So the United States is what it would rather not be: a Colossus to some, a Goliath to others—an empire that dare not speak its name.39 Yet what is the alternative to American empire? If, as so many people seem to wish, the United States were to scale back its military commitments overseas, then what?
We tend to assume that power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. In the history of world politics, it seems, someone is always the hegemon, or is bidding to play that role. Today, it is the United States; a century ago, it was the United Kingdom. Before that, it was France, Spain, and so on. The great nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke portrayed modern European history as an incessant struggle for mastery, in which a balance of power was possible only through recurrent conflict. More recent historians have inferred that as the superpowers of the Cold War era succumb to “overstretch,” their place will be taken by new powers. Once it was supposed to be Germany and Japan. These days, wary realists warn of the ascent of China and Europe. Power, in other words, is not a natural monopoly; the struggle for mastery is both perennial and universal. The “unipolarity” identified by some commentators following the Soviet collapse cannot last much longer, for the simple reason that history hates a hyperpower. Sooner or later, challengers will emerge, and back we must go to a multipolar, multipower world. In other words, if the United States were to conclude from its experience in Iraq that the time has come to abandon its imperial pretensions, some other power or powers would soon seize the opportunity to bid for hegemony.
But what if no successor were to emerge? What if, instead of a balance of power, there were an absence of power? Such a situation is not unknown in history. Unfortunately, the world’s experience with power vacuums (or eras of “apolarity,” if you will) is hardly encouraging. Anyone who looks forward eagerly to an American retreat from hegemony should bear in mind that, rather than a multipolar world of competing great powers, a world with no hegemon may be the real alternative to U.S. primacy. Apolarity could turn out to mean not the pacifist utopia envisaged in John Lennon’s dirge “Imagine,” but an anarchic new Dark Age.
Why might a power vacuum arise early in the twenty-first century? The reasons are not especially hard to imagine. Consider the three principal contenders for the succession if the United States were to succumb to imperial decline. Impressive though the European Union’s recent enlargement has been—not to mention the achievement of a twelve-country monetary union—the reality is that demographic trends almost certainly condemn Europe to decline (see chapter seven). With fertility rates dropping and life expectancies rising, West European societies are projected to have median ages in the upper forties by the middle of this century. Indeed, “Old Europe” will soon be truly old. By 2050, one in every three Italians, Spaniards, and Greeks is expected to be sixty-five or older, even allowing for ongoing immigration.40 Europeans therefore face an agonizing choice between Americanizing their economies, i.e., opening their borders to much more immigration, with all the cultural changes that would entail, or transforming their union into a kind of fortified retirement community, in which a dwindling proportion of employees shoulder the rising cost of outmoded welfare systems. These problems are compounded by the Euro area’s sluggish growth, a consequence of labor market rigidities, high marginal tax rates, and relatively low labor inputs (notably in terms of working hours).41 Meanwhile, the EU’s still incomplete constitutional reforms mean that individual European nation states continue to enjoy considerable autonomy outside the economic sphere, particularly in foreign and security policy. Eastward enlargement may look like a solution to the EU’s creeping senescence, but each additional member makes the task of managing the Union’s confederal institutions more difficult.
Optimistic observers of China insist the economic miracle of the past decade will endure, with growth continuing at such a pace that within thirty or forty years China’s gross domestic product will surpass that of the United States.42 Yet it is far from clear that the normal rules for emerging markets have been suspended for Beijing’s benefit. First, a fundamental incompatibility exists between the free-market economy, based inevitably on private property and the rule of law, and the Communist monopoly on power, which breeds corruption and impedes the creation of transparent fiscal, monetary, and regulatory institutions. As is common in “Asian tiger” economies, production is running far ahead of domestic consumption— thus making the economy heavily dependent on exports—and even further ahead of domestic financial development. Indeed, no one knows the full extent of the problems in the Chinese domestic banking sector.43 Those Western banks that are buying up bad debts to establish themselves in China must remember that this strategy was tried once before: a century ago, in the era of the “Open Door” policy, when American and European firms rushed into China only to see their investments vanish amid the turmoil of war and revolution. Then, as now, hopes for China’s development ran euphorically high, especially in the United States. But those hopes were dashed, and could be disappointed again. A Chinese currency or banking crisis could have immense ramifications, especially when Western investors realize the difficulty of repatriating assets held in China. When foreigners invest directly in factories rather than through intermediaries such as bond markets, there is no need for domestic capital controls. It is no easy thing to repatriate a steel mill.
