After Tamerlane (72 page)

The reversal was astounding. In the mid-1980s the scope of Soviet ambition seemed greater than ever. From a forward base at Camranh Bay in southern Vietnam, the Soviet navy could make its presence felt across the main sea lanes running through South East Asia and in the Indian Ocean, a ‘British lake' until the 1950s.
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By laying down huge newaircraft carriers like the
Leonid Brezhnev
, Moscownowaimed to rival the Americans' capacity to intervene around the globe. But then in less than half a decade this vast imperial structure – the ruling power across Northern Eurasia; the tenacious rival in Southern Asia, Africa and the Middle East – simply fell to pieces. By 1991 it was an empire in ruins. There was no ‘silver age' or phase of decline: just a calamitous fall.

The explanation may lie in the converging pressures for internal reform and the ill-fated schemes of the Soviet leaders to escape from the vice they thought was closing upon them. The basic failing of the Soviet system was economic. After 1970, the rapid growth of previous decades could not be sustained. The extra production to improve living standards and fund the apparatus of military power eluded the Soviet planners. Without the sanction of terror, the command economy that Stalin had fashioned lost its grip on the workforce.
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The lack of a price mechanism to direct investment and select innovation became more and more costly. To make matters worse, the setbacks affecting the market economies in the 1970s proved very short-lived. In the G- 7 countries (Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Canada, Japan and the United States) that made up the core of the capitalist world, the 1980s sawextremely rapid movement towards the characteristic forms of commercial globalization: ever-greater dependence upon
exports and trade; bank activity across national borders; the flowof capital into foreign investment; the large-scale buying and selling of currencies.
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America's corporate economy staged a major recovery in the 1980s.
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The spectacular growth of so-called ‘newly industrialized countries', like Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan and, above all, South Korea (the world's tenth largest producer of steel by 1989), most of which had sheltered under American strategic protection, erased the fear that they would be hollowed out by Marxist liberation movements. In South East Asia, the ‘South Korean' road to industrial prosperity, not the ‘Vietnamese' road to peasant revolution, exerted the stronger appeal. But in the Soviet empire the burden of military spending became more and more crushing, while the satellite economies of Communist Eastern Europe looked increasingly westward for investment and trade.

Gorbachev's ‘perestroika' was a last-ditch effort of imperial reform by a newSoviet leader.
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Its principal aim was to ‘Westernize' both the ‘domestic' economy of the Soviet Union and the ‘imperial' economy of the ‘outer empire': to make them more responsive to consumer demand and technological innovation. The logic of this was very far-reaching. It meant promoting ‘new' men and weakening the grip of the party bureaucracy on the command economy. It meant freeing up resources previously committed to the military effort. It meant loosening the ‘discipline' that Moscowimposed on the satellite governments in Eastern Europe, to permit ‘moderate' change. It meant negotiating access to Western investment and Western newtechnologies. And, because none of this was possible without easing the tensions of the ‘newCold War', it meant shrinking the scale of the Soviet military presence: in Eastern and Central Europe; in the spheres of intervention across Asia and Africa; above all in Afghanistan. Yet it is most unlikely that Gorbachev intended to surrender the claim of the Soviet Union to be a global power – indeed, the second great power. What he sought was a breathing space. His détente diplomacy was designed to protect Eastern Europe's delicate transition from a Soviet sphere of control to an ‘informal empire' of fraternal influence. The Soviet empire would be modernized under Western eyes in a congenial climate of ‘cooperative coexistence'. Revived and rejuvenated, it would still claim to offer a ‘parallel modernity'.

