The United States Is, and Should Be, an Empire
A New Atlantic Initiative Debate
July 17, 2003
Transcript prepared from a tape recording
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4:45 p.m. |
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Niall Ferguson, New York University |
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Robert Kagan, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace |
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Proceedings:
[Music.]
[Applause.]
MR. SIKORSKI: You were supposed to sing along.
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the American Enterprise Institute and welcome to the New Atlantic Initiative. I am Radek Sikorski, Executive Director of NAI. I'm sorry Chris DeMuth, the President of AEI, cannot be with us. He's on his way to Moscow to spread the NAI message there.
The New Atlantic Initiative was set up at the Congress of Prague in 1996. Our original aim was to welcome the new democracies to Western institutions. But having achieved the expansion of NATO and now of the European Union, we have now proceeded to more ambitious tasks, such as saving the transatlantic relationship itself.
NAI met recently with Windsor Castle to examine whether or not the United Nations can be made more relevant to the challenges that face us. On the 1st of July, over 200 people gathered in Warsaw at the Conference on Ronald Reagan: Legacy for Europe. This autumn, our major international conference will take place in Rome during the Italian Presidency of the EU on how to heal the rift in transatlantic relations.
At a separate event here in Washington, we will examine the impact of the proposed European Constitutions, constitutional relations between our continents.
On the 10th of December, the International Day of Human Rights, we will look for a solution to the genocidal war in Chechnya.
Ladies and gentlemen, your presence here tonight in such numbers suggests that our subject is timely and that the fame of our two debaters has spread far and wide. You have their extensive and very impressive biographies in your folders. I will just remind you that Mr. Niall Ferguson, relatively new to these shores, is the author of the best-selling "Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power."
Mr. Bob Kagan, author of "Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order," is perhaps the sexiest transatlantic intellectual today.
[Laughter.]
MR. SIKORSKI: Having singlehandedly caused the major transatlantic discussion over America's right dominance. If you haven't read these excellent books yet, I strongly encourage you to do so, and they're on sale in the foyer.
Before we proceed, I want us to cast our minds back 200 years ago to June 1791. Chris Matthews, the journalist of "Hardball," recently reminded an audience that I'm not at liberty to disclose that within sight of where we are today, two gentlemen on horseback looked down from what was then known as Jenkins Farm onto a stretch of Maryland flatland banking the Potomac River. There were, of course, George Washington and Pierre L'Enfant. What the two imagined was what we have today, including what L'Enfant described as "an impressive carriageway connecting the Capitol to the Executive Mansion."
They were, of course, talking about Pennsylvania Avenue. L'Enfant, Washington's architect, knew the power of what they were doing. "No nation," he wrote to Washington, "perhaps had ever before the opportunity offered them of deliberately deciding on the spot where their capital city should be fixed. The plans should be drawn on such a scale as to leave room for the aggrandizement and embellishment which the increase of the wealth of the nation will permit it to pursue at any period, however, remote."
Who am I to tell you? I'm not even American. But I think there is a certain idea there that is not a thousand miles away from the subject we're about to debate. Since we have academics here, I think it's also good to define our terms.
Here's how the Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus defines "empire": "a large group of states under single authority."
Here's Merriam Webster: "a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority."
And here's the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: "empire: a political unit having an extensive territory or comprising a number of territories or nations and ruled by a single supreme authority."
Ladies and gentlemen, the speakers will each make their case for about 15 minutes. They will each have the right to a brief rebuttal, and we will then open the floor to questions and statements.
After the debate, we shall take a vote: ayes to the right, nays to the left, and abstentions in the middle.
I shall moderate it in an undemocratic, not to say empirical, fashion. Those who belabor their points will be led away by our AEI praetorians, who may be beautiful but, let me assure you, are quite deadly.
[Laughter.]
MR. SIKORSKI: And we have brought a couple of lions to the basement for the occasion.
Mr. Ferguson, the floor is yours.
[Applause.]
MR. FERGUSON: Thank you very much indeed, Radek. I can tell I've spent too long in England. I can't even work an electronic microphone. Thank you, Radek, for that introduction.
I want to begin by making it very clear to all of you in the audience that not all Europeans come from Venus.
[Laughter.]
MR. FERGUSON: There are, in fact, two Europeans in Washington today who do not come from Venus, and I think it was very good of the Prime Minister to act as my warm-up act--
[Laughter.]
MR. FERGUSON: --earlier today.
It's important to clarify that neither Mr. Blair nor I come from Venus, because it's very clear to me that most Americans now assume that when emotion like this is put before them, the European speaker will be in some way motivated by spite, envy, and malice, will be making an argument critical of the United States. I am going to say some things that are critical of the United States, but I want to make it very clear that I criticized from the vantage point of a passionate pro-American.
I think the United States is such a wonderful country that I don't regard it as utopian, to imagine the whole of the world peopled by replicas of the United States. In an ideal world, there would be a United States of Europe in the image, adopting the structures of the United States. In an ideal world, perhaps, there might be a United States of Arabia or at least a United States of Iraq. So please don't misunderstand me. Don't assume that I'm the usual Venusian from Europe in what I have to say.
The motion before the house, if my memory serves me correctly, is that the United States is, and should be, an empire. And what I would to argue is--and this is a characteristic academic piece of nit-picking--is that the motion ought perhaps to read that the United States is an empire and should acknowledge the fact and do the job properly. And that's the burden of what I want to argue.
Now, I am well aware that I will lose this debate, so profound is the antipathy of the typical American to the word "empire." And it's understandable that Americans should feel, at best, ambivalent, if not downright hostile, towards the word "empire." Their creation, the very essence of that strange state religion on which the United States political culture is founded, is that of an anti-imperial, rebellious colony that fought against an evil empire for its own independence. And it's, therefore, an assumption that I think most Americans share that having once thrown off an imperial yoke, it would be inconceivable that the United States itself should become an empire.
Now, of course, it's easy to forget that England had once been a colony of the Roman Empire. Having once been a colony does not prevent you from in the future becoming an empire. And, therefore, the argument that what happened in 1776 somehow disqualifies the United States from becoming an empire is a fallacious one.
