Paul A. Bové
1354 Royal Oak Drive
Wexford, PA 15090
Friday, April 29, 2005
For delivery at Notre Dame
On May 3, 2005
The Ineluctability of American Empire
In this note, I want to propose a hypothesis built on the research of William Appleman Williams into what he called “empire as a way of life.” In fact, I intend to correct an important error in Williams’ analysis by exposing an unexamined presupposition that often misdirects a great deal of scholarship on US history, on US literary and cultural reality. In 1980, Williams insisted that the American people did not know that the US in an empire and his work clearly suggested that if intellectuals could bring that fact to public attention and incorporate it within the popular culture, American democracy would choose a non-imperial path for American politics and culture.
Williams’ book appeared in 1980, when the Reagan revolution took hold in US presidential politics. The book is not a merely belated expression of sixties optimism over participatory democracy or the literalization of Cold War faith in democratic republican forms. It is also a tactical intervention into a crisis that would see the US reorganize its economic, military, and security policies to adjust for the fall of the Breton Woods accords. In the UK, Margaret Thatcher foreshadowed the conservative movement’s transformations of US political rhetoric and practice and Jimmy Carter’s failures to deal with either material structural weaknesses or the ‘malaise that gripped the American people’ opened the door for a jovial savage politics of developing neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism.
Williams’ 1980 error was a simple one: he believed in the liberatory ideologeme of ‘democracy’ in the American myth or he thought it still a viable figure within the political arsenal of progressive politics, as it had seemed perhaps since Woodrow Wilson and Walt Whitman. Williams’s book is out of print, a minor fact in a longer story that has seen the neo-conservative intellectuals seize control of the word ‘democracy’ and its heritage to operate an openly forceful US national security policy. Williams’s book came at the end of a rapidly fading and embattled tendency in US history which fact accounts in part for the tonal pathos that competes with its utopian ambitions.
What was Williams’s error? In a word, he did not place enough weight on the structural arrangements the US state had imposed on the country for its imperial purposes. Without considering this brute fact, especially progressive historians and cultural critics will always imagine they see the possibility of resistance or of real social alternatives to the imperial arrangements of US power. For at least one hundred years, the state has disposed of the US in such a way that it can draw upon its resources for its own purposes and manage its institutional legitimacy without threat of more than temporary or local opposition. The powerful if not dominant conservative and reactionary tendencies in US culture and politics rest upon not a short-term manipulation of public opinion to form hegemony, but long-standing arrangements of material power that state intellectuals planned for some time. Everyone can adduce some seeming exception to my claims, from the struggles of the CIO, and the Civil Rights movement, to the expansion of the university population. Rather than be drawn into debates over the bite each particular might take out of my claim, let me rest its legitimacy upon the ease with which the American state has recently projected force around the world without regard for its opposition. Power is a measure of success. That state power is not absolute matters little in this discussion.
We might examine at least two lines of research. First, we can look at the arguments about turnout and participation in the recent presidential elections. This is an important topic because it might trouble Williams’s assumption that Americans would not choose empire if they knew the US were an empire! Second, and more important, we should look carefully at a persistent tradition among US state intellectuals who believe not only in the manufacture of consent—to invoke Chomsky—but also in the often globally expansionist capacities and requirements of US power and interest. Given time restraints, I will focus here on the second of these lines of work.
There are at least two avenues to these state intellectuals’ policies: US survival demands expansion and security comes only from global domination. Intentionally I set aside all the ideologemes of American exception and the like to concentrate on some more hardheaded expression of material vision. In these times, we can reward our reading by considering again the origins of modern US national policy in a vision of geopolitical and historically fated insecurity. Alfred Thayer Mahan is the most important US intellectual whose work understood these national problems and influenced state affairs.
