The Trump “Legacy” for American Foreign Policy: Charles S. Maier

 America and the World—The Effects of the Trump Presidency

The Trump “Legacy” for American Foreign Policy

Essay by Charles S. Maier, Harvard University

Published on 22 September 2021 | issforum.org

Editor: Diane Labrosse  | Commissioning Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii

https://issforum.org/to/ps2021-52

We cannot calculate President Trump’s “legacy” for United States foreign policy simply by describing his diplomacy while he was in power.  Virtuous fathers can fritter away family wealth, and Mafiosi can leave ill-gotten gains to charity.  It is still too early to know what long-term consequences might emerge, and it is difficult to sort out what trends would have prevailed even with a less disruptive leader.  Happily, a one-term presidency is less likely to leave durable wreckage in terms of our international reputation than eight years would have done.  My own admittedly non-impartial view is that Trump’s domestic legacy was more damaging and dangerous than his international one.  With his wanton disregard for truth, his use of social media to spread vituperation and contempt, whether for opponents or supporters who fell out of favor, his winking at practitioners of political violence, he simply trashed the norms needed for a functioning democracy – and that is not to mention the continual challenges to the 2020 election results.  Still, H-Diplo has asked about the consequences for foreign policy, and those remain the focus here.   

The impulsiveness of Trump’s foreign policy, exemplified by the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Iranian nuclear framework along with the coarsening of rhetoric – yes, words matter – has damaged America’s stature as a reliable partner (or adversary) in foreign affairs.  By the end of the first term an impartial observer might plausibly have believed that the United States was a danger to global peace, not because the country intended a war – George W. Bush was far clearer about that goal in 2003 – but because its leader was brutally transactional, and like every American president possessed extraordinary constitutional power over foreign policy and military decisions.  To my mind, as a historian of Europe, American behavior sometimes recalled the Germany of Kaiser William II – a country, like the United States, that was given to revering its military forces and saddled with a mercurial ruler, unpredictable and heedless of the lamentable impression it was making abroad.  Fortunately, the American defense and state department bureaucracies were inertial or intelligent enough to resist some, though not all, of the White House whims.  And even the president managed to resist the potential for untethered policy making from advisers such as Michael Flynn or John Bolton.

Fortunately, much of the behavior that dismayed those who prize a collaborative relationship with allies and friends involved style more than substance, so can probably be repaired.  Nevertheless, as the Trump presidency fades into history – assuming that he will not successfully run again in 2024 or that his approach to U.S. international behavior will not be reproduced under a Republican successor – it is also evident that the considerable challenges now facing the Biden administration are not simply legacies from the Trump administration.  They are agonizing issues that transcend the question of which president is in power.  President Barack Obama could not resolve them, and it is hardly clear that President Biden can either.  To be sure, Trump denied their gravity and believed he could overcome them on the basis of vague threats or of personal bonding with one or another dictator.  Still, the issues involved would have vexed, and will vex even the wisest leadership.  And to judge from initiatives taken so far, the Biden administration has not figured out, or believed it appropriate to stake out positions, that are fundamentally different.  

This essay was largely written before President Biden’s decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, but a final version must take account of that defeat.  One can argue that the Trump administration’s signing of a peace accord with the Taliban in 2020 foreclosed Biden’s options.  But enough maneuverability remained in terms of timing and residual force levels to leave the current president some freedom of action.  Biden, however, like Obama – with respect to Syria -- and perhaps like Trump, saw the alternative as a ‘forever war’ that could yield no decision.  I appreciate the reasoning that led to this disengagement, but fear that a generation of aspiring Afghan women and those citizens who wagered on presidential assurances will pay a heavy price for U.S. abandonment.  President Biden has claimed that the country will no longer be an al-Qaeda haven (just as President Trump declared that the danger of ISIS had ended), but that proclaimed goal has long been less compelling now that terrorist networks subsist in many different territories.  Indeed, the alleged removal of a terrorist threat from a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan may prove a spurious achievement given the recent actions of the so-called ISIS-K network.  The greater consideration was perhaps that both the Trump and Biden administrations decided that if the Afghans could not finally defend themselves, they did not deserve to be forever defended by the United States.  This is a justification, however, that ignores the role of the allies of United States, and the sacrifices Afghans themselves have made.  Defenders of the sudden withdrawal have also stressed that the United States was unlikely to turn the country into a functioning democracy.  But acknowledging this limitation did not have to mean that the U.S. could not have helped to preserve a non-authoritarian and more tolerant regime at an acceptable cost.  

