An empire, if you can keep it

National Interest, The, Spring, 2003 by Stephen Peter Rosen

The answer depends on circumstances. As long as the personal and societal safety of American citizens is at risk from external threats, historical precedent suggests that rather few limits will be placed on the use of American military power, or on the constraints the United States will impose on the peoples of other countries. Any use of weapons of mass destruction against targets in the United States, or against American soldiers abroad, will evoke the implacable rage of the American people against a clear enemy.

As for imperial rule over other peoples, the United States has always preferred indirect rule: the installation of local governments compatible with American policies. Direct rule will be seen as a temporary measure to prepare conditions for a transfer of power to local inhabitants. But effective transfer could be a long time coming in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, or in other places where the United States establishes military garrisons intended to be temporary. The United States is fully capable of enlarging its army to maintain such garrisons over long periods of time; in living memory, after all, the peacetime U.S. military has had over three million men and women. The real constraint will be political: Will the elites and general population of the United States regard it as just to rule other peoples, some of whom hate Americans enough to engage in suicidal attacks, and many of whom may exploit American power for their own malign purposes?

Rather than wresde with such difficult and unpleasant problems, the United States could give up the imperial mission, or pretensions to it, now. This would essentially mean the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the Middle East, Europe and mainland Asia. It may be that all other peoples, without significant exception, will then turn to their own affairs and leave the United States alone. But those who are hostile to us might remain hostile, and be much less afraid of the United States after such a withdrawal. Current friends would feel less secure and, in the most probable post-imperial world, would revert to the logic of self-help in which all states do what they must to protect themselves. This would imply the relatively rapid acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Iran, Iraq and perhaps Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Indonesia and others. Constraints on the acquisition of biological weapons would be even weaker than they are today. Major regional arms races would also b e very likely throughout Asia and the Middle East. This would not be a pleasant world for Americans, or anyone else. It is difficult to guess what the costs of such a world would be to the United States. They would probably not put the end of the United States in prospect, but they would not be small. If the logic of American empire is unappealing, it is not at all clear that the alternatives are that much more attractive.

NOR IS IT really obvious, as so many assume, that empire is somehow historically obsolete. If an American empire does endure, we may, in retrospect, come to understand the era of independent nation-states as something of an historical anomaly. William McNeill first advanced this idea in 1985, when he challenged the opinion