Ken Kistler
After seventy years at the apex of global power, the most powerful empire in world history is beginning a protracted, painful decline.
This decline might be a unique event for the United States, but from a world historical perspective these imperial transitions have happened often. Indeed, the past two centuries have been marked by the rise and fall of many empires.
By 1815, Napoleon’s continental empire had collapsed. In the 1820s, Spain lost most of its Latin American empire. A century later, Britain was so exhausted by its victory in World War I that the end of its global empire was preordained. With the end of World War II, the Japanese empire in Asia, the world’s largest, and the Nazi empire in Europe, the first to control that continent, were defeated.
In the two decades following World War II, the half-dozen European colonial empires that once ruled nearly half of all humanity dissolved with blinding speed. More recently, the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and Central Asia imploded during the early 1990s, setting off shock waves that are still reverberating.
After seventy years at the apex of global power, the most powerful empire in world history is beginning a protracted, painful decline.
Looking back over the past two centuries, these imperial transitions are often marked by two troubling trends. First, dying empires often plunge into costly, sometimes disastrous military misadventures in a desperate attempt to recover their fast fading imperial glory. And, second, they tend toward political extremism as the painful loss of empire overseas demoralizes the citizenry back home.
As their power wanes, empires often plunge into micro-military misadventures in a foolhardy bid to recover their fading imperial power. Since these operations spring from irrational psychological motivations, they are dangerously unpredictable.
In its long imperial retreat, Spain provides a good example of micro-militarism—both the desperate bid to recover fading glory and the domestic political consequences. In response to the loss of Latin America in the 1820s, Madrid launched a half-dozen imperial interventions ranging from Vietnam in 1858 to Peru in 1864—with all of them ending in debacle or defeat.
Then, after losing its last colonies to the United States in the Spanish-American War of 1898, Spain began to expand out of its small coastal enclaves at Morocco in 1909, fighting the Rif War in the 1920s against the Berber tribes and suffering the horrific slaughter of 20,000 of its soldiers in the Battle of Anual. Nonetheless, Madrid clung desperately to the wastelands of Spanish Morocco, dispatching the Spanish Foreign Legion under the command of Francisco Franco and mobilizing every possible military resource for a protracted pacification of Berber guerrillas that featured history’s first sustained aerial bombardment with poison gas and the world’s first successful amphibious landing.
In a very real sense, Generalissimo Franco’s forty years of fascist dictatorship arose from the ashes of empire, taking form in Morocco and full flight when his Army of Africa launched a bloody Civil War against Spanish democracy in 1936.
Another telling example of micro-militarism was Britain’s Suez invasion of 1956. After a difficult postwar recovery from the devastation of World War II, Britain was enjoying robust employment, lucrative international investments, a carefully managed decolonization that preserved much of its power, and the prestige of its pound sterling as a global reserve currency.
Then came the devastating Suez crisis.
Just as Americans of an earlier generation took pride in the Panama Canal as symbol of national prowess, so British conservatives treasured the Suez Canal as a vital lifeline to its Iranian oil refineries. When Egypt’s President Nasser electrified the Arab world by nationalizing the Suez canal in 1956, Britain’s conservative prime minister Anthony Eden erupted with egotism, bluster, and outrage. He first ordered Nasser’s assassination and, when that failed, launched an invasion by 300,000 British, French, and Israeli forces to secure the Suez Canal.
The Israelis under under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon attacked Sinai, their jets sweeping the skies, their tanks smashing Egyptian armor, and their paratroopers advancing on the canal. The British and French sent an armada of five aircraft carriers that shot down 200 Egyptian aircraft and landed commandos to occupy much of the Canal Zone. The Anglo-French invasion smashed the Egyptian military, killing 3,000 troops and capturing 30,000 more. The Egyptians filled dozens of merchant ships with rocks and sank them at the mouth of the canal, deftly denying the British their prize.
But in the end, Great Britain was forced to accept a humiliating defeat. The International Monetary Fund launched its first-ever fiscal bailout, mobilizing nearly a billion dollars to bring the British pound back from the brink of collapse—effectively ending its role as a major global reserve currency.
The author of this extraordinary debacle was British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, a child of privilege and a rebel within his own Conservative Party, whose career offers some uncanny parallels with Donald Trump.