The other thing--and Radek helped me by reading those definitions from the dictionary out. The other thing that helps Americans assume or believe that they're not an empire is the narrow definition of "empire" that leads them to believe that only 14 dependencies, of which the largest is, I believe, Puerto Rico, could possibly be constituted an American empire; that is to say, colonies subject peoples without representation but under direct American rule. And since these 14 dependencies between them cover no more than about 10,000 square kilometers of the world's land surface, the most you might say, adopting a very narrow definition of "empire," is that the United States has one of the smallest empires in all of human history, so small as to be scarcely detectable from space.
But I as a historian do not rely exclusively on dictionaries for my definitions of "empire." A definition of "empire" that could be inferred from the vast literature that exists on the subject of not just the British Empire but all past empires would be far broader in its scope. And I want to use a broader definition of "empire," which I think is a more useful definition of "empire," to try and persuade you not only that the United States is an empire, but that it is, in fact, one of the most powerful empires in all history, and the only remarkable thing about this is that so many Americans are unaware of the fact.
Let me there to make what I'd call the "quack like a duck" argument as follows, in other words, if it quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. If it quacks like an empire, it probably is an empire.
Let me put it to you that, militarily, economically, and culturally, the United States has all the attributes of past empires, and it has them in extremely impressive ways. We know that roughly 750 military bases and installations exist under American servicemen in around 130 countries around the world. That is something like two-thirds of all the world's countries. We know that the United States accounts now for roughly two-fifths, 40 percent, of all military expenditures in the world.
In military terms, ladies and gentlemen, there never has been an empire as powerful as the United States today. Never at any point in its history did Great Britain enjoy the lead over its imperial rivals that the United States currently enjoys over all other major nation states in the world. Technologically, the financial figures understate the extent of America's military reach and America's military prowess. If one definition of "empire" is the ability to project your power globally--and, indeed, beyond the globe into space--then the United States is almost a unique empire in the extent and magnitude of its military capability. It could fight and win any war against any rival today.
But that's not the only dimension, although some Americans sometimes seem to think it's the only dimension of power. In economic terms, too, ladies and gentlemen, the United States has awesome power. Its share of global economic output, if you take a measure like gross domestic product, using purchasing power parity figures, is something like 31 percent. Nearly a third of world output is accounted for by the United States. That's three times larger as a share of global output than Great Britain enjoyed at the very height of its power in the very heyday of the Industrial Revolution.
The economic resources at the disposal of the American empire are truly daunting and far exceed those of the last great Anglophone empire in the 19th century.
And, of course, I hardly need belabor the point, because it's been made so eloquently by Joseph Nye and others, that the United States also has one very important attribute of empire not contained in the dictionary definition. It has the ability to export its cultural values, to make its cultural values not only attractive to other peoples, but to make those peoples adopt them voluntarily. And one can cite many statistics about the extent to which American cinema and American television dominate popular culture around the world, particularly, for example, in Latin America. So there is a cultural dimension to American imperial power which should never be underestimated.
When one considers these three pillars of power--the military, the economic, and the cultural--then from a British vantage point, the only thing that is really quite remarkable about the American empire, aside from the fact that it dwarfs the British Empire even in its heyday, is the fact that Americans refuse to believe in its existence.
It is and has been for many decades official policy that the United States is not an empire. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld gave an interview in March of this year, I think, to the television station Al-Jazeera in which he quite explicitly said, and I quote roughly from memory: The United States is not in the business of empire; we don't do colonies.
And this is generally, I think, the assumption that most Americans make. Those were the words, more or less, the sense certainly of the words used by President George W. Bush on the SS Lincoln when he said, not for the first time in his career, but when Americans have won a military victory, all they wish to do is to come home. It was indeed in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, that President Bush offered the historical insight that when the United States won the Second World War, it did not leave behind occupying armies. It left behind constitutions and parliaments, which must have been news to the occupying armies which continue to inhabit Western Germany and Japan, to say nothing of South Korea even today.
This is an empire in denial, ladies and gentlemen. It is an empire that refuses to acknowledge its own existence. And this, it seems to me, is the problem: not the extent of America's might, but the fact that Americans simply will not recognize the extent of that might.
I want to suggest to you in the very brief time that I have available to me--and I know Radek will call in his Praetorian Guard if I exceed the bare 15 minutes I've been allocated--that there are three fundamental problems with a hyper-power that refuses to recognize its own imperial role in the world.
The first of these is that all American military interventions, certainly since the 1960s, have been conducted on a false premise, namely, that they can be wound up within a matter of months or, at most, a few years. It is a fundamental flaw--and it's visible already in Iraq and Afghanistan today--in an imperial power when it states that it will withdraw as soon as possible from the country that it has occupied. And yet this is what is constantly stated by American spokesmen.
The reason it's a flaw is that all empires are based not on coercion but on collaboration. They are based on the willingness of indigenous elites to collaborate in the creation of stable institutions in their home country.
Why would you collaborate with an occupying power that says it's about to leave? I can't imagine anything more reckless than to participate in the authorities that are being created in Afghanistan and Iraq today under American rule when it is so clear that the Americans intend to wind these authorities up and go home within a matter of months.
The second problem about an empire in denial is that it doesn't adequately resource its imperial undertakings. It does not spend enough money on them. This is an empire, ladies and gentlemen, based on the Wal-mart principle: the principle of low prices always. If you consider how much money is being spent on the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq at the moment, the majority of the people in this room would be aghast at the amounts concerned.
Only this week, it was revealed that the monthly cost of occupying Iraq is something like $3.9 billion. Gasps of astonishment could be heard all over the country when this figure was revealed. It is, in fact, far too little. And the reason it's far too little is because it is entirely going to maintaining the military presence of 140,000 or so American troops. Virtually no money is being spent on the all-important task of reconstructing the Iraqi economy and ensuring that law and order take root in that society.
