Tag Archives: geopolitics

An Imperial Birthday

Perhaps I should give it another try, but Revolutionary Era America has never been high on my list of times in history that intrigue me, nor that I find particularly instructive to our present moment. The extent to which commentators of all political stripes try to harness the Founders for contemporary purposes, or to which modern jurisprudence is grounded in that era, do not, I think, do us many favors in our attempts to construct a just or opportunity-driven society. The more one digs into it, the more the Revolution feels like a sideshow of squabbles among small-colony elites in a far greater drama from which the putative loser of that struggle, the British Empire, rose to an unprecedented position of dominance over the globe that it would hold for the next century-plus.

No, the best way to understand America remains a road trip across it in the here and now, to see all its different corners and glories and complicated stories. The sheer size and scale of this country, even in a digital age, will always render its project somewhat imperial. I don’t use that phrase pejoratively; I just mean that it is going to have to accommodate a ton of different people, and that it will always be hard to govern in a communal, more parliamentary manner. To the extent that history can be a guide I am more drawn to tales of empire: Rome and Byzantium and Britain, and at the more local level I will always cast my lot with the Greeks. But I also think there are limits to the benefits of historical knowledge in a very different world, too.

After 250 years, I will submit that the United States’ triumphs are real. Its political origins were at the front end of a global wave, ideas that then trickled across the pond and southward to Latin America and eventually filtered into institutions we Americans imposed on the world when we supplanted the British for good after World War II. I don’t have a ton of use for hagiography of the US Constitution or political system, but they were achievements for their time. Some aspects have aged well, others less well, but none of them unrescuable, and I will forever acknowledge my incredible good fortune to be born in the time and the place that I was. Much of how we wound up here are products of geography and wealth and the exercise of raw power, but some of it was visionary and shrewd decision-making, sometimes very admirable.

I will not be saying anything new when I claim that the foundations of American exceptionalism are in its engine of growth and hunger, and in the belief in new beginnings inherent in its early colonization. From the conquest of the frontier to space age pursuit to Silicon Valley’s present rush into the virtual future, the US sets a frenetic pace, less constrained by trappings of culture and tradition than anywhere else. The drawbacks of some of these rushes forward are well-documented: the extermination and subjugation of people who already lived on that frontier, the vacuousness of consumer culture, the anti-human profit hunger of some people on the cutting edge of the technological arms race. But to it we owe incredible material wealth and comfort.

Like any great power the United States has behaved venally and exercised its might, sometimes with great consequences. What has made it at times exceptional was the range of its vision, and the humanity with which it pursued some of these goals; the Marshall Plan and some Cold War era artifacts like the Peace Corps and foreign aid played a longer, more careful game, one that understood that careful long-term foundations could produce far more peace and stability than endless crude power politics, at the same time creating new markets for export and isolating geopolitical rivals. These strategies were often self-interested and carried certain excesses, but in the sweep of human history, they are a high point of hegemonic leadership. The great power peace and rampant acceleration out of poverty enjoyed by billions since 1950 are direct products of that vision.

The US is now drifting out of that role. Shortsighted politics is a key part of that story, but like the British in their late imperial phase, American overextension is real, and the long-term fiscal picture makes the same footprint hard to sustain. Trump Era America simultaneously knows this but wants to maintain the illusion, and uses its characteristic spectacle to try to achieve it cheaply, sometimes to dramatic effect (Venezuela) and sometimes disastrously (Iran). But the Biden Administration’s fumbling Afghanistan withdrawal and attempts to say America was back and unchanged on the world stage were much in the same vein. As it enters its next 250 years, the renegotiation of the imperial footprint is one of the two great questions looming over the United States.

