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.
