u.s.a. – the end of an empire by parvez asad sheikh

No 1: U.S.A. – Th e End of an Empire

by

PARVEZ ASAD SHEIKH

THE DALLAS HOUSE MONOGRAPHSSeries: Th e Global Crisis.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 5

I - THE EXPERIMENT 7

American Siblings 8

An Era of Good Feelings 17

Mexico and a Southern Frontier 26

Civil War 34

II - THE EMPIRE 49

Th e European Invasion

- Stage One: Versailles 52

- Stage Two: D-Day 61

Th e Cold War 66

Th e Last Stage 72

Collapse 87

5

U.S.A. – THE ENDOF AN EMPIRE

For Muslims today, America represents a massive force at war with Islam, a giant at war with us. Th e War on Terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and the daily antagonism towards Muslims on the part of America certainly imply little else regarding the ‘Empire’s’ political and military stance towards us. However, while Muslims are the victims of fundamental misunderstandings on the part of America and the West about Islam, we should not make the same mistake of forming wooden impressions of the country responsible for such a blind exertion of pressure on us. Th e less Muslims hold on to slogan impressions and attitudes towards the American Empire and the more we are to venture to understand its basic anatomy,

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the smaller the leviathan will appear. Behind and between the rhetorical armour-plates of America’s position as superpower lie its exposed points, its soft underbelly and the reality that in the senility of its War on Terror, the Empire is chasing its own tail. To be able to understand America, we must fi rst understand how and where the Empire was born.

We need to understand its physiognomy and form; to fashion limbs from the intangible elements that constitute it in order to shape a model that can help us to ascertain its nature. If a being is built in a certain manner, it will act and move in ways natural to it, which will in turn help to determine its strengths and weaknesses. By understanding these aspects we can study the manner in which it is predisposed to act and, in turn, be able to observe its growth and development from its youth to the autumn of its power.

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American independence from Britain in 1783 following the Revolutionary War gave birth to a democratic island surrounded by the colonies of the great monarchies of the Old World. Its foundation was the fi rst modern democratic experiment. Th e thirteen original states were politically confi ned to the Atlantic seaboard – the colonial borders drawn out by the British – with Spanish colonies to their south, British outposts to their north and the great Appalachian range which the British had designated as the (in reality rather porous) dam that would hold back westward expansion into what it recognised as Native territory. Th e American Republic in its original make-up consisted of a union of two

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THE EXPERIMENT


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distinct and yet interdependent socio-economic and political Americas; an agrarian South and a mercantile North, both with fundamentally divergent views on the manner in which the new republic should be enacted from its Lockean script. Th e story of these two original Americas precedes the story of the United States as we know it today. It is the story of the birth of the political and economic engine that would thrust the American Empire beyond its continental realm and onto the world stage.

American Siblings

Before the American Revolution, the high ideals it had fought to establish could only have been found in the pages of the liberal political philosophies of the European Enlightenment thinkers. Never before had any group of politically active men taken it upon themselves to interpret the works of the Enlightenment philosophes into a real, living and breathing liberal democracy – the English Civil War which preceded the American experiment by a century went only as far as to fetter the monarchy while retaining its crown. Th e American experiment sought to go all the way and create a constitutional system of governance, of rule, that would be subservient to

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the ‘people’ – a subtle and yet pervasive paradox that would perplex the world for centuries to come.

Th e founding fathers of the original ante bellum American Republic took the liberal political philosophy of the British philosopher John Locke as the template from which to begin their political adventure. In a socio-economic realm of pragmatic settlers, far from the Puritan pilgrims of lore, who possessed a particular aptitude for turning the ‘unused’ and ‘excess’ lands of the original Americans into capitalist success, Locke’s ideas fi t like a glove. His view on the acquisition of private property as being the very ‘foundation of civilised society’ fused well with what has been called the ‘cult of pioneer individualism’, providing a deep sense of justifi cation for a crusading drive to spread across the continent. And so the experiment began, the tide of westward settlers overcame the Appalachian dam taking in signifi cant swathes of new territory from the Native Americans, southward encroachment into Spanish-held territory began in earnest and America acquired the Mississippi heartland in 1797. Th is was the fi rst wave of American expansion into the continent, emboldened by their new and radical


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civilising mission of spreading democracy to those lands and people on the continent in need of it, the philosophical drive of the ‘Lockean man’; self-disciplined through adversity and the master of his destiny through the virtues of reasoned determination. But for the new and untested democracy, its delicate fi rst two decades brought important questions to the fore concerning how it would grow and what kind of political animal it would be.

During the fi rst two American administrations of George Washington and John Adams, something the ‘Forefathers’ had not foreseen undermined the unrehearsed enactment of the new liberal democracy. Fundamental diff erences of opinion concerning the existential character of the new republic gathered on both sides of its paradoxical nature – a constitutional system of governance, of rule, that would be subservient to its populace. Th e core debate concerned the role of the federal government in relation to the governments of the individual states that formed the Union. Would America be a union of strong and independent states or would it be a federal union made up of fairly impotent¬ – and most importantly economically impotent – member states? Th e peripheral aspects drawn in by the

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debate extended towards the two competing Americas. At the centre of what could be seen as the American version of France’s Jacobinism – less immediately horrible but no less devastating in its eventual outcome – was the formation of two new ‘parties’; the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. And while to state that these two parties exclusively and neatly delineated the sectional divisions between the North and the South would be an exercise in convenient historical oversight, the interests of each party were inextricably aligned with the economic and political views of each of the two original Americas.

Th e War of Independence from Britain had left the thirteen colonies in debt and the important question of the economic model of the new democracy remained largely unanswered, an economic question deeply linked to the political framework that would stem from it. Alexander Hamilton, the fi rst U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, proposed that America’s economy be modelled on that of England, with a national bank which would be responsible for the collective debts of all the member states, concentrating economic power in the federal government. He further suggested that the new national bank borrow


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money to fi nance the payment of its debts, the interest payments owed to be funded by duties on imported goods and other forms of taxation and tariff s. Th e power to issue a fi at national currency based on the fractional reserve was the cornerstone to his economic model aimed at providing ready credit to the federal government. For the mercantile and increasingly industrialising North, such a debt-based economic set-up made sense as a means to generate the credit needed to fund their projects and was supported by the highly infl uential trading and banking families, both in America and in England.

Hamilton found greatest resistance to his eco-nomic plan in the persons of Th omas Jeff erson and James Madison who represented a diff ering vision of the economic and political direction of the United States. Both Jeff erson and Madison had the interests and support of the South at heart and Jeff erson saw America’s future not as a grand commercial empire as such but rather as one based on the relatively small and economically independent artisan. Th e southern states had already paid back most of their revolutionary debt and had little concern in having to contribute to the interest payments of other members of the Union. Th e agrarian nature of the south, founded

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on capital-intensive and slave-based cultivation, was not compatible with a debt-based economy where movements of fl uid currency dominated.

Jeff erson was outspoken in his views that the creation of a national bank would only encourage speculation and indebt the masses, a signifi cant threat to private acquisition in view of John Locke’s political philosophy. Jeff erson saw the creation of a federal bank as unconstitutional and a dangerous concentration of power outside of the realm of the individual states – a charge Hamilton countered by putting forward the idea that such federal power was implied by the constitution. But the most sinister source of Jeff erson’s aversion was the fact that the national bank would be a private entity with stocks traded internationally. As one of the most vehement supporters of a clear political and economic break with the Old World (and Britain in particular), Jeff erson considered the bank a usurpation of the economic power of the new republic by the fi nancial houses and the political interests of England. Th e American Constitution explicitly proff ers the power of issuing currency to the American Congress as a safeguard against the economic intrigue from which the colonies had suff ered at the hands of the British. In a famous


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quote, Jeff erson stated that to allow private banks to gain the power to issue a national currency would be to “deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered”.

Events across the Atlantic further exacerbated the political divisions of the new fi ssional forces. It had seemed initially, and was celebrated as such, that the American experiment promised to sweep through the Old World when the French mobs ended their monarchy and replaced it with the high ideals shared by the Americans. But once the political catharsis gave way to the madness of the Reign of Terror, many American leaders were deeply aff ected by the course of a revolution that was both inspired by and a result of theirs. According to Elkins and McKitrick:

Th e [French] Revolution began at the very moment at which America […] was venturing upon its career as a constitutional republic in 1789, still needing every sanction of legitimacy it could lay hold of for its past and present course, and for its

very character.

Hamilton, long accused of being an anglophile, was thrown by disgust of the French bloodletting

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towards a re-affi rmed admiration of the English system of parliamentary monarchy with its strong federal characteristics as a means to produce stability and to ensure that the Terror would not grip his new republic. Jeff erson, in a streak of Jacobinism, declared that he “would have seen half the earth desolated” rather than to see the revolution in France fail. He was a founding fi gure of the idea of the modern democratic revolution and had as much intellectual capital at stake across the Atlantic as he had at home. It was also an attitude that resulted from his stance towards an English-inspired Federalism, which he regarded as a revolutionary “halfway house”, that maintained his high hopes for the French experiment. If the liberal experiment failed in France, the Federalist movement would be emboldened and the American Republic’s course would veer away from the Jeff ersonian vision.

As the American intellectual Robert Kagan suggests, the war between England and the new French Republic that began soon after the French Revolution became an extension of the local political debate over the direction the new American Republic was to take. England became representative of the Federalist views on the need of a strong central government and they


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used the bloodshed in France as an example of what the lack of such an institution could bring to America. Th e Republicans referred to such Federalist notions as being disloyal to the liberal political philosophy upon which the Republic was founded and branded their support for the English model a sign of subterfuge by their old coloniser.

Th e competing views over post-revolutionary France came to a domestic political head when Hamilton accused France of fomenting secessionist movements in the south and west in 1796, falling just short of forming a formidable federal army to quell the problem. Th e Jay Treaty headed by the Federalists, which formally aligned America with Britain in support of its war against France, provoked France’s animosity towards America and when France began hampering American trade, Hamilton used these acts of hostility (albeit provoked by his own initiative) as a means to solidify ties with Britain which supplied arms and naval protection to American merchant fl eets. Th is began the ‘Quasi-War’ with France and a ‘Quasi-Alliance’ with Britain. For the Federalist-Republican debate, the strengthened Anglo-American alliance was an initial victory for Hamilton and a blow to the Jeff ersonians.

