Illusions of empire and the spectre of decline

We had, we were told reached the end of history (Fukuyama 1992). Liberalism had triumphed over its last ideological competitor and the world would coalesce around the values and form of government epitomised in the last remaining superpower, the United States, a ‘Rome on the Potomac’ that would rule a benevolent empire (Kagan 1998). Yet today, in the aftermath of Iraq, with China and Russia resurgent, the unipolar moment appears to have been just that: a historical blip, an interregnum between the bipolarity of the Cold War and a new international structure in which the United States, no longer the indispensable nation, is a normal country once again. The American Empire is in decline. America’s victory in the Cold War had seemingly closed the book on the ‘Kennedy

thesis’, which stated that as inevitably as the British and Habsburg empires before it, the United States had risen and was now in decline (Kennedy 1988). Kennedy’s was hardly an original thesis, resting as it did on a realist understanding of international relations in which the international system created basic structural incentives for power to be balanced and hegemons reined in. Indeed, narratives of American decline had previously risen to prominence in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when the military defeat in South-East Asia had combined with rising national debt and the emergence of a more interdependent global economy to provoke calls for America to manage rather than resist the process of its inexorable decline (Hoffmann 1978). Of course, in Ronald Reagan, the declinists found a President whose polarising deficitbased policies seemed certain to overstretch the United States still further, hence the influence of Kennedy’s book when it was published in 1987 in the run-up to a crucial presidential election – manna from heaven for the opposition Democratic Party. Yet for all the furore that the Kennedy thesis generated, it was not academic debate

but events that put notions of American decline to bed. The unexpected end of the Cold War and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrated that the United States had not been the one that was overstretched, and in the 1990s the talk was not of decline but of another American century. Victory in the Gulf War kicked the Vietnam syndrome, Japan’s economic miracle proved a mirage and the United States bailed out an impotent and divided Europe on its own borders in Yugoslavia. In the new world order America was totally dominant militarily, boasted a massive and robust economy and at the same time maintained unsurpassed cultural and ideological appeal. Most Americans were loath to admit it, but this was an empire in all but name. There were of course those prepared to embrace the notion of the American Empire,

arguing that the end of the Cold War had left America in a dominant position, and from that position America needed to not only maintain but extend its superiority. The

fact of American dominance was indisputable: as early as the 1980s the United States was seen to retain ‘on all indicators’ a degree of dominance that Britain had never achieved in the nineteenth century (Russett 1985), and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 had removed the only other near-superpower – and crucially the only other ideological competitor to the United States – from the scene. The United States accounted for around one quarter of world GDP throughout the 1990s and remained the most technologically advanced major economy with expenditures on research and development nearly equalling the rest of the G-7 combined (Wohlforth 1999: 17). This economic and technological dominance allowed the United States to sustain military expenditures that meant it had command of the global commons as no other nation had done before, underwriting world trade, travel and global telecommunications (Posen 2003). Maintaining this imperial geopolitical position would guarantee American security,

because no potential adversary could hope to get close enough to the power of the United States in order to challenge it. As Colin Powell told the Senate Armed Services committee, ‘If you look like you can kick someone’s butt, more often than not, it will not be necessary.’ Others, particularly on the ‘neoconservative’ wing of the Republican Party, were prepared to go farther, to argue that not only was an imperial grand strategy right for America’s own security, it was also a good thing for the world. American values of individual liberty were universal and emancipatory, and America’s noble project to spread norms of democratic political organisation and open market economics would bring both prosperity and peace, fulfilling America’s destiny (Muravchik 1991). Indeed, such was America’s greatness and righteousness that any constraints on the

exercise of American power in pursuit of that destiny were to be cast aside. Instruments of multilateralism constrain the strongest most, and so as long as America must coexist with untrustworthy and tyrannical regimes for whom ‘moral suasion is a farce’, multilateral agreements to which America would bind herself entail a loss of power to those regimes (Krauthammer 2004). Treaties constrain ‘good guys’ who will adhere to them; ‘bad guys’ will either not sign, cheat or openly violate the agreements. On this basis, American neo-imperialists came to reject any multilateral policy which might result in the weakening of the relative power of the United States (Bolton 2000). The neo-imperialists’ arguments rested on a number of key ideas. The key one is that

a unipolar international structure could be a stable one. Rejecting realism’s assertions that overwhelming power repels and causes other states to balance against it (Waltz 1991: 669), American neo-imperialism viewed the strategies of second-order states as inconsequential, since the scale of the power disjunction meant their choices could only range from enthusiastic bandwaggoning to studious avoidance of direct enmity. Added to this, the United States’ peculiar advantages of geography, and in particular, its enduring alliances to the north and south, reinforce the likely longevity of American unipolarity (Wohlforth 1999: 23-37). Crucially, the neo-imperialists rejected notions that American power would be con-

