January 5,
2003, Sunday
MAGAZINE
DESK
THE AMERICAN EMPIRE; The
Burden
By Michael Ignatieff (NYT) 6808 words
I.
In a speech to graduating cadets at West Point in June, President Bush
declared, ''America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish.'' When
he spoke to veterans assembled at the White House in November, he said:
America has ''no territorial ambitions. We don't seek an empire. Our nation
is committed to freedom for ourselves and for others.''
Ever since George Washington warned his countrymen against foreign
entanglements, empire abroad has been seen as the republic's permanent
temptation and its potential nemesis. Yet what word but ''empire'' describes
the awesome thing that America is becoming? It is the only nation that
polices the world through five global military commands; maintains more than
a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier battle
groups on watch in every ocean; guarantees the survival of countries from
Israel to South Korea; drives the wheels of global trade and commerce; and
fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires.
A historian once remarked that Britain acquired its empire in ''a fit of
absence of mind.'' If Americans have an empire, they have acquired it in a
state of deep denial. But Sept. 11 was an awakening, a moment of reckoning
with the extent of American power and the avenging hatreds it arouses.
Americans may not have thought of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon as
the symbolic headquarters of a world empire, but the men with the box
cutters certainly did, and so do numberless millions who cheered their
terrifying exercise in the propaganda of the deed.
Being an imperial power, however, is more than being the most powerful
nation or just the most hated one. It means enforcing such order as there is
in the world and doing so in the American interest. It means laying down the
rules America wants (on everything from markets to weapons of mass
destruction) while exempting itself from other rules (the Kyoto Protocol on
climate change and the International Criminal Court) that go against its
interest. It also means carrying out imperial functions in places America
has inherited from the failed empires of the 20th century -- Ottoman,
British and Soviet. In the 21st century, America rules alone, struggling to
manage the insurgent zones -- Palestine and the northwest frontier of
Pakistan, to name but two -- that have proved to be the nemeses of empires
past.
Iraq lays bare the realities of America's new role. Iraq itself is an
imperial fiction, cobbled together at the Versailles Peace Conference in
1919 by the French and British and held together by force and violence since
independence. Now an expansionist rights violator holds it together with
terror. The United Nations lay dozing like a dog before the fire, happy to
ignore Saddam, until an American president seized it by the scruff of the
neck and made it bark. Multilateral solutions to the world's problems are
all very well, but they have no teeth unless America bares its fangs.
America's empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies,
conquest and the white man's burden. We are no longer in the era of the
United Fruit Company, when American corporations needed the Marines to
secure their investments overseas. The 21st century imperium is a new
invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global
hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy,
enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known. It is
the imperialism of a people who remember that their country secured its
independence by revolt against an empire, and who like to think of
themselves as the friend of freedom everywhere. It is an empire without
consciousness of itself as such, constantly shocked that its good intentions
arouse resentment abroad. But that does not make it any less of an empire,
with a conviction that it alone, in Herman Melville's words, bears ''the ark
of the liberties of the world.''
In this vein, the president's National Security Strategy, announced in
September, commits America to lead other nations toward ''the single
sustainable model for national success,'' by which he meant free markets and
liberal democracy. This is strange rhetoric for a Texas politician who ran
for office opposing nation-building abroad and calling for a more humble
America overseas. But Sept. 11 changed everyone, including a laconic and
anti-rhetorical president. His messianic note may be new to him, but it is
not new to his office. It has been present in the American vocabulary at
least since Woodrow Wilson went to Versailles in 1919 and told the world
that he wanted to make it safe for democracy.
Ever since Wilson, presidents have sounded the same redemptive note while
''frantically avoiding recognition of the imperialism that we in fact
exercise,'' as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said in 1960. Even now, as
President Bush appears to be maneuvering the country toward war with Iraq,
the deepest implication of what is happening has not been fully faced: that
Iraq is an imperial operation that would commit a reluctant republic to
become the guarantor of peace, stability, democratization and oil supplies
in a combustible region of Islamic peoples stretching from Egypt to
Afghanistan. A role once played by the Ottoman Empire, then by the French
and the British, will now be played by a nation that has to ask whether in
becoming an empire it risks losing its soul as a republic.
