http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?040202crat_atlarge

POWER RANGERS
by JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL

Did the Bush Administration create a new American empire—or weaken the old
one?
Issue of 2004-02-02
Posted 2004-01-19

Last March, after Jacques Chirac, the French President, announced that he
would veto any new United Nations resolution sanctioning war against Iraq,
the White House saw a chance for a different sort of victory. If a majority
of the fifteen Security Council members voted for a new resolution and
France vetoed it, the United States could claim that the problem was not
American unilateralism but French obstructionism. And that hope set the
United States scrambling to line up the votes of Chile, Mexico, Pakistan,
and a trio of impoverished states from the west coast of Africa. “No matter
what the whip count is, we’re calling for the vote,” President Bush said at
a news conference broadcast worldwide on March 6th. “It’s time for people
to show their cards, let the world know where they stand when it comes to
Saddam.”

But, apart from Britain, Spain, and Bulgaria, the countries on the Security
Council declined to side with the United States. Emissaries threatened and
cajoled, to no avail. Pakistan, admittedly, had a restive Muslim population
to contend with. But Mexico and Chile said no, too, and so did Cameroon and
Guinea and Angola, a country that is heavily dependent on American trade
and good will. In the end, Bush didn’t call for a vote.

At the time, this moment of mortification received scant attention; the
outbreak of war was imminent. It was a curious spectacle, though. No
country in the world could stand in the way of America’s determination to
remove Saddam. But the United States seemed powerless to persuade even the
smallest nations to legitimatize its power with a symbolic vote.

As hard-liners in the Bush Administration saw it, the real humiliation was
that we had sought the approval of a quarrelsome international body in the
first place. During the previous year, a growing number of them had become
fascinated with the notion of empire. It was time for America, unabashedly
and unilaterally, to assert its supremacy and to maintain global order. The
U.N. debacle—the mismatch between our diplomatic sway and our military
might—could be taken as confirmation of this view. And yet, if our
overtures carried so little weight, just what was the nature of our
imperial power?


For leftist critics of America’s role in the world, it has long been a
baleful article of faith that the United States is an agent of
“neo-imperialism,” exerting its power through global capital and through
organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
After September 11th, a left-wing accusation became a right-wing
aspiration: conservatives increasingly began to espouse a world view that
was unapologetically imperialist. You could watch this happening in
Washington’s think tanks. Over their lunchroom tables, in their seminar
rooms, on the covers of their small magazines, the idea of empire got a
thorough airing—particularly among ideologues close to the policymakers
planning the war on terror. At a panel discussion in the middle of 2002, I
first heard “Middle East reform”—as in making the Middle East democratic
and bourgeois—spoken of the way people speak of welfare reform. As the
military historian Max Boot wrote in The Weekly Standard, “Afghanistan and
other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign
administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and
pith helmets.”

Everyone could admit that there were disreputable aspects of the old
empire. Yet what would be wrong with a truly enlightened version of foreign
rule? “There’s general agreement that there was a mistake that the Brits
made, which is that they allowed the imperial administrators to perpetuate
a kind of snobbishness over the Western-oriented gentlemen,” one of these
conservative thinkers told me last spring, just before the start of the
war. “We think these are the lessons we have learned. And that, therefore,
imperialism as practiced this time will be different.”

In “Empire,” which appeared last spring, the acclaimed historian Niall
Ferguson presented the British Empire as a model of how to secure global
stability, foreign investment for developing countries, and simple good
government. “What the British Empire proved is that empire is a form of
international government that can work—and not just for the benefit of the
ruling power,” he wrote. Through more than three hundred slick, illustrated
pages, Ferguson mapped the past onto the present, identifying the building
blocks of Britain’s empire with their contemporary American analogues. For
Britain’s gunboats, America’s F-16s and Tomahawk missiles—always prepared
to knock around troublemakers on the empire’s periphery. For Britain’s
missionary and social-uplift societies, today’s N.G.O.s. In place of
Britain’s long-running policing action against the slave trade, similarly
high-minded campaigns against ethnic cleansing.

