Jottings from the Granite Studio

Provocative essay in the LA Times last month by Niall Ferguson, author of Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. Ferguson’s basic argument is that if America wishes to pursue a policy around the world that apes the empires of the past, then it needs to start looking at why those empires did or did not succeed.

Less than a century ago, before World War I, the population of Britain was 46 million, barely 2.5% of humanity. And yet the British were able to govern a vast empire that encompassed an additional 375 million people, more than a fifth of the world’s population. Why can’t 300 million Americans control fewer than 30 million Iraqis? Three years ago, as the United States swept into Iraq, I wrote a book titled “Colossus,” which offered a somber prediction, summed up in its subtitle, “The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.” My argument was that the United States was unlikely to be as successful or as enduring an imperial power as its British predecessor for three reasons: its financial deficit, its attention deficit and, perhaps most surprisingly, its manpower deficit. Rather cruelly, I compared the American empire to a “strategic couch-potato … consuming on credit, reluctant to go to the front line [and] inclined to lose interest in protracted undertakings.”

In 2003, I argued that this kind of error could be corrected if only U.S. leaders would learn some history. That was naive. Policy about Iraq has never been based on a rational assessment of that country’s needs. Rumsfeld’s paramount concern appears to have been to win the turf wars between the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs and the State Department — just as Vice President Dick Cheney’s was to satisfy the appetites of the GOP base for big tax cuts and cheap victories. Writing in the 1920s, German historian Eckart Kehr argued that the foreign policy of the Kaiser’s Germany was the defective product of the “primacy of domestic politics.”

I have come to see that U.S. foreign policy suffers from a similar pathology. The primacy of domestic politics — in the form of bureaucratic infighting and electoral manipulation — explains why the Iraq enterprise has, from the outset, been so chronically short-staffed.

To quest after an empire on the cheap…a double immorality.