Miller - The Ethics of Empire

Richard W. Miller Cornell University THE ETHICS OF EMPIRE The standard task of political philosophy has been to describe a person's duties to her compatriots as a citizen of the state they share. Recently, there has been growing interest, as well, in the political duties of people in developed countries to people in developing countries as coparticipants in the global economy and in international economic institutions such as the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank. Yet something big is left out of this picture, or, in any case, not singled out as a source of civic duty: the power structure that is now frequently labelled (even in the United States) "the American empire." Taking a further step beyond the standard task, I will describe some duties of a citizen of the metropolitan power in this empire toward those who are affected by it. (I will have to concentrate on U.S. citizens for reasons of space, but I hope that implications for people in other civic situations will be clear.) I will begin by clarifying the content of the label, "American empire," associating it with three mutually reinforcing aspects of American power. It will turn out that the mere existence of the American empire gives a U.S. citizen a demanding duty of justice to support measures in the interest of needy people in developing countries. Then, reflecting on current debates over the course of empire, I will argue that the turn to more direct and unilateral uses of American military might is one rational response to genuine, growing challenges to the American empire. The rationality of this strategy, its injustice and the limits of American elections in reducing unjust violence in defense of the empire create a second cosmopolitan duty, a duty of an American citizen to take part in an international movement that seeks to hem in the American empire. I will conclude with the question of the proper agenda for this movement, especially the difficult issue of whether it should seek to end the empire. Special Prerogatives

An explication of the phrase "the American empire" that clarifies controversies in which the label is used had better be ecumenical, describing facts of power all of which are often asserted in saying that there is an American empire and all of which are accepted by virtually everyone who says that it exists. These phenomena involve three sources of power to advance U.S.-based interests regardless of the interests of others, which I will call "prerogatives," "the influence of threat power" and "the exercise of destructive power." By America's "prerogatives," I mean America's capacity to pursue interests in ways that give rise to costs to others on account of the importance of the United States in joint arrangements depending on shared norms and answering to shared needs. The prime examples are U.S. prerogatives due to the pervasive use of the dollar and American financial instruments in the international system of finance and payments. Even if needs for fluency and security in commercial transactions make it in the interest of all for there to be a dominant currency connected with a vast financial market that is the safest haven, this global role of the United States makes particular courses of conduct feasible that are opposed to foreign interests. Because of the role of the dollar and U.S. financial markets, the United States can finance vast budget and trade deficits year after year, relying on the need for U.S. Treasury bills in foreign exchange reserves and the continued in-flow of investment funds. Indeed, foreign investors now hold about two fifths of the federal debt in private hands, and have claims on about $8 trillion of U.S. assets, which is over four-fifths the size of current gross national income.1 Exercise of these borrowing prerogatives makes it harder, outside the United States, to obtain investment funds and to buy imports. Because of the denomination of loans in dollars and the need for dollar reserves, U.S. economic policies can have painful side-effects throughout the world (for example, harsh consequences for borrowers of dollar-denominated loans 2

when the Fed increases interest rates and the dollar appreciates.) Similarly, the United States has possessed prerogatives of strategic initiative in the Western military alliance (based on superior forces and the need for a unified command) and prerogatives in setting the agenda in worldwide intellectual work (in which the growth of English as the global language and the importance of internationally recognized sources of credentials, formal and informal, play large roles.) In every important arrangement of international scope in which the United States takes part, it has a prerogative whose impact and capacity to override others' interests in specific cases is far in excess of any other participant's. The Influence of Threat Power Still, "American empire" is only fully apt on the basis of an analogy with sovereign domestic political power, whose core, Hobbes saw, is adequate reason to fear "a common power holding all in awe." The analogy rests on what I will call "the influence of threat power": the United States influences lives elsewhere because people have reason to fear what the U.S. will do if it does not get its way, in American conduct partly motivated by an interest in maintaining such fears. On every issue, everywhere, the U.S. can make trouble. The United States must sometimes exercise its power and actually make trouble to preserve the credibility of its threats. But the shaping of global conduct by the influence of threat power usually vastly exceeds its shaping by the carrying out of threats. For example, in the Uruguay Round , the thirteen years of negotiations that gave birth to the current regime in world commerce, administered by the World Trade Organization, the United States government frequently resorted to threats in order to alter the course of negotiations: threats of punitive tariffs, aggressive export subsidies, and withdrawal into independent blocs of favored partners (as in James Baker's deft threat, "otherwise … we might … explore 'a market liberalization 3

club' approach, through minilateral arrangements.")2 These threats were rarely implemented, and never for long, but they produced a world trade regime that was essentially what the U.S. wanted. Indeed, at any given time, the importance of American threat power in shaping current institutions vastly exceeds the actual prevalence of threats. For the past influence of threat power has molded arrangements that reduce current incentives to depart from the interests of the threat-hegemon. Thus, once a greater role for foreign banks has been forced on a developing country, the new investment climate reduces its government's interest in emphasizing growth of locally-based firms, South Korean style The claim that the threat power of the United States influences conduct throughout the world and molds global institutions such as the WTO says nothing about the coincidence or conflict between U.S. interests and the interests of humanity. What is intended is that the direction of that influence is determined by the interests of the United States as perceived by groups that dominate the formation of U.S. foreign policy, perceived interests that determine the direction of that influence regardless of whether they coincide with the interests of humanity. The thesis that the perceived national interest of the U.S. governs U.S. influence regardless of coincidence with the interests of humanity is not, or, in any case, does not deserve to be controversial. In major disputes over the terms of global arrangements, for example, in the heated disputes over agricultural subsidies, intellectual property rights and investment regulations in the Uruguay Round, scores of countries have advanced positions opposed to that of the United States, which always corresponded to the national interest as interpreted by the respective government. It would take considerable bigotry to suppose that the positions of France, Germany, Britain, Ireland, Australia, Brazil, and India have reflected their respective interests while that of the United States alone reflected, instead, impartial 4

