With the end of the US war in Iraq, the perspective of most commentators across the political spectrum is that the Bush administration is triumphant and can impose its will on the world. Saddam Hussein is banished from power, the United States occupies Iraq and is sitting on top of the world's second largest oil deposits. Referring to the failure of European as well as Arab countries to deter naked US aggression, Tariq Ali, in an editorial in the New Left Review of London, writes, "American global hegemony ... has never been so clearly displayed".
This is a flawed interpretation of the historic impact of the Iraqi intervention. Rather than the triumph of a new imperial order, the war may actually accelerate the decline of US hegemony. In late 2002, Charles Kupchan, a professor at Georgetown University and a member of the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, released a book titled The End of the American Era. Cast in mainstream political language, Kupchan argues that "Pax Americana" will end due to "the rise of alternative centres of power and a declining and unilateralist US internationalism". Even before France and Germany headed up the Western opposition to the US war in Iraqi, Kupchan asserted that the European Union would be in the forefront of an emergent "multipolar world" that will eclipse US ascendancy in the early part of the 21st century.
Events in Iraq in the wake of the war suggest that the US occupation will be a bloody one that contributes to the sapping of US global power. No one, including the US anointed ruler, General Jay Garner, is in control. Iraqi schoolboys shake their shoes at US soldiers, chanting in English, "Down USA". Anti-American demonstrators in Shi'i and Sunni regions of the country rally against US troops, leading US soldiers to fire on angry mobs, killing and maiming scores. US military officers invariably claim their troops "were fired on first", while Iraqi witnesses state there was no hostile fire from the demonstrators. Even if the US assertions are true, these confrontations have all the markings of colonial wars past. Inevitably, the more militant Iraqi opponents of the United States of all political and religious stripes will move among the people, accentuating popular unrest and exacting a toll on the occupying army.
Back in the late 1980s Paul Kennedy, another fairly mainstream scholar at Yale University, asserted in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers that, in their waning years, empires engage in "overstretch". As they begin to decline, the dominant powers almost invariably resort to war and belligerency, thereby accelerating their demise as they waste their national treasuries on military spending to the detriment of their economies and their peoples.
The intended implications of Kennedy's thesis for the United States were apparent at the time his book came out. The Reagan administration was engaging in a massive military build up and sponsoring a series of regional counter-revolutionary wars in Africa, Central America and Asia, attempting to counteract the US setback in Vietnam and other parts of the world. Simultaneously, US economic pre-eminence appeared to be threatened by the more dynamic economies of Japan and Western Europe.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resurgent US economy of the 1990s, Kennedy's argument of imperial overstretch appeared to be mistaken and irrelevant. The success of Bush Senior in the first Gulf war, along with Clinton's interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, nurtured the belief that "Pax Americana" was in fine shape. And, at first glance, George W. Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq appear to indicate that, now more than ever, the United States is a potent empire.
In reality, the Bush administration's unilateralist foreign policy represents an effort to reassert a US hegemony that it believes was compromised by the diffusion of US power under Clinton. The neo-conservatives, the driving force behind US policy today, are in fact engaging in foreign adventures precisely because they are fearful that US dominance in the world is being undermined. Major luminaries of the Bush administration, such as Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, came together back in 1997 to form The Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Lambasting the Clinton administration for allowing US global power to languish, the founding charter of PNAC declared it is "increasingly difficult to sustain American influence around the world".
Then, on the eve of the presidential elections in 2000, the PNAC released a special report entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century. It called for stepped up military spending, the projection of US power around the world and the use of "constabulary forces" whenever necessary. It became the blueprint for the Bush administration's foreign policy, particularly after 11 September 2001. Refusing to accept any limits on US power, the neo-conservative's mission of remaking the world in the US image fits in perfectly with Kennedy's argument that empires in their final stages bring to the fore bellicose leaders who increase military expenditures and engage in wars that actually accelerate their nations' demise.
Other commentators and analysts are also suggesting that something is going wrong with the new US imperium. Independent Strategy, a financial research company for institutional investors, argues, in a paper that is being circulated in the boardrooms of big investment banks like Goldman Sachs, that the US empire has reached its peak. It foresees heightened global terrorism in response to US unilateralism. Independent Strategy also argues that the US economy faces serious economic difficulties due in part to the costs of the war and Bush's massive tax cuts. The dollar is falling in international markets "because the good empire has the same fault lines as many other empires: unsustainable living standards at the core [that] depend on flows of wealth from the periphery". It adds: "The costs of war and unilateralism will increase the thirst for capital, but reduce the return earned by it."
Paul Kennedy has also reappeared in the public debate with an article in the Washington Post at the end of April in which he points to the state of the British empire in the early 20th century, arguing that the Bush administration is in trouble abroad. Kennedy contends: "The US has taken on military commitments all over the globe, from the Balkans and Kuwait to Afghanistan and Korea. Its armed forces look colossal (as did Britain's in 1919), but its obligations look even larger. It is small wonder that, while liberals protest soaring defence expenditures, the US military repeatedly warns of overstretch and is dismayed at the hawkish calls for further adventures."
Robert Fisk of the Independent newspaper of London, perhaps the premier Western reporter in the Gulf and the Middle East, also suggests, in an interview with Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio, that we are seeing history redux in Iraq. In 1917, British troops under the command of Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude seized Baghdad. As Fisk points out, in taking the city Maude used words almost identical to Bush's proclamation at the onset of the Iraqi war: "We come here not as conquerors, but as liberators to free you from the tyranny of generations." The British did manage to remain for years, but the region proved to be a political quagmire as ethnic and religious groups fought each other while also attacking the British occupiers.
It is impossible to predict how this new war of liberation in Iraq will unfold. As Robert Fisk says, "my crystal ball has broken a long time ago". Nonetheless, even he believes that the United States is involved in an interminable conflict in the Gulf, one even more profound than that which the British faced in the early part of the 20th century.
We should remember that the Reagan administration, in which neo-conservatives also held prominent posts, sent troops to the Middle East in August 1982 in an effort to exert its influence in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Just over a year later, 241 Marines died in a car bomb blast in Beirut, Lebanon, and the United States beat a hasty retreat from the region. No doubt, the Bush administration is determined to inflict more bloodshed and take more causalities than this as it seeks to consolidate US rule over Iraq. But imperial overstretch and Iraqi resistance will likely provoke ever increasing calls from within the United States to bring the troops home and surely have major implications for the approaching 2004 presidential elections.
Even before the Iraqi war, Charles Kupchan, in The End of the American Era, worried that the tribulations of unilateralism would cause a backlash among the American people, leading to a "new isolationism". Given his ties to the former Clinton administration, he argues that the United States must continue to be active in a multipolar world, pushing a "globalist" agenda, much as his former boss did. However, from the perspective of the anti-globalization movement that erupted on the world stage in Seattle in 1999, a crisis in US foreign policy that compels US leaders to retreat from their military and corporate ravaging of the world would be of enormous benefit to humanity.
In his editorial in the New Left Review, Tariq Ali calls upon the anti-globalization and anti-war movements to form a broad "anti-imperialist league" to resist US aggression. While he underestimates the importance of the challenge posed by European nations to US hegemony, he does point to the central role of the popular movement in contesting US domination: "The history of the rise and fall of empires teaches us that it is when their own citizens finally lose faith in the virtue of infinite war and permanent occupations that the system enters into retreat." In the end, Ali's reading of history may be even more useful than the lessons drawn by Kupchan or Kennedy.