Why did the British imperium come to an end? The standard histories tell us
about great-power rivalries, a diminishing technological gap between
overlords and subjects, growing independence movements among the colonized.
Some conservative scholars have suggested, however, that the British Empire
fell apart because of war-induced impoverishment and national fatigue.
Finally, they say, the Brits just lacked will. But in 2002 America had will
in abundance, and more money and guns than the British had ever had.
Ferguson was challenging us simply to face up to what we already were. In
the closing pages of his book, he wrote, “Americans have taken our old role
without yet facing the fact that an empire comes with it.” We were, in his
view, an empire “that dare not speak its name . . . an empire in denial.”


That empire did not arise overnight. It was, after all, under the cover of
American military might that Germany and Japan emerged as prosperous and
peaceable democracies. And, especially since the end of the Cold War, the
apparatus of American power—the aircraft carriers and fighter wings and
Army divisions—has come to encircle most of the planet. As Ferguson notes,
a map of the British Royal Navy coaling stations that dotted the globe a
century ago looks much like the array of bases the United States maintains
today.

An “empire of bases” is what Chalmers Johnson calls it in his new book,
“The Sorrows of Empire” (Metropolitan; $25). It is not, for him, an
edifying spectacle. Much in Johnson’s account is no different from what
might be found in a host of other left-leaning critiques of American power,
but the trajectory of his career sets him apart. For decades, Johnson, an
Asia specialist, was one of those stock figures of the Cold War: the
defense analyst and academic in constant orbit of the C.I.A. Then, late in
his career, he began to reconsider his Cold War commitments, particularly
in East Asia. The way America garrisoned allied countries like Japan and
South Korea put him in mind of the de-facto empire that the Soviets had
created in Eastern Europe. Once he made that turn, he never looked back.

By Johnson’s count, in 2001 the United States maintained some seven hundred
and twenty-five military installations abroad—an anomalous situation.
Foreign troops have never been stationed in this country, and most
Americans would probably find the idea of permanent garrisons of German,
Mexican, or Indian troops on American soil almost beyond comprehension. And
yet in many countries in Europe and East Asia a similar arrangement has
been commonplace for generations. A quarter of a million American military
personnel (along with a quarter of a million dependents and civilians) are
stationed abroad, mostly on the old Cold War frontiers of Germany, Japan,
and South Korea. Although, in the last decade, the United States has
reduced its military “footprint” in Europe and the Pacific Rim, more bases
have sprung up in the new arc of conflict stretching from the Balkans to
the Caspian and into Central Asia. Among these are the sprawling Camp
Bondsteel, in Kosovo, and the new Camp Stronghold Freedom, in Uzbekistan,
each complete with all the amenities of home for the soldiers stationed
there and special treaties designed to protect the troops from local law.

President Clinton came to office intending to keep foreign entanglements to
a minimum. That isn’t what happened, of course. Despite dire predictions
that every military engagement would lead to a quagmire, America found that
it could strike with virtual impunity almost anywhere on the globe, and
military forays became more common. Back when the superpower rivalry
circumscribed America’s ability to use force directly, problems were more
likely to be solved through high-stakes diplomacy or covert action. Now
there is an overwhelming temptation to play to our strength. America’s
diplomatic corps, already menaced by domestic enemies and falling budgets,
is no better than those of other great powers. Our military, on the other
hand, dwarfs everyone else’s. Hence the progressive militarization of
America’s foreign policy.

The trend was accelerated by changes in the structure of the military. The
Pentagon had for decades divided the world into a series of regional
commands—sometimes known as cincdoms, after the acronym for
commander-in-chief, the title held, until recently, by those who command
them. (The last of these—centcom, which covers the Middle East, Central and
South Asia, and the Horn of Africa—was created in 1983.) But a
reorganization of the Pentagon in 1986 vastly increased the power of the
cincs by having them report directly to the President as well as to the
Secretary of Defense, unlike the chiefs of the military’s four services,
who report to civilian secretaries. By the late nineties, the officers who
led these commands—men like General Wesley Clark, at the European Command;
Marine General Anthony Zinni, at centcom; and Admiral Dennis Blair, at
Pacific Command—were far more powerful than the various ambassadors who
conduct the nation’s diplomatic business in the countries under each cinc’s
oversight. Johnson notes that when, in October, 1999, General Pervez
Musharraf seized power in a bloodless coup in Pakistan, President Clinton
called in protest and asked that his call be returned. Musharraf called
Zinni instead. “Tony,” Musharraf reportedly said, “I want to tell you what
I am doing.” So the trend hasn’t been simply a militarization of foreign
policy. It has also been a diplomatization of the American military. In the
architecture of empire, the cincs functioned like proconsuls or regional
managers of Pax Americana, with plenty of money and guns and no little
ingenuity.

