U.S. military presence around the world in 2007. As of 2013, the U.S. still had many bases and troops stationed globally. Their presence has generated controversy and opposition by some in foreign countries.
More than 1,000 U.S. troops
100–1,000 U.S. troops
Use of military facilities
American imperialism is the term for a policy aimed at
extending the political, economic, and cultural control of the United
States government over areas beyond its boundaries. Depending on the
commentator, it may include military conquest, gunboat diplomacy, unequal treaties, subsidization of preferred factions, economic penetration through private companies followed by intervention when those interests are threatened, or regime change.
The US is generally agreed to have had a policy of formal imperialism in the late 19th century.
The government of the US does not refer to itself as an empire today,
but some commentators refer to it as such, including mainstream Western writers such as Max Boot, Arthur Schlesinger, and Niall Ferguson.
The United States has also been accused of neocolonialism, sometimes defined as a modern form of hegemony that uses economic rather than military power, and sometimes used as a synonym for contemporary imperialism.
History
Overview
Despite periods of peaceful co-existence, wars with Native Americans
resulted in substantial territorial gains for colonists from the United
Kingdom. Wars continued intermittently after independence, and an ethnic cleansing campaign known as Indian removal gained for ethnically European settlers more valuable territory on the eastern side of the continent.
George Washington began a policy of United States non-interventionism which lasted into the 1800s. The United States promulgated the Monroe Doctrine
in 1821, in order to stop further European colonialism and to allow the
American colonies to grow further, but desire for territorial expansion
to the Pacific Ocean was explicit in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. The giant Louisiana Purchase was peaceful, but the Mexican–American War of 1846 resulted in the annexation of 525,000 square miles of Mexican territory. Elements attempted to expand pro-U.S. republics or U.S. states in Mexico and Central America, the most notable being filibuster William Walker's Republic of Baja California
in 1853 and his intervention in Nicaragua in 1855. Senator Sam Houston
of Texas even proposed a resolution in the Senate for the "United States
to declare and maintain an efficient protectorate over the States of
Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and San Salvador."
The idea of U.S. expansion into Mexico and the Caribbean was popular
among politicians of the slave states, and also among some business
tycoons in the Nicarauguan Transit (the semi-overland and main trade
route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans before the Panama
Canal).
President Ulysses S. Grant attempted to Annex the Dominican Republic in 1870, but failed to get the support of the Senate.
Non-interventionism was wholly abandoned with the Spanish–American War, the United States acquired the remaining island colonies of Spain, with President Theodore Roosevelt defending the permanent acquisition of the Philippines. The U.S. policed Latin America under Roosevelt Corollary, and sometimes using the military to favor American commercial interests (such as intervention in the banana republics and the annexation of Hawaii).
Imperialist foreign policy was controversial with the American public,
and domestic opposition allowed Cuban independence, though in the early
20th century the U.S. obtained the Panama Canal Zone
and occupied Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The United States
returned to strong non-interventionist policy after World War I,
including with the Good Neighbor policy
for Latin America. After fighting World War II, it administered many
Pacific islands captured during the fight against Japan. Partly to
prevent the militaries of those countries from growing threateningly
large, and partly to contain the Soviet Union, the United States
promised to defend Germany (which is also part of NATO) and Japan (through the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States and Japan)
which it had formerly defeated in war and which are now independent
democracies. It maintains substantial military bases in both.
The Cold War
reoriented American foreign policy towards opposing communism, and
prevailing U.S. foreign policy embraced its role as a nuclear-armed
global superpower. Though the Truman Doctrine and Reagan Doctrine
framed the mission as protecting free peoples against an undemocratic
system, anti-Soviet foreign policy became coercive and occasionally
covert. United States involvement in regime change included overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran, the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, occupation of Grenada, and interference in various foreign elections. The long and bloody Vietnam War led to widespread criticism of an "arrogance of power" and violations of international law emerging from an "imperial presidency," with Martin Luther King, among others, accusing the US of a new form of colonialism.
Many saw the post-Cold War 1990–91 Gulf War as motivated by U.S. oil interests, though it reversed the hostile invasion of Kuwait. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, questions of imperialism were raised again as the United States invaded Afghanistan (which harbored the attackers) and Iraq (which the U.S. incorrectly claimed had weapons of mass destruction). The invasion led to the collapse of the Ba'athist government and its replacement with the Coalition Provisional Authority. The Iraq War opened the country's oil industry to US firms for the first time in decades and arguably violated international law. Both wars caused immense civilian casualties.
In terms of territorial acquisition, the United States has
integrated with voting rights, all of its acquisitions on the North
American continent, including the non-contiguous Alaska. Hawaii
has also become a state with equal representation to the mainland, but
other island jurisdictions acquired during wartime remain territories,
namely Guam, Puerto Rico, the United States Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands. The remainder of acquired territories have become independent with varying degrees of cooperation, ranging from three freely associated states
which participate in federal government programs in exchange for
military basing rights, to Cuba which severed diplomatic relations
during the Cold War. The United States was a public advocate for
European decolonization after World War II (having started a ten-year independence transition for the Philippines in 1934 with the Tydings–McDuffie Act). Even so, the US desire for an informal system of global primacy in an "American Century" often brought them into conflict with national liberation movements. The United States has now granted citizenship to Native Americans and recognizes some degree of tribal sovereignty.