I say renegotiation because, for as petty and miserable as its politics have grown, the US colossus looks firm in its absolute position. Europe is comfortable and beautiful but has lapsed backward economically, in need of at least some reinvigoration lest it drift into a senescent old age and see its incredible cultural wealth and diversity fade into mere kitsch. Developed East Asia faces similar pressures, likely even more to the extreme. China is of course the great rising power, theoretically capable of displacing the US with its remarkable trajectory post-Mao, but its demographic time bomb is real and its over-engineered culture runs greater risks than America’s legalistic one; moreover, Chinese civilization’s global pretensions have never matched the totalizing beliefs of the West, to which we Americans are heirs. Russia is an impoverished imperial rump, armed and dangerous but a model to no one. India is interesting, but still has a long way to go. The Middle East, as the Iran War has brought home, remains a bloody basket case, even behind the veneer of Dubaian towers and Saudi scheming. Africa has demographics on its side but little else. Latin America nestles somewhere between all of these worlds, with no claims to much beyond its shores. Someone has got to guide the rule-setting in an anarchic system, and it might as well be us.

There are a few different ways this renegotiation could go. The British, for example, managed a retreat from empire with little loss of their own lives and a national myth largely intact. The impact of that retreat on the nations they left is much less consistent (ask the Indians and Pakistanis about that partition), and we could argue about the extent to which Britain’s increasing ungovernability today is downstream of that imperial fade. But reorientation with dignity is possible, especially when there are allies who understand the stakes and adjust accordingly, as the Americans did with their erstwhile colonialists. Further back in history there are the Habsburgs, brilliant balancers of power for centuries. There is the example of Byzantium, the Roman successor who, while diminished, remained the golden center of the West for another thousand years, and the mythical ideal for Europe for centuries after that. And if things go badly awry there is the model of St. Benedict and the retreat from the worst of a fallen world into intentional communities, there to preserve knowledge and carry something forward on into modernity. I list these examples not as prescriptions, but as pathways of understanding on how things can go.

The second great question facing the United States is one of national identity. The US has done as well as anywhere at integrating a sweeping range of immigrants into a loose national culture, and even haltingly coming to terms with its two great early sins, slavery and the annihilation of Native Nations. In this, the US once again better resembles some empires of old, which had to tolerate a certain level of cultural diversity and decentralization because they were so sprawling and contained so many peoples, and periodically tore down the statues of the old gods and replaced them with new, more useful ones. This stands in stark contrast to the nationalist bloodbaths that consumed Europe between the Napoleonic Era and the Second World War (and in some places beyond), an impulse that turned catastrophically destructive when the hunger for national glory blurred with designs of old-school imperial growth, whether in Napoleonic France or Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. We see a version of this hunger now bubbling on the American right, though lacking obvious pathways outside of niche Greenland fantasies.

The integrationist impulse is under direct attack now from a right that wishes very dearly that the US had a more coherent, rooted sense of self; one that could somehow encompass 350 million people from very different places and of very different origins that somehow also does not settle for the lowest common denominator of 20th century mass culture. It has also taken some blows from a left on a doomed quest to throw out any sense of American history as tainted; a more moderate left couches the US’s role strictly in the realm of noble but somewhat airy ideals, as if rootedness in place and time is an abstraction we can wave away. A few things are simultaneously true: immigration has been a powerful force for American innovation and dynamism, a through-line of new energy. But shared culture is the secret to the success of the strong state (including, and perhaps especially, a welfare state), and beyond a certain level of immigration, there is a regular and extreme backlash that makes such cultural cohesion hard to attain. At the policy level, it requires a balancing act that satisfies few people with strongly held ideas about nationhood or human rights.

Even in an era of optimized algorithms, the US’s size and built-in variety make reproducing a true national culture here a tall order. It is no wonder that American culture so often reduces itself to what can feel like an empty consumerism and commitment to a relentless economic engine: it’s the only thing big enough to bind it all. As a localist who accepts the reality of empire, I do not necessarily mourn this weakness of national unity. It gives us good reason to double down on the more local and tangible, and it lets the rich variety of this country come out. But it does bake in an inherent tension between the rooted hunger for community and the crusading desire for universals baked into the American founding project, twin strands visible anywhere on the political spectrum. The centralizing forces, especially in an increasingly less physical world, threaten to overrun the unique pockets that are at the true heart of the American mythos.

So I once again urge: step out of the imagined community and appreciate the reality on the ground. Immerse yourself; see the great spaces of the West and the immigrant neighborhoods of a global city, the endlessly reinventing metropolises and the struggle for a renewal in an old industrial or agricultural town. Appreciate the commonalities, respect the differences and why they came to be. See us as the empire we are, great and sprawling and flawed. At 250, we are neither a melting pot nor a salad bowl but instead float in a soup. It contains many ingredients all bathed in a general broth, some flavors coming out stronger in certain bites but none coming to dominate the whole meal.

It seems appropriate to see a World Cup played on American shores at time of the Semiquincentennial. Of course the US team’s performance was the same as it ever was, generating irrational hype with victories over such powers as Bosnia and Herzegovina before succumbing when faced with a halfway respectable opponent. (Emphasis on the halfway.) From visa trouble to an overturned red card, the bluntness of American power has been on display. But this is, largely, a pageant that gets past the dumb geopolitics and FIFA corruption. Some of the greatest fun has been in seeing foreigners marvel at such American wonders as air conditioning and Buc-ee’s and parking lots larger than some European micro-states. A love affair grew between Boston and the Scottish masses that descended upon it, and between a Lawrence, Kansas and the Algerians who set up their team camp there. Here is Lionel Messi in an SEC football stadium, uniting the two most rabid fan bases in sports; there is Erling Haaland, the Norwegian cheat code of a striker, trying on a cowboy hat. Amid it all one can still see a sense of how the United States can still be a benevolent hegemon, and of how people from everywhere can find a home here, if only for a little while. The empire’s reach is long, but its touch can still be light.

American Adolescence and the Illusion of Control

“‘God save us always,’ I said, ‘from the innocent and the good.’”

—Graham Greene, The Quiet American

Iraq is a mess. The advance of radical Sunni militants has the country going to pieces, and the blind lack of reason in the tangle web of alliances now has the United States and Iran effectively on the same page. The comparisons to Vietnam have never easier for those who enjoy the policy wonk obsession with historical analogies. Not surprisingly, the American public is rather jaded with all of this; no one has much energy for a new war or nation-building mission, and would prefer to sit back and watch all of this play out.

A lot of people in our political classes and punditocracy don’t like this. (Here’s David Brooks’s lament from Friday’s New York Times as a clear example.) It’s not really a partisan thing, either; both the neoconservatives and the liberal internationalists see it as a problem. The U.S. is reneging on its role as a world leader, and as a beacon of democracy and capitalism; this weakness will empower its rivals around the globe, from Russia to Iran to the Sunni radicals now on the rise. We could have had this, they say; if we hadn’t screwed up here or there in the past ten years, things would be better now. We could have been in control, and if we’d just flash our muscles and prove our “credibility,” we’d be able to turn the tide.

If only geopolitics were that easy. No: reality is far more troubling, far beyond anyone’s control. No one is calling the shots because no one can call the shots. Sure, there’s some collusion here and there, and the good old boys networks naturally emerge among people with common interests and aspirations to power.  But through it all, there is this blind faith that the buck really does stop at the top; that, by virtue of holding certain offices, people really can decides outcomes near and far. The vast majority of the time, they can’t. Some people can fake it well for a while, and appearance can be half the battle, but things are often more tenuous than they seem. Reality is so much more fragmented, so tied up in the agendas and whims of various middlemen and self-interested actors who see the world in an entirely different way. It’s a complex web of incentives, pushing people here and there, amounting to a “thing” only on a level of abstraction.

The realm of ideas does matter, and it’s hard to be rosy when looking at things on that level. People scream “do something” left and right, whether it’s in Libya or Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan. Despite the noble efforts of many soldiers and dedicated public servants, we never seem to make things better, no matter how hard we try. If we never get it right, what on earth fuels the delusion that this time will somehow be different? We hear cries that the U.S. needs to arm the “right” people, as if there were black and white distinctions in this realm; as if all our interests somehow aligned. They don’t. Recall how “our people” in Iraq wound up being corrupt wannabe aristocrats; “our man” in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, has gone down the same road. They operate by a different logic, a different set of incentives, and in turn make their way down a different path.

