American Realism versus American Imperialism
Campbell Craig
World Politics, Volume 57, Number 1, October 2004, pp. 143-171 (Review)
Published by Cambridge University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/wp.2005.0010
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/185503
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Review Article
AMERICAN REALISM VERSUS
AMERICAN IMPERIALISM
By CAMPBELL CRAIG*
Niall Ferguson. Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. New York: Penguin,
2004, 384 pp.
Chalmers Johnson. The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of
the Republic. London: Verso, 2004, 389 pp.
Michael Mann. Incoherent Empire. London: Verso, 2004, 276 pp.
Absence of threat permits policy to become capricious.
—Kenneth Waltz
ORLD politics today appear to be defying basic assumptions of
American international relations realism. American realists believe that international relations are dominated by a political power
struggle among sovereign nation-states. These states must rely on their
own devices to survive this struggle, which they attempt to do by acquiring economic and military power. Realists stipulate that the anarchical international condition formed by this state security seeking is
difficult or even impossible to overcome.1
W
* I would like to thank Alexander Wendt, Fredrik Logevall, Bill Wohlforth, Chris Preble, and three
anonymous reviewers for their comments on this piece, Brian Cuddy for his comments and research
assistance, and International Security Studies at Yale University for tremendous institutional and financial support. I am also grateful to Miguel Centeno at Princeton University’s Institute for International and Regional Studies, Bob Pape at the University of Chicago’s Program in International
Security Policy, and Marilyn Young at New York University’s International Center for Advanced Studies for inviting me to give talks related to this article.
Epigraph. Kenneth Waltz, “Structural Realism after the Cold War,” in G. John Ikenberry, ed., American Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 53.
1
For standard definitions, see Jack Donnelly, Realism and International Relations (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Torbjorn Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory,
2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). This brief description excludes a new variant of American realism, the “nuclear one-worldism” proposed by Daniel Deudney. See Deudney, “Nuclear Weapons and the Waning of the Real-State,” Daedalus 125 (Spring 1995). We will return to his
version of realism at the end of this article.
World Politics 57 (October 2004), 143–71
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Many American realists, following the trail blazed by Kenneth
Waltz, have tried to adopt an objective approach to their subject, eschewing moral assessments of international relations and foreign policies in favor of positivist analysis of interstate systems. Their realism
nevertheless is driven by clear normative concerns,2 as they have usually sought to promote foreign policies or at least political worldviews
that enhance international security and order for the purpose of avoiding major war. Believing that insecurity and fear are the root causes of
conflict and war, American realists have consistently over the past half
century advocated policies and ideas designed to reduce the insecurity
of both the United States and its adversaries. A textbook example is the
widespread realist endorsement, led by the political scientist Robert
Jervis, of mutual assured thermonuclear destruction during the cold
war.3 For “classical” American realists such as Reinhold Niebuhr,
George Kennan, and Hans Morgenthau, international security was always an overt normative objective and an explicit goal in their writings
and politics. For neorealists like Kenneth Waltz, it has tended to be a
more tacit aim, quietly driving their ostensibly positivist analysis. The
tragic view of realists has come from their paradoxical conviction that
the major war they seek to prevent derives from an international anarchy that can never be overcome.
The general course of international politics since the end of the cold
war and, more recently, the foreign policy undertaken by the United
States since the September 11, 2001, attacks verge on the inexplicable
to American realists. They find they cannot easily account for the continuing and so far unchallenged unipolar dominion over international
politics wielded by the United States. Realists have argued at great
length that nations invariably seek to attain enough military power to
allow them to contend with potential rivals, yet over the past decade no
nation, nor even any bloc of nations, has even tried to match American
military predominance.4 Realists have been even more puzzled by the
2
The conflict in American realism between descriptive analysis and normative judgment of international politics is acute. For further discussion of this problem, see Campbell Craig, Glimmer of a New
Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), chaps. 6–7.
3
Jervis, The Meaning of the Thermonuclear Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).
4
A realist explanation of unipolarity is William C. Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World,”
in Ikenberry (fn. 1), 98–118. Wohlforth argues that “the concentration of capabilities in the United
States passes the threshold at which counterbalancing becomes prohibitively costly, and thus the dominant strategy for other powers is some form of engagement.” This insight informs my discussion of realism below. For standard realist discussion of the balance of power and its recurrence throughout time,
see Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948); and Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979).
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recent foreign policies of the current Bush administration. Indeed,
America’s most prominent realists—now happy to engage in normative
policy advocacy—have been sharply and publicly critical of U.S. foreign
policy.5 Realists favor a stable world in which every state rationally
seeks security for itself. This, however, does not appear to be the objective of the Bush administration: in both word and deed, the United
States has demonstrated a clear willingness to pursue goals well beyond
that of basic national security and has done so with apparent disregard
for the insecurities of its adversaries. It has exhibited few qualms about
alienating large nations and/or traditional allies like France, Canada,
and Indonesia and has waged a protracted and expensive war in Iraq for
reasons that do not seem even remotely related to the pursuit of national survival. The nation, in other words, is doing things that most realists would argue no rational great power would do.
What, then, has happened to the great realist consensus of the cold
war? As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has pointed out, the foundations of
U.S. success in its confrontation with the Soviet Union were the twin
realist pillars of containment and deterrence: defensive measures both
of them, designed explicitly to attain security for the United States and
its primary allies without so frightening the Russians as to instigate
World War III.6 Schlesinger, along with his fellow realist cold warrior
the late George Kennan, believes that American foreign policy has
been taken over by expansionists dangerously dismissive of the caution
and prudence that were the hallmarks of traditional realism. Kennan
was particularly critical of the Bush administration, asserting that the
war in Iraq “bears no relation to the first war on terrorism,” describing
the administration’s attempt to make that connection “pathetically unsupportive and unreliable” and denouncing the weak Democratic resistance to that war as “shabby and shameful.”7
How may we define this new American behavior? All three of our
authors use the word empire, but, as we shall explore, the term is one
that demands precise definition. Most Americans have long regarded
their country as anti-imperialist. It was founded in explicit rebellion
against the British Empire, and during the twentieth century the
5
For realist criticism of recent foreign policy, see Nicholas Lemann, “The War on What?” New
Yorker (September 16, 2002); David C. Hendrickson, “A Dissenter’s Guide to Foreign Policy,” World
Policy Journal 21 (Spring 2004), 102–11; and “The Perils of Occupation,” article posted on the Web
site of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, October 28, 2004; www.realisticforeignpolicy.org/.
This latter article was signed by every prominent American realist scholar of whom I am aware.
6
See Schlesinger, War and the American Presidency (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).
7
“At 98, veteran diplomat declares Congress must take lead on war with Iraq,” interview with Albert Eisele, The Hill, September 25, 2002.
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United States watched the demise of a succession of old European empires, from Wilhelmine Germany to Soviet Russia, amidst a consistent
refrain of anti-imperial rhetoric issued by American statesmen like
Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. Yet over the past few years
American behavior toward the rest of the world has undeniably
changed. The United States has shown itself much less interested in
consulting erstwhile allies before taking unilateral action. Further, it has
moved to secure for itself effective control over powerful international
institutions, such as NATO, the International Monetary Fund, and the
World Bank, while simultaneously ignoring other institutions, such as
the United Nations Security Council, when it has seen fit. Indifferent
to the dissent of traditional allies, America chose to wage war upon
Iraq, for declared reasons that have come to appear dubious. Perhaps
most striking has been the language issuing from Washington in justification of these new policies: many writers associated with the current
administration, like the imperialists of Rome and London before them,
are beginning to speak of a Pax Americana, of a world that is to be governed by the United States whether it likes it or not.8
Is the United States really an empire? How do its expansionistic
policies resemble and differ from those of previous empires? Is there an
alternative to Pax Americana in the foreseeable future? For the realist
desirous of a more stable world order, these are central questions indeed. Chalmers Johnson, Michael Mann, and Niall Ferguson provide
troublesome answers.
As their titles suggest, the books by Johnson and Mann are similar in
their thoroughgoing despair over the recent expansionism of the
United States. Both books demonstrate how radically the Bush administration has departed from the relatively prudent tradition of cold war
realism. But neither book shows clearly why this is imperialism and, if
it is, what can be done about it.
Johnson’s book, The Sorrows of Empire, is largely an account of the
massive physical expansion of the American military to every corner of
the world. The American empire, he writes, is not an empire of colonial
8
In 2002 at West Point President Bush stated: “We will defend the peace against threats from terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. And
we will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent. Building the just
peace is America’s opportunity and America’s duty”; “Remarks by the President at 2002 Graduation
Exercise of the United States Military Academy,” June 1, 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/
releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html. A report of the Project for the New American Century, which is
closely linked to members of the current administration, noted that the strategic goal of the twentyfirst century is to “preserve Pax Americana,” and that “the failure to prepare for tomorrow’s challenges
will ensure that the current Pax Americana comes to an early end”; Rebuilding America’s Defenses:
Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, September 2000, www.newamericancentury.org/
RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf, 2, 13.
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territories but an “empire of bases” (p. 23). The United States has chosen to project its power overseas not by establishing colonial governments and cultivating a metropolitan imperium but by sending
American troops to lavish military bases built on every piece of foreign
territory it can get its hands on. The face of American empire, Johnson
writes, is not of a colonial governor or even of a mercantilist trader: it is
of a nineteen-year-old GI, ignorant of the local language and culture,
indifferent to the larger justifications of the American presence there,
eager above all else to return home. The growing resentment of local
populations—infuriated by drunken American soldiers, the appropriation of their countryside for luxury quarters and golf courses, and numerous other grievances cataloged by Johnson—represents the real
“blowback” of modern American empire.
In what is perhaps his most compelling point, Johnson stresses that
the United States has expanded its empire of bases despite the end of
the cold war and the absence of any maritime rival. Overseas bases and
deployments have always been the first line of defense for large nations
contending with one another in colonial territories or on the high seas.
But with whom is the United States contending? The development of
American bases and military installations on every continent and in
more than one hundred countries cannot have anything to do with defense, at least as the term has been traditionally defined. Johnson provides a stark portrayal of this American expansionism.
Johnson’s account of America’s expanding militarism after the end of
the cold war is instructive and also troubling in its lengthy accounts of
boorish and arrogant American behavior abroad. But the larger thesis
has flaws. First, Johnson has had the misfortune to advance an argument that the United States is addicted to the expansion of military
bases and occupation of foreign lands just as the government has announced a large demobilization of occupying forces in South Korea and
Germany.9 Johnson has to account for this, as he must account for the
recent evacuation of American forces from Saudi Arabia, something he
does not do in his book. Certainly the Department of Defense has chosen to remove troops and bases from Germany and Korea because it
needs them for possible duty in the Middle East. Whether one agrees
or disagrees with that policy, it is difficult to argue with the contention
that the current administration favors concentration of forces in the
Middle East over the willy-nilly projection of American troops and
bases everywhere possible.
9
“A Pentagon Plan Would Cut Back G.I.’s in Germany,” New York Times, June 4, 2004; “U.S. May
Cut Third of Troops in South Korea,” New York Times, June 8, 2004; “In Agreement with South Korea,
U.S. to Move Troops From Seoul,” New York Times, July 24, 2004.
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A deeper problem, however, is Johnson’s blurring of cause and effect.
What explains the nature of American military expansion, the addiction to
occupation and bases that Johnson decries? Johnson presents compelling
explanations of American expansion, such as access to oil and cultural aggrandizement, but then concludes that the real culprit is “the post–Cold
War discovery of our immense power, rationalized by the self-glorifying
conclusion that because we have it we deserve to have it” (p. 211).
This is a description of a mentality in American foreign policy that
begs for a deeper source, some larger economic, cultural, or political
force. But Johnson sticks with his argument that militarism is the
source of American economic and cultural expansion, rather than the
other way around. He gives himself another chance to address this issue
when he turns to the origins of the recent war in Iraq. His withering
critique identifies three political forces behind the push for war: the oil
lobby, the pro-Israel lobby, and the advantages of war for the purposes
of domestic politics. Having gone over these factors in close detail,
Johnson nevertheless decides that
it would be hard to deny that oil, Israel, and domestic politics all played crucial
roles in the Bush administration’s war against Iraq, but I believe that the more
encompassing explanation for our second war with Iraq is no different from that
for our wars in the Balkans in 1999 or in Afghanistan in 2001–02: the inexorable pressures of imperialism and militarism. (p. 236)
This reveals a descent into reductionism. If such an impulse—“the
inexorable pressures of imperialism and militarism”—is indeed meant to
explain everything, Johnson must develop a deductive argument showing
how the logic of militarism accounts for the wide range of American decision making, how it quietly drives policies and actions that appear to
most of us to have other motivations behind them. Otherwise, he is making a reductionist argument: for how can militarism explain both the war
in Iraq and the decision to quit South Korea and Germany? The important indictment of American military expansionism that Johnson details in Sorrow’s Empire is diminished by the lack of rigor in spelling out
whether American militarism is a manifestation of empire or its basis.
Michael Mann’s case against American imperialism is more clearly
advanced, if, in the end, equally frustrating. American empire, he argues, is irrational: “incoherent,” as his title suggests. This incoherence
manifests itself in an “overconfident, hyperactive militarism that will
soon destroy it” (pp. 15–16). Oddly, for a sociologist, Mann seeks no
deep cause of this incoherence. Rather, it is beyond analysis. He implies
that this irrationality can be contrasted with more coherent empires of
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the past, such as that of Great Britain—a position that lands him in
methodological hot water.
A scholar of imperial patterns throughout history, Mann is well poised
to assess the American empire in comparative light. He argues that empires employ four means of domination: military, economic, political, and
ideological. In each case, Mann suggests, the American form of imperial
domination is incoherent—difficult to understand. Agreeing substantially with Johnson, he sees the military component of American empire as heavy-handed and ineffective. Nuclear weapons, he argues, are
unsuitable for imposing imperial rule, and American conventional
forces, as vast as they are, are nevertheless too small to govern the
planet. This quandary explains the U.S. decision simply to deploy
troops to as many locations as possible, rather than use its most powerful weapons to subdue its dominions or, as was the case with previous
empires, to engage in the serious imperial work of pacification and sustained military domination. In the light of the American experience in
Iraq, Mann’s evocation of European imperial practice is worth quoting:
The officers were relaxed about their personal safety, sipping their whiskey and
soda and gin and tonic in full view of the natives. The garrisons were not fortified against all natives, for they comprised most of their inhabitants—NCOs and
soldiers, servants, stable-hands, drivers, and sometimes their families. All over
the Empires, the soldiers would routinely leave the barracks on patrols and
“shows of force” throughout the colony. . . . Americans would be appalled by the
brutalities which British and Belgian imperial forces inflicted when encountering resistance. But that is how real Empires were ruled. (p. 27)
The political and economic components of American empire, Mann
continues, are shaped by an irrational, inexplicable public culture. Imperialism is about maximizing the power of the empire, presumably, yet the
bizarre nature of American public policy, Mann suggests, seems to strain
against American interests overseas at every turn. The insatiable American
desire for ever more consumption, a desire few politicians are ready to
challenge, has led the government to finance its military spending and tax
cuts by increasing the national debt, which is financed increasingly by
overseas investment. What kind of empire allows the “barbarians” to become its creditors? Soon, Mann predicts, American insolvency will topple the empire. As Asian savers acquire more and more of the American
spenders’ debt, the moment of reckoning will arrive: either the United
States will face bankruptcy or it will have to agree to Chinese terms.10
10
We will discuss the connections between American economic insolvency and imperialism further, below.
