# Colossus  ## Metadata - Author: [[Niall Ferguson]] - Full Title: Colossus - Category: #books ## Highlights - The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” RON SUSKIND, quoting a “senior advisor” to President Bush ([Location 73](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=73)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Here, in a simplified form, is what it says: 1. that the United States has always been, functionally if not self-consciously, an empire; 2. that a self-conscious American imperalism might well be preferable to the available alternatives, but 3. that financial, human, and cultural constraints make such self-consciousness highly unlikely, and 4. that therefore the American empire, in so far as it continues to exist, will remain a somewhat dysfunctional entity. ([Location 95](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=95)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The case for an American empire in Colossus is therefore twofold. First, there is the case for its functional existence; second, the case for the potential advantages of a self-conscious American imperalism. ([Location 101](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=101)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The dilemmas faced by America today have more in common with those faced by the later Caesars than with those faced by the Founding Fathers. ([Location 106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=106)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Iraq, however, is only the front line of an American imperium which, like all the great world empires of history, aspires to much more than just military dominance along a vast and variegated strategic frontier. 7 Empire also means economic, cultural, and political predominance within (and sometimes also without) that frontier. ([Location 118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=118)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As defined by their president, the democratizing mission of the United States is both altruistic and distinct from the ambitions of past empires, which (so it is generally assumed) aimed to impose their own rule on foreign peoples. The difficulty is that President Bush’s ideal of freedom as a universal desideratum rather closely resembles the Victorian ideal of “civilization.” “Freedom” means, on close inspection, the American model of democracy and capitalism; when Americans speak of “nation building” they actually mean “state replicating,” in the sense that they want to build political and economic institutions that are fundamentally similar, though not identical, to their own. 11 They may not aspire to rule, but they do aspire to have others rule themselves in the American way. ([Location 138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=138)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the very act of imposing “freedom” simultaneously subverts it. Just as the Victorians seemed hypocrites when they spread “civilization” with the Maxim gun, so there is something fishy about those who would democratize Fallujah with the Abrams tank. ([Location 145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=145)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Unfortunately, history shows that the most violent time in the history of an empire often comes at the moment of its dissolution, precisely because—as soon as it has been announced—the withdrawl of imperial troops unleashes a struggle between rival local elites for control of the indigenous armed forces. ([Location 156](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=156)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Such arguments betray a touching naïveté about both the past and the present. First, as I try to argue in the introduction, empire was no temporary condition of the Victorian age. Empires, by contrast, can be traced back as far as recorded history goes; indeed, most history is in fact the history of empires, precisely because empires are so good at recording, replicating, and transmitting their own words and deeds. It is the nation state—an essentially nineteenth-century ideal type—which is the historical novelty, and which may yet prove to be the more ephemeral entity. Given the ethnic heterogeneity and restless mobility of mankind, that is scarcely surprising. In fact, many of the most successful nation states of the present started life as empires; what is the modern United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland if not the legatee of an earlier English imperialism? Secondly, it is a Rooseveltian fantasy that in 1945 the age of empire came to an end amid a global springtime of the peoples. On the contrary, the Second World War merely saw the defeat of three would-be empires—German, Japanese, and Italian—by an alliance between the old West European empires (principally the British, since the others were so swiftly beaten) and two newer empires—that of the Soviet Union and that of the United States. The Cold War also had the character of a clash of empires. Although the United States ran, for the most part, an “empire by invitation” where its troops were deployed and was elsewhere more of a hegemon (in the sense of an alliance leader) than an empire, the Soviet Union was and remained, until its precipitous decline and fall, a true empire. Moreover, the other great Communist power to emerge from the 1940s, the People’s Republic of China, remains in many respects an empire to this day. Its three most extensive provinces—Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet—were all acquired as a result of Chinese imperial expansion, and China continues to lay claim to Taiwan as well as numerous smaller islands, to say nothing of some territories in Russian Siberia and Kazakhstan. ([Location 171](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=171)) - Tags: [[blue]] - All of these mistakes had one thing in common. They sprang from a failure to learn from history. For among the most obvious lessons of history is that an empire cannot rule by coercion alone. It needs above all legitimacy—in the eyes of the subject people, in the eyes of the other great powers and, above all, in the eyes of the people back home. Did those concerned know no history? We are told that President Bush was reading Edward Morris’s Theodore Rex as the war in Iraq was being planned; presumably he had not reached the part when the American occu-pation sparked off a Filipino insurrection. Before the invasion of Iraq, Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley was heard to refer to a purely unilateral American invasion as “the imperial option.” Did no one else grasp that occupying and trying to transform Iraq (with or without allies) was a quintessentially imperial undertaking—and one that would not only cost money but would also take many years to succeed? ([Location 260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=260)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Had policy makers troubled to consider what befell the last Anglophone occupation of Iraq, they might have been less surprised by the persistent resistance they encountered in certain parts of the country during 2004. For in May 1920 there was a major anti-British revolt there. This happened six months after a referendum (in practice, a round of consultation with tribal leaders) on the country’s future, and just after the announcement that Iraq would become a League of Nations “mandate” under British trusteeship rather than continue under colonial rule. Strikingly, neither consultation with Iraqis nor the promise of internationalization sufficed to avert an uprising. ([Location 268](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=268)) - Tags: [[blue]] - For all of the talk in 2004 of restoring “full sovereignty” to an interim Iraqi government, President Bush made it clear that he intended to “maintain our troop level . . . as long as necessary” and that U.S. troops would continue to operate “under American command.” This in itself implied something significantly less than full sovereignty. For if the new interim Iraqi government did not have control over a well-armed foreign army in its own territory, than it lacked one of the defining characteristics of a sovereign state: a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. ([Location 288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=288)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Since President Bush’s election in 2000, total federal outlays have risen by an estimated $530 billion, an increase of nearly a third. This increase can only be partly attributed to the wars the administration has fought; higher defense expenditures account for just 30 percent of the total increment, whereas increased spending on health care accounts for 17 percent, that on Social Security and that on income security for 16 percent apiece, and that on Medicare for 14 percent. 24 The reality is that the Bush administration has increased spending on welfare by rather more than spending on warfare. Meanwhile, even as expenditure has risen, there has been a steep reduction in the federal government’s revenues, which slumped from 21 percent of gross domestic product in 2000 to less than 16 percent in 2004. 25 The recession of 2001 played only a minor role in creating this shortfall of receipts. More important were the three successive tax cuts enacted by the administration with the support of the Republican-led Congress, beginning with the initial $1.35 trillion tax cut over ten years and the $38 billion tax rebate of the Economic Growth and Tax Reform Reconciliation Act in 2001, continuing with the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act in 2002, and concluding with the reform of the double taxation of dividend income in 2003. With a combined value of $188 billion—equivalent to around 2 percent of the 2003 national income—these tax cuts were significantly larger than those passed in Ronald Reagan’s Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981. 26 The effect of this combination of increased spending and reduced revenue has been a dramatic growth in the federal deficit. President Bush inherited a surplus of around $236 billion from the fiscal year 2000. At the time of writing, the projected deficit for 2004 was $413 billion, representing a swing from the black into the red of two-thirds of a trillion dollars. ([Location 305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=305)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Yet this persistence of low long-term rates is not a result of ingenuity on the part of the U.S. Treasury. It is in part a consequence of the willingness of the Asian central banks to buy vast quantities of dollar-denominated securities such as ten-year Treasury bonds, with the primary motivation of keeping their currencies pegged to the dollar, and the secondary consequence of funding the Bush deficits. 31 It is no coincidence that just under half the publicly held federal debt is now in foreign hands, more than double the proportion ten years ago. 32 Not since the days of tsarist Russia has a great empire relied so heavily on lending from abroad. The trouble is that these flows of foreign capital into the United States cannot be relied on to last indefinitely, especially if there is a likelihood of rising deficits in the future. ([Location 332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=332)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The United States derives a significant benefit from the status of the dollar as the world’s principal reserve currency; it is one reason why foreign investors are prepared to hold such large volumes of dollar-denominated assets. But reserve-currency status is not divinely ordained. It could be undermined if international markets took fright at the magnitude of America’s still latent fiscal crisis. 