Indian Wars and Manifest Destiny
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Caricature showing Uncle Sam lecturing four children labelled Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Cuba, in front of children holding books labelled with various U.S. states. A black boy is washing windows, a Native American
sits separate from the class, and a Chinese boy is outside the door.
The caption reads: "School Begins. Uncle Sam (to his new class in
Civilization): Now, children, you've got to learn these lessons whether
you want to or not! But just take a look at the class ahead of you, and
remember that, in a little while, you will feel as glad to be here as
they are!"
Thomas Jefferson, in the 1790s, awaited the fall of the Spanish Empire "until our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by piece". In turn, historian Sidney Lens
notes that "the urge for expansion – at the expense of other peoples –
goes back to the beginnings of the United States itself". Yale historian Paul Kennedy put it, "From the time the first settlers arrived in Virginia from England and started moving westward, this was an imperial nation, a conquering nation." Detailing George Washington's description of the early United States as an "infant empire",
Benjamin Franklin's writing that "the Prince that acquires new
Territory ... removes the Natives to give his own People Room ... may be
properly called [Father] of [his] Nation",
and Thomas Jefferson's statement that the United States "must be viewed
as the nest from which all America, North & South is to be
peopled",
Noam Chomsky said that "the United States is the one country that
exists, as far as I know, and ever has, that was founded as an empire
explicitly".
A national drive for territorial acquisition across the continent was popularized in the 19th century as the ideology of Manifest Destiny. It came to be realized with the Mexican–American War of 1846, which resulted in the annexation of 525,000 square miles of Mexican territory, stretching up to the Pacific coast.
President James Monroe presented his famous doctrine for the western hemisphere
in 1823. Historians have observed that while the Monroe Doctrine
contained a commitment to resist colonialism from Europe, it had some
aggressive implications for American policy, since there were no
limitations on the US's own actions mentioned within it. Scholar Jay
Sexton notes that the tactics used to implement the doctrine were
"modeled after those employed by British imperialists" in their territorial competition with Spain and France. Eminent historian William Appleman Williams dryly described it as "imperial anti-colonialism."
The Indian Wars
against the indigenous population began in the British era. Their
escalation under the federal republic allowed the US to dominate North
America and carve out the 48 continental states.
This is now understood to be an explicitly colonial process, as the
Native American nations were usually recognized as sovereign entities
prior to annexation. Their sovereignty was systematically undermined by
US state policy (usually involving unequal or broken treaties) and white settler-colonialism. The climax of this process was the California genocide.
Filibustering in Central America
In the traditional historiography by historians in the United States and in Latin America, William Walker's filibustering
represented the high tide of antebellum American imperialism. His brief
seizure of Nicaragua in 1855 is typically called a representative
expression of Manifest destiny
with the added factor of trying to expand slavery into Central America.
Historian Michel Gobat, however, presents a strongly revisionist
interpretation. He argues that Walker was invited in by Nicaraguan
liberals who were trying to force economic modernization and political
liberalism. Walker's government comprised those liberals, as well as
Yankee colonizers, and European radicals. Walker even included some
local Catholics as well as indigenous peoples, Cuban revolutionaries,
and local peasants. His coalition was much too complex and diverse to
survive long, but it was not the attempted projection of American power,
concludes Gobat.
New Imperialism and "The White Man's Burden"
This cartoon reflects the view of Judge magazine regarding America's imperial ambitions following a quick victory in the Spanish–American War of 1898. The American flag flies from the Philippines and Hawaii in the Pacific to Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean.
A variety of factors converged during the "New Imperialism" of the late 19th century, when the United States and the other great powers
rapidly expanded their overseas territorial possessions. Some of these
are explained, or used as examples for the various forms of New
Imperialism.
- The prevalence of overt racism, notably John Fiske's conception of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, and Josiah Strong's call to "civilize and Christianize"—all manifestations of a growing Social Darwinism and racism in some schools of American political thought.
- Early in his career, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt was instrumental in preparing the Navy for the Spanish–American War and was an enthusiastic proponent of testing the U.S. military in battle, at one point stating "I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one".
Roosevelt claimed that he rejected imperialism, but he embraced the near-identical doctrine of expansionism. When Rudyard Kipling wrote the imperialist poem "The White Man's Burden"
for Roosevelt, the politician told colleagues that it was "rather poor
poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view." Roosevelt was so committed to dominating Spain's former colonies that he proclaimed his own corollary to the Monroe Doctrine as justification,
although his ambitions extended even further, into the Far East.
Scholars have documented the resemblance and collaboration between US
and British military activities in the Pacific at this time.
Industry and trade are two of the most prevalent motivations of imperialism. American intervention in both Latin America and Hawaii resulted in multiple industrial investments, including the popular industry of Dole
bananas. If the United States was able to annex a territory, in turn
they were granted access to the trade and capital of those territories.