As the United States faces this moment of truth, John Quincy Adams's
warning of 1821 remains stark and pertinent: if America were tempted to
''become the dictatress of the world, she would be no longer the ruler of
her own spirit.'' What empires lavish abroad, they cannot spend on good
republican government at home: on hospitals or roads or schools. A distended
military budget only aggravates America's continuing failure to keep its
egalitarian promise to itself. And these are not the only costs of empire.
Detaining two American citizens without charge or access to counsel in
military brigs, maintaining illegal combatants on a foreign island in a
legal limbo, keeping lawful aliens under permanent surveillance while
deporting others after secret hearings: these are not the actions of a
republic that lives by the rule of law but of an imperial power reluctant to
trust its own liberties. Such actions may still be a long way short of
Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese, but that may mean only that the
worst -- following, say, another large attack on United States citizens that
produces mass casualties -- is yet to come.
The impending operation in Iraq is thus a defining moment in America's
long debate with itself about whether its overseas role as an empire
threatens or strengthens its existence as a republic. The American
electorate, while still supporting the president, wonders whether his
proclamation of a war without end against terrorists and tyrants may only
increase its vulnerability while endangering its liberties and its economic
health at home. A nation that rarely counts the cost of what it really
values now must ask what the ''liberation'' of Iraq is worth. A republic
that has paid a tiny burden to maintain its empire -- no more than about 4
percent of its gross domestic product -- now contemplates a bill that is
altogether steeper. Even if victory is rapid, a war in Iraq and a postwar
occupation may cost anywhere from $120 billion to $200 billion.
What every schoolchild also knows about empires is that they eventually
face nemeses. To call America the new Rome is at once to recall Rome's glory
and its eventual fate at the hands of the barbarians. A confident and
carefree republic -- the city on a hill, whose people have always believed
they are immune from history's harms -- now has to confront not just an
unending imperial destiny but also a remote possibility that seems to haunt
the history of empire: hubris followed by defeat.
II.
Even at this late date, it is still possible to ask: Why should a republic
take on the risks of empire? Won't it run a chance of endangering its
identity as a free people? The problem is that this implies innocent options
that in the case of Iraq may no longer exist. Iraq is not just about whether
the United States can retain its republican virtue in a wicked world.
Virtuous disengagement is no longer a possibility. Since Sept. 11, it has
been about whether the republic can survive in safety at home without
imperial policing abroad. Face to face with ''evil empires'' of the past,
the republic reluctantly accepted a division of the world based on mutually
assured destruction. But now it faces much less stable and reliable
opponents -- rogue states like Iraq and North Korea with the potential to
supply weapons of mass destruction to a terrorist internationale. Iraq
represents the first in a series of struggles to contain the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction, the first attempt to shut off the potential
supply of lethal technologies to a global terrorist network.
Containment rather than war would be the better course, but the Bush
administration seems to have concluded that containment has reached its
limits -- and the conclusion is not unreasonable. Containment is not
designed to stop production of sarin, VX nerve gas, anthrax and nuclear
weapons. Threatened retaliation might deter Saddam from using these weapons,
but his continued development of them increases his capacity to intimidate
and deter others, including the United States. Already his weapons have
sharply raised the cost of any invasion, and as time goes by this could
become prohibitive. The possibility that North Korea might quickly develop
weapons of mass destruction makes regime change on the Korean peninsula all
but unthinkable. Weapons of mass destruction would render Saddam the master
of a region that, because it has so much of the world's proven oil reserves,
makes it what a military strategist would call the empire's center of
gravity.
Iraq may claim to have ceased manufacturing these weapons after 1991, but
these claims remain unconvincing, because inspectors found evidence of
activity after that date. So what to do? Efforts to embargo and sanction the
regime have hurt only the Iraqi people. What is left? An inspections
program, even a permanent one, might slow the dictator's weapons programs
down, but inspections are easily evaded. That leaves us, but only as a
reluctant last resort, with regime change.
Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes that
the empire's interest has a right to trump the sovereignty of a state. The
Bush administration would ask, What moral authority rests with a sovereign
who murders and ethnically cleanses his own people, has twice invaded
neighboring countries and usurps his people's wealth in order to build
palaces and lethal weapons? And the administration is not alone. Not even
Kofi Annan, the secretary general, charged with defending the United Nations
Charter, says that sovereignty confers impunity for such crimes, though he
has made it clear he would prefer to leave a disarmed Saddam in power rather
than risk the conflagration of war to unseat him.
Regime change also raises the difficult question for Americans of whether
their own freedom entails a duty to defend the freedom of others beyond
their borders. The precedents here are inconclusive. Just because Wilson and
Roosevelt sent Americans to fight and die for freedom in Europe and Asia
doesn't mean their successors are committed to this duty everywhere and
forever. The war in Vietnam was sold to a skeptical American public as
another battle for freedom, and it led the republic into defeat and
disgrace.
Yet it remains a fact -- as disagreeable to those left wingers who regard
American imperialism as the root of all evil as it is to the right-wing
isolationists, who believe that the world beyond our shores is none of our
business -- that there are many peoples who owe their freedom to an exercise
of American military power. It's not just the Japanese and the Germans, who
became democrats under the watchful eye of Generals MacArthur and Clay.
There are the Bosnians, whose nation survived because American air power and
diplomacy forced an end to a war the Europeans couldn't stop. There are the
Kosovars, who would still be imprisoned in Serbia if not for Gen. Wesley
Clark and the Air Force. The list of people whose freedom depends on
American air and ground power also includes the Afghans and, most
inconveniently of all, the Iraqis.
The moral evaluation of empire gets complicated when one of its benefits
might be freedom for the oppressed. Iraqi exiles are adamant: even if the
Iraqi people might be the immediate victims of an American attack, they
would also be its ultimate beneficiaries. It would make the case for
military intervention easier, of course, if the Iraqi exiles cut a more
impressive figure. They feud and squabble and hate one another nearly as
much as they hate Saddam. But what else is to be expected from a political
culture pulverized by 40 years of state terror?
If only invasion, and not containment, can build democracy in Iraq, then
the question becomes whether the Bush administration actually has any real
intention of doing so. The exiles fear that a mere change of regime, a coup
in which one Baathist thug replaces another, would suit American interests
just as well, provided the thug complied with the interests of the Pentagon
and American oil companies. Whenever it has exerted power overseas, America
has never been sure whether it values stability -- which means not only
political stability but also the steady, profitable flow of goods and raw
materials -- more than it values its own rhetoric about democracy. Where the
two values have collided, American power has come down heavily on the side
of stability, for example, toppling democratically elected leaders from
Mossadegh in Iran to Allende in Chile. Iraq is yet another test of this
choice. Next door in Iran, from the 1950's to the 1970's, America backed
stability over democracy, propping up the autocratic rule of the shah, only
to reap the whirlwind of an Islamic fundamentalist revolution in 1979 that
delivered neither stability nor real democracy. Does the same fate await an
American operation in Iraq?
International human rights groups, like Amnesty International, are
dismayed at the way both the British government of Tony Blair and the Bush
administration are citing the human rights abuses of Saddam to defend the
idea of regime change. Certainly the British and the American governments
maintained a complicit and dishonorable silence when Saddam gassed the Kurds
in 1988. Yet now that the two governments are taking decisive action, human
rights groups seem more outraged by the prospect of action than they are by
the abuses they once denounced. The fact that states are both late and
hypocritical in their adoption of human rights does not deprive them of the
right to use force to defend them.
The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that
there are some occasions -- and Iraq may be one of them -- when war is the
only real remedy for regimes that live by terror. This does not mean the
choice is morally unproblematic. The choice is one between two evils,
between containing and leaving a tyrant in place and the targeted use of
force, which will kill people but free a nation from the tyrant's grip.