34 A decline in the dollar would certainly hurt foreign holders of U.S. currency more than it would hurt Americans. But a shift in international expectations about U.S. finances might also bring about a sharp increase in long-term interest rates, which would have immediate and negative feedback effects on the federal deficit by pushing up the cost of debt service. ([Location 342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=342)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In accepting his party’s nomination, Kerry recalled how, as a boy, he watched “British, French, and American troops” working together in post-war Berlin. In those days, however, there was much bigger incentive—symbolized by the Red Army units that surrounded West Berlin—for European states to support American foreign policy. It is not that the French or the Germans (or for that matter the British) were passionately pro-American during the Cold War; on the contrary, U.S. diplomats constantly fretted about anti-Americanism in Europe, on both the left and the right. Nevertheless, as long as there was a Soviet Union to the East, there was one overwhelming argument for the unity of “the West.” That ceased to be the case fifteen years ago, when the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev caused the Russian empire to crumble. ([Location 359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=359)) - Tags: [[blue]] - These days, wary realists warn of the ascent of China and Europe. Power, in other words, is not a natural monopoly; the struggle for mastery is both perennial and universal. The “unipolarity” identified by some commentators following the Soviet collapse cannot last much longer, for the simple reason that history hates a hyperpower. Sooner or later, challengers will emerge, and back we must go to a multipolar, multipower world. In other words, if the United States were to conclude from its experience in Iraq that the time has come to abandon its imperial pretensions, some other power or powers would soon seize the opportunity to bid for hegemony. ([Location 379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=379)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Why might a power vacuum arise early in the twenty-first century? The reasons are not especially hard to imagine. Consider the three principal contenders for the succession if the United States were to succumb to imperial decline. Impressive though the European Union’s recent enlargement has been—not to mention the achievement of a twelve-country monetary union—the reality is that demographic trends almost certainly condemn Europe to decline (see chapter seven). With fertility rates dropping and life expectancies rising, West European societies are projected to have median ages in the upper forties by the middle of this century. Indeed, “Old Europe” will soon be truly old. By 2050, one in every three Italians, Spaniards, and Greeks is expected to be sixty-five or older, even allowing for ongoing immigration. 40 Europeans therefore face an agonizing choice between Americanizing their economies, i.e., opening their borders to much more immigration, with all the cultural changes that would entail, or transforming their union into a kind of fortified retirement community, in which a dwindling proportion of employees shoulder the rising cost of outmoded welfare systems. These problems are compounded by the Euro area’s sluggish growth, a consequence of labor market rigidities, high marginal tax rates, and relatively low labor inputs (notably in terms of working hours). 41 Meanwhile, the EU’s still incomplete constitutional reforms mean that individual European nation states continue to enjoy considerable autonomy outside the economic sphere, particularly in foreign and security policy. Eastward enlargement may look like a solution to the EU’s creeping senescence, but each additional member makes the task of managing the Union’s confederal institutions more difficult. Optimistic observers of China insist the economic miracle of the past decade will endure, with growth continuing at such a pace that within thirty or forty years China’s gross domestic product will surpass that of the United States. 42 Yet it is far from clear that the normal rules for emerging markets have been suspended for Beijing’s benefit. First, a fundamental incompatibility exists between the free-market economy, based inevitably on private property and the rule of law, and the Communist monopoly on power, which breeds corruption and impedes the creation of transparent fiscal, monetary, and regulatory institutions. As is common in “Asian tiger” economies, production is running far ahead of domestic consumption—thus making the economy heavily dependent on exports—and even further ahead of domestic financial development. Indeed, no one knows the full extent of the problems in the Chinese domestic banking sector. 43 Those Western banks that are buying up bad debts to establish themselves in China must remember that this strategy was tried once before: a century ago, in the era of the “Open Door” policy, when American and European firms rushed into China only to see their investments… ([Location 389](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=389)) - Tags: [[blue]] - One must go back much further in history to find a period of true and enduring apolarity; as far back, in fact, as the ninth and tenth centuries. In this era, the two sundered halves of the Roman Empire—Rome and Byzantium—had passed the height of their power. The leadership of the Western half was divided between the pope, who led Christendom, and the heirs of Charlemagne, who split up his short-lived empire under the Treaty of Verdun in 843. No credible claimant to the title of emperor emerged until Otto was crowned in 962, and even he was merely a German prince with pretensions (never realized) to rule Italy. Byzantium, meanwhile, was grappling with the Bulgar rebellion to the north, while the Abbasid caliphate initially established by Abu al-Abbas in 750 was in steep decline by the middle of the tenth century. In China, too, imperial power was in a dip between the T’ang and Sung dynasties. The weakness of the older empires allowed new and smaller entities to flourish. When the Khazar tribe converted to Judaism in 740, their khanate occupied a Eurasian power vacuum between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. In Kiev, far from the reach of Byzantium, the regent Olga laid the foundation for the future Russian Empire in 957 when she embraced the Orthodox Church. The Seljuks—forebears of the Ottoman Turks—carved out the Sultanate of Rum as the Abbasid caliphate lost its grip over Asia Minor. Africa had its mini-empire in Ghana; Central America had its Mayan civilization. Connections between all these entities were minimal or nonexistent. This condition was the antithesis of globalization. The world was broken up into disconnected, introverted civilizations. One distinctive feature of the era was that, in the absence of strong secular polities, religious questions often produced serious convulsions. Indeed, it was religious institutions that often set the political agenda. ([Location 439](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=439)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Could an apolar world today produce an era reminiscent of the age of Alfred? It could, though with some important and troubling differences. Certainly, one can imagine the world’s established powers retreating into their own regional spheres of influence. But what of the growing pretensions to autonomy of the supranational bodies created under U.S. leadership after the Second World War? The United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization each considers itself in some way representative of the “international community.” Surely their aspirations to global governance point to the true alternative to American empire—a new Light Age of collective security and international law, the very antithesis of the Dark Ages? 45 Yet universal claims were also an integral part of the rhetoric of that distant era. All the empires maintained that they ruled the world; some, unaware of the existence of other civilizations, may even have believed that they did. The reality, however, was not a global Christendom, nor an all-embracing Empire of Heaven, but political fragmentation. And that is also true today. For the defining characteristic of our age is not a shift of power upward to supranational institutions, but downward. With the end of states’ monopoly on the means of violence and the collapse of their control over channels of communication, humanity has entered an era characterized as much by disintegration as integration. If free flows of information and of the means of production empower multinational corporations and nongovernmental organizations (as well as evangelistic religious cults of all denominations), the free flow of destructive technology empowers both criminal organizations and terrorist cells. These groups can operate, it seems, wherever they choose, from New York to Najaf, from Madrid to Moscow. By contrast, the writ of the international community is not global at all. It is, in fact, increasingly confined to a few strategic outposts such as Kabul and Baghdad. In short, it is the non-state actors who truly wield global power—including both the monks and the Vikings of our time. ([Location 462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=462)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If the United States is to retreat from global hegemony—its fragile self-image dented by minor setbacks on the imperial frontier—its critics at home and abroad must not pretend that they are ushering in a new era of multipolar harmony, or even a return to the good old balance of power. For the alternative to unipolarity may not be multipolarity at all. It could be apolarity—a global vacuum of power. And far more dangerous forces than rival great powers would benefit from such a not-so-new world disorder. ([Location 485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=485)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The best case for empire is always the case for order. Liberty is, of course, a loftier goal. But only those who have never known disorder fail to grasp that it is the necessary precondition for liberty. In that sense, the case for American empire is simultaneously a case against international anarchy—or, to be precise, of a proliferation of regional vacuums of power. ([Location 489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=489)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Sadly, there are still a few places in the world that must be ruled before they can be freed. Sadly, the act of ruling them will sorely try Americans, who instinctively begrudge such places the blood, treasure, and time that they consume. Yet, saddest of all, there seems to be no better alternative for the United States and the world—and that is this book’s bottom line. Once, one hundred and sixty years ago, America’s imperial destiny seemed manifest. It has since become obscure. But it is America’s destiny just the same. The only question that remains is: How much longer will this self-denying empire endure? The answer Colossus offers is: Not long, in the absence of fundamental reappraisal of America’s role in the world. If this book contributes anything to bring that reappraisal about, then it will have served its intended purpose. ([Location 495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=495)) - Tags: [[blue]] - what the world needs today is not just any kind of empire. What is required is a liberal empire—that is to say, one that not only underwrites the free international exchange of commodities, labor and capital but also creates and upholds the conditions without which markets cannot function—peace and order, the rule of law, noncorrupt administration, stable fiscal and monetary policies—as well as provides public goods, such as transport infrastructure, hospitals and schools, which would not otherwise exist. ([Location 524](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=524)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Like all historical questions, these can only be answered by comparisons and counterfactuals, juxtaposing America’s empire with those that have gone before and considering other imaginable pasts, as well as possible futures. ([Location 542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=542)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In a trenchant article for the Weekly Standard, published just a month after the destruction of the World Trade Center, Max Boot explicitly made “The Case for an American Empire.” “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today,” Boot declared, “cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.” 