(This article was originally written in 2005)
'America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world and to all the inhabitants thereof.'
-President George W. Bush, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 2005.
'For sixty years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.'
-Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State, American University, Cairo, Egypt, June 20, 2005.
This was the summer when global realities---mass murder in London and popular mobilization for Africa---intruded on Canadian introspection. It is scarcely believable that not so many weeks ago, we were all focused on the political drama in Ottawa. As Canadians looked inward, casting doubt that we could afford a robust foreign aid budget when our at-home health care, educational, and anti-poverty needs are so great, our elephantine neighbour to the south was looking outward, or at least outward and inward at the same time. It has no choice, which is why, these days, it would be easier to be a Canadian than an American, were it not for the growing imperative of solving the time-honoured Canadian dilemma of what to do with American appetites…for oil, water, and for winning the “war against terrorism.”
The difference between President Bush’s “proclamation” and U.S. Secretary of State Rice’s admission of failure and announcement of a “different course” is more one of degree than of kind. Both hit Jeffersonian nerves, but neither answers the troubling question: does the world, or the Middle East, want the particular brand of liberty or democracy that the United States is proclaiming or supporting? In his Second Inaugural Address, President Bush harkened back four short years, and the tragedy and brutality of 9/11 seemed to be his operational well-spring. Five months later, with the war in Iraq on-going, Condoleezza Rice, perhaps reflecting a now more sober administration, took a longer view. Of course, it must be said, that after the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II, 1945 and the few world-altering years that followed, saw the emergence of global political internationalism in the form of the United Nations. The idea was that by gathering nation states around the table, and by forcing compromises upon them, the UN would create stability in an insecure world and would thereby keep imperialism at bay. So, why is it then that a single nation, the United States, has taken it upon itself to be both the world’s super-cop and freedom’s patron saint?
In my travels since 9/11, I have found Americans divided in their views in ways that reflect the differences between so-called red (Republican) states and blue (Democratic) states, but not necessarily in the ways people would assume. In the blue states, I have encountered plenty of liberals who excoriate George W. Bush every chance they get. But they also express concerns about the risks of terror attacks on their cities in a way that Canadians never would. And in the red states, while I find fewer people with nasty things to say about the president, I have met people with serious doubts about the war in Iraq and where it will lead. A tour guide operator in Lafayette, Louisiana, joked with me last winter about the way Parisians look down their noses at the way French is spoken in Cajun country. “I tell them, get over it,” she says “you’re not in Paris. Anyway the Parisians are not coming so much right now because they’re mad at us about the war.” Then she sighs and says she thinks it’s “the wrong war.” It’s not so much a political comment as a statement of weary resignation. There are plenty of bumper stickers and signs in windows urging people to “Support Our Troops” in south Louisiana. But the war feels like something to be endured, like bad weather, not something for which there is passionate support.
As cheerleaders and detractors now agree, the United States has assumed this global role, and, in so doing, has become an empire, the greatest since Rome. Like all empires it is compelled to act when threatened; like all empires, its work is forever incomplete, and it has fostered enemies and challengers. But as debate swirls about whether the American Empire serves the broad interests of humanity, many at home are wondering if it is even sustainable. The two debates are intertwined, and for the United States blinking is not an option. All are watching, including Osama bin Laden, who is surely enjoying the cost of American lives and the cost to the U.S. treasury that the on-going insurgency in Iraq is causing. He is also no doubt enjoying the disquiet in the heart of the Republic, America’s new civil war, a battle not over the Jeffersonian notion that freedom is a natural birthright desired by all, but a battle over whether the U.S. should shoulder the costs of exporting this birthright.
At the height of the Cold War, when there was a visible enemy seemingly just as determined as America to export its own doctrine of truth, U.S. federal tax revenue fluctuated between 17 and 20 per cent of America’s Gross Domestic Product, and few disputed the need to vanquish the “evil empire” by outspending it on military initiatives. But with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the “end of history,” and peace and security settling in through the relatively inexpensive selling of democracy to the world’s “failed states,” one might have expected lower taxes. Right or wrong, it didn’t work out that way. During the Clinton presidencies, and during the much vaunted age of globalization, U.S. taxes increased, reaching a high of 21 per cent of GDP by the time President George W. Bush took office.
When Bush entered the White House he took aim at profligate spending (by the Democrats) and overseas gambling. Having already indicated that he would be a stay-at-home president, in June 2001, the U.S. Congress authorized Bush’s tax cut, valued at $1.35 trillion over the coming decade. That tax cut has led to a sharp drop in federal tax revenue, from 21 per cent to 16 per cent of GDP. This might be considered the good news side of the story. However, in 2000, there was a budget surplus of $236 billion, and the total debt stood at $5.7 trillion; by 2004, the surplus had morphed into a $520 billion deficit, and the debt had grown to an unmanageable $7.4 trillion. What happened?