I was shocked this week to discover that in Afghanistan, where the process of nation building--your euphemism for empire--has been going on now for one year and a half, that the total amount of money that the American Government has spent in supporting the government that it created in Kabul is precisely $5 million. You cannot, ladies and gentlemen, run an empire on a shoestring. But you must. You must because, in truth, this empire in denial is a colossus with feet of clay. Your system of welfare, as has been revealed by work done by a member of the American Enterprise Institute, (?) and Kent Smatters (ph), your welfare system is headed for a profound fiscal crisis. The discrepancy between the liabilities of the Medicare and Social Security system and their projected revenues over the foreseeable future is on the order of $44 trillion. That's something that most Americans and certainly Americans running America's fiscal policy are in denial about, too. But to be in denial about the impending fiscal crisis of your own system of Social Security is also to be in denial about the speed with which your empire will surely decline.
The third great problem about the American empire is that it is premised at the moment, as far as I can see, on a misunderstanding about the nature of imperial power, namely, that it should be exerted unilaterally. It was the great imperial statesman Lord Salisbury who coined the phrase "splendid isolation," but when he used it, it was sardonically to criticize his opponents in the House of Parliament.
The key point about imperial power is that it requires collaboration and cooperation with other powers. It cannot be based on isolation. And Salisbury's argument was that Britain's power depended on a network of alliances with the other great powers of Europe, and indeed with the United States, in order to be enduring.
It is perfectly clear to me that for reasons of culture and of fiscal constraint, the United States is incapable of effective peacekeeping efforts and policing efforts in the countries that it has so recently conquered. It badly needs not only military support but support in the form of aid budgets from the European Union states, which currently spend roughly three times on aid and as much more on peacekeeping as the United States.
In a recent article in Foreign Policy Magazine, it was pointed out that in 16 military interventions undertaken by the United States since 1898, only four have successfully led to democratic institutions' taking root: West Germany, Japan, Panama, Grenada. The rest of the names on the list really are names redolent with tragedy: Haiti, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, Nicaragua.
Why, ladies and gentlemen, if the United States is so wealthy, so militarily powerful, and has such an attractive culture, has it been such an unsuccessful empire? Why has it failed so much more often than it has succeeded when it has intervened and sought to impose its institutions on foreign countries? The answer is because it is an empire in denial, because it does not recognize the nature of its responsibilities, because it attempts to nation-build in a time frame of two years, the electoral cycle. It attempts to nation-build on the Wal-mart principle of low prices always. It attempts to nation-build without adequate cooperation and support from its allies. That is why the United States is one of the least successful as well as one of the most potentially powerful empires in all history.
In 1913, the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Gray had a conversation with the American Ambassador in London on the subject of Mexico. And Sir Edward Gray asked, rather skeptically, how long American troops would remain in Mexico, since Woodrow Wilson had sent them there to restore what he saw as the legitimate government. And the Ambassador replied that they wouldn't stay long and they would stay until new elections had been held. And Sir Edward Gray responded, rather sardonically again, how long it would be before the Ambassador felt they would have to return to Mexico and would they continue to return to Mexico indefinitely on this basis. And the Ambassador finally lost patience with the supercilious (?)-mist and said that the United States would be around for at least 200 years, and I quote, "and it would continue to shoot men for"-- [end of recording on Tape 1, Side 1.]
-- "learn to vote and to rule themselves."
[Laughter.]
MR. FERGUSON: Ladies and gentlemen, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. I know we're not allowed to speak French in Washington.
It seems to me that nothing has changed in this respect and that the United States policy is still predicated on the idea that you shoot people and then you hold elections and go home. And it doesn't work. It will never work.
So, ladies and gentlemen, let me offer you the following straightforward conclusion: The United States is an empire. It has long been an empire. It should be an empire. But today, ladies and gentlemen, it's a colossus with an attention deficit disorder, practicing cut-price colonization. I beg to propose the motion.
Thank you.
[Applause.]
MR. SIKORSKI: Thank you, Niall.
Mr. Kagan?
MR. KAGAN: Thank you very much, Radek, and thank you, Niall, for that stimulating opening to our discussion.
There is the danger that we will descend into a definitional argument. I'll try not to engage in that, although I must say to define "empire" as you've defined it is to define it out of -- [end of recording Tape 1, Side 2.] --great power. And I'd like to, in the course of my response, explain why that distinction needs to be made, the distinction between actual empire and mere, although, as you say, "colossal" power. Because I think the distinction for the United States has made it, in fact, the most successful, and I won't call it "empire" because I don't believe it is an empire, but the most successful global hegemon, the most successful global power in history.
And I think it's quite astonishing for anyone to look back over the past 60 years, since the second World War and declare the American, whatever you want to call it, a failure because there's no democracy in Haiti, when the task of maintaining the peace of the world through a frightening Cold War, and the task of raising up and, yes, nation-building in the most important countries in the world, both in Europe and Asia,
has been completed with great success and a Cold War that ended peacefully, and I would argue because America was decidedly not imperial and, in fact, more specifically, because the leaders of the Soviet Union knew that the United States was not imperial and that the Soviet Union would, in fact, benefit from surrender, rather than being taken over in classic imperial fashion.
I would venture to say that the British Empire, with regards to these large questions of world peace and world order, and I don't deny all the points that Niall makes in his book about the great contributions of the British Empire to humanity, but on these major questions, and specifically the rise of dangerous adversaries and usurpers of power in Europe, that it was the British Empire that failed miserably again, and again and again and that, by comparison, the challenge the United States faced and succeeded in dealing with in the Soviet Union was perhaps one of the great successes of any nation's foreign policy in history.
I wasn't going to make any of these points, but I felt prodded to do so.
[Laughter.]
MR. KAGAN: Having begun that way, let me just say that the debate between Niall and I on this subject is a complex one. Our disagreement is a complex one. It would be much simpler if you were debating Gore Vidal or Pat Buchanan, but I don't share their views. In fact, I share with you enormous common ground in looking at America's role in the world. I think America does have the critical role to play in maintaining world order, both in its own interests and the interests of humanity. The United States is, and has been for quite some time, the sole pillar upholding a liberal world order that is conducive to the principles we believe in, as well as our own basic interests.
And I am acutely aware of the problems that the United States has had in playing that role, the inconstancy of our foreign policy, the short attention span which has historically been American quality, the inefficiency of the way we've conducted our foreign policy, and I too search for a way to convince, as best I can or to let the American people understand that they have this important role, and they do need to act with greater constancy and greater commitment.
Perhaps it's not so much the American people who need to be told this as the American elites in both politics, and the media, and in academia. And I would also say, in this regard, that we have in common a set of adversaries: those Americans who would shirk this responsibility, deny the existence of this responsibility; those who are, in fact, hostile to American power and suspicious of American influence; those on both left and right, who still cling to a myth about America, it's a myth of an edanic innocence that existed at the founding of the United States, a country that had no interest in foreign involvement, a country that was essentially isolationist.
This myth is perhaps the most popular myth that we have, and it's one that I think leads us to misunderstand ourselves in much the way that Niall talks about, but not in the sense of misunderstanding our imperial role.
I'd like to just do a little American history here because I think it's important both in answering Niall's argument, but also in answering the argument of those who think that America went astray in 1898 or in World War I or in World War II or in the Cold War or most recently in Iraq.
The fact is Americans have an imperial past. In fact, Americans were very enthusiastic imperialists before they became Americans. As members of the British Empire, the leading men and women of the colonies, the leading men of the colonies, were, in fact, advocates of the British Empire. If you go back and read Benjamin Franklin, you will see that he hoped, as did many, a surprising number of British-American colonists hope. that the seat of the empire would eventually move from Great Britain to the American Continent and that in America, on the American Continent would be the head of the British Empire.
So Americans, even Thomas Jefferson, declared his devotion to the British Empire. Americans had no problem with imperialism before the Revolution.
Obviously, the Revolution itself was an anti-imperial act, but if you look at the behavior of the United States in its early years, I would say that the best case for America having been an empire occurs in those years, in the tremendous acquisition of territory, some by purchase, mostly by force or persuasion or blackmail, the Americans moved across the continent in fairly classic imperial fashion. If you want to look for an analogy, it's obviously the Roman Empire, since in general it made those whom it conquered also citizens.
The United States, when it was a slave republic, when it was in fact dominated, to a very large extent, by slave interests, very much acted as an imperial power, since it was the goal of the slave states to expand in imperial fashion so that it might, in fact, enslave other peoples in other territories. And the great phrase which we look back on so fondly or at least some do, of manifest destiny, is, in fact, very much a declaration by the slave-owning part of the nation that the manifest destiny was, in fact, to create a Caribbean, a Western Empire that would be dominated by slavery.
The Civil War was a turning point in American history, and it was a turning point, in part, away from the imperialist idea. I think that historians, traditionally, historians have it entirely upside down, that as the United States moved through the 19th century and into to the 20th century, it became less imperialist, not more imperialist.
The great myth of 1898 is that this was a great imperialist upsurge, and it was not. The acquisition of the Philippines was incidental to what was then believed to be the liberation of Cuba. The men who are commonly called imperialists today were not, in fact, imperialists. What they were were classic Americans believing that the expansion of American power was a good thing for America and for the world, and that is really the essence of American foreign policy.
The irony is that as American imperialism diminished, American power grew, and this I believe is the great source of confusion which I believe Niall has also succumbed to. There is, of course, enormous common ground between a very powerful country and an imperial country. I had this exact same debate, actually, a few years ago with Ron Steel, and I hope it isn't dirty pool to say he made exactly the same case that Niall did, in saying that because America has garrisons overseas, therefore it's an imperial power; because it has influence, therefore it's an imperial power; because it exports its culture, it's an imperial power.
I don't think we have to accept this kind of definition. I think we can tell the difference between a great power, and even the world's greatest power, and a country that seeks to exercise dominion over others, which is what the true definition of empire is.
And I believe that at this point in our history, we can also eschew the labels of Marxism and Leninism, about what imperialism is, that the expansion of the free market is not, in fact, imperialism. I don't think we have to accept that any more. I don't think we have to accept the notions that there is such a thing as cultural imperialism in the world.
I think we can see clearly what imperialism is and what it is not, and America is not an empire, even though it has exercised more influence, in some respects, than any empire has. Yes, it has always been the American tendency to say that anyplace where the United States intervened was soon to be departed. And, yes, this has led to great difficulties and failures, in many cases. But I would suggest that, ultimately, if you look at the great success of American foreign policy, it is precisely because everyone has always known that the United States did not intend to exercise imperial control, that America's rising hegemony in the world was so widely accepted and so little feared.
I think that, in a way, the American people's lack of full comprehension of the power they wield, something I don't welcome, we may nevertheless have to accept the fact that it is a kind of virtue in our foreign policy. What would the world think of a power of our size, of America's size, that had a design, that had an imperial design that was expanding to take control of others for its own purposes. Yes, the United States has expanded and wields enormous power, but the rest of the world knows, even today, that it is not a grasping and ambitious country in the way that past empires have been.
I believe that Niall, and not just Niall, but others, Americans, friends of mine who use the term "empire," are hopeful that by using this term they can get Americans to accept their responsibilities more effectively and understand them.
But in any real sense, does that seem to be plausible? Does anyone think that the American people would rally behind the banner of empire? We don't have a "Rule Britannia" song. We don't have poets singing the praises of American Empire. Where are the poets who sing, I don't know, I have this all written down here, "Did not the painted kings of India greet our queen and lay their scepters at her feet? Her pitying smile accepts their suppliant claim and adds four monarchs to the Christian name."
Where is the American poetry that would be the equivalent of that?
[Laughter.]
