Colossus

by Niall Ferguson

  The only alternative is to rely on foreign armies to provide auxiliary forces. There are precedents for this too. Without the Indian Army, Britain’s empire would have suffered from a chronic manpower deficit. India was, as Lord Salisbury memorably remarked, “an English barrack in the Oriental Seas from which we may draw any number of troops without paying for them.”13 The British relied heavily on their empire to provide manpower in wartime: roughly a third and just under a half of total British forces during World War I and World War II, respectively. Having rashly dissolved the Iraqi Army, L. Paul Bremer belatedly came to see that resurrecting it might be his best hope of establishing order and reducing unemployment. The alternative, as we have seen, is to go begging to the UN or NATO for reinforcements. If Americans themselves are reluctant peacekeepers, they must be the peacekeepers’ paymasters, and strike such bargains as the mercenaries of the “international community” may demand.

  Of the three deficits, however, it is the third that may prove the most difficult to overcome—namely, the attention deficit that seems to be inherent in the American political system and that already threatens to call a premature halt to reconstruction in both Iraq and Afghanistan.14 This is not intended as a term of abuse. The problem is systemic; it is the way the political process militates against farsighted leadership. In the words of retired General Anthony Zinni:

  There is a fundamental question that goes beyond the military. It’s, “What is our obligation to the world?” We preach about values, democracy, human rights, but we haven’t convinced the American people to pony up…. There’s no leadership that steps up and says, “This is the right thing to do.”… That’s the basic problem…. There’s got to be the political will and support for these things. We should believe that a stable world is a better place for us. If you had a policy and a forward-leaning engagement strategy, the U.S. would make a much greater difference to the world. it would intervene earlier and pick fights better.15

  But a “forward-leaning engagement strategy” is much easier for a soldier to imagine than for an elected politician. It is not just that first-term American presidents have only two and a half years in office before the issue of securing reelection begins to loom. It is the fact that even sooner, midterm congressional elections can have the effect of emasculating their legislative program. It is the fact that American politics operates on three tiers simultaneously: the national, the state and the local. How could Californians be expected to pay full attention to the problems of nation building in Baghdad in the summer of 2003, when a self-selected mob of amateur politicians was noisily bidding to recall their incumbent governor? It is the fact that the federal executive itself is anything but a homogeneous entity. Interdepartmental rivalry is of course the norm in most human institutions of any size. But there were times in 2003 when the complete absence of coordination among the Defense Department, the State Department and the Treasury—to say nothing of the Commerce Department, the trade representative, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the host of institutions now notionally concerned with “homeland security”—recalled the worst “polycracy” of Wihelmine Germany.16 The presidency is of course an elected rather than a hereditary office, but its recent incumbents have sometimes appeared to conduct business in the style of the last German kaiser, allowing policy to be determined by interagency competition rather than forging a sense of collective responsibility. Small wonder so many American interventions abroad have the spasmodic, undiplomatic quality of Wilhelm Il’s Weltpolitik. Imperial Germany too practiced what Michael Ignatieff has called imperialism in a hurry. It too was “impatient for quick results.”17

  Unlike the kaiser’s Germany, however, the United States disclaims any interest in acquiring new “places in the sun.” Its conquests are not merely temporary; they are not even regarded as conquests. The Victorian historian J. R. Seeley famously joked that the British had built their empire “in a fit of absence of mind.” Americans, however, have gone one better; here absent-mindedness has become full-blown myopia. Few people outside the United States today doubt the existence of an American empire; that America is imperialistic is a truism in the eyes of most educated Europeans.18 But as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noted as long ago as 1960, Americans persist in “frantically avoiding recognition of the imperialism [they] in fact exercise.”19

  Does imperial denial matter? The answer is that it does. Successful empire is seldom solely based on coercion; there must be some economic dividends for the ruled as well as the rulers, if only to buy the loyalty of indigenous elites, and these dividends need to be sustained for a significant length of time. The trouble with an empire in denial is that it tends to make two mistakes when it chooses to intervene in the affairs of lesser states. The first may be to allocate insufficient resources to the nonmilitary aspects of the project.20 The second, and the more serious, is to attempt economic and political transformation in an unrealistically short time frame. As I write, the United States would seem to be making the second of these mistakes in both Iraq and Afghanistan. By insisting—and apparently intending—that they will remain in Iraq only until a democratic government can be established “and not a day longer” American spokespeople have unintentionally created a further disincentive for local people to cooperate with them. Who in these countries can feel confident that if he lends support to American initiatives, he will not lay himself open to the charge of collaboration as soon as the Americans go? “If the people of the Balkans realized America would be there,” General John Shalikashvili remarked in the late 1990s, “it would be great…. Why is it such a crime to suggest a similar longevity [to the occupations of West Germany and Japan] in Bosnia and Kosovo?”21 The answer is a political one. Today’s GIs must be brought home, and soon.

  These two points help explain why this vastly powerful economy, with its extraordinary military capability, has had such a very disappointing record when it has sought to bring about changes of political regime abroad. The worst failures—in Haiti, Cuba and Vietnam—were due, above all, to this fatal combination of inadequate resources for nonmilitary purposes and a truncated time horizon. It would be a tragedy if the same process were to repeat itself in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. But not a surprise.

  TOWARD APOLARITY?

  Consuming on credit, reluctant to go to the front line, inclined to lose interest in protracted undertakings: if all this conjures up an image of America as a sedentary colossus—to put it bluntly, a kind of strategic couch potato—then the image may be worth pondering. According to the standard measure of obesity, the body mass index,22 the percentage of Americans classified as obese has nearly doubled in the past decade, from 12 percent in 1991 to 21 percent in 2001. Nearly two-thirds of all American men are officially considered overweight, and nearly three-quarters of those aged between forty-five and sixty-four.23 In other words, for every superfit Schwarzenegger there are now three fat Frank Cannons. International comparisons, insofar as these are possible, suggest that only western Samoans and Kuwaitis are fatter.24 Today, it seems, “the white man’s burden” is around his waist.25

  Yet this should not be taken to vindicate those pessimists who predict imminent decline for the United States, whether relative to Europe or to China. The trouble with “realist” fears of a coming shift from “unipolarity” to “multipolarity” is that they overlook the possibility of generalized impotence—or, if you like, apolarity. Those fixated on a Bismarckian model of the balance of power tend to assume that international relations resemble the interplay of magnets, with the larger powers attracting satellites as if they were iron filings, sometimes joining together, but more often repelling each another. But what if the great powers of today ceased to be magnetic, losing their powers both to attract and to repel? What if even the United States, ever more preoccupied with its own internal problems, became the strategic equivalent of an inert lump of old iron? In many ways, this is already the fate that has overtaken Japan and the European Union; once economic tit
ans, they are now senescent societies and strategic dwarfs. Nor will China be exempt from demographic “graying.” One legacy of the one-child policy will be a rising dependency ratio in the coming decades.

  The absence of great power conflict is a concept that is unfamiliar in modern international history. In his classic 1833 essay “The Great Powers,” Ranke portrayed European history since the sixteenth century as a succession of bids for hegemony by one empire or another, each of which had been successfully resisted by the others: first the Habsburgs, then France in the seventeenth century and again France between 1793 and 1815. Had he lived for another ninety years, Ranke would have been able to add Germany between 1914 and 1945. For Ranke, Europe’s natural order was truly multipolar; power was shared by a pentarchy composed of France, Austria, England, Russia and Prussia, each in its different way an imperial power.26 From 1945 until 1989, of course, we lived in a bipolar world, which would have astonished Ranke (though not his contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville), a world divided between two continental empires, each accusing the other of being the imperialist. Then in the early 1990s it seemed as if the United States had established a unipolar order. Yet today’s transnational threats such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation and organized crime—to say nothing of disease pandemics, climate change and water shortages—put a premium on cooperation, not competition, between states. The attractions of unilateralism are undeniable, since demanding allies can be more irksome than invisible foes, but a solo strategy offers little prospect of victory against any of these challenges; the successful prosecution of the “wars” against all of them depends as much on multilateral institutions as does the continuation of international free trade. There is, in any case, nothing more dangerous to a great empire than what the Victorian Conservatives called, with heavy irony, splendid isolation. Then as now, the great Anglophone empire needs perforce to work in concert with the lesser—but not negligible—powers in order to achieve its objectives. As G. John Ikenberry has argued, American success after both the Second World War and the cold war was closely linked to the creation and extension of international institutions that at once limited and yet legitimized American power.27

  Consider again the question of peacekeeping. It has become abundantly clear that the United States is not capable of effective peacekeeping—that is to say, constabulary duties—in countries as far apart as Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq without some foreign assistance. Peacekeeping is not what American soldiers are trained to do, nor do they appear to have much appetite for it. It also seems reasonable to assume that the American electorate will not tolerate a prolonged exposure of U.S. troops to the unglamorous hazards of “low-intensity conflict”: suicide bombers at checkpoints, snipers down back streets, rocket-propelled grenades fired at patrols and convoys. The obvious solution, short of a substantial expansion of the U.S. Army, is to continue the now well-established practice of sharing the burdens of peacekeeping with other United Nations members—in particular, America’s European allies, with their relatively generous aid budgets and their large conscript armies. If they are not used for peacekeeping, it is hard to see what these soldiers are for, in a Europe that has declared perpetual peace within its own borders and is no longer menaced by Russia.

  Those, like Robert Kagan, who dismiss the Europeans as Kant-reading Venusians—as opposed to America’s Hobbes- (and Clausewitz-) reading Martians—overlook the crucial significance of Pluto in the process of nation building. War and love are all very well, but all empires depend in some measure on money. Without hefty investment in enforcing the rule of law, countries like Afghanistan and Iraq will stagnate and perhaps disintegrate. Unless the United States is prepared radically to alter its attitudes toward low-intensity conflict, it will have little option but to cooperate with the more generous Europeans. Unilateralism, like isolation, is not so splendid after all. Indeed, it is seldom a realistic option for an empire.