concern for moral values. As the same controversies show, the claim that a current arrangement is molded by U.S. threat power in ways that reflect U.S. interests also does not entail the insulting view that those who maintain and direct such influence would act as they do if they thought they acted unjustly. All participants in these controversies appealed with evident sincerity to objective considerations of equity as justifying the main thrust of their positions. To suppose that the United States was the sole participant immune from the tendency of normative beliefs to adapt to the justification of self-interested conduct would, again, require considerable bigotry, as well as ignorance of a vast literature on the reduction of cognitive dissonance (largely derived from experiments in the United States.) Destructive Power The third element in imperial power, namely, the exercise of destructive power, makes threats credible, and does more besides. It also serves as a means of increasing the influence of one's threat power by destroying resources on which others' contrary threat power depends and serves as part of a process of forcibly gaining resources at others' expense. Taking over Iraq was an advantageous exercise of destructive power in all three ways: instilling a heightened level of fear of costs imposed by the United States, destroying Saddam Hussein's contrary threat power in an important region, and gaining increased access to oil reserves, markets and investment opportunities. Especially if one includes the effects of the arming of foreign groups engaged in imposing costs (such as the contras, the mujaheddin of Afghanistan, and the Israel Defense Force), the United States has exercised destructive force abroad much more extensively than any other country since the end of World War II. These three forms of power possessed by the United States, which I will call, collectively, 5

"domineering influence," are mutually reinforcing. For example, special U.S. prerogatives to borrow and to shape rates of foreign exchange due to the dollar's role in international trade and finance are a basis for the credibility of threats by which the United States shapes international trade agreements and make possible the borrowing that sustains large deficits entailed by exercises of destructive power, as in Iraq. Measures that would reduce prerogatives based on the role of the dollar are blocked, in turn, by the influence of American threat power, which has, for example, rendered moot recurrent proposals that the IMF base international liquidity on the granting of special drawing rights to mixed baskets of currencies. If the actual exercise of destructive power did not provide evidence of American readiness to carry out threats, the influence of threat power would wane since this influence is due to expectations. Territoriality The insistent theme in discussions of the American empire is the preponderance of the United States in all three dimensions of power. Ironically, this same preponderance raises the most acute question about the aptness of the label. The preponderance is now global. But surely, there are vast stretches of the globe --including, for example, France, Germany, Iran and China -- that are not part of the American empire. Can there be imperial power that is not power over territory? An ecumenical response to this question, receptive to all facts that lead people to adopt the label, "American empire," would note that part of the American power encouraging this label does consist of domination of territories, while also noting the importance of domineering influence outside this territorial empire. In a few foreign places, namely, military bases and U.S. occupied territories, territorial domination rests on the sort of power exercised by Britain in parts of crown colonies that were subject to direct rule: the main organizations regulating conduct through coercion 6

have a U.S.-based chain of command. Much more frequently (as in Haiti and the Phillipines,) territorial domination involves the limited and conditional territorial autonomy characteristic of indirect rule under the British Empire. For example, as late as the 1950's, the Tiv of central Nigeria were largely governed by customary law, applied in native courts, with their traditional leadership as ultimate authority.3 But the most important features of organized relationships with people outside of Tivland reflected the domineering influence of Britain; the terms of economic self-advancement largely reflected past British domineering influence; and British domineering influence was likely to implement a change in the options available within Tivland if circumstances should make the change strongly in the perceived interests of Britain. Aristide was no more the ultimate executive power in Haiti than the king of the Tiv was in Tivland. In other cases, (for example, Mexico), internal resources for independent action have created a larger space for conduct departing from U.S. interests, but molding by the domineering influence of the United States is deep and extensive, strong enough to block large departures from U.S. interests, incomparably greater than any other foreign power's and utterly asymmetrical (i.e., the domineering influence of Mexico on the United States is minute.) One might see these parts of the world as having "dominion" status, analogous to Canada's relation to Britain in the late nineteenth century, when London tolerated departures from such preferred courses as free trade in order to avoid a Canadian alignment with the United States.4 Such territorial dominance is crucial to current debates over the course of the American empire. But even outside the territorial empire, (for example, in China, France and Iran), the domineering influence of the United States has an impact on most people's lives and more impact than the domineering influence of any other country. Unless nonterritorial domineering influence is included, talk of "the American empire" will underrate American power. 7

Empire and Responsibility The following four claims are not very controversial. Lives everywhere are significantly affected by domineering influence based in the United States. U.S. power in each dimension of domineering influence is much greater than power based in any other country. Large parts of the world's surface are under the territorial dominance of the United States. The international institutions and practices that affect lives throughout the world are largely molded by U.S. interests, on account of the three, mutually reinforcing types of domineering influence. I will take the assertion that there is an American empire to be an abbreviation for these claims. Even though the assertion is not especially controversial, it adds a distinctive dimension to the ethics of international life: on account of the existence of the American empire, citizens of the United States have a strong obligation of concern for urgent needs in developing countries -- on grounds of political justice, not charity. When she supports laws that would affect her compatriots, a citizen seeks to mold their lives through the use of her government's domineering influence over its sovereign territory. If a compatriot were to ask for reasons why he should accept the laws that she supports, it is not justification enough for her to say that her side will win and the domineering influence of the state will give him plenty of reasons to obey. Shared political arrangements are just only if everyone living under them has adequate reason willingly to support them in appropriate ways, not just selfinterested reasons to acquiesce. Within a polity, the willing support that ought to be pursued is equal and demanding loyalty, a basis for political cooperation that gives rise to familiar requirements to reduce economic inequality. But even when such loyalty is not in question, the exercise of domineering influence can give rise to duties to attend to needs of those whose lives are molded. Because Britain used its 8