But Gorbachev found (like the old colonial powers before him) that informal imperialism was not an easy option. To give up control and the threat of coercion was to take a big risk. Without other means to keep old clients loyal, it might even prove fatal. What Moscowcould offer by way of economic inducements was paltry indeed compared with the West: this could already be seen in the slackening grip of Soviet power on Poland in the 1980s. So, with dizzying speed, East European reform turned into East European revolt. In November 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, pro-Soviet governments collapsed, the East European ‘outer empire' vanished. This disaster devastated the authority and legitimacy of the Soviet regime. The command economy broke down at home. In the following year (1990) the revolt spread quickly across the ‘inner empire' of the Soviet Union. The Soviet republics – including Russia itself, under Boris Yeltsin – now demanded their freedom. The abortive attempt by Gorbachev's colleagues to stem the political tide by a military coup and a state of emergency was the final straw. The Treaty of Alma Ata in December 1991 dissolved the Soviet Union into fifteen newstates. It acknowledged the end of the Soviet
raj
in the Baltic, in the Trans-Caucasus and in Central Asia. Perhaps most telling of all, even the Ukraine, the vital auxiliary of Russian imperial power since the 1650s, voted for full independence. Post-Soviet Russia remained a colonial power with a huge domain. But, with a crippled economy and growing American influence in Inner Eurasia, its prospects might have daunted even Peter the Great.

The empire-building of the bipolar age had been the other face of decolonization. Two great imperial systems had struggled to contain each other's expansion (real or imagined) and stabilize the wide zone of post-colonial instability to their own advantage. In fact stabilization had proved a mirage. There was even less chance than before 191 4 that the rivals could agree on a global partition, or enforce its terms if they did. Firstly, the newnorm of sovereignty inscribed in the charter of the United Nations ruled out recourse to overt territorial
control – as did the domestic ideology of both contending powers. Secondly, with the exception of Europe, neither was willing to concede the permanent loss of any world region where hope still remained of political change. On that point, too, domestic ideology was firm. Thirdly, the legacy of empire to the post-colonial world had been anything but a smooth start in life. Geopolitical disputes between successor states, unresolved religious and ethnic conflicts, the use of state power to amass private wealth, and the vulnerability of weak states to economic shocks from outside were among the bitter fruits of colonial freedom. They hugely increased both the risk of upheaval and the scope for outside interference, by invitation or not. Fourthly, even if the two superpowers had settled the limits of their imperial spheres, they faced the irreconcilable enmity of the excluded other. Courted or quarrelled with, China was the joker in superpower politics. Neither side could be sure when or how it might change the game. Indeed, China's turn towards capitalism in the late 1970s, and the extraordinary growth of its hitherto closed economy, injected a large newfactor of uncertainty in the last decade of superpower rivalry.

But what would happen once the Soviet collapse brought an end to competition? It was immediately clear that there would be no American retreat into hemispheric isolation. The great forward movement of American power and influence after 1945 would not be reversed. The Cold War had been the great age of American expansion. The vast newscale of American trade and investment, and America's dependence upon imported products (especially oil), made it just as important as at the end of the Second World War to have a dominant voice in shaping the rules of the world economy. The geostrategic revolution brought about by air power, satellite technology and nuclear weapons affirmed even more forcefully that American security was a global, not a hemispheric, matter. Thus the American response to the end of the Cold War was to see it not as the chance to lay down an imperial burden, but as a metahistoric opportunity to shape the course of world history.
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This was the moment to complete the permanent transformation of the global economy, already under way in the 1970s and '80s. Closed economies should be opened up; state monopolies be broken down; the open door be enforced; private
property – especially foreign private property – be made safe. Woodrow Wilson's prescription for international peace – long obstructed by Marxism–Leninism, Nazism and old-fashioned European colonialism – could at last be administered right around the world. Political differences, the scars of nationalism, the wounds of class warfare, even the horrors of race hatred, would be washed away by the cleansing tide of free economic exchange and its cultural by-products. For the market economy would bring in its train an irresistible demand for democratization. Freed from the tyranny of the command economy and the spiritual oppression of ideological warfare, hitherto subject peoples would naturally choose liberal democracy. The vital corollary for this global task was geostrategic. No state could be allowed to frustrate its achievement by the use of force. No state should be able to threaten its neighbours and carve out a regional ‘empire' designed to exclude the global economy and its liberal culture. The enormous military lead that the United States had built up by the end of the Cold War must nowbe deployed to freeze the global balance of power, where it mattered most. To the veteran grand strategist ZbigniewBrzezinski the logic was obvious. American policy had no choice but to play a managing role in the geopolitics of Eurasia.
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It was hardly surprising that the seemingly unlimited scope of American ambition bred a mixed reaction. Unrestrained by the need to solicit goodwill, no longer in need of its Cold War alliances, and riding the wave of ideological triumph, America seemed free to use its economic and military muscle against all opposition, and the opposition of all. Talk of an American ‘empire', previously confined to the rhetoric of the Left, became increasingly common. A universal empire, in which one state imposed its domestic laws upon all the others, was the polar opposite of the long tradition of international lawthat had evolved in Europe since the seventeenth century. In that tradition, it was the need to respect the sovereignty of states that was constantly stressed, and the requirement to seek the agreement of all (in the nineteenth century it had been all ‘civilized' states) when framing the rules of international conduct.
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Unease on the Left was fused with the suspicion of many post-colonial states that the freedoms they had enjoyed under bipolar conditions were about to be lost, and with the
wider complaint that building decolonized cultures – in which the ‘normality' of the West was no longer assumed – was an impossible task in the face of ‘globalization' under American auspices.

