Writing in the dying days of the Clinton administration, I concluded— somewhat heatedly—that “the greatest disappointment facing the world in “the twenty-first century [is] that the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it.” Little did I imagine that within a matter of nine months, a new president, confronted by the calamity of September 11, would embark on a policy so similar to the one I had advocated. Since the declaration of the war against terrorism, the question has ceased to be about guts. It is now about grit, the tenacity to finish what has been started.
Unlike most European critics of the United States, then, I believe the world needs an effective liberal empire and that the United States is the best candidate for the job. Economic globalization is working. The rapid growth of per capita incomes in the world’s two most populous countries, China and India, means that international inequality is finally narrowing.33 But there are parts of the world where legal and political institutions are in a condition of such collapse or corruption that their inhabitants are effectively cut off from any hope of prosperity. And there are states that, through either weakness or malice, encourage terrorist organizations committed to wrecking a liberal world order. For that reason, economic globalization needs to be underwritten politically, as it was a century ago.
The United States has good reasons to play the role of liberal empire, both from the point of view of its own security and out of straightforward altruism. In many ways too it is uniquely well equipped to play it. Yet for all its colossal economic, military and cultural power, the United States still looks unlikely to be an effective liberal empire without some profound changes in its economic structure, its social makeup and its political culture.
American neoimperialists like to quote Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” written in 1899 to encourage President McKinley’s empire-building efforts in the Philippines. But its language—indeed the entire nineteenth-century lexicon of imperialism—is irrevocably the language of a bygone age. Though I have warned against the dangers of imperial denial, I do not mean to say that the existence of an American empire should instead be proclaimed from the rooftop of the Capitol. All I mean is that whatever they choose to call their position in the world—hegemony, primacy, predominance or leadership—Americans should recognize the functional resemblance between Anglophone power present and past and should try to do a better rather than a worse job of policing an unruly world than their British predecessors. In learning from the history of other empires, Americans will learn not arrogance but precisely that humility which, as a candidate for the presidency, George W. Bush once recommended to his countrymen.
There is another poem by Kipling, written two years before “The White Man’s Burden,” which perhaps strikes a more apposite chord. Entitled simply “Recessional,” it is a somber intimation of imperial mortality, perfectly crafted to temper late Victorian delusions of grandeur:
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
These are words the Colossus of our time needs to heed, even as it seems to bestride the globe, unrivaled. As Tony Blair put it succinctly in his address to Congress in July 2003, “All predominant power seems for a time invincible, but in fact, it is transient.”34 The question Americans must ask themselves is just how transient they wish their predominance to be. Though the barbarians have already knocked at the gates—once, spectacularly—imperial decline in this case seems more likely to come, as it came to Gibbon’s Rome, from within.
Statistical Appendix
TABLE 1: MAJOR AMERICAN OCCUPATIONS OF FOREIGN TERRITORY, 1893–2003
*Gross national income per capita, Atlas method (current US$).
†Freedom House index of political freedom: 1 = wholly free, 7 = wholly unfree.
TABLE 2. AMERICAN CASUALTIES IN MAJOR WARS
NOTE: “Combat deaths” refers to troops killed in action. “Other” includes deaths from disease, privation and accidents and includes and includes losses among prisoners of war. KIA = killed in action.
*Confederate nonbattle deaths and wounded estimated.
†Only one month of combat.
‡Only six weeks of sustained combat.
Source: Department of Defense.
Notes
PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
1. Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.
2. Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 443.
3. It is symptomatic that John Lewis Gaddis interprets the present predicament of the United States with reference to John Quincy Adams: Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).
4. Ash, Free World, p. 102.
5. Text of President Bush’s speech, New York Times, April 13, 2004.
6. My emphasis; first presidential debate, September 30, 2004, text from FDCH E-Media. See also David M. Halbfinger and David E. Sanger, “Bush and Kerry Clash Over Iraq and a Timetable,” New York Times, September 7, 2004.
