FIRST DRAFT – NOT TO BE REPRODUCED OR QUOTED WITHOUT THE AUTHOR’S PERMISSION ‘American Primacy and Its Discontents: Reflections on an Empire in Denial’ (Harvard University, September 23, 2003) Niall Ferguson Herzog Professor of Financial History Stern School of Business New York University Senior Research Fellow Jesus College Oxford University Ferguson, Empire American Primacy and Its Discontents Al Jazeera: Would it worry you if you go by force into Iraq that this might create the impression that the United States is becoming an imperial, colonial power? Rumsfeld: Well I’m sure that some people would say that, but it can’t be true because we’re not a colonial power. We’ve never been a colonial power. We don’t take our force and go around the world and try to take other people’s real estate or other people’s resources, their oil. That’s just not what the United States does. We never have and we never will. That’s not how democracies behave. That's how an empire-building Soviet Union behaved but that’s not how the United States behaves. Interview with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Al Jazeera.1 They played a lot of Risk, the board game where color-coded armies vied to conquer the world. It took hours, so it was great for killing time. Private First Class Jeff Young ... was so good at it that the other guys formed coalitions to knock him out first. Black Hawk Down2 I It used to be that only critics of American foreign policy referred to the ‘American Empire’. During the Cold War, of course, both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China harped incessantly on the old Leninist theme of Yankee imperialism, as did many Western European, Middle Eastern and Asian writers, not all of them Marxists.3 But their claim that overseas expansion was inspired by sinister corporate interests was not so very different from the indigenous American critiques of late- nineteenth and early twentieth-century overseas expansion, whether populist, progressive or socialist.4 In the 1960s these critiques fused to produce a new and influential historiography of American foreign policy usually referred to as ‘revisionism’.5 Historians like Gabriel and Joyce Kolko argued that the Cold War was the result not of Russian but of American aggression after 1945, an argument made all the more attractive to a generation of students by the contemporaneous war in Vietnam – proof, as it seemed, of the neo-colonial thrust of American foreign policy.6 The reassertion of American military power under Ronald Reagan prompted fresh warnings against the ‘imperial temptation’.7 This tradition of radical criticism of American foreign policy shows no sign of fading away. Its distinctive, anguished tone continues to emanate from writers like Chalmers Johnson, William Blum and Michael Hudson,8 echoing the strictures of an earlier generation of anti-imperialists (some of whom are themselves still faintly 1 Ferguson, Empire audible).9 Yet criticism of American empire was never the exclusive preserve of the political Left. In the eyes of Gore Vidal, the tragedy of the Roman Republic is repeating itself as farce, with the ‘national-security state’ relentlessly encroaching on the prerogatives of the patrician elite to which Vidal himself belongs.10 Meanwhile, far to the Right, Pat Buchanan continues to fulminate in the archaic isolationist idiom against East Coast internationalists intent on entangling the United States – against the express wishes of the founding fathers – in the quarrels and conflicts of the Old World. In Buchanan’s eyes, America is following not the example of Rome but that of Britain, whose empire she once repudiated but now imitates.11 Other, more mainstream conservatives – notably Clyde Prestowitz – have also heaped scorn on ‘the imperial project of the so-called neo- conservatives’.12 Recently, however, a growing number of commentators have begun to use the term ‘American empire’ less pejoratively, if still ambivalently,13 and in some cases with genuine enthusiasm. Speaking at a conference in Atlanta in November 2000, Richard Haass – who went on to serve in the Bush administration as director of policy planning in the State Department – argued that Americans needed to ‘re-conceive their global role from one of traditional nation-state to an imperial power’, calling openly for an ‘informal’ American empire.14 This was, at the time, bold language: it is easy to forget that during the 2000 presidential election campaign it was George W. Bush who accused the Clinton-Gore administration of undertaking too many ‘open-ended deployments and unclear military missions’.15 As Thomas Donnelly, deputy executive director of the Project for the New American Century, told the Washington Post in August 2001: ‘There’s not all that many people who will talk about it [empire] openly. It’s discomforting to a lot of Americans. So they use code phrases like “America is the sole superpower.”’ 