These fears were sharpened at the end of the century. For it was then that the easy assumptions of a post-Cold War world began to unravel. In the Middle East, in East Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa the conflict and instability of the Cold War era showed a stubborn persistence. History had not come to an end. Decolonization, in its larger sense, remained incomplete. The response in America was to assert much more bluntly that American power should be used to secure the gains and advance the programme of the new world order after 1989. The ensuing debate made still more explicit the question of whether the United States was an empire, or should embrace the role of an imperial power. What the critics perceived was the aggressive revival of two deep-rooted attitudes towards the rest of the world. The first was unilateralism: the reluctance to be bound by rules made for others. It sprang from beliefs about America's ‘exceptional' origins as a democratic society in a world ruled by despots or the feudal detritus of the European nobility. The second was universalism: what was good for America was good for the world. Democratic institutions on the American model, America's version of the market economy, and a commercial culture made for mass consumption were the best guarantees of wealth and stability. To refuse to adopt them was a hostile act against progress and peace. Unilateralism and universalism were harmless foibles in an isolationist power. In the world's only superpower they became the chief elements of an imperial outlook. Wedded to the use of a coercive diplomacy or armed intervention, they were the high road to ‘empire' in which perpetual war abroad would subvert democracy at home.
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It is pointless to debate whether America should be seen as an imperial power: the case has already been made. After 1990 it became the only world empire. A state with the means to intervene forcibly in almost any part of the world, with such a massive advantage in military power over any possible rival, and with an advanced economy more than twice the size of its nearest competitor was such an empire de facto. That America was without the colonial possessions that contributed
partly
to the global pre-eminence of Victorian Britain is
of trivial importance. Victorian Britain was widely different in its public ideology, economic objectives and political methods from first-century Rome, but both ruled empires. Empires exist to accumulate power on an extensive scale; the form that they take reflects prevailing conditions, not unthinking adherence to an obsolete model. The interesting question about America's empire is not its existence (which we may take as read) but the limits to which it (like all previous empires) may be subject (or not).

The elements of its power can be briefly listed. In 2003 the United States possessed more than 700 bases (and 234 military golf courses) in 130 countries, not counting a number of ‘temporary' installations. More than 250,000 uniformed personnel served overseas in the huge regional commands (‘Pacom', ‘Southcom', ‘Centcom' etc.) that divided the globe between them. With fifty-four nuclear attack submarines, twelve aircraft carriers, a dozen helicopter carriers and a huge fleet of support vessels, the United States holds command of the sea. In space, in the air and in modern warfare on land, American superiority is all but unchallengeable. In economic terms, the scale of American wealth is just as astounding. The United States accounted for nearly one-third of the world's gross production in 1999;
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its gross national product is five times that of China. As a buyer and seller on a massive scale, as the loudest voice in the organizations that regulate the world's trade and finance, and as the home of many of the world's largest business corporations, the United States can wield enormous ‘soft power'. Thirdly, economic success and the prestige and appeal of American-style democracy have combined to create newbridgeheads of influence all over the world. The cavernous purse from which to reward cooperation and friendship, and the social networks built by educational links and by migrations and diasporas whose richest members reside in America, offer the means to drive them wider and deeper. For the American empire (like the British before it) is not the preserve of governments and policymakers. Much of the energy that fuels American expansion is unofficial and private.