Colossus

by Niall Ferguson

  If military power is the sine qua non of an empire, then it is hard to imagine how anyone could deny the imperial character of the United States today. Conventional maps of U.S. military deployments understate the extent of America’s military reach.75 A Defense Department map of the world, which shows the areas of responsibility of the five major regional commands, suggests that America’s sphere of military influence is now literally global.76 The regional combatant commanders the “proconsuls” of this imperium have responsibility for swaths of territory beyond the wildest imaginings of their Roman predecessors. USEUCOM extends from the westernmost shore of Greenland to the Bering Strait, from the Arctic Ocean to the Cape of Good Hope, from Iceland to Israel.77

  It is of course a truth universally acknowledged that large overseas military commitments cannot be sustained without even larger economic resources. Is America rich enough to play the part of Atlas, bearing the weight of the whole world on its shoulders? This was a question posed so frequently in the 1970s and 1980s that it became possible to speak of “declinism” as a school of thought. According to Paul Kennedy, military and fiscal “overstretch” doomed the United States—like all “great powers”78 before it—to lose its position of economic dominance.79 For a brief time after the fall of the Berlin Wall it was possible to rejoice that the Soviet Union had succumbed to overstretch first.80 The economic travails of Japan, once touted as a future geopolitical contender, added to the sense of national recuperation. While America savored a period of “relative ascent” unlike any since the 1920s, when an earlier peace dividend had fueled an earlier stock market bubble, declinism itself declined. By the end of the 1990s, however, commentators had found new rivals about which to worry. Some feared the European Union.81 Others looked with apprehension toward China.82 Samuel Huntington too saw “unipolarity” as only a transient phenomenon: as Europe united and China grew richer, so the world would revert to a “multipolarity” not seen since before the Second World War.83 In Emmanuel Todd’s eyes, French fears about American “hyperpower” ignored the reality of an impending decline and fall.84

  If recent rates of growth of population and output were to continue for another twenty years, America could conceivably be overtaken as the largest economy in the world by China as early as 2018.85 Yet it is highly unlikely that growth rates in either country will be the same in the next two decades as in the previous two. All we can say with certainty is that in 2002 American gross domestic product, calculated in international dollars and adjusted on the basis of purchasing power parity, was nearly twice that of China and accounted for just over a fifth (21.4 percent) of total world output—more than the Japanese, German and British shares put together. That exceeds the highest share of global output ever achieved by Great Britain by a factor of more than two.86 Indeed, calculated in current U.S. dollars, the American share of the world’s gross output was closer to a third (32.3 percent), double the size of the Chinese and Japanese economies combined.87 In terms of both production and consumption, the United States is already a vastly wealthier empire than Britain ever was.88

  Nor are these the only measures of American economic dominance. In Britain’s imperial heyday, only a handful of corporations could really be described as “multinational,” in the sense of having substantial proportions of their assets and workforce in overseas markets. Today the world economy is dominated by such firms, a substantial number of which—ranging from Exxon Mobil to General Motors, from McDonald’s to Coca-Cola, from Microsoft to Time Warner—are American in origin and continue to have their headquarters in the United States. The recent history of McDonald’s provides a vivid example of the way American corporations have expanded overseas in search of new markets, much as the old Hobson-Lenin theory of imperialism would have led one to expect. In 1967 McDonald’s opened its first foreign outlets in Canada and Puerto Rico. Twenty years later it had nearly 10,000 restaurants in 47 countries and territories, and by 1997 no fewer than 23,000 restaurants in over 100 countries. In 1999, for the first time, the company’s foreign sales exceeded its American sales. Today there are more than 30,000 McDonald’s restaurants in over 120 countries; fewer than half, 12,800, are in the United States.89 Like Donald Rumsfeld, Ronald McDonald needs his map of the world, and it presents a striking alternative geography of American empire. In the words of the company’s chief operating officer, “There are 6½ billion people on the Earth and only 270 million live in the US…. Who else is positioned around the globe to deal with that opportunity?”90Coca-colonization is a hackneyed catchphrase of the antiglobalization “movement,” but it conveys a certain truth when one considers the geographical range of the soft drink company’s sales: 30 percent to North America, 24 percent to Latin America, 22 percent to Europe and the Middle East, 18 percent to Asia and 6 percent to Africa. Significantly, the Real Thing’s fastest-growing market is the People’s Republic of China.91

  The relatively rapid growth of the American economy in the 1980s and 1990s—at a time when the economy of its principal cold war rival was imploding—explains how the United States has managed to achieve a unique revolution in military affairs while at the same time substantially reducing the share of defense expenditures as a proportion of gross domestic product. The Defense Department Green Paper published in March 2003 forecast total expenditure on national defense to remain constant at 3.5 percent of GDP for at least three years.92 That should be compared with an average figure during the cold war of 7 percent. Given Paul Kennedy’s “formula” that “if a particular nation is allocating over the long term more than 10 per cent … of GNP to armaments, that is likely to limit its growth rate,” there seems little danger of imminent imperial overstretch.93 In short, in terms of economic resources as well as of military capability the United States not only resembles but in some respects exceeds the last great Anglophone empire.