7. On the significance of the frontier in imperial history, see Maier, Among Empires.
8. Remarks by the President at the Twentieth Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, November 6, 2003; http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106–2.html.
9. President Bush’s speech to the Republican Party Convention, New York Times, September 2, 2004.
10. “We’re pursuing a strategy of freedom around the world…”; first presidential debate, September 30, 2004.
11. See Fukuyama, State Building.
12. Roger Cohen, “ ‘Imperial America’ Retreats from Iraq,” New York Times, July 4, 2004.
13. Daniel Drezner, “Bestriding the World, Sort Of,” Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2004.
14. Michiko Kakutani, “Attention Deficit Disorder in a Most Peculiar Empire,” New York Times, May 21, 2004.
15. See my Empire.
16. By the end of August 2004, there had been around 300 allegations of mistreatment of detainees; 155 had so far been investigated, of which 66 had been substantiated; Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2004.
17. Ibid.
18. Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 249.
19. “The Best-laid Plans?,” Financial Times, August 3, 2003.
20. Woodward, Plan of Attack, pp. 150, 270.
21. See the remarks of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in an interview with the BBC in September 2004.
22. Daniel Barnard, “The Great Iraqi Revolt: The 1919–20 Insurrections against the British in Mesopotamia” paper presented at the Harvard Graduate Student Conference in International History, April 23, 2004, http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~conih/abstracts/Barnard_article.doc.
23. “White House Says Iraq Sovereignty Could Be Limited,” New York Times, April 22, 2004.
24. My own calculations based on Budget of the United States Government, 2005 historical tables, http:/frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/multidb.cgi.
25. Budget of the United States Government, 2005, table 1.3, http://www.gpoacess.gov/usbudget/fy05/sheets/hist01z2.xls
26. “Kennedy, Reagan, and Bush Tax Cuts in Historical Perspective,” http://www.taxfoundation.org/bushtaxplan-size.htm.
27. Economic Report of the President, table B-81, http://wais.access.gpo.gov.
28. Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, p. 291.
29. Ibid.
30. Source: Congressional Budget Office.
31. See Michael P. Dooley, David Folkerts-Landau, and Peter Garber, “An Essay on the Revived Bretton Woods System,” NBER Working Paper, 9971 (September 2003) and “The Revived Bretton Woods System: The Effects of Periphery Intervention and Reserve Management on Interest Rates and Exchange Rates in Center Countries,” NBER Working Paper, 10332 (March 2004).
32. Source:
Treasury Bulletin, June 2004, http://www.fms.treas.gov/bulletin/.Cf. Pýivi Munter, “Most Treasuries in Foreign Hands,” Financial Times, June 14, 2004.
33. See most recently Peterson, Running on Empty. According to the April 2004 report of the Medicare trustees, the system obligations to future retirees are unfunded by $62 trillion: see Joe Liebermann, “America Needs Honest Fiscal Accounting,” Financial Times, May 25, 2004.
34. Niall Ferguson, “A Dollar Crash? Euro Trashing,” The New Republic, June 21, 2004.
35. See Paul Krugman, “Questions of Interest,” New York Times, April 20, 2004. For a different view, see David Malpass, “Don’t Blame the Deficits for America’s Rate Hikes,” Financial Times, May 3, 2004.
36. Niall Ferguson, “Who’s Buried by Higher Rates,” Fortune, June 14, 2004. On the macroeconomic implications of the decline of the American savings rate, see Lawrence H. Summers, “The United States and the Global Adjustment Process,” Third Annual Stavros S. Niarchos Lecture, Institute for International Economics, Washington, D.C., March 23, 2004.
37. “Kerry’s Acceptance: There Is a Right Way and a Wrong Way to Be Strong,” New York Times, July 30, 2004.
38. Robert Manchin and Gergely Hideg, “E.U. Survey: Are Transatlantic Ties Loosening?” http://www.gallup.com/content/default.aspx?ci=12247&pg=1.