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But this initial victory stirred a wave of pro-French movements which accused the Federalists of collusion with Britain and President John Adams moved towards a restoration of peaceful ties with France and the annulment of the Jay Treaty. Th omas Jeff erson won the 1800 elections, bringing the Republicans into power and the Federalists fell apart into competing factions led by Hamilton and Adams.

Th e Republicans had ultimately won on the political front but the economic debate had been concluded early on with the establishment of Hamilton’s brainchild, the fi rst National Bank, in 1791 with a twenty year charter. Th e Federalist-Republican debate was the foundational crisis in the life of the young and inexperienced America and the ideological perspectives it gave birth to would help to formalise the antagonism which would steer the competition between North and South towards the ultimate destruction of one in favour of the other.

An Era of Good Feelings

Th e early nineteenth century saw more stability in internal American politics and the Republic seemed to be growing from strength to strength


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as it expanded from the eastern seaboard into the continental heartland. Th e newly acquired Mississippi valley provided a new state adhering to the Southern economic model as its fertile soils allowed for agriculture. Louisiana was bought from Napoleon as a means for France to forge an alliance with the boisterous American Empire early in the nineteenth century and this further extended the Southern frontier. A high international demand for American goods helped both the northern and southern regions gain their fi nancial footing and the traditionally mercantile north-eastern regions underwent a shift from shipping to industrial activities as the Industrial Revolution hit American shores. New Western regions began to be incorporated as states and to grow in economic and political infl uence, creating the American West of the ‘frontiersmen’ settlers. In an act of new-found pluck, America pushed against its north-eastern border with British-held Canada in the Anglo-American War of 1812. Th e fi nancial atmosphere of the war allowed for the reluctant acceptance of the Hamiltonian fi nancial system on the part of the Republicans as a means to bolster America’s military strength. Florida was taken from Spain and the great tribes of the region in 1818, and American leaders saw further

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expansion as inevitable, using Newtonian physics as a metaphor to describe the manner in which their republic would attract the land and islands around it.

War and expansion helped to quell the heated Federalist-Republican debate as well and, along with it, assuage the sectional diff erences of the two Americas. A new breed of Republicanism was born during this time, led by the likes of James Monroe, John Quincy Adams and John Clay. Under the aegis of these new National Republicans, many of the Federalist projects which the original Republicans had fought so hard against were implemented and the role of the central government was bolstered signifi cantly. Th e fi rst move of the National Republicans was the romantic and geo-politically fruitless war of 1812 against England. Th e new Republicans saw the foreign policy of ‘peaceful conquest’ championed by Jeff erson and Madison before them as the rationalisation of the bullied. Peter Beinart has identifi ed as cycles what he terms American ‘hubris’, characterised by an ideological, political and ultimately militarist push for a re-awakening of the American martial spirit after a period of common gluttony. Th is new generation saw a war with England as the perfect furnace in


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which to recast the nation’s mettle and to extend the northern frontier.

America ultimately drew, but it was seen as a victory for such a young republic against a formidable foe and the north-eastern border with what would become Canada was fi nalised at the Peace of Ghent of 1814. A strong sense of nationalism permeated the Republic for the fi rst time since the Revolutionary War and the pressures of military conquest against a common enemy seemed to have had the desired eff ect on the national ethos. As part of the Nationalist Republican’s vision of a strong and universal ‘American System’, federal debt also funded great infrastructural projects in the new Western states, and tariff s protected Northern industry. Th is ultimately left the South with little more than an antiquated railway system and trouble competing internationally for the cotton market due to the protectionist tariff system. And yet even old-guard Republicans saw the benefi ts of an increase in federal expenditure, particularly the manner in which it had helped to mobilise the fi nance behind the war eff ort. Th is nationalist drive would help the young America gain confi dence and land until the unavoidable mention of slavery would once again divide it

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into two in 1819.

America’s continental expansion was a formalised process which blended the insatiable thrust of settlers into Spanish and Native lands with the sober need to keep the expanding frontier within the Union. Th e fi rst stage in the process of expansion saw settlers encroach onto foreign land where they would either establish themselves as a powerful new community of expatriates or fi ght with the previous inhabitants, the former being the norm in the case of Spanish and the latter of Native lands. Th is resulted either in the laying of claims to the territory and/or a revolt against local authorities. Th e second stage of expansion comprised the federal government’s intervention as a means to stabilise the situation and ensure the protection of its citizens, both maintaining a constant barrage of expansionist settlers and providing the political legitimacy for federal intervention. Th is second stage produced either a treaty of compromise with the original authorities (which would either include an expansion of American territory or the eventual negation of the agreement) or military support for the settlers. Such a combination of wily force and unscrupulous political patronage proved to be an unstoppable tide for the Spanish and the


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Native tribes to hold back. New territories were then incorporated as states through the North West Ordinance of 1787 which had established the political framework to contain the expansion within the Union and great swathes of what were known as Territories (areas that had not yet met the criteria to be admitted as states) spanned westward.

Whether a state would be designated as ‘slave-holding’ or ‘free’ was originally a matter implicitly decided on by that state’s local government, but when Missouri applied for statehood in 1819, a suggestion made by a New York Congressman that restrictions on slavery be established by the federal government, led to a fl are-up in North-South antagonism which had lain dormant during the initial era of the American System. Th e move to limit slavery was heavily supported by Northern political leaders and the growing abolitionist movement in the region took to the soap-boxes for their cause. Th e abolitionist movement was an increasingly popular manifestation of the Northern liberal identity and its view of the South and was also a by-product of the Nationalist Republican drive for progressive governance.

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For Northern political and economic leaders with interests in the promulgation of the Hamiltonian economic and political model, however, slavery was not the real issue. Paul Kagan suggests that “[f ]or many northerners, the Missouri battle was about the political and sectional balance of power, not about southern slavery”. Southern leaders saw the move as an attempt to bestow upon the federal government the power to dictate not only the morality of slavery but directly to undermine the foundation of the Southern economy as well. Tension between the two Americas almost boiled over and only a compromise would serve as a temporary lid to keep the Union together. Catastrophe was avoided by the admittance of Missouri as a slave-holding state and the establishment of the Mason-Dixon Line, along latitude 36° 36’ or midway through the Union, as the boundary between slave-holding and free areas in territories that had not yet assumed statehood. Th e new Northern state of Maine also helped to establish a fragile equality in numbers between free and slave-holding states. But the political border between North and South was now etched across the young Empire. And from that moment on it became apparent that expansion would come at the price of exacerbating the divisions between the two Americas.


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Th e Northern abolitionist movement continued to gather popular support after 1819 and Britain’s move to abolish slavery spread the movement across the globe, making it an issue which many regarded as a matter of the progress of civilisation. One could see England’s championing of the moralist Abolitionist cause as similar to that of Northern American leaders; they did after all share similar economic models. Slave-based agrarian economies proved incompatible with the growing capitalist fl ow of fi nance, goods and commodities brought on by the Industrial Revolution. And while the slave trade helped to fi nance England’s (and Northern America’s) industrialisation, the institution hampered her access to new markets. When Britain made alliances with slave-holding regions such as the Swahili east-coast of Kenya, the conditionality of abolition attached to the alliance destroyed the economic strength of the new allies and created a dependence on Britain both economically and politically. Th e British abolitionist movement, once taken under offi cial aegis, was therefore an implicit dynamic in facilitating the extension of the British Empire. As in America’s North, the popular support in Britain for abolition as a moral cause also lent a great amount of popular legitimacy to the expansion of its economic and

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political boundaries.

Th e South reacted to the North’s fl agrant anti-slavery drive by returning to the original Republicanism of Th omas Jeff erson and becom-ing increasingly uneasy about being encircled by new free-states. Northern politicians saw the end of Southern slavery as a matter of time and an implicit policy of the containment of Southern states began. Parallels have been drawn between this Northern containment of the South and the policy of Containment that America would pursue during the Cold War. While such a thesis may be somewhat over-simplifi ed, one can see in this proto-Cold War between the two ideologically and economically divergent Americas the natural predisposition of the America that survived as time progressed.

Th e original debate on the American experiment was thrown wide open with the antagonism born out of Missouri. When Andrew Jackson attained the Presidency in 1828 with Southern support, the economic extension of the debate was re-opened because he put an end to the National Bank. Ultimately, the Missouri Compromise ended the fi rst wave of America’s continental expansion and the young Empire began focusing


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on the political incorporation of the vast tracts of new western land. Th e West began to take the form of pieces on a chessboard and, as of 1819 the young Union teetered on the edge of catastrophe until a Southern attempt to break out of its encirclement would push America to Civil War. Mexico and a Southern Frontier

Th e Presidency of John Quincy Adams, son of the second American President, established the National Republicans or Whigs, as they were also known, into a lasting representation of Federalist interests. His administration would also be the last held by a Republican until the coming of Abraham Lincoln more than thirty years later. Th e ‘era of goodwill’ that had initially given rise to the Nationalist Republicans began to atrophy soon after the Missouri Compromise and a rising West accompanied by fi nancial crises brought on by the over-stretched economic model ushered in the fi rst Western President. Andrew Jackson, whom Adams referred to as the ‘Brawler of Tennessee’ – the famous soldier of the frontier responsible for the ‘displacement’ of the Creek Indians from the Mississippi Valley – rose to the Presidency in the 1828 elections

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as the Democratic presidential candidate. Th e Democrats would in turn represent the original Jeff ersonian principles opposed to the Republicans and it would be a Jeff ersonian who would remove Quincy Adams just as the original Jeff erson had removed his father from offi ce in 1800. Th e Democratic Party and Jackson had the ideological support of the South and West. Th e two Jackson administrations were a more elaborate, but markedly similar, re-enactment of the original American debate between the Federalists and the old-guard Republicans, this time including a Western supporting role. Th e issues at the heart of this new era of debate were the same as the original: the role of the Federal Government, the existence of a Federal and debt-based economic system, the system of tariff s and taxation established as a means to fi nance interest payments and how they would aff ect both North and South economically.

