Colossus

by Niall Ferguson

  There are those who would insist that an empire is by definition incapable of playing such a role; in their eyes, all empire are exploitative in character. Yet there can be—and has been—such a thing as a liberal empire, one that enhances its own security and prosperity precisely by providing the rest of the world with generally beneficial public goods: not only economic freedom but also the institutions necessary for markets to flourish.117 In this regard, Americans have more to learn than they are prepared to admit from their more self-confident British predecessors, who, after the mid-nineteenth-century calamities of the Irish Famine and the Indian Mutiny, recast their empire as an economically liberal project, concerned as much with the integration of global markets as with the security of the British Isles, predicated on the idea that British rule was conferring genuine benefits in the form of free trade, the rule of law, the safeguarding of private property rights and noncorrupt administration, as well as government-guaranteed investments in infrastructure, public health and (some) education.118 Arnold Toynbee’s injunction to his Oxford tutorial pupils destined for the Indian Civil Service was clear: “If they went to India they were to go there for the good of her people on one of the noblest missions on which an Englishman could be engaged.”119

  Let me emphasize that it is not my intention to suggest that Americans should somehow adopt the Victorians as role models. The British Empire was very far from an ideal liberal empire, and there is almost as much to be learned from its failures as from its successes. But the resemblances between what the British were attempting to do in 1904 and what the United States is trying to do in 2004 are nevertheless instructive. Like the United States today, Great Britain was very ready to use its naval and military superiority to fight numerous small wars against what we might now call failed states and rogue regimes. No one who has studied the history of the British campaign against the Sudanese dervishes, the followers of the charismatic Wahhabist leader known as the Mahdi, can fail to be struck by its intimations of present-day conflicts. Yet like the United States today, the Victorian imperialists did not act purely in the name of national or imperial security. Just as American presidents of recent decades have consistently propounded the benefits of economic globalization—even when they have deviated from free trade in practice—British statesmen a century ago regarded the spread of free trade and the liberalization of commodity, labor and capital markets as desirable for the general good. And just as most Americans today regard global democratization on the American model as self-evidently good, so the British in those days aspired to export their own institutions—not just the common law but ultimately also parliamentary monarchy—to the rest of the world.

  Americans easily forget that after the blunders of the late eighteenth century, British governments learned that it was perfectly easy to grant “responsible government” to colonies that were clearly well advanced along the road to economic modernity and social stability. Canada, New Zealand, Australia and (albeit with a restricted franchise) South Africa all had executives accountable to elected parliaments by the early 1900s. Nor was this benefit intended to be the exclusive preserve of the colonies of white settlement. On the question of whether India should ultimately be capable of British-style parliamentary government, Thomas Babington Macaulay was quite explicit, if characteristically condescending: “Never will I attempt to avert or to retard it [Indian self-government]. Whenever it comes it will be the proudest day in English history. To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own.”120 Not dissimilar aspirations were being expressed in some quarters last year on the subject of democratizing the Arab world. Speaking at the United Nations in September of last year, President Bush himself made it clear that this was one of his objectives in invading Iraq.121 As we shall see, however, the Americans were not the first Anglophone invaders to arrive in Baghdad proclaiming themselves to be “liberators” rather than conquerors.122

  The structure of this book is straightforward. Chapter 1 considers the imperial origins of the United States and seeks to characterize the extent and limits of its empire up to the First World War. Chapter 2 asks why, despite its vast economic and military capabilities, the United States had such difficulties in imposing its will on so many of the countries where it intervened during the twentieth century. It also offers some explanations for the exceptional successes of American “nation building” in West Germany, Japan and South Korea.

  Chapter 3 argues that the events of September 11, 2001, though they struck Americans like a bolt from the blue, represented the culmination of well-established historical trends: the contradictions of American policy in the Middle East, the growing dependence of Western economies on oil from the Persian Gulf and the adoption and development of terrorism as a tactic by Arabs hostile to the United States and its allies. Perhaps the biggest change the terrorists wrought was in American attitudes; this was not the kind of change that they intended. It was 9/11 that converted an instinctively introverted, if not isolationist, administration and electorate to the idea of waging a war against real, suspected or even potential sponsors of terrorism. Yet here too there were important continuities. The real historical turning point—the moment when the twenty-first century may be said to have begun—was not 9/11 but 11/9. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, changed the context of American power far more profoundly than the fall of the World Trade Center. Malignant though it is, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism remains a far less potent threat to the United States than the Soviet Union once was.

