American Colossus
Is the United States an empire? George W Bush maintains that it has never been one. 'We don't seek empires,' insists US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. 'We're not imperialistic.'
Nonsense, says Niall Ferguson. In his book Colossus: The rise and fall of the American empire (which accompanies the Channel 4 documentary American Colossus), he argues that the US is nothing less than the most powerful empire the world has ever seen.
In this edited extract, Professor Ferguson demonstrates that, in terms of economic resources as well as of military capability, the United States not only resembles but in some respects exceeds the British empire at its height.
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All told, there have been no more than 70 empires in history. If the Times Atlas of World History is to be believed, the American is, by my count, the 68th. (Communist China is the 69th; some would claim that the European Union is the 70th.)
From the Egyptians to Rome
How different is the American empire from previous empires? Like the ancient Egyptian, it erects towering edifices in its heartland, though these house the living rather than the dead. Like the Athenian empire, it has proved itself adept at leading alliances against a rival power. Like the empire of Alexander, it has a staggering geographical range. Like the Chinese empire that arose in the Ch'in era and reached its zenith under the Ming dynasty, it has united the lands and peoples of a vast territory and forged them into a true nation-state.
Like the Roman empire, it has a system of citizenship that is remarkably open: Purple Hearts and US citizenship were conferred simultaneously on a number of the soldiers serving in Iraq last year, just as service in the legions was once a route to becoming a civis romanus. 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. In its relationship with western Europe, too, the United States can sometimes seem like a second Rome, though it seems premature to hail Brussels as the new Byzantium.
Great land empires
The Roman parallel is in danger of becoming something of a cliché. Yet in its capacity for spreading its own language and culture – at once monotheistic and mathematical – the United States also shares features of the Abbasid caliphate erected by the heirs of Muhammad. Though it is often portrayed as the heir – as well as the rebellious product – of the western European empires that arose in the 16th century and persisted until the 20th, in truth the United States has as much, if not more, in common with the great land empires of central and eastern Europe. In the 19th century, the westward sweep of American settlers across the prairies had its mirror image in the eastward sweep of Russian settlers across the steppe.
In practice, its political structures are sometimes more reminiscent of Vienna or Berlin than they are of The Hague, capital of the last great imperial republic, or London, hub of the first Anglophone empire. To those who would still insist on American 'exceptionalism', the historian of empires can only retort: as exceptional as all the other 69 empires.
Rebellious son, despised father
Let us consider more precisely the similarities and differences between this American empire and the British empire, against which the United States at first defined itself, but which it increasingly resembles, as rebellious sons grow to resemble the fathers they once despised.
The relationship between the two Anglophone empires is one of the leitmotifs of Colossus for the simple reason that no other empire in history has come so close to achieving the things that the United States wishes to achieve today. Britain's era of 'liberal empire' – from around the 1850s until the 1930s – stands out as a time when the leading imperial power successfully underwrote economic globalisation by exporting not just its goods, its people and its capital, but also its social and political institutions. The two Anglophone empires have much in common. But they are also profoundly different.
Territory and people
The United States is considered by some historians to be a more effective 'hegemon' than Great Britain. Yet in strictly territorial terms, the latter was far the more impressive empire. At its maximum extent between the world wars, the British empire covered more than 13 million square miles, approximately 23% of the world's land surface. Only a tiny fraction of that was accounted for by the United Kingdom itself: a mere 0.2%.
Today, by contrast, the United States itself accounts for around 6.5% of the world's surface, whereas its 14 formal dependencies – mostly Pacific islands, acquired before the Second World War – amount to a mere 4,140 square miles of territory. Even if the United States had never relinquished the countries it at one time or another occupied in the Caribbean and Latin America between the Spanish–American War and the Second World War, the American empire today would amount to barely one-half of 1% of the world's land surface.
In demographic terms, the formal American empire is even more minuscule. Today the United States and its dependencies together account for barely 5% of the world's population, whereas the British ruled between a fifth and a quarter of humanity at the zenith of their empire.
