David C. Hendrickson is the Robert J. Fox Distinguished Service Professor at Colorado College and a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.

The Curious Case of American Hegemony Imperial Aspirations and National Decline David C. Hendrickson

Is there an American empire? Will it last? These debates over American empire These two questions haunt the contempo- merged and overlapped with longstanding rary period. In the last few years, roughly disputes among political scientists over the since the enunciation of a new national character of the contemporary international security strategy in President Bush’s West system, the sources of power within it, and Point address in June 2002, hardly a day its most important vectors of change. Is the has passed without a news item, essay, or international system unipolar or multipolar, book announcing, denouncing, or contesting or some combination of the two? Does mili- the existence of an American empire. Le- tary power still rule the roost, or is the in- gions of journalists, activists, and professors ternational system a complex multilevel have investigated the concept of empire, chessboard with other and equally impor- compared it with previous representations tant sources of power and authority? In the of the type, assessed how far the United current system, are states more likely to bal- States fits—or breaks—the mold, and em- ance against or bandwagon with American ployed it as a term of abuse or praise. From power? this outbreak of fascination with things im- The debates over empire also merged perial among the chattering classes no con- and overlapped with longstanding contro- sensus emerged: opinions ranged from the versies over the sources of decline and re- view that the United States is an empire and newal of U.S. power within the inter- has always been one to the view that the national system, such as that prosecuted United States is not an empire and never by the Yale historian Paul Kennedy and was one. These terminological disputes the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye arose partly from the genuine difficulty of in the late 1980s.2 Analysts working in finding a commonly agreed definition of this vein understood the American predica- the thing itself, but more importantly from ment in grand strategic terms and were the common appreciation that the “e” word attentive to the gap that Walter Lippmann bore closely on the legitimacy of the enter- made famous—that is, the potential dis- prise. There is also no consensus on the sec- junction in a democracy between the ends ond question. One side insists that the and means of national strategy. Here the United States has entered a “unipolar era” focus of the inquiry is the relationship likely to last for several decades, the other between power and commitments, usually that “the eagle has crash landed” and that informed by the precept that the nation its economic primacy is at an end. “In the must “maintain its objectives and its first decade of the twenty-first century,” power in equilibrium, its purposes within writes the critic Michael Lind, “the Empire its means and its means equal to its pur- Bubble has succeeded the Tech Bubble and poses, its commitments related to its re- will look as absurd in hindsight in a decade sources and its resources adequate to its or two.”1 commitments.”3

The Curious Case of American Hegemony 1 Both these persistent debates, the one That’s not the way the world really works over the sources of power in the interna- anymore. We’re an empire now, and when tional system, the other over the quest for we act, we create our own reality. And while solvency in national strategy, were renewed you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as and transformed by the Bush Doctrine. you will—we’ll act again, creating other The emergence of explicit imperial aspira- new realities, which you can study too, and tions in the world’s only superpower was that’s how things will sort out. We’re histo- in its own way as surprising and transfor- ry’s actors...and you, all of you, will be left mative as the collapse of the Soviet Union. to just study what we do.”5 This statement In the early 1990s, the United States was subsequently was held up to great ridicule, generally deemed unlikely to chase after particularly the bit about the “reality-based any imperial temptations. Despite the im- community,” but there is little doubt that pressive military primacy that emerged by this senior administration official spoke a default after the Soviet collapse, most ob- fundamental truth when he said that “when servers had generally shared the image of we act, we create our own reality,” and the United States as a conservative power that the rest of us are left to follow in its oriented to the maintenance of the status wake. quo, more likely to withdraw from the As the senior administration official world than to dominate it. suggested, the Bush Doctrine is indeed an This expectation also conditioned many imperial program, one that must be placed debates among political scientists during on the ideological terrain of “universal em- the 1990s. Neither the “offensive realism” pire.” Critics, it may be conceded, are per- of the University of Chicago’s John Mear- fectly irrelevant to its trajectory, but they sheimer nor the “liberal institutionalism” may find busy-work in soberly addressing of Duke University’s Robert Keohane ex- its prospects. I shall take up that rather in- pected the United States to take up the glorious task by examining the empire via white man’s burden and seek through a bodily analogy—inquiring into its mind force a revolutionary reconstruction of (the coherence of the Bush strategic out- Middle Eastern governments. Surely the look); its arms (the uses and limits of mili- United States would realize that it should tary power); its legs (the sustainability of content itself with regional hegemony the Bush economic program); the rotten- and not attempt an impossible march to ness or sweetness of its heart (the perceived global hegemony, thought Mearsheimer. legitimacy of America’s justifications); and Surely the United States would appreciate the energy imparted by its breath6 (the in- the rational advantages offered by leadership fluence of political culture on U.S. external in international institutions, thought conduct). Keohane.4 The general thesis is that imperial aspi- Bush broke out of these constraints and rations produce national decline, and this in created a new reality every bit as revolution- both the material and moral realms. Achiev- ary for world politics, and just as disturbing ing strategic solvency and moral legitimacy, for conventional paradigms in political sci- to put the point in policy terms, requires ence, as the Soviet collapse. The new out- the rejection of universal empire. Despite look was well expressed by a senior Bush ad- the weaknesses induced or exposed by the ministration official in a conversation with a imperial strategy, the United States also en- journalist in the summer of 2002. People in joys certain intrinsic strengths that make the “reality-based community,” the aide its position far from irretrievable if it were said, “believe that solutions emerge from to reject the imperial vision. What was your judicious study of discernible reality.... long said of Russia—“not as strong as she

2 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 2005 seems, not as weak as she looks”—is also trol. Each of its five global military com- true of America. mands enjoys escalation dominance against potential adversaries, and the vast resources The Bush Doctrine allotted to these commands have marginal- The question—republic or empire?—has ized the State Department and given them been one of the longest-running arguments increasingly important diplomatic func- in American history and has arisen in one tions. The United States conducts a vast form or another in virtually every war spying operation on the rest of the world fought by the United States. It rang out through expenditures of some $30 billion a in 1776 and 1812, in the controversies year (with funds dedicated to these objec- over Indian removal in the 1830s, in the tives steadily rising). It enjoys strategic nu- wars with Mexico and Spain in 1846 and clear superiority and dominance of the glob- 1898, and on into the wars of the twenti- al commons. And it maintained this posi- eth century, especially Vietnam. At no tion by spending, in the late 1990s, only time in American history, however, has the 3.5 percent of its GDP on defense. Even now, transmogrification from republic to empire nearly four years after 9/11, it devotes only been so stark and compelling as in the ad- 5 percent of GDP to defense and homeland ministration of George W. Bush. Though security.7 there are various precedents for the Bush To these impressive capabilities, the policies, especially in the presidencies of Bush administration added a revolutionary Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and strategic doctrine. Its innovations were four- Bill Clinton, no preceding administration fold. It broke from the Cold War doctrines put these together in so alarming a way. of containment and deterrence, arguing that By marrying a revolutionary strategic doc- the threat posed by terrorists and “rogue trine with the unipolar dispensation created states” justified a strategy of preventive war, by the end of the Cold War, Bush brought which it called “the strategy of preemp- the “empire” business to a whole new tion.” States like Iraq, Iran, and North Ko- level. rea, together with their “terrorist allies,” The gap in military capabilities was in Bush said in his 2002 State of the Union large part a simple consequence of the end Address, “constitute an axis of evil, arming of the Soviet Union and strategic bipolarity, to threaten the peace of the world.”8 Once but it grew in the 1990s due to the “revolu- war with Iraq began, notice was served on tion in military affairs,” creating the capa- others that they might be next. “This is just bility in U.S. forces to deliver precise and the beginning,” one administration official concentrated firepower in virtually every told the New York Times in late March 2003. corner of the globe and prompting the oper- “I would not rule out the same sequence of ational objective of “full spectrum domi- events for Iran and North Korea as for nance.” The United States accounts for Iraq.”9 about 40 to 50 percent of total world mili- The administration also argued that tary spending and maintains yet higher democratic government and the liberal shares of world expenditures on military re- ideals with which it was associated were of search and development. This technological universal validity and that the United States prowess has created a large gap between has a right, perhaps even in some cases a U.S. and allied armed forces, making it dif- duty, to impose such a government by force ficult for them to function effectively to- against tyrants. Though the administration gether on the battlefield. The United States insisted that the Iraq war was launched to maintains an “empire of bases” throughout safeguard American security, it was also con- the world, largely exempt from local con- tinually represented as a noble cause. Never