  Chapter 4 asks if American policy in Iraq since 1990 can be understood as a descent from “multilateralism” to “unilateralism.” I suggest that, on the contrary, it has been the United Nations that has performed a shifting role in the last decade and a half, and American policy has been in large measure improvised in response to the failures of the UN and, in particular, to the failures of the European powers represented on the UN Security Council. It was during the 1990s that the United States learned, through bitter experience, the value of credible military interventions in countries where state terror was being used against ethnic minorities. It also learned that these did not require explicit authorization in the form of UNSC resolutions. “Coalitions of the willing” could suffice.

  Chapter 5 makes the case for contemporary empire in the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by considering the costs and benefits of the last great Anglophone empire. The suggestion here is that liberal empire makes sense today in terms of both American self-interest and altruism. For many former colonies, the experiment with political independence has been a failure in economic and in political terms. Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, has been impoverished not by the oft-denounced legacies of colonialism but by decades of misrule since independence. By contrast, a liberal imperial model offers the best prospects for economic growth by guaranteeing not just economic openness but, more important, the institutional foundations for successful development. Chapter 6 attempts a provisional cost-benefit analysis of the American occupation of Iraq, asking if the liberal imperial model can work in that unfortunate country. The chapter suggests that American objectives in 2003—to ensure the disarmament of Iraq, to overthrow a vicious tyrant and to transform fundamentally the politics of the Middle East—were both laudable and attainable. However, it is far from clear as I write that the United States is capable of committing either the manpower or the time needed to make a success of its “nation building” in Iraq, much less in Afghanistan. This is primarily because the American electorate is averse to the kind of long-term commitment that history strongly suggests is necessary to achieve a successful transition to a market economy and representative government. Though I fervently hope to be proved wrong, I therefore question whether America has the capacity to build effective civilian institutions in Iraq, given its historic preference for sho
rt-term, primarily military interventions and its reluctance to learn that these seldom, if ever, work.

  Chapter 7 compares American and European versions of empire and asks if today’s European leaders, and some American scholars, are correct to foresee a time when the European Union will act as an effective counterweight to American power. At times during 2003 this already appeared to be happening. Yet in reality the European Union is almost the antithesis of an empire; its institutions are designed not to harness and wield power but to disperse it between the member states and the regions within its borders.

  Finally, chapter 8 challenges the thesis that growing overseas military commitments may drag the United States toward economic overstretch. There is no question that the United States is an unusual empire in its dependence on foreign capital to finance both private consumption and government borrowing. Yet its twin deficits are not the result of too many foreign military interventions. In fact, it is the domestic fiscal commitments of the federal government that seem likely to overstretch it in the years ahead. The true feet of clay of the American Colossus are the impending fiscal crises of the systems of Medicare and Social Security.

  My conclusion (for those readers who like an indication of their ultimate destination) is that the global power of the United States today—impressive though it is to behold—rests on much weaker foundations than is, commonly supposed. The United States has acquired an empire, but Americans themselves lack the imperial cast of mind. They would rather consume than conquer. They would rather build shopping malls than nations. They crave for themselves protracted old age and dread, even for other Americans who have volunteered for military service, untimely death in battle. It is not just that, like their British predecessors, they gained their empire in “a fit of absence of mind.” The problem is that despite occasional flashes of self-knowledge, they have remained absentminded—or rather, in denial—about their imperial power all along. Consequently, and very regrettably, it is quite conceivable that their empire could unravel as swiftly as the equally “anti-imperial” empire that was the Soviet Union.

  Those who wish to perpetuate American primacy by achieving and maintaining full-spectrum dominance are, in short, facing the wrong way. For the threat to America’s empire does not come from embryonic rival empires to the west or to the east. I regret to say that it may come from the vacuum of power–the absence of a will to power–within.

  PART 1

  RISE

  Chapter 1

  The Limits of the American Empire

  What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law?

  But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable.

  What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? … What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? … What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.

  HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick, chapter 89

  INTIMATIONS OF EMPIRE

  It is commonplace to assume that having been forged in a war of independence against imperial rule, the United States could never become an empire in its own right. Many Americans today would accept the verdict of the historian Rupert Emerson, writing in 1942: “With the exception of the brief period of imperialist activity at the time of the Spanish-American war, the American people have shown a deep repugnance to both the conquest of distant lands and the assumption of rule over alien peoples.”1 The irony is that there were no more self-confident imperialists than the Founding Fathers themselves.

  The empire they envisaged was, to be sure, very different in character from the empire from which they had seceded. It was not intended to resemble the maritime empires of Western Europe. But it did have much in common with the great land empires of the past. Like Rome, it began with a relatively small core—the founding states’ combined area today is just 8 percent of the total extent of the United States—which expanded to dominate half a continent. Like Rome, it was an inclusive empire, relatively (though not wholly) promiscuous in the way that it conferred citizenship.2 Like Rome, it had, at least for a time, its disenfranchised slaves.3 But unlike Rome, its republican constitution has withstood the ambitions of any would-be Caesars—so far. (It is of course early days. The United States is 228 years old. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C., the Roman Republic was 460 years old.)

