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The Curious Case of American Hegemony 1

Is there an American empire? Will it last?These two questions haunt the contempo-rary period. In the last few years, roughlysince the enunciation of a new national security strategy in President Bush’s WestPoint address in June 2002, hardly a dayhas passed without a news item, essay, orbook announcing, denouncing, or contestingthe existence of an American empire. Le-gions of journalists, activists, and professorshave investigated the concept of empire,compared it with previous representations of the type, assessed how far the UnitedStates fits—or breaks—the mold, and em-ployed it as a term of abuse or praise. Fromthis outbreak of fascination with things im-perial among the chattering classes no con-sensus emerged: opinions ranged from theview that the United States is an empire andhas always been one to the view that theUnited States is not an empire and neverwas one. These terminological disputes arose partly from the genuine difficulty offinding a commonly agreed definition of the thing itself, but more importantly fromthe common appreciation that the “e” wordbore closely on the legitimacy of the enter-prise. There is also no consensus on the sec-ond question. One side insists that theUnited States has entered a “unipolar era”likely to last for several decades, the otherthat “the eagle has crash landed” and thatits economic primacy is at an end. “In thefirst decade of the twenty-first century,”writes the critic Michael Lind, “the EmpireBubble has succeeded the Tech Bubble andwill look as absurd in hindsight in a decadeor two.”1

These debates over American empiremerged and overlapped with longstandingdisputes among political scientists over thecharacter of the contemporary internationalsystem, the sources of power within it, andits most important vectors of change. Is theinternational system unipolar or multipolar,or some combination of the two? Does mili-tary power still rule the roost, or is the in-ternational system a complex multilevelchessboard with other and equally impor-tant sources of power and authority? In thecurrent system, are states more likely to bal-ance against or bandwagon with Americanpower?

The debates over empire also mergedand overlapped with longstanding contro-versies over the sources of decline and re-newal of U.S. power within the inter-national system, such as that prosecuted by the Yale historian Paul Kennedy and the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nyein the late 1980s.2 Analysts working in this vein understood the American predica-ment in grand strategic terms and were attentive to the gap that Walter Lippmannmade famous—that is, the potential dis-junction in a democracy between the endsand means of national strategy. Here the focus of the inquiry is the relationship between power and commitments, usuallyinformed by the precept that the nationmust “maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes withinits means and its means equal to its pur-poses, its commitments related to its re-sources and its resources adequate to itscommitments.”3

David C. Hendrickson is the Robert J. Fox Distinguished Service Professor at Colorado College and a member of theCoalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.

The Curious Case of American HegemonyImperial Aspirations and National DeclineDavid C. Hendrickson

Both these persistent debates, the oneover the sources of power in the interna-tional system, the other over the quest forsolvency in national strategy, were renewedand transformed by the Bush Doctrine. The emergence of explicit imperial aspira-tions in the world’s only superpower was in its own way as surprising and transfor-mative as the collapse of the Soviet Union.In the early 1990s, the United States wasgenerally deemed unlikely to chase after any imperial temptations. Despite the im-pressive military primacy that emerged bydefault after the Soviet collapse, most ob-servers had generally shared the image ofthe United States as a conservative poweroriented to the maintenance of the statusquo, more likely to withdraw from theworld than to dominate it.

This expectation also conditioned manydebates among political scientists duringthe 1990s. Neither the “offensive realism”of the University of Chicago’s John Mear-sheimer nor the “liberal institutionalism” of Duke University’s Robert Keohane ex-pected the United States to take up thewhite man’s burden and seek through force a revolutionary reconstruction of Middle Eastern governments. Surely theUnited States would realize that it shouldcontent itself with regional hegemony and not attempt an impossible march toglobal hegemony, thought Mearsheimer.Surely the United States would appreciatethe rational advantages offered by leadershipin international institutions, thought Keohane.4

Bush broke out of these constraints andcreated a new reality every bit as revolution-ary for world politics, and just as disturbingfor conventional paradigms in political sci-ence, as the Soviet collapse. The new out-look was well expressed by a senior Bush ad-ministration official in a conversation with ajournalist in the summer of 2002. People inthe “reality-based community,” the aidesaid, “believe that solutions emerge fromyour judicious study of discernible reality....

That’s not the way the world really worksanymore. We’re an empire now, and whenwe act, we create our own reality. And whileyou’re studying that reality—judiciously, asyou will—we’ll act again, creating othernew realities, which you can study too, andthat’s how things will sort out. We’re histo-ry’s actors...and you, all of you, will be leftto just study what we do.”5 This statementsubsequently was held up to great ridicule,particularly the bit about the “reality-basedcommunity,” but there is little doubt thatthis senior administration official spoke afundamental truth when he said that “whenwe act, we create our own reality,” and that the rest of us are left to follow in itswake.

As the senior administration officialsuggested, the Bush Doctrine is indeed animperial program, one that must be placedon the ideological terrain of “universal em-pire.” Critics, it may be conceded, are per-fectly irrelevant to its trajectory, but theymay find busy-work in soberly addressingits prospects. I shall take up that rather in-glorious task by examining the empire via a bodily analogy—inquiring into its mind(the coherence of the Bush strategic out-look); its arms (the uses and limits of mili-tary power); its legs (the sustainability ofthe Bush economic program); the rotten-ness or sweetness of its heart (the perceivedlegitimacy of America’s justifications); andthe energy imparted by its breath6 (the in-fluence of political culture on U.S. externalconduct).

The general thesis is that imperial aspi-rations produce national decline, and this inboth the material and moral realms. Achiev-ing strategic solvency and moral legitimacy,to put the point in policy terms, requiresthe rejection of universal empire. Despitethe weaknesses induced or exposed by theimperial strategy, the United States also en-joys certain intrinsic strengths that make its position far from irretrievable if it wereto reject the imperial vision. What was long said of Russia—“not as strong as she

2 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 2005

seems, not as weak as she looks”—is alsotrue of America.

The Bush DoctrineThe question—republic or empire?—hasbeen one of the longest-running argumentsin American history and has arisen in oneform or another in virtually every warfought by the United States. It rang out in 1776 and 1812, in the controversies over Indian removal in the 1830s, in thewars with Mexico and Spain in 1846 and1898, and on into the wars of the twenti-eth century, especially Vietnam. At no time in American history, however, has thetransmogrification from republic to empirebeen so stark and compelling as in the ad-ministration of George W. Bush. Thoughthere are various precedents for the Bushpolicies, especially in the presidencies ofRonald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, andBill Clinton, no preceding administrationput these together in so alarming a way. By marrying a revolutionary strategic doc-trine with the unipolar dispensation createdby the end of the Cold War, Bush broughtthe “empire” business to a whole new level.

The gap in military capabilities was inlarge part a simple consequence of the endof the Soviet Union and strategic bipolarity,but it grew in the 1990s due to the “revolu-tion in military affairs,” creating the capa-bility in U.S. forces to deliver precise andconcentrated firepower in virtually everycorner of the globe and prompting the oper-ational objective of “full spectrum domi-nance.” The United States accounts forabout 40 to 50 percent of total world mili-tary spending and maintains yet highershares of world expenditures on military re-search and development. This technologicalprowess has created a large gap betweenU.S. and allied armed forces, making it dif-ficult for them to function effectively to-gether on the battlefield. The United Statesmaintains an “empire of bases” throughoutthe world, largely exempt from local con-

trol. Each of its five global military com-mands enjoys escalation dominance againstpotential adversaries, and the vast resourcesallotted to these commands have marginal-ized the State Department and given themincreasingly important diplomatic func-tions. The United States conducts a vastspying operation on the rest of the worldthrough expenditures of some $30 billion ayear (with funds dedicated to these objec-tives steadily rising). It enjoys strategic nu-clear superiority and dominance of the glob-al commons. And it maintained this posi-tion by spending, in the late 1990s, only3.5 percent of its GDP on defense. Even now,nearly four years after 9/11, it devotes only5 percent of GDP to defense and homelandsecurity.7

To these impressive capabilities, theBush administration added a revolutionarystrategic doctrine. Its innovations were four-fold. It broke from the Cold War doctrinesof containment and deterrence, arguing thatthe threat posed by terrorists and “roguestates” justified a strategy of preventive war,which it called “the strategy of preemp-tion.” States like Iraq, Iran, and North Ko-rea, together with their “terrorist allies,”Bush said in his 2002 State of the UnionAddress, “constitute an axis of evil, armingto threaten the peace of the world.”8 Oncewar with Iraq began, notice was served onothers that they might be next. “This is justthe beginning,” one administration officialtold the New York Times in late March 2003.“I would not rule out the same sequence ofevents for Iran and North Korea as forIraq.”9

The administration also argued thatdemocratic government and the liberalideals with which it was associated were ofuniversal validity and that the United Stateshas a right, perhaps even in some cases a duty, to impose such a government by forceagainst tyrants. Though the administrationinsisted that the Iraq war was launched tosafeguard American security, it was also con-tinually represented as a noble cause. Never


in history, proponents said, had so manybeen freed at so little cost.

