Can We Really Call It “the American Empire”?

A matter of definition -- and morals.

Some political and media insiders think the phrase “American empire” is rhetorical overkill. They think anyone who uses it is radical, naïve, or – even worse – an idealist. Others dislike it because they see the United States as “the exceptional country” in human history (as if being merely human was not enough.)

Empires are a recurring phenomenon; they’re hardly “exceptional.” Worse, they have tended to have a predictable and limited life cycle, where they would rather imagine that our dominion is immortal.

But is the phrase “American empire” correct?

The Definition of Empire

Most definitions of “empire” include at least two meanings. The first, as expressed by Merriam-Webster, is, “a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority.” The United States exercises direct political control over very few territories outside its own borders. It prefers to use hand-picked surrogates wherever possible. That makes it hard to map the borders (or even the interior) of its sphere of control.

Merriam-Webster’s second definition of “empire” is “an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control.” That domination or control can exist with or without explicit sovereign authority. This second description certainly seems to apply to the US (and a lot of people in Latin America would undoubtedly agree).

Machines of Empire

US domination is hardly restricted to its own hemisphere. Its military budget is greater than that of the next six nations combined, and that’s not counting significant intelligence expenditures.

The US has just under 1.4 million active-duty military personnel and another 850,000 reserve troops. As of 2010, US troops were stationed in 80-150 countries around the world, in nations that include Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and the United Kingdom, as well as combat zones like Afghanistan and Iraq. By 2015, 800 active bases were still in operation around the world.

Why would they be there, if not to protect an empire?

Planetary OS

In How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, historian Daniel Immelwahr argues that the history of the “greater” US can be told “in three acts.” First, westward expansion displaced American Indians and expanded the economic might of the European descendants from the Eastern part of the continent. Then, the US begins annexing territory outside North America as colonies, the way traditional empires had done for millennia.

But something interesting happened in the third act. “Why,” asks Immelwahr, “did the United States, at the peak of its power, distance itself from colonial empire?” For Immelwahr, technology provided a critical part of the answer. “During the Second World War,” Immelwahr writes, “the United States honed an extraordinary suite of technologies that gave it many of the benefits of empire without having to actually hold colonies.”

Immelwahr adds:

“Plastics and other synthetics allowed it to replace tropical products with man-made substitutes. Airplanes, radio, and DDT enabled it to move its goods, ideas, and people into foreign countries easily without annexing them. Similarly, the United States managed to standardize many of its objects and practices—from screw threads to road signs to the English language—across political borders, again gaining influence in places it didn’t control.”

“Collectively,” Immelwahr writes, “these technologies weaned the United States off the familiar model of formal empire. They replaced colonization with globalization.”

US products, most of which are made in factories outside the United States, preserve our economic power by functioning as a kind of operating system for the world. And, as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs could have attested, to control the operating system is to control the entire device.

Poison Pills

I was an eyewitness to that third use of technology when I worked for the State Department in Eastern and Central European countries as their Communist era ended. There were times when hotel bars in Prague, or Warsaw, or Budapest for the scenes of ‘soft rivalry’ among aid representatives from the US, Germany, Japan, and other nations. Donations of computers or medical equipment were often given with the sole intent of making that country’s operating systems and standards the standard in that nation. My suggestion that we coordinate medical aid, made at a hotel bar one winter’s night in Poland, was met with laughter.

My work there took place in the 1990s. The situation has progressed rapidly in the USA’s favor since then. Facebook, Google, Amazon: American technology increasingly controls far more than the interoperability of computers or medical devices. It controls the interoperability of human beings and human societies. That’s a prerogative no empire enjoyed before. The British could force the Indians to purchase salt from Britain, just as they could restrict the tea trade in America. But never before has one country held such power over the communications, information, and even the thought processes of the citizens of other nations.

Nihil Obstat (Nothing Stands in Our Way)

Not to mention their freedom. The persecution of Julian Assange represents a new form of imperial prerogative. The United States flouted international law in the most flagrant way possible when it forced down a plane belonging to the president of another country, solely because it believed Assange was on board. Why? Because Assange’s information leaks were bothersome to the empire. The ongoing persecution of Assange, orchestrated by the US and carried out by subservient imperial outposts like the United Kingdom, is meant as a warning to anyone else who would do the same.

The US produces 25 percent of the planet’s pollution. It has hundreds of military bases around the world – perhaps as many as a thousand, depending on how you define a “base.” It rules by proxy. It believes it is entitled to attack any country, anywhere in the world, if it feels threatened.

A Majority of One

Even the United Nations, conceived as a deliberative body for the world’s governments, feels the weight of American empire. The US holds veto power over other nations and uses it extensively to protect its military, economic and political interests. Acting alone, the US has vetoed more than 20 resolutions regarding Israel’s occupation of Palestine. It vetoed a 2020 resolution from Indonesia on the prosecution, sentencing, and rehabilitation of terrorists because the agreement didn’t allow for the immediate repatriation of those accused.

Other countries also hold great power at the United Nations as permanent members of the UN Security Council: China, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom. They are all, perhaps not incidentally, current or former empires.

Cry Empire

Many contemporary observers have used the term “empire” to describe the United States, including Immelwahr, Gore Vidal, historian Alfred McCoy, economist Michael Hudson, historian Howard Zinn, journalist Chris Hedges, and retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich.

Still, if the term is polarizing, why use it? Because, without it, we don’t understand the nature of American power. The United States continues to rule large portions of the world as an empire. We act to protect that empire’s interest at any cost, human or financial. And, like every empire before us, we fail to understand the fundamental principle of empires: they rise, they rule ... and then they fall.

Related: I recently interviewed Michael Hudson about the release of the 3rd edition of his book, Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire. Video and transcript are here.