III.
Still, the claim that a free republic may sense a duty to help other people
attain their freedom does not answer the prudential question of whether the
republic should run such risks. For the risks are huge, and they are
imperial. Order, let alone democracy, will take a decade to consolidate in
Iraq. The Iraqi opposition's blueprints for a democratic and secular
federation of Iraq's component peoples -- Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans
and others -- are noble documents, but they are just paper unless American
and then international troops, under United Nations mandate, remain to keep
the peace until Iraqis trust one another sufficiently to police themselves.
Like all imperial exercises in creating order, it will work only if the
puppets the Americans install cease to be puppets and build independent
political legitimacy of their own.
If America takes on Iraq, it takes on the reordering of the whole region.
It will have to stick at it through many successive administrations. The
burden of empire is of long duration, and democracies are impatient with
long-lasting burdens -- none more so than America. These burdens include
opening up a dialogue with the Iranians, who appear to be in a political
upsurge themselves, so that they do not feel threatened by a United
States-led democracy on their border. The Turks will have to be reassured,
and the Kurds will have to be instructed that the real aim of United States
policy is not the creation of a Kurdish state that goes on to dismember
Turkey. The Syrians will have to be coaxed into abandoning their claims
against the Israelis and making peace. The Saudis, once democracy takes root
next door in Iraq, will have to be coaxed into embracing democratic change
themselves.
All this is possible, but there is a larger challenge still. Unseating an
Arab government in Iraq while leaving the Palestinians to face Israeli tanks
and helicopter gunships is a virtual guarantee of unending Islamic wrath
against the United States. The chief danger in the whole Iraqi gamble lies
here -- in supposing that victory over Saddam, in the absence of a
Palestinian-Israeli settlement, would leave the United States with a stable
hegemony over the Middle East. Absent a Middle East peace, victory in Iraq
would still leave the Palestinians face to face with the Israelis in a
conflict in which they would destroy not only each other but American
authority in the Islamic world as well.
The Americans have played imperial guarantor in the region since
Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud in 1945 and Truman recognized Ben-Gurion's
Israel in 1948. But it paid little or no price for its imperial pre-eminence
until the rise of an armed Palestinian resistance after 1987. Now, with
every day that American power appears complicit in Israeli attacks that kill
civilians in the West Bank and in Gaza, and with the Arab nations giving
their tacit support to Palestinian suicide bombers, the imperial guarantor
finds itself dragged into a regional conflict that is one long hemorrhage of
its diplomatic and military authority.
Properly understood, then, the operation in Iraq entails a commitment, so
far unstated, to enforce a peace on the Palestinians and Israelis. Such a
peace must, at a minimum, give the Palestinians a viable, contiguous state
capable of providing land and employment for three million people. It must
include a commitment to rebuild their shattered government infrastructure,
possibly through a United Nations transitional administration, with
U.N.-mandated peacekeepers to provide security for Israelis and
Palestinians. This is an awesomely tall order, but if America cannot find
the will to enforce this minimum of justice, neither it nor Israel will have
any safety from terror. This remains true even if you accept that there are
terrorists in the Arab world who will never be content unless Israel is
driven into the sea. A successful American political strategy against terror
depends on providing enough peace for both Israelis and Palestinians that
extremists on either side begin to lose the support that keeps violence
alive.
Paradoxically, reducing the size of the task does not reduce the risks.
If an invasion of Iraq is delinked from Middle East peace, then all America
will gain for victory in Iraq is more terror cells in the Muslim world. If
America goes on to help the Palestinians achieve a state, the result will
not win over those, like Osama bin Laden, who hate America for what it is.
But at least it would address the rage of those who hate it for what it
does.
This is finally what makes an invasion of Iraq an imperial act: for it to
succeed, it will have to build freedom, not just for the Iraqis but also for
the Palestinians, along with a greater sense of security for Israel. Again,
the paradox of the Iraq operation is that half measures are more dangerous
than whole measures. Imperial powers do not have the luxury of timidity, for
timidity is not prudence; it is a confession of weakness.
