The Cost of Empire: Bush must be held accountable
Raymond
President Bush's war policy marks the beginning of the end of
America's era of global dominance.This is the beginning of the end of
America's era of global preponderance. For this,
Bush must be held accountable.
American policymakers should want to avoid the fate but will not be
wise enough to see the consequences of this madman's conduct..
Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep,
And in his simple show he harbors treason.
- William Shakespeare, King Henry the Sixth, Part II
(Suffolk at III, i)
By Christopher Layne
The administration's U-turn decision to ask for United Nations help in
Iraq, and President George W. Bush's request that Congress appropriate
$87 billion to fund the occupation and reconstruction of that country
send a very clear message: the administration's Iraq policy is a
fiasco. And a foreseeable one at that.
U.S. intelligence agencies predicted that American troops occupying
Iraq would not be welcomed as liberators but would be resisted. A pre-
invasion State Department report warned that the administration had
the proverbial snowball's chance of transforming Iraq into a Western-
style democracy (a conclusion reinforced by a recent Zogby poll of
Iraqis that found only 38 percent of Iraqis favor democracy, while 50
percent believe that "democracy is a western way of doing things and
it will not work here"). Similarly, it was obvious that the
administration's go-it-alone hubris, combined with its sledgehammer
diplomacy, would chill Washington's relations with the other major
powers and trigger a worldwide backlash of hostility toward the United
States.
Those-here and abroad-who opposed Washington's reckless march to war
can say we told you so. But that is not the point. More than that, it
is necessary to step back from day-to-day events and place the Iraq
war in the context of its longer-term significance for the United
States. A good place to start is by asking why the administration
embarked on war while ignoring widespread-and accurate-predictions
that even a successful military campaign could lead to postwar
disaster. In other words, what were the administration's war aims?
We know what they were not. Iraq was not an imminent threat to the
security of the Middle East and Persian Gulf. (Did anyone say "weapons
of mass destruction"?) And-the administration's manipulation of public
opinion notwithstanding-Saddam Hussein was not involved in Sept. 11
and was not in bed with al-Qaeda. But, as both U.S. and British
intelligence warned, by going to war with Iraq, the administration has
created a terrorist threat where none existed previously, making the
U.S. less, not more, secure than it would have been had we not invaded
Iraq.
The real reason the administration went to war had nothing to do with
terrorism. Indeed, many of the administration's architects of illusion-
Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle, among others-put
Iraq squarely in their geopolitical crosshairs while they were out of
power during the 1990s. The administration went to war in Iraq to
consolidate America's global hegemony and to extend U.S. dominance to
the Middle East by establishing a permanent military stronghold in
Iraq for the purposes of controlling the Middle Eastern oil spigot
(thereby giving Washington enormous leverage in its relations with
Western Europe and China); allowing Washington to distance itself from
an increasingly unreliable and unstable Saudi Arabia; and using the
shadow of U.S. military power to bring about additional regime changes
in Iran and Syria.
It is fashionable to say that 9/11-and the subsequent war with Iraq-
"changed everything." But this is not true. Before Sept. 11 the
biggest debate among students of international politics and analysts
of U.S. foreign policy was about American hegemony. Re-christened as a
debate about the wisdom of American empire, it still is. The big fault
line in this debate is over which of two theories-yes, academic
theories about international relations really do reflect and influence
real-world policy-about how states can best attain security for
themselves in the competitive arena of world politics is correct.
"Offensive realism" holds that the best way for a state to gain
security is to amass overwhelming power-that is, by becoming a
hegemon. In plain English, being a hegemon means being like Leroy Brown
-badder than old King Kong and meaner than a junkyard dog. A hegemon
can use its power to eliminate rivals-by conquering them, co-opting
them, or intimidating them-and seek to create a congenial world order
that reflects its own ideology, values, and preferences. Since World
War II, offensive realism has undergirded American grand strategy,
although the current administration's policy is offensive realism on
steroids. If the Duchess of Windsor had been an administration
strategist she would have said that the U.S. can never be too rich,
too powerful-or too well-armed or too willing to employ force against
its adversaries.
Hegemony is a superficially appealing grand strategy. After all, if
power counts in international politics-and every realist knows it
counts big time-then it seemingly makes sense for the U.S. to grab as
much power as possible.
Traditional realists like Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, and Walter
Lippman reject the logic of offensive realism because they believe
that when one state becomes too powerful all the others fear for their
security. They respond by building up their own military capabilities
or by forming alliances with others to act as a counterweight against
a hegemon's power (or both). This is what students of international
politics refer to as "balancing." And, indeed, the historical record
pretty conclusively shows that hegemony is a self-defeating grand
strategy, not a winning one. Every hegemonic aspirant in modern
international history-the Hapsburg Empire under Charles V, Spain under
Philip II, France under Louis XIV and Napoleon, and Germany under
Hitler-has been defeated by counter-hegemonic balancing.
American policymakers have come up with a number of (far too) clever
rationales to convince themselves that the U.S. will escape the fate
that invariably befalls hegemons. For example, they claim that the
United States is a different kind of hegemon-a "benign" or
"benevolent" one that is non-threatening because it acts
altruistically in international politics and because others are
attracted to America's "soft power" (its political institutions and
values, and its culture). There is no reason, they say, for others to
balance against the United States. Other proponents of American
hegemony take a different tack: they claim that the United States can
throw its hegemonic weight around as it pleases because its power-
economic, military, and technological-is so overwhelming that it will
be a very long time before other states can even think about balancing
against the U.S.
These are not compelling arguments. In international politics,
benevolent hegemons are like unicorns-there are no such animals.