By the end of the decade, the United States had established two
protectorates under the aegis of nato and the U.N., intervened or helped
intervene in five countries or provinces (Bosnia, East Timor, Haiti,
Kosovo, and Somalia), and practiced some form of gunboat diplomacy against
Afghanistan, China, North Korea, Sudan, and, almost constantly, Iraq. These
wars were neither defensive nor offensive. They were policing actions,
small wars of management—of, in a sense, imperial management, like the
“little wars” that were a backdrop to life in Victorian England. Similarly,
the United States Treasury worked through the I.M.F. and the World Bank to
head off a Mexican financial collapse in 1995, and did much the same thing
in 1997 to contain the so-called “Asian flu.” Step by step, America took on
the job, often with others but sometimes alone, of enforcing order in
almost every corner of the globe.

If America, militarily unchallenged and economically dominant, indeed took
on the functions of imperial governance, its empire was, for the most part,
loose and consensual. In the past couple of years, however,
neo-imperialism, this thing of stealth, politesse, and obliquity, has come
to seem, so to speak, too neo. Especially as the war on terror began,
hard-liners who were frustrated by Clinton’s bumbling and hesitations saw
no reason to deny that America was an imperial power, and a great one: how
else to describe a country that had so easily vanquished Afghanistan, once
legendary as the graveyard of empires? The only question was whether
America would start running its empire with foresight and determination,
rather than leaving it to chance, drift, and disaster.


The Bush doctrine, with its tenets of preëmptive war, regime change, and
permanent American military primacy, promised a new global order. The best
way to think of that order is by analogy with the internal organization of
a nation-state. What makes a state a state is its monopoly over the
legitimate use of force, which means that citizens don’t have to worry
about arming to defend themselves against each other. Instead, they can
focus on productive pursuits like raising families, making money, and
enjoying their leisure time. In the world of the Bush doctrine, states take
the place of citizens. As the President told graduating cadets at West
Point in 2002, America intends to keep its “military strengths beyond
challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras
pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.” In
other words, if America has an effective monopoly on the exercise of
military force, other countries should be able to set aside the
distractions of arming and plotting against each other and put their
energies into producing consumer electronics, textiles, tea. What the Bush
doctrine calls for—paradoxically, given its proponents—is a form of world
government.

The new order envisaged by the Bush doctrine hasn’t quite worked out as it
was meant to. That’s because, from the beginning, the White House has acted
on the assumption that bold action would make our allies rally behind us
and our enemies cower. Building a consensus with our friends before we
acted only encouraged quarrelsomeness. The point wasn’t that dictation was
superior to consensus; the point was that it created consensus.

Again and again, things didn’t turn out that way. In March, 2002, Dick
Cheney, in his only trip abroad as Vice-President before last week, toured
Middle Eastern capitals to line up support for the war against Iraq.
Foreign leaders used the occasion to denounce the planned attack. A week
after Cheney’s return, the Saudis and the Kuwaitis were arranging their
first rapprochement with Iraq since the Gulf War. In the months preceding
the second Gulf War, a year later, the Administration was castigated for
bungled diplomacy with its allies. But the real problem was that, though
America could do as it liked, its erstwhile allies didn’t necessarily fall
in line.

“Bill Clinton was actually a much more effective imperialist than George W.
Bush,” Chalmers Johnson writes darkly. “During the Clinton administration,
the United States employed an indirect approach in imposing its will on
other nations.” That “indirect approach” might more properly be termed a
policy of leading by consensus rather than by dictation. But Johnson is
right about its superior efficacy. American power is magnified when it is
embedded in international institutions, as leftists have lamented. It is
also somewhat constrained, as conservatives have lamented. This is
precisely the covenant on which American supremacy has been based. The
trouble is that hard-line critics of multilateralism focussed on how that
power was constrained and missed how it was magnified.