IV.
The question, then, is not whether America is too powerful but whether it is
powerful enough. Does it have what it takes to be grandmaster of what Colin
Powell has called the chessboard of the world's most inflammable region?
America has been more successful than most great powers in understanding
its strengths as well as its limitations. It has become adept at using what
is called soft power -- influence, example and persuasion -- in preference
to hard power. Adepts of soft power understand that even the most powerful
country in the world can't get its way all the time. Even client states have
to be deferred to. When an ally like Saudi Arabia asks the United States to
avoid flying over its country when bombing Afghanistan, America complies.
When America seeks to use Turkey as a base for hostilities in Iraq, it must
accept Turkish preconditions. Being an empire doesn't mean being omnipotent.
Nowhere is this clearer than in America's relations with Israel.
America's ally is anything but a client state. Its prime minister has
refused direct orders from the president of the United States in the past,
and he can be counted on to do so again. An Iraq operation requires the
United States not merely to prevent Israel from entering the fray but to
make peace with a bitter enemy. Since 1948, American and Israeli security
interests have been at one. But as the death struggle in Palestine
continues, it exposes the United States to global hatreds that make it
impossible for it to align its interests with those Israelis who are opposed
to any settlement with the Palestinians that does not amount, in effect, to
Palestinian capitulation. The issue is not whether the United States should
continue to support the state of Israel, but which state, with which borders
and which set of relations with its neighbors, it is willing to risk its
imperial authority to secure. The apocalyptic violence of one side and the
justified refusal to negotiate under fire on the other side leave precious
little time to salvage a two-state solution for the Middle East. But this,
even more than rescuing Iraq, is the supreme task -- and test -- of American
leadership.
V.
What assets does American leadership have at its disposal? At a time when an
imperial peace in the Middle East requires diplomats, aid workers and
civilians with all the skills in rebuilding shattered societies, American
power projection in the area overwhelmingly wears a military uniform.
''Every great power, whatever its ideology,'' Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once
wrote, ''has its warrior caste.'' Without realizing the consequences of what
they were doing, successive American presidents have turned the projection
of American power to the warrior caste, according to the findings of
research by Robert J. Lieber of Georgetown University. In President
Kennedy's time, Lieber has found, the United States spent 1 percent of its
G.D.P. on the nonmilitary aspects of promoting its influence overseas --
State Department, foreign aid, the United Nations, information programs.
Under Bush's presidency, the number has declined to just 0.2 percent.
Special Forces are more in evidence in the world's developing nations
than Peace Corps volunteers and USAID food experts. As Dana Priest
demonstrates in ''The Mission,'' a soon-to-be-published study of the
American military, the Pentagon's regional commanders exercise more overseas
diplomatic and political leverage than the State Department's ambassadors.
Even if you accept that generals can make good diplomats and Special Forces
captains can make friends for the United States, it still remains true that
the American presence overseas is increasingly armed, in uniform and behind
barbed wire and high walls. With every American Embassy now hardened against
terrorist attack, the empire's overseas outposts look increasingly like Fort
Apache. American power is visible to the world in carrier battle groups
patrolling offshore and F-16's whistling overhead. In southern Afghanistan,
it is the 82nd Airborne, bulked up in body armor, helmets and weapons, that
Pashtun peasants see, not American aid workers and water engineers. Each
month the United States spends an estimated $1 billion on military
operations in Afghanistan and only $25 million on aid.
This sort of projection of power, hunkered down against attack, can earn
the United States fear and respect, but not admiration and affection.
America's very strength -- in military power -- cannot conceal its weakness
in the areas that really matter: the elements of power that do not subdue by
force of arms but inspire by force of example.
VI.
It is unsurprising that force projection overseas should awaken resentment
among America's enemies. More troubling is the hostility it arouses among
friends, those whose security is guaranteed by American power. Nowhere is
this more obvious than in Europe. At a moment when the costs of empire are
mounting for America, her rich European allies matter financially. But in
America's emerging global strategy, they have been demoted to reluctant
junior partners. This makes them resentful and unwilling allies, less and
less able to understand the nation that liberated them in 1945.