In 1898, Senator Albert Beveridge
proclaimed that an expansion of markets was absolutely necessary,
"American factories are making more than the American people can use;
American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written
our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours."
One of the New York Journal's most infamous cartoons, depicting Philippine–American War General Jacob H. Smith's order "Kill Everyone over Ten," from the front page on May 5, 1902.
American rule of ceded Spanish territory was not uncontested. The Philippine Revolution had begun in August 1896 against Spain, and after the defeat of Spain in the Battle of Manila Bay, began again in earnest, culminating in the Philippine Declaration of Independence and the establishment of the First Philippine Republic. The Philippine–American War ensued, with extensive damage and death, ultimately resulting in the defeat of the Philippine Republic. According to scholars such as Gavan McCormack and E. San Juan, the American counterinsurgency resulted in genocide.
The maximum geographical extension of American direct political and military control happened in the aftermath of World War II, in the period after the surrender and occupations of Germany and Austria in May and later Japan and Korea in September 1945 and before the independence of the Philippines in July 1946.
Stuart Creighton Miller says that the public's sense of innocence about Realpolitik impairs popular recognition of U.S. imperial conduct.
The resistance to actively occupying foreign territory has led to
policies of exerting influence via other means, including governing
other countries via surrogates or puppet regimes, where domestically unpopular governments survive only through U.S. support.
A map of "Greater America" c. 1900, including overseas territories.
The Philippines is sometimes cited as an example. After Philippine
independence, the US continued to direct the country through Central
Intelligence Agency operatives like Edward Lansdale. As Raymond Bonner and other historians note, Lansdale controlled the career of President Ramon Magsaysay,
going so far as to physically beat him when the Philippine leader
attempted to reject a speech the CIA had written for him. American
agents also drugged sitting President Elpidio Quirino and prepared to assassinate Senator Claro Recto. Prominent Filipino historian Roland G. Simbulan has called the CIA "US imperialism's clandestine apparatus in the Philippines".
The U.S. retained dozens of military bases, including a few major
ones. In addition, Philippine independence was qualified by legislation
passed by the U.S. Congress. For example, the Bell Trade Act
provided a mechanism whereby U.S. import quotas might be established on
Philippine articles which "are coming, or are likely to come, into
substantial competition with like articles the product of the United
States". It further required U.S. citizens and corporations be granted
equal access to Philippine minerals, forests, and other natural
resources. In hearings before the Senate Committee on Finance, Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs William L. Clayton
described the law as "clearly inconsistent with the basic foreign
economic policy of this country" and "clearly inconsistent with our
promise to grant the Philippines genuine independence".
Wilsonian intervention
American troops marching in Vladivostok during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, August 1918
When World War I broke out in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson promised American neutrality throughout the war. This promise was broken when the United States entered the war after the Zimmermann Telegram.
This was "a war for empire" to control vast raw materials in Africa and
other colonized areas according to the contemporary historian and civil
rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois. More recently historian Howard Zinn
argues that Wilson entered the war in order to open international
markets to surplus US production. He quotes Wilson's own declaration
that
Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process... the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down.
In a memo to Secretary of State Bryan, the president described his aim as "an open door to the world". Lloyd Gardner notes that Wilson's original avoidance of world war was not motivated by anti-imperialism; his fear was that "white civilization and its domination in the world" were threatened by "the great white nations" destroying each other in endless battle.
Despite President Wilson's official doctrine of moral diplomacy seeking to "make the world safe for democracy", some of his activities at the time can be viewed as imperialism to stop the advance of democracy in countries such as Haiti. The United States invaded Haiti
in July 1915 after having made landfall eight times previously.
American rule in Haiti continued through 1942, but was initiated during
World War I. The historian Mary Renda in her book, Taking Haiti,
talks about the American invasion of Haiti to bring about political
stability through U.S. control. The American government did not believe
Haiti was ready for self-government or democracy, according to Renda. In
order to bring about political stability in Haiti, the United States
secured control and integrated the country into the international
capitalist economy, while preventing Haiti from practicing
self-governance or democracy. While Haiti had been running their own
government for many years before American intervention, the U.S.
government regarded Haiti as unfit for self-rule. In order to convince
the American public of the justice in intervening, the United States
government used paternalist
propaganda, depicting the Haitian political process as uncivilized. The
Haitian government would come to agree to U.S. terms, including
American overseeing of the Haitian economy. This direct supervision of
the Haitian economy would reinforce U.S. propaganda and further entrench
the perception of Haitians being incompetent of self-governance.
In World War I, the US, Britain, and Russia had been allies for seven months, from April 1917 until the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in November. Active distrust surfaced immediately, as even before the October Revolution, British officers had been involved in the Kornilov Affair which sought to crush the Russian anti-war movement and the independent soviets. Nonetheless, once the Bolsheviks took Moscow, the British began talks to try and keep them in the war effort. British diplomat Bruce Lockhart cultivated a relationship with several Soviet officials, including Leon Trotsky, and the latter approved the initial Allied military mission to secure the Eastern Front, which was collapsing in the revolutionary upheaval. Ultimately, Soviet head of state V.I. Lenin decided the Bolsheviks would settle peacefully with the Central Powers at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. This separate peace led to Allied disdain for the Soviets, since it left the Western Allies to fight Germany without a strong Eastern partner. The British SIS, supported by US diplomat Dewitt C. Poole, sponsored an attempted coup in Moscow involving Bruce Lockhart and Sidney Reilly, which involved an attempted assassination of Lenin. The Bolsheviks proceeded to shut down the British and US embassies.