The trouble is that, no matter how viciously we may take apart the illusion of control, the alternatives also tend to operate in a realm of idealism no less divorced from reality. When a nation is as powerful as the United States, inaction is also an active policy. The U.S., one might recall, was minimally involved in direct intervention in the Middle East prior to 9/11. Instead, the U.S. propped up the status quo and let its global culture leech into every little village. This benign reach was, in a way, far more threatening than the complete arsenal of the American military. There was no easy target for anger, no obvious threat: just that steady loss of control, the destruction of a worldview with things as simple as pop music and suggestive clothing. The U.S. could pull every last soldier out of the Middle East, withdraw every dollar it pays into its despotic regimes, and it would still be implicated, somehow, in whatever happens next. Such is the power of Western culture and U.S. hegemony on the world stage.

This is, of course, the U.S.’s great conundrum: it is founded on the belief in ever-greater freedom, in an ongoing quest for the realization of the self. Old cultural artifices have no place here. Over two centuries after its founding, the U.S. has proved wildly successful in exporting that dream of liberty. It’s successful because it taps into a fundamental aspect of the human psyche, one that comes out most clearly in adolescence: the urge for a bold assertion of self, an individual independent of old constraints, capable of authoring one’s own fate. It’s a necessary spark, and the resultant blaze of passion fuels many of humanity’s greatest achievements. Can any of us imagine our lives without it?

Like any human urge, though, it has its dark side. It risks naïveté, consumed by the belief that this quest for freedom is the only thing. The old roots don’t die so easily, and often are an essential part of the rebellion itself. (When compared to Latin America, the U.S. owes much of its relative economic success and political stability to the Enlightenment-influenced, more bourgeois British colonists; our southern neighbors, born of the Counter-Reformation and hierarchical Spain, faced rather different troubles from independence onward.) It can’t be dropped into other places and made to take root with a few quick brushstrokes that empower the “right” people. It has to be organic, not only in the foundation of the movement but in its creation of new institutions. The two buzzwords that dominate all sensible international affairs theory nowadays are “incentives” and “institutions.” If they’re not in place, nothing can follow.

The death of great dreams is never easy, and the threat of declinist hysteria may be the most serious danger to U.S. politics in the coming years. Now more than ever, Octavio Paz’s words ring true. History did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but instead died somewhere in the sands of Iraq or among the peaks of Afghanistan, ever that graveyard of empires. At long last the worldwide ideologies have exhausted themselves, and while several linger in attenuated forms, they might yet be defeated by the forces of reality. Perhaps now we can arrive at more realistic nations in the Middle East, instead of things drawn on the back of a napkin by Europeans in 1916. The coming sort will no doubt be bloody, but precious few nations can claim a peaceful birth, and for all its flaws, the international community is better equipped to enforce some standards of decorum and decency now than it ever has been in the past. Frustrating as they can be, the idealists still have a key role to play on that front.

“Now we’re finally the same age,” wrote Roger Angell immediately after 9/11. “None of us is young this week, and, with death and calamity just down the street, few of us vicarious any longer.” He was playing the world-wise old man, one who’d seen wars and death in his then eighty years, teaching us kids a thing or two about how to handle one of those terrible reminders that we have no control. On an individual level that may have been true, but for the U.S. as a whole, it never quite worked. From Watergate to Vietnam to 9/11, people claimed that hubris would be the ruin of the innocent belief in the American world project, but it never really did. People forgot, moved on, and continued with that noble mission to mold the world in the American image.

Maybe, just maybe, Angell’s words finally ring true. Maybe that adolescent stage is now over. It was a glorious stage, one of national greatness and awesome wealth and considerable influence. Only those who serve a higher God would want to trade away that power of living in the moment. That illusion of control might have come as close to reality as it ever has. But the U.S. isn’t young anymore. We have a history now, and after touring the world and running down its streets, brashly proclaiming we’re the kings of it all, perhaps it’s time to head home for a bit. Perhaps it’s time to settle down and find a job; maybe not a glamorous one, but one that keeps us afloat and lets us do some good in the neighborhood, when and where it makes sense. We’ll never be free to be left alone; such is the life of a global citizen. But we can make sure our own house is in order before trying to save those of people we don’t really know, and we can use our soft power to make sure our little contribution—that youthful spark—remains a worthy aspiration. Maybe, then, a sane international order might emerge. Or maybe I’m just as much of a dreamer as the idealists I scorn. I’ll take my chances.

