To what extent can the United States in the twentieth century be described as an empire?
The question of whether the United States (or indeed any state) can be
defined as an empire depends on the criteria by which ‘empire’ is
defined. This is not something which can be addressed neutrally; indeed,
much of the self-image of the United States has involved defining itself
in opposition to imperialism.Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War, Third World
Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), chap. 1
<https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511817991>.
For Maier, ‘Empire is a form of political organization in which the
social elements that rule in the dominant state […] create a network
of allied elites in regions abroad who accept subordination in
international affairs in return for the security of their position in
their own administrative unit’.Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy
and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009),
p. 7 <https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674040458>.
Similarly, Hunt and Levine describe ‘coercion […] to subjugate an
alien population’, involving both the use of force as well as
‘ideological orthodoxies that rationalize dominance both at home and in
the field’.Michael H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine, Arc of Empire:
America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2012), pp.
3–4.
A more complex description is given by
Darwin, describing imperialism as ‘the sustained effort to assimilate a
country or region to the political, economics, or cultural system of
another power’.John Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: The
Dynamics of Territorial Expansion’, English Historical Review, 112.447
(1997), 614–42
<https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cxii.447.614>.
Writing primarily about the British Empire, he elaborates that
imperialism has both ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ modes: the former,
involving ‘explicit transfer of sovereignty’; the latter, ‘trade,
investment, or diplomacy, often supplemented by unequal treaties and
periodic armed intervention’ (a state of affairs also referred to as
hegemony). In this model, an imperial power my only exert formal control
over a subject when necessary to protect its interests, relying on
informal influence at other times; this ‘informal imperialism’ may also
be referred to as hegemony. This essay will attempt to show that, at
various times during the twentieth century, the United States has
exercised both formal and informal imperialism.
American imperialism can be dated back to the nineteenth century, with
the War of 1812, and later territorial expansions within the continent.
Westad notes that by 1900, ‘less than 30 percent of Latin America was
formally colonized’ but ‘most of the continent was dominated by European
or US capital’.Westad, chap. 4.
The
Spanish-American War of 1898 led to the United States gaining
sovereignty over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, with Cuba
gaining formal independence in 1902. However, the United States retained
the right to direct its foreign policy and intervene in other areas of
government, by means of the Platt Amendment to the Cuban constitution,
with the hope that close integration — in particular, free trade — would
lay the groundwork for ‘annexation at the earliest possible moment’. The
aims took the form of supporting the ‘better classes’ to assert their
‘natural governing role’ and support them against threats to their
position and property. Indeed, ownership of property was in some cases
the criterion by which the right to a political opinion depended: ‘The
Cubans as a whole — meaning all those who have any property […] —
desire annexation to the United States’, along with a racial aspect:
annexation was preferable to a ‘government of half-breeds’.Louis A. Pérez, Cuba Between Empires, 1878-1902
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983), chaps
11,17,19.
American intervention in Latin America continued over the next decades,
with Theodore Roosevelt and his successors justifying it by means of the
Monroe Doctrine, by which the United States asserted its right to
intervene in nearby states. Although in 1913 Woodrow Wilson argued
against putting ‘material interests’ ahead of ‘human liberty’, this was
hardly reflected in his foreign policy, which saw more foreign
interventions than his predecessors.Antony Best and others, International History of the
Twentieth Century and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2008), chap. 6
<http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1ldPngEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9780415438964&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api>.
Major examples during the first half of the century include occupations
of Cuba (1906–09), Nicaragua (1912–33), Haiti (1915–34), and the
Dominican Republic (1916–24). It also intervened in the Russian Civil
War between 1917 and 1920.
After the Second World War and with the start of the cold war, American
foreign policy took on a new dimension, establishing itself firmly in
opposition to the Soviet Union as protector of capitalist democracy.