Bush also broke dramatically from theconstraints of multilateral organizations, insisting that no foreign government couldcontrol the decisions of the United States in matters of war and peace. After it be-came apparent that the United States couldprobably get only 4 votes (out of 15) in the U.N. Security Council to approve theuse of force against Iraq, one administra-tion official said, “We will want to makesure that the United States never getscaught again in a diplomatic choke point in the Security Council or in NATO.”10 Inkeeping with this attitude, the administra-tion had previously withdrawn from or scuttled a range of international treaties, including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty,the International Criminal Court, and theKyoto Protocol on climate change. And why not? As John Bolton, the fox whomBush nominated in 2005 to guard the U.N.henhouse, observed in 1999, “It is a bigmistake for us to grant any validity to inter-national law even when it may seem in ourshort-term interest to do so—because, overthe long term, the goal of those who thinkthat international law really means anythingare those who want to constrict the UnitedStates.”11

Finally, the Bush administration adopt-ed and strengthened a doctrine of Americansupremacy first enunciated in a Pentagonplanning document of 1992, but publiclydisavowed at the time by the first Bush ad-ministration. This new official doctrineplainly avowed a determination to maintainindefinitely American military supremacy,holding that a peaceful international orderwas only possible if one state maintained ab-solute dominance, making any effort by oth-ers to overcome their own inferiority impos-sible and hardly worth trying. “America has,and intends to keep, military strengths be-yond challenge,” the president observed atWest Point, “thereby making the destabiliz-ing arms races of other eras pointless, and

limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuitsof peace.”12

Underlying these changes was the doc-trine that the only alternative to interna-tional anarchy was a hierarchically orderedinternational system. International coopera-tion as an alternative to either anarchy or hierarchy was dismissed as the pipe dreamof utopians. The world needed a rule-giver.The neoconservative columnist CharlesKrauthammer gave a characteristically pungent expression of the new ethos evenbefore the September 11 attacks. “Americais no mere international citizen,” wroteKrauthammer. “It is the dominant power inthe world, more dominant than any sinceRome. Accordingly, America is in a positionto reshape norms, alter expectations, andcreate new realities. How? By unapologeticand implacable demonstrations of will.”What America must do if it is “to wield im-perial power,” wrote Stephen Peter Rosen, aHarvard political scientist and an importantideologist of the new ethos, “is to create andenforce the rules of a hierarchical interstateorder.” Though Rosen acknowledged that“humility is always a virtue,” he insistedthat “the dominant male atop any social hierarchy, human or otherwise, never man-aged to rule simply by being nice.” The imperial power must enforce the principle of hierarchy, Rosen insisted, “but is not it-self bound” by the rules it prescribes for others.13

For most Americans, no doubt, theethos underlying these changes—the ani-mating spirit that gave it life and confi-dence—was nationalist in character. It arosefrom anger over the September 11 attacks,from the unbridled fear those attacksprompted, and from hitherto untappedsources of patriotic fervor. But if the Ameri-can body politic reacted, almost reflexively,to the attacks by giving its support to war,the brain entertained a more sophisticatedand far-reaching vision, one that gave animperial dimension to American policy un-matched in previous experience. The substi-



tution of preventive war for containmentand deterrence, the embrace of unilateral-ism, the hostility to international law, therejection of international institutions, thestride toward absolute strategic superiority,the chiliastic tones in which democracy washeld to be the only legitimate form of gov-ernment—all this breathed an unmistakablyimperial air.

Contours of Universal Empire“Hyperpower, superduper-power, Americanempire, new Rome, unipolar world—allthese terms,” writes the British historianTimothy Garton Ash, “attempt to capturethe new reality of global predominance withno precedent in the history of the world.”14

Actually, there is a precedent for the mix ofawesome capabilities and revolutionary doc-trines now possessed by the United States.It lies in what the leftist critic JonathanSchell calls the “hoary old nightmare of the ages, the always-feared but never-real-ized ambition to win universal empire.”15

Whereas “empire,” in its ordinary significa-tion, means political control, whether director indirect, that is exercised by one politicalunit over another unit separate from andalien to it,16 “universal empire” means con-trol over the state system as a whole. Moresimply, empire is ruling over other peopleswithout their consent, while universal em-pire is ruling over the state system withoutits consent. Both are exercises in domina-tion, which is usually the key attribute thatusers of the label have in mind, but they arevery different in significance. Empires are adime a dozen, scattered all throughout hu-man history; the quest for universal empireoccurs less frequently but is the more im-portant and world-shattering phenomenon.

The term “universal empire” is not incommon usage today—“global hegemony”or “world domination” are more likely tocome from the pens of critical writers—butit was in widespread currency during thelong emergence of the European state sys-tem. The older term is useful because it

gives us imaginative access to a critique of the phenomenon that was once part of the American consensus and that speaks tocertain enduring issues. Up until the pro-foundly interdependent and globalized ageof the twentieth century, the term usuallydid not connote the literal domination ofthe earth, but rather dominance and masteryover a wide swath of peoples (who shouldotherwise, by virtue of proximity or interac-tion, form a system of states).17 Above all, itmeant any situation in which one monarchyor state was in a position to give the law tothe others. European diplomatic history forthe last 500 years is essentially organizedaround the story of the successive bids fordomination or mastery of the state systemand of the countervailing coalitions thosebids provoked in the name of the balance of power and “the liberties of Europe.” Thecontemporary quest for universal empire,however durable it proves to be, raises thesame issues as these previous attempts,while outdoing them in the notable respectof being the first to actually be global in itsreach.

The critique of “Monarchia Universalis”is of long standing. It was advanced by a remarkable group of Spanish writers, in-cluding Vitoria, Las Casas, and Soto, in thesixteenth century, and taken up avidly by a host of Enlightenment thinkers in theeighteenth century.18 Montesquieu, Vattel,Hume, Robertson, Burke, and Gibbon allconsidered the theme, and were as one in re-garding universal empire as, in AlexanderHamilton’s words, a “hideous project.” Theprevention of a situation in which any onepower could give the law to the others wasthought by the classic writers to be a neces-sary underpinning of international society,and they all looked with dread on the condi-tion of supreme power to which the Bushadministration aspired. Whether in Anglo-American constitutional thought or amongthe writers on the law of nations, it was ax-iomatic that any situation of unboundedpower held peril for the maintenance of

both order and liberty. Such power wouldinevitably be abused; a prince that did notdo so would be “the ornament of history,and a prodigy not to be looked for again.”19

Universal empire did not necessarilyconnote direct rule over subject provinces.Hamilton called the conduct of revolution-ary France toward Great Britain a “copy ofthat of Rome toward Carthage,” aimed atdestroying “the principal obstacle to a dom-ination over Europe,” but he acknowledgedthat France did not intend “to reduce allother nations formally to the condition ofprovinces. This was not done by Rome inthe zenith of her greatness. She had herprovinces, and she had her allies. But her al-lies were in fact her vassals.” Juridicalniceties, Hamilton was saying, could notsettle the question of whether any stateaimed at universal empire. Control that wasnot expressed in terms of formal sovereigntycould nonetheless be practically effectiveand certainly threatening if it represented abid for mastery of the state system.20

While conceding that universal empirehad a certain irresistible and siren-like ap-peal, the classical writers believed that theenterprise would inevitably recoil upon itsauthors. Universal empire was deemed notonly a menace to others but also a threat toits possessors. Montesquieu doubted thatLouis XIV, accused “a thousand times...ofhaving formed and pursued the project ofuniversal monarchy,” had really done so; buthad the Sun King been successful in thepursuit of that objective, Montesquieu held,“nothing would have been more fatal to Eu-rope, to his first subjects, to himself, and tohis family.” “Enormous monarchies,” wroteDavid Hume, “are, probably, destructive tohuman nature; in their progress, in theircontinuance, and even in their downfall,which never can be very distant from theirestablishment.” Hume traced out, as hadMontesquieu, a natural process by which ag-grandizement turned on itself: “Thus hu-man nature checks itself in its airy eleva-tion; thus ambition blindly labours for the

destruction of the conqueror.” Rousseaureached a conclusion very similar to that ofHume: “If the princes who are accused ofaiming at universal monarchy were in reali-ty guilty of any such project, they gavemore proof of ambition than of genius. Howcould any man look such a project in theface without instantly perceiving its absurdity...?”21