A New World Disorder

Let’s take a step back from the Syrian intervention debate for a moment here, play some pop poly sci, and explore what the ongoing crisis means for world politics. Put simply, it could well be the end of the post-Cold War Pax Americana, and a sign of a much more complex world. Of course, some people have been talking about this for a long time. The most famous is probably Fareed Zakaria, who wrote a bestselling book about it five years ago. As early as the mid-1990s, Samuel Huntington was imagining creative new ways in which people might fight each other, absent any Cold War ideological battle lines to separate each other.

The people making these arguments usually framed them against the narrative of the hegemony of liberal democracy and capitalism, made famous by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. It was a great title for grabbing people’s attention, though it also led a lot of people to misunderstand him. We’ll save that argument for some other time and say that, quite simply, things looked pretty good if you were a proponent of liberal democracy and capitalism at the end of the Cold War. The communists were done for, and authoritarians were falling across Europe, Latin America, and even in a few other places. The European Union was taking the next step, NAFTA was in the works, and the Gulf War had shown that no one could really mess with the United States military. In an increasingly interconnected world, there were no obvious alternatives. Sure, there were some angry Muslims out there who weren’t too fond of liberal modernity who might blow a few things up, and yes, democratization would have to come in bumps and lurches in many places. But it was hard to conceive of another ideology that might be applicable to the entire world. The biggest questions were over how to make all that integration happen—would it simply be economic, or political as well?—and how to deal with the people and countries that didn’t take off on the right path right away.

Fast forward to 2003 or so, and the narrative still pretty much applies. Yes, some angry Muslims blew some things up, but the U.S. pursued them into Afghanistan and knocked off their patrons and made its message pretty clear. The rest of the world pretty much had the U.S.’s back. The E.U. had itself some shiny new coins. Democracy was lurching ahead in Latin America and in Africa; only in the Middle East were things not really showing signs of moving in the “right” direction. So the U.S. went in and tried to do something about it.

Ten years later, we know that didn’t work so well. Iraq is no shining beacon of democracy in the Middle East, and if anything, the invasion simply added to the regional instability. Though it did little to truly undermine global capitalism, the financial crisis was very disruptive for the countries that had been bankrolling the march of liberal democracy. This was especially true in the troubled Eurozone, though the United States had its own set of issues, especially as the country in the lonely throne atop the world order. The failures of the Bush Era now evident, Barack Obama was elected to usher in a new foreign policy; two years after that, voters decided they didn’t much care about foreign policy when the economy was still not moving much, and in came the Tea Party—which, whatever else one might say about it, by in large has little interest in the nuances of geopolitics. The global vision seemed to be collapsing in on itself, as everyone was too busy dealing with their own crap to bother with saving other people.

A few months later, though, there was reason for hope again. Finally, the dominoes were beginning to fall in the Middle East: spontaneous, popular protests began to weaken the entrenched autocracies, the most notable being Egypt, a regional power. Killing Osama bin Laden was a nice cherry on top, too. Hey, maybe the dream wasn’t dead after all. When it became clear the popular revolt in Libya was going to need a bit of a nudge to knock off its ugly autocrat, the U.S. and its friends were happy to lend a hand. Once again, freedom was on the march.

Fast forward again, and the hopes of the liberal democrats have again gone unfulfilled. The Libya intervention effectively destabilized Mali. Egypt’s “revolution” now looks more like a series of coups coupled with huge protests, and no one has any idea what the endgame will be there. Perhaps even more significant now, though, is Syria, where Bashar al-Assad has shown he is willing to fight to the death in his own civil war. The worldwide debate over how to respond shows just how troubled the world order is:

-Existing international institutions have no real mechanism to react. There is no way to punish chemical weapons users from some sort of international, objective position up on high. This position does not exist.

-No rising power yet has the power or the interest to lead its own effort, with one—Russia—actively opposing any action. If the world intervenes, it will be the U.S. (maybe with France tagging along) or no one.

-A war-weary portion of the American public—including Rand Paul’s wing of the long-united, pro-intervention Republican Party—has no interest in geopolitical questions, and thinks the U.S. should mind its own business.