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American imperial politics are even less rational. Mann focuses at
length on the special relationship between the United States and Israel,
which he, like his fellow Briton Niall Ferguson, finds difficult to comprehend. Much of the Bush administration’s policy toward the Middle
East, he shows, has been articulated by advisers with clear, undisguised
links to the right-wing Likud Party of Israel. Bush has routinely sided
with the Likud prime minister Ariel Sharon on various issues, ranging
from Sharon’s abrogation of the “road map” peace process, to his policies of targeted killings and collective punishment, to his desire to see
Iraq and Iran deprived of weapons of mass destruction and serious regional power. This is so, Mann argues, even though Israel provides no
obvious strategic benefit to the United States. “U.S. failure to control
Israel is irrational,” he concludes. A “real empire,” he asserts, “would
have preferred the Arabs, since they have the oil” (pp. 93, 95).
Ideology is the final and most important component of America’s incoherent imperialism. Excessive fear, Mann believes, is the animating
emotion behind American empire. At home “Americans arm themselves with handguns and tank-like SUVs,” he writes, while abroad they
hunker down in fortified bases and green zones. While the European
imperialists sipped their drinks defiantly on open verandas, instilling
rather than experiencing fear, Americans talk about shock and awe but
practice it from the safety of command centers in Qatar, fortified command posts on the Baghdad green zone, or bomb bays twenty thousand
feet in the air. To rid the Iraqi city of Falluja of anti-American insurgents, U.S. forces reduced it largely to rubble before moving in, reviving
in this sense the tradition from the Vietnam War of destroying a village
in order to save it. American reliance upon massive force to minimize
U.S. casualties, Mann demonstrates, only serves to strengthen and embolden the enemies of the United States.
Mann and Johnson provide us with a thoroughgoing moral indictment of contemporary American policy. The United States acts in a
heavy-handed and often crass manner overseas. Its foreign policies appear often to be driven by base domestic political considerations rather
than long-term statecraft. It bullies smaller nations and defies international law whenever it chooses. Americans who are proud of their
country’s record of goodwill at home and abroad will be disillusioned
or perplexed by even a cursory reading of these two books.
Neither of the two authors, however, offers any alternative to American empire. They both criticize its excesses and illiberalism but provide
no other vision than that of a world dominated by the United States.
This leads us to a larger problem, one that Kenneth Waltz identified in
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his 1959 book Man, the State and War, the most important study of international relations written in the twentieth century. Neither Johnson
nor Mann asks the first question that any well-trained student of realist international politics and history asks when faced with the problem
of illiberal state power: “Compared to what?” American action overseas
may seem to many illiberal and brutish, but unlike an unpopular regime
at the domestic level, it cannot be replaced by a more palatable one by
means of peaceful political process. To imagine alternatives to American preponderance, therefore, one must contemplate systemic scenarios
that would have been necessary to achieve a different outcome. For example, to use the method of counterfactual history, an obvious alternative to our current situation is a world dominated by a Soviet Union that
had won the cold war. That would not have been self-evidently preferable
to our current situation. Nor would an international order in which China
replaced the United States as world hegemon. Perhaps more to the point
of the two authors, nor would a world in which the United States retreated from global dominance but was not immediately replaced by other
great powers. Alternative international orders of the future might be much
more acceptable to a liberal sensibility today than is American unipolarity.
Or they might be much less acceptable. Or, and this is Waltz’s deepest
point, our understanding of what “liberal” is might change in response
to what is happening in world politics. Had the USSR won the cold
war, most of us would now possess very different views about what is
and is not acceptable behavior at the international level. In an anarchical world, moral conceptions of international relations are not fixed.11
If we are to lament American unipolarity, let us consider real-world
alternatives to it. Today, there is only one great power. Neither Russia,
the European Union, China, nor any other foreseeable entity is anywhere close to being able to contend with the United States in military
terms, and, so far, none of these states or unions appears very interested
in even attempting to do so. Because international politics is so heavily
dominated by America, a unilateral decision by the United States to relinquish its power, in a world in which no other entity possessed the
means to replace it, could usher in an extremely violent and turbulent
period in international affairs. What would become of the gigantic
American military arsenal and force structure? Could it be peacefully
dismantled and returned home safely? What would happen in regions
11
Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), esp. chap.
5. For a seminal philosophical articulation of this point, see Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribners, 1932). Waltz applies Niebuhr’s thesis systematically to modern international politics.
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of severe political grievance, in failed states, in areas of border disputes
and national confrontations? Would Pakistan and India keep their fingers off the nuclear button without a United States to worry about?
Would Israel? Power abhors a vacuum, and the largest vacuum in
recorded history would result from a rapid departure by the United
States from international political predominance. As corrupt, brutal,
and venal as the Roman Empire became in its dying days, life in the
Mediterranean world was not ideal after its fall—and that was before
the days of weapons of mass destruction.
These are the sort of problems that motivate Niall Ferguson. Like
Thomas Hobbes a few centuries earlier, Ferguson uses the chaos of recent history to argue that his world needs a ruling power: a Colossus.
The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, he writes, unleashed a series
of catastrophes around the world (esp. p. 24). No longer constrained by
their American or Soviet patrons, no longer able to rely upon a steady
stream of economic and military aid, many nations in Southeastern Europe, the Middle East, Central and South America, and particularly
sub-Saharan Africa have collapsed into an anarchy of chaos and ethnic
warfare. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, subnational terrorism, an expanding
global market in weapons of mass destruction, irreconcilable border disputes, and the failure in general of many governments to provide their
citizens with even the most basic sort of protection and order—these, say
Ferguson, are some of the most evident outcomes of the end of the cold
war international order. During the cold war both superpowers were
largely successful in their attempts to maintain basic political stability in
their client states and constrain lingering ethnic and historical grievances.
They did this not out of intrinsic altruism but in order to secure a steady
political allegiance from their client states and, more important, to prevent regional conflicts from escalating toward a superpower crisis and
hence a possible thermonuclear exchange. Because the cold war was
global, sparing almost no society, the United States and the Soviet
Union considered it in their interest to stabilize political disorder almost
everywhere they found it. Wars in Korea or Vietnam or Afghanistan
were kept artificially limited to avoid escalation. The two superpowers allowed client governments to engage in ruthless suppression of ethnic and
political rebellions that might otherwise have destabilized the regime
of an important ally. After the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 the predominant objective of both American and Soviet foreign policy, at least
until the late 1980s, was to preserve the world as it was.12
12
That record has emboldened realists like John Mearsheimer and Kenneth Waltz to suggest that
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The existence of an American empire, then, does not constitute a
problem for Ferguson—for without it one might see an acceleration of
global chaos, a proliferation of failed states, and a spiraling into regional
and perhaps global war. This is the great danger that Mann and Johnson do not confront. Rather, the problem for Ferguson is that the
American empire is poorly and illiberally run. The best and last hope
for the world, in Ferguson’s view, is an American empire exercised with
enlightenment and skill. An empire, in other words, more like the one
once wielded by Ferguson’s native country, Great Britain.
Ferguson establishes his argument in stages, and the first part of the
book consists largely of an overview of American diplomatic history.
This section is based on secondary sources, contains many unsubstantiated points that this historian found maddening, and is not really necessary to uphold the larger point he is trying to make.13 The heart of
Ferguson’s book follows, in his examination of the American empire and
the sources of its illiberalism. In particular, he identifies three key
“deficits” in American politics that have contributed to its poor performance: an economic deficit, a manpower deficit, and an attention deficit.