Mahan’s 1889 classic on sea power in history exists to answer the question how the US, situated as it is, might become a great power. Knowing his audience, Mahan set a solid foundation for his book. “Men,” he wrote, “may be discontented at the lack of political privilege; they will be yet more uneasy if they come to lack bread” (38). Insecurity exists on just this continuum from poverty to weakness—although how the lack of bread would come about in the US is unclear. The metonymic anxiety is clear enough. The solution is also clear and marks the modern American state ambition: “Only an absolute control of the sea can wholly secure such [commercial] communications, since it is impossible to know at what point an enemy coming from beyond the visible horizon might strike” (39).
In an article for the Guggenheim Foundation, I studied the way in which Paul Wolfowitz theorizes the development of US power as the mechanism for controlling the globe in the 21st century. As part of that paper, I commented on Wolfowitz’s invocation of his great predecessor, Mahan, whose work 100 years earlier, established the norm for US state intellectuals’ articulation of US power and its purposes. Since my purpose here is to suggest something of the iron-cage nature of American empire and to draw attention to the terms in which some of its principle theorists structured America as empire, I want to look at Mahan’s expression of foundational principles and policy. I know, in advance, that especially populist progressives (the children of Appleman Williams) will revolt against my effort, claiming not only that forces of historical resistance create spaces for freedom and difference against my notion of the iron cage, but also that a careful examination of historical detail shows the necessary compromises inherent in any structuration. I concede all of this, as I say, in advance, but add that it matters not at all to my analysis. The brute fact is that for more than 100 years America has been foundationally imperial. In fact, despite any form of anti-imperial developments, the nation-state has persistently arranged itself best to order the world and its power systems to its own interests. Even defeats, such as Vietnam, have not resulted in any weakening of the iron cage. We need to understand this if we are to think the question, ‘can there be a non-imperial America.’
Wolfowitz specifically invokes Mahan’s essay, “A Twentieth Century Outlook,”[1] in his own essay on the twenty-first century.[2] Wolfowitz found two important points in Mahan: peace must not be accepted as a good; and state politics must acquire priority over economy as the leading discourse for discussing power, action, and value.
Even more fundamental principles link Mahan and Wolfowitz than their basic claims for state power and sovereign will. Before addressing these directly, it is worth noticing some pertinent parallels of situation and person. Each is a secularist. Each makes strategic use of moral and religious languages and politics. Each works at a time when the force of liberal economics create movements that we now know by the term, global. Also, each contests the power of a seemingly natural ideological ally in the economic sphere—those we might call the free traders, the classic liberals, equally well represented by the Manchester School and the University of Chicago.
For each, though, the most important principle is historical in the deepest sense that civilizational concepts allow. We are familiar with the habit of victorious powers making history as they need. In the case of modern American state intellectuals such as these, it is their fundamental conception of the nature of history and of state actors in history that unites them in what we have come to call imperium—when it might be just as well to call it a state system of excess power.
Mahan was a strategic thinker whose work combined two central objects of thought: first, discovering the universal laws of power and advantage—military or geopolitical; and second, determined how best to dispose those laws in the historically specific and geographically determining realities of a particular moment. In short, Mahan’s concern was with the creation, development, and operation of great powers, the greatest of which acquire the status of imperia. Over and again Mahan writes in his treatises, his articles, his lectures, his reports, and even his letters to his friends and family, that a time is coming soon when the American people will accept—consciously and unconsciously—that their appetites and interests require not only action abroad, beyond the continent’s borders, but the installation of a political system that organizes America to become a great power extended wherever its interests roam.
