Musings on Empire

I'm going to jump on the bandwagon here and post probably the seventy billionth piece of writing since 2001 on the nature of the American empire. With all the discussion of American hegemony since Sept. 11th, one thing seems to be sort of assumed among most commentators that simply isn't true. The assumption (even from Good Liberals) is that America's preeminent military strength allows it to "conquer" or control the world. More simply, these imperial scholars argue that America could be an empire along the models of Rome or Britain.

This is simply not the case, and, at this point in history, will NEVER be possible.

Say it with me: The Global American Empire will never happen. Now, one could certainly argue that the post-WWII world has been defined by certain American-imperial aspects, and I would agree, especially when we look at American policies in Latin America and Africa. However - and this is the crux of the matter - America lost the ability to actually conquer foreign countries and impose its will sometime before Vietnam. At a guess, I would argue that this occurred in the late 1950s with the economic recovery of Europe and Japan, and the growing alternate Empire of the USSR posing an immense challenge to US power in most areas of the world. Since then, American policy has relied to much on technological superiority and not enough on numbers. We've seen what the inability to put say, a half million troops on the ground in Iraq has led to. America has plenty of power to destroy all comers, but actually maintaining control (which is, after all, the whole point of empire) requires actual boots on the ground.

This is not to say that I think America SHOULD be investing in more men, only that the dreams of empire are impossible without first having several hundred thousand more active duty soldiers. Of course, despite its size (and America's population is still one of the world's largest - #5 I think) America doesn't have nearly the manpower to draw on. US+NATO still doesn't have as many people as India or China, and we've seen how difficult it is to get unity between the US and NATO.

Of course, China and India are still relatively weak powers because of their economic weakness. This will of course change - by the 2020s, both India and China will have economies substantially larger than the US, barring some calamity. China alone can today draw on, in theory, a manpower pool of 208 million, according to the CIA world factbook. The number for India is 172 million. The numbers for theoretical military strength are actually larger than all but the largest nations total populations, so the idea of Asian hegemony in the future doesn't sound so far-fetched, does it?

Fortunately for us, one of the Asian hegemons is already a democracy, and the People's Republic seems to (in fits and starts, and always slowly) be moving in that direction. The rot at the foundation of the Communist Party in China since Tiananmen has fundamentally weakened the party's authority, and the party knows it. There are already "competitive" elections in some parts of China - competitive in the sense that more than one person is allowed to run in the election, though they are all still Communists. The party seems to hope that China can be a Communist Democracy, or something like that. I doubt it, but any move towards openness should be welcomed, especially in light of where China is coming from. A nation with 5000 years of absolute autocratic rule under its belt is not going to be able to make the change to Republic overnight - hell, it's been nearly a century and China still doesn't have it yet.

Of course, this is all a roundabout and long-winded way of saying that US hegemony is on its way out. Whether this happens peacefully or not will be interesting, to say the least.