Colossus Read online

  NIALL FERGUSON

  Colossus

  The Rise and Fall of the American Empire

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Introduction

  PART I — RISE

  1. THE LIMITS OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

  2. THE IMPERIALISM OF ANTI-IMPERIALISM

  3. THE CIVILIZATION OF CLASHES 105

  4. SPLENDID MULTILATERALISM

  PART II — FALL?

  5. THE CASE FOR LIBERAL EMPIRE

  6. GOING HOME OR ORGANIZING HYPOCRISY

  7. “IMPIRE”: EUROPE BETWEEN BRUSSELS AND BYZANTIUM

  8. THE CLOSING DOOR

  Conclusion: Looking Homeward

  Statistical Appendix

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  COLOSSUS

  ‘One of the world’s 100 most influential people’ Time Magazine

  ‘A talented controversialist. He brings a wealth of historical knowledge to bear on big questions’ Independent

  ‘In Colossus he turns his formidable powers of analysis toward the “American Empire,” offering a brief history as well as a provocative argument…. it is sure to shake the assumptions of both fans and critics of the American Empire – including those who deny that such a thing even exists’ Max Boot, author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise ofAmerican Power

  ‘Illuminating, entertaining and often contentious’ The Times

  ‘Niall Ferguson takes as a premise that an American empire exists and that the world at large benefits from it. Even those who disagree with his perspective will find Colossus an immensely learned and useful book written with great verve and historical breadth’ William Roger Louis, author of The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951

  ‘Every page of Colossus is provocative. Niall Ferguson poses and puts tentative answers to every question that foreigners ask about America and that Americans ought to ask about themselves’ Ernest May, author of Strange Victory: Hitlers Conquest of France and Imperial Democracy

  ‘Challenging and provocative’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘Niall Ferguson combines a prodigious output with clear, fluent writing and the all-too-rare ability to blend economic analysis with that of politics’ Economist

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Niall Ferguson is Professor of International History at Harvard University, Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild (two volumes), The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire and Colossus. He was also the editor of Virtual History. He lives in Oxfordshire with his wife and three children.

  For John and Diana Herzog

  Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings, as she can. What a colossus shall we be.

  THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1816

  … to me strength is my bane,

  And proves the source of all my miseries;

  So many, and so huge, that each apart

  Would ask a life to wail, but chief of all,

  O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!

  Blind among enemies, O worse than chains,

  Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age!

  MILTON, Samson Agonistes

  Preface to the Paperback Edition

  The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

  RON SUSKIND, quoting a “senior advisor” to President Bush1

  “History,” he said, shrugging, taking his hands out of his pockets, extending his arms, and suggesting with his body language that it was so far off. “We won’t know. We’ll all be dead.”

  BOB WOODWARD, quoting President Bush2

  I set out to write this book in the belief that the role of the United States in the world today could be better understood by comparing it with past empires. I understood well enough that most Americans feel uneasy about applying the word empire to their country, though an influential minority (as the first epigraph above confirms) are not so inhibited. But what I had not fully understood until the first edition of Colossus was published was the precise nature of “imperial denial” as a national condition. It is, I discovered, acceptable among American liberals to say that the United States is an empire—provided that you deplore the fact. It is also permitted to say, when among conservatives, that American power is potentially beneficent—provided that you do not describe it as imperial. What is not allowed is to say that the United States is an empire and that this might not be wholly bad. Colossus set out to do this, and thereby succeeded in antagonizing both conservative and liberal critics. Conservatives repudiated my contention that the United States is and, indeed, has always been an empire. Liberals were dismayed by my suggestion that the American empire might have positive as well as negative attributes.

  As in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, so in the United States today, it seems to be expected “That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive / Is either a little Liberal, / Or else a little Conservative!” But I am afraid this book is neither. Here, in a simplified form, is what it says:

  that the United States has always been, functionally if not self-consciously, an empire;

  that a self-conscious American imperalism might well be preferable to the available alternatives, but

  that financial, human, and cultural constraints make such self-consciousness highly unlikely, and

  that therefore the American empire, in so far as it continues to exist, will remain a somewhat dysfunctional entity.

  The case for an American empire in Colossus is therefore twofold. First, there is the case for its functional existence; second, the case for the potential advantages of a self-conscious American imperalism. By self-conscious imperialism, please note, I have never meant that the United States should unabashedly proclaim itself an empire and its president an emperor; perish the thought. I merely mean that Americans need to recognize the imperial characteristics of their own power today and, if possible, to learn from the achievements and failures of past empires. It is no longer sensible to maintain the fiction that there is something wholly unique about the foreign relations of the United States. The dilemmas faced by America today have more in common with those faced by the later Caesars than with those faced by the Founding Fathers.3

  At the same time, however, the book makes clear the grave perils of being an “empire in denial.” Americans are not wholly oblivious to the imperial role their country plays in the world. But they dislike it. “I think we’re trying to run the business of the world too much,” a Kansas farmer told the British author Timothy Garton Ash in 2003, “… like the Romans used to.”4 To such feelings of unease, American politicians respond with a categorical reassurance. “We’re not an imperial power,” declared President George W. Bush on April 13, 2004, “We’re a liberating power.”5

  Of all the misconceptions that need to be dispelled here, this is perhaps the most obvious: That simply because Americans say they do not “do” empire, there cannot be such a thing as American imperialism. As I write
, American troops are engaged in defending governments forcibly installed by the United States in two distant countries, Afghanistan and Iraq. They are likely to be there for some time to come; even President Bush’s Democratic rival John Kerry implied in the first of last year’s presidential debates that, if he were elected, he would only “begin to draw the troops down in six months.”6 Iraq, however, is only the front line of an American imperium which, like all the great world empires of history, aspires to much more than just military dominance along a vast and variegated strategic frontier.7 Empire also means economic, cultural, and political predominance within (and sometimes also without) that frontier. On November 6, 2003, in his speech to mark the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, President Bush set out a vision of American foreign policy that, for all its Wilsonian language, strongly implied the kind of universal civilizing mission that has been a feature of all the great empires:

  The United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East…. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution…. The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country…. We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom—the freedom we prize—is not for us alone, it is the right and the capacity of all mankind.8

  He restated this messianic credo in his speech to the Republican Party convention last September [2004]:

  The story of America is the story of expanding liberty: an ever-widening circle constantly growing to reach further and include more. Our nation’s founding commitment is still our deepest commitment: In our world, and here at home, we will extend the frontiers of freedom…. We are working to advance liberty in the broader Middle East because freedom will bring a future of hope and the peace we all want…. Freedom is on the march. I believe in the transformational power of liberty: The wisest use of American strength is to advance freedom.9

  Later that month, he used very similar words in the first presidential debate.10

  To the majority of Americans, it would appear, there is no contradiction between the ends of global democratization and the means of American military power. As defined by their president, the democratizing mission of the United States is both altruistic and distinct from the ambitions of past empires, which (so it is generally assumed) aimed to impose their own rule on foreign peoples. The difficulty is that President Bush’s ideal of freedom as a universal desideratum rather closely resembles the Victorian ideal of “civilization.” “Freedom” means, on close inspection, the American model of democracy and capitalism; when Americans speak of “nation building” they actually mean “state replicating,” in the sense that they want to build political and economic institutions that are fundamentally similar, though not identical, to their own.11 They may not aspire to rule, but they do aspire to have others rule themselves in the American way.

  Yet the very act of imposing “freedom” simultaneously subverts it. Just as the Victorians seemed hypocrites when they spread “civilization” with the Maxim gun, so there is something fishy about those who would democratize Fallujah with the Abrams tank. President Bush’s distinction between conquest and liberation would have been entirely familiar to the liberal imperialists of the early 1900s, who likewise saw Britain’s far-flung legions as agents of emancipation (not least in the Middle East during and after World War I). Equally familiar to that earlier generation would have been the impatience of American officials to hand over sovereignty to an Iraqi government sooner rather than later. Indirect rule—which installed nominally independent native rulers while leaving British civilian administrators and military forces in practical control of financial matters and military security—was the preferred model for British colonial expansion in many parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Iraq itself was an example of indirect rule after the Hashemite dynasty was established there in the 1920s. The crucial question today is whether or not the United States has the capabilities, both material and moral, to make a success of its version of indirect rule. The danger lies in the inclination of American politicians, eager to live up to their own emancipatory rhetoric as well as to “bring the boys back home,” to unwind their overseas commitments prematurely—in short, to opt for premature decolonization rather than sustained indirect rule. Unfortunately, history shows that the most violent time in the history of an empire often comes at the moment of its dissolution, precisely because—as soon as it has been announced—the withdrawl of imperial troops unleashes a struggle between rival local elites for control of the indigenous armed forces.

  But is the very concept of empire itself an anachronism? A number of critics have objected that imperialism was a discreet historical phenomenon which reached its apogee in the late nineteenth century and has been defunct since the 1950s. “The Age of Empire is passed,” declared the New York Times as L. Paul Bremer III left Baghdad in June 2004:

  The experience of Iraq has demonstrated … that when America does not disguise its imperial force, when a proconsul leads an “occupying power,” it is liable to find itself in an untenable position quickly enough. There are three reasons: the people being governed do not accept such a form of rule, the rest of the world does not accept it, and Americans themselves do not accept it.12

  As one reviewer of Colossus put it, “nationalism is a much more powerful force now than it was during the heyday of the Victorian era.”13 According to another, the book failed “to come to terms with the tectonic changes wrought by independence movements and ethnic and religious politics in the years since the end of World War II.”14 A favorite argument of journalists is—perhaps not surprisingly—that the power of the modern media makes it impossible for empires to operate as they did in the past, because their misdeeds are so quickly broadcast to an indignant world.

  Such arguments betray a touching naïveté about both the past and the present. First, as I try to argue in the introduction, empire was no temporary condition of the Victorian age. Empires, by contrast, can be traced back as far as recorded history goes; indeed, most history is in fact the history of empires, precisely because empires are so good at recording, replicating, and transmitting their own words and deeds. It is the nation state—an essentially nineteenth-century ideal type which is the historical novelty, and which may yet prove to be the more ephemeral entity. Given the ethnic heterogeneity and restless mobility of mankind, that is scarcely surprising. In fact, many of the most successful nation states of the present started life as empires; what is the modern United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland if not the legatee of an earlier English imperialism? Secondly, it is a Rooseveltian fantasy that in 1945 the age of empire came to an end amid a global springtime of the peoples. On the contrary, the Second World War merely saw the defeat of three would-beempires—German, Japanese, and Italian by an alliance between the old West European empires (principally the British, since the others were so swiftly beaten) and two newer empires—that of the Soviet Union and that of the United States. The Cold War also had the character of a clash of empires. Although the United States ran, for the most part, an “empire by invitation” where its troops were deployed and was elsewhere more of a hegemon (in the sense of an alliance leader) than an empire, the Soviet Union was and remained, until its precipitous decline and fall, a true empire. Moreover, the other great Communist power to emerge from the 1940s, the People’s Republic of China, remains in many respects an empire to this day. Its three most extensive provinces—Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet—were all acquired as a result of Chinese imperial expansion, and China continues to lay claim to Taiwan as well as numerous smaller islands, to say nothing of some territories in Russian Siberia and Kazakhstan.

  Empires, in short, are always with us. Nor is it immediately obvious why th
e modern media should reduce the capacity of an empire to sustain itself. The growth of the popular press did nothing to weaken the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; on the contrary, the mass-circulation newspapers tended to enhance the popular legitimacy of the empire. Anyone who watched how American television networks covered the invasion of Iraq ought to understand that the mass media are not necessarily solvents of imperial power. As for nationalism, it is something of a myth that this was what brought down the old empires of Western Europe. Far more lethal to their longevity were the costs of fighting rival empires—empires that were still more contemptuous of the principle of self-determination.15

  Another common misconception is that there will always be less violence in the absence of an empire than in its presence, and that the United States would therefore make the world a safer place if it brought its troops home from the Middle East. One way to test such arguments is to ask the counterfactual question: Would American foreign policy have been more effective in the past four years—or, if you prefer, would the world be a safer place today—if Afghanistan and Iraq had not been invaded? In the case of Afghanistan, there is little question that what Joseph Nye has called “soft power” would not have sufficed to oust the sponsors of al Qa’eda from their stronghold in Kabul. There would have been no elections in Afghanistan in 2004 had it not been for the hard power of the U.S. military. In the case of Iraq, it is surely better that Saddam Hussein is the prisoner of an interim Iraqi government than still reigning in Baghdad. Open-ended “containment”—which was effectively what the French government argued for in 2003—would, on balance, have been a worse policy. Policing Iraq from the air while periodically firing missiles at suspect installations was costing money without solving the problem posed by Saddam. Keeping U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia indefinitely was not an option. Sanctions may have disarmed Saddam (at the time, of course, we could not be sure) but they were also depriving ordinary Iraqis. In any case, the sanctions regime was on the point of collapse thanks to a systematic campaign by Saddam’s regime to buy votes in the United Nations Security Council—a campaign of systematic corruption that was made easy by the United Nations’ oil-for-food program. In short, the policy of regime change was right; arguably, the principal defect of American policy toward Iraq was that the task had been left undone for twelve years. Those who fret about the doctrine of pre-emption enunciated in President Bush’s National Security Strategy should bear in mind that the overthrow of Saddam was as much post-emption as pre-emption, since Saddam had done nearly all the mischief of which he was capable some time before March 2003.