Up With Empire

Robert Kaplan offers a brief in defense of empire at the Atlantic. “Throughout history,” he argues, “governance and relative safety have most often been provided by empires, Western or Eastern. Anarchy reigned in the interregnums.”

Globalization today depends on the infrastructure of the British empire: “as the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has argued, the British Empire enabled a late-19th- and early-20th-century form of globalization, tragically interrupted by a worldwide depression, two world wars, and a cold war. After that, a new form of globalization took root, made possible by an American naval and air presence. . . . Globalization depends upon secure sea lines of communication for trade and energy transfers: without the U.S. Navy, there’d be no globalization, no Davos, period.”

The charge that empires are cruel is true enough, but “they were less cruel and delivered more predictability for the average person than did anything beyond their borders.” The claim that empires are reactionary doesn’t fit history: “Athens, Rome, Venice, and Great Britain were the most enlightened regimes of their day. True, imperialism has often been driven by the pursuit of riches, but that pursuit has in many cases resulted in a hard-earned cosmopolitanism.” Empires ancient and modern “delivered more peace and stability than the United Nations ever has or probably ever could.”

For Kaplan, the “problem with imperialism is not that it is evil, but rather that it is too expensive and therefore a problematic grand strategy for a country like the United States. Many an empire has collapsed because of the burden of conquest.”

Despite the costs, he thinks that a “tempered imperialism” is better than Obama’s “post-imperialism,” which he warns could be disastrous: “If America sharply retrenched its air and sea forces, while starving its land forces of adequate supplies and training, the world would be a far more anarchic place.”

Most of this is quite accurate, but Kaplan doesn’t pay sufficient attention to differences among empires. It’s simplistic to say imperialism brings benefits without specifying which imperialism you’re talking about. There is no such thing as “empire,” only empires.