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One of the preeminent historians of American Empire, William Appleman Williams, famously stated that one of the central 'themes of American historiography is that there is no American Empire'. With the events of 9/11 however, the analysis of America as a global Empire has moved from the margins of debate and gained increasing usage amongst hitherto mainstream analysts of US foreign policy and world order.
This trend has undoubtedly been spurred on by the US's increasingly unilateral policy orientation that has sought to overtly bypass global institutions of multilateral governance combined with its new doctrine of pre-emptive war against a number of third world states that comprise a so-called 'axis of evil' as part of a global 'war on terror'.
Central to the emergence of the US as an empire is an implicit periodisation that links the emergence of American Empire to the post-Cold War and post-9/11 eras. As Michael Cox pointedly argues, after 9/11 a number of analysts are now arguing that 'we should start calling things by their right name, drop the pretence that America is not an Empire, and accept that if the world was going to be a stable place, the US had to act in much the same imperial fashion as the British and Romans had done several centuries before'.
Thomas Friedman, for example, compares the events of 9/11 to the Second World War and the end of the Cold War in terms of its significance for international order and US foreign policy and uses the events of 9/11 to call for a more imperial US policy in relation to the so-called third world 'failed states':
World War I gave birth to the League of Nations and an attempt to re-create a balance of power in Europe, which proved unstable. World War II gave birth to the United Nations, NATO, the IMF and the bipolar US-Soviet power structure, which proved to be quite stable until the end of the Cold War. Now, Sept. 11 has set off World War III, and it, too, is defining a new international order.
Friedman continues that like the earlier Cold War era, the new post-September 11th era 'is also bipolar, but instead of being divided between East and West it is divided between the World of Order and the World of Disorder' with the mission of the world of order led by the overwhelming power of the US to 'stabilize and lift up the World of Disorder'.
Within the new US imperial discourse there are a number of sub-discourses which are animated around the essentially benign nature of contemporary US Empire. Michael Ignatieff argues that
America's Empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man's burden. The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an Empire lite, 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.
Moreover, the US is invariably portrayed as a reluctant Empire that has almost accidentally inherited the capacity for global power projection due to the preponderance of power left over from the superpower confrontation. America's Empire was thus not desired nor sought, but was established almost by default with the extension and consolidation of Empire in the post-September 11th era allegedly driven by defensive considerations to bring order to the zone of war within the third world.
These themes have been echoed by US planners themselves. The pre 9/11 draft 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DFG) paper drawn up by then Under Secretary for Policy Paul Wolfowitz and US Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney was sent to military leaders and Defense Department heads to provide them with a geopolitical framework for interpreting the US role in the post-Cold War era. The DFG argued that the US's 'first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival' in the post-Cold War era. In so doing the US should 'endeavour to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia'.
Under the office of the current US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, private studies of past great Empires have been conducted so as to ascertain 'how they maintained their dominance' and what the US could learn from the 'successes and failures of ancient powers'. Richard Haass, the director of policy planning at the US Department of State, and the US's lead co-ordinator for post-Taliban Afghanistan openly called for the re-conceptualisation of the US as an imperial power within world order: 'building and maintaining such an order would require sustained effort by the world's most powerful actor, the United States. For it to be successful would in turn require that Americans re-conceive their role from one of a traditional nation-state to an imperial power'.
Perhaps the clearest indication of this new imperial discourse, however, was the Bush administration's 2002 National Security Strategy which echoed the earlier 1992 DFG paper. In it the Bush Administration committed itself to building up it's military forces to deter any potential rival for world supremacy: 'Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build up in the hopes of surpassing, or equalling, the power of the United States'.
However, US Empire has not been without it critics. Amongst the most perceptive, Ikenberry fears that the US's new 'imperial grand strategy' which seeks to utilise it's current preponderance of global power into a 'world order in which it runs the show' could ultimately lead to other states seeking to 'work around, contain and retaliate against US power'. Moreover, this 'grand strategic vision' could potentially leave the world 'more dangerous and divided - and the United States less secure'. In sum, a new imperial discourse has developed when analysing the US state and its role within world order with the US increasingly seen as a relatively benign Empire as a result of the end of the Cold War and the terrorist attacks on 9/11.