The Curious Case of American Hegemony 3 in history, proponents said, had so many limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits been freed at so little cost. of peace.”12 Bush also broke dramatically from the Underlying these changes was the doc- constraints of multilateral organizations, trine that the only alternative to interna- insisting that no foreign government could tional anarchy was a hierarchically ordered control the decisions of the United States international system. International coopera- in matters of war and peace. After it be- tion as an alternative to either anarchy or came apparent that the United States could hierarchy was dismissed as the pipe dream probably get only 4 votes (out of 15) in of utopians. The world needed a rule-giver. the U.N. Security Council to approve the The neoconservative columnist Charles use of force against Iraq, one administra- Krauthammer gave a characteristically tion official said, “We will want to make pungent expression of the new ethos even sure that the United States never gets before the September 11 attacks. “America caught again in a diplomatic choke point is no mere international citizen,” wrote in the Security Council or in NATO.”10 In Krauthammer. “It is the dominant power in keeping with this attitude, the administra- the world, more dominant than any since tion had previously withdrawn from or Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position scuttled a range of international treaties, to reshape norms, alter expectations, and including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, create new realities. How? By unapologetic the International Criminal Court, and the and implacable demonstrations of will.” Kyoto Protocol on climate change. And What America must do if it is “to wield im- why not? As John Bolton, the fox whom perial power,” wrote Stephen Peter Rosen, a Bush nominated in 2005 to guard the U.N. Harvard political scientist and an important henhouse, observed in 1999, “It is a big ideologist of the new ethos, “is to create and mistake for us to grant any validity to inter- enforce the rules of a hierarchical interstate national law even when it may seem in our order.” Though Rosen acknowledged that short-term interest to do so—because, over “humility is always a virtue,” he insisted the long term, the goal of those who think that “the dominant male atop any social that international law really means anything hierarchy, human or otherwise, never man- are those who want to constrict the United aged to rule simply by being nice.” The States.”11 imperial power must enforce the principle Finally, the Bush administration adopt- of hierarchy, Rosen insisted, “but is not it- ed and strengthened a doctrine of American self bound” by the rules it prescribes for supremacy first enunciated in a Pentagon others.13 planning document of 1992, but publicly For most Americans, no doubt, the disavowed at the time by the first Bush ad- ethos underlying these changes—the ani- ministration. This new official doctrine mating spirit that gave it life and confi- plainly avowed a determination to maintain dence—was nationalist in character. It arose indefinitely American military supremacy, from anger over the September 11 attacks, holding that a peaceful international order from the unbridled fear those attacks was only possible if one state maintained ab- prompted, and from hitherto untapped solute dominance, making any effort by oth- sources of patriotic fervor. But if the Ameri- ers to overcome their own inferiority impos- can body politic reacted, almost reflexively, sible and hardly worth trying. “America has, to the attacks by giving its support to war, and intends to keep, military strengths be- the brain entertained a more sophisticated yond challenge,” the president observed at and far-reaching vision, one that gave an West Point, “thereby making the destabiliz- imperial dimension to American policy un- ing arms races of other eras pointless, and matched in previous experience. The substi-

4 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 2005 tution of preventive war for containment gives us imaginative access to a critique and deterrence, the embrace of unilateral- of the phenomenon that was once part of ism, the hostility to international law, the the American consensus and that speaks to rejection of international institutions, the certain enduring issues. Up until the pro- stride toward absolute strategic superiority, foundly interdependent and globalized age the chiliastic tones in which democracy was of the twentieth century, the term usually held to be the only legitimate form of gov- did not connote the literal domination of ernment—all this breathed an unmistakably the earth, but rather dominance and mastery imperial air. over a wide swath of peoples (who should otherwise, by virtue of proximity or interac- Contours of Universal Empire tion, form a system of states).17 Above all, it “Hyperpower, superduper-power, American meant any situation in which one monarchy empire, new Rome, unipolar world—all or state was in a position to give the law to these terms,” writes the British historian the others. European diplomatic history for Timothy Garton Ash, “attempt to capture the last 500 years is essentially organized the new reality of global predominance with around the story of the successive bids for no precedent in the history of the world.”14 domination or mastery of the state system Actually, there is a precedent for the mix of and of the countervailing coalitions those awesome capabilities and revolutionary doc- bids provoked in the name of the balance trines now possessed by the United States. of power and “the liberties of Europe.” The It lies in what the leftist critic Jonathan contemporary quest for universal empire, Schell calls the “hoary old nightmare of however durable it proves to be, raises the the ages, the always-feared but never-real- same issues as these previous attempts, ized ambition to win universal empire.”15 while outdoing them in the notable respect Whereas “empire,” in its ordinary significa- of being the first to actually be global in its tion, means political control, whether direct reach. or indirect, that is exercised by one political The critique of “Monarchia Universalis” unit over another unit separate from and is of long standing. It was advanced by a alien to it,16 “universal empire” means con- remarkable group of Spanish writers, in- trol over the state system as a whole. More cluding Vitoria, Las Casas, and Soto, in the simply, empire is ruling over other peoples sixteenth century, and taken up avidly by without their consent, while universal em- a host of Enlightenment thinkers in the pire is ruling over the state system without eighteenth century.18 Montesquieu, Vattel, its consent. Both are exercises in domina- Hume, Robertson, Burke, and Gibbon all tion, which is usually the key attribute that considered the theme, and were as one in re- users of the label have in mind, but they are garding universal empire as, in Alexander very different in significance. Empires are a Hamilton’s words, a “hideous project.” The dime a dozen, scattered all throughout hu- prevention of a situation in which any one man history; the quest for universal empire power could give the law to the others was occurs less frequently but is the more im- thought by the classic writers to be a neces- portant and world-shattering phenomenon. sary underpinning of international society, The term “universal empire” is not in and they all looked with dread on the condi- common usage today—“global hegemony” tion of supreme power to which the Bush or “world domination” are more likely to administration aspired. Whether in Anglo- come from the pens of critical writers—but American constitutional thought or among it was in widespread currency during the the writers on the law of nations, it was ax- long emergence of the European state sys- iomatic that any situation of unbounded tem. The older term is useful because it power held peril for the maintenance of

The Curious Case of American Hegemony 5 both order and liberty. Such power would destruction of the conqueror.” Rousseau inevitably be abused; a prince that did not reached a conclusion very similar to that of do so would be “the ornament of history, Hume: “If the princes who are accused of and a prodigy not to be looked for again.”19 aiming at universal monarchy were in reali- Universal empire did not necessarily ty guilty of any such project, they gave connote direct rule over subject provinces. more proof of ambition than of genius. How Hamilton called the conduct of revolution- could any man look such a project in the ary France toward Great Britain a “copy of face without instantly perceiving its that of Rome toward Carthage,” aimed at absurdity...?”21 destroying “the principal obstacle to a dom- Of all these various bids for universal ination over Europe,” but he acknowledged empire, the one bearing the closest analogy that France did not intend “to reduce all in ideological complexion to that of the other nations formally to the condition of contemporary United States is that which provinces. This was not done by Rome in occurred in conjunction with the French the zenith of her greatness. She had her Revolution and the wars that erupted in provinces, and she had her allies. But her al- its train. It had it all: a strategic doctrine lies were in fact her vassals.” Juridical of preventive war, a revolutionary creed niceties, Hamilton was saying, could not looking to liberate foreign peoples from settle the question of whether any state tyranny, contempt for the society of states aimed at universal empire. Control that was and its customary prohibitions, and a mili- not expressed in terms of formal sovereignty tary machine that had, with the levée en could nonetheless be practically effective masse, discovered sources of power hither- and certainly threatening if it represented a to unknown. The essential features of this bid for mastery of the state system.20 colossal power were limned by Alexander While conceding that universal empire Hamilton in the late 1790s, when he had a certain irresistible and siren-like ap- charged that France was making “hasty peal, the classical writers believed that the and colossal strides to universal empire.” enterprise would inevitably recoil upon its Revolutionary France, in Hamilton’s esti- authors. Universal empire was deemed not mation, had “betrayed a spirit of universal only a menace to others but also a threat to domination; an opinion that she had a its possessors. Montesquieu doubted that right to be the legislatrix of nations; that Louis XIV, accused “a thousand times...of they are all bound to submit to her man- having formed and pursued the project of dates, to take from her their moral, politi- universal monarchy,” had really done so; but cal, and religious creeds; that her plastic had the Sun King been successful in the and regenerating hand is to mould them pursuit of that objective, Montesquieu held, into whatever shape she thinks fit; and “nothing would have been more fatal to Eu- that her interest is to be the sole measure rope, to his first subjects, to himself, and to of the rights of the rest of the world.” Here, his family.” “Enormous monarchies,” wrote in capsule form, are all the essential symp- David Hume, “are, probably, destructive to toms of the dread disease, the historic human nature; in their progress, in their checklist for detecting the malady of uni- continuance, and even in their downfall, versal empire. Altogether familiar to inhabi- which never can be very distant from their tants of the twenty-first-century world is establishment.” Hume traced out, as had the charge that Hamilton brought against Montesquieu, a natural process by which ag- France, for it is the same charge now grandizement turned on itself: “Thus hu- brought against America. He traced this man nature checks itself in its airy eleva- spirit to “the love of dominion, inherent tion; thus ambition blindly labours for the in the heart of man,” reasoning that “the