MR. KAGAN: The fact is you might as well tell the Americans that they should be the middle kingdom as to tell them that they should be an empire. And if you add to that the effect on the rest of the world of declaring the United States wrongly an empire, I think it would be catastrophic, in addition to being wrong. So that our definitional debate is one thing, and I think your definition of empire is wrong, and I think your understanding of America is wrong. But does it help, would it help to call America an empire? I think that we need to recognize, as I think Niall, perhaps, in his nostalgia fails to recognize, that we are beyond the age of empire, that the American people, and the vast majority of the world's people do not accept empire as the purpose of foreign policy. And this evasion, this effort to find an easy answer to this problem that we face needs to be avoided. The truth is we must continue to engage in the difficult task of constantly arguing the case for why the United States must remain engaged in the world, why it must have more constancy.
We cannot simply declare that we are an empire and therefore it flows mechanically. We must al continue to work to make our fellow Americans understand the important role that the United States has to play. And we also have the task of convincing the rest of the world that America's actions are not purely selfish but are in the interests of many others who share its views.
And so I don't know what you're supposed to say in an Oxford debate about when I don't agree with what you just said, but I don't agree with what he just said.
[Laughter.]
[Applause.]
MR. SIKORSKI: I beg to oppose is the phrase.
[Laughter.]
MR. SIKORSKI: Mr. Ferguson has the right to a brief rebuttal.
MR. FERGUSON: I was thinking, as I was listening to Robert, of a kind of nursery rhyme or preparatory school lesson you could teach that would go like this. "I am a hegemon. You are a power. He is an empire. We are nation-building. You are occupying. They are colonizing."
It seems to me that this is very clearly a semantic question. This is not a question of definition so much as a question of euphemism. Americans, as I've said already, and as Robert has just illustrated, find the "E" word almost entirely impossible to utter, so they use euphemisms: great power, hegemon, unipolarity, leader. America leads. It's hegemonic. It exercises power in a unipolar world. Anything but admit that you are, in fact, an empire.
Robert talks about the Cold War. I'm happy to take up that particular cudgel. The Cold War was, of course, an absolutely archetypal clash between two very evenly matched, very different empires. You don't call one an evil empire if you don't secretly believe you're the good empire.
[Laughter.]
MR. FERGUSON: And what happens after the Cold War? Where are American troops currently being deployed? Precisely in the former colonies of the Soviet Union in very great numbers, in Central Asia, in Eastern Europe. And to cap it all, to round it off as if to prove to the world, lest anyone be in any doubt, what do you finally do? You invade Afghanistan.
[Laughter.]
MR. FERGUSON: Now, there is no surer sign that you are an empire than the invasion of Afghanistan. It's something we tried, it's something the Russians tried, and there you go again, as Ronald Reagan used to say.
[Laughter.]
MR. FERGUSON: If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, ladies and gentlemen, everybody else in the world knows it's a duck. It's only you that deny it.
I think it's important when we discuss these definitional terms, when we seek to extricate ourselves from the labyrinth of euphemism that American academics so self-servingly constructed over the years to use some helpful terminology. British analysts of empire in the 19th century distinguished between direct and indirect rule, between formal and informal empire, and this is a distinction which the United States has much to learn from because, in my view, it is precisely at this point in time that the United States stands at the threshold of a transition from indirect to direct rule, and direct rule is when you have local potentates ruling nominally as sovereigns, but with your political advisers and military advisers in charge.
Direct rule is when you realize they are hopelessly corrupt and useless and have to take over yourselves, and this is the transition that the United States is slowly learning it has to make in certain parts of the world where the local rulers simply can't be relied upon.
So think of this not as--ghastly word--hegemony, think of it as a transition, from the indirect and informal empire of the early age of empire to the mature age of empire, an age of direct and formal rule.
You cannot invade Iraq and occupy Baghdad and pretend you are not an empire. The only way you can achieve this, and I thought Robert's excellent speech illustrated this perfectly, is by protesting the altruism of your intentions, as he did. I quote, "The expansion of American power was good for America and for the world. That's why we're not an empire."
Do you really think the British didn't make exactly this argument throughout the 19th century? The whole characteristic of 19th century British imperialism was its self-proclaimed altruism. The British saw themselves as the bearers of Christianity, commerce and civilization in the words of David Livingston. They saw their manifest destiny as being to extend the benefits of British liberty, economic and legal liberty, to the knighted world.
"We come not as conquerors, but as liberators." I wonder who said that? It does sound awfully familiar, doesn't it? It was General F.S. Maude in March 1917, following the British occupation of Baghdad.
[Laughter.]
MR. FERGUSON: Ladies and gentlemen, it is a distinguishing feature of both the great Anglophone Empires that they insist they are acting in the best interests of the people that they subjugate. It is part of our charm. It is our share of culture.
[Laughter.]
MR. FERGUSON: But the difference is, and Robert is right to point this out, that while the British ultimately came to trumpet the existence of their empire, to write frightful poetry about it, and some of the most pompous music ever composed, America, and this is rather English in itself, prefers self-deprecation. "No, no, no, we're not an empire."
[Laughter.]
MR. FERGUSON: "Please, call me, Hegemon."
[Laughter.]
MR. FERGUSON: Ladies and gentlemen, call it what you like. Call it nation-building, call it hegemony, call it Wal-Mart, as far as I'm concerned, but if you are going to occupy these countries, which are indeed the seabeds of terrorism, where the threat to your country has already taken shape in the past, and will take shape again in the future if you fail, if you are going to undertake these things, call it what you like, but do it right.
Thank you very much.
[Applause.]
MR. SIKORSKI: Mr. Kagan, let's have an even briefer response to the rebuttal before we open the floor.
MR. KAGAN: Well, it only took us a while to get to the silly part of the discussion anyway.
I think the flaw in Niall's argument is there is no purpose discussed really in many of these examples that you talk about. When you talk about the fact, and I know it's a good joke, but when you talk about the invasion of Afghanistan, we haven't really forgotten why the United States invaded Afghanistan, have we?
I think the reason for the American invasion of Afghanistan is somewhat different from the reasons of the British and the Russian invasions of Afghanistan. In fact, in some respects, they may be all the difference. The only similarity may be in our inability to do any better in Afghanistan than the British and the Russians did.