For 50 years, Europe rebuilt itself economically while passing on the
costs of its defense to the United States. This was a matter of more than
just reducing its armed forces and the proportion of national income spent
on the military. All Western European countries reduced the martial elements
in their national identities. In the process, European identity (with the
possible exception of Britain) became postmilitary and postnational. This
opened a widening gap with the United States. It remained a nation in which
flag, sacrifice and martial honor are central to national identity.
Europeans who had once invented the idea of the martial nation-state now
looked at American patriotism, the last example of the form, and no longer
recognized it as anything but flag-waving extremism. The world's only empire
was isolated, not just because it was the biggest power but also because it
was the West's last military nation-state.
Sept. 11 rubbed in the lesson that global power is still measured by
military capability. The Europeans discovered that they lacked the military
instruments to be taken seriously and that their erstwhile defenders, the
Americans, regarded them, in a moment of crisis, with suspicious contempt.
Yet the Americans cannot afford to create a global order all on their
own. European participation in peacekeeping, nation-building and
humanitarian reconstruction is so important that the Americans are required,
even when they are unwilling to do so, to include Europeans in the
governance of their evolving imperial project. The Americans essentially
dictate Europe's place in this new grand design. The United States is
multilateral when it wants to be, unilateral when it must be; and it
enforces a new division of labor in which America does the fighting, the
French, British and Germans do the police patrols in the border zones and
the Dutch, Swiss and Scandinavians provide the humanitarian aid.
This is a very different picture of the world than the one entertained by
liberal international lawyers and human rights activists who had hoped to
see American power integrated into a transnational legal and economic order
organized around the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the
International Criminal Court and other international human rights and
environmental institutions and mechanisms. Successive American
administrations have signed on to those pieces of the transnational legal
order that suit their purposes (the World Trade Organization, for example)
while ignoring or even sabotaging those parts (the International Criminal
Court or the Kyoto Protocol) that do not. A new international order is
emerging, but it is designed to suit American imperial objectives. America's
allies want a multilateral order that will essentially constrain American
power. But the empire will not be tied down like Gulliver with a thousand
legal strings.
VII.
On the new imperial frontier, in places like Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo,
American military power, together with European money and humanitarian
motives, is producing a form of imperial rule for a postimperial age. If
this sounds contradictory, it is because the impulses that have gone into
this new exercise of power are contradictory. On the one hand, the
semiofficial ideology of the Western world -- human rights -- sustains the
principle of self-determination, the right of each people to rule themselves
free of outside interference. This was the ethical principle that inspired
the decolonization of Asia and Africa after World War II. Now we are living
through the collapse of many of these former colonial states. Into the
resulting vacuum of chaos and massacre a new imperialism has reluctantly
stepped -- reluctantly because these places are dangerous and because they
seemed, at least until Sept. 11, to be marginal to the interests of the
powers concerned. But, gradually, this reluctance has been replaced by an
understanding of why order needs to be brought to these places.
Nowhere, after all, could have been more distant than Afghanistan, yet
that remote and desperate place was where the attacks of Sept. 11 were
prepared. Terror has collapsed distance, and with this collapse has come a
sharpened American focus on the necessity of bringing order to the frontier
zones. Bringing order is the paradigmatic imperial task, but it is
essential, for reasons of both economy and principle, to do so without
denying local peoples their rights to some degree of self-determination.