Hegemons love themselves, but others mistrust and fear them. Others
dread both the over-concentration of geopolitical weight in America's
favor and the purposes for which it may be used. Washington's
(purportedly) benevolent intentions are ephemeral, but the hard fist
of American power is tangible-and others worry that if U.S. intentions
change, they might get smacked. As for the argument that the U.S. is
too mighty to be counter-balanced, history reminds us that things
change fast in international politics. The British found out toward
the end of the 19th century that a seemingly unassailable
international power position can melt away with unexpected rapidity.
Perhaps the proponents of America's imperial ambitions are right and
the U.S. will not suffer the same fate as previous hegemonic powers.
Don't bet on it. The very fact of America's overwhelming power is
bound to produce a geopolitical backlash-which is why it's only a
short step from the celebration of imperial glory to the recessional
of imperial power. Indeed, on its present course, the United States
seems fated to succumb to the "hegemon's temptation." Hegemons have
lots of power and because there is no countervailing force to stop
them, they are tempted to use it repeatedly, and thereby overreach
themselves. Over time, this hegemonic muscle-flexing has a price. The
cumulative costs of fighting -or preparing to fight-guerilla wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, asymmetric conflicts against terrorists (in the
Philippines, possibly in a failed Pakistan, and elsewhere), regional
powers (Iran, North Korea), and rising great powers like China could
erode America's relative power-especially if the U.S. suffers setbacks
in future conflicts, for example in a war with China over Taiwan.
At the end of the day, hegemonic decline results from a combination of
external and internal factors: over-extension abroad (imperial
overstretch) and domestic economic weakness (endless budget and
balance-of- payments deficits). It comes as no surprise that the
imperial overstretch debate of the late 1980s-about the costs of
empire and America's ability to afford them-which was aborted by the
Soviet Union's sudden collapse, has re-emerged with a vengeance. And
there is ample reason to worry about whether the U.S. can sustain the
burdens of hegemony. A recent report commissioned by the U.S. Treasury
Department, but buried by the Bush administration, pointed out the
magnitude of the fiscal crisis confronting the U.S. in funding health
care and pension commitments to the rapidly aging "baby boom"
generation. As Niall Ferguson and Laurence Kotlikoff suggest in an
important article in the Fall 2003 issue of the National Interest, the
looming imperative of achieving fiscal solvency through a combination
of painful tax increases and spending cuts eventually will spur the
realization that America's imperial ambitions are unaffordable. Over
time, America's fiscal troubles will erode its economic power-which is
the foundation of its military might-and, as the relative power gap
between the U.S. and potential new great powers begins to shrink, the
costs and risks of challenging the United States will decrease and the
pay-off for doing so will increase.
American policymakers should want to avoid the fate of hegemons. In
the late 1890s, Great Britain-widely regarded as at the zenith of its
hegemonic power-had its own counterpart to American unilateralism:
splendid isolation. But as speculation grew that the other European
great powers would form a coalition to balance against Britain, London
realized its isolation was far from splendid. As the British military
analyst Spencer Wilkenson said the time, "We have no friends, and no
nation loves us." A recent New York Times article on other nations'
perceptions of the U.S. suggests that it is not much of a leap to
conclude that, because of its hegemonic strategy, the U.S. risks
facing the nightmare scenario depicted by Wilkenson.
The administration, however, is not worried because it believes that
American hegemony is an unchallengeable fact of international life.
But this does not hold up because the rest of the world draws the
opposite conclusion: that the United States is too powerful, and its
hegemony must be resisted. The administration has dug the U.S. into a
deep hole in Iraq and, more worryingly, in terms of its relations with
the rest of the world. So, what is to be done?
Realists have tried to do something. Nearly every major realist
scholar of international politics in the U.S. opposed going to war
with Iraq. No surprise here. During Vietnam, realists like Kennan,
Morgenthau, and Kenneth Waltz were among the first-and most prescient-
in warning that the war would become a quagmire that would undermine,
rather than further, U.S. interests. While understanding the
ineluctable role of power in international politics, realists also
understand that military force is a blunt instrument and that its use
often has unforeseeable consequences. While understanding that
unilateralism is the default strategic option for great powers,
realists also know that, when possible, it is best to work with others
(especially in the real war on terrorism, which cannot be won by the
U.S. without the co-operation of other states). Realists also know
that it is foolish to antagonize other states needlessly or to destroy
institutional frameworks of co-operation through which the U.S. can
work with others to advance its own interests.
Now that the Iraqi debacle has underscored the risks of the
administration's imperial ambitions, a new group called the Coalition
for a Realistic Foreign Policy is organizing to push for a more
prudent U.S. strategy. Composed of leading realist scholars from
academe, think-tank analysts, and mainstream members of the political
establishment, the Coalition is a group that transcends partisan and
ideological divides. It is united by the "desire to turn American
national security policy toward realistic and sustainable measures for
protecting U.S. vital interests in a manner that is consistent with
American values." Perhaps as the 2004 presidential campaign unfolds,
someone like a Howard Dean or a Wesley Clark will recognize the virtue
of reaching across party lines to staff a foreign-policy team
dedicated to reconstructing American foreign policy on a sounder, non-
imperial basis.
One thing is certain: unless the call for the United States to
exercise self-imposed grand-strategic restraint is heeded, the rest of
the world will act to impose that constraint on Washington. If that
happens, the Bush administration will not be remembered for conquering
Baghdad but rather for a policy that shattered the pillars of the
international security framework that the United States established
after World War II, galvanized both hard and soft balancing against
U.S. hegemony, and marked the beginning of the end of America's era of
global preponderance. For this, it must be held accountable. .
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Christopher Layne writes frequently about U.S. foreign policy and is a
member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy