November 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

The American Century as Imperial Enterprise

Zia Mian gave the keynote address at AFSC New England's Empire is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things conference on October 10, 2003, the first part of which is excerpted below. He is a physicist with Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security http://www.princeton.edu/~globsec/publications/index.shtml and a lecturer at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is a regular contributor to Peacework.

There's a funny thing about naming empires. There was the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire, even the Belgians had an empire. If you haven't read about the Belgian Empire, you should read King Leopold's Ghost about what happens when empire is unleashed in all its ferocity. Those are the kinds of empires that we've grown up with. These are the empires that we read about in history books. They are empires which identify a people and a place as the carriers of that empire.

Yet people seldom, today, refer to the US Empire. The US doesn't like to refer to itself this way. One of the things that's always struck me is that if you go back to the period around World War II, much of what we're seeing now has echoes from that period. In 1941, Henry Luce wrote his famous essay in Life magazine about the American Century. Sixty years later, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) advocates what it calls "American global leadership." The PNAC brings together the likes of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and other key members of the Bush Administration. They claim the next hundred years are ours.

They're claiming not a place, but every place, for the next hundred years, is ours. So, the US empire is both intrinsically global and not actually, necessarily, about occupying territory per se. The implication, of course, is that whether you want it or not, you're all within the boundaries of the American Empire, whether you are in Pakistan or Botswana or Timbuktu. Because you are all living in the Twentieth Century and now the Twenty-first Century. How do you confront a century?

Empire is not just about geography and history, it's about a relationship. A very interesting and important book, Empires, by Michael Doyle, examines empires in comparative perspective. His definition of empire is very clear. Too often, we use a lazy notion of empire. We think of Roman legions, British ships, American troops chasing up and down. Doyle challenges us to go a little deeper. He says, "Empire is a relationship, formal and informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, or by economic, social or cultural dependence."

That's a long, long way from the simple notion of empire, because what it brings out is that there's another side to the imperial relationship. There are those who are willing to collaborate with empire. There are not just economic dependencies in relationships, but social ones and cultural ones. Imperialism, he then goes on, is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire.

It's not just a question of where we are sending troops. Where are we building bases? Where are we fighting wars, but also what are our political relationships? Who is collaborating with the US? How are we getting them to collaborate? What are the exercises of economic, social, and cultural power? How are we generating dependence in these areas? That's part of the dynamic of empire.

Now, if you want to read a little bit and understand a little bit about how the social and the cultural relationships of empire have worked and continue to work, there are few books as significant as Culture and Imperialism by the late Professor Edward Said, who passed away about two weeks ago. By analyzing 19th-century British novels, Said pointed out that underneath all the politeness of society, there is this substructure of domination and exploitation at work. Said reminds us to pay attention to what's there, but not spelled out. This is the architecture of the building. Don't just look at the interior décor.

The National Security Strategy

Now the Bush Administration has embraced imperialism as a policy. I don't think this is a matter of any debate or dispute. If you read their most recent imperial edict, it's called the National Security Strategy of the United States, September, 2002 <www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html>. It starts out by saying, and I quote, "The United States possesses unprecedented and unequaled strength and influence in the world." Unprecedented and unequal. Strength and influence. It draws distinctions between these things that are important. So, in other words, we are capable of being imperialists.

Second, this is a time of opportunity for America. In other words, the US government plans to use its strength and influence to extend imperial control. The third part is the classic imperial rationale. The aim of this strategy, it says, is to help make the world not just safer but better. We're going to make the whole world better. How can you argue with that? What do you say? But all empire builders make the same spurious claim.

Many of the people who are in power in the Bush Administration, were also in King George the First's, I'm sorry, the first President Bush's, administration. You see, it comes easily, when you spend time thinking about empires, to be suddenly struck by the fact that fathers and sons rule one after the other. But they produced in 1992 this infamous document called Defense Planning Guidance 1992 <http://www.pnac.info/blog/archives/000045.html>. It was written for Cheney by Wolfowitz and others at the end of the Cold War to say, OK, what do we do now? We won. What do we do?

Our first objective, it says, is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. The strategy requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region. Cheney and friends are not just talking about dominating the world, they're saying we're not even going to let any power arise that can dominate a region of the world, especially a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. In other words, the route to power is through control of the resources that are in regions. We will not let any power gain control over those resources, even in their own region.

These regions include Western Europe (so much for 50 years of alliance politics), East Asia, the area of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia. The document contains great detail about how to prevent the rise of regional rivals. In the section on the Middle East (Southwest Asia), it says, of course, that the US's overall objective is to remain the predominant power in the region and preserve US and Western access to the oil.

Inconsistencies and Contradictions

One of the regions that's missing from their analysis is Latin America. It's as if it doesn't exist. One reason for its absence is that if there's one region that has already suffered the American empire, it is Central and South America. It's suffered so much that it doesn't even exist as a possibility of a threat, something the US planners need to worry about anymore. Some have speculated that what all this translates into, these grand dreams of the Bush administration, is the Latin Americanization of the world. You can have your countries, you can have your flags, you can have your airlines, but you will be docile. You will not pose a threat, and, when "necessary," we will support a military dictatorship if you get uppity democratically elected governments like Salvador Allende's in Chile or Hugo Chavez's in Venezuela. We'll just integrate your economies into ours so that you will do what we want.

But there are inconsistencies, of course, because in the pursuit of empire, of political collaboration rather than just brute force, you have to work with the people who are in charge in all these other countries. Power often only recognizes power. So what does the US do? It says, well, who's the most powerful institution in these countries? It's usually the military. What does the military want? More guns. So, we'll sell them some. Then the military will be our friends and that's the end of that. They won't want to fight us because we sell them guns.

So it should come as no surprise that consistently now, for over a decade, the US has been overwhelmingly the largest global supplier of weapons to the world. As a single state it is now responsible for over 45% of all the arms sales in the world. That leaves the other 192 countries in the world making up the rest. Now, you'd think selling weapons when you're trying to rule the world was a bad idea. But, empire has contradictions. You want to work with institutions that are powerful, you want a currency that you can deal with them in and so then you sell them guns. Sometimes those guns are turned against you, and you're stuck. Since the US has more weapons, it presumes it will prevail.

Now, I'll conclude by saying that those of us who see ourselves as part of what you might call a constituency of resistance face a dilemma. We are relatively small in number, perhaps relatively better informed, but in a democracy that doesn't seem to matter. There are two options I can see for resistance. One is to say, if we elect a Democrat, at least it won't be this bad. Well, it's true, we hope it won't be this bad, right? And in some ways it may not be as bad. But to do that embraces a set of assumptions about identity and responsibility and power which fails to question the empire itself.

The alternative is much more challenging. We have this beautiful picture of the world in space, where we can't see any boundaries. This requires seeking changes of the same magnitude that the Bush Administration strategists are planning, which is to challenge the order of the nation state in place since the 17th century. They want to do it by saying, there will be America and then there will be everybody else. My solution is to offer, as Edward Said and Noam Chomsky and many others have done for a very long time, a vision of humanity without a claim to a national identity that is tied to a place.

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