I think these differences are important and not to be laughed away. I think it is important to go and look at Niall Ferguson's own book, which I've read with great pleasure when he points out that as far as the British Empire was concerned, as soon as another people within the empire stood up and demanded their British liberties, the British Empire in that part of the world was gone; the point being that democracy and belief in individual rights is ultimately incompatible with real empire and unsustainable by the people who would carry it out.
And in the places where Britain maintained its empire, again, I recall some wonderful quotations from Niall Ferguson's book, particularly from Edmund Burke discussing the British occupation and colonization of India, where he talked about trodding on the rights of the people and turning India into a desert.
I mean, I agree that Britain talked about commerce, and Christianity and freedom, and this is what Burke argued for, as he sought to pull back the British Empire, but let us not also forget, as I'm sure you don't forget, the fundamentally exploitative purposes of the British Empire in its beginning stages, and frequently in its later stages as well.
I must say I have no desire to replicate that. I think it is the genius of American power and foreign policy and its economic policy that it's been able to follow what I call the Hyman Roth principle. I don't know how well you remember Godfather II.
[Laughter.]
MR. KAGAN: The fact is the United States always made money for its partners. It did not turn countries that it got involved with, intervened with, associated with into deserts; it enriched them.
And when you talk about an empire that quacks, let's talk about quacking. What kind of an empire is it exactly? The strongest empire in the history of the world, that when it undertakes what its leadership and much of the country believes to be an absolutely vital war, in this case in Iraq, it cannot bring around any of its putative subjects in Europe, it cannot bring around Turkey, a dependent country on this great empire if ever there was one, because the Turkish democracy, which the United States has been supporting, decided against support, it cannot bring around Saudi Arabia entirely to support this vital action, what kind of empire--is that a quacking empire? I would think that an empire would do a good bit better in ordering its imperial subjects around.
So unless you want to limit your discussion of empire merely to, in fact, those 14 dependencies, I think the fact is America's relationship, even to the weak nations that it is involved with, is one of continuing voluntary association, and it is precisely that voluntary association, not the fact that America is an empire, that has made, on balance, for a very successful foreign policy.
MR. SIKORSKI: Thank you.
[Applause.]
MR. SIKORSKI: Ladies and gentlemen, please introduce yourself, and please keep your questions or statements very brief.
Sir?
QUESTION: Stanley Kober with the Cato Institute.
On this question of empire hegemon, two things; one Mr Ferguson mentioned. What do you do about the financial constraints? You said that. You said it would be a problem, but you never addressed how you get around that in order for the United States to maintain this role, whatever you call it.
And, second, something very different from when we were in Vietnam now. The opposition to the involvement in Iraq seems to be coming not from the campuses, but from the troops and their families, the soldiers and their families. This is something different. How can you be a hegemon or an empire if the soldiers don't want to play that role?
MR. FERGUSON: Well, I'd love to answer those questions. I'll answer them as swiftly as possible. The financial constraints are not insoluble. They do require radical reform of the Medicare system, and this is something which is going to dominate the political agenda in this country, not just this year, but for years to come.
But all you need to do is to make relatively modest savings to be able to increase the amount of money that the United States spends not just on its military, there's no problem there, but on the nonmilitary aspects of nation-building.
If you look at the effective value of American aid, it is round about a third of the equivalent aid budgets of the European Union states. It's not a lot of money compared with $44 trillion. In fact, it's small beer. It would be easy to lose it in the huge morass of the federal budget.
So relatively modest savings on the bloated domestic programs would allow effective allocation of funds for nation-building. As for the opposition of the troops, there's obviously a problem with discipline in the U.S. Army. You don't hear this from the squaddies in Basra. Put it that way.
MR. KAGAN: Well, I don't know whether it's possible that one can overstate the degree you're hearing it from the American soldiers as well. I don't know what your particular opinion canvas is on the opinions of American soldiers.
I would also say, though, I'm sure if you'd taken a poll of American soldiers serving in World War II, that you wouldn't have found unanimous joy. It's a difficult job. They're in a difficult position, but I don't have any doubt about their willingness to continue doing their job in Iraq.
MR. SIKORSKI: I'll abuse the privilege of the moderator and ask a question myself.
Niall, what do you say to this? Whenever the Americans are asked to go, as in Philippines, as no doubt will happen if Germans ask them to go, they go, which suggests that these are voluntary associations, rather than imperial outposts that have been foisted on by force.
MR. FERGUSON: Well, when they were asked to go to Rwanda, they said, no, with disastrous consequences for Central Africa. They don't always say, yes. The United States is quite selective about--
MR. SIKORSKI: No, I mean, liquidating military bases.
MR. KAGAN: When they're asked to leave.
MR. FERGUSON: Oh, I see what you mean, Radek. I misunderstood your question.
Well, I think the question, really, about the liquidation of military bases is much more often addressed, as far as I can understand it, in practical terms. I mean, there is an enormous problem of overstretch at the moment. There is a proliferation of military bases and, in fact the size of the Armed Services has been declining steeply since the mid 1980s. If they weren't closing some bases down, that would be a problem.
So I'm not sure that this indicates a kind of proof that this is not an empire. The empires exist, and have always existed, on the basis of consent. One of the problems Americans don't understand about empires is that they think they're based exclusively on coercion.
But British power in North America itself had rested on consent until that consent broke down disastrously, unavoidably, in the 1770s. Consent is the key to empire. One cannot hold down islands, hold borders by force. The Romans didn't do it, nor did the British, nor do Americans and that, seems to me, to be the best explanation for the closing down of unpopular bases like the one in the Philippines.
Remember, also, that with an empire, it's perfectly possible to have, I think contrary to distinctions of what's just been said by Robert Kagan, representative government. The British learned their lesson with the disaster of the 1770s and granted responsible government to Canada, to Australia, to New Zealand, to South Africa, and intended to grant it ultimately to India, and in the far distant future to African colonies when they were considered able to make representative government work.
Empire does not necessarily preclude the existence of representative institutions. It has to be based on consent or it won't work.
MR. SIKORSKI: Sir?
QUESTION: My name is [?] from JCIF. I'm still learning English in this country. So I wonder if I could have basic question about English.
