Precipitous Imperial Collapse

The collapse of empires in history is rapid, precipitous, and unpredictably predictable.  So says Niall Ferguson in an essay in the March/April 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs.  Ferguson, the eminent Oxford/Harvard historian, takes on the conventional perspective of imperial-collapse-as-long-term-decay and argues for a historical view that attempts to pinpoint specific crises that function as tipping points for the sudden dissolution of empires.  His is no abstract, insular, ivory-tower theory.  Rather, it is a substantive attempt to alert the United States of its peril as an imperial power, ripe for such a capricious tipping point of its own.

Feguson's foil is the famous pentaptych The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole; five paintings that capture the long-term-decay historical view of empires, which now hangs in the New-York Historical Society. Cole's working assumption was that just as the rise of an empire is typically slow, so is its fall.  Ferguson cites Gibbon's history of Rome as the quintessential perspective of this cyclic view of empire, but also mentions the Ming dynasty, the Bourbon monarchy of France, the Hapsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov empires, as well as the British empire, and even the Soviet empire as all subject to the traditional view of long-term decay.

Ferguson's Porgy challenges historians' Bess with a resounding "it ain't necessarily so."  In each of Ferguson's examples, specific and unpredictable crises precipitates a rapid decline, even collapse, and they seem to have at least one point in common: "All of the above cases were marked by sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, as well as difficulties with financing public debt." (Foreign Affairs, p. 30)  The specific trigger of collapse in each case was unforeseen, unpredictable, and when fired, unstoppable.  But the fiscal conditions in place in each assured that once the crisis hit, rapid collapse was inevitable.

Ferguson is a watchman on the wall for the United States empire (only the rose-colored blinders on the collective eyes of populist patriotic nationalism prevent acknowledgment of the existence of the US imperium).  The numbers are ominous: a deficit of 1.4 trillion dollars in 2009 (11.2 percent of GDP), a public debt of $5.8 trillion in 2008 which will double--and then some- to $14.3 trillion in 2019, and interest payments on that debt will also more than double from 8 percent to 17 percent of federal revenues.  It is not the numbers themselves that may be the trigger, but the expectations those numbers raise for future power.  To date, the global community believes the US can weather these numbers and maintain its unitary global hegemony (of course, not all in the community think that hegemony is a good thing).  But at some point, according to Ferguson, a random bit of bad news in the headlines could spell a sudden shift in confidence and precipitate a collapse.  The rapid sub-prime mortgage downward spiral in 2008 is harbinger of the potential for this.

Andrew Bacevich concurs in The Limits of Power.  These hard numbers, future expectations, and the highly-leveraged nature of US internal public obligations, combined with its over-reached, militarized foreign-policy commitments, have the country's adversaries patiently awaiting their main goal: the forced contraction of the US empire through fiscal necessity, or its collapse due to our country's refusal to set its own house in order.  They astutely believe that time is on their side.  And that time--if Ferguson is right--may come sooner than later.

A Necessary Prophet Among Conservatives

Andrew J. Bacevich refers to himself as a conservative realist.  He's not very optimistic about America's role as the indispensable nation in the world.  Dr. Bacevich questions the wisdom of a global war on terror and forced democratic reform under the guidance of the US military in the greater Middle East.  He criticizes the profligacy of American materialist consumption, which he believes lies at the root of our current foreign policy quagmires.  He wonders at the immoral and unjust character of a nation that insists the country conduct war to secure its own interests, but refuses to pay the bill for the war directly, passing it on to future generations.  He questions the nation's sense of fair play by its willingness to rely upon only 0.05% of the population to actually fight that war, while blithely pursuing its life of leisure.

The professor of history and international relations at Boston University is a prophet among today's conservatives.  He is a Jeremiah among the triumphalist Right, and his warnings continue to be largely ignored, dismissed, or regarded with scorn and contempt by the purveyors of populist nationalism pervading much of the modern right wing.

Professor Bacevich is no ivory tower abstract idealist.  A graduate of West Point, he served in combat with honor during the Vietnam War.  Regarded by many as one of the most morally compelling thinkers on current US foreign policy, Dr. Bacevich is sought out by members of Capitol Hill, by academic institutions, and by a wide array of advocacy and policy organizations and institutes across the country.  But even more, Dr. Bacevich is a parent.  A parent who paid the ultimate sacrifice for his country when his son Andrew was killed in action by an IED in Iraq in 2007.

Andrew Bacevich's most recent book The Limits of Power, The End of American Exceptionalism will be the basis for several of my initial posts.  I find, that just like Bill Moyers, about every 3rd sentence is worth highlighting in neon yellow (for me it is actually whole paragraphs), and so it will take me a while to get through the book and think about the implications it has for my own thinking.  It is a gripping, compelling, and challenging read.

Here is just a sample of Bacevich's probing prose:

     During the 1990s, at the urging of politicians and pundits, Americans became accustomed to thinking of their country as "the indispensable nation." Indispensability carried with it both responsibilities and prerogatives.
    
     The Chief responsibility was to preside over a grand project of political-economic convergence and integration commonly referred to as globalization.  In point of fact, however, globalization served as a euphemism for soft, or informal empire.  The collapse of the Soviet Union appeared to offer an opportunity to expand and perpetuate that empire, creating something akin to a global Pax Americana.
     
                                        The indispensable nation's chief prerogative, self-assigned, was to establish and enforce the norms governing the post-Cold War international order.  Even in the best of circumstances, imperial policing is a demanding task, requiring not only considerable acumen but also an abundance of determination.  The preferred American approach was to rely, whenever possible, on suasion.  Yet if pressed, Washington did not hesitate to use force, as its numerous military adventures during the 1990s demonstrated. (The Limits of Power, p. 2).

     What is remarkable about these observations is that they emanate from within the broader spectrum of American conservative thinking (as distinguished from neo-conservative thinking with its foreign policy emphasis upon military interventionism for the sake of projecting and preserving American hegemony abroad).  Moreover, he lays the country's current converging economic and foreign-conflict crises directly at the feet of her citizens.  We are responsible for allowing the course of history to bring us to this critical point in our history.  That is probably the most stinging aspect of the book.  And yet, his rebukes arise out of a deep love for the American historical experiment, the noble aspirations of the republic, and the positive purpose set forth so eloquently in the preamble of the US Constitution.  Bacevich is clearly a member of the loyal opposition.

His is a much needed voice to check the grand illusions of American hegemonic global dominance; an empire the US can not afford to sustain; nor one that can in anyway, shape, or form, remain true to the ideals of the country's founding.  I recommend this book without hesitation, and I hope to unpack its riches without misrepresenting the sterling integrity of this most unusual of authors.