-The neoconservatives—John McCain, Lindsey Graham—on the other hand, are obsessed with geopolitics, and want the U.S. to take the lead, knock out Assad, and set the Middle East on a course to peace. Failure to do so, they believe, will embolden the likes of Russia and Iran, and let an evil dictator stay in power. The word they repeat ad nauseam is “credibility.” If the U.S. says it will act and then does not, the American reputation will be tarnished forever, they say. (Of course, they never bother to mention what happens after the U.S. asserts its credibility by lobbing a few bombs at Damascus, unless they want an all-out invasion and occupation.)

-As of this writing, is hard to know what Barack Obama thinks. Has he called for a vote on Syria—something he did not bother to do with Libya—for strictly political reasons? It makes total sense from that perspective, as it exposes the rifts in the Republicans, makes them complicit in the march to war if and when things do go wrong, and gives him an easy out if Congress somehow actually rejects his proposal.

However, I suspect Obama is genuinely conflicted on this, which may be why he’s passing the buck and actually (gasp) following the Constitution instead of attacking at will. On the one hand, he does believe most of what he said back when he gave his Nobel Prize address; good liberal that he is, he wants to believe the world can punish evildoers and those who violate international law, and he knows the U.S. is the only country that can really do that. But this is also a man who ran as someone who’d learned the lessons of Iraq: that it will be difficult not to escalate from a “surgical” first shot, that this will inevitably be seen as taking a side in the conflict, and that a rebel victory could very easily bring hardline Islamists to power, creating a far bigger regional headache than Assad ever was. Given the difficulty of the question, some dithering is understandable; the problem is that the dithering makes him look at best indecisive, and at worst a total cynic.

And so it becomes clear that the new world order is anything but the hegemony of liberal democracy. It hasn’t been a clash of civilizations, a la Huntington: there have been hints of that, and there may be future threats of that, but Huntington’s worry about “Islam’s bloody borders” was misplaced. It was the bloody interior of the Islamic world that would make it all apparent. We’re left with Alawites and Sunnis and Shias and secularists all shooting each other (with Christians as the collateral damage), all tangled up in bizarre webs of alliances. (Here is a helpful chart that makes everything clear.)

This thing shows how laughable it is to imagine an overarching narrative here. Some people might lament lost chances: if only the U.S. had stayed out of Iraq, or gotten it right, or—to take a more hard-line stance—nipped off all of these disruptive Middle Eastern revolts before they upended a stable, if autocratic, region. I don’t buy it. Autocracies never last, and the allure of “freedom” is always there, especially in such an interconnected world. The revolts would have happened, sooner or later. Likewise, the U.S.’s window of dominance is going to end sooner or later: if not because of military defeat, simple demographics make this clear enough. (I’m not saying the U.S. will fall from its spot as the foremost international superpower anytime soon; given my doubts over the stability of autocracies, I think China has far more serious issues than the U.S. does that it will have to deal with sometime down the line. I’m simply saying that U.S. power for international military influence is shrinking, and will probably continue to shrink.)

And so we’re left with our new world order, which, it turns out, is not some sort of march toward destiny (be it of liberal or a communist or a religious variety), but a mess of regimes rising and falling all over the place and dragging people into webs of intrigue worse than my high school love life. It isn’t pretty, but no one can accuse it of being boring, and as horrible as conditions may be in Syria, this is also (by historical standards) a pretty peaceful time. That might last; it might not. Further integration and democratic advance remain a real possibility, probably worth supporting when they do not require extreme exertion. (See Myanmar, for example.)

But that also might not happen, and any student of international politics must understand that, for sanity’s sake. We’re left with a diverse world full of interesting messes, and while this shouldn’t cause us to give up all hope of changing it, we do have to respect its complexity. If that makes us traitors to this America messianic mission of converting the world, then so be it. We are not slaves to the fate of humanity: we are free to carve out our own little communities of contentment and choose only the battles that we cannot avoid or that we know will not consume us. We can only control so much.

Edit: Ross Douthat has come out with a good, measured piece that wrestles with some of these themes.