Too often, normal accounts of this expansive impulse restrict themselves to the important and pertinent questions of race and class; they fail to take seriously the consciously articulated purposes of these reflective grand strategists, the effect of their thinking and rhetoric, and the tactical success of their work. In Mahan’s case, for example—an example that would not be lost on Hannah Arendt—the defining thought is clear, simple, traditional, and, some might conclude, dangerous. In the same article that Wolfowitz so admires, Mahan quotes Mommsen on Rome in a way that vividly presents how these strategic intellectuals think:
“When the course of history,” says Mommsen, “turns from the miserable monotony of the political selfishness which fought its battles in the Senate house and in the streets of Rome we may be allowed-—on the threshold of an event the effects of which still at the present day influence the destinies of the world—to look round us for a moment, and to indicate the point of view under which the conquest of what is now France by the Romans, and their first contact with the inhabitants of Germany and of Great Britain, are to be regarded in connection with the general history of the world.... The fact that the great Celtic people were ruined by the transalpine wars of Cesar was not the most important result of that grand enterprise—far more momentous than the negative was the positive result. It hardly admits of a doubt that if the rule of the Senate had prolonged its semblance of life for some generations longer, the migration of the peoples, as it is called, would have occurred four hundred years sooner than it did, and would have occurred at a time when the Italian civilization had not become naturalized either in Gaul or on the Danube or in Africa and Spain. Inasmuch as Cesar with sure glance perceived in the German tribes the rival antagonists of the Romano - Greek world, inasmuch as with firm hand he established the new system of aggressive defense down even to its details, and taught men to protect the frontiers of the empire by rivers or artificial ramparts, to colonize the nearest barbarian tribes along the frontier with the view of warding off the more re-mote, and to recruit the Roman army by enlistment from the enemy’s country, he gained for the Hellenic-Italian culture the interval necessary to civilize the West, just as it had already civilized the East. Centuries elapsed before men understood that Alexander had not merely erected an ephemeral kingdom in the East, but had carried Hellenism to Asia; centuries again elapsed before men understood that Cesar had not merely conquered a new province for the Romans, but had laid the foundation for the Romanizing of the regions of the West. It was only a late posterity that perceived the meaning of those expeditions to England and Germany, so inconsiderate in a military point of view, and so barren of immediate result. . . . That there is a bridge connecting the past glory of Hellas and Rome with the prouder fabric of modern history; that western Europe is Romanic, and Germanic Europe classic; that the names of Themistocles and Scipio have to us a very different sound from those of Asoka and Salmanassar; that Homer and Sophocles are not merely like the Vedas and Kalidasa, attractive to the literary botanist, but bloom for us in our own garden—all this is the work of Cesar.”[3]
This vision is familiar to us in the humanities. What does it mean when those with power act on it? And how do they so act? There are two more points I want to make here, in defense of my iron cage theory about America, and Mahan is, as in so much, the perfect textual repository for some exploration.
Mahan answers the ‘how’ with nothing short of a new scientific development. He invents the science of logistics. Had we time, we would do two things here. First, we would explore this term logistics carefully for the philological markers of its importance. One reason I am comfortable reading Mahan as evidence of the iron cage theory of American empire is that as a logistician, Mahan full well understood that his grand strategy required Americans coming to be at home with the idea of being a great power and comfortable with living in a home always arranged to that end. Logistics in this sense derives from logis, which is lodging. Furthermore, logistic, as a singular form, derives from logos, which indicates the rationalized scientific ambition underlying Mahan’s intense preoccupations with logistics. What does logistics, which seems to be only a matter of moving materiel around for soldiers, have to do with a conference of American humanists, especially literary or theoretical humanists? It is part of our function as historical critical intellectuals to know about these matters and bring to bear our unique talents and techniques. Otherwise, important questions remain unexamined and so can be neither opposed nor displaced.
Logistics, in this case, matters because Mahan, the great naval historian and grand strategic thinker, realized that one of history’s universal laws required political economic organizations structured to allow the state to maximalize its access to national productive and ideological resources whenever necessary. Against peace, such intellectuals organize nations always on the model of war. Mahan’s extraordinary influence results not just from his monumental research into and agitation for sea-power, especially in the form of offensively capable strike battle-ships, but also his theory for organizing modern production and modern societies through powerful, moving, flexible vectors of force that served always raisons d’etat.
