Out of the Blue, Into the Black: Transnationalizing Earth 5: The Empire Strikes Back

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Having pubilshed my book chapter section on "The Transnational Islamic State" on 23 September 2014 as an international coalition began military operations in Syria, and my book chapter section on "The Submerged State." on 24 September 2014 in the wake of the United Nations climate change conference in New York, I might as well publish other section of the chapter, "Transnationalizing Earth," which speculates on trends that are influencing changes in the Westphalian nation-state system, or outright challenging it. The book manuscript is far from being in shape for publication, but I would like to circulate some of my ideas and hopefully stimulate discussion in the academic and policy communities. --TG

The Holy Roman Empire was mortally wounded in the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century and finally expired a century and a half later. In the 20th century many multiethnic empires broke apart and colonial empires dismantled themselves as consequences of the World Wars and the Cold War. These empires were not isolated world-systems, however; each was embedded in a larger system of political and economic competition. In contrast, the Roman state, from the beginning of the 2nd century BCE to the late 4th century CE, faced no external existential threats. No state in history has even reached this state of political and economic supremacy… until the 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union left the United States as the world’s sole superpower.

Never since the Roman Empire has power been so concentrated in one state (Waltz 2000, 17).

Indeed, with the classical architecture of its capital and the republican structure of its constitution, the United States is perhaps more like a ‘new Rome’ than any previous empire—albeit a Rome in which the Senate has thus far retained its grip on would-be emperors (Ferguson 2002).

In recent months, leading analysts in the United States have begun making comparisons between the United States and the Roman empire. On the right, conservatives like Max Boot of the Wall Street Journal editorial page have openly called for “benign” American imperialism.

Meanwhile, on the center-left, some “humanitarian hawks” are as eager as many conservatives to use U.S. military force in wars to pre-empt threats and topple hostile regimes.

In the past, parallels between Imperial Rome and Imperial America were primarily drawn by leftists or right-wing isolationists.

They thought that U.S. power politics corrupted the world, the American republic — or both. What is new since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 is the embrace of U.S. imperialism by many mainstream voices as something desirable and defensible (Lind 2002).

Instead of becoming the “ordinary country” that some anticipated, facing a world “after hegemony,” the United States found itself in a position of preponderance unseen since the Roman Empire (Walt 2002, 121).

It has become fashionable among international relations scholars to draw parallels between America’s current position in the world and imperial Rome’s position in the Mediterranean world. However, the parallels run much deeper than the current distribution of military power in the aftermath of the Cold War. At the time that the United States gained its independence, it was the most extensive republic seen since the Roman republic. From the first, American political institutions emulated those of republican Rome. We have a Senate, of course. We also have two consuls (the president and vice-president), and our House of Representatives, being the “people’s house,” performs many of the same functions as the various comitiae in republican Rome. We have consciously emulated republican Rome in our political symbols; the fasces, the symbol of the Roman magistrates’ authority, adorns the interior of the Capitol, as does Bellona, the goddess of war. Also, the design of American public buildings has traditionally been based on Roman architecture. Yes, certainly, America is a new Rome. It was raised from birth to be that (Gangale 2004).

Thus Rome learned much from the Greeks, the British in turn were inspired by the Ancients, and the British of course passed on their imperial knowledge to their Atlantic cousins at the end of World War II, remarking as they did so that like the sophisticated ‘Greeks’ of old, they were now transferring responsibility to those untutored, vulgar, but extraordinarily powerful ‘Romans’ who happened to live beside the Potomac (Cox 2004, 585).

Now empire talk has roared back. Terms like Imperial America, US imperialism, the imperial grand strategy, the New Imperial State and The New Rome are in the air. Instead of being the epithet hurled by the left that it was in the 1960s, talk about the US empire has been revived by the political right and given a positive sheen. It has become fashionable to compare the American Empire with Britain’s informal “free trade” empire of the nineteenth century or with the Roman Empire (Laxer 2005, 317).

An American Empire has significant implications for the structure of the world order, the Westphalian system of sovereign territorial states, and ultimately, the evolutionary path that the political order of the Solar System will take.

In his review of three books examining the implications of the American Empire (Ferguson 2004; Johnson 2004; Mann 2004), Campbell Craig concludes by expressing grave doubts in its ability to deter a major war indefinitely, and presents a horrific vision of the consequences of failure.