Of all these various bids for universalempire, the one bearing the closest analogyin ideological complexion to that of the contemporary United States is that whichoccurred in conjunction with the FrenchRevolution and the wars that erupted in its train. It had it all: a strategic doctrine of preventive war, a revolutionary creedlooking to liberate foreign peoples fromtyranny, contempt for the society of statesand its customary prohibitions, and a mili-tary machine that had, with the levée enmasse, discovered sources of power hither-to unknown. The essential features of thiscolossal power were limned by AlexanderHamilton in the late 1790s, when hecharged that France was making “hasty and colossal strides to universal empire.”Revolutionary France, in Hamilton’s esti-mation, had “betrayed a spirit of universaldomination; an opinion that she had a right to be the legislatrix of nations; thatthey are all bound to submit to her man-dates, to take from her their moral, politi-cal, and religious creeds; that her plastic and regenerating hand is to mould them into whatever shape she thinks fit; and that her interest is to be the sole measure of the rights of the rest of the world.” Here,in capsule form, are all the essential symp-toms of the dread disease, the historicchecklist for detecting the malady of uni-versal empire. Altogether familiar to inhabi-tants of the twenty-first-century world isthe charge that Hamilton brought againstFrance, for it is the same charge nowbrought against America. He traced thisspirit to “the love of dominion, inherent in the heart of man,” reasoning that “the


rulers of the most powerful nation in theworld, whether a Committee of Safety or aDirectory, will forever aim at an undue em-pire over other nations.” “The spirit of mod-eration in a state of overbearing power,” asHamilton nicely summarized the point, “isa phenomenon which has not yet appeared,and which no wise man will expect ever tosee.”22

Faced with such great concentrations ofpower, the frequent recourse of many pres-ent-day observers is to charge a sort of venalcorruption in political leaders, explainingevents with reference to private interests(e.g., Halliburton) and presuming a thor-oughgoing cynicism in the powerful. In theview of our Enlightenment sages, however,this view may mislead. Asked by ThomasJefferson why all Europe had “acted on thePrinciple ‘that Power was Right’” duringthe Wars of the French Revolution andNapoleon, John Adams held “that Power al-ways sincerely, conscientiously, de tres bonFoi, believes itself Right. Power alwaysthinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views,beyond the Comprehension of the Weak;and that it is doing God Service, when it isviolating all his Laws.”23 An appreciation ofthis point is necessary if we are to under-stand the nature of the phenomenon and tosee its possibilities for tragic denouement.

The new American empire is most oftenthought of as the heir to the British Empire,and there are indeed remarkable similaritiesbetween them. During and after the ColdWar, the maps of U.S. military deploymentslooked “extraordinarily similar to the chainof fleet bases and garrisons” once possessedby Great Britain.”24 The American task ofregenerating the governments of the MiddleEast certainly recalls Britain’s self pro-claimed “civilizing mission,” just as it re-calls the entry of British forces into Iraq inthe aftermath of the First World War.American neoconservatives like Max Bootand liberal imperialists like Niall Fergusonwant a suitably modernized version of thegoals of British imperialism, which Winston

Churchill once characterized as follows: “[Toreclaim] from barbarism...a fertile regionand large populations.... To give peace towarring tribes, to administer justice whereall was violence, to strike the chains off theslave, to draw the richness from the soil, toplant the earliest seeds of commerce andlearning, to increase in whole peoples theircapacities for pleasure and diminish theirchances of pain....”25 Finally, the UnitedStates has an equivalent to Britain’s “gun-boats and Gurkhas” in the lethal combina-tion of U.S. airpower and local groundforces.26

But there are differences. The UnitedStates uses more ordnance in a single cam-paign than Britain used in epochs of imperi-al rule; American empire is above all distin-guished by overwhelming displays of fire-power in climactic battles of good againstevil, whereas the British more often favoredparsimonious uses of violence and did notdemonize the lesser breeds they sought tobring within the law. America’s appetite fordirect rule is far less than Britain’s once was.Even as America looks to the overthrow of anumber of governments, it does not have avision of itself as a colonizing power. As theIraq occupation demonstrated, it lacks theessentials of a colonial office (though it mayacquire one speedily after digesting the “les-sons” of the Iraq experience).

But the most dramatic difference be-tween the two empires lies in the scale anddimensions of military power. Even in theheyday of the “Pax Britannica,” British landforces were small; Bismarck famouslyquipped in the 1860s that if the Britisharmy landed on the Prussian coast he wouldhave it arrested by the local police. Britaindominated the maritime sphere and wassometimes denounced as a universal empire,but its position in Europe was limited topreventing one state from dominating thecontinent, and indeed its special genius as amoderating factor in the European systemwas that it could help maintain the balancebut did not threaten it. In its aspiration to


achieve “full spectrum dominance” in everytheater and over every combat arm, theUnited States today presents an entirely dif-ferent and much more formidable picture.As such, the really salient comparison is notto the overseas empire that Britain createdbut to the “universal empires” that a succes-sion of kings and dictators sought to buildat the center of the international system,and which Britain over the course of cen-turies was fated to oppose.

The Neoconservative PredicamentDespite uncanny resemblances, the depic-tion of the United States as making giantsteps toward universal empire meets resis-tance for a variety of reasons. For one thing,the Bush administration has explicitly dis-avowed the imperial ascription. “We haveno empires to establish or utopias to pro-mote,” Bush said. His national security ad-visor, Condoleezza Rice, declared flatly:“The United States has no imperial ambi-tions.” In hearings to confirm her nomina-tion as secretary of state, Rice pledged to“unite the community of democracies inbuilding an international system that isbased on shared values and the rule of law”and “to support and uphold the system ofinternational rules and treaties that allow usto take advantage of our freedom.” At thesame time, the administration has madeclear that these commitments to interna-tional law and institutions did not cancelout or seriously constrain the Bush Doc-trine, and thus it is difficult to take them atface value. It was, indeed, the conjunction ofimperial aspiration and public denial, of act-ing and talking like a duck while pretend-ing you weren’t one, that made writers em-ploy artful circumlocutions for the thingthat lay before them. The most apt designa-tions were those that played upon the gapbetween profession and practice. Thus, theconservative thinker Clyde Prestowitz calledit “the unacknowledged empire” whoserecognition we are “frantically avoiding,”and the British historian Niall Ferguson

said it was “an empire in denial,” the “em-pire that dare not speak its name.”27

The neoconservatives were themselvesdivided on how to handle this delicate prob-lem. One hemisphere of their collectivebrain said they should come out of the clos-et and admit ownership of (benevolent) em-pire, but the other side objected heatedly tothe imperial attribution. “How dare you callus an empire?” they sneered at liberal crit-ics. One-half of their collective cerebrum in-sisted that the removal of Saddam Husseinwas more important than international law,while the other half bristled at the assump-tion that the enterprise was illegal. One sidecelebrated the Bush policy as a “new unilat-eralism,” whereas from the other welled upthe accusation that foreign states were yetmore guilty of the sin and that the UnitedStates was still the kingpin of coalitions. Inone part of their mind lay the firm convic-tion that the Bush policy is revolutionaryand constitutes a dramatic break from thepast, whereas in another was the answeringcharge that everything Bush did was prefig-ured by previous administrations, who neverrespected international law and thought in-ternational institutions were a joke.

Robert Kagan’s perspicacious study, OfParadise and Power, also straddled this inter-esting divide. The brilliance of the accountlay in the way that Kagan assessed norma-tive commitments in relation to the powerimpulse. He skillfully wove his thesis thatEurope and America had switched places,with European statesmen of the early twen-ty-first century, in their support for interna-tional law and institutions, sounding re-markably like American statesmen of theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Butthough Kagan was willing to explain virtu-ally all of Europe’s attitude in relation to apsychology of weakness, he only went partof the way in ascribing America’s attitude tothe psychology of strength. The logical im-plication of this reversal of position is thatAmerican statesmen should “feel power andforget right,” as Jefferson thought the great


imperial powers of his day had done. If the Europeans now sounded like Melians,should not the Americans sound like Athe-nians? But Kagan would not draw this con-clusion. “The United States is a behemothwith a conscience,” he argued. “It is notLouis XIV’s France or George III’s England.Americans do not argue, even to themselves,that their actions may be justified by raisond’état.”28 Though in Kagan’s estimation theUnited States inhabited a Hobbesian world,in which force and fraud were the two cardi-nal virtues, and in which there was no jus-tice or injustice, no mine and thine distinct,this lawless anarchy was also represented byhim to be a resplendent order, such that therest of the world should offer gratitude tothe United States for its maintenance. Wasit an unrestrained Hobbesian anarchy or apeaceful world order? Kagan said it wasboth.

