Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

The collapse of the USSR was not foreordained. The problems in Russia came to a head when the collective costs of the Cold War finally overwhelmed its productive capacities. Gorbachev’s remedies were, however, incommensurate with the problems and led to a loss of political authority, leaving the country with a crippled political system. As time ran out on the Soviet empire, Gorbachev’s military restraint in dealing with Eastern Europe was admirable, but the endgame of the Soviet Union remains a cautionary tale for any overextended empire that waits too long to try to halt the drift toward crisis. In contrast to the Soviet Union, China has thus far successfully demonstrated that it is possible to dismantle a Soviet-type economy without destroying its political arrangements.

No matter how humanely (or ineptly) Gorbachev handled the Soviet crisis of the 1980s, it was imperial overstretch that brought the Soviet Union down. Just as during the Cold War there was a symmetry between the USSR and the United States in terms of their respective empires in Eastern Europe and East Asia, so there are at least certain potential symmetries emerging in their post–Cold War fates. The United States believes that it is immune to the Soviet Union’s economic problems. That may be true, although America’s grossly inflated military establishment and its system of support for arms manufacturers offer parallels to the inefficiencies of the Soviet system. More significantly, unable to agree on a proper course for the country and made complacent by the wealth that flowed its way during the late 1990s, America’s leaders have allowed a process to develop that might in certain ways prove analogous to political conditions in post–Cold War Russia.

On December 19, 1998, a Republican Congress voted to impeach a Democratic president—the first time in American history that an elected president had been impeached. It did so for the most partisan and flimsy of reasons: that the president had lied about sexual encounters with a subordinate in his office. In the course of trying to extricate himself from this fratricidal political battle, the president twice resorted to military strikes against other countries, a precedent for which he might well have been justifiably impeached. In August 1998, on the day impeachment evidence against him was being released to the public, Bill Clinton ordered cruise missiles fired into a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant and old mujahideen camps in Afghanistan, allegedly the assets or training bases of an international terrorist ring that had attacked U.S. embassies in East Africa; and on the eve of the House of Representatives’ impeachment vote he sent cruise missiles into Iraq, allegedly once again to discipline Saddam Hussein. In neither case did the United States have United Nations or other international authority to act as it did.

The president’s acquittal on February 12, 1999, superficially resolved his dispute with Congress. But much like the warfare between Gorbachev and the Communist old guard in the Soviet Union, it had the effect of further weakening the structures of political authority. Congressional willingness to resort to so untested a device as impeachment combined with a president willing to try to divert attention through warlike actions suggests a loss of prudence, even a recklessness, on the part of American elites that could be fatal to the American empire in a time of crisis.

Even though the United States at century’s end appears to have the necessary firepower and economic resources to neutralize all challengers, I believe our very hubris ensures our undoing. A classic mistake of empire managers is to come to believe that there is nowhere within their domain—in our case, nowhere on earth—in which their presence is not crucial. Sooner or later, it becomes psychologically impossible not to insist on involvement everywhere, which is, of course, a definition of imperial overextension.

Already, the United States cannot afford its various and ongoing global military deployments and interventions and has begun extracting ever growing amounts of “host-nation support” from its clients, or even direct subsidies from its “allies.” Japan, one of many allied nations that helped finance the massive American military effort in the Gulf War, paid up to the tune of $13 billion. (The U.S. government even claimed in the end to have made a profit on the venture.) Japan also pays more generously than any other nation for the American troops on its soil. On the economic front, the arrogance, contempt, and triumphalism with which the United States handled the East Asian financial crisis guarantees blowback for decades to come. Capitals like Jakarta and Seoul smolder with the sort of resentment that the Germans had in the 1920s, when inflation and the policies of Britain and France destabilized the Weimar regime.