17 When his history of America’s “small wars” appeared the following year, its title was taken from Rudyard Kipling’s notorious poem “The White Man’s Burden,” written in 1899 as an exhortation to the United States to turn the Philippines into an American colony. ([Location 578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=578)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the Office of the Secretary of Defense organized a Summer Study at the Naval War College, Newport, to “explore strategic approaches to sustain [U.S. predominance] for the long term (~50 years),” which explicitly drew comparisons between the U.S. and the Roman, Chinese, Ottoman and British empires. 30 Such parallels clearly do not seem outlandish to senior American military personnel. ([Location 612](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=612)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In 2000 General Anthony Zinni, then commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command, told the journalist Dana Priest that he “had become a modern-day proconsul, descendant of the warrior-statesman who ruled the Roman Empire’s outlying territory, bringing order and ideals from a legalistic Rome.” 31 It is hard to be certain that this was irony. ([Location 615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=615)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In so-called world-system theory, by contrast, hegemony means more than mere leadership, but less than outright empire. ([Location 676](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=676)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In yet another, narrower definition, the hegemon’s principal function in the twentieth century was to underwrite a liberal international commercial and financial system. 52 In what became known, somewhat inelegantly, as hegemonic stability theory, the fundamental question of the postwar period was how far and for how long the United States would remain committed to free trade once other economies, benefiting from precisely the liberal economic order made possible by U.S. hegemony, began to catch up. Would Americans revert to protectionist policies in an effort to perpetuate their hegemony or stick with free trade at the risk of experiencing relative decline? This has been called the hegemon’s dilemma, and it appeared to many writers to be essentially the same dilemma that Britain had faced before 1914. 53 ([Location 678](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=678)) - Tags: [[blue]] - successive U.S. governments allegedly took advantage of the dollar’s role as a key currency before and after the breakdown of Bretton Woods. The U.S. government had access to a “gold mine of paper” and could therefore collect a subsidy from foreigners in the form of seigniorage (by selling foreigners dollars and dollar-denominated assets that then depreciated in value). 54 ([Location 693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=693)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The distinction between hegemony and empire would be legitimate if the term empire did simply mean, as so many American commentators seem to assume, direct rule over foreign territories without any political representation of their inhabitants. But students of imperial history have a more sophisticated conceptual framework than that. At the time, British colonial administrators like Frederick Lugard clearly understood the distinction between “direct” and “indirect” rule; large parts of the British Empire in Asia and Africa were ruled indirectly—that is, through the agency of local potentates rather than British governors. A further distinction was introduced by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in their seminal 1953 article on “the imperialism of free trade.” This encapsulated the way the Victorians used their naval and financial power to open the markets of countries outside their colonial ambit. 56 Equally illuminating is the now widely accepted distinction between “formal” and “informal empire.” The British did not formally govern Argentina, for example, but the merchant banks of the City of London exerted such a powerful influence on its fiscal and monetary policy that Argentina’s independence was heavily qualified. 57 In the words of one of the few modern historians to attempt a genuinely comparative study of the subject, an empire is “first and foremost, a very great power that has left its mark on the international relations of an era . . . a polity that rules over wide territories and many peoples, since the management of space and multi-ethnicity is one of the great perennial dilemmas of empire. . . . An empire is by definition . . . not a polity ruled with the explicit consent of its peoples. [But] by a process of assimilation of peoples of democratization of institutions empires can transform themselves into multinational federations or even nation states.” ([Location 702](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=702)) - Tags: [[blue]] - an empire may provide “public goods”—that is, intended or unintended benefits of imperial rule flowing not to the rulers but to the ruled and indeed beyond to third parties: less conflict, increased trade or investment, improved justice or governance, better education (which may or may not be associated with religious conversion, something we would not nowadays regard as a public good) or improved material conditions. ([Location 728](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=728)) - Tags: [[blue]] - imperial rule can be implemented by more than one kind of functionary: soldiers, civil servants, settlers, voluntary associations, firms and local elites all can in different ways impose the will of the center on the periphery. ([Location 732](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=732)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Nor is it by any means a given that the benefits of empire should flow simply to the metropolitan society. It may only be the elite of that society that reaps the benefits of empire (as Lance E. Davis and R. A. Huttenback claimed in the case of the British Empire); 60 it may be colonists drawn from lower-income groups in the… ([Location 735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=735)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the social character of an empire—to be precise, the attitudes of the rulers toward the ruled—may vary. At one extreme lies the genocidal empire of National Socialist Germany, intent on the annihilation of specific ethnic groups and the deliberate degradation of others. At the other extreme lies the Roman model of empire, in which citizenship was obtainable under certain conditions regardless of ethnicity (a model with obvious applicability to the case of the United States). In the middle lies the Victorian model of complex racial and social hierarchy, in… ([Location 738](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=738)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The precise combination of all these variables determines, among other things, the geographical extent—and of… ([Location 743](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=743)) - Tags: [[blue]] - it can be argued with some plausibility that the American empire has up until now, with a few exceptions, preferred indirect rule to direct rule and informal empire to formal empire. Indeed, its cold war–era hegemony… ([Location 746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=746)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the American empire can therefore be summed up as follows. It goes without saying that it is a liberal democracy and market economy, though its polity has some illiberal characteristics 62 and its economy a surprisingly high level of state intervention (“mixed” might be more accurate than “market”). It is primarily concerned with its own security and maintaining international communications and, secondarily, with ensuring access to raw materials (principally, though not exclusively, oil). It is also in the business of providing a limited number of public goods: peace, by intervening against some bellicose regimes and in some civil wars; freedom of the seas and skies for trade; and a distinctive form of “conversion” usually called Americanization, which is carried out less by old-style Christian missionaries than by the exporters of American… ([Location 750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=750)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Even when it conquers, it resists annexation—one reason why the duration of its offshore imperial undertakings has tended to be, and will in all probability continue to be, relatively short. Indeed, a peculiarity of American imperialism—perhaps its principal shortcoming—is its excessively short time horizon. ([Location 766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=766)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Like the Chinese Empire that arose in the Ch’in era and reached its zenith under the Ming dynasty, it has united the lands and peoples of a vast territory and forged them into a true nation-state. ([Location 774](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=774)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Like the Roman Empire, it has a system of citizenship that is remarkably open: Purple Hearts and U.S. citizenship were conferred simultaneously on a number of the soldiers serving in Iraq last year, just as service in the legions was once a route to becoming a civis romanus. ([Location 775](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=775)) - Tags: [[blue]] - with the classical architecture of its capital and the republican structure of its constitution, the United States is perhaps more like a “new Rome” than any previous empire—albeit a Rome in which the Senate has thus far retained its grip on would-be emperors. In its relationship with Western Europe too, the United States can sometimes seem like a second Rome, though it seems premature to hail Brussels as the new Byzantium. 64 ([Location 777](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=777)) - Tags: [[blue]] - in its capacity for spreading its own language and culture—at once monotheistic and mathematical—the United States also shares features of the Abbasid caliphate erected by the heirs of Muhammad. ([Location 782](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=782)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the nineteenth century the westward sweep of American settlers across the prairies had its mirror image in the eastward sweep of Russian settlers across the steppe. ([Location 785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=785)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Today the United States and its dependencies together account for barely 5 percent of the world’s population, whereas the British ruled between a fifth and a quarter of humanity at the zenith of their empire. ([Location 804](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=804)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Before the deployment of troops for the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military had around 752 military installations in more than 130 countries. 67 Significant numbers of American troops were stationed in 65 of these. 