My English teacher teaches me that no emperor stands actually without an emperor nor empress. [?] the United States right now is a kind of empire. Who would be the empire's emperor or empress?
Well, emperor and empress is not actually concerned about any other balance of power, Congress or Justice. This is my question. Thank you.
MR. FERGUSON: I'm not sure whether I'm competent to answer this, as I'm still learning American.
[Laughter.]
MR. FERGUSON: But I understand that the term for emperor used in this country is president. When one looks around this wonderful city, built at French suggestion, in the classical style, built of course to symbolize Republican virtue, one has to be reminded that within all great republics are the seeds of empire and that the tribunes can, with only subtle constitutional changes, quite quickly rename themselves emperor. It wasn't only Caesar, but later Napoleon, who did this.
I find it a fascinating question, one that to a British historian is an unfamiliar one. Higher republics can contend with global dominance without succumbing to the temptations of empire. It's a classic question of traditional political theory, and I think when one contemplates the disproportionate power of the military in America's current foreign policy and current global projection, one cannot help but detect at least intimations of a transition from a Republican to an imperial order.
MR. SIKORSKI: Sir, over here. You, sir, in glasses.
QUESTION: Thank you. My name is Sayed Arikh [ph].
Mr. Ferguson, what would be the purpose of this empire, considering, and how much money would you have to spend, if America already spends $4 billion a month in Iraq, to reach the level that you are advocating? How much money would that be?
And to Mr. Kagan, I'd like to ask you how much of a projection of power in Iraq, for instance, must America do to be seen as occupier or indeed as an imperial power in the world?
Thank you.
MR. FERGUSON: Well, it's a little hard to put an exact figure on this, but what one has to learn from the past is that in order to be successful, occupations do require some financial pump priming, and Marshal aid performed that function hugely successfully after the second World War.
What is clearly absent from the current road map for the Middle East is any equivalent allocation of resources for nonmilitary, economic stimulus. Now, my sense would be that a reasonable ballpark would simply be to match the money that's being spent on the military with a serious budget for the economic reconstruction of Iraq. You see, I don't think Iraq is bound to be a basket case. Potentially, this economy should grow very rapidly, not just because it has natural resources, but because the memory of capitalism has not been obliterated. Saddam wasn't in power long enough to do that.
If you go back to the year just before Saddam came to power, per capita GDP in Iraq was about half of per capita GDP in the U.S. It's currently probably more like a twentieth if not less, but this is not an economy to be Liberia. It does, however, need pump priming. It needs the confidence-building effect of some serous money, just as West Germany needed Marshal aid in order to achieve the economic miracle of the 1950s.
It's not money that's going to bankrupt the United States, but I would suggest that tax cuts were not perhaps the most timely thing to initiate simultaneously with two invasions of such very difficult states as Afghanistan and Iraq. Just reverse the tax cuts.
[Laughter.]
MR. SIKORSKI: Mr. Kagan?
MR. KAGAN: And then we can be a successful empire, thank goodness.
Actually, can I just ask a question, Niall, of you directly. Let's say that Iraq was stood up, in an economic and political sense, within let's say 5 or 10 years, would you have the United States remain in any case or leave at that point?
MR. FERGUSON: Well, let's look at the experience of West Germany, Japan and South Korea. Did you leave there?
MR. KAGAN: Well, no, but was it your position the United States should stay in Iraq, regardless of what condition Iraq is in?
And by the way--well, answer that question and--
MR. FERGUSON: That's an invidious question to ask because it seems to fly in the face of practice that the United States has consistently adopted in the most successful states that it's reconstructed in post-conflict situations. And that is to formally declare the occupation over, after between five and seven years, and then leave between 50- and 60,000 troops in place just in case for strategic purposes.
MR. KAGAN: I'm glad you came back to this because this is something that I forgot to mention. Is it your position that the maintenance of American troops in Germany and in Europe, after the successful reconstruction of Germany, was an imperial occupation?
MR. FERGUSON: It was to resist the threat posed to those territories by a rival empire, the Soviet Union.
MR. KAGAN: Was it not a presence that was demanded, requested and begged for, in fact, by the Europeans who were seeking protection?
MR. FERGUSON: From that rival empire. But I can assure you that it was perfectly in the interests of the United States to maintain a presence in Western Europe because the loss of Western Europe to the Soviet Union would have been a strategic disaster of monumental proportions.
MR. KAGAN: I quite agree. But so from your point of view, imperialism has nothing to do with the purpose that one is maintaining an occupation or a presence in another country; it is simply the presence itself that makes something imperial, not the purpose of the presence.
MR. FERGUSON: Of course, there are diverse purposes for military occupation. The purpose of the American Empire, as it presently exists, is to spread free markets, the rule of law to eliminate the mainsprings of terrorism, which are commonly to be found in places where there are tyrannies and civil wars, to impose order in those territories and to pave the way for representative government in those territories, and in this respect, in all of these respects, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the 19th century British imperial project.
The only question is how long you require a military presence in a country to achieve these objectives, and British imperial history shows, if you read my book--
[Laughter.]
MR. FERGUSON: --that the time period varied enormously. And the number of British troops, incidently, stationed abroad about 100 years ago, was roughly the same number as American troops that are presently stationed abroad, and they were stationed in quite unusual and odd places. Many, many more American troops are still based in the United States than wherever based in Britain itself, even if you include Ireland. But you have to station them where you're strategically vulnerable.
The Suez Canal area was an obvious area where Britain had to maintain a military presence. It very quickly wound down its military presence in North America, once it was clear that a policy of appeasement of the United States was going to be pursued more or less indefinitely.
So I think the answer is a pragmatic one, as it always should be. Let's identify our objectives. I tried to sketch them for you there. I assume there are very few people in this room who would disagree with the proposition that we want to see free markets spread to the entire globe, that we want to see the rule of law established, that we want to put an end to civil wars, and we want to put an end to despotism precisely because they support terrorism, the organizations that threaten our security.
My point is that these objectives can only be achieved by what in the past would have been known as empire. The only question it seems to me that's really at issue here is what do you call it? And I leave that entirely to the euphemism mongers.