Expansion necessitated a looser and more fl exible Federal structure in order to be able to encourage the independent-minded settlers who pushed into new land, while preventing them from becoming autonomous from the Union. Th e fi nancial crisis of 1819 turned the West against the National Bank and found Southern


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antagonism towards the institution to be a politically uniting factor. Both small-scale and commercial farmers in the two regions owed the Northern fi nancial houses signifi cantly for their projects and the instability of a banking crisis led to popular rage against the Federalist economic system. One of Jackson’s most important actions as President was to remove all governmental deposits from the National Bank and distribute them among local banks across the country, ending the Hamiltonian fi nancial era, while still not entirely fulfi lling the constitutional vision of giving the American Congress the power to mint a national currency. Th e American System appeared to have begun to be dismantled by the Democrats. But Western interests played a role in the manner in which the West approached the North. It could play both sides and this had a compromising eff ect that added a sense of pragmatism to the original North-South debate. Ultimately, however, while the North lost out in terms of Jackson’s economic and political reforms, the two regions, North and West, benefi tted from infrastructural works and plans that excluded the South.

S.E. Morrison describes the outcome of this “sectional balance” as the very “alignment of

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parties in the future; even in the Civil War itself. Was it to be North and West against South, or South and West against North?” Northern Containment of the slave-holding South continued during this time and the South began looking to expand its border. And since many of the new states that emerged from the Territories were explicitly ‘free’, such as Mormon Utah, the only direction that Southern America could look to was southwards.

Texas had seceded from the newly independent Mexican Republic in November 1835, led by the large American population that had been settling in the region and caused to a large extent by the abolition of slavery in Mexico, which the Texans relied on. Th e Texan secession seemed to be somewhat tolerated by the Mexicans at fi rst due to the government’s weak hold on the area and many of the outlying areas of Mexico. But when the Mexican leader Santa Anna took power, he moved swiftly in retaliation. In 1836 a small Texan force was destroyed by a superior Mexican army led by Santa Anna at the Mission House of the Alamo. Th e state rose in indignation and gathered a larger military contingent, this time crushing Santa Anna’s army and capturing the leader himself. Santa Anna recognised the


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independence of the new Republic of Texas led by the victorious Tennessee native Sam Houston as President, and calls on the part of the Texans to join the United States were made almost immediately after its independence.

Th e Texan call was not heard by the politicians in Washington for nearly a decade because Missouri had made it clear that the annexation would bring them to blows. Texas was a slave-holding state and any move to incorporate a new state which shared the Southern economic and political model would have given the South a majority in the Senate. Th is shift in the sectional balance would not be without dramatic reprisals from the North. In the moral atmosphere of a growing and radicalising abolitionist movement in the North, calls were made for Northern secession if Texas joined the South. But the unresponsive Union turned Texas into a growing liability for the Union as it began to be courted by England who saw it as the perfect setting to destabilise the North American region.

At the same time two regions on the Pacifi c coast began to gravitate towards restless new America, whose internal driving forces pushed for a resumption of the expansion that had slowed

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down unnaturally following the crisis of 1819. American ports had been sprouting along the coast of California, a Mexican province, founded by sailors and settlers looking to profi t from the South Sea trade with China in particular, and the growing American population in the region was looking to Washington for representation. Th e Oregon territory north of California had also been settled by Americans and competing British claims to the region called for American action. With the westernmost reaches of the continent calling for America’s expansion, the age of ‘Manifest Destiny’ was born. It was seen as America’s ineluctable destiny to cover the entire expanse of the North American continent and beyond. Th is suited the South which wanted to expand in order to save its economic and political viability and many Northern leaders had been converted from their original sensitivities towards sectional friction to affi rm the dream of the Pacifi c coast and the vast Oriental market.

James K. Polk won the presidential election of 1845, referred to by American historians as a ‘referendum on the Texas issue’. As a Jacksonian Democrat, his intention to annex Texas won him the Southern support needed to reach offi ce. As a compromise to Northern interests, Polk had


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extended the idea of the annexation of Oregon, as pre-determinably anti-slavery as Texas was for it, as part of the popular drive of ‘Manifest Destiny’ that had begun to strengthen nationalist sentiment in ways that only calls for war and expansion could do, and would do, in American politics.

Texas joined the Union swiftly after the election in December of 1845 and the move almost immediately led to a fl are-up with Mexico caused by American southward encroachment beyond the original Texan boundaries. Th e lead-up to a war with Mexico helped to solve the Oregon question with Britain in a peaceful manner. Britain did not want another war with an increasingly self-assertive America while at the same time having to contend with pugnacious France in Europe. Th e existing border between America and Canada was agreed upon in the same year in which America marched on Mexico. Th e Mexican-American War began in 1846 with a Mexican attack on American forces along the disputed border with the new state of Texas.

At the time of the war of 1846 it was still uncertain who would be the stronger of the two sides. While America was growing in strength,

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Mexico was an old force in the region and had the larger army. But the war was swift and expertly carried out by a new generation of military offi cers who had graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. Th e South would contribute the most, both in terms of men and leadership, and this would play a role in establishing its superior military capabilities for most of the Civil War. In fact, many of the heroes of the Mexican War would later face one another in battle. Using an impressive combination of land and naval approaches, by September 1847, Mexico City had been captured. Th e Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave America the Texan boundary it had regarded as natural to its situation and in the Gadsden Purchase which followed America acquired all Mexican land above the Rio Grande which comprised California, Arizona, New Mexico and the rest of the future American South-West. By the war’s conclusion, half of Mexico had been engorged by the American expansionist machine and its Manifest Destiny had been fulfi lled. Th e Empire had reached its fi nal continental form and the South had expanded into the vast swathes of new territory it hoped would support its survival. But with the conclusion of America’s second and fi nal wave of continental expansion came


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the same fi ssional pressures on the Union and a renewed crisis in the American experiment.

Civil War

By the 1850s, the anti-slavery movement had reached its apogee in the North. Harriet Beecher Stowes’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852 to become a bestselling abolitionist work, spanning the globe and further stoking the attitudes of Northern ‘liberals’ towards the South. And while many of the great Coloured activists of the likes of Frederick Douglass saw the ostensibly philanthropic support of their Euro-American counterparts as little more than clumsy patronage and a distraction from the real plight of the enslaved and the Coloured of America, anti-slavery became a Northern cause which made the South recoil into a state of paranoid fi tfulness.

When California applied for statehood as a free-state yet another crisis erupted and yet another fl imsy compromise was used to tape the Union together. Th e crisis had its root cause in the 1819 compromise, as the Mason-Dixon Line which had been designated as the political boundary of slavery for future states cut straight across the

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Californian territory. After the great orators had been unleashed against one another in Congress, a compromise was reached through the eff orts of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster in favour of maintaining the teetering Union. A new principle would override the old Missouri Compromise delineation. California and the southern states, newly acquired from the Mexican War, would decide their stance on slavery through the principle of ‘popular sovereignty’, that is, through a popular referendum by the states’ populace. Th is calmed Southern concerns because it extended the choice to the state and not the federal government and at the same time opened up the prospect for a Southern expansion north of the Mason-Dixon. A major communicative mix-up left the North with the impression that ‘popular sovereignty’ would only be used in the case of former Mexican territories and the Mormon lands of Utah. Th e South in turn saw the new legal compromise as the loosening of the Northern noose that had been constricting its expansion and survival. California became a state in the Union in 1850, against the institution of slavery, growing on mercantile activities and the tumult of the Gold Rush.

Th e fi nal crisis before the outbreak of Civil War


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set the stage to turn the offi cial stance on the issue of slavery from a legislative matter into one of a purely moral nature. It would inspire a ‘backwoods politician’ to push the issue and the Union into the abyss of fratricide. Th e turmoil which led to, and followed, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 would drive Abraham Lincoln to the inevitable position of War President.

Th e main incentive to establish the statehood of Nebraska was the plan to build a transcontinental railway line across the American mid-riff , a truly Federalist move supported by the North and West which left the South to contend with its now rusting rails. A politically integrated Nebraska and Kansas was needed to connect the eastern states to the west over the Territories. Th e issue of slavery inexorably hijacked what was a purely logistical matter and made it into another sectional confl ict. Political debate fl ared up as great as the popular antagonism that boiled over, and in the heat of it all a South Carolina Senator clobbered his Massachusetts’s counterpart unconscious with his cane. Th e proposed use of ‘popular sovereignty’ in Nebraska, which fell north of the Mason-Dixon, was seen by the North as untenable and the South called for the repealing of the Missouri Compromise. In the

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end the South won and ‘popular sovereignty’ was to decide the states of Nebraska and Kansas’ stance on slavery in the Douglas Compromise of 1854.

Kansas broke out into violence between pro- and anti-slavery factions over the outcome of their referendum in what has been called the ‘Kansas Bleeding’, costing the lives of more than two hundred people. During the last Jacksonian Democratic administration of James Buchanan, the teetering legislative equilibrium constructed by the American political leaders was overturned and overt antagonism over slavery ensued. In 1850 John Brown, the fanatical abolitionist who had already murdered several pro-slavery leaders in their sleep, went on to take control of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, declaring war on the federal government and freeing what the American historian Churchill described as ‘a few bewildered slaves’. A Federal force had to be called in to deal with Brown and his followers. Th e North canonised Brown and the South accused them of manufacturing the incident. Tempers had overwhelmed the rationality of the two Americas and the Douglas Compromise would be the last attempt made by both sides to skirt the issue of slavery. Slavery would be the


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casus belli for war between two fundamentally diff erent interpretations of the original Lockean script that had given birth to the American experiment. Abraham Lincoln:

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this Government cannot endure perma-nently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the

states, old as well as new, North as well as South.

Abraham Lincoln’s rise from ex-Congressman to President was driven by his personal embodiment of the principles of his political cause – the inevitable implications of his political stance were eclipsed by his moral drive. Since the days of the Douglas Compromise and the bloodshed in Kansas, Lincoln had spent his time travelling across his home state of Illinois giving public speeches and debates against the measures that had been established in the last attempt to keep the Union together using political and

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legislative means. He was campaigning for a seat at the Senate which ultimately eluded him. But Lincoln had become a symbol of the anti-slavery movement and confi dent enough to ride on his morality, and popular enough to run as the Republican candidate in the presidential election of 1860. Th e original sectional party divisions of the Jeff erson-Hamilton era had ossifi ed along a clear-cut sectional divide ever since the decision to invade Texas, and by 1860 there was a clear split between the Southern Democrats and the Northern Republicans. Th is process had allowed for sectional diff erences to manifest at the very heart of the young democratic system and it was the democratic machine – the electoral process – and not an unruly spectre, which would send America hurtling towards civil war.