68 Their locations significantly qualify President Bush’s assertion in his speech of February 26, 2003, that “after defeating enemies [in 1945], we did not leave behind occupying armies.” 69 In the first year of his presidency, around 70,000 U.S. troops were stationed in Germany, and 40,000 in Japan. American troops have been in those countries continuously since 1945. ([Location 807](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=807)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The British too relished their technological superiority, whether it took the form of the Maxim gun or the Dreadnought. But their empire never dominated the full spectrum of military capabilities the way the United States does today. ([Location 828](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=828)) - Tags: [[blue]] - For a brief time after the fall of the Berlin Wall it was possible to rejoice that the Soviet Union had succumbed to overstretch first. 80 The economic travails of Japan, once touted as a future geopolitical contender, added to the sense of national recuperation. While America savored a period of “relative ascent” unlike any since the 1920s, when an earlier peace dividend had fueled an earlier stock market bubble, declinism itself declined. By the end of the 1990s, however, commentators had found new rivals about which to worry. Some feared the European Union. 81 Others looked with apprehension toward China. 82 Samuel Huntington too saw “unipolarity” as only a transient phenomenon: as Europe united and China grew richer, so the world would revert to a “multipolarity” not seen since before the Second World War. ([Location 844](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=844)) - Tags: [[blue]] - in 2002 American gross domestic product, calculated in international dollars and adjusted on the basis of purchasing power parity, was nearly twice that of China and accounted for just over a fifth (21.4 percent) of total world output—more than the Japanese, German and British shares put together. That exceeds the highest share of global output ever achieved by Great Britain by a factor of more than two. 86 Indeed, calculated in current U.S. dollars, the American share of the world’s gross output was closer to a third (32.3 percent), double the size of the Chinese and Japanese economies combined. 87 In terms of both production and consumption, the United States is already a vastly wealthier empire than Britain ever was. ([Location 857](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=857)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The relatively rapid growth of the American economy in the 1980s and 1990s—at a time when the economy of its principal cold war rival was imploding—explains how the United States has managed to achieve a unique revolution in military affairs while at the same time substantially reducing the share of defense expenditures as a proportion of gross domestic product. ([Location 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=881)) - Tags: [[blue]] - American power, it is argued, consists not just of military and economic power but also of “soft” power. According to Joseph Nye, the dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School, “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness.” Soft power, in other words, is getting what you want without “force or inducement,” sticks or carrots: “It is the ability to entice and attract. Soft power arises in large part from our values.” ([Location 891](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=891)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In some ways, the soft power that Britain could exert in the 1930s was greater than the soft power of the United States today. In a world of newspapers, radio receivers and cinemas, in which the number of content-supplying corporations (often national monopolies) was relatively small, the overseas broadcasts of the BBC could hope to reach a relatively large number of foreign ears. Yet whatever soft power Britain thereby wielded did little to halt the precipitous decline of British power after the 1930s. ([Location 914](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=914)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The young Winston Churchill once defined the goals of British imperialism as being “[to reclaim] from barbarism fertile regions and large populations . . . to give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. . . .” 109 Is this so very different from the language of American idealism? As Senator J. William Fulbright observed in 1968, “The British called it the ‘white man’s burden.’ The French called it their ‘civilizing mission.’ Nineteenth-century Americans called it ‘manifest destiny.’ It is now being called the ‘responsibilities of power.’” 110 The “promotion of freedom” or the “strategy of openness” is merely its latest incarnation. ([Location 966](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=966)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Unlike the majority of European writers who have written on this subject, I am fundamentally in favor of empire. Indeed, I believe that empire is more necessary in the twenty-first century than ever before. The threats we face are not in themselves new ones. But advances in technology make them more dangerous than ever before. Thanks to the speed and regularity of modern air travel, infectious diseases can be transmitted to us with terrifying swiftness. And thanks to the relative cheapness and destructiveness of modern weaponry, tyrants and terrorists can realistically think of devastating our cities. The old, post-1945 system of sovereign states, bound loosely together by an evolving system of international law, cannot easily deal with these threats because there are too many nation-states where the writ of the “international community” simply does not run. What is required is an agency capable of intervening in the affairs of such states to contain epidemics, depose tyrants, end local wars and eradicate terrorist organizations. This is the self-interested argument for empire. But there is also a complementary altruistic argument. Even if they did not pose a direct threat to the security of the United States, the economic and social conditions in a number of countries in the world would justify some kind of intervention. The poverty of a country like Liberia is explicable not in terms of resource endowment; otherwise (for example) Botswana would be just as poor. 114 The problem in Liberia, as in so many sub-Saharan African states, is simply misgovernment: corrupt and lawless dictators whose conduct makes economic development impossible and encourages political opposition to take the form of civil war. 115 Countries in this condition will not correct themselves. They require the imposition of some kind of external authority. ([Location 983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=983)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Arnold Toynbee’s injunction to his Oxford tutorial pupils destined for the Indian Civil Service was clear: “If they went to India they were to go there for the good of her people on one of the noblest missions on which an Englishman could be engaged.” 119 ([Location 1006](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1006)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Americans easily forget that after the blunders of the late eighteenth century, British governments learned that it was perfectly easy to grant “responsible government” to colonies that were clearly well advanced along the road to economic modernity and social stability. Canada, New Zealand, Australia and (albeit with a restricted franchise) South Africa all had executives accountable to elected parliaments by the early 1900s. Nor was this benefit intended to be the exclusive preserve of the colonies of white settlement. On the question of whether India should ultimately be capable of British-style parliamentary government, Thomas Babington Macaulay was quite explicit, if characteristically condescending: “Never will I attempt to avert or to retard it [Indian self-government]. Whenever it comes it will be the proudest day in English history. To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own.” ([Location 1020](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1020)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The real historical turning point—the moment when the twenty-first century may be said to have begun—was not 9/11 but 11/9. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, changed the context of American power far more profoundly than the fall of the World Trade Center. Malignant though it is, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism remains a far less potent threat to the United States than the Soviet Union once was. ([Location 1043](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1043)) - Tags: [[blue]] - There is no question that the United States is an unusual empire in its dependence on foreign capital to finance both private consumption and government borrowing. Yet its twin deficits are not the result of too many foreign military interventions. In fact, it is the domestic fiscal commitments of the federal government that seem likely to overstretch it in the years ahead. The true feet of clay of the American Colossus are the impending fiscal crises of the systems of Medicare and Social Security. ([Location 1071](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1071)) - Tags: [[blue]] - My conclusion (for those readers who like an indication of their ultimate destination) is that the global power of the United States today—impressive though it is to behold—rests on much weaker foundations than is commonly supposed. The United States has acquired an empire, but Americans themselves lack the imperial cast of mind. They would rather consume than conquer. They would rather build shopping malls than nations. They crave for themselves protracted old age and dread, even for other Americans who have volunteered for military service, untimely death in battle. It is not just that, like their British predecessors, they gained their empire in “a fit of absence of mind.” The problem is that despite occasional flashes of self-knowledge, they have remained absentminded—or rather, in denial—about their imperial power all along. Consequently, and very regrettably, it is quite conceivable that their empire could unravel as swiftly as the equally “anti-imperial” empire that was the Soviet Union. ([Location 1074](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1074)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Those who wish to perpetuate American primacy by achieving and maintaining full-spectrum dominance are, in short, facing the wrong way. For the threat to America’s empire does not come from embryonic rival empires to the west or to the east. I regret to say that it may come from the vacuum of power—the absence of a will to power—within. ([Location 1082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1082)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added April 8, 2025 at 4:11 PM - The irony is that there were no more self-confident imperialists than the Founding Fathers themselves. The empire they envisaged was, to be sure, very different in character from the empire from which they had seceded. It was not intended to resemble the maritime empires of Western Europe. But it did have much in common with the great land empires of the past. Like Rome, it began with a relatively small core—the founding states’ combined area today is just 8 percent of the total extent of the United States—which expanded to dominate half a continent. Like Rome, it was an inclusive empire, relatively (though not wholly) promiscuous in the way that it conferred citizenship. 2 Like Rome, it had, at least for a time, its disenfranchised slaves. 3 But unlike Rome, its republican constitution has withstood the ambitions of any would-be Caesars—so far. (It is of course early days. The United States is 228 years old. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C., the Roman Republic was 460 years old.) ([Location 1101](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1101)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When, in the draft Articles of Confederation of July 1776, John Dickinson proposed setting western boundaries of the states, the idea was thrown out at the committee stage. To George Washington the United States was a “nascent empire,” later an “infant empire.” 4 Thomas Jefferson told James Madison he was “persuaded no constitution was ever before as well calculated as ours for extending extensive empire and self-government.” The initial “confederacy” of thirteen would be “the nest from which all America, North and South [would] be peopled.” ([Location 1111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1111)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Already in 1820 the indigenous population had numbered just 325,000 (a mere 3 percent of population), their numbers having been roughly halved in the previous century by disease and small wars. ([Location 1141](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1141)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The new Republic simply continued the old British practice of treating traditional native hunting grounds as terra nullius, free, ownerless land. Jefferson talked of an expansion based “not on conquest, but [on] principles of compact and equality.” 13 Like so much that he wrote on the subject of equality, however, this was an implicitly qualified statement. Just as the “rights of man” did not apply to his or any other plantation owner’s slaves, so territorial expansion would not be based on the consent of the indigenous peoples of North America. ([Location 1143](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1143)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In his seminal study, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893), Frederick Jackson Turner later sought to portray continental expansion as the source of America’s alleged democratic vigor. ([Location 1156](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1156)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Matters were also made easy for the growing Republic by the fact that none of the other European (or Europeanized) powers with territorial claims in North America posed a potentially fatal threat to the United States after 1783. In one respect, Jefferson was right. When it came to securing territory from them, this would not be an empire based on conquest. Rather, it would be an empire purchased for cash—or, to be precise, for government bonds. ([Location 1163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1163)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Ironically, it was in part the British navy that made the Louisiana Purchase possible; had it not been for its dominance of the Atlantic sea-lanes, which had effectively confined Napoleon’s power to the European continent, Jefferson’s offer might not have been so readily accepted. To exchange real estate covering roughly eight hundred thousand square miles for $11.2 million in freshly printed U.S. federal government bonds was, for the French, a financial expedient. For the United States the deal was, in effect, the mother of all mortgages—and, it should be added, one brokered by the London bank Barings. ([Location 1169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1169)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Only by flirting with Great Britain—raising the prospect of a British satellite to the south of the United States as well as to the north—was the Texan president Sam Houston able to resuscitate his country’s bid to join the Union; even then, a second proposal for accession was rejected by the Senate in June 1844. It was the emergence of Texas as an election issue that tipped the balance. ([Location 1193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1193)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In a speech to the Senate in 1850, William Henry Seward had hailed California’s accession to the Union, declaring: “The world contains no seat of empire so magnificent as this, which . . . offers supplies on the Atlantic shores to the overcrowded nations of Europe, while on the Pacific coast it intercepts the commerce of the Indies. The nation thus situated must command . . . the empire of the seas, which alone is real empire. ([Location 1221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1221)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Nothing illustrates more clearly the limits of American expansion than the failure of the United States to acquire any other territory north of the forty-ninth parallel. We should not forget that the Founding Fathers had originally intended to unite “the inhabitants of all the territory from Cape Breton to the Mississippi.” 33 Yet as we have seen, bids to seize Canada by force had failed, first during the War of Independence and again in the War of 1812. Moreover, when it came to continental expansion, Canada proved every bit as dynamic as did the United States. It was the American purchase of Alaska that precipitated the creation of the federal Dominion of Canada (1867), which by 1871 extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific (and the economic success of which demonstrated conclusively that a repudiation of British political institutions was not a prerequisite for success on the North American continent). There was and is nothing much that is natural about the northern frontier of the United States, which follows a degree of latitude for most of its length and then effectively bisects the Great Lakes; it does not even stick to the course of the St. Lawrence River. This arbitrary two-and-a-half-thousand-mile line perfectly illustrates the limits of nineteenth-century American power. The stark reality is that in the first century of their existence under an independent republic, Americans spilled far more blood fighting one another (in what was, in effect, their war of unification) than they had to spill fighting for continental lebensraum. By the 1860s the question for which Americans were prepared to fight and die was not how big their republic should be but how free it should be. ([Location 1233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1233)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s opinion in the notorious Dred Scott decision (1857) 35 stated that there was “certainly no power given by the Constitution to the Federal Government to establish or maintain colonies bordering on the United States or at a distance, to be ruled and governed at its own pleasure; nor to enlarge its territorial limits in any way, except by admission of new States.” 36 This seemed to make it plain that there could be no colonies or other forms of dependent territories, only new states. ([Location 1250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1250)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Thirty years later, however, A. Lawrence Lowell could argue quite differently. “Possessions may also be so acquired,” he wrote in the Harvard Law Review, “as not to form part of the United States, and in that case constitutional limitations, such as those requiring uniformity of taxation and trial by jury, do not apply.” 38 The timing of Lowell’s article was significant, for by 1899 the United States had acquired a clutch of new territorial possessions, few, if any, of which seemed suitable candidates for statehood. ([Location 1256](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1256)) - Tags: [[blue]] - until such times as the United States had a world-class navy, it could not really enforce its claim to what amounted to a hemispheric exclusion zone. In the 1880s the American fleet was still an insignificant entity, smaller even than the Swedish. 44 However, inspired by Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan’s hugely influential book The Influence of Sea Power upon History, the United States embarked on a navy-building program more ambitious even than Germany’s. The achievement was astonishing: by 1907 the American fleet was second only to the Royal Navy. 45 With this, the Monroe Doctrine belatedly acquired credibility. ([Location 1280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1280)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The components of economic imperialism were essentially the same on both sides of the Atlantic: a desire to reduce other people’s tariffs (hence the “Open Door”), 55 a confidence that overseas investment would beget new export markets (especially important in the depression of 1893–97), but also a readiness to use political and military leverage to outwit the competition. 56 Equally familiar to students of European imperialism are the ideological currents that were at work: the social Darwinism expounded by Josiah Strong, author of Expansion Under New World-Conditions (1900); 57 the shrill chauvinism of the Hearst and Pulitzer papers. ([Location 1318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1318)) - Tags: [[blue]] - two related things made the American experiment with empire different from its transatlantic counterpart. First, the political base for imperialism was narrower; empire appealed much more to the elites of the industrialized North than to the rest of the country. Secondly, the economic rationale of acquiring colonies was more open to doubt. Britain had embraced free trade as early as the 1840s. Nothing had subsequently been done to protect British farmers from the influx of cheaper foodstuffs, as steamships, railways and refrigerators integrated the world’s corn and meat markets. Britain seemed self-evidently to need a global imperium, if only to secure the flow to its domestic emporium of goods it could not grow itself. Moreover, the bankers of the City of London, whose business it was to direct British capital overseas, had a vested interest in a continuation of both free trade and empire. How could the debtor countries of the New World be expected to honor their obligations if their exports of primary products did not have free access to the British market? And if they did threaten to default, what better way to prevent them from doing so than to occupy their countries and govern them according to sound economic principles? 60 In the United States there were men who made similar arguments, but there were powerful protectionist lobbies pushing in the opposite direction. Their argument was that the United States had no need of British-style colonies if their function was simply to inundate the American market with goods that Americans could just as well produce for themselves (albeit less cheaply). Other opponents, dismayed at the changing complexion of the immigrants coming to the United States, saw colonies as just a further source of inferior racial stock. 61 Though they shared some of its underlying prejudices, protectionism and nativism proved to be false friends to imperialism; pace Kipling, their proponents had no real interest in shouldering “the white man’s burden.” ([Location 1329](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1329)) - Tags: [[blue]] - That an eight-island archipelago located over two thousand miles from the American mainland should have ended up being the fiftieth state of the Union is a true historical puzzle, particularly as other, more obvious candidates for integration into the United States were passed over. Three groups combined to Americanize Hawaii: missionaries, sugar planters and navalists. To the last group, Hawaii offered, in the words of Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, an attractive “resting spot in the mid-ocean, between the Pacific coast and the vast domains of Asia, which are now opening to commerce and Christian civilization,” not to mention a way of “curbing” the already discernible rise of Japan. 