special and overriding domineering influence to prevent the Tiv from freely advancing their interests through foreign relations, to set the terms of life in Tivland in important ways, and to preserve the option of further intrusion should British interests dictate, Britain had an important responsibility to help Tiv cope with severe deprivation if they could not on their own. Even the limits to intrusion that Britain prudently observed in nineteenth century Canada did not eliminate this basic responsibility, since Britain still used its domineering influence to maintain basic deference. Subjects of these territorial exercises of domineering influence could not self-respectfully willingly accept Britain's constraints if they were not accompanied by a concern to provide, if necessary, for their basic needs. Even if the imperial constraints were not acceptable, in the final analysis, because of offended interests in autonomy, maintaining territorial domination without this second-best responsiveness to legitimate interests would have added injury of neglect to insult of violated autonomy. So long as the Empire endured, a responsible British citizen had a political duty of concern for basic needs throughout the Empire. In general, the more exclusive and extensive the domineering influence of a person or group throughout a territory, the more demanding the responsibility to take care of the basic needs of vulnerable people in the territory. (By putting a fence around a plot of land, I acquire a special responsibility to take care of urgent needs inside the boundary.) Anyone who equally values everyone's life would insist on this correlation of territorial dominance with trusteeship, so that power is not negligently extended. It follows that no morally responsible U.S. citizen can fail to support measures in the interests of needy people in developing countries, most of which are in the U.S. territorial empire and all of which are profoundly affected by U.S. domineering influence. This political duty of concern is 9

extremely demanding. What her government provides in order to advance prosperity within U.S. borders is an important source of any U.S. citizen's material wellbeing. If total state provision has been misallocated, she is not in a position to complain of losses from its responsible reallocation. And extensive reallocation is needed. Although American domineering influence is deep in developing countries, American responsiveness to deprivation there is shallow. Nonmilitary aid to these countries amounts to $39 per person per year; 5 subsidies to U.S. farming, which blight the prospects of poor farmers in the poorest parts of the empire, amount to $20 billion a year ($69 per U.S. resident);6 and the United States pays hardly any of the bill for repair of its exercise and sponsorship of destructive power, for example, in Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Palestine and (for a quarter century) Afghanistan. The Course of Empire Of course, the imperial topic that pervades American politics today is not the question of how the United States can make up for its irresponsibility toward the empire's neediest. Rather, the great debate concerns a strategy that is now pursued by the Bush administration, which might be called the strategy of Bolder Empire. This is a strategy of extending the scope of American territorial dominance, deepening American shaping of foreign political and economic institutions, resorting more readily to the direct use of American military destructive power, and being less constrained by the wishes of other powers in pursuing these goals with these tactics. Although far from satisfying its partisans' "resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests,"7 the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime was the natural first step in implementing this strategy. His dictatorship was vile. His defiance of American interests and values promised to make his defeat a rich source of increased threat influence. Since Iraq is a potentially rich Muslim country with 10

commercially and technologically sophisticated secular elites, the reshaping of its institutions is especially apt to provide an influential example to parts of the world currently resistant to American commerce. Finally, the conquest of Iraq has changed control over destructive power in a strategically and economically important part of the world, and redirected transnational benefits of Iraqi natural resources and commerce toward the United States. Despite all the difficulties of this birth of the Bolder Empire, no other feasible large first step would have commanded acceptance as broad or created as little global instability. In the United States, public discussion of the Bolder Empire is largely a contest between two positions. Its partisans argue that this boldness will advance the interests of humanity, not just of the United States, by establishing juster regimes and more open economies and spreading fear among dangerous tyrannies. Opponents with important standing in politics, policy-making or the respectable media argue that this strategy is irrational, foolishly destroying resources of goodwill and trust needed to sustain American world power in the face of the most serious challenges. I believe that both positions are wrong, and that this fact entails a second cosmopolitan duty. From the perspective of a friend of humanity, the Bolder Empire threatens to increase violence and interfere with struggles to emerge from poverty, dangers that are not justified by any foreseeable gains. The conquest of Iraq, the natural first step, is a useful paradigm. It has, foreseeably, served as a powerful recruiting tool for international terrorism. An important tactic for reducing terrorism and violent injustice, forcing the settlements policy on the Israeli government that a viable Palestinian state requires and most Israelis would prefer, is not available as part of an imperial strategy premised on the molding of institutions by force, dependent on stable ties with military allies in dangerous places and sold as the bold use of force that terrorism merits. In the 11

longer term, the global level of violence will depend on the sequel to the current act in the drama of world power: presumably, a rival superpower will emerge, ultimately, a superpower stronger than the United States. With the sole exception of the transition from Great Britain to the United States, these changes have been bloody phases of world history, sometimes supremely violent, as in the two World Wars of the last century. This turmoil will be intensified if other powers respond to an established American strategy of going its own way in the deployment of force to increase territorial dominance. China will remember. The Bolder Empire will also deepen and defend current trade and financial arrangements in which developing countries must be open to imports and capital flows, including ownership of strategic sectors of communications and banking, without the regulation characteristic of the preWTO era, in which they must defer to dictates of U.S. patent and copyright laws that advantage firms based in the United States and other developed countries, and in which they put up with interminable excuses for the subsidies advantaging firms and farms in developed countries. No country has ever successfully developed without relying on measures to manage damage and increase advantages from world trade that are illegal under this regime. In 1960-78, the heyday of such restrictions on trade and capital flows, population-weighted average annual growth of per capita GDP was 2.8% among Latin American countries; in 1978-98, when these economies were pried open, first through structural adjustment conditions imposed, on U.S. initiative, by the IMF and World Bank, then through the trade, investment and property rights regime administered by the WTO, growth declined from 2.8% to .8%. The comparable figures for Asia are a decline from 4.0% to 3.6%, for Africa, a decline from 1.5% to .1% In the Soviet and ex-Soviet bloc, the contrast is between 5.1% growth and shrinkage at a rate of 1.1%.8According to the most incisive study (by Rodriguez and Rodrik) of the 12

recent correlation of economic growth with the policy-induced trade liberalization sought by the American empire, it has been nil in a typical developing country in recent years -- despite the tumultuous instability that it introduces into millions of lives.9 Thus, a centrally important hope for the world's neediest is the pursuit of options for integration into the world economy that the Bolder Empire would foreclose. (Foreclosing these options in order to manage globalization in the interest of the United States is both a goal of the Bolder Empire and a vital means, since gains from management of globalization pay the bills for boldness.10) Finally, when territorial domination is extended by military means, by an empire minimizing its own casualties, people get killed in large numbers. For example, over 5000 civilians were killed in the 2003 invasion of Iraq11, along with literally uncounted thousands of Iraqi soldiers.12 This proved a preliminary to the deaths of thousands more. In September 2003, a typical month after U.S. victory and before large-scale insurgency, 518 people were killed by gunfire in Baghdad, a city in which such deaths had averaged 6 per month under Saddam Hussein.13 In the first week of the April 2004 U.S. assault on Fallujah, the main hospital and four clinics reported 600 deaths, the vast majority women, children and old men,while 6 American soldiers died.14 If the Bolder Empire is a bad strategy for humanity, then a friend of humanity should hope that it is foolish imperialism. For all American political and economic elites now seek a strong American empire. But the strategy of Bolder Empire is one intelligent response to real challenges, relying on the one qualitative superiority of the United States, its military superiority. If these challenges are not met, the U.S. government and the most powerful American firms may lose a great deal of wealth and power that they could have otherwise, a loss that the elites, like all such elites before, have no disposition willingly to accept. 13

1. The challenge of Europe. The European Union has begun to pose an important threat to American prerogatives. In 2002, the GDP of the European Union was $8.6 trillion, close to the $10.3 trillion of the United States. The total flow of trade in and out of the EU was essentially the same as the total flow of trade in and out of the United States ($1.9 trillion in each case.)15 The success of the euro, combined with European prosperity, could reduce the primacy of the dollar to the tipping point at which U.S. indebtedness cannot be refinanced at current levels and the attractiveness of dollar investments no longer counterbalances a world-historically large trade deficit. At this point, U.S. policy initiatives would face the same fiscal disciplines as everyone else's do now while a large permanent depreciation of the dollar would reduce access to imported goods. Iraq is a good example of the usefulness of an expanded territorial empire, reflecting America's vast military supremacy, in meeting the challenge of Europe. One of Saddam Hussein's acts of defiance was to break with the international practice of selling oil for dollars, getting payment in euros. International obligations will be contracted in dollars, in the Iraqi economy that the United States is shaping. Already, regimes neighboring Iraq have made it clear that a tilt toward Europe is a provocation that they now seek to avoid. In the wake of the American conquest of Iraq, the Le Monde business section mournfully reported that French gains in Qatar had turned into an often unsuccessful fight to hold contested ground "especially in big 'political' contracts. ...The ruling family are relatively weak. Even if they express a certain resentment of the all-powerful Americans, they respect their power."16 2. Losing the cutting edge. In a globalized economy, cutting edge technology is increasingly attractive, but U.S. dominance of the cutting edge has declined over the long run. This decline threatens to accelerate as industry standards are determined by non-American firms, and extra14

American locales become the venues for the complementary skills and facilities needed for innovation. This process can be slowed by the preferential treatment encouraged by the Bolder Empire. Iraq provides another neatly illustrative example. In the wake of American destruction of the Iraqi telephone system, Bahrain's telephone company quickly established an effective wireless network through a $5 million investment in European wireless equipment. Unappreciative of this entrepreneurship, the U.S. occupation authorities shut the system down, announcing, some months later, a grant of licenses to firms based in Kuwait, Egypt and the north-Iraq Kurdish protectorate, using Motorola equipment.17 3. Who Is the World's Banker? The most dynamic and contested aspect of globalization is the extension of services, above all, financial services, across borders. Services, especially services outside of transportation and travel, are the only large category in which the United States has achieved a large and growing trade surplus in the last two decades. But the competitive vigor of European banking has always been strong, and is, if anything, stronger with the revolution in information technology and European accommodation to the use of English as the world lingua franca. Since governments are inevitably involved in the major projects in developing countries that require the most important financing, the extension and consolidation of the territorial American empire shores up American international finance in the face of this competition. 4. The challenge of development. As transnational links in manufacturing, trade and finance between developed and developing countries have strengthened, the trade and financial regime which would be advanced by the Bolder Empire has become increasingly important to the United States and other developed countries, while remaining a target of opposition from developing countries. If the growing economic power of developing countries with large internal markets such as China, Brazil 15

and India were accompanied, as it naturally would be, by leadership in a unified bloc in negotiations, the United States and other developed countries would find it hard to achieve their favored resolutions of the many open questions in the world trade regime. The fearful or dependent governments of an expanded American territorial empire would be important in meeting this threat. Iraq is a shining example of the lure of this project of imposing the kind of development that profits America. The Coalition Provisional Authority has imposed what the New York Times describes as "a series of new laws meant to transform the economy … tariffs were suspended, a new banking code was adopted, a 15 percent cap was placed on all future taxes, and the once heavily guarded doors to foreign investment … were thrown open" as "plans were announced to sell about 150 of the nearly 200 state-owned enterprises."18 5. Scrambling for Oil. American movement of people, goods and weapons is virtually all fueled by oil. National Energy Policy, the report of Dick Cheney's National Energy Policy Development Group, projects an increase in U.S. oil imports of about 75% from 2000 to 2020, moving from 52% to 64% of U.S. consumption.19 In this period, U.S. oil production will decline (by 1.5 million barrels per day, according to the report,) world oil production will probably reach its peak, because of limits to what there is underground,20 and world consumption will become half again greater,21 an increase in demand led by China, an oil-deficient country whose imports are projected to grow "from approximately 1 million barrels of oil per day at present to possibly 5 to 8 billion."22 The vast majority of the world's oil reserves are in the hands of governments of developing countries, partly because that's where the unextracted oil lies, partly because extractive industries are easy and lucrative targets for expropriation. In particular, Middle Eastern governments, whose 16

