World Politics

Absence of threat permits policy to become capricious.

World 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 [End Page 143]

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 [End Page 144] 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 [End Page 145] 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 [End Page 146] 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. [End Page 147]

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.

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 [End Page 148] 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.

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 [End Page 149]

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 [End Page 150] 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 [End Page 151] 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 [End Page 152]

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 evident. [End Page 153] 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 long-standing 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 governance. [End Page 154] 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. [End Page 155]

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 [End Page 156] "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 [End Page 157] 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. [End Page 158]

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 [End Page 159] 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 [End Page 160] 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 [End Page 161] 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. [End Page 162]

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, [End Page 163] 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 pro-Western regimes in oil-rich Middle Eastern states lest the Soviet [End Page 164] 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 aggrandizement, [End Page 165] 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 [End Page 166] 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. [End Page 167]

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. [End Page 168]

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 [End Page 169] 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 possession [End Page 170] 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.