6 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 2005 rulers of the most powerful nation in the Churchill once characterized as follows: “[To world, whether a Committee of Safety or a reclaim] from barbarism...a fertile region Directory, will forever aim at an undue em- and large populations.... To give peace to pire over other nations.” “The spirit of mod- warring tribes, to administer justice where eration in a state of overbearing power,” as all was violence, to strike the chains off the Hamilton nicely summarized the point, “is slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to a phenomenon which has not yet appeared, plant the earliest seeds of commerce and and which no wise man will expect ever to learning, to increase in whole peoples their see.”22 capacities for pleasure and diminish their Faced with such great concentrations of chances of pain....”25 Finally, the United power, the frequent recourse of many pres- States has an equivalent to Britain’s “gun- ent-day observers is to charge a sort of venal boats and Gurkhas” in the lethal combina- corruption in political leaders, explaining tion of U.S. airpower and local ground events with reference to private interests forces.26 (e.g., Halliburton) and presuming a thor- But there are differences. The United oughgoing cynicism in the powerful. In the States uses more ordnance in a single cam- view of our Enlightenment sages, however, paign than Britain used in epochs of imperi- this view may mislead. Asked by Thomas al rule; American empire is above all distin- Jefferson why all Europe had “acted on the guished by overwhelming displays of fire- Principle ‘that Power was Right’” during power in climactic battles of good against the Wars of the French Revolution and evil, whereas the British more often favored Napoleon, John Adams held “that Power al- parsimonious uses of violence and did not ways sincerely, conscientiously, de tres bon demonize the lesser breeds they sought to Foi, believes itself Right. Power always bring within the law. America’s appetite for thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, direct rule is far less than Britain’s once was. beyond the Comprehension of the Weak; Even as America looks to the overthrow of a and that it is doing God Service, when it is number of governments, it does not have a violating all his Laws.”23 An appreciation of vision of itself as a colonizing power. As the this point is necessary if we are to under- Iraq occupation demonstrated, it lacks the stand the nature of the phenomenon and to essentials of a colonial office (though it may see its possibilities for tragic denouement. acquire one speedily after digesting the “les- The new American empire is most often sons” of the Iraq experience). thought of as the heir to the British Empire, But the most dramatic difference be- and there are indeed remarkable similarities tween the two empires lies in the scale and between them. During and after the Cold dimensions of military power. Even in the War, the maps of U.S. military deployments heyday of the “Pax Britannica,” British land looked “extraordinarily similar to the chain forces were small; Bismarck famously of fleet bases and garrisons” once possessed quipped in the 1860s that if the British by Great Britain.”24 The American task of army landed on the Prussian coast he would regenerating the governments of the Middle have it arrested by the local police. Britain East certainly recalls Britain’s self pro- dominated the maritime sphere and was claimed “civilizing mission,” just as it re- sometimes denounced as a universal empire, calls the entry of British forces into Iraq in but its position in Europe was limited to the aftermath of the First World War. preventing one state from dominating the American neoconservatives like Max Boot continent, and indeed its special genius as a and liberal imperialists like Niall Ferguson moderating factor in the European system want a suitably modernized version of the was that it could help maintain the balance goals of British imperialism, which Winston but did not threaten it. In its aspiration to

The Curious Case of American Hegemony 7 achieve “full spectrum dominance” in every said it was “an empire in denial,” the “em- theater and over every combat arm, the pire that dare not speak its name.”27 United States today presents an entirely dif- The neoconservatives were themselves ferent and much more formidable picture. divided on how to handle this delicate prob- As such, the really salient comparison is not lem. One hemisphere of their collective to the overseas empire that Britain created brain said they should come out of the clos- but to the “universal empires” that a succes- et and admit ownership of (benevolent) em- sion of kings and dictators sought to build pire, but the other side objected heatedly to at the center of the international system, the imperial attribution. “How dare you call and which Britain over the course of cen- us an empire?” they sneered at liberal crit- turies was fated to oppose. ics. One-half of their collective cerebrum in- sisted that the removal of Saddam Hussein The Neoconservative Predicament was more important than international law, Despite uncanny resemblances, the depic- while the other half bristled at the assump- tion of the United States as making giant tion that the enterprise was illegal. One side steps toward universal empire meets resis- celebrated the Bush policy as a “new unilat- tance for a variety of reasons. For one thing, eralism,” whereas from the other welled up the Bush administration has explicitly dis- the accusation that foreign states were yet avowed the imperial ascription. “We have more guilty of the sin and that the United no empires to establish or utopias to pro- States was still the kingpin of coalitions. In mote,” Bush said. His national security ad- one part of their mind lay the firm convic- visor, Condoleezza Rice, declared flatly: tion that the Bush policy is revolutionary “The United States has no imperial ambi- and constitutes a dramatic break from the tions.” In hearings to confirm her nomina- past, whereas in another was the answering tion as secretary of state, Rice pledged to charge that everything Bush did was prefig- “unite the community of democracies in ured by previous administrations, who never building an international system that is respected international law and thought in- based on shared values and the rule of law” ternational institutions were a joke. and “to support and uphold the system of Robert Kagan’s perspicacious study, Of international rules and treaties that allow us Paradise and Power, also straddled this inter- to take advantage of our freedom.” At the esting divide. The brilliance of the account same time, the administration has made lay in the way that Kagan assessed norma- clear that these commitments to interna- tive commitments in relation to the power tional law and institutions did not cancel impulse. He skillfully wove his thesis that out or seriously constrain the Bush Doc- Europe and America had switched places, trine, and thus it is difficult to take them at with European statesmen of the early twen- face value. It was, indeed, the conjunction of ty-first century, in their support for interna- imperial aspiration and public denial, of act- tional law and institutions, sounding re- ing and talking like a duck while pretend- markably like American statesmen of the ing you weren’t one, that made writers em- eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But ploy artful circumlocutions for the thing though Kagan was willing to explain virtu- that lay before them. The most apt designa- ally all of Europe’s attitude in relation to a tions were those that played upon the gap psychology of weakness, he only went part between profession and practice. Thus, the of the way in ascribing America’s attitude to conservative thinker Clyde Prestowitz called the psychology of strength. The logical im- it “the unacknowledged empire” whose plication of this reversal of position is that recognition we are “frantically avoiding,” American statesmen should “feel power and and the British historian Niall Ferguson forget right,” as Jefferson thought the great

8 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 2005 imperial powers of his day had done. If The 18-minute speech setting the tone the Europeans now sounded like Melians, for Bush’s second administration provides should not the Americans sound like Athe- evidence for both viewpoints, though the nians? But Kagan would not draw this con- preponderant weight is in favor of the glob- clusion. “The United States is a behemoth alists. Bush acknowledges that spreading with a conscience,” he argued. “It is not freedom “is not primarily the task of arms, Louis XIV’s France or George III’s England. though we will defend ourselves and our Americans do not argue, even to themselves, friends by force of arms when necessary,” that their actions may be justified by raison which seems a bow toward Krauthammer’s d’état.”28 Though in Kagan’s estimation the democratic realism. This statement, how- United States inhabited a Hobbesian world, ever, does not exclude the possibility that in which force and fraud were the two cardi- freedom can be advanced through arms— nal virtues, and in which there was no jus- the fire America has lit, Bush also says, not tice or injustice, no mine and thine distinct, only warms those who feel its power but al- this lawless anarchy was also represented by so “burns those who fight its progress.” The him to be a resplendent order, such that the general line of analysis producing the con- rest of the world should offer gratitude to clusion that “our vital interests and moral the United States for its maintenance. Was purposes are now one” soars well beyond the it an unrestrained Hobbesian anarchy or a threat posed by “rogue states” and rests on peaceful world order? Kagan said it was the proposition that the United States can both. only be truly secure in a world made wholly These internal divisions of the neocon- free. The Second Inaugural does not man- servative mind are also on display in the date the use of force for these objects, but differing emphases placed on the two neither does it exclude the possibility. The great strategic innovations of the Bush six regimes mentioned by Rice in her con- Doctrine, the license given to preventive firmation hearings as likely to receive spe- war as a means of thwarting the acquisition cial attention were Cuba, Burma, North by rogue states of weapons of mass destruc- Korea, Iran, Belarus, and Zimbabwe.30 tion, and the pledge to make it “the policy How far the American Colossus will run of the United States to seek and support with its newly consecrated doctrines is the the growth of democratic movements and question of the hour, and I venture no confi- institutions in every nation and culture, dent prophecies on that score. Bush is clear- with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny ly unrepentant, but also blocked by various in our world,” which Bush unfolded in his exigent constraints. In keeping with many Second Inaugural. Here the ideological divi- classical critics of universal empire, some ar- sion is between “democratic realists,” who gue that the bid will be checked by the rise argue that the United States should only of a rival superpower or some kind of coun- engage in democratic liberation when its tervailing military coalition, but this seems putative vital interests are at stake, and unlikely. In contrast to such an “externalist” “democratic globalists,” who take seriously or “systemic” theory, the more fruitful line the mission embraced in Bush’s Second of approach is an “internalist” account in Inaugural. Both are imperial programs, which domestic weaknesses and contradic- though they differ in detail—the one urging tions are seen as the key variables that will focused strategic exertion in the broader drive change.31 Middle East, the other fully sharing this ob- jective but also intent on the end of history: The Limits of Military Power the destruction of tyranny throughout the It is upon the superiority of its arms that world.29 American empire rests today. The factors

