NYT Magazine: The End of the American Empire

What a difference 5 years makes!  The NYT, perhaps noticing the fact that Republican triumphalism is as dead as Russian Communism, has abandoned its cheerleading role in its magazine for a bit of realism...

Then (January 2003):

Being an imperial power, however, is more than being the most powerful nation or just the most hated one. It means enforcing such order as there is in the world and doing so in the American interest. It means laying down the rules America wants (on everything from markets to weapons of mass destruction) while exempting itself from other rules (the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and the International Criminal Court) that go against its interest. It also means carrying out imperial functions in places America has inherited from the failed empires of the 20th century -- Ottoman, British and Soviet. In the 21st century, America rules alone, struggling to manage the insurgent zones -- Palestine and the northwest frontier of Pakistan, to name but two -- that have proved to be the nemeses of empires past...

America's empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man's burden. We are no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company, when American corporations needed the Marines to secure their investments overseas. The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known. It is the imperialism of a people who remember that their country secured its independence by revolt against an empire, and who like to think of themselves as the friend of freedom everywhere. It is an empire without consciousness of itself as such, constantly shocked that its good intentions arouse resentment abroad. But that does not make it any less of an empire, with a conviction that it alone, in Herman Melville's words, bears ''the ark of the liberties of the world.''

In this vein, the president's National Security Strategy, announced in September, commits America to lead other nations toward ''the single sustainable model for national success,'' by which he meant free markets and liberal democracy. This is strange rhetoric for a Texas politician who ran for office opposing nation-building abroad and calling for a more humble America overseas. But Sept. 11 changed everyone, including a laconic and anti-rhetorical president. His messianic note may be new to him, but it is not new to his office. It has been present in the American vocabulary at least since Woodrow Wilson went to Versailles in 1919 and told the world that he wanted to make it safe for democracy.

Now:

Robert Kagan famously said that America hails from Mars and Europe from Venus, but in reality, Europe is more like Mercury — carrying a big wallet. The E.U.’s market is the world’s largest, European technologies more and more set the global standard and European countries give the most development assistance. And if America and China fight, the world’s money will be safely invested in European banks. Many Americans scoffed at the introduction of the euro, claiming it was an overreach that would bring the collapse of the European project. Yet today, Persian Gulf oil exporters are diversifying their currency holdings into euros, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has proposed that OPEC no longer price its oil in "worthless" dollars. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela went on to suggest euros. It doesn’t help that Congress revealed its true protectionist colors by essentially blocking the Dubai ports deal in 2006. With London taking over (again) as the world’s financial capital for stock listing, it’s no surprise that China’s new state investment fund intends to locate its main Western offices there instead of New York. Meanwhile, America’s share of global exchange reserves has dropped to 65 percent. Gisele Bündchen demands to be paid in euros, while Jay-Z drowns in 500 euro notes in a recent video. American soft power seems on the wane even at home.

And Europe’s influence grows at America’s expense. While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream. Africa wants a real African Union like the E.U.; we offer no equivalent. Activists in the Middle East want parliamentary democracy like Europe’s, not American-style presidential strongman rule. Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didn’t educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past. More broadly, America controls legacy institutions few seem to want — like the International Monetary Fund — while Europe excels at building new and sophisticated ones modeled on itself. The U.S. has a hard time getting its way even when it dominates summit meetings — consider the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas — let alone when it’s not even invited, as with the new East Asian Community, the region’s answer to America’s Apec.

The East Asian Community is but one example of how China is also too busy restoring its place as the world’s "Middle Kingdom" to be distracted by the Middle Eastern disturbances that so preoccupy the United States. In America’s own hemisphere, from Canada to Cuba to Chávez’s Venezuela, China is cutting massive resource and investment deals. Across the globe, it is deploying tens of thousands of its own engineers, aid workers, dam-builders and covert military personnel. In Africa, China is not only securing energy supplies; it is also making major strategic investments in the financial sector. The whole world is abetting China’s spectacular rise as evidenced by the ballooning share of trade in its gross domestic product — and China is exporting weapons at a rate reminiscent of the Soviet Union during the cold war, pinning America down while filling whatever power vacuums it can find. Every country in the world currently considered a rogue state by the U.S. now enjoys a diplomatic, economic or strategic lifeline from China, Iran being the most prominent example.

I've travelled perhaps 25 times outside of the US in the past 5 years.   I can only say in response to this penetrating glance into the obvious, "Well, duh!"

The very first time I was in Munich, back in 1994 or 1995,  it was obvious to me: the food was superior, a Holiday Inn in Munich had to be the equivalent of a Marriott deluxe in the states to bear the name.

Ditto for Japan in the mid-90s.  Despite the fact that Japan was mired in its recession, I felt poor compared to the Japanese.

In Europe, with the exception of Naples,  I was never able to get a decent meal on my per diem.

Sure, China felt like a bargain and still feels so today, but any American who visits China is  struck by its pollution as well as its sense of newness.  China will likely address its pollution problems, because it costs money ultimately to avoid them.

But the US, because of its tendency to be an empire wannabe has been impoverishing us since the 80s, when Reagan decided that the problems of raw materials needed to sustain the American wasteful lifestyle could be bought by pointing guns at dirty poor people.

The strategy looked doomed to me throughout the 80s and into the triumpahlist "see! we were right!" period that went with the Soviet Union's cry of "Uncle!" (sam?) in the late 80's/early 80s.

But our empire is and was doomed.

It's time we stopped this heedless spending of money on overseas armies.

On edit:

By the way, here's some stuff to watch for in the article that's not added or mentioned:

• Russia has had quite a lot of investment in its (relatively) high-tech work force because, thanks to the Soviet era, they've got oodles of low cost scientists, engineers and mathematicians.  Intel, and quite a few European companies have facilities in Russia because of this
• How America can deal with a rising Brazil or India?
• There are huge strategic weaknesses that the Bush regime's incompetent foreign policy have created.  The only question, in my opinion, is how a strategic retreat from imperialism can be executed