Ferguson agrees with Mann that the U.S. economy is in trouble, despite the vast wealth of Americans. To maintain the stunningly high
material standard of living enjoyed by Americans, successive governments have borrowed heavily from overseas investors and engaged in
questionable accounting practices in order to hide the growing debt. The
present administration, which has cut taxes, waged a war in Iraq that is
costing hundreds of billions of dollars, and maintained levels of domestic
spending, has in the space of a few years created a massive budget deficit,
which can be financed only by more overseas investment, notably from
Asian investors. Such insolvent practice, he warns, is unsustainable for an
empire responsible for global order (pp. 269–73).14
The second deficit, “manpower,” may be the area in which the distinction between the British and American imperial models is most evwe will miss the stability of the cold war. This seems to go too far, making realism simply an endorsement of stopping time whenever international politics happens to be orderly.
13
Ferguson’s treatment of U.S. cold war history, and in particular American policy during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, suffers from an alarming disregard for current historiography. He makes several claims (such as the suggestion that the Vietnam War was more limited than Korea) that are, to be
charitable, unsubstantiated, and he engages in dodgy arithmetic on U.S. casualties in Vietnam and
surely misunderstands the conflict between Truman and MacArthur in 1951. These are only some of
the objectionable points made in this section of Colossus (pp. 91–92, 94–101).
14
In support of his position, Ferguson cites an ominous study recently published by Jagadeesh
Gokhale and Kent Smetters, government economists who have produced a technical work that coolly
shows that the imminent retirement of the baby-boom generation means wholesale fiscal collapse unless draconian steps are taken today.
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ident. Ferguson, a recent immigrant to the United States, can barely
contain his amazement at the unwillingness of America’s best and
brightest to serve their country overseas. The most conspicuous example of this “manpower deficit” is the skewed social makeup of the
American military, as the recent war in Iraq has so evidently demonstrated. Few Americans from privileged backgrounds opt for an officer’s
military career, and virtually none enlist in the regular army.15 The
American empire, as Johnson also emphasizes, is represented overseas
primarily by Americans of working-class and underclass backgrounds,
many of whom have no interest in presenting a liberal face to the foreign peoples they encounter. Perhaps even more surprising, Ferguson
continues, is the fact that few privileged Americans pursue careers in
the foreign service or in other forms of imperial administration. Bent
on achieving lucrative positions in medicine, law, and business, the
cream of America’s youth do not think of aspiring to government and
overseas careers as did their British counterparts a century ago. A more
liberal American empire requires an elite civil service, argues Ferguson,
a culture in which the graduates of top universities naturally prefer
serving their country to maximizing their income. It is hard to disagree
with this point.
The “attention” deficit relates more directly to American foreign policy as such, and certainly speaks even more directly to the current war
in Iraq. This is the unwillingness of the United States to develop longstanding commitments to the countries it attacks and occupies.
Whereas empires like France and Britain would cultivate their colonial
administration in places like Algeria or India over decades, even centuries, the United States has tended rather to invade its dominions
quickly, install the first regime it can classify as “friendly,” and get out,
leaving the field to remaining military garrisons, unhappy diplomats
keen to return home, and a large, aggrieved population not incorporated into the imperial project in any coherent way. To establish viable
colonies an empire must take the long view, Ferguson contends, absorbing early setbacks, relying more on political administration than
military occupation, and seeking above all to sell the idea of becoming
part of the empire to as much of the native population as possible. Keen
for quick success and victory celebration, the American public has traditionally had little stomach for sustained, unglamorous colonial govern15
An estimated 3.8 percent of enlisted soldiers and 29.6 percent of warrant officers have completed
college, according to the “Estimated Educational Level of Active Duty Military Personnel,” in Department of Defense, Selected Manpower Statistics, 2003, http://web1.whs.osd.mil/mmid/M01/
fy03/m01fy03.pdf.
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ance. President Bush catered to this sentiment when he donned a flight
suit on May 2, 2003, and appeared before a banner proclaiming “mission
accomplished” on the USS Lincoln off the coast of San Diego.
The books by Mann and Johnson present a moral indictment of
American imperialism. Ferguson’s rebuttal is simple: American empire
is here, alternatives to it are worse, and hence the only reasonable approach is to advocate for its liberalization, for a more effective and enlightened empire. Ferguson answers their despair with the promise of
reform, and in this he has truly learned something about American political culture.
Nevertheless, there are two important flaws in his argument, both of
which may result from his unfamiliarity with American foreign relations history. First, and most obvious, he is curiously unwilling to accept that there are economic motives behind contemporary American
foreign policy. One can agree with him that simple pecuniary interests
cannot in the end explain the deepest origins of a nation’s foreign relations—this is one of the defining arguments in his monumental history
of the origins of the First World War.16 But to reject in toto economic
interpretations of current American policy, in particular of the recent
war in Iraq, is to take this rejection of materialism way too far. To sustain his claim that oil played no role in the decision to go to Iraq, Ferguson must contend more seriously with the ostensible evidence that it
did.17 The United States, which consumes one-quarter of the world’s
annual production of fossil fuels, has just waged a war against a country
that rests atop the world’s second-largest known oil reserves and replaced its hostile leader with a client. Upon entering Iraq and then
Baghdad, military authorities sent troops to guard oil-production facilities and ministries before anything else, including arms depots and the
national museum. Bush administration officials with links to the oil industry, most notably Vice President Dick Cheney, were among the
most adamant in pushing for the war. This does not prove that oil was
the ultimate cause of the war; a definitive verdict will require the documentation and perspective available only to future historians. But the
evidence we have makes it untenable simply to deny that oil played a
role. Straining, Ferguson finally dismisses the oil explanation by pointing out that the oil company Halliburton’s stock price has declined
since 2001 (p. 268). This is hardly a winning blow.
16
Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Allen Lane, 1998), 31–55.
Ferguson characterizes the idea that access to Iraq’s oil reserves lay behind the American interest
in war as a “conspiracy theory.” This term has become a slur used to cease argument; it should not be
so casually used by such a serious scholar as he. See Colossus, 265.
17
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A second and more central deficiency in Ferguson’s treatment of
American imperial policy is his disinclination to explore the sources of its
current illiberalism. An unanswered question runs through his iteration of
the three American “deficits.” What explains the ephemeral, short-term
nature of American imperialism? Why, to put one’s finger more precisely
upon Ferguson’s grievance, is the United States unable to act more like
Britain? Is it simply that the British are intrinsically better at empire than
the Americans, the enlightened Greeks to the brutish Romans? Ferguson, one feels, is aching to say this and be done with it, but as with all “national characteristics” explanations all that does is beg the question.
The real question is, why did the British undertake a more patient
and sustained approach to their imperial project than have the Americans so far? This leads to a more serious investigation of the differences
between the British and American diplomatic traditions than the one
Ferguson employs. A key factor in such an investigation—in any investigation of the ultimate sources of a nation’s foreign policy—is straightforward: geopolitics.18 Though it was protected to some extent by the
Channel, Great Britain had constantly to weigh its imperial ambitions
against the possibility of war with its long-standing rivals on the Continent. For their empire to succeed and prosper, the British needed to run
it as efficiently and unprovocatively as possible. They could not normally
afford to send large armies overseas to police colonial uprisings, as this
would leave the homeland more vulnerable to attack from the Continent. And they could not afford to wage lengthy great power wars, as
that would deprive them of the men and money needed to run the empire. British imperial diplomacy therefore rested, as Ferguson well knows,
on the two pillars of balancing power in Europe and practicing lean efficiency further afield. This required real expertise: Britain had to administer a worldwide empire without triggering sustained major warfare with
its European rivals, a trick managed more or less for three hundred years,
with the one great exception of Napoleon. The British Empire relied
upon diplomatic skill because Britain’s proximity to the hostile powers
of continental Europe would have made inept diplomacy fatal. When
this policy finally failed in the twentieth century, so did the empire.
The physical environment for the United States has been fundamentally different. After its victory over the British in the War of 1812
the United States enjoyed more than a century of mostly effortless, or
18
Recent discussion of the analytical power of geopolitics can be found in Daniel Deudney,
“Geopolitics as Theory: Historical Security Materialism,” European Journal of International Relations
6 (Spring 2000). For an excellent treatment of American geopolitics, see David Henrickson, “In Our
Own Image: The Sources of American Conduct in World Affairs,” National Interest 50 (1997).
