American Empire: Part One

When did it all go badly wrong for the US empire. I suppose it is best to start at the beginning; the term itself is of course a tad problematic for many English speakers, especially residents of that ‘Beautiful country’ as it is known in Korean (via the medium of Chinese characters). I will use it because I hail from firmly left-wing roots of a lower middle-class teenager who subconsciously resented the fact he didn’t go to private school. Being an ex-Marxist, turned pragmatist I have noticed a tendency in many left-wing writings to attribute to mendacious agency what is far more adequately explained through foolishness and blind luck. Thus that is how I interpret the rise of the US empire. We could class the first white settler state as the start, conquering what they called ‘virgin fields’ but which were actually nothing of the sort. America was a land with a people long before my forefathers took it upon themselves to colonise the place. Nonetheless whilst this was part of a vast British imperial project, and could (probably should) be classed as an empire from the beginning of its existence, I will ignore this anomaly.

Rather then, the American empire started by accident in 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire. This is a rather famous, and yet far more seminal event in world history than most historians give it credit. Here is where the post-war global financial architecture was formed. We should not forget that to have an empire you must have a dominant currency. British imperial power rested on the pound. The imperial power of the United States rested and still rests on the fact that the dollar is the global reserve currency, universally convertible and usable in any commercial level transaction even in North Korea. Bretton Woods marked the start of America’s pre-eminent status as the world’s banker, both as a sovereign entity and on Wall Street in the private sector. Sovereign nations who needed credit had serious problems during the Great Depression, thus a series of financial institutions were created at Bretton Woods which would insure that the Great Depression would not recur. These included the IMF and World Bank which remain with us today and are key instruments of US imperial power. The way they work is well known so I will not dwell on their functioning suffice it to say most of the capital that the IMF lends is US money. Thus it gives a great deal of leverage to the United States over any country that requires IMF loans.

Bretton Woods was itself the product of British imperial eclipse. Our Empire began to break away as we became deeply indebted and no longer able to finance the huge cost of an empire of diminishing returns. Furthermore the appetite for independence amongst the ‘natives’ should not be underestimated. Anyway suffice it to say America stepped into the breach as did the Soviet Union. Britain whilst having the largest empire, was not the only imperial power in continental Europe. The French, Portugese, Spanish, Belgium’s and Italians all had large empires stretching across what we call the Third World. As these empires collapsed in the 1950s and 1960s they were replaced by states that sought to align with either the Soviet Union or the United States in the cold war. There were of course a few exceptions, there always are; they formed what became known as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) which included truly neutral states like Yugoslavia and India, weird places like North Korea, and then erstwhile Soviet allies like Cuba (for some bizarre reasons). Nonetheless lets back to the main topic when did it all start to go wrong for the American empire? When did the decline begin?

The US empire is founded on a number of simple principles. First, US policy makers believe in the benevolence of US power and the benefits to the world of its hegemonic ubiquity far beyond the corridors of power in Washington. Second, they believe in the need to maintain a world market dominated by Liberal states, which have ‘free’ economies. These principles in themselves are not as quintessentially American as you might think; in fact the idea of maintaining an Empire was anathema to the United States well into the twentieth century. Isolationism remained the dominant paradigm of US foreign policy up until 1914. Many did not want to become entangled in a European war or part of the European global system beyond trade. Nonetheless there were imperialists in America going back to its foundation; America did invade Mexico and the Philippines in the 19th/20th Centuries. Closer to home let us not forget the ‘General Sherman incident’ where an American ship tried to forcibly open Pyongyang to trade in the 1860s. Nonetheless it was only as a result of the Great Depression that US thinking was fundamentally altered. The Great Depression was prolonged by the breakdown of the global market, countries across Europe erected trade barriers and implemented capital controls in order to try and stop runs on their currencies and economic failure. A lack of mutual economic dependence was also blamed for the outbreak of the Second World War. Thus America sought to reconstruct the world in its own image. Also remember the threat of the Soviet Union was a pressing concern for the United States. America was to be a reluctant imperialist who was handed its role because of an internecine Europe war that resulted in the spread of Communism and a Third World power vacuum.