The American empire reached its first centenary in the 1880s, just as the frontier was closing. At that point thirty-eight states had joined the Union. This still left a large territorial empire outside the Union, to which must be added many protectorates and client states whose number would grow significantly in the years ahead. Although not as large as the British or Russian empires in terms of territory, it was nonetheless very extensive and placed the United States in a strong position when it came to disputes with imperial rivals.
The American empire reached its second century in the 1980s, just as the Cold War was ending. No longer an empire based primarily on territory, this was a vast undertaking—labeled semiglobal in this book—that placed the US state in a privileged position in the world by virtue of its control over key global institutions and the support it received from a range of powerful nonstate actors (NSAs). And the impending collapse of the Soviet Union raised the prospect temporarily of an empire that would be truly global in scope.
Today the American empire looks very different. When it reaches its 250th anniversary in the 2030s, it will still be in operation. However, it will be a pale shadow of its former self. The retreat from empire will have continued, and the outlines of a new world order will have become clearer. The United States may still be at the center, but global power will be much more contested. The empire may even have the same foundations, but they will not be so solid and the empire will no longer be semiglobal.
As the empire retreats, the nation-state will loom larger. The line between the two will become less blurred. What is good for the preservation of the empire may not be so good for the nation-state, a theme that was heard repeatedly in the 2016 presidential election. Future presidents may be more reluctant than Donald Trump openly to demand “America first,” but they will express the same sentiments in different language. Failure to do so will render them unelectable.
The American empire is unlikely to reach its three hundredth anniversary. By then the United States will have become “just” a nation-state, one that may or may not be at peace with itself. Shedding the imperial skin acquired over decades, even centuries, is never painless, and America is experiencing that pain today. Yet it can eventually be a liberating experience, as the citizens of other erstwhile empires have discovered. And if the retreat from empire is mainly for internal reasons rather than due to external pressures, as is the case in America, it increases the chances of a successful transition.
If the three hundredth anniversary of American empire fails to materialize, it is already clear that the empire will have achieved a long life before it ends. Some two hundred fifty years, surely the minimum that the American empire will manage, is still a considerable length of time. Among nearly two hundred empires recorded in history, roughly two-thirds ended before they reached 250 years. And among the longer-lasting ones, most had been reduced to fairly feeble affairs before the end. The US empire by contrast still has some vigor even if its retreat has already begun. And it has outlived all the European empires with which it had to compete in its early years.
America’s imperial destiny was a choice, but it was not especially controversial. The United States of America acquired by treaty, following skillful negotiations, a land mass that doubled the de facto size of the thirteen colonies. In theory, the Founding Fathers could have granted autonomy to the Native American and other populations in these territories or incorporated them immediately into the Union. However, no party or faction favored this, and it is therefore hardly surprising that the territories became effectively US colonies.
The last of the mainland colonies joined the Union in 1912 (or 1959, if we include Alaska), so that the continental empire survived a long time. The imperial mindset became deeply engrained and promoted ideas of expansion that took the empire offshore long before the Spanish-American War in 1898. This offshore expansion was more controversial than the continental one since—in addition to the question of slavery—it was complicated by issues of racism and protection of domestic interests. However, it was never reversed, and colonies simply became US protectorates after formal rule was ended in those rare cases where decolonization was permitted.
Offshore expansion of the empire was also a choice. The federal government could have survived without overseas colonies, treaty privileges in Chinese ports, unequal treaties with Pacific states, powers of intervention in Latin America, or commercial advantages in the Caribbean. Yet this was not how states that saw themselves as great powers operated. In an age of imperial preference, a great trading nation such as the United States needed an offshore empire to counteract what was seen as its commercial disadvantage and to counter the geopolitical ambitions of some European states.
Offshore imperial expansion could therefore be justified as the defense of national interests. The empire built after the Second World War, however, needed to be justified in a different way. This empire, based on global and regional institutions with the support of powerful NSAs, had taken shape even before the Cold War started, so it was not initially about defeating international communism. Only America, it was argued, could provide the global public goods that the world needed, since it was the only country in the world that could be trusted not to pursue a selfish agenda based on a narrow pursuit of self-interest.
This may have been self-deception of the highest order, but many countries—crippled by war—were only too happy for the United States to undertake this role. They may not have been fully convinced that US interventions were unlike those of other countries, motivated purely by acting as a “force for good,” but they were willing to accept much of the ideology of American exceptionalism that has always underpinned the US imperial project. And in the United States itself belief in the country’s exceptional nature was at its height as the Second World War came to an end.