These internal divisions of the neocon-servative mind are also on display in the differing emphases placed on the two great strategic innovations of the Bush Doctrine, the license given to preventivewar as a means of thwarting the acquisitionby rogue states of weapons of mass destruc-tion, and the pledge to make it “the policyof the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements andinstitutions in every nation and culture,with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” which Bush unfolded in hisSecond Inaugural. Here the ideological divi-sion is between “democratic realists,” whoargue that the United States should only engage in democratic liberation when itsputative vital interests are at stake, and“democratic globalists,” who take seriouslythe mission embraced in Bush’s Second Inaugural. Both are imperial programs,though they differ in detail—the one urgingfocused strategic exertion in the broaderMiddle East, the other fully sharing this ob-jective but also intent on the end of history:the destruction of tyranny throughout theworld.29

The 18-minute speech setting the tonefor Bush’s second administration providesevidence for both viewpoints, though thepreponderant weight is in favor of the glob-alists. Bush acknowledges that spreadingfreedom “is not primarily the task of arms,though we will defend ourselves and ourfriends by force of arms when necessary,”which seems a bow toward Krauthammer’sdemocratic realism. This statement, how-ever, does not exclude the possibility thatfreedom can be advanced through arms—the fire America has lit, Bush also says, notonly warms those who feel its power but al-so “burns those who fight its progress.” Thegeneral line of analysis producing the con-clusion that “our vital interests and moralpurposes are now one” soars well beyond thethreat posed by “rogue states” and rests onthe proposition that the United States canonly be truly secure in a world made whollyfree. The Second Inaugural does not man-date the use of force for these objects, butneither does it exclude the possibility. Thesix regimes mentioned by Rice in her con-firmation hearings as likely to receive spe-cial attention were Cuba, Burma, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, and Zimbabwe.30

How far the American Colossus will runwith its newly consecrated doctrines is thequestion of the hour, and I venture no confi-dent prophecies on that score. Bush is clear-ly unrepentant, but also blocked by variousexigent constraints. In keeping with manyclassical critics of universal empire, some ar-gue that the bid will be checked by the riseof a rival superpower or some kind of coun-tervailing military coalition, but this seemsunlikely. In contrast to such an “externalist”or “systemic” theory, the more fruitful lineof approach is an “internalist” account inwhich domestic weaknesses and contradic-tions are seen as the key variables that willdrive change.31

The Limits of Military PowerIt is upon the superiority of its arms thatAmerican empire rests today. The factors


that made for the preservation of Europe’splural state system from the fifteenth cen-tury to the twentieth century—geographicbarriers, the relatively equal size of the par-ticipating units, the traditional maxims ofEuropean policy—have all been notablyweakened in the contemporary period.Against smaller powers, U.S. firepower is ir-resistible in toppling regimes and forcingenemies underground, since it can destroyeverything that it can see, and this superior-ity is especially marked when it can makeuse of allies on the ground who welcome aidagainst their historic oppressors. Whetherthe United States can create new politicalorders in places such as Afghanistan andIraq is still an open question, but its de-structive capacity is not in doubt. Americanstrategic nuclear superiority will likely befurther enhanced by yet more accurate offen-sive capabilities and new defensive systems,and U.S. domination of the sea and airlanes, and of space, seems assured for thenext generation.

The emergence of a global military rivalto the United States is very difficult to en-visage, for the two most plausible candi-dates, the European Union and China, areunlikely to contend for those stakes, andRussia, India, and Japan are “hinge powers”rather than potentially opposing poles.

The EU will balance against Americanpower, as it ought to do, but its balancingwill take a constitutional and not a militaryform, consisting of verbal protests, refusalsto “do the dishes” when the Americansmake a bloody mess of their meals, and aninsistence that Europe gets representation indecision making if the United States wantsit to share the burdens. The EU is likely toexercise great influence on many issues inworld politics, but in crucial respects the in-ternal character of the EU forbids it fromcreating a foreign security policy and de-fense identity that would enable it to be aworld power in the military sense. Even if itfurther develops its interventionary capabili-ties (achieving or going beyond the 60,000-

strong rapid deployment force), it is highlyunlikely to form a military counterpoise tothe United States. This sort of doing is con-trary to its being as an association dedicatedto the peaceful settlement of disputes andwould almost certainly threaten its internalbalance. Europe and America, in short, arecondemned to a loveless marriage. Hatingone another, but fearing divorce, they areunlikely to undergo a formal split. Even ifthis were to occur, Europe is most unlikelyto play the role of the challenging militaryhegemon. Its challenge is rather in all theother dimensions of power.

China is a much more likely candidateas a military rival of the United States. Insignal respects, it already is one. Here, too,however, it is difficult to imagine that overthe next two decades China would achievecapabilities that would enable it to threatenwar against the United States outside itsnear abroad or to stand in relation to theUnited States as the Soviet Union once did.The Taiwan question remains potentially ex-plosive and could again become “the mostdangerous spot on the planet,” but it is dif-ficult to see any other Sino-American dis-pute reaching a flammable point. The Unit-ed States will continue to enjoy escalationdominance but may lose military parity inthe immediate theater (across the TaiwanStrait) as China builds its armed forces. Chi-na knows it would be madness to fight awar with the United States but has made itclear that Taiwanese independence is a redline, and it may be that Chinese popularopinion is even more hawkish on this ques-tion than is the Chinese state. In the longerrun, it is evident that the management ofChina’s rise by the United States (or shallwe say the management of the incoherentAmerican hyperpower by China?) is a politi-cal and military problem of the first order,and equally evident that historical prece-dents do not suggest a smooth adjustment.Given the compelling interests of both sidesin the avoidance of war, it should not be be-yond the wit of statesmen to manage peace-


fully this power transition, but war cannotbe excluded over the next several decades.

The likely persistence of military unipo-larity will encourage the continued use offorce by the United States, but affords noguarantee that such uses will not meet withtremendous frustration. There is a kind ofdebility that attends the possession of somuch power, for given sufficient time it willexpand to the margins of its capability.What there is to use, gets used. This is thekernel of truth in offensive realism.32 Thedefensive realist may object that militarypower is most effective in non-use, when itpreserves order by the threat but not the useof violence, but practitioners feel a steadyurge to demonstrate credibility through theuse of force. After the United States hadblown apart the Taliban’s rule over Afghan-istan in 2002, it was seriously suggestedthat American credibility would be de-stroyed if Washington failed to go to warwith Iraq. Was the war in Afghanistan animpressive demonstration of American re-solve? Yes, but it was not enough. Did theUnited States enjoy overwhelming militarysuperiority over Saddam? Yes, but we wouldnot be safe until he was destroyed. The manfrom Mars, reasoning from eternal princi-ples, might assume that a condition of over-whelming military dominance would be asource of security for its possessors, but suchit did not prove to be.

Despite qualities that give its use asiren-like appeal, military force is a bluntand demonic instrument, often carryingstates beyond where they want to go, andsometimes entirely incapable of achievingthe mission it is assigned. It is one thing tosay that we will bring democracy on thewings of a military campaign to oust a terri-ble dictator. It is quite another to actuallydo it. Though the campaign to oust SaddamHussein was widely portrayed as “brilliant”and “flawless,” even by critics who concededthat planning for the postwar was littleshort of disastrous, the two judgments, infact, cannot harmonize. It was the very suc-

cess of American arms—their total breakageof the Iraqi state—that instantaneously pro-duced the conditions of anarchy that so badly prejudiced the possibility of a success-ful occupation. There has been frequent crit-icism in the United States that the Bush ad-ministration has badly bungled the occupa-tion, and there are a litany of errors it is al-leged to have committed (such as invadingwith too small a force, being unprepared forthe responsibilities and hazards of occupa-tion, disbanding the Iraqi army, proscribingthe Baath party). The deeper point, how-ever, may be that there is no way to conductsuch an enterprise well. The Iraq experience,rather than attesting simply to the ideologi-cal blinders of the Bush administration, mayattest more directly to the limitations ofmilitary power as an agent of democracy andliberalization.33

The response of the imperial intellectu-als to such frustration is always: more effort,more staying power, more will. But what ifthe problem goes beyond will? What if wejust don’t know how to conduct such enter-prises successfully, even if we had the will?Iraq has demonstrated with great clarity theold truth that it is easier to destroy than tobuild; all the “nation-building” expertise inthe world will get you nowhere if a raginginsurgency takes as its fundamental objec-tive the prevention of reconstruction.34

The unexpected duration and high com-bat tempo of the Iraq war have also revealedserious constraints on any future operationinvolving the use of large ground forces.The Pentagon’s initial idea was to bringU.S. forces in Iraq down to 30,000 by thefall of 2003, whereas they have stayed wellabove 100,000 for the duration and reached150,000 on the eve of the January 30, 2005Iraqi elections. The most serious price hasbeen paid by reserve forces, which have con-stituted some 40–45 percent of soldiersserving in Iraq. The result, according to thecommander of the reserves, is a “brokenforce.” The condition of the Americanground forces does not preclude the use of


air or naval power by the United States;nevertheless, the frustrations of the Iraqcampaign and the pinched condition of U.S.ground forces do foreclose alternatives thatundoubtedly seemed attractive to the Bushadministration in the confident days of2002. In the curt summary of Boston Uni-versity professor Andrew Bacevich, the se-quel to the conquest of Baghdad punctured“the illusion that the world’s sole superpow-er has reserves of power to spare. It doesn’t,not militarily, not financially and not mor-ally. Iraq has shown how narrow the marginis between global hegemony and imperialoverstretch.”35

Unipolarity, then, has its hazards.Among them is a kind of inexorable pres-sure to continually demonstrate the efficacyof military power. On point is the maximthat became popular among critics duringthe Iraq war: “If all you have is a hammer,every problem looks like a nail.” Of course,people are perfectly capable of seeing thatevery problem is not a nail, but the realiza-tion has a habit of coming too late. Oncecommitted, the imperial power cannot lose.It straps itself to the wheel, invests its re-sources in projects that will demonstrate itscredibility, persists in enterprises that oughtnot to have been undertaken in the firstplace but which, once undertaken, immedi-ately become vital interests whose sacrificeis unthinkable. It takes up enterprises, asBush has acknowledged, that are difficult to achieve but would be dishonorable toabandon.