Tensions between Russia (including its allies) and the West
turned intensely ideological. Horrified by mass executions of White
forces, land expropriations, and widespread repression, the Allied
military expedition now assisted the anti-Bolshevik Whites in the Russian Civil War, with the US covertly giving support to the terroristic and antisemitic General Alexander Kolchak. Over 30,000 Western troops were deployed in Russia overall.
This was the first event which made Russian–American relations a matter
of major, long-term concern to the leaders in each country. Some
historians, including William Appleman Williams and Ronald Powaski, trace the origins of the Cold War to this conflict.
Wilson launched seven armed interventions, more than any other president. Looking back on the Wilson era, General Smedley Darlington Butler,
a leader of the Haiti expedition and the highest-decorated Marine of
that time, considered virtually all of the operations to have been
economically motivated. In a 1933 speech he said:
I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it...I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street ... Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
The Grand Area
Although the United States was the last major belligerent to join World War II, it began planning for the postwar world from the conflict’s outset. This postwar vision originated in the Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR), an economic elite-led organization that became integrated into
the government leadership. CFR’s War and Peace Studies group offered its
services to the State Department in 1939 and a secret partnership for
post-war planning developed. CFR leaders Hamilton Fish Armstrong and Walter H. Mallory saw World War II as a “grand opportunity” for the US to emerge as “the premier power in the world.”
This vision of empire assumed the necessity of the US to “police
the world” in the aftermath of the war. This was not done primarily out
of altruism, but out of economic interest. Isaiah Bowman, a key liason between the CFR and the State Department, proposed an “American economic Lebensraum.” This built upon the ideas of Time-Life publisher Henry Luce, who, in his “American Century”
essay wrote that: “Tyrannies may require a large amount of living space
[but] freedom requires and will require far greater living space than
Tyranny.” According to Bowman’s biographer, Neil Smith:
Better than the American Century or the Pax Americana, the notion of an American Lebensraum captures the specific and global historical geography of US ascension to power. After World War II, global power would no longer be measured in terms of colonized land or power over territory. Rather, global power was measured in directly economic terms. Trade and markets now figured as the economic nexuses of global power, a shift confirmed in the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, which not only inaugurated an international currency system but also established two central banking institutions—the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—to oversee the global economy. These represented the first planks of the economic infrastructure of the postwar American Lebensraum.
In an October 1940 report to Franklin Roosevelt, Bowman wrote that
“the US government is interested in any solution anywhere in the world
that affects American trade. In a wide sense, commerce is the mother of
all wars.” In 1942 this economic globalism was articulated as the “Grand
Area” concept in secret documents. The US would have to have control
over the “Western Hemisphere, Continental Europe and Mediterranean Basin
(excluding Russia), the Pacific Area and the Far East, and the British Empire
(excluding Canada).” The Grand Area encompassed all known major
oil-bearing areas outside the Soviet Union, largely at the behest of
corporate partners like the Foreign Oil Committee and the Petroleum
Industry War Council.
The US thus avoided overt territorial acquisition, like that of the
British and French empires, as being too costly, choosing the cheaper
option of forcing countries to open their door to American capitalism.
American exceptionalism
On the cover of Puck published on April 6, 1901, in the wake of gainful victory in the Spanish–American War, Columbia—the National personification of the U.S.—preens herself with an Easter bonnet in the form of a warship bearing the words "World Power" and the word "Expansion" on the smoke coming out of its stack.
American exceptionalism is the notion that the United States occupies a special niche among the nations of the world in terms of its national credo, historical evolution, and political and religious institutions and origins.
Philosopher Douglas Kellner traces the identification of American exceptionalism as a distinct phenomenon back to 19th century French observer Alexis de Tocqueville, who concluded by agreeing that the U.S., uniquely, was "proceeding along a path to which no limit can be perceived".
President Donald Trump has once said that he does not "like the term" American exceptionalism
because he thinks it is "insulting the world". He told tea party
activists in Texas that "If you're German, or you're from Japan, or
you're from China, you don't want to have people saying that."
As a Monthly Review editorial opines on the phenomenon, "in Britain, empire was justified as a benevolent 'white man's burden'.
And in the United States, empire does not even exist; 'we' are merely
protecting the causes of freedom, democracy and justice worldwide."
Views of American imperialism
1903 cartoon, "Go Away, Little Man, and Don't Bother Me", depicts President Roosevelt intimidating Colombia to acquire the Panama Canal Zone
Journalist Ashley Smith divides theories of the U.S. imperialism into
5 broad categories: (1) "liberal" theories, (2) "social-democratic"
theories, (3) "Leninist" theories, (4) theories of "super-imperialism", and (5) "Hardt-and-Negri" theories.
There is also a conservative, anti-interventionist view as expressed by American journalist John T. Flynn:
The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.
In 1899, Uncle Sam balances his new possessions which are depicted as savage children. The figures are Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba, Philippines and "Ladrone Island" (Guam, largest of the Mariana Islands, which were formerly known as the Ladrones Islands).
A "social-democratic"
theory says that imperialistic U.S. policies are the products of the
excessive influence of certain sectors of U.S. business and
government—the arms industry
in alliance with military and political bureaucracies and sometimes
other industries such as oil and finance, a combination often referred
to as the "military–industrial complex". The complex is said to benefit from war profiteering and the looting of natural resources, often at the expense of the public interest. The proposed solution is typically unceasing popular vigilance in order to apply counter-pressure. Chalmers Johnson holds a version of this view.
Alfred Thayer Mahan, who served as an officer in the U.S. Navy during the late 19th century, supported the notion of American imperialism in his 1890 book titled The Influence of Sea Power upon History.
Mahan argued that modern industrial nations must secure foreign markets
for the purpose of exchanging goods and, consequently, they must
maintain a maritime force that is capable of protecting these trade routes.
A theory of "super-imperialism" argues that imperialistic U.S.
policies are not driven solely by the interests of American businesses,
but also by the interests of a larger apparatus of a global alliance
among the economic elite in developed countries. The argument asserts
that capitalism in the Global North
(Europe, the U.S., Japan, among others) has become too entangled to
permit military or geopolitical conflict between these countries, and
the central conflict in modern imperialism is between the Global North
(also referred to as the global core) and the Global South (also referred to as the global periphery) rather than between the imperialist powers.
Empire
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Ceremonies during the annexation of the Republic of Hawaii, 1898
Following the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001,
the idea of American imperialism was reexamined. In November 2001,
jubilant marines hoisted an American flag over Kandahar and in a stage
display referred to the moment as the third after those on San Juan Hill and Iwo Jima. All moments, writes Neil Smith, express US global ambition. "Labelled a war on terrorism, the new war represents an unprecedented quickening of the American Empire, a third chance at global power."
On October 15, the cover of William Kristol's Weekly Standard carried the headline, "The Case for American Empire". Rich Lowry, editor in chief of the National Review, called for "a kind of low-grade colonialism" to topple dangerous regimes beyond Afghanistan. The columnist Charles Krauthammer
declared that, given complete U.S. domination "culturally,
economically, technologically and militarily", people were "now coming
out of the closet on the word 'empire'". The New York Times
Sunday magazine cover for January 5, 2003, read "American Empire: Get
Used To It". The phrase "American empire" appeared more than 1000 times
in news stories during November 2002 – April 2003. Two Harvard Historians and their French colleague observed:
Since September 11, 2001 ... if not earlier, the idea of American empire is back ... Now ... for the first time since the early Twentieth century, it has become acceptable to ask whether the United States has become or is becoming an empire in some classic sense."
It used to be that only the critics of American foreign policy referred to the American empire ... In the past three or four years [2001–2004], however, a growing number of commentators have begun to use the term American empire less pejoratively, if still ambivalently, and in some cases with genuine enthusiasm.
US historians have generally considered the late 19th century imperialist urge as an aberration in an otherwise smooth democratic trajectory ... Yet a century later, as the US empire engages in a new period of global expansion, Rome is once more a distant but essential mirror for American elites ... Now, with military mobilisation on an exceptional scale after September 2001, the United States is openly affirming and parading its imperial power. For the first time since the 1890s, the naked display of force is backed by explicitly imperialist discourse.
In the book "Empire", Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that "the decline of Empire has begun". Hardt says the Iraq War is a classically imperialist war, and is the last gasp of a doomed strategy.
They expand on this, claiming that in the new era of imperialism, the
classical imperialists retain a colonizing power of sorts, but the
strategy shifts from military occupation of economies based on physical
goods to a networked biopower based on an informational and affective economies. They go on to say that the U.S. is central to the development of this new regime of international power and sovereignty,
termed "Empire", but that it is decentralized and global, and not ruled
by one sovereign state: "the United States does indeed occupy a
privileged position in Empire, but this privilege derives not from its
similarities to the old European imperialist powers, but from its
differences". Hardt and Negri draw on the theories of Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze and Italian autonomist Marxists.
A U.S. soldier stands guard duty near a burning oil well in the Rumaila oil field, Iraq, April 2003
Geographer David Harvey says there has emerged a new type of imperialism due to geographical distinctions as well as unequal rates of development. He says there has emerged three new global economic and political blocs: the United States, the European Union and Asia centered on China and Russia. He says there are tensions between the three major blocs over resources and economic power, citing the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the motive of which, he argues, was to prevent rival blocs from controlling oil.
Furthermore, Harvey argues that there can arise conflict within the
major blocs between business interests and the politicians due to their
sometimes incongruent economic interests. Politicians live in geographically fixed locations and are, in the U.S. and Europe,
accountable to an electorate. The 'new' imperialism, then, has led to
an alignment of the interests of capitalists and politicians in order to
prevent the rise and expansion of possible economic and political
rivals from challenging America's dominance.