Lincoln’s persona and platform panicked the Democrats and made the election fi rst about slavery, and secondly about the fate of the Union. It became increasingly obvious that if Lincoln won, the South would secede. To make matters more complicated, a number of extra candidates sought either to keep the Union together through yet another compromise or to rise on the wave of a politically fecund crisis. Th e Democratic Party split between those for compromise and those


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for a heavier hand against the North, putting forward two candidates and halving its chances to win in the process. As Winston S. Churchill the American historian states in his history of the Civil War:

Slavery was the dominating and all-absorbing issue. Lincoln and the Republicans wanted to […] prohibit slavery in the Territories and confi ne it within its existing limits. Douglas and the original Democrats were for non-intervention in the Territories and ‘popular sovereignty’ by the settlers. Breckenridge and his [Democrat] supporters demanded that slavery in the Territories be supported by law. Bell tried to ignore the issue altogether in the blissful hope that the nation could be made to forget everything that had happened

since the Mexican War.

Lincoln won the elections on the 6th of November and before he was sworn in, while Buchanan was still eff ectively President, South Carolina passed its Ordinance of Secession and on December 20th 1860 left the Union. South Carolina was followed en suite by the states of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas to form the new Confederate Republic in the February of 1861. Th e Confederacy established a constitution, its own fl ag and elected Jeff erson

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Davies as President. Th e South had completed the logically inevitable task of breaking away from the North. And yet while the two Americas stood facing one another with their chins held high in defi ance, calls were made for compromise by some Northern leaders – war was not immediate. Lincoln would have none of it. He refused to compromise on the issue of slavery on which he had staked his political career. When the new Confederate Army bombarded a defi ant Major Anderson and his troops – who had fl own the Union fl ag in defi ance of their location at Fort Sumter on the Charleston Harbour – for two days until his surrender on the 14th of April, the American Civil War had begun. Lincoln declared his intention to raise an army to suppress the seven states “too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings”.

Lincoln’s call to arms drove Virginia – the heart not only of the South but a state that had produced the fi nest of the early American leaders – to join the Confederacy. It was not slavery but what the Virginians saw as the unconstitutionality of a federal intervention over the sovereign rights of the states to secede that completed the Southern Confederacy. For all the morality of Lincoln’s deep and admirable belief in the cause of anti-


42

slavery, the still growing Americas had now to fi ght to the death. He was the catalyst who would turn the issue of slavery from one that could be dealt with using an “ordinary course of judicial proceedings”, however untenable in the long run (as untenable as the survival of American slavery itself ), into the morally-driven destruction of the original America.

Th e American Civil War ended on April 9th 1865 after four years of bloodshed. It was the costliest war of its time. Th e South initially benefi tted from superior military acumen as a result of the Mexican experience towards which it had contributed the majority of men and offi cers. Its loose Jeff ersonian ideals allowed for the necessary freedom to be given to the generals and the other military offi cers of the Confederate Army which allowed their military genius to win battle after battle; more than once they reached within sight of Washington, even drawing out the ladies and politicians to come out and ‘see the sport’ of battle. General Robert E. Lee and his great lieutenant ‘Stonewall’ Jackson would have innumerable successes against outlandish odds until the demise of Jackson and attempts by the Confederate President to intervene in military matters. Th e Northern approach to the

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military aspects of the war was an extension of the Federalist ideology. Politics in Washington and Lincoln’s own attempts at generalship from the capital would have the Union change generals constantly until the coming of Ulysses S. Grant and General Sherman. It was under Grant that the active battles of the war ended unoffi cially before 1865 when he moved to exhaust Lee’s outnumbered forces using the tactics of trench warfare – a precursor to the wars of attrition of the twentieth century – which would eventually defeat a starving South. Th is friction between politician-president and soldier-general over America’s conduct in military operations is systematic to the American Model that was founded by Lincoln. He would dismiss Generals McClellan and Burnside, President Truman dismissed General MacArthur during the Korean War and President Obama dismissed General McChrystal during the ongoing war in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.

Th e war had dragged on until one side was exhausted beyond recovery. It was the economic experimentation which the Northern leaders embarked on that allowed the North to hold on until victory. Lincoln, the quintessential Hamiltonian Republican, had established the cornerstone of


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Jeff erson’s economic vision of America, albeit in a modifi ed form, which facilitated the South’s eventual demise. On approaching the New York bankers to request their aid towards the mobilisation of funds necessary for the Northern war eff ort, Lincoln was repelled by the incredible interest rates which accompanied the funds. Th is led him to allow Congress, for the fi rst time since America’s conception, to take its constitutional responsibility for the issuance of currency – although the Constitution prescribes the minting of specie coinage, or bimetallist currency, based on a silver standard and not the fi at notes that Lincoln would prescribe. Lincoln’s ‘Greenbacks’ were printed without cost or interest to the federal government between 1862 and 1865 and proved extremely successful to the war eff ort until the bankers set in motion moves that would systematically erode the new currency. Being fi at in nature made the Greenback vulnerable to the bankers’ limitations, allowing the noose that they set to strangle its viability. Neither government interest payments nor import duties would be accepted by the fi nancial houses in the new currency, undermining confi dence in the otherwise value-less money. By 1863 Lincoln himself had lost confi dence in the viability of the currency without the support of the bankers and

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he established the National Banking Act as a concession to ensure their support. He had been harrowed enough by the fi nancial burden of war to exclaim that “they have argued me almost blind – I am worse off than St. Paul. He was in a strait between two. I am in a strait between twenty and they are bankers and fi nanciers.” Th e Greenbacks continued to circulate but were eventually replaced by new National Bank notes. Th e North had returned to Hamilton’s economic model under the duress of war, and while the system’s effi cacy in mobilising war fi nance gave the Federalists victory through its ability to surmount the trench-like impasse of the eastern front, it left them bankrupt.

Th e end of the Civil War was the beginning of America as we know it today in its basic form. Th e North had won and the South was destroyed. Th e North was bankrupt and after Lincoln’s assassination the economic model had been decided on by force; Hamilton would have his way after all. Th e re-establishment of the National Bank charter during the war had made the institution central to the American political character. Th e period of Reconstruction saw more Federalist investment in infrastructure and aid to the devastated South, the Civil War was


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America’s ‘fi rst war of reconstruction’, a model that it would follow in a gradually evolving manner from that moment on. Th e South as the socio-political alternative to and argument against Federalism ceased to exist. Freed slaves saw a brief period of inclusion in the political system but after Lincoln’s demise that initial freedom gave way to a legislative tyranny in the South that would overshadow even slavery. Th e war may have been about slavery, but the Coloured man was as much a spectre to the whites of the North as he was in the South and even a war would not change their fate. Th ey never got their forty acres and mule.

Th e Civil War was an event of fratricide, the off set eruption of America’s own Reign of Terror. In destroying the South, Federalism had won, the great debates over the economic and political path of the young democracy ceased to add to the dynamism of the American experiment. Th e Coloured man was fought for and then forgotten, the Native Americans would be the next victims as the federal machine, built and fused into the Northern model through war, would turn on them once and for all. Within the story of the two Americas lies the basic genetic predisposition of the American Empire that would venture out

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of its continent in earnest fi fty years later. Ezra Pound the great American poet saw in the 1860s the ‘decline of American civilisation’; it was to be followed by the rise of the mechanism of an American Empire.

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Half of American history takes place before the end of the Civil War. Th e following half is the story of the political machinery which America – as democratic experiment – ultimately adopted as its fi nal form. With the victory of the Federalist North and the demise of a truly Jeff ersonian South the great debates between two diff ering visions of how America could and should be, ended. Th e Federalists won; heirs to the Hamiltonian vision that was born during the fi rst decades in the life of a young and tentative America. At the centre of the Hamiltonian vision lay the economic model, and the mitochondrial bone of contention between Hamilton and Jeff erson had been the economic question from which the

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THE EMPIRE


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political inevitably sprang. Th is economic debate had fi nally been concluded when the South, which was economically, politically and culturally a result of the Jeff ersonian vision, was defeated. And with the end of the economic debate came the end of the fi rst experiment. America would be Federalist; it would have a debt-based economy centred on a private national bank and it would have a strong federal government. Th ese two central characteristics of the American Model had been fused into the political mechanism through war; fi rst during the Anglo-American War of 1812 and the construction of the American System and fi nally during the Civil War and the subsequent era of Reconstruction. Th is lent to the fi nal American Machine a tendency towards military intervention, and reconstruction, as a means to strengthen its two fundamental Hamiltonian characteristics. Subsequently, this deeply entrenched tendency would aff ect the political dialectics which would permeate from the most fertile of American minds into the functional realms of the political and the socio-cultural.

If one would look at the story of America following the Civil War, it would at its most simplistic level consist of a series of foreign

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military actions which result in a popular distaste for an increasingly spectacular scope of bloodshed. But the very nature of America as an economic and political animal would eventually grow tired of pacifi sm and lunge across the oceans to begin the cycle once more. Peter Beinart identifi es this cyclical nature of American foreign policy as being the result of ‘hubris’, the result of the Empire’s political minds and men, but it is the result of a deeper impulse that lies at the very heart of a constantly developing and overdeveloping Hamiltonian political end economic machinery. While the extravagant characters who rise to the helm are the inevitable human catalysts of events, America’s ‘imperial legacy’ is not the story of the man as much as it is that of the machine.

Once the North had conquered the South, freed the slaves and forgotten them, turned on the original Americans and elbowed the great tribes into the ghettos of the reservations, the now confi dent America began to look abroad in earnest, starting with the Spanish-American war of 1898 which secured its dominance in the Caribbean and Pacifi c. Several forays of intervention in foreign aff airs before 1865 had been experimented with, such as Haiti and the Barbary Coast, but instability at home hampered


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their ultimate aims and results. Now that the continent had been conquered by Northern America, the Union would play its part in the great upheavals of the twentieth century. Th e manner in which it would act in each of these events would have its precedent in the North’s approach to the South – the basic technique had been learnt, the machine’s movements had been determined. Th ese movements would develop along with their Hamiltonian economic foundation in an evolutionary manner which would allow for America’s swift rise to the station of hegemony and lead it to an eventual and logically necessary end at which the economic scaff olding would collapse under the weight of conquest.

