Even as Americans and our allies adopt some of the practical arrangements of empire, we should avoid calling these imperial or unipolar.
Commentary
The whiff of empire is in the air.
Russia is attempting to recapture its lost Soviet republic of Ukraine. China is preparing to grab Taiwan, along with more chunks of Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and India. “Global Britain” is taking the lead in training Ukrainians, in what might be considered a reprise of the 19th century “Great Game” against Russia. Iran seeks a new status as “regional hegemon,” doubtless encouraged by a flattering Beijing and Moscow that will later consume such small powers when their usefulness as tools against U.S. alliances are spent.
And what of the so-called “American empire” that we embraced by name until World War I, including how we viewed our dominion over the Philippines and Puerto Rico? With the fall of the European empires in the 20th century—some with nudges from Washington after they were hollowed out during the world wars—the term went out of fashion.
However, the idea of an American empire is alive in the far-left imagination as a way to smear American power and thus pave the way for leftist empires centered in Moscow and Beijing. Added to that today is the positive portrayal of an American empire revived by more reputable writers, perhaps as the lesser of two evils when compared with the
violent chaos into which the world is descending, most recently in Ukraine and Israel.
Janan Ganesh, writing for The
Financial Times, says that the only viable foreign policy for the United States is the “pivot to everywhere.” He compares the United States to late imperial Britain, which found its “portfolio of responsibilities ... expanding, while its underlying wherewithal went the other way.” According to Mr. Ganesh, “The U.S. will need the subtlest statecraft to manage its own version of this late-imperial predicament.”
Dominic Green in The
Wall Street Journal gives a positive review of Bruno Maçães’s book, “History Has Begun,” calling it “a fascinating survey of the decline and possible rise of the American empire.” The book warns of the risk of an illiberal “Eurasian world order” that sidelines the United States through China’s “developing and controlling the key technologies of the future.”
Ross Douthat writes wistfully in The
New York Times of the waning of the “post-Cold War Pax Americana” in Ukraine, but also of the “persistent weaknesses of America’s major adversaries,” and “the deficits of legitimacy and competence in illiberal regimes.” He believes that talk of a “multipolar world” wrongfully implies that the “American imperium” is in “the kind of superpower decline that unmade British power in the 20th century, or Spanish power in the 17th, or Soviet power much more rapidly than that.” He points to the fallacy in notions of American decline as demonstrated by strong U.S. GDP growth relative to the G7, population growth relative to China, and Russia’s weakness relative to NATO.
One could argue that true American empire, under a different name, was born in the 1940s and 1950s with the defeat of the former colonial empires and their replacement with U.S.-centric international organizations centered in New York City and Washington DC, along with their U.S.-centric values of democracy, human rights, and free trade. But this would be to hand a rhetorical victory to the leftists, and ignores promotion by the United States of the true independence of countries as recognized through the UN guarantee of territorial integrity for each sovereign nation, no matter how small.
Sovereignty and territorial integrity is what nations want, and what the United States has largely delivered through its Pax Americana, sometimes enforced in wars, for example against Germany in the 1910s, Germany, Japan, and Italy in the 1940s, North Korea in the 1950s, North Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviets in the 1980s, Iraq in the 1990s, and Afghanistan in the 2000s. Though the United States failed in all of its objectives in Vietnam and Afghanistan, we succeeded in the other wars to maintain the sovereignty of the invaded. In all of the wars, including against Vietnam and Afghanistan, the United States punished aggressors to the point of deterring other would-be aggressors over more than a century.
Maintaining the international system of sovereign states takes significant funding, of which the indebted United States has increasingly little. The subtlest American statecraft for which Mr. Ganesh calls arguably refers to the need for the United States to
mobilize and coordinate our allies and adversaries, sometimes with the incentives that aren’t seen as imperial, and sometimes with the disincentives that appear otherwise.
The necessity, too infrequently accepted by freeriding U.S. allies, is that they increase their share of the fiscal, in-kind, and other burdens of U.S. global defense requirements. This burden sharing is in part what the United Kingdom is doing in Ukraine, what
Japan did when it helped fund the Iraq War, what South Korea does when it shares control of its own military with U.S. commanders, and what Poland proposed in 2018 when it offered to pay the United States $2 billion to establish a permanent military base in its country called “Fort Trump.” Taiwanese and Saudi purchases of billions of dollars worth of U.S. arms is another way to pay the United States for implicit security guarantees against regional threats like China and Iran, respectively.
But, even as Americans and our allies adopt some of the practical arrangements of empire, we should avoid calling these imperial or unipolar. These terms are pejorative now, and can only be misunderstood and complicate what should instead be thought of as the less sensational and conservative “guarantee of international security by an alliance of equal and sovereign countries.”
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
