Is an imperial world order an attainable and/or desirable goal?

The question here is whether there has ever been an imperial world order in the sense of a single, global imperial order. Even at the height of its power, the British Empire covered only around 25 percent of the world’s land surface and population. From a historical point of view, there is a certain question mark over the very notion of an imperial world order.

What are the benefits of an American Empire in the 21st century? Which countries or peoples will benefit most?

From the point of view of our time, many people would dispute whether the United States is an empire or something more like a benign hegemon—but let’s just assume that it performs many of the functions that previous empires performed. The United States provides at least some of the underpinnings of an international order based on relatively free trade. It provides the international reserve currency in the form of the US dollar, and it provides a whole range of financial and accounting standards that are more or less adopted by countries that want to trade with the United States or attract US investment. So the United States provides a range of “economic public goods”—it is not just the United States that benefits from the existence of organizations like the WTO, which is in many ways an American creation, it is everybody who participates in that organization. Those are just the economic benefits.

If you then ask about the cultural benefits, the United States is providing a kind of global lingua franca. We call it English, but it is actually American. There is a kind of public good there, as people find it easier to communicate. We do not all need to approve of The Simpsons to recognize that there is a type of American popular culture adopted globally, which can be traced back to the older days of Hollywood and the export of jazz music. These are all parts of the cultural benefits that the United States provides.

Finally, there is the security dimension. The United States prevented the expansion of Soviet communism during the Cold War, and there is a sense in which the United States, as the dominant, preeminent military power in the world today, still has the potential to act against what we call “rogue regimes,” even if its performance in dealing with the rogue regime in Iraq has been rather disappointing. Those are the three main kinds of benefits that I think any empire would look to address: the economic benefits, the cultural benefits, and the military benefits or geopolitical benefits in terms of global security.

Let me stress that there are liabilities as well as assets in this balance sheet, and although the American Empire provides public goods, it also acts in its own self-interest. Its negotiations of trade agreements are advantageous to the United States, its export of culture is profitable to US producers of culture, and its military power is exercised primarily from the point of view of the American national interest. Like most empires, the United States is concerned as much with its own security as with the interests of other countries. Empires are not entirely altruistic; no empire in history has been entirely altruistic.

What are some of the costs of an American Empire, or of any empire?

The costs of empire are distributed between the rulers and the ruled. From a US point of view, it is quite expensive to maintain the largest military force in the world. Those Americans who serve in the military in places like Iraq and Afghanistan pay a cost that could be in terms of life itself. The taxpayers who foot the bill for the vast defense budget are also paying some of the cost of empire. But notice that the national security budget is now lower than the social security budget, so the American military empire is quite a cheap empire compared to the American welfare state. From the point of view of people outside the United States, however, the costs of American power are quite obvious: because US power is not terribly good at transforming countries from a state of misrule into a state of stability.

The US interventions over the last century have generally been quite poor. When the United States intervenes, it tends to have an unrealistically short timeframe for its interventions. We have seen it in Iraq, and it is not the first time it has happened. The United States intervenes, gets rid of the bad guys, and then does not quite know what to do with respect to building new institutions. The situation then degenerates into one that is actually worse than what prevailed before. We have seen this happening in earlier interventions in countries like Haiti, Nicaragua, and Cuba. So the cost of American empire for the rest of the world is essentially the ineptitude of American empire builders and the resulting inefficiencies that often accompany US interventions. The fact that the United States is quite bad at colonizing and transforming the states that it invades is not especially surprising since the United States is an empire in denial; it does not want to admit that it is engaged in the imperial business.

Why is it that the United States and the world in general are averse to the word “empire”? Should countries change their attitude toward the term?

I think the term "imperialism” is pretty radioactive because of the way that both Marxists and liberals used it in the past century to discredit the policies of empires. The term “imperialism” is a derogatory term designed to conjure up visions of entirely exploitative entities based on the plunder of subject peoples. Once imperialism entered the political discourse of the English and non-English speaking worlds, empire became a tainted term. The failures of empires of the 20th century are partly due to that change in perception.

In a sense, you cannot really turn it around, and for that reason I have argued that however benign an empire's function in the world order, nobody is going to be able to make it acceptable again as a political term. It is never going to be a label that is respectable, but that does not alter the fact that a nation can behave like an empire without actually calling itself an empire.