Empires End

Featured

Jul 23

The thing about predicting the inevitable is that you'll always be wrong, until you're finally right. Eventually the broken clock strikes twelve. That doesn't mean there's any point in waiting for it to happen, since it happens whether you wait for it or not. There are better things to do with your time; prediction markets are for suckers. Stop worrying and love the bomb. Leave the future to the pundits, who get paid for striking out.

But there's some profit, or at least there's some fun, in meditating on what the inevitable future feels like, or will feel like when it comes. After all, the future is already here, waiting to get evenly distributed. We probably have some inkling of its qualities. Also, there are other places where the future has fully arrived, and we can always ask what life is like there.

One of the great inevitabilities is that empires die. That we Americans have an empire is pretty indisputable. That it's dying is up for debate, and the debate is currently pretty hot. John Grey, ever the pessimist, thinks Iran signals the end. Defense analyst Jennifer Kavanagh thinks he’s right. David McWilliams (among others) calls it a “Suez moment” for the US. But who knows: Providence might choose to smile on the “turboamerica” for another century or two, as we sink further into the various substance addictions and general stupidities for which the Almighty is known to have a special affection, to the chagrin of buttoned-down Prussians everywhere. Or maybe our teetotaling commander-in-chief will push the big red button tomorrow, and we can all call it a day.

My own pundit-sense tells me our expiration date is getting close. Of course, expiration dates are mostly there for liability and marketing purposes; everybody knows you can actually keep those pills in your medicine cabinet for years. So even if it’s true that things are winding down for the American Empire, and winding up for the Chinese Century, or for some new multipolar anarchy, we've still got all our bombs, and we can go on loving them for years. Just look at Russia.

But Russia, despite some come-hither advertising, isn’t really a place I'd like to call home. The vodka runs a little too freely, and there's a lot of mud. Many of its stereotypical faults are longstanding, but I imagine part of what makes it so depressing is a malingering nostalgia for the old USSR. Sure, it was a horrible dictatorship, and daily life was terrible for most people. But back then Russians had respect. And that’s a hard thing to lose. Everything you do after that is going to look a little like you’re trying too hard (don’t make me use the nukes! we still have nukes!). No wonder a lot of people there give up trying for drinking.

But Russia is far away, and it was our mortal enemy for several long decades. Americans aren’t going to relate very easily to its postimperial experience (though no doubt feel our own sense of nostalgia for the loss of such an excellent archnemesis). The better example for us is probably contemporary Britain, which has been stewing in the juices of its own lost empire for several decades now. The UK is marked by a “politics of imperial nostalgia,” a habit of “post-imperial cope” which has aimed for some time to preserve a pretense of continued global importance which is now unraveling at speed. The symptoms of this delusion include growing domestic conflict, a stagnating economy, failing infrastructure, and a general malaise fit to make Jimmy Carter proud. Americans, who enjoy at least a second-hand memory of Victorian glories (I admit to a guilty affection for the Raj – too much Kipling as a kid) and Churchillian rhetoric, should be capable of feeling vicariously some of what it is like to remember what was once it’s gone.

I’m not a fan of empires. I think they ruin nations, which by contrast do not necessarily have expiration dates, at least not on the same time-scale as empires do. The sun finally set on the British Empire, but Britain is still around. The Soviet Union dissolved on December 26th, 1991, but Russia soldiers on. It’s not very common for nations to just disappear – though falling birthrates might make things interesting. What’s very common is for the empire a nation builds to collapse, and for that to have certain effects on the nation’s people. There are plenty of studies that can tell us much about what these effects might be, should we Americans be so (un)fortunate as to suffer the same fate (which of course we will, even if not yet). But it may also be useful for citizens to reflect more personally on the prospect of an impending return to normal-nation status.

What I find interesting is that to me the prospect is sad. Like I said, I’m not a fan of empires. There are Evil Empires and less-evil empires, and imperialism can obviously have positive consequences. Empires stop wars and build roads. But in principle they’re still bad, simply because they encroach on the independence of nations (including the nation that builds the empire), and nations ought to be independent. That’s my view, at least. It might be wrongheaded. The point, though, is that even though that’s my view, I still bristle at the thought that America’s empire might be on its last legs. In my head, it’s wrong that we have an empire. In my heart, I like it and I want it to last.

I like telling my kids, with the proper note of moral ambivalence, that America is the most powerful country in the history of the world. I like the fact that we could obliterate civilization, and the idea that we won’t because we’re the good guys. I like this video of Douglas MacArthur accepting the Japanese surrender while hundreds of B-52s fly overhead. I like the royal blue of my passport. I like walking around in foreign countries with that special kind of insouciance that comes when your government operates 800 military bases (that you know about). This kind of stuff just makes me feel good, no matter how bad I might feel about it. And I suspect that’s how it is for everybody. It doesn’t matter what your opinions are, or how “postcolonial” your sensibilities might be. It doesn’t even matter how much you benefit materially from the empire. If you’re an American, then in your heart, you like it when America is respected. Because then, no matter your individual qualities and circumstances, you’re respected, too.

There’s a scene near the beginning of Gary Shteyngart’s dystopian novel Supersad True Love Story in which the main character is stuck on an airplane on a crumbling JFK runway while a group of soldiers search the cabin for a political enemy. The scene depicts near-future America as a third-world nation, dilapidated and oppressive. What really hits home is how differently the American and foreign passengers react to the intrusion of soldiers. “[The soldiers] scanned us . . . for three interminable minutes, during which the American contingent remained petulantly silent while the Italians aboard began to speak in angry, assertive tones. And then it began. They grabbed him [the political enemy] . . . The Americans instantly turned away, but the Italians were already hollering: ‘Que barbarico!’ and ‘A cosa serve?’

This is not how we are used to thinking of ourselves. We’re supposed to be the Italians in that situation. Americans are the ones who speak up, not the ones who shut up. Americans are cowboys, individualists, anti-authoritarians. We’re Bruce Willis in Tears of the Sun, defying the orders and shooting the warlords and rescuing the kids. We’re Indiana Jones punching Nazis. This is just who we are, even and especially when we’re yelling about our own government’s foreign policy (que barbarico!) and getting accused of anti-Americanism. At least, it’s who we’ve always been, as long as most of us can remember. The idea that one day it might change – that we might someday be the innocents getting oppressed by the warlords, that we might be the ones signing surrender papers on a battleship, that we might be the ones who show our papers on request and don’t dare complain – does not feel good.

These are certainly not the only options. The decline of an empire could be the restoration of a republic. For most of us, our imperial confidence is as unearned as are the material advantages that come with living in the metropole. We’re riding on the coattails of the people who actually did the work (I didn’t fly a B52 over Japan), and it would be healthier if we found our self-respect in the independence of our country from others, not in the dependence of other countries on us. But, just as empires inevitably fall, history suggests that the fallout from the fall almost as inevitably takes the path oft-traveled. The Roman Republic did not return in 476 AD. When you spend too long ruling other people, you can forget how to rule yourself, and it usually takes a long time to remember.