That admittedly less exalted mission has now been foreclosed, and the decision is in line with Trump’s policies even if Biden faced up to more honestly.  For better or worse, American policy in the Middle East and Central Asia has long been a messy bipartisan one.  It has occasionally been mendacious and disastrous such as in the case of the 2003-04 war in Iraq, which was also supported on both sides of the aisle.  More often it has been one of temporizing, what the British called cunctation – kicking the can down the road, which works until it doesn’t.  This approach has characterized the U.S. approach to the Saudi regime, and it has characterized the government’s unwillingness to pry Israel from its policies that are determined to forestall any viable Palestinian national structure.    

Cunctation may be the only realistic policy with respect to the other issues Biden must face.  In the long run the United States is unlikely to overcome the assertiveness of China in geopolitical and economic terms, the resistance of both China and the Soviet Union to human rights, and the global turn to authoritarianism more widely.  With respect to international economic and social issues, the major Western nations will all confront throngs of migrants fleeing collapsing or abusive state authority in Central America and the Middle East (the latter of which are more of a European concern); they have already had a hard time facing the global health issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic; and all them are struggling to institute the collective action needed to mitigate the massive impact of climate change.  The harsh truth is that every president inherits a heavily encumbered international situation and must judge what to accept and what to contest.  Biden has accepted Germany’s plan to move ahead with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia as a “fait-accompli,” even though it threatens to further squeeze Ukraine, and will not reduce German dependence on hydrocarbons^[1]  Despite ritual denials, NATO partners in general have apparently accepted the Russian annexation of Crimea as a fait-accompli.  Swallowing the fait-accompli may become the leitmotif of U.S. decline even though acceptable political rhetoric will never allow it to be confessed openly. 

President Trump did nothing to reverse this melancholy prospect.  His massive over-confidence in his mastery of the art of the deal and his personal presence led him to believe that Kim Jong-un would succumb to his blandishments and renounce North Korea’s nuclear program.  He was foolish to think so and to have disregarded the unsettling impact it would have on the delicate triangle with South Korea and Japan.  Still, if it had been adequately prepared, I would not condemn the wager on a personal meeting as such.  The underlying problem is that Trump seemed to have little capacity to understand the ‘structural’ limits to personal cajolery.  So long as Kim Jong-un remains willing to disregard the economic costs to his population, his nuclear arsenal provides him with a power and status he has no reason to renounce.  The Chinese could change his calculus, but why should they bring Pyongyang to heel so long as it remains an irritant to the United States, South Korea, and Japan?  Beijing has no motive to make life easy for Washington. 

The dilemma posed by the Iranian nuclear program is somewhat different since Tehran has not yet achieved a nuclear stockpile.  The question was (and remains) whether the JPCOA was really likely to forestall that eventuality in the long run.  The Biden administration has not rushed to rejoin it unconditionally.  Detractors of the agreement believe that its 15-year limit is dangerously brief.  Supporters are wagering that somehow Iran’s rulers will find it in their interest to extend it.  In both cases the wager is on the long-term nature of the Iranian regime.  Is it realistic for the United States to seek long-term cooperation from Iranian moderates?  Or should it accept their weakness in the current institutional structure and simply confront the hard-liners with ever-harsher sanctions (assuming that the U.S. and its Israeli allies forswear the option of a preemptive strike with all the incalculable consequences that would entail)?  Obviously, the division between hard-liners and moderates is far too crude and allows for no evolution of positions.  (The historian does well to recall the dilemmas posed by the Versailles treaty framework and its impact on German political institutions between 1919 and 1939.  Would earlier revision have forestalled the advent of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler?  Should it have been enforced integrally early on once he came to power?  These issues are still debated.) 