sidered benign through ‘self-binding’, a process which sanitises power through restraint, multilateralism and the promotion of joint gains (Kupchan 1998). Rather, there was an explicit assumption that the United States would be seen as benign because, quite simply, the United States is benign – a truth that rests on distinctively American ideas about the special nature of their own nation and the universality of ideas of liberty. American power was justified in the eyes of one prominent commentator because America’s self-interest was so enlightened that it came ‘dangerously close to resembling

generosity’ (Kagan 1998: 28). For the proponents of American primacy then, the world had nothing to fear from American dominance, and felt assured that ‘most of the world’s major powers … prefer America’s benevolent hegemony to the alternatives’ (Kristol and Kagan 1996: 21). The American empire had been invited; therefore its leadership would be welcomed (Lundestad 1986). The story from here is of course well known. Provided with what appeared to be a

new organising principle for grand strategy by the attacks of 9/11, the American Empire moved into full swing, invading first Afghanistan and Iraq and singling out Iran and North Korea alongside Saddam Hussein to construct that notorious triumvirate, the ‘axis of evil’. Global solidarity in the immediate months after 9/11 was swiftly lost amidst the perceived illegitimacy of the Iraq invasion. Although ‘shock and awe’ and the breathtaking speed of the American advance to Baghdad appeared to underline the total dominance of the American empire, the insurgency soon drew US forces deep into an irregular conflict and undermined attempts to rebuild. An unwelcome occupier, as the United States expended yet more blood and treasure in an increasingly difficult conflict the decline argument surfaced once more. With America’s military power apparently ineffective and her soft power squandered, economic and political rivals were rising and the American Empire’s days were numbered after less than two decades. In the summer of 2008, a conjunction of events served to vividly highlight the decline

of American power. As authoritarian China wowed the world with an opening ceremony to the Beijing Olympics that was as a spectacular demonstration of Chinese national greatness and economic success, an emboldened Russia marched its troops into Georgia, a democracy and a NATO candidate, destroying several years’ worth of American military assistance in the process. The United States could only stand and watch as these two new giants announced themselves to the world, and it appeared that American values and interests were now fair game in a world that is no longer unipolar but non-polar (Haass 2008). What are we to make of this rapid shift between ideas of empire and protestations of

decline? Both concepts are bound by our understandings of power on the one hand and resistance on the other. How we measure power and the significance we attach to resistance are therefore central questions in the debate surrounding the global status of the United States – is it an empire, overwhelming in its power and merely irritated by bouts of asymmetric opposition, or is resistance to American power a genuine challenge that renders nonsensical continued talk of American imperium? The argument that America is in decline rests on two not unrelated propositions.

First, that foreign policy failures, most notably the Iraq conflict, have eroded America’s position in the world, both by revealing the impotence of American power and by eroding its legitimacy. Second, other powers are rising to challenge the dominant position of the United States: primarily the European Union, China and Russia. If the history of empire teaches us anything it is that hubris leads to defeat (Snyder

1991; Kupchan 1994). After 9/11, the United States benefited from near universal international sympathy, and most saw the Afghanistan campaign as a necessary and justified response to the attacks (Colombani 2001). Yet the rush to wage a war of choice to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq smacked of a worrying militarism at the heart of United States foreign policy that alienated allies, enraged publics and squandered that goodwill (Bacevich 2005). The wars to which America committed itself under the banner of the Global War on Terror turned out to be far less

straightforward than anticipated. The ‘spectacular’ failure to impose order and stabilise Iraq in particular had been brought on by the ideological arrogance of an empire flush with notions of both its own power and righteousness (Dodge 2005). Perhaps more worryingly than the apparent ineffectiveness of American military

power is that many of the means by which the United States pursued its global war on terror have undermined the moral authority that America once held over potential great power rivals. It is difficult to lecture China on human rights when the United States presides over Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, and Russian action against Chechen ‘terrorists’ looks acceptable alongside American assaults on Fallujah. American preference for anti-terrorist governments over democratic ones leaves it with little claim to be the beacon of liberal values in the world, and in so doing may have relinquished its authority to lead (Buzan 2008). Nowhere was that loss of legitimacy more noticeable than in Europe, where anti-

