The United States, we are told, is the most powerful nation in world history, the sole superpower, winner of the Cold War, the “indispensable nation,” a “hyperpower” that has achieved “full spectrum dominance” over all other military forces on Earth. Yet the US failed to achieve its objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan, was defeated outright in Vietnam, and since World War II has won unambiguous victories only in the first Gulf War of 1991, a war with the strictly limited objective of expelling Iraq from Kuwait, and in various “police actions” against pathetically small and weak opponents in the Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 1983, and Panama in 1989. How can we explain this dichotomy between unparalleled military advantage over all rival powers and a virtually unblemished record of military defeat since the end of the Cold War? And how has the strange mix of great military capacity and inability to use that power to attain military victories affected America’s ability to maintain geopolitical hegemony?
What the Right Says
Champions of US global dominance have an easy and clear answer to these questions. The problem, in their view, is that Americans are unwilling to pay the financial or human cost of maintaining their empire or, when they bother to express it in more palatable terms, to uphold democracy and the rule of law in the world. Thus Niall Ferguson, who believes that as a historian his role is to instruct Americans on how to adopt the best practices of the British empire, criticizes Americans in general for demanding “that overseas interventions show positive results within two or at most four years” and Ivy League graduates in particular because they “aspire not to govern Mesopotamia but to manage MTV; not to rule the Hejaz but to run a hedge fund.”1 He also wants the US to spend less on social programs and more on the military.
I will address American attitudes toward casualties below, but in terms of spending there is no evidence to support Ferguson and other twenty-first-century imperialists. The US in fact has easily maintained, and since the end of the Cold War vastly expanded, its edge over the budgets of geopolitical rivals. Indeed, the US advantage in military spending and technology is unprecedented in recorded history.
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