Historicising US Empire
These arguments however, have a number of problems. Inherent within this new imperial discourse is the periodisation of US Empire to the post-Cold War or post-9/11 era, or to the election of the Bush administration and the ideological orientation of its key neo-conservative members. However, this assertion is operationalised by an inherently orthodox historiographical reading of US foreign policy during the Cold War period that overestimates the geo-political centrality of anti-Communism as the primary motivation for US Cold War grand strategy. Importantly this orthodox historical narrative erases entirely the long-term commitment of the US state to the policing and reproduction of world capitalism in which it enjoys a predominant position. As Andrew Bacevich argues, a reading of 'US grand strategy from the late 1940s through the 1980s as "containment"--with no purpose apart from resisting the spread of Soviet power--is not wrong, but is incomplete'. He continues that the US has long sought to 'open up the world politically, culturally, and, above all, economically' and as such, the US has long been an empire.
The US role as the lead state within world capitalism became increasingly apparent with the bankrupting of Great Britain, the custodian of global capitalism prior to the end of the Second World War. US pre-eminence was underwritten by its unrivalled military, political and economic power. At the end of the Second World War, for example, the US had almost half of the worlds manufacturing capacity, the majority of its food supply and nearly all of its capital reserves.
The centrality of the US in underwriting a capitalist world order was recognized early on by US planners. In 1942, US Secretary of State Cordell Hull argued that leadership 'towards a new system of international relations in trade and other economic affairs will devolve largely on the United States because of our great economic strength'. He went on to assert that the US 'should assume this leadership and the responsibility that goes with it, primarily for the reasons of pure national self-interest'. In this new role, the post-war US national interest was articulated around a dual vision; the maintenance and defense of an economically open international system conducive for capital penetration and circulation coupled with a concomitant global geo-strategy of containing social forces considered inimical to capitalism, including but extending far beyond alleged Soviet aligned communists.
National Security Council Document sixty eight (NSC 68) was one of the central documents outlining the US's policy of containment. Within it was a very clear statement of intent on the part of the US. NSC 68 argued that the US's 'overall policy at the present time' is 'designed to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish'. NSC 68 went on to assert that even 'if there were no Soviet Union we would face the great problem of the free society — of reconciling order, security — with the requirement of freedom'.
This reconciliation of order, security and freedom and the role that the US state would play in underwriting world order was encapsulated by the 'Grand Area' strategy which served as a blueprint for US policy in constructing the post-war international system. The Grand Area strategy was developed by the influential Council on Foreign Relations and senior US policy makers, and emerged from an analysis of what caused the Second World War which was attributed to the disintegration of the inter-war international order and the emergence of rival spheres of influence and protectionist blocs amongst capitalist powers. The Grand Area strategy sought to eliminate the potential for inter-imperial rivalry between the leading core states and called for the opening up of hitherto closed territories for investors and traders and the incorporation of rival capitalist nations under US economic, political and military hegemony. Moreover, it required the break up of the old European empires and included not only what had been formerly under British imperial control, but also the Western Hemisphere, the Far East and the Middle East.
This postwar strategy was designed to 'solve the internal problems of Western industrial capitalism' argues John Ikenberry and to ensure the long-term 'economic and military viability' of the US by securing 'markets and supplies of raw materials is Asia and Europe'. George Kennan, one of the central architects of US post-war policy cynically captured the role of the US state in a top secret planning document in 1948. Kennan argued that the US has about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population ... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships that will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.
The US has thus long been an Empire, and it is imperative that activists challenge the inherent and dubious historical narrative that lays at the heart of the new imperial discourses. The second part of this series will examine and trace the way in which the US empire incorporated potential rivals during the Cold War era and structured relations between the so-called first and third worlds.
Dr Doug Stokes is a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK.
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