In writing on geopolitical conceptions of power, the contributors to the Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook 2001 recognize Mahan’s central place in global conceptions of modern state power. Following Mahan, “geopoliticians establish the claim that there exist a close correlation between the overall logical structure of environmental (or spatial) ‘logistics’ and the power control in the world. This is not simply a matter of military logistics but also an issue in regard to the strategic distribution of the world’s resource bases and how this is correlated with the world political system as a differentiated unit. This issue was later actualized as a topic by Hans Morgenthau.”
George Bush’s national security documents continue this line of state effort, especially by openly collapsing distinctions between national and international, between matters of domestic and security policy. If nothing else, the Department of Homeland Security is a powerful instrument, along with censorship, pressure groups, disciplined political parties, and the like, for intensifying the geopolitical logistical effort to make the nation seamlessly available to the state.
Normal authorities on Mahan admit his conceptual breakthrough in logistics, a thinking that earned the respect of US, Japanese, and German policy makers along with high intellectuals such as Carl Schmitt and George Kennan. “Mahan . . . defined logistics as the support of armed forces by the economic and industrial mobilization of a nation.” Gravity’s Rainbow is not, in this aspect, a story of paranoia, but a history of the US iron cage.
If logistics is the answer to the question of how state intellectuals imagined the convergence of US cultural and economic production within a permanent state of war preparation, as what we might call, a ‘being toward war,’ Mahan provides an equal solution to the puzzle of politics in what was at his time already a globalizing international arena with multiple albeit unequal even if aspiring new and old power centers. As Joseph Buttigieg emphasizes in speaking with me on these questions, we can find clear echoes of Mahan’s thinking even in such pygmy intellectuals as Robert Kagan, the latest ideologue of American exceptionalism.
I do not, however, intend to soil Mahan with the dirt of such a charge. His thinking is too cunning and careful for such familiar abuse. Exceptionalism, I would argue, is a minor element in policy makers’ thinking and decision making. Mahan explicitly holds to a great power thinking that recognizes the transient nature of status and capacity. In fact, Mahan’s commitments seem to rest on some sort of bureaucratic proceduralist model, especially for states and nations deciding on the truthfulness of their decisions to apply power.
In October, 1899, Mahan published another in the long series of magazine pieces he wrote to modify elite judgment about military and strategic matters. The essay, “The Peace Conference and the Moral Aspect of War,”[4] is a critique of the Hague Peace Conference that had set up restrictions on naval competition as well as boards of arbitration and judgment to negotiate peaceful settlements to conflicts. Mahan, although a member of government that supported these efforts, publicly attacked their very idea as unjustifiable morally and politically. Proleptically, he warned that nation-states cannot and should not seem to yield sovereignty to transnational entities. Furthermore, beyond the fact that only force can compel a state, Mahan objected that a sovereign state, defined in its highest essence as an ethical state, could not be constrained by law. Indeed, developing an elaborate analogy between individual conscience and national decision, Mahan concludes that states must act in agreement with their conscience as long as, after following procedure, they are sure of the truthfulness of their moral and political judgment—even if that decision flies in the face of what must be judged others’ erroneous or cowardly or immoral attitudes.
Mahan sets out to persuade by insisting that nations should act sincerely and according to their ethical commitments: “Nations, like men, have a conscience.” Under the long secular view of a Mommsen, according to which a state regime’s civilizational efforts can be neither known nor judged for centuries, nation-states’ sincerity requires they act to enforce right:
The resort to arms by a nation, when right cannot otherwise be enforced, corresponds, or should correspond, precisely to the acts of the individual man which have been cited; for the old conception of an appeal to the Almighty, resembling in principle the medieval ordeal, is at best but a partial view of the truth, seen from one side only. However the result may afterwards be interpreted as indicative of the justice of a cause,—an interpretation always questionable,—a State, when it goes to war, should do so not to test the rightfulness of its claims, but because, being convinced in its conscience of that rightfulness, no other means of overcoming evil remains. (436)
After Machiavelli, we might be excused for believing that a nation-state’s conscience, comforted by its bureaucratic procedures, fits the most self-interested form of truthfulness rather than the most self-sacrificing. Mahan himself insists on this obvious truth. Hoping to undermine the appeal of peace parties in the US and elsewhere, Mahan creates that uniquely American sense of insecurity by arousing anxiety about ubiquitous but unknown threats that not only call for the projection of force but achieve legitimacy based on decisiveness by a state convinced, at whatever point in its procedures is convenient, in the truthfulness of its cause. States use force to restore right.
