An empire, if you can keep it

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

New military skills could be taught directly by European military trainers, and the French were the first to train Indian soldiers in hopes of using them to resist the British. So Arthur Wellesley, the commander responsible for British military operations in India, ordered that any French officer training local Indians (Marathas to be specific) could receive safe conduct and free passage back to Europe. In this fashion Wellesley hoped to sustain the British monopoly on effective military power in India.

But by observation and learning on their own, Indian armies began to adopt or re-invent European techniques even without European trainers. Richard Wellesley, Governor-General of the East India Company, believed that the only solution for this rising danger was to quickly capitalize on the waning British military advantage to lock in British superiority. Rather than hang back and avoid involvements in local Indian military struggles, Wellesley adopted an aggressive policy of offering British military assistance to selected local Indian rulers so that they could win their baffles, but only on the condition that those helped by the British agreed thereafter to disband their armies and rely on British power for their security. It was a good idea, but even so, it was a near thing. By 1803, the British were still able to defeat a Maratha army twice the size of their own army, but only after losing half the British force.

As these examples illustrate, successful imperial governance must focus on maintaining and increasing, if possible, the initial advantage in the ability to generate military power. Putting matters in these terms casts an acute historical light on U.S. policies to control the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. Americans see such efforts as part of a program to ensure global "stability"--something that is good for everybody, because it heads off "unnecessary" and costly arms races. Viewed through the lens of imperial practice, however, U.S. nonproliferation policies compose a classic case of an imperial effort to keep a monopoly on the forms of military power that help provide its dominance.

Complementary to efforts at arms control, the United States has a strategy similar to that of the British in India: extending security guarantees to others in order to remove their need for independent military capabilities. This concept was explicitly raised in the now famous 1992 Defense Policy Guidance, which recommended that the United States be capable of defending other countries so that they would not feel compelled to build forces to defend themselves. External observers were left to make the point that this would have the consequence of reinforcing the dominant American military position. American forces stationed abroad help fulfill this function, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, by reassuring host countries that the United States will ensure that they need not arm themselves further. The offer to friendly countries of American missile defense technology--the research and development costs of which have been carried by the United States for almost fifty years--similarly reduces the like lihood that they will develop and control their own missile defenses.