The answer, according to an increasing number of Americans – sixty per cent, say the polls, now believe that the Iraq War, the second one, has been an unwinnable misadventure – lies in defence spending and homeland security costs. Since the end of the Cold War, American defence spending has followed two distinct trends. For the period 1991 to 2001, it remained relatively constant, fluctuating between $265 billion and $304 billion, and annually representing roughly 16 per cent of overall federal spending. Since 2001, both in terms of total dollars and as a percentage of federal allocations, spending on defence has risen by approximately $50 billion a year, and the total defence expenditures for 2005 will likely top $500 billion, or over twenty per cent of overall federal spending.
The spreading of Jeffersonian ideals and values, and the notion that the American Constitution has universal applications, has always been more a liberal than a conservative boast, and under this patina President Clinton seemed to enjoy his globetrotting. Today, as an on-going response to 9/11 it has flipped over to the Republican side, but as a consequence of overseas extravagance, President Bush’s empire is in serious disrepair at its very centre, and in his travels he is just as likely to meet foreign central bankers who have their grip on America’s fiscal lifeline, as he is celebrants of the cause of liberty. Japan and China hold over one trillion dollars in U.S. government securities, and foreigners in general hold close to four trillion dollars worth of U.S. financial assets. At the same time, having lost more than a third of its value against the Euro since 2001, and with the Chinese Yuan attracting new buyers, the U.S. dollar is failing and its position as the world’s reserve currency is in peril.
Serious observers recognize that American current accounts and government deficits are not sustainable. Unable, in fact, to pay for their wars and for maintaining their global military establishment, many affluent Americans are living in denial as the U.S. plunges ever further into debt. And on the horizon new clouds are forming. The U.S. gained a reprieve of sorts with the failure of the European Union to consolidate around core principles, but if China and India’s growth continues to out-pace all others, the time will come when their internal markets are robust enough not to be beholden to overseas buyers. At that point, and if either of these two nations have imperial aspirations, the shrewdest step possible would be to foreclose on American debts and bankrupt their imperial competitor.
The cracks in America’s imperial armour, however, are more of the moment. Despite President Bush’s late June address to the nation (appropriately from Fort Bragg, North Carolina), where he pledged to “stay the course” in Iraq, June represented the fifth consecutive month in which the U.S. Army missed its recruitment quota. With nearly 2,000 American soldiers having come home in body bags, and Iraqi replacements unready in numbers, not even lucrative sign-up inducements seem to be helping the U.S. volunteer army. New millions have been spent on recruitment drives, but in America’s heartland the idea of sacrificing your body for the slippery notion of selling democracy in the streets of Mosul and the deserts of Iraq, is simply not compelling enough. Increasingly at odds with itself and its core values, a distrustful America is now asking if this quagmire is responsible for everything from the drive to privatize social security to the questionable appointment of a unilateralist, John Bolton, as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
As is the case with all empires, those at the helm of the American Empire must ask the crucial question: what imperial frontiers can be sustained at a cost that is not prohibitive. The Romans decided that most Scots and Germans were not worth the outlay in blood and treasure needed to control them. In the United States, almost all serious shades of political opinion remain committed to the continuance of the American empire, but are openly divided on strategy and tactics. Multilateralists are prepared to limit the extent of the empire, and understand the need to use soft as well as hard power to achieve their goals, to cajole as well as to conquer. While under close scrutiny at the moment, unilateralists, the neoconservatives who are now in power and who believe that the stick is mightier than the carrot, might dare again to thrust the empire into exorbitantly costly conflicts on the frontiers.
While the bounties of empire are many, so too are the costs. No empire can be long sustained without a ruling class that is prepared to bear its burden. The British upper classes were willing to pay the price in the eighteenth century during their struggle against France. They paid high taxes, won, and kept their heads. The French aristocrats refused to pay, their state collapsed, and they went to the guillotine during the French Revolution. The Roman Empire also collapsed because its upper classes turned their noses up at taxes. For the British rulers there was a happy ending after Waterloo in 1815. With their enemy vanquished, they enjoyed a century of low taxation and cheap empire. Do the American upper classes, with their pronounced taste for immediate gratification, have the stomach for a protracted struggle in the Middle East, to say nothing of the coming confrontation with China?
If the first great question concerns the durability of the American empire, the second concerns its utility. A great boast of the Anglo-Americans at the end of the twentieth century was that their victories over fascism and communism had rid the world of the vicious utopianisms that had been the most dangerous feature of the century. But the collapse of the Soviet Union and its eastern European empire fifteen years ago left the US in a quandary: justified for four decades as containing communism and protecting the free world, what to do in the 1990s with its own global military footprint? Frenzied investment followed the apparent triumph of liberal democracy – to some, the capitalist equivalent of the Marxist notion that with communism the state would wither away – and the playing field was, quite suddenly, global in scope. But while U.S. reformers looked forward to scaling down costly, and now unnecessary, military instillations, for others the long battle over communism confirmed that “might is right,” and preparations had to be made for a “new American century.” Keeping military bases intact served the interests (and the level of confidence) of multinational corporations, but U.S. imperial dominion still required an overarching concept. It came in the form of the indispensable nation theory. A favourite concept of former U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, the indispensable nation theory was serviceable enough during that transitional time, the so-called era of globalization, before more robust ideas to justify American hegemony became necessary with the terror attacks on New York City and Washington DC, in the new age of blood and iron.