The Curious Case of American Hegemony 9 that made for the preservation of Europe’s strong rapid deployment force), it is highly plural state system from the fifteenth cen- unlikely to form a military counterpoise to tury to the twentieth century—geographic the United States. This sort of doing is con- barriers, the relatively equal size of the par- trary to its being as an association dedicated ticipating units, the traditional maxims of to the peaceful settlement of disputes and European policy—have all been notably would almost certainly threaten its internal weakened in the contemporary period. balance. Europe and America, in short, are Against smaller powers, U.S. firepower is ir- condemned to a loveless marriage. Hating resistible in toppling regimes and forcing one another, but fearing divorce, they are enemies underground, since it can destroy unlikely to undergo a formal split. Even if everything that it can see, and this superior- this were to occur, Europe is most unlikely ity is especially marked when it can make to play the role of the challenging military use of allies on the ground who welcome aid hegemon. Its challenge is rather in all the against their historic oppressors. Whether other dimensions of power. the United States can create new political China is a much more likely candidate orders in places such as Afghanistan and as a military rival of the United States. In Iraq is still an open question, but its de- signal respects, it already is one. Here, too, structive capacity is not in doubt. American however, it is difficult to imagine that over strategic nuclear superiority will likely be the next two decades China would achieve further enhanced by yet more accurate offen- capabilities that would enable it to threaten sive capabilities and new defensive systems, war against the United States outside its and U.S. domination of the sea and air near abroad or to stand in relation to the lanes, and of space, seems assured for the United States as the Soviet Union once did. next generation. The Taiwan question remains potentially ex- The emergence of a global military rival plosive and could again become “the most to the United States is very difficult to en- dangerous spot on the planet,” but it is dif- visage, for the two most plausible candi- ficult to see any other Sino-American dis- dates, the European Union and China, are pute reaching a flammable point. The Unit- unlikely to contend for those stakes, and ed States will continue to enjoy escalation Russia, India, and Japan are “hinge powers” dominance but may lose military parity in rather than potentially opposing poles. the immediate theater (across the Taiwan The EU will balance against American Strait) as China builds its armed forces. Chi- power, as it ought to do, but its balancing na knows it would be madness to fight a will take a constitutional and not a military war with the United States but has made it form, consisting of verbal protests, refusals clear that Taiwanese independence is a red to “do the dishes” when the Americans line, and it may be that Chinese popular make a bloody mess of their meals, and an opinion is even more hawkish on this ques- insistence that Europe gets representation in tion than is the Chinese state. In the longer decision making if the United States wants run, it is evident that the management of it to share the burdens. The EU is likely to China’s rise by the United States (or shall exercise great influence on many issues in we say the management of the incoherent world politics, but in crucial respects the in- American hyperpower by China?) is a politi- ternal character of the EU forbids it from cal and military problem of the first order, creating a foreign security policy and de- and equally evident that historical prece- fense identity that would enable it to be a dents do not suggest a smooth adjustment. world power in the military sense. Even if it Given the compelling interests of both sides further develops its interventionary capabili- in the avoidance of war, it should not be be- ties (achieving or going beyond the 60,000- yond the wit of statesmen to manage peace-

10 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 2005 fully this power transition, but war cannot cess of American arms—their total breakage be excluded over the next several decades. of the Iraqi state—that instantaneously pro- The likely persistence of military unipo- duced the conditions of anarchy that so larity will encourage the continued use of badly prejudiced the possibility of a success- force by the United States, but affords no ful occupation. There has been frequent crit- guarantee that such uses will not meet with icism in the United States that the Bush ad- tremendous frustration. There is a kind of ministration has badly bungled the occupa- debility that attends the possession of so tion, and there are a litany of errors it is al- much power, for given sufficient time it will leged to have committed (such as invading expand to the margins of its capability. with too small a force, being unprepared for What there is to use, gets used. This is the the responsibilities and hazards of occupa- kernel of truth in offensive realism.32 The tion, disbanding the Iraqi army, proscribing defensive realist may object that military the Baath party). The deeper point, how- power is most effective in non-use, when it ever, may be that there is no way to conduct preserves order by the threat but not the use such an enterprise well. The Iraq experience, of violence, but practitioners feel a steady rather than attesting simply to the ideologi- urge to demonstrate credibility through the cal blinders of the Bush administration, may use of force. After the United States had attest more directly to the limitations of blown apart the Taliban’s rule over Afghan- military power as an agent of democracy and istan in 2002, it was seriously suggested liberalization.33 that American credibility would be de- The response of the imperial intellectu- stroyed if Washington failed to go to war als to such frustration is always: more effort, with Iraq. Was the war in Afghanistan an more staying power, more will. But what if impressive demonstration of American re- the problem goes beyond will? What if we solve? Yes, but it was not enough. Did the just don’t know how to conduct such enter- United States enjoy overwhelming military prises successfully, even if we had the will? superiority over Saddam? Yes, but we would Iraq has demonstrated with great clarity the not be safe until he was destroyed. The man old truth that it is easier to destroy than to from Mars, reasoning from eternal princi- build; all the “nation-building” expertise in ples, might assume that a condition of over- the world will get you nowhere if a raging whelming military dominance would be a insurgency takes as its fundamental objec- source of security for its possessors, but such tive the prevention of reconstruction.34 it did not prove to be. The unexpected duration and high com- Despite qualities that give its use a bat tempo of the Iraq war have also revealed siren-like appeal, military force is a blunt serious constraints on any future operation and demonic instrument, often carrying involving the use of large ground forces. states beyond where they want to go, and The Pentagon’s initial idea was to bring sometimes entirely incapable of achieving U.S. forces in Iraq down to 30,000 by the the mission it is assigned. It is one thing to fall of 2003, whereas they have stayed well say that we will bring democracy on the above 100,000 for the duration and reached wings of a military campaign to oust a terri- 150,000 on the eve of the January 30, 2005 ble dictator. It is quite another to actually Iraqi elections. The most serious price has do it. Though the campaign to oust Saddam been paid by reserve forces, which have con- Hussein was widely portrayed as “brilliant” stituted some 40–45 percent of soldiers and “flawless,” even by critics who conceded serving in Iraq. The result, according to the that planning for the postwar was little commander of the reserves, is a “broken short of disastrous, the two judgments, in force.” The condition of the American fact, cannot harmonize. It was the very suc- ground forces does not preclude the use of