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“free,” security.19 The ocean’s distance between America and the great
powers of Europe, together with the fact that the balance of power in
Europe prevented the emergence of a threatening European superstate,
allowed the United States to pursue its foreign policies on the North
American continent and abroad with almost no risk of becoming embroiled in a major war in which it could have been conquered. As a result, Americans had much less incentive to wage deft great power
diplomacy, and indeed found realpolitik morally inferior to their splendid isolation from the corrupt world of European power politics. Before the Second World War the U.S. military was small and geared to
regional action or to minor overseas forays, and it was never really incorporated into a larger global strategy. American diplomats spent most
of their time hustling up business for overseas industrial concerns. The
brief exception to this isolation—Wilson’s intervention in the Great
War—ultimately proved the rule: America’s military and diplomatic
weakness prevented Wilson from successfully imposing his vision on
the Old World, a failure happily accepted by an American public eager
to resume its isolation from the depraved powers of Europe.
Therefore, when free security came to an end and the United States
became a great power, during the Second World War, it did so without
an ongoing strategic or diplomatic tradition to draw upon in its emerging confrontation with the Soviet Union.20 Unlike Britain, which over
the centuries had successfully adopted an amoral approach to its relations with European states on the Continent (allying with one nation
and then another while cultivating its overseas empire), the United
States went from an isolationist nation in the 1930s to a superpower
confronting the Soviet Union over a destroyed Europe in the 1940s.
Americans had to adjust to the loss of a kind of utopia of international
politics within a mere decade. And in the space of two decades, they
had to account for the Soviet Union’s ability to destroy their nation
with thermonuclear weaponry.
The United States, in other words, is relatively unfamiliar with the
gray area of international politics.21 Its long enjoyment of free security
and then its rapid descent into a bipolar, globalized, and potentially
19
A fuller discussion of free security can be found in Campbell Craig, “The Not-so-Strange Career
of Charles Beard,” Diplomatic History 25 (Spring 2001). See also Fredrik Logevall, “A Critique of
Containment,” Diplomatic History 28 (September 2004), 477.
20
The effect of America’s diplomatic inexperience on its twentieth-century foreign policy is a central theme in George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy: 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), 91–103.
21
On this point, see also Stephen Sestanovich, “Not Much Kinder and Gentler,” New York Times,
February 3, 2005, 15.
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thermonuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union created a diplomatic approach in America that is much less nuanced and morally relativist than the long-term, balance of power strategy employed by the
British and by other European states.22 To put it another way, European
states became accustomed during the three centuries between Westphalia and the Second World War to the security dilemma: to the understanding that their pursuit of security was always going to make
other nations insecure. Either they adopted moderate and flexible
diplomatic traditions or they ran the risk of total war. America has
never really had to engage in this kind of diplomacy, with the brief,
great exception of nuclear-war avoidance during the late 1950s and
early 1960s. Its geopolitical situation has allowed it to develop a more
parochial and self-centered foreign policy tradition and one much less
inclined toward compromise and process than could have worked for
any large European state hoping to avoid major war.
It should be of no surprise that this mindset prevails in America
today. It is safe to theorize that any nation enjoying the preponderance
of power that the United States currently possesses would incline toward indifference to the sentiments of other nations. For the United
States, with its long history of a black-and-white approach to security,
it comes close to an inevitability.23 This is not to assert an absolute historical determinism: American leaders are not cosmically unable to act
more like the realpoliticians of Europe. The U.S. has produced realist
internationalists like George Kennan and Dwight Eisenhower, just as
Ferguson’s Britain produced Douglas Haig and Neville Chamberlain.
But Eisenhower, Kennan, and a few other statesmen and scholars defied the dominant tradition in American foreign relations; they did not
change it. Their attitude toward international politics is almost wholly
absent from the making of U.S. foreign policy today.
Ferguson calls for a more liberal American empire, but he does not
show why the United States should listen. He does not identify any
structural impediments to American heedlessness, and he does not
identify elements in American politics that might be capable of moderating American power. Indeed, in his zeal to highlight the defects of
American empire, he focuses on the numerous aspects of American
politics that would seem to rule out any hope of change. What, in the
end, gives us reason to believe that the American empire can become
more like Britain’s? Ferguson does not say.
22
On this point, see Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” Policy Review 113 ( June–July 2002).
Michael Cox, “Empire, Imperialism and the Bush doctrine,” Review of International Studies 30
(October 2004), 605.
23
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In this respect, at least, Ferguson’s verdict does not differ substantially from that of Mann and Johnson. All end up agreeing in effect
that the American empire is illiberal, and all find no evidence to suggest
that change is likely. None maintains that there is something beyond
the internal sources of U.S. foreign policy that might serve to constrain
or modify American action. Their recommendations boil down to the
hope that American foreign policy will become more liberal for its own
sake. But the history of international politics is the history of the repeated dashing of such hopes.
The titles of the three books under review, together with countless
others that have appeared recently, contain the word empire. Johnson,
Mann, and Ferguson all use the term freely, but without establishing
what American empire specifically means. That the United States is an
empire like Rome and Britain were empires is a claim that should not
simply be asserted, especially by authors like Mann and Ferguson, who
spend as much time as they do showing how American policy abroad
departs in substantial ways from previous imperial models, particularly
that of Great Britain. This much is undeniable: the United States is an
expansionist state, unrivaled in its power, imposing its political, economic, and cultural institutions on other parts of the world. But if the
term empire is to have any meaning, it must be distinguished in some
essential way from superpower, hyperpower, unipolar hegemon, or other
less historically weighted terms.24
Talk of American imperialism was once the province of the left.25
Recently, however, it has become a widely accepted designation, among
both critics and defenders of contemporary U.S. policy.26 But few have
troubled to show how a historical definition of imperialism applies to
an analysis of what the United States is doing today. Johnson cites
Hannah Arendt’s definition, as the “central political idea” of a state in
which expansion is “a permanent and supreme aim of politics.” As
Johnson notes, this allows us to get beyond the modern equation of imperialism with capitalism. At the same time, however, it would seem to
lump widely differing states together under the same rubric, for this
definition would seem to include not only Rome, Spain, China, Great
Britain, and contemporary America but also the Soviet Union, Nazi
Germany, and Imperial Japan. Expansion was arguably the supreme
24
See, for example, G. John Ikenberry, “Illusions of Empire,” Foreign Affairs 83 (March–April
2004).
25
On this point, see Cox (fn. 23), 587.
26
See the dialogue between John Gaddis and Paul Kennedy, in “Kill the Empire (or Not),” New
York Times, July 25, 2004.
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aim of, say, the Serbs in the 1990s, or the Maori tribes of New Zealand
before European settlement, or the Nordic Vikings, but few would
confidently call them imperialists.
Mann implies, despite the title of his book, that imperialism is not
really possible in a world of nation-states. The great empires of the past
engaged in a practice that the United States has, so far, rejected: the incorporation of foreign peoples into their own polity, whereby the conquered redefine themselves as members of the empire, come to think of
themselves as Roman, or Ottoman, or British, and, most decisively,
fight for its army, often in order to colonize other peoples. The power
of national identity in lands outside of the United States makes this an
almost unthinkable prospect. Afghans or Iraqis or North Koreans are
not likely to become willing members of the larger American dominion, just as the United States is unlikely to spend the decades and billions necessary to incorporate such outsiders into their society. It is
tempting, therefore, to regard empire as a strictly historical term, describing a predominant and expansionist regime able to conquer nationless peoples and then assimilate them under metropolitan rule. It is
clear that the United States is not doing this, at least at present.27
Nevertheless, there seems to be something about contemporary
American foreign policy that is more than just expansionistic, hyperpowerful. To get at this, it might be useful to return to the realist conception of survivalist foreign policy and contrast it with current U.S.
behavior. Realism posits that nations pursue security above all else, but
there is nothing inherent in the definition of realism that would preclude a nation, as John Mearsheimer argues, from pursuing security to
the point of world domination. In the abstract a logical course for the
United States or any hypothetical nation to take, if it wants to achieve
as much security as possible, is to dominate all potential rivals and control as much territory and resources as it can.28
Accordingly, it would be logically possible for a nation to aspire to
world domination without being imperialist—without seeking anything more than its own security. And here is the distinction we can
draw about imperialism in our modern world of nation-states. We can
say that a nation may be acting imperially when it continues to project
its power overseas even when it has attained security from the predation of other nations.29 We can say that a nation is definitely acting imperially when, in engaging in this projection of power, it undertakes
27
Cox (fn. 23), 598.