63 To the sugar producers of the islands themselves, the United States represented a potentially vast market, if tariff-free trade could be achieved. The mission schools meanwhile prepared the Hawaiians for subjugation. ([Location 1352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1352)) - Tags: [[blue]] - it was Japanese and later Filipino migrants who came to populate Hawaii. Despite measures to exclude newcomers, the Japanese community grew rapidly. In the early 1920s three in every hundred voters were Japanese, but by 1936 the proportion was one in four. 73 Hawaii might be strategically valuable to the United States, but it offered enterprising Americans few economic opportunities to equal those available at home. ([Location 1379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1379)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Of particular importance was the distinction drawn by Justice Edward Douglass White between annexation and incorporation (which required congressional authority). In his opinion, “Puerto Rico had not been incorporated into the United States, but was merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.” As such, only certain “fundamental” provisions of the Constitution applied to it. The significance of this ruling, which defined that strange limbo between independence and American statehood occupied by Puerto Rico ever since, was that decisions could now be taken retrospectively about the status of other possessions. Since, under the terms of their acquisition, “formal” as well as “fundamental” provisions of the Constitution had been extended to both Alaska and Hawaii, they must by definition have been incorporated and therefore entitled to full statehood, which they eventually attained in 1959. ([Location 1387](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1387)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The judgments of 1901 appeared to clear the way legally for the annexation of new and larger colonies that could be treated like Puerto Rico as “organized but unincorporated” and therefore outside the domain of the Constitution. Why, then, has the United States not got more Puerto Ricos? The answer can be expressed in two words: the Philippines. ([Location 1395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1395)) - Tags: [[blue]] - What happened in the Philippines has unfortunately proved to be far more typical of American overseas experience than what happened in Hawaii and Puerto Rico. To be precise, seven characteristic phases of American engagement can be discerned: 1. Impressive initial military success 2. A flawed assessment of indigenous sentiment 3. A strategy of limited war and gradual escalation of forces 4. Domestic disillusionment in the face of protracted and nasty conflict 5. Premature democratization 6. The ascendancy of domestic economic considerations 7. Ultimate withdrawal ([Location 1398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1398)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the space of three years the number of American troops committed to the Philippines rose from just 12,000 to 126,000. 80 Although Aguinaldo was captured in March 1901, and the war declared officially over in July 1902, resistance continued on some islands for years afterward. It was not a pleasant war; nor was it to be the American military’s last taste of jungle warfare against guerrillas indistinguishable from civilians. ([Location 1426](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1426)) - Tags: [[blue]] - We should not imagine, of course, that the Anti-Imperialist League spoke for a majority of voters. 85 But its membership included two former presidents, Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, a dozen senators from both parties, eight former members of Cleveland’s cabinet, to say nothing of the millionaire industrialist Andrew Carnegie. The league had enough leverage to make Filipino independence a part of the 1900 Democratic Party platform. 86 And in Mark Twain it had on its side the most influential American man of letters of the day. ([Location 1441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1441)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The decisive campaign for Filipino independence was in fact waged by a coalition of sectional lobbies within the U.S. Congress, motivated almost solely by their own self-interests: sugar, dairy and cotton producers who wanted to exclude Philippine cane sugar and coconut oil from the U.S. market, hand in glove with trade unionists pressing for immigration restrictions against Filipino workers. Indeed, so harsh were the provisions of the original American independence offer of 1933 that the islands’ legislature refused to accept it. Although the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 was somewhat less punitive—it left the future of the American military bases on the islands open to negotiation—its economic provisions remained essentially the same. Independence would mean a phased imposition of American tariffs on Philippine products, a heavy blow to an economy that by this time relied on the American market to buy more than three-quarters of its exports. 94 There was much less for Filipinos to celebrate when independence finally came in 1946 than is generally appreciated. ([Location 1473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1473)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added April 19, 2025 at 4:11 PM - There was, however, an alternative to formal European-style imperialism; indeed, the decision to grant the Philippines political (if not commercial) freedom was part of that alternative. Instead of occupying and running fully fledged colonies, the United States could instead use its economic and military power to foster the emergence of “good government” in strategically important countries. Initially, that meant not just pro-American government but also American-style government. The development of this new approach to empire, which had something in common with the British notion of indirect rule, owed much to the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. But the underlying idea can be traced back to his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (December 1904), which declared: “Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere, the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.” ([Location 1488](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1488)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Just where such a policy might lead became suddenly clear to the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey in 1913, when Wilson declared his intention not to recognize the government of General Victoriano Huerta, who had seized power in Mexico following the assassination of the liberal premier Francisco Madero. After Walter Page, the American ambassador in London, had explained his government’s position to Grey, the following conversation ensued: GREY: Suppose you have to intervene, what then? PAGE: Make ’em vote and live by their decisions. GREY: But suppose they will not so live? PAGE: We’ll go in and make ’em vote again. GREY: And keep this up 200 years? PAGE: Yes. The United States will be here for two hundred years and it can continue to shoot men for that little space till they learn to vote and to rule themselves. 99 Thus was born the paradox that was to be a characteristic feature of American foreign policy for a century: the paradox of dictating democracy, of enforcing freedom, of extorting emancipation. ([Location 1506](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1506)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The strategic crux of American policy was the Central American isthmus and the long crescent of islands—stretching from the Straits of Florida to the island of Trinidad—that separate the Caribbean from the Atlantic, what Henry Cabot Lodge called the “outwork essential to the defense” of the continental “citadel.” 100 The countries that therefore mattered most in the region were Nicaragua and Panama as well as the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola, divided since 1844 between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. ([Location 1521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1521)) - Tags: [[blue]] - even the once-bullish Roosevelt now professed to “loathe the thought of assuming any control over the island such as we have over Puerto Rico and the Philippines.” By now he had largely lost his faith in the idea that “thickly peopled tropical regions” like Cuba could be run “by self-governing northern democracies.” 113 Two and a half years later the American troops left, having installed a new president. ([Location 1557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1557)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The dream of using American military force to underwrite American-style governments in Central America had failed miserably. There was only one true democracy in the entire region by 1939, and that was Costa Rica, where the United States had never intervened. ([Location 1610](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1610)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people,” Herman Melville wrote in White Jacket, “the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of liberties of the world.” 139 In the course of the twentieth century American leaders were to resort ever more frequently to such biblical language in their efforts to dignify, if not to sanctify, U.S. foreign policy. In doing so, they were following the example of earlier empire builders, not least McKinley. The extension of American values, both economic and political, beyond the frontiers of the United States seemed as much a matter of “manifest destiny” as the expansion of the frontier itself. Yet there was a chronic problem of execution. The farther into the tropics the United States sought to reach, the weaker its grip proved to be. The “empire of liberty” plainly had much to offer places like Cuba, Nicaragua and Mexico, to say nothing of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. But the will to make them permanent components of a greater American Republic turned out to be lacking; Hawaii and Puerto Rico alone were retained, not least because they were the most docile of the candidates for colonial status. ([Location 1648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1648)) - Tags: [[blue]] - America’s primary weapons . . . are stockings, cigarettes, and other merchandise. They want to subjugate the world, yet they cannot subdue little Korea. JOSEF STALIN 2 ([Location 1672](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1672)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It might be said that two calamitous events helped turn the United States from hesitant dominance of the Americas to what has sometimes been called globalism. 3 The first was the sinking of the Cunard liner Lusitania by the German submarine U-20 on May 7, 1915, off the Old Head of Kinsale on the south coast of Ireland. Nearly 1,200 people lost their lives; among the drowned were 128 American passengers. 4 The second was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which sank or wrecked three cruisers, three destroyers and eight battleships and killed 2,403 Americans, most of them sailors. It was these two acts of maritime aggression that forced Americans to answer what has been called the oldest question in American foreign policy: whether to safeguard American security “by defense on this side of the water or by active participation in the lands across the oceans.” ([Location 1676](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1676)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Taiwan will likely be the next true test - it was not the sinking of the Lusitania that brought the United States into the First World War—or even the Germans’ final, desperate resort to unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917—but the exposure of a spectacularly clumsy attempt by the German Foreign Ministry to enlist both Japan and Mexico on the side of the Central Powers in the event of an American decision for war. The inducement the Germans offered President Carranza was “an understanding . . . that Mexico is to re-conquer the lost territories in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.” 