Shouldering empire’s burden

According to the German economist Moritz Julius Bonn, “the United States have been the cradle of modern Anti-Imperialism, and at the same time the founding of a mighty empire.” Those words, written two years after the end of World War II, capture tensions in American policy and public discourse that define the country’s uneasy position in the 21st century.

America’s role as guarantor of global stability raises the question of whether an empire can operate effectively under anti-imperial premises. Unmatched by peer competitors since the Cold War’s end, the United States now faces a very different challenge from disorder along the periphery of the developed world.

Whereas in the 18th century Edward Gibbon could argue that distance and technology provided the West with a security unknown even to the Romans, globalization now projects distant conflicts and grievances into the heart of Europe and the United States.

The debate sparked by this new dynamic has revived interest in empire as a way to analyze the problem of international order and America’s role in solving it.

Niall Ferguson’s “Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire” offers an important contribution to understanding the United States’ role as a global power and the tensions that result from it. Building on earlier studies of international finance and World War I, Mr. Ferguson locates the war on terrorism, including the American campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, within a broad historical framework.

Indeed, as both polemic and analysis, “Colossus” expands upon themes the author raised last year in a book about the British Empire and its lessons for global power. Britain led efforts to police the global commons in the 19th century, stamping out slavery and piracy while joining its European rivals and the United States to impose governmental control over private companies and autonomous tribes whose activities often generated violence.

The decline of the Pax Britannica in the mid-20th century brought a power vacuum that the United States filled as instability threatened American interests, but the Cold War masked the nature of this gradual transition to a Pax Americana.

Globalization, the catch phrase of the 1990s, provided a shorthand description of an American world order defined by the Washington consensus of free markets, rule of law, and representative government.

Mr. Ferguson notes the growing number of calls from writers such as Max Boot and Michael Ignatieff for nation-building as a means to address “failed states” and violations of human rights. The September 11 terrorist attacks made these questions more acute and brought an open debate on whether the United States is an empire.

The phenomenon of failed states and the conflicts they engendered during the 1990s revived interest in liberal imperialism, and the war on terrorism provided a rationale. Like Arnold Toynbee in the 1940s, Mr. Ferguson sees the United States as Britain’s natural heir in exercising benevolent imperial rule, and he urges Americans to underwrite consciously the liberal empire necessary to sustain globalization.

Nonetheless, he poses a fundamental question: Can an empire operate effectively while denying the scale of its responsibilities and trying to avoid long-term commitments of time and money, as required by nation-building? An “empire in denial,” the United States aims to shift or share burdens more than take up new ones and focuses on exit strategies rather than permanence.

History and public culture impose constraints on American power which advocates of empire must address to present an effective case.

Perhaps Mr. Ferguson’s most valuable contribution lies in his efforts to define empire in a historically sophisticated manner. The word “empire” has been used carelessly as a way to describe the post-Cold War system ever since Michael Hardt and Toni Negri introduced it in their eponymous polemic published in 2000, more cited than read. Empire does not mean direct rule or imply the possession of colonies, which carry an association for many Americans with squalor, backwardness, and exploitation.

Mr. Ferguson proposes to use empire as a synonym for hegemony, primacy, or global leadership. He might also have noted other definitions emphasizing sovereign independence from external authority or control over expanses of territory.

Americans in the early republic drew on this usage when they spoke of their country as an empire. The empire most Americans had in mind during the early 19th century — in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, “an empire of liberty” — involved continental expansion and conquest of the frontier. Viewing the 13 colonies as the metropole of a settlement empire across North America provides a different perspective on both American history and imperialism than that which is typically given.

America emerged as a world power in the next century, contingent events shaping the direction it took. Policy-makers either responded to challenges or sought to avoid the need for a response; there was no grand strategy for global mastery.

The Cold War drew the United States more deeply into transforming Germany and Japan than its leaders had intended, and the outcome reflected circumstances rather than predetermined policies.

British weakness and the devastation of Europe created a vacuum that Washington felt compelled to fill for fear of the repercussions. America did not so much claim an imperial role after World War II as find itself saddled with one by the consequences of other decisions. This was largely, in Geir Lundestad’s phrase, an “empire by invitation.”

Mr. Ferguson views the Korean War as a defining point that indicated the limits to American action. Although he claims the United States had the capability and motive to expand the war, thereby achieving total victory and the overthrow of Mao Tse-tung’s regime in China, it lacked the will to do so. Most empires, he adds, would have seized the opportunity, and Douglas MacArthur urged a harder line.

But Harry Truman had a better sense of public opinion and the potential for confrontation with the Soviets, and he easily outmaneuvered MacArthur. Korea showed (John Kennedy’s later rhetoric aside) that Americans would not pay any price or bear any burden.

Even at the height of the Cold War, America lacked a consensus that would support extended conventional wars to contain communism. Only faced with direct provocation where unambiguous rights were at stake, did American public opinion stand ready to fight.

What Mr. Ferguson calls the self-limiting character of the American republic made liberal imperialism a difficult project under the most favorable circumstances, and the end of Cold War rivalry brought even more resistance to foreign commitments. The backlash from Vietnam prompted the Weinberger-Powell doctrine stipulating that the United States avoid foreign intervention without firm public support, overwhelming resources, and a strong prospect of success.

These criteria make liberal intervention difficult and nation-building impossible, but they should be seen as a response to the dilemma Mr. Ferguson articulates. Simply changing the doctrine to facilitate intervention fails to address the broader concerns behind it and risks a reprise of the disappointments brought by Vietnam.

Withdrawal offers no more feasible option than the liberal imperialism that Mr. Ferguson advocates — the challenge is to balance objectives with a realistic appraisal of means. “Colossus” is especially valuable for drawing attention to this point.

Leveraging power through alliances and diplomacy, combined with the judicious direct exercise of power, provides the best solution to sustaining global order. Political skill matters more than resources, and the real test for statesmanship will be how much America can accomplish without bearing the burden alone.

The seriousness of that test cannot be understated. By citing lines from Rudyard Kipling’s elegiac poem “Recessional” that “all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Ninevah and Tyre!” Mr. Ferguson strikes an appropriately cautionary note. He aptly ends with a nod to Gibbon, noting that, for America as with Rome, decline will more likely come from within the frontiers than beyond them.

William Anthony Hay is a historian at Mississippi State University and a fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute.