Imperial Pretensions and the Financial Crunch

Though Gates has also claimed of late that the Pentagon's gargantuan budget will no longer outpace inflation, that growth in military spending is "probably a thing of the past," this is still a recipe for a relatively unrestrained imperial future that, as Aziz Huq, author of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror, points out below is a disaster waiting to happen. It is, in fact, a potential recipe for American bankruptcy. Tom

Use It or Lose It?

How to Manage an Imperial Decline
By Aziz Huq

Do empires end with a bang, a whimper, or the sibilant hiss of financial deflation?

We may be about to find out. Right now, in the midst of the financial whirlwind, it's been hard in the United States to see much past the moment. Yet the ongoing economic meltdown has raised a range of non-financial issues of great importance for our future. Uncertainty and anxiety about the prospects for global financial markets—given the present liquidity crunch—have left little space for serious consideration of issues of American global power and influence.

So let's start with the economic meltdown at hand—but not end there—and try to offer a modest initial assessment of how the crumbling U.S. economy might change America's global stance.

From its inception, the financial panic stemmed from, and also exposed, a form of imperial overstretch—that of Wall Street's giant financial firms. For them, it took the form of highly leveraged positions grounded on fragile, poorly assessed collateralized debt. As John Grey recently observed in the British Guardian, however, the panic also uncovered another kind of imperial overstretch—that of American geostrategic power, raising questions about how the gap between stressed political and military assets and Washington's global ambitions will be resolved.

It's important to clarify what's currently at stake globally. Otherwise, depending on one's druthers, this is a subject that tends to be either overblown or underplayed. Few in the mainstream media even countenance the possibility of catastrophic changes in the U.S. position in the world. On the other hand, some in that world are already ascribing seismic significance to what's happening, before the dust has even settled. As historian Andrew Bacevich cautions, the future has yet to be written and so neither outcome is—as yet—a foregone conclusion.

Nonetheless, it's worth trying to grasp just how today's financial crisis is converging with two other trends—the weakening of American hard and soft power—to transform the geopolitical landscape.