Day of Empire

by Amy Chua

  THE EVOLUTION OF HYPERPOWERS

  American world dominance is the result of a long process of evolution in the history of hyperpowers. In ancient times, military power and economic power were linked in a very direct way. The more a society conquered, the wealthier it got, whether by taxing, looting, annexing, or exacting tribute. The Achaemenid kings pulled in the “most valuable possessions” and “productions” of every subjugated kingdom, “whether the fruits of the earth, or animals bred there, or manufactures of their own arts.”8 The Romans gained millions of pounds of silver and gold by conquering Dacia alone. The Mongols, who themselves had no industry or technology, became a hyperpower by conquering the territory and absorbing the wealth of the world's then most advanced civilizations—Persia, China, and the Arab lands.

  If the key to wealth was military might, then the key to military might was strategic tolerance. It was through tolerance that pre-modern hyperpowers amassed the most powerful armies, both by successfully enlisting hundreds of thousands of conquered foot soldiers and by recruiting the most skilled warriors and commanders of all backgrounds. Greek mercenaries formed the cream of the Achaemenid military. The Roman legions were filled with Libyans, Syrians, Caledonians, Gauls, and Spaniards. Tang China extended its rule to Afghanistan, Samarkand, and Tashkent only by securing the loyalty of the “barbarian” horsemen from the steppe. The Mongols could not have overcome the great walled cities of central Asia and Europe if they had not drawn into their nomadic ranks the Chinese engineers who built their massive siege engines.

  With the dawn of the modern age, economic dominance continued to require military dominance, but the parameters began to change. Naval power became increasingly important. Starting around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, technological advances vastly enlarged the reach of the largest, strongest societies. Gold and silver in the faraway Americas, the pepper and spice trades of the Indies, Caribbean sugar, and other so-called rich trades—in coffee, tea, cocoa, textiles, tobacco, jewelry, and other luxuries—from the Baltics to the Mediterranean to Africa became the new, dazzlingly lucrative prizes. Suddenly, the key to wealth and world dominance lay in control over the world's navigable waters, as the Dutch and British were to prove.

  But as the levers of global wealth shifted from land to sea, and from conquest to commerce, the link between military and economic power began to shift as well. Invasion, occupation, and annexation were no longer essential prerequisites for a hyperpower seeking to reap the riches of faraway lands. Conquest and rule were expensive, and control over trade could be far more efficient.

  This was a lesson the Romans had begun to learn the hard way a millennium earlier. The conquest of Dacia (AD 101-106) was in fact the last time that the Roman treasury would reap large profits from the plunder of foreign lands. Yet Rome, “[a] society persistently primed for war, most of whose adult males could expect to see active military duty,” continued to field its massive legions on missions of conquest and expansion long after the material costs of warfare had far outstripped its benefits.9

  With the Dutch Republic, the balance between trade and conquest shifted decisively in favor of the former. To an unprecedented degree, the Dutch strategy for global preeminence dispensed with the whole enterprise of conquest and territorial expansion. In the Americas, Africa, and Southeast Asia (with a few exceptions like Java and Ceylon), most of the Dutch “empire” consisted of mere trading outposts, with native peoples and inland cities left largely to their own devices.10 These outposts were protected by the Netherlands’ extraordinary navy, which also did its best to keep out competitor merchants from other European countries, securing the republic its fantastically lucrative commercial monopolies.

  For the Dutch, strategic tolerance was just as essential to world dominance as it had been for the ancient hyperpowers, but Dutch tolerance began to assume a radically new and modern form. Tolerance for the ancients essentially meant tolerating conquered peoples: leaving intact their customs and languages, co-opting their elites, and recruiting their best craftsmen and warriors. By contrast, Dutch tolerance turned the Netherlands itself into a magnet, not for conquered peoples but for persecuted religious minorities from all over Europe. Amsterdam in the seventeenth century became the most cosmopolitan city in the world—“a veritable melting pot,” in which “Flemings, Walloons, Germans, Portuguese and German Jews, and French Huguenots” all became “true Dutchmen.”11 As a direct result of its immigrants’ contributions, the Dutch Republic became the center of world trade, industry, and finance.

  For a brief moment in history, the Dutch Republic pointed the way to a new kind of world dominance in which military conquest and colonization could play a much diminished role. But the next hyperpower on the world stage—Great Britain—was as much a successor to Rome as it was to the Netherlands. Like Holland, England became famous for its tolerance at home and thereby attracted immigrants fleeing religious persecution in neighboring countries. But unlike the Dutch, Great Britain took up Rome's civilizing and expansionist mission. The British sought to rule and to legislate over all the immense territories they conquered; Victoria was not only queen of England but empress of India. At the same time, the British rediscovered the ancient formula for imperial expansion, amassing through strategic tolerance enormous armies filled with hundreds of thousands of soldiers native to India and other conquered lands.

