Empire building

• Last Updated: December 12. 2008 9:30AM UAE / December 12. 2008 5:30AM GMT

A new history of American foreign policy suggests that intervention is in the country’s blood, writes Gabriel Paquette.


From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776
George C. Herring
Oxford University Press
Dh114

“There is not a spot on this habitable globe”, the US Secretary of State John Quincy Adams complained to Britain’s ambassador to the United States in 1821,“that I could affirm you do not claim.” The swift transformation of the United States from a mere cluster of recalcitrant, heterogeneous, inconsequential colonies thinly spread along the Atlantic coast into a geopolitical titan was far from an obvious outcome in the early nineteenth century. Yet the incontestable reality of American hyperpuissance today prods historians to depict the rise and expansion of its global influence as foreordained. Alternate trajectories, timely strokes of political fortune and highly contingent circumstances are easily swept aside or woven discretely into grand narratives of America’s inexorable rise to global primacy.

George Herring’s colossal history of US foreign relations has earned fully-deserved praise for its staggering erudition, lucid prose and brisk style. It offers far more than a litany of long-forgotten diplomats and treaties. Instead, Herring persuasively suggests, the US has been embedded fatefully in international politics since its inception. France and Spain, eager to strike a blow at their increasingly dominant rival Britain, lent massive support to a ragtag group of improbable rebels from 1778, support without which their insurgency would have been suppressed. Foreign affairs are not a sideshow of American history, Herring demonstrates, but one of its chief determinants.

Nevertheless, the publication of From Colony to Superpower is strangely anachronistic, coming at a moment when many political commentators are ushering in a “post-American world”, eulogising the “unipolar moment”, or speculating openly about the relative decline of the US as economically buoyant countries like India and China clamour to assume their proportional share of global leadership’s burdens. Such conjectures seem incontrovertible as two wars sputter along, the US economy reels from a deepening financial crisis, and the National Intelligence Council pessimistically predicts a diminished international stature by 2025.

Is Herring, then, offering an off-key paean to the origins, awesome extent and persistent strength of the American empire, oblivious to the current gloomy realities? Or is From Colony to Superpower, with its detailed description of the durable foundations of American geopolitical power, a useful counterpoint to the alarmist tendency of the new prophets of US decline? Has the international order that the US has constructed been undermined irrevocably by reckless actions both at home and abroad – or is the fashionable talk of the precipitous decline of American power premature and uninformed by history?

Herring harbours no illusions concerning the arrogant self-fashioning of American power, from John Quincy Adams’s allusion to the “benignant sympathy of our example” to Madeleine Albright’s reference to the “indispensable nation”. One of the most refreshing qualities of his book is its demonstration that racial prejudice, cultural chauvinism and unabashed opportunism have shaped US external relations since the republic’s infancy. Herring disabuses his readers of long-entrenched historical myths about America’s supposed pacific age of innocent isolationism before its turn to robust involvement in global affairs. Intervention, not isolation, has been the prevailing tendency in US foreign relations. Indeed, America’s aspiration to intervene beyond its borders has been unconstrained by the actual limits of its authority and resources. The imperial vocation was largely divorced from its military and fiscal capacity. The first decades of the nineteenth-century saw the new nation, racked by internal division and a weak federal government, engage in a vigorous transoceanic campaign to suppress state-sponsored piracy by the “Barbary states” of North Africa. As Napoleon’s armies pillaged Europe, Thomas Jefferson approvingly noted that the “New World [would] fatten on the follies of the Old”, a reference perhaps to the huge swathe of territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Moreover, Herring resists salvaging anything positive from Manifest Destiny — the idea, fashionable in the 1840s and 1850s, that God had willed the U.S.’s expansion across the North American landmass, justifying the extirpation of Amerindians and Mexicans as part of a broader cosmic design. Herring also starkly recounts the often-maleficent role in Latin America played by the US, from the Monroe Doctrine to FDR’s “Good Neighbour” policy to Ronald Reagan’s anti-communist crusade.

Beyond these useful correctives, Herring largely traces the contours of established narratives. This is surprising, since his earlier books have contributed powerfully to rethinking the history of the Vietnam War. So, the Spanish-American War is treated as a harbinger of hemispheric hegemony while settlement of the First World War is seen to have provided the US with an opening to assume a greater role in global affairs, a shift that culminates with its emergence from the carnage of the Second World War as the world’s chief power broker. By 1947, the dean of American diplomats, Henry Stimson, could remark that “foreign affairs are now our most intimate domestic concern”. By 1953, the defence budget would comprise 12 per cent of GNP and 60 per cent of total federal expenditure. The Cold War, along with conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, would make US foreign policy inextricable from domestic affairs. The massive outlay of men and treasure – the Marshall plan, skyrocketing levels of foreign aid to head off the communist threat, the burgeoning national security apparatus, the arms race, the maintenance of thousands of troops at hundreds of military installations worldwide – eliminated any barrier that might have existed previously between foreign and domestic affairs.

In his final chapter, Herring mentions several of the indicators typically associated with the waning of American influence: geopolitical parity due to the emergence of the EU and the rise of Brazil, Russia, India and China; ballooning US government debt held by foreign banks and sovereign wealth funds; the pervasive unfavourable perception of the US abroad. Interestingly, in the preceding chapters, Herring makes no reference to the possibility of overstretch, the fiscal burdens imposed by ubiquitous obligations and the strains these imposed on the US domestic economy and American society.