The most paradoxical feature of theAmerican security situation is the simulta-neous conjunction of immense power andacute vulnerability.36 I do not think this re-lationship is adventitious. The nation has atrue blind spot in understanding the effectof American actions on others. It wants sobadly to believe in the rightness of Ameri-can actions that it simply loses the capacityto put itself in the shoes of the other and tosee things from his point of view. We un-derstand that terrorist acts against our na-

tional territory stir us to anger and inspireus to fight, but we do not understand thatthe ranks of suicide bombers rise or fall inrelation to our violent acts.37 The theoristsof overwhelming force (Victor Davis Han-son, Angelo Codevilla, Mark Helprin) arenot altogether wrong in their beliefs: un-doubtedly the hypertrophy of force in theSecond World War created the necessaryconditions for the successful rehabilitationof Germany and Japan. But this circum-stance, so often invoked to justify the Iraqwar and occupation, in fact shows the limitsof the parallel. Considering the broader dan-ger of terrorist attacks on the United Statesfrom scattered eruptions in the Islamicworld, there is no way to use force on a scalethat would achieve those sorts of effects, andit would be criminal in any case to try. Evenin Iraq itself, the war simply paved the wayfor suicide bombers and significantly ex-panded the field of terrorist operations, cre-ating the very danger the administrationwent to war to prevent, but which did notexist until it went to war. In the broader Is-lamic world and in Europe’s Muslim com-munities, the suffering entailed by the warplayed directly into the hands of Osama bin Laden.

The unnerving possibility is that Ameri-ca’s vast capacity for intervention, far frombeing a real shield against terrorist attack, isbasically useless against the most seriousdanger that threatens us because it does notadd to our capability to intercept smallgroups plotting terrorist attacks. Worse, theuse of American power, with its brutalitiesshown every night on television to hundredsof millions of Muslims, may at the sametime endanger us by adding to the likely re-cruits for terrorist attacks. Such are the waysin which “ambition blindly labours for thedestruction of the conqueror.”

The Sinews of Economic StrengthPaul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the GreatPowers, published on the morrow of thegreat stock market meltdown of October


1987, has often been mocked for its failureto foresee the dramatic turnaround in theeconomic fortunes of the United States thatoccurred during the 1990s. Kennedy had as-sumed that America’s relative share of worldoutput would continue to fall, going as lowas 16 percent; instead it rose to 32.3 per-cent (calculated in current U.S. dollars) by2002.38 He had worried that the budgetdeficits would continue to grow, reflecting alarger strategic predicament in which powerand commitments were out of balance; in-stead the United States managed to generatebudgetary surpluses in the late 1990s. Hehad assessed bleakly various trends thatwould be damaging “in the event of anotherlong-lasting, Great Power, coalition war.”The Soviet Union, of course, promptly dis-appeared. Instead of “imperial overstretch”—a yawning gap between commitmentsand power—there emerged a surfeit of power in relation to commitments, which in effect caused the latter to expand. In1987, Kennedy worried that spending 7.5percent of GDP on defense, which he regard-ed as the probable limit of public support,might not be enough to meet America’spressing strategic liabilities. Fifteen yearslater, writing in the Financial Times, hedwelt on the amazing fact that America’sunprecedented strategic dominance could beachieved by spending only 3.5 percent ofGDP on defense. Critics called it a classic recantation. Kennedy, of all people, had finally thrown in the towel.39

The schadenfreude of the triumphalists,however, seems a bit premature. ThoughKennedy was wrong in certain respects, hewas undoubtedly right in the larger argu-ment of his study. The proposition that mil-itary strength ultimately rests on economicstrength is, after all, a sort of truism. Norwas Kennedy wrong to insist that the healthof the economic organism rests on the need,faced by every state, to balance its militaryspending, its public and private consump-tion, its investments for the future, and itslevels of taxation.40 Most pertinently, many

of the features of the American strategicpredicament that Kennedy pointed to as worrisome have now returned with avengeance under Bush. In 2005, as in 1987,we might also look back nostalgically on thetwo decades after 1945, “when [the U.S.]share of global manufacturing and GNP wasmuch larger...its balance of payments werefar healthier, the government budget was al-so in balance, and it was not so heavily indebt to the rest of the world.”41 After a rosyinterlude in the 1990s, these adverse fiscaland trade imbalances now threaten the dol-lar’s reserve status and pose serious risks forthe world economy. America’s habits—“rampant government borrowing, furiousconsumer spending and a current-accountdeficit big enough to have bankrupted anyother country some time ago”—reflectdeeply inappropriate behavior for theguardian of the world’s reserve currency.42

Inescapable signs of serious economicweakness emerged with the collapse of thestock market bubble and were exacerbatedby the subsequent return of fiscal insolvencyunder the impetus of the Bush tax cuts andspending increases. The budget deficit,which was $412 billion in fiscal year 2004,was in nominal terms the largest ever andfell little short, as a percentage of GDP, ofthe deficits produced by the Reagan tax cutsof 1981. The Bush tax cuts produced a fed-eral tax take of 16.3 percent of GDP in 2004,but spending remained stubbornly high at19.8 percent of GDP. “Official projectionsscore the fiscal imbalance at a cumulative $5 trillion over the next decade,” writes the economist Fred Bergsten, “but excludeprobable increases in overseas military andhomeland-security expenditures, extensionof the recent tax cuts and new entitlementincreases.” On current policies, as Bergstennotes, the budget deficit could approach $1trillion per year.43 The unwillingness to payfor what it wants and to want only what itis willing to pay for is also apparent fromthe underfunding of the Bush Doctrine.Two neoconservatives, who insist that “it is


impossible to have a Bush Doctrine worldwith Clinton-era defense budgets,” estimatethe deficit at $100 billion a year, and itwould be undoubtedly larger yet if anothermajor war were to be launched in the nextfew years.44

These constraints should not be mis-construed; they are political, not economic,in character. The experience of the 1990sshows that the structural gap between ex-penditures and revenues can be overcomewithout serious cost, and it is in any casedifficult to believe that the U.S. economywould tank even if federal tax revenuesreached 25 percent of GDP. Still, Bush’ssharp reduction in taxes is surely significant.If he is not willing to pay for his own doc-trine, who will be? One cannot know howthe contradiction between big governmentexpenditures and small government tax revenues is going to be resolved, only that it has to be addressed. Unless Bush renegeson his promises regarding taxes, however, itwill inevitably constrain the substantial in-creases that neoconservatives believe are nec-essary to fund the Bush Doctrine.45

American energy policy is also insol-vent. The “false arithmetic” that Jeffersonsaid was often employed to justify war isnowhere more in evidence than in the pur-blind subsidization of cheap energy as akind of birthright, an unhealthy appetiteperfectly symbolized by the gas-guzzlingand road-hogging SUV. Enormous as thecosts of this are—oil imports well over 10 million barrels a day, soaring tradedeficits, yearly expenditures of hundreds of billions of dollars on military enterprisesto secure access to Persian Gulf and CentralAsian oil—the real costs do not get regis-tered in gas prices or computed in nationalpolicy, quite as if an accountant chargedwith balancing the books forgot to count liabilities. The pattern, notes Clyde Pres-towitz, “is to use as much as we want, pro-duce as much as we can, and fight for theright to do both with whatever militarymuscle it takes.”46

Yet more extraordinary than eitherbudgetary or energy imbalances has beenthe growth of the U.S. current accountdeficit, which in 2004 reached $666 billionand 5.7 percent of GDP. Bergsten notes thatit is on track to grow to $1 trillion, or 9–10percent of GDP, assuming (what is very un-likely) no change in the value of the dollar.In its heyday, the British Empire exportedcapital from the metropole with as much fa-cility as today the United States importscapital from abroad. In the second quarter of 2003, the central banks of China, Japan,and Taiwan purchased 60 percent of thedebt instruments offered by the U.S. Trea-sury. It is not farfetched to compare this de-velopment with Britain’s liquidation of as-sets to pay for the First World War, and it ispretty extraordinary that these capital im-ports are greater in size than what Americaspends on a defense establishment that laysclaim to an unprecedented global strategicsuperiority.