39. The phrase was originated by Charles Maier.
40. Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, World Population Prospects: The 2002 Revision, http://esa.un.org/unpp.
41. Edward C. Prescott, “Why Do Americans Work So Much More than Europeans?,” NBER Working Paper, 10316 (February 2004). For a different interpretation, see Olivier Blanchard, “The Economic Future of Europe,” NBER Working Paper, 10310 (February 2004).
42. Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman, “Dreaming with the BRICs: The Path to 2050,” Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper, 99 (October 1, 2003).
43. Nikola Spatafora, Yongzheng Yang, and Tarhan Feyzioglu, “China’s Emergence and Its Impact on the Global Economy,” International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook (March 2004), pp. 82–99.
44. Niall Ferguson, “Eurabia?” New York Times Magazine, April 4, 2004. The neologism was coined by the Egyptian-born writer Bat Ye’or.
45. For an optimistic view, see Held, Global Covenant. Rather more pessimistic—and more aware of medieval visions of a global “civil society”—is Linden, A New Map of the World.
INTRODUCTION
1. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, interview with Al Jazeera TV, February 27, 2003, press release, Department of Defense.
2. Bowden, Black Hawk Down, p. 228.
3. For an archetypal rant from the French Left, see Julien, America’s Empire.
4. See, e.g., Nearing, American Empire; Freeman and Nearing, Dollar Diplomacy.
5. For an early example, see Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy. See also Lerner, America as a Civilization and Williams’s later Empire as a Way of Life.
6. Kolko and Kolko, Limits of Power. Also Kolko, Politics of War; Kolko, Roots of American Foreign Policy; Kolko, Vietnam. For a good example of the way Vietnam encouraged talk of American empire, see Buchanan, “Geography of Empire.” See also Magdoff, Age of Imperialism; McMahon, Limits of Empire; Swomley, American Empire. The odd contrarian defended American imperialism in the 1960s: see Liska, Imperial America; Steel, Pax Americana. One was even a Frenchman: Aron, Imperial Republic.
7. Tucker and Hendrickson, Imperial Temptation, pp. 53, 211.
8. Johnson, Blowback; Blum, Rogue State; Hudson, Super Imperialism. See also Smith, American Empire.
9. See, for example, Eric Hobsbawm, “America’s Imperial Delusion,” Guardian, June 14, 2003. Predictable commentaries have also come from Edward Said and Noam Chomsky.
10. Vidal, Decline and Fall of the American Empire.
11. Patrick Buchanan, Republic, p. 6. See also idem, “What Price the American Empire?,” American Cause, May 29, 2002.
12. Prestowitz, Rogue Nation.
13. See, e.g., Bacevich, American Empire, p. 243: “Although the U.S. has not created an empire in any formal sense … it has most definitely acquired an imperial problem …. Like it or not, America today is Rome, committed irreversibly to the maintenance and, where feasible, expansion of an empire that differs from every other empire in history. This is hardly a matter for celebration; but neither is there any purpose served by denying the facts.” See also Rosen, “Empire,” p. 61: “If the logic of an American empire is unappealing, it is not at all clear that the alternatives are that much more attractive.” For a superbly nuanced and subtle contribution to the debate, see Maier, “American Empire?”
14. Quoted in Bacevich, American Empire, p. 219.
15. Ibid., p. 203.
16. Thomas E. Ricks, “Empire or Not? A Quiet Debate over U.S. Role,” Washington Post, August 21, 2001.
17. Max Boot, “The Case for an American Empire,” Weekly Standard, October 15, 2001.
18. Boot, Savage Wars, p. xx: “Unlike nineteenth-century Britain, twenty-first century America does not preside over a formal empire. Its ‘empire’ consists not of far-flung territorial possessions but of a family of democratic, capitalist nations that eagerly seek shelter under Uncle Sam’s umbrella.” However, Boot later adds that “the U.S. has more power than Britain did at the height of its empire, more power than any other state in modern times;” p. 349. On the distinctly mixed reception of Kipling’s poem, see Gilmour, Long Recessional, pp. 124–29.