THE EUROPEAN INVASION

Stage One: Versailles

Th e First World War introduced America to the geo-political dynamics of the European continent and, as the young Empire elbowed its way past an exhausted Europe to take its seat in global aff airs, the American Model would leave its indelible mark that would in eff ect set

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the stage for the second wave of continental civil war. Woodrow Wilson’s presence at the Versailles Conference was a political introduction to the club of Old World politicians. Th e central impetus for this introduction abroad was an important development of the Hamiltonian model at home.

Th e administration of Th eodore Roosevelt had ushered in the Progressive era of American politics at the beginning of the twentieth century. Th is political movement had a domestic focus which aimed at constructing some semblance of order out of the American tumult where an unchallenged, untamed and crude capitalism had run amok since the end of the Civil War. Progressivism was a political ethos that was directly descended from the Nationalist Republicans who had attempted to establish their American System a century earlier before being beaten back by the Jeff ersonian Presidency of Andrew Jackson, the ‘Brawler from Tennessee’. Now that the Jeff ersonian vision of the American experiment had been demolished along with its Southern bastion, the Progressives went on unimpeded to consolidate the Hamiltonian nature of the American Model and, in the process, took it to its next evolutionary stage.


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Th is next stage consisted of a further empowerment of the federal system in terms of its command over state and local aff airs, business activities, taxation and, most importantly, the fi nalisation of the economic and fi nancial dynamo that would allow for the political process to ossify itself and build on the basic anatomy of the American Model of foreign conquest. Wilson, the dour idealist whose handshake was once described as a “ten-cent mackerel in brown paper”, was the perfect political man to oversee what could be identifi ed as the founding event in America’s short history as an empire. His faith in the political philosophy of Progressivism, which was based on the formulaic idea that the power of reason was the means to establish a healthy bureaucratic system, inevitably made him more cerebral than worldly, and in the process facilitated the more practical of those in Washington to fashion the existential results of such reasoning unchecked. In Wilson’s case that practical man, or as Beinart calls him, “a fi xer, highly skilled in the dark art of patronage, conspiracy and, intimidation”, was Colonel Edward House, who Wilson himself described as his “second personality” and “independent self ”. Th e establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 – eased into the Progressive agenda as a result of House’s proximity to Wilson – would

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extend the power of the original Hamiltonian National Bank directly into the political process and the hallways of Washington. It would be House, who had been described by some as the “unoffi cial Secretary of State”, who would facilitate the creation of the position of Governor of the Federal Reserve that would later be described in a similar manner as “more powerful than the Secretary of State”.

Th e establishment of the Federal Reserve System would have two immediate eff ects on America, one domestic in nature and facilitating the other eff ect that would establish the Republic’s foreign policy. First, it would remove the economic and fi nancial responsibility and power from the political process once and for all, setting the modern stage of domestic American politics as a purely political debate between two parties that have no ability to address the economic nature of the Republic – the political catharsis of a spectacular battle between a donkey and an elephant. Secondly, it would immediately rope America into the Great War that would ravage Europe soon after its foundation by functioning as a means of mobilising credit and ultimately drawing the once reclusive America into it. As in the case of the Anglo-American War of 1812,


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the Federalist fi nancial model’s most effi cient function, if not its primary function, would be that of facilitating military expenditure which would be impossible without vast amounts of credit. Th e Federal Reserve System was a signifi cant growth in that function and ultimately a result of the relationship between America’s Federalist model and war as the central means for its reinforcement.

Th e immediate impact on America’s foreign policy of a stronger and more centralised eco-nomic dynamo would be the granting of large amounts of credit to her allies, which only the functioning of a central bank – what the Federal Reserve essentially was – could facilitate. Wilson described this mobilisation of war funds to America’s allies as a “patriotic duty” in a public address given in 1917. Th e pre-1913 banking system had allowed for a limited relationship between American politics and the debt-based economic model which had facilitated the establishment of the Hamiltonian System within the Republic’s continental homeland. Th e consolidation of the Federal Reserve as the economic centre of American politics and the creation of the position of Governor of the Federal Reserve in Washington conjoined the two realms

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of the economic and political (while keeping the political beneath the economic through a subservient relationship, “the state must not interfere with the market”, a post-modernisation of the original Jeff ersonian vision), allowing for American politics to look overseas.

American loans to her European allies would make the Republic the largest creditor in the world, and it is very possible that they prolonged the natural conclusion to the war and ultimately necessitated American intervention to save its waning allies as it would do again twenty years later. Wilson announced America’s entrance into the war to Congress in April of 1917 and the one million American soldiers that landed on European soil in the spring of 1918 dealt the fi nal blow in the military carnage as the ‘Starvation Blockade’ of Germany defeated the families of those dying on the front. Germany’s white fl ag would bring the victorious belligerents together at Versailles in the following year.

While the “war to end all wars” raged on, Wilson and the Progressive intellectuals and politicians initiated plans to supplant what was seen as the outdated European realpolitik with a Progressive (and Hamiltonian) model of a European


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political balance which, as had been achieved to an arguable extent at home, would establish a political structure in Europe that would make war redundant. Th is ‘scientifi c peace’, as Beinart notes, was a concept that ‘came straight from the belly of the progressive movement’. Wilson and his hand-picked group of intellectuals who worked feverishly at a new and rational map of Europe were in eff ect planning the Federalist structure which would be carved out of the lands of the Ottoman, Hohenzollern and Habsburg Empires. Th e Inquiry which was given this task consisted of geographers, historians, sociologists, economists and only a ‘handful’ of political minds who studied the ethnic and geographic layout of the continent quasi-scientifi cally (with a heavy dose of free analogies about certain tribes and peoples) in order to ensure that each ethnicity would have their land and ‘not an inch more’. What this noble eff ort in cerebral geo-politics gave birth to was to be known as Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the most infamous among them being his principle of self-determination and the creation of the League of Nations. Wilson and the Progressive intellectuals sincerely thought that they could create a rational geo-political framework that would end war, ‘a constitution for the entire world’. It was on the foundation of

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these Fourteen Points that Prince Max of Baden would sue for peace at the end of the war, and it would be the constitutional framework upon which the meeting at Versailles between the victors would take place.

Th e Paris Peace Conference which threw Wilson, Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd-George into the same room was a clash of ideologies, particularly between Wilson, who saw America and himself as a ‘detached mediator’ in the interests of a rational outcome, and Clemenceau the ‘French Tiger’, who more than anything wanted to cripple Germany for good. What came out of the conference was the Treaty of Versailles and it would not be reason but rather a harrowing vengeance that would dominate the fi nal outcome, what Marshal Ferdinand Foch presciently called “an armistice for twenty years”. Wilson’s scientifi c peace did not come to fruition and his Fourteen Points failed to supplant the old game of balance-of-power in European politics. However, his plan did provide the blueprint upon which the lands of Eastern and Central Europe were jig-sawed into new and unstable republics, most importantly Czechoslovakia and Poland. Th e right of self-determination would be largely ignored as Germans were divided and the original


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Wilhelmian lands lobbed off and handed to these weak new republics. America’s role at Versailles was the implanting of the federalist democratic model in lands that belonged to monarchies before the War. It could be seen as some level of victory for the American democratic experiment that republics had supplanted the European monarchies in the region, however, they were the result of the molestation of Wilson’s idealism by the vengeance which ultimately dominated.

Th e League of Nations would be another ultimate failure of the Wilsonian vision as it democratised Europe as a continent and gave the Eastern European republics equal importance to the recovering victors, France and England, and the defi ant Germany, regardless of the actual importance they had in the interests of the major powers, ultimately reeling the continent back to blows only two decades later as predicted by Marshal Foch. Th e ultimate manifestation of Wilson’s lofty approach to the aff air of Versailles was that his nation never descended from the realm of ratiocination to sign the treaty itself.

Wilson’s, and America’s, role at Versailles was the setting-up of the idealistic and untenable political framework which would collapse

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neatly into the Second World War when Hitler attempted to undo Versailles without fi ring a shot. Th e debacle of Munich, the failure of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy and the War Guarantees that were extended by Britain and France to the Czechs and Poles respectively would not have been possible without Versailles being what Prince Max had intended as an eff ort to ‘work out the practicalities’ of the Fourteen Points. But while America’s entry onto the world stage was a failure in many respects, it allowed for the unravelling of the political framework it had imposed to push Europe towards a second wave of war from which America would emerge as the ultimate victor.

Stage Two: D-Day

During most of the inter-war period Woodrow Wilson, Progressivism and Versailles were cautionary tales. Germany had been drawn and quartered and the virtues of Reason had only strengthened the blow of the victorious European powers. At home, a short-lived period of extravagance had given way to the Depression. Americans were sceptical of war and the need for the Republic to venture abroad; they were increasingly disillusioned with the American


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Model which had hoisted a monumental economic burden on its own citizens, a situation similar to the 1819 economic crisis which ushered in the Jacksonian Revolution. Th e young Empire had reached a point of stasis, of contraction even. Th is fall would inevitably jolt the political mechanism towards expansion and war once again as it was drawn into a new wave of confl ict which it had benignly helped to create. Th e distinctive process that would thrust the Empire to complete its conquest of the Old World was the same basic movement that it had learned during the onset of the Civil War.

Th e initial position is that of stasis: the reluctance to exacerbate the Union after the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act before the Civil War – the stage of popular isolationism and instability brought on by America’s failure at Versailles and the onset of the Great Depression.

What follows is an intellectual and political drive towards a shift in stance in relation to a perceived threat, in turn transforming the nature of the issue from legislative to moral: the increasing popularity of the Northern abolitionist movement and the political manifestation of Abraham Lincoln

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against the instability of the North caused by Southern interests – an intellectual shift on the part of academics, journalists and political minds away from a liberalism that questions the American Model and towards a stance that aims at strengthening and re-affi rming it, revolving around the need to counter Fascism under the political aegis of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, which wartime industry helped to make a success.

Th is is the fi rst stage in the creation of the dialectic. It permeates through from the minds of policy-makers to the evening news until it is absorbed by the public in its crudest form as a bumper-sticker. Th e second stage is either a reaction to a breakdown in the Federalist system or the ineluctable result of its expansion. What begins as a shift in the intellectual hub of American political thought becomes a popular stance, setting the tinder that awaits the match.

Th e third stage, or event, draws in the dialectic and combusts into the legitimacy and justifi cation for war: Fort Sumter, 1861 – Pearl Harbour, 1941.

Finally, the movement or cycle ends with the re-affi rmation of the American Model in its Federalist


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political and economic nature: increased Federal power, Reconstruction and the re-establishment of the National Bank after the Civil War – FDR’s and the Federal government’s signifi cant accumulation of power, the United Nations, the establishment of the Bretton Woods institutions and the onset of the democratic-communist dialectic of the Cold War.

As Franklin Roosevelt sat with Churchill and Stalin in the Livadia Palace at Yalta in February of 1945, the stage was being set for the next phase of America’s assertion of power beyond the Atlantic and the Pacifi c. Th e ‘Big Th ree’ presided over the future of a decimated European continent, the fi nal outcome of which would be decided on less by the negotiating strategies at the plenary sessions – Stalin spoke only when eff ective, Churchill wore down his audience with long-winded monologues and, when necessary, Roosevelt revived himself from the catatonia of illness and played his hand with diplomatic tenacity – and more by the realities on the ground. Th e Soviets had borne the brunt of the war as they waited for America to decide to re-impose Allied pressure on the western front after Britain’s retreat at Dunkirk. Th e Soviets also occupied most of the unstable geo-political core

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of Eastern Europe as they raced towards Warsaw during the last days of Operation Bagration which had ‘rolled back’ the German forces and delivered the fi nishing blow on the eastern front. All that remained of the War by the time of the Yalta Summit was its conclusion in the Pacifi c. Th e conference was an agreement amongst politicians, a formality, aimed at recognising the new global balance of power, just as Churchill’s famous ‘percentages’ deal had been when he and Stalin casually laid down the basis of the future European spheres of infl uence on a scrap of paper over a fi reside chat.

America was now a senior partner amongst the victors and the undertones of a historical shift in power permeated the initial attempts at remaking a global power framework. Th rough American Lend-Lease, it had been able to establish a strategic military presence in key areas around the globe while at the same time ensuring its economic dominance over Britain and Russia. Th is economic element, which had not been used eff ectively during the fi rst wave of the European War at the beginning of the century, helped to bolster the Republic’s infl uence in asserting its vision of the future global framework. Most importantly, the Lend-Lease would establish the


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economic and political alliances with countries that would prove essential to the young Empire’s rise, particularly in the Middle East, and would form the foundation on which that infl uence would grow. At Yalta, however, the nature of the coming geo-political balance of power was still hidden under the geniality of a successful alliance and American economic aid was also responsible for the rebuilding of the Soviet bloc. Once the realities of the new competition became self-evident, two of the Big Th ree would face each other as foes and the third would begin to fade away under a growing American shadow.

Th e Cold War

Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of the post-War world relied on an alliance with Stalin and consisted of the establishment of an international framework that would require the major global powers to ‘police’ a world of more vulnerable states so as to prevent another small state from igniting another major war, as Czechoslovakia and Poland had done. FDR had been for his nation’s entry into the Second World War and the ideological climate in America shifted to suit his intentions, eventually justifi ed after Pearl Harbour. He knew the practical defi ciencies of the Wilsonian

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vision of the world as tabula rasa, the weaknesses of unrestrained idealism, and aimed to establish a geo-political framework that was cloaked in Wilsonian terminology while being sober and realistic about the ‘crude’ basis of global power. While his attempts at realism aided the setting-up of the foundation for American power over the vast dominions of a fading British Empire, the halo he had hung over the ‘Old Bear’ Stalin would prove imaginary.

Th e establishment of the United Nations enabled the victors to divide the spoils of war between them. Th is meant that the map of the world that was born after Versailles would undergo further complexifi cation as entire nations of peoples were split in half as ‘Protectorates’ between the Soviets and the ‘West’ in what the dovish rhetoric of the victors claimed to be a temporary stride towards their ultimate liberation. Roosevelt hoped that after allowing Stalin dominion over Eastern Europe, his cooperation would be ensured. He was mistaken: allowing Stalin to take the geo-political core of Europe ensured the beginning of the Cold War. FDR would suff er from a fatal stroke soon after he had overseen the establishment of the United Nations at Yalta and wooed the Arabs and Persians in the oil-


68

rich Middle East, but before he could see his alliance with the ‘Old Bear’ suff er the same fate as the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Stalin, in the words of Patrick Buchanan, “trashed the Yalta agreement” and the realisation of the new de facto state of aff airs slowly dawned on the Western leaders. Buchanan:

[O]n March 5, 1946, Churchill would be in Fulton, Missouri, declaring, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Churchill was describing the line he [, FDR] and the Old Bear had drawn together at Teheran, Moscow, and

Yalta.

Truman took the Presidency by default in April 1945 and during his administration the Republic launched swiftly into a new and lasting dialectical posture, this time against the Soviet Union and the global spectre of Communism. Truman’s attitude toward Stalin at the Potsdam Conference soon after his ascendance to the Presidency was dominated by the deep belief that he was dealing with a man bent on world domination and he spent their time together testing his Soviet counterpart in order to prove his suspicions correct. Th e only unanimous decision that would result from the conference

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was in the terms for Japanese surrender and the fi nal move towards the new President’s executive order to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war in the Pacifi c by taking to the extreme the dialectic technique used to justify the actions of the Allies.

In February of 1946, George Kennan sent his ‘Long Telegram’ from Moscow to his superiors in Washington planting the ideological seeds for a stance that was to grow into Containment and burgeon into the Cold War dialectic. Th at same year, competition between the Americans and Soviets over the oil-rich Middle East came to a head in Iran. Th is led to Truman’s demand to the Soviets that they withdraw from the country and cease their support for a nationalist militant group plaguing the Shah’s regime, and he backed the rhetoric with military aid. Th e gambit worked and America’s foreign policy strengthened towards the tenets of Containment, albeit in a manner which leaned increasingly to the rhetorical norm produced by the Republic’s dialectical nature and less towards the steely realism of Kennan’s original views.

Th e following year, Truman was to use the same method learned in Iran to counter Soviet


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competition in Greece and Turkey, unveiling in a speech to Congress what was to become the ‘Truman Doctrine’. Truman’s ‘doctrine’ was the extension of the old Monroe Doctrine – which announced the young America’s hostility towards any European presence on its continental domain – towards the lands across the oceans which it now saw as its global domain. Th e same movement learnt during the fi rst American experiment was being played out once again. NATO was formed in 1948 and by 1950 the idea of Containment had solidifi ed into offi cial policy with the publishing of a National Security Report known as NSC 68 which fi nalised the shift from America’s anti-fascist stance to one geared towards the countering of Internationalist Communism coupled with massive defence spending. Th e Hamiltonian model had grown to its next stage of development. Th e Cold War, a term fi rst coined by the American journalist Walter Lippmann in an editorial attacking the growing dialectical implications of Kennan’s views, would last for forty years.

At this point in the story of the American experiment the ‘American System’ was portrayed as the blue-print for the success of a bankrupt and destroyed Europe and its newly

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independent colonies. Th e American minister to Egypt, Alexander Kirk, foresaw an age of global American power as being based “on the intent to help backward countries to help themselves in order that they may lay the foundation for real self dependence.” Th e ‘American Century’ cannot be dislocated from the story of ante bellum America. It is a continuation of the experiment and the expansion of the Hamiltonian model abroad. Th e Cold War era, with its Communist-Capitalist dialectic, bears striking similarity to the competition between North and South. And it was during the Cold War that America reached the apogee of its global power. Th e need for the dialectic ‘other’ in order to legitimise its expansion was met in the form of the Soviet bloc and Communism. Th e NSC 68 report of 1950, which laid down the offi cial policy for the Cold War, was based on the principles of Deterrence and Credibility which allowed for America to strengthen itself in a relatively healthy manner. Deterrence was a principle which ensured that the war with Moscow, unlike the eventual outbreak of the Civil War, would be cold as it were, and direct confl ict with the USSR was never on the table. Th e rest of the world however, like the Territories during its continental expansion, was fair game. Credibility was based on the idea that


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America needed to maintain legitimacy of its power as the anti-Communist force and defender of the ‘Free World’. Th e Republic was safe from direct confl ict with the USSR while ensuring its global expansion and the legitimisation of the Cold War dialectic through constant foreign intervention. Th e United Nations would be the political platform for the dialectic to be played out while the Bretton Woods agreement, the IMF and the World Bank ensured that the political discourse was based on economic patronage by the American fi nancial system.

Th e Last Stage

America’s interpretation of the Cold War dialectic underwent an evolutionary process as the Empire came to terms with the responsibilities of its newfound position. Th e initial stage of direct foreign intervention led to what the American historian Paul Kennedy termed ‘imperial over-stretch’ and a subsequent re-evaluation of the Empire’s capability to enforce its rule directly over its dominions. In the case of America’s Cold War stance, this meant the ability to use GIs on the ground to fi ght the ‘threat of Communism’ directly. Th e Truman Doctrine would give way to the Eisenhower administration and his famous

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farewell address which warned his audience of the threats inherent in America’s approach to its power. Th e Kennedy administration’s involvement in the Bay of Pigs fi asco, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the beginnings of America’s disastrous involvement in Vietnam would bring the re-evaluation of American geo-political discourse from one of Containment to one of Interdependence and Detente during the Nixon years.

Th e ‘Forgotten War’ in Korea was the harbinger of a new global political discourse and a result of the fl exing of the political and economic mechanisms America had established after 1945. Th e Korean peninsula was an afterthought to the Roosevelt and Truman administrations whose attention was occupied by the strategically vital geo-political spheres of Western Europe and the oil-rich Middle East. Th e ‘fulcrum’ of the Far East had been slashed in half after the war by an arbitrary line which divided a Soviet administered North and an American administered South, much like the old Mason-Dixon line had done the Territories. Th e rationale behind the creation of the 38th Parallel was that it would ultimately be a temporary measure – Korea was to be reunifi ed through a UN sanctioned referendum


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and the joint withdrawal of American and Soviet troops. Needless to say, once the lines had been drawn and the Truman Doctrine announced, the referendum fell by the wayside. Stalin had installed a friendly Communist regime in the North soon after the war and had provided the logistical and economic support needed for the puppet to hold sway over the populace. Th e South, however, suff ered from a lack of American attention and the Democratic, pro-Western administration of Syngman Rhee was left largely to its own meagre devices. FDR, still hopeful of a proactive Soviet alliance, had made it offi cial policy for America’s demeanour in the Far East not to be mistaken for that of a conqueror. Th is meant that South Korea was given little military aid in order to be able to defend itself from a stronger, more aggressive North.

