By Anatol Lieven
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
2003


Originally published in the Financial Times, January 2, 2003

American Empire: The Realities and Consequences
of US Diplomacy
Harvard University Press 2002


Since September 11 2001 and the expansion of US
military power that followed, Americans have
begun to feel more comfortable with the idea of
their country as an empire - something that
previously most would have fervently denied.
Talk of America as the "new Rome" is common on
comment pages. At the same time, Americans have
always been anxious to believe that theirs is a
new kind of empire and uniquely beneficial.
In the words of Elihu Root, secretary of war,
"the American soldier is different from all
other soldiers of all other countries since the
world began. He is the advance guard of liberty
and justice, of law and order and of peace and
happiness". Root was speaking in 1899 but one
could imagine his words in the mouth of George
W. Bush. As a result of this belief in American
exceptionalism and singular benignity, the US
foreign policy and security establishment is not
very good at drawing lessons from the experience
of former empires.

Andrew J. Bacevich, a distinguished former US
officer, addresses this deficiency with striking
success. He debunks the notion that the US has
been historically averse to using armed force to
expand its power and spread its values - with
that power and those values usually seen as
identical.

But empires come in different forms and US power
is exerted not by direct rule but by indirect
influence backed up by military force when
necessary. As Bacevich points out in a chapter
entitled "Gunboats and Gurkhas", this follows
one old imperial tradition. Like America today,
most of the European empires of the past at
least began by trying to run empires on the
cheap.

This was especially true after the rise of mass
democratic politics in 19th- century Europe,
when it became politically impossible to send
conscripts to die in far-off campaigns in places
their families had never heard of. For Bacevich,
America's cruise missiles and stealth bombers
are the contemporary equivalent of 19th-century
gunboats.

The other way of saving money and avoiding
domestic protest is to use not your own troops
but native auxiliaries such as the Gurkhas. As
Bacevich points out, this is essentially the
strategy the US followed in the former
Yugoslavia and in Afghanistan, with the Croatian
forces, the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army and
Afghan Northern Alliance.

The question is whether the US can go on
fighting wars in this way, or will have to
employ its own troops in long-running wars of
conquest and occupation; and, if the latter,
whether the American people will tolerate it.
Beyond this lies a wider question: whether the
US can go on exercising hegemony by indirect
means, or will be inexorably drawn into the
business of direct imperial rule. For up to now,
one of the reasons there has been so little real
opposition to US hegemony in most of the world
is precisely that this hegemony is distant and
indirect.

Crucially, the US has no actual territorial
claims on any other country, though it may
sometimes back secessionist movements. This is
of great importance in deflecting mass
hostility. Of course, radical Islamists detest
even indirect US hegemony; but for the great
majority of Arabs, the really infuriating thing
about the US is its close identification with
Israel, which is in direct occupation of Arab
land and in a position of direct military rule
over an Arab population.

At first sight, it looks probable that the US
can go on running an indirect empire at small
cost in casualties. In fact, thanks to the level
of protection enjoyed by modern US soldiers, a
staggering disproportion has developed between
military casualties and those suffered by
civilians in terrorist attacks. And while such
attacks may in the long run sap the will of the
American people to intervene elsewhere in the
world, for a long time to come they seem more
likely to whip them into demands for revenge.
Nonetheless, two things should be kept in mind.
The first is that while contemporary US warfare
may be cheap in American lives, it is certainly
not cheap in American money. If the US economy
were to suffer a really steep downturn, the Bush
administration's present combination of massive
tax cuts and massive military spending would be
unsustainable.

The other problem is that indirect empires
require client states and, as the British found
in the 19th century, this relationship is
difficult to sustain over time. The demands
placed on the client regime by the imperial
power may be so great that it collapses. The
empire can then either withdraw completely or
step in and rule the country directly. This is
the US dilemma that is slowly germinating in
Afghanistan - and is likely to burst into the
open in the aftermath of a war with Iraq.

The reviewer is a senior associate at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.