An Erring Empire

The United States, then, is an empire—but a peculiar kind of empire. It is militarily and economically peerless. It has great, though not unbounded, cultural reach. Yet it has distinctive limitations. It is an empire based not on colonization, but on net immigration. There are also important limits to the way in which its wealth can be deployed. First, there is good reason to fear that, in the foreseeable future, the costs of the US welfare system—specifically, the systems of Medicare and Social Security—will begin to outstrip tax revenues. According to one recent estimate, the difference between the present value of all the federal government’s future liabilities and the present value of all its future tax receipts amounts to a staggering US$44 trillion. Only steep cuts in public expenditure or increases in taxation will enable the government to avoid a grave fiscal crisis.

Secondly, the prosperity of the United States has become heavily reliant on very large inflows of foreign capital. With the current account deficit rising above five percent of GDP last year, much (not least the exchange rate of the dollar) depends on the continued willingness of foreign investors to put their savings into dollar-denominated assets. Once again, the contrast between Britain in her imperial prime is pronounced. In the British case, net foreign investment was consistently positive between the mid 1870s and World War I, rising to a peak of nine percent of GDP in 1913. Moreover, the destinations of British overseas investment were very diverse: substantial shares flowed to those relatively poor countries in which Britain had a disproportionate strategic interest. By comparison, US citizens who invest abroad favor Europe (especially Britain) and the Pacific (especially Japan, Australia, and Hong Kong). Barely one percent of US Foreign Direct Investment goes to the Middle East, and even less (0.8 percent) goes to China. This is a far cry from the “dollar diplomacy” of the 1920s, when US loans to strategically important countries in Europe and Latin America played an important role in underpinning US foreign policy. Today, foreign investors are theoretically the ones who have leverage over the United States, since fully 40 percent of the federal debt in public hands is held by foreigners.

This is not to say that those pessimists are right who predict imminent relative decline for the United States. What it does mean is that the United States is not quite the hyperpuissance of French nightmares. And what it also means is that, in dealing with transnational threats such as terrorism, international crime, nuclear proliferation, and infectious diseases like AIDS or SARS—to say nothing of global warming—the United States can achieve relatively little by acting unilaterally. As surely as the continuation of international free trade depends on multilateral institutions, so too does the successful prosecution of the war against terrorism.

Does this mean that the United States is not, after all, an empire? On the contrary. As that great imperial statesman Lord Salisbury well understood, there was nothing more dangerous to a great empire than what he called, with heavy irony, “splendid isolation.” Then as now, the great Anglophone empire needs perforce to work in concert with the lesser—but not negligible—great powers in order to achieve its objectives.

Consider just one example. It is becoming abundantly clear following the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that the United States is not capable of effective peacekeeping—that is to say, policing—without some foreign assistance. Peacekeeping is not what US soldiers are trained to do, nor do they have much appetite for it. It also seems reasonable to assume that the US electorate will not tolerate US soldiers’ prolonged exposure to the unglamorous hazards of “low-intensity conflict,” with suicide bombers at checkpoints, snipers down alleys, and missile grenade attacks on convoys. The obvious solution is to continue the now well established practice of delegating peacekeeping to the United Nations and, under its auspices, to the US European allies. According to figures published in Foreign Policy magazine, the EU states contributed more than twice as much to UN peacekeeping operations as the United States in the years 2000 and 2001.

It is also noteworthy that EU states also contributed three times as much in effective aid to poor countries. Those, like Robert Kagan, who dismiss the Europeans as Kant-reading Venusians—as opposed to America’s macho Martians—overlook the crucial significance of Pluto in the process of “nation building.” Without hefty investment in creating the rule of law and priming the pump of economic recovery, countries like Afghanistan and Iraq will stagnate, if not disintegrate altogether. Unless the United States radically alters its attitudes toward peacekeeping and aid, it will have little option but to cooperate with the more generous Europeans. Unilaterialism, like isolation, is not so splendid after all. Indeed, it is seldom a realistic option for an empire.

Dangers of Denial

The Victorian historian J.R. Seeley famously joked that the British had “conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” In acquiring their empire, the United States has followed this example. Few Europeans today doubt the existence of a US empire. But as the German theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noted in 1960, Americans persist in “frantically avoiding recognition of the imperialism [they] in fact exercise.”

Does it matter? The answer is yes. The problem with an empire that is in denial about its own imperial nature is that it tends to make two mistakes when it chooses to intervene in the affairs of lesser states. The first is to attempt economic and political transformation in an unrealistically short timeframe. The second is to allocate insufficient resources to the project. As I write, both of these mistakes are being made in Iraq and Afghanistan. By insisting that US forces will remain in Iraq until a democratic government can be established “and not a day longer,” US spokesmen unintentionally create a powerful disincentive for local people to cooperate with them. Who in Iraq today can feel confident that, if he lends support to US initiatives, he will not simply lay himself open to the charge of collaboration when the US troops depart?