'Occupying armies'
On the other hand, the United States possesses a great many small areas of territory within notionally sovereign states that serve as bases for its armed services. Before the deployment of troops for the invasion of Iraq, the US military had around 752 military installations in more than 130 countries. Significant numbers of American troops were stationed in 65 of these.
Their locations significantly qualify President Bush's assertion in his speech of 26 February 2003, that 'after defeating enemies [in 1945], we did not leave behind occupying armies.' In the first year of his presidency, around 70,000 US troops were stationed in Germany, and 40,000 in Japan. American troops have been in those countries continuously since 1945. Almost as many (36,500) were in South Korea, where the American presence has been uninterrupted since 1950.
Moreover, new wars have meant new bases, such as Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, acquired during the 1999 war against Yugoslavia, or the Bishkek air base in Kyrgyzstan, an 'asset' picked up during the war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. At the time of writing, about 10,000 American troop are still based in Afghanistan, and it seems certain that a substantial force of 100,000 will have to remain in Iraq for at least the next few years.
Military superiority
Nor should it be forgotten what formidable military technology can be unleashed from these bases. Commentators like to point out that 'the Pentagon's budget is equal to the combined military budgets of the next 12 or 15 nations' and that 'the US accounts for 40-45% of all the defence spending of the world's 189 states.' Such fiscal measures, impressive though they sound, nevertheless understate the lead currently enjoyed by American armed forces.
On land, the United States has 9,000 M1 Abrams tanks. The rest of the world has nothing that can compete. At sea, the United States possesses nine 'supercarrier' battle groups. The rest of the world has none. And in the air, the United States has three different kinds of undetectable stealth aircraft. The rest of the world has none. The United States is also far ahead in the production of 'smart' missiles and pilotless high-altitude 'drones'.
Credible threats
The British empire never enjoyed this kind of military lead over the competition. Granted, there was a time when its network of naval and military bases bore a superficial resemblance to America's today. The number of troops stationed abroad was also roughly the same. The British, too, relished their technological superiority, whether it took the form of the Maxim gun or the Dreadnought.
But their empire never dominated the full spectrum of military capabilities the way the United States does today. Though the Royal Navy ruled the waves, the French and later the Germans – to say nothing of the Americans – were able to build fleets that posed credible threats to that maritime dominance, while the British army was generally much smaller and more widely dispersed than the armies of the continental empires.
Sphere of military influence
If military power is the sine qua non of an empire, then it is hard to imagine how anyone could deny the imperial character of the United States today. Conventional maps of US military deployments understate the extent of America's military reach. A US Defense Department map of the world, which shows the areas of responsibility of the five major regional commands, suggests that America's sphere of military influence is now literally global.
The regional combatant commanders – the 'pro-consuls' of this imperium – have responsibility for swaths of territory beyond the wildest imaginings of their Roman predecessors. USEUCOM extends from the westernmost shore of Greenland to the Bering Strait, from the Arctic Ocean to the Cape of Good Hope, from Iceland to Israel.
Rich enough?
It is, of course, a truth universally acknowledged that large overseas military commitments cannot be sustained without even larger economic resources. Is America rich enough to play the part of Atlas, bearing the weight of the whole world on its shoulders? This was a question posed so frequently in the 1970s and 1980s that it became possible to speak of 'declinism' as a school of thought. According to Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1989), military and fiscal 'overstretch' doomed the United States – like all 'great powers' before it – to lose its position of economic dominance.
For a brief time after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was possible to rejoice that the Soviet Union had succumbed to the overstretch first. The economic travails of Japan, once touted as a future geopolitical contender, added to the sense of national recuperation. While America savoured a period of 'relative ascent' unlike any since the 1920s, when an earlier peace dividend had fuelled an earlier stock market bubble, declinism itself declined.
