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August 17, 2006
In the New York Review of Books John Gray asks in relation to the US as a hegemonic power: 'How can there be imperialism, when there are no imperialists?' It is a reasonable question.
In an another issue of the New York Review of Books Robert Skidelsky comments on the formation of America as empire:
an academic consensus is developing that by its military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, its establishment for the first time of military bases in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and its threat of an attack on Iran, the United States has moved beyond the forms of "primacy," "hegemony," "leadership," or "ascendancy," by which its role has until recently been described, and aspires to reach a new stage in which the term "empire" might apply. The historian Niall Ferguson has called America an "empire in denial"...
Despite America's anti-imperial traditions, and despite the fact that imperialism is delegitimized in public discourse, an imperial reality already dominates US foreign policy. Many neoconservative present a view of the US as the final guarantor of global security---containing terrorism is supposed to be at the core of America's global military deployment. It is an empire with a difference from previous kinds of empire.
There does seem to be some self-deception amongst Americans about empire. According to John Gray, writing in the New York Review of Books Michael Mandelbaum in The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the 21st Century says that:
"The American global role differs dramatically from--indeed is the opposite of--imperial rule, since "it is the United States that pays and the rest of the world that benefits without having to pay." As the only power in a position to supply global public goods, such as the military forces used in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, the US, he writes, acts as the world's government.
Gray comments that Mandelbaum does not deny that America uses its power in its own national interests, but seems to see no possibility of conflict between these interests and those of other countries. Gray then makes a good point:
The invasion and occupation of Iraq may not have produced anything resembling a colonial administration, but it has allowed the expropriation of the country's oil reserves. There are many in Iraq and elsewhere who see regime change as a pretext for securing American control over Iraq's natural resources, and while this may be an oversimplified view it identifies a crucial factor in American policies. America remains critically dependent on the depleting oil reserves of the Gulf at a time when demand is rising inexorably in China and India. Faced with this situation the US has reverted to classical geopolitics. Its forces are in central Asia, in such countries as Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, to secure American interests in the current rerun of the Great Game in which it is in competition with other countries for the region's energy resources. American forces serve the same strategy in the Gulf.
The US as the final guarantor of global security acting to containing terrorism is also acting in terms of its national interest.
Historically the United States has tried to enforce stability in the Middle East because the Washington foreign policy elites and American presidents viewed it as inherently in US interests to do so -- to protect the flow of oil, keep the Soviets out of the region, open markets to Western capital, and keep the Arab-Israeli conflict from getting out of hand. Gray adds that the underlying political reality in the Middle East is pervasive hostility to American power. As a result of its oil dependency America has committed itself to a neo-imperial strategy of military intervention that can only aggravate that enmity.The reason is that the neo-imperial strategy policy was not done for the benefit of the people of the Middle East. It was for US benefit, and, secondarily, for the benefit of the colonized elites who transferred their loyalties -- or at least their services -- to America after the old European colonial powers left the region.
Gray then usefully spells out the limits of the US as an imperial power:
The true beneficiary [of the Cold War] is not America but Asia. The Soviet collapse quickened the pace of globalization, which is enabling China and India to become great powers whose interests may conflict with those of the United States. The era of Western primacy is coming to a close. It is this fact more than any other that precludes the formation of an American Empire and rules out any prospect of the United States being accepted as a de facto world government.
Gray thinks in terms of the dissolution of America's global hegemony as an integral part of the process of globalization. Though the United States will continue to be pivotal, it cannot expect its interests or its values to be accepted as paramount.
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