John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 29–54.
29
This is not to suggest that a nation cannot act imperially even if it faces plausible security threats.
28
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policies that actually reduce its security—when impulses within the empire pushing for further and further expansion are so strong that they
come to supersede the basic pursuit of state survival. This distinction
resembles the process Paul Kennedy has defined as “overstretch”—the
hubristic pursuit of power that has brought down empires since the beginning of history.30
Is the United States pursuing and exercising power beyond any possible security interest? Partaking of the criticism provided by Johnson,
Mann, and Ferguson, we can discern three aspects of contemporary
American policy—policy not necessarily limited to that of the current
administration—which suggest that the answer is yes. These are (1) absolutist security strategy, (2) foreign policy in the Middle East, and (3)
empire and the domestic economy.
Absolutist security strategy. One year after the September 11 attacks,
President Bush unveiled a new basic strategy for the United States.31
One of its most notable elements reflects an argument put forward by
Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz back in the early 1990s: this
is the grand premise that the basic strategy of the United States must
be to prevent the emergence of any rivals—forever.32 In other words,
the United States must remain the only great power on the planet: it
should develop a military force so vast that it deters any rival from contending with it and it should use all means at its disposal—most notoriously, preventive war—to deal with nations or groups not deterred by
this military preponderance.
This policy departs fundamentally from the American cold war
strategy of containment, which accepted, by definition, the existence of
the Soviet great power and furthermore rejected the notion of waging
preventive war to achieve cold war objectives.33 In a more basic sense, it
departs from the four-century-old balance of power tradition that European states and then the United States and the Soviet Union often
accepted from Westphalia through the cold war. The balance of power
tradition emerged in modern international politics not because a group
30
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from
1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage, 1989).
31
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September, 2002,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html. The best treatment of the new Bush strategy is Robert
Jervis, American Foreign Policy in a New Era (New York: Routledge, 2005), chap. 4.
32
See Andrew J. Bacevich’s discussion of the “Wolfowitz indiscretion,” in Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 44.
33
On this notion of American containment, see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A
Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press,
1982), 48–49, 100, 149.
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of statesmen devised it (though something like this happened eventually after the defeat of Napoleon) but because statesmen realized over
time that the pursuit of unipolar power leads inevitably to war and to
the likely destruction or at least weakening of the state seeking such
power, both in terms of its position in Europe and in terms of its overseas empire.34
For reasons we will explore below, a return to a balance of power system in the European style is unlikely for the foreseeable future. The
issue here, however, is how the United States is to wield its unipolar
power at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The aggressiveness
that permeates the 2002 security strategy suggests that the current administration has adopted a Machiavellian view. Thus, to retain its power
indefinitely, the United States must instill fear in any potential rivals, declaring that it will not allow them to contend with the United States and
that it will deal with them if they make any serious attempt to do so.
It is plausible that the 2002 security strategy stems from a genuine
attempt by the Bush administration to maximize American security—
that it is not, consciously, an imperialist doctrine. The larger matter,
though, is whether the decision to write and publicize an aggressive
doctrine that threatens any and all comers with preventive war and that
seems to make the absolute maximization of American security the primary national interest reflects an imperialist mindset as we have defined it. Taken to its logical conclusions, the 2002 strategy designates
all other nations as potential enemies, threatens them with war if they
impinge upon American interests, and thus turns world politics into a
permanent game of the U.S. against the world. This is not a grave
problem today because most nations have no interest in threatening the
United States and because most nations do not suffer much from
American encroachment. But it does not require a pessimistic reading
of international history or a negative bias against the United States to
conclude that nations identified by a superpower as potential enemies,
and threatened with destruction if they move to augment their relative
power, will begin to think of themselves as under threat. The absolute
pursuit of security, in other words, may be self-defeating—it may cause
greater enmity and reaction than a security policy that can accept some
countervailing power. This is what Kennan was talking about when he
called the 2002 strategy a “great mistake in principle”: a world in which
one nation’s security comes to entail insecurity for every other nation is
a world destined for conflict.
34
Kennedy (fn. 30), 73–193.
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Foreign policy in the Middle East. The 2002 strategy states clearly that
the United States has no adventurous agenda and is only interested in
maximizing its security. As we have seen, this is plausible and meets our
definition of imperialist only in its possible, uninvited effects. However,
American policy cannot simply be judged by an examination of a stated
doctrine; it must also be judged by actions. The Bush administration
claimed in 2002 that the primary national interest is to preserve American security. Yet it has undertaken two major policies in one part of the
world—the Middle East—that are inconsistent with this claim.
The first is the unrelenting U.S. support for Israel. As Mann, Johnson, and Ferguson all show, American partiality toward Israel is one of
the most striking features of modern international relations.35 The
United States devotes one-third of its entire foreign aid budget to Israel, aid that is delivered in cash, with no strings attached; another third
of this budget is given to nations like Egypt and Jordan as direct payment for their assurances not to attack Israel.36 The United Nations
General Assembly regularly resolves to castigate Israel for its settlement
activities in the West Bank and Gaza; the United States is often the
only nation that votes alongside Israel against these resolutions, though
sometimes it is joined by small Pacific Island nations.37 Key members
of the Bush administration’s foreign policy team, working in positions
that directly relate to Middle Eastern policy, have openly served as consultants to right-wing Israeli politicians like Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon or the former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 38 These
kinds of overt connections, hard to imagine with any other nation,
35
Criticism of the unusual relationship between Israel and the United States is expanding. For a
diverse set of examples, see Jerome Slater, “Ideology vs. the National Interest: Bush, Sharon, and the
U.S. Policy in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Security Studies 12 (Autumn 2002); Stanley Hoffmann,
“The High and the Mighty,” American Prospect 13 ( January 13, 2003); Sherle Schwenninger, “Revamping American Grand Strategy,” World Policy Journal (Fall 2003), 28–30; Nikolas K. Gvosdev and
Travis Tanner, “Wagging the Dog,” National Interest, no. 77 (Fall 2004), 5–10; New York Times, lead
editorial, October 18, 2004, 14; “Ending the Israeli-Palestinian Stalemate,” Statement signed by
dozens of leading American scholars, January 1, 2005, http://www.realisticforeignpolicy.org/archives/
2005/01/ending_the_isra.php. This statement also appeared as an advertisement in the Economist 374
( January 2005).
36
The percentage for Israel is calculated by Mann (fn. 7), 53–54. His figures are based upon several
sources, including Shirl McArthur, “A Conservative Total for U.S. Aid to Israel: $91 Billion—and
Counting,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 20 ( January–February 2001), 15–17.
37
General Assembly Resolutions A/RES/58/98 (2003) and A/RES/57/126 (2002) were opposed
by Israel, the United States, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Palau, and
Nauru: Press Release GA/10219, Press Release GA/10121, http://www.un.org/documents/resga.htm.
38
“A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” was prepared by a study group including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith for Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996; www.israeleconomy.org/
strat1.htm. Perle and Feith played central roles in formulating U.S. foreign and military policy during
the Bush administration’s first term.