In October 1949, China’s pro-American Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek had been overthrown by the hordes of Mao Zedong, his fate sealed by the American White Paper on China which declared the Nationalists dispensable and that a Maoist China might prove to be a future American ally in containing Soviet Russia as it was largely independent of the need for Soviet infl uence thanks to its gigantic popular base.

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But the pragmatic position taken by the Truman administration clashed with the rhetorical fi re that it had used to baptise the Truman Doctrine, confounding the public. Th e loss of China was followed by the Inquisition of senator Joseph McCarthy who saw in the public bemusement about China a chance to rise in the political ranks by fl ailing about accusations that his country had been infi ltrated by the ‘Reds’. Th e trials which followed and the conviction of senior members of the political class of being Soviet agents helped to bring the popular interpretation of the new dialectic in on itself, using the China debacle to paint the Truman administration – the same administration responsible for using atomic arms – as soft.

When North Korean troops crossed the 38th Parallel in late June of 1950 – the arbitrary border had in fact been the scene of a prolonged guerrilla war between North and South since the ‘founding’ of the two republics – America’s response was overwhelming; the dialectic had combusted once again and the Empire was at war soon afterwards. Th e United Nations Security Council voted overwhelmingly to condemn the invasion the following day and established a military alliance of the ‘union of the free’ to


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fi ght against the threat of Communism in Korea. General Douglas MacArthur landed his troops at Inchon in September moving swiftly over the 38th Parallel and encroaching on the Chinese border of the Yalu River. Soon the Chinese would be drawn into Korea, affi rming the Communist role as the dialectic ‘other’. Mao, encouraged by Stalin to lend support to North Korea’s war eff ort, agreed to send a wave of Soviet-armed Chinese troops to the peninsula in November. Th e Chinese off ences rolled back the UN troops and bogged down both sides in a war of attrition along the 38th that was prolonged by the fi ring of General MacArthur who pushed for an escalation in an off ensive against China which he saw as the only option to get his troops “back by Christmas”. Just as Lincoln had overruled his generals on the fi eld from the political miasma of Washington during the Civil War, Truman dismissed his general. Th e same divergence in the approach to military action between politician and soldier led America to a war of attrition instead of an off ensive attempt at a decisive victory.

After two years of deadlock around the 38th Parallel the war began to lose popular support back home in America. General Eisenhower, the successful commander of the Allied troops on

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the Western Front in 1945, took the Presidency promising not to “win” the war in Korea but to “end” it. Ike took personal initiative to fulfi l his pledge to remove his soldiers from the Peninsula and travelled to the battlefi eld in order to manufacture a peace settlement. His approach to establishing a diplomatic outcome with North Korea and China was an alteration of the Truman Doctrine. He fi rst threatened to use the atomic arsenal, gaining his opponents’ ears, and then capitalised on the attention to broker a peace deal that would allow the ‘union of the free’ to withdraw without undermining too severely the credibility of America’s ability to fulfi l its rhetorical commitments established in the run-up to the war. Th e Eisenhower Doctrine’s approach to Containment was characterised by capitalising on nuclear deterrence, covert operations, and military aid to American allies as a means to avoid direct military intervention.

Th e Korean War resulted in compromise and the solidifying of a once arbitrary line of delineation into the creation of two separate republics out of one nation and a continuing source of instability to this day. Whether or not Korea can be seen as an American success in Containment, the war set the tone for the political discourse that


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would dominate the Cold War era. America was coming to terms with its new role as one of two centres of a new bi-polar world.

By the time of the Kennedy administration the story of Korea had been turned on its head from one of compromise to an example for a more experienced American Empire to follow. Just as the National Republicans had felt that Americans were growing eff eminately comfortable, an intellectual movement known as the ‘ultra-realists’ found their voice during the post-Eisenhower years, people who had grown disillusioned with the ‘pre-fabricated’ culture of the boom-years of the 1950s. And just as the National Republicans had seen the Jeff erson and Madison administrations’ approach to foreign policy as weak, the ultra-realist characters in the Kennedy administration saw Eisenhower’s indirect approach to Containment as harmful to the credibility of American power, which was a central tenet enshrined in the NSC 68. “Behold the Eisenhower doll,” they quipped: “Wind it up and it does nothing for eight years.”

Kennedy’s fi rst attempt at reinforcing America’s grip on its foreign interests fell apart when the American-backed militia which landed at

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the Bay of Pigs to overthrow the new Castro regime dissolved into radio silence only days after the launch of the operation. In the wake of the failure to topple Castro, Kennedy met the Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev in Vienna in the summer of 1961 where the semi-literate head of the Politburo “savaged” his younger American counterpart. Vienna and the Cuban Missile Crisis which followed soon afterwards pushed the ultra-realists further under Kennedy’s political patronage and the dialectical mechanism was on track towards war. Immediately after Vienna, Kennedy reportedly stated that “we have a problem in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place”.

Th e root cause for the Vietnam War lay in its division along the 17th Parallel by the French as part of their withdrawal agreement with the Vietminh after they suff ered a defeating blow to their aspirations to retake their Southeast Asian colony after the Second World War. As in the case of Korea, the country was to be united through a popular referendum in 1956, two years after the French withdrawal. Th e Communist North led by Ho Chi Minh, head of the Vietminh movement that had fought against France’s occupation was pitted against the Democratic, Southern regime


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of Ngo Diem who many Vietnamese saw as a lackey of the French. Th e Vietminh had initially accepted the division of their country based on the rationale that they would inevitably win any popular referendum in competition with the largely unpopular Diem regime which held very little power outside of its southern capital. Once the elections had been forgotten, the Vietminh began to support, with the help of China and Russia, the Vietcong movement in the South which aimed at toppling Diem and reuniting the country by force.

America had been bankrolling the French attempt at defeating the Vietminh, who found themselves on the wrong side of the rationale of Containment and, after their withdrawal, Kennedy extended his support to Diem’s eff orts against the Vietcong. Once it became clear to the Americans that they were backing a lame horse, Kennedy gave his approval to a military coup which sent the South into anarchy. Both Kennedy and Diem were assassinated in November of 1963 and America was now fi rmly ensconced in the events taking place in Vietnam.

When Lyndon B. Johnson – the man whom FDR had deputised to ensure that draft legislation

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went through Congress – took the helm of the American machine, he saw direct American military intervention as the next logical step despite advice to the contrary from General Charles de Gaulle and infl uential American political minds. But the ultra-realists had taken over the foreign policy machine and Johnson had been convinced. On the 4th of August 1964, two American navy vessels were attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin after Johnson had ordered that the ships maintain an unnecessary presence in the area. Th is was Vietnam’s Pearl Harbour. Johnson took America to war.

America’s experience in Vietnam was harrowing. Once the airstrikes were ordered by Johnson, the GIs followed soon after and from that point on the number of soldiers in the Far Eastern jungle would escalate continuously without success in quelling the Vietcong. Th e war lasted for seven years and Johnson and his coterie of ultra-realists were destroyed by the blowback the war had at home. It would come to an end only during the Nixon administration in 1972 when a ceasefi re was ordered and America retreated with no gains to speak of. America had suff ered a blow to its initial belief in Containment and retreated


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to re-formulate its approach to holding on to its empire.

From the Nixon years until the fall of the Soviet Union, America’s approach to the Cold War dialectic underwent a change from the direct interventionism of the Truman administration towards a more diplomatic stance with the Soviet Union while America maintained its credibility through the use of proxies and covert operations, adopting Eisenhower’s approach to the Cold War. Nixon would play China and Russia, now competitors in Asia, against each other in order to gain a diplomatic footing that would lead to the period of Detente. While Vietnam had forced America to re-assess its military and political approach towards Communism, the economic foundation of its power was largely unaff ected and continued to grow. Th e Bretton Woods agreement which had pegged the dollar to the gold standard and other global currencies to the dollar ended in 1971. But the dollar managed to maintain its primacy as the world’s major currency using its sway over the Middle East to ensure that oil could be traded only in American currency and that the IMF and World Bank, with their headquarters in Washington, would promote the international Hamiltonian

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debt system’s use of the dollar as the primary international currency. With the end of Bretton Woods, the American fi nancial system would go ‘post-modern’ and the next stage in the evolution of the American Model’s economic centre would allow it to maintain its economic hold over its empire and, ultimately, to outlive the Soviet bloc.

America’s decline begins with the demise of its Soviet nemesis. Once the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, the US was unwittingly handed the position of ‘sole superpower’. Th e Bush-Clinton era was a time when America searched rather unsuccessfully for its next great dialectical battle that would legitimise its unprecedented power. Th e Cold War’s political framework was no longer relevant and the American Empire struggled to maintain credibility without a viable new dialectic as Richard Haass’ searching work Th e Reluctant Sheriff , published in 1997, portrays. Clinical military interventions in the Persian Gulf and Eastern Europe successfully played out America’s global power, but at the same time failures on the African continent undercut its credibility.

Th e rise of the neo-conservatives on the coat-


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tails of George W. Bush threw America into the aff airs of the world with renewed vigour. Th is time Communism was replaced by the threat of ‘Terrorism’ which was conceptualised by the administration as ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’. Th e confused and unstable new dialectic exploded on the 11th of September 2001 and America seemed to have found its rhetorical footing in a brave new world. But where the Soviet bloc gave the American Empire a tangible, if fantastically portrayed, force to contend with – as a result of the dealings at the end of the Second World War – ‘Terrorism’ as America’s geo-political foe proved more of a spectre.

