Battle Hymn of the Empire

- Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire by Niall Ferguson

- Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos by Robert D. Kaplan

Reviewed by Patrick Lawlor

The 2004 elections confirmed that the Republican Party has a winning political strategy and is now likely to dominate American policy for the forseeable future. In particular, the election was a victory for the “neocons” who planned and implemented the invasion of Iraq. Those of us who voted against Bush-Cheney and the Iraq Invasion will have to lick our wounds, analyze the election results, and look for a way to break up the new conservative majority. But we also have to accept that this may not happen for many years.

In the meantime, this means that we need to understand the Brave New World that the neocons are forging. With that in mind, I’ve chosen to review two recent books that are on Dick Cheney’s night-time reading table (George Bush only has need of the Bible at his bedside). The authors, Niall Ferguson and Robert Kaplan, might not describe themselves as neocons, but both endorsed the Iraq invasion and are right-wing “fellow travelers.”

The Second English-Speaking Empire

A few years ago the British historian Niall Ferguson wrote Empire in which he argued that the colonial British Empire was, despite its many faults, ultimately a positive influence on the world; he believes most of the colonies benefited from British laws and institutions, and that Queen Victoria’s “liberal empire” represented the beginnings of a global free trade system. Ferguson recently started teaching in the U.S. (currently at Harvard) and has produced a follow-up book, Colossus, in which he points out that there is now, and always has been, a de facto American Empire, even though most Americans dislike the term. Ferguson believes that this global Yankee Empire can also be a force for good, but only if Americans are willing to follow the example of the Victorians and accept all of their imperial responsibilities.

As a Briton, Ferguson was not raised on pious stories about the Founding Fathers, and so he has no difficulty in looking back at history and pointing out that, in spite of its denials, the U.S. has always been an empire. From the beginning, the original Thirteen Colonies were set on expansion. He lists the many conquests, territorial thefts, and interventions: the lands of the Native Americans, failed invasions of Canada, Texas stolen from Mexico, Puerto Rico from the Spanish, the seizure of the Phillipines, the annexation of Hawaii, and the manipulation of puppet-regimes in Latin America. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were military interventions in Columbia, Nicaragua, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.

Anyone who doubts America’s imperial history might consider some of these choice quotes:

- President Grant’s regrets about the U.S. attack on Mexico: “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”

- President McKinley’s justification for his seizure of the Philippines despite fierce native resistance: ”there was nothing left for us to do but take them all, and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them…”

- U.S. General Smedley Butler in 1935: “I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”

So we were already an empire long before World War II and the ascension of the U.S. to superpower status. By 2003 Ferguson notes that the U.S. had over 750 military installations in 130 countries across the globe. Yet most Americans still view their country as some kind of big friendly non-aggessive Switzerland.

Ferguson sees nothing wrong with this imperial growth; he simply finds it peculiar that Americans acquired their empire without ever being willing to acknowledge it as such, even to themselves. But Ferguson thinks that this self-delusion has now become a critical problem, since the future and stability of the world is dependent on clear-eyed American foreign policy, and the committed long-term presence of U.S. troops and administrators in troubled regions of the MidEast, Caribbean and Africa.

Despite its vast power America is prone to failures like its intervention in Somalia in the 1990’s. Ferguson points out what he sees as the critical flaw: “The certainty that American forces would soon be gone removed any incentive on the part of the Somali warlords to mend their ways.” American military interventions are usually short-term affairs, a quick regime change, in and out. Ferguson sees this practice as the main reason why America’s empire is inferior to that of the British. To Ferguson, the current problems in places like Cuba and Haiti can be blamed on the failure of the U.S. to simply annex these islands a century ago as it did Puerto Rico.

And this leads to Ferguson’s key question: “Might it not be that for some countries some form of imperial governance…might be better than full independence, not just for a few months or years but for one or more decades?” His answer is yes, claiming that strife-torn nations such as Liberia are doomed to spiral into violent chaos unless a strong imperial power takes control. He believes that only America can now play this role of a benevolent “liberal empire.”

But who will actually govern these places? The British Empire had legions of educated “Orientalists” who wanted to live in exotic faraway lands. Instead America has the famous Powell Doctrine which requires an exit strategy for every military intervention. The British Empire never needed an “exit strategy” for their conquests, because they planned to stay for good. Foreign postings attracted Britain’s “best and brightest” – over 70% of the members of the Indian Civil Service were graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. But Americans are different – few graduates of Yale and Harvard today are likely to want to spend their whole careers in places like Baghdad.

Ferguson’s proposed model for America is that of the British experience in Egypt, where it used local proxies and always promised to leave, without actually doing so for seventy years. Ferguson claims that Egypt benefited enormously during this period, since a stable government made Egypt a safe choice for foreign capital investments. And so this is his recommendation for Iraq: “Control of the country’s military, fiscal and monetary policies needs to remain, at least for the foreseeable future, in American hands,” stating that the country will need an American “viceroy in all but name for decades.”

But Ferguson only considers his “liberal empires” from the viewpoint of the rulers; he never tries to imagine what it actually feels like to be a powerless individual, the subject of an occupation by foreign imperial troops. In the 1920’s my uncles joined the IRA and fought against the British Empire that Ferguson admires so much – they were young Irishmen who were quite naturally angry and bitter about the subjugation of their homeland. The fact that the British had built hospitals, roads and schools in Ireland was irrelevant – to my uncles they were still foreign invaders, and had no right to govern a land where they were not welcome. It would be foolish to imagine that a young Iraqi today feels any different about the presence of American troops in his homeland.