There is another alternative: simply accept that after fifteen years the Iranians may well acquire nuclear weapons, and that thereafter the Islamic Republic’s potential adversaries will have to rely on the balance of terror to keep them from being used.  This is, after all, the regime that India and Pakistan, China, Russia, France, Britain and the U.S. have relied on since 1945.  Before insisting that it remains unacceptable in the case of Iran or North Korea we have to ask what feasible and acceptable alternative promises greater stability.  

In any case, the non-proliferation regime that has been in theory a bipartisan commitment of U.S. foreign policy is always going to be vulnerable short of global nuclear disarmament.  It establishes a hierarchy of great powers that second-rank authoritarian powers will be tempted to challenge.  In practice it is a regime of slowed proliferation, in which one or two new nuclear powers have been allowed to emerge every couple of decades.  The major deterrent to acquisition aside from cost has been the quite rational conclusion that to possess atomic weapons is likely to make one a target for other nuclear powers.  Trump apparently asked his advisers why, if the United States has nuclear weapons, it doesn’t use them.  The question suggested that the rationality needed for a deterrence regime may not be foolproof.  The Soviets and Americans have preserved a mutual deterrence regime for some 70 years, but it can only be judged successful if it lasts forever.  Israel may ultimately have to live with such a Damoclean status quo.  The debate that Trump’s legacy should reopen is whether the U.S. should strive for universal nuclear disarmament including its own arsenal if it would keep countries such as Iran from acquiring atomic weapons.  A hierarchical system of limited access to weaponry is unlikely to provide stability forever.

Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JPCOA had, of course, wider implications in terms of regional Middle Eastern politics.  It further cemented an alignment with former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli policies, a clear choice to write off any remaining tattered hopes for a two-state solution and to humiliate the Palestinians.  Trump’s turning over a highly complex set of questions to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was not unprecedented (Italian dictator Benito Mussolini also relied on his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano as foreign minister… before he had him shot for supporting his ouster), but it revealed again how all complex issues were filtered through personal relationships.  

Nonetheless, an implicit strategy was emerging for the Middle East from Kushner’s bricolage.  The administration in effect was brokering an alignment of authoritarian Gulf rulers, the Saudis, and Netanyahu to tamp down the troublesome (and yes, sometimes terrorist) subaltern peoples of the region – whether Palestinians or the non-Arab proletariats of the Gulf.  Having an authoritarian regime in Egypt preoccupied with its own repressive agenda, a hapless Iraqi state, and an epic tragedy in Syria helped facilitate this combinazione.  Probably any international agreements involving Israel and the other Middle Eastern powers should be welcomed, but the so-called Abraham Accords were clearly a coalition of conservative elites against radical change, a latter-day Holy Alliance sanctimoniously named for the spiritual ancestor of the three monotheistic faiths.  None of its signatories apparently recalled how Hagar fit into that story as well.

                                                                                                                                                *

When it comes to foreign policy it seems to me that several fundamental choices currently face the United State, and they are often obfuscated by worn-out slogans.  Does it wish to retain its “global leadership”?  Is it in fact an “indispensable nation”?  Does it make sense for political leaders to insist that its “greatest days lie ahead”?  I am not sure what global leadership consists of these days.  If it involves military preponderance, the U.S. may still retain it, but an edge in hardware probably means less than it once did.  If North Korea managed to land nuclear missiles on any American city the result would be disastrous, no matter what vengeance the United States might choose to exact.  If Russian-protected cyber outlaws brought down urban transportation and medical systems, the consequences would be catastrophic.  It has been evident for over half a century that the United States could not maintain its post-World War II share of global production and wealth, and the real success of foreign economic policy would be a more universal economic development.  If moral “leadership” is at stake – which is where Trump failed most egregiously—then the United States has serious tasks ahead:  absorbing migrants, closing Guantánamo, and reforming its incarceration system (more the product of the Clinton years than Trump’s administration – indeed one area where Trump promised some meaningful reform), and reversing glaring inequalities of race, income, and wealth.  Rather than insisting on global leadership, the task of the U.S. should be to manage America’s relative decline in a multipolar system without military conflict.  Measure success by raising the health, education, and welfare levels of the world’s poorest, including America’s own.

