Neocon Fantasies of Empire Crushed: the New Global Reality

By Mark Engler, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted April 21, 2009.

Johnson explains, "The purpose of all these bases is ‘force projection,’ or the maintenance of American military hegemony over the rest of the world. They facilitate our ‘policing’ of the globe and are meant to ensure that no other nation, friendly or hostile, can ever challenge us militarily." Since the end of the Cold War, holding such unrivalled power has been a stated cornerstone of U.S. defense policy.

We must now ask: Can such hegemony plausibly be maintained? On the objective level, President Bush made the strains on empire more severe by occupying multiple countries and creating a need for more troops than the military could recruit. Highlighting this dilemma, Kennedy argued in a 2006 interview, "U.S. Army generals would definitely say that America is overstretched.” 

But even more significantly, Bush upped the political and economic costs of empire by engendering ill-will and resistance to the United States throughout the world. A key aspect of imperial overstretch is that it must be measured relatively. It depends not only on objective factors, like the size of the U.S. military, but also on how other international actors choose to respond to America’s foreign policy prerogatives. Ironically, as the neoconservative "imperial globalists" of the Bush administration placed ever more stock in America’s hard power, they only ended up demonstrating its impotence. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has shown itself unable to create stability or suppress insurgency with its might. Like its failure in Vietnam, the fiasco in the Middle East has emboldened opposition. The neocons dreamed of Iraq as a democratic ally and platform for U.S. power in the region. Instead, the country is now a symbol of the superpower’s weakness. 

Democratic resistance also determines the relative limits of empire. Among our allies, the Bush administration’s "with us or against us" attacks on multilateralism diminished the willingness of other powers to shoulder part of the burden of America’s overseas adventures. Members of the international community, disgusted by imperial globalism’s failure to produce real security, increasingly refused to go along. This left a politically isolated United States with the stark and foreboding prospect of policing the world alone — a humbling proposition even to an administration notably lacking in humility.

President Obama may be able to reverse some of the diplomatic damage of the Bush years, but his administration faces problems of its own. Global force projection requires not only a huge amount of political capital; at a most fundamental level it demands financial treasure. Thus, degrees of overstretch must also be gauged relative to economic health—something which is now in short supply. Many would think that America, in the throes of financial crisis, would be destined for imperial bankruptcy. 

The United States, accustomed over the past 15 years to running a large current account deficit, has clearly been living beyond its means. While its bubble economy was expanding, the government relied on foreign investors to pay for its excessive military spending. And on the consumer level, families went into credit card debt and borrowed against the value of their homes to keep consuming. 

It was an unsustainable state of affairs, and most nations would never have been allowed to maintain it. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) would have railed against wanton economic mismanagement and warned creditors not to invest in that country unless the government promised sweeping reforms. Even without the institution’s influence, textbook economics holds that, on seeing such signs of economic weakness, investors would shy away from the country, its currency would fall, consumers would no longer be able to afford as many foreign goods, and the economy would undergo a necessary, if painful, "correction." Financial hardship and declining standards of living would logically prompt a country to scale back pricey involvements abroad.

Now that crisis has struck, it would seem that we are overdue for a tough reckoning with imperial costs. However, the state of the markets is not the only factor in play. Like in the political sphere, the ability of the United States to survive economically as a hegemon depends in large part on whether others decide to support, tolerate, or resist the present order. 

What makes the United States different than other countries? As the world’s political superpower and largest economy, America’s dollars serve as the reserve currency for the rest of the world. Foreign countries keep their money in dollars because they believe they are more dependable than any alternative. As long as other nations are willing to keep pouring money into the dollar, the United States can finance ever-larger deficits. 

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Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via DemocracyUprising.com.

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