The antirealist case for indefinite American empire cannot get around one stubborn reality. As long as international relations remain anarchical, the United States, no matter how powerful it becomes, cannot forever prevent the outbreak of major war. Major war, in our era, means thermonuclear war, or perhaps one fought with other weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Either the United States will have to accept the continuing existence of nuclear (and possibly other WMD) arsenals held by other states, a condition that cannot endure indefinitely without devolving into war, or it will have to see to the reliable and permanent elimination of all such arsenals, a task, as contemporary international affairs reveal indisputably, that neither it nor any other nation could ever achieve acting alone. The perpetuation of an anarchical world dominated by American empire leads inescapably to one outcome, sooner or later: a catastrophic war in which tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or perhaps the greater part of the human race is killed. Because realism is concerned ultimately with creating a state that can protect citizens from a dangerous environment, its verdict with respect to these alternatives is clear: only the permanent elimination of anarchy and national arsenals of weapons of mass destruction will eliminate the visceral insecurity that derives from the possibility of such a war.

…[T]he primary threat to human security is the major war that will occur between the United States and some other nation as long as the current system of unipolar anarchy continues (Craig 2004, 169-70).

International relations realists have been rocked back on their heels since the end of the Cold War. During the first decade after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, they were unable to account for the longevity of the “unipolar moment (Krauthammer 1990),” what was supposed to be a brief transition from the bipolar world order of the Cold War to an inevitable multipolar future, in which there would be several great powers, once again engaging in balancing behavior to deter the strongest state. Thus, realists were unable to account for the Western alliance’s obstinate refusal to curl up and die; France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, and others should have left the American orbit to pursue their independent foreign policy trajectories. To their astonishment, not only did the North Atlantic alliance not disintegrate as forecasted (Mearsheimer 1990, 52), it expanded eastward to include all of its former Warsaw Pact adversaries as well as three former Soviet republics. While it could have been predicted that the United States would greet the expansion of NATO as an opportunity to spread its influence, and it could have been anticipated that Eastern Europe would welcome the opportunity to join the Western alliance as insurance against a future resurgent Russia, realists expected that Western Europe would be singularly uninterested in being accomplices to American military expansion eastward, and that such expansion would heighten Russian anxiety to a dangerous level. Again, to the astonishment of realists, Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin shrugged off NATO expansion to Moscow’s doorstep as “no tragedy (Warren 2002),” and Western Europeans embraced the prospect of uniting their continent. The Western Europeans viewed NATO as a unifying institution every bit as valuable as the European Union, providing additional incentive for Eastern Europe to liberalize and democratize. Russia’s acquiescence is more difficult to explain, but as I argued (Gangale 2002), since NATO policy is decided by consensus, the more members there are in the alliance, the more difficult it becomes to achieve a consensus for “out of area” military adventures, while collective defense remains its core mission. Contrary to the predictions of realists, a balancing coalition has failed to form to contain American hegemonic ambitions, and the unipolar moment lives on.

International relations liberal theory had a ready explanation. America’s security partners are democracies, and democracies do not view each other as threats because of the open nature of their politics (Doyle 1986); this is the essence of democratic peace theory. Economic liberals also argue that the economic interpenetration of free trade reinforces this effect. As discussed in the previous chapter, G. John Ikenberry argues that American power is embedded in international institutions that make it safe for cooperating second-tier states (Ikenberry 1999; 1999a, 2001). The US began the construction of post-war international institutions before the Second World War was over to build a global structure for stability and peace. That this structure also served George Kennan’s grand strategy of deterrence and containment of the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War was only because that was the first challenge to the Western order; now that structure lives on to face new challenges to stability and peace. It was a decade into the post-Cold War era before a realist came up with a plausible explanation regarding the durability of the Western alliance and the failure of an anti-American coalition to emerge: that the power gap between the US and other states was so great that there was no realistic hope of closing it.

Because the current concentration of power in the United States is unprecedentedly clear and comprehensive [military, economic, technological, and geopolitical], states are likely to share the expectation that counterbalancing would be a costly and probably doomed venture (Wohlforth 1999, 39).

Earlier, realist Stephen Walt (1987; 1988) had offered another fine-tuning of the classical balance-of-power theory.

That anomaly of states failing to balance U.S. power largely vanishes if we focus not on power but on threats. As I have argued at length elsewhere, balance-of-threat theory helps explain why most of the other major powers did not ally against the United States after World War II, when the United States controlled nearly half of the world economy, had sole possession of atomic weapons, and possessed large conventional forces as well. It also goes a long way to explaining why balancing has not occurred to any significant degree today (Walt 2002, 133).

Walt raises a very good historical point. From Leningrad to Stalingrad, the Nazi Germany had devastated the Soviet Union, killing 27 million of its citizens (nearly half of all Second World War fatalities), yet the major powers chose to ally with the far more powerful United States against this all but prostrate state.

Balance-of-threat theory argues that states form alliances to balance against threats. Threats, in turn, are a function of power, proximity, offensive capabilities, and aggressive intentions (Walt 2002, 133).

There is no doubt that in the early 21st century the US possesses an overwhelming lead in power and offensive capabilities over other states, to the point that a lack of proximity is not great impediment to its global force projection capabilities; it has fought two simultaneous wars on the other side of the planet in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the al Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001 initially justified the Afghan operation, the US has continued that operation after its killing of Osama bin Laden. In the case of Iraq, there is no doubt that the US had aggressive intentions; more than anything, Colin Powell’s playing recordings of intercepted Iraqi communications in the United Nations Security Council reminded me of Cato producing a branch of figs from the folds of his toga, declaring to the Roman Senate, “Carthago delenda est!” Carthage must be destroyed! Sandwiched between Afghanistan and Iraq and nursing nuclear ambitions, Iran has reason to fear America’s aggressive intentions; in fact, as early as 2008 there was buzz in the US defense community that in terms of the pre-positioning of covert capabilities, “we are already there.” However, the US is benign compared with history’s other great powers. That the US does not, or more importantly, is not perceived to have, aggressive intentions against most other states, against which they would wish to balance, begs the question: why? Here we come around again to democratic peace theory; the US is not hostile to any sibling democratic state.

But what has really thrown realists for a loop is the neoconservative US foreign policy under President George W. Bush.

The general course of international politics since the end of the cold war and, more recently, the foreign policy undertaken by the United States since the September 11, 2001, attacks verge on the inexplicable to American realists. They find they cannot easily account for the continuing and so far unchallenged unipolar dominion over international politics wielded by the United States. Realists have argued at great length that nations invariably seek to attain enough military power to allow them to contend with potential rivals, yet over the past decade no nation, nor even any bloc of nations, has even tried to match American military predominance. Realists have been even more puzzled by the recent foreign policies of the current Bush administration. Indeed, America’s most prominent realists—now happy to engage in normative policy advocacy—have been sharply and publicly critical of U.S. foreign policy. Realists favor a stable world in which every state rationally seeks security for itself. This, however, does not appear to be the objective of the Bush administration: in both word and deed, the United States has demonstrated a clear willingness to pursue goals well beyond that of basic national security and has done so with apparent disregard for the insecurities of its adversaries. It has exhibited few qualms about alienating large nations and/or traditional allies like France, Canada, and Indonesia and has waged a protracted and expensive war in Iraq for reasons that do not seem even remotely related to the pursuit of national survival. The nation, in other words, is doing things that most realists would argue no rational great power would do (Craig 2004, 145).

Though this be madness, yet there is method in ‘t.
--William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene II

George W. Bush, after having left office, is said to have admitted that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a mistake (Labrecque 2011). However, other dimensions of his administration’s national security policies deserve judgment independent of that blunder. In September 2002, one year after the al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush administration released its first National Security Strategy document. Inter alia, it states that not only must the US military “deter threats against U.S. interests, allies, and friends; and decisively defeat any adversary if deterrence fails,” it must have the unprecedented strength to “dissuade future military competition (United States 2002).” In other words, the United States must prevent the emergence of any rivals and remain the only great power on the planet… forever.

This policy departs fundamentally from the American cold war strategy of containment, which accepted, by definition, the existence of the Soviet great power and furthermore rejected the notion of waging preventive war to achieve cold war objectives. In a more basic sense, it departs from the four-century-old balance of power tradition that European states and then the United States and the Soviet Union often accepted from Westphalia through the cold war (Craig 2004, 161).

Indeed, this policy, if successful, would replace the Westphalian system with a new global political order. The enduring attribute of the Westphalian system has always been that it is anarchic, that states have struggled to provide for their security in a self-help environment; this has been a constant as the structure of the system has evolved from multipolar to bipolar to unipolar. While China views the current system as “one pole, many powers,” in which the US clearly enjoys military superiority but other powers must be taken into account, the US is pursuing the goal of global military supremacy. If it were to achieve this, the global order would cease to be anarchic. The power of other states would be so eclipsed by US military preponderance that the other militaries of the world might become viewed as pointlessly expensive indulgences in the trappings of a bygone sovereignty, and allowed to atrophy.

Chalmers Johnson (2004) doubts that the US economy can sustain the level of military spending that would be necessary for a global imperial project to succeed. He points to the militarization of the US economy as responsible for the failure to invest in key sectors of the civilian economy, the hollowing out of vital industries, and the deterioration of infrastructure, as well as contributing significantly to the federal government’s frighteningly huge debt. As of this writing the US economy enters the fifth year of its longest and deepest recession since the Great Depression. Offensive realism theorist John Mearshimer (2001) doubts the wisdom of such an imperial project on geopolitical grounds, arguing that the “stopping power of water” constrains the US to the proper role of an offshore balancer to prevent the rise of regional hegemons in Europe and East Asia, while protecting its own hegemony in the western hemisphere. Furthermore, in a globalized world, the logic of empire has changed.