Classics professor and war historian Victor Davis Hanson
dismisses the notion of an American Empire altogether, with a mocking
comparison to historical empires: "We do not send out proconsuls to
reside over client states, which in turn impose taxes on coerced
subjects to pay for the legions. Instead, American bases are predicated
on contractual obligations — costly to us and profitable to their hosts.
We do not see any profits in Korea, but instead accept the risk of
losing almost 40,000 of our youth to ensure that Kias can flood our
shores and that shaggy students can protest outside our embassy in
Seoul."
The existence of "proconsuls", however, has been recognized by many since the early Cold War. In 1957, French Historian Amaury de Riencourt associated the American "proconsul" with "the Roman of our time". Expert on recent American history, Arthur M. Schlesinger
detected several contemporary imperial features, including
"proconsuls": Washington does not directly run many parts of the world.
Rather, its "informal empire" was one "richly equipped with imperial
paraphernalia: troops, ships, planes, bases, proconsuls, local
collaborators, all spread wide around the luckless planet." "The Supreme Allied Commander,
always an American, was an appropriate title for the American proconsul
whose reputation and influence outweighed those of European premiers,
presidents, and chancellors."
US "combatant commanders ... have served as its proconsuls. Their
standing in their regions has usually dwarfed that of ambassadors and
assistant secretaries of state." Harvard Historian Niall Ferguson calls the regional combatant commanders, among whom the whole globe is divided, the "pro-consuls" of this "imperium". Günter Bischof
calls them "the all powerful proconsuls of the new American empire.
Like the proconsuls of Rome they were supposed to bring order and law to
the unruly and anarchical world". In September 2000, Washington Post reporter Dana Priest
published a series of articles whose central premise was Combatant
Commanders' inordinate amount of political influence within the
countries in their areas of responsibility. They "had evolved into the
modern-day equivalent of the Roman Empire's proconsuls—well-funded,
semi-autonomous, unconventional centers of US foreign policy".
The Romans often preferred to exercise power through friendly client
regimes, rather than direct rule: "until Jay Garner and L. Paul Bremer
became US proconsuls in Baghdad, that was the American method too".
Another distinction of Victor Davis Hanson—that
US bases, contrary to the legions, are costly to America and profitable
for their hosts—expresses the American view. The hosts express a
diametrically opposite view. Japan pays for 25,000 Japanese working on
US bases. 20% of those workers provide entertainment: a list drawn up by
the Japanese Ministry of Defense included 76 bartenders, 48 vending
machine personnel, 47 golf course maintenance personnel, 25 club
managers, 20 commercial artists, 9 leisure-boat operators, 6 theater
directors, 5 cake decorators, 4 bowling alley clerks, 3 tour guides and 1
animal caretaker. Shu Watanabe of the Democratic Party of Japan asks: "Why does Japan need to pay the costs for US service members' entertainment on their holidays?" One research on host nations support concludes:
A convoy of U.S. soldiers during the American-led intervention in the Syrian Civil War, December 2018
At an alliance-level analysis, case studies of South Korea and Japan present that the necessity of the alliance relationship with the US and their relative capabilities to achieve security purposes lead them to increase the size of direct economic investment to support the US forces stationed in their territories, as well as to facilitate the US global defense posture. In addition, these two countries have increased their political and economic contribution to the US-led military operations beyond the geographic scope of the alliance in the post-Cold War period ... Behavioral changes among the US allies in response to demands for sharing alliance burdens directly indicate the changed nature of unipolar alliances. In order to maintain its power preponderance and primacy, the unipole has imposed greater pressure on its allies to devote much of their resources and energy to contributing to its global defense posture ... [It] is expected that the systemic properties of unipolarity–non-structural threat and a power preponderance of the unipole–gradually increase the political and economic burdens of the allies in need of maintaining alliance relationships with the unipole.
In fact, increasing the "economic burdens of the allies" is one of the major priorities of President Donald Trump.
Classicist Eric Adler notes that Hanson earlier had written about the
decline of the classical studies in the United States and insufficient
attention devoted to the classical experience. "When writing about
American foreign policy for a lay audience, however, Hanson himself
chose to castigate Roman imperialism in order to portray the modern
United States as different from—and superior to—the Roman state."
As a supporter of a hawkish unilateral American foreign policy,
Hanson's "distinctly negative view of Roman imperialism is particularly
noteworthy, since it demonstrates the importance a contemporary
supporter of a hawkish American foreign policy places on criticizing
Rome".
U.S. foreign policy debate
Map of the United States and directly-controlled territories at its greatest extent from 1898–1902, after the Spanish–American War
1898 political cartoon: "Ten Thousand Miles From Tip to Tip" meaning the extension of U.S. domination (symbolized by a bald eagle) from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. The cartoon contrasts this with a map of the smaller United States 100 years earlier in 1798.