6 ([Location 1689](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1689)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The defining characteristic of American foreign policy in the three decades prior to 1947 was the insistence of successive presidents that the United States could somehow be a great power without behaving like any previous great power. ([Location 1702](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1702)) - Tags: [[blue]] - German miscalculation presented Woodrow Wilson with an opportunity to do so, an opportunity not unlike that which presented itself to the Younger Pitt’s successors in the closing years of the Napoleonic Wars. With the European powers exhausted by years of slaughter, it was possible for an American expeditionary force to decide the outcome of a global struggle, much as Wellington’s army had struck the mortal blow against Bonaparte in 1814–15. 9 Yet Wilson could not be content with the traditional fruits of victory: imposing reparations, new borders and even a new regime on the losing side. Stung, perhaps, by the charges that the United States had intervened only “at the command of gold” 10—to underwrite Wall Street’s loans to Britain and France—his overwrought mind craved nothing less than a reconstruction of the entire international system. As early as December 1914 he had proposed that any peace settlement “should be for the advantage of the European nations regarded as Peoples and not for any nation imposing its governmental will upon alien people.” ([Location 1704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1704)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As envisaged by Wilson, the new “League of Nations” would not merely guarantee the territorial integrity of its member states but might consider making future territorial adjustments “pursuant to the principle of self-determination.” 15 To Europeans this might seem revolutionary; to Americans, Wilson insisted, it was as self-evident as the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence: “These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no other. And they are also the principles and policies of forward looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.” 16 ([Location 1718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1718)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the fatal flaw of the Wilsonian design was that it simply could not be sold to a skeptical Senate. There was a vast gulf between the bold assertion of the Roosevelt Corollary, which simply authorized the United States to do what it liked in Latin America, and the airy commitments of the League Covenant, which would have obliged the United States to “respect and preserve against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing independence of all Members of the League.” When Henry Cabot Lodge proposed to make ratification of the peace treaty conditional on certain “reservations”—reservations that the British and French were prepared to live with—Wilson refused to compromise. He instructed Democratic senators to vote against any such qualified version of the treaty, pinning his hopes on the presidential election that a stroke then prevented him from fighting. ([Location 1730](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1730)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Europeans wanted the Americans to bind themselves to the new postwar order. The Americans preferred to retain their freedom of action. So insuperable did this division of opinion appear in the 1920s that a further question needs to be addressed. Why was it possible after 1945 to overcome it? What changed between Wilson and Truman? Two answers suggest themselves. One is obvious. In the aftermath of the First World War the United States was comparatively sanguine about the threat posed by the Bolshevik regime that had established itself in Russia after the October 1917 Revolution. Although the United States, along with Britain, committed troops to support the White side in the civil war that ensued, it was a halfhearted effort—surprisingly so in the American case, since the greater part of the immense army assembled to fight the Germans had arrived in Europe too late to see action. The United States was not war-weary, as the Europeans were. It merely underestimated the monster that had been born in Moscow. In February 1919 Wilson’s adviser Colonel Edward M. House sent William C. Bullitt to Russia, ostensibly to report on “conditions political and economic therein,” in fact to sound out peace terms with Lenin’s government. Bullitt (a youthful champagne socialist) saw what he wanted to see; after their three-week junket he and the journalist who accompanied him concluded that they had seen the future and “it works!” True, the economy was in dire straits, but this was a temporary inconvenience, like the “red terror,” which (so Bullitt confidently reported) was in any case already “over.” Wilson did not need much persuading. Even before Bullitt left for Moscow, he had concluded that American troops were doing “no sort of good in Russia.” 18 American attitudes were very different in the 1940s. The second change related to the American economy. The stimulus of the First World War to U.S. growth was substantially less than the stimulus of the Second. As figure 1 shows, the Second World War had in every respect a bigger impact. The years before the war were dominated by the most severe and persistent depression in American history, the war more than doubled gross national product in real terms and the end of the war led to a severe slump. By contrast, economic performance before, during and after the First World War was subject to markedly less severe fluctuations. The recession of 1907–09 was minor compared with what happened in the 1930s, American entry into the First World War had a relatively muted impact on output and although there was a sharp downturn in 1921–22, the recession of 1946–48 was in fact more severe. Nor is it without significance that the recovery in the latter case was in large measure due to rearmament, which did not play a major role in the 1920s boom. ([Location 1736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1736)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Franklin Roosevelt’s anti-imperialism was to be especially influential, not least because of his leading role among the architects of the postwar international order. “The colonial system means war,” he had told his son in 1943. “Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of those countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements—all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war.” ([Location 1772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1772)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Churchill habitually saw Roosevelt’s anti-imperialism as the legacy of America’s origins in the War of Independence. As he put it in The Hinge of Fate, “The President’s mind was back in the American War of Independence, and he thought of the Indian problem in terms of the thirteen colonies fighting George III. . . .” 25 ([Location 1788](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1788)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Unlike so many later critics of U.S. foreign policy, Toynbee had little difficulty reconciling himself to American imperialism. As he observed, “Her hand will be a great deal lighter than Russia’s, Germany’s or Japan’s, and I suppose these are the alternatives. If we do get an American empire instead, we shall be lucky.” 34 Given the seeming inevitability of their own bankrupt empire’s decline, the British regarded a transfer of global power to the United States as the best available outcome of the war. ([Location 1812](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1812)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As supreme commander for the Allied powers (SCAP), MacArthur was omnipotent. “I had,” he later recalled, “not only the normal executive authorities such as our own President has in this country, but I had legislative authority. I could by fiat issue directives.” 36 From his general headquarters in the Dai-ichi Building in downtown Tokyo, MacArthur and his staff, which initially numbered fifteen hundred, but which more than tripled in size in the space of three years, set out to achieve a “revolution” from above, to impose American “civilization” on a people most of them regarded as racially inferior. 37 ([Location 1831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1831)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added April 20, 2025 at 4:11 PM - The Americans set out to “get at the individual Japanese and remold his ways of thinking and feeling.” 38 They achieved nothing of the sort; attempts at Christianization, with which MacArthur certainly sympathized, came to naught. 39 Nor were Japan’s institutions more than partially transformed. The principal achievement of the occupation was to persuade the Japanese simply (in John Dower’s phrase) to “embrace defeat”; to renounce the pursuit of military power in what had proved an unwinnable competition against the United States in favor of the pursuit of economic riches as the Americans’ junior partners. ([Location 1845](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1845)) - Tags: [[blue]] - barely 1 percent of senior Japanese civil servants lost their jobs, and it was through the civil service that the Americans governed. 43 How, otherwise, could the American occupation have functioned? Japan’s postwar masters were almost completely ignorant of the language and culture of their new subjects. ([Location 1858](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1858)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The achievement of the American occupations of Japan and West Germany most often emphasized today was the extraordinary economic recovery both countries enjoyed. In neither case was this an outcome the occupiers originally intended. On the contrary, the initial plan was to weaken their economies and impoverish their peoples. The mood among many Americans as the war drew to a close was retributive, not regenerative. One adviser to the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) proposed “almost [the] annihilation of the Japanese as a race.” 48 The more restrained report of the Pauley Commission of late 1945 recommended the reduction of Japanese shipbuilding, chemicals and steel production, as well as the payment of reparations through the transfer of industrial plants to countries the Japanese had occupied during the war. In January 1946 the statistician and management expert W. Edwards Deming proposed the dismantling of monopoly companies; this was adopted by the SWNCC, which passed it on to the SCAP; as late as May 1947 it was still the centerpiece of economic policy when it was adopted by the Far Eastern Commission as directive FEC-230. ([Location 1871](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1871)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The story was not wholly dissimilar in the American zone of occupation in western Germany, with one important difference. MacArthur relished his role as viceroy. His counterpart in Germany, a military engineer named General Lucius D. Clay, who succeeded Eisenhower as military governor of the U.S.-occupied zone, could scarcely have felt less enthused about his post. “Nobody talked to me about what our policies were in Germany,” Clay later recalled. “They just sent me over there. I did not want the job. After all, we were still fighting a war, and to be the occupying deputy military governor in a defeated area while the war was still going on in the Pacific was about as dead-looking an end for a soldier as you could find.” 54 The Joint Chiefs of Staff, in their April 1945 directive (JCS 1067), envisaged that the American commander in Germany would wield “supreme legislative, executive and judicial authority” and instructed him to exercise his power in a manner that was “just but firm and aloof.” 