Th e Invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was the harbinger of the new Terror dialectic, just as Korea had announced the Cold War half a century earlier. Th e Bush administration’s aim was to ‘liberate’ Iraq and to ‘spread democracy’ across the globe. During the Cold War the limits of America’s fi ght against Communism – learned in Vietnam – had been to provision military and economic aid to capitalist allies against Communist threats. Deniability of American complicity in regime changes was carefully maintained through the use of covert operations, particularly following the Bay of Pigs. Th e neo-

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conservative approach towards Iraq, and the world, in contrast, was the American machinery of conquest taken to its farthest limits. America would destroy Saddam Hussein and most of Iraq itself and rebuild it from the rubble to be a thriving democracy. Th eir circumvention of the United Nations towards a new ‘Coalition of the Willing’ signalled the end of the United Nations’ role as grand chessboard of international politics. It was the end of a steady decline that had begun in the dusk of the Cold War.

Iraq was the product of the Versailles Treaty. Th e former Ottoman suzerainty was handed to Britain through the League of Nations after the First World War. A pro-British regime was installed and the current borders clumsily drawn around it. Th e strange new state circled around three groups of peoples who had been at odds with one another for centuries and made it mandatory that any ruler would have to wield an iron fi st in order to make any sense of it as a nation-state – a major reason behind George H. Bush’s decision not to topple the once American-backed Saddam regime in the fi rst Gulf War. Colin Powell attempted to explain the unstable nature of Iraq’s ethnic and ‘sectarian’ make-up to George W. Bush before he led his country into a


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vortex: “When you hit this thing, it’s like crystal glass […] it’s going to shatter. Th ere will be no government. Th ere will be civil disorder.” Bush and his neo-conservative courtiers proceeded to destroy that iron fi st in 2003 and suff ered the consequences of historical myopia. While the outcome of the Iraq War is being portrayed as a success – just as Korea transformed from a story of compromise into one of success – Iraq’s organic incompatibility with a structuralist system of governance will ensure that whoever takes power there will have to be as heavy handed as Saddam to keep the country together.

Th e War in Afghanistan is beginning to call into question the pre-emptive swagger of the ‘Bush Doctrine’. Barack Obama’s campaign promise to focus on Afghanistan and bring the war to an end echoes Nixon’s approach to Vietnam once the Johnson administration had been destroyed by a more reactive American public. Obama is in the process of formulating a diff erent approach to the War in Afghanistan and this will inevitably entail a re-assessment of the Terror dialectic. But the state of the American Empire during and after the Vietnam War and the pressures it faces in and around Afghanistan today are worlds apart. Th e story of the American Experiment

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has come full circle, as it were, and has reached its logical conclusion.

Collapse

Th e neo-conservative movement rose from the ashes of Vietnam on the wings of a group of cynical American intellectuals who had been aversely aff ected by the shock that had reverberated through the American Empire both at home and abroad. Th eir central assumption was that, although their country had stumbled and faltered in its approach to its power, the American Model was as good as the world could do, even if their idea of utopia was a dwarf of steely realism. Th ey saw the American Model as the result of an evolutionary process. Th is ultra-realist view of America would evolve from a reserved form of the acceptance of a messy world to the farthest reaches of the assumption’s possible interpretation when Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘End of History’. When the Soviet Union collapsed in on itself, the neo-conservative movement, which had managed to introduce several of its own into the Reagan administration, was strengthened in its conviction of the supremacy of the American Model. During the wandering years of the Bush-Clinton era, the movement began to push for


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America to take advantage of its power in order to export aggressively the American Model to regions devoid of democracy. Needless to say, they were sidelined by the more intellectually astute political actors in Washington. Enter George W. Bush.

In Bush Junior the neo-conservatives saw the perfect vehicle through which to make their image of the American Empire. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, the ‘neo-con’ insiders during the Bush administration who had failed to sway the two previous heads of state, managed to hijack the ideologically vacant President. In an interview prior to the 11th of September, when Bush was asked to give his views on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, he giddily explained his lack of response by stating that he had thought the Taliban were “some band”. Th e spectacle of the 11th of September was the event that would give birth to the world the neo-conservatives had envisioned. Th e administration swiftly formulated a new nemesis that would unite the popular imagination and set it off on a war path. And they would take America’s approach to its Empire to its farthest limits. It was now the duty of the United States to fi ght against the spectre of Terrorism through

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direct military intervention – meaning American soldiers on the ground – in order to destroy existing ‘tyrannies’ and physically to replace the existing order through the installation of a leader who would set up a democratic regime on the rubble. Never before had America attempted to use this frontier approach to its ‘domains’ overseas. It was an attempt at reverting back to the old method of continental expansion which had proved so unstoppable before the Civil War.

Coupled with the neo-conservative’s political perspective was its ‘fundamentalist’ belief in the free-market. An economic creed fi rst championed as ‘Reaganomics’ which saw the separation of state and economy as sacrosanct, this economic approach had been used in order for America to spread its infl uence into the former Soviet Union. Using the fi nancial clout of the IMF and the World Bank to enforce the economic-based expansion, the Washington Consensus of 1989 established ‘Structural Adjustment’ conditions on loans as a means for America to take the spoils of its Cold War with the Soviet Union. Th e fundamental result of this economic conquest was the privatisation of state industries and functions – the introduction of the


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latest stage of the evolution of the Hamiltonian economic system. Th e world economy would become more fl uid and interconnected than ever before. In America, free market ideology would take economic power further away from the government and set it in the speculative markets of Wall Street.

When the Bush administration took over, the privatisation process was accelerated at home. Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defence, would tell the staff at the Pentagon on September 10th 2001 that the bureaucracy on which the institution was run was “a serious threat to the Security of the United States of America” as “one of the last bastions of central planning”. Th e functioning Government was scaled down to a skeletal system which outsourced everything from intelligence gathering to schooling to disaster management. Th e Federalist system had reached its fi nal stage as a hollow shell. At the same time its power reached unprecedented levels since the days of FDR during the Second World War with the signing of the Patriot Act which has remained unchanged two years into the Obama administration.

Th e Sub-prime Mortgage Crisis which threw

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the fi nancial system into disarray in 2008 is the culmination of the last stage in the complexifi cation of the American economic model that had begun at the end of the Cold War. Wall Street fi rms deemed ‘too big to fail’ were bailed out and the already heavily indebted America, which was fi ghting two wars, had to borrow heavily from abroad in order to hold its economy together. With the War in Iraq costing trillions of dollars and the escalation of the war in the Af-Pak region, American foreign policy has become quite literally bankrupt. War is no longer enough to save the American Model as it had done so many times before. Furthermore, the post-Cold War era has given rise to a fi nancial situation which directly undermines America’s sovereignty. As Dawud Hurrell put it in his analysis of the ‘geo-economic’ context of the fi nancial crisis: “to add some humour to the ‘War on Terror’, we can say that the United States, plus a bit of China, a bit of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, a little Russia and some of Germany, invaded Iraq.” Th e rise of China in particular as America’s ‘banker’ and as what some political minds are already claiming to be another hegemonic centre of the post-Cold War era has made the re-evaluation of American foreign policy a remarkably more complicated task than


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recovering from the momentous eff ects of the Vietnam War. While the Vietnam War led to a loss of confi dence in the dollar as infl ation undermined its value, and to the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement, the American economic model at home was still in one, if brittle, piece. Th e American economy today has shattered. And while the Vietnam War led to Detente, the Terror dialectic, which set America and NATO chasing ghosts in the Hindu Kush, off ered little prospect of congruity.

At home, unemployment hovers at the ten percent mark and even the most optimistic of economists, the same ones who had spoken of ‘green shoots of recovery’ earlier on in the recession, are now resigned to the fact that recovery will take years, swabbing the sweat from their foreheads as more federal stimulus apparently staves off a second plunge. Meanwhile, countries around the globe which had adopted the American economic model suff er the same fate as a result of the massive speculative bubbles of the post Cold War economic era.

If we are to place the American Model that was born from the American Civil War beside the American Empire of today, the conclusion of the

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American experiment becomes clearer. Th e two bedrocks of the American Model – its Federalist political structure and the Hamiltonian economic system – have reached their evolutionary conclusion. Th e Federal structure has withered away after the Bush era while its powers have reached their apogee as a result of the dialectical extreme of the War on Terror. Th e debt-based economic system has collapsed on itself as a result of the free-market ideology of the post-Cold War era and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we are to contrast the Empire that was born after the Second World War with the state of the American Empire today, the international political framework of the United Nations is no longer relevant, a fact illustrated by attempts to shift its functions to the G8, G20 and an ideologically antiquated NATO.

Th e wars which America is waging in its ‘War on Terror’ have their roots in its European conquest. Wilson’s aims of a ‘scientifi c peace’ and his Fourteen Points on which Versailles was based led to the foundation of republics in lands formerly ruled by monarchies; the American political model spread abroad and the map of the world altered in an unprecedented manner. Th is complexifi cation of the political map of


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the new nation-states, or republics, underwent a second stage after the Second World War when America would supplant Britain and the other tired colonisers in their domains and with the formation of the Soviet Union. Iraq was the result of Versailles, and the nationalist dynamics in the Asian Subcontinent that are fuelling the war in the ‘Af-Pak’ region are the result of the ossifi cation of the Durand Line as a defi nitive border between Pakistan and Afghanistan and the tragedy of Kashmir that resulted from the end of the British Raj. If we look at the War on Terror in this perspective then America is at war with the Nationalist movements (of its own making) in Muslim lands, a daunting task to say the least.

Th e American Century is over. Th e democratic experiment which began on the North American Atlantic seaboard has been concluded in this age of the Terror dialectic and the collapse of the Global Recession and the two central components of the Federalist model which conquered the world are now rusted from within. America cannot maintain its legitimacy through a dialectic that tries to force two billion Muslims into a corner. Th e drone attacks in Afghanistan, operated by men in front of computer screens thousands of

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miles away, which kill more women and children than armed men are the symbol of the decay of the American Empire. It cannot fi nd legitimacy for its power any longer, and it no longer has the strength to enforce it, and so it retreats to where it began. America is going to have to leave Afghanistan, to recognise the impossibilities of the Terror dialectic after almost a decade of fruitless interventionism, and the following years of economic ‘recovery’ will have to entail a new vision for the Empire. History does not wait for the fallen, but for the rise of the new, while in the south Mexico systematically moves to regain its lost territories.

u.s.a. – the end of an empire by parvez asad sheikh

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