Is America's Empire Doomed?

At least two sets of major threats from without confront the American empire, and critics suggest that these might be capable of undermining or catalyzing the empire's decline. First, some claim that the United States has paid insufficient attention to terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, information warfare, and other such so-called asymmetric threats. Second, other critics cite the political and moral tensions created by the empire's possession of three-quarters of the world gross product for consumption with less than a fifth of the world's population. They also point to what they feel is an inadequate U.S. response to such health crises as the spread of HIV in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere in the third world. These global social problems, the theory goes, stir the moral and political indignation that motivates terrorist groups.

We do not deny these threats and dangers, or the fact that they can cause pain and damage to the United States and its allies. But the salient question is whether these issues present a threat serious enough to cause the decline of the American empire.

Consider the terrorist threat. Al Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were tragic for the approximately three thousand victims and their families--cataclysmic for many of them. For the strategic position of the United States, however, the attacks did only minor damage. Moreover, the U.S. military reaction, carrying the war to Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda and its Taliban sponsor have been decimated with little loss of U.S. military personnel, has reinforced the world's understanding of the immensity and reach of U.S. military power. The campaign certainly reinforced for the Russian and Chinese general staffs the impressions they got from the Persian Gulf War in 1991. An indirect consequence of the 9/11 attacks has therefore been to enhance the image of American power in the world by accenting some of its capabilities.

Additional Qaeda attacks may occur, but they cannot destroy the American empire. Terrorist organizations, even if they acquire and use weapons of mass destruction, can be no more than painful nuisances. They do not even rival ordinary crime or drug trafficking in the United States as problems. They can, however, prompt U.S. leaders to make unwise decisions in pursuing military operations against them, in treatment of American military allies, and in management of both the U.S. and the global economy. The serious threats in the post-9/11 era were also present in the pre-9/11 era.

Terrorism is a tactic and not an enemy. This observation clarifies the dangers of wars against terrorism. The United States, by any legal definition of terrorism, has been among the largest sponsors of terrorist operations since World War ll. It has supported liberation movements in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation and against communist regimes in Central America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. From the American viewpoint, the forces carrying out these operations were "freedom fighters," not terrorists. This elementary point needs repeating because of the vast amount of misleading rhetoric in the United States since 11 September. Al Qaeda is an enemy, and it can be either defeated or reduced to trivial levels of operation. To trumpet terrorism as a worldwide scourge, however, is to confuse the public and misdirect diplomacy. U.S. leaders need to stay focused on specific countries and groups ("nonstate actors" is the misleading new jargon), not on emotionally loaded terms and slogans. So-called terrorist groups will certainly try to exploit weapons of mass destruction, especially biological and nuclear. The spread of technology has never been stopped more than temporarily in the modern world. If terrorists succeed in carrying out an attack with weapons of mass destruction, then the United States and its allies will have to deal with the damage, but such a successful attack would not mean that the attacking group had defeated the United States or even caused strategically significant damage. Only imprudent U.S. reactions to such actions can do that, especially those that could split the United States from its military and political allies, the members of the empire.

Another external source of challenges and uncertainties arises from the very large portion of the world's population living in countries outside the empire, about 83 percent, who consume less than 30 percent of the world gross product. Moral indignation about this inequity will continue to be a major factor in world politics, as it was throughout the Cold War and even earlier. Liberal societies have developed and tried many kinds of welfare transfer programs, private and public, over the past two centuries, all inspired by the broadly shared desire to soften the plight of the impoverished. A critique of the issues involved and the validity of the popular assumptions about global poverty cannot be provided in a few paragraphs, but a few disturbing facts can help us avoid illusions about "what to do and how to do it" in dealing with such vast inequities. In the postwar era, government foreign aid programs were initiated by the United States. Japan, Western Europe, and several other countries soon followed with programs of their own. Churches and religious organizations have a much longer record of missionary work that has continued and expanded. A few secular organizations that provide aid to the world's poor predate World War II, but in the postwar era the number of such nongovernmental organizations has risen rapidly. International organizations within the United Nations, the World Bank, and several regional international banks have also contributed to welfare transfers, but in many of these the aim has been to promote economic development.