The American empire is now in retreat. Indeed, it has been in retreat for some time. Yet this does not mean the nation-state is in decline. This point cannot be made strongly enough. Those who confuse imperial retreat with the decline of the nation-state have been able to deny the former in view of the strength of the latter. Yet imperial retreat is not the same as national decline, as many other countries can attest. Indeed, imperial retreat can strengthen the nation-state just as imperial expansion can weaken it. It all depends how and why imperial retreat has come about.
There is no single moment when the American empire can be said to have begun its retreat, nor is there a simple one-dimensional cause. It began long before external pressures became a consideration, even if they are now an important part of the story. Economic performance is part of the explanation but it is by no means the whole one. The increasing difficulty of using the international institutions built by the United States to promote an American agenda is another factor. The fracturing of the consensus in favor of empire among the leading NSAs has also been significant, as has been the increasingly dysfunctional nature of the political system. Above all, and reflecting all other considerations, has been the questioning of the myth of American exceptionalism. And, as a consequence of all these things, US governments have found it harder to exercise the kind of leadership that a semiglobal empire is expected to deliver.
For the first three decades after the Second World War, the performance of the American economy matched the imperial ambitions of the state. Resources expanded to meet not only the international requirements of the federal government but also the material dreams of the citizens. The US economy may not have been the fastest growing economy in the world, but it was growing fast enough to make any talk of relative decline—let alone absolute decline—seem absurd.
Since the mid-1970s all this has changed. The relative decline is apparent to all but the most blinkered. Absolute decline has never occurred, expect for very short periods, but the distribution of the national cake has changed dramatically. Many citizens, including members of the fabled middle-class, have struggled to adapt as their share of national income has fallen. And the poorest in society have faced real hardship. Imbalances in the US economy, including the trade and budget deficits, have not led to a big improvement in infrastructure, health care, or educational quality but instead have placed increasingly tight constraints on what policy makers can do.
America may still have the largest armed forces in the world, capable of deterring enemies and imposing enormous destruction on those in their path, but military intervention alone could never sustain a semiglobal empire based primarily on institutions and NSAs. Instead the nation’s formidable hard power sits uneasily alongside a citizenry that is increasingly skeptical about foreign adventures and a world that is unwilling to unite behind US interventions. Coalitions of the willing are no substitute for military intervention based on domestic consensus and backed by the force of international law.
The global and regional institutions built by the United States after the Second World War are still in existence, but the federal government finds it ever more difficult to use these institutions to craft a world in its own image. To some extent, this is inevitable, as the organizations were constructed at a time when there were around fifty independent states rather than nearly two hundred, as is the case today. However, it is also due to ambivalence by the US state on the role played by international laws and treaties in global governance. Unwilling to commit fully to these institutions, especially the United Nations, the United States has been slow to permit the kinds of reforms that would allow them to function more effectively. As a result, the rest of the world has found ways of circumventing these very same institutions and is therefore more able to resist American pressure.
NSAs no longer play the same supportive role on behalf of the American empire as before. The media are much more fragmented, the philanthropic foundations are more independent, the think tanks are less subservient, and the churches have become more partisan. Above all, many multinational enterprises (MNEs) have become truly global and no longer feel committed to the American empire in the way that they did before.
Consider, for example, the “manifesto” published by Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Facebook) in February 2017. Addressed to “our community,” rather than citizens of the United States, he outlined a vision in which the federal government was never mentioned: “Our greatest opportunities are now global—like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science. Our greatest challenges also need global responses—like ending terrorism, fighting climate change, and preventing pandemics. Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.”1 Even if these ambitious goals might chime with the interests of the American empire, it is clear that Zuckerberg imagines a world in which solutions will not depend on global leadership by the US state but rather on the actions of a “global community” that is pulled together by NSAs such as Facebook. Modern globalization may have been created by the American state, in this view, but it is now too important to be left to the United States alone to defend it.
All this has made it difficult for US governments to exercise global leadership, a problem exacerbated by the dysfunctional nature of the American political system. This problem, always acute, has become almost unbearable in the last twenty years as even the most skilled presidents have struggled to build bipartisan support for imperial policies. On trade, climate change, international security, and global human rights, American leadership has often been stymied by ideological divisions that have grown fiercer over time.