With birthrates in Muslim societies more than double the European average, the Islamic countries of Northern Africa and the Middle East are bound to put some kind of pressure on Europe and the United States in the years ahead. If, for example, the population of Yemen could exceed that of Germany by 2050 (as the United Nations forecasts), there must either be dramatic improvements in the Middle East’s economic performance or substantial emigration from the Arab world to aging Europe. Yet the subtle Muslim colonization of Europe’s cities—most striking in France, where North Africans populate whole suburbs of cities like Marseille and Paris—may not necessarily portend the advent of a new and menacing “Eurabia.”44 In fact, the Muslim world is as divided as ever, and not merely along the traditional fissure between Sunnis and Shiites. It is also split between those Muslims seeking a peaceful modus vivendi with the West (an impulse embodied in the Turkish government’s desire to join the EU) and those drawn to the revolutionary “Islamism” of renegades like Osama bin Laden. Opinion polls from Morocco to Pakistan suggest high levels of anti-American sentiment, but not unanimity. In Europe, only a minority expresses overt sympathy for terrorist organizations; most young Muslims in England clearly prefer assimilation to jihad. We are still a long way from a bipolar clash of civilizations, much less the rise of a new caliphate that might pose a geopolitical threat to the United States and its allies.
In short, each of the obvious potential successors to the United States— the European Union and China—seems to contain within it the seeds of future decline; while Islam remains a diffuse force in world politics, lacking the resources of a superpower.
Let us now imagine that American neo-conservative hubris meets its nemesis in Iraq and that the Bush administration’s project to democratize the Middle East at gunpoint ends in ignominious withdrawal. Suppose also that no aspiring rival power steps in to fill the resulting vacuums—not only in Iraq but conceivably also Afghanistan, the Balkans, to say nothing of Haiti. What would an apolar future look like? The answer is not easy, as there have been very few periods in world history with no contenders for the role of global, or at least regional, hegemon. The nearest approximation in modern times might be the 1920s, when the United States walked away from President Woodrow Wilson’s project of global democracy and collective security centered on the League of Nations. There was certainly a power vacuum in Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Romanov, Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman empires, but it did not last long. The old West European empires were quick to snap up the choice leftovers of Ottoman rule in the Middle East. The Bolsheviks had reassembled the czarist empire by 1922. And by 1936 German revanche was al
ready well advanced.
One must go back much further in history to find a period of true and enduring apolarity; as far back, in fact, as the ninth and tenth centuries. In this era, the two sundered halves of the Roman Empire—Rome and Byzantium—had passed the height of their power. The leadership of the Western half was divided between the pope, who led Christendom, and the heirs of Charlemagne, who split up his short-lived empire under the Treaty of Verdun in 843. No credible claimant to the title of emperor emerged until Otto was crowned in 962, and even he was merely a German prince with pretensions (never realized) to rule Italy. Byzantium, meanwhile, was grappling with the Bulgar rebellion to the north, while the Abbasid caliphate initially established by Abu al-Abbas in 750 was in steep decline by the middle of the tenth century. In China, too, imperial power was in a dip between the T’ang and Sung dynasties.
The weakness of the older empires allowed new and smaller entities to flourish. When the Khazar tribe converted to Judaism in 740, their khanate occupied a Eurasian power vacuum between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. In Kiev, far from the reach of Byzantium, the regent Olga laid the foundation for the future Russian Empire in 957 when she embraced the Orthodox Church. The Seljuks—forebears of the Ottoman Turks—carved out the Sultanate of Rum as the Abbasid caliphate lost its grip over Asia Minor. Africa had its mini-empire in Ghana; Central America had its Mayan civilization. Connections between all these entities were minimal or nonexistent. This condition was the antithesis of globalization. The world was broken up into disconnected, introverted civilizations.
One distinctive feature of the era was that, in the absence of strong secular polities, religious questions often produced serious convulsions. Indeed, it was religious institutions that often set the political agenda. In the eighth and ninth centuries, Byzantium was racked by controversy over the proper role of icons in worship. By the eleventh century, the pope felt confident enough to humble Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV during the battle over which of them should have the right to appoint bishops. The new monastic orders amassed considerable power in Christendom, particularly the Cluniacs, the first order to centralize monastic authority. In the Muslim world, it was the ulema (clerics) who truly ruled. This ascendancy of the clergy helps to explain why the period ended with the extraordinary holy wars known as the Crusades, the first of which was launched by European Christians in 1095. Yet this apparent clash of civilizations was in many ways just another example of the apolar world’s susceptibility to long-distance military raids directed at urban centers by more backward peoples. The Vikings repeatedly attacked West European towns in the ninth century—Nantes in 842, Seville in 844, to name just two. Small wonder that the future seemed to lie in creating small, defensible, political units: the Venetian republic—the quintessential city-state, which was conducting its own foreign policy by 840—or Alfred the Great’s England, arguably the first thing resembling a nation state in European history, created in 886.