countries now provide a quarter of U.S. oil imports, control two thirds of proven world oil reserves.23 Unless they are converted to deferential clients through subjugation or threats or through military support in the face of frightening internal opposition, the oil-related interests of the governments of developing countries will not coincide with those of the United States. Slowing the depletion of national oil reserves while maintaining relatively high prices is the rational development strategy for responsible governments. Stripping assets without investment in expanded production and discovery is the rational theft strategy for kleptocracies. The multinational corporations, mostly American, that control the best means of extraction and marketing compete with the governments controlling oil for shares of the profit that can be extracted from a naturally scarce commodity in wide demand. Countries or groups of countries whose decisions have an impact on global oil supply can use this power to pursue distinctive foreign policy objectives, as in the Arab oil embargo. While the maintenance of a long term reserve capacity used to pump more oil to ease temporary shortages could in principle serve a common interest in stability, in the real world large reserve capacity opens a government to pressures to reduce prices over the long run. Yet spurts of production using reserve capacity are the only means of damping the volatility of crude oil prices, marked by such changes as an increase in average initial purchase price from $8.03 a barrel in December 1998 to $30.30 in November 2000.24 The American empire's best resource for coping with the prospect of uppity governments of developing countries rich in oil has been reliance on superior coercive power to maintain deferential client regimes. The centerpiece of this strategy has been the guarantee of the rule of the family of predators who control Saudi Arabia. They certainly pose no threat of retaining oil income to promote domestic development. As petrodollars have flowed abroad, mostly to the United States, per capita 17

Gross National Income at foreign exchange conversion to current dollars has dropped from $16,700 in 1981 to $8460 in 2001, a decline of about 40% in local purchasing power.25 (From 1965 through 1999, the average annual change in Gross Domestic Product at constant dollars was -1.)26 This despicable mismanagement has been accompanied by agile use of Saudi spare capacity, which constitutes 70 to 90 percent of global spare capacity, to increase production to help damp oil prices down. As the National Energy Policy report graciously acknowledges, "Saudi Arabia has pursued a policy of providing effective assurances that it will use its capacity to mitigate the impact of oil supply disruptions in any region."27 A recent article in Foreign Affairs was more fervent, "Saudi spare capacity is the energy equivalent of nuclear weapons … the cornerstone of U.S. oil policy."28 However, as the New York Times reports, "the country's oil fields are in decline … capacity will probably stall near current levels." worldwide demand for oil. Different challenges to the same general effect have threatened the American empire's oil dominion in Iran, Iraq and even Venezuela. A deepening and extension of the oil-bearing parts of the territorial empire, deploying America's military superiority, is one plausible response. Its strategic appeal was epitomized in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, which had defiantly managed Iraq's oil in its own interests (including, it must be said, interests in Iraqi economic development), had every reason to weaken the U.S.-Arabian alliance, and controlled the third largest proven oil reserves in the world, perhaps the most cheaply produced in the world, in a country which was 90% untouched by oil exploration.30 This was a natural first step in meeting the growing challenge to secure, stable access to cheap oil, but it can hardly be the last, as the challenge grows.
29

Meanwhile, discontent in Saudi Arabia grows, along with

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Empire, Excess and Elections What should a U.S. citizen do to reduce unjust international violence due to her government? The Bolder Empire, the policy of violence that dominates the American political agenda now, is not the only rational imperial response to current challenges. In America's political elites, critics of the Bolder Empire vigorously argue that it weakens the empire by inspiring distrust among European powers and fury and resentment in the world at large. In the governance of the empire, this sort of disagreement is resolved in U.S. elections. So an informed friend of humanity who is an American citizen can and should work to elect the lesser of two evils, the candidate who opposes the more dangerous course of empire. Still, the rationality of the Bolder Empire makes a difference for this citizen's political duties. It is part of the basis for a civic duty to take part in an international, nonelectoral movement to hem in the empire. Since the Bolder Empire is one intelligent response to serious challenges to interests guiding American political and economic elites, it will be a recurrent prospect, however the next election goes, and activity directed at electing the presidential candidate less committed to the Bolder Empire will not provide good protection against future outbreaks of this disease. In contests to see who will be U.S. President, the position that less American power would be better and that the U.S. is apt to use its power irresponsibly is a thought that dare not speak its name. (Even Howard Dean's mild reminder that the United States will not be sole superpower forever earned the rebuke from Kerry's camp that he had disqualified himself from being commander-in-chief.) In discourse based on the shared premise of the sanctity and beneficence of American world power -- the more of it, the better -- past excesses in boldness are acknowledged, if at all, as isolated tragic mistakes. This is not a discussion that generates enduring, growing opposition to the recurrent bolder strategy of empire. 19

In addition, once an open and bold imperial adventure has taken hold of foreign territory, American political elites unite in defending the new salient. For it is a shared strategic insight of those who advance American imperial power that an empire must hold on to what it openly and directly seizes, or, in any case, exact terrible costs before letting go. This is how an empire maintains its capacity to induce Hobbesian awe. Long after the thoughtful and articulate strategists whose work we know as The Pentagon Papers had concluded that America's Vietnam intervention had been unwise, they insisted that the U.S. must fight on to preserve its credibility. In the words of the shrewdest among them, John McNaughton, " … however badly SEA [Southeast Asia] may go over the next 1-3 years … [w]e must have kept promises, been tough, taken risks, gotten bloodied and hurt the enemy very badly. We must avoid harmful appearances which will affect judgments by, and provide pretexts to other nations regarding how the US will behave in future cases of particular interest to those other nations …"31 John Kerry joins a long tradition of rational imperial strategizing when he says that the U.S. must stay the course in Iraq, inviting support at the Council on Foreign Relations with fearmongering about the resolve of his opponent. ("I fear that in the run up to the 2004 election the Administration is considering what is tantamount to a cut and run strategy. Their sudden embrace of accelerated Iraqification and American troop withdrawal without adequate stability is an invitation to failure."32) Conscientious opposition to continued American presence in Iraq (or whatever victim of the latest bold adventure) requires rejection of the shared presupposition of American electoral discourse, that American domineering influence everywhere is a feasible source of good. In any case, the least bold imperial strategy that is actively advanced by American political leaders with a chance of electoral success is extremely deadly. This strategy seeks to manipulate 20

