Straight talk in the NY Times Magazine

New York Times Magazine, December 2, 2001

2011
By NIALL FERGUSON

There is a third trend that has been at work for more than a decade: 
the transition of American global power from informal to formal 
imperialism. 

Since 1945, the United States has largely been content to exercise 
influence around the world indirectly: exercising economic leverage 
through multinational corporations and international agencies like 
the International Monetary Fund and political power through 
''friendly'' indigenous regimes. 

As Britain discovered in the 19th century, however, there are limits 
to what can be achieved by informal imperialism. Revolutions can 
overthrow the puppet rulers. New regimes can default on their debts, 
disrupt trade, go to war with their neighbors -- even sponsor 
terrorism. 

Slowly and rather unreflectively, the United States has been 
responding to crises of this sort by intervening directly in the 
internal affairs of faraway countries. True, it has tended to do so 
behind a veil of multilateralism, acting in the name of the United 
Nations or NATO. But the precedents set in Bosnia and Kosovo are 
crucial. What happened in the 1990's was that those territories 
became a new kind of colony: international protectorates underwritten 
by U.S. military and monetary might. 

Since the United States and Britain went to war against Afghanistan 
-- with the avowed intention of replacing the Taliban regime -- I 
have found myself quoting Rudyard Kipling on ''the White Man's 
Burden,'' particularly those lines (written just over a century ago) 
that enjoined Americans to fight what he called ''the savage wars of 
peace'' while at the same time filling ''full the mouth of Famine.'' 
(Kipling would certainly have grasped the rationale of simultaneously 
dropping cluster bombs and food parcels.) Of course, no one today 
would be so politically incorrect as to call governing Afghanistan 
''the White Man's Burden.'' Even in his messianic speech at the Labor 
Party conference in October, British Prime Minister Tony Blair talked 
innocuously about ''partnership,'' ''the politics of globalization'' 
and ''reordering this world.'' Yet the underlying message of that 
speech was pure Kipling. 

There are good reasons to wonder how readily Americans will assume 
the Victorian burden, of course. The strengths of the U.S. economy 
may not be the strengths of a natural imperial hegemon. The British 
Empire relied on an enormous export of capital and people, but since 
1972 the American economy has been a net importer of capital (to the 
tune of 15 percent of G.D.P. last year), and the United States 
remains the favored destination of immigrants from around the world, 
not a producer of would-be colonial emigrants. Moreover, Britain in 
its heyday was able to draw on a culture of unabashed imperialism 
dating back to the Elizabethan period. The United States -- born in a 
war against the British Empire -- will always be a reluctant ruler of 
other peoples. 

But reluctance isn't the same as renunciation. And the obvious lesson 
the United States can draw from the British experience of formal 
empire is that the world's most successful economy can do a very 
great deal to impose its preferred values on less technologically 
advanced societies. It is nothing short of astonishing that Great 
Britain was able to govern about a quarter of the world's population 
and land surface -- and to control nearly all of its sea lanes -- 
without running up an especially large defense bill (an average of 
just 3 percent of net national product between 1870 and 1913, lower 
for the rest of the 19th century). And today the United States is 
vastly wealthier relative to the rest of the world than Britain ever 
was. In 1913, Britain's share of total world output was a shade over 
8 percent; the equivalent figure for the United States in 1998 was 
just under 22 percent. Nor should anybody pretend that, at least in 
fiscal terms, the cost of expanding the American empire -- even if it 
meant a great many little wars like the one in Afghanistan -- would 
be prohibitive. Last year, American defense spending stood at just 
2.9 percent of G.D.P., compared with an average for the years 1948-98 
of 6.8 percent. 

Full: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/02/magazine/02TENYEARS.html
-- 
Louis Proyect, lnp3@panix.com on 12/02/2001

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