55 Clay could not wait to get rid of this unlooked-for responsibility. From the outset he planned that the military government would be short-lived; he aimed to cut his staff from twelve thousand to six thousand by February 1, 1946, and set July 1 as the target date for handing power over to a completely civilian government. 56 Like Eisenhower, he believed that “the Government of Germany should, at the very earliest practicable moment, pass to a civilian organization.” 57 But until this was possible, he argued, it was the job of the State Department, not the U.S. Army, to run the occupation. ([Location 1895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1895)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A case in point was the policy of denazification. After four early stabs at the problem, the directive of July 7, 1945, alighted on the notion of “guilt by officeholding,” creating 136 mandatory removal categories; supplementary to this was Clay’s Law No. 8 of September 26, which decreed that former Nazis thus defined should be reemployed only in menial jobs. Yet as in Japan, so in Germany: to get rid of all the senior administrative personnel of the previous regime was a recipe for chaos. As early as the winter of 1945–46, the disruption caused by so many internments and demotions convinced Clay of the need to change tack. 63 As he put it in March 1946, “With 10,000 people I couldn’t do the job of denazification. It’s got to be done by the Germans.” 64 What this meant was an inundation of questionnaires, designed to get the Germans to rank themselves on a precisely calibrated scale of malfeasance: major offenders, offenders, lesser offenders, followers, fellow travelers and (as the Germans joked) the “Persil white.” Clay later called denazification his “biggest mistake,” a “hopelessly ambigious procedure” that created a “pathetic ‘community of fate’ between small and big Nazis.” ([Location 1920](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1920)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The democratization of Western Germany was, without question, one of the great successes of American postwar policy. But it is important to recognize that it was driven forward in large measure by Clay’s desire to hand over power to a civilian authority as soon as possible. If the State Department refused to do the job, then once again it would have to be the Germans themselves. ([Location 1936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1936)) - Tags: [[blue]] - During discussions with the future German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Clay sought guidance from Washington on the subject of federalism but found he “could never get a strict definition for what they really intended to do to create a federal government.” He ruefully concluded: “I think we have a peculiar idea of our government being perfect without knowing really and truly how it works.” 72 ([Location 1972](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1972)) - Tags: [[blue]] - By contrast, the economic recovery of Germany happened with painful slowness. As in the case of Japan, this was largely because the initial thrust of postwar policy was either directly or indirectly to inhibit rather than stimulate growth—insofar as there was a coherent thrust at all. There was in fact a tension from the outset between the harshly retributive ideas for deindustrialization of Henry Morgenthau’s 1944 plan and the more pragmatic aims of the army reflected in its Handbook for the Military Government of Germany; nor was there any consensus among the departments of State, War and Treasury, to say nothing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 75 JCS 1067 was a compromise document, but it still retained elements of the Morgenthau Plan. Thus it formally instructed the military government to “take no steps (a) looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany, or (b) designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy.” 76 Instead Clay should aim to “decentralize the structure and administration of the German economy to the maximum possible extent” and to “require the Germans to use all means at their disposal to maximize agricultural output.” At the same time, he was told “to ensure the production and maintenance of goods and services required to prevent starvation or such disease and unrest as would endanger occupying forces.” 77 The result was a zone-wide SNAFU, ([Location 1982](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=1982)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added April 21, 2025 at 4:11 PM - Byrnes admitted what Douglas had recognized from the beginning: “Recovery in Europe . . . will be slow indeed if Germany with her great resources of iron and coal is turned into a poorhouse.” 82 With the merging of the American and British zones in January 1947, the aim became “the expansion of German exports . . . as rapidly as world conditions permit.” 83 Yet progress at the time seemed desperately slow, something we tend today to forget. ([Location 2006](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=2006)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was not in fact an irenic desire to make a success of nation building that resolved the economic problems of occupied Japan and Germany. On the contrary—and this would prove crucial throughout the cold war period—it was the fear of a rival empire. For an empire in denial, there is really only one way to act imperially with a clear conscience, and that is to combat someone else’s imperialism. In the doctrine of containment, born in 1947, the United States hit on the perfect ideology for its own peculiar kind of empire: the imperialism of anti-imperialism. ([Location 2022](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=2022)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Truman drew his own conclusions from Kennan’s warning in his address to a joint session of both houses of Congress on March 12, 1947. “It must be the policy of the United States,” he declared, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” 90 Just which outside pressures the Americans had in mind was spelled out by Kennan four months later in an anonymous and epoch-making article for Foreign Affairs, entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which warned of “Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world” and Moscow’s aim to “encroach . . . upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.” “It is clear,” Kennan argued, “that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” In this analysis, Russian imperialism was a given. Kennan’s point was that it was “something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy [and] . . . designed to confront the Russians with an unalterable counter-force at every point. . . .” 91 By 1950 official U.S. policy had outstripped even Kennan. ([Location 2029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=2029)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Yet for all its defensive connotations, the American notion of containment, predicated though it was on the threat from another, malignant empire, was itself implicitly an imperial undertaking, as Truman himself let slip when he pronounced America’s responsibility to be even greater than those that had once faced “Darius I’s Persia, Alexander’s Greece, Hadrian’s Rome [and] Victoria’s Britain.” The only way to “save the world from totalitarianism,” 93 Truman argued, was for “the whole world [to] adopt the American system,” for “the American system” could survive only by becoming “a world system.” 94 ([Location 2055](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=2055)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Unveiled by Marshall at Harvard in June 1947 and enacted the following April, the four-year European Recovery Program is sometimes discussed as if it had bought Western Europe for the United States the way dollars had once bought Alaska. But the amounts concerned should be kept in perspective. The total outlay averaged not much more than 1 percent of U.S. GNP. ([Location 2086](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=2086)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It has often been said that American aid boosted growth by instilling confidence. This may be true. But equally important may have been the confidence instilled by the continuing presence of American troops and the integration of the two countries into the new American structure of security treaties. The combination of dollars and deutschmarks might have achieved much less had not Clay decided to break the Soviet siege of West Berlin with an unprecedented eleven-month airlift between June 1948 and May 1949. Although the formal occupations of Japan and West Germany ended in, respectively, 1952 and 1955, substantial numbers of American troops remained there for another fifty years; indeed, remain there to this day. ([Location 2095](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=2095)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This was another unintended outcome. Before the chill of cold war had descended, the Americans had proposed a treaty to enforce demilitarization of Germany for twenty-five or even forty years, but it had been turned down by the other powers. 105 By 1953 six American divisions were deployed in West Germany, along with nine other divisions from other members of the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization, including West Germany itself. Rearmament—not just of the United States but of the other NATO members—contributed a further stimulus to the industries of all concerned. ([Location 2100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=2100)) - Tags: [[blue]] - By boosting Japanese and German growth under conditions of increasingly liberal trade, they created new and dynamic markets for American exports. As early as 1948 and 1949, goods sold to West Germany already accounted for close to 7 percent of total U.S. exports. By 1957 Germany and Japan had for the first time overtaken Great Britain in their importance for American trade (see figure 2). There was, in short, a self-interested rationale for stimulating the recovery of America’s erstwhile foes. ([Location 2106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=2106)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In 1948, as the era of containment began, the United States was at the zenith of its relative economic power. In the preceding decade the output of the American economy had grown in real terms by two-thirds. It now accounted for roughly a third of total world output, three times the share of its rival empire, the Soviet Union. 107 Despite accounting for just 6 percent of the world’s population, the United States produced nearly half the world’s total electrical power and held roughly the same proportion of the world’s monetary gold and gold-equivalent bank reserves. American firms controlled nearly three-fifths of the world’s total oil reserves. They dominated the international production of automobiles. ([Location 2122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=2122)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the essence of American “hegemony” was the preferential treatment of American allies when it came to the allocation of loans and grants of aid (whether for development or military purposes). 110 Given the size of the American economy relative to those of even its wealthiest allies, sums that were, from an American viewpoint, relatively modest (see figure 3) could appear very large to the recipients. Total economic aid for the period 1946 to 1952 amounted to nearly 2 percent of U.S. GNP, half of it accounted for by the Marshall Plan. ([Location 2134](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07287QHG4&location=2134)) - Tags: [[blue]]