And what about the constitutional provisions for setting American foreign policy?  After the Vietnam War Congress moved to reclaim more power over American military interventions abroad – a tendency that was reversed again after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.  Normally vigorous Congressional oversight should seem desirable.  But let us be candid, Congress supported the cold-war engagement that liberals called for during a period when Democrats still ruled a one-party South and segregationist senators chaired key committees concerned with foreign policy and defense.  Do supporters of a strong presidential role really want Congressional oversight when Trump’s legacy still seems so strong over a Southern white electorate?  

On the other hand, whether speaking as historian or citizen, I am not ready to endorse the calls for a withdrawal from international commitments to the degree that has now become fashionable among some in both conservative and progressive circles.  Andrew Bacevich and Stephen Wertheim have exposed some of the grandiose visions that have motivated American imperial pretensions since the outset of World War II, but perhaps because of my age (a child of the Marshall Plan, so to speak), I think that the military and diplomatic retrenchment they recommend would be unwise in today’s world.^[2]  Aside from the global upheavals that might follow, I do not believe that American politics would witness a succession of uncontested catastrophic outcomes, whether in the Middle East, or Taiwan, or elsewhere without descending into a series of domestic witch hunts or ultimately giving way to a sudden reversal of security policy from an objectively disadvantaged position (cf. Britain in 1938-40).  

I believe it is appropriate to defend values as well as interests, although to what degree military force should be engaged has to be weighed case by case.  There is a case for speaking loudly as well as wielding a big stick.  Speaking truth to power is a more appealing way of putting it.  I would submit it is the best choice for dealing with China even while the United States reengages with regional Asian and European allies.  Human rights cannot be the only guideline for policy but neither can acceptance of the fait accompli.  Public opinion loves to find a suitable “doctrine” for foreign policy – the Monroe Doctrine, the Truman Doctrine, the Nixon Doctrine, etc. – but case-by-case wisdom is probably more useful and will certainly be more necessary.  Ironically, the Trump presidency may have done one indirect public service through all its brutal disruptions if it compels a rethinking of what foreign policy the American imperial republic can and should defend.

 

Charles S. Maier received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1967 and is currently Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University.  His most recent book is Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).

© Copyright 2021 The Authors

 

Notes

[1] John Hudson, “Amid internal disputes over Russia policy, Biden has chosen a mix of confrontation and cooperation,” The Washington Post, 15June 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/biden-putin-summit/2021/06/15/19657e2c-cd44-11eb-9b7e-e06f6cfdece8_story.html

[2] See among his other works, Andrew Bacevich, After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed (New York: Macmillan, 2021); The Age of Illusions (New York: Henry Holt, 2020); The Long Wars: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow the World: the Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020).

 

Books on Empires, and one Empire in especial - Foreign Affairs

Empire Without End
Charles S. Maier *
Foreign Affairs, July-August 2010

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper's extensive volume and Timothy Parsons' selective survey are systematic treatments of empires; Richard Immerman's history is a focused critique of America's imperial career. None is an apologia for the United States.

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper:
Empires in World History: Power and Politics of Difference
Princeton University Press, 2010, 528 pp.
ISBN 9780691127088 - Price $35.00

Timothy Parsons:
The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall
Oxford University Press, 2010, 496 pp.
ISBN 9780195304312 - Price $22.95

Richard H. Immerman:
Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism From Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz
Princeton University Press, 2010, 286 pp.
ISBN 9780691127620 - Price $24.95

Many leaders of the American Revolution welcomed the idea that their new nation would grow up to be an empire. To them, the concept was compatible with a republic; it meant size and benign influence. David Ramsay, South Carolina's delegate to the Continental Congress, wrote as early as 1778 that the grandeur of the American continent provided the basis for a realm that would make "the Macedonian, the Roman, and the British sink into insignificance." George Washington thought of the new country as a "rising" or an "infant" empire. Thomas Jefferson, who secured the vast Mississippi and Missouri valley corridors, famously envisaged an "empire of liberty." But whose liberty? The idea of empire as conquest or subjugation was curiously absent from this postindependence reverie. Cheered by the euphemism of "manifest destiny" deep into the nineteenth century, Americans of European origin continued to enjoy the incredible lightness of empire.
Subsequent observers would contend that the process of building and managing an empire is often violent, unfettered by concerns about law and equality. Empire, as Joseph Conrad wrote and American anti-imperialists came to acknowledge, had a heart of darkness. As Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, the authors of the massive comparative study Empires in World History, argue, "Terror was the hidden face of empire." And it has not always been so hidden, either.
The word "imperium" originally signified the authority delegated by the Senate of the Roman Republic to exercise command over the republic's own citizens and subdue others. It came to be applied to Rome's new territories throughout Italy and then beyond, even before Augustus founded the Principate, the first formal phase of the Roman Empire proper. More recently, in the United States, the growth of presidential power has periodically awakened concerns about what the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., termed "the imperial presidency," that is, the growth of executive authority at the expense of legislative supervision and public dissent.
Three recent books on empire -- Burbank and Cooper's comparative history, Timothy Parsons' The Rule of Empires, and Richard Immerman's Empire for Liberty -- are less concerned with how nominally representative institutions can give way to authoritarian leaders than with how one state or national group extends its rule and often territory at the expense of others. This focus is hardly surprising, since much of the literature on empires has responded to the string of interventions the United States has undertaken since the Cold War.
People who object to applying the term "empire" to the United States point out that it has never established permanent colonies beyond its borders. Those who apply the term insist that the project of filling out the continent was imperial from the outset, since it involved the forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of indigenous groups. As for American forbearance abroad, they argue, the United States has sought no permanent colonies or territories because it has not needed them. Occasional but decisive interventions have sufficed to protect U.S. interests, and hundreds of U.S. military bases continue to preserve a sphere of influence well beyond the United States' borders.
Other commentators have argued that Washington should be unapologetic about using power this way. The historian Niall Ferguson suggested in Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World that British colonialism brought valuable experience in parliamentary and economic practices to the United Kingdom's colonies, and he deplored the United States' apparent unwillingness to take on the long burden of tutelage. The writer James Traub, among others, has suggested that Washington should intervene in central Africa to stop civil war and genocide -- even if doing so would awake concerns about U.S. imperialism. And the historian John Darwin's masterly After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 accepts frankly, without any moralizing, that the United States is the most recent in a long series of transoceanic empires.
History suggests that it is not easy to maintain the distinction between humanitarian and imperial interventions. Before Iraq devolved into protracted civil conflict, it was much easier for champions of a muscular foreign policy, such as the writer Peter Beinart, in the liberal camp, and the usual neoconservative suspects, to argue that the "empire of liberty" must awaken from the torpor of indifference and intervene abroad. Immerman's history of the myopic intentions of U.S. leaders reflects the painful process of learning how difficult it can be to reshape other societies and institutions. To what degree meaning well mitigates historical responsibility remains a highly charged issue, although American society is relatively forgiving of policies whose major impact lies abroad and that exhibit the bravery of U.S. soldiers.
Such moral debates are unavoidable and important, but morality is hardly the only issue surrounding empire. Empires have existed since the organization of states in the river valleys of Africa and Asia. What characterizes them? How do they function? When do they arise? How and why do they collapse? The scientific study of empires has become a major inquiry. Burbank and Cooper's and Parsons' books are efforts to cover empires systematically; Immerman's is a more focused critique of the United States' imperial career. None is an apologia for the United States.