16 Such inhibitions seemed to fall away in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In a seminal article for the Weekly Standard – published just a month after the destruction of the World Trade Center – Max Boot explicitly made ‘The Case for an American Empire’. ‘Afghanistan and other troubled lands today’, Boot declared, ‘cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.’17 When his history of 2 Ferguson, Empire America’s ‘small wars’ appeared the following year, its title was taken from Rudyard Kipling’s notorious poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ – written in 1899 as an exhortation to the United States to turn the Philippines into an American colony.18 The journalist Robert Kaplan also took up the imperial theme in his book Warrior Politics, arguing that ‘future historians will look back on 21st-century United States as an empire as well as a republic’.19 ‘There’s a positive side to empire,’ Kaplan argued in an interview: ‘It’s in some ways the most benign form of order.’20 Charles Krauthammer, another conservative columnist, detected the change of mood. ‘People’, he told the New York Times, were ‘now coming out of the closet on the word “empire”.’21 ‘America has become an empire,’ agreed Dinesh D’Souza, a Fellow at the Hoover Institution, in the Christian Science Monitor; but happily it is ‘the most magnanimous imperial power ever’. His conclusion: ‘Let us have more of it.’22 Writing in Foreign Affairs in 2002, the journalist Sebastian Mallaby proposed American ‘neo-imperialism’ as the best remedy for the ‘chaos’ engendered by ‘failed states’ around the world.23 One reading of Michael Ignatieff’s recent critique of American ‘nation-building’ in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan is that it has not been not sufficiently imperialistic to be effective.24 While Mallaby and Ignatieff are perhaps best described as liberal interventionists – proponents of what Eric Hobsbawm has sneeringly dismissed as ‘the imperialism of human rights’ – the majority of the new imperialists are neo-conservatives, 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 of Swarthmore College in a special ‘Empire’ issue of the National Interest, ‘the global empire of the United States. The U.S. military ... are the true heirs of the legendary civil officials, and not just the dedicated military officers, of the British Empire.’25 Speaking on Fox News in April 2003, the editor of the Weekly Standard, William Kristol declared: ‘We need to err on the side of being strong. And if people want to say we’re an imperial power, fine.’26 That same month, the Wall Street Journal suggested that the British naval campaign against the slave trade in the mid nineteenth century might provide a model for American policy against nuclear proliferation.27 Max Boot even called for the United States to establish a Colonial Office, the better to administer its new possessions in the Middle East and Asia.28 3 Ferguson, Empire Within the Pentagon, the figure most frequently associated with the ‘new imperialism’ is Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who first won notoriety – as Under- Secretary of Defense under the current president’s father – by arguing that the aim of U.S. policy should be to ‘convince potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests’.29 That line, so controversial when it was written back in 1992, now seems remarkably tame. Nine years later, the Office of the Secretary of Defense organized a Summer Study at the Naval War College, Newport, to ‘explore strategic approaches to sustain [U.S. predominance] for the long term (~50 years)’, which explicitly drew comparisons between the U.S. and the Roman, Chinese, Ottoman and British empires.30 Such parallels clearly do not seem outlandish to senior American military personnel. In 2000 General Anthony Zinni, then Commander in Chief of U.S. Central Command, told the journalist Diana Priest that he ‘had become a modern-day proconsul, descendant of the warrior- statesman who ruled the Roman Empire’s outlying territory, bringing order and ideals from a legalistic Rome’.31 It is hard to be certain that this was irony. Officially, to be sure, the United States remains an empire in denial.32 Most politicians would agree with the distinction drawn by the historian Charles Beard back in 1939: ‘America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America.’33 Richard Nixon insisted in his memoirs that the U.S. 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.