In the classic realist world traditional military forms of statecraft were closely intertwined with possibilities for economic gain. Powerful economic actors were presumed to have an interest in the political and military capacities of “their” states, just as state managers had an interest in the capacities of “their” entrepreneurs. National economic prowess was the foundation of military (and therefore diplomatic) strength. Territorial expansion was a route to control over new productive assets. A world of global production networks makes the prospective economic gain from territorial conquest dubious, reducing the returns to realist statecraft. Access to capital and technology depends on strategic alliances with those who control global production networks, rather than on control of any particular piece of territory. In a global economy where there is a surplus of labor, control over large amounts of territory and population can be more of a burden than an asset (Evans 1997, 66).

Certainly the US has discovered this burden in its occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Aside from the fact that in a globalized world one can acquire land and labor more easily and cheaply via capital rather than conquest, the international system has developed a strong norm against territorial conquest in the course of the past century in a process that was kicked off by Woodrow Wilson’s policy to “make the world safe for democracy” under the banner of national self-determination. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the waging of aggressive war came to be viewed as an international crime rather than the historic prerogative of the strong over the weak. In a world of self-determination and globalization, what is an empire to do? Does the word “empire” have any meaning in such a world?

The United States, after all, has conquered no territory. It has championed, and still does, the principle of self-determination. And it lives in a world of independent states. Furthermore, as Ikenberry has astutely pointed out, under conditions of globalisation, where there is a complex web of international rules to which even the United States has to adjust its behaviour, what sense does it make to talk of an American Empire (Cox 2004, 598)?

Early in the Cold War, John Herz theorized that nuclear weapons had entirely eroded the sovereignty of states, in effect de-territorialized them, because there was no effective defense against such weapons, and the defense of the people is the first duty of the state. “The meaning and function of the basic protective unit, the ‘sovereign’ nation-state itself, have become doubtful (Herz 1957, 473).” Predicting the demise of the territorial state turned out to premature, as within the next decade the strategic nuclear doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” took hold. The stabilizing effect of nuclear deterrence became widely accepted, thus their deterrent effect served to re-inscribe the territorial integrity of sovereign state authority. Indeed, Kenneth Waltz, the preeminent structural realist theorist in international relations, maintains that the proliferation of nuclear weapons and their deterrent effects actually stabilizes international relations, making the world safer and, implicitly, strengthening the security of sovereign states (Waltz 1981; 1990).

Raymond Duvall of the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Havercroft of the University of British Columbia argue that the US pursuit of national missile defense, and of military supremacy in Earth orbit in terms of denial of access to an opponent and force application from space to the surface, if achieved, will realize Herz’s vision and leave only one sovereign state remaining on Earth: the United States of America. It is precisely with these goals in mind that the US has consistently opposed a treaty on the prevention of an arms race in outer space (PAROS), and that neoconservatives John R. Bolton and John C. Yoo (2012) castigated the Obama administration for signing onto the European Union’s draft Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities (Council of the European Union 2008; United States Department of State 2012).

Considering first national missile defense, if the US were the only power to develop such a system, the deterrent value of other states’ nuclear arsenal would evaporate, since the US would be able to employ is nuclear weapons in the confidence that a retaliatory strike would be intercepted. The hard shell of sovereignty would be lost to every state but the US, which will have added a third dimension to its shell. This does not necessarily mean that the US would shift to a first strike policy, but it does mean that aspiring nuclear states would lose the incentive to develop such weapons, and even established nuclear states would find it more difficult to justify the expense of maintaining their existing nuclear arsenals.

To the extent that it is accomplished, this would partially re-inscribe, through a truly three-dimensional shield, the borders of the United States—in Herz’s terms, its “hard shell”—and accordingly its effective sovereignty as political subject. At the same time, it would reduce or even eliminate the capacity of other political subjects to exercise an effective deterrent defense against U.S. intervention in their affairs—that is to say, it would further erode their sovereignty (Duval and Havercroft 2006, 8-9).

Additionally, the US is developing both space-based kinetic weapons and directed energy weapons not only for missile defense, but for use against the space assets of other states as well as against surface targets. Force application from space to the surface renders two-dimensional territorial borders moot, since the threat comes from the third dimension; once again, the hard shell of sovereignty is evaporated for all states but the US.