MANAGING DIFFERENCE
Cooper is one of the most perceptive historians of the late colonial period in Africa. His early work emphasized how the British and the French, by trying to allow civic and economic rights within their African possessions, only awakened more militant resistance, especially among colonial labor movements. Throughout his career, Cooper has sought to go beyond the simple dichotomy of collaboration and resistance among imperial subjects. He has proposed that colonial subjects develop various ways of pressing for equality and recognition within, and ultimately against, imperial rule. His co-author, Burbank, is an expert on imperial and twentieth-century Russia and editor of a volume that examines the impact of Russia's geographic vastness on its domestic institutions. In Empires in World History, Burbank and Cooper survey almost the entire history of global empires, beginning in the third century BC with the Han dynasty and the Roman Empire. They follow the spread of Islamic empires, Byzantium, the Mongols, and their Central Asian successors and then devote much attention to the Ottomans, before turning to the Austrians, the Russians, the overseas European empires, and, finally, the German, Japanese, Soviet, and American empires.
Burbank and Cooper accept empire as the dominant form of governance over large spaces and explore different strategies (what they term "repertoires") of imperial control. The underlying problem for empires is how to impose unity over difference. An empire must preserve the differences among the peoples it yokes together but not at the expense of its overall structure -- creating a tension that requires continually balancing power among contenders.
In the search for unity, successful imperial structures generate what might be called a big idea -- whether it be cultural unity, as in the various Chinese dynasties; citizenship, in the Roman Empire; law, in the British Empire; or, for the Americans and the Soviets during the Cold War, economic development. Empires organized around a monotheistic religion -- Islam or Christianity -- have drawn on a particularly potent source of legitimacy but remain vulnerable to schism and dissent.
From the Han dynasty on, the Chinese recruited a class of scholar-officials who did not have the local resources to defy the center, thereby avoiding the problem Rome faced when its delegated princes or leaders became challengers. But palace factionalism, warlordism, and the threat that officials might defect to neighboring powers remained a danger to the Chinese dynasties. Rome and subsequent empires needed, indeed wanted, their soldiers to be posted at the frontiers, a long way from the capital. But the distance also allowed ambitious contenders to accumulate power locally. Empires continually required military exertions, which necessitated the regular extraction of resources from agriculture or commerce in far-flung provinces -- a perpetual challenge. Of course, this has been the case for all types of states, which have centralized fiscal and military institutions as a response to international pressure. Still, with their extensive territory, empires experience a much greater tension between the center and the periphery. It would have been useful, then, for Burbank and Cooper to provide a more sustained discussion of the difficulties that the Mogul empire faced in South Asia. This wealthy and multireligious empire gets strikingly short shrift even though it exemplified all the liabilities of empire: unruly frontiers, aggressive neighbors, fiscal crises, and an extremely confederal structure. It was the power in Asia most similar to the contemporaneous Holy Roman Empire.
As Burbank and Cooper stress, conflict at the boundaries, especially boundaries shared by empires engaged in a protracted competition, such as that faced by the Ottomans from the seventeenth century on, can lead to revenue scarcity, rebellion, and territorial shrinkage -- all of which ultimately undermine even the most robust imperial structures. Indeed, imperial politics are uniquely determined at the perimeter, where challenges emerge. Borders can never remain entirely fixed or stable: even the Roman, Chinese, and Berlin walls were sites of turbulence. Often, brilliant and ruthless commanders who seized imperial power -- Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte -- began their campaigns at the perimeters of power and pressed inward, toward the rich provinces in the heartland.