This new era of policy was summed up by Harry Truman, who stated that
‘it must be the policy of the United States to support free people who
are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside
pressures’. On the one hand, this can be seen as a continuation of
Wilsonian principles of self-determination; however, in practice it
amounted to ‘support for anticommunist regimes throughout the world, no
matter how undemocratic’.Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History, 2nd
edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
Significant interventions in the immediate post-war period came in 1947,
in both Italy and Greece. In the former, the US applied economic
pressure (in the form of withheld financial assistance while communists
and socialists held government posts); in the latter, the support also
included military assistance to the right-wing government, installed by
the British at the end of the Second World War, against socialist
rebels, remnants of the anti-Nazi resistance groups.William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA
Interventions Since World War II (London: Zed Books, 2003), chaps
2–3.
In both of these cases, it can be seen that
the reasoning of the Truman Doctrine cannot be applied, since the
‘threat’ came from within — indeed, in Greece in particular the Soviet
Union had stood aside, by agreement, and allowed it to become part of
the British ‘sphere of influence’.
Interventionist tactics were taken further in Iran in 1953; going beyond
simply supporting a friendly regime, US and British intelligence
services collaborated to remove a prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh,
whose policies of nationalization were detrimental to British and
American business interests. There was no question of ‘supporting free
people’: Mosaddegh had been democratically elected, and received no
support from the Soviet Union, who viewed him as a ‘bourgeois
nationalist’. Similar policies were followed in Guatemala the following
year,Blum, chaps 9–10; John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), chap. 6.
and regularly over the next decades, particularly in Latin America
during the 1980s, where US-backed anti-government guerrillas in
socialist Nicaragua were bolstered by the similarly US-backed right-wing
regimes in neighbouring Honduras and El Salvador.
The US occupation of Japan (1945–52) can also be interpreted as
imperialism, going beyond that which was necessary to establish a
functioning state after the devastation of the war. In particular, and
unlike in Germany, the United States had a free hand in the
administration of Japan, and although this began initially with the
intent of establishing a liberal democracy, the onset of the Cold War
changed the priorities. In particular, the occupying forces limited
political freedoms to suppress left-wing dissent. More ominously, US
advisors spoke of the need to ‘remold’ the ‘Japanese brain’, i.e., to
teach Japanese people to think like Americans, and to impress upon the
Japanese population the same ideologies shared by the American
population.Westad, chap. 1.
With the start
of the Korean War, the need for a regional ally became even more
pressing, leading to the acceleration of plans to end the formal
occupation and a transition to a situation whereby Japan became an
independent state and junior partner in a military alliance with the
United States. This shift also saw a transition, mirrored in the US
itself, from pre-war New Deal social policies to what might later be
called neoliberalism; a free liberal democracy was less important to the
United States than was an ally against Communism.Eric J. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth
Century 1914–91 (Abacus, 1994), chap. 7; John W. Dower, Embracing
Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton,
1999), chap. 8; Westad, chap. 1.
Japan could thus
be expected, by the late 60s, to ‘build a military power of its own and
gradually take on the role of a counterbalance to Chinese influence in
Asia’.Westad, chap. 5.
United States policy in south-east Asia can be seen to follow the same
tactics, with a progressive escalation as each failed in turn. US
involvement in the region began in 1950, providing support for France in
Vietnam’s war for independence. After a ceasefire in 1954, the US chose
to an international agreement that required elections to be held for all
of Vietnam in 1956, instead supporting the establishment of a
nominally-independent Republic of Vietnam under president , providing
the new regime with financial and military aid, while establishing
economic sanctions against North Vietnam.Best and others, chap. 12; Blum, chap. 19; Martin
Shipway, Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the
End of the Colonial Empires (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), chap.
4.
American involvement then increased steadily
until the 1960s, at which point a pretext was found to engage in direct
military action.
Vietnam’s significance came out of the US policy of ‘containment’, which is to say its desire to prevent socialism from succeeding and becoming established, particularly since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. In Darwin’s model, as quoted in the introduction, this can be understood as an attempt to maintain Vietnam and its neighbours within the American politico-economic sphere of influence, or, at least, to prevent it from moving into the Chinese (or Soviet) sphere. The same can be said of Cuba; a close neighbour allying itself with the Soviet Union presented not only a military threat (as exemplified in the missile crisis of October 1962) but also a challenge to American authority, which might set a ‘bad example’ for other states.