The significance of the trade and currentaccount deficits is at the heart of specula-tion about the future direction of the worldeconomy and America’s relative share ofworld output. The gap, though exacerbatedby the Bush economic policies, is not sim-ply a function of them—the current accountdeficit reached $400 billion a year and over4 percent of GDP in 2000—and seems,somewhat mysteriously, to be a defining fea-ture of the age of globalization. Some say ittestifies to the continued strength of theUnited States as a haven for capital; othersthat it is a symbol of the most profoundweakness. Predictions that imbalances farless severe than those now existing wouldinevitably produce a dollar crisis have rungout since the late 1980s and, until recently,have proved incorrect, for the inflows ofcapital kept coming. The decline of the dol-lar (35 percent against the euro from early2002 to late 2004) raises the question ofwhether the wolf is finally at the door.

The most arresting thesis regarding thesignificance of these imbalances has been


put forward by the French thinker Em-manuel Todd, who argues that the differencebetween what America makes and what ittakes has become a kind of imperial tribute.From the amazingly productive and gener-ous country that emerged from the SecondWorld War, when it was truly the store-house of the world, Todd argues, Americahas become increasingly parasitic, taking farmore than it gives. Yet more arrestingly,Todd compares U.S. expansion since the endof the Cold War with the rapid expansion ofRome after the defeat of Carthage. Rome“collected taxes or tribute throughout itsempire and was able to transfer to the cen-tral capital massive quantities of foodstuffsand manufactured items. The peasants andthe artisans of Italy saw their economic basedisappear as this Mediterranean economywas ‘globalized’ by the political dominationof Rome. The society was polarized be-tween, on the one hand, a mass of economi-cally useless plebeians and, on the other, apredatory plutocracy.... The middle classescollapsed.”47

This portrait of simultaneous “economicglobalization” and “class stratification” inthe ancient world is alarmingly familiar tostudents of present-day trends in the worldpolitical economy. But the parallel, thoughinstructive, has its limits. There is, after all,a key difference between ancient and mod-ern times. Whereas the Romans claimedtheir booty of foodstuffs, slaves, and goodsby right of conquest, Americans exchangepieces of paper bearing promises to pay inthe future for the $600 billion trove ofgoods they take in over and above exportsevery year. The Romans could quell rebel-lions through force, but this method is notparticularly efficient against bond tradersand currency speculators, nor even againstcentral banks. The expectation must be that these imbalances will be resolved by a severe dollar crisis, not unlike the mone-tary turbulence induced by the VietnamWar and the “breakdown of the BrettonWoods system” in 1971. In its incapacity

to make the choice between guns and but-ter, and in light of the insolvency that af-flicts its energy policy and its balance ofpayments, here, certainly, “America is not as strong as she seems.” Multipolarity in the economic dimensions of power is asfixed as fate.

The Importance of Being LegitimateIf the analysis of American military and eco-nomic power discloses signs of weakness,the loss of confidence abroad in the legiti-macy of American power is also quite seri-ous. The pattern of the first Iraq war, with asuccessful victory setting aside the reserva-tions of the skeptical, failed to emerge inthe aftermath of the second. If anything,skepticism deepened. Approval ratings ofthe United States plunged, especially in tworegions where public support matteredmost: Europe and the Muslim world.

There is no simple way of articulatingthe complex bargains and beliefs that haveunderlain the legitimacy of American power. America, it seemed, was a reluctantsuperpower and had taken up its duties as a world power with the spirit of Cincinna-tus, as ready to lay down as to take up thesword. America, it was thought, found noglory in dominion, but took pride instead inhaving subordinated its interest to a gener-ous view of world order, one that claimedparticular privileges for no state but that afforded equality of opportunity to all inpeaceful pursuits. The richness of its politi-cal tradition, the way it had institutional-ized the pursuit of power and subordinatedit to law, fitted the United States, as no other state, to be trusted with extraordinarypower. This was a judgment not only widelypropagated by Americans themselves, butaccepted as containing a good deal of truthby many others.

Confidence in that narrative has beenshattered, and whether it can be regained isan open question. From the spring of 2001to the spring of 2003, favorable attitudestoward the United States plunged from 20


to 50 percentage points in countries acrossthe world. In Indonesia, where one govern-ment official said Bush was “the king of theterrorists,” approval ratings fell from 75percent in 2001 to 61 percent in 2002 to 15percent in 2003. The loss of public approvalwas no less evident in countries whose gov-ernments supported, rather than opposed,the American war. In Spain and Italy, whomBush corralled into his coalition of the will-ing, public opposition was just as strong asin the “chocolate nations” of “old Europe.”Even in Britain, which alone among thecoalition of the willing contributed signifi-cant numbers of troops to the Iraq war, dis-affection within the political establish-ment—left, right, and center—was pro-found. In the estimation of the world,America had become a rogue nation. Theacts of war its own public opinion deemedbrilliant, just, and noble were seen else-where as clumsy, illegal, and reckless.

The attitude of American officialdomtoward the legitimacy problem is complex.Certainly, it pays its rhetorical respects tothe values embodied in multilateralism, in-ternational law, close consultation, partner-ship. This may be the tribute that vice paysto virtue, but it does throw a bright lighton where the sources of American legiti-macy are seen to lie by officials. The admin-istration does not want to offend these godsunnecessarily, but neither does it wish to respect the constraints that they impose.Undoubtedly this poses a dilemma for theBush administration, though it seems likelythat whatever is deemed necessary for U.S. national security will trump what isneeded to restore U.S. legitimacy. This is sowhether preventive war or democratic liber-ation—or some weird mixture of both—proves to be the ground on which the issueis fought. It is very difficult to believe thatworld public opinion would accept as legiti-mate a preventive war against North Koreaor Iran. Nor does it accept the propositionthat it is legitimate to overturn a tyrantwith external force. It takes the traditional

view, one of the vital pillars of the West-phalian system, that the right of revolutiondoes not belong to outsiders. It accepts themaxim of Alexander Hamilton, that “in pol-itics as in religion, it is equally absurd toaim at making proselytes by fire and sword.Heresies in either can rarely be cured bypersecution.”48

“Legitimacy” is part of what Joseph Nyemeans by “soft power,” which he defines asthe ability to lead and persuade arising from“the attractiveness of a country’s culture, po-litical ideals, and policies.”49 But it is notquite the same thing. The dictionary defineslegitimate behavior as that “sanctioned bylaw,” and most of the judgments bearing onlegitimacy are registered in solemn treatiesand compacts, such as those prescribing therules by which force must be justified orthose governing the conduct of military op-erations (to take only one subset of what is avery large and complex terrain). Neoconser-vatives like Robert Kagan want to limit thereach of international law as a restraint onAmerican actions they deem necessary andvirtuous, and hence they minimize the sig-nificance of adherence to law as a factor inbestowing legitimacy.50 But here, too, theneoconservative mind is divided. One sidesays that legitimacy just isn’t worth a damnwhen it is provided by decadent Europeansand corrupt U.N. bureaucrats, so to hellwith it. The other route—taken by theBush administration—solemnly vows toabide by international law while farmingout to its lawyers the task through skilfulexegesis of bringing illegal acts within thelaw. Probably the core conviction—andgamble—is simply that legitimacy can andwill arise from extralegal means. The Bushvision supposes that the United States canforcibly create new democratic regimes inthe place of tyrannies and that the worldwill be forced to smile at the result, accord-ing to the process a retrospective but never-theless real legitimacy. It believes that it can get the rest of the world to accept theproposition, in the words of the neoconser-


vative polemicist Victor Davis Hanson, that“‘imperialism’ and ‘hegemony’ explain noth-ing about recent American interventionabroad—not when dictators such as Norie-ga, Milosevic, the Taliban, and SaddamHussein were taken out by the U.S. mili-tary. There are no shahs and Your Excellen-cies in their places, but rather consensualgovernments whose only sin was that theycame on the heels of American arms ratherthan U.N. collective snoozing.”51 If thatclaim is good, the whole question of Ameri-can legitimacy would indeed be trans-formed; at the present time, however, thetenor of world public opinion is decidedlyagainst accepting any such narrative. Ameri-can eloquence is unlikely to cure them ofthe conviction that external invasion is notjustified simply for the cause of deposing atyranny.52

Does it matter if the United States loseslegitimacy? What, after all, is it good for?We are all familiar with instances where thepowerful escape punishment for wrongfulacts and where weaker actors have no choicebut to deal with the powerful even if theyregard the latter as making illegitimate de-mands. It is nevertheless folly for any stateto be careless of its reputation for lawful-ness, probity, and candor. The clinching ar-gument for its importance is the lengths towhich states go to show that they occupythe high ground of legitimacy even when itis obvious that they do not. That constantactivity to put a pretty face on motives thatare unavoidably mixed attests to the aware-ness of political actors that they must con-tend for this prize and that abject failure onthis score can only produce nemesis.