Part of the problem for US leaders has been the doubts expressed by a large part of the public with regard to American exceptionalism. If the United States is not exceptional, it can be argued, then there is less justification for the country exercising global leadership. And if economic resources are strained by current imperial commitments, then there is even less justification for extending them. Indeed, there is a strong case for cutting back.
These doubts could be overcome as long as most of the rest of the world was content to see America provide leadership on a global scale. That, however, is no longer the case. The pool of “loyal” allies is shrinking, with some countries once renowned for their deference to the United States now being willing to defy it. This is partly because these countries have become more self-confident, but also because they have come to doubt the ability of the American system to deliver the kind of leadership they desire.
Something similar has happened to US rivals outside the semiglobal empire. The Russian Federation, successor state to the Soviet Union, was too quickly dismissed as a geopolitical lightweight. Patronized at first by US governments, Russia never forgot the humiliations of the 1990s and reasserted itself on the international stage with some success. Although unable to match the superpower status of the Soviet Union, it has acquired the ability to thwart American ambitions in numerous areas while building a network of like-minded states of its own.
The most important of these states is China, which now enjoys a close relationship with Russia after centuries of intense rivalry. As China moved from an obsession with economic growth to becoming a major geopolitical force, it has clashed repeatedly with the United States. These disputes have so far been handled peacefully, but both sides are prepared for war. If force is used, however, the United States will no longer be able to count on a wide array of allies. China has been too successful at marketing itself as the rising power that other countries will not wish to defy.
“American empire” was never mentioned in the 2016 primary and presidential election campaigns, but it still loomed large. The visions for the United States outlined by the candidates all had different implications for the imperial project. One of the most ambitious was the one offered by Hillary Clinton, which insisted on American exceptionalism and called for a renewal of US leadership at the global level. Yet even this vision failed to articulate a trade strategy that would have perpetuated American hegemony, suggesting that retreat from empire would have still continued even if she had won the presidential election.
The alternative vision outlined by Donald Trump emphasized the limitations of American empire both in terms of what it had achieved for US citizens and also in terms of the obligations it imposed on the nation-state. This was recognition that imperial retreat was already under way and would continue in the future. While full of contradictions and inconsistencies, this vision still found favor with enough voters to secure Trump the support in the electoral college he needed to win.
President Donald Trump (2017–), soon after taking office, shifted foreign policy in certain respects away from what had been outlined in his presidential campaign and moved closer to the mainstream. Yet in great swaths of international affairs, notably combating climate change and multilateral trade agreements, it was clear that the United States would not seek to lead. Instead, that role will be left to others, with predictable consequences for America’s retreat from empire.
Allies, especially in Europe, have been stunned by this change in US policy. Having assumed that American empire would continue indefinitely, they had crafted their policies on the assumption that America would remain the global leader. Worse still for them has been the dismissive attitude shown by the Trump administration toward their most cherished achievements, in particular the European Union (EU) and their steadfast commitment to a two-state solution in the Middle East. These allies, it is fair to say, are now having to contemplate for the first time since 1945 a world in which the United States is not there to support them.
Retreat from empire is therefore becoming ever more apparent. Of course, no country is yet prepared or willing to take the place of the United States, and some have seen that as evidence that American empire can and must continue as before. However, that is wishful thinking. While we cannot be sure what will take its place as the American empire retreats, the space vacated cannot easily be reoccupied. Retreat chimes with a large part of the electorate, not just those that voted for President Trump, and they do not wish to see the United States accept the same imperial burden as in the past.
The imperial history of America has been a long one. Only now, however, as it enters its final phase, is it being fully recognized for what it is and has been. The number of books on American empire is expanding all the time and adding greatly to our understanding. This book hopefully will do the same. Most readers will probably agree with the premise even if not all of them accept the conclusions. Others will build on what is written here.
The American empire has not been unique, although it has had many unusual features. Imperial retreat will therefore find some parallels in what has gone before. Perhaps the biggest mistake the United States can make is to delay the retreat as long as possible, hoping that something will change in the meantime that might permit a restoration of hegemony. That rarely happens in history and would be highly unlikely this time around. It is better to embrace what is becoming inevitable. The hardest part will be shedding the imperial mindset, acquired over many generations. Yet, as other countries have shown, it can be done, and young people in the United States are leading the way.