Convinced that Britain was still a great power, Eden rejected sound advice that he consult with the United States, the country’s closest ally, before the invasion; then, as his bold intervention plunged toward diplomatic disaster, he focused on manipulating the British media; and, finally, he lied blatantly and obviously to Parliament, saying, “there was not foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt. There was not.”
Protesters denounced Eden as “too stupid to be a prime minister”; opposition MPs laughed openly when he appeared before Parliament. His own party’s former leader, Winston Churchill, branded him “a great mistake”; and President Eisenhower shunned him. Led by Eden’s delusions of omnipotence into this unimaginably misbegotten operation, the once-mighty British lion now seemed to the world a toothless circus animal that would henceforth roll over whenever Washington cracked the whip.
When historians look back on America’s long-forgotten global empire a century from now, they may similarly characterize President George Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a micro-military misadventure that accelerated the decline of U.S. global power.
Historians may characterize Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq as a micro-military misadventure that accelerated the decline of U.S. global power.
Back in 2003, the Bush Administration sold the war by promising it would cost just $80 billion dollars, pay for itself in oil profits, spark a golden age of democracy for the entire Middle East, and secure a U.S. bastion for the projection of its power throughout the region.
Instead, the war resulted in U.S. casualties numbering 4,424 dead, 31,952 wounded, and 4,839 suicides by active-duty soldiers, and many more by Iraq-war veterans. It produced a torrent of refugees, including five million displaced Iraqis. U.S. military operations have gone on for the past fifteen years and will likely continue into the foreseeable future. A corrupt Iraqi democracy has produced, just this month, the election of a party led by the anti-American Shia militant Muqtada al-Sadr.
All of this has destabilized the wider Middle East, diminished U.S. international prestige, and arguably damaged American democracy. After surveying 134 countries, Gallup’s pollsters recently reported that worldwide approval of U.S. leadership has plunged from 48 percent in 2016 to a record low of 30 percent—a notch below China at 31 percent.
The direct military costs of the Iraq War are $757 billion, and indirect costs are now estimated at $3.5 trillion—the equivalent of 20 percent of the entire U.S. economy in 2016. The Watson Institute at Brown University estimates the total cost of the Global War on Terror at a mind-boggling $5.6 trillion—diverted from domestic investments desperately needed for this country to remain competitive in world markets.
With foreign policy crises on the boil from Ukraine and Syria to Afghanistan, and from South China Sea to South Korea, there are countless opportunities for an American President to launch a misguided military intervention.
For the past seventy years, Washington has used its extraordinary strength to build a world order grounded in a “delicate duality” that juxtaposed two contradictory attributes—an idealistic community of sovereign nations equal under the rule of international law, joined tensely to an American imperium grounded in the realpolitik of raw U.S. military and economic power.
At the end of World War II, Washington encircled Eurasia with hundreds of military bases to confine its Cold War enemies, China and Russia, behind the Iron Curtain. The United States, an industrial powerhouse, dominated the world economy. Its diplomats negotiated defense pacts and trade deals that advantaged America, and its CIA operatives maneuvered relentlessly to topple neutral or hostile governments.
Washington eventually won the Cold War, but its tough tactics entailed some heavy costs—brutal military dictatorships across Asia and Latin America, millions of dead in Indochina, and devastated societies in Central Asia, Central America, and southern Africa.
After World War II, Washington also invested its power and prestige in forming an international community that would promote peace and shared prosperity through permanent institutions—the United Nations, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the World Health Organization (WHO). The United States helped establish the International Court of Justice under the U.N. charter and would later promote both human rights and women’s rights.
If the world experiences a slow peaceful transition away from U.S. hegemony, then the subsequent global order just might maintain the liberal international institutions that represent the best of American values, like the United Nations, World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the International Court.
If, by contrast, the world experiences a pell-mell U.S. retreat from the world stage and the rapid rise of autocratic Chinese or Russian hegemony, then we will likely witness a harsher world order based on realpolitik and commercial advantage, with scant attention to human rights, women’s rights, and the rule of law.
One thing is certain: This transition will be transformative, even traumatically so, impacting the lives of every American.
Editor’s note: This essay was adapted from a speech delivered at a Vets for Peace Memorial Day event, May 28 in Madison, Wisconsin.
Paul McMahon
Alfred W. McCoy
Alfred W. McCoy
Alfred W. McCoy is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, and the recently published In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.