Morality for Caesars

Unlike an academic such as Ferguson, Robert Kaplan is a journalist who over the years has physically ventured to many of the world’s conflict zones, from the Balkans to Afghanistan. His book Warrior Politics is a well-written argument built on his experiences in the field and from his reading of the pagan political philosophy of the ancients. Kaplan’s subject is “the ancient tradition of skepticism and constructive realism.” He believes that men like Thucydides, Livy, and Sun Tzu had few illusions about the dark side of human nature, and that their ruthlessly pragmatic insights are more sensible than the utopian dreams of Christian do-gooders and bleeding-heart liberals.

The way Kaplan sees it, the gentle morality of Jesus may be fine in private life, but affairs of state demand the pagan morality of a fierce Caesar. And since Kaplan agrees with Machiavelli that the ends justify the means, he likewise states that a leader who lies, cheats, and kills in the service of a higher good is therefore more “virtuous” than a leader who risks his nation’s security by refusing to engage in these immoral activities. The book has naturally received high praise from both Newt Gingrich and Henry Kissinger.

One of Kaplan’s heroes is Winston Churchill, whose blatant imperialism he admires: “it is difficult to condemn Churchill for having supported colonialist interventions that provided stability and a better material life for the local inhabitants.” Likewise “Churchill the arch-colonialist is inseparable from the Churchill who stood alone against Hitler.”

Kaplan believes that now is the time for an “American imperium” similar to that of the ancient Han Empire that unified China, or another pagan example: “Rome, in particular, is a model for hegemonic power, using various means to encourage a modicum of order in a disorderly world.”

Kaplan believes that we must always assume the worst about human involvement in politics: the French Revolution and the various Marxist experiments ended in catastrophe because they were based on utopian ideals about human nature. Instead, Kaplan believes that the American Republic was ultimately successful because the Founding Fathers were suspicious of mob rule and deliberately created a constitutional system of checks and balances.

Machiavelli is one of Kaplan’s “pagan” philosophers since “Machiavelli believed that because Christianity glorified the meek, it allowed the world to be dominated by the wicked” and “Machiavelli’s pagan virtue is public virtue, whereas Judeo-Christian virtue is more often private virtue.” The lesson for leaders is that “projecting power comes first; values come second.”

Kaplan’s book is often compelling since it is so elegantly written and because he is genuinely sincere; he truly wants to avert future horrors like the recent ones in Bosnia and Rwanda, and he is convinced that only a hardheaded big-stick American foreign policy can accomplish this. Tyrants like Milosovic and Saddam Hussein only understand raw power, and therefore the only “virtuous” response to them is brute force, delivered swiftly. Likewise, we must be prepared to unleash the CIA to use deceit, assassination and other tactics in our dealings with foes such as North Korea whom it would be unwise to attack directly.

Though I completely disagree with Kaplan’s argument, his book was a pleasure to read: he has a fresh voice and in each chapter he lays out a wonderful summary of a classic political work and draws interesting analogies to our own era. Unlike many others, he fits the description of the term “compassionate conservative” and writes directly from his own classically “tragic” perspective of human affairs. He believes that unfortunately humans are just as selfish and cruel today as they were in ancient times, and that it is simply foolish to assume otherwise. Therefore, civilization can only be maintained by strong, wise leaders who understand and can properly manipulate the balance of power using any means necessary.

But Kaplan’s argument is fatally flawed because of two terrible assumptions he makes, that:

- A virtuous leader can cleanly separate high moral standards in private life from the ruthless “dirty work” required in political life;

- Morally “good” ends can be achieved through “evil” means.

Kaplan says that these principles are based on the pagan wisdom of the ancients, but there are alternative pagan philosophies which he has ignored, and which directly contradict his view. For example, the Indian concept of karma undermines his entire argument. The CIA uses a rather modern term for karma – they call it blowback, the unforeseen negative repercussions that result from an aggressive covert operation. America’s cynical funding of an Islamic jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980’s is the textbook example, since it also resulted in the eventual creation of Al-Qaeda.

Unfortunately, America’s entire history in the Mideast can seem to be a case of karmic blowback: our support of the tyrannical Shah led to the Ayatollahs’ Iranian Revolution, and the Reagan administration’s funding of Saddam’s war against our enemy Iran led ultimately to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Yet these are all examples of the power-play tactics which Kaplan endorses.

Kaplan’s pessimistic assumptions about “the mob” and innate human selfishness also blind him to the possibilities of genuinely ethical political movements. Gandhi and Martin Luther King both led campaigns that were truly revolutionary: massive numbers of people working together for peaceful political transformation. Gandhi’s political philosophy, Satyagratha, or truth-force, was based on the principle that virtuous ends can only be achieved through virtuous means. Or as my meditation teacher used to say, the action is the result – you simply cannot separate one from the other.

Kaplan does not seem to grasp this fact, which allows him to make horrifying statements like the following: “The Mexican War was probably unjust – motivated as it was by sheer territorial aggression. But it was a war worth fighting: the United States acquired Texas and the entire Southwest, including California.” Kaplan has convinced himself that an “unjust” war of aggression was perfectly justifiable!

The universal law that Kaplan ignores is that ends and means are the flipsides of one coin - his argument that they can be cleanly compartmentalised is absurd and illogical. A Machiavellian prince who uses ruthless tactics in service to a “higher good” is deceiving himself, and is simply triggering the events of an inevitable Shakespearean tragedy.

But unfortunately the attempt to separate personal and political morality has already begun in the current White House administration. George Bush has no problem standing with Laura in front of church gatherings and talking about his Christian family values while in the backroom his deputies are writing legal memos to justify the torture of Arab detainees. Such a perverse sense of morality can only lead us to disaster.