The American Empire

The Americans Have Gone Mad by John le Carré

As a proportion of national wealth, American foreign aid is the skimpiest among rich countries. (here)

We constantly refuse to pay our United Nations bills. We have failed to join, and are busy trying to undermine, the new International Criminal Court, as well as global efforts to crack down on pollution and end discrimination against women.

Overrated

What Americans overrate most is — America. They imagine that they live in the most democratic nation on earth, but in the United States, to a far greater extent than in many other democracies, electorates are shamelessly gerrymandered, the voting system squeezes out minor parties, Wyoming has as many senators as California, and money gives the rich a wildly disproportionate share of power and influence.

Americans think they are the freest people on earth, but the president keeps American citizens in detention for nearly two years without even allowing them to talk to a lawyer, let alone putting them on trial. And no one in America has the freedom of the Dutch to choose how they die, should they become incurably ill.

Americans also favor "American pre-eminence" — the Hobbesian view that the United States ought to rule the world, simply because it has the military muscle to do so.

Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University. (here)

American Empire ... Get Used To It

By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF New York Times Magazine

The U.S. is the only nation that polices the world through five global military commands; maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean; guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea; drives the wheels of global trade and commerce; and fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires.

Being an imperial power, however, is more than being the most powerful nation or just the most hated one. It means enforcing such order as there is in the world and doing so in the American interest. It means laying down the rules America wants (on everything from markets to weapons of mass destruction) while exempting itself from other rules (the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and the International Criminal Court) that go against its interest. It also means carrying out imperial functions in places America has inherited from the failed empires of the 20th century -- Ottoman, British and Soviet. In the 21st century, America rules alone, struggling to manage the insurgent zones -- Palestine and the northwest frontier of Pakistan, to name but two -- that have proved to be the nemeses of empires past.

As the United States faces this moment of truth, John Quincy Adams's warning of 1821 remains stark and pertinent: if America were tempted to ''become the dictatress of the world, she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.'' What empires lavish abroad, they cannot spend on good republican government at home: on hospitals or roads or schools. A distended military budget only aggravates America's continuing failure to keep its egalitarian promise to itself. And these are not the only costs of empire. Detaining two American citizens without charge or access to counsel in military brigs, maintaining illegal combatants on a foreign island in a legal limbo, keeping lawful aliens under permanent surveillance while deporting others after secret hearings: these are not the actions of a republic that lives by the rule of law but of an imperial power reluctant to trust its own liberties. Such actions may still be a long way short of Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese, but that may mean only that the worst -- following, say, another large attack on United States citizens that produces mass casualties -- is yet to come. Whenever it has exerted power overseas, America has never been sure whether it values stability -- which means not only political stability but also the steady, profitable flow of goods and raw materials -- more than it values its own rhetoric about democracy.

Where the two values have collided, American power has come down heavily on the side of stability, for example, toppling democratically elected leaders from Mossadegh in Iran to Allende in Chile. Iraq is yet another test of this choice. Next door in Iran, from the 1950's to the 1970's, America backed stability over democracy, propping up the autocratic rule of the shah, only to reap the whirlwind of an Islamic fundamentalist revolution in 1979 that delivered neither stability nor real democracy. Does the same fate await an American operation in Iraq?

Unseating an Arab government in Iraq while leaving the Palestinians to face Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships is a virtual guarantee of unending Islamic wrath against the United States. The chief danger in the whole Iraqi gamble lies here -- in supposing that victory over Saddam, in the absence of a Palestinian-Israeli settlement, would leave the United States with a stable hegemony over the Middle East. Absent a Middle East peace, victory in Iraq would still leave the Palestinians face to face with the Israelis in a conflict in which they would destroy not only each other but American authority in the Islamic world as well.

Properly understood, then, the operation in Iraq entails a commitment, so far unstated, to enforce a peace on the Palestinians and Israelis. Such a peace must, at a minimum, give the Palestinians a viable, contiguous state capable of providing land and employment for three million people. It must include a commitment to rebuild their shattered government infrastructure, possibly through a United Nations transitional administration, with U.N.-mandated peacekeepers to provide security for Israelis and Palestinians. This is an awesomely tall order, but if America cannot find the will to enforce this minimum of justice, neither it nor Israel will have any safety from terror. This remains true even if you accept that there are terrorists in the Arab world who will never be content unless Israel is driven into the sea. A successful American political strategy against terror depends on providing enough peace for both Israelis and Palestinians that extremists on either side begin to lose the support that keeps violence alive.

Paradoxically, reducing the size of the task does not reduce the risks. If an invasion of Iraq is delinked from Middle East peace, then all America will gain for victory in Iraq is more terror cells in the Muslim world. If America goes on to help the Palestinians achieve a state, the result will not win over those, like Osama bin Laden, who hate America for what it is. But at least it would address the rage of those who hate it for what it does.

This is finally what makes an invasion of Iraq an imperial act: for it to succeed, it will have to build freedom, not just for the Iraqis but also for the Palestinians, along with a greater sense of security for Israel. Again, the paradox of the Iraq operation is that half measures are more dangerous than whole measures. Imperial powers do not have the luxury of timidity, for timidity is not prudence; it is a confession of weakness.

What assets does American leadership have at its disposal? At a time when an imperial peace in the Middle East requires diplomats, aid workers and civilians with all the skills in rebuilding shattered societies, American power projection in the area overwhelmingly wears a military uniform. ''Every great power, whatever its ideology,'' Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once wrote, ''has its warrior caste.'' Without realizing the consequences of what they were doing, successive American presidents have turned the projection of American power to the warrior caste, according to the findings of research by Robert J. Lieber of Georgetown University. In President Kennedy's time, Lieber has found, the United States spent 1 percent of its G.D.P. on the nonmilitary aspects of promoting its influence overseas -- State Department, foreign aid, the United Nations, information programs. Under Bush's presidency, the number has declined to just 0.2 percent.

Each month the United States spends an estimated $1 billion on military operations in Afghanistan and only $25 million on aid.

This sort of projection of power, hunkered down against attack, can earn the United States fear and respect, but not admiration and affection. America's very strength -- in military power -- cannot conceal its weakness in the areas that really matter: the elements of power that do not subdue by force of arms but inspire by force of example.

Successive American administrations have signed on to those pieces of the transnational legal order that suit their purposes (the World Trade Organization, for example) while ignoring or even sabotaging those parts (the International Criminal Court or the Kyoto Protocol) that do not. A new international order is emerging, but it is designed to suit American imperial objectives. America's allies want a multilateral order that will essentially constrain American power. But the empire will not be tied down like Gulliver with a thousand legal strings. (full story here)

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