The Curious Case of American Hegemony 11 air or naval power by the United States; tional territory stir us to anger and inspire nevertheless, the frustrations of the Iraq us to fight, but we do not understand that campaign and the pinched condition of U.S. the ranks of suicide bombers rise or fall in ground forces do foreclose alternatives that relation to our violent acts.37 The theorists undoubtedly seemed attractive to the Bush of overwhelming force (Victor Davis Han- administration in the confident days of son, Angelo Codevilla, Mark Helprin) are 2002. In the curt summary of Boston Uni- not altogether wrong in their beliefs: un- versity professor Andrew Bacevich, the se- doubtedly the hypertrophy of force in the quel to the conquest of Baghdad punctured Second World War created the necessary “the illusion that the world’s sole superpow- conditions for the successful rehabilitation er has reserves of power to spare. It doesn’t, of Germany and Japan. But this circum- not militarily, not financially and not mor- stance, so often invoked to justify the Iraq ally. Iraq has shown how narrow the margin war and occupation, in fact shows the limits is between global hegemony and imperial of the parallel. Considering the broader dan- overstretch.”35 ger of terrorist attacks on the United States Unipolarity, then, has its hazards. from scattered eruptions in the Islamic Among them is a kind of inexorable pres- world, there is no way to use force on a scale sure to continually demonstrate the efficacy that would achieve those sorts of effects, and of military power. On point is the maxim it would be criminal in any case to try. Even that became popular among critics during in Iraq itself, the war simply paved the way the Iraq war: “If all you have is a hammer, for suicide bombers and significantly ex- every problem looks like a nail.” Of course, panded the field of terrorist operations, cre- people are perfectly capable of seeing that ating the very danger the administration every problem is not a nail, but the realiza- went to war to prevent, but which did not tion has a habit of coming too late. Once exist until it went to war. In the broader Is- committed, the imperial power cannot lose. lamic world and in Europe’s Muslim com- It straps itself to the wheel, invests its re- munities, the suffering entailed by the war sources in projects that will demonstrate its played directly into the hands of Osama credibility, persists in enterprises that ought bin Laden. not to have been undertaken in the first The unnerving possibility is that Ameri- place but which, once undertaken, immedi- ca’s vast capacity for intervention, far from ately become vital interests whose sacrifice being a real shield against terrorist attack, is is unthinkable. It takes up enterprises, as basically useless against the most serious Bush has acknowledged, that are difficult danger that threatens us because it does not to achieve but would be dishonorable to add to our capability to intercept small abandon. groups plotting terrorist attacks. Worse, the The most paradoxical feature of the use of American power, with its brutalities American security situation is the simulta- shown every night on television to hundreds neous conjunction of immense power and of millions of Muslims, may at the same acute vulnerability.36 I do not think this re- time endanger us by adding to the likely re- lationship is adventitious. The nation has a cruits for terrorist attacks. Such are the ways true blind spot in understanding the effect in which “ambition blindly labours for the of American actions on others. It wants so destruction of the conqueror.” badly to believe in the rightness of Ameri- can actions that it simply loses the capacity The Sinews of Economic Strength to put itself in the shoes of the other and to Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great see things from his point of view. We un- Powers, published on the morrow of the derstand that terrorist acts against our na- great stock market meltdown of October

12 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 2005 1987, has often been mocked for its failure of the features of the American strategic to foresee the dramatic turnaround in the predicament that Kennedy pointed to economic fortunes of the United States that as worrisome have now returned with a occurred during the 1990s. Kennedy had as- vengeance under Bush. In 2005, as in 1987, sumed that America’s relative share of world we might also look back nostalgically on the output would continue to fall, going as low two decades after 1945, “when [the U.S.] as 16 percent; instead it rose to 32.3 per- share of global manufacturing and GNP was cent (calculated in current U.S. dollars) by much larger...its balance of payments were 2002.38 He had worried that the budget far healthier, the government budget was al- deficits would continue to grow, reflecting a so in balance, and it was not so heavily in larger strategic predicament in which power debt to the rest of the world.”41 After a rosy and commitments were out of balance; in- interlude in the 1990s, these adverse fiscal stead the United States managed to generate and trade imbalances now threaten the dol- budgetary surpluses in the late 1990s. He lar’s reserve status and pose serious risks for had assessed bleakly various trends that the world economy. America’s habits— would be damaging “in the event of another “rampant government borrowing, furious long-lasting, Great Power, coalition war.” consumer spending and a current-account The Soviet Union, of course, promptly dis- deficit big enough to have bankrupted any appeared. Instead of “imperial overstretch” other country some time ago”—reflect —a yawning gap between commitments deeply inappropriate behavior for the and power—there emerged a surfeit of guardian of the world’s reserve currency.42 power in relation to commitments, which Inescapable signs of serious economic in effect caused the latter to expand. In weakness emerged with the collapse of the 1987, Kennedy worried that spending 7.5 stock market bubble and were exacerbated percent of GDP on defense, which he regard- by the subsequent return of fiscal insolvency ed as the probable limit of public support, under the impetus of the Bush tax cuts and might not be enough to meet America’s spending increases. The budget deficit, pressing strategic liabilities. Fifteen years which was $412 billion in fiscal year 2004, later, writing in the Financial Times, he was in nominal terms the largest ever and dwelt on the amazing fact that America’s fell little short, as a percentage of GDP,of unprecedented strategic dominance could be the deficits produced by the Reagan tax cuts achieved by spending only 3.5 percent of of 1981. The Bush tax cuts produced a fed- GDP on defense. Critics called it a classic eral tax take of 16.3 percent of GDP in 2004, recantation. Kennedy, of all people, had but spending remained stubbornly high at finally thrown in the towel.39 19.8 percent of GDP. “Official projections The schadenfreude of the triumphalists, score the fiscal imbalance at a cumulative however, seems a bit premature. Though $5 trillion over the next decade,” writes Kennedy was wrong in certain respects, he the economist Fred Bergsten, “but exclude was undoubtedly right in the larger argu- probable increases in overseas military and ment of his study. The proposition that mil- homeland-security expenditures, extension itary strength ultimately rests on economic of the recent tax cuts and new entitlement strength is, after all, a sort of truism. Nor increases.” On current policies, as Bergsten was Kennedy wrong to insist that the health notes, the budget deficit could approach $1 of the economic organism rests on the need, trillion per year.43 The unwillingness to pay faced by every state, to balance its military for what it wants and to want only what it spending, its public and private consump- is willing to pay for is also apparent from tion, its investments for the future, and its the underfunding of the Bush Doctrine. levels of taxation.40 Most pertinently, many Two neoconservatives, who insist that “it is

The Curious Case of American Hegemony 13 impossible to have a Bush Doctrine world Yet more extraordinary than either with Clinton-era defense budgets,” estimate budgetary or energy imbalances has been the deficit at $100 billion a year, and it the growth of the U.S. current account would be undoubtedly larger yet if another deficit, which in 2004 reached $666 billion major war were to be launched in the next and 5.7 percent of GDP. Bergsten notes that few years.44 it is on track to grow to $1 trillion, or 9–10 These constraints should not be mis- percent of GDP, assuming (what is very un- construed; they are political, not economic, likely) no change in the value of the dollar. in character. The experience of the 1990s In its heyday, the British Empire exported shows that the structural gap between ex- capital from the metropole with as much fa- penditures and revenues can be overcome cility as today the United States imports without serious cost, and it is in any case capital from abroad. In the second quarter difficult to believe that the U.S. economy of 2003, the central banks of China, Japan, would tank even if federal tax revenues and Taiwan purchased 60 percent of the reached 25 percent of GDP. Still, Bush’s debt instruments offered by the U.S. Trea- sharp reduction in taxes is surely significant. sury. It is not farfetched to compare this de- If he is not willing to pay for his own doc- velopment with Britain’s liquidation of as- trine, who will be? One cannot know how sets to pay for the First World War, and it is the contradiction between big government pretty extraordinary that these capital im- expenditures and small government tax ports are greater in size than what America revenues is going to be resolved, only that spends on a defense establishment that lays it has to be addressed. Unless Bush reneges claim to an unprecedented global strategic on his promises regarding taxes, however, it superiority. will inevitably constrain the substantial in- The significance of the trade and current creases that neoconservatives believe are nec- account deficits is at the heart of specula- essary to fund the Bush Doctrine.45 tion about the future direction of the world American energy policy is also insol- economy and America’s relative share of vent. The “false arithmetic” that Jefferson world output. The gap, though exacerbated said was often employed to justify war is by the Bush economic policies, is not sim- nowhere more in evidence than in the pur- ply a function of them—the current account blind subsidization of cheap energy as a deficit reached $400 billion a year and over kind of birthright, an unhealthy appetite 4 percent of GDP in 2000—and seems, perfectly symbolized by the gas-guzzling somewhat mysteriously, to be a defining fea- and road-hogging SUV. Enormous as the ture of the age of globalization. Some say it costs of this are—oil imports well over testifies to the continued strength of the 10 million barrels a day, soaring trade United States as a haven for capital; others deficits, yearly expenditures of hundreds that it is a symbol of the most profound of billions of dollars on military enterprises weakness. Predictions that imbalances far to secure access to Persian Gulf and Central less severe than those now existing would Asian oil—the real costs do not get regis- inevitably produce a dollar crisis have rung tered in gas prices or computed in national out since the late 1980s and, until recently, policy, quite as if an accountant charged have proved incorrect, for the inflows of with balancing the books forgot to count capital kept coming. The decline of the dol- liabilities. The pattern, notes Clyde Pres- lar (35 percent against the euro from early towitz, “is to use as much as we want, pro- 2002 to late 2004) raises the question of duce as much as we can, and fight for the whether the wolf is finally at the door. right to do both with whatever military The most arresting thesis regarding the muscle it takes.”46 significance of these imbalances has been

