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Foreign Affairs
History and the Hyperpower
By Eliot A. Cohen
Eliot A. Cohen is Robert E. Osgood Professor and Director of the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and the author of Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime.
Empires's New Clothes
Most historians cringe at talk of the “lessons of history.” Trained as specialists and wary of sweeping comparisons, they flinch from attempts to make past events speak directly to current policy. They remind us of what makes circumstances unique, highlighting differences where others see similarities.
Politicians and policymakers, on the other hand, have few compunctions about drawing on historical analogies to frame and explain policy choices. Scholars may wince at their shallow thinking and imprecision, but such practitioners always have the last word. And even if we try to understand our world purely in its own terms, implicit, historically grounded beliefs—in trends and turning points, analogies and metaphors, parallels and lessons—inevitably shape our views. Better, then, to ask explicitly how history should inform our understanding of the present.
The historical analogy making the rounds of late is the notion that the United States today is an empire that can and should be compared with imperial powers of the past. This idea gained immediacy when U.S. soldiers trod in the footsteps of Alexander the Great in Afghanistan and U.S. tanks rumbled through the ancient imperial heartland of Mesopotamia: ruling and remaking distant, recalcitrant peoples looks very much like an imperial project.
Casual talk of a Pax Americana—harking back to the Pax Britannica, itself an echo of the Pax Romana—implies that the United States is following a pattern of imperial dominance that holds precedents and lessons. The metaphor of empire merits neither angry rejection nor gleeful embrace. It instead deserves careful scrutiny, because imperial history contains analogies and parallels that bear critically on the current U.S. predicament.
Currencies of Power
An empire is a multinational or multiethnic state that extends its influence through formal and informal control of other polities. The Indian writer Nirad Chaudhuri put it well: “There is no empire without a conglomeration of linguistically, racially, and culturally different nationalities and the hegemony of one of them over the rest. The heterogeneity and the domination are of the very essence of imperial relations. An empire is hierarchical. There may be in it, and has been, full or partial freedom for individuals or groups to rise from one level to another; but this has not modified the stepped and stratified structure of the organization.”
Most people throughout history have lived under imperial rule. The current international system, with nearly two hundred independent states and not a single confessed empire, is a historical anomaly. Most empires, however, have had only regional scope and limited ambitions. In the nineteenth century, the French, Russian, Turkish, and Austro–Hungarian Empires jostled one another at the margins and waged war in conjunction with other allies, but none towered over the rest. Of past empires, only ancient Rome and the British Empire in the nineteenth century had enough power and influence to dominate the international system. Each exerted not only military strength, but also cultural influence; each made international economic order possible; each was envied, resented, and ultimately displaced—not by a single . . .