  It fell to the United States to follow the path the Dutch had charted. Like the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, America's tolerance turned it into a magnet for refugees and others seeking better opportunities. Although the United States certainly has had its imperialist moments, and although its westward expansion was based in part on military conquest, the true key to America's success has always been its ability to attract and reward talented, motivated, and enterprising individuals of all backgrounds. From the beginning, immigration has been the fuel of American wealth and innovation, providing the United States with a continuing human-capital edge that has proven equally decisive in the industrial, atomic, and computer ages. In an important sense, then, the United States is a hyperpower on the Dutch model, but taken to entirely different orders of magnitude. The Dutch Republic was receptive to immigrants; the United States is a nation of immigrants—and thus the first nation of immigrants to rise to hyperpower status. Moreover, like the Dutch but far more so, America built its world dominance not through conquest but commerce.

  Historically, while the British were “planting the Union Jack on one territory after another,” America for most of the nineteenth century “contented itself with carving out…[an] ‘empire of the seas'—an informal empire based on trade and influence.”12 In 1942, the historian Rupert Emerson observed, “With the exception of the brief period of imperialist activity at the time of the Spanish-American war, the American people have shown a deep repugnance to both the conquest of distant lands and the assumption of rule over alien peoples.”13

  Even today, as John Steele Gordon writes, “ [i]f the world is becoming rapidly Americanized as once it became Romanized, the reason lies not in our weapons, but in the fact that others want what we have and are willing, often eager, to adopt our ways in order to have them too.” English is today's dominant global language not because of the threat of U.S. stealth bombers but because of the prospect of U.S. dollars. Notwithstanding the United States’ terrifying nuclear arsenal, “[t]he ultimate power of the United States”—like that of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century—lies “not in its military,” “but in its wealth.”14

  The United States thus represents a kind of culmination in the evolution of hyperpowers. In antiquity, the only way to become the richest society on earth was through military conquest. Today, the links between economie and military power, while still important, are far more attenuated; not even the most hawkish supporter of U.S. militarism calls for the annexation of foreign territories. Commerce and innovation—not plunder and expropriation—have proven to be the greatest engines of wealt
h creation. At the same time, the face of strategic tolerance has changed, with immigration replacing conquest as the most effective way for a society to incorporate the world's best and brightest.

  The good news, then, is the emerging possibility of a much less militaristic form of global dominance in the modern world, which the United States—as the world's economic and technological leader rather than its military overlord—could exemplify in the decades to come. There is, however, a catch. Precisely because of this transformation in what it means to be a hyperpower, the United States today is ill equipped to deal with the one crucial challenge that has confronted every hyperpower in history—and will necessarily confront every hyperpower to come.

  THE DEMOCRATIC HYPERPOWER AND THE

  ANCIENT PROBLEM OF “GLUE”

  The United States is not only the first nation of immigrants to become a hyperpower. It is also the first mature universal-suffrage democracy to do so. This is not a coincidence. For all its imperfections, democracy in America has been, in addition to a source of strength and liberty, part of its tremendous appeal to outsiders. Like its relatively open free market system, which has allowed untold numbers to rise economically, the United States’ democratic system of government is part of its distinctively modern brand of strategic tolerance, in principle providing Americans of any background, creed, or skin color—and regardless of when they or their families became citizens—an equal opportunity to participate and rise in politics. As such, democracy is part of the formula that has made America the hyperpower it is.

  But democracy also imposes limits on America, as compared to hyperpowers of the past. Those calling for an American empire often compare the United States to Rome. This comparison is apt in many ways. Not only was Rome the military and economic giant of its time, but it was astonishingly “multicultural,” tolerant both ethnically and religiously up to the highest levels of power. At the same time, alone among the ancient empires, Rome offered a cultural package that was extraordinarily appealing to people throughout its dominions—at least if they weren't slaves. Similarly, the United States today offers a cultural package—blue jeans and baseball, hip-hop and Hollywood, fast food and Frappuccino Light—that is maddeningly attractive to millions if not billions around the world.

  But Rome, as we have seen, had an advantage: It could make those it conquered and dominated part of the Roman Empire. Subjugated peoples from Scotland to Spain to West Africa all became subjects of the greatest power on earth. Even more significantly, Rome turned large numbers of conquered men, both elites and common soldiers, into Roman citizens, clothed with the high status and privileges that such citizenship entailed.

  The United States can do no such thing. Precisely because it is a democracy, the United States does not try or want to make foreign populations its subjects—and certainly not its citizens. When Americans imagine bringing U.S. institutions and democracy to the Middle East, they are not envisioning the people of Baghdad and Falluja voting in the next U.S. presidential election. Even when the United States invades and occupies other countries, the goal today is never annexation but, at least ostensibly, an eventual military withdrawal, leaving behind a constitutional (and hopefully pro-American) democracy.

  During the Cold War, America's support of democratic movements around the world—particularly in the 1980s—was part of a general strategy to counter Soviet influence. This strategy included spreading economic liberalism along with democratic institutions. At that time, resentment of the American superpower was relatively mild, mainly because it represented a clear alternative to the much-more-repressive Soviet system. The collapse of the Soviet Union—the leading obstacle to the spread of free market democracy—could have made the rest of the world more receptive to American leadership.

  Instead, the ironic result of the United States’ “democratic world dominance” has been rampant, raging anti-Americanism. Today, America faces billions of people around the world, most of them poor, who know that the American dollar is the world's dominant currency, that English is the world's dominant language, that American corporations are the most powerful and visible in the world, and that American brands are the most pervasive and coveted. In the eyes of billions, America is the antithesis of what they are. They are poor, exploited, and powerless, often even over the destiny of their own families. America, in their eyes, is rich, healthy, glamorous, confident, and exploitative—at least if Hollywood, our multinationals, our advertisements, and our leaders are any indication. America is also “almighty” and “able to control the world,” whether through our military power, our “puppets” the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, or our formidable economic leverage. In short, large numbers of people all over the world feel dominated by—but no connection or allegiance to— the United States.

  This, then, is America's dilemma. Inside its borders, the United States has over time proven uniquely successful in creating an ethnically and religiously neutral political identity capable of uniting as Americans individuals of all backgrounds from every corner of the world. But America does not exert power only over Americans. Outside its borders, there is no political glue binding the United States to the billions of people who live under its shadow.

  The problem facing the United States is as old as empire itself. The first hyperpower in history, Achaemenid Persia, never solved it. As the Achaemenid Empire expanded, it came to include increasingly diverse peoples, which remained distinct communities under their Persian rulers. The Achaemenid Empire had no overarching political identity; only military might held it together. Indeed, the tolerance that allowed the Achaemenids to assemble their mighty war machine also encouraged their different subject peoples to preserve their own languages, identities, and political affiliations. Less than a century after its founding, the empire was riven by fragmentation and separatist rebellions. When a stronger, more charismatic military leader, Alexander of Macedon, began sweeping through the region, elites throughout the Achaemenid Empire simply switched their allegiances. They were not traitors, because they had never been patriots.

  A similar fate befell the Mongols. Through strategic tolerance, Genghis Khan succeeded in creating a single people out of the warring tribes of the Mongolian steppe. Thus Genghis Khan accomplished what Cyrus the Great never did, establishing a new political identity for his people. But this identity—the Great Mongol Nation or “People of the Felt Walls”—extended no farther than the nomadic steppe. Beyond the steppe, the fearful and disdainful populations the Mongols subdued never acquired any affiliation with the empire that swallowed them up. On the contrary, like Khubilai Khan, who embraced Chinese culture and established a Chinese dynasty, or the Mongols of central Asia who embraced Islam, the Mongol khans and courts in foreign lands increasingly assumed the identities of their more civilized subjects. Its armies were the mightiest in the world, but with no common identity to bind together its culturally dissimilar components, the Mongol world empire quickly splintered into four large kingdoms before breaking up altogether.

  China's Tang Empire offers another example. In some ways, the story of the Tang is the mirror image of the Mongols'. The conquering Tang emperors were the “civilized” ones; their genius lay in subduing, winning over, and ultimately harnessing the fierce militarism of the “barbarians” beyond China's walls.

  What is most remarkable about the great emperors of the early Tang was their attempt to establish a universal empire in which Chinese and barbarians were at least nominally equal. But the political affiliation the Tang emperors offered their non-Chinese subjects was too weak to hold together the disparate groups—Tibetans, Sogdi-ans, and Turks; Muslims, Zoroastrians, and Nestorians—whom the Tang sought to govern. As with Achaemenid Persia, the tolerance of the Tang rulers eventually worked against them. Because they did not try to impose a “Han” Chinese identity on their non-Chinese subjects, they left intact large subcommunities with distinct cultural, ethnic, and religious bonds. As the Tang Empire reached its zenith, insurr
ections by non-Chinese peoples spread in all the frontier areas. Tang military commanders of foreign descent increasingly turned on their Chinese overlords.

  Of all of history's hyperpowers, Rome came closest to solving the problem of creating a common identity capable of generating loyalty among its far-flung subjects (which goes a long way toward explaining the spectacular longevity of the empire). Through its appealing cultural package and its extension of citizenship to Greeks, Gauls, Britons, and Spaniards alike, Rome managed to “Romanize” vastly different peoples living continents apart. A millennium and a half later, Great Britain was surprisingly successful in this respect too. As late as the 1890s, members of the Indian National Congress cheered whenever Empress Victoria's name was mentioned. Hundreds of thousands of Indian soldiers fought for the British in World War II, and even men like Gandhi and Nehru, the eventual leaders of India's independence movement, were deeply loyal to the crown in their early days, seeing themselves as “above all, British citizens of the Great British Empire.”15