Annexation
is a crucial instrument in the expansion of a nation, due to the fact
that once a territory is annexed it must act within the confines of its
superior counterpart. The United States Congress' ability to annex a
foreign territory is explained in a report from the Congressional
Committee on Foreign Relations, "If, in the judgment of Congress, such a
measure is supported by a safe and wise policy, or is based upon a
natural duty that we owe to the people of Hawaii, or is necessary for
our national development and security, that is enough to justify
annexation, with the consent of the recognized government of the country
to be annexed."
Prior to annexing a territory, the American government still held
immense power through the various legislations passed in the late
1800s. The Platt Amendment
was utilized to prevent Cuba from entering into any agreements with
foreign nations, and also granted the Americans the right to build naval
stations on their soil.
Executive officials in the American government began to determine
themselves the supreme authority in matters regarding the recognition or
restriction of independence.
When asked on April 28, 2003, on Al Jazeera whether the United States was "empire building", Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld replied, "We don't seek empires, we're not imperialistic. We never have been."
However, historian Donald W. Meinig says the imperial behavior by the United States dates at least to the Louisiana Purchase,
which he describes as an "imperial acquisition—imperial in the sense of
the aggressive encroachment of one people upon the territory of
another, resulting in the subjugation of that people to alien rule". The
U.S. policies towards the Native Americans he said were "designed to remold them into a people more appropriately conformed to imperial desires".
Writers and academics of the early 20th century, like Charles A. Beard, in support of non-interventionism (sometimes referred to as "isolationism"),
discussed American policy as being driven by self-interested
expansionism going back as far as the writing of the Constitution. Some
politicians today do not agree. Pat Buchanan
claims that the modern United States' drive to empire is "far removed
from what the Founding Fathers had intended the young Republic to
become."
Andrew Bacevich argues that the U.S. did not fundamentally change its foreign policy after the Cold War, and remains focused on an effort to expand its control across the world.
As the surviving superpower at the end of the Cold War, the U.S. could
focus its assets in new directions, the future being "up for grabs"
according to former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz in 1991. Head of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, Stephen Peter Rosen, maintains:
A political unit that has overwhelming superiority in military power, and uses that power to influence the internal behavior of other states, is called an empire. Because the United States does not seek to control territory or govern the overseas citizens of the empire, we are an indirect empire, to be sure, but an empire nonetheless. If this is correct, our goal is not combating a rival, but maintaining our imperial position, and maintaining imperial order.
In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the political activist Noam Chomsky
argues that exceptionalism and the denials of imperialism are the
result of a systematic strategy of propaganda, to "manufacture opinion"
as the process has long been described in other countries.
Thorton wrote that "[...]imperialism is more often the name of
the emotion that reacts to a series of events than a definition of the
events themselves. Where colonization finds analysts and analogies,
imperialism must contend with crusaders for and against." Political theorist Michael Walzer argues that the term hegemony is better than empire to describe the US's role in the world; political scientist Robert Keohane
agrees saying, a "balanced and nuanced analysis is not aided ... by the
use of the phrase 'empire' to describe United States hegemony, since
'empire' obscures rather than illuminates the differences in form of
rule between the United States and other Great Powers, such as Great
Britain in the 19th century or the Soviet Union in the twentieth".
Since 2001, Emmanuel Todd
assumes that USA cannot hold for long the status of mondial hegemonic
power due to limited resources. Instead, the USA is going to become just
one of the major regional powers along with European Union, China,
Russia, etc. Reviewing Todd's After the Empire, G. John Ikenberry found that it had been written in "a fit of French wishful thinking". The thinking proved to be "wishful" indeed, as the book became a bestseller in France for most of the year 2003.
Other political scientists, such as Daniel Nexon and Thomas Wright, argue that neither term exclusively describes foreign relations of the United States.
The U.S. can be, and has been, simultaneously an empire and a hegemonic
power. They claim that the general trend in U.S. foreign relations has
been away from imperial modes of control.
Cultural imperialism
McDonald's in Saint Petersburg, Russia
Some critics of imperialism argue that military and cultural imperialism are interdependent. American Edward Said, one of the founders of post-colonial theory, said that,
... so influential has been the discourse insisting on American specialness, altruism and opportunity, that imperialism in the United States as a word or ideology has turned up only rarely and recently in accounts of the United States culture, politics and history. But the connection between imperial politics and culture in North America, and in particular in the United States, is astonishingly direct.
International relations scholar David Rothkopf disagrees and argues that cultural imperialism is the innocent result of globalization,
which allows access to numerous U.S. and Western ideas and products
that many non-U.S. and non-Western consumers across the world
voluntarily choose to consume. Matthew Fraser has a similar analysis, but argues further that the global cultural influence of the U.S. is a good thing.
Nationalism is the main process through which the government is able to shape public opinion. Propaganda
in the media is strategically placed in order to promote a common
attitude among the people. Louis A. Perez Jr. provides an example of
propaganda used during the war of 1898, "We are coming, Cuba, coming; we
are bound to set you free! We are coming from the mountains, from the
plains and inland sea! We are coming with the wrath of God to make the
Spaniards flee! We are coming, Cuba, coming; coming now!"
American progressives have been accused of engaging in cultural imperialism.