EMPIRE AS EXPLOITATION
Burbank and Cooper's decision to follow empires chronologically allows them to present a sustained, sequential narrative punctuated by targeted comparisons. At times, the individual stories flatten out into a general political account of the world's megastates, and the focus on imperial strategies fades. Although their narratives are rich in detail, it is not clear that it makes sense to follow empires individually, since the trajectory of each is affected by rivalry with others. Still, as the authors leisurely unfold their gigantic panorama, they return to the main requirements and achievements of successful empires -- the management of differences within extensive territorial and ethnic realms.
The contrast with Parsons' large study of selected empires is revealing. Parsons, an Africanist by training, samples instructive imperial experiences: Roman Britain, Muslim Spain, Spanish Peru, the East India Company in Italy, Napoleonic Italy, British Kenya, and Vichy France. Like Burbank and Cooper, Parsons synthesizes a huge amount of global history, even though he does not claim the total coverage they seek. Also like them, he attributes the lightning conquests of the Spanish in Mexico and Peru to the fact that the Aztec and Incan empires they displaced had recently conquered other tribes who chafed under the Aztec and Incan yokes.

Although they are sometimes justified by grand ideas of civilizational supremacy, empires are not really created by any cultural disparity; they arise from transitory technological and military supremacy. On this point, Parsons diverges from Burbank and Cooper, for whom ideologies must be taken seriously even when they serve as a rationale for hierarchy and domination. The notion that imperial rule is for the benefit of its subjects "was and always will be a cynical and hypocritical canard," according to Parsons. "Empire has never been more than naked self-interest masquerading as virtue."
Empires are cartels of multiethnic elites in which local leaders hold on to their regional power by deferring to the overriding authority of the center. Empires stabilize their rule horizontally across space by reinforcing vertical hierarchies within their diverse geographic holdings. (The United States' effort to control tribal leaders in Afghanistan today is only the most recent example of this strategy.) Thus, the best way to study them is to examine how they lasted rather than how they came to be.
Like Burbank and Cooper, Parsons believes that empires work by recruiting intermediaries and making deals with local elites. But he thinks that the founding acts of conquest remain essential for historical judgment: "No one became an imperial subject voluntarily." Hence, he tends to characterize the kind of collaboration that occurred in Vichy France as selling out, whereas Burbank and Cooper describe a far more fluid and equal set of transactions. For them, the intermediary is a creative political entrepreneur, be he Polybius, the Greek sojourning in Rome who made himself a preeminent political interpreter, or one of the Albanian, Armenian, or Greek civil servants among the Ottomans. Linguistic talent and intermarriage are the major strategies for attaining influence among the colonizers even when those in charge promote racial distinctions to inhibit mingling. (Think of the formidable roles played by Hernán Cortés' Marina, John Rolfe's Pocahontas, and Lewis and Clark's Sacagawea.) Burbank and Cooper also stress how indigenous elites can promote genuine economic innovation.
Readers familiar with Cooper's earlier, sympathetic focus on what are often termed "subaltern" groups in British and French Africa may be surprised by the mellowness of Empires in World History; Burbank and Cooper cannot help but admire the political and societal engineering that empires have sustained over vast regions and long centuries. Cooper and Parsons both began as historians of empires in Africa, acutely aware of states where the gulf between the rulers and the ruled was reinforced by race. But Burbank and Cooper also understand that the refined courts and capitals of the Byzantine, Ming, and Persian empires often softened the founding violence of the conquerors. Such imperial grandeur means little to Parsons. For him, empires, despite all their sophistication, remain structures of conquest, domination, and exploitation, and they are doomed to fail.
Unfortunately, Parsons seems to have selected only cases that reflect this particular trajectory. He studies Napoleonic Italy, Vichy France, and the sanguinary last phase of British rule in Kenya; had he covered the major Chinese dynasties or the Ottomans, he might have wound up adopting a less accusatory stance. Burbank and Cooper, for whom empires subsist as amazing structures of large-scale governance, accommodating difference without (or until) falling to forces of localism or alternative empires, have a different perspective on collapse. Where Parsons sees the demise of empires as the inevitable result of a dialectic of resistance -- force, counterforce -- Burbank and Cooper believe that empires usually succumb because the intermediaries between the government and the governed gradually accrete their own power and form their own domains or defect to a another conqueror.