14 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 2005 put forward by the French thinker Em- to make the choice between guns and but- manuel Todd, who argues that the difference ter, and in light of the insolvency that af- between what America makes and what it flicts its energy policy and its balance of takes has become a kind of imperial tribute. payments, here, certainly, “America is not From the amazingly productive and gener- as strong as she seems.” Multipolarity in ous country that emerged from the Second the economic dimensions of power is as World War, when it was truly the store- fixed as fate. house of the world, Todd argues, America has become increasingly parasitic, taking far The Importance of Being Legitimate more than it gives. Yet more arrestingly, If the analysis of American military and eco- Todd compares U.S. expansion since the end nomic power discloses signs of weakness, of the Cold War with the rapid expansion of the loss of confidence abroad in the legiti- Rome after the defeat of Carthage. Rome macy of American power is also quite seri- “collected taxes or tribute throughout its ous. The pattern of the first Iraq war, with a empire and was able to transfer to the cen- successful victory setting aside the reserva- tral capital massive quantities of foodstuffs tions of the skeptical, failed to emerge in and manufactured items. The peasants and the aftermath of the second. If anything, the artisans of Italy saw their economic base skepticism deepened. Approval ratings of disappear as this Mediterranean economy the United States plunged, especially in two was ‘globalized’ by the political domination regions where public support mattered of Rome. The society was polarized be- most: Europe and the Muslim world. tween, on the one hand, a mass of economi- There is no simple way of articulating cally useless plebeians and, on the other, a the complex bargains and beliefs that have predatory plutocracy.... The middle classes underlain the legitimacy of American collapsed.”47 power. America, it seemed, was a reluctant This portrait of simultaneous “economic superpower and had taken up its duties as globalization” and “class stratification” in a world power with the spirit of Cincinna- the ancient world is alarmingly familiar to tus, as ready to lay down as to take up the students of present-day trends in the world sword. America, it was thought, found no political economy. But the parallel, though glory in dominion, but took pride instead in instructive, has its limits. There is, after all, having subordinated its interest to a gener- a key difference between ancient and mod- ous view of world order, one that claimed ern times. Whereas the Romans claimed particular privileges for no state but that their booty of foodstuffs, slaves, and goods afforded equality of opportunity to all in by right of conquest, Americans exchange peaceful pursuits. The richness of its politi- pieces of paper bearing promises to pay in cal tradition, the way it had institutional- the future for the $600 billion trove of ized the pursuit of power and subordinated goods they take in over and above exports it to law, fitted the United States, as no every year. The Romans could quell rebel- other state, to be trusted with extraordinary lions through force, but this method is not power. This was a judgment not only widely particularly efficient against bond traders propagated by Americans themselves, but and currency speculators, nor even against accepted as containing a good deal of truth central banks. The expectation must be by many others. that these imbalances will be resolved by Confidence in that narrative has been a severe dollar crisis, not unlike the mone- shattered, and whether it can be regained is tary turbulence induced by the Vietnam an open question. From the spring of 2001 War and the “breakdown of the Bretton to the spring of 2003, favorable attitudes Woods system” in 1971. In its incapacity toward the United States plunged from 20

The Curious Case of American Hegemony 15 to 50 percentage points in countries across view, one of the vital pillars of the West- the world. In Indonesia, where one govern- phalian system, that the right of revolution ment official said Bush was “the king of the does not belong to outsiders. It accepts the terrorists,” approval ratings fell from 75 maxim of Alexander Hamilton, that “in pol- percent in 2001 to 61 percent in 2002 to 15 itics as in religion, it is equally absurd to percent in 2003. The loss of public approval aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. was no less evident in countries whose gov- Heresies in either can rarely be cured by ernments supported, rather than opposed, persecution.”48 the American war. In Spain and Italy, whom “Legitimacy” is part of what Joseph Nye Bush corralled into his coalition of the will- means by “soft power,” which he defines as ing, public opposition was just as strong as the ability to lead and persuade arising from in the “chocolate nations” of “old Europe.” “the attractiveness of a country’s culture, po- Even in Britain, which alone among the litical ideals, and policies.”49 But it is not coalition of the willing contributed signifi- quite the same thing. The dictionary defines cant numbers of troops to the Iraq war, dis- legitimate behavior as that “sanctioned by affection within the political establish- law,” and most of the judgments bearing on ment—left, right, and center—was pro- legitimacy are registered in solemn treaties found. In the estimation of the world, and compacts, such as those prescribing the America had become a rogue nation. The rules by which force must be justified or acts of war its own public opinion deemed those governing the conduct of military op- brilliant, just, and noble were seen else- erations (to take only one subset of what is a where as clumsy, illegal, and reckless. very large and complex terrain). Neoconser- The attitude of American officialdom vatives like Robert Kagan want to limit the toward the legitimacy problem is complex. reach of international law as a restraint on Certainly, it pays its rhetorical respects to American actions they deem necessary and the values embodied in multilateralism, in- virtuous, and hence they minimize the sig- ternational law, close consultation, partner- nificance of adherence to law as a factor in ship. This may be the tribute that vice pays bestowing legitimacy.50 But here, too, the to virtue, but it does throw a bright light neoconservative mind is divided. One side on where the sources of American legiti- says that legitimacy just isn’t worth a damn macy are seen to lie by officials. The admin- when it is provided by decadent Europeans istration does not want to offend these gods and corrupt U.N. bureaucrats, so to hell unnecessarily, but neither does it wish to with it. The other route—taken by the respect the constraints that they impose. Bush administration—solemnly vows to Undoubtedly this poses a dilemma for the abide by international law while farming Bush administration, though it seems likely out to its lawyers the task through skilful that whatever is deemed necessary for exegesis of bringing illegal acts within the U.S. national security will trump what is law. Probably the core conviction—and needed to restore U.S. legitimacy. This is so gamble—is simply that legitimacy can and whether preventive war or democratic liber- will arise from extralegal means. The Bush ation—or some weird mixture of both— vision supposes that the United States can proves to be the ground on which the issue forcibly create new democratic regimes in is fought. It is very difficult to believe that the place of tyrannies and that the world world public opinion would accept as legiti- will be forced to smile at the result, accord- mate a preventive war against North Korea ing to the process a retrospective but never- or Iran. Nor does it accept the proposition theless real legitimacy. It believes that it that it is legitimate to overturn a tyrant can get the rest of the world to accept the with external force. It takes the traditional proposition, in the words of the neoconser-

16 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 2005 vative polemicist Victor Davis Hanson, that surdity?” There are, however, powerful cul- “‘imperialism’ and ‘hegemony’ explain noth- tural forces that point in a contrary direc- ing about recent American intervention tion. By culture I don’t mean the appeal of abroad—not when dictators such as Norie- Hollywood movies and the American way of ga, Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam life, but rather the way in which Americans Hussein were taken out by the U.S. mili- typically reason about who they are, what tary. There are no shahs and Your Excellen- their purpose is, and why their enemies act cies in their places, but rather consensual as they do. Though some have pointed to governments whose only sin was that they the quest for unlimited economic expansion came on the heels of American arms rather as holding the key to American empire,53 than U.N. collective snoozing.”51 If that and others have seen it arising from the au- claim is good, the whole question of Ameri- tonomous imperatives of the military-indus- can legitimacy would indeed be trans- trial complex,54 the sustaining forces seem to formed; at the present time, however, the me to be primarily cultural in character, tenor of world public opinion is decidedly arising from powerful conceptions of self- against accepting any such narrative. Ameri- identity. It is the way we think about right can eloquence is unlikely to cure them of and wrong, not how we add up profit and the conviction that external invasion is not loss, that is the key variable. justified simply for the cause of deposing a The search for new markets and invest- tyranny.52 ment opportunities by avid corporations and Does it matter if the United States loses 401k rentiers may explain the lion’s share of legitimacy? What, after all, is it good for? America’s global economic policy, but the We are all familiar with instances where the infatuation with military power is owing to powerful escape punishment for wrongful deeper, if misguided, conceptions of national acts and where weaker actors have no choice role and purpose, akin to (and increasingly but to deal with the powerful even if they reinforced by) religious conviction. New regard the latter as making illegitimate de- Testament fundamentalism, overlaid by Old mands. It is nevertheless folly for any state Testament righteousness, sustains the con- to be careless of its reputation for lawful- viction of the United States as a new Rome ness, probity, and candor. The clinching ar- whose mission it is to punish the guilty, es- gument for its importance is the lengths to tablish absolute security through over- which states go to show that they occupy whelming military dominance, and revolu- the high ground of legitimacy even when it tionize the domestic order of refractory is obvious that they do not. That constant states. That messianic and Manichean per- activity to put a pretty face on motives that spective makes us blind to the misgiving are unavoidably mixed attests to the aware- and fears of others, incapable of understand- ness of political actors that they must con- ing how our way of war generates intense tend for this prize and that abject failure on resentment and hatred, and as ready to mis- this score can only produce nemesis. read enemy intentions as to view con- temptibly the advice of friends. The Way We Are There is a belief, not without some These military, economic, and political con- plausibility, that this is not the “real Amer- straints, each casting a formidable shadow, ica.” The British commentator Anatol point to the existence of serious obstacles to Lieven, in an otherwise harsh critique of universal empire, and might reasonably these cultural tendencies, argues that “while prompt a reiteration of Rousseau’s question: America keeps a splendid and welcoming “How could any man look such a project in house, it also keeps a family of demons in the face without instantly perceiving its ab- its cellar. Usually kept under certain