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make it impossible for other nations to take the United States seriously
as an impartial actor in Middle Eastern affairs.
The question of U.S. support for Israel is often caught up in the debate about Israeli policy toward the Palestinian intifada, but these are
two different issues. One can sympathize with the Israeli desire for security—one might even agree with Likud policies—while at the same
time asking why Israel, which is not the only nation in the world facing
security problems, merits such extraordinary support from the United
States. The U.S. receives no obvious strategic benefits from the aid it
provides to Israel; indeed, its overt favoritism toward it damages its
standing among moderate Arabs in the Middle East whose support the
United States is now seeking. And it has long alienated regimes in the
Middle East and elsewhere that might otherwise be much more loyal
U.S. allies.39 By our definition, then, U.S. favoritism toward Israel is a
clear example of American imperialism.
A second and more substantial example of American imperialism in
the Middle East is U.S. policy there with respect to oil. Since the end
of the cold war the United States has deployed massive military force in
the Middle East to secure Western access to Persian Gulf oil supplies
and to bolster pro-American regimes there, most notably the repressive
government of Saudi Arabia. This overt, dominating American presence in the Middle East is the leading source of anti-American and
anti-Western feeling in the region.40 Terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda
have repeatedly stated that their primary grievance against the United
States is that it props up corrupt and repressive regimes, like the one in
Saudi Arabia, to guarantee the maximum flow of oil to the West. Via
the medium of fundamentalist Islamic ideology, this anti-Americanism
has spread to Muslim nations that are either without oil or not in the
Middle East, such as Pakistan, Algeria, and Indonesia.41
During the cold war it was plausible for the United States to contend that oil was a strategic asset—that is was necessary to install proWestern regimes in oil-rich Middle Eastern states lest the Soviet
39
On this point, see also Robert Jervis and Michael Desch, “Ending the Israeli-Palestinian Stalemate Will Help with the War on Terror,” posted on Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy Web site,
January 26, 2005; www.realisticforeignpolicy.org/archives/2005/01/ending_the_isra_2.php.
40
“In an audiotape obtained by the Associated Press [April 7, 2003] in Pakistan, bin Laden exhorts
Muslims to rise up against Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other governments it claims are ‘agents of
America,’ and calls for suicide attacks against US and British interests. The CIA determines the 27minute tape is likely authentic”; “Tapes from al-Qaeda Leaders,” New York Times, October 1, 2004.
41
Jemaah Islamiah, the terrorist organization blamed for the 2002 bomb attacks in Bali, had its
roots in earlier Indonesian Muslim nationalist movements but was radicalized by contacts with alQaeda; “Some Facts about Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiah,” Reuters, September 9, 2004.
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Union gain control over such a valuable commodity.42 This argument,
now obviated, has been replaced by the vaguer claim that access to
Middle Eastern oil is vital to the economic survival of the West. In one
sense this is an unarguable assertion, in that uncertainty about the regular flow of oil from that part of the world could unleash havoc, at least
over the short term, on the developed, capitalist West.
This begs the question, increasingly blatant, however: how do we define economic “survival”? The Western industrial nations consume the
bulk of the world’s oil, with the United States by far the greediest. With
only 4 percent of the world’s population, America consumes 25 percent
of the world’s fossil fuels annually.43 Democratic and Republican governments alike have declined over the past twenty-five years to develop
even modest policies to reduce American oil consumption; on the contrary, American consumption of existing oil flows has increased, as
more Americans drive their larger trucks and their SUVs greater distances—a trend that the Bush administration has actually subsidized.44
That Americans are unwilling to engage in even token attempts to
reduce their consumption of imported oil, despite the evidence that this
dependency clearly appears to damage U.S. security, is the best example
of today’s American imperialism, as we have defined it. Indeed, oil addiction points to the third, and perhaps most important factor to consider in our discussion of American empire: the material exploitation of
U.S. global preponderance by American society.
Empire and the domestic economy. Our realist definition of empire
stipulates that a dominant power engages in imperialism when its expansionist foreign policies cannot plausibly be attributed to security requirements and when in fact that expansionism comes to damage its
security. It leaves aside inquiry into the sources of this expansionism—
into the question of why a nation undertakes such policies. Surely, governments throughout history have established empires for many
different reasons—military glory, religious mission, cultural aggran42
See Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Touchstone,
1991), 450–78.
43
“Pushing Energy Conservation into the Back Seat of the S.U.V.,” New York Times, November 22,
2003.
44
According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2004 report, “Light Duty Automotive
Technology and Fuel Economy Trends, 1975–2003,” fully one-half of all new vehicles bought in the
U.S. in 2003 were pickups and SUVs; see www.epa.gov/otaq/cert/mpg/fetrends/r03006.pdf, iv. The
Bush administration has fought to subsidize this trend, most notably by supporting legislation that
classifies these vehicles as trucks, which exempts them from “gas guzzler” surcharges. A thorough
treatment of the bizarre American propensity for large SUVs and pickups is Keith Bradsher, High and
Mighty: SUVs—The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way (Washington, D.C.:
Public Affairs, 2003). See also Gregg Easterbrook’s trenchant review of this book, “Axle of Evil,” New
Republic 228, no. 2 ( January 20, 2003).
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dizement, the wealth of the metropolis. What is becoming clear in the
case of the United States is that a primary driving force behind its imperial policies, perhaps the decisive one, can be captured easily in the
mantra of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, “It’s the economy,
stupid,” or in the former secretary of state James Baker’s justification for
the first Gulf War: “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Though the American electorate
already enjoys, on average, a stupendous material standard of living,
both the Democrats and Republicans have concluded that the surest
way for them to gain and maintain power is to promise ever more. 45
This creates an irresistible temptation, particularly given the four-year
time span of American presidential politics, to utilize American unipolar power in ways that promise to serve that end immediately, even if
the long-term security of the nation may be damaged.
We have already addressed the most evident manifestation of this
domestic utilization of American overseas power, U.S. oil policy. But as
Niall Ferguson expertly shows, a more subtle use of American preponderance for the material advantage of the American public may be even
more dangerous for the long-term welfare of the nation. This is
America’s exploitation of its core management of the global capitalist
system for immediate economic gain. The global system devised by
American planners at Bretton Woods in 1944 established the dollar as
the standard currency of the capitalist world. For sixty years, and despite the abandonment of the gold standard in 1972, it has remained
so. Investors and banks in other countries therefore must often obtain
American dollars to conduct international transactions, and they often
are keen as well to buy American bonds as a safe investment hedge
against their own fluctuating currency. As a consequence, foreign
money pours into the United States for the purpose of buying American dollars and Treasury bonds. And if the United States chooses to
run a current-accounts deficit—as it is has been doing of late with a
vengeance—it is essentially printing money and selling it to foreign investors.46
Such practice may be connected to American imperialism in two
different ways. On the one hand, the government’s eagerness to borrow
money from foreign investors to subsidize the domestic consumer
economy belies the claim that the primary national interest is maximum security—any nation that were truly determined to safeguard its
45
On this point, see Bacevich (fn. 32); and Gregg Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox (New York:
Random House, 2004).
46
Ferguson, Colossus, 279–85. See also Peter Peterson, “Riding for a Fall,” Foreign Affairs 83 (September–October 2004).
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sovereignty over the long term would never tolerate the sort of fiscal irresponsibility and vast overseas borrowing that the current administration casually accepts.
On the other hand, America’s dominance in the global capitalist
economy permits it to run large deficits in a way that distinguishes it
from other debtor nations. Today, regimes that mismanage their finances are eventually dealt with by U.S.-dominated international organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund.47 Governments badly in debt are forced to commit to a program
of severe austerity measures or face bankruptcy. It is hardly necessary to
say that, given the current realities of international power politics, the
International Monetary Fund could not impose comparable austerity
measures on the United States. As a result, America will likely be able
to get away with its fiscal irresponsibility in a way that was not possible
for Argentina, for example. The ongoing debate over Social Security
reform suggests that the current government is not blind to this problem. The fact that it has become a problem at all in the richest country
on earth reveals the close connection between American imperialism
and the domestic economy, a connection that will be put to the test
should the United States experience a severe financial crisis.