balances of power in the empire's favor with the acquiescence of European powers and Japan, without embarking on open, large-scale, direct American military engagement unconnected with international aggression by another party. It has has produced virtually all of the deaths due to the maintenance of the empire since the end of the Vietnam War. Sometimes, as in Afghanistan, the less bold strategy has been relayed from Democratic to Republican administrations. Zbigniew Brezinzski says that "secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul" was approved by Jimmy Carter in light of Brezinzski's opinion that "this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention," and boasts, "That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?"33 The death toll from that trap was over a million, mostly Afghan civilians. After the Soviet withdrawal, the United States, under Republican Presidents, continued funneling arms and subsidies through Pakistan to rigidly Islamicist warlords, hoping to restrict the influence of Iran. These warlords subjected the country to a reign of lawless terror in which, for example, 25,000 people, mostly civilians, died in factional fighting over control of Kabul in 1994.34 Pursuing the less bold strategy elsewhere in the Middle East, U.S. efforts to prevent a decisive victory of either side in the Iraq-Iran War included the sharing of "deliberately distorted or inaccurate intelligence data .. to prevent either Iraq or Iran from prevailing," according to a 1987 New York Times report.35 Half a million died in that prolonged war. George Herbert Bush, who seems on the verge of canonization as a judicious statesman, ended his Gulf War with repeated appeals to "the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands -- to force Saddam Hussein the dictator to step aside,"36 and then, when the call produced a popular uprising rather than a coup, abandoned tens of thousands of rebellious Iraqis to a bloodbath for fear that they were too 21

sympathetic to Iran or apt to provoke Turkey through excessive Kurdish independence: in the south, Iraqi helicopters organized the carnage with American aircraft flying above them, as U.S. troops stopped rebels from taking abandoned arms and ammunition.37 In the first Gulf War, precisionguided weapons destroyed the power stations on which refrigeration, water supply and sewage treatment depends and bombs destroyed the main Baghdad sewage treatment plant.38 Planners of the attacks explained to a Washington Post reporter that they were a deliberate effort to strike "against 'all those things that allow a nation to sustain itself.' … 'What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions.'"39 According to extensive research at the U..S Census Bureau, by a demographer who was forced out after a leak of her report, the war, the suppression of the uprising at its end and the first year of suffering from destruction and sanctions resulted in 158,000 Iraqi deaths -- 40,000 of soldiers killed in combat and 32,000 of children.40 Here, the relay from Republican to Democratic administrations was flawless. Because of vigorous defense of the sanctions by the Clinton administration, which made it impossible to restore sanitation and health care in Iraq, the sanctions ultimately led to 400,000 or more excess deaths among Iraqi children under five41 -- a cost that was "worth it," according to Madeline Albright, now a leading opponent of the Bolder Empire.42 Both political parties have a deep interest in excluding all reference to these atrocities from their electoral debates. Yet this knowledge is a crucial resource for opposition to future deadly responses to the growing challenges to empire, whether the responses are bolder or more traditional, whether their target is Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, or some now quite unforeseen contested territory. A Cosmopolitan Duty As far into the future as anyone can see, American foreign policy will be at least as violent 22

and unjust as some rational strategy for promoting the global power of U.S. economic and political elites requires it to be. Challenges to this power are so severe that all rational strategies involve a great deal of unjust violence, mitigated only by the need to obtain sufficient public acquiescence. Yet because of the domestic political power of these elites, the remoteness of the vast majority of those injured by the empire and the fact that only a tiny minority of those with a great stake in the course of empire get to vote in American elections, electoral competition is a grossly inadequate means of reducing violent injustice by the United States. So a U.S. citizen has a further cosmopolitan duty: to join the international movement of nonelectoral groups committed to opposing the excesses and injustices of the America empire, sometimes opposing them by disruptive and illegal means. Such a movement can save lives, despite the strategic rationality of unjust excesses. The Pentagon Papers, our best guide through the jungle of American imperial planning, is essentially free of concern that a cost in death or suffering might make a deadly choice unjustifiable. But the risk of enraged public opinion together with risks of violent response by China and the Soviet Union are costs (essentially the only costs) that give the planners pause about going too far.43 The movement that a U.S. citizen ought to join is international, moved and coordinated by discussions across borders among anti-globalization outfits, human rights groups, anti-Iraq War coalitions and groups working against world poverty and global climate change. This is as it should be. An American movement against the excesses of empire that is not integrated with this larger whole would reproduce the arrogant confidence in American insight and leadership that properly inspires resentment of the empire. People throughout the world deserve to play an active role in joint activity containing the domineering influence that molds lives throughout the world, most deeply affecting wellbeing outside the United States. 23

What should the goal of this movement be? If, as I have claimed, the American empire has enduring tendencies toward lethal injustice, it might seem obvious that ending the American empire is the right goal. However, there is a powerful argument for a much more limited aim, of hemming in the empire. In this view, the end of the American empire will only occur as part of a shift to some alternative hegemony by a new empire or a hegemonic club of world powers. Friends of humanity have no interest in hastening this transition. The danger that a quick change will be a violent one overrides any reasonable hope that the next hegemon (presumably, China) will be better. Nor is a multipolar power structure an apt goal for a social movement: hegemonic clubs of powers, like the Concert of Europe, tend periodically to dissolve in extremely violent quarrels. Moreover, (the argument continues) even apart from the violence of transition, empire, as opposed its absence, benefits the world's neediest -- rather as the neediest are bettered by exploitation when the alternative is destitute unemployment. Export-led growth is most desperately poor people's best chance of improvement. Given the proliferation of sovereign governments, each with its own elites pursuing parochial interests, the stable expectations and fluent transactions on which the world's people depend require institutions molded by the threat influence of an imperial power or a stable club of imperial powers. -- In this perspective, the international movement should aim to be a global analog of an uncensored press and other aspects of civil society that limit government excesses in constitutional democracies: they reduce the excesses, never eliminate them -- and a good thing, too, since the goal of eliminating government (which is an inevitable source of injustice) is a prayer best left unanswered. Perhaps the power of both arguments is best acknowledged in a vision of the long term future which distinguishes different stages. At some future point, a new structure of influence on American 24

political and economic elites might end the global dominance that I have associated with the phrase "the American empire" without replacing it by any similar hegemony or inviting world conflagration. One basis for this change would be sufficient economic strength and political cohesion outside the United States, including currently developing countries, greatly to increase the strategic appeal of compromise as against aggrandizement. Still, the loss of power, even through graceful compromise, is hateful to imperial elites and their minds are fruitful sources of justifications for its violent defense. So changes within the United States would be required. One would be sufficiently widespread awareness of the bad things that happen when the territorial American empire is deepened or extended. Also, because elites have no monopoly on the capacity to tailor moral awareness to perceived interests, there is a need to cut national attachments to aspirations -- such as an SUV and cheap gas to put in it -- that would be jeopardized by the loss of the world power I have described. Perhaps the degrading centrality of such aspirations is inevitable in a highly unequal society in which individual wealth is the ticket to security and comfort. If so, the struggle for less inequality in the United States is part of the international movement. We are now far from this stage, but nothing about our present situation seems to rule out its realization. What we would do to get to this stage is what we should be doing anyway, even if we actually get no farther than hemming in the empire. So, ending the empire is an appropriate longterm goal. But the civil society model is, I think, the best device for representing what we ought to seek now. Forgetting where we are leads to wasted energy and a narrower appeal through demands for institutional change that do not fit the present stage. Some IMF is better than none, because of the global need for liquidity and stability, and, at the present stage, voting rules that deprived the biggest contributors of their extremely undemocratic control would simply lead them to withdraw support. 25

The U.N. only contributes what it can to world peace if it reflects the global balance of power. Proposals to strengthen it are apt merely to increase the dazzle of its windowdressing for the American empire. (Kofi Annan has been the global evangelist for intervention to change regimes. U.N. emissaries, such as Lakhdar Brahimi and Sergio de Mello, have played a leading role in connecting appearances of local control with realities of American empire in Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq.) Protest, information and disruption to reduce excesses of the American empire are enough for now, before the higher stage which would support new designs for global institutions. That movement to hem in the empire is the cause in which a U.S. citizen should join people everywhere.

1.See Niall Ferguson, "True Cost of Hegemony: Huge Debt," New York Times, News of the Week in Review,April 20, 2003, p. 1; Statistical Abstract of the United States 2002 (U.S. Census Bureau: Washington, 2003), pp. 417, 782.
2

See Ernest Preeg, Traders in a Brave New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p.

80.
3

See Paul and Laura Bohannan, The Tiv of Central Nigeria, (London: International Afgrican

Institute, 1953); Paul Bohannan, Justice and Judgment among the Tiv (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.)
4

See P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: 1688-2000 (London: Longman, 2002 [orig.

ed.: 1993]), pp. 228-40. Following standard practice among historians of the British Empire, Cain and Hopkins also include an "informal empire" in their study, consisting of countries such as Chile and Argentina, where ties of dependence were based on loans from London banks and imperial mandates often took the form of what would now be called "structural adjustment conditions" for

26

continued credit.
5

World Bank, World Development Indicators 2003 (Washington: World Bank, 2003), p. 336. Statistical Abstract of the United States 2002, pp. 8, 521. Project for the New American Century, "Statement of Principles" (1997)

6

7

www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm, p. 1 -- the 1997 founding statement of the Project, six of whose twenty five signers were to play important roles in the future Bush administration (namely, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Elliott Abrams and Zalmay Khalilzad.)
8

See Branko Milanovic, The Two Faces of Globalization (Washington: World Bank, 2002),

www.worldbank.org/research/inequality/pdf/naiveglob1.pdf, p. 14.
9

See Francisco Rodriguez and Dani Rodrik, "Trade Policy and Economic Growth: A Skeptic's

Guide to the Cross-National Evidence" (19999), www.nber.org/papers/w7081.
10

Niall Ferguson notes this pay-off in his plea for a bolder empire, "Clashing Civilizations or

Mad Mullahs: The United States between Informal and Formal Empire" in Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda, The Age of Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 126, 141.
11

The civilian tally, from www.iraqbodycount.net, only takes account of incidents involving civilian

deaths reported by two or more major news sources and tabulates the least deaths reported in each incident. Confinement to North American, European and Australian reporting would not materially affect the total. On June 11, 2003, the Associated Press Baghdad bureau reported a “fragmentary” count of civilian deaths during the month of war, based solely on deaths recorded by 60 of Iraq’s 124 hospitals. They further excluded records that did not distinguish between civilian and military

27

deaths, a precaution which they took to exclude “hundreds, possibly thousands” of civilian victims. This death tally was 3,240. See Niko Price, “AP Tallies 3,240 Civilian deaths in Iraq,” www.rr.com/v5/1/my/news/story/0,2050,9000_430693,00.html.
12

While the records which once would have provided a death toll of Iraqi soldiers have been

destroyed, the U.S. military estimated that at least 2320 Iraqis were killed in one operation, the attack on troops near Baghdad preliminary to the taking of the city. See ”Special analysis: Iraq has fallen,” Independent (London), April 16, 2003, www.independent.co.uk, p. 7. Reuters reports "unofficial think-tank estimates" of 4,895 to 6,370 deaths ("Table of Military deaths in Iraq," April 7, 2004, www.reuters.com.
13

See "Iraq, six months on," Independent, October 10, 2003, p. 1. See Patrick Cockburn, "'Do we look like fighters?" ask Fallujah families …", Independent, April

14

13, 2004; Abdul-Qader Saadi and Lourdes Navarro, "Fragile Cease-Fire Holds in Fallujah," (Associated Press), Washington Post, April 11, 2004, www.washingtonpost.com.)