Mahan is by no means the start of US intellectuals’ thinking about state power and war, but his lucidity, his place in the institutional history of war planning, his global influence, and his success as a critic of US imperial weaknesses—in 1898 and at other times—gives him something of an originary status. His works appear everywhere on the curricula of US military war colleges and academies. (As an aside, it’s worth noting that a computer search of the MLA online bibliography turned up only one article dealing with Mahan, by Chris Connery in b2.) He is a very successful figure and his concepts and histories have had enormous success. Keeping with Henry Adams’s advice that to deal with power one must study success, critics would do well to turn their attention to figures like Mahan and away, for a while at least, from the now all too familiar allegories of subversion, resistance, local difference, and so on.
What do we see if we keep our eyes on this success? Among other things, we detect a powerful, intelligent, and highly worked out set of arguments for the US to assume a certain form of great power self-definition that prophetically closes the distances between foreign and domestic affairs and assures the nation that it’s good conscience and commitment to truthfulness as it understands it, assures the rightness of its violence and demands something like obedience, or, if you prefer, the subsumption of individual agents as citizens within the fuller agency of the imperium:
Fidelity to conscience implies not only obedience to its dictates, but earnest heart-searching, the use of every means, to ascertain its tine command; yet withal, whatever the mistrust of the message, the supremacy of the conscience is not impeached. When it is recognized that its final word is spoken, nothing remains but obedience. Even if mistaken, the moral wrong of acting against conviction works a deeper injury to the man, and to his kind, than can the merely material disasters that may follow upon obedience. Even the material evils of war are less than the moral evil of compliance with wrong.
Sincerity demands obedience. What then of the nay-sayers who knowingly, like Cesar, cast a glancing eye and see the future, understand the directions of history, and yet find themselves thrown aside for bias or some other affective infelicity and breach of decorum? Lionel Trilling, in his 1971 Jefferson lecture, published in 1972 under the title, Mind in the Modern World, warned that disaster lays in such practices. Trilling, endlessly worried about the declining power of literature, knew that the loss of literature was the lost of criticism. Arnoldian to his core, Trilling took literature seriously as a criticism of life as it is. It is against such instances of alternative ways of being and thinking that Mahan casts the high style of his political philosophy, as an aesthetic performance using the allure of reason and morals to argue for the right to violence in the name of the good and the truthful. Note well, he argues not in the name of truth—historical, moral, or philosophical truth—but for the legitimacy of the nation-state coming to a decisive sense of its own truthfulness, even if wrong. For civilization carried by force is a value for which imperialists will seemingly roll the dice. Once America has become the great power and the die are cast, it seems clear that America cannot be without being an imperium incarnate.
[1] A Twentieth-Century Outlook, by Alfred T. Mahan, Harper's Magazine (Sept. 1897), at MoA-Cornell pp. 521 ff.
[2] “Managing Our Way to a Peaceful Century,” in Managing the International System over the Next Ten Years: Three Essays; Report to the Trilateral Commission: 50 (New York, Paris, and Tokyo: The Trilateral Commission, 1997), pp. 43 – 62.
[3] Quoted in Mahan p. 528
[4] North American Review. No. IDXV. October, 1899: 433-47.
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