  That the United States would expand was decided almost from its very inception. When, in the draft Articles of Confederation of July 1776, John Dickinson proposed setting western boundaries of the states, the idea was thrown out at the committee stage. To George Washington the United States was a “nascent empire,” later an “infant empire.”4 Thomas Jefferson told James Madison he was “persuaded no constitution was ever before as well calculated as ours for extending extensive empire and self-government.” The initial “confederacy” of thirteen would be “the nest from which all America, North and South [would] be peopled.”5 Indeed, Jefferson observed in a letter of 1801 that the short history of the United States had already furnished “a new proof for the falsehood of Montesquieu’s doctrine, that a republic can be preserved only in a small territory. The reverse is the truth.”6 Madison agreed; in the tenth of the Federalist Papers, he forcefully argued for “extend[ing] the sphere” to create a larger republic.7 Alexander Hamilton too referred to the United States—in the opening paragraph of the first of the Federalist Papers—as “in many respects the most interesting … empire … in the world.”8 He looked forward eagerly to the emergence of a “great American system, superior to the control of all trans-Atlantic force of influence, and able to dictate the terms of connection between the Old and the New World.”9

  Such intimations of grandeur were widespread. William Henry Drayton, chief justice of South Carolina, declared in 1776: “Empires have their zenith—and their descension [sic] to a dissolution…. The British Period is from the Year 1758, when they victoriously pursued their Enemies into every Quarter of the Globe…. The Almighty … has made choice of the present generation to erect the American Empire…. And thus has suddenly arisen in the World, a new Empire, stiled [sic] the United States of America. An Empire that as soon as started into Existence, attracts the Attention of the Rest of the Universe; and bids fair, by the blessing of God, to be the most glorious of any upon Record.”10 Thirteen years later a Congregational minister named Jedidiah Morse published his American Geography, predicting that the “last and broadest seat” of empire would be in America, “the largest empire that ever existed”: “We cannot but anticipate the period, as not far distant, when the American Empire will comprehend millions of souls, west of the Mississippi…. Europe begins to look forward with anxiety to her West Indian Islands, which are the natural legacy of this continent, and will doubtless be claimed as such when America shall have arrived at an age which will enable her to maintain her right.”11

  In the space of less than a century the vision of a continental empire was largely realized. Yet Morse’s prediction that America’s expansion would go beyond the continent’s two ocean shores was only very feebly fulfilled. Why?

  FRONTIER FOR SALE

  The overland expansion was easy; this is often forgotten. For one thing, the Native American populations were too small and technologically backward to offer more than sporadic and ineffectual resistance to the hordes of white settlers swarming westward, enticed by the prospect of virgin land. Around 6 million immigrants came to the United States between 1820 and 1869, and nearly 16 million in the years to 1913. Already in 1820 the indigenous population had numbered just 325,000
(a mere 3 percent of population), their numbers having been roughly halved in the previous century by disease and small wars.12 The new Republic simply continued the old British practice of treating traditional native hunting grounds as terra nullius, free, ownerless land. Jefferson talked of an expansion based “not on conquest, but [on] principles of compact and equality.”13 Like so much that he wrote on the subject of equality, however, this was an implicitly qualified statement. Just as the “rights of man” did not apply to his or any other plantation owner’s slaves, so territorial expansion would not be based on the consent of the indigenous peoples of North America. As early as 1817 the secretary of war, John C. Calhoun, inaugurated the policy of removing “Indians” beyond the ninety-fifth line of longitude, a policy that became law in 1825.14 President Andrew Jackson’s professions of humanitarian intent scarcely disguised the ruthlessness of what was being done: “[This] just and humane policy recommended… [the Indians] to quit their possessions … and go to a country to the west where there is every probability that they will always be free from the mercenary influence of white men…. Under such circumstances the General Government can exercise a paternal control over their interests and possibly perpetuate their race.”15 In sum, the Native American tribes were to be coerced into exchanging “their possessions” for the “possibility” of perpetuating their race under their expropriators’ “paternal control.” In his seminal study, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893), Frederick Jackson Turner later sought to portray continental expansion as the source of America’s alleged democratic vigor. In reality, expansion was achieved by a combination of land hunger, religious zeal and military force—in that order.16 The number of settlers and sectarians was always vastly greater than the number of soldiers concerned. Between 1816 and 1860 the American army numbered on average less than 20,000 men, little more than one-tenth of 1 percent of the population—a tiny ratio of military participation by European standards.17 The Indian Wars were doubtless cruel, but they were small wars. The Shawnees and the Seminoles needed a European ally to stand any chance of victory. After 1815 the prospect of such support disappeared, and the Indians were on their own.