Is America an Empire?

John Rapley is a distinguished author. He teaches at Cambridge University in Great Britain. He is an authority on the meaning of the term empire, so we should take his views seriously. He believes that America is an empire, albeit an empire in decline.

We can counterpoint his recent New York Times essay on America as a declining empire with an earlier piece by Sarang Shadong, an equally competent foreign policy analyst, to the effect that while America’s status as the world’s leading empire is not really threatened, the expansion of an alternative alliance, called BRICS, reduces American power and influence. 

For the record, BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. As of last week their number was increased by inviting Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — to join.

An alternative to an American world order seems to be forming.

Anyway, we recall that it takes more than a label to make something an empire. Recall Voltaire’s famous quip, namely that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, not Roman, nor an empire. 

In recent history the most conspicuous efforts at empire were the Third Reich and international Communism. In fact, the German word, Reich means, among other things, Empire. One should mention that empires have emperors and that they cohere as social groups by the unquestioned adoration of the emperor. An empire has no rule of law because the emperor’s word is the law. 

Call Great Britain an empire if you like, but two twentieth century wars made clear that it’s formula was radically different from the imperial aspirations of its Teutonic enemies.

Surely, Rapley is aware of all this. Thus, he defines empire as an economic alliance whose viability is guaranteed by the United States and its currency. America receives the largest share of profit from the arrangement. 

At the famous Bretton Woods Conference, the United States developed an international trading and financial system that functioned in practice as an imperial economy, disproportionately steering the fruits of global growth to the citizens of the West.

Alongside, America created NATO to provide a security umbrella for its allies and organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to forge common policies. Over the second half of the century, this system attained a degree of world domination no previous empire had ever known.

At the least, it’s an empire without an emperor. Nations work within a framework dictated by America, but that does not mean that they worship an emperor. Anything but.

In any case, Rapley points out that the Western world, which is not identical to America, has been in decline. One remarks, because he did not, that Germany, a pillar of European economic power, is currently in a state of economic decline.

Otherwise, he notes:

At the turn of the millennium, the Western world accounted for four-fifths of global economic output. Today, that share is down to three-fifths and falling. While Western countries struggle to restore their dynamism, developing countries now have the world’s fastest-growing economies. Through institutions like BRICS and OPEC and encouraged by China, they are converting their growing economic heft into political power.

These countries have discovered that if they keep their wealth in dollar denominated assets in American banks, the chance always exists that the Biden administration will confiscate them. 

The convertibility of the American dollar and the security offered by American banks was certainly a major reason that nations around the world were happy to trade in dollars. Such seems no longer to be the case.

He offers a different reason for American decline:

In the same way, America’s decline is a product of its success. Although developing countries grew more slowly in the postwar period than their Western counterparts, they still grew. By the end of the century, they had started to convert that expanding economic clout into political and diplomatic power. Not only had they begun to acquire the capacity to negotiate better trade and financial agreements, but they also had a crucial bargaining chip in the form of two resources Western businesses now needed: growing markets and abundant supplies of labor.

Actually, over the past four decades, China has grown far faster than any other country on the planet. Its success has produced its enhanced reputation. 

Yet, Rapley is slightly more optimistic than I am about Western preeminence. He believes that we can outcompete all other nations in knowledge-based industries, though he does not explain how we can continue to do so by producing a generation of children who cannot read, write or count.

Although Western countries no longer dominate manufacturing and services, they still retain an edge in knowledge-intensive industries like artificial intelligence and pharmaceuticals or where they’ve built brand value, such as in luxury goods, sports and entertainment. Economic growth — even if more slowly than in the periphery — can continue in the West.

He recognizes these points and suggests that immigrants will take up the slack. Such is certainly the case today in Silicon Valley, where a majority of the tech staff was educated in China. 

Given that Western societies, with declining birthrates and aging populations, aren’t producing enough workers, they will have to come from the global periphery — both those who immigrate to the West and the many more who stay at home to work in businesses serving Western supply chains. Migration may have eroded the Roman Empire’s wealth. Now it’s what stands between the West and absolute economic decline.

And yet, if Rapley thinks that American hegemony will be enhanced by a flood of migrants from South and Central America he has been smoking the wrong kind of cigarettes. The migrants from these countries are illiterate and innumerate. To imagine that they will be running the knowledge-based industries of tomorrow is fanciful, even delusional.

I give him the last word. Like many others, he insists that no other currency can rival the American dollar. Nations around the world know this and are working to make their own currencies viable alternatives. They might not succeed tomorrow, but if they ever do, it will be a cold day.

The country still has sources of power that nobody can seriously rival: a currency that faces no serious threat as the world’s medium of exchange, the deep pools of capital managed on Wall Street, the world’s most powerful military, the soft power wielded by its universities and the vast appeal of its culture. And America can still call upon its friends across the globe. All told, it should be able to marshal its abundant resources to remain the world’s leading power.

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