The Curious Case of American Hegemony 17 restraints, these demons were released by they are in the business of shaping new real- 9/11.” Lieven does not exactly say that these ities that break out of the constraints that demons are going to be swiftly restored to liberals and realists have identified. To go their former habitat, but his account does beyond the limits previously deemed pru- allow for that possibility.55 The distin- dent for the exercise of military power, such guished Australian analyst Owen Harries— as were registered in the Cold War strate- like Lieven a sharp critic of the Iraq war and gies of containment and deterrence, to load America’s new-found imperial ambition—is up the economic mechanism with debt on more optimistic. Though arguing that Iraq the theory that “deficits don’t matter,” to was a “misbegotten venture, wrongly con- challenge the fundamental bases for the le- ceived as well as incompetently implement- gitimation of force while asserting claims to ed,” and that the war is doomed to fail in eternal strategic preponderance, and to do terms of its declared objective, the creation all this with the conviction of utter righ- of a democratic Iraq, Harries nevertheless teousness—such traits seem inseparable insists that “the outcome of the Iraq war from the present governing consensus. will be a defeat whose good consequences Though Bush’s revolutionary vision has al- will outweigh its bad ones because it will ready collided with unwelcome and in- destroy illusions of omnipotence and restore tractable realities, it is boosted by a power- a sense of limits, restraint and balance to ful array of forces that seem like permanent American foreign policy.”56 One hopes that fixtures of American life. I do not know Harries is right in welcoming a coming how far this doctrine will run; my argument spell of moderation, but there is good cause is simply that the further it does run, the for thinking his expectation much too greater the risk to the nation’s security, optimistic. prosperity, and international legitimacy. With the outcome of the clash between this Dreams of the Future irresistible force and various immovable ob- Will the “Empire Bubble” look as absurd in jects highly uncertain, let us hope that the a decade or two as the “Tech Bubble” of the judgment America makes of itself in the fu- mid to late 1990s does now? Probably so. ture will not be that rendered by the stag in Are there good reasons for turning away Aesop’s fable: “I am too late convinced, that from strategies of domination and repression what I prided myself in, has been the cause and toward strategies of cooperation and of my undoing; and what I so much disliked reciprocity? Indubitably. Should we cast a was the only thing that could have saved skeptical eye on promises that preventive me.”57• war will solve our security problems? We should. Isn’t it high time to put our finan- Notes cial house in order and address the various 1. Michael Lind, foreword to Emmanuel insolvencies now embedded in national eco- Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the Ameri- nomic policy? Of course. Ought not we to can Order (New York: Columbia University Press, recognize that the restoration of legitimacy 2004), p. xii. See also Immanuel Wallterstein, “The will require a return to the constraints of Eagle Has Crash Landed,” Foreign Policy, July/August law and the practices of multilateralism? In- 2002. deed. Will any of these recommendations of 2. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the the “reality-based community” actually hap- Great Powers: Economic and Military Conflict from pen? This seems rather more doubtful. 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987); The neoconservative architects of Ameri- Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Na- ca’s universal empire like the dreams of the ture of American Power (New York: Basic Books, future better than the history of the past; 1990).

18 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 2005 3. Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield 15. “Jonathan Schell on the Empire That Fell of the Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), pp. 7–8. as It Rose,” August 19, 2004, at http://www. See also Samuel P. Huntington, “Coping with the tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1691. Lippmann Gap,” Foreign Affairs: America and the 16. For this definition of “empire,” see Paul World 1987/88; and James Chace, Solvency: The Price Schroeder, “Is the U.S. an Empire?” History News of Survival—An Essay on American Foreign Policy (New Network, February 3, 2003, at http://hnn.us/arti- York: Random House, 1981). cles/1237.html. 4. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great 17. As Daniel Deudney notes, Enlightenment Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001); Robert observers saw Europe’s resistance to universal empire Keohane, “International Institutions: Can Interde- as anomalous: “Other regions in Eurasia with compa- pendence Work?” Foreign Policy, no. 110 (spring rable sizes, populations, and levels of material civi- 1998), pp. 82–96. lization were tending to consolidate into region-wide 5. Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt,” New York universal monarchies (the Ottomans in the Near Times Magazine, October 17, 2004. East, the Moguls in India, the Manchus in China, 6. By breath I mean what the Chinese call chi and even the Romanovs in Russia)” (Bounding Power: —variously translated as life force or energy, which Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global seems a suitable metaphor for political culture. Village [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 7. On the “empire of bases,” see especially forthcoming]). Chalmers A. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Mili- 18. See Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: tarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic (New York: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. Metropolitan Books, 2004). On the displacement of 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, the State Department by the military commands, see 1995). Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities 19. François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge: Har- “On the Necessity of Alliances,” in Theory and Prac- vard University Press, 2002). tice of the Balance of Power, 1486–1914, ed. Moorhead 8. George W. Bush, State of the Union Ad- Wright (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1975), dress, January 29, 2002. p. 41. For further discussion, see David C. Hendrick- 9. Quoted in Steven R. Weisman, “Pre-emp- son, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Found- tion: Idea with a Lineage Whose Time Has Come,” ing (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), New York Times, March 23, 2003. pp. 40–46. 10. Quoted in Joseph Fitchett, “France Likely to 20. Alexander Hamilton, “The Stand IV,” April Suffer Reprisals from America,” International Herald 12, 1798, The Works of Alexander Hamilton, 12 vols., Tribune, March 15, 2003. ed. Henry Cabot Lodge (Boston: G. P. Putnam’s 11. Quoted in Nicholas Thompson, “John Sons, 1904), vol. 6, pp. 282, 285. The extent of ef- Bolton vs. the World,” www.salon.com, July 16, fective domination from the center in many once- 2003. existing overseas empires should also not be exagger- 12. Remarks by the President at 2002 Gradua- ated. Edmund Burke noted that “the immutable con- tion Exercise of the United States Military Academy, dition, the eternal law, of extensive and detached em- June 1, 2002. pire” was to govern with a loose rein in order to gov- 13. Charles Krauthammer, March 5, 2001, cited ern at all, to respect the “chains of nature,” to com- in Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, p. 321; Stephen Peter ply, to submit, to watch time (“Speech on Concilia- Rosen, “An Empire, If You Can Keep It,” National tion [1],” March 22, 1775, Edmund Burke on the Interest, no. 71 (spring 2003), p. 53. To similar effect, American Revolution: Selected Speeches, ed. Elliot R. see Niall Ferguson, “A World Without Power,” For- Barkan [New York: Harper & Row, 1966], p. 86). eign Policy, July/August 2004, pp. 32–39. Cf. the restrictive definition of empire in Philip 14. Timothy Garton Ash, Free World: America, Zelikov, “The Transformation of National Security: Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West (New Five Redefinitions,” National Interest, no. 71 (spring York: Random House, 2004), pp. 84–85. 2003), pp. 18–19.