And they have appeared. Like an imperial star ship, the Bush administration’s doctrine that the United States has the right to pre-emptive intervention anywhere against perceived threats, now looms over the planet. While so much ink is spilled on Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others supposedly contemptuous of democracy, the star ship is equally surrounded and supported by a different halo, the shining ephemera of a new liberal justification of American empire that plays the role in our world that Christian missionaries played in the days of the old imperialism. These missionary imperialists have performed a great service for the Bush administration, making its policies palatable to many who would not otherwise regard them as legitimate.
A luminary among those who support present and possibly future interventions by the United States and its allies is Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian Carr Professor of Human Rights Practice and Director of the Carr Centre of Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and now potential successor to Paul Martin as Liberal party leader. “It is at least ironic that liberal believers….,” Ignatieff notes in Empire Lite, “someone like me, for example---can end up supporting the creation of a new humanitarian empire, a new form of colonial tutelage for the peoples of Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan.” But before you are offended by the imperial label, he cautions, you should consider that “it is an empire lite, hegemony without colonies, a global sphere of influence without the burden of direct administration and the risks of daily policing…but that does not make it any less of an empire, that is, an attempt to permanently order the world of states and markets according to its national interests.”
In a similar vein, Ignatieff further writes that “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….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.”
Without an empire, proclaim today’s pro-imperial enthusiasts, there can be no peace, stability and economic development. Without empire, there would be no power that could intervene where states have failed, to deal with human catastrophes and to make possible functioning states, where market economies, democracy and the rule of law can take root. Required is a superpower, superior to all others, to ensure that the global system functions. The alternative to empire is chaos, and liberals like Ignatieff appear to have conceded the American Republican point that the United Nations has either had its day in the sun, was dysfunctional from the beginning, or is incapable of remedy and too cumbersome for a just-in-time world.
The missionary position has been adopted by a very specific species of intellectuals---liberal ideologists who were won over to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Such thinkers have been stirred to passion by the drive to remake the Middle East according to American values. What they find attractive about George W. Bush is not his conservatism, but his utopian liberalism. In a narrative the emperor Hadrian would have understood, the new liberal imperialists warn that the civilized world is threatened by barbarians who lash out at it for a variety of reasons. Exploiting the situation in “failed states”, where human catastrophes brought on by civil war, natural disaster, disease, genocide and religious persecution have destroyed the possibility of viable states, the enemies of civilization take root. In the world’s string of failed states, which can be likened to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter where planets failed to form, drug smugglers, traffickers in human chattels and terrorists have set up shop. From these safe havens, they lash out at the rest of the world. Most dangerous in our age of instant communications and weapons of mass destruction are the terrorists, with al Qaeda the generic name for terrorists committed to Islamic fundamentalism, who have the capacity strike the first world as fiercely or more fiercely than they did on September 11.
In Longitudes and Attitudes, prolific author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, states it frankly: “How the World of Order deals with the World of Disorder is the key question of the day.” And Friedman is clear that the forces of civilization, led by the United States, must strike at the sanctuaries of the barbarians, just as the Romans did in their time, to make the world safe.
The world is beset by the problems of failed states, Ignatieff equally asserts, citing as one principal cause the wreckage of the process of de-colonization of earlier empires in the 1950s and 1960s. Faced with the barbarians, the imperial centre has no choice but to hit back, using force where necessary, not only to protect itself against attacks, but also to occupy failed states so that they can be nurtured back to health. This process he calls nation-building. Thus, for Ignatieff, imperialism, for a time at least, is the essential handmaiden for the construction of nation states in zones of barbarism.
“The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike,” Ignatieff wrote in the New York Times Magazine in January 2003, noting that critics “have not factored in what tyranny or chaos can do to vital American interests.” Overlooking the point that it might just be the interests (oil, geo-strategic positioning, etc.) that is driving the agenda, Ignatieff’s work has the feel of the belle époque about it. His is a “civilizing mission, and the addition of such thinkers to the ranks of those who supported the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq has widened the political spectrum of those willing to endorse the imperial wars of George W. Bush, and, perhaps unwittingly, given credence to the religiosity of the new American mission.
There seems a paradox here. Following his own logic and historical analysis – the wreckage left by earlier empires, and the fact that empire always produces resistance – it cannot be, for Ignatieff, that empire as such is necessary. If the goal is peace, security, and freedom can this not only be achieved through some