In contrast, many other countries with American brands have
incorporated themselves into their own local culture. An example of this
would be the self-styled "Maccas", an Australian derivation of
"McDonald's" with a tinge of Australian culture.
U.S. military bases
Combined Air and Space Operations Center (CAOC) at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, 2015
Chalmers Johnson argued in 2004 that America's version of the colony is the military base. Chip Pitts argued similarly in 2006 that enduring U.S. bases in Iraq suggested a vision of "Iraq as a colony".
While territories such as Guam, the United States Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa and Puerto Rico remain under U.S. control, the U.S. allowed many of its overseas territories or occupations to gain independence after World War II. Examples include the Philippines (1946), the Panama canal zone (1979), Palau (1981), the Federated States of Micronesia (1986) and the Marshall Islands (1986). Most of them still have U.S. bases within their territories. In the case of Okinawa, which came under U.S. administration after the Battle of Okinawa during the Second World War, this happened despite local popular opinion. In 2003, a Department of Defense distribution found the United States had bases in over 36 countries worldwide.
By 1970,
the United States had more than 1,000,000 soldiers in 30 countries, was
a member of four regional defense alliances and an active participant
in a fifth, had mutual defense treaties with 42 nations, was a member of
53 international organizations, and was furnishing military or economic
aid to nearly 100 nations across the face of the globe.
In 2015 the Department of Defense reported the number of bases that had
any military or civilians stationed or employed was 587. This includes
land only (where no facilities are present), facility or facilities only
(where there the underlying land is neither owned nor controlled by the
government), and land with facilities (where both are present).
Also in 2015, David Vine's book Base Nation, found 800 US military
bases located outside of the US, including 174 bases in Germany, 113 in
Japan, and 83 in South Korea, the total costs, an estimated $100 billion
a year.
According to The Huffington Post,
"The 45 nations and territories with little or no democratic rule
represent more than half of the roughly 80 countries now hosting U.S.
bases. ... Research by political scientist Kent Calder
confirms what's come to be known as the "dictatorship hypothesis": The
United States tends to support dictators [and other undemocratic
regimes] in nations where it enjoys basing facilities."
Benevolent imperialism
Political cartoon depicting Theodore Roosevelt using the Monroe Doctrine to keep European powers out of the Dominican Republic.
One of the earliest historians of American Empire, William Appleman Williams,
wrote, "The routine lust for land, markets or security became
justifications for noble rhetoric about prosperity, liberty and
security."
Max Boot
defends U.S. imperialism, writing that "U.S. imperialism has been the
greatest force for good in the world during the past century. It has
defeated communism and Nazism and has intervened against the Taliban and
Serbian ethnic cleansing." Boot used "imperialism" to describe United States policy, not only in the early 20th century but "since at least 1803". This embrace of empire is made by other neoconservatives, including British historian Paul Johnson, and writers Dinesh D'Souza and Mark Steyn. It is also made by some liberal hawks, such as political scientists Zbigniew Brzezinski and Michael Ignatieff.
British historian Niall Ferguson
argues that the United States is an empire and believes that this is a
good thing: "What is not allowed is to say that the United States is an
empire and that this might not be wholly bad." Ferguson has drawn parallels between the British Empire
and the imperial role of the United States in the late 20th and early
21st centuries, though he describes the United States' political and
social structures as more like those of the Roman Empire
than of the British. Ferguson argues that all of these empires have had
both positive and negative aspects, but that the positive aspects of
the U.S. empire will, if it learns from history and its mistakes,
greatly outweigh its negative aspects.
Another point of view implies that United States expansion overseas has indeed been imperialistic, but that this imperialism
is only a temporary phenomenon; a corruption of American ideals or the
relic of a past historical era. Historian Samuel Flagg Bemis argues that
Spanish–American War
expansionism was a short-lived imperialistic impulse and "a great
aberration in American history", a very different form of territorial
growth than that of earlier American history. Historian Walter LaFeber sees the Spanish–American War expansionism not as an aberration, but as a culmination of United States expansion westward.
Historian Victor Davis Hanson argues that the U.S. does not pursue world domination, but maintains worldwide influence by a system of mutually beneficial exchanges. On the other hand, a Filipino revolutionary General Emilio Aguinaldo
felt as though the American involvement in the Philippines was
destructive, "the Filipinos fighting for Liberty, the American people
fighting them to give them liberty. The two peoples are fighting on
parallel lines for the same object."
American influence worldwide and the effects it has on other nations
have multiple interpretations according to whose perspective is being
taken into account.
Liberal internationalists
argue that even though the present world order is dominated by the
United States, the form taken by that dominance is not imperial.
International relations scholar John Ikenberry argues that international institutions have taken the place of empire.
International relations scholar Joseph Nye argues that U.S. power is more and more based on "soft power", which comes from cultural hegemony rather than raw military or economic force.
This includes such factors as the widespread desire to emigrate to the
United States, the prestige and corresponding high proportion of foreign
students at U.S. universities, and the spread of U.S. styles of popular
music and cinema. Mass immigration into America may justify this
theory, but it is hard to know for sure whether the United States would
still maintain its prestige without its military and economic
superiority.
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