Could an apolar world today produce an era reminiscent of the age of Alfred? It could, though with some important and troubling differences. Certainly, one can imagine the world’s established powers retreating into their own regional spheres of influence. But what of the growing pretensions to autonomy of the supranational bodies created under U.S. leadership after the Second World War? The United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization each considers itself in some way representative of the “international community” Surely their aspirations to global governance point to the true alternative to American empire—a new Light Age of collective security and international law, the very antithesis of the Dark Ages?45 Yet universal claims were also an integral part of the rhetoric of that distant era. All the empires maintained that they ruled the world; some, unaware of the existence of other civilizations, may even have believed that they did. The reality, however, was not a global Christendom, nor an all-embracing Empire of Heaven, but political fragmentation. And that is also true today. For the defining characteristic of our age is not a shift of power upward to supranational institutions, but downward. With the end of states’ monopoly on the means of violence and the collapse of their control over channels of communication, humanity has entered an era characterized as much by disintegration as integration. If free flows of information and of the means of production empower multinational corporations and nongovernmental organizations (as well as evangelistic religious cults of all denominations), the free flow of destructive technology empowers both criminal organizations and terrorist cells. These groups can operate, it seems, wherever they choose, from New York to Najaf, from Madrid to Moscow. By contrast, the writ of the international community is not global at all. It is, in fact, increasingly confined to a few strategic outposts such as Kabul and Baghdad. In short, it is the non-state actors who truly wield global power— including both the monks and the Vikings of our time.
Waning empires, religious revivals, incipient anarchy, a retreat into fortified cities: These are the Dark Age experiences that a post-imperial world could conceivably find itself reliving. The symptoms are already not far to seek. The trouble is, of course, that this Dark Age would be an altogether more dangerous one than the Dark Age of the ninth and tenth centuries. The world is much more populous—roughly twenty times more. Technology has transformed production, of course; now human societies depend not merely on fresh water, livestock, and the harvest but also on machines that have vastly increased our productivity. Unfortunately, the principal fuels on which our machines run are known to be finite in supply; they also pollute the earth’s atmosphere, altering its climate, even as they are used. Technology has upgraded deliberate destruction, too. It is now possible not just to sack a city but to obliterate it. For all these reasons, the prospect of an apolar world should perturb us today a great deal more than it perturbed the heirs of Charlemagne. If the United States is to retreat from global hegemony its fragile self-image dented by minor setbacks on the imperial frontier its critics at home and abroad must not pretend that they are ushering in a new era of multipolar harmony, or even a return to the good old balance of power. For the alternative to unipolarity may not be multipolarity at all. It could be apolarity—a global vacuum of power. And far more dangerous forces than rival great powers would benefit from such a not-so-new world disorder.
The best case for empire is always the case for order. Liberty is, of course, a loftier goal. But only those who have never known disorder fail to grasp that it is the necessary precondition for liberty. In that sense, the case for American empire is simultaneously a case against international anarchy— or, to be precise, of a proliferation of regional vacuums of power. None of this is to pretend that the United States is a perfect empire. Empires are by their very nature compromised by the power that they wield; they inexorably engender their own dissolution at home even as they impose order abroad. That is why our expectations should not be pitched too high. If it is hard enough to be an empire when you believe you have a mandate from heaven, how much harder is it for the United States, which believes that heaven intended it to free the world, not rule it.
Sadly, there are still a few places in the world that must be ruled before they can be freed. Sadly, the act of ruling them will sorely try Americans, who instinctively begrudge such places the blood, treasure, and time that they consume. Yet, saddest of all, there seems to be no better alternative for the United States and the world—and that is this book’s bottom line. Once, one hundred and sixty years ago, America’s imperial destiny seemed manifest. It has since become obscure. But it is America’s destiny just the same. The only question that remains is: How much longer will this self-denying empire endure? The answer Colossus offers is: Not long, in the absence of fundamental reappraisal of America’s role in the world. If this book contributes anything to bring that reappraisal about, then it will have served its intended purpose.
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