American sentiment had been growing with every unilateral action of the Bush administration. Public sentiment translated into policy as it seldom had as the peaceniks of ‘Old Europe’ made a public show of opposing American action in the theatre of the United Nations. The tensions in the transatlantic alliance were by 2003 more important than ever – no longer a US dependent, the European Union had become the biggest single market on the planet with a GDP higher than that of the United States, with its own foreign and security policy and way of war. The promise of membership was proving to be a more effective power than any element of geopolitics – as one writer confidently put it, in the new European century, the European way of doing things would become the world’s (Leonard 2005). The lessons of the American experience in Iraq, and to a lesser extent Afghanistan,

are lessons about the utility of military power. Not only does overwhelming military power inevitably generate anxiety and resistance, the use of that power both brings with it a loss of authority and the generation of forms of resistance which military power finds very difficult to counter. Asymmetric warfare – as any warfare the United States is engaged in must necessarily be – exploits the twin vulnerabilities of democratic powers by encouraging mission creep while at the same time forcing that mission to face the threat of casualties (Freedman 2006: 49-61). In particular, indigenous insurgents have a profound advantage over foreign forces in that they need not ‘win’ as such – all they need do is to prolong the conflict and sap the great power’s stomach for the fight (Layne 2006). Of course, when it comes to fighting wars, non-democracies are made of sterner stuff

than their liberal counterparts, blessed as they are with the absence of an electoral cycle. Hence Russia has been able to conduct its campaign in Chechnya – as an ally of the United States in the broader war on terror – with greater ruthlessness and determination than the US has mustered in Iraq. Emboldened by its military successes and having grown rich on the back of rising oil prices, Russia is resurgent. After contracting in the 1990s, Russian growth has averaged nearly 7 per cent since 2000. But it is the nature of Russian export growth that underpins its revival as a great power, in that much of Europe is now dependent on Russia for supplies of natural gas. Energy accounts for over 65 per cent of all EU imports from Russia, and the Kremlin has not been averse to viewing that dependence as a strategic asset, adroitly using it to prevent a common EU policy towards Russia. Russia is therefore the best example of emerging ‘petro-authoritarian’ states, basing its assertive nationalism on the security provided by its strategic exports of oil and gas (Friedman 2006). Record oil prices (ironically in

part fuelled by the uncertainty brought on by American policies in the Middle East) only serve to strengthen those assets; it is surely no coincidence that Russia felt able to push the West as far as it has in Georgia when oil prices oscillated around the $120/barrel mark. For the declinists, the conflict sparked by Mikheil Saakashvili’s miscalculations in

South Ossettia is a vivid example of American impotence. With its European allies split and the United States both unwilling and realistically unable to take military action in defense of Georgian territorial integrity one commentator complained that the United States had turned in its global sheriff badge (Rosett 2008). Yet the idea that America would ever have been willing or able to put its military power down on the borders of a still-nuclear Russia to defeat Russian interests is absurd. Indeed, it may be argued that it was by overreaching itself by attempting to exercise power in former Soviet space that the United States got itself into this mess (Greenway 2008). Decline must be a relative concept, in which a power advantage over other states ebbs away over time; it is not the distance from omnipotence. Temporary overstretch therefore need not precipitate decline, as Hadrian well knew. On the other hand, overstretch may run deeper than the travails of the American

military. Kennedy’s central point was that in the long run there exists a very clear connection between a state’s relative economic rise and fall and its growth and decline as a military power, which leads us from Russia, which despite its growth and natural resources ranks only eleventh globally in terms of GDP, to the economic rise of China, which has been little short of meteoric. Since the implementation of market reforms in the 1970s, its economy has quadrupled, and as the world’s manufacturing centre it consumes roughly a third of the global supply of iron, coal and steel (Ikenberry 2008). China’s growth through the 1990s averaged 10.6 per cent, barely slowing to 9.6 per cent since in the twenty-first century, so that GDP now stands at over $7 trillion. Trade surpluses during this period have allowed China to accumulate over $1 trillion of foreign currency reserves, mainly invested in US Treasury bonds, a level of control over the US national debt and its currency that has led the prospect of liquidation of Chinese dollar holdings to be talked of as a ‘nuclear option’ (Evans-Pritchard 2007). China’s economic strength was highlighted by the Beijing Olympics, where an esti-

mated budget of $44 billion was lavished on a carefully controlled and choreographed games designed to reinforce China’s burgeoning soft power (Beech 2008). The success of Chinese athletes and of the games themselves have increased China’s prestige, and so the likelihood that other states will aspire to follow its example (Nye 2004). Already the so-called Beijing consensus offers an alternative development model, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, where Chinese respect for sovereignty and rhetoric of noninterference is beginning to trump Washington’s model of economic openness and political liberalisation (Thompson 2005; Springborg 2008). We should, however, be cautious not to over-estimate the impact of Chinese growth,

