrop went the pilgrims and puritans in search of paradise. Those two searches have driven American expansion ever since.

There was – to begin with – a certain duality in the minds of the country’s founders. On the one hand, Washington and Jefferson warned against entangling alliances, and John Quincy Adams famously noted that ‘America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy… She might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.’ Yet it was Jefferson who dreamed of an ‘empire of liberty,’ who boldly doubled the country’s size with his purchase of the Louisiana Territory and who imagined a time when ‘our multiplication will cover the whole northern if not southern continent.’ Adams echoed him, saying, ‘North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation.’ Actually, the unilateralist attitude toward foreign countries and the expansionist spirit were two edges of the sword called American Exceptionalism.
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