In short, in terms of military capability and economic resources the United States not only resembles the last great Anglophone empire but exceeds it. Nor are its goals so very different. In September 2002, the Office of the President produced a document on “National Security Strategy” that explicitly states that it is a goal of US foreign policy “to extend the benefits of freedom … to every corner of the world.” There are those who argue that such altruism is quite different from the more self-serving aims of British imperialism, but this betrays an ignorance of the comparably liberal ethos of the Victorian Empire. In any case, the National Security Strategy also asserts that the United States reserves the right, if the President should deem it necessary, to take pre-emptive military action against any state perceived as a threat to US security. If the US population still refuses to acknowledge that they have become an empire, the doctrine of pre-emption suggests—by way of a compromise—a possible neologism. Perhaps the United States today should be characterized as a pre-empire.

City on a Hill

One argument sometimes advanced to distinguish US “hegemony” from British Empire is qualitative. US power, it is argued, consists not just of military and economic power but also of “soft” power. According to Joseph Nye, “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness.” Soft power, in other words, is getting what you want without sticks or carrots. In the case of the United States, “it comes from being a shining ‘city upon a hill’”—an enticing New Jerusalem of economic and political liberty. Nye is not so naďve as to assume that the US way is inherently attractive to everyone, everywhere. But he does believe that making it attractive matters more than ever before because of the global spread of information technology. To put it simply, soft power can reach the parts of the world that hard power cannot.

But does this really make US power so very different from imperial power? On the contrary. If anything, it illustrates how very like the last Anglophone empire the United States has become. The British Empire, too, sought to make its values attractive to others, though initially the job had to be done by “men on the spot.” British missionaries, businessmen, administrators, and schoolmasters fanned out across the globe to “entice and attract” people toward British values.

These foot-slogging efforts were eventually reinforced by technology. It was the advent of wireless radio—and specifically the creation of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)—which really ushered in the age of soft power in Nye’s sense of the term. Within six years, the BBC had launched its first foreign language service—in Arabic, significantly—and, by the end of 1938, it was broadcasting around the world in all the major languages of continental Europe.

In some ways, the soft power that Britain could exert in the 1930s was greater than the soft power of the United States today. In a world of newspapers, radio receivers, and cinemas—where the number of content-supplying corporations (often national monopolies) was relatively small—the overseas broadcasts of the BBC could hope to reach a relatively large number of foreign ears. Yet whatever soft power Britain thereby wielded did nothing to halt the precipitous decline of British power after the 1930s.

This raises the question of how much US soft power really matters today. If the term is to denote anything more than cultural background music to more traditional forms of dominance, it surely needs to be demonstrated that the United States can secure what it wants from other countries without coercing or suborning them, but purely because its cultural exports are seductive. One reason for skepticism about the extent of US soft power today is the very nature of the channels of communication for US culture, the various electronic media through which US culture is currently transmitted tend to run from the United States to Western Europe, Japan, and in the case of television, Latin America. It would be too much to conclude that US soft power is abundant where it is least needed, for it may well be that a high level of exposure to US cinema and television is one of the reasons why Western Europe, Japan, and Latin America are on the whole less hostile to the United States than countries in the Middle East and Asia. But the fact remains that the range of US soft power in Nye’s sense is more limited than is generally assumed.

One important qualification applies. Whatever the critics of the United States may say, the United States is indeed a very attractive place—and its attraction extends far beyond the range of AOL-Time Warner and CNN. It is so attractive that millions of foreigners want either to visit the country or to move here permanently. In 2000, for example, more than 50 million people visited the United States, making it the world’s second most popular holiday destination (after France). That figure is more than double the approximately 20 million US citizens who traveled abroad on vacation. The United States also remains a popular destination for immigrants, with an annual net influx of around three people per thousand of population. Between 1974 and 1998, around 16.7 million foreigners came to live in the United States. About 26 million current US residents were born abroad, a number that vastly exceeds the four million US-born residents abroad. This is, of course, in marked contrast to the experience of Great Britain, which was a remarkable exporter of people throughout its imperial heyday. Between 1850 and 1950, nearly 18 million people left the British Isles.

But does this make the United States more or less powerful? Proponents of the “soft power” thesis argue that the very large numbers of foreign students who come to US universities act—unwittingly—as the agents of US empire when they return to their native lands, imbued with the distinctive value systems of the Harvard Business School or the Stanford Political Science Department. “The ability of the American empire to govern its domains,” argues James Kurth, “will depend upon its success in producing this distinct kind of immigrant/emigrant to serve as its distinct kind of imperial civil official.” There are two reasons why this seems over-optimistic. First, a substantial proportion of the foreign students simply never return home to spread the good news about US principles and practice. The second is that a very substantial number of the leading nationalists who opposed and ultimately supplanted British rule in both Asia and Africa were themselves the beneficiaries of British university education.