It is therefore clear that America intervened regularly in other states,
including the use of military force. The question, therefore, is: does
this intervention constitute imperialism? Part of the American ideology
has always been that it is an anti-imperialist power, that it stands for
liberty, and not, in Wilson’s words, ‘material interests’.Westad, chap. 1.
Yet an
ideological self-definition clearly does not constitute an unbiased
judgement. How, for example, is ‘freedom’ defined? In fact, it has meant
different things at different times. It has been claimed that, far from
simply pursuing the goal of freedom, no matter how aggressively, the
United States during the Cold War redefined ‘freedom’ simply in
opposition to socialism — ‘[w]hatever Moscow stood for was by
definition the opposite of freedom’,Eric Foner, ‘American Freedom in a Global Age’,
American Historical Review, 106.1 (2001), 1–16
<https://doi.org/10.2307/2652222>.
a rejection
of Isaiah Berlin’s ‘positive freedom’ (tentatively favoured in the
pre-war New Deal welfare state) in favour of ‘free enterprise’.
Indeed, the American claims of ‘freedom’ were often directly self-contradictory; Hồ Chí Minh could quote the Declaration of Independence of the United States in his Proclamation of Independence in 1945, yet faced decades of conflict with states supposedly inspired by the same principles (the French Republic, after all, also took inspiration from the liberal democracy of the United States). Even more contradictory is the way that the same regime could be a friend or an enemy of freedom at different times; geopolitics, not liberty, was the driving force here. Examples with particular relevance into the twenty-first century are the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s Baʿath party in Iraq, both of which received United States backing during the Cold War only to reveal themselves as a threat after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Another example, in the opposite direction, can be found in the Communist Party of Cambodia (the Khmer Rouge), which as the ruling party of Cambodia was an enemy of the United States, a genocidal ‘Communist’ regime. Nevertheless, after the Cambodian–Vietnamese War and the Khmer Rouge’s ousting by a Soviet-aligned socialist party in early 1979, the Khmer Rouge formed a government-in-exile and received military and diplomatic support from the United States among others, although its leadership remained the same.
Thus it seems clear that American interventions, particularly in the
Cold War period but generally throughout the twentieth century, were
based not in pursuit of ‘liberty’ broadly defined, but on free markets
and free trade; that is, US foreign policy constituted a sustained
effort to assimilate and maintain significant regions of the globe to
its economic system, by economic or diplomatic pressure where possible,
and by overt or covert military force where that failed. Karl Marx wrote
in 1867 that “[t]he Established Church, for instance, will more
readily pardon an attack on thirty-eight of its thirty-nine articles
than on one thirty-ninth of its income. Nowadays atheism is a culpa
levis [a relatively slight sin, c.f. mortal sin], as compared with
the criticism of existing property relations”.Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy
(London: Penguin, 1976), i, Preface to
the first German edition.
The United States,
likewise, repeatedly prioritized its material interests over its
principles, and challenges to its economic primacy met with political
repression at home and abroad, in a manner that constituted ‘informal’
if not formal imperialism.
References
Best, Antony, Jussi M Hanhimäki, Joseph A Maiolo, and Kirsten E Schulze, International History of the Twentieth Century and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2008) <http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1ldPngEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9780415438964&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api>
Blum, William, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (London: Zed Books, 2003)
Darwin, John, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion’, English Historical Review, 112.447 (1997), 614–42 <https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cxii.447.614>
Dower, John W., Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999)
Foner, Eric, ‘American Freedom in a Global Age’, American Historical Review, 106.1 (2001), 1–16 <https://doi.org/10.2307/2652222>
———, Give Me Liberty! An American History, 2nd edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008)
Gaddis, John Lewis, We Now Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)
Hobsbawm, Eric J., Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–91 (Abacus, 1994)
Hunt, Michael H., and Steven I. Levine, Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012)
Maier, Charles S., Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) <https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674040458>
Marx, Karl, Capital: Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin, 1976), i
Pérez, Louis A., Cuba Between Empires, 1878-1902 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983)
Shipway, Martin, Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008)
Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War, Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) <https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511817991>