For the first time since 1989 – or arguably, since 1945 – the United States faces an opportunity to reshape the world. It has inherited Britain’s imperial mantle to the point that a future historian may see the British and American empires as a single development, growing like a walnut tree as two trunks from a single root.
Their motivations are similar. Both have been trading rather than military empires – like Athens rather than Sparta, like Venice or Carthage rather than Prussia. If they had a single textbook, it would be Adam Smith, not Machiavelli nor Marx. Indeed, it is no mere coincidence that 1776 marks the publication of Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The U.S. may have retained more of the intellectual imprint of the British 18th century than Britain itself. Both the British and American empires have responded to circumstances, and been shaped by happenings rather than intentions. Britain stumbled into empire and so has the United States.
In the recent struggle in the Middle East, the continuity of the Anglo-Saxon approach to imperialism remains obvious. As the U.S. now travels the same territory that Britain covered in the first half of the 20th century, it meets the same problems of oil, Islam, and Arab nationalism. Ever since George Washington warned of foreign entanglements, the notion of empire has been treated as America’s permanent temptation and its potential nemesis.
Yet, what word but “empire” describes the awesome thing America has become? It leads the world in all dimensions of power – military, economic, scientific, and cultural. It is the only nation that polices the world through five global military commands, maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents, deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean, guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea, drives the wheels of global trade and commerce, and seeks to infuse the world with its own dreams and desires.
