American empire at the turn of the twenty-first century

Abstract

In February 1941 Henry Luce proclaimed the beginning of the American Century. America, he declared, must now: “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world … to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit …. We must now undertake to be the Good Samaritan to the entire world ….” This was global imperialism for a good cause. As we saw in Chapter 5, American imperialism after World War II had been quite varied. Over Europe it was hegemonic, even legitimate. Over East Asia it was a mixture of indirect empire and informal empire through military intervention, yet domination then became more benign and now legitimate hegemony predominates there too. Latin America and the Middle East were at the receiving end of informal empire through military intervention or proxies, though this has recently declined in Latin America while increasing in the Middle East. The United States had no colonies in this entire period and tended to move toward milder forms of domination. Yet, as Chalmers Johnson (2000, 2005) says, the size and sprawl of its military base network constitutes a new type of global empire, intended to militarily coerce without formal occupation. This chapter deals with two recent crystallizations of American imperialism: economic imperialism, centered on dollar seigniorage occurring from the early 1970s; and military imperialism intensifying in the 1990s and 2000s. I try to explain them and I ask whether the two were in fact distinct or whether they became merged into a single global imperial strategy, as world systems theorists and others argue. I will ask how successful the two were and whether they reversed the drift toward lighter forms of American empire. Since Chapter 6 already discussed some of the economic intensification, I focus here more on military power relations, and especially on the two main wars of the twenty-first century so far, in Iraq and Afghanistan. I begin with the economy.