MR. SIKORSKI: I'll abuse my privilege again on this last point.
[Laughter.]
MR. SIKORSKI: Niall, in your book you argue, I think very convincingly, that the reason why the Americans rose up against Britain was not the taxation because they were, in fact, more lightly taxed than the British back at home, not any of the other depredations, but in fact the feeling that Americans were fed up with being dominated, being treated like subjects from London.
Now, aren't you paying them now a back-handed compliment telling them call yourself empire. And isn't Bob, in fact, right that that would cause so much resentment around the world that it would hasten the demise of the whole project?
MR. FERGUSON: I'd like to clarify something, and it's about the way in which the word "empire" should be used. I'm not a politician; I'm an academic. I can call things by their real names, with more or less, no fear of the consequences because the students will still have to come to the class.
[Laughter.]
MR. FERGUSON: But from a political point of view, of course I'm not advocating an explicit use of the word "empire" by President Bush or anybody else in the administration, and I applaud their ability to disclaim imperial ambitions in all of their public pronouncements. That is precisely the right way to play it. The United States should constantly deny that it's an empire, should consistently promise that its troops will be withdrawn. This seems to me to be almost inherently part of the new American Empire.
The key thing is not to mean these things.
[Laughter.]
MR. FERGUSON: And I think in a gathering like this, we can call things by their real names and understand their true functions, and then leave and revert to the euphemisms to which we've all grown accustomed. But what worries me is the terrible possibility that Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Bush genuinely believe, and Mr. Bremer, genuinely believe that the United States can withdraw from Iraq in the very near future, having held free and fair elections. If they genuinely believe that, then I'm filled with misgivings.
MR. SIKORSKI: Madam over there.
QUESTION: Helga Flores, Heinrich Boell Foundation.
If the U.S. was an empire, why would such an empire go to Kosovo of all places? It seems to me that with your definition of empire, you're missing the point that interests definition has changed or it seems to have changed in the U.S. So I would like to know about that.
MR. FERGUSON: Well, it's perfectly possible to exercise imperial power for, if you like, humanitarian reasons. One answer to your question is that it was necessary for the United States to intervene in the Balkans because the European Empire failed so miserably to exert its rightful role, and proper role, in stabilizing the region. But it seems to me important to recognize the possibility that interventions can be actuated by altruism.
The British Empire regularly intervened militarily beginning in the 1830s, carrying on into the 1850s, against states engaged in the slave trade. It had no strategic interest in doing this whatsoever, but the Royal Navy patrolled the waters off the coat of West Africa and, indeed, on one occasion menaced the State of Brazil with a naval force purely because the great political elites and public had made up their minds that the slave trade and slavery were evil and should be abolished. It was wonderfully fast because for the previous 100 years, they'd been the most active participants in the slave trade in the world.
So empires can be altruistic, they can intervene for humanitarian reasons, but the whole point about it is that they can do it, and the fact that the United States, without sustaining a single casualty, could end the occupation or end the attempted genocide in Kosovo and then bring about indirectly the fall of Slobodan Milosevic. It seems to me rather good proof of its imperial capability, all of this done under Mr. Clinton as well, which is often forgotten Europe, without, I don't remember, much of a United Nations' mandate.
MR. SIKORSKI: Mr. Dale?
QUESTION: Thank you. I'm Reginald Dale of the European Affairs Magazine and the Woodrow Wilson Center.
I was prompted, well, to intervene, and firstly I'll comment about the pompous music which I must say I totally disagree with.
[Laughter.]
QUESTION: But on the other hand, you just referred to the European Empire, and it occurred to me to ask both you and Mr. Kagan, because this is somewhat a subject of his, whether one of the problems in the Atlantic relationship now is because the European Union is having pretensions to becoming an imperial power in its own sense; that is to say, it already is in the economic sense that you mentioned. It's trying to form a common military and security policy, and not perhaps very successfully, but it is extending its influence around the world. It's spending a lot of money, and it certainly has ambitions to project that influence much further.
Are we seeing a potential clash between an existing empire and the rise or the attempted rise of a new one?
MR. FERGUSON: Well, that's a very good question, and I think Charles Cooption [ph] is one of those people who sees a grave threat from the emerging European Union/Empire.
I think, in many ways, the sum truth in what you are driving at, certainly it seems to me that the European Union is using the member states of the European Union even more so, using aid budgets, are using, if you like, "soft" power much more intelligently than the United States at the moment, and one of course must take at least half-seriously talk of creating something more like a credible European defense capability.
My own feeling though is that this is eyewash and nothing will come of it; that in the final analysis, the European Union is not a federal state, it is simply a confederation that's still very powerful, and semi-autonomous, if not autonomous, nation states, and they have shown themselves chronically incapable, and not least in the recent crisis over the Middle East, chronically incapable of speaking with one voice.
So I think the European Empire will never pose a meaningful threat to the United States. That I think is something that only people who have spent too long in political science departments and never been to Brussels could seriously imagine.
[Laughter.]
MR. KAGAN: Well, I agree with that conclusion as far as you as a major competitor. I think that because, in fact, of a mentality that's not only post-imperial, but sort of post-power, that Europe is not going to give itself the capacity to engage in that kind of competition, but I will continue to object to the notion that the mere desire to project influence in the world equates to imperialism. I just think we have begun to drain the word of any plausible meaning.
And in a way this entire discussion reminds me, I believe in the international relations political science field, there was the argument that businesses were in control of American foreign policy, and therefore American foreign policy was always aimed at serving American businesses.
But then it was proven, in so many cases, that the business community opposed whatever America happened to be doing at some point, that they created something, I believe it's called the corporatist synthesis, which was a way of saying, even when America is not acting in the interests of business, it's still really acting in the interests of business.
[Laughter.]
MR. KAGAN: Even when it's not conscious of the fact that it's acting in the interests of business, it's still acting in the interests of business. I must say I find this analysis of imperialism, when the United States is withdrawing its--
[End of Recorded Segment.]