  The danger is that great power cooperation could simply break down, not because of rivalry between the United States and the European Union but because neither lacks the will to act beyond its own borders. The internal problems of these huge and complex entities may simply distract them from the problems of failed states and rogue regimes. Some would say that such a Spengleresque decline of the West might create a vacuum that only the rising powers of Asia could fill. Yet those who look at China as a future hegemon may discover that it too has enough to contend with in managing the social and political consequences of its second “Great Leap Forward,” this time to the capitalist free market. Likewise, those who see Islam as the West’s principal antagonist in a war of civilizations will find it difficult to imagine a political accompaniment to the indisputable demographic expansion of Muslim societies. The future, in short, might prove for a time to be apolar, a world without even one dominant imperial power.

  THE TERMINATOR

  The paradox of globalization is that as the world becomes more integrated, so power becomes more diffuse. Thanks to the dynamism of international capitalism, all but the poorest people in the world have significantly more purchasing power than their grandfathers dared dream of. The means of production were never more productive or—as China and India achieve their belated economic takeoffs—more widely shared. Thanks to the spread of democracy, a majority of people in the world now have markedly more political power than their grandfathers. The democratic means of election were never more widely accepted as the optimal form of government. The means of education too are accessible in most countries to much larger shares of the population than was the case two or three generations ago; more people than ever can harness their own brainpower. All these changes mean that the old monopolies on which power was traditionally based—monopolies on wealth, political office and knowledge—have in large measure been broken up. Unfortunately, thanks to the proliferation of modern means of destruction, the power to inflict violence has also become more evenly distributed. Firepower has also been shared out as never before.

  Power, let us not forget, is not just about being able to buy whatever you want; that is mere wealth. Power is about being able to get whatever you want at below the market price. It is about being able to get people to perform services or part with goods that they would not ordinarily offer to sell at any price. For empires, those ambitious states that seek to exert power beyond their own borders, power depends on both the resolve of the masters and the consent of the subjects. Yet power diminishes as it is shared. One country with one nuclear bomb is more powerful, if the rest of the world has none, than a country with a thousand nuclear bombs, if everyone else has one.

  And this brings us to the final respect in which the United States resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. In military confrontations, the United States has the capability to inflict amazing and appalling destruction, while sustaining only minimal damage to itself. There is no regime it could not terminate if it wanted to—including North Korea’s. Such a war might leave South Korea in ruins, of course, but the American Terminator would emerge from the rubble more or less unscathed. What the Terminator is not programmed to do, however, is to rebuild. In his wake he leaves only destruction.

  During the fall of 2003 President Bush sought to stiffen American morale by declaring that he was “not leaving” Iraq; that America “doesn’t run”; that the Middle East “must be a focus of American policy for decades to come.” If, nevertheless, the United States finally submits to political pressure at home and abroad by withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan before their economic reconstruction has been achieved, the scene will not be wholly unfamiliar. The limits of American power will be laid bare when the global Terminator finally admits: “I won’t be back.”

  In my book The Cash Nexus, written in 2000 and published in the spring of 2001, I tried to make the argument that the United States not only could afford to play a more assertive global role but could not afford not to. Any historian who ventures to make prognostications has a duty to review them with the benefit o
f hindsight. The key points I made were as follows:

  “The means of destruction have never been cheaper…. The main beneficiaries [of cheap weaponry] have been and remain the guerrilla armies of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, the terrorist groups of Western Europe and the drug gangs of the Americas.”28

  “Plainly, it is highly unlikely that any state would contemplate a direct attack on the United States in the foreseeable future; though a terrorist campaign against American cities is quite easy to imagine.”29

  “Nearly all of the increase in the number of wars in the world since 1945 is due to the spread of civil war…. [But] the United Nations [has a] very patchy record as a global policeman…. Between 1992 and 1999 the Security Council authorized a series of humanitarian interventions…. The majority were at best ineffective, and at worst disastrous.”30

  “The question has frequently been asked, and deserves repetition: would it not be desirable for the United States to depose these tyrants and impose democratic government on their countries? The idea of invading a country, deposing its dictators and imposing free elections at gunpoint is generally dismissed as incompatible with American ‘values’ A common argument is that the United States could never engage in the kind of overt imperial rule practiced by Britain in the nineteenth century—though this was precisely what was done in Germany and in Japan at the end of the Second World War, and with great and lasting success.”31

  “Far from retreating like some giant snail behind an electronic shell, the United States should be devoting a larger percentage of its vast resources to making the world safe for capitalism and democracy. Contrary to the naïve triumphalism of the ‘end of history,’ these are not naturally occurring, but require strong institutional foundations of law and order. The proper role of an imperial America is to establish these institutions where they are lacking, if necessary … by military force. There is no economic argument against such a policy, since it would not be prohibitively costly. Imposing democracy on all the world’s ‘rogue states’ would not push the U.S. defense budget much above 5 per cent of GDP. There is also an economic argument for doing so, as establishing the rule of law in such countries would pay a long-run dividend as their trade revived and expanded.”32