Conservative ideologues, in calling for an international order in which
America would have a statelike monopoly on coercive force, somehow forgot
what makes for a successful state. Stable governments rule not by direct
coercion but by establishing a shared sense of allegiance. In an old
formula, “domination” gives way to “hegemony”—brute force gives way to the
deeper power of consent. This is why the classic definition of the state
speaks of legitimate force. In a constitutional order, government accepts
certain checks on its authority, but the result is to deepen that
authority, rather than to diminish it. Legitimacy is the ultimate “force
multiplier,” in military argot. And if your aim is to maintain a global
order, as opposed to rousting this or that pariah regime, you need all the
force multipliers you can get.


The empire-makers of 2002 weakened America’s covert empire because, at a
critical level, they didn’t understand how it worked. As Ivo Daalder and
James Lindsay note in “America Unbound” (Brookings; $22.95), a new history
of Bush’s foreign policy, Administration hawks believe that American global
supremacy is possible not only because America is a uniquely just nation
but because others around the globe see it as such. The current unipolar
state of the world is the best evidence of this: because most countries see
American power as being more benign than not, they acquiesce in it. But
this acquiescence isn’t irreversible.

In ways that many hawks have been slow to realize, the demise of the Soviet
Union has had a paradoxical effect on America’s role in the world. What has
made the United States more powerful militarily has made it weaker
politically. For half a century, American policymakers had been accustomed
to habits of deference from democratic allies in Europe and Asia. Yet fear
of the Soviets was responsible for much of that deference. That’s why, in
the decade after the Cold War, the makers of our foreign policy recognized
that America could best protect its supremacy by making sure that smaller
countries felt, even in some small measure, that they had been “dealt in.”
This was one function of those balky international organizations, and not
the least important objective of international diplomacy.

The current Administration has, of course, taken a different tack. As
Fareed Zakaria observed last year, after speaking to government officials
in dozens of countries around the world, almost every country that has had
dealings with the Bush Administration has felt humiliated by it. America
isn’t powerful because people like us: our power is a product of dollars
and guns. But when people think that America’s unique role in the world is
basically legitimate, that power becomes less costly to exert and to
sustain. People around the world have respected and admired American power
because of the way America has acted. If it acts differently, the
perceptions of American benevolence can start to ebb—and, to judge from any
public-opinion poll from abroad over the last year, that’s essentially what
has happened. When it comes to political capital, too, this is an
Administration with a weakness for deficit spending.

There are signs that the Administration may be capable of adjusting its
course. Last month, James A. Baker III was dispatched as an envoy to
Europe, ostensibly to negotiate debt restructuring but with an unstated
brief of fence-mending. On the Korean peninsula, where our initial “no
deals” posturing proved futile, the United States has been working with
Russia, China, Japan, and South Korea, and offering North Korea a
“multilateral security pledge.” President Bush now speaks about the virtues
of “a collective voice trying to convince a leader to change behavior.”


Not all conservatives have been chastened by the setbacks of unilateralism;
some have been stoked to greater outrage and resolve. This much is clear
from “An End to Evil” (Random House; $25.95), by David Frum, a former Bush
speechwriter, who helped coin the phrase “axis of evil,” and Richard Perle,
a former chairman of the Defense Policy Board. Rising disapproval from
abroad doesn’t lead Frum and Perle to question their policies. It just
confirms them in the belief that America has even more enemies than it
realized.

“An End to Evil” is a call to stay the course in an unremitting battle, and
to resist the slide toward appeasement and defeatism. “We have to cast off
once and for all the 1970s cynicism that sneered from the back of the
classroom at the joiner and volunteer,” the authors write in a typical
passage. Their fury is directed almost as much against America’s internal
enemies as its external ones. And the fury directed abroad is boundless.
The book conveys a general sense that America is at war with Islam itself,
anywhere and everywhere: the contemporary Muslim world, with the exception
of a few irenic clerics and a few secular intellectuals, is depicted as one
great cauldron of hate, murder, obscurantism, and deceit. If our Muslim
adversaries are not to destroy Western civilization, we must gird for more
battles.