…[T]he placing of weapons in space capable of targeting objects on or near the Earth’s surface creates a new form of territorial rule. Whereas modern military action has been concerned principally with occupying and controlling territory, and whereas modern sovereignty is accordingly territorially defined, this form of weaponization of space would dispense with the need for such cumbersome military practices, and the pretense of sovereign territorial authority. Instead, through increased precision in space-based weapons systems, combined with the ability to target and attack anywhere on the Earth on a very short notice—ranging from minutes to seconds depending upon the weapon system—it becomes possible to “surveil and punish” any potential enemy of such a system. This is constitutive of a globally singular sovereign, capable of deciding the exception for the entirety of humanity, with no terrestrial “outside” to the scope of its sovereignty (Duval and Havercroft 2006, 9).

The implication of a US capability to militarily control Earth orbit and to deny the use of it to other states is that US sovereignty would in effect extend into outer space, for one of the attributes of sovereignty is the monopoly of state violence within a specified region.

The modern state is constituted and produced as subject of global political life— “international relations” and the domestic polis—through and in terms of the institution of sovereignty. To be a modern state is to be socially recognized and legitimated as sovereign…. Lacking social acknowledgement that it exists as the locus of sovereign authority—that is to say, in the absence of generally accepted normative principles that it has the capacity and the right (the authority) to make law and decide the exceptions to that law—the modern state loses its status as subject of global political life (Duval and Havercroft 2006, 3-4).

Our argument, in simple terms, is that the militarization of space reconstitutes and alters the social production of political society in three interlocked ways that are rooted respectively in three distinct forms of putting economies/cartographies of violence into practice in outer space. The conjoint effect of those three processes of reconstitution is to substitute the consolidation of an extra-territorial system of rule—which we refer to as empire of the future—for the competitive sovereignties of the modern states-system (Duval and Havercroft 2006, 9).

Whereas past empires have been multinational, conquering territory and assimilating unlike peoples under the sovereignty of one state, this “empire of the future” would be unlike any empire of the past. It would be a transnational empire; a system of legally sovereign states would remain, but with the US as primus inter pares. The objective is not to subjugate alien races and dispossess them of their land and wealth, the objective of this empire is to complete the Wilsonian project to “make the world safe for democracy”… and for global capitalism. Given that wars in regions that are important to the globalized economy send shudders through the capital markets, if democratic peace theory is valid in this new environment, the US should go to war only rarely, only when legitimately provoked, and only against nondemocratic governments, which become fewer with each passing year. However, in the future the US needs to take more seriously the sound advice of its allies, and to devise some means of democratic accountability (Keohane 2004) to them that makes them participants in rather than subject of its empire. Also, it remains to be seen whether these non-Muslim democracies will recognize democracy Islamic style as enough of a like type to engage them peacefully and effectively to keep Huntingtonian civilizational tensions from flaring into interstate wars.

The term “empire of the future” is apt in a second sense; the US would conquer the present only indirectly, while its true objective would be to conquer the future, to maintain its military supremacy on Earth and in outer space by perpetually advancing its military technologies far beyond the reach of any other nation’s state of the art. Its control of Earth orbit and the capability to project force from that third dimension to any point on Earth would trump the historical stopping power of water that Mearshimer invokes against the successful pursuit of American global hegemony, and indeed, any other conceivable geographic barrier. Yet control of near-Earth space is only one facet of this “empire of the future.” In early 2013 it became clear that pursuit of the American “empire of the future,” far from being a superficial gleam in the eye of neoconservatives, is deeply rooted in bipartisan US foreign policy, calling to mind the old saying, “Politics stops are the water’s edge.” The Barack Obama administration’s policy on the use of remotely piloted drones to attack terrorists anywhere on Earth, in blatant disregard of sovereign airspace, is best understood as another tool in the de-territorialization of nation-state sovereignty and the reordering of the world system as an American empire. The effect of US military supremacy is that the reality of sovereign territorial airspace is fading for every state except the US, as is the concept of outer space as an international commons. Not only does politics stop at the edge of the ocean, apparently is also stops at the edge of outer space. In the “empire of the future,” access to outer space would be regulated by US control of Earth orbit. Although people came from many nations to America to settle the Old West, it was America’s frontier alone. Analogously, “space, the final frontier,” however multinational the US might allow it to be, nevertheless will be America’s frontier alone, for in having sovereignty over Earth orbit, the US will border every state on Earth. Although a full examination of the debates about the American Empire and the weaponization of outer space is beyond the scope of this work, how these issues play out in the coming decades will profoundly shape the politics of the peopling of the Solar System.