since the US economy remains strong. It remains the largest national economy in the world, as well as being ranked by the World Economic Forum as the world’s most competitive economy, with productivity growth over the last decade a full percentage point higher than the European average. The United States is dominant in higher education and emerging technologies and retains the dynamism of immigration (Zakaria 2008). Furthermore, China does not appear to be immune from the current economic crisis, with notions that emerging markets might ‘decouple’ from a US-led recession looking increasing far-fetched (Bennett 2008). So although even the most

pessimistic expect China’s growth to remain well ahead of that of the United States, China is still a long way from becoming the most powerful economic actor, and its fortunes remain bound up with those of the United States. The sheer size of the American economy also allows it to sustain simply massive

military spending, which totalled $547 billion in 2007. The defence budget accounts for only around 4 per cent of GDP, but this is a staggering 45 per cent of all military spending worldwide, a military dominance that is unprecedented in world history. Despite having increased military expenditures by 59 per cent in real terms since 2001, the burden of military spending is less than it was during previous peak spending years in the post-World War II period (Kennedy 2008). Militarily, China continues to invest, increasing its military spending threefold over

the past decade (Stålenheim et al. 2008). It now accounts for 5 per cent of world military spending, which at just 2.1 per cent of GDP can be increased still further. Yet China has not focused solely on expanding its coercive capabilities. China’s growing power has brought with it real political influence, particularly in its relationship with ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which caught the United States unaware and at a stroke put American dominance in East Asia in question (Mahbubani 2008). Indeed, while America’s focus has been on the Middle East since 2001, some analysts have noted how its inattentiveness in Asia has hastened the arrival of the Asian Century, centred around the military and economic power of China, India, Japan and South Korea (Kaplan 2007). However, it is not just in Eurasia where American dominance is increasingly in

question. The war on terror and the issues of China and Russia have led the United States to take its eye off the ball in Latin America, perhaps assuming that the Monroe Doctrine was a perpetual condition. Venezuela’s hostile ideological petro-diplomacy reflects anti-American sentiment in the region and broader disillusionment with democratic politics, a situation that is allowing China to expand its interests in Latin America (Hakim 2006). Within the region itself, while Brazil and Mexico’s growth has yet to really take off, they are expected to be the world’s fourth and fifth largest economies by 2050 (Wilson and Stupnytska 2007). Given all these measures, America’s position relative to the rest of the world is

clearly not as dominant as it was in the early 1990s. Yet capabilities and alignments tell us only part of the story. The real issue is not simply how much power you seem to have, but how much influence and freedom of action that power gives you. Both neo-imperial notions of American dominance and the recent discussions of

decline assume that power is intrinsic to capabilities, that those resources of power that we can measure translate directly into power per se. During the Cold War zero-sum relationships abounded within the framework of a diametrically opposed global bipolarity. In military capabilities, economic strength and ideological success, capabilities did essentially translate into power, because one side’s gain was necessarily the other’s loss. However, this strong relationship between capabilities and power was an empirical one, not a logical one. No less a profound – if too often overlooked – thinker on international relations as Raymond Aron understood that political power is not absolute, that it is fundamentally a human relationship in which men apply power to their fellow creatures, and that therefore our measures of power are approximate and the factors that bestow power change (Aron 1966: 47-53). In the post-Cold War world the aims of actors are more diffuse and the relationships

between them less clearly defined. Released from the necessity to see all of international

politics through the prism of the global conflict, actors may act for security, for power itself – ‘the intoxication of ruling’ – for glory, for ideas (ibid.: 73-6). That crucial human relationship of power and resistance no longer has embedded in it the mechanics of bipolar structure, which automatically conferred upon the actions of great powers the role of conqueror or legitimate sovereign. In the post-Cold War world, great powers seeking to apply their power to their fellow men need to generate their own legitimacy, having lost the animating greater struggle through which they could contextualise and justify themselves. It appears then that both the neo-imperialists and the declinists miss the point. In

both being wedded to Cold War notions of power, the neo-imperialists wrongly assume that America’s military and economic dominance can translate into effective policy, whereas the declinists assume that the failure of those policies and the rise of others means that America is in decline. The reality is that what power is and the ways in which states are able to use it have