The Curious Case of American Hegemony 19 21. David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political and induce fundamental change in Arab governments, no Literary, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty such regimes made the top six list. Classics, 1985 [1777]), p. 341; Montesquieu, The 31. For a similar distinction, see Charles Spirit of the Laws, ed., Anne M. Cohler, et al. (Cam- Kupchan, “Life after Pax Americana,” World Policy bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), book 9, Journal, vol. 16 (fall 1999). Kupchan argued that the chap. 7, p. 136; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Abstract of United States “will not be eclipsed by a rising chal- the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s Project for Perpetual Peace lenger, as is usually the case during transitions in in- [1756], Rousseau on International Relations, ed. Stanley ternational hierarchy. Instead, a shrinking American Hoffmann and David P. Fidler (New York: Oxford willingness to be the global protector of last resort University Press, 1991), pp. 62–64. will be the primary engine of a changing global 22. Alexander Hamilton, “The Warning I,” Jan- landscape.” For further elaboration, see Charles uary 27, 1797, Works of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 6, Kupchan, The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign pp. 233–34. See further Claes G. Ryn, America the Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-First Century Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Em- (New York: Knopf, 2002). Kupchan’s larger argu- pire (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, ment differs somewhat from my own, but this dis- 2003). tinction between systemic and internal drivers of 23. Adams to Jefferson, February 2, 1816, The change is important. Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon, 2 vols. 32. See Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Prince- 1959), vol. 2, pp. 462–63. ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 24. Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 33. See further David C. Hendrickson and p. 519. Robert W. Tucker, “Revisions in Need of Revising: 25. Quoted in Carnes Lord, “Dreams of Em- What Went Wrong in the Iraq War,” Survival, pire,” Claremont Review of Books, August 31, 2004. vol. 47 (summer 2005). 26. Bacevich, American Empire, pp. 141–66. 34. For a discussion of these limitations on mili- 27. Clyde Prestowitz, Rogue Nation: Ameri- tary power, see Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable can Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 35, citing Rein- (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003). hold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A 35. Andrew J. Bacevich, “Mr. Bush’s Grand Illu- Study of Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scrib- sions,” Los Angeles Times, February 19, 2004. ner’s Sons, 1932), p. 294; Niall Ferguson, Empire: 36. For frightening analyses of these vulnerabili- The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the ties, see Graham Allison, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ulti- Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, mate Preventable Catastrophe (New York: Times Books, 2003). 2004); and Stephen E. Flynn, America the Vulnerable: 28. Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power (New How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us from Ter- York: Knopf, 2004), p. 41. rorism (New York: Harper Collins, 2004). 29. For the distinction between “democratic re- 37. The most striking instance of this denial is alists” and “democratic globalists,” see Charles that the relation between the first Gulf War and Krauthammer, “In Defense of Democratic Realism: 9/11 should be a kind of forbidden topic. Because An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World,” 9/11 was not a justified retaliation, Americans want speech given at American Enterprise Institute, Wash- to say that it was no retaliation at all. As a matter of ington, D.C., February 12, 2004. human psychology, however, it seems indisputable 30. Doyle McManus, “Bush Pulls ‘Neocons’ Out that the 1991 Gulf War played an important role in of the Shadows,” Los Angeles Times, January 22, 2005. the inculcation of that implacable hatred that led to The omission of Syria from this expanded axis of evil 9/11. The use of American power in the region was is curious, since it has been the recipient of stern simply unprecedented. For the first time, the offshore U.S. threats in the recent past. Though it has been a maritime power made a huge commitment on land, pronounced focus of the neoconservative agenda to and used force on an extraordinary scale. The terrible

20 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 2005 suffering to both soldiers and civilians spawned by weight by Niall Ferguson put the net liability at $45 the war was the soil in which Osama bin Laden and trillion, of which about four-fifths ($36.6 trillion) al-Qaeda formed their hideous purpose, and it count- consisted in health-care liabilities and one-fifth ($7 ed at least as much as—I think more than—their ha- trillion) the deficit in the Social Security trust fund. tred of the Jews or their outrage over the defilement The conclusion that Ferguson and a colleague arrive of Saudi soil by American troops. The importance of at is that “the decline and fall of America’s unde- these visual images of destruction (especially Israel’s clared empire will be due not to terrorists at our 1982 shelling of Beirut and the 1991 Gulf War) is gates nor to the rogue regimes that sponsor them, apparent from bin Laden’s own commentary on his but to a fiscal crisis of the welfare state” (Niall Fer- motives. It is the spectacle of blood innocently guson and Laurence Kotlikoff, “Going Critical,” Na- spilled that gives men the most direct and persuasive tional Interest, no. 73 [fall 2003], pp. 22–32). This is motive for spilling innocent blood themselves. We extravagant. First, we must be very suspicious about need to understand this about our enemies and not the $45 trillion figure, which includes far too much read them out of the human race. in the way of pure guesswork and absurd extrapola- 38. Adjusted on the basis of purchasing power tions over a 75-year period to be useful. Second, parity, the U.S. share of world output in 2002 was President Clinton showed that there was a way to considerably smaller, at 21.4 percent. See Niall Fer- overcome the budgetary insolvency, and the methods guson, “American Colossus,” at http://www. he used might also be employed to address the im- channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/a-b/ balances in pensions and health care. Let us not con- American.html. fuse incapacity to address these deficits with the dif- 39. Paul M. Kennedy, “The Eagle has Landed,” ficulty, admittedly onerous, of reaching consensus on Financial Times, February 2, 2002; Charles Kraut- how to do so. Third, Europe, Japan, China, and Rus- hammer, “The Unipolar Moment Revisited,” Nation- sia also face profound demographic imbalances that al Interest, no. 79 (winter 2002/03), p. 5. As the eco- in some respects are even more acute than those of nomic historian Robert Higgs has noted, published the United States. It is thus improper to attribute estimates of defense spending do not count a variety much weight to this factor when speculating about of expenditures—e.g., the costs of the nuclear weap- the future distribution of world power. ons complex, military aid, veteran’s benefits, and the 46. Prestowitz, Rogue Nation, p. 105. interest on past defense expenditures financed 47. Todd, After the Empire, pp. 61–62. through borrowing—that clearly belong in this cate- 48. The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middle- gory. Higgs argues that the real defense budget is town, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), no. 1, nearly twice as large as the official published figures p. 5. (“The Defense Budget Is Bigger Than You Think,” 49. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to San Francisco Chronicle, January 18, 2004). Success in World Politics (New York: PublicAffairs, 40. See further Robert Gilpin, War and Change 2004). in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University 50. Robert Kagan, “America’s Crisis of Legiti- Press, 1981). macy,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 83 (March/April 2004). 41. Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, See also Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrick- p. 529. son, “The Sources of American Legitimacy,” Foreign 42. “The Disappearing Dollar,” Economist, De- Affairs, vol. 83 (November/December 2004), and cember 2, 2004. the subsequent exchange, Kagan, “A Matter of 43. Fred Bergsten, “The Risks Ahead for the Record,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 84 (January/February World Economy,” Economist, September 9, 2004. 2005), and Tucker and Hendrickson, “The Flip Side 44. Tom Donnelly and Vance Serchuk, “The of the Record,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 84 (March/April Military Needed for the Bush Doctrine,” Weekly 2005). Standard, November 29, 2004. 51. Victor Davis Hanson, “Cracked Icons: Why 45. On top of it all are looming deficits in old the Left Has Lost Credibility,” National Review Online, age pensions and health care. One study given great December 17, 2004.

The Curious Case of American Hegemony 21 52. Despite Bush’s invocation of the Founding themselves.” Some such doctrine—reinforced by the Fathers as sanctioning this enterprise, it was settled baleful experience of nineteenth-century European doctrine among them that going to war for the sake imperialism and the destructiveness of twentieth- of imposing one set of political institutions on anoth- century war—continues to express a basic consensus er people was an illegitimate exercise of force. Bush in most of the world. cites the Declaration of Independence to justify his 53. See Bacevich, American Empire, for a recent view that the United States is entitled to revolution- articulation of this view, which he associates with ize foreign tyrannies. But the self-evident truths of Charles Beard and William Appleman Williams. the Declaration—that all men are created equal and 54. The most chilling portrait is Chalmers John- are endowed by the Creator with natural rights to son, Sorrows of Empire. life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—did not 55. Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An justify, for the author of the Declaration, the proposi- Anatomy of American Nationalism (New York: Oxford tion that foreign states had any right to revolutionize University Press, 2004), p. 1. any existing political order, even a tyrannical one. 56. Owen Harries, “Iraq Is the Failure the US This was contrary to “the law of nature and nations,” Had to Have,” Sydney Morning Herald, January 7, which granted to every people the right to determine 2005. their own institutions. Thus Jefferson, expressing the 57. Aesop, “The Stag Looking into the Water,” hope that the governments of South America would in Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of adopt republican forms, nevertheless insisted that All Ages, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Scribner, “they have the right, and we none, to choose for 2001), p. 225.

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