For all of the wealth transfers through these many programs, public and private, the record of improving life and economic performance among the 83 percent of people living outside the American empire is poor. Humanitarian aid programs to regions afflicted with wars often have the effect of prolonging conflicts by unintentionally feeding the armies of one or both sides. Economic development aid, the great hope of several American presidents and many American economists, has a disappointing fifty-year record. It has, of course, helped victims of famine and provided shelter to some of the world's poor, but it has not put them on the road to sustainable development. Capital assistance to countries without constitutional orders and governments that provide third-party enforcement cannot sustain economic growth. In fact, it makes matters worse. Moreover, where effective institutions exist, direct economic assistance to governments is seldom needed. Commercial banks and international capital markets readily supply capital.

How will the American empire cope with this morally disturbing reality? Modern liberalism has deeply religious roots in the Protestant Reformation. The same moral impulses that defend the autonomy and inalienable rights of the individual also inspire sympathy for the world's poor and downtrodden masses. The American public has repeatedly refused to sit by while such poverty existed. It has shipped hundreds of billions of dollars of aid in many forms to third world countries since World War II. At the same time, it has also seen very little result for that large transfer of wealth. While the average income level in South Korea, starting at the same level of several sub-Saharan African states, has increased by a factor of twenty-five, income has not appreciably grown in any of those African states. Latin America and Southeast Asia have a better performance record but no promise of reaching first world levels.

The cruel fact is inescapable: aid programs have assuaged the consciences of the publics in wealthy liberal countries, but they have done little or nothing for the world's poor. The major cause of this sad outcome is as evident as the failure of the aid programs itself: indigenous political institutions that stubbornly sustain perverse path dependence. No amount of aid will overcome the capacity of such institutions to squander it. The third world's greatest shortage is not food, clothing, and capital. It is effective government. Effective government would encourage the production of adequate food, clothing, and capital savings. Meeting this shortage has to be among the greatest challenges facing the American empire in the decades ahead. The United States has long tried to cultivate effective government in many countries but with little success except where its military forces have remained for many decades and U.S. officials have effectively imposed liberal institutions on the local society. This expensive method is simply not feasible for such a large part of the world. Moreover, the United States could better help the third world by merely abolishing all of its tariffs than it has with all its economic aid.

Some observers insist that this inequitable distribution of income inspires groups such as Al Qaeda. Perhaps it plays some role, but the causal linkages to poverty turn out, on closer examination, to be tenuous if they exist at all. Vast wealth from oil production did not mitigate radical groups' behavior in the shah's Iran, nor does it dissolve political radicalism in the Arab oil-producing states. Moreover, Osama bin Laden is from one of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest families, and all of the hijackers on 9/11 were from relatively privileged backgrounds. The clash between traditional values and modern ones brought by Western influences and wealth provides a better explanation. While it is tempting to say that if wealth were equitably distributed, anti-Western groups like Al Qaeda would decline and disappear, it is simplistic to believe so. We know well that reactions against modernization are unavoidable, and we know that the political leaders who exploit those reactions often include beneficiaries of that modernization. There is a strong objective case for concluding that it would be wiser to ignore the third world's impoverished masses. The impact, however, both domestically and internationally, on the United States' moral reputation would be unacceptably damaging. But to continue the same old ineffective aid programs is not a promising alternative, either, because their fecklessness, once acknowledged only by a few serious scholars, is ever more widely recognized. This issue has come to embrace more than economic development in the poor regions of the world; now it also includes ecology, demography, globalization, and other such problems. American hegemony does not make such problems easier to solve, but it does make them increasingly unwise for the United States to ignore.