Colossus

by Niall Ferguson

  Introduction

  AL JAZEERA: Would it worry you if you go by force into Iraq that this might create the impression that the United States is becoming an imperial, colonial power?

  RUMSFELD: Well I’m sure that some people would say that, but it can’t be true because we’re not a colonial power. We’ve never been a colonial power. We don’t take our force and go around the world and try to take other people’s real estate or other people’s resources, their oil. That’s just not what the United States does. We never have and we never will. That’s not how democracies behave. That’s how an empire-building Soviet Union behaved but that’s not how the United States behaves.1

  They played a lot of Risk, the board game where color-coded armies vied to conquer the world. It took hours, so it was great for killing time. Private First Class Jeff Young … was so good at it that the other guys formed coalitions to knock him out first.

  MARK BOWDEN, Black Hawk Down2

  AGE OF EMPIRES

  One of the most popular of computer games in the world is called Age of Empires. For several months my own ten-year-old son was all but addicted to it. Its organizing premise is that the history of the world is the history of imperial conflict. Rival political entities vie with one another to control finite resources: people, fertile land, forests, gold mines and waterways. In their endless struggles the competing empires must strike a balance between the need for economic development and the exigencies of warfare. The player who is too aggressive soon runs out of resources if he has not taken the trouble to cultivate his existing territory, to expand its population and to accumulate gold. The player who focuses too much on getting rich may find himself vulnerable to invasion if he meanwhile neglects his defenses.

  Many Americans doubtless play Age of Empires, just as the Rangers in Mogadishu played its board game predecessor, Risk. But remarkably few Americans—or, for that matter, American soldiers—would be willing to admit that their own government is currently playing the game for real.

  This book argues not merely that the United States is an empire but that it always has been an empire. Unlike most of the previous authors who have remarked on this, I have no objection in principle to an American empire. Indeed, a part of my argument is that many parts of the world would benefit from a period of American rule. But what the world needs today is not just any kind of empire. What is required is a liberal empire—that is to say, one that not only underwrites the free international exchange of commodities, labor and capital but also creates and upholds the conditions without which markets cannot function—peace and order, the rule of law, noncorrupt administration, stable fiscal and monetary policies—as well as provides public goods, such as transport infrastructure, hospitals and schools, which would not otherwise exist. One important question this book asks is whether or not the United States is capable of being a successful liberal empire. Although the United States seems in many ways ideally endowed economically, militarily and politically—to run such an “empire of liberty” (in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase), in practice it has been a surprisingly inept empire builder. I therefore attempt to explain why the United States finds being an empire so difficult; why, indeed, its imperial undertakings are so often short-lived and their results ephemeral.

  Part of my intention is simply to interpret American history as in many ways unexceptional—as the history of just another empire, rather than (as many Americans still like to regard it) as something quite unique. However, I also want to delineate the peculiarities of American imperialism, both its awesome strengths and its debilitating weaknesses. The book sets recent events—in particular, the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq—in their long-run historical context, suggesting that they represent less of a break with the past than is commonly believed. Thus, although this is partly a work of contemporary political economy, inspired by my spending much of the past year in the United States, it is primarily a work of history. It is also, unavoidably, concerned with the future—or rather, with possible futures. The later chapters of the book ask how enduring the American empire is likely to prove.

  Is the American empire mightier than any other in history, bestriding the globe as the Colossus was said to tower over the harbor of Rhodes? Or is this giant a Goliath, vast but vulnerable to a single slingshot from a diminutive, elusive foe? Might the United States in fact be more like Samson, eyeless in Gaza, chained by irreconcilable commitments in the Middle East and ultimately capable only of blind destruction? Like all historical questions, these can only be answered by comparisons and counterfactuals, juxtaposing America’s empire with those that have gone before and considering other imaginable pasts, as well as possible futures.

  IMPERIAL DENIAL

  It used to be that only critics of American foreign policy referred to the “American Empire.” During the cold war, of course, both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China harped incessantly on the old Leninist theme of Yankee imperialism, as did many Western European, Middle Eastern and Asian writers, not all of them Marxists.3 But their claim that overseas expansion was inspired by sinister corporate interests was not so very different from the indigenous American critiques of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century overseas expansion, whether populist, progressive or socialist.4 In the 1960s these critiques fused to produce a new and influential historiography of American foreign policy usually referred to as revisionism.5 Historians like Gabriel and Joyce Kolko argued that the cold war was the result not of Russian but of American aggression after 1945, an argument made all the more attractive to a generation of students by the contemporaneous war in Vietnam—proof, as it seemed, of the neocolonial thrust of American foreign policy.6 The reassertion of American military power under Ronald Reagan prompted fresh warnings against the “imperial temptation.”7

  This tradition of radical criticism of American foreign policy shows no sign of fading away. Its distinctive, anguished tone continues to emanate from writers like Chalmers Johnson, William Blum and Michael Hudson,8 echoing the strictures of an earlier generation of anti-imperialists (some of whom are themselves still faintly audible).9 Yet criticism of American empire was never the exclusive preserve of the political Left. In the eyes of Gore Vidal, the tragedy of the Roman Republic is repeating itself as farce, with the “national-security state” relentlessly encroaching on the prerogatives of the patrician elite to which Vidal himself belongs.10 Meanwhile, far to the Right, Pat Buchanan continues to fulminate in the archaic isolationist idiom against East Coast internationalists intent on entangling the United States—against the express wishes of the Founding Fathers—in the quarrels and conflicts of the Old World. In Buchanan’s eyes, America is following not the example of Rome but that of Britain, whose empire it once repudiated but now imitates.11 Other, more mainstream conservatives—notably Clyde Prestowitz—have also heaped scorn on “the imperial project of the so-called neoconservatives.”12

  In the past three or four years, however, a growing number of commentators have begun to use the term American empire less pejoratively, if still ambivalently,13 and in some cases with genuine enthusiasm. Speaking at a conference in Atlanta in November 2000, Richard Haass, who went on to serve in the Bush administration as director of policy planning in the State Department, argued that Americans needed to “re-conceive their global role from one of traditional nation-state to an imperial power,” calling openly for an “informal” American empire.14 This was, at the time, bold language; it is easy to forget that during the 2000 presidential election campaign it was George W. Bush who accused the Clinton-Gore administration of undertaking too many “open-ended deployments and unclear military missions”.15 As Thomas Donnelly, deputy executive director of the Project for the New American Century, told the Washington Post in August 2001, “There’s not all that many people who will talk about it [empire] openly. It’s discomforting to a lot of Americans. So they use code phrases like ‘America is the sole superpowe.’”16

&
nbsp; Such inhibitions seemed to fall away in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In a trenchant article for the Weekly Standard, published just a month after the destruction of the World Trade Center, Max Boot explicitly made “The Case for an American Empire.” “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today,” Boot declared, “cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”17 When his history of America’s “small wars” appeared the following year, its title was taken from Rudyard Kipling’s notorious poem “The White Man’s Burden,” written in 1899 as an exhortation to the United States to turn the Philippines into an American colony.18 The journalist Robert Kaplan also took up the imperial theme in his book Warrior Politics, arguing that “future historians will look back on 21st-century United States as an empire as well as a republic.”19 “There’s a positive side to empire,” Kaplan argued in an interview. “It’s in some ways the most benign form of order.”20 Charles Krauthammer, another conservative columnist, detected the change of mood. “People,” he told the New York Times, were “now coming out of the closet on the word ‘empire.’ ”21 “America has become an empire,” agreed Dinesh D’Souza in the Christian Science Monitor, but happily it is “the most magnanimous imperial power ever.” His conclusion: “Let us have more of it”22 Writing in Foreign Affairs in 2002, the journalist Sebastian Mallaby proposed American “neo-imperialism” as the best remedy for the “chaos” engendered by “failed states” around the world.23 One reading of Michael Ignatieff’s recent critique of American “nation building” efforts in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan is that these have not been sufficiently imperialistic to be effective.24

  While Mallaby and Ignatieff are perhaps best described as liberal interventionists—proponents of what Eric Hobsbawm has sneeringly dismissed as “the imperialism of human rights”—the majority of the new imperialists are neoconservatives, and it was their views that came to the fore during and after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. “Today there is only one empire,” wrote James Kurth in a special “Empire” issue of the National Interest, “the global empire of the United States. The U.S. military … are the true heirs of the legendary civil officials, and not just the dedicated military officers, of the British Empire.”25 Speaking on Fox News in April 2003, the editor of the Weekly Standard, William Kristol, declared: “We need to err on the side of being strong. And if people want to say we’re an imperial power, fine.”26 That same month the Wall Street Journal suggested that the British naval campaign against the slave trade in the mid-nineteenth century might provide a model for American policy against nuclear proliferation.27 Max Boot even called for the United States to establish a Colonial Office, the better to administer its new possessions in the Middle East and Asia.28

  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 generatio
n 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