The old European imperialism justified itself as a mission to civilize,
to prepare tribes and so-called lesser breeds in the habits of
self-discipline necessary for the exercise of self-rule. Self-rule did not
necessarily have to happen soon -- the imperial administrators hoped to
enjoy the sunset as long as possible -- but it was held out as a distant
incentive, and the incentive was crucial in co-opting local elites and
preventing them from passing into open rebellion. In the new imperialism,
this promise of self-rule cannot be kept so distant, for local elites are
all creations of modern nationalism, and modern nationalism's primary
ethical content is self-determination. If there is an invasion of Iraq,
local elites must be ''empowered'' to take over as soon as the American
imperial forces have restored order and the European humanitarians have
rebuilt the roads, schools and houses. Nation-building seeks to reconcile
imperial power and local self-determination through the medium of an exit
strategy. This is imperialism in a hurry: to spend money, to get results, to
turn the place back to the locals and get out. But it is similar to the old
imperialism in the sense that real power in these zones -- Kosovo, Bosnia,
Afghanistan and soon, perhaps, Iraq -- will remain in Washington.
VIII.
At the beginning of the first volume of ''The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire,'' published in 1776, Edward Gibbon remarked that empires endure only
so long as their rulers take care not to overextend their borders. Augustus
bequeathed his successors an empire ''within those limits which nature
seemed to have placed as its permanent bulwarks and boundaries: on the west
the Atlantic Ocean; the Rhine and Danube on the north; the Euphrates on the
east; and towards the south the sandy deserts of Arabia and Africa.'' Beyond
these boundaries lay the barbarians. But the ''vanity or ignorance'' of the
Romans, Gibbon went on, led them to ''despise and sometimes to forget the
outlying countries that had been left in the enjoyment of a barbarous
independence.'' As a result, the proud Romans were lulled into making the
fatal mistake of ''confounding the Roman monarchy with the globe of the
earth.''
This characteristic delusion of imperial power is to confuse global power
with global domination. The Americans may have the former, but they do not
have the latter. They cannot rebuild each failed state or appease each
anti-American hatred, and the more they try, the more they expose themselves
to the overreach that eventually undermined the classical empires of old.
The secretary of defense may be right when he warns the North Koreans
that America is capable of fighting on two fronts -- in Korea and Iraq --
simultaneously, but Americans at home cannot be overjoyed at such a
prospect, and if two fronts are possible at once, a much larger number of
fronts is not. If conflict in Iraq, North Korea or both becomes a
possibility, Al Qaeda can be counted on to seek to strike a busy and
overextended empire in the back. What this suggests is not just that
overwhelming power never confers the security it promises but also that even
the overwhelmingly powerful need friends and allies. In the cold war, the
road to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, led through Moscow and Beijing.
Now America needs its old cold war adversaries more than ever to control the
breakaway, bankrupt Communist rogue that is threatening America and her
clients from Tokyo to Seoul.
Empires survive when they understand that diplomacy, backed by force, is
always to be preferred to force alone. Looking into the still more distant
future, say a generation ahead, resurgent Russia and China will demand
recognition both as world powers and as regional hegemons. As the North
Korean case shows, America needs to share the policing of nonproliferation
and other threats with these powers, and if it tries, as the current
National Security Strategy suggests, to prevent the emergence of any
competitor to American global dominance, it risks everything that Gibbon
predicted: overextension followed by defeat.
America will also remain vulnerable, despite its overwhelming military
power, because its primary enemy, Iraq and North Korea notwithstanding, is
not a state, susceptible to deterrence, influence and coercion, but a
shadowy cell of fanatics who have proved that they cannot be deterred and
coerced and who have hijacked a global ideology -- Islam -- that gives them
a bottomless supply of recruits and allies in a war, a war not just against
America but against her client regimes in the Islamic world. In many
countries in that part of the world, America is caught in the middle of a
civil war raging between incompetent and authoritarian regimes and the
Islamic revolutionaries who want to return the Arab world to the time of the
prophet. It is a civil war between the politics of pure reaction and the
politics of the impossible, with America unfortunately aligned on the side
of reaction. On Sept. 11, the American empire discovered that in the Middle
East its local pillars were literally built on sand.
Until Sept. 11, successive United States administrations treated their
Middle Eastern clients like gas stations. This was part of a larger pattern.
After 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet empire, American presidents
thought they could have imperial domination on the cheap, ruling the world
without putting in place any new imperial architecture -- new military
alliances, new legal institutions, new international development organisms
-- for a postcolonial, post-Soviet world.
The Greeks taught the Romans to call this failure hubris. It was also, in
the 1990's, a general failure of the historical imagination, an inability of
the post-cold-war West to grasp that the emerging crisis of state order in
so many overlapping zones of the world -- from Egypt to Afghanistan -- would
eventually become a security threat at home. Radical Islam would never have
succeeded in winning adherents if the Muslim countries that won independence
from the European empires had been able to convert dreams of
self-determination into the reality of competent, rule-abiding states.
America has inherited this crisis of self-determination from the empires of
the past. Its solution -- to create democracy in Iraq, then hopefully roll
out the same happy experiment throughout the Middle East -- is both noble
and dangerous: noble because, if successful, it will finally give these
peoples the self-determination they vainly fought for against the empires of
the past; dangerous because, if it fails, there will be nobody left to blame
but the Americans.
The dual nemeses of empire in the 20th century were nationalism, the
desire of peoples to rule themselves free of alien domination, and
narcissism, the incurable delusion of imperial rulers that the ''lesser
breeds'' aspired only to be versions of themselves. Both nationalism and
narcissism have threatened the American reassertion of global power since
Sept. 11.
IX.
As the Iraqi operation looms, it is worth keeping Vietnam in mind. Vietnam
was a titanic clash between two nation-building strategies, the Americans in
support of the South Vietnamese versus the Communists in the north. Yet it
proved impossible for foreigners to build stability in a divided country
against resistance from a Communist elite fighting in the name of the
Vietnamese nation. Vietnam is now one country, its civil war over and its
long-term stability assured. An American operation in Iraq will not face a
competing nationalist project, but across the Islamic world it will rouse
the nationalist passions of people who want to rule themselves and worship
as they please. As Vietnam shows, empire is no match, long-term, for
nationalism.
America's success in the 20th century owed a great deal to the shrewd
understanding that America's interest lay in aligning itself with freedom.
Franklin Roosevelt, for example, told his advisers at Yalta in 1945, when he
was dividing up the postwar world with Churchill and Stalin, that there were
more than a billion ''brown people'' living in Asia, ''ruled by a handful of
whites.'' They resent it, the president mused aloud. America's goal, he
said, ''must be to help them achieve independence -- 1,100,000,000 enemies
are dangerous.''
The core beliefs of our time are the creations of the anticolonial revolt
against empire: the idea that all human beings are equal and that each human
group has a right to rule itself free of foreign interference. It is at
least ironic that American believers in these ideas have ended up supporting
the creation of a new form of temporary colonial tutelage for Bosnians,
Kosovars and Afghans -- and could for Iraqis. The reason is simply that,
however right these principles may be, the political form in which they are
realized -- the nationalist nation-building project -- so often delivers
liberated colonies straight to tyranny, as in the case of Baath Party rule
in Iraq, or straight to chaos, as in Bosnia or Afghanistan. For every
nationalist struggle that succeeds in giving its people self-determination
and dignity, there are more that deliver their people only up to slaughter
or terror or both. For every Vietnam brought about by nationalist struggle,
there is a Palestinian struggle trapped in a downward spiral of terror and
military oppression.
The age of empire ought to have been succeeded by an age of independent,
equal and self-governing nation-states. But that has not come to pass.
America has inherited a world scarred not just by the failures of empires
past but also by the failure of nationalist movements to create and secure
free states -- and now, suddenly, by the desire of Islamists to build
theocratic tyrannies on the ruins of failed nationalist dreams.
Those who want America to remain a republic rather than become an empire
imagine rightly, but they have not factored in what tyranny or chaos can do
to vital American interests. The case for empire is that it has become, in a
place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike. Even so,
empires survive only by understanding their limits. Sept. 11 pitched the
Islamic world into the beginning of a long and bloody struggle to determine
how it will be ruled and by whom: the authoritarians, the Islamists or
perhaps the democrats. America can help repress and contain the struggle,
but even though its own security depends on the outcome, it cannot
ultimately control it. Only a very deluded imperialist would believe
otherwise.
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