New rivals
By the end of the 1990s, however, commentators had found new rivals about which to worry. Some feared the European Union. Others looked with apprehension towards China. In his article 'The Lonely Superpower' in the journal Foreign Affairs (March–April 1999), Samuel Huntington, too, saw 'unipolarity' as only a transient phenomenon: as Europe united and China grew richer, so the world would revert to a 'multipolarity' not seen since before the Second World War. In Emmanuel Todd's eyes (as seen in his book of 2002, Après l'Empire: Essai sur la décomposition du système américain), French fears about American 'hyperpower' ignored the reality of an impending decline and fall.
If recent rates of growth of population and output were to continue for another 20 years, America could conceivably be overtaken as the largest economy in the world by China as early as 2018. Yet it is highly unlikely that growth rates in either country will be the same in the next two decades as in the previous two. All we can say with certainty is that, in 2002, American gross domestic product, calculated in international dollars and adjusted on the basis of purchasing power parity, was nearly twice that of China and accounted for just over a fifth (21.4%) of total world output – more than Japanese, German and British shares put together.
That exceeds the highest share of global output ever achieved by Great Britain by a factor of more than two. Indeed, calculated in current US dollars, the American share of the world's gross output was closer to a third (32.3%), double the size of the Chinese and Japanese economies combined. In terms of both production and consumption, the United States is already a vastly wealthier empire than Britain ever was.
The spread of McDonald's
Nor are these the only measures of American dominance. In Britain's imperial heyday, only a handful of corporations could really be described as 'multinational', in the sense of having substantial proportions of their assets and workforce in overseas markets. Today the world economy is dominated by such firms, a substantial number of which – ranging from Exxon Mobil to General Motors, from McDonald's to Coca-Cola, from Microsoft to Time Warner – are American in origin and continue to have their headquarters in the United States.
The recent history of McDonald's provides a vivid example of the way American corporations have expanded overseas in search of new markets, much as the old Hobson–Lenin theory of imperialism would have led one to expect. In 1967, McDonald's opened its first foreign outlets in Canada and Puerto Rico. Twenty years later, it had nearly 10,000 restaurants in 47 countries and territories, and by 1997, no fewer than 23,000 restaurants in over 100 countries. In 1999, for the first time, the company's foreign sales exceeded its American sales. Today there are more than 30,000 McDonald's restaurants in over 120 countries; fewer than half – 12,800 – are in the United States.
Geographical range
Like Donald Rumsfeld, Ronald McDonald needs his map of the world, and it presents a striking alternative geography of American empire. In the words of the company's chief operating officer, 'There are 6.5 billion people on the Earth and only 270 million live in the US … Who else is positioned around the globe to deal with that opportunity?'
Coca-colonisation is a hackneyed catchphrase of the antiglobalisation 'movement', but it conveys a certain truth when one considers the geographical range of the soft drink company's sales: 30% to North America, 24% to Latin America, 22% to Europe and the Middle East, 18% to Asia and 6% to Africa. Significantly, the Real Thing's fastest-growing market is the People's Republic of China.
Unique revolution
The relatively rapid growth of the American economy in the 1980s and 1990s – at a time when the economy of its principal Cold War rival was imploding – explains how the United States has managed to achieve a unique revolution in military affairs while at the same time substantially reducing the share of defence expenditures as a proportion of gross domestic product.
The US Defense Department Green Paper published in March 2003 forecast total expenditure on national defence to remain constant at 3.5% of GDP for at least three years. That should be compared with an average figure during the Cold War of 7%. Given Paul Kennedy's 'formula' that 'if a particular nation is allocating over the long term more than 10% … of GNP to armaments, that is likely to limit its growth rates,' there seems little danger of imminent imperial overstretch.
In short, in terms of economic resources as well as of military capability, the United States not only resembles but in some respects exceeds the last great Anglophone empire.
Niall Ferguson is Herzog Professor of Financial History at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He is also a senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His other books include The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus and Empire: How Britain made the modern world.