The Way We AreThese military, economic, and political con-straints, each casting a formidable shadow,point to the existence of serious obstacles touniversal empire, and might reasonablyprompt a reiteration of Rousseau’s question:“How could any man look such a project inthe face without instantly perceiving its ab-

surdity?” There are, however, powerful cul-tural forces that point in a contrary direc-tion. By culture I don’t mean the appeal ofHollywood movies and the American way oflife, but rather the way in which Americanstypically reason about who they are, whattheir purpose is, and why their enemies actas they do. Though some have pointed tothe quest for unlimited economic expansionas holding the key to American empire,53

and others have seen it arising from the au-tonomous imperatives of the military-indus-trial complex,54 the sustaining forces seem tome to be primarily cultural in character,arising from powerful conceptions of self-identity. It is the way we think about rightand wrong, not how we add up profit andloss, that is the key variable.

The search for new markets and invest-ment opportunities by avid corporations and401k rentiers may explain the lion’s share ofAmerica’s global economic policy, but theinfatuation with military power is owing todeeper, if misguided, conceptions of nationalrole and purpose, akin to (and increasinglyreinforced by) religious conviction. NewTestament fundamentalism, overlaid by OldTestament righteousness, sustains the con-viction of the United States as a new Romewhose mission it is to punish the guilty, es-tablish absolute security through over-whelming military dominance, and revolu-tionize the domestic order of refractorystates. That messianic and Manichean per-spective makes us blind to the misgivingand fears of others, incapable of understand-ing how our way of war generates intenseresentment and hatred, and as ready to mis-read enemy intentions as to view con-temptibly the advice of friends.

There is a belief, not without someplausibility, that this is not the “real Amer-ica.” The British commentator AnatolLieven, in an otherwise harsh critique ofthese cultural tendencies, argues that “whileAmerica keeps a splendid and welcominghouse, it also keeps a family of demons inits cellar. Usually kept under certain


restraints, these demons were released by9/11.” Lieven does not exactly say that thesedemons are going to be swiftly restored totheir former habitat, but his account doesallow for that possibility.55 The distin-guished Australian analyst Owen Harries—like Lieven a sharp critic of the Iraq war andAmerica’s new-found imperial ambition—ismore optimistic. Though arguing that Iraqwas a “misbegotten venture, wrongly con-ceived as well as incompetently implement-ed,” and that the war is doomed to fail interms of its declared objective, the creationof a democratic Iraq, Harries neverthelessinsists that “the outcome of the Iraq warwill be a defeat whose good consequenceswill outweigh its bad ones because it willdestroy illusions of omnipotence and restorea sense of limits, restraint and balance toAmerican foreign policy.”56 One hopes thatHarries is right in welcoming a comingspell of moderation, but there is good causefor thinking his expectation much too optimistic.

Dreams of the FutureWill the “Empire Bubble” look as absurd ina decade or two as the “Tech Bubble” of themid to late 1990s does now? Probably so.Are there good reasons for turning awayfrom strategies of domination and repressionand toward strategies of cooperation andreciprocity? Indubitably. Should we cast askeptical eye on promises that preventivewar will solve our security problems? Weshould. Isn’t it high time to put our finan-cial house in order and address the variousinsolvencies now embedded in national eco-nomic policy? Of course. Ought not we torecognize that the restoration of legitimacywill require a return to the constraints oflaw and the practices of multilateralism? In-deed. Will any of these recommendations ofthe “reality-based community” actually hap-pen? This seems rather more doubtful.

The neoconservative architects of Ameri-ca’s universal empire like the dreams of thefuture better than the history of the past;

they are in the business of shaping new real-ities that break out of the constraints thatliberals and realists have identified. To gobeyond the limits previously deemed pru-dent for the exercise of military power, suchas were registered in the Cold War strate-gies of containment and deterrence, to loadup the economic mechanism with debt onthe theory that “deficits don’t matter,” tochallenge the fundamental bases for the le-gitimation of force while asserting claims toeternal strategic preponderance, and to doall this with the conviction of utter righ-teousness—such traits seem inseparablefrom the present governing consensus.Though Bush’s revolutionary vision has al-ready collided with unwelcome and in-tractable realities, it is boosted by a power-ful array of forces that seem like permanentfixtures of American life. I do not knowhow far this doctrine will run; my argumentis simply that the further it does run, thegreater the risk to the nation’s security,prosperity, and international legitimacy.With the outcome of the clash between thisirresistible force and various immovable ob-jects highly uncertain, let us hope that thejudgment America makes of itself in the fu-ture will not be that rendered by the stag inAesop’s fable: “I am too late convinced, thatwhat I prided myself in, has been the causeof my undoing; and what I so much dislikedwas the only thing that could have savedme.”57•Notes

1. Michael Lind, foreword to Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the Ameri-can Order (New York: Columbia University Press,2004), p. xii. See also Immanuel Wallterstein, “TheEagle Has Crash Landed,” Foreign Policy, July/August2002.

2. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of theGreat Powers: Economic and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987);Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Na-ture of American Power (New York: Basic Books,1990).


3. Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shieldof the Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), pp. 7–8.See also Samuel P. Huntington, “Coping with theLippmann Gap,” Foreign Affairs: America and theWorld 1987/88; and James Chace, Solvency: The Priceof Survival—An Essay on American Foreign Policy (NewYork: Random House, 1981).

4. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of GreatPower Politics (New York: Norton, 2001); RobertKeohane, “International Institutions: Can Interde-pendence Work?” Foreign Policy, no. 110 (spring1998), pp. 82–96.

5. Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt,” New YorkTimes Magazine, October 17, 2004.

6. By breath I mean what the Chinese call chi—variously translated as life force or energy, whichseems a suitable metaphor for political culture.

7. On the “empire of bases,” see especiallyChalmers A. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Mili-tarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic (New York:Metropolitan Books, 2004). On the displacement ofthe State Department by the military commands, seeAndrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realitiesand Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge: Har-vard University Press, 2002).

8. George W. Bush, State of the Union Ad-dress, January 29, 2002.

9. Quoted in Steven R. Weisman, “Pre-emp-tion: Idea with a Lineage Whose Time Has Come,”New York Times, March 23, 2003.

10. Quoted in Joseph Fitchett, “France Likely toSuffer Reprisals from America,” International HeraldTribune, March 15, 2003.

11. Quoted in Nicholas Thompson, “JohnBolton vs. the World,” www.salon.com, July 16,2003.

12. Remarks by the President at 2002 Gradua-tion Exercise of the United States Military Academy,June 1, 2002.

13. Charles Krauthammer, March 5, 2001, citedin Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, p. 321; Stephen PeterRosen, “An Empire, If You Can Keep It,” NationalInterest, no. 71 (spring 2003), p. 53. To similar effect,see Niall Ferguson, “A World Without Power,” For-eign Policy, July/August 2004, pp. 32–39.

14. Timothy Garton Ash, Free World: America,Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West (NewYork: Random House, 2004), pp. 84–85.

15. “Jonathan Schell on the Empire That Fell as It Rose,” August 19, 2004, at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1691.

16. For this definition of “empire,” see PaulSchroeder, “Is the U.S. an Empire?” History NewsNetwork, February 3, 2003, at http://hnn.us/arti-cles/1237.html.

17. As Daniel Deudney notes, Enlightenmentobservers saw Europe’s resistance to universal empireas anomalous: “Other regions in Eurasia with compa-rable sizes, populations, and levels of material civi-lization were tending to consolidate into region-wideuniversal monarchies (the Ottomans in the NearEast, the Moguls in India, the Manchus in China,and even the Romanovs in Russia)” (Bounding Power:Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the GlobalVillage [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,forthcoming]).

18. See Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World:Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1995).

19. François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon,“On the Necessity of Alliances,” in Theory and Prac-tice of the Balance of Power, 1486–1914, ed. MoorheadWright (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1975),p. 41. For further discussion, see David C. Hendrick-son, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Found-ing (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), pp. 40–46.

20. Alexander Hamilton, “The Stand IV,” April12, 1798, The Works of Alexander Hamilton, 12 vols.,ed. Henry Cabot Lodge (Boston: G. P. Putnam’sSons, 1904), vol. 6, pp. 282, 285. The extent of ef-fective domination from the center in many once-existing overseas empires should also not be exagger-ated. Edmund Burke noted that “the immutable con-dition, the eternal law, of extensive and detached em-pire” was to govern with a loose rein in order to gov-ern at all, to respect the “chains of nature,” to com-ply, to submit, to watch time (“Speech on Concilia-tion [1],” March 22, 1775, Edmund Burke on theAmerican Revolution: Selected Speeches, ed. Elliot R.Barkan [New York: Harper & Row, 1966], p. 86).Cf. the restrictive definition of empire in Philip Zelikov, “The Transformation of National Security:Five Redefinitions,” National Interest, no. 71 (spring2003), pp. 18–19.