  GOING SOFT

  One argument sometimes advanced to distinguish American hegemony from British empire is qualitative. American power, it is argued, consists not just of military and economic power but also of “soft” power. According to Joseph Nye, the dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School, “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness.” Soft power, in other words, is getting what you want without “force or inducement,” sticks or carrots: “It is the ability to entice and attract. Soft power arises in large part from our values.”94 In America’s case, “it comes from being a shining ‘city upon a hill’ ”—an enticing new Jerusalem of economic and political liberty.95 Nye is not so naive as to assume that the American way is inherently attractive to everyone, everywhere. But he does believe that making it attractive matters more than in the past because of the global spread of information technology.96 To put it simply, soft power—or what other writers have called Americanization—can reach the parts that hard power cannot reach.97

  But does this make American power so very different from imperial power? On the contrary. If anything, it illustrates how very like the last Anglophone empire the United States has become. The British Empire too sought to make its values attractive to others, though initially—before the advent of modern communications technology—the job had to be done by “men on the spot.” British missionaries, intent on spreading their islands’ various brands of Christianity, fanned out across the globe. British businessmen too introduced their distinctive styles of accounting and management. British administrators applied their notions of law and order. And British schoolmasters drummed reading, writing and arithmetic into colonial elites. Together all of them contrived to spread British leisure pursuits like cricket and afternoon tea. The aim was without question to “entice and attract” people toward British values. Moreover, these footslogging efforts were eventually reinforced by new technology. After the advent of transoceanic telegraphs, London-based press agencies could supply newspapers around the world with Anglocentric co
ntent, but it was the advent of wireless radio—and specifically the creation of the British Broadcasting Corporation—that really ushered in the age of soft power in Nye’s sense of the term. On Christmas Day 1932 King George V was able to broadcast to the entire British Empire. Within six years the BBC had launched its first foreign-language service—in Arabic—and by the end of 1938 it was broadcasting in all the major languages of continental Europe. There is no question that the BBC played an important part in encouraging dissent in Axis-occupied territories during the war; why else did Joseph Goebbels so obsessively prosecute Germans caught listening to it? In some ways, the soft power that Britain could exert in the 1930s was greater than the soft power of the United States today. In a world of newspapers, radio receivers and cinemas, in which the number of content-supplying corporations (often national monopolies) was relatively small, the overseas broadcasts of the BBC could hope to reach a relatively large number of foreign ears. Yet whatever soft power Britain thereby wielded did little to halt the precipitous decline of British power after the 1930s.

  This raises the question of how much America’s soft power really matters today. If the term is to denote anything more than cultural background music to more traditional forms of dominance, it surely needs to be demonstrated that the United States can secure what it wants from other countries without coercing them or suborning them, but purely because its cultural exports are seductive. One reason for skepticism about the extent of American soft power today is the geographical reach of these cultural exports. True, thirty-nine of the world’s eighty-one largest telecommunications corporations are American, and around half of all the world’s countries rely principally on the United States to supply their cinemas with films. But a very large proportion of Hollywood’s exports go to long-standing American allies within the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. Apart from Japan, Asian countries—particularly India—import very few American productions. Likewise, most translations of American books and foreign users of American Internet sites are to be found in Europe and Japan. The only other region where a major channel of communication may be said to be dominated by American culture is Latin America, where 75 percent of television programs are U.S.-made.98 It would be too much to conclude that American soft power is therefore abundant where it is least needed. It may well be that a high level of exposure to American cinema and television is one of the reasons why people in Western Europe, Japan and Latin America are still, on the whole, less hostile to the United States than their counterparts elsewhere. Still, the fact remains that the range of American soft power is more limited than is generally assumed. The Middle East, where the BBC began its foreign-language broadcasting, is now much more resistant to the charms of “Anglobalization” than it was then. The advent of Al Jazeera shows that the entry barrier into the soft power game is now quite low. Even in war-torn Somalia, American forces found their foes able to dominate the local airwaves with anti-American propaganda. Soft power could not avert genocide in Rwanda: when the United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali asked the Clinton administration to jam the murderous broadcasts of Radio Mille Collines, he was informed that such a step would be too expensive.99

  There is one exception, and that exception provides another example of what the British Empire and today’s American empire have in common. Missionaries are as important a channel for cultural dissemination in the developing world today as they were a century and a half ago. Because of the multiplicity of Christian sects involved, it is not easy to find reliable figures for the total number of American missionaries working outside the United States today. Estimates (for Protestant missionaries only) suggest that there are between 40,000 and 64,000, a relatively small number compared with the 300,000 or so American missionaries working within the United States.100 Nevertheless, even small numbers of evangelical missionaries can achieve a good deal, furnished as they are with substantial funds from congregations at home. In April 1994 the Churches of Christ had a total of 223 missionaries in Latin America, with the largest number (81) in Brazil. Seven years later, although the number of missionaries in the region had fallen by nearly half, the total membership of Churches of Christ congregations had increased by 60 percent.101 One estimate (published in 1990) puts the proportion of Latin Americans who are now Protestant as high as 20 percent.102 The extraordinary display of evangelical faith by the victorious Brazilian team after the last soccer World Cup final lends credibility to that estimate. More recently, encouraged by evangelists like Luis Bush (himself born in Argentina), missionaries have turned their attention to the “unevangelized” millions who inhabit a so-called window of opportunity between the tenth and fortieth latitudes. According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, the number of Christian missionaries to Islamic countries has almost doubled since 1982, from around 15,000 to 27,000; half of them are Americans.103

  But what of America’s official, secular values and altruistic goals? Are these not fundamentally different from those of past empires, which were selfish and exploitative in their intentions? It is often argued that American policy makers since Woodrow Wilson have renounced imperialism, seeking instead to encourage the spread of Wilsonian principles: international law, democracy and the free market.104 Somehow—presumably because they are so self-evidently good—these ideas have “come to dominate international affairs.” The most that the United States therefore needs to do is “act as the chief of the constabulary” to prevent any unenlightened forces from challenging this benign world order.105

  There is certainly no shortage of vintage Wilsonian rhetoric in President Bush’s “National Security Strategy” published in September 2002, which explicitly states that it is a goal of American foreign policy “to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe.” “We will actively work,” the document declares, “to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world … America must stand firmly for the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity: the rule of law; limits on the absolute power of the state; free speech; freedom of worship; equal justice; respect for women; religious and ethnic tolerance; and respect for private property.”106 Yet this “strategy of openness” is not without its imperial precursors.107 From the second half of the nineteenth century until the Great Depression, the British Empire shared many of the same aspirations.108 The young Winston Churchill once defined the goals of British imperialism as being “[to reclaim] from barbarism fertile regions and large populations … to give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain….”109 Is this so very different from the language of American idealism? As Senator J. William Fulbright observed in 1968, “The British called it the ‘white man’s burden.’ The French called it their ‘civilizing mission.’ Nineteenth-century Americans called it ‘manifest destiny.’ It is now being called the ‘responsibilities of power.’ ”110 The “promotion of freedom” or the “strategy of openness” is merely its latest incarnation.111 The fact is that liberal empires nearly always proclaim their own altruism. When he spoke of the United States as an “empire of liberty,” Thomas Jefferson was merely purloining a hoary trope of British imperialism. Edmund Burke had identified “freedom” as a defining characteristic of the British Empire as early as 1766.112

  Like the British Empire, in any case, the United States reserves the right to use military force, as and when it sees its interests threatened—not merely reactively but on occasion preemptively. Thus President Bush’s “National Security Strategy” asserts that the United States reserves the right to “act preemptively… to forestall or prevent … hostile acts by our adversaries … even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.”113
Soft power is merely the velvet glove concealing an iron hand.

  A BRITISH MODEL?

  Unlike the majority of European writers who have written on this subject, I am fundamentally in favor of empire. Indeed, I believe that empire is more necessary in the twenty-first century than ever before. The threats we face are not in themselves new ones. But advances in technology make them more dangerous than ever before. Thanks to the speed and regularity of modern air travel, infectious diseases can be transmitted to us with terrifying swiftness. And thanks to the relative cheapness and destructiveness of modern weaponry, tyrants and terrorists can realistically think of devastating our cities. The old, post-1945 system of sovereign states, bound loosely together by an evolving system of international law, cannot easily deal with these threats because there are too many nation-states where the writ of the “international community” simply does not run. What is required is an agency capable of intervening in the affairs of such states to contain epidemics, depose tyrants, end local wars and eradicate terrorist organizations. This is the self-interested argument for empire. But there is also a complementary altruistic argument. Even if they did not pose a direct threat to the security of the United States, the economic and social conditions in a number of countries in the world would justify some kind of intervention. The poverty of a country like Liberia is explicable not in terms of resource endowment: otherwise (for example) Botswana would be just as poor.114 The problem in Liberia, as in so many sub–Saharan African states, is simply misgovernment: corrupt and lawless dictators whose conduct makes economic development impossible and encourages political opposition to take the form of civil war.115 Countries in this condition will not correct themselves. They require the imposition of some kind of external authority.116