19. Kaplan, Warrior Politics.
20. Emily Eakin, “It Takes an Empire,” New York Times, April 2, 2002.
21. Ibid.
22. Dinesh D‘Souza, “In Praise of an American Empire,” Christian Science Monitor, April 26, 2002.
23. Mallaby, “Reluctant Imperialist,” p. 6. Cf. Pfaff, “New Colonialism.” For similar arguments in favor of European neo-imperialism, see Cooper, “Postmodern State.”
24. Ignatieff, Empire Lite, pp. 3, 22, 90, 115, 126. See, however, “Why Are We in Iraq? (And Liberia? And Afghanistan?),” New York Times Magazine, September 6, 2003.
25. Kurth, “Migration,” p. 5.
26. James Atlas, “A Classicist’s Legacy: New Empire Builders,” New York Times, May 4, 2003, Section 4, p. 4.
27. “Interdicting North Korea,” Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2003, p. A12.
28. Max Boot, “Washington Needs a Colonial Office,” Financial Times, July 3, 2003.
29. Quoted in Bacevich, American Empire, p. 44.
30. “Strategies for Maintaining U.S. Predominance,” Office of Net Assessment, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Summer Study, August 1, 2001, esp. p. 22.
31. Priest, Mission, p. 70.
32. Ferguson, Empire, p. 370. For a suggestive discussion, see Williams, Empire as a Way of Life, p. ix.
33. Quoted in Bacevich, American Empire, p. 242.
34. Quoted in Mead, Special Providence, p. 6.
35. Speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, 1999, quoted in Washington Post, August 21, 2001.
36. Quoted in Bacevich, American Empire, p. 201.
37. “Transcript of President Bush’s Speech,” New York Times, February 26, 2003.
38. Transcript from the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State, http:usinfo.state.gov.
39. “Transcript of President Bush’s Remarks on the End of Major Combat in Iraq,” New York Times, p. A16.
40. Colin L. Powell, “Remarks at The Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University,” http:www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2003/23836.htm.
41. Minxin Pei, “The Paradoxes of American Nationalism,” Foreign Policy, May–June 2003, p. 32.
42. However, see Davies, First English Empire.
43. Zelikow, “Transformation,” p. 18.
44. Schwab, “Global Role.” “American empire,” in the words of Michael Mandelbaum, “was given up in the twentieth century:” Mandelb
aum, Ideas, p. 87.
45. Kupchan, End, p. 228.
46. Mandelbaum, Ideas, p. 88.
47. Bobbitt, Shield of Achilles. Bobbitt sees imperialism as a thing of the past, having been one of the “historic, strategic and constitutional innovations” of the “state-nation” in the two centuries between 1713 and 1914.
48. I am extremely grateful to Graham Allison for inviting me to open this series. This book owes much to the rigorous and constructive criticism of the seminar’s participants.
49. See, e.g., Kagan, Paradise and Power, p.88; Kupchan, End, p. 266.
50. Johannson, “National Size,” p. 352n.
51. A hegemonic power was “a state … able to impose its set of rules on the interstate system, and thereby create temporarily a new political order,” and which offered “certain extra advantages for enterprises located within it or protected by it, advantages not accorded by the ‘market’ but obtained through political pressure”: Wallerstein, “Three Hegemonies,” p. 357.
52. This notion can be traced back to Charles Kindleberger’s seminal work on the interwar world economy, which described a kind of “interregnum” after British hegemony, but before American. See Kindleberger, World in Depression.
53. See, e.g., Kennedy, Rise and Fall.
54. Calleo, “Reflections.” See also Rosecrance, “Croesus and Caesar.”
55. O’Brien, “Pax Britannica.”
56. Gallagher and Robinson, “Imperialism of Free Trade.”
57. See Robert Freeman Smith, “Latin America,” pp. 85–88. Cf. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism.
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