21. David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political andLiterary, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1985 [1777]), p. 341; Montesquieu, TheSpirit of the Laws, ed., Anne M. Cohler, et al. (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), book 9,chap. 7, p. 136; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Abstract ofthe Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s Project for Perpetual Peace[1756], Rousseau on International Relations, ed. StanleyHoffmann and David P. Fidler (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1991), pp. 62–64.

22. Alexander Hamilton, “The Warning I,” Jan-uary 27, 1797, Works of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 6,pp. 233–34. See further Claes G. Ryn, America theVirtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Em-pire (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,2003).

23. Adams to Jefferson, February 2, 1816, TheAdams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon, 2 vols.(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1959), vol. 2, pp. 462–63.

24. Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 519.

25. Quoted in Carnes Lord, “Dreams of Em-pire,” Claremont Review of Books, August 31, 2004.

26. Bacevich, American Empire, pp. 141–66.27. Clyde Prestowitz, Rogue Nation: Ameri-

can Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions(New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 35, citing Rein-hold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: AStudy of Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scrib-ner’s Sons, 1932), p. 294; Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and theLessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books,2003).

28. Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power (NewYork: Knopf, 2004), p. 41.

29. For the distinction between “democratic re-alists” and “democratic globalists,” see CharlesKrauthammer, “In Defense of Democratic Realism:An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World,”speech given at American Enterprise Institute, Wash-ington, D.C., February 12, 2004.

30. Doyle McManus, “Bush Pulls ‘Neocons’ Outof the Shadows,” Los Angeles Times, January 22, 2005.The omission of Syria from this expanded axis of evilis curious, since it has been the recipient of sternU.S. threats in the recent past. Though it has been apronounced focus of the neoconservative agenda to

induce fundamental change in Arab governments, nosuch regimes made the top six list.

31. For a similar distinction, see CharlesKupchan, “Life after Pax Americana,” World PolicyJournal, vol. 16 (fall 1999). Kupchan argued that theUnited States “will not be eclipsed by a rising chal-lenger, as is usually the case during transitions in in-ternational hierarchy. Instead, a shrinking Americanwillingness to be the global protector of last resortwill be the primary engine of a changing globallandscape.” For further elaboration, see CharlesKupchan, The End of the American Era: U.S. ForeignPolicy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-First Century(New York: Knopf, 2002). Kupchan’s larger argu-ment differs somewhat from my own, but this dis-tinction between systemic and internal drivers ofchange is important.

32. See Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power:The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

33. See further David C. Hendrickson andRobert W. Tucker, “Revisions in Need of Revising:What Went Wrong in the Iraq War,” Survival, vol. 47 (summer 2005).

34. For a discussion of these limitations on mili-tary power, see Jonathan Schell, The UnconquerableWorld: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003).

35. Andrew J. Bacevich, “Mr. Bush’s Grand Illu-sions,” Los Angeles Times, February 19, 2004.

36. For frightening analyses of these vulnerabili-ties, see Graham Allison, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ulti-mate Preventable Catastrophe (New York: Times Books,2004); and Stephen E. Flynn, America the Vulnerable:How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us from Ter-rorism (New York: Harper Collins, 2004).

37. The most striking instance of this denial isthat the relation between the first Gulf War and9/11 should be a kind of forbidden topic. Because9/11 was not a justified retaliation, Americans wantto say that it was no retaliation at all. As a matter ofhuman psychology, however, it seems indisputablethat the 1991 Gulf War played an important role inthe inculcation of that implacable hatred that led to9/11. The use of American power in the region wassimply unprecedented. For the first time, the offshoremaritime power made a huge commitment on land,and used force on an extraordinary scale. The terrible


suffering to both soldiers and civilians spawned bythe war was the soil in which Osama bin Laden andal-Qaeda formed their hideous purpose, and it count-ed at least as much as—I think more than—their ha-tred of the Jews or their outrage over the defilementof Saudi soil by American troops. The importance ofthese visual images of destruction (especially Israel’s1982 shelling of Beirut and the 1991 Gulf War) isapparent from bin Laden’s own commentary on hismotives. It is the spectacle of blood innocentlyspilled that gives men the most direct and persuasivemotive for spilling innocent blood themselves. Weneed to understand this about our enemies and notread them out of the human race.

38. Adjusted on the basis of purchasing powerparity, the U.S. share of world output in 2002 wasconsiderably smaller, at 21.4 percent. See Niall Fer-guson, “American Colossus,” at http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/a-b/American.html.

39. Paul M. Kennedy, “The Eagle has Landed,”Financial Times, February 2, 2002; Charles Kraut-hammer, “The Unipolar Moment Revisited,” Nation-al Interest, no. 79 (winter 2002/03), p. 5. As the eco-nomic historian Robert Higgs has noted, publishedestimates of defense spending do not count a varietyof expenditures—e.g., the costs of the nuclear weap-ons complex, military aid, veteran’s benefits, and theinterest on past defense expenditures financedthrough borrowing—that clearly belong in this cate-gory. Higgs argues that the real defense budget isnearly twice as large as the official published figures(“The Defense Budget Is Bigger Than You Think,”San Francisco Chronicle, January 18, 2004).

40. See further Robert Gilpin, War and Changein World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1981).

41. Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 529.

42. “The Disappearing Dollar,” Economist, De-cember 2, 2004.

43. Fred Bergsten, “The Risks Ahead for theWorld Economy,” Economist, September 9, 2004.

44. Tom Donnelly and Vance Serchuk, “TheMilitary Needed for the Bush Doctrine,” Weekly Standard, November 29, 2004.

45. On top of it all are looming deficits in oldage pensions and health care. One study given great

weight by Niall Ferguson put the net liability at $45trillion, of which about four-fifths ($36.6 trillion)consisted in health-care liabilities and one-fifth ($7trillion) the deficit in the Social Security trust fund.The conclusion that Ferguson and a colleague arriveat is that “the decline and fall of America’s unde-clared empire will be due not to terrorists at ourgates nor to the rogue regimes that sponsor them,but to a fiscal crisis of the welfare state” (Niall Fer-guson and Laurence Kotlikoff, “Going Critical,” Na-tional Interest, no. 73 [fall 2003], pp. 22–32). This isextravagant. First, we must be very suspicious aboutthe $45 trillion figure, which includes far too muchin the way of pure guesswork and absurd extrapola-tions over a 75-year period to be useful. Second,President Clinton showed that there was a way toovercome the budgetary insolvency, and the methodshe used might also be employed to address the im-balances in pensions and health care. Let us not con-fuse incapacity to address these deficits with the dif-ficulty, admittedly onerous, of reaching consensus onhow to do so. Third, Europe, Japan, China, and Rus-sia also face profound demographic imbalances thatin some respects are even more acute than those ofthe United States. It is thus improper to attributemuch weight to this factor when speculating aboutthe future distribution of world power.

46. Prestowitz, Rogue Nation, p. 105.47. Todd, After the Empire, pp. 61–62.48. The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middle-

town, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), no. 1,p. 5.

49. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means toSuccess in World Politics (New York: PublicAffairs,2004).

50. Robert Kagan, “America’s Crisis of Legiti-macy,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 83 (March/April 2004).See also Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrick-son, “The Sources of American Legitimacy,” ForeignAffairs, vol. 83 (November/December 2004), and the subsequent exchange, Kagan, “A Matter ofRecord,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 84 (January/February2005), and Tucker and Hendrickson, “The Flip Sideof the Record,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 84 (March/April2005).

51. Victor Davis Hanson, “Cracked Icons: Whythe Left Has Lost Credibility,” National Review Online,December 17, 2004.


52. Despite Bush’s invocation of the FoundingFathers as sanctioning this enterprise, it was settleddoctrine among them that going to war for the sakeof imposing one set of political institutions on anoth-er people was an illegitimate exercise of force. Bushcites the Declaration of Independence to justify hisview that the United States is entitled to revolution-ize foreign tyrannies. But the self-evident truths ofthe Declaration—that all men are created equal andare endowed by the Creator with natural rights tolife, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—did notjustify, for the author of the Declaration, the proposi-tion that foreign states had any right to revolutionizeany existing political order, even a tyrannical one.This was contrary to “the law of nature and nations,”which granted to every people the right to determinetheir own institutions. Thus Jefferson, expressing thehope that the governments of South America wouldadopt republican forms, nevertheless insisted that“they have the right, and we none, to choose for

themselves.” Some such doctrine—reinforced by thebaleful experience of nineteenth-century Europeanimperialism and the destructiveness of twentieth-century war—continues to express a basic consensusin most of the world.

53. See Bacevich, American Empire, for a recentarticulation of this view, which he associates withCharles Beard and William Appleman Williams.

54. The most chilling portrait is Chalmers John-son, Sorrows of Empire.

55. Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: AnAnatomy of American Nationalism (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2004), p. 1.

56. Owen Harries, “Iraq Is the Failure the USHad to Have,” Sydney Morning Herald, January 7,2005.

57. Aesop, “The Stag Looking into the Water,”in Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children ofAll Ages, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Scribner,2001), p. 225.


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