Can American realism provide an alternative to American imperialism? As we have seen, Johnson, Mann, and Ferguson all fail to provide
a logical argument explaining why the United States would alter its imperialist policies. Many American realists, however, do offer one. The
central argument of America’s most prominent realists since the end of
the cold war has been that new states will emerge to contend with
American power and that this will force the United States to rein in its
imperial quests and cultivate better relations with erstwhile allies lest it
find itself resented and outnumbered. Neorealists like Kenneth Waltz,
John Mearsheimer, and Charles Kupchan have all asserted that the ascent of new powers is inevitable: Kupchan believes it will be Europe;
Mearsheimer and Waltz, China. But they all assume that new powers
will rise, just as a classical microeconomist assumes that new firms will
emerge to contend with a monopoly.48 The more heedless and wasteful
that monopoly, the easier it will be for new rivals to compete with it.
That is one reason why these realists have opposed what they regard as
the excesses of American imperialism, most notably the war in Iraq.
47
Joseph Stiglitz has noted that “IMF programs are typically dictated from Washington”; Stiglitz,
Globalization and Its Discontents (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 24.
48
See Charles Kupchan, The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the
Twenty-first Century (New York: Knopf, 2003); Mearsheimer (fn. 28); and Waltz (epigraph).
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In the pages of this journal almost a half-century ago David Singer
announced the birth of a new means of analyzing international relations, structural realism, which he had found expressed in Waltz’s Man,
the State and War.49 Structural realism is the source of the conventional
realist belief in the eventual resumption of multipolarity. Waltz argued
that the driving force in international politics is the structural process,
the “third image,” created by the anarchical interstate condition obtaining among great powers. He maintained that the “second image,” the
level of national politics and foreign policy–making, is in the end subordinate to the third image—it does not determine the fundamental
events of international politics, namely, great wars. Because of the ultimate preponderance of the third image over the second, great wars
could (and did) occur throughout history even though none of the great
powers involved in them may have wanted to fight. Anarchy, that is,
trumps states’ desire for peace.
As John Ikenberry has written, what is happening today at the international level suggests an inversion of Waltz’s framework.50 On the one
hand, interstate conflict among great powers no longer really characterizes world politics: to be meaningful, the term interstate requires more
than one power. At present, however, no state besides the United States
can be characterized as a great power, using the standard realist definition of a great power—a nation that can hold its own in a war with any
other nation. On the other hand, the importance of the second
image—the level of national policy—has moved into the first rank. The
international political scene was once a conflicting dynamic of national
interests and foreign policies in which great powers needed to calibrate
their policies with respect to the interests and motivations of their rivals. But despite the best efforts of some European nations, it is becoming increasingly clear of late that the dynamic of world politics now
stems from the development in the United States of its own policies
and from the reactions by other nations to them. As the epigraph from
Waltz at the beginning of this article implies, the absence of great
power rivals to the United States has magnified the importance of
American foreign policy, turning it effectively into the driving force of
world politics—that had once been Waltz’s third image. Foreign observers of the recent U.S. presidential election noted that its outcome
affected their nations’ destinies far more than the outcome of their own
national elections. These observers were right.
49
J. David Singer, “International Conflict: Three Levels of Analysis,” World Politics 12 (April 1960).
Ikenberry, “Liberalism and Empire: Logics of Order in the American Unipolar Age,” Review of
International Studies 30 (October 2004), 614.
50
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World power politics are no longer dominated by the balance of
power system that has prevailed since the seventeenth century and that
Waltz was the first to characterize theoretically in 1959. The system of
international politics today is unipolar—there is no balance of power,
no other state that is creating a balance by effectively contending with
the United States. Correspondingly, world power politics are shaped
primarily not by the structure created by interstate anarchy but by the
foreign policy developed in Washington. We have just stipulated that
this foreign policy is, to some extent, imperialist. As a consequence,
then, American imperialism is what shapes world politics. The question that remains is how the realist understanding of politics can apply
to this new state of affairs.
A realist conception of international relations that is based irreducibly upon balance of power interstate politics can no longer have
much to say about our new world. But as Daniel Deudney has argued,
it is crucial to recall that realism is a transcendent political philosophy,
meant to apply to any political situation, not just to modern interstate
politics. It is based fundamentally upon the pessimistic notion that the
primary desire of human beings is security in a dangerous environment
and that the basic role of government is to protect them.51 This deep
aspect of realism still applies to contemporary international relations,
and indeed it supplies the greatest argument against American imperialism.
The antirealist case for indefinite American empire cannot get
around one stubborn reality. As long as international relations remain
anarchical, the United States, no matter how powerful it becomes, cannot forever prevent the outbreak of major war. Major war, in our era,
means thermonuclear war, or perhaps one fought with other weapons of
mass destruction (WMD). Either the United States will have to accept
the continuing existence of nuclear (and possibly other WMD) arsenals
held by other states, a condition that cannot endure indefinitely without
devolving into war, or it will have to see to the reliable and permanent
elimination of all such arsenals, a task, as contemporary international affairs reveal indisputably, that neither it nor any other nation could ever
achieve acting alone. The perpetuation of an anarchical world dominated by American empire leads inescapably to one outcome, sooner or
later: a catastrophic war in which tens of millions, hundreds of millions,
or perhaps the greater part of the human race is killed. Because realism
51
See Deudney (fn. 1), 212.
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is concerned ultimately with creating a state that can protect citizens
from a dangerous environment, its verdict with respect to these alternatives is clear: only the permanent elimination of anarchy and national arsenals of weapons of mass destruction will eliminate the visceral
insecurity that derives from the possibility of such a war.
The transformation of world politics over the past decade has unleashed two apparent threats to the international security that realists
seek. Over the short term, the primary threat is the use of weapons of
mass destruction by subnational terrorist groups, a threat that shows no
clear signs of abatement. Over the longer term, the primary threat to
human security is the major war that will occur between the United
States and some other nation as long as the current system of unipolar
anarchy continues.
A return to a multipolar order, the alternative to the current state of
affairs that many realists favor, does not seem possible, as we have already suggested. But even if it did come about, a new multipolarity
would not clearly eliminate either of these threats. Subnational terrorism might diminish in a new multipolar order, but it could just as easily
worsen in an anarachical world dominated by the relations of a few
wealthy states. It could even become a covert weapon of states eager to
avoid overt confrontation. Even more important, a multipolar order
would only put off the eventual choice between ending anarchy and experiencing interstate nuclear war. A regime of nuclear deterrence might
prove able to maintain peace among states in this new order for a time,
but it could not do so forever. That the world managed to avoid thermonuclear war for a few decades of the twentieth century does not
mean that it can do so indefinitely.
The poor prospects of another multipolar order have led younger realists to conclude that the logic of realism today points toward the necessary formation of a world state.52 A world state would, by definition,
be able to deal with subnational terrorism in a manner completely different from how it is being addressed today, by treating it as crime
rather than as international aggression. Dealing with terrorism would
become a question of international law and enforcement rather than
one of foreign policy and war; the United States would no longer become the focus of terrorist enmity. A world state would, by definition,
deal with the longer-term threat of global nuclear war by taking pos52
Alexander Wendt, “Why a World State Is Inevitable,” European Journal of International Relations
9 (December 2003); Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global
Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming); Craig (fn. 2), conclusion.
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session of all weapons of mass destruction, just as states today, following the dictum of Max Weber, possess a monopoly over all war-making
weaponry. The obstacles to forming an actual world state are so staggering that it is a simple matter to dismiss it as utopian fancy. Be that as
it may, for realists it has become the only logical alternative to unipolar
American empire in an anarchical world.