15

European Union, "Facts and Figures on the European Union and the United States,"

www.eurunion.org/profile/facts.htm.
16

Laure Belot, "Les groupes americains menacent les positions francais au Qatar," Le Monde, May

10, 2003, www.lemonde.fr, pp. 2f.
17

See Tarek al-Issawi, "Iraq Awards Mobile Telephone Contracts," Independent, October 7, 2003,

p. 2; Edward Wong, "The Struggle for Iraq," New York Times, December 23, 2003, www.nytimes.com, pp. 1f. 28

18

Daphne Eviatar, "Free-Market Iraq? Not So Fast", New York Times, News of the Week in Review,

January 10, 2004. The "Not So Fast" refers to impotent doubts about the compatibility of such measures with Hague and Geneva conventions. Jay Garner, the first, brief chief of the occupation, has said that his dismissal overrode his preference "as soon as we could [to hold] some form of elections" without first putting that American economic "template on things." His own assumption was that Iraq would merely be used for projecting American military power: "We used the Philippines … [as] a coaling station for the Navy ... I think we should look right now at Iraq as our coaling station in the Middle East" (Greg Palast, "Iraq for Sale," BBC Newsnight, March 19, 2004, www.gregpalast.com.)
19

National

Energy

Policy

Development

Group,

National

Energy

Policy

(2001),

www.whitehouse.gov, Overview, p. x, chapter 1, p.13.
20

See Charles Arthur, "Peak Oil a Reality," Independent, October 4, 2003; George Monbiot, "The

World Is Running Out of Oil," Guardian, www.guardian.co.uk, December 2, 2003.
21

See Energy Information Administration, U.S. Department of Energy, "International Energy

Outlook 2004," www.eia.doe.gov, p.2.
22

National Energy Policy, chapter 8, pp. 14, 16. Ibid., chapter 8, p.4. Ibid., chapter 1, p. 11. World Bank, "Railroad Data for Saudi Arabia,"

23

24

25

www.worldbank.org/transport/rail/rdb/raildata/saudi.xls; World Bank, World Development Indicators 2003 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2003), p. 16; Statistical Abstract of the United

29

States: 2002, p. 449.
26

World Bank, World Development Indicators 2001 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001), p.

26.
27

Ibid., chapter 8, p.5. Edward Morse and James Richard,"The Battle for Energy Dominance," Foreign Affairs 2002, p.

28

20.
29

Jeff Gerth, "Forecast of Rising Oil Demand Challenges Tired Saudi Fields," New York Times,

February 25, 2004.
30

Energy Information Administration, "Iraq", March 2004, p. 3. Memo of March 24, 1965, U.S. Department of Defense, The Pentagon Papers:The Senator Gravel

31

Edition (Beacon Press: Boston, n.d.), vol. 3, p. 582. In a major policy proposal the previous month, successfully advocating a sustained escalation of bombing of North Vietnam, McGeorge Bundy noted, "We cannot assert that a policy of sustained reprisal [against North Vietnam] will succeed in changing the course of the contest in Vietnam … [But] even if it fails the policy will be worth it … a reprisal policy -- to the extent that it demonstrates U.S. willingness to deploy this new norm in counter-insurgency -- will set a higher price for the future upon all adventures of guerilla warfare, and it should therefore somewhat increase our ability to deter such adventures," ibid., p. 690. In these terms, United States may have succeeded in the Indochina War.
32

John Kerry, "Making America Secure Again," address to the Council on Foreign Relations,

December 3, 2003, www.johnkerry.com, p.3.
33

For the whole interview, see "How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen" Counterpunch,

30

October 8, 2001, www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski/html. This interview originally appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15-21, 1998, p. 76, but not in the shorter edition sent to the United States. John Cooley presents some excerpts in Unholy Wars (London: Pluto, 2000), pp. 19f.
34

See Human Rights Watch, "Military Assistance to the Afghan Opposition," October, 2001,

www.hrw.org/backgrounder/asia/afghan-bck1005.htm, p. 4.
35

Stephen Engelberg, "Iran and Iraq Got 'Doctored' Data, U.S. Officials Say," New York Times,

Jauary 12, 1987, p. A1.
36

Bush's words in two widely reported speeches of February 15, 1991. See Andrew Cockburn and

Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), p. 38
37

Ibid., pp. 23, 39. Ibid., pp. 4, 131. Barton Gellman, "Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq," Washington Post, June 23, 1991, p. A 1. Thomas Ginsberg, "War's Toll: 158,000 Iraqis and a researcher's position," Philadephia

38

39

40

Inquirer, January 5, 2003, p. A05, reporting a 1991 study by Beth Osbourne Daponte.
41

The 1999 UNICEF survey of childhood mortality in Iraq concluded that if the 1980’s trend of

reduced under-five mortality had continued through the 1990’s, there would have been 500,000 fewer deaths than occurred from the start of the sanctions through 1998. See “Iraq – Under-Five Mortality” (1999), www.unicef.org/reseval/pdfs/irqu5est/pdf, p. 1. In a recent reanalysis, Ali, Black and Jones consider the conservative assumption that under-five mortality rates would have remained the same in the absence of the sanctions and derive a excess deaths estimate of 400,000 on this basis. See Mohamed Ali, John Blacker and Gareth Jones, “Annual Mortality Rates and Excess deaths of 31

Children under Five in Iraq, 1991-98,” Population Studies 57 (2003): 217-26.
42

Cockburn and Cockburn, Out of the Ashes, p. 138. See, for example, The Pentagon Papers, vol. 3, p. 388; vol. 4, pp. 257f., 463, 479, 561, 603.

43

Vietnamese casualties, as such, play no dissuasive role in these thousands of pages of resourceful arguments. American casualties only figure as depletions of military resources or threats to American public support, apart from a few dissents by George Ball as he prepares to quit.

32