The authors advise toppling more regimes in the Middle East, treating the
French and the Saudis as the enemies they are, squeezing China, and
launching an air and naval blockade against North Korea. At home, they
propose aggressive reform in the State Department, the C.I.A., and the
armed forces. “Friends and Foes,” the penultimate chapter, turns out to
discuss only foes. In sum, the prescription amounts to war, cold or hot,
against pretty much everyone, everywhere, all the time—until everyone
relents. And, if that doesn’t do the trick, more war.

The significance of “An End to Evil” is as much in its tone as in its
policies. An illuminating contrast can be made with a book published a year
ago, William Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan’s “The War Over Iraq,” a curiously
sunny brief for regime change in Iraq as the cornerstone of a new Pax
Americana. The Victorian cant of empire always had a tone of mastery,
rather than bellicosity, and the talk of 2002 had just that air of
masterful confidence. Great powers, after all, are normally custodians of
peace and stability. Why shouldn’t they be? They’re already on top.
Historically, it has been “revisionist” powers that have had an interest in
upending settled arrangements and sowing unrest. Like Wilhelmine Germany at
the start of the last century, they stir up trouble and look for ways to
overturn a world system that has held them down. For Perle and Frum,
America is the revisionist power in the midst of its own imperium.

In this latest turn of neoconservative thought, the trappings of optimism
and the hopeful talk of a liberal-democratic domino effect have been
abandoned. Where Ferguson is all cool confidence, Perle and Frum are fire
and foreboding. Theirs are not policies that would lead to the end of evil;
they might well, in the long run, lead to the end of empire.


Hard-liners like Perle and Frum would do well to remember that America
began as an empire, formally and officially. It wasn’t our empire, of
course; it was Britain’s. And the story of how Britain lost its first
empire may be more instructive for Americans today than how Britain found
itself without its second. Americans like to flatter themselves that the
seeds of independence were planted with the first spades into the earth of
Massachusetts and Virginia. In fact, during the century before the
Revolution, Britain’s North American colonies were, by most measures,
becoming more Anglicized, more firmly tied to Britain’s monarchy and trade.
(The archetype of American homespun virtues, Ben Franklin, spent much of
his life trying to make a name in London and find a place for himself in
the British establishment.) Britain lost its North American empire through
a common mistake: it misunderstood the nature of its power. In particular,
it confused the power it had on paper—its claims to sovereignty and
dominion—with the nature of the control it exercised on the coast of North
America.

Britain’s hold in North America was, at heart, a consensual arrangement.
Over more than a century, the home government had reduced most of the
settlements to Crown colonies with royally appointed governors. But London
did not exercise what historians call government in depth. It had little
sway in the family and business networks that held the colonies together.
In fact, outside a few port towns, the Crown had to rely on local
bigwigs—the New England merchants and Virginia planters—to wield authority
in its name.

For years, the status quo persisted. The menace posed by Britain’s imperial
rival, France, helped keep the colonies in line. But by the early
seventeen-sixties Britain had successfully prosecuted a world war with
France, a conflict that began when a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant colonel
in the Virginia militia named George Washington attacked French troops not
far from the site of modern-day Pittsburgh. The conflict quickly spread
from North America to the German states, India, and the Caribbean. The
Seven Years’ War—which the colonists called the French and Indian War—left
Britain the master of North America and the dominant imperial power around
the globe, with the most formidable navy the world had ever seen. Still,
the war had been costly, and London suddenly looked on America with an eye
to just how much wealth it could extract from it.

The result was a dozen years of contention over taxes, which exploded into
arguments over principle, and the loss of Britain’s most valuable imperial
possessions. Britain believed that the reins of monarchical allegiance
would keep its colonies secure; but when it pulled back on those reins,
they fell apart. The truth is that, once Britain got to the point of
holding on to its colonists by
force, it had already all but lost them. Vengeful France, using its
runner-up navy to such effect at Yorktown, merely provided the coup de
grâce. Britain thought it was at its strongest. Yet by knocking out the
rival that drove the colonies into its arms, and then changing the rules,
Britain had actually become weaker.

Historical analogies are never perfect. America’s power is far too great to
be easily or quickly dislodged. But there are lessons to be learned here,
and not just about the French gift for making trouble for great nations at
the apex of their power.