Coming at the end of a book about the steady, seemingly inexorable ascent of US power, these brief mentions of the possible impending eclipse of America’s superpower status are jarring. It had seemed that all setbacks in Herring’s chronicle were merely temporary; obstacles to US primacy were never insuperable; debts amassed in pursuit of often quixotic strategic designs were never called in by the creditors. The War of 1812, for example, which saw British troops ignominiously burn the newly-constructed capital of Washington to the ground, is portrayed by Herring as an overture to the coalescence of genuine national unity. War with Spain in 1898, taken together with the occupation of the Philippines and Cuba, healed the lingering wounds of the Civil War, providing both Southerners and Northerners with a common cause to rally around. The cumulative social and economic impact of the military-industrial complex is glossed over. The bottom line is that the Cold War was won and the summit of geopolitical power was reached. In From Colony to Superpower, the US seems to have moved from strength to strength. The origins of the present crisis or the seeds of possible decline in the coming decades are concealed from the reader’s view. This is not to say that Herring ignores the sordid episodes of the Cold War, including US involvement in Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile and Angola. These macabre moments are recorded, often in detail. Yet as the narrative hurdles toward its conclusion – the achievement of untrammeled geopolitical superiority – these unsavory chapters are reduced to subplots, mere epiphenomena without long-term consequences.

Is Herring’s book flawed for having failed to anticipate those who now foresee a dramatic downscaling down of America’s global role? Is there a major shift in world power afoot, a translatio imperii, whose slow genesis his book fails to appreciate? While historians have at their disposal a considerable repertoire of metaphors and schemata to describe the rise and fall of global powers, identifying and explaining the causes of underlying imperial decline is notoriously difficult. Historians are routinely forced to resort to imprecise language and rely on remarkably primitive assumptions about the nature of historical change to elucidate staggeringly complex phenomena.

Since the early modern period, it has been accepted that decline is more natural than stability: Machiavelli observed that “since nature has not allowed worldly things to remain still, when they arrive at their final perfection, they have no further to climb and so they have to descend”. Edward Gibbon put the matter more pithily in his 1776 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “all that is human must retrograde if it does not advance”.

Almost all historians of decline consider overextension or overstretch – military, economic, territorial – to be either a precursor or cause of decline. But only a few have recognised that the term “decline” is shorthand for a number of intersecting yet distinct processes which should be disaggregated and analysed individually before any broad conclusion about decline can be reached. So, for example, Gibbon would note that the various phases of Rome’s decline were not conterminous. The loss of liberty, the deterioration of education and learning, the corruption of military discipline, and the decay of agriculture may have overlapped, but they were not causally linked; they occurred unevenly, at different rates, in different centuries, and in different places.

Yet historians have not understood decline solely through the lens of antiquity. Their histories are shaped by the world they inhabit. From the seventeenth until the late twentieth century, the main framework for understanding decline was drawn from contemporary international relations, the idea of a “balance of power”. The rise of one state was thought to presage the decline of others: for example, the global empires created by Spain and Portugal began to decline precisely when they proved unable to repulse the challenge posed by the ascendant maritime powers to the North, the Dutch Republic and Britain in the seventeenth century. So, in a world where a growing number of aspirant states vied for a fixed amount of global power, it was thought that the ascent of these newcomers would precipitate the decline of those states on top.

Will the US suffer such a fate, ceding its primacy as new, more vigorous challengers enter the fray? It seems unlikely. Rarely is the transition from decline to collapse sudden. Nor does it proceed in linear fashion. There are usually intermediate periods of revival and regeneration, during which reforms to reverse the downwards trajectory are pursued. Such efforts tend to turn the process of decline and fall into a rather protracted affair: the Spanish empire, thought to be in decline from the first decades of the seventeenth century, managed to hold on to its overseas dominions for another two centuries, acquiring more territory and extracting more precious natural resources along the way. Britain’s loss of the American colonies in the final decades of the eighteenth century was merely its imperial meridian. An opulent empire in South Asia more than replaced what Britain had relinquished in North America. More than a century later, when this second British Empire appeared enfeebled, having fallen behind a rising Germany, the settlement of the First World War left Britain with more territory under its administration than at any moment in the past.

The point is that decline, whether of a self-proclaimed empire or a great power masquerading as an empire, does not proceed in linear fashion. The process is usually marked by epicycles of decline, revival and fall. Short of the unpredictable consequences of a global war, the existing international pecking order is unlikely to undergo anything but a modest adjustment or a strategic recalibration. Yet domestic calamity or sustained turmoil in an individual state could impact the international hierarchy. As the sixteenth-century political thinker Giovanni Botero astutely remarked, “it rarely happens that external forces ruin a state that has not first been corrupted by internal ones.” It is far from obvious that the global primacy enjoyed by America will prove resilient given the magnitude of the domestic challenges it faces. Yet Herring’s grand narrative makes clear that robust interventionism, not isolationism, is the gold thread running through American history, a sense of world-historical purpose unaffected by the fluctuations of GNP and the ambitions of rivals. Gibbon’s “retrograde” movement may prove to be America’s fate, but its complacent acquiescence to this new role is much less certain.

Gabriel Paquette teaches imperial history at Harvard University.