American empire foreclosed? (Part I)

By Weekly Archive On Apr 22, 2009

Reconsidering
U.S. power in a time of economic crisis

Foreign
Policy In Focus

Not
long ago, excitement over American imperialism reached levels not
seen in a century. “People are coming out of the closet on the word
‘empire,’” the right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer told
The New
York Times
in early 2002. Neoconservatives were on the rise in Washington, and
their leading propagandists were not shy in making the case for
aggressive expansionism.

Wall
Street Journal editor
Max Boot, for instance, took issue with Pat Buchanan’s belief that
the United States should be a “republic, not an empire.” “This
analysis is exactly backward,” Boot wrote.
“[T]he Sept. 11 attack was a result of insufficient American
involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our
goals and more assertive in their implementation.” He added,
“troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign
administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs
and pith helmets.”

It
is hard to believe that those sentiments, hallmarks of George W.
Bush’s first term, were features of our very recent history. The
debate they were a part of now seems distinctly strange and foreign.
Since then, the world has experienced a catastrophic occupation in
Iraq, and voters have ousted the Republican vanguard of the “War on
Terror.” Overt defenders of imperialism have found good reason to
creep back into their wardrobes.

And
that, of course, is to say nothing of the bursting of the housing
bubble, the fall of Lehman, and the end of the hedge fund era. With
unemployment rising and Wall Street shamed, we have entered a period
of economic downturn acute enough to raise serious questions about
the viability of U.S. power. The pressing issue today is: How will
the economic crisis affect our country’s role in the world? Or,
more bluntly: Is America’s empire facing foreclosure?

The
answer involves more than just quibbles over the semantics of U.S.
dominance. Together, the fallout from the imperial hubris of the Bush
administration and the discrediting of the deregulated market
fundamentalism that thrived even under Bill Clinton have opened new
possibilities for reshaping the global order in the Obama years.

Stretched
beyond the limits?

The
theory of imperial decline that has become standard over the past two
decades is known as “overreach” or “overstretch.” Historian
Paul Kennedy most famously described the concept in his 1988 book,
The Rise
and Fall of the Great Powers.
Kennedy argued that, historically, dominant world powers doomed
themselves by engaging in overseas adventures that drained their
strength and strained their finances. His analysis, with its
implication that the United States could well follow the pattern of
past empires, proved influential. The term “imperial overstretch”
quickly became a fixture in mainstream political discussion.

At
the time, American conservatives fumed. They argued that the
British-born professor was a doomsayer who did not appreciate
America’s unmatched power. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the
American economy took off in the 1990s, they considered themselves
vindicated. However, it appears that Kennedy may yet have the last
laugh.

Today,
the price tag on America’s global military posture looks more
imposing than ever. Even under President Obama — whose
administration has proposed
cutting a few costly and outmoded weapons systems — the United
States will
spend
upwards of a half trillion dollars per year to fund its armed forces
and keep up its “Baseworld.” This is what author and foreign
policy analyst Chalmers Johnson named
the country’s sprawling network of overseas encampments, rarely
noticed by citizens at home but bitterly resented by much of the
world. The United States officially owns 737 bases worldwide, worth
more than $127 billion and covering at least 687,347 acres in some
130 foreign countries. “Once upon a time, you could trace the
spread of imperialism by counting up colonies,” Johnson writes in
his 2007 book, Nemesis:
The Last Days of the American Republic.
“America’s version of the colony is the military base.”

Johnson
explains, “The purpose of all these bases is ‘force projection,’
or the maintenance of American military hegemony over the rest of the
world. They facilitate our ‘policing’ of the globe and are meant
to ensure that no other nation, friendly or hostile, can ever
challenge us militarily.” Since the end of the Cold War, holding
such unrivalled power has been a stated cornerstone of U.S. defense
policy.

We
must now ask: Can such hegemony plausibly be maintained? On the
objective level, President Bush made the strains on empire more
severe by occupying multiple countries and creating a need for more
troops than the military could recruit. Highlighting this dilemma,
Kennedy argued
in a 2006 interview, “U.S. Army generals would definitely say that
America is overstretched.”

But
even more significantly, Bush upped the political and economic costs
of empire by engendering ill-will and resistance to the United States
throughout the world. A key aspect of imperial overstretch is that it
must be measured relatively. It depends not only on objective
factors, like the size of the U.S. military, but also on how other
international actors choose to respond to America’s foreign policy
prerogatives. Ironically, as the neoconservative “imperial
globalists” of the Bush administration placed ever more stock in
America’s hard power, they only ended up demonstrating its
impotence. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has shown
itself unable to create stability or suppress insurgency with its
might. Like its failure in Vietnam, the fiasco in the Middle East has
emboldened opposition. The neocons dreamed of Iraq as a democratic
ally and platform for U.S. power in the region. Instead, the country
is now a symbol of the superpower’s weakness.

Democratic
resistance also determines the relative limits of empire. Among our
allies, the Bush administration’s “with us or against us”
attacks on multilateralism diminished the willingness of other powers
to shoulder part of the burden of America’s overseas adventures.
Members of the international community, disgusted by imperial
globalism’s failure to produce real security, increasingly refused
to go along. This left a politically isolated United States with the
stark and foreboding prospect of policing the world alone — a
humbling proposition even to an administration notably lacking in
humility.

Dangling
the dollar

President
Obama may be able to reverse some of the diplomatic damage of the
Bush years, but his administration faces problems of its own. Global
force projection requires not only a huge amount of political
capital; at a most fundamental level it demands financial treasure.
Thus, degrees of overstretch must also be gauged relative to economic
health — something which is now in short supply. Many would think
that America, in the throes of financial crisis, would be destined
for imperial bankruptcy.

The
United States, accustomed over the past 15 years to running a large
current account deficit, has clearly been living beyond its means.
While its bubble economy was expanding, the government relied on
foreign investors to pay for its excessive military spending. And on
the consumer level, families went into credit card debt and borrowed
against the value of their homes to keep consuming.

It
was an unsustainable state of affairs, and most nations would never
have been allowed to maintain it. The International Monetary Fund
(IMF) would have railed against wanton economic mismanagement and
warned creditors not to invest in that country unless the government
promised sweeping reforms. Even without the institution’s
influence, textbook economics holds that, on seeing such signs of
economic weakness, investors would shy away from the country, its
currency would fall, consumers would no longer be able to afford as
many foreign goods, and the economy would undergo a necessary, if
painful, “correction.” Financial hardship and declining standards
of living would logically prompt a country to scale back pricey
involvements abroad.

Now
that crisis has struck, it would seem that we are overdue for a tough
reckoning with imperial costs. However, the state of the markets is
not the only factor in play. Like in the political sphere, the
ability of the United States to survive economically as a hegemon
depends in large part on whether others decide to support, tolerate,
or resist the present order.

What
makes the United States different than other countries? As the
world’s political superpower and largest economy, America’s
dollars serve as the reserve currency for the rest of the world.
Foreign countries keep their money in dollars because they believe
they are more dependable than any alternative. As long as other
nations are willing to keep pouring money into the dollar, the United
States can finance ever-larger deficits.

Ironically,
one effect of the crisis thus far has been to sustain high demand for
the dollar. The logic is simple. In a chaotic economy, many investors
consider
U.S. Treasury bonds the only safe place to hold their money — even
if interest rates are low. But this won’t last forever. Already
noises of discontent have come from major investors. As world leaders
were gathering in London for the recent G20 summit, Zhou Xiaochuan,
the governor of China’s central bank, called for a new
“super-sovereign reserve currency,” which would displace the
dollar.

Progressive
economists such as Paul
Krugman
and Dean
Baker
have debated the significance of China’s latest posturing, and it
is doubtful that an immediate abandoning of the dollar is in the
offing. But when other countries do decide to change economic
strategies and turn to a new reserve currency, it could be a tipping
point for America’s imperial designs. Washington need only consult
London about the gravity of this problem. As many historians have
observed, the unraveling of the British Empire came hard on the heels
of the shift away from pounds sterling as the global currency of
choice.

The
promise and perils of multipolarity

Even
if the United States weathers the crisis with its economy more or
less intact, most political observers believe that its power will
diminish in coming years, at least relative to that of other
countries. “Multipolarity” has become the watchword of the day.
In a multipolar order, there will no longer be a sole superpower, the
United States, calling the shots. Instead, America will have to
function within a constellation of regional political and economic
powerbrokers.

Even
before the financial crisis, U.S. government intelligence sources
predicted a significant international realignment over the next two
decades. In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a
119-page report
entitled Mapping
the Global Future.
As Slate
reported,
the document argued that in the year 2020, “the United States will
remain ‘an important shaper of the international order’ —
probably the single most powerful country — but its ‘relative
power position’ will have ‘eroded.’ The new ‘arriviste
powers’ — not only China and India, but also Brazil, Indonesia,
and perhaps others — will accelerate this erosion by pursuing
‘strategies designed to exclude or isolate the United States’ in
order to ‘force or cajole’ us into playing by their rules.”

These
predictions are proving to be well founded. According
to the London Independent,
the G20 summit put a version of a multipolar order on display; it was
“a summit that show[ed] the new balance of power.” There, “the
voice of the United States was one, albeit an influential one, among
others…. By inclination or by necessity, the post-Bush United
States seems to see its place in the world a little differently: less
American exceptionalism, more consensus-seeking. In the G20, the
presence of China, India and Indonesia, among others, gives a
foretaste of a future world order.” Standing out among other
nations, “China made its shy debut as a rising power.”

Debates
rage about the implications of the multipolar shift. Some
commentators have worried that, paralleling the rise of fascism in
the interwar period, a global economic collapse could bring
reactionary, xenophobic movements to power in many countries. And
already in the Bush years, conservative defenders of empire, such as
Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, spread fear about the prospects of
unipolarity’s end. “If the United States retreats from global
hegemony — its fragile self-image dented by minor setbacks on the
imperial frontier — its critics at home and abroad must not pretend
that they are ushering in a new era of multipolar harmony, or even a
return to the good old balance of power,” he wrote
in Foreign
Policy.
“Unfortunately, the alternative to a single superpower is not a
multilateral utopia, but the anarchic nightmare of a new Dark Age.”
The historian warned of “Waning empires. Religious revivals.
Incipient anarchy. A coming retreat into fortified cities. These are
the Dark Age experiences that a world without a hyperpower might
quickly find itself reliving.”

Of
course, those who most bemoan the loss of “hyperpower” are the
same people who cheered the invasion of Iraq. And unfortunately, in
its tenure as a global hegemon, the United States bolstered
repressive and undemocratic governments at least as often as it
thwarted them. Yet there is some amount of justified caveat here for
multipolarists: imperial decline does not guarantee progress.
Certainly, other rising powers will need to be subjected to the same
level of public scrutiny and democratic criticism as past goliaths.

But
while the rejection of both corporate and imperial models of
globalization may not be sufficient for creating a more just global
order, it is necessary. Today’s economic crisis, global in scope,
will mean real pain for working people and for economically
vulnerable communities throughout the world, those who will suffer
most during a “Great Recession.” But there is also hope in this
time of crisis. The dual delegitimization of empire and of market
fundamentalism has created more space for global alternatives than
has existed since the end of the Cold War. Now is a moment ripe for
the spread of political and economic visions emerging from below. And
it is an opportunity for the United States to craft a vision of
international relations more humble, more egalitarian, and more
democratic than what has previously been pursued in freedom’s name.

(In
next week’s final part, Engler asks how Washington will manage the
transition to a situation where its relative dominance has
diminished.)

Mark
Engler, a writer based in New York City, is a senior analyst with
Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of How
to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation
Books, 2008). He
can be reached via the Web site http://www.DemocracyUprising.com.