changed greatly in the past twenty years. The world has become flatter – not in the sense that Friedman considered globalised economics to be taking place on a level playing field but in the sense that states are less able to ‘put their power down’ and so the balance of power itself matters less. The United States has found that military hardware cannot be relied on to simply crush resistance, particularly in a world where global communications serve the needs of resistance far more effectively than they serve governments. Since nuclear weapons have effectively rendered great power war obsolete, asymmetry is now the dominant mode of military conflict, eroding not only the usefulness of military power but also the legitimacy of its use, in that modern militaries pitted against civilians and irregulars swiftly becomes seen as bullying. In economics, the universal acceptance of free market capitalism as the organising principle of globalisation has created a level of interdependence that renders trade competition counterproductive and creates significant barriers to the use of economic power, even raising the possibility of mutually assured economic destruction. These new social imperatives which flatten out traditional power disparities have rendered the notion of compulsion virtually obsolete. States and populations no longer regard the exercise of military force as a means of defending or promoting national interests. The tools of power that the imperial narratives of the 1990s focused on are less effective than we thought, but that truth is not limited to the United States. A second dynamic that is at work in this debate is that the promising illusions of

neo-imperialism bring with them the spectre of decline. To the extent that the United States has been unable to succeed as the empire it was thought to be, we perceive American power to be in decline. The reality, of course, is that America was never as powerful as the neo-imperialists would have had us believe, nor is its power now so eroded, something that we can understand when we consider the unique historical nature of the American Empire. After 1945, America had embedded much of its national power in the western order,

which after the collapse of the rival communist system became the global order. This order had been based on economic openness and cooperative management through liberal democratic institutions (Ikenberry 1996). The American Empire that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union was therefore, in spite of its overwhelming military dominance, one that was based on structural power and the creation of international norms rather than the coercive use of national power. In a sense, the American Empire was one in which the unipolar power had prevented itself from acting

imperially solely for its own interests, because to do so was to undermine the very system that sustained it. Instead, American imperial power could be used to sustain the system itself, something that it did largely with the consent of other states, a sanction that ranged from enthusiastic bandwagoning to acceptance of a fait accompli. Where states made attempts to undermine or revise the system the use of American power was justified not by the protection of US interests but by the maintenance of the public good of international order. That states accepted that the United States was constrained in this way explains the failure of others to engage in military build-ups to challenge American hegemony. Thus the American national interest, as the dominant power, was to exercise that power cautiously and only in pursuit of the interests of the international system, since by doing so the United States could ease others’ perceptions of threat and prevent the emergence of aspiring great powers. Of course, the disconnectedness of power and capabilities and the maintenance of

American power through its exercise in pursuit of systemic rather than national interests are logics that apply differently in peacetime from how they do in wartime, as evidenced by the zero-sum relationships of the Cold War. Yet for all the talk of global war in the aftermath of 9/11, and the profound way in which those events continue to animate American politics, the notion of a war on terror has not created a new global war paradigm which justifies the accumulation and use of national power. So when the United States was perceived over Iraq to be acting in pursuit of its own interests rather than the interests of international stability, it forfeited the acquiescence to its power that had sustained it, and released the resistance that had been calmed. So where next for American foreign policy in such world? In its dying days the Bush

Administration appears to have been recanting its imperial ways and advocating a return to a more limited, realist conception of the national interest (Rice 2008). Certainly America seems likely to be haunted by Iraq for some time, and with the need to reinvigorate the economy at home in the wake of the credit crunch, there is unlikely to be much willingness to see American power as the answer to many of the world’s problems. Having said that, those in Europe who hope for a full-scale reversal of US foreign policy are certain to be disappointed. Bush’s foreign policy is not so far out of step with American history as many believe, and the foreign policy narrative in the United States continues to be constructed around the events of 9/11. The challenge for the United States is to re-establish its legitimacy as the sustainer of

its own system. That will require a foreign policy that relies more on alliances, and we have already seen an effort to reengage European elites, although at the popular level much more needs to be done as anti-Americanism is more enduring than many believe (Cox 2008). In this, and in a broader effort to unify Western policy towards Russia in particular, the United States retains many of the advantages of empire. Its liberal political values remain by far the most animating ideas on the world stage – one cannot imagine a candidate to lead the Chinese Communist Party being met by a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin. The international system remains the American system, and there are no realistic challengers to it, with even the autocracies of Russia and China now fully engaged with and constrained by global capitalism. Whether you term it structural power or hegemonic power, the basic elements of the international system are set up to favour the means and ends of the United States (Strange 1988; Mead 2004: 25). Fundamentally, nothing has emerged to replace the reliance upon American leadership in the major issues of international relations. Whether that leadership can once more be accepted rather than resisted is the challenge that the new incumbent of the White House will face.