OF LIBERTY? FOR LIBERTY?
Immerman's brief study of six important architects of U.S. foreign policy argues that the idea of empire was inherent in the United States' national aspirations from the beginning. Restlessly articulated in terms of national ideals, the project was a thrust for a large national domain, not merely of liberty but also for liberty; indeed, Immerman suggests that democratic ideas continually justified expansion. He has little patience for those who hesitate to recognize the United States as an empire, and he shows the ideological contortions that accompanied the process of becoming one. His debt to critical historians, including Walter LaFeber and William Appleman Williams, is evident. Unlike them, however, Immerman sees political, legal, and racial ideas -- not the capitalist search for markets -- as motivating U.S. imperialism.
Engaging and informative as these six studies are, they do not establish a pattern. Benjamin Franklin, Immerman's first exemplar, conceives his imperial vision within the framework of a then still-viable joint British and U.S. enterprise of Western Hemispheric expansion. John Quincy Adams was probably the most articulate in fusing anticolonialism with continental expansion. William Seward and Henry Cabot Lodge were the most intent on pressing beyond continental borders; John Foster Dulles and Paul Wolfowitz, the most absolutist in their ideological ambitions. Immerman depicts Wolfowitz with considerable sympathy, even as he deplores the results of his project.

At the end of Immerman's biographies, conceptual questions remain. Is there really much of a distinction between an empire of liberty and an empire for liberty? Which territorial ambitions were understandably compelling for the early Republic, abutting, as it did, the overseas outposts of European empires? Must an ambitious foreign policy in pursuit of a national ideal inevitably degenerate into imperial interventions and acquisitions? The argument would seem less one-sided had such issues been probed more deeply.
It is normal enough that those who dominate should think their purpose enlightened and their mission natural. Empire could not exist without its intellectuals, who take on the task of explaining that goals pursued for self-interest are in fact justified by progress. Historians may find such rationales convincing, but it would be naive to forget that those who are ruled often do not. Somewhere, always, empire is sustained (and contested) by violence. Some apologists respond that the imperial conquerors impose peace or suppress barbaric practices -- the conquistadors stopped Aztec priests from ripping out the hearts of their prisoners, the Americans ousted the tyrant who had gassed the Kurds. Others will say that all forms of government sometimes require violence, or at least surveillance and coercion. All this may be true, but in democratic states, citizens have some degree of control over their own regime. The essence of empire is that the power to participate in decision-making is bestowed very unequally.

THE END OF AN ERA?
Is the age of empires over, as many believe? In the aftermath of 1989, American observers celebrated "civil society," believing that by stubbornly exercising their residual power, organized groups -- churches, unions, protest movements -- could bring down repressive bureaucratic apparatus. But since 9/11, civil society has faded as a compelling vision. Other nonstate actors have proved that violence and counterviolence still matter. In that milieu, empire will not easily fade, even if colonialism does.
The policy question, then, is whether states that have the power to act like empires can learn to work within an international system that, compared to the past, is less hierarchical and rests more on associations of interest. After 1945, the old imperial powers got caught in the contradiction of claiming to give their colonies a free choice while expecting them to stay in some form of associated subordination. Today, China, Russia, and the United States have the capacity to organize empires. But Europe is demonstrating that a new form of confederal association might emerge that in fact is more egalitarian and therefore more promising.
How the world can make the transition to a sort of comity of regions will be the overriding question for international politics in the decades to come. The world may be better off with no single superpower, even one that seems as benevolent as the United States does to many Americans. Such major transitions, however, are always risky; they create crises fraught with danger. The ride can be rocky, as future historians will no doubt document, and empire has seemed a plausible alternative in such turbulence for a long time.

* CHARLES S. MAIER is Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University and the author of Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors.