Colossus- The Rise and Fall of the American Empire

360 Pages·2016·18.3 MB·English

by  Ferguson Niall

THE RISE AND FALL OF
HE AMERICAN EMPIRE
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
PART I-RISE
1. THE LIMITS OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE 33
2. THE IMPERIALISM OF ANTI-IMPERIALISM 61
3. THE CIVILIZATHlN OF CLASHES 105
4. SPLENDID MULTILATERALISM 132
PART II-FALL?
5. THE CASE FOR LIBERAL EMPIRE 169
6. GOING HOME OR ORGANIZING HYPOCRISY 200
7. "IMPIRE": EUROPE BETWEEN BRUSSELS AND BYZANTIUM 227
8. THE CLOSING DOOR 258
Conclusion: Looking Homeward 286
Statistical Appendix 303
Acknowledgments 305
Notes 309
Bibliography 3 43
Index 365
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-bl~ilding Soviet Union behaved
but that's not how the United States behaves.!
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 ad
dicted 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 water
ways. In their endless struggles the competing empires must strike a bal
ance 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
2 COLOSSUS
getting rich may find himself vulnerable to invasion if he meanwhile ne
glects 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 argu~s 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 Amer
ican 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 condi
tions 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 suc
cessfulliberal empire. Although the United States seems in many ways ide
ally 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 builderU..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~.J
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. How
ever, 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 com
monly believed. Thus, although this is partly a work of contemporary po
litical 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, con-
INTRODUCTION 3
cerned with the future-or rather, with possible futures. The later chap
ters 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 Sam
son, 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 con
sidering 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 pop
ulist, 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 aggres
sion 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
4 COLOSSUS
whom are themselves still faintly audible).9 Yet criticism of American em
pire 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 preroga
tives of the patrician elite to which Vidal himself belongs.l0 Meanwhile,
far to the Right, Pat Buchanan continues to fulminate in the archaic iso
lationist 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 conserva
tives-notably Clyde Prestowitz-have also heaped scorn on "the impe
rial project of the so-called neoconservatives."12
In the past three or four years, however, a growing number of com
mentators 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 ~ imperial power," call
14
ing openly for an "informal" American empire. ~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 admin
istration 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 superpower.' "16
Such inhibitions seemed to fall away in the aftermath of the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001. In a trenchant article for the VVeekly Stan
dard, published just a month after the destruction of the World Trade Cen
ter, 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."!7 When his history of
INTRODUCTION 5
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 im
perial theme in his book VVczrrior Politics, arguing that "future historians will
look back on 21st-century United States as an empire as well as a repub
liC."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 Krautham
mer, another conservative columnist, detected the change of mood. "Peo
ple," 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 mag
nanimous 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"
23
engendered by "failed states'· around the world. 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 dis
missed 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 In
terest, "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 VVeekly 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 VVczll 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 es
tablish a Colonial Office, the better to administer its new possessions in the
28
Middle East and Asia.
6 COLOSSUS
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 fa
ther, by arguing that the aim of US. policy should be to "convince po
tential 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 [US. predominance] for the long term (-50 years),"
which explicitly drew comparisons between the US. and the Roman,
30
Chinese, Ottoman and British empires. Such parallels clearly do not
seem outlandish to senior American military personnel. In 2000 General
Anthony Zinni, then commander in chief of the US. Central Command,
told the journalist Dana Priest that he "had become a modern-day pro
consul, descendant of the warrior-statesman who ruled the Roman
Empire's outlying territory, bringing order and ideals from a legalistic
Rome."3! It is hard to be certain that this was irony.
32
Officially, to be sure, the United States remains an empire in denial.
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 Clin
ton, 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 t~e
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 Am~rican Enterprise Institute shortly
before the invasion of Iraq, Bush stated: :~!he US has no intention of de
termining 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
INTRODUCTION 7
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, inde
pendent 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."~9 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 adminis
tration are agreed. Speaking at the George Washington University in Sep
tember 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 di
minished. 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,
8 COLOSSUS
and so can empires. The kingdom of England was proclaimed an empire
by Henry VIII-before it became oneY The United States by contrast has
long been an empire, but eschews the appellation.
Defme the term empire narrowly enough, of course, and the United
States can easily be excluded from the category. Here is a typical example:
"Rea!, imperial power ... means a direct monopoly control over the organiza
tion 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
generation 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 armexa
tion 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, fundamen
tally cWferent in character. According to one recent formulation, it was "hot
an imperial state with a predatory intent"; it was "more concerned with en
hancing 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 for
mer French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine. Some writers favor more
anemic terms like global leadership,46 while Philip Bobbitt simply regards
47
the United States as a particularly successful form of nation-state. A re
cent series of seminars at Harvard's Kennedy School opted for the inof
fensive 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 al
liance, 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