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The National Interest
An Empire, If You Can Keep It
by Stephen Peter Rosen
. . . The central-one may say the necessary but not sufficient-imperial task is the creation and management of a hierarchical interstate order. From that key task of regulating the external behavior of other states proceeds the imperial problems of maintaining a monopoly on the use of organized military power, and of using its monopolistic but still finite military power efficiently-a problem captured in the military concept of "economy of force." But an empire must also ensure the security and internal stability of its constituent parts, extract revenue to pay the costs of empire, and assimilate the elites of non-imperial societies to the metropolitan core, tasks that presuppose influence over the internal affairs of other societies. . . .
Today, the picture for the United States is mixed. It exercises effective, if less than formal, hierarchical authority in the Western Hemisphere, in the Asian rimland, on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf and in the NATO area. At the start of 2003, it was trying to extend its hierarchical interstate order to the Balkans and Afghanistan, and was preparing to intervene in the internal affairs of Iraq. China, Russia and India cooperate opportunistically with the United States, but have been willing to challenge American dominance when possible. They certainly reject the right of the United States to intervene in their internal affairs, and thus remain the major countries outside the U.S. hierarchical order.
But what of the three internal governance functions of empire? The United States does tend to the internal security and stability of its constituent parts, but it does so selectively. Its methods are manifold: humanitarian intervention, aid and assistance programs, intelligence sharing, stationing U.S. military forces abroad and other means besides. The new post-September 11 concern with the security implications of failed states suggests an even greater focus on internal governance issues, and indeed the language of the new National Security Strategy points in that direction. As for extracting revenue to pay the costs of empire, only the 1991 Gulf War stands as a direct example of that. American influence over the main international economic organizations-the wto, the IMF and the World Bank-may be construed, at least indirectly, as a revenue extraction process, as may the international role of the dollar, but this is really to stretch the imperial point. And as to the absorption of elites from the periphery to the core, the nature of globalization changes how we even think about such a question.1 If the United States does do this, it is not a function of an imperial governmental core that can tightly manage or control such things, but a by-product of social and economic phenomena intrinsic to the culture. . . .